Even More Nasty Stories

by Brian McNaughton

  That was the intention of my attacker, I have no doubt, but my lurching progress or my size may have confused him, for the club came down hard on my left shoulder. Flailing angrily, I felt my fist collide by accident with a nose, and when I looked about for its owner, I was astounded to find that I had knocked him flat.

  But he was rising with a metal baseball-bat in his hands, a rat-faced ruffian in the obligatory black of our local loons. Our driver was down, but I had no time to determine his condition, for the footpad was coming at me with his bat raised. Most of my curses were directed at Ramon, for the sword I had asked him to polish and oil was stuck fast in its stick.

  “Wait a minute, you, till I get my sword—” but he ignored my words, which I knew to be ludicrous even as I spoke them. I bent to grip the stick with my knees and tug on the hilt with both hands just as he swung his bat a second time. My sudden change of position made him miss; the blow would have been a deadly one, for he fell sprawling when it failed to connect. At the same time I tripped over my own weapon and fell on him. His breath gushed out in a strangled cry. The fight was over.

  I was congratulating myself when Susan screamed: “No! Uncle, help me!"

  I rose to see a second rogue bending into our cab from the other side. I gave my sword a mighty heave this time, powered by the sheer terror of Susan's scream, and it flashed free. My stroke was clumsy, but it was good enough to bite his arm. He merely grunted, but Susan's scream rose to a heart-stopping pitch. When the attacker fell back, I saw that he held a bloody knife.

  I pursued him for a few steps before I understood my priorities. I dashed back to the cab, where I expected to see the worst. What I saw was, in a way, even worse than that. Susan stared up at me, her face death-white, her lips trembling, unable even to scream in her distress. The bloody left hand she clutched with her right was missing its smallest finger.

  If anyone stirred in this riverside street of derelict warehouses and gutted mills, they chose not to intrude on our misfortune. The traffic light that had caused our dutiful driver to make a stop at this lonely intersection continued to click, just as dutifully, through its sequence; but the deriver lay dead in a pool of blood from his cut throat. The first murderer, merely winded, had run off with his accomplice.

  I found a meager first-aid kit in the driver's compartment and bound up Susan's wound with hands that trembled from the importance of the task. I would have called the injury minor if anyone else had suffered it, but her apathy was not a good sign.

  Trying to start the car never occurred to me, nor looking for a telephone, another device invented to baffle and enrage me. I lifted Susan in my arms. She seemed to weigh nothing, and the face like a pale flower in the darkness looked no older than my deluded memory of the girl I had hoped to please with a doll. My first impulse on entering that iniquitous salon had been to do just this, to wrap her in a coat and carry her home. How I wished I had obeyed that impulse!

  Pelted with questions after running, then walking, then staggering to the Hazard home on Zaman's Hill with my dear burden, I could only gasp as I tried to shake an insectile ballet of black spots from my eyes. I laid Susan down on the nearest couch. Carter arrogated to himself the duty of shaking me, and did it hard enough to rattle my teeth, when he had seen his daughter's injury.

  “Set upon,” I wheezed. “Cutthroats. On the way from Mrs. Kilpatrick's."

  Sarah cried, “You took her there, Brother?"

  Susan tore my heart by rallying from her torpor to defend me: “Of course not, Mama! He came to take me away from that place."

  Her father released me, but he annoyed me even more than Sarah had when he shouted at large, “Send for a doctor!"

  I swallowed my pride and said, “You're quite right.” I added in an undertone, “I don't like her lethargy at all."

  “But of course, you'll stay and oversee her care, Doctor,” he said, trying to retrieve his blunder.

  “I can't.” I bent over Susan and managed to evoke a wan smile from her. She knew as well as I that ordinary thieves don't ignore purses or wallets to steal fingers, and she understood me when I said, “I have something I must do that can't wait."

  No one else understood, of course. Where must I go, what would I do, what was I thinking of? As sometimes happens in distraught families, such silly questions demanded more attention than the victim. Vague talk of prior engagements failed to win my freedom.

  If Hazard had not been my brother-in-law, I might be tempted to describe him as a singularly thick-headed booby, and I hadn't the patience to persuade him that Mrs. Kilpatrick affected to practice a form of necromancy with the dead parts of living persons. Even if I succeeded, he would want to call his attorney to devise a prudent course of action. They would eventually decide to call the police, who would obtain a search warrant and arrive at Mrs. Kilpatrick's home sometime tomorrow afternoon.

  I must act now if I would retrieve the finger, which still might be reattached. And I was eager to demonstrate to that vile woman as soon and as forcefully as possible that a professor of anatomy, armed with a sword, should never be provoked to a competition in dismemberment.

  It's sometimes convenient to have a name as a buffoon. I confessed to the distracted parents that I had obtained one of the scarce tickets to see Niobe's farewell performance with her elephant. This foolery they could accept from me. They threw up their hands and let me take my leave. My brother-in-law made no effort to mask his sneer when he offered to lend me his car and chauffeur for such an urgent mission, but I accepted.

  The driver, even thicker than his master, refused to believe that I didn't want to be conveyed to the Dunwich fairgrounds, since Carter had spat out that destination in wishing me a jolly evening. Only when I had spoken some very hard words indeed would he divert his course to the Medical School. He showed his displeasure by driving like a demon taking me to hell, a likeness that I tried not to dwell upon.

  The waxing moon beloved of witches had raised its hump over the Old Lecture Hall when I alighted and gave the driver a bill, entreating him to secrecy. Once underway, he shouted back, “Plenty of naked ladies in the Med School morgue, but they won't wiggle like Niobe!"

  I realized that no one would come looking for me in the right place if I failed to return, but this consideration was no more important than my painful weariness as I hurried past the campus to Mrs. Kilpatrick's grounds. Perhaps I was a fool to risk my life for a scrap of dead flesh and bone, but a terrible anger drove me on.

  The house was dark, the party was over, but a dim light still shone from the room that opened on the gardens. I skulked in the shadows, uncertain how to proceed as I asked myself where one would go to eat stolen flesh. As if cued by my entrance, Mrs. Kilpatrick herself answered the question by gliding down the steps from her salon and hurrying toward the cemetery.

  She gave no sign that she had seen me, but her timely appearance suggested that I was being toyed with. Her white cape, too, a clear beacon in the moonlight, could have been chosen to make pursuit easy. Knowing that she meant to trap me made the trap seem less perilous, and perhaps that was her convoluted intention, but I followed.

  I was thinking that it would be impossible to lose her at the very moment when she vanished. The white cape that had gleamed so brightly in the forsaken garden went out like a snuffed candle.

  I dashed forward, unable to imagine what had become of her until the ground under my feet quite suddenly absented itself. It was a short fall, but legs already wobbling from fatigue gave way and sent me sprawling. I had already forgotten how old Sarah had said I was, but I knew I was too old for this. I should have seized the lady the instant she appeared; assuming I could have caught her.

  I lay in the cellar of some vanished outbuilding, cluttered with dead branches, withered vines and rusted garden tools. Directly opposite, a door in the cellar wall hung invitingly open, if a doorway leading into the bowels of a graveyard may be called inviting. I hauled myself painfully erect and hobbled closer. I peered wit
hin, where darkness and silence oppressed me almost as much as the stench of mold and decay.

  Giving it no thought, for thought would have stopped me cold, I stripped to my shirt and put my fine garments aside. I drew my sword and stepped through the door.

  The tunnel beyond was somewhat wider than I, but shorter. A man of average height might have walked comfortably erect, or as comfortably as one could between walls clotted with fungi whose textures evoked slippery flesh and lank hair. I had to stoop, and perhaps I partly cringed from the awareness that each step took me beneath a greater weight of earth, of stones, of corpses and their scavengers.

  The walls were of orderly masonry, although the identity and purpose of the builders were beyond all but the most macabre conjecture. The dead were not carried into a graveyard by underground tunnels, but such tunnels might conveniently be used to bring them out.

  I was abruptly stopped by a sight, the first thing I had seen since entering, but I could put no name to it. It was a pallid glimmer that seemed to contract and expand without ever achieving a coherent shape, although it began to look very much like a blind, mouthing face. Whether it was fleeing or rushing toward me I couldn't say, but I raised my hand as if to ward it off and was surprised by the sudden materialization of a second pale shape: my own hand. It reflected the almost imperceptible glow of nitrous streaks on the low ceiling, leakage from coffins above. The first phantom could have been nothing but Mrs. Kilpatrick's white cape, its shape altering in time to her hurried footsteps.

  I hurried, too, but the spectral gleam grew no closer. Sometimes it disappeared entirely for long minutes. When I stopped to listen, I heard only my own hammering heartbeat and laboring lungs. Each time I recaptured the image I was never entirely sure that it was really there, that I wasn't willing myself to see it, but I pressed on.

  I breathed more easily when I perceived that the tunnel shied from a direct route to the center of the hill, and that its trend was upward. I could not be as far beneath the surface as I feared. Having met no obstacles yet, I dared to go faster.

  Light dazzled me. Against this glare, the pale ghost I had pursued suddenly become a black form of clear outline, startlingly close enough to touch. The lady then astounded me by rising, as if by magic, to leave me trapped in the earth. This puzzle baffled and unmanned me until I stumbled over the lowest of the stone steps she was ascending. I saw her clearly for the first time when she passed through the light, which was nothing but a sliver of moonlight falling from above.

  I hurried up the steps. I believe I emerged into a ruined tomb, its door open to the night and its roof half-fallen, but I hardly noticed my surroundings. My attention was seized by the figure of the lady, bending with studied grace as if to pet a dog or offer a tidbit to a child.

  “Here's a dainty treat for you, son,” she said, “from the niece of the man who dares call himself Ghoulmaster."

  The massive shadow before her was neither a dog nor a child. Only its malformed head and shoulders extruded from a second hole in the floor of the tomb. When I cried out, it rolled its yellow eyes at me with a look of insufferable arrogance, as if it were some grand personage I had presumed to discommode.

  I believed that Mrs. Kilpatrick had conceived and staged the events up until now: her appearance, my pursuit, this confrontation, perhaps even her grimace of exaggerated surprise as she turned toward me. But I daresay she was unprepared for my improvisation on her drama. I rushed forward with my sword and chopped her hand off at the wrist.

  Her shriek was unfit for a madhouse, and the ghoul's laughter for a nightmare in that madhouse, but I ignored both of them as the twitching hand released a finger that was not its own. I dropped to my knees to scrabble for it on the bloody floor, but the monster was more dexterous. It seized the finger in its filthy claws and dropped into the pit with a final, echoing cackle.

  Deluding herself that I coveted her vile hand, which I would not have touched with even a gob of phlegm or a stream of urine, Lady Glypht snatched it from the floor and scuttled into the shadows, where she raved at me: “Roger will know her now, you fool, will possess her to the uttermost depth of her being, in a way that your own secret itch for the little slut could never achieve!"

  I had believed myself incapable of gloating over a fellow creature's distress, but I was forced to revise that belief as I watched the stump of her wrist spout blood. This lady's presence would not much longer pollute the earth.

  Neither had I believed that, faced with a living ghoul, I would desire nothing but its destruction. I am a scientist, and the thing that had once been Roger Kilpatrick was a riddle never posed to science before. But no thought of questioning him, studying him, or curing him crossed my mind. Whatever this thing was, it was an insult to Nature. I had never known the irrational disgust that some feel for snakes, rats or spiders. I knew it now, and I doubt that any man on earth could hate snakes as I hated this ghoul.

  Few ophiophobes would go headfirst into an unknown pit after a snake, though. One might, if it stole something dear to him. There was little hope of retrieving Susan Hazard's finger, but I could avenge its theft. If the monster were indeed the missing Roger Kilpatrick, I could avenge his poor bride, too. Had that child's morbid but innocent delight in drawing “mythical” creatures led her to those foul jaws?

  Still I hesitated. I glanced at Mrs. Kilpatrick in that moment. She had left off shrieking obscenities. I thought she might be unconscious, perhaps even dead, but I was unhappily wrong. This descendant of Sidney Newman, who had undoubtedly brought the necrophiliac plague to our shores, squatted in a strangely animal-like way, greedily gnawing on her own severed hand. To such a sight, hell would be a relief. I crawled into the pit.

  This was no man-made passage of stone. It was like the tunnel of a giant mole, scooped by claws and packed smooth by wriggling bodies that had infused it with their stench. The ammoniac stink was a drill in my skull, and there was no air to dilute it, for the ghoul's body corked the tunnel ahead. I heard him giggling and mumbling in words that sounded nearly like human speech. Then I heard—and I still hear it, will I always hear it?—the grinding of huge teeth, the crackle of tiny bones.

  My scream was less human than his when I lunged forward. My hand fell on slimy flesh. I gripped it convulsively. I believed it was an ankle, and I used it to drag myself forward as I jabbed my sword into tissue that I sincerely hoped was more vulnerable than gluteal muscle. He shrieked, and I feared I might never hear again, but I wrenched out the sword for a second thrust.

  Anatomist I may be, but I forgot that the foot I held would have a mate. Its horny heel struck me between the eyes like a battering ram, and I knew no more.

  The sick sometimes wake up merely to die, and I believed that was what I had done. No continuation of my pain and nausea seemed possible, nor even, in that foul atmosphere, desirable. I vomited until my stomach clenched like an empty fist, but even that brought no relief.

  Recalling where I was, I jabbed again with my sword, but it encountered nothing except the tunnel walls. The tone of the scraping suggested that the pit lay empty before me. But I had done with chasing ghouls. I writhed backward, upward, recalling the air of the tomb as if it were the ocean breeze, the moonlight as if it were the noon sun. In no time at all, my foot struck a solid obstruction.

  I had reached the end of the tunnel, the hole by which I had entered, and it was blocked. I couldn't turn, but I tried to make my feet serve as hands. As far as I could tell, a heavy slab now rested on the hole. I doubted that I could move it even if I put my back under it, and that was impossible in the cramped tunnel.

  The only alternatives were railing against fate, weeping, or turning my sword on myself, so I crawled forward through my own vomit and downward through the filth of the ghoul.

  To keep moving was my only thought. At least the painful effort would occupy my mind. It seemed too much to hope that it would exhaust me and kill me before thirst, starvation or inhuman claws did that work. As for escape from th
e underground, I tried not even to think of it.

  The tunnel branched and kept branching. No one creature could have dug so much. No ten creatures could have dug so much. No twenty creatures, working for twenty years with clawed hands.... Besides his horrific books, what had the earliest Newman brought with him from the Middle East? What had his descendant brought back from the South Seas? A bride? An infection? An alteration in his genetic structure? I could almost believe that a demonic curse had been laid on this house.

  I always chose the fork that seemed to go upward, but it always dipped downward again; I always took the direction that seemed—but my confusion on that subject was complete. This time there was no dancing gleam to pursue, nor any light at all.

  I felt things, some of them soft and unspeakably putrid. Others were hard, and you may not believe it, but I positively delighted in my ability to say that this was a radius, that an ulna. Even though they bore the scoring of fangs, even though shreds of stinking flesh adhered to some of them, they were familiar, and nothing else was. For a long time I carried a nicely formed scapula with me, as a lost child might cling to a doll, but I dropped it somewhere along the way. When I noted its loss, it irked me more than the later loss of my sword.

  I could reckon time only by the growing extent of my torn clothing, my scraped flesh, my ripped fingernails, and by such calculation, an aeon crept by. As I began to drift into sleep or madness, I couldn't say which, it seemed that little Susan scrambled all over me, searching eagerly for the candy I had hidden. I laughed, protested, turned this way and that to guard the prize. I grabbed her hand, which bit me. I understood then that it was a rat I had captured, and I squeezed the life from it. Its shrill piping seemed echoed by tittering in the hollow distance.

  I saw many dead men I had known and held annoyingly banal conversations with them. Perhaps the gargoyle faces that peered and gibbered into mine were likewise hallucinations, but I'm not absolutely sure, even though I think it would have been too dark to see real faces. Screaming at them and punching them made them flee, and I doubt that phantasms would have been so timid.