Tag Archives: weird fiction

My Grandfather’s House part 2

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Part Two: Waking Into A Dream

tzazanoth4

Read My Grandfather’s House part 1 first.

I awoke to myself again, swaying and grasping gratefully at the handle of a door. It gave way under my weight and I near fell into the room within. The house’s energies had drained me and I collapsed, sweating coldly and trembling, gratefully into the chair set separately and centrally in the room. On seating myself I noted its perfect position amidst the scrawlings of arcane and improbably alluring geometries that spiralled outwards from its legs. Instantly I knew that I had erred, perhaps fatally. I felt appallingly passive, my mind leeched by the revolting appendages that lined the room circuitously, wending their labyrinthine passages through our reality and into the next. The tears they wrought in the walls led out to the room adjacent but between these hollow parcels of human comfort.

The gash across my palm that I had thought healed reopened and wept vitally down my hand and through the open cuff of my shirt, staining it with my essence before spilling down my trembling fingertips. The sight transfixed me, its drip drip drip hypnotic in its regularity. Idly I wondered how long I could maintain its metronomic sapping and how I would look at the centre of a pool of myself – inverted and converted into a glimmering sheet of crimson.

The steady mesmeric trickle stole my mind and it was not until my jacket grew grossly wet and dark against my ribs that I realised to my horror that it was not only the wounds of an occult origin that split freshly in the terrible womblight that sank and stole horribly through the fabric of my grandfather’s house. Attracted no doubt by the curious and horrifying objects of ancient power which he had collected for their ageless evil and concentrated in this ill-chosen room for slumber, or for sitting, as I had foolishly done.

The visions that pierced the brutally shredded brick and plaster (overlaid with eldritch paper detailing the swirled patterns of a madman) violated the shivering veil of sanity we habitually draw across the fearful nightmares that lurk breathingly beyond that damask rustling. That haze, normally only dissipated by the force of insurgent dreams too keen to fortify themselves with the fresh cerebral matter of our minds was here surrendered with insulting weakness and torn from the railings of my thought and being. I was naked to them, as the blood ran down and stained the beds of my nails.

As my strength ebbed and the awful light waxed ever stronger through the edges and corners of the room I grew aware of a lightness in my mind, detaching itself from the blackened pool which lay dying inside me, its dark vacuum fed by the expulsion of my lifeblood. It was as if I drifted above myself, I felt my skin roll past like an ectoplasmic illusion and as I became free of my flesh that womblight embraced me, rushing hot and sour through the dimensions of the room. Achingly bright it ran greasily about the encased limbs – they extended through the glass, the alcohol-soaked lumps attaining their true state, flexing and flagellate. The room felt to me alive and throbbed with unusual vigour, as I imagine my heart would feel were I trapped within it. Each pulse was the beat of my heart expelling another drop of blood into the crimson tide which playfully chased the graven maze upon the floor.

I was dying. I knew that, and yet it felt ripe with potential. The ceiling surged towards me, heavy with lines of force that erupted, extending in ridges like bone towards me. A moisture ran from the infernal edges of the room along the ceiling and flowed up and down the twisted pyramid that reached out for me. At its tip hung a bell shaped lump that swelled as I breathed my insubstantial soul breath upon it. The light said to me “Choose”. I understood the vibrations which were not sound nor voice, but like the rattle of glass in a distant pane. The bell shaped itself, growing translucent and icy. The liquid that ran up the pyramid dripped down into the glassy fruit which twitched and hummed as it filled up. The light urged me to drink. I looked back at my body, grey-skinned at the heart of a sea of red. I reached up and took the strange glass object in my surreal fingers, and drank.

I drank the pellucid tears of a dead god. They burned, raw and bitter in my mind’s throat, pulling me downward as they raced into my being. I fell from the ceiling, through the greying flesh of my corpus and landed behind my own eyes. The womblight dimmed and the ceiling and the room’s marvellous shapes rushed backwards away from me. With a hiss I felt the floor uncoil beneath me, and the blood I had lost reversed its languid exit, sucking back into the gash in my hand and the wounds in my side and face. So vigorous was the rush that I was pulled to my feet and stood upright, tingling as the blood re-entered my body. I swayed on my feet, and then fell, overwhelmed at the sound of my heart beating once more.

 

My Grandfather’s House part 1

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Part One: Waking From A Dream

tzazanoth4I sat in silence. The watch, that horrible grisly thing that would not leave me, pursued me through the house, lay on the arm of the Chesterfield. Its vile anatomy seemed as if it were a broken spur of wrist protruding from the deep red flesh of the upholstered chair. Though it did not tick conventionally, as a clock of man might, I felt its uncanny hands pound through my pulse and the fabric of the house. I sat in silence. Around me the walls thrummed with dark animation. Shudders ran through the wallpaper, lifting the flowery relief images in waves of menacing faces.

I had not left the house in weeks and its presence oppressed me and constricted me. Blearily I pulled myself to my feet and staggered from the reading room. The hot breath of the house was as normal to me now as that of a dog one allows to share one’s bed. Its rank, organic stench barely touched my nose. The staircase loomed out of the hallway, spiralling upwards like gleaming bone – the spine of the thing that had inhabited my home since I first unearthed the watch from my grandfather’s attic. I staggered and rested my hand on the door frame, and yelped for the contact pressed harshly upon the wounded skin of my palm. It brought back to me that stumbling run from… from what? The watch, with its sharp bracelet that cut into me when I squeezed its ghastly living links. In fear I had tossed it into the drawer and locked it. The drawer where it would not stay. Even now I realised it was wrapped about the wrist I held up to the door. I was sure I had left it on the arm of the chair.

That awful night’s sleep, the dreams it had pressed upon me. I felt as if I had not slept since, and yet surely that is but my imagination for I lived still, if one could call it a life, stumbling about the body of this beast. A man must sleep, how else can he tell his dreams from reality? Without the sweet succour of slumber I led a drifting life, my mind and skin fluttering on the dead breath that stroked at my soul. I found myself at times lurching to wake from my bed, or a chair, or while mounting the stair or raising my head from a book. My life was being lived, but not by me. I merely borrowed it for moments when its new owner was absent. In these precious seconds when I was myself and could briefly grasp at the frame of existence I dwelled alongside I felt torn between horror at my impotence and dread of what my awful schemes my body might be engaged in.

Books and artifacts lay in rows and stacks along the hallway. I had been unpacking my grandfather’s collection in my not-sleep. The tomes were leathery and ancient. They hummed with malice and whispered sibilantly in my mind. Terrible things about the end of the world, about bleeding my memories away and worst, of reading the blood-inked whorls and sigils within them. I walked amongst those arcane horrors, piled to waist height throughout the house. I had no sense of the time I must have lost while I wandered absent from my mind, emptying the attic and the cupboards to produce this new labyrinth within the house.

As I drew past swaying piles of books I flinched, for their whispers grew guttural and glutinous, promising awful delights whenever my shoulder brushed their unhealthily hued bindings. I knew that I ought to be hungry; I felt weak and light headed, though that may have been merely the heat that sent shuddering beads of sweat down my back. The kitchen would be cooler, and with luck not entirely empty of goodness. The dull progress of my feet pulled me nearer to the smoothly tiled floor that broke from the threadbare carpet. I believed I might attain that haven (or so it appeared to my delirious and desperate mind). That was before I caught sight of the figure standing behind the staircase, blocking the way to my imagined sanctuary. Blackness enveloped me, as my eyes rebelled against me, denying truth to the monstrous shape I had seen uncoil from the underside of the steps. I felt its crenellated limbs reaching over me, its thorny fingertip touches seizing my dumb, listless body and dragging me limply, blindly into its embrace. It seemed as if I slept at last.

To be continued next week…

My Grandfather’s Book

My Grandfather’s Watch

My Grandfather’s Carpet

Twinned With Evil – part 4

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This is the fourth part of a story – read Part 1 , Part 2  and Part 3 first (if you want).

Cedric leads me down more stairs into the restaurant. It feels like a refuge of the past – its sunken floor is pitted with pools and miniature waterfalls. A waiter leads us courteously across stepping stones. I cannot resist giving Cedric a quizzical smile: this is not the sort of place either of us have ever haunted. The waiter deposits us at our pavilion where two men wait for us. One is the inspector from years ago, I sigh inwardly. The other man is large and perhaps in his twenties. I find him immediately aggravating.

“Old neutrals are new friends now,” Cedric offers as we take our seats, “you remember Clement.” I barely notice him. Cedric and Clement accept their drinks from the attentive but unobtrusive waiter and settle back on the other side of the table. I stare at the other man. There’s something in him I recognise. He stammers, makes some attempt at conversation. Then he finally meets my eyes and I know what he is, and why Cedric wanted me to meet him.

~

The second my eyes met hers the restaurant seemed to fall away. I’d been here with the inspector for perhaps half an hour, chatting quietly and enjoying my beer. When they arrived I felt my heart stir and I knew they were Clement’s guests. They approached us with a sense of inevitability. An older man, and a slightly younger woman. At first I thought she was old because of how she dressed, then young when she sat down, quickly and sullen. She sat in silence while the other man greeted the inspector.

The woman just stared at me, without a hint of feeling. Her eyes bored into me. I try to strike up a conversation but she totally ignores me. The waiter lays the table between our moments of awkwardness and leaves. The inspector and the man in the hat have arranged themselves on the other side of the table and are just watching us. Me. I’m sitting right next to the strange woman. It makes me nervous. The edge of the world shudders.

That’s when I notice that the water around our pavilion is receding from us and the air feels darker and heavier. I look into her eyes and they’re like black holes – the darkness in them devouring the skin around her eyes. Tendrils of night stream out of her face. I lurch backwards in alarm as black cracks striate her face and clothes. I seize the knife from the table and slam it into her chest. She screams, and doesn’t stop screaming.

The skin in her face unravels becoming just one terrible mouth lined with teeth all the way down the back of her throat – the teeth hum at me hungrily. I rip the knife back out and plunge it in again as she bucks and twists in my grip. She gets too hot to hold down, the fires within pierce her smouldering flesh and she bursts into a flaming corpse. She won’t stop screaming, I can feel it tearing at my mind.

The restaurant is gone, fallen into the darkness that has enveloped us, it is just me and the screaming. With a brutal and impossible contortion of her spine her back rotates to face me and splits; a black carapace ridged with blue and red spines forces its way out of her burned flesh and swells in size. Her limbs stretch, crack and reform into a nightmarish crab-like thing that becomes enormous, looming over me dripping ichor and shaking with hatred.

With one claw it tears the roof away and the gloom clears a little – we’re standing on the roof of an old church. The monster that the woman has become squats with its hind legs gripping the steeple, its fore-claws and mandibles still shriek the horrors of the world at me. I dive under it and jab upwards with the knife again, under the jaw where I can reach. The creature involutes itself impossibly, its jaws opening underneath me. I fall down into the night.

 ~

The restaurant is quiet save for the distant chatter of other diners. I take a small sip of water and glance at my boss. He raises his eyebrow. I straighten the dinner service. “Good instincts,” I say. The man next to me is shiny with sweat, eyes wide and shaking. I hand him his knife back. He looks terrified, justly. “Don’t worry,” I say, “you get to choose”. The dark-faced man nods. “He’ll do,” I say.

I left the city that same night, the same way I came in. It feels like the last time. I don’t think there will be anything to come back for. One more point of force inside the city won’t help it now. Together, perhaps, we can stop anything getting out when the city finally does die. Until then, I’ll be here. Watching.

Twinned With Evil – part 3

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This is the third part of a story – read Part 1 and Part 2 first (if you want).

My dream takes me past the security doors and its grim faced personnel. The corridor into the building folds back and forth in a paranoid maze until I reach the stairs and descend into the subterranean bureaucracy. It is cool and airy in the modern way, with no receptionists in your face and the offices muted and private. My feet lead inevitably to the Map Room. The room is swept periodically with light, illuminating the wood-panelling that surrounds the huge table. It supports a detailed map of the city; my eyes are drawn to the lines of force that arc and twitch around the city’s landmarks. Two wooden figures stand on the map.

We’re here to supervise the voting process. Now that good and evil are viable terms for social policy some measure of them is required in politics and the wheels of civil governance. It is not yet acceptable to build a party on such philosophical nightmares though, and that in part, was cause for our attendance. Still religion and economics attempts to take the fore. My boss, Cedric, in his constant suit and hat calmly regards the map.

We had a visitor present, from the inspection committee. He was a dark-faced man with a temper and no patience for our talk of good and evil. I felt nothing but contempt for him and pointedly ignored him. The map is more than enough to focus on. We made it together, Cedric and I. We infused with the forces we can sense; it exactly represents the City and its mood.

As the voting progressed the figures on the table grew steadily. We were watchful for deformation, sparks of colour and speed – all of which would indicate the influence of evil, or good on the proceedings. The feeling of mirrored energies surging across the table map and into the two men’s figurines was exhausting. We spent the day watchful for those sensations to which we are equally but diametrically attuned. We guard each other in raised eyebrows and significant glances.

The election seemed to go well, though the inspector offered constant distractions from our quiet vigil. He fussed and huffed until we could assure him that the figurines on the map were untainted by excess, that they contained a normal degree of good and evil, and that neither of us had exerted an undue influence over the outcome of the election. That showed how little he understood – our job was to monitor each other for our own sakes. The temptation to encourage your nature, tease it out from its hidden corners is powerful and we helped each other to curb ourselves. I don’t even recall who won. It hardly matters – they were ordinary men, equally subject to our extremes; the future was not within our remit and that future was beyond a mere election.

The day left me restless and unhappy. I spoke quietly with my boss, we touched hands and I left. I knew that I was a danger to the City. Despite our influence on each other I could still feel those coils of darkness in the City. They were drawn to me, and I to them. It was not safe for me to stay.

I wake. It is not an election today but the dream of it lies heavy in my mind. It has been years since the election and as I predicted, events have overtaken politics. The City fell to the darkness and it has spent the last ten years consuming everything. On the outside I was insulated from those curlicues of violence in the night. With the City sealed in a bubble of its own decline my role has been to watch from the outside, detect any escaping dread that might infect the rest. The emigration from the cities has been effective, there have been no more desperate purges, riots, terrible acts of rage and fear. The threat had been contained, or so I believed.

Having already made the trip in my dream the journey to the office smacked of deja vu, but as if through smoked glass. Parts of the city I remember fondly are gone, unseen by the residents. There are more people about today and I watch them ignoring the gaps in their City, taking extreme diversions around blacked out streets and buildings. Even the crawling death across the paving slabs is nimbly stepped over.

It all feels wrong, and yet so right. The evil inside me thrills to this subsumption but it is exactly that which persuaded me to join the agency. I know to be wary of that feeling, it is seductive. I regret my return even as I am welcomed.

I meet my boss at the office. He seems much older than he should. We exchange weary smiles and touch hands. The office is precisely as I remember, until we reach the map. It is riven with darkness like a cankerous parasite clawing the City into itself. He raises an eyebrow and makes a dismissive gesture.

“Let’s go out for dinner” he says, “there are some people I’d like you to meet.”

The sky’s blue is fading already and the birds are playing their speed stunts again. A warm wind blows sepia through the city. We walk down a street of restaurants and bars. Many are closed, but several are lanterns in the night, full of cheerful faces and happiness. We don’t look at the other side of the road where the houses disappear in a ragged darkness and barely coalescent shapes haunt the shadows.

Part 4 (finale) coming next week… I’m sorry…

Twinned With Evil – part 2

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This is the second part of a story – read Part 1 first (if you want).

I am relieved to find the old apartment building still standing in the light. The street lights flicker and strobe as I walk towards it and I will them to remain lit. They do. My hand hardly shakes at all as I fit the key into the lock. The shadows rush out past me; I feel their passing against my skin. They flee to join the night and the bleakness that infests it.

The flat is dark and empty. But still mine. Not much more than a round table and a bed. It is clean and the cupboards not as pitifully bare as I left them, so my boss must have had it maintained; he always feared I would need to return. Night falls heavily outside, the darkness reaching up to pull the blanket over itself. I draw the curtains to keep it out.

Dreams torment my sleep. Being here brings all my memories of the last time back in a flood. It is one of those awful dreams where I dream of waking and am still asleep. It takes me back to the last time I was here: before I banished myself my role was to adjudicate in the election. I wake in the narrow wooden bed and the light is plowing through the air above me, painting ghosts and nightmare figures on the scarred wallpaper. Breakfast is a nauseating lurch across the flat and back, puppeteered by the dream. My mind seems intent on replaying the details I have cast aside; the ashen taste of cereal, the sourness of milk. My clothes do not fit properly.

The door slams behind me, beating an echo into the air which travels before me. The distance between the flat and the office goes by in long stutters of treacle slowness and flashing speed. The city had not gone bad then, but it was surely on the way. Even by daylight the streets were subdued, the people reclusive. Just a month earlier the last music hall had burned to the ground and the football stadium had closed. We no longer wanted to associate with others. Quiet bars, and oddly, the libraries had even had a resurgence of interest. The shadow of imminent violence hangs over everything.

I pass the staring faces that watch me as I walk down the roads to the office. They had relocated the government offices underground after the murder sprees started. Bloody, awful affairs that ended hundreds of lives. Shop workers, wives, teachers, electricians. There seemed to be no pattern until we looked at where they lived or worked. “Frequency of contact” was the official conclusion, and it held true for all the later events. It was as if we’d hit the maximum number of people we could see and still care about and yet society just kept pushing more in our faces. There was that, and something more.

I was recruited when I survived the Beynemouth Slaughter. That was when I discovered the kind of threat I, and those like me are. We can talk about good and evil, light and dark and get all philosophical about what makes a woman good or evil, we can euphemise as much as we like. It doesn’t change the facts, only hides that some of us revel in the violence and in the darkness. Our existence made it worse – people already hated being near each other but we thrived on it, instigated it. If we’d known we were doing it, if I’d known that was what I was doing… well. I didn’t, and in our ignorance we hit a critical mass of hate and fear in the City, and made it real.

Evil became a presence, and people succumbed to it. The community purges which followed as religious and political leaders, as well as the damaged people already waiting for an opportunity, incited further fear, spreading the darkness and ensuring that blood was spilled. I could feel it, almost smell the hatred in the air. I’d never really felt alive before. I attended a rally where I found myself shouting and shaking my fists. The darkness moved with me, like streamers from my fingertips and I cast it over the crowd with my words.

The Beynemouth Slaughter that followed tore a hole in our world, a place for the bleak consuming hate to live and fester like a gash in our City. The agency was formed shortly afterward and I was one of its first agents. Cedric knew what I was, had picked me out of the photographs of the riots and turmoil. I was scared and repentant. I’d relished the sensations that surrounded me as men bludgeoned each other to death, loved watching the dark blossoming from the mob. But I saw that it lingered, saw it become part of the city. I watched it grow, felt it grow and stretch, distort and gnaw at everything. Despite my lust for it I realised that it was destructive. I’m not a bad person, just an evil one. That’s what my boss helped me to understand.

Part 3 coming soon…

Twinned With Evil – part 1

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Brambles and branches try to hit me in the face and water soaks into the hem of my dress from the filthy puddles I trudge through. I am returning from overseas. This narrow, overgrown ditch is the last entrance into the City that I know of. It is not welcoming, but then I would not wish for one anyway. I do not wish to be here and, if the people here knew I was returning, would not want me here either. The silence is absolute. No animals dwell in this abandoned corner. Even the brambles are dead and brittle; their thorns fall in a shower behind me.

I have been summoned. It has been a long time since I was here last. I had hoped that I would not be needed. I drag my satchel free of the thorns in a soft explosion of brick dust. Despite my reluctance I am curious about how the City might have changed without me. The last turn necessitates hopping over a thick root which has some slight sense of life left in it. I can feel it pulse, deep in its heart as I clear it. My dress slaps wetly against my boots.

When I land on the other side of the barrier everything feels different. No longer dead, but dying. This place is afflicted with a terrible blight, one we were unable to heal when last I was here. It can be tasted in the air, cold and damp. If I couldn’t feel the sparks and shards of life scattered through the City like slivers of glass I would think it a graveyard. As it is, those slivers are all too few. Once the City had a population of hundreds of thousands. Now it is in the tens of thousands. All that change in a generation. It still looks the same.

The tall fantastically arched buildings rising from the grey flagstones on either side of the road. The alleys loom dark and threatening between them. I stick to the middle of the road. I’m impressed that the streets are clean, if empty. This side of town is quiet but not too bad. Despite that I walk quickly, hooded and with my satchel drawn in close. Shadows move behind windows. I know that I’m being watched but I don’t feel threatened.

The people here are right to be wary – there are no strangers here. The City has been locked down – sealed on one side and consumed on the other. Ways in and out such as those I used are known to very, very few. Of course most of the survivors don’t realise this; they know it, deep down but how can you live in fear all of the time? They continue to live, for as long as they can and forget those who disappear and the streets where they used to play and work. The empty houses pass me by and I see a few souls making their way home from work, most likely in the power stations to judge by their clothing.

It’s a long way to the flat I keep here. I assume it is still there though my summons made no mention of it. My boss – I still call him that, though our relationship has not been one of employer and employee since we first met. But I don’t have any other useful way to refer to him. His name has all the wrong connotations for how I feel about him. Cedric is not a name to inspire respect, or fear. Both are deserved for my boss. His summons was short, terse even in its single word “Come”.

That I should be needed here again can only be bad news. Since my self-imposed exile I have dreamed of the City, feared it, made it into a monster. At first glance it doesn’t appear to merit that – it’s just another fading city, depopulated as so many are now. We came to fear the intimacy of society and spread out, back into the countryside and the compact communities which our species can cope with. Put us together for too long and we turn… bad. I know I did. This place is where it all started where it began to go wrong twenty years ago.

I am thinking too much about our history and am not paying attention to my route. My feet know where to go. I pause briefly to look up at the moon which has risen while I crossed the City. It hangs, a ghostly impression on the slowly darkening sky. I’m sure that’s a sneer across its face. The sight makes me nervous, I should be inside before full dark.

Gazing at the moon I am startled by a sudden racket in the hedge that thrusts between the railings behind me. A volley of thrushes launches out of the greenery and wheels up into the sky – scant millimetres separate them and they fly impossibly fast, twisting and turning in tight loops before rocketing back into the hedge. I watch their aerial curlicues and count the runes they inscribe in the sky. A man nearby is staring at them too, alternating his attention between the birds me. I keep going.

Part 2 coming soon…

My Grandfather’s Watch

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After the sudden death of my grandfather I had discovered that I was his sole heir. It came as some surprise to me as I had spent many years estranged from my family and had only recently returned to town. It came as an even greater surprise to my kin. During a tense reading with daggerous looks between his remaining relatives, his house and properties were willed to me alone. I was uneasy with the estate for my prior experience of home ownership extended little beyond possession of a sleeping bag and a talent for cadging a sofa by night. Failing even those luxuries I had camped out beneath the stars in a series of tents and rough spots. Drifting, always drifting. Yet I had returned home at long last and thanks to the quixotic will of my grandfather I had a reason to stay.

I had a house of intriguing and oddly shaped rooms to do with what I wished, and the considerable enmity of my cousins. So it was that I came to be alone for much of my time browsing aimlessly through my grandfather’s vast collection of intriguing trinkets and the countless leather-bound tomes of strange subjects and suggestive titles which littered every room of the house and surface within it. There is something tiring to the eye of such incessant jumble and I sought out quieter vistas.

Amongst the seeming endless ring of keys that had been pressed into my hands by the sweating fingers of my grandfather’s executor was one labelled ‘attic’. I had not yet ventured within. Indeed I had not yet gone above the second storey of the tall Victorian house.

As I fingered the key and ascended the stair to the third storey I felt a speeding quiver in my heart – is there not always a thrill to exploring an attic or cellar? Somehow they bind a house with mystery and potential. I left behind the halls of open doorways and found myself in a hallway in which were five doors – two to my left and right and a fifth facing the stairs.

All locked and unmarked, save for one which must have been at the back of the house (I had gotten somewhat turned around in my ascent and there were no windows in the hall – a room must have been built to enclose the sources of natural light). That door was also closed, but held an ostentatious lock on its outside with a bolt that plainly ran deep into the wall. Its frame was deeply scratched around the lock and lacerations ran its full height from ceiling to floor as if something had deeply desired entrance, yet lacked the key. I felt little desire to test it myself.

At the end of the hall a hatch was set into the ceiling, directly above the fifth door. The attic key was the only one so marked and it fit smoothly into the heavy padlock which lidded the attic shut from beneath. A twist and a tug removed the chain and the hatch swung open eagerly. I was almost struck by the shape which thrust at me with sudden violence from within the darkness above and fell back in alarm. My shock gave way to laughing relief as I realised it was just the folding ladder leaping to greet a visitor.

Heart still pounding and resolute I climbed the ladder and pulled at the cord which hung from the ceiling. Dim lights flickered into life along the length of the attic, blocked and channelled by the hundred trunks and crates which populated the space. A weave of dust hung in the lamplight and tickled at my nose and eyes. With no particular aim I wandered about the huge room, which plainly stretched over the entire plan of the house. I marvelled again at my grandfather’s fascination with collecting and wondered how I would ever manage to dispose of his assets.

I opened a few trunks and examined the disturbing contents: a series of child-sized death masks, a quartet of verse on The Nature of Unions in Undeath, candles and statuettes depicting crude physical acts, a necklace made of teeth and a straw doll with the face of some amphibious creature. I felt dizzy with confusion and the dust eating at my lungs and restacked the oddments where I had found them. I prepared to leave, taking a last look around this warehouse of intriguement. Perhaps I would be able to find a specialist evaluator to examine the house’s contents.

My attention was captivated by the light rebounding in a dazzling arc from an object which hung above the trunks and parcelled books. The arc was almost a rainbow in shape, though it offered none of the rainbow’s jolly hues. The singular item which cast the achromal arch swung by a lightbulb from a leather thong binding it to the rafter above. It was a slender tube of around a foot in length made of some supple and slick artifice that my fingers could barely grip. My eyes slid off the patterns embossed on its curious surface. The shapes hinted at hidden meanings and glamorous twists in perspective.

I gazed at it, entranced by the mandalas and I was scarcely aware of removing it from its resting place and sitting cross-legged upon the floor with the unusual cylinder in my lap. The glyphs and script upon it seemed as if they might be the cousins of a text I’d perused in my grandfather’s study. There they had been described as the words of an ancient people who claimed to perceive time in reverse and whose rites prescribed mutilation and promise of fearsome revelation.

Idly I traced a spiderweb of ancient wisdom with my finger. The tube hummed, grew warm and separated with neat clicks… like the teeth of a skull. Within lay an object which seemed familiar to me and yet had not the familiarity of such items as I had handled before. It was, perhaps, a time piece, for its shape resembled that of an ordinary wristwatch. Yet the chronometry which ringed its face meant nothing to me, telling only the time belonging to an occult and ancient calendar.

The hours were too many, or at least those things I assumed to be the prime divisions of an inhuman day were too great to match our revolutions. The hands were numerous and sprouted in interlocking shapes across the face. Worst of all, it appeared to be made of a glistening gristle; it lay swaddled in the velveteen packaging like a stillborn bone child.

A tremor of fear thrummed in my heart and yet my fingers reached out of their own accord and plucked it from its bed. It was wet and cold in my hand, like a bleeding fish. The lights in the attic dimmed until I was left in blackness. A grisly ticking commenced immediately and with its beat a rush of blood filled my head as if my heart were powered by the engine of a monstrously vigorous furnace. I felt hot, heavy. And then nothing.

I awoke in the dark, though not the dark of the attic but that of night. I lay on my bed, in the guest bedroom (my grandfather’s chamber is too rich with his interests to permit a peaceful slumber). I faced the open window and the starry night sky beyond. Often have I gazed in wonderment at the vastness of the universe with hope that there must be beauty in its vastness and a future for mankind out there. I felt also a calm contentment with our tiny slice of it. For all the petty annoyances of man’s life (and mine had had its share) there are fresh air and butterflies to balance it.

Yet tonight I felt different. My heart ached still from its earlier pounding and there was a dry nausea in my mouth. Frowningly I regarded the starscape anew. It was… wrong. A perverse irreality of the night intruded upon my senses. Where were my astrological friends whom I nightly greeted and goodbyed before I slept?

The Hunter no longer hunted. Instead he cowered, shrinking back from his spectral quarry. New constellations, or rather – ancient skies? I saw the hints of stars I knew, but paled in comparison with the devilish reds and putrescent yellows that dominated the night, threatening my astral familiars. The wrongness of the air threw my head into a spinning dread.

I drew the curtains to evade the portentous sky. It was then I noted the grotesque time piece which lay like a streak of eviscerated organ upon the bedside table. It seemed to me that it throbbed hungrily for the witch lights I had curtained. I resolved to ignore the foul thing and so I swept it into a drawer and resumed my slumber, for even these brief minutes of wakefulness had wearied me.

I fell into bleak dreams pierced by strange threads of symbolism which drew me into a tapestry of sweating horror. Great staring eyes tormented me and penumbrally monolithic structures haunted me vertiginously. At the end I was repeatedly horrified by a trilobite crawling in and out of my slipper as I lay alone on a cold wet floor. I felt unable to draw them forth from beneath the bed when I awoke, slick with fear. I stepped barefoot and fearful to the window and steeled myself to draw the curtains asunder.

The world was as it normally was in the afternoon. I had slept late and the sun was beginning to diminish. Red tinged shadows stretched across the roads outside, their talons reaching through the gardens and scratching at the window, keen to be let in. I looked up to where the dark moon was rising, jaws spread wide to consume our native satellite. I thought nothing of it and turned away from the outside. My hand was drawn to stroke at the cartiliginous thing that wrapped about my wrist, its hands whirling and its pulse beating blackly in counterpoint to my own.

The Recreational Entertainment

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A night of nonsensical dreams and a persistent headache left me washed up lke a beached whale upon the chaise longue in my night room. The most I could achieve on my road to morning humanity was to loosely tamp my pipe. My drooling lips could scarcely support the trembling pipe stem which spilled smouldering shag down my shirt. The possible  ignition caused me no worry; a-squint through my eyelids I saw that fire would only improve the room in which I had wrought much party.

I bellowed for aid. Mr Tribblings flew into the room (for this was in those pleasant days before his revolt), a lemon tea resting upon a silver tray. It was his own drink and he teased me with it. Despite his preternatural ability to brew tea I had become averse to the beverage, finding it faintly reminiscent of simian urine.

I insisted the goose-ape pull me to my feet and commence grooming. He disliked getting his fur wet but I was in powerful need of water’s erosive touch and had no desire for his fumbling mitts to draw insects from me. At length my bestial manservant supplied me with a towel followed by a vast breakfast spread. When finally my repast ended with a pudding I realised that my only hope for true wakefulness was a stroll in the park. Fully en-spatted and en cravate I departed the house, snug in the embrace of my latest invention – the Ele-Chair.

Part ordinary seat, part elephant it was the ambulatory chaise to end all mobile furniture. The recent fad for steam-powered carriages had quite inspired me but I was more comfortable with vivisection. I had taken a pair of young elephants (Afric for their convenient expanse of ear upholstery). One I’d flattened along the back, the other glued upon it in repose so that I’d legs to motivate the chair, another pair to rest my arms upon and the final pair to drape a roofing over.

The lower walking limbs I’d stripped to the bone and varnished as one would a table, which achieved an aesthetically pleasing grain. Naturally I’d decapitated the beasts for their features are monstrously penile. The trunks I’d re-stitched as simple cranes (for shoppping and such) while their tusks made a rather vicious forward-facing ladder for attaining one’s seat.

By means of gimbals I maintained a gentle ride while the Ele-Chair ploughed through the streets, scattering pedestrians with cries of awe and admiring shrieks. As the chair negotiated a junction (I’d naturally endowed it with the delicate mind of a badger I found in my garden one opiated night, for such matters as navigation are beneath a gentlean’s concern) the other road users gave ground gracefully as we turned into the park.

A wondrous expanse of baise green beneath the smoggy sky. My mount picked up speed as it relished the grass between its skeletal toes. With my peasant-beating spear I directed my chair towards a certain copse in whose leafy shade I was confident of finding gentlemanly diversion.

Within the trees’ penumbral umbrella stood a trio of hamnsom carriages, two of which bounced jovially upon their wheels. A quintet of well-dressed gentlemen and ladies ringed the cars, their gaze intent and breathing heavy. When I drew up my pachyderm armchair I elicited a gasp of surprise and a satisfying swoon.

Wordlessly I offered my hand to a finely clad maiden (the unconscious lady would be too much effort). A smile of secret sorts passed between us and I helped her up the tusks and into my lap. With the depression of a bony lever the chaise’s hood rose over us, the four ears of the elephants fanning around to enclose us in an amorous and faintly hairy screen. My ill health was vanishing in a lady haze…

Something was awry. I first noted it when the earth gave the impression of greater motion than I had anticipated. Indeed, the quiver of thighs I’d attributed to my sensual ministrations was a disturbance in the outer world. The smooth travel of my elephantine stool had belied our true progress, for as I peered between petticoats and leathery folds I saw we were far from the restful grove in which we had begun our courtship.

My chair’s tusks were slick with gore and from one of them dangled an impaled swan,  the other boasted a child’s pram. This was potentially awkward. My companion’s alarm was irritatingly evident so I applied a calming chloroform to her and activated the chair guns. It would be dreadful if word were to escape the park that yet another of my creations had run murderously amok.

Accordingly I took aim at a gawping bystander and silenced his potentially slanderous tongue. Our bloody route was easy to retrace for it was strewn with flattened pedestrians. As the Ele-Chair bounded and capered, those few which it merely maimed I drew upon and finished off.

With the noisome folk extinguished (for they did bemoan my actions), my mount calmed and contented itself with uprooting daffodils.

It seemed unlikely that I would return to the passionate grove for it was now a blood spattered boneyard. At least I’d rescued this charming lady who drooled unconscious on my waistcoat. In time the chloroform would wear off, and before then we must find ourselves a fresh copse to revive our romance. “Ho chairephant – to the heath!”

My Grandfather’s Carpet

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Though I was finally free from many of life’s worries I found the shame of feeling so pierced my high spirits. My heart burdened with the weight of an uncommon liberty; this freedom granted me by death. So distracted was I that much of my day was spent mooching from room to room, idly tugging a volume free from a shelf or inverting some curio that had come from who knows where. As I spent more time in my grandfather’s house I found that a hyperactive nausea began to lie thickly upon my soul.
Late in the evening my fingers quavered with inactivity, for I could not bring myself to settle and achieve any one thing. At length my feet took me to the bedroom at the rear of the house. My grandfather had filled the room with dark wooden furniture which hemmed me into a leathered chair in the corner opposite the bed, worn through years of use. A glass sat on a round table at my right; on a bureau sat a silver tray with a decanter of some amber liquid. I found it to be a whiskey. Maybe it would soothe me.
As the drink passed my lips I began to relax. The window gave me a narrow sliver of the night sky, the moon swollen and part-shrouded in mauve clouds. The silvery light cast curious shadows from the figurines which stood guard at the window sill. The house was full of such artifacts and I should make some inventory of them, eventually. My gaze fell to the floor, on which lay a glorious weaving. Something in the pattern intrigued me, drew me into the weave. My earlier restlessness returned and I could no longer sit still.
The twitching unease roused me from my seat and took me on a nervous curlicue of the intricate carpets. The paths I traced were surely unknown to the skilled carpeteer whose only design was that of ornament, and yet- and yet… Were not those patterns which my spirit sought out through the elocution of mine toes as they plunged admirable into the weft those patterns which had been framed in my very mind? Framed and presented to my waywarding soul in the dark resplendence of the waking dreams into which I had been lured by those awful vilified peerless ancients whose dead breath I felt in my mind’s ears. Those very treads marked the stain they had left in me.
And exposed, I saw them – naked in the furrows ploughed by my toes and heel. In a panic of fluttering wrists and palsied eye I took pen to paper to record the daemonic maze I had limberly scribed. Paper was not enough and I tore from the walls such decor as I had looked upon with former affection and littered the bed with them. High-kneed I over-stepped my footed pattern and mirrored it on the four walls of my quarters.
My work completed I fell back amongst the ruin of treasures, broken jags of frame and torn tapestry my mattress. About me I could truly see the messages the ancients had so crudely couriered to our world through the unwilling postiary of my half-woken mentation. It was only as I traced my psychic horrors on the chamber walls with a faltering thumb that I realised my error.
How stupid, how ignorantly rapt in their eldritch influence I had been. Laid bare about me I saw the nightmare gate I had etched in first ink, then, my bleeding wrists attested in the blood of my veins. And wrought a dire magic.
The runic gateway I’d mindlessly daubed were filling with a ghast light, from that place beyond emotion and life where they dwell. And from where they would soon return.

The Box and The Beetle

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The box rocked violently between the two books which held it neatly in place; at one end a large hardback collection of artistic cat prints, opposing it an equally large dictionary. Both looked rather worse for wear, broken bindings, loose threads and gold type wearing thin. By marked contrast the box between them appeared brand new, or at least one presumed it was brand new: it had no scratches, no markings, no chipped corners or any of the usual injuries sustained either before or during arrival here. Instead it had a peculiarly smooth finish, which made it glisten in the dim, mote-filled light. When touched however, it felt neither smooth nor wet. But then again, it didn’t feel rough or dry. Really it felt of nothing at all. Those same fingertips could only sense that the muscles were being prevented from contracting further- no sensory information was available. Even the hairline crack running precisely between the halves of the box was too fine, the parts too perfectly flush, for the primitive agency of touch.

The box was naturally something of a curiosity, less that people would come to see such a curious object, rather that should someone classify it, it would certainly be as a curious curio from unknown parts of unknown parts. This though a classifier, when in fact none existed nor had one done so for a long time. Books aged and withered, creaking and cracking until the binding snapped, emptying volumes of paper flakes upon the shelves and floor. The books surrounding the box had not yet reached this stage of decay; a trifle worn they possessed sufficient weight to pin the curio down.

The rocking subsided once more, as it always did, apparently having rid itself of dead pages and dust. The glistening box grew darker, murkier in colour, slowly sinking through the spectrum of night until its intactile sheen was now complemented by its total lack of reflectivity. The box was to all intents and purposes invisible. But what were its intents, its purposes?

Content, as all immobile objects appear to be, simply to wait, unaffected by the continual erosion of the material beyond it. It was an age since anyone had even seen the box, let alone moved it from between the guarding tomes. The guards, however slowly were also decaying, it was but a matter of time before one or the other gave way and slowly collapsed into debris.

As the dust continued to pile up the box gave the distinct impression of impatience; shaking itself more furiously and more frequently to prevent itself from being buried. At last only the top of the box could be seen, or rather unseen, since it left only a disc of darkness nestled in the greying crater. Flecks of dust settled lightly on the exposure, plotting the box’s curve. Still the box remained. Finally, with agonising slowness the outside cover of the dictionary pulled itself free from the terribly worn and abused binding which split, threads splaying forwards and downwards. An avalanche of slow motion paper fell next, crumbling from the top of the dictionary, pulling more flecks free until whole pages disintegrated, heaping onto the shelf.

As it wasted away, there was only ‘A’ and the cover left, by a heap of decaying paper. The bulk of the fine book of artistic cat prints, no longer counter-weighted by the lexicon, fell hard onto the box. Its descent was somewhat slowed by the great dust drifts between them; but when forced down they burst out outwards like the exhaust from some terrific engine. The standing dictionary cover toppled, and tumbled off the shelf. The moment the obstruction was gone the grinning face of a cat slapped down upon the box, propelling it swiftly across the shelf on a platform of dust which it dragged behind, arcing into a shaft of thick sunlight; the box an impenetrable hole in the light.

Entering the shadows the box did not vanish as might be supposed, the box as it flew began to glimmer again, as if the moments of frantic activity had energised it, and its speed did not diminish but increase. The flawless and now luminescent box displayed an infinitely thin glowing yellow line about its perimeter as the box made first contact with a wall of brick and wood and passed through it without even a whisper, leaving a perfectly smooth and featureless hole behind it. The box stopped in mid-air, and could now be seen oscillating so rapidly that were it not for the slight distortion effected upon the yellow line it should have been perceived motionless.

As it hung there the yellow light distorted more wildly, weaving an erratic web around the box. The oscillation continued until the entire box gave out a uniform yellow light, easily discernible in the shadows next to the wall it had so neatly punctured. Cautiously the luminous box sank toward the ground, folding down long blades of grass. As it neared the ground the shaking lessened and the yellow light drew back into its minute groove. The light cast a neat halo upon the bare earth a few inches beyond the box, and the box’s colours began to run, from the top downwards; a slow running and dripping. The darkness of the box spread onto the ground, pouring like black coffee into the halo’s confines; once the area was filled, the halo vanished, leaving a disc of darkness on the ground. The rest of the box was now a brilliant white, the base pearlescent in its own shade.

It was a quiet day, a light breeze made the sharp blades of grass rasp against one another, and when that sound died there was the industrious racket of insect hordes determinedly approaching the interloper. The first was a beetle, with its shiny black oil-slick shell, marching over the uneven ground on six delicately articulated legs, its antenna waving in the air as it neared the disc of blackness. Abruptly the beetle turned and proceeded to tour the perimeter of the box. Soon the beetle arrived back where it began, having described a perfect circle. It settled down on the ground, squarely facing the box as if resigned to a long wait; the twitching of its feelers the only animation. Other insects also approached, ants- travelling in a solid file surrounded the box briefly before concluding that the dark halo was entirely unknown and thoroughly impregnable. The ants retreated in confusion, lacking the coherence with which they arrived in a rambling, rushing flood of armour. Other insects came and went with varying reactions: flying insects were unable to land on the box and buzzed ineffectually about it; gastropods found they could get no grip with their powerful feet and got no further.

Eventually all the insects left, except for that first beetle to come on the scene. Hours had passed and all manner of creeping, crawling insectile life had been unable to so much as lay a feeler upon the black disc or the white block on it. The beetle’s feelers waved feebly and it reared up on its hindmost legs, gesticulating in the air, weaving a complex of patterns with its segmented limbs, spread wide in appeal and calm, encouraging gestures. The beetle’s wings unfolded and re-folded producing a rasping rhythm to accompany its dance. Finished, the beetle hesitated briefly as it regained its footing and then shook its heavy carapace from side to side; the beetle rocked more and more violently, until it overcame its own sense of balance and toppled, rolling helpless onto its back.

The legs did not waggle frantically as might be expected; rather the legs extended fully and bent in half, bringing the sharp points of six feet to rest along the centre of the beetle’s abdomen. Those feet dug down, hard and swift into the beetle and the abdomen split, smoothly and cleanly with no outpouring of fluids. The two halves rolled back into the shell and the head flipped back as if hinged, leaving a gaping opening into the body of the bug. Its interior was faintly lighted, and became brighter, casting a tiny silhouette out over the beetle’s upside-down head. That shadow vanished, to be replaced by a powerful beam of light which passed over the black disc and onto the white box, not merely reaching, but piercing the smooth finish; ripples formed as the beam struck, suggesting motion. Simultaneously, the beetle rose into the air and towards the box. It passed the darkness and followed the beam of light into the whiteness: the beetle was smoothly enveloped as if sunk gently in a mildly viscous pool.

Still once more, all ripples caused by that beam of light now spent, the box gave no hint that the beetle had entered it. The black halo began to fall back, slickly running up over the white box, consuming it in blackness again, but this time broken by tiny, distant-star-like points, slowly moving in spirals about the box, rising ever upwards. As the spirals continued to rise, they coiled, their multicoloured specks fusing together, coating the box in vivid iridescent rainbows until the whole box was one spectral mass, the previous luminescence now rich and oily again. The box rose slowly into the air, grass beneath it straightening themselves and creaking with the effort, up and up it rose, above the holed wall, high into the air still visible as a dark, shining speck hurtling upwards past the limits of vision, and on.