The Dark Rites of Cthulhu (31 page)

His shiny buckled shoes slipped on the damp stone as he eagerly lowered the carriage stair, and with a dangerous creak to the axles, out stepped Marsila, Nevill’s short, stout, shockingly ugly new bride. Not even a thick layer of white pancake makeup could cover the pits and moles that assaulted her distended face, punctured by a pair of close-set yellow eyes that added a piggish quality to the horsiness of her appearance. She adjusted her pink-tinged wig, looked at the mansion and grinned, exposing a tiny row of rotted teeth. A fly buzzed around her mouth.

Nevill offered an arm to his wife, and they walked toward the house without a glance behind them, as Elias, an eleven year old boy, hopped down from the carriage and glumly shoved his hands into the pockets of his simple trousers. He obviously resembled his mother... a mother lost far to the south.

Elias looked back at the carriage driver, who watched him beneath the folds of his cloak, only the tip of his long nose providing evidence of a face underneath. After several moments of nothing passing between the two, Elias trudged away, veering toward the back garden. Behind him, the horses stamped their hooves on the flagstones, the impact ringing like gunshots sucked into the gloom that hid the sun above.

The tall grass snaked against Elias’ feet, soaking his pants and tripping him up. He stepped high and pushed through, inspecting the overgrown grounds along the side of the house. The trees looked too
large, and not native to the British Isles, propped up on bloated tubers that gathered above the ground, providing hiding places within the tangle of roots. Great explosions of unruly shrubbery stood uncut for what must have been decades, and seemed to take the shape of monstrous, unformed creatures. 

Suddenly feeling exposed, Elias moved closer to the house, running his hand along the greenish stone textured with the play of lichens. Coming upon a salt frosted window, he peered inside, framing his eyes with his hands to block out the diffused sunlight smeared gray by the fog. He saw nothing on the other side of the pane.  Just a greasy darkness, veined with the swirl of memories that had nothing to do with him or his father.

              In the sprawling back garden, accented by randomly placed trees and weathered statuary, Elias crunched through a dead flowerbed and stubbed his toe on a stone half buried in the sandy soil. Angry, he tore it from the ground and heaved it at a window on the second floor, puncturing the glass in a perfect silhouette of the rock, but not shattering the window. Nevill’s frowning face appeared above the hole, his expression cold. Elias looked down at the buckles on his wet shoes, a matching pair to Nevill’s, purchased by another family’s money. The boy remembered when his father would have thrashed him for such a transgression. Since the wedding, he only received that same, hollow look. Elias peered up at the window, but his father was gone. The boy searched for another rock.

Elias moved from room to dusty room, each one darkened by thick, pea green curtains drawn across the windows. All the furniture was covered by white sheets, like the lumpen mummies of fallen Titans. Each room, all the same. All furnished with the belongings of strangers. All covered in funeral shrouds.

Upstairs, he stood in the doorway of a cramped bedroom, smaller than the rest of the rooms. Servants’ quarters, most likely. The shattered hole in the window let in a breeze, which set the sheets flapping and undulating like white tentacles of jellyfish. There was other movement, too, but they were vague, only detected from the corner of his eye. Anything regarded directly was still. Elias smiled and dropped his bag next to the rock on the floor, surrounded by broken glass. This would be his bedroom, marked as it was.  Elias believed in such signs, things that weren’t taught in mass. The way he saw it, one didn’t argue with the destiny of stone.

Lying on the floor of the second story hallway, Elias bounced a canvas ball off of the fresco painted on the paneled wall across from him, aiming for the comically large codpiece of a hulking jester set amid a Renaissance party scene populated by forest creatures dancing with their human companions. The clown’s four-pointed belled hat rose like sweeping horns above his head, a forked tongue lolling from his grinning mouth. Elias threw the ball at the wall, finding its mark, and the ball bounced back into his hand each time. He did this over and over, the dual thud of the ball finding a measured rhythm.

              “Boy!” his father’s voice shouted from somewhere lower in the house.

             
Elias caught the ball and held his breath, waiting for an admonishment, but none came. In the silence, the thud of the ball echoed back at him. Two beats at a time. Like a sluggish heartbeat.

             
Half tempted to toss the ball again to arouse his father’s once-famous temper, Elias instead rolled the ball down the long hallway leading to the other end of the house, lit by a series of thin, ineffectual windows that fought to keep out slivers of pale light. The ball rolled along quickly, moving in and out of the rays of white, then suddenly stopped, half illuminated, half in the dark. Elias found this curious. 

He got to his feet, walked to the ball on damp socks and picked it up. It felt suddenly heavier, like a cannon ball, and he struggled to bring it to his chest. He looked it over, and found it no different than when he had tossed it moments before. Readjusting his feet under the weight, the floor gave a little. He poked it with his toe, and found the boards pliable, soft. Elias dropped the ball, and it buried itself an inch into the wood. There was a shift behind him, and he shot a look back at the fresco on the wall, and found that the painting had changed, as it now showed the animals tossing the humans into a hole in the ground. And still the horned jester danced and grinned, his tongue wagging at the horrified faces of the figures
falling into the earth. Before he could inspect this, a shadow passed across the slatted windows. He walked to one of the openings, turned his head to the side, and looked outside. 

It was a view of the back estate grounds, but from a higher vantage point than he had earlier. The expanse of garden dotted with carved figures stretched to a stand of forest about quarter mile from the house. Something large jutted up from the ground in the middle, like a pointing fist. Beyond that, at the forest’s edge, a stone and plank gristmill moldered on the shores of a sludgy stream.  Its ancient wheel, draped in algae, turned slowly.

In the dining room later that night, a brightly colored pinwheel spun in Elias’ hand, reflecting as identical spirals in his brown eyes. His mother had bought it for him in Brighton when he was just a wee lad. Half the size he was now, and smaller still by four. Elias blew on it, watching it spin, finding something in the whirling,
almost smelling the perfume of his mother’s hair in the feeble breeze it provided.

“Boy!” Nevill barked.

Jarred from his reverie, Elias peered down to the far end of a ridiculously long table, where his father glowered at him, embarrassed. He was always embarrassed these days, ashamed of himself and his son and his dead wife and everything the three of them had been before meeting the woman who had asked him to marry her after knowing him for two months. Elias put the pinwheel down. Marsila was seated at the head of the table. Nevill was to her right, more handmaiden than husband.

“I asked you to thank your mum for…” Nevill looked at Marsila for prompting, and she mouthed the words to him. “Our lovely new home,” Nevill finished, grinning with the accomplishment of a dimwit successfully reciting a nursery rhyme.

“Thank you,” Elias said.

“Mum,” Nevill said, finishing a sentence Elias would never, ever think, let alone say.

Elias looked at his father, who gripped his fork in a shaking hand, then at Marsila, who watched him with a curious expression. Finally, Elias sighed. “Mum.”

Nevill nodded and tucked into his meal, sawing at the slab of meat on his oversize plate. Marsila continued to watch Elias, draining a goblet of dark wine, sediments cascading down the side of the garish blue glass. 

The trio looked tiny at the enormous table, which in turn looked miniscule set amid this sprawling dining chamber, its vaulted ceiling stretching two stories above them. Murals of naked humans frolicking with leering, piping satyrs covered the frescoed panels between massive wooden beams. The domestic help, silent and expressionless, deposited food and drink, and at an imperious wave from Marsila disappeared into the darkness of the house. Elias tried to learn their faces, and hopefully their names, but he found that as soon as they left his vision, they also left his mind, and he couldn’t remember nor distinguish between any of them.

Elias picked up a fork, and looked down at the whole fish staring up at him from his plate. Nothing had been removed prior to cooking, nor afterwards, and aside from the boiled smell, Elias half-expected the gawking creature to leap from the plate and flop its way toward the nearby sea. Hacking loudly and sucking mucous down her throat, Marsila stuffed a napkin into the front of her many layered dress and tore into her roasted game hen, chewing through bone and gristle and dangerously undercooked meat. Nevill dabbed at the juices that dribbled down her chin. Marsila grunted at him with pleasure, like a sow at the trough.

“Father,” Elias said, trying to distract himself, or them, or everyone at once. “I saw a curious building at the edge of the forest.”

“How’s that?” Nevill muttered, not looking down the table at his son.

“I said,” Elias called, cupping his hands around his mouth, “I saw an old building in the far grounds, by the forest. It had a big wheel.”

Nevill tried to feed Marsila a boiled carrot, but she slapped it from his hand. “The old gristmill,” she
said, stuffing her mouth full of fowl. “Put up before my family took over this land.”

“Bloody Vikings, I reckon,” Nevill said.

Marsila snorted. “Norsemen couldn’t properly wipe their arses, let alone build something like that. The mill be Pictish made.”

“It looked quite interesting, father, and I was thinking it would be—”

“—Stay away from it, boy,” Marsila said, spitting out a splinter of bone. “The planks are old and rotten. You could fall through and end up God knows where.”

“But—” Elias began.

“—You heard your mother, boy!” Nevill snapped.

Elias hadn’t heard his mother. He hadn’t heard her voice in a long, long time, and realized with a pang of sadness that he had forgotten the sound of it, just remembering the music. The pitch and cadence, the rich and slightly sad laughter, that was unlike any other voice on Earth. It was a beautiful sound, like a violin played in a minor key. He closed his eyes and started to hum, as Marsila regarded Elias with a decayed grin. He looked down at his fish, which was now on the tablecloth, several feet away. A zigzagging trail of slime led from the plate. 

Elias got up from the table. He’d go to bed hungry that night, even if the breach in etiquette earned him the belt. He’d welcome it at this point, if it meant a return to the old days. The familiar comfort of paternal attention. Nevill didn’t notice him leaving the room.

Elias lay in bed, continuing to hum tunelessly while staring at the wood grain on the ceiling, lit by a blue moon outside that had somehow wormed its way through the mist that seemed to shrink away from the sky at night, as if it knew it wasn’t needed then. He stopped humming as the patterns of the wood began to quiver, then morph into something more than just striations in dead trees. He shrank into the heavy covers while the figures above grew into a canopy of beasts and winged demons, dancing, clutching at each other, copulating. Eating each other and giving birth to something new and then eating what was born.

Elias tore his eyes away and stared at his bedpost, counting backwards from 100, as his mother had always taught him during thunderstorms. A bizarre, geometric pattern had been carved deep into the wood. Elias traced it with his fingers, the disjointed melody inside his head beginning to find their notes.

Dawn crept hesitantly over the land, fighting in vain through the briny mist that had arisen with the sun. Groups of sheep huddled on the damp hills, moving away from the mansion that bled smoke into the sky from only one of its many chimneys.

Under this smokestack, in the master bedroom, a rail of low flames played over a stack of damp logs that smoldered and spit in the massive fireplace, as if the wood repelled the heat. On the four post bed big enough to sleep a family of Irish, Marsila pushed Nevill off of her with a wail and a burst of surprising strength. 

“Stop pawing at me!” she said, her skin now greenish and loose under the ever-present pancake makeup. Her stumpy shape was almost swallowed up by the swirl of her poofy nightgown. 

Nevill bounced off the bed and landed heavily on the floor, his sleeping robe billowing around him. “But lovie, we’re married now.”

“
But lovie, we’re married now
,” she whined, mocking his voice. “Stop sniveling, you worm.”

“Aren’t we…” he began, losing his nerve as she fixed him with a withering glare from deep inside her face. He lowered his voice. “Aren’t we going to…
consummate
?”

Marsila laughed, a phlegmy, guttural sound. Nevill’s head drooped. She continued to laugh, covering her mouth, when she abruptly went silent, jerking her head to the bedroom door. Elias stood in the doorway, watching them. Marsila raised a finger and pointed at the boy, her eyes narrowing to slits, nearly buried inside the folds of made-up skin. “
Sneak
.”