Gathered Dust and Others (3 page)

Uncle Silas was not a literary man, and when I realized that as I approached manhood I felt a distinct disappointment.  There he was, surrounded by Elmer Harrod’s magnificent library, and he let the books gather dust, except for the summers when I visited, at which times I was often alone in the mammoth library devouring the nameless fictive lore.  I don’t think that Uncle Silas recognized that I was having less to do with him during my summer visits, or that my youthful high opinion of him had been tarnished when I realized that he did not share my love of literature.  I was amazed and deeply grateful, of course, when he casually mentioned over one quiet dinner that he would bequeath me his house and its delirious contents, and it was then that I arranged for his portrait to be painted and replace the one of Harrod that hung over the fireplace in the living room.  I never detected any strangeness in my uncle’s demeanor, and his sudden suicide came as an unpleasant shock.  I was ecstatic, of course, about leaving my small and pathetic apartment and moving into the mammoth house in Arkham, and yet everywhere I looked there were items that reminded me of the sad situation that had allowed me to move there.  Still, the spacious library became my happy little world, and I devoted myself to the genre in which I plotted to become an active and popular voice, working on my own book by using Harrod’s antiquated manual typewriter with which to compose my rough drafts.  I felt a cool kind of communion knowing that the keys I pressed had felt the other fellow’s touch.  I could not help, at times, to look around me and laugh out loud at the world I had inherited; for as a television host, Harrod had crammed his abode with props from films and nightmarish gifts from fans and friends, so that his home came to resemble something out of Charles Addams.  Yet for all of his outlandish behavior, his mugging before the camera as he filmed his campy introductions to forgotten horror films, I began to feel a kinship with Harrod, for he had loved weird literature.  There were, on the walls, framed stills of Harrod with certain celebrities, many of them horror film players, but some few the actual authors of the books he had collected.  I had discovered a large scrapbook in which Harrod had pasted some few newspaper articles or photos from the local media, who enjoyed writing about him around Halloween; and I was charmed by a photo of him reading an edition of Arthur Machen in Old Dethshill Cemetery.  On a whim I decided to hunt for and peruse that very edition, which was easily found.  As I opened the book, dry soil spilled onto my lap, and I suspected that the debris was graveyard dirt.  In the newspaper cutting, Harrod was reading the book with the aid of a large flashlight – but that seemed wrong to me, and thus I was happy to find, in the back tool shed, an antique oil lamp.  I was determined to journey into the graveyard that very night, book in hand, and read a story from it with the aid of lantern light.

I had turned a small room adjacent to the library into my bedroom and thus rarely visited the three upstairs bedrooms; but I was feeling a bit clownish that night and decided that I wanted to dress up for my first nighttide visit to Old Dethshill Cemetery, and so I climbed the carpeted stairs and went into Harrod’s old room, which my uncle had preserved just as the horror host had left it and where many outlandish television costumes remained hanging in various closets.  He had been as lean as I and about the same height, and so the tuxedo decorated with synthetic spider webs fitted rather well.  Thus attired I took the lantern and edition of Machen and stepped into night’s calm air.  I could not see a moon, but the stars that dotted the cosmos seemed brighter than usual.  The cemetery was just across the road from where I lived, and I felt a kind of joy as I climbed over its low stone wall and listened to the subtle sounds of the place.  I was rather amazed at the aura of the place – it felt weirdly inhabited, although I was the lone individual there, and I heard no birds and glimpsed no scurrying vermin.  I turned to look across the road at my home, where I had left some few lights on that illuminated various windows; and I marveled at the fantastic aura of the house in which I lived, at its sinister aspect that was aided by the rooftop gargoyles and other such paraphernalia with which Harrod had decorated it.  I continued my exploration, walking through yellow grass that sometimes reached my knees, passing weed-choked markers and weathered tombstones on which names and dates had been erased by elemental time.  I crossed over a creek that trickled through the cemetery and looked at the thickening trees that grew on the surrounding Arkham hills.  There was no wind, yet the late August air was chilly, and so I stopped and lit my lantern, which aided sight but gave no warmth.

I heard a sudden wailing cry from somewhere in the trees just beyond me, a sound that seemed to summon nature’s breath and coax a wind to exhale and thus stir up the scents of the place in which I lingered.  Something in the sound of bestial cry touched my imagination, and I parted my mouth in imitation of the wail; and my noise was answered above me as a dark cloud melted and thus the moon that had been secreted behind it was exposed.  I blinked as dead lunar light fell onto my eyes, as another sphere arose, as if from buried earth, small and delicate, with black pits where a human visage would wear eyes.  A scarlet line, its mouth, parted, from which a patch of vapor poured forth, accompanied by a voice.

“ 
Ses yeux profonds sont faits de vide et de ténèbres
…”

The figure ceased its recitation and cocked its head.  I watched as it hopped from the tabletop tomb and walked a few steps nearer, and as it approached I noticed the book it held.  The young thing smiled and spoke again.

“I suppose you don’t know French, judging from your dumb expression.  Let me translate and sing the verse again, thus:

‘Her eyes, made of the void, are deep and black;

Her skull, coiffured in flowers down the neck,

Sways slackly on the column of her back,

O charm of nothingness so madly decked!’

Delicious, is it not?  And how clever of Luna to show her form just now, so as to aid with ghastly light.  One should always read poetry by moonlight, don’t you think?”

“Certainly, if the poet is Baudelaire.”

“
Ah! 
An educated soul.”  The voice was high and nasal, yet masculine.  His eyes were concealed behind round black lenses of what looked like antique wire spectacles.  His fantastic mauve hair was piled high upon his dome in thick tube-like coils, and moonlight shimmered on the crimson gloss with which his simpering lips had been coated.  “I’ve been looking for mine kindred dead, for I’ve been told that many of us are planted here.”  He looked at me from behind his queer eyewear and spoke his name.  “Randolph H. Carter, of Boston.  And yes, I am ruefully related to the writer and man of mystery.  Have you read his infamous book?”

“I’ve inherited a first edition, but I haven’t looked at it yet.  What was his mystery?”

“Oh, there are many, a multitude of riddles.  What, for example, happened to his friend and mentor, Harley Warren, who was last seen with Randy on the day of Warren’s disappearance?  I actually know a direct relative of Warren’s here in town, a fabulous painter who has a studio on French Hill.  It was she, actually, who informed me of this place, for she often paints it and its denizens.  Just now she is conjuring a life-size doppelganger of Obediah Carter, who was whispered to have been a wizard.”

“That was his tomb you were standing on just now.”

“Yes – I was drawn to it, but could not make out the inscription.  I recognized him from his photograph, of course.  Such a sinister face, don’t you agree?”  He began to walk but stumbled over a clump of weed.  “Damn, this terrain is treacherous.”

“Perhaps,” I ventured, “you should remove the shades…”

“Don’t be absurd.”  He cautiously moved away from me through tall dry grass, and so I held my lantern high so as to light our way as I followed.  We both saw the tree at the same time, and I could not repress a shudder.  “Some fool hanged himself on that tree last year.”  He turned and frowned at the expression on my face.  “How sad you look – but then, who wouldn’t, dressed like that.  You look like some Gothic hobo.  Well, I must depart, morning classes come so early.  What are you reading?”  I told him.  “Ah,” and he winked.  “Best be on guard for the little people.  This is so their demesne, one would imagine.”  He waved a petite hand and I watched him saunter toward the trees and vanish within their darkness, and suddenly I felt alone and vulnerable.  Turning, I found my way homeward, climbed over the stone wall and examined my home.  It looked a grotesque thing in the sallow moonlight, with its cupola, widow’s walk and many gables.  Lunar light feasted on the face of the gargoyle that Elmer Harrod had added as a feature to be seen when the house was filmed as part of the introductory footage of his television show, in which Elmer could be seen peering from a window, his face made up to resemble a rapacious ghoul.  Standing as it did at the end of a dead end street on which most of the other houses were decayed and uninhabited, the Victorian pile wore an aura of desolation on this particular night.  It looked very much a haunted house.  And so it was, haunted by my lonely life, my strange imagination, my spectral dreams.

Entering my home, I went to the library and found the collection of horror stories by the original Randolph Carter,
The Attic Window and Others
, the first edition of which had been published by private hands some few years after the author’s queer vanishing act in 1928.  The book had caused a mild sensation due to hostile reviews, and a Carter cult had begun, centering primarily at Miskatonic University among the Bohemians who were attracted to weird fiction, the occult and other such manifestations of morbidity.  The commotion attracted the attention of a New York publisher, and a new edition containing additional stories sold very well, which led to the republication of Carter’s novels, which were not as popular as his eerie early work.  Settling into my cozy armchair, I cracked open the book and began to read, oblivious to the subtle keening of windsong that emanated from the nearby graveyard.  Soon my eyes grew heavy, and my long day ended as I succumbed to slumber.

II.

It was a muted drumming that aroused me from the folds of dreaming that encased me like a filigree of spider web.  Raising my hands, I pushed the debris of dream away and floated to my feet, watching as the book that had been on my lap drifted to the floor, where it lay open so as to reveal a curious symbol on its yellow leaf.  I did not like the way that symbol oozed across the page, like a sentient spill of enchanted ink, and thus I reach down and closed the book, then took it up and pressed it to my breast as I listened again to the subterranean drumming.  I followed the sound, which led me to the basement, a place I had not fully investigated on account of its damp chilliness, which I feared would trigger an asthma attack.  I could not understand why the basement floor felt so soft beneath my feet.  The rhythmic sensation of sound came from a small dark room, into which I drifted.  A wrought iron sconce fastened to the wall held a squat black candle, and when I struck a match to its wick the room became subtly illuminated, enough so that I could see the panel in the wall that was slightly opened.  I remembered reading in Elmer Harrod’s journal of his finding a secret passageway in some section of the house – this must be the place of which he wrote.  Grasping the thick black candle, I removed it from its sconce and pushed the panel with my shoulder, then stepped into the earthen passageway thus revealed.  A current of air pushed at me, on which I could smell a remnant of ancient death; and this was perplexing because when I came to the end of the passageway I found myself confronted with a wall of moist yet solid earth, with no openings where a breeze might filter through.  There was another sconce on the wall before me, and so I placed the candle in it and examined the curious emblem that had been etched into the surface of the wall, the familiar sign.  One hand still pressed the book to my chest, but now I opened it and examined the similar sign that had stained its page.  Although the beating of muted drums had softened, I sensed that they sounded still, from some place beyond the wall before me.  I lifted my hand and followed the symbol’s design with my finger, and as I did so the emblem in the book began to smoke.  I shouted as the book crumbled into ash that sifted through my hand and drifted down, and then my blood froze as the heap of spilled ash began to rotate and rise until it formed a cowled figure that breathed upon me through a face that was hidden by its hood.  A palsied hand arose and trembled before me, its fingers resembling bloated grave worms that seemed to hunger for my soul.  One of those soft moist fingers pressed against my forehead and began to etch a symbol onto my flesh.  I pushed away from the thing, against the wall of earth, that wall that took me within its substance as if it were a pit within cemetery sod.  The cowled figured bent toward me as the pounding I had heard filled my head, the noise that I knew was the beating of my heart.  A glimmer of candlelight caught the countenance within the hood, a face that was familiar; for I had seen its likeness in a photograph that had been attached to the tomb slab of Obediah Carter.

III.

I pushed the dream away and laughed as I stretched in the library armchair with Carter’s book of weird tales in my lap.  The clock told me that it was mid-morning, and yet the muted light that sifted through the window was quite thick, so I got to my feet and went to open the front door, where I was confronted with a blanket of fog.  Old Dethshill Cemetery was hidden from view, yet I could
feel
its palpable presence, and I could hear its subtle sounds, its never-ending stirrings and rustlings and whisperings.  Perhaps a part of my mind was still lost in dreaming, or my horror writer’s imagination was working subconsciously – for some of the sounds I heard were surely imaginary.  It amused me that I was becoming obsessed with the neighboring necropolis, and I wanted to visit it more often.  There was only one thing within it that tainted my fondness for the place – that bleached emblem of my uncle’s lunacy and suicide.  If that was removed, all would be well, and I could linger within the cemetery often and let it arouse my creativity, as it had inspired my dreaming.  It was the thickness of the fog that coaxed me toward resolution.  I went to the garden shed and found the can of petrol that was there, then slipping garden gloves over my hands I carried the can through the fog, over the low stone wall and into the cemetery.  The atmosphere was thick with weird foreboding, which thrilled me.  I wanted to remember the sensation so as to describe it in my next book, in which I would evoke the phantoms of this haunted place.  It was funny, I felt as I tramped through the fog that I had entered yet another dream in which I floated past rotting slates of stone and tabletop tombs that invited one to stop, recline, and rest one’s mortal bones.  “Perchance to dream,” I whispered, reflecting on Hamlet’s soliloquy regarding the dreams one might experience in death.  I had a hunch that death was not the end of the soul, and Old Dethshill Cemetery seemed to somehow verify that intuition – for this was a place that lived with a sentience all its own, unearthly though it be.