Goat Mother and Others: The Collected Mythos Fiction of Pierre Comtois (44 page)

“You know of course that she lived for two days following the ‘accident’ unable to speak, and that after a brief wake, for appearances sake, I buried her myself. But although she was gone, the horror continued. Since her death, I’ve been plagued with phone calls, letters, and notes threatening me, cajoling me, flattering me to abandon my home here, presumably so that they, the Outer Ones, can begin their mining operation in the surrounding hills as they have in Vermont. With each contact I find myself losing self-control. They’ve done hellish things to people in the neighborhood; nothing I could prove however, and heaven knows what they did to Ruth to gain her cooperation. They’ll stop at nothing, and killing a person is the least that they’re capable of. And now that you’ve been warned, I’m warning you, if you value your lives, your sanity, get out!”

But Stout and I were left speechless after my uncle’s inane story. Clearly, his paranoia was completely out of control.

“Leave here and don’t come back!” he shouted, oblivious to our reactions to his tale. “It’s not worth the…” at that point the phone rang and my uncle jumped to his feet and snatched for the receiver.

From where I stood, I could plainly hear a sort of buzzing sound from the earpiece.

“No! Leave me alone! I’ll never surrender my home! Stay away!” shouted my uncle into the receiver. Then, slamming it onto its cradle, he threw the phone violently across the room.

Shocked at this total loss of temper, I had to try and calm him down.

“Uncle Giles! Please relax…”

“Shut up! If you refuse to accept the danger you’re in, you leave me with no choice.”

Then, with as little warning as that, Uncle Giles flung himself through a nearby window, glass shattering, and dashed himself to death on the broken flagstones two stories below. He’d acted so suddenly, that neither Stout nor I had time to divine his intentions let alone to stop him. For a few moments, all I could do was stare in horror at the broken window, not moving until a white faced Stout beckoned me to the phone he’d retrieved from the floor. Placing the receiver to my ear, I heard a grotesque parody of human speech mingled with what I can only describe as an unearthly buzzing or clicking sound that repeated my uncle’s name over and over again. I looked at Stout, that buzzing still emanating from the earpiece, and knew we were thinking the same thing. However the human voice can be disguised, it was impossible to even entertain the thought for a second that what I’d heard was anything but the voice of hell itself.

The rest of the day was a blur to me as Stout and I gathered up the body of my uncle and laid him upon his own bed, dismissed Bruce with a handsome retainer that would see him to his grave, and fortified ourselves liberally from the bar.

Finally, before we called in the police, Stout suggested what he’d had in mind to do since my uncle first confessed to him his murder of Ruth Wilcox; the disinterment of the body. Despite my emotional exhaustion, I agreed to accompany him to the grave holding aloft an electric lamp as he worked the spade. Though the rain had eased by dusk, taking the wind with it, I was still chilled and shaking when Stout finally cleared the moist soil from the lid of the coffin.

I stared in morbid fascination as he pried it open with the spade and motioned for me to hold the lamp closer. At first, the light revealed nothing more terrible than what I’d expected to see, the emaciated, dehydrated body of Ruth Wilcox, hands folded across her chest; but as I brought the light along her body to her feet, Stout gasped and staggered back, scrambling from the pit, falling and stumbling along the hill as he ran for the house. Clenching the lamp handle tightly, I leaned forward, riveted there at the grave despite every instinct that told me to run. Just as the light shone on the corpse’s feet I saw a sight that blasted my senses; I reeled, dropping the lantern. I think I screamed. I don’t know. All I remember is running, running… and the old house burning beyond the trees. I ran because the sight of Ruth Wilcox’s feet showed that they were not feet at all. Where the fiendishly designed skin of her human feet lay beside them in a hideously wrinkled heap, I saw not human feet but the
chitinous footpads of some monstrous human crab!

nton Zarnak enjoyed autumn in New England. Though it was late in the season now with the colorful leafage long since gone, the grayish forests standing against overcast skies and empty, stubbled fields that characterized the countryside still held a somber beauty of their own.

Just now, he was motoring up Interstate 495 heading north to Arkham and the campus of Miskatonic University. His office in Manhattan had received a call from a Dr. Aaron Stillnor, director of the Pickerton Rehabilitation Hospital, requesting help on a case involving a patient who had recently emerged from a coma. It seemed the patient…Zarnak reached over and slipped a chart out from a folder on the seat beside him…a Charles Danforth, had been in a comatose state for almost forty years before suddenly coming to his senses a few weeks ago.

Danforth had been a resident of the hospital since 1962 when family members asked that he be transferred from the Danvers State Insane Asylum. Before agreeing to extend his consultative services, Zarnak decided to conduct a little research at the New York Public Library and was surprised to discover that Danforth had been a member of the tragic Dyer Expedition that Miskatonic University had sent to explore the region beyond the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica. That was in 1930, before the age of satellites and such when exploration still meant wooden ships and dog sleds. The Dyer Expedition, however, had been equipped with the most modern conveniences including a few Dornier airplanes and the latest drilling apparatus. In any case, the expedition met disaster when an advanced party was killed…presumably from harsh weather…with starving sled dogs unfortunately digging out the bodies before relief arrived in the person of the expedition’s leader and Charles Danforth.

The remnants of the advance campsite were found by the later Starkweather-Moore Expedition of 1935, an effort initially opposed by Prof. William Dyer in a monograph filled with what the kindest critic might describe as delusions inspired by Antarctic isolation and shock at the condition of the bodies found at the advanced campsite.

Although the existence of a megalithic city described by Dyer in his monograph was confirmed by Starkweather-Moore, its conclusions as to its origins were at variance with those of the professor who claimed they were millions of years old and built by some pre-human race from another planet. The stone construction and reliance on the arch as a key component of its architecture alone precluded any belief that the city was built by a culture any more advanced than the Romans. In fact, it had been the conclusion of academics as far back as the late 1930s that the stone city was likely built by ancestors of cultures represented by the builders of Machu Picchu or Teotihuacan.

Although Dyer himself returned to his professorial duties at Miskatonic University, Danforth seemed never to have fully recovered from his experience in Antarctica. Reports at the time suggested that he was high strung and prone to neuroticism. He became close-mouthed and refused to speak to anyone except Dyer with whom he insisted on talking to only behind closed doors. Eventually, his nervous condition had evolved such that he suffered a complete nervous breakdown that ended in catalepsy and coma.

Zarnak emerged from the library with his interest piqued. He made arrangements to visit the patient and consult with Dr. Stillnor. With other business taken care of, he drove out of New York that morning and took the usual route to Massachusetts along I-95. His Ford Mustang made good time and soon he was speeding up 128 and spotted the brown highway sign indicating he should take the next exit for Arkham. If he recalled correctly from previous visits, not much further up would be the off ramp for Dean’s Corners and the Dunwich country and beyond that, up around Newburyport, Innsmouth.

Checking the dashboard clock, Zarnak ascertained that he’d have some time to spare before his appointment with Dr. Stillnor so decided to check in at a bed and breakfast he knew of along Washington Street in Arkham’s historic district. Passing through a few suburban neighborhoods, he soon found himself in an area where big, Victorian-era homes still stood, preserved by the efforts of the city’s Historic District Commission. In many respects, Arkham was still a college town, and a small one at that. Miskatonic University itself had not grown much since the heyday of ivy league schools in the early part of the century. Its reputation then was much respected in the area of archeology and anthropology but in the 1960s the tide of such subjects had moved out and the school was better known today for being somewhat old fashioned and behind the times. Newer departments dedicated to xenobiology and cryptoarcheology, however, did little to enhance the institution’s standing in the academic community.

Zarnak had little trouble finding the bed and breakfast and after bringing in his things, took his briefcase back to the car and headed across town to the hospital. He found the Pickerton Rehabilitation Hospital located behind a stone wall on well-manicured acreage that in better weather, no doubt, had a calming effect on its patients. He identified himself to a speaker at the entrance and had the satisfaction of seeing the iron gates swing slowly open. A short drive beneath bare branched trees led him to the visitor parking lot where he left the Mustang. An unassuming side entrance brought him to the reception area where he asked for Dr. Stillnor. Soon, he was met by a middle aged man in white lab coat who offered his hand in greeting.

“Dr. Zarnak?” he asked.

“Yes,” replied Zarnak, taking the man’s hand. “And you are Dr. Stillnor?”

“I am. Shall we go to my office?”

Stillnor led Zarnak beyond a pair of doors that cut off the reception desk from the administration area and up a corridor to a door labeled “Dr. Aaron Stillnor.” Stepping inside, Stillnor motioned Zarnak to a chair and took the one behind the room’s desk.

“I saw from your note that you’ve familiarized yourself somewhat with Mr. Danforth’s case?” asked Stillnor without preamble.

“I did,” replied Zarnak. “I found it most interesting.”

“That’s good,” admitted Stillnor. “Because I’ve been somewhat at a loss as to how to proceed.”

“Suppose you fill me in on the details.”

“There’s not much to tell,” began Stillnor. “The patient, Charles Danforth, has been here at the hospital for eight years. His family asked that he be transferred from Danvers hoping that a private institution could provide more personalized treatment for the patient. It seems to have worked, though I hesitate to take credit for Danforth’s sudden emergence from his comatose state.”

“Did your treatment vary in any way from that provided at Danvers?”

“Very little,” said Stillnor. “An increased use of mineral baths and more frequent muscular massage to loosen the limbs. As you know, this case has been somewhat unusual in that it seemed to involve a combination of both catalepsy and coma, so treatment was necessarily bifurcated in its application. Maybe it was the combination of the two that triggered something in Danforth’s mind bringing him to full wakefulne

“Hmm. So it seems to me that the patient is on the road to recovery. A happy situation for his family, I’m sure.”

“It would seem so except for the fact that the patient has been delusional ever since coming to his senses. He thrashes about with such violence that we’ve had to have him restrained and even sedated for his own protection. Those precautions may calm him down physically, but I’ve not been able reach him where it counts, his reasoning mind.”

“But you say the drugs have calmed him down. He hasn’t been receptive to the usual methods of verbal communication?”

“Not at all.”