The Dark Boatman: Tales of Horror and the Cthulhu Mythos (11 page)

The local train I took from Newcastle arrived in Wisterton a little after six o’clock, and as I walked out of the tiny station into the street, I found several cars drawn up against the curb along with a handful of taxis. Nowhere was there any sign of my uncle. Hesitating for only a moment, I was on the point of heading for one of the waiting taxis when a tall, thin-faced man approached me and enquired whether I was Ernest Oliver. After being assured that I was, he explained that my uncle had been detained on urgent business, and had asked him to meet me and drive me out to the small village of East Wisterton, which was apparently some five miles from Wisterton. It was, he indicated, a long enough journey, and the cost of taking a taxi would indeed be prohibitive.

As we drove out of the town, taking the road along the rugged coast, he explained that he was a business acquaintance of my uncle, and that he had already heard a lot about me, even to the point of knowing why I had relinquished my post at the university to come to this desolate spot on the coast. After a long, somewhat tiring train journey, I found it distinctly refreshing to be able to sit back and relax and listen to the other as he described several of the landmarks which showed themselves clearly on the skyline to the west. The nearness of the strangely domed hills, topped by thick copses, now intruded more pronouncedly on my consciousness, and I realised that I had not been mistaken in my belief that here were strange, primal, and time-touched things, incredible and alien, which in spite of the late afternoon sunlight brought a little shiver to my body.

All that I had learned of this county welled up inside me as I stared out of the window of the car, striving to read something into the signs I saw all about me. Here and there, narrow lanes branched off the main road and vanished in leafy mystery on either side, while deep green labyrinths loomed on top of us at every bend in the road. We passed few cars on the way and after fifteen minutes or so, rounding a steep bend, we came within sight of the sea once more, far below us, while in the distance, the sunlight touched the white, spectral finger of a lighthouse standing on a rocky headland thrusting out into the sea.

But as we began the breathtaking descent towards East Wisterton, a tiny cluster of whitewashed houses about a mile distant, I noticed something that attracted my attention oddly, although I could not define the reason for it. Less than a quarter of a mile from the village there stood a two-storey house, which seemed unusually large and elegant for its situation. Even from that distance I could see that it was no longer occupied. There was a general air of stagnation and decay about it that was unmistakable.

Several of the windows appeared to be broken, for they did not reflect the sunlight as most of the others did, and there was a tantalising air of familiarity about it, which made me feel distinctly uneasy. I knew I had never seen it before, either in real life or in a picture, nor had I heard my uncle speak of it in any of his lectures or on the few occasions when we had met in Cambridge. Yet the feeling that I knew it intimately persisted during the rest of the drive to the village.

My guide dropped me off in front of my uncle’s house but made no attempt to alight himself, saying that he still had some urgent business to do in the village, and that if my uncle had not yet arrived home, I would be sure to find the door open. I watched as he drove on into the village and then made my way slowly along the carefully-tended path to the house. As the other had said, the front door opened to my touch and I went inside, setting down my two suitcases after receiving no answer to my call.

When my uncle arrived twenty minutes later, I was shocked and surprised at the haggardness of his expression. There were deep purple circles under his eyes and he looked as though he had not slept for several nights. In response to my enquiries, he would say little more than that there had been certain odd occurrences in the village over the past few months, and in his role of the local doctor he had been helping the police with their investigations. It was with a trace of genuine dread and concern that I tried to question him further, for it was utterly out of character for him to take things so seriously, but he refused to go into more detail until we had eaten.

We ate the meal in silence, an uneasy silence which began to eat at my nerves, and when we eventually settled down in the easy chairs in front of the fire in the parlour, smoking our pipes, I waited for him to explain the situation with a growing sense of alarm. When he spoke, it was evident he was more overwrought than I had expected.

“To begin with, Ernest, I have a confession to make to you. This dreadful affair has been going on now for more than six months, and my main reason for asking you to come and stay with me was not so much to provide you with a place of comparative solitude where you could finish your book in peace and quiet as to provide me with both moral and intellectual support in this hideous matter. Things are pretty bad, and I think the climax is near in spite of everything we have been able to do. You have some kind of experience of these nightmare happenings on an indirect, if not direct, level and most of all you will not be inclined to scoff at my ideas, nor are you so steeped in superstition as to be mortally afraid as the rest of the folk are hereabouts. But I must begin at the very beginning. No doubt you noticed the old Carter place on your way here, about a quarter of a mile or so outside the village. It’s been empty now for more than five years, just an empty shell of a place since Henry Carter died, but even before we found him stiff and cold at the foot of the stairs there had been a lot of unwholesome talk about the place.”

“What kind of talk?” I asked.

My uncle shrugged, plainly ill at ease. “The usual sort. Strange blue lights in the windows at night, terrible sounds whenever the moon was full, and a frightful odour about the place. It only needs someone to begin a rumour such as that and the place becomes haunted, the home of ghosts and untold horrors even when there is, in all probability, quite a logical and scientific explanation for the happenings. You will probably call what I am going to tell you raving at first, Ernest, but in time, if you decide to stay, you will appreciate that your knowledge is on a totally different plane to that which exists here. Anyway, once Carter was dead, the horror came to East Wisterton with a vengeance. No one from the village would dare to go anywhere near that house, especially after dark. Those of us who had hoped that these idiotic myths concerning the place would die a natural death were doomed to disappointment. If anything, they got worse, much worse. The most disturbing thing had begun some time ago, the complete disappearance of at least six people in as many months. All of these people came from outside the area and you can well imagine, a house such as that, with its evil and malodorous reputation, is of a kind to powerfully attract the morbidly curious. There’s no direct proof that any of these people did visit this place or that it had any direct connection with their disappearance, but village gossip as it is, we naturally had to be sure. We’ve searched the place from cellar to attic without finding a trace whatsoever of them;
yet it is an undeniable fact that they have vanished off the face of the Earth
.”

“Maybe they did go there, but the general atmosphere was such that they left without giving any indication of their intentions,” I suggested.

He shook his head emphatically. “We naturally probed that possibility thoroughly. On two occasions, anxious relatives came to enquire about them, but without any conclusive results. As a doctor, there was little I could do in an official capacity. There were no bodies on which to conduct a post-mortem, nothing definite at all—until two days ago.”

Pausing at this point, my uncle sucked meditatively on his pipe as if reluctant to continue with his narrative, then slowly and concisely related a story that both frightened and disturbed me, all the more because I had had a vague inkling of it ever since my first sight of this county from the speeding train.

It appeared that two days before, a little after midnight, he had been called urgently to the hospital some three miles inland where an attempted suicide had been brought in suffering from acute shock, together with multiple bruising and abrasions. On arrival, he had examined the patient, and was shocked to discover that it was a close neighbour of his—a certain Hedley Trelawney—and although his bodily injuries were of a relatively minor nature, it was his mental condition which had given rise to much alarm.

From the local police sergeant, he had learned that two fishermen, making their way along the narrow cliff road, not far from the old Carter house, had been startled to hear hideous screaming coming from the deserted grounds of the place ,and a few moments later had spotted a dark figure, arms waving madly, race over the cliffs and throw itself off the edge into what would have been a three-hundred-foot drop onto the needle-shaped rocks below. Hurrying to the scene, they had peered over the edge, fully expecting to see the smashed body lying on the floor below, but as luck would have it, an outjutting branch had caught the man’s coat and held him less than twenty feet down the sheer wall of the cliff.

Evidently something unutterably horrible had sent the man running from that accursed place, and neither man had any wish to remain in the vicinity, but when no further horror manifested itself, they had plucked up sufficient courage to rescue the unfortunate wretch, clambering precariously over the ledge to where he hung suspended on that slender branch, which was all that lay between him and a mangled death below. Working desperately, they had finally succeeded in getting him to the top, where he had screamed and struggled furiously so that it had taken all of their combined strength to subdue him and carry him to the nearest cottage, where they had then driven him to the hospital, recognising this as a case which my uncle would not be able to handle alone.

Although Trelawney had been given a powerful sedative on admittance, he still appeared to be partially conscious, and it was his rambling mutterings that had frightened two of the nurses and prompted the hospital doctor to call my uncle in the hope that he might be able to throw some light on the matter. As far as he had been able to make out from the almost unintelligible mouthings, the words that Trelawney kept repeating over and over again were:

“Knew he weren’t dead: none of that accursed family ever did really die. Grey dust...everywhere! A thousand different shapes...spinning...the vortex...all dust, grey and blue-crimson. Carter must have found out the way to call it up...fed it on the others. God! All that dust...spinning....”

Trelawney was still under restraint and continual observation at the hospital, and the doctors there were doubtful if his mind would ever be right again. There seemed no doubt that he had seen something in that house, something so fearful that his mind had snapped under the terrible mental strain. My uncle would have liked to have questioned him further, for he felt certain now that there were things which he ought to know; but it had become increasingly obvious that it would be a very long time, if ever, before Trelawney would speak sensibly and coherently again.

My first impulse was to suggest that these had been nothing more than the ravings of delirium, but I knew that this must already have occurred to my uncle, who was in a far better position to judge than I was, so I did not put my initial thoughts into words but sat silent, shivering a little spite of the warmth of fire in the wide hearth. What my uncle had now revealed to me hinted at darker, more malignant, forces existing here than I had ever read or dreamed of, although in some of the forbidden volumes I had perused there had been the passages which had hinted at monstrous things, not of Earth, which had at one time inhabited this planet, and which might still do so, though now hidden behind myth and legend following the encroachment of civilisation and scientific discovery.

Plainly there was the possibility that this might be just such a thing, and sitting there in that quiet parlour, I found nothing absurd about it. For the rest of the evening and well into the early hours of the morning, we discussed the situation as calmly as we could, trying to decide what to do about this outburst of terror that had descended upon the village. It seemed acutely uncanny even in a part of the country where strange and often frightful things were commonplace. From my uncle’s description, it was clear that nothing would be gained by further questioning of the central figure in the drama—Trelawney himself—and whatever we did, it would have to be done by ourselves. In quite a short time, we had reached the conclusion that the only way to satisfy ourselves would be to stay for a night in the Carter house, to discover at first hand what untold horror had sent Trelawney screaming wildly from the place to throw himself off the cliff in an effort to end his fear-crazed life, an attempt which only a blind and merciful providence had foiled.

Accordingly, we resolved in our minds on the best course to take; which weapons we should take with us in order to protect ourselves against any contingency, and how to track down this blasphemous nightmare which had, if we had read the signs correctly, been responsible for the disappearances of six people and the near suicide of another. When we finally ended our discussion, it was almost four o’clock, and as I made my way upstairs to my room, it was with a feeling of oppressive fear mingled with a sense of growing excitement.

I undressed quickly, for I was very tired, and my brain was reeling with a chaos of half-formed thoughts and ideas, some idiotic, others making a little more sense; and I could not escape the sense of dread and impending disaster as I thought of that terrible and lonely place out there on the edge of the cliffs. Was it possible that there, in this wild, isolated region, lurked nightmare, supernatural forces such as are undreamed of by present-day science, denied by the church, and come only in dreams to a few sensitive people?