by Sam Gafford
Arthur had been right: it would have been impossible for me to find my way alone. Even though he had not walked these paths since his youth, his feet unerringly knew the way. He began to stumble; and when I caught him before he nearly fell, my hand came back with drops of blood on the fingers.
“You’re pushing yourself too hard, Arthur. You need to rest.”
“No,” he insisted; “nearly there, nearly there. Come, the turn is just ahead.”
We moved up to a row of trees that looked like a solid wall. Arthur stopped and examined them closely. “They’ve grown,” he said, pushing himself through them. I followed and could feel the branches pulling and tearing at my hair, face, and clothes, but then I was through.
There were several areas of decaying Roman ruins that we passed through, with their remains of walls and stones sticking out defiantly from the ground, but this was different. The ground rose up to a hill that was steeper than it looked. Around it, almost like a series of circular rings, Roman stones jutted out at odd and impractical angles. The grass should have been high and wild, but was low and stunted. There were no trees on the hill. In fact, it looked as if the trees surrounded it in a form of protection, keeping everything else away. The sun had long set and the moon was beginning a slow rise, but even in that low starlight I could see that there was nothing and no one on top of the hill.
“She’s not here, Arthur, we must have the wrong place.”
“No,” he rasped, “this is the right place. You forget: she is on the other side of the curtain now. We cannot see her, but she can see us.”
The wind blew in strongly from town, and I could faintly hear the song of the Mari Lwyd. Arthur was singing along with it in Welsh.
“What does it mean?” I asked. “What are they singing?”
“Wel dyma ni’n dwad (Well here we come)
Gy-feillion di-niwad (Innocent friends)
I ofyn am gennad (To ask leave)
I ofyn am gennad (To ask leave)
I ofyn am gennad i ganu (To ask leave to sing).”
From somewhere else I heard a response ring out:
“Yr wyf yn croesawu chi
Yr wyf yn croesawu chi
Rwy’n agor y drws
wledda a chyflwyno
O Mari Lwyd.”
It was the voice of Mary Kelly singing.
“Arthur, what’s she saying?”
He cocked an ear forward and listened. “It’s the response:
‘I welcome you,
I welcome you,
I open the door,
Feast and deliver,
O Mari Lwyd.’
She’s inviting it in, asking for it to lend its strength to hers. Quickly, now!”
Before I could object, he pulled out a length of strong rope and bound my hand to his tightly.
“I don’t have time to teach you the moves and the faces you have to make, and I’m not strong enough to take her on alone. I’ve no idea if this will work. but if it does, you’ll be pulled through with me. Hold tight and stay as close to me as you can!”
Arthur then proceeded to go through a series of steps that defied explanation. Several times he twisted in a way that I did not think possible for a human body, and I could tell that it was causing him great pain. A dark stain was growing on his side, but he would not stop. In certain places he would make a sound like a grunt or contort his face in certain ways that made him look unpleasantly like the dhole he had killed. Finally I felt a strong pull on the rope and, as I watched, Arthur Machen stepped out of this existence.
Chapter 84
And now the STORM-BLAST came, and he
Was tyrannous and strong:
He struck with his o’ertaking wings,
And chased us south along.
With sloping masts and dipping prow,
As who pursued with yell and blow
Still treads the shadow of his foe,
And forward bends his head,
The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast,
And southward aye we fled.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The rope pulled me just fast enough that I was propelled through after Arthur, only to land on top of his unconscious body. Slowly, I looked up. The hill before me was the same but as if seen through a broken and filthy lens. The stones moved in the opposite direction, and cavorting around them was a mass of the little people like those I had seen in London. These were worse, like the degenerate cousins of their city relations. Were they not somewhat human in appearance, I would believe that they were animals.
Above, the sky was also different. The clouds moved by at an alarming rate; what should have been dark was light, and what should have been light was dark. The trees glowed with a fearsome luminosity as they swayed in a hot breeze that should not have existed in a chilly November.
Where before the top of the hill had been empty, now there was a stone slab that looked uncomfortably similar to the one that had been in the London underground. Mary was there, naked, with a fire that was burning through her flesh that gave neither heat nor light. There was something soft on the slab, but I would not see exactly what it was even though I was certain it was the babe she had ripped out of Ann’s womb.
Mary looked up and, seeing me, smiled a hideous smile.
“Albert,” she said, a voice a blend of purrs and raspiness, “you’re just in time. I’ve been waiting for you.”
I took out my gun, pointed it, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.
“Those won’t work here, Albert. Come—come and see what I have here.”
I carefully struggled to the top of the hill. The slope was bad enough, but I had to move between the writhing forms of the creatures which, thankfully, entirely ignored my presence among them.
Above, the clouds began to move in a circle directly over us.
As I crested the hill, I could see that there was a female baby on the slab, but it looked to be a few months old instead of only a few days. Mary smiled and gently stroked the child’s head. It cooed happily. It already had a head of blond hair, and as I looked closer I could see that it looked like Ann—but I still couldn’t believe it.
“I don’t know what that is,” I said, “but it’s not Ann’s. It couldn’t be.”
“Still so stubborn and disbelieving. The evidence is right before you and you still refuse to accept it. Look closely: you will see that it is Ann’s child, but there is more of her father in her than you see.”
As I looked, the baby’s face and form shimmered and smoothed so that it had no features or hair. Then the face flattened and the arms and legs became some sort of tentacle that grasped and swatted at me. Just as quickly, it shuddered again and was back to the form of a female baby.
“What kind of horror is this?” I asked. “It’s not human.”
Mary laughed. “Well, part of it is. The other part belongs to my dear, dead dhole. He was my sole companion through my youth after being tormented by the people in this place. Through it all he stood by me, even though he had been stuck in the form of the man who had abandoned me, who deserted me and left me to torture and shame: Arthur Machen. How painful it was for me to see his face upon my creation. It made me hate and love him. When it came time for him to do his duty as I had called him to do, he answered and gave your Ann his child. That icy sperm must have felt like the devil’s spit, but she took it, gratefully, lovingly.”
“You lie! Ann was pure. It was you who brought her low.”
She laughed again. “I could not have corrupted her unless she was capable of being corrupted. The potential was within her all along; I merely brought it out of her and played with it.”
I lunged for her, but she swatted me aside as if I were some annoying bee or pest. The force of her blow threw me halfway back down the hill.
“You thought,” she snarled, “that when you found us in the crypt you had stopped me, but I knew that there was another chance. Here, during the Mari Lywd, I can still accomplish my intenti
on.”
Mary turned away from me and, looking upward, spread her arms wide in pleading as she shouted/sang more words in Welsh. The clouds moved faster and faster, and a spout began to form on the bottom, reaching for Mary.
The babe on the stone slab began to rise into the air. It changed form like a demented wheel increasing in ever-increasing frequency.
Below, the creatures groaned and moaned as their frenzy reached a shuddering climax.
In my coat I felt the weight of the moonblade calling to me. I grabbed it and, holding it strongly in my right hand, inched closer to Mary.
The baby continued to rise, now nearly at eye-level with Mary. Above, the spout reached down further and something began to peer through it. A voice, thick from disuse for aeons, answered back as Mary continued to sing.
I moved closer and thrust the knife forward.
Without turning, Mary grabbed me by the throat with her left hand and started to lift me off my feet. I pulled at her hand, but it would not move. Her nails dug into the flesh of my neck, and I could feel blood begin to trickle out. Flailing wildly, I swung my right hand, and the moonknife dug itself into Mary’s flesh under her armpit.
Screaming, she crumbled and let go of my throat. Blood flowing, I fell to the ground. Looking up, what I saw was not Mary Kelly. It was some creature of the pit, a thing that belonged outside our world, a madness given solid form. I cannot even describe it other than to say that it only vaguely resembled a human being. The mouth took up nearly all of what I think was her face and was an unrelenting black hole that screamed and howled in pain, anger, and hate. Ribbons of some type of matter fluctuated around her like hurricane winds upon the ocean, and her body was dark as ebony.
Below us, the creatures screamed in horror and uncertainty. The spell upon them broken, they started to run away. Above, flashes of lighting shone through the cloud funnel and the disembodied voice grew lost and confused.
Closing my eyes, I leaped forward and thrust the moonknife into the thing over and over again. My arm grew numb from the effort as claws ripped at my face and arms. With one last spurt of my dwindling energy, I took aim where I thought its heart should be and jammed the knife in to its hilt.
An explosion of light and energy knocked me off my feet. My brain shattered with pain as two voices howled and then fell silent. Thunder roared in the skies above, and the clouds broke apart as rain began to fall in torrents.
Every part of my body was in pain as I pulled myself up by the stone slab. In my mind, I could still hear the two voices dwindling as they fell away.
When I was finally able to see what had become of Mary, I felt my mind begin to scream in revolt. Here was all the work by which man had been made repeated before my eyes. I saw the form waver from sex to sex, dividing itself from itself, and then reunited. Then I saw the body descend to the beasts whence it had risen, and that which was on the heights go down to the depths, even to the abyss of all being. The principle of life that infuses an organism always remained, but the outward semblance changed.
Impossibly, Mary’s form altered before my eyes, at first degenerating farther and farther down the evolutionary ladder until what it represented would have only been seen in the frescoes of forgotten civilisations. Then, as I felt it must be nearing its end, it ascended the ladder again to mimic the form of early man, then a sort of hermaphroditic blend of man and woman, and finally back into a semblance of Mary. In agony, she screamed and attempted to remove the moonknife, but it was too late.
I know that what I saw perish was not Mary, and yet in the last agony Mary’s eyes looked into mine. Finally, her body shuddered and fell into wet, thick pieces of liquid not unlike splatterings of mercury upon a table.
Of Mary, or the thing that had pretended to be Mary, there was nothing left. Every piece of it was gone.
On top of the slab lay the baby. It had fallen from the height directly onto the stone and landed badly. Most of its bones were broken. Its visage was caught between the face of the innocent girl and the blank aspect of the dhole. I went to touch it, and it hissed and snapped at me. Instantly the face changed to an exact duplicate of Mary, and the teeth were sharp like daggers. I could not bear to look at it anymore, nor could I risk leaving it here. I slowly picked up a large flat rock from nearby, nearly dropping it as it grew slick from a sudden downpour. Before the thing could regenerate itself and slink away, I crushed the creature with the heavy rock. The liquid that oozed out from under the stone was not blood.
Stumbling, I put the moonknife back in my pocket and headed back to Arthur. I tried to look back up, but the rain was blinding. The last thing I remember is falling down the side of the hill and directly upon one of the large Roman stones.
Chapter 85
Every branch of human knowledge, if traced up to its source and final principles, vanishes into mystery.
—Arthur Machen
November 14, 1888
Two days later I awoke in a hospital bed. Well, ‘hospital’ might be too charitable a word for it. The place was more like a clinic, and far inferior to the London hospitals I had sadly become acquainted with. It was mid-afternoon, and the sun was beginning to decline as it poured rays of light through the open windows. I could hear the sounds of the outside and the scent of a calm, fall day wafting in on the breeze. A few nurses were moving back and forth in the large room, which was practically empty except for myself and Arthur.
He was sitting in a chair by my bed, reading a London paper. The headlines were still shouting about the Ripper, so I knew not much time had passed. He was dressed casually, not in a robe, and moved stiffly in his chair, which meant that he had been patched up again and, from the looks of it, quite tightly.
I moved about slightly, so that he would know I was awake. At that, he grinned broadly but not happily. “Albert,” he said, “welcome back to the land of the living. How do you feel?”
I feebly motioned for a drink, and he quickly poured me a glass of water from a nearby pitcher. The liquid felt delightfully cool as it poured down my throat.
“Sorry I can’t give you anything stronger just yet,” he said apologetically, “but the doctors wouldn’t allow it.”
I coughed slightly. “That’s fine, Arthur. Where are we? What day is it?”
He sat back down in the chair. “Today is Wednesday, November fourteenth. You have been unconscious for nearly two days. This is the ‘Caerleon Hospital,’ which, small as it may be, is a definite improvement over the single doctor’s consulting room I knew back in my youth. Slowly, by bits and fits, Caerleon-on-Usk is being dragged into the present day.”
“What happened?” I asked and could hear the raspiness in my own voice. I touched my neck and felt bandages there. A similar one covered part of my forehead, under which was a large and tender bump.
“Ah-ah,” Arthur said, bringing my hands back down. “Doctor says you mustn’t fiddle with those. You had rather deep cuts, I’m afraid. Your head bump is from when you made contact with one of those Roman stones on the hill.”
“Then it all did happen?”
“Albert, how much do you remember?”
I thought for a moment. Much of my memory of that night was fuzzy and out of focus. “I recall fighting with Mary, and then a thunderstorm.”
“Yes, yes, but anything else?”
I shook my head, which made both my head and neck hurt at the same time.
“No, I’ve drawn a blank. Arthur, did I do it? Is she gone?”
Arthur moved closer and sat on the edge of my bed.
“Yes, Albert, you did it. Mary Kelly, or that thing that took her place, is gone.”
An immense relief flooded over me. It was finally all over. Ann could rest now.
“What happened? Did you see?”
He nodded. “I awoke at the base of the hill just as your fight with Mary began. I did not have the strength to help you, and I doubt if the little creatures would have allowed it. I saw you charge up to her and Mary grab you by the thr
oat. Because I was further away, I could see much more than you could.
“The ‘cloud funnel’ that was stretching down from above. You remember, yes? As the baby rose in the air, I could see something stretching down through the funnel, trying to reach it. At first I thought it was a giant hand, but I truly don’t know what it was. It was nearly close to the bottom of the funnel when you stabbed Mary.
“After that, I’m not really sure what I saw.
“Mary . . . changed. All pretence at being human dropped like a curtain on the floor, and she stood revealed as she truly was, as Alala was. From my view, it was a large black spot through which no light could penetrate. Her flesh was like the surface of a pond, and her form was nothing this world had ever beheld since the primordial age. She tore at you and you jumped forward, stabbing over and over again until, with one final blow, she—changed. I could not see it myself, but it was like the breaking of a strong cord which connected Mary to that other. At that moment, they all howled: Alala, the baby, and the thing that hid in the clouds. The air made a cracking sound, and for a moment I could swear that I saw several different hills existing at the same time in the same space. I cannot describe some of the things I saw on those hills. Then thunder burst as the funnel broke apart.”
“I remember it was raining,” I said.
“Yes, but only within the circle of the hill. Do you remember what you did next?”
I closed my eyes, not wanting to see. “The baby was on the slab. It had fallen there and broken its back. It cried and hissed. It was an abomination. I took up a heavy rock and I—”
Arthur nodded. “You did what you had to do, Albert. You could not suffer it to live. The part of it that was Ann would have gone the way of Mary eventually, and next time there might not be someone standing against it on top of that hill.”
Grief overwhelmed me. I had not allowed it to touch me after that morning in Miller’s Court. Vengeance had consumed me. Now that it had fled, only grief and loss remained. I cried bitterly for what seemed like an hour, but Arthur never left. A nurse came to check on me, but Arthur politely yet firmly motioned her away.