by Michael Shea
When two hours had passed, I set in motion my first little arrangement. Bo Beck had, with Roger, done much to flatter and persuade Valerie into her first experiments with what they called the “porno genre.” He was, intrinsically, a loathsome being—I say it with strict impartiality, scorning to drum up justification for my revenge, which I would proudly pursue against an angel, if he wronged me. When I turned to this man, however, and casually laid my bait before him, I conceived as it were a poeticized image of what I was about to do. I imagined a huge, blood-swollen tick being crushed between my thumbnails.
The bait I speak of? So simple, and so infallible! With genial naïveté I told him that his asking about my cellars earlier was quite a coincidence. Roger had also asked, and had been intensely interested on learning of the ancient apparatuses of torture and inquisition that they still contained. He had in fact tentatively proposed to pay me well if I would permit, in the near future, a second filming at Sternbrucke. He would shoot it in the cellars—something he called a “snuff” film.
Beck might have been an automaton, so precise were his responses. He rose and tersely pointed out to his friends that it was time to final-rehearse their difficult lines. He stilled Natalie’s outburst of renewed complaint with one masterfully raised palm, and briskly set up for her the deck with which they were to play their practice tape. (I’d had Roger make it just before he was “called away,” and the first hard vocables chilled me with remembered transports of revenge: Cthulhu fhtagn, nngyah! nngyah!) He delivered a last admonition about the relative nearness of moonrise and then ushered me out for a stroll around the grounds, “to dig the grass and trees and everything.”
Of course, I knew his ambition to grow wealthy through “snuff” films quite as well as I knew what kind of films those were. Roger’s interest in making them was my invention—so much of poor Roger’s part in all this was. As for Bo, his envy of his producer’s recent, modest fortune was obvious to any who observed them, while his ambitions had been revealed a year or so earlier when he had attempted a surreptitious use of Roger’s capital and equipment to launch himself in the blood-and-sex “genre.” Only Beck’s skills as a technician, and his desperate, apologetic arse-kissing, had prevented his discovery from leading to a dismissal by the enraged producer.
Thus, to precipitate the cameraman’s still-rankling greed and bitterness into impulsive action was no great matter. I needed only to appear to have been interested in Roger’s “offer,” and to quote as the sum proposed by him an amount I knew Beck could easily overmatch. He scarcely pretended to notice the windblown greens of sward and trees, all lambent with the latening sun. Quick to his purpose, he was soon probing me with questions:
“A bastinado? A strappado? I know you’re putting me on, Monty. You say an Iron Maiden and oubliettes, too? Real oubliettes? I mean, right there, that’s hard to believe. Those things are medieval, right? This house isn’t that old!”
“I did not suspect the breadth of your reading, Bo!” I cried. “You’re a downright scholar in these matters!” (I could afford to goad him a bit now.) “In fact, Sternbrucke’s upper structures are scarcely more than three hundred years old—there was an unfortunate local disturbance at the turn of the seventeenth century and the place burned down. The undamaged understructures were incorporated into the new building, and they date from the tenth century, if not earlier. The main entry to them is over there, just off the courtyard. Do you care to test your disbelief?”
When we came to the stairhead of the cellars, it almost frightened him, that gaping well of masonry with those rough and cruelly pitched steps belonging so palpably to a darker and more remorseless Age of Man. There would be another stairwell more dreadful than this, where his fear would have to be dealt with, but here a faltering could abort the entire scenario. The colossal scale and druidic harshness of that stonework can pierce even ignorance like Beck’s with an almost visceral awareness of antiquity. The man reeled, ever so slightly, as he stood in that first cold gust from Sternbrucke’s lower regions. It was my fortune that his professional sense of visual impact was more violently aroused than whatever fear of the Immemorial he may have conceived. I took a flash from a chest just inside the threshold, and we fairly plunged in, Beck hastening ahead, pausing at turnings to probe various perspectives with the light and talking without cease.
Partly his eagerness was his greed, for as a cinematic setting of the genre amusingly known as “gothic,” those corridors and passages and vaulted chambers are probably unequaled throughout the continent. But partly his feverishness was also his fear. I suppose I must say that he did not quite yet know that he was afraid.
“Jumping Jesus!” he said. “It’s friggin’ unreal. Look at the iron in those doors! And those statues in their cubbyholes…(What are those things, anyway?) I mean this place is a movie already! Another turn? Will you look at how far these things go, in all directions! Down again!? You’re not serious. And just listen to how my voice echoes! You get a sound kind of like nasty laughing far away—Christ, if we can just pick that up! (How far do these things go?) And that crusty stuff oozing out of the ceilings…it’s like Vincent Price, right? Under a river? You mean we’re already below that valley in back of your place? Incredible! I’d put torches all along these halls. Hell, I could get some inserts from Val and Kamin down here before we take off tomorrow! They’d be a sideplot, and I’d only have to come back once more for the snuff. How deep did they keep those torture rooms, anyway?”
His voice poured on, fell spattering and rippling away from us through those centuried darknesses until our light-beam blundered into a yet more terrible darkness just ahead of us. We had reached the juncture. There, stark, atavistic fear wrenched shut the spigot of Beck’s words. Only his uneven breathing was heard as we came to the stairhead and looked down those ragged, reeking stairs.
This I had foreseen, for how could he not be moved? Down there, the stonework changes character, because those ultimate, deepest corridors were not dug by the inhabitants of the ancient maze, but rather met their diggings. Other workers had fashioned the staircase and sunken halls it led to; other artisans had incised those brine-foul stones with the bas-reliefs that sardonically twisted on them still; workers and artisans from the sea, some five miles distant, toiling to meet their kin and colleagues under the earth.
When I thrust the strong beam down that stairwell and made the squiddish throngs dance shadowed on the stone, and when the numbing, oceanic gust of salty, sunken grottoes and immemorial decay breathed up against us, I felt the cameraman’s spirit wince and recoil within him.
Speedily, I feigned a debilitating chill and drew an ample silver flask from my smoking-jacket. The rum in it was luscious, liquid fire, a hundred and fifty proof. I mimed a deeper draught than actually I took. I offered Beck the flask, and he tried to feign a shallower draught than his bobbing throat attested to. Almost immediately he took a second dose which abandoned pretense and half-emptied the flask.
He was not accustomed to admitting sourceless terror to himself, but no man in his wits is impervious to such sense of age-long presence as flows up that stairwell at the juncture. He used the liquor impulsively to bludgeon into quiescence his humiliating attack of fear, but it was too light a club for his purpose. The drink only stunned his dismay, as revealed by the stiffness of his gait going down those mist-slick stairs. Midway he stopped and vented his unease in anger:
“Look, I don’t need a hike! How much further is it!? Jesus Christ, it’s cold! It stinks like . . . like . . . it stinks, for Christ’s sake! Look, do you really have a rack or an oubliette or any of that crap? What about all those other doors we passed? This some kind of goose-chase?”
The alcohol seemed to be taking a slightly more palpable hold on him. I played the surest gambit. I gasped with vexation at myself for having brought him here, for not noticing how much it frightened—well, not frightened of course, but bothered him. We must go back at once. Naturally I had the articles we’d spo
ken of, but they could wait. Roger had had precisely the same reaction, and he had turned back before this.
Bo Beck boomed jocose obscenities, called me a great joker, and disclaimed anything but utter fascination for these unbelievable “layouts” of mine. He swaggered in the lead the rest of the way down. I was solicitous about the chill and gave him the flask, which he had emptied before we had gone another hundred yards.
Then he was numbed, splendidly numbed. He waxed voluble, humorously intimate, and I was privileged to view the Inner Man. He told me he had always thought I was a weird old type, but genuinely profound. He told me that Valerie was “strictly meat-parade.” He confided that he had himself often enjoyed her favors and hoped amiably that there were no hard feelings.
He told me that sex meant nothing anymore. Death films were the new wave. He boasted that he was prepared to film them with new scope and imagination. By the pit! I hear him still, hear his little meeping, tittering foulnesses echoing so punily amid the contortions of Cthulhuoid art that flanked us. How satanic he fancied himself, how powerful in what he flattered himself was his Evil. Ha ha! His piddling amoral impulsiveness, Evil? The creatures on the torch-stirred walls preceded us with fluid coilings and liquid leaps, a transcosmic advance guard, leading our steps with lurid glee. I wanted to dance for very exaltation and pinch the sweaty cheeks of my meaty sacrifice. The door was in sight.
“They’re as good as dead already,” he explained with sudden enthusiasm. “I mean syphilis, worms, TB, some of ’em really retarded, cancer, you name it. They’re just making a little money instead of dying for nothing a little later on! I mean, bluntly, they’re trash-meat, right? And this way they can leave a little something to their mamacita or whatever, dig?”
We stood before the iron, rune-decked door. I shot the bolt, but did not yet push inward on the door. I smirked at my guest. I leered in his face and it shocked him, for he had never known me as other than self-effacing. “Trash-meat,” I said. “That is poetry, Mr. Beck. You are a poet. Trash-meat, hollowed out of soul, empty of mind, a rack of beef that speaks, eats, drinks, eliminates, and makes money—or tries to.”
He stood murderously quiet, narrowing his pig’s eyes in a way that was meant to frighten me. Compliantly, I cringed against the door, the overweening pedant suddenly fearful of the stronger man. Smiling fiercely, he crowded upon me. I heaved with my shoulder and we stumbled inside together, and after he was in I shouldered home the door and tripped the latch.
I stood calm again, needing no more pretense, and held the light on him while he—why, he had forgotten my insult in the stench of the huge chamber, the dreadful fetor into which he had dived, and he actually staggered and leaned against the wall. He clutched his belly, gagging, and, uncontainably, he vomited upon the stone. I turned away and spoke the fire-syllable, causing the torches that ringed the great round room to ignite.
When his bowels were still and he straightened, pale and shaken, to look around him, he was only distracted from his amazement at the torches by the rusted gratings inset everywhere in the quarter-acre floor, and by the huge, crusted altar that dominated its center. With a sweeping gesture I cried out merrily to him:
“Behold! did I lie to you? Oubliettes! Very ancient ones, too, Mr. Beck, and far deeper, far more . . . commodious than the norm. Oh yes! And, dear Mr. Beck, do you know what, by all the Old and Elder Gods? Can you guess? These oubliettes, they are in use. Genuine and ancient prisoners they hold. Authentic! Oh, yes, authentic past all your guessing. Do you know what a shoggoth is? Would you care to meet one?”
“No!” He screamed it—I thought it would split his throat, that cracked howl. For, under the ring of my taunts, he had heard, you see, had heard the titan stir and slosh that welled up, with greater stench, from those iron gratings. And he, as I, had felt the viscous shifting of an elephantine mass against the basalt foundations of the floor we stood on.
And he didn’t doubt those premonitions, not he! They were too unmistakable. Even as he glared at me, his jaw broken-hinged, the silken roll and thud, as of a captive surf, reverberated beneath us and resonated up our legs. He moaned.
“What?” I crooned. “Is Mr. Beck disturbed? Does he want to sell his ticket back and leave the show? Listen to this!”
In a more strident voice, I called out to the floor:
“Kar-datt, shoggoth! Hin-gyah, Hin-gyah!”
The tearing sound of watery suction surged from the gratings anew, and a dense miasmus of foul reek burgeoned from the same source. Bo Beck turned and clawed the door, which did not move. I cried out to him:
“How can you decline to meet the shoggoth? So authentic and unique a being as it is! Come, say you’ll welcome the shoggoth’s embrace? It longs to clasp you, it gets out so little!”
Again he screamed, without articulation now. He clawed the latch so desperately that the blood welled and rivered from his ruined fingers, and his fumblings made a slippery, ratlike sound against the rude iron.
“Oh, well,” I said. “You’ll need the key, if you insist on leaving.” I held it up, and he rushed toward me with the suddenness of a boar breaking cover. I threw the key, and its silver arc through the firelight ended ringingly atop the altar.
He stopped, waited one shuddering breath, and veered toward the altar, his horror of remaining in the room overcoming his dread of penetrating to its center. Even as he ran, I uttered the necessary syllable, and the largest of the gratings rose groaning on its hinge and gaped erect. Beck plunged with a whimper upon the great dais of ensanguined stone, and in that instant the ebon geyser of the shoggoth fountained from the opened pit. It poured with oceanic swiftness to surround the altar, blackly foaming, piping with shrill, delirious cosmic greed.
It towered and belled out above the fat man, became a pulsing, ropy canopy that rained scalding tentacles upon him. Beck’s arms smoked where it pinioned them. He howled and gibbered in his sanity’s annihilation, while the shoggoth, knowing my will, did not engulf him, but plunged instead its feed tentacles into the back of the fat man’s skull, as one might thrust a spoon into an egg to scoop it hollow. And Bo Beck gaped and stared, and knew, as long as any of the apparatus of knowing remained in him, the shoggoth’s every probe and pluck and hungry violation of his tissues!
∴
The sun was much declined when I re-crossed the sward amidst my beloved trees. I knew an artist’s pride, for I had shaped a justice with consummate skill. And now, like an omen of further triumph, Natalie came striding toward me over the grass, indignation in every storkish limb. For Natalie, a fool proud of her wits, the justice must involve disclosure. She must be shown the truth, and see it not, that her blindness might be revealed to her when the truth enveloped her.
“Monty,” she opened, crisp and imperious, “there’s got to be a stop to this crap as of right now. I mean it, I mean that gobbledy-gook dialogue. They got it all down pat in perfect good faith, but it just sounds too ridiculous, like someone spitting up or…choking to death. Audiences will laugh! It’ll completely destroy the mood!”
I beamed upon her a sad, avuncular smile and gazed as if with fond and painful remembrance into her eyes. “Natalie,” I said, “I was just going to tend my roses, dear. Would you like to see them? In the light of dusk, they have a splendor that no words can describe.”
“Damn it, Monty, don’t play games! What the hell are you talking about? Roses?”
“My dear, it’s not only to view my roses that I ask you along. You see, Roger and I have not been entirely open with you. We have entered into certain arrangements that the rest of you do not suspect. And now, frankly, I am becoming doubtful and even ashamed of my part in the deception.”
I started walking, and she, with a visible tug like a hooked fish, lurched after me. I continued, slowing my utterance with remorseful sighs and pained pauses. “You see my dear…you haven’t always been very friendly to me…you even put considerable…effort into getting your sister to divorce me. But somehow, in spite of thi
s…I can’t help feeling that you’re the only one here with sufficient detachment and insight to hear me out, and to honor my confidence, at least for a reasonable time.”
She was striding beside me now, all attention. “I’m not promising anything in advance, Monty. I’ve got to know more about what’s going on.” We turned round the eastern corner of the house and down a graveled walk flanked by yew and cedar. I walked in silence some moments, my countenance struggling as if to phrase humiliating disclosures.
“You see, my dear, Roger did not conceive this film and has not paid a cent to implement it. He has, rather, been paid a quarter of a million dollars to pretend to conceive it, pretend to work on it, and pretend, at length, to hit upon the idea of using Sternbrucke for the location, due to a happy coincidence whereby he learned that I owned such a place. In truth it was I who told him of the property. I came to him with the entire proposition, fully detailed, and with an advance check of a hundred thousand dollars in my pocket. Oh, but wait, my dear, for this is not even the half of it!”
She had stopped, and clenched her fists. “That sonofabitch! His belt-tightening budget! Why, he’s got me working on percentage! You sonofabitch! All this bullshit! All this…”
“My God,” I sighed, “I was afraid of this. I can’t tell you the rest. I can see you’ll go immediately to the others. I had hoped there’d be compassion for the grotesque whimsies of a very lonely old man!” I moved, as if despairingly, onward. She greatly lusted to fly back to the others and deliver her discoveries with triumphant squawks, but she craved, even more, to have it all before she did so. Before the gap between us had widened too far, she came hurrying after me, grumbling that she promised nothing but had to know more.