The Last Ancient House

2007-12-14T19:34:00.001-06:00

Fiction

Darker
Homecoming
Lamentry
Nyarlathotep's Lament
Seafoam
Snake Oil
The Caverns
What Is Within You...
The Owls

Poetry

In Ulthar
On the Shore by the Ocean
The Ghost on the Beach
The Hill
We Dream
When Old Gods Awaken
Where the Moon Is Always Gibbous
Yuggoth On the Rim
Yule Fest

Other

The Bloodhunter Chronices: The Diary of a Vampire Hunter

Fragmentary Fiction

Prelude: The Weird

Dream Sketch: To Be Like Those Who Are Truly Dead

2007-11-01T21:19:00.000-05:00

Almost everyone died, for a little while. The few who lived thought it was the end of the world. Sometimes now it's easier to believe it was the beginning of hell.

And here I am again, almost out of ammo and the sun coming up. I can feel them gathering, moving on the other side of the wall. They are drawn by the warmth of my flesh, by the beating of my still living heart. I can feel them like the brush of cold scales across my skin in the darkness, like the vague movement of a shadow in the night, like the chill of a winter wind down the back of my neck.

There's a lot we still don't know, and probably will never know. But everyone blames it on the comet. The astronomers had been tracking it for years. It shot through space in such an incomprehensibly galactic orbit that no one could tell for sure if it had ever passed by the Earth before, or if it ever would again. It was enormous. They said there was only a ten billion to one chance it would hit the Earth.

They were right. It missed. And then the planet passed through it's tail.

It all happened in a single 24-hour rotation of the Earth. It was too fast for anyone to prepare for or deal with in any way. By the time the survivors figured out what had happened, it was too late.

Almost everyone died. We still don't know the real numbers. Numbers like that, and the ability to track such numbers, are no longer a reality in this world. There is no infrastructure, no management, nowhere near even having the living bodies to perform such work. But let's just say that 90% of the humans on the planet died in a single day. That's close enough. They went to sleep, and never woke up. Not until later, anyway.

People didn't just drop dead in the street. They only died in their sleep. On the second day, maybe half of those who had survived went to sleep for the last time. Then, we think, the Earth came out of the comet's tail, and people stopped dying.

Then there was me. Whatever was in the dust from the comet's tail, it proved lethal to almost everyone on the planet. Some few it harmed not at all. Some very few were thrown into a deep coma-like state for several days, and awakened still human but changed. Such a one am I.

This night had been much like any other night. I was one member of a three-person scavenging party. We spent most days like this. Searching houses, stores, any place we found for anything we could use. Food has proven to be not a big problem. The comet's tail did not affect animals. Many of the humans who survived, if they didn't know how to hunt and clean game, learned how to do so quickly, and livestock remained plentiful. Others threw themselves into farming and gardening. Our primary objective in our scavenger hunts was ammunition. Any ammo was good, but the more powerful, the better.

The dead are beating against the wall now. It will not be long before they break through. The sunlight slants through the window and casts a bright beam of innocent lethality across the floor.

There was a young girl in our group who began screaming in horror a few days after we came out of the comet's tail. "There's too many!" she shrieked over and over again. It took hours to get her calm enough to speak rationally. She'd had visions, she said. She told us that the dead were coming back. Too many had died at once, and they couldn't pass. It was like a bottleneck into the afterlife. There were too many, and they were coming back.

It didn't make sense. It sounded ridiculous. But she was right.

The dead who came back were not the same. They were no longer human. During daylight, they appeared to be human, but they huddled and hid inside because sunlight would kill them. During the night they roamed free, and with the coming of darkness they transformed into humanoid shapes without features, a head with grotesquely suggestive hollows and bumps where ears, eyes and nose should be. Hairless, utterly featureless but for a mouth, their entire bodies colored a dark, ghastly gray.

They hungered for living humans. If they caught one of us, they ate us alive. If they found someone who was truly dead, they cared nothing for the corpse. They wanted only to devour alive those who were still living--or at least those who were still warm.

They could be killed, so they were truly dead. It took much more trauma to kill them than it should have a normal human, but they could be killed. The most effective way was massive destruction of the head, which was why I spent most nights combing the city for the most powerful guns and ammunition I could find. It was why I had learned to handle a huge revolver that fired the fearsome .454 Casull. It was why my two companions had both carried long guns that were capable of blowing the top of a skull off. But unlike me, they had been truly human, and now were truly dead.

When I had awakened from the coma, I also had changed. But I hungered only for such food as I had before, and such food as any human would eat and find agreeable. I had also learned very soon that sunlight was extremely painful to me. It had taken only a few seconds exposure to tell me this. I did not know if it would ultimately be as lethal to me as to the dead. I had also apparently developed a new sense that allowed me to feel the nearby presence of the dead. My newfound perception often gave us a precious few minutes warning to escape. This was why I accompanied so many scavenging parties, and why when I was with them we went out only at night. But on this night, there had been too many of the dead, from too many different directions. We had been trapped here, and my companions became truly dead before I was able to block the door into this room.

The sun has slipped up above the eaves, casting the room full in shadow. I sit in the windowsill. There is another house, the window broken and gaping open, perhaps only 20 yards away. The dead will not be able to cross such a gulf during the day; the sunlight will kill them. If I can make it, I will be safe until nightfall. I know the sunlight will be excruciating. I fully expect someday to die, to be like those who are truly dead, but not--I hope--today.

The door splinters open and the dead lurch through. I fire one shot. One of the dead drops lifeless as parts of its head spatters across those behind. They seem not to notice. I decide to save my last few rounds and leap into the sunlight...

We Dream

2007-08-05T18:52:00.000-05:00

Dream of quiet pools
Where liquid eyes stare hungrily
Through starry spaces
And strange reflections

Dream of empty skies
Lashed with winds
Cold and ceaseless
Where thunder walks

Dream of hidden caverns
Dim and dank and dripping
Where secret things
Creep and whisper

Dream of restless seas
That shudder with old life
Waiting, lurking darkly
Death is forgotten

Dream of sunken lands
Where shapes are wrong
Grim alien dweller
Slithers through cracks

We dream
And some of us never awaken...

©2005 Alan Peschke

Prelude: The Weird

2007-07-18T18:42:00.000-05:00

The old woman had lived there for a very long time. When she was still a young she had followed her heart, and the wind, and discovered the small, sheltered meadow a few miles from the foot of the big mountain. There was a small village close enough to walk to in less than a day, but far enough away that she wouldn’t be bothered—too often. Occasionally a villager would turn up with some minor ailment or the other. She had some healing skills and wisdom in the old ways, and they would pay her with salted beef, or a half-dozen eggs, or if she was particularly lucky, a chicken or two.

Weird. The word had hung over her like a thundercloud for weeks. At first—all those years ago—she had sheltered in a flimsy lean-to made of woven willow boughs near the creek, trusting weather and weird for her safety and comfort. She had spent more than one night cowering from terrific storms and incredible winds that swept down off the mountain. In a shallow hole, covered with leaves and earth, a grave to keep her safe, saving nothing but an old black-handled knife and what clothes she could wrap around herself. But she always arose alive, cold and hungry, but unharmed. Weird.

Before winter of that first year came, she was called to the village to help with a birthing. It was a hard birth, and the power she drew on to bring the baby alive and kicking into the world exhausted her. But the young boy lived, as did the mother. The father was so grateful he built her the tiny one-room shack she had lived in the rest of her days. Weird.

The stranger had come through last autumn. He had passed not far from her house, a pair of mules hitched to a peddler’s wagon, traveling in silence. She felt him coming when the sun was still low in the morning sky, and by noon she had walked out to meet him as he rode past. He said nothing, merely looked at her. His glance had sent prickles up the back of her neck, and she had shivered in the noonday sun. She did not try even to speak to him, only strode as quickly back to her cabin as her old bones would move, shuttering the single window and staring into the shadows. Listening to the world move, and seeing what creaked. It was something her own grandmother had taught her, when both she and the world seemed young.

Why now? There had once been a time when she could conjure fire with little more than a snap of her fingers and a wisp of her own red hair. Now her hair was as gray as the morning fog, and she could kindle a flame far more easily with flint and tinder. The powers she had once aspired to as a young girl, had even commanded for a time, had long since faded behind the passing years.

Weird. Her weird. She believed now that she hadn’t come to this place by accident or convenience. She had been drawn here, driven here by powers that she still didn’t understand, though her quest for their wisdom had occupied her entire life.

But why now? She was too old, she knew. Her instinct told her that she would not see the coming winter. The stranger had driven his wagon up to the mountain, had somehow taken it up narrow precipitous trails, had created his aerie to pursue his blasphemous aims.

Blasphemy. It was not an accusation she was accustomed to making. She was not entirely comfortable with making it, but it fit. She could think of no more fitting word.

She knew what he had done because of one of the few powers left to her. A small bowl—the same bowl she ate her stew from, scoured clean with sand from the creek, dusted with a sprig of sage, filled with water and sprinkled with a dash of salt. The watery shadows had shown her all she needed to see. She had seen the violet lightning flicker across the mountainside, closed her mind in horror from the things that appeared in the quivering light. Great gouges of earth and stone were ripped from the mountainside, and her scrying could not penetrate the cave that was left gaping in the rough earth—the cave that the stranger vanished into when the lightning finally flickered its last. But she had seen enough. She could feel the wind. She could hear the earth creak in a way that was not right.

The things had come down from the mountain early that morning, but were caught by the sunrise and had gone to earth. She knew she could no longer make the day-long trek to town—she hadn’t been that way in a long time. There was no way she could outrun them. But there might be one other thing she could do. The reason she had been guided here so many years ago. Her weird.

She spent the day renewing an old ward that encompassed the tiny cabin, a ward she had created many long seasons ago, and hoped she would never need. With the old knife that her grandmother had given her, she retraced the line, carefully moving small stones and pulling out the occasional weed or tuft of grass until she had a single, unbroken circle. She hummed an old song to herself the whole time, a tune that reminded her of a deep river squeezing through a narrow gorge. A song that closed out the world except for the few square inches just before her eyes.

As the sun began to slip behind the western mountain, she released her few chickens, boiled her last egg, and finished her last bit of cheese. There was one thing only that she could think might make a difference, and she would need her strength. She washed the last bite of cheese down with cold water from the creek.

Her bowl was once again cleaned, dusted, filled and salted. This time she cast herself outward, not open and receptive, but focused and questing. There was one…there was one out there. Somewhere. She concentrated all she knew and all she suspected into a tiny burning kernel of knowing, reached out and touched him…

They arose from the earth with growls of hunger as the sun fell into darkness. It didn’t take long before they reached the cabin. The first one struck the invisible circle in the darkness—that final circle the old witch had invested with the last scraps of her power. It screamed, more in surprise than pain, and disappeared in a flare of green, miasmatic flame. The second one made it across with only a scream of anger and a flare of dark greenish light. That was all the power she had, and as the circle collapsed they swarmed into the darkened cabin.

The old woman’s bones were stripped clean while they were still warm.

*****

Far out in the darkness a lone man suddenly twitched in his sleep and abruptly sat up, his hand automatically reaching for the unusual double-barreled pistol beside him. His horse nickered at his sudden movement and he spoke softly, reassuringly, to silence it. His fire had died down, glowing like a single red eye in the night.

He had been wandering the land for a long time, following only the wind, and he had nothing to show for it. But now…he didn’t know how he knew, but he knew. He tossed another piece of wood on his small campfire and leaned back against the saddle, slouching into a not particularly comfortable position beneath his blanket. He knew which way to go now, and he would need some sleep. It would be an early morning, and he had miles to go before he slept again.

©2007 Alan Peschke

In Ulthar

2007-06-14T22:07:00.000-05:00

In shadowed Ulthar, where the moonbeams fall
Draping the chimneys with a silver pall
Where the people work by light of day
And trade with the merchants from down Hatheg way
In Ulthar, one must all cats respect
No cat in Ulthar ever knows neglect
For the cats of Ulthar are special ones
Old ones that drowse by the light of the sun
Young ones that sing when the moon fills the sky
Wise ones that gaze with intelligent eye
Kittens that caper on slanted rooftops
Teasing the moon till the Old Man cries "Stop!"
Leaping and climbing from gable to gable
Till rooftops are seething with calico and sable
Until finally, the sunrise
When they narrow their bright eyes
Down from rooftops they gambol
And homeward they amble
To nap on the hearth till the sun should go down
And the gibbous moon rises on their little town
And the star-pinned night sky will send out its call
In shadowed Ulthar, where the moonbeams fall

© 1991 Alan Peschke

Nyarlathotep's Lament

2007-06-09T21:38:00.000-05:00

"Bob?"

Consciousness returned to me slowly, coalescing in fuzzy little whitish clumps somewhere behind my eyes, where I supposed my brain should be. Something hard and plastic was wedged between my teeth. The reeking stench in the air gave me the distinct impression that someone was cremating a partially decomposed cat.

"Bob?"

My name isn't Bob, I said, or thought I said, until I realized that my brain seemed to be disconnected from my mouth. I turned my head slightly, very deliberately and very gently stretched my facial muscles, moving my lower jaw like a cow chewing a cud. The hard plastic thing between my teeth fell out.

"Bob?"

I forced my eyes open a slit and harsh white sunlight lashed through my eyelids, searing my pupils to tiny pinpoints. My name isn't Bob, I thought a little more forcefully, and tried to force the words between my lips, but all that came out was...

"Mwowm."

Silence. Perfect silence. Not only could I have heard a pin drop, but I probably could have heard the angels on the head of it dancing. The wind stopped blowing, I heard a harsh gasp of breath, somehow I got the impression that the sun stopped in the sky. Not even a blip of tinnitus was there in the silence that defied all existence. I tried to speak again.

"Mwowm."

There, the sun was moving again. A hot breeze burned my cheek. Someone near me spoke softly. "It's okay Bob, it's over..."

What's over? I thought, then the voice added, "...for now, anyway."

I slitted my eyes open a little more. The pallid sky was slowly spinning, winding down, coming to a stop. I shielded the sun's glare from my eyes with my hand. Very slowly, and very carefully, I propped myself up on my elbow and sat up. I looked painfully in the general direction that I'd heard the voice coming from. A vague brownish blur shifted, split in two, united and clarified into loose brown curls of hair framing a pale freckled face. Upon the bridge of its nose hung a pair of huge black-framed spectacles with lenses that made a Coke bottle look like a thin sheet of Plexiglas. Slightly buck-toothed, this face was, and a pale freckled hand rose to wedge the glasses more firmly onto its nose. My gaze traveled across and down. The person was wearing a ragged, off-white t-shirt and faded, threadbare blue jeans.

I croaked, tried to swallow, worked my tongue for a few seconds, and finally managed, "My name isn't Bob."

"Ha!" the person barked, his voice slightly shrill and unpleasantly nasal. "Good one, Bob. Now cut the cracks and get hold of yourself. It's not quite over yet."

My legs still felt half-ethereal, too insubstantial to hold my weight. I surveyed our surroundings from where I sat. The other person had moved away a few feet, and stood on the edge of a green mound: a nearly perfectly round green mound, in the center of which was a hole, into which was inserted a flag. My legs straddled the flag, and a discarded golf club--a putter--lay beside my hand. A golf club. A golf green. We had been playing golf? Faint markings in the grass showed a circle at the mound's circumference, a circle that enclosed a five-pointed star...a pentagram?...along with some other squiggles that were disturbingly familiar. Beyond the mound was--how shall I say it? Desolation.

No vegetation. No animals, no birds, no people. Nothing. Just great smoking hollows that gaped at the sky, like mouths opened in surprise at an unexpected death. Sure, my memories were hazy. Okay, I had no real memories to speak of, but I was pretty sure that things were not supposed to look like this.

"What happened?" At the time, it seemed like the question I most needed to ask.

The person with the curly brown hair turned slowly, staring at me uneasily, as if he had suddenly realized he was talking to a stranger. "You really don't remember?"

I shook my head as if I could rattle all the loose pieces back into place. The stench in the air seemed to redouble itself, assaulting my nostrils with an unholy reek. I glanced at the object that had fallen from my mouth. A pipe. Just a pipe, straight stem, a narrow golden band between the stem and the shank, a thin tendril of blue-gray smoke rising from the ash.

"For Chrissake, Bob, don't let the pipe go out!" The nerdish person snatched the pipe and wedged it between my teeth. I sucked in some smoke and almost retched. The pipe flew from my lips as I coughed spasmodically, my lungs seemingly intent on turning themselves inside out. Finally it subsided, and I glared at the pipe, its ashes spilled and its flame cooling as it lay like some dismembered extremity in the soft grass.

The brown-haired person stared at me, dumbfounded, his mouth agape. I stared back, determined to demand an explanation. I pinned him with my gaze and commanded, "Uhmm..."

"Ivan," he said.

"Ivan," I began again. "Okay, Ivan, who are you?"

"I'm, well..." he hesitated. "I'm your caddy. Sort of."

"Okay," I agreed. That sounded logical enough. Now for the tricky bit. "Who am I?"

His mouth fell open again, then shut self-consciously. "You're...Bob."

"And?" I insisted.

He shrugged. "I think we'd better get going." He turned and began to walk cautiously into the wasted land around us.

"Just a minute!" I called. He stopped. I looked around. "If we were playing golf, where are my clubs?"

It seemed he turned a slightly whiter shade of pale. "They were..." He looked around hopelessly. "...outside the circle...when it happened." He shrugged. "The only thing that saved us was the Elder Sign." He took a deep breath and sighed. "We'd better go, see if there are any survivors."

Survivors? I looked around myself again. As far as I could see, there was nothing. Just scorched desert and holes blasted like some cosmic nuclear testing ground. I didn't know who I was, what had happened, and all I had to my name--which I wasn't sure of anyway--was an old pipe that smelled like a rat had died in it, a bent putter, and a caddy named Ivan. If this was all I had, it was coming with me. I put the now cool pipe carefully into the pocket of my slacks and heaved myself to my feet with the putter. The earth rocked under me, and I almost fell. Suddenly Ivan was at my side, helping me to stand.

"I'm okay, I'm okay." I shook him off and wobbled forward, using the putter as a cane. An idea suddenly occurred to me so I glanced into the hole in the center of the green. A golf ball. Okay, so now I had a caddy, a pipe, a bent putter, and a golf ball. Better and better. I walked away. Ivan adjusted his spectacles and followed.

I don't know how long we walked, but it didn't seem to matter because everything looked the same. The earth still retained its general contour, a rise here that might have once been a hill, a dip there that might have once been a valley. But still, there was nothing. Just burnt sand, and a hot wind. Time didn't seem to run right. It lurched in spasmodic clumps of temporal inanity. A few seconds, an hour, it didn't make much difference. After a while we came to what had once been a river. There was still a bridge across it, where a highway must have once been. My foggy memories told me that it had been a highway not long before. A brief flashing image of the convenience store that had once been there flickered in my mind.

There was nothing in the river that could be accurately referred to as water. A thick, viscous sludge flowed slowly and slimily between the banks. It gurgled and boiled, and something that probably had once been a fish slowly surfaced, glared at me with an empty, baleful red eye, and slowly sank again. Occasionally large bubbles expanded and popped, releasing a stench like a million rotted eggs. Brimstone, if I wasn't mistaken--burnt sulfur. But where did it come from, and why was the bridge still intact? I asked Ivan as much.

"He wants us to see everything. He wants us to be able to go anywhere we feel like, just so we can see what's happened. It's our punishment for defying him."

My mind spun with questions, but no answers fell into the gaps.

"Who is 'he'? And how do you know all this?"

He chose to answer the second question. "Because he told us--he let us know, anyway--before he...before he struck."

"Okay," I said. "And now, once more, who is 'he'?"

Ivan glanced at me, again with an expression of utter hopelessness. He shrugged again, his answer to every question. He sniffed, adjusted his glasses, and stared at the ground. Then he mumbled a name that shocked me with an instant of ultimate, paralyzing fear.

"Nyarlathotep."

For an instant the sky seemed to darken, the earth rocked and rumbled, for a second I thought I was standing upside down, suspended over the livid sky like a fly on a ceiling. Then the world righted itself and I sat heavily in the dirt, dust puffing out from under me. It was all starting to come back now.

Nyarlathotep. The crawling chaos. He had come out of Egypt, to save the world, he said. More fanatical than Hitler, more stubborn than Hussein, more dangerous than anyone before him. Purification, he said. The world must be purified. People began to listen to him, then to follow him. Soon the movement became a religion. A religion born of horror and self-annihilation.

I got my feet back under me and we crossed the bridge. Survivors--we had to know if anyone was left. As we left the river of filth behind, I looked back once, and with a sickening feeling realized it was flowing uphill.

The river of slime had fallen behind the horizon when the sun suddenly set with an abruptness that left me dizzy. A hot darkness buzzed around us, an absolute darkness that was completely alien to a normal night. A darkness like the inside of a cave on a world that had no sun--and me without my Zippo. A few minutes later the sun rose again in almost the same place it went down. Crazy. The laws of the universe had been violated. We walked.

"We should be getting near the city soon," said Ivan. "Maybe there's some ruins left, or something. Maybe we can find some water."

I hoped so. I was about to parch. My tongue felt thick and dead like an old stick. I tried to moisten my mouth and mumble around my tongue.

"Is the whole planet like this?"

Ivan stopped and stared around. I think he would have cried if he could have spared the moisture. He looked sadly at me, and said probably yes.

"Jees." I couldn't think of anything fitting to say.

"We might have stood against him," Ivan went on. "But his damn cultists summoned...well, you know."

"No, I don't." I tapped my head. "Remember?"

Ivan looked at his feet in dejection. The name he whispered was almost inaudible: "Azathoth."

My mind went blank. Not the comfortable, dazed blankness of a good yoga or marijuana buzz, but a terrifying, numbing, deadening blank. I could only whisper one word. "Damn."

Then everything I had forgotten rushed back into the void in my mind. I reeled under an almost physical impact of returning memories. It all came back.

Azathoth. The Demon--excuse me--Daemon Sultan. The blind idiot god that writhes mindlessly at the center of the universe, beyond what mere humans think of as space and time. The alien, unknowable thing that exists only for destruction, the heart and soul of which is Nyarlathotep. I might have known.

"But wait a minute," I said suddenly. Ivan looked at me sharply.

"Yeah?"

"It isn't time yet, is it? I mean, the stars aren't right yet. Right?"

"Right," he agreed. "It was all because of those damn cultists--the idiots. They summoned him...it."

I held the putter like a quirt, tapping the club end against the palm of my left hand. "Okay," I said. Let's go."

I set off with a purpose, Ivan following in my wake. It wasn't too far to where the city had been, I now knew. I just wanted to know one thing first--before I did what I had to do. I knew the earth would get destroyed by these alien god-monsters someday, but dammit, it wasn't time yet.

We saw the ruins for a long time before we reached them. The absence of vegetation coupled with the relatively flattened landscape made for a terrific field of vision. Probably just another thoughtful little touch of good old Nyarlathotep, making sure we could see the destruction without obstruction. I called out as we approached, but saw nothing. Not until I called out three times did anyone appear, and then very timidly. I didn't blame them. They'd just seen their world get wasted.

Okay, it looked like he had left survivors. I surmised that there were others in other parts of the world, to make sure he'd have plenty of humans left to torment. Without humans, he wouldn't really have any reason for existing. I could feel the fear coming from them in palpable waves of terror--the fear that would help me summon Nyarlathotep. Somehow their terror strengthened me, shoring up my resolve. I walked away from the ruins, up to the crest of what might have once been a hill. A wave of dizziness washed over me as I felt that I was walking downhill, though my eyes clearly showed me the opposite. The air grew hotter still and the sky changed color as a storm gathered swiftly...too swiftly. With the putter in my hand I looked into the neon-green sky.

"You got a pen?" I asked.

Ivan did. I began to scribble diagrams in the surface of the golf ball that I had been carrying in my pocket. Diagrams that few people would recognize, and those who did might shudder at the implications--if they didn't run away screaming first. As I mumbled certain words from a forgotten language the energy flowed through my fingertips and across and around the ball. The pen was only a focal point anyway, a tool for channeling the true power. It wasn't long before the golf ball was wrapped in a multi-dimensional web of energy that burned, twisted and swirled with a brilliant darkness. I stopped just short of finishing. One more word. One more word only...

"NYARLATHOTEP!!!" I gave it everything I had.

Thunder rumbled. The sky darkened. Weird glowing violet clouds scudded and boiled across the green sky, dripping scattered greasy drops that sizzled and burned wherever they touched. One struck me and I screamed the name again. Then he appeared.

I cannot describe what he looked like. Part of my mind went into hiding, refusing to witness what stood above and before me, towering into the sky, scraping its topmost parts against the stars, howling soundlessly into the void of outer space. Another part of my mind whirled with a bizarre reverse vertigo from the intense height of the thing. The earth shuddered beneath its weight, bending to fit strange dimensions that it was never meant to fit. Rainbows of unearthly hues rippled through the air as the titanic alien violated reality. My mind was utterly consumed with the awesome immensity of the thing. It had a thousand forms, they say, and this wasn't a friendly one.

In spite of being almost overwhelmed by disorientation verging on insanity, I found myself yelling at it. "It isn't time! You idiot! It isn't time!"

It howled. Its single five-lobed red eye glared down at me. The thought that it could be focusing on me specifically was almost too much. I staggered under its glare. Ivan caught me and propped me back up. From somewhere I heard maniacal laughter, but I couldn't tell if it was me or Ivan.

I scooped up a small mound of sand and put the golf ball on top of it. The putter was still bent but I tried to straighten it across my knee.

There is no sane reason for me surviving to tell this story, yet survive I did. Perhaps the key word here is sane, for I am told that I was often regarded as crazy, and still am regarded as such by some. Perhaps my sanity had already left me when it happened, or perhaps I'm just living proof that when a man gets mad enough, he can take on anything. Or maybe I was just too stupid. Somewhere amidst the cosmic howling, the cackling laughter and the creaking, warping earth, a tendril of thought reached out and touched me.

A galaxy of sorrow and anger poured through my soul, and I gasped with a bottomless scream of inhalation that seemed to never end. Nyarlathotep had been formed by alien minds so dedicated to hate that they were forever beyond the understanding of such simple, imperfect creatures as humans. Formed for one reason only: to torment and destroy humanity. And for that one reason, it could not destroy us utterly. A few of us would always be kept alive just so it had a reason to exist.

It was full of rage and sorrow and bent on destruction. Its soundless howling lament became a shriek that descended out of the supersonic into realms that humans can hear, then beyond into the subsonic--a thunderous roaring scream that rattled the earth and made the air vibrate with horror. I stood over the makeshift tee made from sand and lined up on the ball. My feet well apart, eyes on the ball, I lifted the putter and swung, screaming the final word.

"aaaAAAIIIIIIEEEAAAAAAAA!!! MWOWM!!!"

The ball rocketed upward like it was shot from a cannon, somehow seemingly accelerating as it gained altitude, leaving an arc of dripping, unidentifiable colors as it rocketed straight into the blazing eye of Nyarlathotep--the eye that burned like five red exploding suns.

There was a blast that singed my eyebrows off and sent me tumbling backward into heat, sand, and oblivion.

* * * * *

"Bob?"

It was Ivan again, trying to bring me back around. I opened my eyes, squinted against the blue of the sky--the blue of the sky...

I sat up abruptly. "He's gone."

Ivan grinned. "Yep. You did it. I don't know how, but you did it."

I stood. "Hot damn," I said, and grinned back. I didn't know how either, but I knew I needed a smoke. I reached into my slacks pocket and extracted my pipe, slightly scuffed but none the worse for wear. Ivan produced a bag of something that looked vaguely like tobacco and I tamped some of it down into the bowl. I grinned again, then clenched the stem in my teeth and sucked. The herb in the bowl spontaneously ignited and I inhaled a deep lungful of fresh, sweet smoke. I looked around.

Where Nyarlathotep had been was another blasted spot--black, wasted, burnt, a crater where the bane of mankind had once stood--forced back into his hellish netherworld. The air was fresher, the sun was in the right place, but still I was surrounded by miles of desert. Desert in front of me, desert behind me. I surveyed my surroundings, and suddenly my smile grew even wider. As far as I could see, back the way I had come, slogging through the loose sand and burned earth, all the way to the horizon, it was the same.

Flowers were sprouting from my footprints.

Yuggoth On the Rim

2007-06-06T19:19:00.000-05:00

Across the nighted deeps of space
Past Neptune cold and dim,
Where solar wastes meet starry voids
Is Yuggoth on the rim.

From the wells of night to the gulfs of space,
Beyond the sun's wan glim,
On gossamer wings come flying the Fungi
From Yuggoth on the rim.

Lost in the darkened hills where they lurked, I
Heard their voices coarse and grim,
Whisper of space, and time, and stranger things
On Yuggoth on the rim.

In darkling woods, encircled, they gathered,
Chanting an eldritch hymn:
"Ia! Nyarlathotep! who brought strange joy
To Yuggoth on the rim."

In sibilant tones they sang of Shub
Niggurath's fabulous vim;
Of Yog-Sothoth, who dwells beyond
Even Yuggoth on the rim.

Tomorrow they will take me there
Through spacetime's limpid scrim,
Across vast chasms of empty space
To Yuggoth on the rim.

Yule Fest

2007-06-06T19:18:00.000-05:00

Gathered together for the centuried rite;
Across snow-covered ground we walk bleakly t'ward home,
Through archaic Kingsport and streets seldom trodden,
After sunset's last rays have sunk into the gloam.

Only the lonely and poor still remember
Why we have come to this place out of time;
In this strange haunted city where once lived our elders,
With its gambrels and gables all covered with rime.

In the last ancient house at the end of the alley
We are met by the priest in his waxen-faced mask;
From blasphemous books we relearn the rituals,
Through tunnels beneath we descend to our task.

In green-litten caverns we hold dark communion,
Near a subterrene river where ghouls fear to tread.
With wild harmonies and songs cacophonic,
We sing and we laugh as we feast with the dead.

Then beyond the blackness from over the river,
Where the green flame burns bright and the black waters fall,
Come our mounts that are neither a mole nor a buzzard,
But something a sane man could never recall.

Far back in the shades of these gangrenous caverns,
In the depths of this cosmic Tartarean hall;
Are shapes of vile things that somehow are moving:
Vile things that walk but ought only to crawl.

Maddened, we rush down that black, oily river,
Past chaotic cataracts that thunder and boom;
Through caverns infernal on wings gaunt and membranous,
Our steeds flop and fly as we rejoice in our doom.

Yes, only a few of us old ones remember--
Only the cursed and the sad demon-kissed;
And snow fills the footprints that wend through the alley,
And the last ancient house disappears in the mist.

Where the Moon Is Always Gibbous

2006-12-23T23:19:00.000-06:00

Down a dusty, winding road,
Past houses old and crumbling,
Twilight sifting through the trees
And distant thunder grumbling.
My searches for some curious lore
Led me into the deep'ning night,
As the moon rose cold and gibbous,
And I feared the stars were right.

The chapel sat dark amidst the trees
Where music played wild and thin,
Lightning flicked across gables steep--
An empty door beckoned me in.
I felt strange forces gath'ring round
As I approached the eldritch site,
Where the moon was wan and gibbous,
And it seemed the stars were right.

The scent of mould and old decay
From the vacant door outbreathed,
On the steeple a faceless figure perched
In shadowy wings enwreathed.
What madness drove me onward--
Though my soul was thrilled with fright?
As the moon leered strange and gibbous,
And I knew the stars were right.

The book was there, as I had heard,
In the chancel old and bare.
Upon the lectern I found it--
As I breathed a whispered prayer;
In a forgotten tongue I heard myself
The ancient cant recite--
As the moon hung low and gibbous,
And the stars watched cold and bright.

The antique and brittle pages turned
Revealing dimensions unseen,
Where an ancient priest of age-old gods
Sleeps in bizarre aquatic demesne,
And dreams and waits 'til comes the time
His disciples fulfill the rite--
When the moon shrinks small and gibbous,
And the stars wheel all aright.

Still on I read, of the crawling
Chaos that looms anon,
Loosing blasphemies upon the earth
'Til peace and death are gone.
For in such times--when strangeness comes--
Ancient pow’rs are unpenned,
Dreams will turn to madness and
Even death itself may end.

Darkened skies and thunderclouds
Along the horizon churn,
Somewhere a mad flute wildly plays
While civilizations burn;
This doomed and fated future world
Is revealed to my faltering sight--
Where the moon is always gibbous,
And the stars forever right.

© 2005 Alan Peschke

The Owls

2005-11-26T17:07:00.000-06:00

"It was the owl that shriek'd, the fatal bellman
Which gives the stern’st good-night."
--William Shakespeare

A dusty off-white Ford pickup made a slow turn off of Bowie Street onto a long, narrow dirt driveway and rolled with apparent reluctance toward the old house that stood some fifty yards back from the street. The house was made of ruddy reddish and brown stone, and was almost certainly a perfect square, with a flat roof. A curious design, but an old one, and one which the driver of the pickup had seen several times during his travels through this area of central Texas. Undoubtedly the house had been built before commercial electricity and water were available. The battered, ruined remains of an ancient windmill and a dilapidated cistern rising behind the house attested to this. There were still several such houses in this old Texas town of Seguin that had begun as a small Mexican settlement inside the wide curve of the Guadalupe River east of San Antonio. It was not hard to believe this house may have been standing before Texas had become an independent country, even before the Anglo settlers had begun mispronouncing the name "Tejas."

Xavier J. Grimm pulled the pickup to a stop behind another old pickup and a slightly newer car that were already parked in the driveway, shut off the engine, and sighed. It was a deep sigh, a blowing-out-the-cheeks sigh through pursed lips that briefly lifted the light brown hair hanging down on his forehead. He removed his wire-framed bifocals to rub his blue eyes for a few seconds. It had been a long, though leisurely drive from his home town of Crowther up in the hill country to the north. Though most road signs now proclaimed a 70 mile per hour speed limit, he had kept it under 60 the whole trip--he had been in no hurry to get here. Under most circumstances he would have enjoyed such a drive, but not today. He had never investigated a death before. He replaced his glasses and got out of the pickup.

He didn't really expect to discover anything new. Certainly nothing the conventional authorities could use, or anything they would even bother listening to. There were just a few things he wanted to see for himself, a few things to confirm in his own mind, before he let the matter rest. He walked slowly up to the house and knocked at the door.

*****

October 2, 1997
Crowther, Texas

My Dear Mr. Grimm,

It was with great delight that I received your letter and learned that you were moving back to Texas, even if only temporarily. Perhaps if you find the time we may be able to have a cup of coffee (or a few glasses of tea, ha ha) and a pipe, and catch one another up on things we have learned since you were my student those many years ago. You know I have no children or any other family of my own, and I have often thought of my students as being my family. You, who were one of my favorite students, were certainly numbered among them.

Let me know when you've returned to Crowther. I am sure you have tired of those cold Massachusetts winters--we can sit outside on a warm December day sipping iced tea and snubbing our noses at such cold weather.

In the meantime, I am about to make a trip to Seguin. It is a small town south of here, where a family lives who I have heard has preserved a curious folk legend regarding the screech owl. I learned about it from a current student who is from there, and it is something I've not heard of before. Perhaps I can document it more thoroughly and add it to the general body of folkloric knowledge. It could well prove to be a proverbial feather in my cap, so to speak (ha ha).

Again, call me when you have returned.

Respectfully, your old Prof (and now, perhaps, colleague?)
Robert Moffett

*****

Xavier’s knock was not answered immediately. He looked around, taking in the surrounding grounds. The house sat in a lot that covered perhaps three acres, and around the old house was only an empty field. No, not quite empty. Already in early spring, longs shocks of Bermuda grass were waving and rippling liquidly in the brisk breeze. Here and there blue and pink wildflowers dotted the field and the lawn immediately in front of the house was speckled with dark violet phlox. Leaning protectively over the house were a grove of ancient live oak trees, their curling limbs whiskered with long strands of Spanish moss. He was just about to knock again when the door opened. He found himself looking down at a very attractive, petite young woman with shoulder-length glossy black hair and deep, wide brown eyes. She looked up at him expectantly.

"I'm Xavier Grimm," he said after nervously clearing his throat. "A friend of Professor Moffett...I called earlier?" He voiced the statement as a question.

"Oh...hi, come on in," she answered, and stood aside holding the door open.

The house seemed even smaller inside than out; not cramped, but definitely cozy. The dark greenish wallpaper of an indiscriminate design was faded, but not cracked or peeling. Somehow the family had managed to squeeze two easy chairs and a sofa into the small living room, ranged in a loose semicircle around a television that sat on a small table against the front wall. On the side wall was a fireplace, now empty of flame but still with a scattering of ashes from fires burned the winter before. Above the mantle was a stylized picture of Jesus, looking upward with a strange expression of beatific agony.

"We were just about to eat dinner," said the young woman. "I hope you can join us."
Xavier smiled inwardly. It had been a while since he'd heard someone refer to the midday meal as dinner. He murmured a thankful assent as she ushered him through the living room into a tiny kitchen near the back of the house. Two people were already sitting at the table: one an older version of the young woman, the other an elderly man of regal bearing with eyes that slanted downward slightly in an expression of perpetual sadness.

*****

October 11, 1997
Seguin, Texas

Dear Xavier,

I have made the acquaintance of a very solemn and honorable old gentleman by the name of Salvador Rangel. His grand-daughter Anita is the student I mentioned in my previous missive. His is an old colonial family who moved north from Mexico in the late 1700’s. He has told me much of his family history--he seems genuinely pleased that someone such as myself is interested in such things. Of course, my interest in history is only incidental to my interest in this curious folktale mentioned by Anita, and about which he seems strangely reluctant to speak.

Thus far, I have managed to gather only a little. That the legend is somehow related to the owl is certain. Exactly how it is related, I am still unsure. Since you grew up in this area, I suppose you have picked up a least a smattering of Spanish. My knowledge of this language is very poor, and looking through a dictionary of classical Spanish I found the word for "owl" is "lechuza." However, in this local dialect the word "lechuza" seems to echo of strange and disturbing connotations. It seems that this lechuza is always female, and it may be more correct (and convenient, for me) to capitalize it when referring to the folktale. The word itself is considered the feminine gender in the Spanish tongue, however, if the Lechuza is thought a female because of this, or if the word is of feminine gender because of its roots in the old legend, I do not know.

If I were of a superstitious cast, I might think that old Mr. Rangel believes there is some truth to the legend. His wife, Lupé, says nothing, though in truth I have not attempted to engage her in any conversation. My impression is that her knowledge of English may well be as poor as mine is of Spanish. Salvador himself is quite proficient in both tongues, however, and has taught me a new word or two.

I will spend tonight in a small (and cheap) motel on West Kingsbury St. I'll be returning to Crowther on the morrow--if my car isn't stolen tonight (ha ha).

Best regards,
Robert Moffett

*****

Conversation during the meal was almost nonexistent. Mr. Rangel said a short prayer of blessing over the meal--in Spanish--of which Xavier was able to recognize only a few words.

"I hope you weren't expecting Mexican food," Mr. Rangel said a few minutes later, with just a touch of humor in his voice. "We all like spaghetti very much."

"The spaghetti is excellent," said Xavier, and asked for another slice of garlic bread. There were a few noncommittal comments about the weather, but little else until the end of the meal.

"My family once owned much of this land," said Mr. Rangel later. He had invited Xavier into his backyard after they finished eating, where they stood in the cool shade of one of the big live oaks. The open field of Bermuda grass extended back to a row of shabby trees that didn't quite succeed in blocking the view of the next street. "Before the city had grown so large," Mr. Rangel was saying, "this was all farmland. Most of it was sold before it was worth enough to make my family rich." He laughed a quiet, sad little laugh. "This place now is large for a city lot, but it helps me still to feel at home."

Xavier squatted and picked up an acorn, toying with it and tossing it from hand to hand. Naturally not a very talkative person, he was unsure of how to bring the conversation around to Professor Moffett. "Mr. Rangel," he began, then hesitated.

"Yes, of course," answered the old man. "You are here to learn the truth of what happened to your friend Robert. He was your friend?"

"Yes." Xavier stood. "I was his student in college, and we kept in touch after I had transferred to another school up north."

Mr. Rangel plucked a leaf from a low-hanging branch and pretended to examine it closely. "This land has many old stories," he said. "My ancestors lived here many centuries before even the Spanish explorers came, and there are stories that were already old during their time. I have seen many people like you laugh at the old legends, saying they are only silly superstitions."

"I'm not laughing," said Xavier, as he looked the old gentleman directly in the eye. "And you may be surprised at what I may believe."

Mr. Rangel regarded him thoughtfully for several longs seconds before he spoke again. "This place here," he gestured around them with a wave of his hand, "belonged to my brother Domingo, before he died. Before I moved here, I lived on my own small farm at the end of what is now Bear Creek Road, in the country east of town."

*****

November 1, 1997
Seguin, Texas

Dear Xavier,

As you can see from the postmark I am again in Seguin. Since I last wrote you I have spoken at some length with both Salvador Rangel and his grand-daughter Anita. It is now clear to me that the old fellow does truly believe his stories are real. He owns a small farm on the eastern outskirts of Seguin. The house there is now deserted, and he only keeps a few cattle on the place. He moved out of it many years ago, just after the death of his son. It appears that he blames this Lechuza creature for his death--or rather, he partially blames himself though he believes that this creature (whatever it is) actually killed his son. It was at his old farm that his son’s death occurred.

Of course I am treating his claims with all seriousness. I imagine the death of one’s own son must be a terrible loss, but I find myself wondering if the old man’s grief didn't at least partially unhinge him. Anita was too young to remember it at the time, and they told me her mother died from complications resulting from her birth. I told you already of Lupé’s reticence, so, I have only old Salvador’s words on the matter. Perhaps I should later attempt to investigate old newspaper records to see if there was any report on the death of Salvador’s son other than the usual obituary.

In any case, according to what I have been told, the curse of the Lechuza seems to afflict certain families. Though most people have been reluctant to speak with an outsider such as myself, I have still spoken with a few who seemingly believe in the old legend but do not claim to have had any firsthand experience with it. One thing seems clear: they do not like to talk about the Lechuza, as if they are afraid of attracting her attention.

Mr. Rangel has given me permission to stay in his old farmhouse for a few days. He has kept electrical service to this property but no telephone, so at least I won't be left in the dark. I have taken a short leave of absence from C.C.C. in order to make these investigations. I will look over the old place and put my notes in order. When you arrive I should have at least a preliminary report written for you to look over, but alas, I fear that there will not be much for you to read. Specific information seems to be woefully lacking.

Regards,
Robert Moffett

*****

Xavier hadn't learned anything from old Mr. Rangel that he didn't already know from reading the Professor’s notes. "My family has carried this curse for many years," he told Xavier. "I think that may be why my ancestors left Mexico in the first place, to try and escape it." They had returned to the Rangel’s living room, where they talked over the low murmur of a Spanish-language soap opera that his wife was watching on the television.

"When it began, I don't know," continued Mr. Rangel. "But I heard the Lechuza’s cry many times on my old farm."

"You heard its cry?"

"Yes, it makes the sound of a crying baby, to lure you outside. It is often heard during thunderstorms." He paused. "My son Julio was living with us after Anita was born. The death of his wife, Marisela, had been a terrible shock to him, we were all trying to help him through his grief. He had lived with us for six or seven months when one night during a bad storm we heard the cry of the Lechuza." The old man paused again but Xavier said nothing.

"It upset Julio badly," he continued. "He was determined to go outside, it sounded so much like someone had abandoned a baby on our doorstep. I stopped him. We were up most of the night, even after the storm had stopped the crying continued, and all around us we heard the sounds of owls. Screech owls, calling each other all night until it was almost daybreak. Then suddenly the crying stopped and the owls stopped, and it was quiet. We managed to sleep for a few hours, then finally went outside later in the morning. There were scratches on some of the window ledges, like something with huge claws had been there. We found one of the dogs, he had been torn apart, as if by a wild animal."

Xavier remained silent. A dog, torn apart--that was not too extraordinary. This incident would have happened about twenty years before. He knew that there was still the odd cougar wandering around in these parts back then. He shrugged mentally. It could even have been another dog, he thought. He had seen dogs driven nearly to madness by loud noises before, an intense thunderstorm could easily have been the cause.

"I'm sorry," he said suddenly. "But how do owls fit into this?"

"It is said that when the Lechuza does not want you know she is there, she disguises herself as an owl--a screech owl. In her other form she is a terrible combination of owl and human."

"It was the next night that Julio died," Mr. Rangel took up the story again. "Many people do not think it’s wise to talk too much about the Lechuza, but that day when we found the dog, Julio was very angry. He shouted curses at her and swore to kill her if she ever came again, and that night, she did."

The old gentleman took out a handkerchief and wiped his face. Surprised, Xavier realized he had been silently weeping. Mr. Rangel blew his nose and continued his story.

"The owls began calling and hooting soon after sundown," he said. "Later that night we heard the crying again. Julio was so angry that I didn't try to stop him. He took a shotgun, and I took my old deer rifle, and we went outside with flashlights. We shone them into the trees around the house, and everywhere there were owls. Normally, any animal will turn and flee when such a bright light hits them. They may be paralyzed for a few moments in a bright light, but when the light is gone they will run, or fly. As we swept the trees with our lights the owls never moved, but only sat there staring at us with their large, round eyes. I was very frightened. Suddenly Julio shouted something and ran into the trees, there was a terrible noise. I heard my son..." He stopped and cleared his throat, then continued. "I heard my son screaming, and the crying sound. I was too frightened. I ran back into the house and didn't come back out until it was daylight."

"I'm very sorry," said Xavier. "But you mean you never saw the Lechuza yourself?"

"No," he answered. "And I still pray that I never will. We couldn't live there anymore after that. We all--my wife, my grand-daughter--lived here in this house with my brother until he passed away three years ago."

*****

November 3, 1997
Seguin, Texas

Dear Xavier,

I haven't much to say in this letter, only that I have had a rough time of it the last couple of nights. It seems there is an unusual profusion of screech owls living on this old farm, and they spend much of the night keeping me awake with their infernal cackling. I have made a cursory investigation of the grounds here, and of course found nothing unusual, except (as I mentioned) the owls. I have made the rounds of all the neighbors hereabouts, explaining that I was a researcher of folklore and a professor at Crowther Community College. Most of them either say that they have never heard of such a legend, or, like Mr. Rangel, are very reluctant to speak about it. One old fellow actually closed the door in face my when I uttered the word "Lechuza."

It is most peculiar that on several occasions I have noticed an owl, sitting in a tree nearby wherever I might be, simply sitting there staring at me. I must admit that it has begun to be somewhat disconcerting.

I expect to be back in Crowther by the end of the week. Look me up when you arrive in December.

Regards,
Robert Moffett

*****

Xavier kept thinking back to that last letter he had received from the Professor in early November of the previous year. It was the last he had heard from Robert Moffett until the Seguin police had delivered that last letter that was found on the Professor’s body and never mailed, along with the hastily scrawled note found lying on the table inside the old farmhouse. Xavier had persuaded Mr. Rangel to allow him to visit the old farm, on one condition.

"I hope you don't take it the wrong way," the old man had told him. "But I will be coming out later to put some hay out for the cattle. If you are not gone by dark, I will call the police and have you removed." Xavier had looked at him sharply in surprise, and Mr. Rangel put a friendly hand on his shoulder. "Only for your safety, young man. Your Professor friend was the first to stay the night in that house since my son’s death, and if I have my way, he will also be the last." Xavier had acquiesced; he hadn't planned on staying very long anyway. He was about to back out of the Rangel’s driveway when he heard a door slam and saw Anita on the front porch waving at him. He stopped as she trotted out to his pickup.

"Mind if I come along?"

They didn't say much to each other on the way out to the farm. Xavier had the feeling she meant to tell him something, but she only gave him a few directions on where to turn, even though her grandfather had already told him how to get there. The farm was at the end of a roughly graveled county road that ran due east out of town between some watermelon and peanut fields. Xavier rolled to a slow stop at the front gate.

Now they stood in an open area between the house and the barn. A few feet away a white-faced Hereford cow grazed lazily. He looked into the distance where a grove of tall, straight elms clustered darkly along the banks of Bear Creek at the back end of the property. Around the house the woods were less dense; a scattering of post oak, hickory and stunted prickly ash were the only things to be seen. Somewhere down in that dark thicket of elms was where Julio Rangel had met his death, and somewhere between the house and the front gate, not far from where Xavier stood, was where the Professor had met his. Like Julio, Robert Moffett’s death had gone in the records simply as an animal attack. Nothing more specific than that--case closed. Anita stood nearby, her arms crossed as if she were trying to protect herself from the cold, though the weather was mild and the sun was shining brightly from a clear sky.

Xavier had seen the gouges in the window ledges too. Old ones, weathered and indistinct, and newer ones around the door frame, that he supposed could have happened a few months before, about the time the Professor was here. The authorities had an answer for that too--vandals, with hatchets. He smiled a small, sardonic half-smile. Vandals with hatchets, scratching narrow segments out of the wooden window and door frames.

"There’s one thing I don't understand," he said finally. "Accepting that this thing actually exists, and it followed your ancestors all the way up here from Mexico, then why has it stayed out here instead of following your family to their house in town?"

"It hasn't," replied Anita. "I've heard it."

Xavier’s only reply was a lifted eyebrow that betrayed his curiosity.

"I don't know if my grandfather knows, but I've heard it."

"Have you seen it?"

"No...partly because it’s always dark when it comes, and partly because I bury my head under the pillows when I hear it."

Xavier smiled briefly at the attempted joke. "So does it sound like a baby crying to you, too?"

She looked up at him, her eyes wide and dark. "No, it isn't crying," she said, her voice almost a whisper. "It’s laughing."

Xavier thought about that in silence for a few long seconds. "Well," he said after a pause, "can you show me where the Professor is buried?"

"Sure, it’s not far."

They walked slowly back to his pickup in silence. He pretended not to notice the owl sitting in one of the nearby trees, an owl sitting in the open in bright daylight, staring at him with large, round, unblinking eyes.

*****

November 3, 11:30 PM

Dear Xavier,

You must forgive me if I begin to sound somewhat unstrung--the hideous and unceasing shrieking of the owls has become intolerable--and there has been something else. I attempted to leave earlier tonight, but only made it a few steps out the door before I was assailed by several owls. It was more of an annoyance than anything else, though it frightened me terribly at the time. I was able to struggle my way back into the house only after receiving several painful, though not serious, wounds from their beaks and claws. I searched through the house until I found an old quilt with which I thought I could shield myself and make another run for the car, and was just about to do so when I heard what seems to be an infant crying.

Xavier, I am sure during your studies at M.U. that you have on occasion seen at least some parts of the old Necronomicon. I have read a great deal of it, in fact it was doing so that led to my partial breakdown, and which is why I was able to find work only at a small junior college such as C.C.C. instead of gaining employment at my old alma mater of M.U. as I had always hoped. I fear greatly that this old folktale may hold within it the substance of some truth. You remember how we used to wonder if there were some things that Alhazred may have left out, or if there were things that had simply been lost in the many translations from the original Al Azif? I fear that the Lechuza may be one of those things. Perhaps it is something peculiar only to this part of the world, of which the Arab was completely unaware, some eldritch demon of the wild such as the Wendigo of the north.

Enclosed you will find my collection of notes and what brief interviews I have managed to gather regarding the legend. I will throw this heavy quilt over my head and make a quick run for my car. I'll spend the night in the motel I mentioned before, dropping this letter off at the Post Office on my way across town. See you in December--

Robert

*****

A few minutes later Xavier’s pickup rattled across the one-lane wooden suspension bridge that spanned Bear Creek and rolled to a stop on the side of the road across from a small Catholic cemetery. He followed Anita through the gate as they walked the path that led to a back corner of the old graveyard.

"My grandfather felt so bad about what happened to Professor Moffett," said Anita, "that when he found out the Professor had made no arrangements for his own funeral and such, he granted permission for him to be buried here."

His grave was easy to find, the mound of earth over it still mostly bare of any growth after only a few months. There was only a tiny marker on the ground, with barely enough room to show the Professor’s name, and birth and death dates. Anita plucked a bluebonnet and played with it between her fingers. Xavier only stood quietly smoking a battered, leather-covered pipe for several minutes until there was nothing left in the bowl but a fine, white ash. Then it was time to go.

He glanced into his rearview mirror once just after crossing back over the narrow bridge, but the cemetery had already disappeared around a bend in the road. All he saw was the bridge and a spray of bluebonnets that grew along the roadside, nodding softly in the wind. In spite of the complete tranquillity of the scene, he couldn't stop his mind from going back over that last note--the note that had been left lying on the kitchen table of the old farmhouse, and which the authorities had dismissed as being wholly lacking in credulity.

*****

In the Necronomicon there is a certain passage which now continually echoes through my mind. "...of their semblance can no man know, saving only in the features of those they have begotten on mankind; and of those there are many sorts..." The owls...their calling and hooting has become a hideous shrieking laughter, and I have seen it. It was waiting for me just outside the door...with great curved claws and terrible rending beak, and those horrible huge round eyes in a disgusting owlish parody of a human face. Those great round unblinking eyes like windows into the blackest depths of the cosmos...now I know what Poe meant--"his eyes have all the seeming of a demon that is dreaming..." Even now I hear it clawing relentlessly at the door...

I can see them beating at the windows with their beaks and claws and wings, and their laughter...THAT FACE...Their merciless shrieking laughter...it now drowns out all other sounds--except for that other laughter--my own ludicrous and maniacal laughter that trembles my hand as I pen these words, and spatters teardrops of obscene hilarity across the page...

What Is Within You...

2005-09-10T13:41:00.003-05:00

"If you bring forth what is within you,
what you bring forth will save you.
If you do not bring forth what is within you,
what you do not bring forth will destroy you."
--The Gospel of Thomas

Outside a lukewarm rain fell from a flat, slate-grey sky onto an equally featureless, colorless city. Inside it was mostly quiet.

The bare walls of the two-room apartment had once been white, when the apartment had been as new and full of hope as the greedy dreams of its landlord. Somewhere along the way it had been repainted an unpleasant shade of watery green. Now it was only dull and resigned, like the hopeless and cynical dreams of its tenant.

The front room housed an empty refrigerator, a rusty table and a lopsided chair in which that tenant still sat, staring sightlessly at the faded greenish wall, his face frozen in a strained, frightened expression. The color had always made him feel as if he were underwater; almost as if he were drowning. Add it to the long list of things he had wanted to escape.

Behind him on the floor was a jambox with dual cassette decks; one of the few luxuries he had allowed himself. He hardly ever had any money left over after paying rent and buying a few scant groceries to keep from starving. His job delivering pizzas didn't pay much; most of his meals consisted of leftover pizza that would have been consigned to the dumpster if he hadn't grabbed them first. What little money he did have, he spent on cheap cassette tapes. He'd tape hours and hours of radio programs and dub the songs he liked the most onto another cassette, but only the songs that really touched him in just the right way, songs that somehow made him feel free for two minutes and fifty-nine seconds, or songs that seemed to empathize with his own omnipresent bleakness of mood. Against one wall were several three-foot high stacks of cassettes, each carefully labeled as to artist and song title. There was a soft click as the tape in the jambox auto-reversed and began playing again. It was Townes Van Zandt singing "Dead Flowers," an old Rolling Stones song.

Send me dead flowers every morning...

There was another, louder click and the steady hum of an air conditioning unit made the apartment thrum softly as slightly cooler and less stale air drifted through both rooms. The soft breeze fluttered timidly against the brittle pages of an old book lying open on the table. The small table stood in the corner of the room, alongside a window shuttered with dusty grey blinds, and inside the confines of a sprawling circular design that in some ways resembled a five-pointed star, and in some other ways resembled nothing that anyone would find familiar. Anyone, that is, but the resident of the apartment, and perhaps, others who had seen what he had seen, and knew what he had known.

He had been studying the old book for a long time. Weeks, months, maybe years, in the end he hadn't been able to remember just how long it had been. Not that it mattered. By the time he had hastily scribbled the design on the floor, time had essentially become meaningless to him; he only felt that there wouldn't be enough of it, in the end.

A fresh burst of rain slammed down with redoubled force, accompanied by a close lightning strike that bleached the dusky day bright white for a split second, then darkened again with a thunderclap that crashed and rolled away slowly, grumbling and dissatisfied in the distance. He showed no sign of awareness of the noise or the flash.

He had felt it might come to this; had known it would probably come to this, in the end. But it almost, almost hadn't mattered, because he had learned to dream. Not the pale, two-dimensional, barely remembered dreams of common men; not the dreams that came with little reason or meaning and left one only with vague feelings of confusion, humor, or terror. Not the happy, faithful dreams of youth or the wistful wishful dreams of age. Not those. He had learned to dream the dreams of things far removed from the dim reflections of the subconscious mind, of places that never were, and never could be except in the phantasmagorical dimensions of dream. The dreams of stranger things, and places, and people, and other things that weren't people. The old book had held the key.

The old book. It had told him of the places he would dream of, and how he should dream of them. How to dream of things that the human imagination could barely wrap itself around, how to shape those things into sights and sounds and symbols he could understand and use. It had warned him of the things that would come into his dreams, the things that weren't people, the things that there were no dream-symbols for, nothing for him to shape into something he could understand, the things wholly alien to human intelligence and the space in which humans lived. The dreams of those things, the old book had said, sometimes impinged on the dreams of humans, and where those dreams overlapped, a whole new world resulted; a world full of strange wonders and bizarre terrors. So they would come into his dreams, the old book had warned, but there were ways to elude them, if one were strong enough, and careful enough.

He had first dreamed of huge, bare stone stairs, each step almost as tall as a man, that he had laboriously clambered down, farther and farther each time, until finally he had descended to a dark forest that stretched away and away into an eternal twilight where it never rained, never saw moon or sun or sky. The strange twilight forest was lit only by a strange phosphorescence that glowed from the grey fungi covering the forest floor.

Farther. Through the shadowy forest where curious, small, furry things tittered and rustled in the underbrush until he had emerged upon a vast, open, sunburned plain, dotted only with bare scrubby bushes, the air filled with the warm scent of baked earth. Here, the bleached, dry bones of another man, another dreamer who had lost his way. There, other bones, not of a man, but of something he hoped he would never encounter in a living form.

He had dreamed again and again. Following the signs given in the old book, forming the symbols within his mind, creating the dreams from out of himself, down the stairs, through the forest, and across the plain. Finally, there on the edge of the plain, he came to a vast, cold mountain where a frigid wind whistled continuously during daylight and howled through the night, slacking only to whisper unwanted secrets in the twilight of every dawn. In daylight the mountaintop was hidden by frosty swirls of gelid clouds, and at night it was lit by strange fires that seemed somehow heatless and forbidding in the distance. There were answers on that mountaintop. He knew because the old book had spoken of the ancient gods who still played in their hidden eyries where no human had ever gone. No human, except an old priest of the dreamworld who had once been so filled with pride and audacity that he had tried. He had climbed the mountain one night when the moon was unexpectedly eclipsed, and he had never been seen again. There were secrets in the old book, however, secrets the old priest hadn't known, secrets that would grant him power to question the ancient gods who slumbered restlessly on the mountaintop. Up the mountain he had dreamed, into the whispering wind and through rocky steeps that seemed bent on hurling him down, down onto the gaunt, craggy plain where those bones were, those bones that must have belonged to some other dreamer who came before him, came and was lost, lost and never found, never found because there was no one to find him. One night he thought he felt the brush of great, leathery wings in the blackness of that rocky mountainside, but whether the thing meant to threaten him or to protect him, he couldn't tell.

In the lurid yellow light of the following morning he had reached the windblasted peak where a dark, bent tower curled like a single skeletal claw into the sky. It was there in the tower that he had finally met the thing the old book had both promised and warned him of. There he had learned the truth about the ancient gods who lived on the mountain, how they were only pale shadows of the unknowable things that dwelled in the vast inconceivable expanse of space and sometimes reached through the foggy dimensions of dream to bring horror and madness to those in the waking world. He had learned of the thing that lived in the tower and spoke with a veiled face, and then that thing had removed its veil. It was those infinite abyssal eyes that pierced him when the veil fell that had sent him howling down the mountain, howling like the wind that whipped him at every stride, screaming the secrets aloud that the cold wind had whispered to him so insistently at every twilight dawn.

He had awakened in the other room on his narrow, sagging bed. Feverishly, he had scrambled into this room with the table and the chair and scrawled the signs on the walls that might keep the thing from coming through, keep that thing that had looked into him as he had dreamed himself up that mountainside from reaching across the grey walls of dreams into his awakening mind. He knew it would follow him, because the old book had warned him, and he knew he had been neither careful enough to avoid it nor strong enough to withstand it. Swiftly, swiftly he had scribbled the signs around the walls, across the ceiling, until the simple cubical room had seemingly changed proportions where he had scrawled the symbols with clustered intensity around each corner. Strange symbols he had drawn in red and black ink while speaking strong, convoluted words that he had read in the old book, until the hard angles of the walls had been warped into other dimensions, brushing the boundaries of the known and unknown that separate the worlds of dreams and waking. But he hadn't been fast enough.

And I won't forget to put roses on your grave...

The music continued to play. Townes Van Zandt's plaintive voice was especially suited to this song. The pages of the old book still fluttered weakly in the artificial breeze of the air conditioner. He still sat in the chair. The chair drawn up hard against the edge of the table, as he had desperately tried to remain inside the final circle, that final circle that the old book had said might be necessary for a dreamer who wasn't strong enough. The final circle where he had committed a final act of desperation, spoken a final word, to escape the thing that had followed him from the dream.

He sat, almost in an attitude of relaxation, his hands lying loosely in his lap, his fingers curled in some arcane mudra as if he were cradling something precious and sacred. In the end, he had finally understood what the old book had been saying all along. No escape. No escape from this world where dreams are broken and hopes are denied, not out of malice, but out of sheer apathy. No escape in dreams, not even across the shrouded dimensions where he had learned to go, because there were other things there, beings who thrived on the desperation and hopelessness of lost human souls. No escape...nothing but surrender to the horror and madness that emanates indefatigably from the center of an uncaring, insane universe.

So he had spoken a final word, a word he had read in the old book, a word that could save him or damn him only if he realized what it meant, realized what it would call, realized that only by embracing the horror would he find an escape, of a sort. The word was heard. It was heard by one of the other gods, one of the hoary grey gods of dreamers who doze fitfully somewhere in the mists that shroud the worlds of dreams and who sometimes gaze with curious, detached bemusement at the feeble efforts of those who have learned to dream. The word was heard, and one awoke, and as he mindlessly surrendered to the horror of that thing that had followed him into the waking world, the old grey god of dreamers reached across the misty shrouds of the dreamworld and plucked him away...

*****

He awakened in a cave, in a vibrant darkness full of movement and a strange soundless music. He saw the movement, heard the music with an other awareness; an awareness wholly alien to, somehow more and less than the senses of sound and sight. How he could see in the darkness, how he could hear in the silence, he didn't know, but he found himself unable to care, unaware even of the strangeness of the sensation. The soundless music came from the laughter of others like him, others who had taken a final waking leap into their dreams to escape their own personal horrors, others who had vainly dared to climb the mountain to demand answers of the ancient gods and were never seen again. The darkness was filled with visions of dark shapes and wide fluttering wings, though he had no eyes to see. The music filled him with wonder and a curious wistful joy, though he had no ears to hear. And he lifted his voice and his laughter joined in the song, though he had no mouth to speak. He and the others who were all like him moved out of the cave, into the dusk of another ending day.

The night-gaunts launched themselves from the cliffs of Ngranek.

The Hill

2005-09-10T13:38:00.000-05:00

Clawing moonlight scrapes across the land
Where ragged treetops hide against the hill,
And darkness falling, gathers moist and chill
On shadows standing hand in spectral hand.

No simple ghostly phantom of the night
Can further wail the note of ling'ring dread
Once howled by ghoulish things amidst the dead
That restive sleep within this woody blight.

Nothing moves, where once there proudly stood
Majestic towering oaks and flowers fair,
For a secret strangeness lingers in the air
And sunlight shuns the sullen, dusky wood.

No creature wild will walk the weedy trail
That winds among the gnarly, stunted trees,
For noisome vapors sometime stain the breeze
And waft unwelcome down into the vale.

Something happened, one grim sunless day
Of which the country folk refuse to speak;
Now ghastly glimmers between rough headstones peek--
And more than this, I cannot--will not--say.

© 1999 Alan Peschke

The Caverns

2005-09-04T21:16:00.000-05:00

Karl Sommer's first impulse was to just give them the gold. The two outlaws had caught him just as he had forded Cibolo Creek. His horse was still winded and tired from the long hard ride out of San Antonio, and he didn't think he could outrun them. Now even his Winchester was gone. They had taken it out of its saddle scabbard when they first stopped him.

Two or three times every year he made the trip south into San Antonio with a small herd of green-broken mustangs to sell at the livestock auction--such horses were in high demand by the south Texas ranchers who needed them to train for working cattle. After the sale he had left San Antonio at a trot, a handful of gold coins in his saddlebag, heading north into the hill country. When he was beyond sight of the town he kicked the horse into a run and didn't slow down until he reached Cibolo Creek. He was naturally always cautious, but this time even more so. He hadn't liked the looks of the two men who watched him pick up the gold from his sale in the lobby of the Menger Hotel. They must have ridden as hard as he had, or harder, to have been waiting for him on the north bank of the Cibolo. They had appeared suddenly from out of the brush, surrounding him on either side, so close their knees almost touched as one of them seized his horse's reins and forced it to stop. They had spoken softly, and politely, in tones so genial as to seem quite friendly. But they had been anything but friends. Karl's English was far from perfect, but he had understood perfectly well what they meant. Turn over his gold, or die. They were both carrying revolvers--a luxury that Karl had never felt was worth the expense for himself, and one of them, the ugliest one that was also holding the reins of Karl's horse, pointed his revolver carelessly in Karl's direction. They sat on their horses with sneering smiles and waited for him to hand over the gold.

No, Karl thought. He had been saving all his money so that he could pay for the passage of his beloved Magdalena. He had promised that he would bring her across to the new country as soon as he could, where they could begin building a new life together. With this last trip he had enough money to do it, and he wouldn't give it up easily. Their horses must be just as winded as his was, if they had ridden hard enough to catch him. That should even the odds a little. He stammered something in German, pretended not to understand their demand. His hand crept toward the big knife in his belt sheath.

"I guess the squarehead don't understand much English, Joby," said the thin one He was as skinny and leathery as an old whip.

So Joby was the one holding his horse's reins.

"Heh, I reckon not," agreed Joby. His face was greasy with sweat and was covered with pockmarks, and his small, thin mouth looked like an old scar. "I reckon we better just--"

Joby's words were abruptly cut off as Karl dug his heels into the horse and it lunged forward. The reins went taut and they whirled in a wild dance around each other as Joby held on with one hand while trying to aim his revolver with the other. Karl's big knife came out and in two deft strokes the reins were severed. Joby, off balance, dropped his weapon and made a grab for the horse's halter but his hand only closed in the razor-sharp blade of the knife. He screeched and fell backwards, blood spraying out of his mutilated hand onto his horse's face, which panicked, reared, and threw him.

Karl didn't hesitate. He bolted his horse straight into the other one--the horse that the thin one was riding. As the horses collided they both almost went down, but Karl's sure- footed little mustang caught itself just as the other bigger horse went back down the creek bank, rolling over on top of the man and spraying water in a huge splash as it hit the shallow creek at the bottom of the incline.

Karl knew his horse needed rest but there wasn't time for that now. He pointed its nose north and kicked it to a gallop. He didn't slow down for a long time.

*****

It was late night with a sliver of a moon high in the sky before Karl stopped. He and his horse were both exhausted. He knew he had to stop before the horse stumbled and lamed itself, even though he had wanted to cross the Guadalupe River before quitting for the night, but the horse was too worn out to risk swimming the river, especially in the dark. He led the horse down to the river for water, splashed some on his face, drank, and refilled his canteen. Now late at night, the air seemed to vibrate with the sounds of countless chirping frogs and the weather was almost cool enough to be comfortable. Somewhere out across the water something splashed. He quietly led his horse away from the river into the nearly green darkness of a thick clump of live oaks. For a moment he considered leaving the horse saddled, in case he had to make a quick escape, but he knew that would probably be a mistake. He still had a long ride ahead of him, and there was no sense in risking saddlesores. He slid the saddle to the ground and rubbed the horse down briefly with a handful of the dead leaves that carpeted the ground. The horse was already standing slack-legged and dozing before he finished. Karl managed to eat a few strips of venison jerky he had stowed in a saddlebag before his weariness overcame him and he fell asleep, sitting on the ground against the trunk of an oak tree, his hand resting on the big knife.

The low whicker of his horse suddenly awakened him. He moved cautiously and slowly toward the horse, careful not to make too much noise, thankful that the roar of frogs and crickets would probably cover any slight sound he made. He held the horse's mouth and whispered softly to it to keep it from making any more noise, and in the dim light of the crescent moon watched the two men walk their horses by within fifty feet of him. They were talking.
"I'm tellin' ya Buck, when we catch that bastard I'm gonna cut his goddam hands off! How'm I gonna handle a gun with my hand all cut up like this?" That would be Joby. So the other one's name was Buck.

"Just calm down," replied Buck. "Once we catch up with 'im, you can do anything you want. Guess you'll just have to learn to be a southpaw for a while."

"I don't even care about the gold no more," continued Joby. "I just want him!"

"You kiddin'?" said Buck. "Those mustangs brought him six months worth of mendin' fence and workin' cattle, and I ain't never been one to work too hard if I could help it."

"Well, anyways, I'm tuckered," said Joby. "Let's bed down and pick up his trail in the morning."

For a moment Karl heartily wished he still had his Winchester. At this distance it would be so easy to just shoot them down. Buck first, then Joby, because Joby wouldn't be able to handle a gun very well...He shook his head. Wishful fantasies wouldn't help him at all. He would have to elude them for a couple more days. The two men moved farther away and melted into the darkness. Karl breathed a sigh of relief and slumped back onto the ground, reassuming his position against the bole of the oak tree. His horse, still exhausted, had already gone back to sleep. A plan began to form in his mind...

The caverns. If he could get them into the caverns he could take their horses and ride away. They would never be able to follow him without horses, and if they weren't entirely stupid they would be able to live off the land until they could get to the nearest town. He wasn't the only one who knew about the caverns, but very few knew them as well as he did. A quarter-century before, the Confederate Army had used the bat guano there to make gunpowder during the war; in one cavern there were still a few empty kegs left behind from the cache that had been stored there. He had heard the story of the famous outlaw Sam Bass, who had died in those caverns. He had used them for a hideout, and when the law finally tracked him down he had been trapped there. It had been easy for the posse to just sit outside and wait, and they had shot him down when he tried to fight his way out. It was because of this that most people thought the caverns were a dead end. The only problem was, Sam Bass hadn't gone far enough...

*****

He started early the next morning, before dawn was even a glint on the horizon, holding to the saddlehorn as his horse swam them across the river. He didn't try to fight the current, just let it carry them downstream as they slowly made their way across. At this point, the river was fairly sluggish anyway; they came out of the water only 50 yards or so downstream from where they had entered it. During the next several hours, he began to hope that he had managed to elude them. Around noon, when the sun was high overhead, he rode around the curve of a hill and then came back up its north side. Leaving the horse ground-tethered far enough down the lee of the hill that it couldn't be seen from the south, he crawled up to the peak and crouched behind a lonely cedar bush, slowly chewing more jerky while he looked out over the country. Suddenly his heart sank.

There in the distance, maybe two, two-and-a-half miles away, he saw the shapes of two men on horses top a hill. They must have found his trail again. He cautiously crept back down to his horse, mounted, and trotted down the hill.

The next two days were almost torture--a seemingly unending nightmare of long rides and little sleep. He went northwest, up into the craggy hills around the headwaters of the Blanco River, then more riding back to the northeast and down into the dales where he swam his horse across the broad clay-colored expanse of the Pedernales. Still farther to the northeast, until midafternoon of the second day when he reached the massive, towering, sprawling dome of pink granite called Enchanted Rock.

"Verzauberter Felsen," he whispered to himself as he pulled the horse to a stop for a few minutes and looked up at it. "Enchanted Rock." He had heard stories about this place, stories that other settlers had picked up from the Indians. It was supposed to be haunted. Oftentimes at night, strange flickering lights could be seen fluttering like small silver ghosts across its hulking expanse. It served as a prison, the Indians said, to an old god who lay half-slumbering, half-dead, inside it. Sometimes there were strange sounds heard here also. Dull booming noises that seemed to come from within the rock itself. Yes, said the Indians, that was the old god awakening and trying to escape.

But in the clear light of midafternoon with the sun overhead it looked safe enough, though eerily impressive as it glowered above him. Today it would serve Karl a very practical purpose.

He rode his horse around to the north side where he tethered it within reach of a small pond and then began to laboriously clamber up the long, slow slope of the towering mound of granite. It took him nearly an hour to reach the top. He found a hollow in the rock where rainwater had collected and paused to take a swallow and run a few drops through his hair with his fingers.. The water was warm, almost hot from being exposed to the sun all day, but still refreshing. A few feet away some soil had somehow gathered in a crack and a tiny cactus was pushing its way through, appearing to almost magically grow out of the solid rock. Looking back down the way he had come, he could see the small pond winking in the sunlight like a tiny blue diamond several hundred feet below him, his horse an ant-like brownish dot near its edge. He crept the few feet to the very top of the mound where he lay and surveyed the country to the south. From this vantage, it seemed the entire state of Texas was spread out beneath him.

The rock was hot and uncomfortable to lie on, but he didn't want to expose himself by standing or sitting where he could easily be seen. After a few minutes of squinting into the distance through the glare of the sunlight that bounced off the rock, he could see a thin tendril of dust and then once more saw the shapes of two men on horses as they topped a hill less than two miles away.

"Gottfluch!" he cursed to himself. They were still following him. No matter. He would make it to the caverns soon. He hastily crept down from the peak of the mound and began scrambling back down to his horse.

*****

"Dammit!" exclaimed Joby, as he and Buck drew their horses to a halt atop yet another hill. Even from this elevation, the huge mass of Enchanted Rock towered over them in the distance. "I don't like this place, Buck. You know the Injuns say it's haunted, don't you?"

"They say a lotta things," replied Buck. "Besides," he continued, "I been thinkin'. I been thinkin' that this fellow prob'ly lives up around here somewheres, and this prob'ly ain't the first time he's been down to San Antone to sell horses. I reckon wherever he lives, he's prob'ly got even more gold than what he's carryin' on him right now. We follow 'im to where he lives, we're gonna get us enough gold to live mighty high on the hog for a while."

Realization dawned on Joby's pockmarked face. "I hadn't thought of that," he said.

"Guess that's why I do all the thinkin'," replied Buck. "Now shut yer yap and hurry it up. He cain't run from us forever."

*****

Karl Sommer didn't bother trying to hide his trail after leaving Enchanted Rock; he wanted them to be able to follow him easily. He crossed the Colorado River several hours later, as the green countryside was changing into the muted greys of twilight. More hard riding all through the night, until he couldn't force his horse any farther. He stopped to snatch a few hours of restless sleep just before dawn, then pushed on again until he came to a small, secluded chaparral where he left his horse and concealed his bag of gold coins beneath the dead leaves that had collected around the base of a prickly pear cactus. Taking only his knife, he made his way across the uneven ground to the caverns a few hundred yards to the west.

*****

Joby and Buck stared down into the small gully where the entrance to the caverns opened. The chill air of the inner earth wafted up around them; it was a welcome relief after the heat of days of riding through open country. It was almost sundown before they had found Karl's horse still dozing in the small chaparral. A feverish search of the area had uncovered no gold, but had disturbed a particularly annoyed rattlesnake. The encounter with the snake had left neither of them in an especially pleasant mood, and now they scowled down into the shadowed gully, muttering vague promises of vengeance on the man who had led them on this wild chase.

"His tracks are clear enough, all right," muttered Joby. "He musta gone right into that cave there."

"It ain't just a cave," answered Buck. "It's a whole bunch of caverns down there. This is where they caught ol' Sam Bass--remember him?"

"Why, heck yeah!" replied Joby. "In that case, we got 'im! There ain't no way outta there except the way he went in. We still got a quart of coal-oil from that fire job we did a while back--we can make torches with it. All's we gotta do is go in and take 'im."

"Yep," agreed Buck. "Poor dumb bastard prob'ly thinks he got away from us. Almost makes me feel sorry for 'im."

"Aw shucks," said Joby. "I didn't know you were such a sensitive fella, Buck."

They leered at each, amused at their own humor. They dismounted and scrambled down the steep, rocky bank toward the yawning mouth of the caverns.

*****

Karl Sommer commended himself on having left an extra lantern and some oil cached just inside the entrance to the caverns, though he wished he had spent the money for an extra rifle and stashed it there also. He had never intended to go this deep inside again. He had been this far in only twice. Past the rough, rocky floors and wedging himself through cracks in the rock into deeper and deeper caverns, he had finally emerged into a vast open room where he could see an opening in the ceiling high above. The walls were almost perfectly sheer and smooth from erosion; it must have been thousands of years before when the caverns was full of water that churned down through the grotto and given the walls of this cavern an almost polished appearance. The air was heavy and pungent from the stench of the bat droppings that covered the floor like a thick, soft carpet. Overhead hundreds of small bats hung by their feet from the rough ceiling; it bore countless tiny crags and crevices that, unlike the walls, the rushing water had seemingly never touched. At about midday the sun would send a single shaft of wan yellowish light into the gloom of the cavern for just a few minutes--otherwise, the cavern was filled with a blackness that nearly swallowed the light of his coal-oil lantern. He still remembered--would never forget--that first time when he had found another crevice in the wall, so narrow he had to push the lantern through first and then slide through sideways after it. Beyond the narrow crack, another cavern had opened up, a cavern so deep and vast he couldn't see the end of it. The ceiling of that final cavern was low, only a few inches above his head, but it stretched away to the left and right, and forward into the undisturbable darkness farther than his lantern could send its feeble light. He had never explored beyond that point, because there was only a few square feet of smooth, flat stone to stand on. At the edge of the stone floor was water--an underground lake that lay quietly, unperturbed for countless centuries by the small breezes that always give a constant motion to such bodies of water that lay on the surface of the earth.

It was uncannily quiet. Karl had never been able to convey the sensation to anyone. The surface of the lake was perfectly still and smooth as polished glass. There were no tiny waves to lap reassuringly at the banks, no quiet splashes as water slapped against a piece of driftwood--it was simply still. For the first few feet, as far as he could tell, the water was only a few inches deep and he crawled to the edge on his hands and knees to peer at strange, almost-transparent crayfish that scuttered across the sandy bottom of the shallows. After inspecting the ceiling above him he had found a narrow, cylindrical tunnel through the rock, boring straight up. It was close enough to the wall that after a few failed attempts, he managed to clamber up the few handholds he could find and wedge himself into the tunnel. Cursing his own curiosity, he had left his lantern behind and continued upward into the darkness, keeping himself from falling back by bracing himself against the tunnel walls and feeling carefully for each tiny crevice that could afford a purchase for his questing hands and feet. After a time--he was uncertain exactly how long, but was surely no more than a quarter of an hour--his head had emerged from a tiny sinkhole that was entirely concealed from above by a bushy prickly-ash tree. Several seconds later he was lying upon the solid ground, tired but otherwise none the worse for his long climb up the almost vertical tunnel.

He had returned the next day, bringing with him a long cane pole which he maneuvered carefully through the series of caverns and finally pushed it ahead of himself through the last crevice. Once again he stood on the edge of the water, this time pushing the pole down into the lake. As he had seen before, the first few feet near the bank was only a few inches deep, but then it dropped off abruptly to an unknown depth; he could feel no bottom at all with the long pole.

He had had to bring another lantern, since he had left the one behind the day before. He moved carefully along the narrow strip of dry rock to where the other lantern was and found it, but he stared at it curiously when he saw that it was lying on its side and appeared to have been scuffed and the glass broken. He looked up into the dark hole of der Kamin--the Chimney, as he had begun to think of it. He had left the lantern almost directly beneath the Chimney to provide light for his initial climb. Of course, he thought, he must have knocked some loose rocks down during his climb that had knocked the lamp over and broken the glass. That was it.

He had then opened a small leather bag that was tied to his belt and pulled out a length of string to which was attached a fish hook. He fastened the string to the end of the cane pole. It was easy to catch one of the weird, transparent, and apparently blind crayfish and drive the hook through it. With a sidearm throw, he flung the line out into the water. There was a small splash which echoed eerily away into the distance, and a few seconds later the tiny ripples came back to him out of the darkness and lapped silently against the smooth rock where he stood. He sat on the rock and waited. The line was at least 20 feet long, and it didn't feel as if it were touching the bottom. He had only waited a few minutes when there was a tug on his line that suddenly became a sharp jerk as the hook sunk home. It was difficult to pull the line back in with such a low ceiling, but after a few minutes of work he pulled his catch out of the darkness into the dim light of the burning coal-oil.

"Mein Gott!" His exclamation echoed around him like a thousand mocking voices until it faded into strange reverberating whispers into the far unseen distance. It was a catfish. It was definitely a catfish, but its pallid skin was almost translucent in the yellow light of his lantern, and it had no eyes. It writhed blindly and helplessly on the end of the line. He quickly extracted the hook and dropped it back into the water. Somehow he couldn't bring himself to even think of eating such a strange looking creature. He sat, debating with himself about whether he should try another cast and see if there was anything else to catch in this subterranean tarn, watching the ripples cast off from the fish as they died away and the water was once again perfectly still.

As he sat in the near-darkness where the only sound was his own breathing, a disturbing thought suddenly came to him. He looked again over to where the other lantern was lying on its side, broken and bent. He had dismissed it as having been hit by rocks that fell during his climb up the Chimney, but now he realized that there were no loose rocks lying about--nothing that could have fallen and broken the lantern. As he looked around, peering into the darkness, large swells suddenly rippled toward him and splashed against the rock where he sat. It was only then that he had realized there was a breeze, a cold breeze that tugged at his hair and made his breath come out in moist clouds. He stood up to leave and the breeze turned into a wind that pulled at him, almost throwing him off balance into the water. Leaving the old lantern and the fishing pole, he crammed himself into the crevice and scrambled through into the outer cavern. The wind was whistling eerily through the crevice and he shielded his good lantern as it guttered and almost went out. It pulled at him as if with cold, unseen hands as he made his way back toward the entrance, failing in intensity as he went through one cavern after another, until it was hardly noticeable when he finally stood blinking in the bright sunlight in the gully at the cavern's mouth.

*****

So here he stood once again, staring into the gloominess of the last room before the lake. Overhead the hole in the ceiling stared down like an irregular sky-blue eye. The room was filled with the small rustling sounds of the hundreds of bats that were hanging above him, and the floor was moist and soft with a thick layer of guano. He shielded his lantern and waited.

He would wait until he heard them coming before he slipped through the crack into that last vast cavern of the lake. He had never intended to go there again, but now he thought it would be the best way to elude them. He had no idea what it was in there that had broken his lantern and caused such huge wave-like swells to ripple across the otherwise still waters of the lake, but he thought that he wouldn't be in there long enough to arouse it again anyway. Just slip through the crack and go straight up the Chimney.

A faint sound in the distance followed by the echoes of a curse alerted him. He hurriedly wedged himself through the crack into the last cavern.

*****

"How far back you reckon this damn thing goes?" Joby whined.

"Just keep goin'," answered Buck. "It cain't go on forever. He's got his whole stash of gold back in here, I'd just bet."

Their makeshift torches guttered and flickered, throwing uneven light that highlighted strange, shifting shadows along the walls and over their heads.

"Well, I sure wish we'd find the end of this thing, anyway," muttered Joby.

*****

Karl Sommer left his lantern by the crevice where the two men would be able to see it shining through. He hoped it would be enough to draw them into the cavern of the lake, and buy him a few more minutes before they decided to come back out. He glanced around hastily. There was the old lantern, somehow seemingly more battered than when he had seen it the last time. The abandoned fishing pole was lying partially submerged in the water; he lifted it to see it had been broken off a few feet from the end--the other part was nowhere to be found. Just as he was about to make his way over to the Chimney he saw a faint suggestion of an imprint in the sand a few inches into the water.

He stooped to look at it more closely. Some kind of footprint, he mused. There was another one--farther out just where the shallow sloped away into the unplumbed depths of the lake. They were unlike any footprints he'd ever seen. A peculiar, large, rounded footprint with...five toes? But the toes were arranged around the circumference of the central print, almost like a star, it seemed. There certainly were many strange new wonders in this America, he thought, but he didn't have time to stop and investigate it now. He climbed into the Chimney and feverishly scrambled toward the waiting daylight above.

*****

"Hsst!" warned Buck, whispering. "There! Ya see? There's his lantern. He must be tryin' to hide behind those rocks over there."

"Hot damn!" said Joby, also whispering. "We got 'im now!"

"Let's give him a warning," said, Buck. "We'll let 'im come out on 'is own."

"All right," Buck spoke loudly. "Come on out and you won't get hurt." He looked at Joby and winked, and they both chuckled silently as the echoes died away and the bats above them rustled and shifted restlessly, disturbed by the unusual noise.
"I guess he ain't comin' out," said Joby, after waiting a minute or so and hearing no response. "I guess we'll have to go in and get 'im."

"All right, go ahead," ordered Buck.

Grumbling under his breath, Joby handed his torch to Buck and crammed himself through the narrow crevice. "Okay, I'm through," he said after a few seconds. "I don't see him nowhere, Buck. He musta doubled back on us somehow or somethin'."

"You want somethin' done right..." muttered Buck, and began pushing his way through the crack into the room beyond.

*****

Karl had just emerged from the Chimney into the fading light of late evening when he heard shouts coming up from beneath him. The sounds were faint and hollow, but he understood them well enough.

"You just come on out now!" he heard one of them yell. "You cain't hide from us no more! Come on out and you won't get hurt!" Now! More! Hurt! Their echoes reverberated eerily out of the small sinkhole as he scrambled out onto solid ground. This time he didn't wait to rest, but ran back toward the mouth of the cavern where he hoped they had left their horses.

*****

"Damn!" Buck's exclamation followed the echoes of their previous shouts, turning into small whispered curses that faded into the blackness of the unseen reaches of the cavern. "Damn," he repeated with less vehemence. "Looks like he got away from us somehow. Well, let's make a good search and maybe we'll find his stash anyways. I don't reckon it's in here, it's prob'ly back in that last cavern we were in where all the bats were. Let's go on back."

"Yep," agreed Joby, then he added, "Hey, wait a minute..."

The thunderous blast of his revolver sounded like a cannon in the low-ceilinged cavern, the concussion almost stunning them both.

"What the hell did you do for, dammit!" Buck yelled, his ears ringing from the gunshot.

"Sorry," said Joby sheepishly, picking up the tattered remains of a crayfish. "I just ain't never seen nothin' like this before."

Buck looked at it curiously for a few seconds before his anger returned. "It's just a damn crawdad, you idiot! Liked to make me go deaf, dammit."

Joby shrugged and dropped the crayfish back into the water. "Sorry," he repeated. Buck was already exiting through the crevice. Joby turned to follow him.

A sudden gust of wind pulled at him, just as a large swell lapped and splashed against the rock where he stood. "Hey Buck," he called. "I think there must be something..."

"Just shut up!" Buck yelled back him. "Just shut the hell up and come on."

*****

A wave of relief washed over Karl Sommer as he caught sight of the outlaws' two horses tied to trees in the thicket of live oaks that clustered around the gully that concealed the cavern's mouth. He even smiled for the first time in days as he saw that they had left their rifles behind, along with his own rifle that had been tied behind one saddle. They must have gone into the caverns with only their revolvers.

He mounted one horse and took the reins of the other, leading them back toward the big sinkhole that opened into the cavern where the all the bats lived. He checked his rifle and found it still loaded. The smile on his face was replaced by a more grim and determined expression as he levered a shell into the chamber and kicked the horse up to a trot.

*****

A cold, whistling wind blew--no, sucked past Joby as he stood still on the smooth stone shore of the lake, peering into the vague darkness as the swells of water grew larger and splashed against the stone with such force that a frigid spray spattered his face.

"Hey Buck?" he repeated. "I think there must be something in here." He turned suddenly and ran the few steps to the crevice that led back into the bat-room. The wind howled viciously at him as he forced himself through the narrow opening.

"Damn it, Joby!" cursed Buck. "You shoulda brought that fella's lantern back with you, it woulda been a lot better than these damn torches!" As if in answer, his torch guttered and flickered in the mounting wind, almost going out. "Go back and get it!"

Joby shook his head. "I ain't going back in there, Buck. I'm gettin' outta here right now!" He had already made his way to the outer edge of the cavern, pausing to scrape the guano off his boots with a convenient rock. Cursing to himself, Buck began to go back for the lantern. He had only taken one step when he saw the light of the lantern suddenly vanish. He stopped and stepped backward, bracing himself against the wind that now howled down into the depths of the earth with new intensity. He drew his revolver as something moved in the flickering shadows of the torchlight. There was a rumble that turned into a roar as the pile of fallen stones that had been almost entirely blocking the entrance of the lake-cavern fell outwards, and the in last second before both torches blew out, a huge shapeless something floated silently into the room.

*****

Karl had dismounted and began approaching the big sinkhole on foot when a sudden dark, shifting cloud of bats swarmed out of the hole into the mellowing twilight sky. Almost simultaneously, gunshots and inarticulate screams erupted out of the earth before him. Surprised, he dropped to the ground, thinking they were shooting at him, before he realized that the screams were not of anger, but of abject terror. The gunshots ended and there three sharp, staccato shouts of apparently insane laughter. Then silence.

He crawled to the edge of the big hole, feeling curious tendrils of cold wind begin to suck at him as he gained its perimeter. There were strange sounds coming up out of the hollow earth beneath. Moist, somehow solid, sounds. He called out.

"Joby!" No answer. "Buck!" No answer. Maybe they were waiting for him. Maybe it was a trick. He held his hat by the brim and eased it out over the opening of the hole, trying to tease them into shooting and revealing themselves. Maybe they would see the silhouette of his hat and think it was him. Nothing happened.

"I got your horses and rifles," he shouted. "You go your way and I'll go mine." Still no answer. "If you come after me again, I will kill you." Nothing. "Joby? Buck?" The only answer was a hollow whistling that somehow didn't seem to come from the wind that continued to blow chillingly around him, but rather somehow seemed to come out of the cavern yawning beneath him.

He retreated from the hole, uncertain about what he should do. He noticed a flask hanging from the saddlehorn of the horse he had been leading. Opening it, he found a few ounces of coal-oil left in it. Hastily securing a fallen tree branch, he dipped it into the oil and struck a Lucifer match to create a quick torch, and once more approached the hole, crawling on all fours as the wind continued to mount.

Carefully, he extended the torch over the edge of the open hole, then crawled forward enough to peer down into the inky blackness of the cavern. He stared downward in stunned silence for a few long seconds.

Several feet beneath him, apparently floating in the air in the middle of the cavern, he saw it. It was huge, yet somehow its size was deceiving. He felt a sudden inward vertigo as its dimensions shifted, twisted, whirled in upon itself, extending tendrils that suddenly vanished and were replaced, it rolled and spun, yet somehow was absolutely still. Though it had no eyes that he could see, still he could tell that it saw him, was looking at him, was looking inside him to awaken unknown primitive memories that welled up out of him in a long, low howl that was somewhere between a scream and a moan. The torch fell from his nerveless fingers into the cavern, where it fell completely through the thing and flickered weakly on the floor for a few seconds before it was extinguished. The wind redoubled itself with a sudden vengeance that slammed him into the ground and almost tipped him into the hole. He threw himself backward, fighting the howling tempest, rolling over and over away from the sinkhole that now seemed to open for him like a hungry, toothless mouth. He regained his footing and ran, screaming into the deepening twilight, the horses bolting as he ran past them in blind terror. He kept screaming as he ran, vanishing into the darkening night, his screams gradually fading as he disappeared into the distance.

The wind slacked and became an almost gentle, chilling breeze. Then even that was gone. Darkness came to the quiet Texas hill country. Somewhere in the distance an owl hooted. A few minutes later a whippoorwill answered. Everything was quiet after that.

© 1997 Alan Peschke

Snake Oil

2005-09-04T21:09:00.000-05:00

"Amazing grace...how sweet the sound...that saved a wretch...like meeeee..."

Dr. A. Herman Thripshaw's voice cracked on the high note and he stopped singing to chuckle quietly to himself. The words meant very little to him; it was only a song he had heard some people singing a long time ago, when he had been living near a small country church. He just liked hearing a voice. Even if it was only his own voice, and despite the fact that no one would ever accuse him of being a skilled crooner--or any other kind of crooner, for that matter. It was either this, or talk to the mules. They never talked back, but then, he didn't think they liked him much anyway.

The pair of scrawny mules had pulled his small wagon steadily and with only occasional complaint from some indeterminate place back east, winding slowly westward across this narrow, rough dirt track toward the small town of Groverton in the Colorado Territory. He had been traveling for a long time, longer than he cared to remember. His quest for the secret ingredient had taken him all around the world, to places so far removed by distance and culture from this small frontier town that the simple country bumpkins there would be filled with wonder and yes, perhaps even horror at the things he'd seen and learned. And done. He had listened to the ravings of drugged dreamers in the opium dens of China, had been to the peaks of cold mountain wastes in hidden Tibet where he had learned uncouth things from strange creatures who lived in the snow. To a lost city that lay buried beneath the sand somewhere in the deserts of Araby, and into the heart of darkest Africa where he'd feasted on undiscovered animals and conversed in unknown tongues with the small people who haunted the jungles there. But all along, the thing he'd been looking for was in none of those places. All along, it had been right here in North America, in an unnoticed and obscure place in the Indian Territory.

He chuckled again, a little louder this time. One of the mules flicked its ear curiously at the sound. He had been laughing a lot lately, because now he had it, and now he was heading to Groverton to try it out. Groverton would be his test. Why Groverton? No special reason, he reflected. He had been there once before, long ago, before the town had ever existed, and it amused him to go there now. It was the end of his long journey, but if his secret ingredient worked, it would also be only the beginning.

He wasn't really a doctor, of course, and his real name wasn't A. Herman Thripshaw, but people in his business had to make certain elaborations on the truth to get the job done, to make a living. He hadn't used his real name in ages. A. Herman Thripshaw was just something he had made up once, because he thought it sounded grandiose and authoritative. And of course he had to be a doctor. No one would take him seriously if he wasn't a doctor, so...

He flicked the reins restlessly, urging the mules to hurry up a little. Now that his search was complete, he was anxious to get started. He glanced in the general direction of the sun. He should get there sometime after dark, he thought, and start first thing in the morning.

*****

When the people of Groverton were just beginning to stir the next morning, A. Herman Thripshaw had already stabled his mules and set up his small wagon in a prominent place in the center of town. He wiped the trail dust carefully from the wooden walls of the wagon, where a freshly painted sign read, "DR. A. HERMAN THRIPSHAW'S WONDROUS NERVE TONIC," and in smaller letters beneath that, "Cures the Sick and Invigorates the Healthy." The seat of the wagon had been temporarily converted into an elevated podium, from which he would proclaim the incredible restorative powers of his brilliant new concoction. He checked himself in a small looking glass. He had been very careful to cultivate a sophisticated, suave, and healthy appearance--nothing else would do. His suit, pressed and stored in a chest during his trip up the dusty trail, was immaculate and sure to impress. His neat goatee was carefully trimmed and just beginning to show a few flecks of grey. He had contemplated adding spectacles to the costume, but then decided against it. It wouldn't do for the inventor of such a wonderful curative to have bad eyesight. He was just a little portly, not so much as to be unhealthily overweight, but enough to appear hearty and healthy--glowingly healthy, he thought as he looked into his own warm hazel eyes in the mirror--and his skin was tanned to just the right degree.

As the first curious passerby walked by the wagon, he tipped his bowler hat courteously. "A very good morning, fine sir, and may I interest you in a small sample of the Wondrous Nerve Tonic?" The man only shook his head negatively and kept walking without saying a word. A. Herman Thripshaw frowned briefly in disappointment. No matter, he thought, there were at least a couple hundred people here, and he only had to sell a few. After that, it wouldn't be long before everybody would want some.

A few minutes later three more men approached, one wearing a shiny metal star on his leather vest that marked him as the local sheriff. The two others stood silently in the background as the sheriff spoke to him.
"Mr...Thripshaw," began the sheriff, reading his name from the side of the wagon, "we don't appreciate snake-oil peddlers in our town, maybe it would be better if you just moved along."

"Doctor Thripshaw," he corrected, "and surely you wouldn't begrudge an honest man a living? Only small samples for a very small price, and if you don't indeed feel invigorated, I will gladly refund the purchase." He leaned closer toward the sheriff. "And seeing how you are obviously a man of some authority," he added more quietly and with a conspiratorial wink, "I will grant you a sample absolutely free, and allow you to judge for yourself. Free samples for all three of you?" He glanced at the other two men still hovering behind the sheriff.
"Well..." the sheriff looked around indecisively at the other two men. One of them shrugged and nodded. "Okay, but if we decide that you're just trying to take our money for a few drops of watered-down whiskey, you're going to have to leave--if we don't throw you in jail first."

"Of course, of course," he agreed obsequiously. "I have complete confidence that the Wondrous Nerve Tonic will more than exceed your expectations." He handed a half-pint bottle to each of the three men and they walked away, discussing the matter and throwing back an occasional curious glance. Dr. A. Herman Thripshaw smiled and gave them a friendly wave. Now it had started. They would be back. He laughed again, quietly to himself.

*****

By noon a small crowd had gathered, and though his first few spiels hadn't gone over very well, he had eventually captured their attention and now some of them were actually listening to him. Yes, he thought, they were almost hypnotized. He marveled at how much easier it was to sell to a crowd than to separate individuals. Once one or two people decided to buy it, everyone wanted a bottle to try for himself. Some of them had come back for more, but that was fine, he had plenty. There was only a small drop of the secret ingredient in each half-pint bottle. Other than that, it was only a mixture of water, grain alcohol, and a little something special he had picked up in the Amazon to ensure that they indeed felt invigorated and would indeed come back for more. A sprig of dill floating in it for appearances and a handful of other herbs to give it a more medicinal flavor, all for only a few cents a bottle. It seemed that everyone in town wanted some. Husbands had taken it home for their wives, parents had shared it with their children. Everything was going wonderfully.

A few hours later the crowd had begun to taper off, so he collected his mules and moved down the road to make camp a hundred yards or so from the edge of town. He spent the rest of the day puttering around inside his tiny wagon, mixing up more of the Wondrous Nerve Tonic, chuckling to himself and humming broken snatches of tuneless songs. As darkness came he unrolled his blankets beneath the wagon and fell happily asleep.

*****

He awoke early the next morning, just a little tense and anxious to see what the new day would bring, but still quite confident that all would turn out as planned. Dr. A. Herman Thripshaw hitched the mules to his wagon and tied their reins to a convenient tree to prevent them from wandering, then walked back toward town. He was standing in the middle of the street and the first bright rays of sunlight were just slipping over the distant mountains when the screams began.

Oh yes, he thought, it had worked. It had worked wonderfully. Shouts of alarm and shrieks of terror arose around him in a hellish clamor as he stood smiling and humming to himself in the center of the doomed village. A woman staggered into the street, still wearing the tattered remains of her bedclothes. He could see that her skin had begun sloughing away in dry, flaky sheets to reveal the squamous new layer beneath. She fell helplessly to the ground to squirm insanely as all her extremities were gradually absorbed into a single slender torso. Her screams degenerated into nothing but a violent hissing and he knew eventually even that would go silent. A small boy ran past him, so consumed by horror that the boy didn't even notice him standing there, his arms held wide, at least a dozen snakes hanging like obscene living fringes from the sleeves of his shirt. He too, fell, and was silent as his body vanished beneath a writhing swarm of angry snakes. There were snakes coming out of every door and window; many of the townsfolk had undoubtedly already been transformed while they slept, awakening to a new mindlessness of which their tiny reptilian brains would now be wholly unaware. The very few who had not swallowed any of the Wondrous Nerve Tonic would try to fight--yes, there were a few gunshots even as he thought this, and he watched the hapless sheriff reel backward into the street, a revolver in each hand, firing back through the door of the office he had just exited. His struggle was hopeless. Up his legs came a teeming mass of hissing serpents until his entire body was a single squirming pullulation of reptilian death. He took two lurching steps and collapsed. No one could withstand the venom of the serpents of Yig.

Dr. A. Herman Thripshaw listened for a few minutes after the last scream, but nothing more disturbed the silence. The snakes were slowly vanishing from the street to seek shelter in hidden places beneath the buildings and the boardwalks. One last snake--a large timber rattler by the look of it--emerged from the clothes that had recently been worn by the luckless sheriff, and coiled for a moment around the shiny metal star still pinned to the leather vest. He watched it hiss at him, the crescent-shaped mark on its head gleaming whitely in the morning sunlight. He knew it wouldn't attack him, however. Snakes never bothered him at all. It slithered away through the open door of the sheriff's office.

A few minutes later Dr. A. Herman Thripshaw had returned to his wagon. He clucked at the mules and flicked the reins to start them off. He had many places to go, and a lot of the Wondrous Nerve Tonic to sell. He started to sing.

"Bringing in the sheaves...bringing in the sheaves..." He broke off abruptly as he erupted into a fit of laughter; a loud, sibilant, coughing hiss that made the mules shy violently. He pulled the reins to stop them and give them a few minutes to calm back down.

Oh, yes, he thought, it had worked wonderfully. For just a moment he relaxed, but only for a moment--it wouldn't do to spook the mules again. For just an instant the pupils of his beady yellow eyes narrowed into thin vertical slits and a slender forked tongue flicked out to test the air.

Father Yig will be very pleased, he thought. Very pleased, indeed.

© 1997 Alan Peschke

On the Shore by the Ocean

2005-09-04T21:03:00.000-05:00

Walking alone on the shore by the ocean,
Where waves are unfurling like cold dragon's wings,
Driftwood comes floating in shapes grim and distorted;
With bellowing surf the deep ocean sings.

'Neath a small yellow moon, above cold briney spray
Are black silhouettes that facelessly flutter,
Keeping their secrets, betraying no aims;
Silently fly with not a peep nor a mutter.

And the small yellow moon is briefly occulted
By great vasty wings that encompass the sky;
Eclipsing the stars and sleeking the water--
As suddenly gone, and the surf breathes a sigh.

And o'er all, the music of wind and the water
Whispering secrets too subtle to hear,
But understood only by strange intuition:
Too eldritch for joy, more awesome than fear.

Wand'ring in silence through grey-litten dreamlands
Brought on by reading an abhorréd tome;
Then, timidly, sunlight leaks through the shutters,
Ending the vision and bringing me home.

© 1998 Alan Peschke

When Old Gods Awaken

2005-09-04T21:00:00.000-05:00

Spectral steeples in the silver moon gleaming,
Cat's eyes a-glitter in the sepulchral glare,
Rustle of leaves where cold wind goes streaming,
Old house agape with window-frame stare,
Small things that scamper away from the light,
Dark shapes that flutter on the fringes of sight:

From out of our dreams these things have arisen,
Shadowy phantoms in the gibbous moon's sheen.
Old ones grow restless and break from their prison
When strange aeons come and the stars all convene.
Dreams become horror, all saneness forsaken,
When all of the eldritch old gods awaken.

© 1999 Alan Peschke

Lamentry

2005-09-04T20:46:00.000-05:00

On the far north end of the Texas panhandle there is a tiny, almost completely unnoticed town called Lamentry. Lamentry has a fairly colorful history, as small towns go, having been founded as a waypoint for cattle drives coming out of New Mexico and Arizona bound for Abilene, Kansas. It has seen its share of gunfights, usually disagreements between drunken cowboys over the local bargirls. In fact, the town began with a gunfight between its two founders back before the war between the states.

Eighteen hundred and fifty-eight, it was, when Luther Cosgrove and Able Tanner decided it would be profitable to provide a welcome stop for cattle drivers coming out of the sparse plains of New Mexico to stop on their long dusty trip. The land provided plenty of water and grass, and they would provide other necessities such as whisky and women. The town was funded by some of their banker friends back east who saw an opportunity for profit, and when Luther and Able first arrived there they were partners and best of friends. Luther wanted to name the town Cosgrove, of course, and Able, well, he wanted to name it Tannerville. They were unable to solve the disagreement amicably, and their friendship eventually turned to enmity, and the enmity to violence. Neither one was what you could honestly call a gunfighter, but of course they both carried guns, as everyone did. By the time the town had taken shape and could boast of a few saloons and at least one general mercantile, it still had no name. One day when both Luther and Able had had a few whiskeys too many and happened to come out of two saloons right across the street from each other at the same time, well, a final settlement on the name of the town was just about inevitable. No one saw who drew first, but everyone heard the shots, and when the bullets stopped flying Able was dead and Luther dying. There were several people gathered around Luther, watching him gasp out his last breath, when they heard him say something. Mortally wounded as he was, he could hardly get it out, and there was some dispute as to whether he said "lemon tree" or "lamentry," neither of which made any sense. An enterprising journalist who had decided to make a go of starting his own newspaper there wrote the item up as "lamentry," and somehow the name stuck. So neither Luther nor Able had his way, in the end.

Gunfights were fairly common from then on, as is the way of most towns where the main industries are liquor and ladies of pleasure, and most of the customers are traveling, trail-weary cowboys. There was one particular gunfight, however, that some of the folks remember and still talk about today. The war had ended, all the Confederate states were once again part of the Union, and the cattle industry was getting back into full swing since all the soldiers had quit soldiering and needed to go back to making a living.

One day a tall, dark stranger rode into town on a gaunt, black horse, a horse so thin you could count its ribs. The stranger wore black leathers and an eyepatch, and he and the horse were both covered with several layers of trail dust. He wasn't part of any cattle drive, that much was certain, but other than that no one could say much about him. Nobody seemed to know his name, and he didn't offer it. Rumor went around that he had been a rebel sharpshooter during the war, but that may have just been because of the Sharps rifle sticking out of a saddle scabbard. He wore a big Walker Colt tied down low in a gunfighter's style on his left--though whether he was a southpaw by nature or necessity no one could say, since it was his right eye that the patch covered.

He was in town for no more than a week, all told. He took an upstairs room at the Silver Dollar, which he paid for in gold coin. There he spent most of his time, only coming down to the bar in the afternoons, where he'd stay until late at night drinking whiskey and playing poker. Old Gus, the barkeep, might still tell some folks about how the stranger checked in. When Gus asked him to sign in for the room, he just looked at Gus for a second, and said, "Oh, you'll know me." Some folks wondered if the stranger was on the run from the law, though he didn't act like someone who was hiding out. Besides, he caused no trouble until that last day, and there was nothing wrong with the gold he paid for the room. Gus will even remark how the stranger was one of the best customers he ever had. Paid for his room, bought whiskey, and played poker. "Funny thing," Gus sometimes adds, "how the fellow never seemed to eat."

About the only time he left the Silver Dollar was to go tend to his horse. That horse was just as quiet as the stranger himself, just stayed in his stall in the stable, and never made so much as a nicker even when all the other horses were feeling restless. Speaking of which, the other horses didn't seem to like it much. They all tended to shy away from that skeletal black beast. When the stranger brought it in, he paid Raleigh--he was the blacksmith, you know, and kept a stable on the side--with one of those gold coins and just said, "I'll tend him myself." Raleigh still remembers. Sometimes he'll even say that the stranger's voice was cold and dead as the desert in December, but Raleigh's always been the kind to use a dozen words where one would do, if you take my meaning.

Then there was the incident with Lovey Phillips. Lovey, like most women of her particular vocation, had been around the turn a time or two and had probably seen a few things that wouldn't normally be spoken about in polite company. Not that the company kept at the Silver Dollar was necessarily polite--Lovey herself least of all. But, she kept herself well and was one of the more popular ladies at that fine recreational establishment. She had seen the stranger pay for his room that first day, and when she saw those gold coins she got the idea in her head that if she could earn herself a few of those coins she'd soon be leaving for greener pastures, maybe even change careers and open a little sewing shop up in Abilene.

So about the second or third day after the stranger showed up, she caught him playing poker and sat herself down on his knee.

"Honey, you look like you could use some company," she said, all smiling and as pretty she could be.

"I don't think so." It was all the stranger said, but his tone of voice had the finality of a grave in it.

Lovey was not to be discouraged. "Oh, come on now, honey," she said, then leaned over and whispered something right in the stranger's ear.

Suddenly he had hold of her wrist and pushed her away, forcing her to leave his knee and stand on her own feet. A look that some believed was only frustration, but others later said might have been fear, shifted across her wide blue eyes as the stranger pinned her with his dark, one-eyed glare. They stared at each other for a few seconds, then the stranger said, "Well, if that's what you really want."

They went on upstairs to the stranger's room and no one thought anymore of it, it was just the usual day's business at the Silver Dollar. It wasn't more than ten minutes before everyone heard a shriek from upstairs, then another, and the general hubbub of the saloon ceased as everyone listened to doors slamming and Lovey screaming something that no one could understand. Tess Harper, who shared a room with Lovey, went up to talk to her and came back down in a few minutes for a bottle of whiskey, saying Lovey just needed something to calm her down. Lovey calmed herself down, all right. She drank herself senseless that night. Tess wasn't able to get much sleep, either. Lovey just kept moaning to herself in her sleep, things like "red hungry eye," "darkness," "black stars," and curiously enough, "buzzards." Tess wasn't able to make heads or tails of it, but whatever happened in that stranger's upstairs room, Lovey didn't want any part of it. Apparently she'd earned herself a couple of those gold coins, though. She bought a seat on the first stagecoach to Abilene the very next morning, and no one in Lamentry ever saw her again. As for the stranger, he never said anything about it. The next day he was just playing poker and drinking whiskey as usual.

The stranger had been in town for right at a week when Ben Yates arrived. Ben was a cowboy who worked the cattle drives, and he fancied himself as something of a gunslinger. He was known to the folks in Lamentry, and on two separate occasions he had had gunfights in the street just outside of the Silver Dollar. He won them both, of course, and there was talk that he had had other gunfights in other towns along the trail. He was a hothead, that much was certain, and he wore a pair of Navy Colts that he was mighty proud of. He'd told the story more than once of how he had taken them from a Yankee captain who he'd killed during the war. On this particular day he got himself into the same poker game as the stranger. Some of the other gentlemen sitting around that poker table said that Ben accused the stranger of cheating, and they exchanged some words, when Ben jumped up and called the stranger a liar. No one heard the stranger's reply, but Ben began reaching for his gun when Gus yelled at him to take it outside, nobody was going to shoot up his bar.

In those days, a man was only as good as his word, and being called a liar was a mortal insult, something that you just didn't let go by without doing something about it. So it was only to be expected that Ben and the stranger would settle this little altercation with bullets. Ben nodded toward the doors and said, "Let's go." The stranger, in his quiet, flat, humorless voice, just said, "Well, if that's what you really want."

The streets cleared when they went outside; it was obvious to everyone that death was going to visit their little town within the next few minutes. Ben and the stranger stood facing each other thirty or forty feet apart, Ben crouching and tense, his fingers working just above the butts of his guns, the stranger standing motionless and seemingly without a care. Just about everyone who could was watching out of various doors and windows, and later most everyone agreed about the shadow of a low-flying buzzard that flickered over the street just as Ben went for his gun.

Ben was confident that he would win another gunfight. He didn't have a doubt in his mind. The stranger's big Walker wasn't really made for quick-drawing. It was more of a saddle gun that weighed almost twice as much as one of Ben's Navy Colts, with a long barrel that let it throw a .44-caliber ball a long way with deadly accuracy, but was awkward to handle in a rush situation such as this. Ben also had two good eyes, he thought smugly to himself, to the stranger's one. He always liked to stare into his opponents eyes before he shot them, but there was something wrong with the stranger's single eye. The way the sun was hitting it or something, made it turn an eerie reddish color. Yes, it was certainly red, almost burning in the stranger's chasmal eye socket. Ben saw the dark shadow of a passing buzzard slide across the street, but he fought the urge to look upward and kept his eyes locked on the stranger and his single burning red eye. Ben reached for his gun, and suddenly it seemed as if everything were moving slowly, so slowly. Ben's gun was already out of its holster and the stranger still stood, motionless, his own revolver still sheathed.

Ben saw another buzzard flying low just behind the stranger, then another and another. His thumb found the hammer of the revolver and he began to tilt the gun up as the hammer was cocked back. The stranger's single burning red eye was positively on fire, like a tiny sun in the middle of the street, a fire that seemed to burn through Ben's eye sockets and bore holes through the back of his skull. He felt something brush past him and looked upward to see a whole flock of buzzards wheeling around him. Their wings brushed him with gusts of a clammy, carrion wind as they snatched at him with skeletal claws. His gun was up and leveled at the stranger when he felt himself gripped remorselessly around the shoulders and lifted into the air by something huge, black, and merciless. Ben screamed, at first more in annoyance than anything else, and the giant buzzard lifted him away from the street as countless more of the things whirled around him, so thick they blotted out the sun, blotted out the land, blocked out everything but the stranger's flaming crimson eye. It was the only light in Ben's universe, a universe filled with black stars that moved strangely and hungered for the warmth of his flesh. For the first time Ben felt fear, as he fought against the thing that held him and he noticed finally that the things weren't buzzards. In the center of their coal-black heads they each had a single burning red eye that never blinked, that saw right through Ben's soul. The swirling, swarming things parted just enough that Ben was able to look down, far far below him where he saw himself still standing in the street pointing his gun. Then the vision was eclipsed by an infinity of dead black wings and flaming crimson eyes as bony claws began to tear him apart, and he screamed and screamed endlessly as he was shredded and swallowed by an oblivion in which there was somehow no relief.

*****

Most of the folks of Lamentry will still tell in loud, insistent voices about how Ben Yates got his final comeuppance from the dark stranger who rode out of town that very day and was never seen again. They still marvel at the skill of the stranger, who waited until the last instant before he drew his big revolver with impossible speed and sent a single ball directly through Ben's head. Their voices only become more strident and forceful if anyone tries to suggest otherwise. Some of them will even tell how the stranger took his horse out of the stable, saddled it up, and rode out of town before anyone could get up the nerve to go out on the street again. In fact, it was a good half-hour after the stranger and his cadaverous black horse had disappeared over the horizon before Evan Zager, enterprising undertaker that he was, walked out into the street to start taking measurements for Ben's final resting place.

But there are just a few folks in Lamentry who will tell a different story. In the hush of quiet back rooms there are a handful of people who will speak in careful whispers of what really happened. Folks like Gus the barkeep, who was watching from behind the Silver Dollar's swinging doors, or Raleigh the blacksmith, who was peeking out through a knothole in the wall of his shop, or Tess the bargirl, who was looking down from an upstairs window. They will speak quietly of how the shadow of a low-flying buzzard flicked across the street just as Ben slapped leather, and how the stranger stood impassive and unmoving the entire time. How Ben looked upward as his mouth curled back from his teeth into a rictus of voiceless terror, and how he finally began screaming as he deliberately drew his gun and placed the end of the barrel against his temple. And lastly, with halting words, they will tell of how his final scream abruptly stopped when he shot himself in the head.

© 2000 Alan Peschke

Homecoming

2005-09-04T20:29:00.000-05:00

The old woman sat on her front porch in a rocking chair. The chair creaked rhythmically--or maybe it was the planks of the old porch--everything was so ramshackle it was hard to tell anymore exactly where the creaks were coming from. Maybe it was even her old bones, moaning and popping with the stress of her great age. The dilapidated shack behind her was nearly as drafty as the porch in bad weather, and nearly as pleasant in good weather. She extracted a plug of tobacco and a pocketknife from within the folds of her dress and hewed off a chew, which she popped into her mouth and began working slowly, letting the dark rich taste fill her mouth and waft up into her sinuses. Abruptly she stopped rocking, peering away into the distance where a dark green line of trees skirted along the riverbank. A figure appeared from out of the trees and walked toward her and the house. She squinted into the distance for a few seconds, then leaned back and resumed her rocking. In spite of her fading eyesight she knew it could only be one person. It was her grandson. The war was over, and he was coming home.

*****

Jeremiah Cullum had had all he wanted of fighting, and shooting, and killing and dying. He hadn't been terribly motivated to join the war anyway, he'd only done it because his grandmother had told him it would be good for him to see what other parts of the world were like, before it came time for him to leave. He guessed he'd seen enough of it; what he had seen he sure wouldn't miss after he was gone. He'd been walking for weeks to get back home; when he got to the Sabine River he just dropped his musket on the far riverbank and swam across. He was fairly certain he wouldn't need the gun anymore, anyway. The river water, going briny here so close to the Gulf of Mexico, had felt cool and clean, and he almost felt cleansed of all he'd seen and experienced in the last four years. It felt good to be home again, to be standing on Texas soil, even though he knew he wouldn't be staying and that this home had never truly been his real home. Soon Texas would be part of the Union again, just like all the rest of the Confederacy, but by that time he would be long gone.

He left the giant moss-hung cypress trees behind him and walked toward the old shack at the other end of the clearing. It was where he'd been born, and grown up, where his parents, Grampa, and little sister had lived before they had gone on. He could barely remember his grandfather. Old Benjamin Cullum had gone on a long time ago, when Jeremiah was hardly more than a baby, and his sister had gone when they were both kids. He could see his grandmother sitting in her rocking chair, the same place she'd been sitting when he had left to join the rebels in 1861. He could almost believe she'd been sitting there the whole time, not moving except for her gentle rocking, the only consistent thing in this country that had been so torn by the chaos that the war brought on. The war...

He was still haunted by vivid memories of some of the things he'd seen. He would never forget Shiloh. He had probably come as close to death as he ever would, back at Shiloh. He had felt himself a part of an invincible force as his regiment had advanced in a ragged line toward the waiting Federal troops. There was a sudden thundering rumble of muskets and artillery and men began falling all around him. He had a vivid split-second vision of a giant scythe cutting through a hayfield, except the hay in this field were men; Confederate troops by the thousand collapsing in pools of blood and shattered limbs. His face was spattered by bits of flesh and bone fragments as a bullet struck someone near him. Many were dead when they hit the ground, others, not so lucky, fell screaming with arms or legs nearly severed from the deadly minié balls hurtling through the air toward them. Some pulled insanely at their clothing to see exactly where they'd been hit--those who had been hit in the guts knew they would be facing a long, slow, excruciatingly painful death. The first bullet to hit him actually crashed through the lock of the old squirrel rifle he carried before him, breaking the gun completely in two and deflecting into his hip. Almost at the same time, a second ball hit him in the arm. He spun and fell as he heard an unending howl of thousands more musket balls flying over him. He remained still. Maybe if he quit moving no one would shoot at him. Maybe...he had regained consciousness hours later, when it was nearly dark and the only sounds were the moans and screams of the men still lying in the field, dying all around him.

He shook himself to try and rid his mind of the visions of that battlefield. After Shiloh all he wanted to do was go home, but the fighting wasn't over yet, not by a long shot.

*****

Gramma Cullum was wearing a faded old calico dress with a matching bandanna; the bandanna wrapped around her head like a scarf and tied with a bow in the back to cover her nearly bald head. As he approached more closely he found himself unable to speak. A simple hello just didn't seem right anymore. Gramma Cullum spat a long dark brown arch of tobacco juice away from the porch. "Well, it's good to see you home," she said.

"It's good to be...here," answered Jeremiah. He couldn't bring himself to call it home anymore.

"Come on up where I can get a look at you," said his grandmother. "My eyes ain't so good no more, these days."

"Yes'm," he answered. He walked closer and lifted one foot up onto the edge of the low porch, crossing his arms on his knee. His grandmother looked him over more closely.

"You been doin' okay?" she asked.

"Yes'm," he answered.

"Know anything new?"

"I reckon I might, Gramma." He hesitated, and was about to speak when she cut him off.

"You ain't stayin', are you?"

"No ma'am," he answered. "I just wanted to stop by and..."

"You got somethin' on your mind, go ahead and tell me."

"Well, I just seen some things I wanted to tell you about."

She spat again, and gestured for him to continue.

*****

"I guess I always thought I'd be able to live here forever," he started. "Even after ever'body but you an' me was gone, I thought maybe it'd just stay like this. I figgered I could spend the rest of my days fishin' in the river and takin' a few 'gators from the swamp, take the skins down to Port Arthur for a little cash money when we needed it."

"You know that cain't be," his grandmother said. "We cain't stay here forever."

"Yes'm," he agreed. "I guess just a part of me thought maybe it could be that way. Anyhow I damn near didn't come back. I liked to got killed twice. Them Yankee boys weren't half-bad fighters, I'll tell you what."

"First time was at Shiloh," he continued. "We just about had them Yankees on the run, then durin' the night they got some reinforcements. They whupped hell out of us the next day. I caught a ball in my arm, right about here, and another one here." He pointed to a spot on his left arm about midway between shoulder and elbow, and another spot somewhere on his left hip. It hurt like all hell, and I figgered maybe if I quit movin' they'd stop shootin' at me. I musta laid there for hours, nearly bled to death, then fin'ly when things quieted down I got up and drug myself back into camp. Damn sawbones was gonna cut my arm off, said it was the only way to keep me from gettin' the gangrene. Well, you know I've always been stronger'n most folks, I was still able to put up a hell of a fuss. Told him wasn't no way he was gonna saw off my arm, kep' raisin' such a ruckus that fin'ly he just said, 'All right, you wanna die, you go 'head an' die. I got other people need's takin' care of.' So I crawled off an' hid up in some real thick brush for a few days until I got to feelin' better. I went ahead and joined back up with my regiment, a few weeks later I saw that doctor again. He went plumb white when he seen me. Didn't say nothin', just went all white and scared-like and went on his way, like he figgered I shoulda been dead by that time. I just laughed at him, and waved like this with my shot arm, to show him it was okay, and that kinda seemed to scare him even more. Bastard called hisself a doctor. Cuttin' off people's arms an' legs was all that sawbones was good for."

"You watch your language," said his grandmother. "He was just doin' his job as best he could."

"Yes'm", he answered sullenly. "I reckon he was."

"So how's your arm?" she asked.

He rolled up his sleeve to reveal a puckered white mass of toughened skin where the musket ball had struck him. "I guess I'll always have this here scar, but other than that, seems just fine."

"Yep," she said, leaning forward to peer at it more closely, "our folk always was better at healin' up hurts than most. I reckon you'll be okay."

"The next time," he said, "that's what I mainly wanted to tell you about. We was stationed up along the Red River. I had been assigned to scout duty and was out all by myself when I just walked smack into a little group of three Yankees. You know when I left here all I had was Daddy's old squirrel gun, but by this time I'd took one of them fancy muskets off a dead Yankee somewhere or 'nother, it had a bayonet an' all. Anyhow, when I walked into them three boys we all looked at each other real surprised for about two seconds, an' then all hell cut loose. I shot one, took another one out with the bayonet, and then the third one managed to wing me, I reckon he wasn't a very good shot. I figger I was real lucky he didn't kill me right then and there."

"Yep, our folks always was good in a scrap," interrupted his grandmother, a glint of admiration in her eyes.

"Anyway," he continued, "I'd lost my musket when I put the bayonet through the guts of that one ol' boy, he had twisted around back'ards and I lost my grip on it. I didn't reckon I wanted to take on that last Yankee, him with a bayonet and me with only my bare hands, so I dove right into the river. I can hold my breath for a long time, so I figgered I'd just stay under until he got tired of lookin' for me and wandered off. I held my breath so long I was about to bust, then fin'ly I come up real slow like with just my eyes out of the water and took a look around. Damn it if that ol' boy wasn't still prowlin' around the riverbank lookin' for me. He seen me too, so I went under again and I guess he musta reloaded because I felt a hard smack in the water that I figgered was prob'ly a musket ball. I knew it would take him a while to reload so I went ahead and came up again, and damn it if that son of a gun didn't just drop his musket and come into the water after me!"

His grandmother's expression only changed to a slightly greater degree of curiosity as she spat once more. "Then what?" she asked.

"I didn't think he could swim near as good as me, so I went for the deepest water I could find, but damn if he didn't come right after me. We went at it, right there in the river, and that ol' boy was strong, nearly as strong as me! Fin'ly I got a grip around his neck that he couldn't break, and I held on a long time, him still squirmin' and wigglin' like a fish on a hook. I had to surface for another breath, so I kep' my grip on him and got back into some shallow water where I could sit up with my head above water and get some air. Fin'ly he stopped movin', so I drug him out on a sandbar and just sat there a while gettin' my breath back. 'Bout that time I got to looking at 'im and got to noticin' he was kinda familiar." He stopped for a second and looked directly at his grandmother. "Gramma, you reckon we got any Yankee kinfolk?" he asked.

"Yankee kinfolk?" she echoed.

"Yes ma'am," he confirmed. "Once I got to lookin' him over I noticed how he had them big eyes like we get. He wasn't quite so far along, but he was just beginnin' to lose his hair and such. I pulled his shirt open and took a good look at his neck, and I'm pretty sure he was our kinda folk."

His grandmother took several long, thoughtful chews of her tobacco before she answered. "Well..." she drawled, "I reckon there's folks like us all over the world these days. Wouldn't surprise me a'tall if we had some kinfolk up north."

"Well, anyhow," said Jeremiah, "after that, I guess with me spendin' all that time in the water tryin' to hold my breath an' all, it started the change somethin' fierce. I figgered I better get on back home. The fightin' was mostly done by then, anyway. So I started back home an' here I am."

"You'll be goin' on, then?" asked his grandmother.

"Yes'm," he replied. "I figger two, three days at most, I'll be ready to go. I reckon I'll just head south and hide out in the swamp along the coast until the time comes.

His grandmother leaned forward, taking his chin in her hand and turning his head from side to side as she looked him over. "Yep," she agreed, "the change comes to some sooner than t'others. Looks like it's about your time." She leaned back and resumed rocking. "You tell your Momma and Daddy hello for me, an' little Liza and Grampa too, if you can find 'em."

"Yes'm. I don't reckon Liza is so little no more, though. She's prob'ly growed up pretty big by now." His grandmother only nodded in reply.

"I got to thinkin'," continued Jeremiah, "maybe I'll head up north and see if I can find any other kinfolk up there. I guess the war don't mean much to us now, anyway."

"You do that," said his grandmother. "An' if you find 'em, you give 'em my best regards."

"Yes ma'am. I guess I better go."

"You take care, Jer'miah. I'll be seein' you again, someday. Later or sooner, I'll be there."

He walked away slowly, looking back several times to see his grandmother still sitting, still rocking and chewing her plug as he walked back to the river.

Gramma Cullum watched her grandson hesitantly walk away, trying to remind herself that she shouldn't miss him, or anyone else in her family. It was only a matter of time before she would see them all again. She was still sitting there at sundown. As the soft summer darkness slowly welled up from the thickening trees away down by the river, and the quiet noises of the night began to echo from the swamp around the shack, she sat and remembered. Her husband Ben had gone on long ago, along with many of the other residents of this old backwoods where they had settled all those years ago.

"Derned old cuss," she muttered as she thought about him.

Her son and his wife had gone on when Jeremiah was only a boy, and she had been left to raise him all by herself, but that was nothing. He was family, and she was glad to do it. His little sister Liza had been born with the change already coming upon her. She remembered how all the family had gone down to the coast with her, and how Ben had been waiting, tall and strong and dark in the moonlight as the breakers crashed along the sandy shoreline. How little Liza had giggled, a sharp gurgling laugh as he had taken her hand and they had vanished with hardly a ripple beneath the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

"The change comes sooner to some than t'others," she mumbled to herself, and took a deep breath of the briny air that wafted up from the salty marsh around her.

*****

Three days later, just after dark, a strange crouching figure appeared from out of the brush along a thin strip of beach several miles to the south of Gramma Cullum's old shack. It half-walked, half-hopped into the breakers and as the salty water swirled around its legs, there appeared on its face an expression that might have been a smile. Farther out away from the beach four other similar figures appeared. One waved and shouted a deep, croaking hello over the noise of the crashing surf.

The thing that had once been Jeremiah Cullum knew it was his grandfather waving to him. He hesitated for just a moment, looking back toward the shore. Somewhere back in that darkness his grandmother still waited. He knew he would miss her, even knowing that someday, sooner or later, he would see her again.

He dove into the water and croaked with pleasure as his newly-developed gills responded to the water washing over them. His family was waiting.

© 1998 Alan Peschke

Darker

2005-09-04T10:47:00.000-05:00

My family hadn't heard from my Uncle Jonas in several months. He was the brother of my grandfather, and he had always lived on his plot of land near the edge of that swamp--the land that he had inherited from his father. I hadn't seen him in several years myself, not since he had come to a family reunion that we held in Gonzales. He didn't like to travel, and that was the only time the reunion had been held near his home. He looked like an old farmer from the early years of this century--which I guess he was, in fact, wearing overalls and a floppy straw hat, the thin hair that fringed the sides of his head the color of clean sand. My dad had once mentioned that his old house didn't originally have electricity or indoor plumbing, but that both had been installed about the time I was born. However, he had never had a phone installed. My dad had asked him to move several times, even offered to help him pay for such a move, but he insisted that that was his home, and that's where he would stay. He usually wrote to us once or twice a year, just to let us know he was still alive and kicking, he always said. I had taken a few days vacation from work with no particular plans, so my dad asked me to go check on Uncle Jonas. It was only a few hours drive, and I thought a drive into the country would be a nice break from my usual habits, so I agreed.

I left my home in the sandhills east of San Antonio, cutting across a few state highways and narrow farm roads until I reached Gonzales. Once there, I turned off on Highway 183, angling back to the northwest toward Ottine and Luling. The highway almost perfectly parallels the San Marcos River as it runs back to the southeast past Gonzales to its intersection with the Guadalupe. The San Marcos River itself is the demarcation of the Balcones fault line--to the south the plains roll away toward the Gulf of Mexico, to the north the hills rise steeply, and the roads are full of twists and turns and ever-changing vistas. As I drove along the winding highway, houses became more and more scarce, traffic became sparse and the landscape grew increasingly wild. When I passed Warm Springs I knew I was getting close, and on the next hilltop saw the slightly eerie panorama of Ottine Swamp spread out below me. In spite of the summer heat and the sun high up in the sky, there were still pockets of mist lying quietly mysterious along the low places, where darkness seemed to cling in mute defiance of the clear blue sky above and the hot Texas midafternoon. It was somewhere down along the edge of that swamp that I knew Uncle Jonas lived. I pulled off to the side of the road and consulted the map my dad had drawn for me. After fixing a picture of the map in my mind as well as I could, I drove on more slowly looking for the unpaved county road that would take me to Uncle Jonas' house.

Once I found it and turned off the highway it was all downhill, a dirt road with scattered, rough gravel and deep washboard ruts that made me slow down to keep from tearing my pickup apart. It twisted like a snake almost back on itself several times, all the while descending toward the river and the swamp. After several minutes of this, I found the tiny bare dirt lane that went to Uncle Jonas' house. It went straight for a hundred yards or so, then made a sharp turn, and another fifty yards away I could see the old house, next to it a 50's-era Chevrolet truck, and the old man standing out in front. As I approached more closely I realized that he was cradling a weapon--either a rifle or shotgun--in the crook of one arm. I kept both hands in plain view on the top of the steering wheel as I rolled slowly to a stop and then stepped out.

I said "howdy" and it only took a few seconds for him to recognize me. A grin replaced the scowl as he said, "Well, if it ain't little Davy. You done some growin' since last I saw you." No one had called me "Davy" for years. I grinned back. At least the old fellow's memory was still clear, if he could recognize me after all this time. We shook hands, and he invited me up to the house.

A few minutes later we were sitting at his kitchen table. Upon entering the kitchen I had noticed with some relief that he did have an old refrigerator-freezer, and though it looked like something from a 1950's TV show, it still worked. He had poured us each a quart jar full of iced tea and now we sat, sipping the cool brown liquid as I caught him up on the family news.

"Guess you're dad sent you out here to see if I was still alive," he suddenly said bluntly.

"Well," I answered, "he had written you several times, and since you never answered..." I let the sentence trail away unfinished.

"Yep," he replied, "well...didn't rightly know what I should say, the way things been goin'. Seemed like a waste of a stamp just to say 'yep, I'm still here.' Been tryin' to think of how to explain things without soundin' like a crazy old man."

I looked down at the large old black and tan hound that lay sprawled across the floor. It had followed us into the house when we came in. I thought that my uncle's behavior was a little odd, and didn't know what to think about his last statement at all.

"I just been waitin' and watchin'," and he touched the old hound gently with the toe of his boot, getting a few lazy tail wags in response. "Ain't that right, Zeke?"

Watching? For what? I wondered. I was afraid maybe his mind was slipping after all, though by the way he kept his house and by the brief conversation we'd had, I had every reason to think he was still in full control of his faculties. So I asked him, "Watching for what?"

He didn't answer right away. First he took another sip of tea, then grunted softly to himself and took another larger swallow. Finally he gave me a calculating look and asked, "You ever hear of a fellow named Newley Meriwether?"

Though the family name of Meriwether sounded vaguely familiar, the name Newley didn't ring a bell at all. I said as much.

"Well," said Uncle Jonas, "when I was a young'un Newley was a friend of mine. Back then times was hard, not much cash money. Me an' Newley did lots of huntin', between us we helped keep both our families fed. Lots of wild animals down in the swamp, plenty of deer, even when deer was hard to find we could still get plenty of squirrel or rabbit, we ate pretty good most of the time. Course, we also did some trappin'. Even durin' the Great Depression there was still a market for hides, and we took in a little cash from 'coons an' ringtails, maybe a 'possum or two. Just enough to keep our heads above water. I usually let Newley have most of the cash, seein' as how he didn't have a pa no more, his family was havin' a harder time an' needed it worse'n ours did."

"Newley didn't have a pa no more," he repeated. "That's another thing that always struck us as kinda strange. One night he just up and walked into the swamp, and that was it. Newley's ma thought he was just goin' out to check on the chickens, or somethin'. She asked him what was wrong, and he said, 'It's too dark,' just like that, and walked outside. They never seen him again."

"Me and Newley was pretty good trackers back then, we looked around the next day 'cause of course everyone was gettin' pretty worried, we thought we found a trail and we followed it maybe a mile into the swamp before we lost it. Newley's ma never was quite right after that, neither was Newley for that matter, but he seemed to take it better than his ma...maybe just because that made him the man of the family after his pa disappeared, and he had to be strong for her."

"Everybody had their opinions about what had happened, of course. Only thing is, nobody talked about it when any of the Meriwethers was around. Everybody pretty much thought the same thing...the Thing got him."

This particular turn of phrase caught my attention more closely. The Thing? Somehow this phrase set off memories in my mind that had been forgotten for at least 20 years. The Thing...? I must have heard my dad or grandpa mention it long ago.

"Don't reckon you're old enough to remember any of those stories," Uncle Jonas continued. "People don't talk about it much anymore. They still believe it, I guarantee you, they just don't say much. Folks who ain't from around here joke about it, because they don't believe. But folks who are from around here don't make jokes because they believe, and they don't talk serious about it neither, because they're scared." He turned his head to look out the front window. "And I don't blame 'em," he added.

"Just a minute," he said, got up with a grunt and walked slowly into the next room, and soon came back with a large book. He thumbed through its thick pages for a few seconds before he found what he was looking for, placed it on the table before me and resumed his seat. It was an old photo album. The picture he pointed to was an old, faded black and white photo with scalloped edges. Two young men sat on the open tailgate of a pickup, and between them sat two hounds. I immediately recognized one of them as my uncle, and guessed he must have been about 17 or 18.

"That's me on the right," Uncle Jonas explained, "Newley on the left, and those two hounds was Blue and Pete. Blue was Newley's, and Pete was mine. We was real proud of them hounds, caught lots of 'coons with 'em. Pete was ol' Zeke's great-great-grand-daddy, many times over I reckon." He leaned back and took another swallow of tea. "Your grandpa took that picture the day..." His voice trailed off and he took another long swallow, cleared his throat and started over again.

"I said before that folks didn't talk about it much, but me an' Newley, we talked about it some. 'Cause we had seen it, or seen where it shoulda been, anyways. All the huntin' we did out in that swamp, 'specially at night when we was trackin' 'coons, we run into it twice. First time, the dogs'd been runnin' somethin' for over an hour, goin' this way an' that but always gettin' deeper into the swamp. We figured it was prob'ly a lion, the way it was runnin', didn't never tree, just kept goin' futher and futher in." I knew when he said "lion" he really meant the mountain lion, or cougar, which back then was still ranging all across central Texas, and was not an uncommon encounter for night hunters. "Well, sir," he went on, "the dogs finally treed it in a big ol' cypress down on the river bottom. We heard it scream when they treed it, so we got down there to 'em fast as we could. A lion like that coulda torn those old hounds apart if it was feeling brave, but we figured maybe if we got down there with our lights we could keep it scared enough so's it wouldn't attack us until we could pull the dogs off and get our tails outta there."

"I'll tell you what...it was dark down in that river bottom. It hadn't seemed so bad when we started out, but gettin' down into that swamp was like goin' down into a cave or somethin'. We were walkin' through all kinda muck and brambles and what-not, I don't know 'bout Newley but I was prayin' I wouldn't step on a cottonmouth or somethin' even worse. I'd heard about patches of quicksand down in that swamp that could suck a cow under in no time. Anyways, we got down there fast as we could and sure 'nough, those two hounds'd treed a lion up in that big ol' cypress. We shined our carbide lights up in there and could see 'im, his eyes glowin' green and yellow while he was snarlin' down at us. The dogs was goin' crazy by this time, itchin' for a fight that I knew would get 'em both killed. The only gun we had was my single-shot .22, it was a good gun for knockin' 'coons out of a tree but was kinda small for somethin' like a lion. Newley grabbed his Blue by the collar, and I grabbed Pete, and there we were draggin' them dogs away, them bawlin' like all hell the whole time, us tryin' to keep our lights shined up in that tree, watchin' that damn lion runnin' back an' forth on that one big limb he was on, screamin' down at us while we was hollerin' at the dogs to shut up and get the hell out..."

"Then all of a sudden the lion shut up, the dogs shut up, an' me an' Newley both looked around wonderin' what was goin' on. There was a sound like a...well, you know how much racket a armadillo can make pushin' its nose around rummagin' for grubs and what-not. It was that kinda sound, like somethin' pushin' its way through the brush, only if it was a armadillo doin' it he musta been big as a Brahma bull. That lion come down outta that tree like his tail was on fire, I saw him comin' down and just about had a heart attack 'cause I thought I was gonna have to try and shoot 'im, but he high-tailed it the other way and we never saw 'im again."

"Durin' all this confusion with the lion and all, me an' Newley had got separated, we was standin' 30, 35 yards apart. By this time the dogs had turned around and were facin' away from the river, back toward where we had come from. I'll tell you what, I thought those dogs had been bristlin' for a fight with that lion, but now they were damn sure bristlin' up for somethin'. You can tell how a dog's feelin' when you get to know 'em. When a dog is ready to fight, he acts fierce and all, barkin' and carryin' on like he's not afraid of nothin' in the world, but what these dogs was doin' now was somethin' different. Ol' Pete, his hair was standin' on end like I hadn't ever seen before, an' he was crouched down behind me, growlin' real low in his throat, and tryin' to pull away from me backwards like he was tryin' to get away from somethin', instead of tryin' to get to somethin'. I could still hear whatever it was crashin' through the brush out there, me an' Newley was both shinin' our lights out there but we couldn't see nothin'. I heard Newley say, 'What in hell is that?' but I didn't answer, didn't have no answer. That crashin' through the brush sound was gettin' louder, like whatever it was was gettin' closer, and then finally I could see the brush movin', but there wasn't nothing there to make it move. Just the underbrush movin' aside like when a boat pushes through water, and sometimes the trees'd shiver like somethin' real big had slammed up against 'em."

"Like I said, me an' Newley was standin' maybe 30 yards apart. I looked over at Newley, an' he looked right back at me. You know, our lights were in these headbands, like those ol' doctor's headlights, so they'd shine in whatever direction we turned our heads. So my light was shinin' right on Newley, and his was shinin' right on me, and that's when that damn thing went right between us."

That damn thing...something about that phrase struck a chord in my memory, reminding me of an old horror story I'd once read. "Did you see it?" By this time I was convinced that my uncle had seen something, something that, under the circumstances, had seemed horrible at the time but which they had later on, laughed about.

"Nope," he answered shortly. He rubbed his hand over his mouth and lower jaw in agitation, and fingered his tea glass nervously. "Like I said, we was shinin' our lights right at each other, and when it went between us there wasn't nothin' but dark. Just dark. Like somethin' big had gone through there and blocked out the light, but what it was, we couldn't see."

"Whatever it was," he continued, "it kept right on goin', 'bout as fast as you could walk if you was in a hurry. It went on past, so me an' Newley could see each other again, an' we swung our lights on down to the river where we could hear it still goin'. We shined our lights down there in them reeds along the riverbank, and I could see 'em movin' aside like somethin' big was just plowin' through 'em, but there wasn't nothin' there to see. Just a big spot of darkness down there that was somehow darker than the night."

"Well, sir, we high-tailed it outta there, and them dogs was glad to go, they didn't want no part of it. We could still hear it crashin' around through the brush, like it was followin' us but not so fast as it would really catch us. When we finally cleared the swamp and got up onto some solid ground, we heard it call. Now of course, I'd heard lions scream, I'd heard buzzards cackle at each other when they were fightin' over their meal, that can kinda make your hair stand on end. But this was somethin' different. Wasn't like no animal I'd ever heard, and it wasn't like nothin' human, neither."

"After that, me an' Newley took to callin' it the Darker, 'cause that was how it looked to us, darker than anything else."

For a second my memory flashed back to my late grandpa, who had been convinced that his house was haunted by its previous owner. I must have smiled slightly at the memory.

"What's so funny?" asked Uncle Jonas.

"I was just thinking about Grandpa," I answered, "how he thought his house was haunted."

"Well..." replied Uncle Jonas, "he was my little brother, and I loved him dearly, but I never could see how he could believe that nonsense. Nope, whatever the Darker is, it ain't a ghost. It's..." he hesitated as he seemed to be fumbling for the right words, "it's...outside...of...things we know about."

It was getting late in the afternoon and I looked out through the window, wondering if I should get started going back home. "You're welcome to stay the night," said Uncle Jonas. "Still got a spare bedroom, prob'ly a little dusty but you're welcome to it."

"Okay, I'll do that." I didn't really feel like driving all the way back home already.

"How long's it been since you had deer meat for supper?" he asked.

"Way too long," I said, grinning.

"Well, we'll see what we can do about that."

Even though Uncle Jonas' house had electricity, he had never bothered to have air conditioning installed, not even a simple window unit. So after a supper consisting of venison, green beans and mashed potatoes, Uncle Jonas suggested we sit out on the back porch where it was cooler. At that time of the summer it wouldn't get dark until nearly nine o'clock, so we still had a few hours before darkness gave us some slight relief from the summer heat. As we went through the house to the back porch, I noticed with just a little trepidation that Uncle Jonas brought the gun with him that he had been holding when I first saw him, and which was never too far from his side. Earlier in the kitchen I had managed to get a close enough look at it to figure out that it was a pump action shotgun. As we walked through his small living room I took a quick look around. There was an easy chair in one corner, and next to it a small stack of newspapers. On a small table nearby was an old radio, and against the outside wall was a big stone fireplace. Above the fireplace was a gun rack holding three more weapons, one bolt action with a scope, one side-by-side double-barreled shotgun, and a smaller rifle that I guessed was probably a .22. The gun rack was nothing unusual itself, I owned a few firearms myself and was quite familiar with their use. However, him carrying around that shotgun all the time had me just a little worried.

We sat in a couple of old chairs on the back porch with our quart jars once again filled with iced tea, looking out across the shadowy swamp. Uncle Jonas leaned his shotgun against the wall. I mentioned that the supper had been very good, and he told me that he'd grown the beans and potatoes himself, and that he'd "shot the deer just a couple hundred yards down that way," he said as he pointed vaguely away down the edge of the swamp. He mentioned that getting a propane oven put in was the best thing he'd ever done, and gestured toward the big propane tank that sat several yards away and to one side of the porch. "Sure beats cookin' on a pot-bellied stove," he added. I had come to admire my old uncle quite a lot in the past few hours that we had become reacquainted, and I was musing that I hoped I would be as spry and active as he when I reached his age, when he brought up the subject of the Darker again.

"Let's see now, I told you that me an' Newley had seen the Darker twice, but I only told you about the first time. That second time...it was the day your grandpa took that picture I showed you." He paused and took a swallow or two of tea before continuing.

"That night me an' Newley went huntin' again. I reckon it was 'bout a year or so after that first time. The 'coons had been runnin' somethin' fierce that night, and we had trailed a few of 'em pretty deep into the swamp. We was gettin' kinda tuckered and figured it was time to pack it in for the night. Well, we got the dogs and started back to the truck, an' that's when I thought I noticed somethin' movin' back down there in the brush. Didn't say nothin' about it though, just figured we'd better get outta there and kept on goin'. We was gettin' pretty close to where we'd left the truck when Newley said, 'It's followin' us, ain't it?' I told him I reckon so. We stopped for a minute and shined our lights back behind us, and sure 'nough, the brush back down in there was movin' around like there was a wind blowin' through it, only it was a still night an' I couldn't feel no wind where we were standin'. So we turned around and hurried on up, tryin' to get back to the truck soon as we could. We made it, and I loaded up Pete and chained him in where he couldn't jump out. Right about then those dogs got to bristlin' all up and growlin' again, and Newley's old Blue just busted loose and took off back into the brush."

"Newley took off after him, cussin' at ol' Blue for bein' such a cantankerous old hound. Pete was chained in tight, so he couldn't jump out, so I figured I should get down there an' help Newley catch ol' Blue. I could hear Blue bawlin' like all hell again, like this time he'd decided he wasn't gonna be scared of whatever that damn thing was down there. I could see Newley's light flashin' in there amongst the trees and started down there toward it. All of a sudden his light blinked on and off, just like it did that first time when that thing had went between us, and then ol' Blue's bawl got cut off sharp and I heard Newley holler...it wasn't no mad holler like he was still cussin' at Blue, it was a scared holler, more like a scream I guess. He come tearin' up out of that brush like he'd gone plumb crazy, his eyes all big and white like he'd seen somethin' terrible. He run right on past me to the truck, like I wasn't even there. I cussed a little and looked back down in there, tryin' to see what happened to ol' Blue, but I couldn't see him. Only thing I saw was this big patch of somethin', somethin' big and dark, swellin' up out of the trees. I decided ol' Blue was a goner and I high-tailed it back to the truck, Newley was standin' there yellin' at me to come on and get the hell outta there, and I did just that. I tore out of there fast as that ol' truck would go. There was a fog comin' in, faster than I had ever seen a fog come in, even down in the swamp, but I didn't care. I just drove like I was crazy tryin' to get outta there. Wasn't 'til we'd got back up on the road that I slowed down and looked over at Newley."

"He was sittin' there shiverin' like he was freezin' to death, his arms all wrapped around himself like he couldn't get warm, even though it must've been damn near 90 degrees. I asked him what had happened down in there. 'It touched me, the damn thing touched me,' he said. Then he looked right at me, all his color gone like I hadn't ever seen before, and he said, 'I seen it, Jonas, I seen the Darker. Big and dark, just big and dark, the damn thing touched me.' I took him on home, didn't know what else to do, him shiverin' the whole time like he was freezin' or somethin'. I wasn't feelin' too brave myself, I hadn't seen it as clear as Newley must have, but the Darker had still scared me pretty bad."

As the sun was setting, a mist had seemed to rise up in the swamp, and shadows from the trees along its edge were weak and thin as the sun was partially obscured by the eerie miasma. I was thinking to myself that there was really no reason to feel spooked, that my uncle had indeed become just a little unhinged in his old age, when he began speaking again.

"Me an' your grandpa went back the next mornin', took our shotguns with us and thought we'd try to find ol' Blue. But he was gone. Wasn't no trace of him, 'cept for a few footprints in the mud down in the brush. But there was other footprints, like nothin' I'd ever seen. Looked sorta like a small person's hand, only the heel come back to a real sharp point, not like normal folk's hands are. And they was deep, like whatever had made 'em was heavy, heavy as a full-grown cow or somethin'."

"Newley wasn't the same after that. We never did go huntin' together again, and I didn't do much huntin' myself, only along the outside edges of the swamp where I felt safer. Not long after that I got called up to the Service. Newley got called up too, but he didn't pass the physical or somethin', he never did get into the Service. They sent me over to Europe. I spent nigh onto four years there, and I seen some mighty awful things. Things that made me throw up, things that made me cry, and things that made me so mad I wanted to kill every damn Nazi I saw. But at least over there you knew what it was that could kill you. Bomb, or bullet, or gas, least it was somethin' you could understand. Nothin' over there ever scared me like the Darker did."

"When I got back I found out that ol' Newley was gone, disappeared just like his pa. He'd left a note, said, 'It's getting too dark,' just like that. Nobody ever seen him again. His ma had a stroke right after that, and died. That meant his family was plumb gone, and not even nothin' left of Newley or his pa to put in a grave."

"That's why I stayed here, never moved away. I been waitin' and watchin' my whole life, waitin' for the Darker to come. I seen it, so I figure whatever it was, it seen me too, and sooner or later it'd come after me. Lately I heard it a few times too, I reckon over the years it's gettin' braver and comin' out to the edges of the swamp more, not stayin' so deep inside like it used to. But I'm gonna be ready for it. Even went into town and got me this new 12-gauge, figured I needed a little more firepower than the old side-by. Pulled out the plug, so she'll hold six shots, got 'er loaded with the heaviest damn buckshot I could find too."

We sat there in silence for several minutes after that, watching the sun sink deeper into the mist that was rising over the swamp until it was just an obscure, fuzzy ball fading away beyond the trees. Already down along the borders of the swamp I could see the darkness gathering in the low places, misty and mysterious away in the distance.

"A while back," Uncle Jonas said suddenly, "I even made a couple of trips into Austin and San Marcos, visited the libraries they got there at the universities. Got one of them young fellows there to show me how to look up books an' such on those computers they got. I did me a heap of readin'. Didn't find much, though, nothing that'd really tell me anything about what the Darker might be. Kept runnin' into all kindsa Bigfoot an' U.F.O. nonsense, buncha bull is what I think."

"Kinda funny, best thing I found was a whole buncha stories, weren't even supposed to be true, that a few fellows wrote a long time ago. Don't know if you ever heard of 'em, fellows like ol' Algernon Blackwood, another name of H.P. Lovecraft, and one damn strange ol' boy name of Ambrose...Ambrose Bierce. 'Specially that Lovecraft fellow. I never did read about nothin' just like the Darker in none of his stories, but he had the right idea...'bout things that maybe weren't meant to be here, or maybe how they are meant to be here, and we're the ones that don't belong. Things that come from someplace else, someplace...outside...don't know exactly how to say it."

At this point Uncle Jonas looked at me sharply. "You ever hear of this word...eldritch?"

"Yes, in fact I have," I answered.

"Well, that's a good word," replied Uncle Jonas. "Good word for the Darker...eldritch. Pretty damn eldritch if you ask me."

By this time the swamp had swallowed the last vestiges of the sunlight and the rising moon had cast an eerie pallor over the swirling mist. Uncle Jonas said he guessed it was time to turn in and wished me good night.

I lay in bed a few minutes later, listening to the dull roar the of countless chirruping frogs that made the swamp their home. The last thing I thought about before sleep claimed me was how I would tell my dad that Uncle Jonas just wasn't quite right anymore.

*****

I awakened later to a strange silence, but I wasn't sure about what had awakened me. I thought I could hear soft movement somewhere in the house and guessed that Uncle Jonas was up puttering around again. After the steady roar of the chirruping frogs that I had gone to sleep with, the silence was somehow ominous. Then I heard it, the sound that I knew had awakened me, and now made me shrink beneath the thin sheet in a plain and simple reflex of sudden fear.

It was like some kind of ungodly siren, beginning with a throaty growl and rising to a high ululation, then back down to end in a sort of roaring cough that echoed in the still, humid night air. I heard the screen door on the back porch slam shut and guessed that Uncle Jonas had gone back outside. Not knowing exactly what I should do, I scrambled into my clothes and began to walk toward the back of the house. I reached the back door and could see my uncle and his hound Zeke standing in the back yard. I heard Uncle Jonas speak.

"Yep, it's gettin' mighty dark, ain't it, Zeke?" he said. "I reckon it's time."

I hesitated a few seconds, trying to decide if I should intervene or not, half afraid for my uncle and half afraid he might mistakenly shoot me if I startled him. Suddenly there was a muted crash from the front of the house, a sound like glass breaking, then that high, ululating cry and another crash. I stumbled hurriedly through the darkened house toward the front door, trying to see what was making all the noise, when I heard my uncle shout, heard Zeke began bawling a deep coonhound bawl--that sound that is neither a bark nor a howl but is somewhere in between--and then a series of thunderous blasts that I knew could only be my uncle's shotgun.

I tripped over something, banging my shin painfully and limping a little more slowly to the front door. That was it, I decided. I'd get in my pickup and get the hell out of here. I'd head for the nearest town and call my dad, let him decide what to do. I got halfway down the steps when I realized I wouldn't be going anywhere.

My pickup had been overturned. It was lying wheels up, a sight that stopped me in my tracks and made me doubt my senses for a few seconds. But there it was. I glanced to the side and saw the same thing had happened to my uncle's old Chevrolet, the top crushed and splintered windshield glass sparkling dimly in the thin moonlight. I backed through the front door, back into the house. Zeke's barking suddenly cut off with a high-pitched yelp and there were no more gun shots. Now what?

Protection. Something was out there and I needed protection. A bear? I had never heard of a bear big enough to flip over a pickup, at least not in Texas. Besides, the black bears that used to live out in East Texas were now all but extinct. So what the hell was it?

I went back into the living room and took down the bolt-action rifle from above the fireplace. It was an old .30-06, and I racked the bolt back to see that the magazine had indeed--as I expected--been left loaded. I shot the bolt home and it scooped a cartridge up into the chamber. Then I tried to go out the front door again.

I actually had my hand on the door and was about to push it open when I saw it. The dim moonlight wasn't bright enough to offer any clear illumination, but there was something...something huge and dark just at the end of the porch steps. I didn't wait around. I crashed back through the house, nearly ripping the back door from its hinges as I tore through it, and ran. Ran like hell.

I wasn't about to go out into that swamp, so I ran at an angle up the hill between it and my uncle's house. I didn't know how far I had run before I caught my foot on something and went down, my ankle twisting beneath me. I fell heavily, curling under to protect the rifle that I still carried as if it were some protective talisman, and crawled painfully behind a nearby fallen tree trunk.

I peered over the top of the log back down the hill toward the house--I had run about 50 yards. The weak light from the waning moon threw just enough light on the scene to let me see that there was something down there. Something big and dark, like my uncle had said, somehow darker than the night itself. Something that seemed to absorb what little light the moon gave into its shapeless immensity. From the way Zeke's bawling had ended, from the way I had never heard my uncle fire another shot after that first fusillade, I guessed they were gone. Gone just like Newley, and Newley's pa, gone just like poor old Blue. It seemed to be moving around the house, crashing into it and smashing everything. I could hear the sounds of glass smashing and wood crunching, then one corner of the roof caved in. All I could see was that big dark shapeless thing smashing the house to pieces, the vague hulks of the two overturned trucks in the front yard, and the dull glint of the big silvery propane tank in the back yard.

The propane tank...the propane tank, I thought to myself. I still had the rifle. I eased it up and braced it across the log, searching for several feverish seconds before I caught the dim glint of the big tank in the scope. I squeezed the trigger.

I can't tell you what I saw in the split second before a piece of flying debris knocked me unconscious. The doctor says the concussion I received robbed me of my short-term memory, and it may be so. Or it may be that I refuse to remember any specific details. The fireball from the exploding gas tank erupted over the moonlit glade, exposing everything in a single, ghastly revelation, and I did see the Darker. A dark, dense, shapeless mass that could have been 10 or 20 feet tall, and just as big around--or two or four times that big. I say could have been, because its form was a constantly shifting, amorphous blot upon the landscape. I vaguely remember hideous, blasphemous shapes horribly suffused with more familiar shapes. Along its outer skin--if skin it was--drifted faces, obscenely large caricatures of faces now bloated and dead and staring, and mute with the terrible knowledge that such a death had brought them. Faces animal and human--Uncle Jonas, and Zeke, and others who I didn't recognize--all who had been claimed by the Darker.

*****

A sheriff's deputy found me there soon after daylight, unconscious, my hair encrusted with blood from the wound in my scalp where something had struck me a glancing blow, probably a piece of shrapnel from the exploding gas tank, I was later told. I awakened with the sharp fumes of an ammonia capsule in my nostrils and the deputy helped me down the hill, half carrying me as I staggered under the dizziness brought on by the head wound and the pain shooting up from my twisted ankle, back toward the smoldering ruins of Uncle Jonas' house. The sheriff himself was standing there surveying the scene. He glanced at the crater where the propane tank had once been. "No wonder they could see it from town," I heard him mutter.

"What's your name, son?" he asked, looking at me.

"David Anderson." My head ached and it was difficult to see clearly.

"You any kin to old Jonas?"

"Yes, he was my uncle." The vibrations from my voice made my head throb.

"Look here, son, you ever see anything like this before?" The sheriff squatted and pointed to something on the ground.

I looked down, almost pitched over as the ground swirled beneath me. The deputy caught me and helped me sit.

"No sir," I answered, "but Uncle Jonas had. He described them to me." The track was deep in the earth, as if something very heavy had walked there. Shaped like a small hand with fingers and thumb splayed out, but the heel tapering back to a much sharper point than a human hand. The ground all around us was covered with them.

"Now look here, son." The sheriff rested his hand on my shoulder and I tried to focus on his face. "You know what happened here, and I can see it myself plain enough. Trouble is, there's no way I could get away with reporting what really happened. So this is how it goes...you were having trouble sleeping 'cause it was so hot in the house, so you went for a walk. Something happened...don't know what, just one of them accidents...and the house caught fire. The heat from the fire made the tank explode. You understand?"

"Yes."

The sheriff stood and looked around again. "Yep, I reckon that's a pretty fair description of what happened."

"I reckon so," agreed the deputy.

*****

My wounds healed eventually, though I still have some trouble sleeping at night, especially when the waning moon has reached that particular phase on the downside of full that is technically known as "gibbous," and the thin shadows and flickering moonlight remind me strongly of that terrible night on the edge of Ottine Swamp. Uncle Jonas' old .30-06 now hangs from a rack in my own house, the only thing there was left to remember him by.

I will never travel that particular track of highway again--that strand of State Highway 183 that skirts along the boundary of Ottine Swamp between Gonzales and Luling, where a wild elder darkness pools in the hollows and mists cling shroudlike to the trees for hours after sunrise. Because I know that somewhere out there in the dim recesses of that swamp, there is a much darker place where the sunrise doesn't make any difference.

© 1997 Alan Peschke

The Ghost on the Beach

2005-09-03T18:43:00.000-05:00

Evening shadows lean across the shore,
Dark'ning sands that once through grasping fingers fell;
Ghastly pale the visage that seeks once more
A glimpse of her spectre on the dark swell.
Roaming the beach where her still form once lay
Alone in her tomb 'midst the cold sea spray--
Lonely but for him, still trapped by her spell.

Lost has she been, since the hurricane's gale
Enraged and ruptured the once quiet sky;
No one remembers--none but the pale
Phantasmal poet who mourns with the sigh
Of the waves that devoured her tomb by the sea;
Entombed 'neath the waters, his Annabel Lee.

© 1999 Alan Peschke

Seafoam

2005-09-03T15:33:00.000-05:00

"Oh, my pipe! hard must it go with me if thy charm be gone!"
--Captain Ahab

"Come on, Grimm, your turn," Wilson said in his booming voice. It was the time of our monthly meeting, when several of us would gather in Wilson's den to enjoy pipe smoking and good conversation. On this October evening, the night outside was blustery and promising to storm, which made the warmth and camaraderie of Wilson's den even more welcome than usual. The stormy weather and wind-lashed sky--not to mention that it wasn't long until Halloween--had put us in the mood to relate tales strange and macabre. Wilson sat in his easy chair to the right of the fireplace; I stood to his right, leaning with one elbow upon the mantle. Ellis was sitting directly in front of the fire, and Grimm had been sitting in another chair opposite from Wilson.

"Come on, Grimm, tell us a quaint and curious story of forgotten lore," Wilson said, laughing softly at his own joke. Grimm had finished a pipe perhaps a quarter-hour before, and for the past minute or so had been studiously packing another pipe, a graceful bent with a bowl like a small brandy snifter. He was always the most taciturn of our group, and tonight was no exception. The rest of us had all told at least one such tale, leaving only Grimm to relate his story. We echoed Wilson's request. Grimm finished packing his pipe, stood, and moved toward the fireplace.

"I do have a story," he said, and a smile flicked across his face like the shadow of a bird in flight, passing without leaving a trace. "And it's true, though you may be inclined to disbelieve it." He reached for the tongs and extracted a coal from the fire. "It's a story about a pipe which I was forced to throw away." He applied the coal to his pipe and clouds of smoke began ascending to the rafters above him.

It is unusual for most pipe smokers to actually discard a pipe; even one that proves unsmokeable is one to keep, as a reminder of past mistakes and a warning against those we might make in the future. We all urged him to continue as he replaced the tongs in their rack and tamped lightly on the tobacco with the rosewood-bolstered pipe tool he always carried. Standing with his back to the fire, he began to tell us his story.

*****

It happened when I was in college. I was a frequent customer at a warehouse-like store that sold old books and other curious items. One day I went in and found a new item. It was a hardened-leather case, of the general shape and fashion that it is customary to keep a meerschaum pipe in--but somewhat larger than any I had seen before. I took the case down from the shelf and opened it.

Inside was a meerschaum, indeed, but unlike any meerschaum I had ever seen or heard of. It would have been remarkable on color alone. Meerschaum, as you know, is usually white, and only later darkens to golden amber or brown hues as it is smoked. I have said this one would be remarkable due to its color alone, because by all practical definitions, it was black.

But a strange blackness it was. A seemingly oily sheen covered the pipe, though as I turned it over in my hands, I realized that it felt completely dry and not oily at all. The color was uncannily consistent--as I am sure you are all aware, most meerschaum pipes color unevenly due to varying densities throughout the particular block it was carved from, also because some parts--such as the bowl itself--are exposed to more of the tobacco oils than is, for example, the stem. It is my understanding that on pipes with particularly intricate engravings, the nature of the carving itself will place certain parts farther away from the central bowl than others, thus causing uneven coloration. The parts of the pipe closest to the tobacco will be darker--usually--than the parts farther away. But the black coloration of this pipe was consistent throughout.

When I said that it would have been remarkable for its coloration alone, I did not mention how completely unique it must have been from the manner in which the bowl was carved. It would be simple to call it grotesque, but such a description would be unjust to so intricate a carving. The front of the bowl appeared to be the face of some sort of octopus, or perhaps even a giant squid, with short tentacles extending out from it, but unlike any such creature I had ever heard of, two arms with heavy claws on the end curled upward from beneath the bowl to grasp menacingly just in front of the octopoid face. From the sides of the bowl, extending back along the stem were what appeared to be misshapen bat wings. As I turned this bizarre pipe over in my hands I noticed that set deep within the face, far behind all those strangely curling tentacles were two tiny red gemstone eyes--inset so deeply they were almost hidden until the overhead lights made them glint dully up at me. That unusual deep black coloration covered it throughout, from the tips of its claws to the tips of each tentacle, all the way back to the ends of the wings. And over all, a very peculiar deep greenish hue that seemed to surface and submerge into the overall blackness, like fish almost--but not quite--surfacing before diving back into the depths of the ocean.

In a brief discussion with the proprietor, he told me simply that the strange pipe had been in the bottom of a box of other curios he had purchased at a flea market. I bought the pipe from him--for a price so small I felt almost guilty for it--and quickly made away with my new treasure.

I had already finished my classes for that day, and didn't have to report to my job at the library for a while yet, so I walked the several blocks to my apartment to enjoy my first smoke in my new pipe. At that time I was renting a tiny single-room apartment on the second floor of an old boarding house. It was very small, and had a shared bathroom at the end of the hall, but it was also very cheap, a prime consideration for those days. It was an old, thick-walled house, set high up on a hill, with a window opening from my room that looked out upon the city. I had the habit of swinging the double-paned windows open and sitting in the sill, smoking my pipe and enjoying the panoramic view that it afforded. I reached my apartment and quickly assumed my favorite position in the windowsill.

As I suggested before, the pipe was larger than usual, and had a deep bowl that I guessed would easily provide a two-hour smoke. Since I did have to report for work later that afternoon, I only filled the bowl up part-way, about one-third of full. The pipe was a very good smoker, cool, and well balanced in spite of the peculiar engravings and those long, narrow wings that extended rearward from the bowl. Curious about the nature of this pipe, I tested it with my tongue. You may have heard that one way to test a solid block meerschaum is to touch one's tongue to it--if it is carved from a block, the material will be quite porous, and when touched with the tip of the tongue, will quickly absorb the moisture from the saliva and cause a sensation almost of stickiness as the tongue slightly adheres to the pipe. This one did just that, satisfying me that it was a true solid block from which the pipe was carved, rather than molded from castings. I leaned back and puffed contentedly as I surveyed the town spread out below me. It was then I seemed to fall into a reverie.

I found myself wondering what the landscape below me may have looked like in centuries past, before there was a town here, back when the first settlers arrived here from across a far ocean to make new lives for themselves. In my mind's eye I could almost see it, at first there would have been just a scattering of small cabins down near the river. Across the hills that now were covered with houses and other buildings, there would have been nothing but forests of oak, hickory, and maybe elm. In my imagination I seemed to see what it would have been like even further back, before even the ancestors of those settlers were aware of this "new world," before even the native tribes camped along this river. When the river itself was young, and the first springs that gave birth to it were still bubbling up from unknown depths in the earth below. I could see a long-forgotten landscape--no, not long-forgotten, because it was so old there was no one there to forget it. I saw the land as it was before man ever put his tracks upon it, an almost alien land, more akin to some distant and desolate planet than to the Earth we know. And then...something moved. It startled me so that I was thrust rudely from my reverie and suddenly seized at the window-ledge to keep from losing my balance. Abruptly the mundane city was again spread out before me, but still there were suggestions of shadows, somehow menacing and somehow terrible, flickering along the edges of my vision. I assumed it was only a hallucinatory dream, of the kind that often occurs when one is drifting along the edges of sleep. Dreams like that were not uncommon to me in my college days, when I tended not to get as much sleep as I should have. I noticed that my pipe had gone out, so I dumped the ash, wiped the bowl out with a tissue, placed it on my desk, and went to work. As I went out the door I glanced back, and those tiny red gemstone eyes seemed to glitter, but I assumed it was only the late afternoon sun slanting in through the window and reflecting from the stones.

*****

"Just what you were smoking in that pipe?" Ellis asked with a chuckle. A few of us echoed his humor. Grimm only smiled again, that quick, shadowy smile that almost wasn't there.

"Only a mixture of Virginia and Perique, I believe," he answered.

His pipe, almost forgotten, had gone out while he was talking. He took a moment to procure another coal from the fire and relight before continuing.

*****

My time at work that night was uneventful. I recall spending most of the time restoring returned books to their proper places on the shelves, and I spent a few minutes looking up pipes in the card catalog to see if I could find any useful information on the origin of mine. There was very little in the library regarding pipes, only an old copy of Barrie's My Lady Nicotine, but nothing that provided any relevant information. As I walked back to my apartment that night the sky was perfectly clear and glittering with stars. The old boarding house I lived in was high enough up on the hill and far enough toward the outskirts of town to escape the worst of the glare of the city's lights, and still provided some fair stargazing opportunities when the sky was clear and the moon was small.

Such a night it was. Upon reaching my apartment, I again stoked up the strange meerschaum pipe and sat in the windowsill. Out below me spread the lights of the town, and above me stretched the stars of the universe. I had never been a serious student of astronomy, but I did enjoy stargazing on occasion, and had spent many pleasant hours in that windowsill, pipe in hand, staring up at the twinkling heavens. As I sat there, smoking the pipe and watching the stars glimmering above, I again fell into an almost trance-like reverie.

It seemed that I became aware of the huge distances between the stars, somehow cognizant of the immense spans of empty space that surround us here on our tiny planet; of how short was the history of humankind upon the Earth--only an eyeblink, really--in the long, long expanse of time and space that makes up the universe. My own infinitesimal lifespan, only one life among the billions that have lived here and will live here after I'm gone--I could hardly comprehend. And other worlds--other worlds that must be spinning in ponderous orbits around those distant stars, and stars even beyond, stars so far away that they must have smoldered to an ash and vanished before their light ever reached us on this Earth. And what may be living there--or may have lived. Dwelling so far beyond the vast reaches of space and time that we couldn't even begin to understand...how far away or what they are.

Then, my mind seized upon the impression of chaos--an ultimate living chaos that writhed and churned at the center of the universe. I was terrified, but could not break away. I thought I imagined an immense and all-powerful mass of insane omnipotence that we mere humans are protected from by simple virtue of our incredible distance away from it here on the outer rim of this peripheral galaxy we call the Milky Way. There were planets there too--planets that moved in gruesome and irregular orbits around the chaos. They held me fascinated. Then, as I watched them lumbering around the chaotic insanity I realized--they were not planets. They were beings.

I did not scream, but I did gasp aloud, and the sound of my own voice broke the trance. I scrambled clumsily out of the windowsill and slammed the shutters closed against the night.

I retired to bed not long after, but was still quite agitated, and eventually fell into a troubled sleep. I dreamed strange, disturbing dreams, of an ancient earth peopled by an uncouth race of fish-creatures--immortal, or nearly so, who stood and walked on two legs like men. The earth was ruled from one central city--a city designed in weird alien angles and shapes that must have never been built to accommodate anything resembling a human. From this city a monstrous, godlike ruler held the fate of the earth in his hideous grip. I never saw this thing in my dreams, but just before I awakened, I again witnessed those disgusting fish-creatures, hopping like mad toads around a terrible idol that must have represented their monstrous ruler. I heard them singing or chanting in a guttural language that seemed to employ certain muscles of the mouth and tongue which humans do not even possess--so alien it sounded. They chanted the same line over and over, until it was ingrained in my memory, and then the occulted moon slid out from behind the clouds and revealed in lurid detail the idol that they danced around. The face upon it bore a shocking resemblance to my pipe.

*****

"Guess you could call that a pipe dream," Ellis quipped. This brought chuckles from me and Wilson, and another swiftly vanishing half-smile from Grimm.

"At the time I assumed I was suffering symptoms of the stress of keeping up with my studies and still working at night," Grimm responded. "But where these images came from...I had no idea."

In fact, knowing Grimm's nature as we did, it was hard to believe he would concoct such a story. We were accustomed to Grimm contributing to our conversations very concisely, with never a word wasted. That he would go on so long with a story like this and use such an abundance of adjectives in attempting to describe the very horribleness of something was quite out of the ordinary. Without bothering to relight his long-forgotten pipe, he again took up the tale.

*****

The next morning I cleaned the pipe and put it away so that I would not even chance to see it by accident. During the next several days I went on with the routine of my life, each night the dreams disturbing my sleep but growing less and less vivid each time, and I did not smoke the strange meerschaum again for nearly two weeks. Then came spring break. On a few occasions before I had gone with some of my friends to the Gulf of Mexico, which was only a few hours drive from the university. I thought a few days of recreation on the beach would do me good, so I packed up a few necessities--along with the meerschaum, and off we went.

I was not much in the mood for playing Frisbee or volleyball, so that first day I sought out a secluded place on the beach with only the seagulls for company, and with a large umbrella for shade and a small ice chest of drinks, spent the day reading to the sound of the booming surf. By late afternoon I had decided to smoke the meerschaum again, and this time, having no restrictions on my time, I filled the bowl to the rim.

The thundering rhythmic surf broken only by the occasional call of the gulls was very hypnotic, and again I began to muse. I thought I could see the faint outlines of that city from which the fish-creatures came, away in the distance on the edge of the horizon. I could even make out the creatures doing their weird frog-like dance in praise around the tall black idol. When the pipe went out, the hazy daydream images vanished, and I realized I had been watching a distant school of fish--or perhaps a group of dolphins--as they leaped from the water.

That night I dreamed again of that city, and this time the dreams were much more vivid than before. Again I could see the ancient city, sprawling in eldritch splendor across the island that was its home. The teeming masses of the loathsome fish-creatures no longer seemed to frighten me so badly--somehow I was becoming inured to the sight of them. I thought that I heard myself chuckling almost gleefully when the sight of that massive idol came into view--that terrible idol of their god that resembled the shape of my pipe. In my dream I fancied I could even see myself joining them in unholy adulation of their monstrous deity. Then there was...an earthquake, perhaps, or a volcanic eruption. It might have been a natural catastrophe, or it might have been the dying act of vengeance from some forgotten elder god. There was an earthshaking cataclysm, and the island city sank beneath the waves, imprisoning that god-thing who ruled the planet from its center. His followers, the fish-creatures, were scattered in chaos, but still they lived, in the hidden depths of the ocean they waited until the time was right to restore the city and bring their terrible ruler back from his deathless sleep. Still I heard their echoing chant, the one phrase that always dominated their songs of praise, and as I struggled back to wakefulness I found myself saying those words aloud, words that turned into an almost-shriek as I realized such alien sounds were coming from my own lips. I did not sleep the rest of the night, and started at the slightest unusual sound. What before had been the comforting rumble of the surf was now a menace that I came to dread, because it concealed the tiny noises that would have been otherwise obvious in the revealing silence. The next morning I had a friend drive me to the nearest bus station, and I used the spending money I had brought to buy a ticket back to town and my tiny apartment high on the hill.

Soon after, the man who lived in the apartment next to mine complained to me that he was being kept awake at night by my continual talking--of which I was completely unaware. I had never been troubled with talking in my sleep, and at first didn't believe him. I borrowed a voice-activated tape recorder and set it up near my bed to catch any sounds that might happen while I was asleep. The next morning I was horrified to hear my own voice chanting in that torturous singsong those words I kept hearing in my dreams. As for the pipe, I never smoked it again. Even so, my sleep continued to be plagued by vivid dreams of that sunken city and the monstrous creature that was trapped there, and of its terrible minions that hopped around the massive black idol, croaking and singing their weird songs of adulation. I hid the pipe away again, inside a box on the floor of my closet. Though I never again smoked it, I felt myself strangely drawn to it, and while I knew that it was somehow exerting a malign influence over me, and wanted to get rid of it, another part of me couldn't bear the thought of discarding it or destroying it. I wanted to fill it to the rim and smoke it and smoke it until all of its terrible, arcane secrets had been revealed--yet the thought of doing such a thing filled me with fear. I felt that perhaps I could come to some resolution by finding out all I could about the pipe without actually smoking it. My studies began to suffer as I spent the remaining weeks of school haunting bookstores, traveling by bus to nearby cities where I could peruse the libraries for hours at a time, searching for any information that might help me discover the origins of the pipe.

At first I tried looking for books about pipes for such information, but they all proved futile. I did learn a great deal about meerschaum in general, enough to know that this pipe, under normal circumstances, should have never been able to achieve such an intense, all-encompassing black coloration. And never did I read any mention of meerschaum with that unusual deep-green ocean hue that flickered across this pipe when the light hit it just right. After studying many books and visiting several tobacconists to inquire about meerschaum pipes, I finally came to the conclusion--whether right or wrong, I'm still uncertain--that this pipe didn't achieve its color from being smoked. Rather, it was made from some unique variety of meerschaum that was actually black with a greenish tinge.

Finding nothing pertinent in any books relating to pipes, I instead turned to the subject of my dreams. I began searching out obscure and little-known books dealing with primitive religion and occult iconography. This took me into some strange avenues of our existence with which, I suppose, most people are unfamiliar. I learned much of hidden religions and occult practices, but nothing that might help me discern the true nature of my pipe. Until finally, in one old book, I read a vague reference to a forgotten religion of an extinct race of South Pacific islanders, in which they had worshipped what they believed to be an immortal race of creatures somewhat resembling both fish and men, and that these creatures in turn worshipped a much greater power, a being that the islanders thought to be trapped or entombed at the bottom of the ocean. I felt both elation and fear. Until that time, I was able to partially convince myself that the entire episode was only due to some malady of the psyche from which I would recover eventually, that I was only suffering from the stress of college life. This, even though it was my third year at college and I had never suffered any such symptoms before. But here was proof, barely tangible though it was, that it was more than my overworked imagination.

The bibliography of this book referenced this bit of information to another book that had been published by a small press at an obscure New England university. I was barely able to keep myself to my studies until the end of the semester--the day after my last exam I was on a bus bound for Boston. I took the pipe with me.
The bus trip was uneventful. When I reached Boston, I immediately bought a ticket for the nearby city of Arkham. Upon reaching Arkham, I consulted with the clerk at the bus station and after receiving directions, walked the few blocks to the university. Once there, the library was not difficult to find.

I went straight to the card catalog and begin feverishly riffling through the index. So close was the answer, I assumed, that I could not wait another minute. But it only took me a few seconds to realize that the book I had read about was not listed in the catalog. I decided to inquire of the librarian about the book.

I said I was researching primitive religions for my thesis and told him the title of the book I was looking for. The gray-haired old man almost seemed to jump when I pronounced the words of the title. He quickly glanced from side to side, as if making certain no one had overheard, then ushered me into a small room behind the checkout desk.

He demanded to know where I had heard of such a book, and had the look about him of someone who is trying to decide whether to fight or run for his life. I told him the truth, of the book I had read the reference in. He muttered something about "getting that damned thing recalled" and after a few other questions that meant nothing to me but seemed to stir up disturbing memories of my dreams, he told me to leave and forget I had ever heard about that book.

"I can't leave yet," I replied. "I need to know about this." I produced the pipe, which I had concealed in the inner pocket of my jacket.

The librarian's reaction to the pipe was quite extraordinary. I have never seen anyone turn quite so pale, quite so quickly as he did. He slumped into a chair and stared with terrified fascination at the black meerschaum. "Where did you get this?" he whispered.

I told him the entire story, including the dreams I had been having and my true motives for wanting to read the book, that I feared my mind might become completely unhinged if my sleep continued to be haunted by such nightmarish images. He gazed at me intently for several long seconds, his eyes occasionally darting to the pipe, then back to my face. Finally he stood and told me to follow him.

We left the room and walked around to a secluded alcove that housed a small service elevator. He tapped a code into a security console mounted on the wall nearby, the elevator doors opened, and he ushered me inside. I felt the elevator going down, then the doors opened again onto another vault-like door that the librarian used a key as well as another security code to open. This last door opened into a small cubical room that housed a desk, a couple of chairs, and a few bookshelves, which held a number of what appeared to be very old, leather-bound books. From one shelf he extracted a thin volume that, unlike most of the others, appeared to have been printed fairly recently with a standard hardback cover. He motioned for me to sit at the small desk, handed me the book, and stood there watching as I opened it to scan its contents.

The title of the book was Cthulhu in the Necronomicon, printed by Miskatonic University Press. I thumbed the pages with increasing anxiety as I saw words and pictures that reminded me of the dreams. There was a drawing of an idol that, while not looking exactly like the one in my dreams, was still obviously a likeness of the creature represented by that dream idol--as well as my pipe. There was another drawing of those hideous fish-creatures. I quickly read passages that told the story of the sunken city, of the monstrous entity that remained entombed there, waiting for the time when the city would again rise and the entity--which I now knew was some elder abomination called Cthulhu--would bring destruction and horror to an unsuspecting world. I read of those fish-creatures, which were referred to simply as "the ones from the deep," and how they, together with a worldwide cult of humans, were working to further the machinations of their buried god until the time when he again was awakened. And then, you may imagine my consternation and mounting terror when there before me I saw an English transliteration of those words--those words that I had heard over and over again in my dreams, and which I recorded my own voice chanting in my nightmare-haunted sleep: "Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn." I realized my hands were trembling and purposefully released the book. It remained open as it lay on the table, a portrait of one of the "deep ones" glaring up at me mockingly. I held my head in my hands, the heels of my hands pressed hard against my forehead, as if trying to crush out this newfound knowledge. "There's more," said the librarian, and he turned the page.

There was another drawing, and though a mere ink rendering could not hope to accurately portray it, the resemblance was close enough that I knew it was the sunken city of my dreams, the alien city of R'lyeh, its giant blocks and monoliths decorated with obscene hieroglyphs, which still sprawled amid the ooze and muck of unguessed eons at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. The last faltering shreds of my disbelief were swept away. I left the library in a daze, hardly aware of my surroundings, my mind still filled with images of that nightmare city and the thing that slept there.

I became obsessed with visiting that place in the ocean where R'lyeh had sunk and where Cthulhu still slept, dreaming his obscene dreams that sometimes invaded and transformed into nightmarish phantasms the dreams of those unfortunate enough to draw his attention. That is what I believed had happened. Somehow, that black meerschaum had served as a key, if not to his awakening, at least to attracting a tendril of his alien mind to influence me in my sleep. I say I became obsessed with visiting that place, but I wasn't sure what I would do there. Would I merely return the pipe to the place of its genesis, or would I throw myself to a certain death in the ocean's fathomless depths? As days went by I resorted to stronger and stronger methods of avoiding sleep--all eventually useless, as my body succumbed to the sleep it demanded. Even when awake I began to see things--the city life around me vanishing to reveal that ancient landscape of the world before mankind walked upon it, the night skies opening to show the outer voids of space where those other things danced insanely and waited for a certain alignment of the stars when they could leap across the intervening emptiness to raven the earth.

I will not trouble you with the details of my search for a ship that would be passing near that distant, desolate spot in the ocean, or of how I managed to finagle my way aboard. Suffice it to say that I succeeded in posing as an environmental activist aboard a ship that was bound for demonstrating against underwater nuclear testing, and our route took us almost directly over that accursed place. Indeed, many details of the following weeks are now unclear to me--of boarding the ship, of our voyage out across that vast ocean--made dreadful to me because I knew what may await us out there. My only clear memories are of the day I finally rid myself of the pipe. I stood at the railing aft of the ship, away from the rest of the crew, during a break from my duties.

As I stood there leaning over the railing I was gripped by the desire to hurl myself overboard and join those hideous ones from the deep in their nameless mysteries and secret revels. I thought I could see vague outlines of that sunken city, though I knew that it was impossible--it was miles below me on the bottom of the ocean. Other shapes, flashing just below the surface and riding along the crests of the waves, I was less able to disbelieve. I stood there, at battle with myself, part of me wanting to join the others in their ocean home, part of me knowing that to leap over the rails meant certain death. Finally, with a spasmodic gesture, I flung the pipe away. As it tumbled toward the brink, those tiny red gemstone eyes seemed to glitter up at me sardonically one last time. It met the waves with an inaudible splash and the strange black pipe vanished beneath the foam cast off from the ship's wake. I had to restrain myself from following it--I was at once torn with grief over the loss of the pipe and the ancient secrets it held, and shaken with relief at finally being rid of the thing. I gripped the rails convulsively as I alternately shook with barely restrained sorrow and elation.
The remainder of the voyage was inconsequential. I remember little, except that I dreaded being above decks at night, and always tried to avoid looking down into the water for fear of what I might see--or think I saw. We returned to the States several weeks later, I phoned home and asked my father to wire me bus fare, and a few days later I was back in my home town, where I spent the remainder of the summer until it was time to return to classes.

*****

The fire had burned down to glowing embers while Grimm told his tale, casting a ruddy, devilish glow on his downturned face. His pipe, long ago forgotten, had extinguished itself, and he dumped the half-unsmoked tobacco out with a forlorn expression. Someone coughed in the silence.

"Did you ever think to have it analyzed?" I asked quietly.

"I did think about it," Grimm answered. "As I'm sure you all know, meerschaum--or seafoam, as we take the name from the German--is simply magnesium silicate. I agree that a chemical analysis may have answered much. But I never went through with it. I feared too much what I might find. Sometimes I regret not having pursued such information. But more often, I am glad that I still retain some shred of ignorance. The question will always remain: from what was the pipe...that blasphemous bowl that I actually touched with my tongue...from what was it made?"

Wilson reached up and turned on a lamp that stood next to his chair. I wandered over to a window and pushed aside the curtains to peer outside. Lightning flashed and thunder rumbled in the distance like an old god awakening. I was thinking we should leave before the weather got too severe, when I realized Grimm was again speaking.

"I never go down to the ocean anymore," he continued. "Neither do I gaze up at the stars for any great length of time, because I can't help but be reminded of what may haunt the cold empty spaces between the stars, or what lurks impatient and deathless at the bottom of the ocean."

The thunder was getting louder so we said our farewells until next month and left Wilson's den to go our separate ways. Outside on the street, I saw Grimm walking away with his face downcast, the collar of his trench coat turned up and his shoulders hunched against the wind. I got into my car and started the engine, shivering in the cold as I waited for it to warm up. My breath came out in moist clouds and congealed against the windshield. Overhead the clouds gathered and burst, and it began to rain.

The Last Ancient House

Table of Contents

Fiction

Poetry

Dream Sketch: To Be Like Those Who Are Truly Dead

We Dream

Prelude: The Weird

In Ulthar

Nyarlathotep's Lament

Yuggoth On the Rim

Yule Fest

Where the Moon Is Always Gibbous

The Owls

What Is Within You...

The Hill

The Caverns

Snake Oil

On the Shore by the Ocean

When Old Gods Awaken

Lamentry

Homecoming

Darker

The Ghost on the Beach

Seafoam