Neil Gaiman & Caitlin R. Kiernan & Laird Barron (67 page)

Noville said, “Almost. I’ll board up the bedroom window. Not that it matters. He can slip between some small spaces. But it will slow it down.”

“Leave it as is, and leave the door to the bedroom partially cracked.”

“You’re sure?”

“Quite.”

The Reverend placed one of the rocks on the table, removed the bullets from his belt and took his knife and did his best to copy the symbols in small shapes on the tips of his ammunition. The symbols were simple, a stick man with a few twists and twirls around it. It took him an hour to copy it onto twelve rounds of ammunition.

Finished, he loaded six rounds in each of his revolvers.

“Shall I light the lamp?” Norville asked.

“No. You have an axe and a shotgun lying about. We may have need for both. Recover them, and then come inside the ring of stones.”

(4)

THE ARRIVAL

While they waited, sitting cross-legged on the floor inside the circle of stones, the Reverend carved the symbols on the rocks onto the blade of the axe. He thought about the shotgun shells, but it wouldn’t do any good to have the symbols on the shells and not on the load, and since the shotgun shot pellets, that was an impossible task.

Lying the axe between them, the Reverend handed the shotgun to Norville. “The shotgun will be nothing more than a shotgun,” he said. “And it may not kill the thing, but it will be a distraction. You get the chance, shoot the thing with it, otherwise, sit and do not, under any circumstances, step outside this circle. The axe I have written symbols on and it may be of use.”

“Are you sure this circle will keep him out?”

“Not entirely.”

Norville swallowed.

∇

They sat and they listened and the hours crept by. The Reverend produced a flask from his saddle bags. “I keep this primarily for medicinal purposes, but the night seems a little chill, so let us both have one short nip, and one short nip only.”

The Reverend and Norville took a drink and the flask was replaced. And no sooner was it replaced, than a smell seeped into the house. A smell like a charnel house and a butcher shop and an outhouse all balled into one.

“It’s near,” Norville said. “That’s its smell.”

The Reverend put a finger to his lips to signal quiet.

There were a few noises on the outside of the house, but they could have been most anything. Finally there came a sound in the bedroom like wet laundry plopping to the floor.

Norville looked at the Reverend.

Reverend Mercer nodded to let him know he too had heard it, and then he carefully pulled and cocked his revolvers.

The room was dark, but the Reverend had adjusted his eye sight and could make out shapes. He saw that the bedroom door, already partially cracked open, was slowly moving. And then a hand, white and puffy like the leaves of an orchid, appeared around the edge of the door, and fingers, long and stalk like, extended and flexed, and the door moved and a flow of muddy water slid into the room along the floor.

The Reverend felt Norville move beside him, as if to rise, and he reached out and touched his shoulder to steady him.

The door opened more, and then the thing slipped inside the main room. It moved strangely, as if made of soft candle wax. It was dead white of flesh, but much of the skin was filthy with mud. It was neither male nor female. No genitals; down there it was a smooth as a well-washed river rock. It was tall, with knees that swung slightly to the sides when it walked, and there was an odd vibration about it, as if it were about to burst apart in all directions. The head was small. Its face was mostly a long gash of a mouth. It had thin slits for eyes and a hole for a nose. At the ends of its willowy legs were large flat feet that splayed out in shapes like claw-tipped four-leaf clovers.

Twisting and winding, long stepping, and sliding, it made its way forward until it was close to the Reverend and Norville. It leaned forward and sniffed. The hole that was its nose opened wider as it did, flexed.

It smells us, thought the Reverend. Only fair, because we certainly smell it.

And then it opened its dripping mouth and came at them in a rush.

As it neared the stones, it was knocked back by an invisible wall, and then there came something quite visible where it had impacted, a ripple of blue fulmination. The thing went sliding along the floor on its belly in its own mud and goo.

“The rocks hold,” the Reverend said, and it came again. Norville lifted the shotgun and fired. The pellets went through the thing and came rattling out against the wall on the other side. The hole made in its chest did not bleed, and it filled in rapidly, as if never struck.

Reverend Mercer stood up and aimed one of his pistols, and hit the thing square in the chest, and this time the wound made a sucking sound and when the load came out on the other side, goo and something dark went with it. But it didn’t stop the creature. It hit the invisible wall again, bellowed and fell back. It dragged its way around the circle toward the horse, tied behind the line of stones. The terrified horse reared and snapped its reins as if they were non-existent. The horse went thundering across the line, and then across the circle of stones, causing them to go spinning left and right, and along came the thing, entering the circle through the gap.

The Reverend fired again. The thing jerked back and squealed like a pig. Then it sprang forward again, grabbed the Reverend by the throat and sent him flying across the room, slamming into the side of the frightened horse.

Norville swung the shotgun around and fired right into the thing’s mouth, but it was like the thing was swallowing gnats. It grabbed the gun barrel used it to sling the clutching Norville sliding across the floor, collecting splinters until he came up against the bedroom door, slamming it shut.

It started forward, but it couldn’t step out of the circle. Not that way. It wheeled to find the exit the horse had made, and as it did, Reverend Mercer, now on his feet, fired twice and hit the thing in the back, causing it to stagger through the opening and fall against the line of rocks that had been there to protect the horse. Its head hit the rocks and the creature cried out, leaping to its feet with a move that seemed boneless and without use of muscle. Its forehead bore a sizzling mark the size of the rock.

“Get back inside the circle,” the Reverend said. “Close it off.”

Norville waited for no further instruction. He bolted and leaped into the circle and began to clutch at the displaced stones. The Reverend put his right leg forward and threw back his coat by bending his left hand behind him; he pointed the revolver and took careful aim, fired twice.

Both shots hit. One in the head, one in the throat. They had their effect. The horror splattered to the floor with the wet laundry sound. But no sooner had it struck the ground, then it began to wriggle along the floor like a grub worm in a frying pan; it came fast and furious and grabbed the Reverend’s boot, and came to spring upright in front of the Reverend with that strange manner it had of moving.

Reverend Mercer cracked it across the head with his pistol, and it grabbed at him. The Reverend avoided the grab and struck out with his fist, a jab that merely annoyed the thing. It spread its jaws and filled the air with stink. The Reverend drew his remaining pistol and fired straight into the hole the thing used for a nose, causing it to go toppling backward along the floor gnashing its teeth into the lumber.

Reverend Mercer ran and leaped into the circle.

When he turned to look, the monster was sliding up the wall like some kind of slug. It left a sticky trail along the logs as it reached the ceiling and crawled along that with the dexterity of an insect.

The horse had finally come to a corner and stuck its head in it to hide. The thing came down on its back, and its mouth spread over the horse’s head, and the horse stood up on its hind legs and its front legs hit the wall, and it fell over backward, landing on the creature. It didn’t bother the thing in the least. It grabbed and twisted the horse over on its side as if it were nothing more than a feather pillow. There was a crunch as the monster’s teeth snapped bones in the horse’s head. The horse quit moving, and the thing began to suck, rivulets of blood spilling out from the corners of its distended mouth.

The Reverend jammed his pistol back into its holster, bent and grabbed the axe from the floor and leaped out of the circle. The thing caught sight of the Reverend as he came, rolled off the horse and leaped up on the wall and ran along it. As the Reverend turned to follow its progress, it leaped at him.

Reverend Mercer took a swing. The axe hit the fiend and split halfway through its neck, knocking it back against the wall, then to the floor. Its narrow eyes widened and showed red, and then it came to its feet in its unique way, though more slowly than before, and darted for the bedroom door.

As it reached and fumbled with the latch, the Reverend hit the thing in the back of the head with the axe, and it went to its knees, clawed at the lumber of the door, causing it to squeak and squeal and come apart, making a narrow slit. It was enough. The thing eased through it like a snake. The Reverend jerked the door open to see it going through the gap in the window. He dropped the axe and jerked the pistol and fired and struck the thing twice before it went out through the breach and was gone from sight.

Reverend Mercer rushed to the window and looked out. The thing was staggering, falling, rising to its feet, staggering toward the well. The Reverend stuck the pistol out the window, resting it on the frame, and fired again. It was a good shot in the back of the neck, and the brute went down.

Holstering the revolver, rushing to grab the axe, the Reverend climbed through the window. The monster had made it to the well by then, crawling along on its belly, and just as it touched the curbing, the Reverend caught up with it, brought the spell-marked axe down on its already shredded head as many times as he had the strength to swing it.

As he swung, the sun began to color the sky. He was breathing so hard he sounded like a blue norther blowing in. The sun rose higher and still he swung, then he fell to the ground, his chest heaving.

When he looked about, he saw the thing was no longer moving. Norville was standing nearby, holding one of the marked rocks.

“You was doin’ so good, I didn’t want to interrupt you,” Norville said.

The Reverend nodded, breathed for a long hard time, said, “Saddle bags. If this is not medicinal. I do not know what is.”

A few moments later, Norville returned with the flask. The Reverend drank first, long and deep, and then he gave it to Norville.

∇

When his wind was back, and the sun was up, the Reverend chopped the rest of the monster up. It had already gone flat and gushed clutter from its insides that were part horse bones, gouts of blood, and unidentifiable items that made the stomach turn; its teeth were spread around the well curbing, like someone had dropped a box of daggers.

They burned what would burn of the beast with dried limbs and dead leaves, buried the teeth and the remainder of the beast in a deep grave, the bottom and top and sides of it lined with the marked rocks.

When they were done chopping and cremating and burying the creature, it was late afternoon. They finished off the flask, and that night they slept in the house, undisturbed, and in the morning, they set fire to the cabin using the BOOK OF DOCHES as a starter. As it burned, the Reverend looked up. The sky had begun to change, finally. The clouds no longer crawled.

They walked out, the Reverend with the saddle bags over his shoulder, Norville with a pillow case filled with food tins from the cabin. Behind them, the smoke from the fire rose up black and sooty and by night time it had burned down to glowing cinders, and by the next day there was nothing more than clumps of ash.

∇

The Fairground Horror

Brian Lumley

T
he funfair was as yet an abject failure. Drizzling rain dulled the chrome of the dodgem-cars and stratojets; the neons had not even nearly achieved the garishness they display by night; the so-called “crowd” was hardly worth mentioning as such. But it was only 2:00 p.m. and things could yet improve.

Had the weather been better—even for October it was bad-and had Bathley been a town instead of a mere village, then perhaps the scene were that much brighter. Come evening, when the neons and other bright naked bulbs would glow in all the painful intensity of their own natural (unnatural?) life, when the drab gypsyish dollies behind the penny-catching stalls would undergo their subtle, nightly metamorphosis into avariciously enticing Loreleis—then it
would
be brighter, but not yet.

This was the fourth day of the five when the funfair was “in town.”

It was an annual—event? The nomads of Hodgson’s Funfair had known better times, better conditions and worse ones, but it was all the same to them and they were resigned to it. There was, though, amid all the noisy, muddy, smelly paraphernalia of the fairground, a tone of incongruity. It had been there since Anderson Tharpe, in the curious absence of his brother, Hamilton, had taken down the old freak-house frontage to repaint the boards and canvas with the new and forbidding legend: TOMB OF THE GREAT OLD ONES.

Looking up at the painted gouts of “blood” that formed the garish legend arching over a yawning, scaly, dragon-jawed entranceway, Hiram Henley frowned behind his tiny spectacles in more than casual curiosity, in something perhaps approaching concern. His lips silently formed the ominous words of that legend as if he spoke them to himself in awe, and then he thrust his black-gloved hands deeper into the pockets of his fine, expensively tailored overcoat and tucked his neck down more firmly into its collar.

Hiram Henley had recognized something in the name of the place—something which might ring subconscious warning bells in even the most mundane minds—and the recognition caused an involuntary shudder to hurry up his back. “The Great Old Ones!” he said to himself yet again, and his whisper held a note of terrible fascination.