The Cthulhu Mythos Megapack (40 Modern and Classic Lovecraftian Tales) (105 page)

By strolling here or there, I could sample the flagrant abuse of instruments intended for music, of language intended for poetry, of minds intended for thought. By publicizing and sensationalizing the university’s unfortunate collection of crackpot books, the late H.P. Lovecraft has a lot to answer for. Each year, it seems, draws a larger and stranger agglomeration of Lovecraftian lunatics, students and street-people, to Miskatonic, and this year’s crop was richly represented in the self-styled artists and philosophers who had flocked to Mrs. Kilpatrick’s salon.

It embarrassed me acutely that I could cut a figure in such an intellectual vacuum. I could have stolen all the mountebanks’ admirers away if I had chosen to rap my stick and announce that I would now speak of ghouls. Incredibly, the applause had not satirized my costume, which many assured me was downright squalid; it had meant they were glad to see me. While the university establishment traded Aubrey stories about a dimwit who forgot to wear his false teeth or his trousers to class, this crowd had been telling each other tales of a mystery-man who trafficked with ghouls and demons. I wasn’t sure which cycle of slanderous myths I liked least. I know I didn’t like it at all when people called me, with respectful intent, “Ghoulmaster.”

Most of the questions with which they vexed me were foolish or incomprehensible, and I would either stare down my questioner in heavy silence or mumble something abstruse. Most vexing of all were the pathetic morons who believed that ghoulism was a desirable state, and who wanted me to help them attain it. I tried to convince them in their own slang that no such perversion was squalid, but they took this for an enigmatic joke.

While I was trying to elude an immoderately graceful young man in a motorcycle jacket and sequined athletic-supporter who desired my opinion of a poem that began, I think, “My love and the worms are on intimate terms,” something caught my eye. I should say, rather, what caught my eye was its absence: the smallest toe on the foot of a passing woman.

When I notice minor disfigurements, I try to put them out of my mind, and I realized that I had already tried to put too many out of my mind that night. In a gathering of a hundred or so, it seemed unlikely that so many as half a dozen would be missing toes, fingers or earlobes, but I had already seen that many, and I had hardly examined the whole crowd.

The last verse had jingled away, and the poet yearned toward me with hound’s eyes. I said, “That is without a doubt, sir, the most squalid effusion to which I have ever been subjected.”

“Ghoulmaster!” he cried. Before I had any idea what he intended, he dropped to his knee, seized my hand and kissed it.

“Get up, get up,” I muttered, scrubbing my hand vigorously with my handkerchief and trying to edge away. To divert him from his art and his adoration alike, I said, “Why are there so many severed fingers?”

He looked stricken. His lip trembled. He said, “Master, forgive me, I don’t know! But I’ll think on it constantly, I swear, and when we next meet, I hope I’ll have a worthy answer.”

I realized, as he danced away to blither of his epiphany, that he had mistaken a plain question for a cosmic riddle.

I found myself confronting the ghastly mural yet again. It would have been an unfit backdrop for any activity, but behind this mob of fetishists and posers and smatterers, it seemed—if I may be permitted the detestable word—ghoulish. Either the artist had never seen a real Polynesian, or else he had tried to legitimize the atrocities by presenting the natives as subhumans whose evolution had been diverted toward the model of the baboon. What particularly appalled me, however illogically, was seeing the machines and victims of hidden torture-chambers arrayed on an idyllic beach in broad daylight.

“Their cannibalism drove my ancestor wild,” Mrs. Kilpatrick said at my elbow, and she smiled to observe its convulsive jerk, “but they saw it as a sacrament.”

“Knocking that idea out of their heads was surely no crime,” I said, leaving my further thoughts unspoken.

Her right hand rested companionably on my arm. As I watched the hummingbird-flicker of the fan in her left, I conceived the notion that she contrived to hide the smallest finger of that hand from my view. I wondered if it was missing. I grew obsessed with this question, but her adroit maneuvers and the shadows of moths that danced around the hanging lamps combined to baffle me.

“They believed they gained the wisdom and experience of their sacrificial victims by eating them,” she said. “Could that idea have any truth in it?”

“If it did, it might spare my students the boredom of my lectures.”

She smiled: not at my poor joke, but in lofty tolerance of my flippancy. Such a fine distinction could she convey quite plainly with the tilt of her chin, the flex of her eyebrow, but most of all with the gleam of her disturbing eyes.

“Am I wrong, Doctor, in believing that a body remembers its missing limb? Who then can say that the limb holds no memory of the missing body and the contents of the brain?”

Even from so fascinating a woman, such nonsense bored me. I answered, “That well may be, but it doesn’t follow that I can assume those memories by consuming the limb. If that were so—” here I popped down a tidbit from a sideboard—“I could now recall the life and opinions of a shrimp.”

“How do you know you can’t,” she laughed, “unless you know the language of shrimp?”

We had continued our game with the fan, and now I knew she had been playing the game, for as she skewered me with that reply, she reached up and scratched my nose: with the little finger of her left hand. I took no offense at this liberty, as I told myself I should have, and discovered a foolish grin on my face after she had swayed away, fluttering, shooting a parting flash of topaz through untidy bangs over her shoulder.

Her admirers swarmed around her again before she had crossed the room, my niece among them. I hurried to extract Susan and propelled her nearly into the garden, where the light was less revealing. She seemed to have grown comfortable with her shameless display, but I hadn’t.

“Uncle, I had no idea you were such a.…” Words failed her, but her eyes sparkled.

“Such a deep shifter?” I filled in, showing off more of my new vocabulary.

“Exactly!” she laughed. “Everyone’s in absolute awe of you. I mean, to hear Father talk—” She broke off in confusion.

I diverted her from the slip: “Why are there so many severed fingers here?”

“Oh, that. That’s just—sort of like fortune-telling, you know, only deeper. Mrs. Kilpatrick can tell you just everything about yourself, who your real friends are, what you should do to be happy, things like that.”

This appalling revelation actually cheered me up. Here was clearly a matter for the police: physical mutilation in aid of fortune-telling. I would report her, Mrs. Kilpatrick would be packed off to a prison or a madhouse, and Susan would be freed from her influence. Mission accomplished.

But I kept my plans to myself as I took both of her hands in mine and examined them. I pushed back her soft hair to check her ears. Not foreseeing how odd it would sound, I said, “Take off your boots.”

She giggled, but she complied. I glanced down at her pretty toes. I found that I could look at her directly without shame or, what I suppose had secretly shamed me, improper urges. As forcefully and earnestly as I could, I said, “Dearest girl, one thing we must all do to be happy is to keep our bodies in one piece. That isn’t always easy. We’re soft creatures in a hard world. When you’ve outgrown this crowd—and you will, believe me—you’ll regret it bitterly if you’ve mutilated your perfect body for their sake.”

“Uncle, I wouldn’t do that! Do you think I’m crazy?”

“No, but you’re young, and Mrs. Kilpatrick has a strong personality, and you admire her perhaps more than she deserves.”

My eye wandered to the mural across the room, visible now in its sickening fullness, of the lady’s ancestor enlightening the cannibals. Had such reminders of that old atrocity so warped her mind that she would embrace the belief her great-great-grandfather had tried to stamp out? Perhaps the fantasy she had advanced held her truest and maddest convictions.

Those savages weren’t alone in their belief. Credulous boobies in our own city—in this very room—believed in ghouls as demons with magical powers. One such power, according to fireside tales, was to retrieve the memories and mimic the appearance of corpses whose parts they ate.

I tried to keep my imagination from running wild, but that was probably the wrong way to understand people like our hostess. A lifetime of medical research had taught me that I could imagine no depravity in the darkest corner of my mind that others weren’t practicing behind respectable and ordinary façades. And in company like this, where nothing seemed ordinary or respectable, what secrets might not lurk?

I needed air, and not just the moldy breeze from the graveyard. Susan made no objection when I proposed to take her home, and I dared to hope that my words had tempered her enthusiasm for the madwoman. I asked one of the servants to phone for a taxi while she, to my relief, collected a black leather coat. We rode for a while in silence, she with thoughts that I hoped were wise, and I with probably foolish ones about the similarity of primitive religion to ghoulish myth.

My speculations gripped my fancy so strongly that I quite forgot the real world until Susan shook me like a sleeper and cried, “What’s going on, Uncle? What is it?”

Our cab had stopped for a traffic light, and our driver had leaped out to expostulate with someone in a way that might have blistered ears in Port-au-Prince. In the next instant a man screamed in pain. I cursed the mystery of the newfangled door handle as I struggled to get out.

“God damn you!” I cried. “What are you playing at now?”

I thought this was one of my typical imbroglios with the lazy, thieving, sarcastic rascals who hire themselves out as taxi-drivers in Arkham. I was at their mercy, having conceded after many years of misplacing my keys, misplacing my car, and driving absent-mindedly into the middle of construction sites and schoolyards, that I should be trusted with no mechanical device more complex than a pen. Tonight’s driver had been worse than most, grumbling to himself about the fate that had chosen him to haul not just Niobe but her elephant as well.

Squeezing myself from a back-seat designed for midget clowns, I anticipated having to sort out some tiresome traffic-dispute with reason, money or threats. I wasn’t prepared to be struck on the head with a club.

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 driver 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.”