Even More Nasty Stories

by Brian McNaughton

  I had found some highly suggestive material in references to Mrs. Kilpatrick's earliest traceable ancestor, Sidney Newman, who had immigrated to our shores in 1674 from the Levant. He was apparently an Arab, an odd addition to the Anglo-Saxon population that then prevailed, but he was by all accounts a charming and articulate gentleman; more importantly to his Yankee neighbors, he was a hard-headed businessman who achieved extraordinary success in all his enterprises. He was a scholar of obscure lore, too, and later laid the foundations for Miskatonic's unique collection of “forbidden” books with a handsome bequest. Although the wildest rumors circulated for years after, no one ever determined whether his murder, in 1715, at the hands of unknown intruders had been triggered by his business practices or his reputed demonolatry. The gruesome nature of his murder, by dismemberment and cremation in his domestic hearth, had kept all the rumors alive in any number of compilations of New England mysteries.

  I toyed with the idea of proposing that Newman had originated our New England ghoul legends by speaking of Arabic myths to his neighbors, but I decided against it. I had no proof. His descendants still existed and might be offended by idle speculation about their unfortunate ancestor. Talk of supernatural connections might expecially offend them, since Newman had traveled to Salem in 1692 to testify as a character-witness for a defendant in the witch-trials, and had narrowly escaped being hanged himself.

  Reasonable readers would have accepted my book about ghouls as a work of fiction, but such readers are rare, and most condemned it as a hoax. Even worse, totally unreasonable readers took it for a scientific treatise. I soon abandoned the hopeless task of trying to convince my detractors that I was a fiction-writer and my admirers that I was a liar. When anyone mentioned ghouls to me, I would usually flee.

  Amy Winfield was one of the morbid eccentrics the subject attracts. She was an art student, and ghouls—drawn solely from her imagination, of course—were the sole subject of her art. Flippantly, one of her instructors told her I was the only person who could verify the anatomical correctness of her drawings, and I gave her the benefit of my best guesses.

  She married Roger Kilpatrick, and within a few months, as my brother-in-law had reminded me, he murdered her. Or his mother had. I had been fond of Amy, even if she had been a bit strange. I was much fonder of my niece, Susan. Whether my help was needed or not, I resolved to give it.

  Until the disappearance of her son, I learned, Mrs. Kilpatrick had been jealous of her privacy. Those who strayed onto her grounds were apt to be set upon by dogs and lawyers. But after lamenting Roger's flight and the death of his bride for a year, she changed her ways. She welcomed students and social butterflies to her salon to meet hypnotists, swamis, gurus, necromancers, oracles, faddists and the less reputable sort of artists. Such companions may not have been evil, as Sarah averred, but they sounded criminally frivolous.

  Those who had visited her salon told me that no one needed an invitation, especially not I—because of my scholarly distinction, they hastened to add, in case I thought they meant I should fit right in, the ninny everyone called “Ghoulmaster” behind his back.

  To avoid confusion with charlatans and lunatics, I dressed formally for the second time that week, which laid me open to no end of sarcastic sallies from my servant, Ramon. He affected to believe that I meant to cut a figure before Niobe, a young woman who had lately won vulgar adulation by performing a salacious dance on the back of an elephant at the Dunwich Fair.

  “For defend the lady if the tiger escape?” he gasped between giggles when I asked him to sharpen and polish the sword-stick I had bought years ago in preparation for a trip to New York City that I later managed to avoid.

  As often happens in my social life, I miscalculated. The large, noisy room I entered assaulted me with the impression of a Hallowe'en party in a bagnio, with Marlene Dietrich and Heinrich Himmler as guests of honor. Anyone asked to pick out the charlatan in that gathering would surely have chosen me.

  I was wondering how to be inconspicuous in my tuxedo when the crowd perfected my humiliation by applauding, as if I were an entertainer who had lumbered onstage to lampoon Fred Astaire. I waited for the applause to end so I could be plainly heard, but as I opened my mouth to damn them all for impudent swine, a young woman dashed up to me and cried: “Uncle Felix! Did my mother send you to spy on me?"

  I had been reminded that Susan was no longer a toddler, and her costume left me in no doubt that she was a grown woman. She seemed to have forgotten to put on a dress over the black undergarments and mesh stockings that she wore, incredibly, with hiking-boots. For the first time in years, I felt my face burn. She blushed, too, to her credit, all the way down to her pretty little breasts.

  “He's certainly dressed for spying, isn't he? Mr. James Bond, I presume.” I was calmer now, but unable to speak with much coherence, so I was grateful when this woman continued, “After he ignored my fifth or sixth invitation, I all but gave up on our illustrious Dr. Aubrey. Whatever did I say, Doctor, that finally tempted you away from your far more interesting tibias and fibias and infundibulums?"

  This was Mrs. Kilpatrick, then, and my first impression was of her eyes. They were incredibly large, their hue was a glowing topaz, and their effect was startling. Beautiful, yes, but they were the sort of beautiful eyes one saw in a zoo, and the absence of intervening bars unsettled me.

  “Um,” I believe I replied to her question, and, “Ah."

  “Uncle, forgive me!” Susan said. “I had no idea you'd been invited."

  Neither did I, and I somehow doubted that I had been, but I said, “I try to open my mail at least once a year, but sometimes I neglect it."

  That seemed to me a reasonable practice, but from the way they laughed, I suspected that I'd just started another Aubrey story on its rounds.

  It was easier to believe that my hostess had killed off her family than that she was sixty. The black dress that matched her long, straight hair was not just diaphanous, it was transparent. Most of the older guests had the sense to eschew a fashion more suited to girls like Susan, but Mrs. Kilpatrick flaunted it in triumph. Lithe as a panther, bright as a bird, she confounded any notion that her skin might be less taut or more freckled than that of the young persons who vied for her attention.

  More than once, as I perambulated the salon like the overdressed ghost of somebody's grandfather, she caught me staring at her and pierced me over the rim of a Japanese fan with her thoroughly unnerving eyes. I wasn't sure if she was threatening or flirting, but those signals are often flown on the same banner. I tried to stop looking her way.

  The room was large, open on two sides to the summer airs of a garden, and to its innumerable moths and beetles. Perhaps my nose was influenced by my awareness that so many ancient dead lay so close by, but the night breeze seemed less fragrant than moldy. The decor was a queasy mix of American decadence and exotic barbarism, most of the latter souvenirs of the swashbuckling Isaac Newman, who had parlayed his stewardship of some South Seas whaling-stations into a petty kingdom in the 1820's. Savage spears flanked effete watercolors, clay gnomes ogled crystal fairies, a marble nude bemused an octopoid demon hacked from basalt.

  Some local primitive had been responsible for the most truly barbarous artifact, an old mural that depicted Isaac meting out justice to the heathen. I tried to keep my back to this horror, but I kept forgetting it, so that I was often startled by fresh aspects of its grisliness.

  By strolling here or there, I could sample the flagrant abuse of instruments intended for music, of language intended for poetry, of minds intended for thought. By publicizing and sensationalizing the university's unfortunate collection of crackpot books, the late H.P. Lovecraft has a lot to answer for. Each year, it seems, draws a larger and stranger agglomeration of Lovecraftian lunatics, students and street-people, to Miskatonic, and this year's crop was richly represented in the self-styled artists and philosophers who had flocked to Mrs. Kilpatrick's salon.

  It embarrassmed me acutel
y that I could cut a figure in such an intellectual vacuum. I could have stolen all the mountebanks’ admirers away if I had chosen to rap my stick and announce that I would now speak of ghouls. Incredibly, the applause had not satirized my costume, which many assured me was downright squalid; it had meant they were glad to see me. While the university establishment traded Aubrey stories about a dimwit who forgot to wear his false teeth or his trousers to class, this crowd had been telling each other tales of a mystery-man who trafficked with ghouls and demons. I wasn't sure which cycle of slanderous myths I liked least. I know I didn't like it at all when people called me, with respectful intent, “Ghoulmaster."

  Most of the questions with which they vexed me were foolish or incomprehensible, and I would either stare down my questioner in heavy silence or mumble something abstruse. Most vexing of all were the pathetic morons who believed that ghoulism was a desirable state, and who wanted me to help them attain it. I tried to convince them in their own slang that no such perversion was squalid, but they took this for an enigmatic joke.

  While I was trying to elude an immoderately graceful young man in a motorcycle jacket and sequined athletic-supporter who desired my opinion of a poem that began, I think, “My love and the worms are on intimate terms,” something caught my eye. I should say, rather, what caught my eye was its absence: the smallest toe on the foot of a passing woman.

  When I notice minor disfigurements, I try to put them out of my mind, and I realized that I had already tried to put too many out of my mind that night. In a gathering of a hundred or so, it seemed unlikely that so many as half a dozen would be missing toes, fingers or earlobes, but I had already seen that many, and I had hardly examined the whole crowd.

  The last verse had jingled away, and the poet yearned toward me with hound's eyes. I said, “That is without a doubt, sir, the most squalid effusion to which I have ever been subjected."

  “Ghoulmaster!” he cried. Before I had any idea what he intended, he dropped to his knee, seized my hand and kissed it.

  “Get up, get up,” I muttered, scrubbing my hand vigorously with my handkerchief and trying to edge away. To divert him from his art and his adoration alike, I said, “Why are there so many severed fingers?"

  He looked stricken. His lip trembled. He said, “Master, forgive me, I don't know! But I'll think on it constantly, I swear, and when we next meet, I hope I'll have a worthy answer."

  I realized, as he danced away to blither of his epiphany, that he had mistaken a plain question for a cosmic riddle.

  I found myself confronting the ghastly mural yet again. It would have been an unfit backdrop for any activity, but behind this mob of fetishists and posers and smatterers, it seemed—if I may be permitted the detestable word—ghoulish. Either the artist had never seen a real Polynesian, or else he had tried to legitimize the atrocities by presenting the natives as subhumans whose evolution had been diverted toward the model of the baboon. What particularly appalled me, however illogically, was seeing the machines and victims of hidden torture-chambers arrayed on an idyllic beach in broad daylight.

  “Their cannibalism drove my ancestor wild,” Mrs. Kilpatrick said at my elbow, and she smiled to observe its convulsive jerk, “but they saw it as a sacrament."

  “Knocking that idea out of their heads was surely no crime,” I said, leaving my further thoughts unspoken.

  Her right hand rested companionably on my arm. As I watched the hummingbird-flicker of the fan in her left, I conceived the notion that she contrived to hide the smallest finger of that hand from my view. I wondered if it was missing. I grew obsessed with this question, but her adroit maneuvers and the shadows of moths that danced around the hanging lamps combined to baffle me.

  “They believed they gained the wisdom and experience of their sacrificial victims by eating them,” she said. “Could that idea have any truth in it?"

  “If it did, it might spare my students the boredom of my lectures."

  She smiled: not at my poor joke, but in lofty tolerance of my flippancy. Such a fine distinction could she convey quite plainly with the tilt of her chin, the flex of her eyebrow, but most of all with the gleam of her disturbing eyes.

  “Am I wrong, Doctor, in believing that a body remembers its missing limb? Who then can say that the limb holds no memory of the missing body and the contents of the brain?"

  Even from so fascinating a woman, such nonsense bored me. I answered, “That well may be, but it doesn't follow that I can assume those memories by consuming the limb. If that were so—” here I popped down a tidbit from a sideboard—"I could now recall the life and opinions of a shrimp."

  “How do you know you can't,” she laughed, “unless you know the language of shrimp?"

  We had continued our game with the fan, and now I knew she had been playing the game, for as she skewered me with that reply, she reached up and scratched my nose: with the little finger of her left hand. I took no offense at this liberty, as I told myself I should have, and discovered a foolish grin on my face after she had swayed away, fluttering, shooting a parting flash of topaz through untidy bangs over her shoulder.

  Her admirers swarmed around her again before she had crossed the room, my niece among them. I hurried to extract Susan and propelled her nearly into the garden, where the light was less revealing. She seemed to have grown comfortable with her shameless display, but I hadn't.

  “Uncle, I had no idea you were such a.... “Words failed her, but her eyes sparkled.

  “Such a deep shifter?" I filled in, showing off more of my new vocabulary.

  “Exactly!” she laughed. “Everyone's in absolute awe of you. I mean, to hear Father talk—” She broke off in confusion.

  I diverted her from the slip: “Why are there so many severed fingers here?"

  “Oh, that. That's just—sort of like fortune-telling, you know, only deeper. Mrs. Kilpatrick can tell you just everything about yourself, who your real friends are, what you should do to be happy, things like that."

  This appalling revelation actually cheered me up. Here was clearly a matter for the police: physical mutilation in aid of fortune-telling. I would report her, Mrs. Kilpatrick would be packed off to a prison or a madhouse, and Susan would be freed from her influence. Mission accomplished.

  But I kept my plans to myself as I took both of her hands in mine and examined them. I pushed back her soft hair to check her ears. Not foreseeing how odd it would sound, I said, “Take off your boots."

  She giggled, but she complied. I glanced down at her pretty toes. I found that I could look at her directly without shame or, what I suppose had secretly shamed me, improper urges. As forcefully and earnestly as I could, I said, “Dearest girl, one thing we must all do to be happy is to keep our bodies in one piece. That isn't always easy. We're soft creatures in a hard world. When you've outgrown this crowd—and you will, believe me—you'll regret it bitterly if you've mutilated your perfect body for their sake."

  “Uncle, I wouldn't do that! Do you think I'm crazy?"

  “No, but you're young, and Mrs. Kilpatrick has a strong personality, and you admire her perhaps more than she deserves."

  My eye wandered to the mural across the room, visible now in its sickening fullness, of the lady's ancestor enlightening the cannibals. Had such reminders of that old atrocity so warped her mind that she would embrace the belief her great-great-grandfather had tried to stamp out? Perhaps the fantasy she had advanced held her truest and maddest convictions.

  Those savages weren't alone in their belief. Credulous boobies in our own city—in this very room—believed in ghouls as demons with magical powers. One such power, according to fireside tales, was to retrieve the memories and mimic the appearance of corpses whose parts they ate.

  I tried to keep my imagination from running wild, but that was probably the wrong way to understand people like our hostess. A lifetime of medical research had taught me that I could imagine no depravity in the darkest corner of my mind that others weren't practicing be
hind respectable and ordinary façades. And in company like this, where nothing seemed ordinary or respectable, what secrets might not lurk?

  I needed air, and not just the moldy breeze from the graveyard. Susan made no objection when I proposed to take her home, and I dared to hope that my words had tempered her enthusiasm for the madwoman. I asked one of the servants to phone for a taxi while she, to my relief, collected a black leather coat. We rode for a while in silence, she with thoughts that I hoped were wise, and I with probably foolish ones about the similarity of primitive religion to ghoulish myth.

  My speculations gripped my fancy so strongly that I quite forgot the real world until Susan shook me like a sleeper and cried, “What's going on, Uncle? What is it?"

  Our cab had stopped for a traffic light, and our driver had leaped out to expostulate with someone in a way that might have blistered ears in Port-au-Prince. In the next instant a man screamed in pain. I cursed the mystery of the newfangled door handle as I struggled to get out.

  “God damn you!” I cried. “What are you playing at now?"

  I thought this was one of my typical imbroglios with the lazy, thieving, sarcastic rascals who hire themselves out as taxi-drivers in Arkham. I was at their mercy, having conceded after many years of misplacing my keys, misplacing my car, and driving absent-mindedly into the middle of construction sites and schoolyards, that I should be trusted with no mechanical device more complex than a pen. Tonight's driver had been worse than most, grumbling to himself about the fate that had chosen him to haul not just Niobe but her elephant as well.

  Squeezing myself from a back-seat designed for midget clowns, I anticipated having to sort out some tiresome traffic-dispute with reason, money or threats. I wasn't prepared to be struck on the head with a club.