Nightscapes





The Girl Who Walked in Circles by Mike Minnis



April 22, 1923

Everidge --

I'm not sure how much longer I can stand it here in Dunwich. Things continue to grow stranger and stranger.

Today, for example. Despite my earlier doubts, Osborn and I have managed to effect a passable classroom of sorts. He even provided a few necessities from his store, namely a pair of benches and a small accountant's desk that will serve me. For my part, I hung up pictures of our two foremost presidents and they now stare out over the room -- Washington looking stern, Lincoln sagacious. I am almost pleased with it. I may dislike Dunwich and the majority of its people, Everidge, but Osborn is a fine man and deserving of better circumstances.

Odd, however, that no one makes an effort to retrieve anything from the Meeting House. I have no roster, no idea of whom my students could be . . .

That is, if they show up. My first day passed without a single student in my presence, despite my having informed the local populace that classes had begun. I spent the day knocking on doors, asking after my students. I received a variety of replies, everything from "they're aout in th' woods" to "they got chores" to "what business is it a yours?"

That was when someone answered the door.

The second day was more of the same. I sat at my desk, grumpily wondering if I shouldn't simply pack up and leave (I finally have my Model T back, by the way). On the third day, some salvation -- a young boy and girl of perhaps 10 and 8, respectively, arrived. Brother and sister, holding hands and so dirty they resembled street urchins -- patched hand-me-downs, scuffed shoes, the boy wearing an ill-fitting cap.

I asked them who they were, and they replied that they were Temperance and Rebecca Bishop.

I invited them to sit. I introduced myself as Mr. Paul, their teacher. I asked if there were other students.

Temperance nodded solemnly.

What were their names?

Temperance mentioned only a few, certainly less than attended Mrs. Orne's class. I said they should be in school. The boy nodded.

Well, where were they? He shrugged.

I asked the girl if she knew where they might be. Why aren't they here? School is very important, after all.

A look passed between her and her brother, brief and wary. The little girl grew nervous. She clasped her hands in her lap, and swung her little feet back and forth. She wouldn't look at me.

"Why aren't they here, Rebecca?" I asked.

The little girl muttered something.

"Excuse me?"

"They's a-scairted," she said, after a time.

I rose from my chair, walking slowly. The boy watched me warily and then his sister, trapped in some sort of private, inner dilemma.

I sat beside her, elbows on knees, in thought.

"Why are they scared?"

She gently bit her lower lip. "Don't know," she said to the floor.

"Do you know?" I asked the boy. "Are they afraid of me?"

"Heck no," he replied. "Fact, Tabby Gardner told me Jimmy Harris and Zeke Adams was plannin' on puttin' a frog in your desk drawer. Then Zeke's brother Orville says he'll double-dare Jimmy t' put it in your coat pocket, and Jimmy said double-darers go first, and then Orville called Jimmy chicken, and that made Jimmy mad, so --"

"So, they're not afraid of me," I said.

"Naw," he said, shaking his head, "they ain't afraid a you."

"Then why aren't they here?"

Again, the shrug. "Don't like school much, I reckon. Don't like strangers tellin' them what t' do."

"But Mrs. Orne told them what to do," I said. "Didn't she?"

The boy grudgingly considered this fact. "Ayuh . . . I s'pose . . ."

"So, if Mrs. Orne --"

The little girl suddenly clapped her hands over her ears. I was careful to hide my surprise.

"Is something wrong, Rebecca?" I asked.

She shook her head emphatically. Temperance began to say something, but I indicated that he should remain quiet. The little boy was growing increasingly nervous.

"Is something wrong, Rebecca?" I gently removed her hands from her ears. The little girl's eyes glistened wetly. She was on the verge of tears. She sniffled, swiped at her nose and asked, "Promise?"

"Promise what, dear?"

Rebecca's eyes finally met my own. "Promise you won't let her near us."

"Who, dear?"

The little girl squirmed. "Promise," she said, her voice rising in agitation.

"Why?"

"Because -- because --"

Before I could react, Temperance had seized his little sister by the hand and together they dashed to the door. This, however, did not keep her from exclaiming, "Because she's awful! She's awful! Awful, awful, awful --"

And then they were gone and I was left alone, dumbfounded.

The following day brought something even stranger.

It was windy and unseasonably mild, almost warm, the sky studded with seraphic clouds. I breathed deeply of the air. Beneath a renewed sun, Dunwich looked if not wholesome, at least less ruined, almost rustic. Oddly, such notions brought me little comfort. It seemed more an aberration, a lie, a sneaking, stealthy shift in the nature of things -- a day of blinding light and leaping, agile blue shadows.

Temperance and Rebecca Bishop did not return to class. No surprises there. I am not only fighting ignorance here, but superstition as well.

To pass the time, I wrote several drafts of a letter to the county requesting my removal from Dunwich. Then, to amuse myself still further, I drew up what I felt were lesson plans appropriate to the local populace. Lesson one: The old woman who lives at the end of the country lane is not a witch. Nor can she blight your crops and maim your cattle by making the sign of the Evil Eye. The spirits of the Pocumtucks do not stalk the woods seeking white men to scalp. The Devil does not hold court upon the hilltops on May Eve and Walpurgisnacht --

For how long she had been standing there before I took notice, I do not know. A moment, perhaps? Several minutes? Eternity? Outwardly, I maintained my composure. Inwardly, I was so startled I nearly died of fright.

A blue-shadowed figure stood silhouetted in the crooked doorway, within white April light so intense, so sharp and harsh, that I initially could discern only the shape's outlines and the vaguest of its details. A heavy, monkish hood of some sort. Hands, crossed over the chest, slender funereal hands. An air of purpose and dreadful patience so surreal I was hesitant to believe it was within the realm of earthly existence. Sunlight spangled about the shape, obscured it, making sickeningly amorphous spots dance and reel before my eyes. I blinked, temporarily blinded, and the shape noiselessly crossed the threshold and soundlessly made its way toward me. I saw then, with immense relief, the dirty bare feet, the tattered fringe of gingham, that it was neither hood nor cowl but merely a faded old shawl, and that this was no otherworldly thing but merely Carter Brown's strange, pitiful daughter Sarah.

"Sarah," I said, at last. "You're here . . . good . . . please be seated."

To my surprise, she obeyed. But she did remove the heavy, tatty shawl, so that I only saw the lower part of her pale face, the purplish lips that trembled ever so slightly in a rictus of a faint smile. Her hands, by contrast, were so perfectly still one would have thought them made of marble. They never moved, but remained crossed at the wrists, holding tight the shawl.

"Why are you wearing that, Sarah?" I asked. "It doesn't look like rain to me."

She did not reply.

"Well, you're in class now, young lady. Please remove it."

The nervous smile twitched. The hands clutched tighter the shawl. Another game, apparently. I wondered: which should I be, schoolmaster or baffled friend? Authoritarian or conciliatory? I normally brook no foolishness, Everidge, but felt an exception should be made here.

So, I played the latter part and sat beside Sarah, as I had done with little Rebecca Bishop. I still could not see under that shawl . . . and found myself not wanting to, either. I had a feeling, the vague uneasiness one might feel in a house said to be with spirits -- that uncomfortable reconciliation of the deeply ordinary and the utterly inexplicable. Certainly, prosaic daylight, the solid walls of the house, the fire and companions are all comfort -- yet, always, there is that delicate tension within its surface, that suggestion that behind the walls things mutter and stare and await the dying of the fire, the farewell of friends. They know the light will fade. They know the walls will later become as the shade of bone, and then they will no longer be held at bay. And this is what I felt beside Carter Brown's daughter, an instinctive inner shudder, realization sharp and cold: She is a haunted house.

Gathering myself, I was to about to speak when Sarah placed her hand gently but firmly over my mouth. Again, that hushed warning, the finger to the lips: Shhh . . .

"Sarah --," I said, when she had removed her hand from my mouth.

Sarah rose, finger to her lips. Shhh . . .

"Why?" I asked, at length.

The enigmatic smile twitched at its corners. She spoke softly. "'Cause . . ."

"Because?"

"'Cause you talk too much," she said. "Jes' like Missus Orne did. All th' time, talkin'. All the time, cluckin' like a hen. Never listenin'. Never hearin' nothin', like I do."

"You . . . hear things?"

"Ayuh," she replied, nodding.

"What do you hear?"

"D'pends on where I'm at. But I do hear 'em. Some places they's real faint-like, like here, but in other places I can hear 'em real good, like up near Cold Spring Glen and old Wizard Whateley's place . . . but he don't like me pokin' 'round his property too much . . .

"I can hear 'em up on th' mountains sometimes, when th' wind's right. Th' ones with th' old Injun stones on top are best. 'Specially round certain times of th' year . . . then I can see 'em . . ."

She began to slowly pace the narrow room.

"What . . . what do they look like?" I asked.

The enigma went to a window. "Don't rightly know," she said, at length. "I never seen all of 'em, and sometimes I don't see nothin' 'cept what they're doin'. Like th' wind in the grass. Come at you, all at once. Then they're gone, and all you hears is th' whippoorwills callin' and your heart poundin'
. . ."

"Where are they from?"

"Th' sky, I think. Or th' stars. But far away. Farther then you kin imagine . . .

"You're scairted of me, ain't you?"

I was somewhat taken aback. She turned to face me. Clouds passed before the wan sun and the shadows in the room deepened, darkened.

"No," I replied. "Hardly."

"No, you're scairted. Like Missus Orne was. She din't like me hearin' or seein' things. Din't like me wearin' this, neither, even if I only do it so I won't see them when they's 'specially bad. Like today.

"But Missus Orne din't care none. She says, 'Sarah Brown, you take that old shawl off'n your head,' and I say, 'No, ma'am, I need it,' and she says that if I din't take it off, she'd rap my knuckles good.

"But, it din't come down to that . . ."

An eddy of wind stole through a hidden crack somewhere, and I shuddered. Had the wind been such a presence but a few moments before? It whined about the eaves and set the old structure to muttering, as if a long sleep had been disturbed. I reasoned that, but next door was Osborn's store. Zebulon would be beside the stove. The locals would be playing another interminable game of checkers. How could one account for the proximity of such unrelieved strangeness, then?

"What, then?"

"You really wouldn't want t' know."

I considered my next question carefully.

"Did you hurt Mrs. Orne, Sarah?"

A pause. "I din't do nothin' that wasn't called for, if that's what you mean. They was what did the hurtin', if you're that curious."

"Who? The other children?"

She became contemptuous. "No. All they's good for is hurtin' little things. They were scairted of Missus Orne. She could be mean."

"Sarah," I asked, "what happened to Mrs. Orne?"

The girl didn't reply, but only clutched the shawl more tightly about her face.

"Sarah --"

"Talkin' 'bout them makes my Pa mad --"

"Fine," I said firmly, "tell me who they are, then."

She sighed quietly, and walked slowly toward another window, and then slowly to my empty desk. With one finger she traced a random pattern on its surface. "They ain't like us," she said. "Ain't like us at all. I never see much of 'em. But what I do see, I don't like. Most folks don't even know they's there. Folks just don't like the places where they conger'gate, and stay away from 'em. Like th' glen and the Injun stones. Animals can spy 'em. Just a bit, though, but 'nough to scare 'em good. I seen it myself. 'Specially certain times of year, when they get pretty thick. They can make things happen, then, if things are right. They make me do things, if my Pa ain't careful 'nough to lock me up in th' attic. Then, I just sit by th' little window, and I listen to them. I listen and listen and listen . . ."

"Do they tell you to do things?"

Sarah shifted uncomfortably. "Sometimes."

"Are these things . . . bad things?"

"Sometimes . . ."

"So --"

"That don't mean I do those bad things, if that's what you're gettin' at."

Silence hung heavy in the air.

"Sarah," I asked, "are you lying to me?"

"No," she replied. "Maybe I should be goin', Mr. Paul."

"Sarah? Please, wait."

She stopped near the door.

"Would you know what the word 'thoth' means, by any chance?"

I thought I detected a profound momentary uneasiness on her part, but she only replied, "I need to be goin', Mr. Paul. My Pa will be lookin' for me."

I rubbed the bridge of my nose. A headache was coming on, and after a while I muttered that she could go. She left, the shawl still bound tightly about her. How does she see through that thing? Perhaps spirits do guide her.

I am at a point where I am willing to believe anything . . .

No. I cannot allow that. Then I'll be no better than the rustics of this region, who still live in fear of the forests at their doorsteps. This is 1923, after all -- not 1723.

I am at a complete loss, Everidge. I sincerely suspect something bad has happened to Mrs. Orne, something more serious than illness -- what exactly, I don't know. Perhaps she suffered a terrible fright. I wouldn't put it past some of the miscreants I've seen here -- especially Carter Brown's daughter. I would bar her from my schoolroom . . . yet, I feel that I should help her, somehow, or at least see that she is put in an institution where she can cause no harm.

Sometimes I wonder if I am to be next -- but the near-complete absence of the children makes me think otherwise.

Was it a prank gone terribly wrong? But that single inexplicable word of the outer spheres: THOTH. Perhaps a few more questions and visits are in order. If only someone . . .

I retire to my quarters in a bleak frame of mind. Please pass my regards along to your wife.

Yours,

AP


April 26, 1923

Everidge --

It appears word of Sarah's visit has reached other ears, including those of her father.

One evening, Zebulon informed me that there has been a terrible row between the two. He'd never seen anything like it; Carter Brown bellowing and clouting the girl about her ears, knocking her this way and that, dragging her back to their house. Sarah shrieking and crying. Terrible, terrible sight.

I asked him what the fight was about. Zebulon gave me a knowing look. "What they's always 'bout; Sarah went and did somethin' Carter dint like. I reckon it was her visitin' this here school yer so keen on."

"I won't tolerate one of my students being abused," I said, disliking the old man even more firmly than usual. "Sarah needs to be institutionalized. Not beaten."

"Fine," he replied, "ye go on up and tell Carter Brown that, 'specially after Sarah went and 'bout clawed his eyes out for him. I'm sure he'll take ye up on it."

He leaned forward, close. "I know what yer thinkin'," he said quietly. "Yer thinkin' of goin' on up there and takin' Carter's girl away from him, ain't ye? Ye'll get the county involved, the state, whoever ye needs. Ye'll get her away from here back to Boston or Arkham so the doctors kin look at her, see what makes her tick, why she has these fits and spells and all, and make her better. Right?"

I did not reply.

"Tell ye what, Mr. Paul -- ye take her away from here, ye'll be hurtin' in real short order. Ye and yer friends."

"Is that a threat, Mr. Whateley?" I asked.

"Nope. No threat. I jest think ye best leave well-enough alone, is all."

I decided neither to argue nor press the matter further. I do, however, plan on paying a visit to Carter Brown tomorrow morning. I certainly don't look forward to it, whatever the locals might think. But, something must be done. If there are any answers to this mystery, they lie up there in the hills. I am only afraid of what I might learn.

The whippoorwills are unusually vocal tonight.

Yours --

AP


April 30, 1923

Everidge --

This is my third attempt at writing this letter. Perhaps this time, I will succeed.

Or perhaps I will not. Better that this should remain a secret, as secret as the hills that rise wild in midnight spaces, as secret as the enigmatic black blasphemy that is the most ancient of words: THOTH.

Strange. I am almost calm. Almost. I can with effort suppress the trembling of my body so that no one suspects anything other than my appearance, which is dreadfully pale. Weary. Disheveled. An inner fear lurks in my eyes and I am careful to avoid the gaze of others, careful to avoid their questions.

I am in Dunwich no longer, but instead Dean's Corners, at the residence of a good friend. He suspects something to be wrong, but I have kept up lies and appearances. So far, he has asked few questions. He is an incurious sort. Perhaps I should follow his example, and bliss will be mine. Ha!

(Nothing is mine, any longer. Mine is the nothingness of night and the outer spheres and whatever lingers there, watching, waiting . . .)

What are the stars like, tonight, Everidge? I am no longer able to look upon them . . . and yet I feel that I must, in dread should something diseased and formless trickle down from them unseen, down to the skeletal trees and barren earth of this beleaguered world.

(Yes. Trickle. There's the word.)

A drum beats like a heart, the heart like a drum. A flute pipes monotonously. Monstrous shapes careen and caper to the slow, dismal music. I hear it, but cannot be made to venture out beneath the stars, beneath the desolate vault of the sky.

I finally know now what happened to Mrs. Orne, and why Sarah dances with Them.

I know now the word THOTH.

And all because I did not wish to see her hurt . . .

(Burn?)

Madness. A universe lies hidden within the country of Dunwich. It presses close against the barriers, it --

It is at once the inner realm and the outer void, this land, untouched by man.

It was here I ventured -- into a region of worn ridges and wooded ravines of ominous depth through which wound the road, among trees of singular size and girth. Some knotted, others twisted, some as thick as the pillars of a cathedral nave and livid with blue-green moss or studded with pale fungal growths. Daylight became a memory beneath the riot of skeleton branches overhead.

(It is the hour of skeletons. It is the hour of burning.)

Only the Model T's engine broke the deep stillness, as it labored uphill. Occasionally, I halted, if only to listen -- the country seemed to compel silence. I heard little, in any event: the babble and chuckle of an unseen brook, the distant piping of a hidden little bird. The wind was a vast presence overhead.

While impressive, it was by no means idyllic. There was a weird skewing of the details, a poisonous shift in perspective here that made things different.

(As they are made different now. Everything is touched, made fitful by revelation.)

Enough. I will gather myself and write this down. I am Aaron Paul. I am the second son of Francis and Meredith Paul. My father is a chemist. I am a schoolteacher. I --

I half-expect to see things peering back at me from the dark corners of my room, the long shadows so like deeply ranked trees to either side. Faces -- stern, striped Pocumtuck faces, or more phantasmal, gibbous forms, the forest-spirits of the old legends.

Great hills reared against the sky and they, too, were the faces of time and this weird land: impassive, enduring and enigmatic . . .

Of particular note was a rift to the left of the road, so deep and precipitous that sunlight scarcely penetrated it. The pines and firs that lined its slopes marched away into the gloom. I heard the faint gurgling of a stream from far below. But for that, it was silent. This was Cold Spring Glen, as Osborn had described it to me.

I was to turn left at the narrow road running along its northern side. That would take me to the Brown farm.

Osborn warned me not to miss the turn. Otherwise the road would simply take me northward into the hills beyond -- old Abenaki tribal lands where hardly anyone lived now. Worse, it passed by Sentinel Hill and Wizard Whateley's farm, and decent folk made a point of staying away from those places.

Osborn disapproved of my going. He said that while Carter Brown was hardly as dangerous as Wizard Whateley, he was something of a hermit and jealously protective of his privacy. More often than not, he'd run visitors off his land, threatening to shoot them if they returned. The latest row between him and Sarah had probably made him even more belligerent.

Osborn's regulars had even more ominous stories to relate. Old Zebulon said that in years long past, terrible things had happened at the Brown farm, perversities too varied and numerous to mention. Whether or not such things still occurred was a matter of conjecture. After all, one of the loungers noted, Brown and his daughter still attended the occasional Sunday service in Aylesbury. Still, this did not keep Zebulon from hinting at dark things, nor the others from giving silent assent to what he said; rumors of a house steeped in murder and suicide, tales of a sunless place and unfettered shapes, resonate with an unseen presence that walked its halls alone. Zebulon said he had been there once or twice, and he had liked neither the brooding house nor its reticent master.

As for Cold Spring Glen, little better was said. Neither should I venture there. They believed it also to be haunted.

One said that as a boy, he had been down into the glen to see if the old stories were true -- stories of spirits, of voices, of unearthly silences and inexplicable echoes beneath the tall roof of branches.

I asked if he had actually seen or heard anything. Well, yes, he had, while standing near Bear's Den -- slow delicate disconnected raindrop-ripples had disturbed the surface of the creek, as if an invisible thing were making its way across the water toward him. True, it had been oppressively overcast that day, with thunder lowering just beyond the shadowed ridges, but no rain was falling. Terrified, he had fled.

I had listened patiently and told them I wasn't about to go stumbling down any haunted ravines or into any forbidden houses. All I wanted was a few questions answered, nothing more.

"Ye'll get more than that," Zebulon said.

I contemplated their stories as I studied the glen below me. In truth, Everidge, I wasn't entirely sure what I was going to say or do when I reached the Brown farm. What should I do if Sarah was there? What if she wasn't? For all I knew she might be down in the glen now, slipping phantom-like through the trees, the ferns and wild grass. It seemed appropriate. I was tempted to see if she might be down there, to call her name, to part the forbidding wall of brambles and branches and see her again.

Instead, I continued onward. The road, cut roughly into the side of the ridge, was a serpentine, treacherous thing full of jolts and bumps and completely without barrier on its left side, which overlooked the glen.

Here and there I spied signs of former habitation -- the remains of a half-buried wall, a stone post; of life, perhaps a few sheep or cows scattered upon a deserted hillside. The wind lashed about the treetops.

I had seen no one, so you can imagine my surprise when I came upon Sarah as I rounded a corner. In fact, I nearly ran her down. I swore and brought the old car to a skidding halt, mere inches from her.

She didn't so much as flinch. I noticed she no longer wore her cowl. Her eyes were empty yet intent.

In my anger I hardly noticed. In my anger I got out of the car, went to Sarah and grabbed her by the shoulders. "Did you just see what almost happened? Did you? What in the hell are you doing out in the middle of the road?"

She squealed and tore away from me. This only made me angrier, and I grasped her by the wrist. Sarah shrieked then -- a high, glassy, piercing note that turned my blood to water. I released her. She stumbled and fell into the dirt, gasping for breath. Her hair swayed and drifted about her pale face. The black tree limbs above us swayed as if in sympathy and in a manner I cannot now wholly attribute to the wind.

Sarah did not rise. On her hands and knees, sometimes crawling, sometimes crouched, she began to move away from me, in a series of elliptical orbits, sometimes clockwise, sometimes not. She staggered as if she were blind, and then would stare into emptiness with singular intensity. She whispered and crooned and muttered and whined to herself. Fear gave way to ecstasy, ecstasy to madness, a fearsome pageant playing across her face. I saw her progress would eventually take her down into the glen.

Cautiously, I approached her. Was she even aware of me, of her surroundings? I don't know. The words of Squire Whateley returned to me, chilling in their import: It's almost like dancing, but then it isn't. Sometimes, it's on her hands and knees. And sometimes, it isn't. Whispers and croons to herself when she does it. Makes signs. Or she doesn't say anything and just stares through her hair at you with those strange eyes of hers . . .

"Sarah . . ."

She grasped my hand, pulling me toward the side of the road with her, so that we resembled two small, crouched, fearful children, beset by the mad dance of wind and twisted trees. The wan white sun peered from behind a bulwark of clouds, but even its presence was of no comfort -- a cold watching eye among the bony branches, a cooling, dying star of no particular import.

"Don't look at it," Sarah whispered.

"The sun?"

"Th' sky. Don't look at it. It's where they're from. Th' sky. Th' air. They see everything. He sees everything . . ."

"Sarah?" I asked. "Sarah, what is going on?"

She swallowed, nervously.

"They saw Pa. They saw him hit me. Saw him hurt me. And they saw what I did to him for hurting me.

"They knew you was comin' here, too, Mr. Paul. That's why I was waitin' for you. That's why we dance and carry on like we do. They see what I see here . . . and I see what they see in His court, at the center of the universe."

"Sarah," I asked, "what did you do to your father?"

Her expression was singularly cold and disdainful -- yet touched by fear. "Same thing I did to Mrs. Orne. What happens is, I get real angry. Then I . . . I get this look 'bout me. And I can feel things inside me . . . and I get all shivery like I'm cold . . . but I'm not.

"Then . . . then I repeat th' third part of His name while I make th' right Sign, over and over . . . 'til I'm done."

"Whose name?" I asked.

She glanced upward at the sky again, at the indifferent sun. "I can't say," she replied.

I gripped her arm tightly. "Whose name, Sarah?"

She swallowed convulsively and muttered something.

"Tell me!"

"Azathoth!" she cried, pulling away from me. Her eyes were wet and wild. "I said th' third part of His name! I said th' third part of His name and made th' Sign, and Pa said he'd kill me if I ever did that, if I ever said His name again. But it don't matter now 'cause he's -- he's -- oh, God!"

Sarah burst into tears. She tore past me and into the glen, stumbling down the steep slope. The brush trembled with the vehemence of her passage. I was certain she would fall, that she would lose her footing and plunge to her death.

I tried to follow, but could not. In fact, I almost fell myself, but grasped onto a young tree. A few loose stones clattered through the bracken to the ground below. I pulled myself back up to the road.

Sarah had, quite simply, disappeared. Cold Spring Glen was as before, undisturbed. Tranquil. Dreaming, like the dead sun and empty sky above us, where He is said to dwell.

Azathoth.

I called her name. There was no reply, only the dismal echo of my voice -- a faint moan I did not care to hear.

Unnerved, I returned to my car. After many long moments, I resumed my journey, convinced now that I might be a witness to more than mere decay and rural strangeness. Murder, perhaps? I would not allow the thought to linger in my mind. Otherwise, I would have turned back.

Upon reflection, it would have been the better decision. Instead, I went forward. I quietly told myself that as a teacher, I had certain duties to fulfill. The welfare of my students was of paramount concern. I would help Carter Brown find his daughter -- sourly reminding myself that such a bizarre event as this was nothing out of the ordinary for these folk.

I would also tender my resignation on the morrow and leave immediately for Arkham. The sun flickered and flashed through the trees, following me. Azathoth, she had called him, it. A curious, strangely ominous name, in equal parts fanciful and fearful. The third part of his name . . .

After half-a-mile or so, I came upon the Brown farm, nestled under a sloping hillside. I was struck foremost by the appearance and size of the house. The farm was rather less decayed and squalid than is the norm here -- the trees and bushes were pruned, the yard free of debris. A cord of wood was stacked between two great oaks. Signs of industry, of work.

As for the house, it was a great three-storied thing of the Colonial-era, entirely of stone, white-trimmed and flanked by enormous chimneys at either end. It was handsome, yes . . . but I did not like it any more than old Zebulon had, and when I left the Model T and entered the yard my apprehensions grew. The silence was underscored only by the intermittent yet pervasive wind. I heard neither man nor beast.

Nor did the character of the house reassure me. It was too large. It towered against the clouded sky and black bank of trees, settled into its slope, a thing of crude magnitude and prodigious bulk. Its dark windows were by contrast too small and narrow. Toward the upper stories they became oddly patterned, clustered near the sharp angles of the roof. They resembled small, avid, watching eyes. Nor were the small slits of the exposed cellar wall any less discomfiting -- they stared blindly forth from a husk of dead creeping vines, moss and delicate fungi. The latter proved particularly repellent upon closer inspection -- diaphanous, fibrous matter of little more substance than cobwebs that flourished beneath the eaves and within the cracks of the walls.

My minute examination brought me uncomfortably close to the thing. Fear, awe, or some other nameless compulsion forced me to look upward, to divest my attention from the scales of the beast to the massiveness of its form. It reared darkly against the dizzying sky. It looked upon me. I looked upon it. I saw with rising dread the long trailing stains that discolored its walls, and could not think but of sacrifice, of blood spilt upon stone, spilt beneath leaden skies. I told myself -- No, this is no altar. This is no gate to the dreams that haunt the small, dead hours of night. It is simply an old house, abandoned to time and the elements. Yet, God help me, I could not help but imagine that behind those blankly staring windows unspeakable twilight things gathered, scuttled and crawled. I looked upon it and could not help but hear the whispered portents and black omens of an unhinged mind.

(As perhaps mine is now, cut loose from its moorings, lost, adrift, alone. The mundane now astounds me, the fantastic can no longer amaze.)

I walked up the steps of the covered porch and knocked, reluctantly, at the front door. There was no reply. The light was dim here, partially obscured by overgrown bushes and a vine-twined trellis. More of the gossamer fungus was in evidence here.

I knocked again. No answer. Against my better judgment, I pressed against the door, opening it just a crack. Nervousness clutched my throat. I had to force the words out. "Hello?" I said. "Carter Brown? It's me. Aaron Paul. The schoolteacher. I ran into Sarah not far from here."

Still, no answer. I pushed the door further open. I saw a wood floor. Disagreeably crimson walls. Muddy galoshes and a coat rack. A crow startled me, calling noisily from the trees above. Farther away, its neighbor raucously answered.

"Is anyone here?" I asked.

I waited, listening. Nothing, but for the intermittent crow-conversation outside.

I stepped into the foyer. It was dark inside, the light curiously wan and muted, but something else in addition -- some vestigial instinct -- had me leave the door ajar. I had no plans of flight -- no coherent ones, anyway. But to be within the maw of that weird house, so resonant with the unknown . . . it was all I could do not to flee.

Not that anything present within the house warranted flight. Apart from its shadowy interior and reddish walls, it was quite mundane. Unexceptional. Deadly ordinary. No suggestion of the outré was here, of the darkly suggestive face it had presented outside. No shapes crouching in the corners, no blood-drenched figure at the top of the stairs -- only specimens of unoccupied furniture that veered between rustic and ugly. The few old pictures present held no secrets either, only the blandly proper faces of dead ancestors and obscure descendants. On the mantel above the huge fireplace a clock slowly went through its revolutions, and in the framed mirror behind it I took note of the single pale tremulous ghost in the room, the schoolteacher from Arkham.

"Carter?" I said more loudly.

I entered a high-ceilinged kitchen, somewhat primitively equipped with an old-fashioned potbellied stove, tall cupboards and wash basin. There was more light here, glowing blearily through a pair of narrow windows. The floor was worn and scored with the passage of countless feet. In an alcove was a smallish table, light blue and flanked by two chairs. A single tin cup sat on it. Nothing else.

Harsh laughter from the crows outside.

Something was in the cup, something glinted. Gold? Spectacles, of the sort Carter Brown wore, but curiously deformed somehow, as if by great heat or force. The lenses were clouded, the left one cracked.

I dropped the spectacles at an unexpected sound -- that of a door slamming, somewhere upstairs. My instinct was to run, but my feet remained rooted to the floor. Then, stillness. Even the crows remained silent.

I gathered myself, left the kitchen and returned to the foyer, to the stairs.

"Carter Brown? Are you all right?"

The wind strained suddenly and mightily against the house. Growing nervous, I cast about for a makeshift weapon and found a brass candleholder. The steep polished stairs receded into midday darkness, darkness heavy with the weight of years, of solitude and half-imagined sounds.

Slowly I mounted them, quietly, carefully, as if I were treading upon the thinnest of ice and all beneath was freezing blackness -- desperate not to break the fragile surface, and yet in even more dread of being heard.

Because, Everidge, I knew something was there, in that lone, weird, watchful place. Something, behind the veil, behind and before me. I am not -- was not -- a superstitious man. I speak ill of the dead. I do not believe in vampires or ghosts or other psychopomps, but something in that house spoke to me -- whispered, chattered, mocked, insinuated -- and all conviction left me. My mind became ashes and reality dust. I believe now that I heeded a will not my own as I ascended those stairs.

The wood was greasy to the touch. My fingertips came away black with soot, moist and sticky.

There was an odor, faint, but charred and sickly-sweet.

A body sat at the end of the hallway, a slumped form, still and oddly discolored. Somehow, I had known it would be there. And I knew whom it was, despite the near-total erasure of any significant facial details, blackened and burned as they were to the bone. Only a nimbus of hair and gristle remained, toward the back of the yellowed skull -- a ghostly, disarrayed halo. The over-bright eyes were gone, nothing but empty black hollows remained; that, and teeth of startling length and burnished whiteness. Yet, I knew this shape. I recognized the untouched clothing, heavy forearms and strong hands of what had once been Carter Brown.

As I knew and now understood the crude strokes of the terrible word written on a nearby wall, written in the ashes of flesh: THOTH.

There was a scream within me, but it could not escape. It found no release, even when I saw I was standing in a thin, spreading pool of blackish-green, tallow-like grease that slowly leaked from beneath that awful corpse.

No, I simply stepped away. The wind screamed, instead, high and buffeting and mindless. The corpse did not move. It did not speak. It merely sat there, slouched against the wall, bare jaws agape, trickling slime, and that was the most terrible thing of all -- that hideous, expectant, timeless silence. It pressed upon me as I made my dazed way back down the stairs -- the sound of the void. I dared not break it -- though I turned to see the slime slowly oozing down the stairs after me. I dared not utter a sound -- even when the loathsome mass trickled, snakelike, around a corner, following me into the foyer.

No, I merely closed the door behind me. I would have locked it, had I had the key. I suspected one belonged to Carter Brown -- did it melt when he was incinerated, I wonder? Did it melt like his spectacles? Perhaps.

I left the house, returned to my Model T and sat inside it for some time. I looked upon the house. It looked upon me.


Send your comments to Mike Minnis

PREVIOUS
HOME
NEXT

© 2001 Edward P. Berglund
"The Girl Who Walked in Circles": © 2001 Mike Minnis. All rights reserved.
Graphics © 1999-2001 Erebus Graphic Design. All rights reserved. Email to: James V. Kracht.

Created: August 14, 2001; Updated: August 9, 2004