The Cthulhu Mythos Megapack (40 Modern and Classic Lovecraftian Tales) (67 page)

The interior of the tower was neat and clean and homelike, though with furniture of a ruder sort than that to which Ambrose was accustomed, and rich but roughly woven arrases. A serving-woman, tall as Moriamis herself, but darker, brought to him a huge bowl of milk and wheaten bread, and the monk was now able to assuage the hunger that had gone unsatisfied in the Inn of Bonne Jouissance.

As he seated himself before the simple fare, he realized that the
Book of Eibon
was still heavy in the bosom of his gown. He removed the volume and gave it gingerly to Moriamis. Her eyes widened, but she made no comment until he had finished his meal. Then she said:

“This volume is indeed the property of Azédarac, who was formerly a neighbor of mine. I knew the scoundrel quite well—in fact, I knew him all too well.” Her bosom heaved with an obscure emotion as she paused for a moment. “He was the wisest and the mightiest of sorcerers, and the most secret withal; for no one knew the time and the manner of his coming into Averoigne, or the fashion in which he had procured the immemorial
Book of Eibon
, whose runic writings were beyond the lore of all other wizards. He was master of all enchantments and all demons, and likewise a compounder of mighty potions. Among these were certain philtres, blended with potent spells and possessed of unique virtue, that would send the drinker backward or forward in time. One of them, I believe, was administered to you by Melchire, or Jehan Mauvaissoir; and Azédarac himself, together with this man-servant, made use of another—perhaps not for the first time—when they went onward from the present age of the Druids into that age of Christian authority to which you belong. There was a blood-red vial for the past, and a green for the future. Behold! I possess one of each—though Azédarac was unaware that I knew of their existence.”

She opened a little cupboard, in which were the various charms and medicaments, the sun-dried herbs and moon-compounded essences that a sorceress would employ. From among them she brought out the two vials, one of which contained a sanguine-colored liquid, and the other a fluid of emerald brightness.

“I stole them one day, out of womanly curiosity, from his hidden store of philtres and elixirs and nagistrals,” continued Moriamis. “I could have followed the rascal when he disappeared into the future, if I had chosen to do so. But I am well enough content with my own age; and moreover, I am not the sort of woman who pursues a wearied and reluctant lover.…”

“Then,” said Ambrose, more bewildered than ever, but hopeful, “if I were to drink the contents of the green vial, I should return to my own epoch.”

“Precisely. And I am sure, from what you have told me, that your return would be a source of much annoyance to Azédarac. It is like the fellow to have established himself in a fat prelacy. He was ever the master of circumstance, with an eye to his own accommodation and comfort. It would hardly please him, I am sure, if you were to reach the Archbishop.… I am not revengeful by nature…but on the other hand—”

“It is hard to understand how anyone could have wearied of you,” said Ambrose gallantly, as he began to comprehend the situation.

Moriamis smiled. “That is prettily said. And you are really a charming youth, in spite of that dismal-looking robe. I am glad that I rescued you from the Druids, who would have torn your heart out and offered it to their demon, Taranit.”

“And now you will send me back?”

Moriamis frowned a little and then assumed her most seductive air.

“Are you in such a hurry to leave your hostess? Now that you are living in another century than your own, a day, a week, or a month will make no difference in the date of your return. I have also retained the formulas of Azédarac; and I know how to graduate the potion, if necessary. The usual period of transportation in time is exactly seven huadred years; but the philtre can be strengthened or weakened a little.”

The sun had fallen beyond the pines, and a soft twilight was beginning to invade the tower. The maid-servant had left the room. Moriamis came over and seated herself beside Ambrose on the rough bench he was occupying. Still smiling, she fixed her amber eyes upon him, with a languid flame in their depths—a flame that seemed to brighten as the dusk grew stronger. Without speaking, she began slowly to unbraid her heavy hair, from which there emanated a perfume that was subtle and delicious as the perfume of grape-flowers.

Ambrose was embarrassed by this delightful proximity. “I am not sure that it would be right for me to remain, after all. What would the Archbishop think?”

“My dear child, the Archbishop will not even be born for at least six hundred and fifty years. And it will be still longer before you are born. And when you return, anything that you have done during your stay with me will have happened no less than seven centuries ago…which should be long enough to procure the remission of any sin, no matter how often repeated.”

Like a man who has been taken in the toils of some fantastic dream and finds that the dream is not altogether disagreeable, Ambrose yielded to this feminine and irrefutable reasoning. He hardly knew what was to happen; but, under the exceptional circumstances indicated by Moriamis, the rigors of monastic discipline might well be relaxed to almost any conceivable degree without entailing spiritual perdition or even a serious breach of vows.

IV

A month later, Moriamis and Ambrose were standing beside the Druid altar. It was late in the evening, and a slightly gibbous moon had risen upon the deserted glade and was fringing the tree-tops with wefted silver. The warm breath of the summer night was gentle as the sighing of a woman in slumber.

“Must you go, after all?” said Moriamis, in a pleading and regretful voice.

“It is my duty. I must return to Clément with the
Book of Eibon
and the other evidence I have collected against Azédarac.” The words sounded a little unreal to Ambrose as he uttered them; and he tried very hard, but vainly, to convince himself of the cogency and validity of his arguments. The idyll of his stay with Moriamis, to which he was oddly unable to attach any true conviction of sin, had given to all that preceded it a certain dismal insubstantiality. Free of all responsibility or restraint, in the sheer obliviousness of dreams, he had lived like a happy pagan; and now he must go back to the drear existence of a mediaeval monk, beneath the prompting of an obscure sense of duty.

“I shall not try to hold you,” Moriamis sighed. “But I shall miss you and remenber you as a worthy lover and a pleasant playmate. Here is the philtre.”

The green essence was cold and almost hueless in the moonlight as Moriamis poured it into a little cup and gave it to Ambrose.

“Are you sure of its precise efficacy?” the monk inquired. “Are you sure that I shall return to the Inn of Bonne Jouissance, at a time not far subsequent to that of my departure therefrom?”

“Yea,” said Moriamis, “for the potion is infallible. But stay, I have also brought along the other vial—the vial of the past. Take it with you—for who knows, you may sometime wish to return and visit me again.”

Ambrose accepted the red vial and placed it in his robe beside the ancient manual of Hyperborean sorcery. Then, after an appropriate farewell to Moriamis, he drained with sudden resolution the contents of the cup.

The moonlit glade, the gray altar, and Moriamis—all vanished in a swirl of flame and shadow. It seemed to Ambrose that he was soaring endlessly through phantasmagoric gulfs, amid the ceaseless shifting and melting of unstable things, the transient forming and fading of irresoluble worlds. At the end, he found himself sitting once more in the Inn of Bonne Jouissance, at what he assumed to be the very same table before which he had sat with the Sieur des Émaux. It was daylight, and the room was full of people, among whom he looked in vain for the rubicund face of the innkeeper, or the servants and fellow-guests he had previously seen. All were unfamiliar to him; and the furniture was strangely worn and grimier than he remembered it.

Perceiving the presence of Ambrose, the people began to eye him with open curiosity and wonderment. A tall man with dolorous eyes and lantern jaws came hastily forward and bowed before him with an air that was half servile but full of a prying impertinence.

“What do you wish?” he asked.

“Is this the Inn of Bonne Jouissance?”

The innkeeper stared at Ambrose. “Nay, it is the Inn of Haute Esperance, of which I have been the taverner these thirty years. Could you not read the sign? It was called the Inn of Bonne Jouissance in my father’s time, but the name was changed after his death.”

Ambrose was filled with consternation. “But the inn was differently named, and was kept by another man when I visited it not long ago,” he cried in bewilderment. “The owner was a stout, jovial man, not in the least like you.”

“That would answer the description of my father,” said the taverner, eyeing Ambrose more dubiously than ever. “He has been dead for the full thirty years of which I speak; and surely you were not even born at the time of his decease.”

Ambrose began to realize what had happened. The emerald potion, by some error or excess of potcncy, had taken him many years beyond his own time into the future!

“I must resume my journey to Vyones,” he said in a bewildered voice, without fully comprehending the implications of his situation. “I have a message for the Archbishop Clément—and must not delay longer in delivering it.”

“But Clément has been dead even longer than my father,” exclaimed the inn-keeper. “From whence do you come, that you are ignorant of this?” It was plain from his manner that he had begun to doubt the sanity of Ambrose. Others, overhearing the strange discussion, had begun to crowd about, and were plying the monk with jocular and sometimes ribald questions.

“And what of Azédarac, the Bishop of Ximes? Is he dead, too?” inquired Ambrose, desperately.

“You mean St. Azédarac, no doubt. He outlived Clément, but nevertheless he has been dead and duly canonized for thirty-two years. Some say that he did not die, but was transported to heaven alive, and that his body was never buried in the great mausoleum reared for him at Ximes. But that is probably a mere legend.”

Ambrose was overwhelmed with unspeakable desolation and confusion. In the meanwhile, the crowd about him had increased, and in spite of his robe, he was being made the subject of rude remarks and jeers.

“The good Brother has lost his wits,” cried some.

“The wines of Averoigne are too strong for him,” said others.

“What year is this?” demanded Ambrose, in his desperation.

“The year of our Lord, 1230,” replied the taverner, breaking into a derisive laugh. “And what year did you think it was?”

“It was the year 1175 when I last visited the Inn of Bonne Jouissance,” admitted Ambrose.

His declaration was greeted with fresh jeers and laughter. “Hola, young sir, you were not even conceived at that time,” the taverner said. Then, seeming to remember something, he went on in a more thoughtful tone: “When I was a child, my father told me of a young monk, about your age, who came to the Inn of Bonne Jouissance one evening in the summer of 1175, and vanished inexplicably after drinking a draft of red wine. I believe his name was Ambrose. Perhaps you are Ambrose and have only just returned from a visit to nowhere.” He gave a derisory wink, and the new jest was taken up and bandied from mouth to mouth among the frequenters af the tavern.

Ambrose was trying to realize the full import of his predicament. His mission was now useless, through the death or disappearance of Azédarac; and no one would remain in all Averoigne to recognize him or believe his story. He felt the hopelessness of his alienation among unknown years and people.

Suddenly he remembered the red vial given him at parting by Moriamis. The potion, like the green philtre, might prove uncertain in its effect; but he was seized by an all-consuming desire to escape from the weird embarrassment and bewilderment of his present position. Also, he longed for Moriamis like a lost child for its mother; and the charm of his sojourn in the past was upon him with an irresistible spell. Ignoring the ribald faces and voices about him, he drew the vial from his bosom, uncorked it, and swallowed the contents.…

V

He was back in the forest glade, by the gigantic altar. Moriamis was beside him again, lovely and warm and breathing; and the moon was still rising above the pinetops. It seemed that no more than a few moments could have elapsed since he had said farewell to the beloved enchantress.

“I thought you might return,” said Moriamis. “And I waited a little while.”

Ambrose told her of the singular mishap that had attended his journey in time.

Moriamis nodded gravely. “The green philtre was more potent than I had supposed,” she remarked. “It is fortunate, though, that the red philtre was equivalently strong and could bring you back to me through all those added years. You will have to remain with me now, for I possessed only the two vials. I hope you are not sorry.”

Ambrose proceeded to prove, in a somewhat unmonastic manner, that her hope was fully justified.

Neither then nor at any other time did Moriamis tell him that she herself had strengthened slightly and equally the two philtres by means of the private formula which she had also stolen from Azédarac.

THOSE OF THE AIR, by Darrell Schweitzer and Jason Van Hollander

Decline, decay, the stench of years closed over me as I drove through Haverbrook Park that colorless wintry afternoon. My old neighborhood had become a hollow place of blackened brick and faded gray clapboard, peopled by phantoms from my past, by vanished friends, by deceased neighbors, by the aging effigies of my parents in their final, precipitous plunge into decrepitude—by everything I thought I had broken free of, the dust I thought I’d stirred for the last time, the chains I thought I’d cast off one evening, ten years before, when I’d screamed “Fuck this goddamn shit!” at the top of my lungs for no immediately apparent reason, packed a hasty bag, and stalked out of the house, informing my startled but perhaps not entirely sorrowful parents that I wasn’t coming back, ever.

I’d made that promise stick for ten years. Now I was coming back, one more time.

Because of an inescapable loose end. Because of Jeffrey, my half-mythic older brother, who wasn’t able to leave as I had.

I glanced at the passing scenery: heaps of rubbish on sidewalks, a burned-out building that might have been a private home or a warehouse, but I couldn’t remember which; four more stores closed, one of them Kohler’s delicatessen where, thirty years ago, my father, then a young parent trying to show off to impress his embarrassed sons, used to pound counters and bellow for corned beef.

Now he wasn’t much up to pounding or bellowing for anything, I knew, even before I pulled into the familiar side-street and inched my way behind the brick rowhouses, weaving among trashcans and the occasional tricycle until I came to our own, familiar, unpainted garage door.

He met me at the back door, after ten years no more than a wizened caricature of his younger self.

“Hello, Dad.”

“Hello, Son.”

I’m sure what he meant to say was more on the order of: Why the Hell did you come back after all this time? I’d hoped you wouldn’t have to.

And I wanted to reply: You know perfectly well. It isn’t my fault, Dad. Or even yours.

But so many of the important things never manage to get said.
Jeffrey is my brother. I can’t help that, but he is.

So, overnight bag in hand, I followed him slowly through the tangle of our basement, then upstairs, through the kitchen—it was a disaster area, far, far messier than I had ever seen it in my life—and into the still immaculate, plastic-covered living room.

He sat on the plastic-covered sofa, too weary to continue, his very presence a stain on this inviolate shrine of a room.

I remained standing. I tried not to touch anything. An awkward silence followed.

Finally, Father ran a liver-spotted hand over his almost bald head. He sighed.

“You look different, Jerry.”

Unthinkingly, I ran my free hand through my own thinning hair.

“Yeah. I guess so.”

“Your Mama’s dead, Jerry.” He hadn’t called her Mama since I was very small. I think he was retreating into memories just then. I couldn’t blame him. I didn’t want to be the one to yank him into the uncomfortable present.

The silence resumed.

Then he said, “It was just a stroke that killed her. Just a simple stroke. Like that.” He snapped his fingers. This display was meant to comfort me. No, she didn’t suffer from some hideous malformity unknown to science and melt away into putrescent slime. Very neat and tidy. Just a stroke.

I swallowed hard, and was about to say something.

“I’m sorry you missed the funeral,” he said.

“I’m sorry too. There was a strike in Buenos Aires. I couldn’t get a plane until yesterday afternoon.”

And now, an absurdity so agonizing it was a torturer’s stroke of genius. The old
Mister Ed
theme went rattling through my brain. It was all I could do not to sing aloud something about people yackettey-yacking and wasting the time of day. But I didn’t. Be thankful for small mercies. I wept, just a little. Father doubtless thought the tears were for Mama, and seemed moved.

We can’t say the important things. Words fail us.

I sat on one of the plastic-protected chairs. In silence. For a long time. Outside, the sky darkened.

Gradually, very subtly, for all I knew he was still locked in his room in the attic, my brother was there, with us, impatient as always.

I had to say it at last. “How’s Jeffrey, Dad?” There, I thought. Did it.

“He’s still changing. Like the book said he would. I’m afraid of him, Jerry. I don’t think he knows me anymore. I don’t think he’ll recognize you either.”

But I’ll have to try, remained unsaid. You know that, Pappa.

* * * *

I remembered that it had been on a winter evening much like this one, the year I was thirteen and Jeffrey was seventeen, that the two of us went outside together for what should have been the last time.

He’d shambled into my room, knocking over books, sending my portable record-player to the floor with a screech that guaranteed that my copy of
St. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
was going to have to be replaced.

“Let’s go out. And play. Please.” He smelled particularly bad just then. His tusks gleamed and dripped with drool. He had to squeeze himself sideways to fit through the doorway. Something, probably a new, vestigial limb stirred underneath the extra-extra-large Philadelphia Eagles sweatshirt he always wore.

I picked up, then unplugged the record player and set it on my desk. The record itself was so obviously ruined I could only drop it into the wastebasket.

For just a second, I was angry enough to hit him.

“Want to p-p-play.” His eyes, sunken in his mottled face, were still my brother’s eyes. I still knew him. Some of him, a little bit, was still that Jeffrey who had walked to school with me as recently as five years earlier, before he was taken out of school and all the kids started beating me up and teasing me, shouting, “You’re brother’s a retard and you are too!”

No, it wasn’t that, of course. For a time, doctors came and said it was some rare and spectacular disease. There was even an English doctor from Merck. I didn’t know what that meant. For the longest time I thought Merck was a place in England.

Then Mother wouldn’t let them come anymore and wouldn’t let Jeffrey go out of the house.

But tonight, she and Daddy were off somewhere. It might have been one of their periodic frenzies of church-going. They might have been off asking God to make Jeffrey normal again.
Take this cup away from me,
as the phrase went.

Even I knew it wasn’t a matter of cups, or God’s business. Jeffrey knew it too. I think that my parents were just as certain, but they still prayed, so they wouldn’t give in to despair.

My brother shook his head violently from side to side, banging against the doorframe with his teeth like an angry bull with its horns, gouging chunks out of the wood.

“Okay! Okay! I’m coming.” I hurried to put on my hat, coat, and gloves, while he stirred and stamped. A stain spread down the front of his jogging pants and started to pour onto the floor. I’d clean that up later. I reached up and put my arm around his neck, to calm him. One of the huge tusks slid wetly against my cheek, but bristling with sharp edges and points from the endlessly intricate carvings he spent most of his time executing.

(“Scrimshaw.” He’d read that word in a book. “Scrim! Shaw!” like a football cheer, but sputtered, grunted. “Yes, carvings on the teeth of a whale,” Mama said, then added, in one of her frenzied periods, “for you are Leviathan, the Great Beast.”)

So we waded out into the still-falling snow, in the evening twilight, me all bundled up with long scarf trailing, a regular boy, and Jeffrey, still in his Eagles sweatshirt and jogging pants, barefoot…I would never have taken him out in broad daylight, no matter how much he wanted to play. No, I couldn’t. But now, there was a certain thrill to it. He was my secret, the vast and potent magic I alone commanded…or so the game went.

We scrambled quickly across the narrow concrete strip that served as a common driveway for all the houses in our row, then I easily mounted the fence—but I had to find an opening for Jeffrey, who was too heavy—and slid, slightly out of control, down the embankment into the comforting security of Haverbrook Park itself, that not-very-large, hilly woodland which seemed endless as the night came on.

He was clumsier than ever before, crashing through the trees and briers, moving on all fours much of the time, but not on his knuckles like an ape, instead with his hands flat on the ground, leaving, huge, perfect handprints in the snow.

He grunted and laughed and even clapped his enormous hands when he came to the stream, and wallowed right in, sitting in the frigid water, splashing. The cold didn’t seem to bother him.

Carefully, I tried to cross on a log, but slipped, and found myself standing in water to my knees, my boots filled, the water so cold it burned before my legs went numb.

“Play!” Jeffrey sputtered, like a very small child, happy as he could be, like the mental retard the neighborhood kids always claimed he was.

But I knew better. I had always known better. Jeffrey merely enjoyed his frivolous moments, when he momentarily escaped those cares and fears he could not express by any means other than carving strange figures and letters on his nearly foot-long teeth.

I was glad for him, just then. I waded to the further bank. “Come on, Jeff,” I said. “Let’s play.”

So we ran and climbed among the rocks and trees, wandering deeper and deeper into the park, as the land rose and the woods shut out the lights and noise of the city that surrounded us. We came, at last, to a series of stone terraces, high above the stream. Some people said they were man-made, that there had once been a forge there, back in the time of the Revolution. Certainly there were a lot of stories about that place.

On this particular night, as it had been some times before, it was
our
place alone, a secret we two brothers shared. We sat on the highest stones, in the darkness, hidden from the world. I was shivering all over then, clinging to Jeffrey for warmth; but in vain, because he wasn’t warm, and felt cold and hard, like living metal beneath his soggy, half-frozen clothes.

“Fairy tale,” he sputtered. That was his other truly childlike characteristic. He liked fairy tales, always had, since he was small, and the way to tell him one was to make him part of it, one of the characters.

“Once, long ago, in an old-time kingdom, there was a Beast that lived in the woods. That’s you, Jeff. You’re the Beast. That’s not a bad thing to be, because the Beast is really a prince and he can do magic.”

“And…what are you?”

I shrugged. “I guess I’m the King’s huntsman.” I tried to laugh. “You don’t want me to be
Beauty,
do you? I mean, that would be queer, like a girl, you know—”

“Does the huntsman kill the Beast?” For once he didn’t sputter. The question was startling. He’d seen right through the tale.

I didn’t know what to say. “Um, no. Of course not.”

“What’s the rest of the story then?”

“I think it’s that the King got so angry with his oldest son—the Royal Wrath was something everyone was afraid of—and when the King was in his rage the ground shook, and there was lightning in the sky—and the King was so angry with his son that he put a curse on him, and the kingdom was cursed too, and the trees died, and the rivers dried up, and there was only silence afterward. Everyone went away, and they left the Beast alone, everyone except his brother, the younger prince who was not afraid of him. And—”

I started to cry then, because I was lying, because the story didn’t go that way. It wasn’t as simple as that. It was so unfair that we couldn’t just be brothers and grow up together, like other kids did. I
didn’t know
how the story would end and was afraid that it never would; not because of anything we’d done, or even because of anything Father had done in his Royal Wrath or Mother had in her prayerful frenzies. No, it was nobody’s fault that our grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents had come from someplace up north called Dunwich and had been named Whateley; and that someone had passed on from generation to generation an old book called the
Necronomicon
, and that some of the words Jeffrey carved on his teeth were in that book and Daddy could read them, but would never tell me what they said.

It wasn’t fair that sometime back in the 1920s the Whateleys had tried a great Experiment and failed, but, somehow, that Experiment had worked its way down the years and through the bloodlines until it came out again in Jeffrey.

I cried because of all that, because it wasn’t fair.

And my brother did the most extraordinary thing. He touched me gently on the back of the neck, almost as if he were stroking me—if anybody else had done it, it would have been queer—and he told
me
a story, struggling for the words around the impediment of his ungainly tusks. I didn’t understand very much of it, but it was about how the Beast was not really a monster after all, but part of a different family, and how “Those of the Air,” as Jeffrey put it, would come someday and take him to a better place, maybe another planet. I couldn’t make that out. There were a lot of words in the story that were just buzzing and spitting and barking sounds.

“Does the younger prince get to come too?”

“No. Blood of Them in him, but not enough. He can just barely see them.”

And we sat for a long time in the darkness after that, and it seemed indeed—I was certain I imagined what I saw, that it was a kind of dream—that the wind circled around us again and again, with a whispered whoosh like a fleet of huge trucks passing, and sometimes I could see shapes among the trees, distorted bodies, and luminous faces floating among the branches. They called out to Jeffrey, and he answered back, in a language I didn’t know.

I nearly froze to death. Jeffrey had to carry me back to the house. He smashed in the back door because he couldn’t open it. Father was waiting for him, and in his Royal Wrath beat Jeffrey with a shovel, and locked him in the attic room, and never let him out again. I went to the hospital for frostbite and missed some school, and later, I could only talk to my brother through the locked door when I slid his meals in through the slot Father had installed. Jeffrey didn’t answer back much, and I never got to tell him any more of the story of the two princes.