Weird Tales #325

by Tanith Lee

  A vision came to him, not a mere dream now, such as any boy might have who is lonely and longs to be somewhere else, but something more, as if a shiny tile had fallen out of some vast mosaic he could not see; and here it was, a part of the larger whole, gleaming before him.

  * * * *

  He seemed to be running in the darkness. He was naked, but his flesh was hard as metal. There was no warmth to him, no softness. His hands were stiff, entirely covered with scars. He was terribly hungry, though he had devoured all others of his kind and his belly was filled with blood, and the souls of every sorcerer who ever lived were contained within him. Yet he could not be satisfied.

  He ran toward a rising sun that gave no warmth, across black, gleaming, featureless water.

  And as the sun rose, he saw something else in the sky, shapes like clouds, but not clouds at all: faces human or nearly so, or else the faces of animals; here the heron, there the crocodile, again, the jackal.

  The very gods. He ran to confront the very gods, with hunger and anger and sorrow in his heart.

  Many voices spoke within him. As the vision faded, he was still trying to sort them out.

  At the very end, he thought that Tica would know what to do. He turned to ask her, but she was not there.

  * * * *

  When he had the strength, he got up and found his satchel with his book in it by the water’s edge. As the sun rose, he sat on a grassy islet, turning the pages, drying them out, searching in vain for the pages in which he had written in such detail of his stolen days together with Tica.

  These, he could not find.

  But he did find, marked with the broken string which had been the necklace, where she had written an account of all that had happened between them, and concluded:

  The sorcerer cannot afford to love. But he can be loved. Farewell.

  THE GRAVEDIGGER’S APPRENTICE, by Alvin Helms

  “Simon! Watch where yer throwin’ that dirt, boy.”

  “Yes, Jonah,” I sighed, and waited for the ‘one thing.’

  “If there’s one thing that irks folks, it’s a messy graveside.”

  We’d been digging all morning and part of the afternoon, and the grave was only five feet deep. My whole body was aching and tired. I couldn’t have cared less where the dirt went.

  But I wiped the sweat from my brow and said, “Yes, Jonah.”

  Jonah sniffed indignantly. “Ye got a lot to learn, boy, if I’m ever gonna make a proper gravedigger out o’ ye.”

  I preferred the term ‘cemetery caretaker,’ and I had no intention of making a career out of it anyway, but I didn’t bother arguing. I just wished Jonah would move into the twentieth century, and dig the graves with a backhoe.

  But we’d had that conversation on my first day at the Eagle Hill Cemetery. He had snorted in disgust at the idea. “If there’s one thing a grave-digger don’t need,” he told me, “It’s some newfangled, godforsaken machine doin’ his work.”

  So I leaned my weight into the shovel, and I dug. And I watched where I threw the dirt.

  My friends teased me a lot when they first heard about my summer job, but it usually wasn’t too bad. It was mostly a lot of yard work. Mowing and weeding and such. In nearly two months, I’d only had to dig four graves with Jonah. Five, counting this one.

  It was a little morbid, sometimes, but I tried not to think about it. It was easy money for college.

  Jonah interrupted my thoughts. “Simon! Ye listenin’ to me, boy?”

  I hadn’t even realized he was talking. “Yes, Jonah,” I lied.

  Just then, as I stepped down on the shovel, the soil caved in beneath the blade. My leg and the shovel plunged into the earth, and I toppled forward with a startled yelp.

  Jonah caught the back of my overalls, yanking me up and onto my feet. He spun me around, and looked me over. “Ye all right, boy?”

  My heart was racing, and my throat had gone dry, but I nodded.

  He patted my shoulder, and turned to study the hole.

  It was rough-edged, about a foot in diameter. Blackness gaped inside it. I realized suddenly that my hands were empty, that I had dropped the shovel in the hole. I wondered how deep it was.

  Jonah stood back, shaking his head. “Damn it!” he muttered. “Them godforsaken sons o’ bitches!”

  I asked, “Who?”

  Jonah scratched at his grey-stubbled chin, squinting up at the sun. “Well, I reckon we got plenty o’ time,” he said, and jangled the keys to the caretaker’s cottage from a pocket of his overalls. He handed me his shovel. “Listen boy, stay here an’ keep an eye on that hole.”

  Before I could speak, he scrambled up the side of the grave and was gone.

  I looked at the hole. A crumble of dirt fell into it. I backed away, wondering how much of the earth beneath me was hollow.

  Birds were chirping in the trees up the hill. The sun was still high and shining. And there was an empty black hole at the bottom of this grave, where no hole had any business being. A chill shivered up my spine. Easy money for college, my ass.

  I was preparing to climb out, walk away, and take my chances at the unemployment office again, when Jonah came hurrying back. He jumped lightly into the grave beside me.

  He was carrying a big, powerful-looking flashlight in one hand, and a big, powerful-looking shotgun in the other. “C’mon over here,” he said. “Careful where ye step, an’ widen that hole a mite.”

  I stayed right where I was. “What the Hell for?”

  He raised his eyebrows, and looked at me as if I were stupid. “Well first off, I want my other spade back,” he said. “An’ secondly, we gotta go down there an’ root out them damned ghouls!”

  He appeared to be serious, which I took to mean that he was insane. I became acutely aware of the shotgun.

  Politely, I said, “. . . ghouls?”

  “Yes, ghouls! Who d’ye think dug that hole?” He gestured with the shotgun’s barrel.

  I considered my answer carefully. “I figured it was just an air pocket.”

  Jonah sneered. “That ain’t no ‘air pocket,’ boy. Jeezus. If there’s one thing ye gotta learn, it’s how to spot ghouls. Now get on over here, an’ knock that hole wider.”

  He was stark raving mad, I decided; but he did have the shotgun. So I cautiously edged past him to the hole, testing each step before bringing my full weight down. From as far away as possible, I stretched out with the shovel and stabbed at the edges of the hole. Clods of dirt broke loose and fell in.

  “C’mon boy, we ain’t got all day.”

  In just a few minutes, the hole had grown considerably. It was oblong, running diagonally under one corner of the grave. Jonah motioned me back. He squatted, peering into the hole. “Yep,” he said, and spat. “Goddamned ghoul tunnel.”

  It occurred to me that I was behind him, and had the shovel; but I leaned over his shoulder. “A tunnel?”

  He nodded. “Take a look.” He clicked the big flashlight on, and shined it down.

  The hole was only about four feet deep. The shovel was down there, half covered by the dirt I’d knocked in. But at each end of the hole, where it passed under the walls of the grave, I saw only darkness. I shivered again.

  “Where —” My voice seemed too loud, so I whispered. “Where does it go?”

  Jonah turned, handing the flashlight to me. “Looks like it runs over to Mrs. Hoffman’s grave, the one we dug last week. If there’s one thing ghouls love, it’s fresh meat.” He said this with a straight face. Then, to my amazement, he hopped into the hole. “C’mon, we’d best get this over with.”

  I blinked down at him, not understanding.

  “C’mon boy! I can’t fire this thing one-handed, so yer gonna have to crawl along behind me an’ hold that light.”

  A nervous chuckle burst out of my throat. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  Jonah scowled at me. “Look boy, this is part o’ the job. Ain’t the nicest part, but it’s got to be done.” He scrounged in a pocket,
tossed me a wad of cotton. “Stick that in yer ears,” he warned, and pumped a round into the shotgun’s chamber. “This is gonna be loud.”

  This was too much to process. A strange sense of giddiness stole over me. I felt like I was floating, as if in a dream. I stuffed my ears full of cotton and followed Jonah into the hole.

  The tunnel was cramped. We had to walk in a low crouch, waddling into the darkness. I held the flashlight high, shining it over Jonah’s shoulder. The tunnel stretched away in the distant shadows, perfectly cylindrical, with walls of tightly-packed, featureless soil.

  I began to smell … something down there, something vaguely unpleasant that made the hair on the back of my neck rise up. It wasn’t a grave smell, because that’s just the smell of freshly turned earth. This was different. Rotten, decaying. It grew stronger as we went deeper.

  Soon the air was thick with the stench, and hard to breathe. My legs began to hurt, and then my back, and then my neck. A cramp slowly tightened in my right calf. I opened my mouth to ask Jonah if we could rest, and a noise echoed down the tunnel to us.

  Even muffled by the cotton, it was horrible. It sounded like … like dogs, crunching bones. Like a straw, when your glass is nearly empty. Like the hissing of a snake. Like wet fabric, tearing slowly. It sounded like all these things, and more, all at once.

  My sweat-soaked overalls were cold against my skin. I told myself that we had wandered near a sewer, or a water line. I tried to convince myself that those were surely the sounds of valves and pipes, made awful by the echoes and my fear.

  I tried to, but I didn’t believe it. My blood turned to ice water. My heart pounded, roaring in my ears. First my hands, and then my whole body began trembling violently.

  Jonah glanced back at me. He turned half around, reached out and seized my shoulder with a grip that surprised me.

  “Ye’ve got to hold that light steady,” he whispered. “I can’t shoot ’em if I can’t see ’em.” He watched me closely.

  I was terrified, but I forced myself to breathe slowly, calmly. The trembling gradually subsided. At last Jonah nodded, and we went on. Twenty feet later, the tunnel curved up and to the right. And there they were.

  There were three of them, in a small cave under the end of Mrs. Hoffman’s coffin. A jagged, splintering hole had been torn through the polished mahogany. The top half of Mrs. Hoffman’s body — or what was left of it — hung down through the opening. Bile rose in the back of my throat.

  The ghouls were huddled around their feast, cringing from the light, shielding their huge, dark eyes with their hands. Thick brown claws curved from the ends of their fingers. Their skin was a putrescent yellow, mottled with white and pink. The color of vomit. One of them slashed at the air, snarling through a round mouth full of sharp teeth.

  Jonah fired into its face, and the explosion was deafening.

  Then he fired again. And again.

  * * * *

  My ears were still ringing when we crawled back into the sunlight. We sat on the cool, moist earth at the bottom of the grave. I hugged my knees, to keep them from shaking. The whole world seemed colder.

  Jonah was watching me.

  Our eyes met, and for the first time since I’d known him, I saw concern and sympathy in his grizzled face. He produced a silver flask from a pocket of his overalls. He drank from it, then offered it to me.

  It was whiskey, which I hate, but it burned good. We passed it back and forth.

  “Used to be a lot more of ’em,” said Jonah, softly. “That’s why they started using embalming fluid, though most folks don’t know it. If there was one thing ghouls couldn’t stand, it was embalming fluid. Most of ’em starved to death. Nowadays, though …” He swished some whiskey in his mouth, spat it into the hole. He shrugged. “I guess they evolved a taste for it.”

  I nodded. It sounded logical.

  From another of his many pockets, Jonah took a handful of shotgun shells. He inserted them, one by one, into the bottom of the gun.

  “What are you doing?”

  “That tunnel goes two ways, boy,” he said, grinning at me. “The other end’ll come out in the nest.”

  My stomach lurched. “Nest?”

  Jonah laughed and swung his legs into the hole. “C’mon, boy. We’ll make a gravedigger out o’ ye yet.”

  * * * *

  That was nine months ago. We killed three more ghouls that day, and another six over the next week. We haven’t seen any since, though we keep an eye out for ’em.

  I don’t know why I stayed on at the cemetery. I guess college seemed a little pointless in the face of what I’d already learned. If there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that the world is full of dark secrets never mentioned in brightly-lit classrooms.

  I moved into the caretaker’s cottage with Jonah. I don’t see much of my old friends anymore, though I can’t blame them for avoiding me. It must be a little creepy to hang around with a gravedigger.

  Excuse me; a gravedigger’s apprentice, Jonah insists. He’s always telling me, “Ye’ve still got a lot to learn, Simon. There’s more to takin’ care o’ the dead than diggin’ holes an’ mowin’ grass.”

  Just today, for example. We watched the services from a polite distance, as always. But when the family left, and it came time to fill in the grave, Jonah put a hand on my arm.

  “Not yet,” he said. “Not with this one.”

  It’s getting late in the day, but Jonah says we can’t fill in that grave just yet. He’s been sitting on the porch for hours now, watching the sun go down, sharpening a wooden stake.

  I don’t know how he knew. I guess Jonah will teach me.

  OUR TEMPORARY SUPERVISOR, by Thomas Ligotti

  I have sent this manuscript to your publication across the border, assuming that it ever arrives there, because I believe that the matters described in this personal anecdote have implications that should concern even those outside my homeland and beyond the influence, as far as I know, of the Quine Organization. These two entities, one of which may be designated as a political entity and the other being a purely commercial entity, are very likely known to someone in your position of journalistic inquiry as all but synonymous. Therefore, on this side of the border one might as well call himself a citizen of the Quine Organization, or a Q. Org national, although I think that even someone like yourself cannot appreciate the full extent of this identity, which in my own lifetime has passed the point of identification between two separate entities and approached total assimilation of one by the other. Such a claim may seem alarmist or whimsical to those on your side of the border, where your closest neighbors — I know this — are often considered as a somewhat backward folk who inhabit small, decaying towns spread out across a low-lying landscape blanketed almost year round by dense, grayish fogs. This is how the Quine Organization, which is to say in the same breath my homeland, would deceptively present itself to the world, and this is precisely why I am anxious (for reasons that are not always explicit or punctiliously detailed) to relate my personal anecdote.

  To begin with, I work in a factory situated just outside one of those small, decaying towns layered over with fogs for most of the year. The building is a nondescript, one-story structure constructed of cinder blocks and cement. Inside is a working area that consists of a single room of floor space and a small corner office with windows of heavily frosted glass.

  Within the confines of this office are a few filing cabinets and a desk where the factory supervisor sits while the workers outside stand at one of several square “assembly blocks.” Four workers are positioned — one on each side — at these square blocks, their only task being the assembly, by hand, of pieces of metal which are delivered to us from another factory. No one whom I have ever asked has the least notion of the larger machinery, if in fact it is some type of machinery, for which these pieces are destined.

  When I first took this job at the factory it was not my intention to work there very long, for I once possessed higher hopes for my
life, although the exact nature of these hopes remained rather vague in my youthful mind. While the work was not arduous, and my fellow workers congenial enough, I did not imagine myself standing forever at my designated assembly block, fitting together pieces of metal into other pieces of metal, with a few interruptions throughout the day for breaks to allow us to refresh our minds from the tedium of our work or to nourish our bodies with food we had brought from home. Somehow it never occurred to me that the nearby town where I and the others at the factory lived, travelling to and from our jobs along the same fog-strewn road, held no higher opportunities for me or anyone else, which no doubt accounts for the vagueness, the wispy insubstan- tiality, of my youthful hopes.

  As it happened, I had been employed at the factory only a few months when there occurred the only change that had ever disturbed its daily routine of piece-assembly, the only deviation from a ritual which had been going on for nobody knew how many years. The meaning of this digression in our working lives did not at first present any great cause for apprehension or anxiety, nothing that would require any of the factory’s employees to reconsider the type or dosage of the medication to which they were prescribed, since almost everyone on this side of the border, including myself, takes some kind of medication, a fact that is perhaps due in some part to an arrangement in my country whereby all doctors and pharmacists are on the payroll of the Quine Organization, a company which maintains a large pharmaceutical division.

  In any case, the change of routine to which I have alluded was announced to us one day when the factory supervisor stepped out of his office and made one of his rare appearances on the floor where the rest of us stood positioned, in rather close quarters, around our designated assembly blocks. For the first time since I had taken this job, our work was called to a halt between those moments of pause when we took breaks for either mental refreshment or to nourish our bodies. Our supervisor, a Mr. Frowley, was a massive individual, though not menacingly so, who moved and spoke with a lethargy that perhaps was merely a consequence of his bodily bulk, although his sluggishness might also have been caused by his medication, either as a side effect or possibly as the primary effect. Mr. Frowley laboriously made his way to the central area of the factory floor and addressed us in his slow-mannered way.