The Satyr's Head: Tales of Terror (11 page)

I nodded. I felt sorry for her, but of course I could not say so. Instead I laughed awkwardly and shrugged my shoulders. ‘Who needs people?’

She looked shocked. ‘We all do, Love!’ Then for a while she was quiet, staring into the fire.

‘I’ll make a brew of tea,’ she suddenly said,
then looked at me and smiled in a fashion I well remembered. ‘Or should we have cocoa?’

‘Cocoa!’
I instinctively laughed, relieved at the change of subject.

She went into the kitchen and I lit a cigarette. Idle, for the moment, I looked about me, taking up the loose sheets of paper that Aunt Hester had left on her occasional table. I saw at once that many of her jottings were concerned with extracts from exotic books. I passed over the piece she had read out to me and glanced at another sheet. Immediately my interest was caught; the three passages were all from the Holy Bible:

“Regard not them that have familiar spirits, neither seek after wizards, to be defiled by them.” Lev. 19:31.

“Then said Saul unto his servants, Seek me a woman that hath a familiar
spirit, that I may go to her and enquire of her. And his servants said to him, Behold, there is a woman that hath a familiar spirit at En-dor.”  I Sam. 28:6,7.

“Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men.” Acts 19.19.

The third sheet contained a quote from
Today’s Christian:

“To dabble in matters such as these is to reach within demoniac circles, and it is by no means rare to discover scorn and scepticism transformed to hysterical possession in persons whose curiosity has led them merely to attend so-called ‘spiritual séances’. These things of which I speak are of a nature as serious as any in the world today, and I am only one among many to utter a solemn warning against any intercourse with ‘spirit forces’ or the like, whereby the unutterable evil of demonic possession could well be the horrific outcome.”

Finally, before she returned with a steaming jug of cocoa and two mugs, I read another of Aunt Hester’s extracts, this one again from Feery’s
Notes on the Necronomicon:

“Yea, & I discovered how one might, be he an Adept & his familiar Spirits powerful enough, control the Wanderings or Migration of his Essence into all manner of Beings & Person—even from beyond the Grave of Sod or the Door of the Stone Sepulchre…”

I was still pondering this last extract an hour later, as I walked Harden’s night streets towards my lodgings at the home of my friend.

Three evenings later, when by arrangement I returned to my aunt’s cottage in old Castle-Ilden, she was nervously waiting for me at the gate and whisked me breathlessly inside. She sat me down, seated herself opposite and clasped her hands in her lap almost in the attitude of an excited young girl.

‘Peter, Love, I’ve had an idea—such a simple idea that it amazes me I never thought of it before.’

‘An idea? How do you mean, Aunt Hester—what sort of idea? Does it involve me?’

‘Yes, I’d rather it were you than any other. After all, you know the story now…’

I frowned as an oddly foreboding shadow darkened latent areas of my consciousness. Her words had been innocuous enough as of yet, and there seemed no reason why I should suddenly feel so—
uncomfortable
, but—

‘The story?’
I finally repeated her. ‘You mean this idea of yours concerns—Uncle George?’

‘Yes, I do!’ she answered. ‘Oh, Love, I can see them; if only for a brief moment or two, I can see my nephew and niece. You’ll help me? I know you will.’

The shadow thickened darkly, growing in me, spreading from hidden to more truly conscious regions of my mind. ‘Help you? You mean you intend to—’ I paused, then started to speak again as I saw for sure what she was getting at and realized that she meant it: ‘But haven’t you said that this stuff was too dangerous? The last time you—’

‘Oh, yes, I know,’ she impatiently argued, cutting me off. ‘But now, well, it’s different. I won’t stay more than a moment or two
—just long enough to see the children—and then I’ll get straight back…
here.
And there’ll be precautions. It can’t fail, you’ll see.’

‘Precautions?’
Despite myself I was interested.

‘Yes,’ she began to talk faster, growing more excited with each passing moment. ‘The way I’ve worked it out, it’s perfectly safe. To start with, George will be asleep—he won’t know anything about it. When his sleeping mind moves into my body, why, it will simply stay asleep! On the other hand, when
my
mind moves into
his
body, then I’ll be able to move about and—’

‘And use your brother as a keyhole!’ I blurted, surprising even myself. She frowned,
then turned her face away. What she planned was wrong. I knew it and so did she, but if my outburst had shamed her it certainly had not deterred her—not for long.

When she looked at me again her eyes were almost pleading. ‘I know how it must look to you, Love, but it’s not so. And I know that I must seem to be a selfish woman, but that’s not quite true either. Isn’t it natural that I should want to see my family? They are mine, you know.
George, my brother; his wife, my sister-in-law; their children, my nephew and niece. Just a—yes—a “peep”, if that’s the way you see it. But, Love,
I need
that peep. I’ll only have a few moments, and I’ll have to make them last me for the rest of my life.’

I began to weaken. ‘How will you go about it?’

‘First, a glance,’ she eagerly answered, again reminding me of a young girl. ‘Nothing more, a mere glance. Even if he’s awake he won’t ever know I was there; he’ll think his mind wandered for the merest second. If he
is
asleep, though, then I’ll be able to, well, “wake him up”, see his wife—and, if the children are still at home, why, I’ll be able to see them too. Just a glance.’

‘But suppose something does go wrong?’ I asked bluntly, coming back to earth ‘Why, you might come back and find your head in the gas oven! What’s to stop him from slashing your wrists? That only takes a second, you know.’

‘That’s where you come in, Love.’ She stood up and patted me on the cheek, smiling cleverly…’ You’ll be right here to see that nothing goes wrong.’

‘But
—’

‘And to be doubly sure,’ she cut me off, ‘why,
I’ll be tied in my chair!
You can’t walk through windows when
tied down, now can you?’

Half an hour later, still suffering inwardly from that as yet unspecified foreboding, I had done as Aunt Hester directed me to do, tying her wrists to the arms of her cane chair with soft but fairly strong bandages from her medicine cabinet in the bathroom.

She had it all worked out, reasoning that it would be very early morning in Australia and that her brother would still be sleeping. As soon as she was comfortable, without another word, she closed her eyes and let her head fall slowly forward onto her chest. Outside, the sun still had some way to go to setting; inside,
the room was still warm—yet I shuddered oddly with a deep, nervous chilling of my blood.

It was then that I tried to bring the thing to a halt, calling her name and shaking her shoulder, but she only brushed my hand away and hushed me. I went back to my chair and watched her anxiously.

As the shadows seemed visibly to lengthen in the room and my skin cooled, her head sank even deeper onto her chest, so that I began to think she had fallen asleep.

Then she settled herself more comfortably yet and I saw that she was still awake, merely preparing her body for her brother’s slumbering mind.

In another moment I knew that something had changed.

Her position was as it had been; the shadows crept slowly still; the ancient clock on the wall ticked its regular chronological message; but I had grown inexplicably colder, and there was this feeling that,
something
had changed…

Suddenly there flashed before my mind’s eye certain of those warning jottings I had read only a few nights earlier, and there and then I was determined that this thing should go no further. Oh, she had warned me not to do anything to frighten or disturb her, but this was different. Somehow I knew that if I didn’t act now
—

‘Hester!
Aunt Hester!’ I jumped up and moved toward her, my throat dry and my words cracked and unnatural-sounding. And she lifted her head and opened her eyes.

For a moment I thought that everything was all right
—then…

She cried out and stood up, ripped bandages falling in tatters from strangely strong wrists. She mouthed again, staggering and patently disorientated. I fell back in dumb horror, knowing that something was very wrong and yet unable to put my finger on the trouble.

My aunt’s eyes were wide now and bulging, and for the first time she seemed to see me, stumbling toward me with slack jaw and tongue protruding horribly between long teeth and drawn-back lips. It was then that I knew what was wrong, that this frightful
thing
before me was not my aunt, and I was driven backward before its stumbling approach, warding it off with waving arms and barely articulate cries.

Finally, stumbling more frenziedly now, clawing at empty air inches in front of my face, she
—it—spoke: ‘No !’ the awful voice gurgled over its wriggling tongue. ‘No, Hester, you… you
fool!
I warned you…’

And in that same instant I saw not an old woman,
but the horribly alien figure of
a man in a woman’s form!

More grotesque than any drag artist, the thing pirouetted in grim, constricting agony, its strange eyes glazing even as I stared in a paralysis of horror. Then it was all over and the frail scarecrow of flesh, purple tongue still protruding from frothing lips, fell in a crumpled heap to
the floor.

That’s it, that’s the story—not a tale I’ve told before, for there would have been too many questions, and it’s more than possible that my version would not be believed. Let’s face it, who
would
believe me? No, I realized this as soon as the thing was done, and so I simply got rid of the torn bandages and called in a doctor. Aunt Hester died of a heart attack, or so I’m told, and perhaps she did—straining to do that which, even with her powers, should never have been possible.

During this last fortnight or so since it happened, I’ve been trying to convince myself that the doctor was right (which I was quite willing enough to believe at the time), but I’ve been telling myself lies. I think I’ve known the real truth ever since my parents got the letter from Australia. And lately, reinforcing that truth, there have been the dreams and the daydreams
—
or are they?

This morning I woke up to a lightless void—a numb, black, silent void—wherein I was incapable of even the smallest movement, and I was horribly, hideously frightened. It lasted for only a moment, that’s all, but in that moment it seemed to me that I was dead—or that the living
me
inhabited a dead body!

Again and again I find myself thinking back on the mad Arab’s words as reported by Joachim
Feery : “…even from beyond the Grave of Sod…” And in the end I know that this is indeed the answer.

That is why I’m flying tomorrow to Australia. Ostensibly I’m visiting my uncle’s wife, my Australian aunt; but really I’m only interested in him, in Uncle George himself. I don’t know what I’ll be able to do, or even if there is anything I
can
do. My efforts may well be completely useless, and yet I must try to do something.

I
must
try, for I know now that it’s that or find myself once again, perhaps permanently, locked in that hellish, nighted—place?—of black oblivion and insensate silence. In the dead and rotting body of my Uncle George, already buried three weeks when Aunt Hester put her mind in his body—
the body she’s now trying to vacate in favour of mine!

JACK MORGAN WAS a painter, or at least that was what he
always said, and his close friends—those whose judgment he cared about—agreed with him on that point, so it hardly mattered what the critics said about his work, whenever they did take the trouble to say something. His life had always been a very calm and peaceful one, he
liked drinking, but not much more than anyone else, and he had tried a few mild drugs too, and had stayed away from them after a severe headache. He had an exceptional ear for music, and always claimed that he could get high on hearing music, so why spend hard cash for ersatz? He had known, and loved, and hated a few women in. his life, and had left them all behind, or they had left him behind depending on what viewpoint one takes. Time had come for a marriage, which never realized, and time had gone past that point too. Jack also liked laughing, and simple fun as well as enjoy reading Sartre. He had many friends who liked him very much until he needed them, when they always seemed to be just out of reach, but always eager to return when he didn’t need, or didn’t want their help anymore.

He read a lot, from crime novels to Wodehouse, and from the classics to science-fiction, and had a healthy distaste for ladies’ novels, until he fell right into one himself, and gradually discovered that there was no way out. The newly arisen dilemma, which had been there for a long time already if he had only seen it, embittered him at first, and angered him. It came in the way of his work, and in his own way he was a straightforward man who hated dilemmas, which couldn’t be solved, but he also prided himself in this fact, and that was what made him unable to solve his particular predicament. That was when he discovered, surprising himself most of all, that he was in love with his best friend’s wife.

Paul and his wife Cenaide were long time friends of Jack, who used to drop in on him at the weirdest hours of day and night, and he was always ready for them, for a drink, and a chat; besides, he used to visit them quite a lot himself. Cenaide wasn’t exactly a classic beauty, and neither was she a very intelligent woman, but one evening when they had gone to a dance, the three of them, and he took her in his arms, felt the softness of her cheek and the tickling of her hair against his face, the suppleness of her body against his, he suddenly realized that he loved her. He had known love before, and he still remembered how it felt and tasted and then hurt afterwards, so this surprised him, then he found it rather funny, and then it angered him. He had no business being in love with this girl, he told himself. Her hair was too short, he had always liked long hair, and the colour wasn’t right either. Her manner of speech was rude and she spoke with a strong cheap dialect, which she never was able to hide. No doubt she had lots of personal, annoying habits, and she couldn’t even talk about things on his own level of understanding. Above all she was married to his friend, whom she loved very much, of that he was certain. But he loved her with a sudden furious passion, which must have been smoldering in the depths of his mind for some time already, unnoticed. When he began thinking seriously about it later, when he was alone in his room, he recalled the fun they had had just by being together, talking about a lot of stupid unimportant things. He began to remember the peace he had felt, just sitting there and talking to her, knowing that she was near. He began to recall many things, small silly things, but they all added up as he brought them out of their hiding places in his mind, the tingle in his fingers when he touched her hand as she passed him his drink, and the warmth he had felt one evening when she had drunk a few glasses too much of the bottle of wine he had brought with him and had fallen asleep on the couch, and he had looked down upon her relaxed, resting face. He remembered now the sudden flare of anger he had felt one day when Paul had been shouting at her for some unimportant stupidity, and his uneasiness when he had visited them one evening, and she hadn’t been home, arriving very late.

He tried the shortest way out of this silly situation, and stopped visiting them without giving a reason, but they came to him, bewildered, and he never let someone stand before a closed door. He tried to be
rude, and only succeeded in surprising and hurting them, but they came back nevertheless, and he couldn’t keep on being rude to
her.
Then the pain began, and the uneasiness, standing before his window in his empty room, looking out over the rain-shrouded city roofs, smoking a cigarette, the smoke biting in his eyes. He took to taking solitary walks through the empty night streets, alone with his brooding thoughts, and this insane love for a woman who wasn’t his, and who would never be his. But the darkness never gives an answer, and if there were an answer to it, it would have to come out of himself.

He couldn’t work anymore with the accuracy so typical for his fingers, starting three paintings, leaving the first one unfinished, tearing the second apart with his knife, and throwing the third against the wall with such a force that it split. He tried looking at it logically, but refused to come into agreement with himself. At first he viewed it as a friendship’s dilemma, until he discovered that he couldn’t care less. He knew how his friend felt about his wife, a superficial love which had drifted into habit through the years. Paul was no real
obstacle, Jack wouldn’t stop because of him. But the real barrier was lying inside Jack himself, and in his guesswork concerning her feelings. He knew for certain that she cared for him only as a good friend, and nothing more, and there wasn’t the slightest chance of a step out of line, because her narrow mindedness on such matters had often before surprised him. Especially as he knew that Paul was far from a faithful husband, and sometimes it was so eye piercing that it seemed almost impossible for Cenaide not to notice it. She didn’t however, or else plainly refused to see things in their true light. She cared a lot for her husband, and would never let him go. Along those lines she also didn’t give a damn for Jack Morgan.

As time passed, Jack’s mind slowly turned into a chaotic labyrinth through which he walked without Ariadne’s thread; there were nights when he drank too much just trying to set his mind at peace and have a clear look at things, because contrary to most people, an intoxicated state sometimes did give him a better insight into himself and other people’s behaviour; but not this time. Reality was turning into a nightmare, his thoughts swarmed through his skull as dark night moths, he couldn’t grasp them or bring any order in them,
they kept on escaping him, leaving him in his confusion. They went out together more often, but though he danced many times with the girl, there never was a real contact between them though their bodies touched. Her back always seemed rigid against his hands as a strained spring; her goodnight kisses cold, hurried and impersonal.

He often desperately thought of simply telling her he loved her, but he didn’t dare risk their friendship. He was practically certain that she’d refuse him, maybe even be horrified at his feelings, and in any case he would never see her again then. He couldn’t risk that, but neither was he able to reject his own feelings. Of course there were always other ways out, but Jack didn’t want to take those. He had never been a violent man, and murder just didn’t appeal to him. Not counting the fact that it would all have to be worked out in elaborate detail and executed in cold blood, something which he wasn’t sure he was capable of, there was always the chance that Cenaide was one of that type of women who prefers to remain a suffering widow for the rest of her life. So Jack tried the other way out.

He had always been fascinated by the strange and the occult, and a long set of tomes on witchcraft and sorcery was among his books. For fun they had even once tried to hold a séance, but except for the nuisance of a poltergeist—all too clearly created by Paul’s knee below the table—they hadn’t been able to get any results. So the group had discarded the supernatural, but it had kept on fascinating Jack. He didn’t exactly believe in the “supernatural” in the popular sense of the word, and he still thought that the general uprising of interest in the so-called “old sciences”, in astrology, spiritualism and erotic orgies poorly disguised as witchcraft were mainly a reaction against the materialistic world image, a protest against the real sciences which were being blamed for the kind of world we live in. He knew a few practising witches, and even a medium of two, and he realized that some of them at least really believed in what they were doing. Their belief was genuine… but were the results? Some of them seemed to be, but were they really brought forth by something from the beyond, or was there a more materialistic origin to be found? Jack refused to believe in a heaven and hell, and in a horned and tailed Satan, but he did believe in the human mind, and in its unused potential. He believed in elemental forces, existing in nature since the beginning of time and only waiting to be discovered, elemental forms of energy of which we are yet unaware, and which can sometimes manifest themselves as an “evil” or a “good” force, not because they are good or evil, but because of the way they are invoked and used. It seemed much more likely and logical than imagining some “beyond” where bodiless spirits are eternally imprisoned, waiting from some rich and bored idiots to start playing with fake spiritualism, just to get a few silly messages.

Now it stopped being a pastime, and Jack began studying the occult in dead seriousness. He started by discarding the general works on magic, and began searching for the rare books, the real books that had not been written with a sensation-hungry public of laymen in mind. What he needed were works written by people who really knew what they were doing. He spent a lot of money, and quite some time hunting them down, but
obtain them he did, and study them, through the lonely hours of dark nights, while slow rain drizzled down from a leaden sky. He didn’t paint often anymore, there was no time for that, but he kept on seeing Paul and Cenaide, though every second he was close to her hurt him, and every evening after they had separated there was an empty hollowness in his brain.

Then, when he thought he knew enough, and he had obtained all he would need, he drew a pentagram for Cenaide.

First he took an empty canvas, and drew the pentagram on it, with strong strokes of black paint. Then he drew the bigger pentagram on the floor of his study, placing the canvas in the center of it. He made the five marks on the corners, and wrote the formulas, feeling silly all the time. It was the only way, however, he had found of making direct contact with the elemental forces, no matter what form they would take. Much of it was maybe folkloristic and unnecessary for his means, but there was no way to
find
out what was really needed and what not, except by trying it out. Then he spoke the spells, reciting the difficult words in a soft sing-song voice, and burned the needed ingredients inside the pentagram.

Something came.

Or maybe some “things” came, he couldn’t be sure, except that whatever they were, they were certainly not of this earth. They moved slowly, almost crawling through the darkness which filled the room; and though he sometimes thought something here or there looked vaguely human, he never could be sure, and probably it was his own mind which made it resemble something familiar. He didn’t try to speak to them, for he didn’t think they were really intelligent, or even alive in the strictest sense of the word. They were forces, pure energy, but somehow managed to spread an aura around them which he could only define as purely evil, though this couldn’t really be so. He had prepared himself well however, and slowly began doing what had to be done, putting his own will on the free energy-things, chanting the old words and making the old gestures with his hands. It took a long time, and when he finally released them, and the moving darkness lifted from the room, he was soaked with sweat. The pentagram on the canvas however was no longer black, it was silvery white, and seemed to be pulsating with a strange life of its own. He stood looking at it for a long time, then got his brush and began painting the canvas in grey, until the pentagram was covered completely.

The next day he visited Paul and Cenaide, declared that he had been commissioned for a group of paintings for a future exhibition, and asked Cenaide if she wanted to pose for him. He wanted to try some new ideas, and had decided to stick to portraits for a few paintings at least. She was surprised and flattered of course, and agreed immediately. So the evenings of the next weeks—because she had her daytime job to attend to—were spent in bringing the face, that not so very special face he loved so much, on the grey-covered canvas. He began by sketching her face on the uniform background, as she was posing rather awkwardly. Then he began filling in the background, making it an old wooden table of a country inn, in which she was sitting, looking straightforward. These evenings were heaven for Jack, as she was with him almost all of the time, and as he was painting he drank in her beauty. Sometimes Paul came along also, changing the records on the gramophone, and for the rest just sitting there, watching. But it wasn’t quite as it had to be, there was a strange repellant sensation when he was really close to her, almost as if they were two negative poles rejecting each other. Even when they went out for relaxation, they didn’t seem as close as before. He didn’t sleep easily anymore, it was as if the dark took strange and alien shapes around him, which were always there, mocking him. Weird things began to
visit his dreams, and gibbered to him in unearthly tongues which he couldn’t understand, so that he awoke having the impression of not having slept at all, to the contrary, he felt abominably tired.

Then he discovered that it didn’t work. Maybe he didn’t know as much about magic as he thought, or he had done something wrong, but the power of the pentagram didn’t work. The unseen distance between him and Cenaide seemed to be growing, almost as if something was constantly interfering. Anger and bitterness came, and finally, acceptance.