The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales (3 page)

Knox pulled down the blinds on all the windows and poured himself another dose of the potent bad medicine. His head was swimming, and he heard the sound of his teeth chattering in his mouth. The compartment around him blurred, the overhead luggage racks, the electric lamps and the advertisements on the walls faded from view and he passed out.

•

When he awoke it must have been hours later. His watch had stopped, so he had no precise way of telling just how long it had been. But he knew he still travelled by night for it was dark outside; he had lifted the blind a little to see if it were daylight yet. His mouth was dry and his lips were encrusted with the scum of dried saliva.

The half-drunk bottle of booze had wedged itself between the cushions of the long seat. Alongside it was the remains of the plastic cup, crushed by the weight of Knox’s body where he had lain slumped after having passed out. The light from the compartment’s electric lamps hurt his eyes and so he took out his mirror shades from the glasses case he kept in the breast pocket of his tweed jacket, and put them on. The hangover was so bad he felt he would never recover from it. He took a swig from the bottle, but the taste made the bile rise in his throat. He decided to go in search of the train conductor in order to find out how much further it was to Losenef.

As he passed the compartment adjacent to his own he heard a groaning from within and stopped to look inside. A solitary passenger was sprawled across the floor, face down and motionless. The man was dressed in a badly crumpled light grey suit covered with dark brown stains. He had a foul odour about him, of eggs that had turned rotten. Knox considered, for a moment, ignoring him but then the groan came again and this time it was louder and more prolonged than before. The man in the grey suit had, like Knox, been drinking the green spirit. An empty bottle of it lay just outside his reach.

Knox knelt down, pinching his nose and covering his mouth with one hand to guard against the stench and, with the other, he grabbed the shoulder of the man’s jacket and turned his body over.

His face was a grisly ruin. Half of it had been eaten away by the maggots that writhed and burrowed through yellowish flesh. There was nothing at all left of the eyes; only vacant sockets remained. And then the corpse groaned for a third time, a hollow and despairing groan that issued from unimaginable depths of suffering. Something conscious existed within the shell.

Knox backed away, leaving the hideous cadaver face-upright. And still it continued to issue its uncanny cries.

The next compartment along contained a similar horror. The occupant, a woman with long dusty blonde hair, faced the wall with her hands reached out as if clutching at it for support. She made heartrending sobbing and snuffling noises. But she was dead. The skin on her hands was flaking away like paint on a weather beaten wall, and Knox was glad he was spared the sight of her face, for the malformed sound of sobbing could only emanate from a deformed mouth.

The litany of terror was repeated throughout the whole of the carriage and, so too, throughout the next. All the passengers were dead but not one was silent.

Knox took a deep breath and leant with his back to the wall behind him. He took off his mirror shades, rubbed his eyes with his knuckles, and spat on the floor. This was junk, he thought. He’d written stories worse than this in his time. He didn’t believe any of it. He must have bashed his head on something whilst he was sozzled, causing him to hallucinate. He had impacted his skull, affecting the brain, resulting in a wild bout of concussion. The more he thought of it, the more the idea fitted. He was having a psychotic episode. Nothing more. He had killed no-one back in Strasgol; he’d only imagined he had. All this business on the train was brought on by a bump to the head. He put his shades back on and grinned. Then he ran his fingers over the entirety of his skull, working through the mass of red hair that covered it. His grin evaporated. There was no damage to his skull.

The train began to slow down and finally drew to a halt amidst a grinding screech. From further along the corridor, out of the buffet cabin, the conductor emerged. He’d removed the long scarf he had wound around the lower half of his face. Now Knox could see why it had been covered up. There was no lower half of his face. Where there should have been a bottom jaw there was instead a gaping bloody hollow. The conductor’s voice issued from a vacuum, and without tongue or lips should have been impossible to form. Yet the sound was as real as when he had spoken previously.

“
Last stop, sir,” the conductor breathed, “Losenef.”

What was odd was that, after disembarking from the train, Knox found Losenef to be an exact duplicate of Strasgol and, moreover, he had arrived an hour earlier than he departed. It was only in the Zacharas Café, having spotted the duplicate of himself drinking Jack Daniels, that he realised the truth. He’d wait a little longer and then try yet again to take his revenge. Eventually, he hoped, he would succeed.

The Man Who Collected Machen

I am writing these lines from a deserted residence situated, I suspect, in the maze of streets to the southeast of King’s Cross, that dim region of London Incognita. I found the house, abandoned for years, when I was lost. It is a squat Georgian villa in the most squalid quarter of the district, its mock-portico decayed, its peeling stucco exterior riddled with weeds. I know now I cannot find my way back from there, and this fact must ultimately put an end to my former existence.

My name is Robert Lundwick. After I had turned twenty-one, in 1969, I came into possession of an income, a legacy from a distant relation whom I scarcely knew. Formerly I had hoped this income would prove sufficient for all my needs. Alas, the gulf between dream and reality! Legal costs had drained the capital of a great deal of its worth. What remained for me was a mere pittance, enough to keep me from starving but not enough to allow for any degree of comfort. I had long ago determined I would devote my life to literary scholarship. Not, let me emphasise, the dry-as-dust scholarship of academe, the crushing orthodoxy to be found in universities, but rather the recondite scholarship that is a journey into the unknown. I refer, chiefly, to those dead authors whose works savour of the uncanny and the marvellous, authors whose unique perspectives are beyond the self-stultifying purview of the modern critical mania for so-called realism. For my part, I chose the mysteries, and the hierophant of mystery was an obscure author called Arthur Machen. Although I had done the best I could to collect a small library of his books, carried with me from lodging to lodging in a battered suitcase as evictions forced me on, I had not sufficient funds for the purchase of the rarer volumes whose cost was beyond my limited means. And so, like many a poor scholar before me, it was necessary I devoted myself to the Reading Room of the British Library.

Dome of a million forlorn hopes! Dome beneath which labour benighted dreamers and unfortunate seekers after knowledge; victims of vanity, slaves of solitude! A legion of bibliophiles weighed down by the learning of centuries. They lift their eyes from their musty tomes but infrequently, gazing with bleary eyes at the enclosed immensity in which they have chosen to incarcerate themselves. Oh monstrous dome! Draining the life from all those scholarly unfortunates who cluster in the radiating rows of desks below. In truth no refuge thou art, no shelter and no haven. Titanic, far-lifted and terrible dome; would that those who come to thee rather fled at once from the silent shades paying thee homage!

It is with an uncanny recollection I now think back to the day I first took my place at my desk and began my study of the work of Arthur Machen. One of the dusty assistants brought me the five items I had selected from the massed ranks of the library catalogue. The items were four in number; the biography by Charlton and Reynolds, the Goldstone and Sweetser bibliography,
Precious Balms
and
The Children of the Pool and Other Stories
. These were books I had heard of only by reputation and although I had once seen a copy of the last of these august tomes in the closed, glass-fronted bookcase of a certain bookseller in Bloomsbury, its exorbitant price tag forced its swift return to the shelf. I made copious entries in my notebook, drawing deeply from the biography. I plunged with joy into my researches, was appalled by the notices Machen had reproduced from ignorant critics in
Precious Balms
, and when I came to the bibliography I realised the extent of his more elusive literary productions, scattered throughout periodicals and American limited editions that had avoided entry in the catalogue of the British Library.

But I came time and again to my desk under the dome during the following weeks, determined to mine the seam of literary gold at my disposal until I had exhausted it. Volumes that had eluded me, such as
The Green Round
,
The Anatomy of Tobacco
,
The Secret Glory
,
Dr. Stiggins
and
The Canning Wonder
were pored over in excitement and triumph.

There were disappointments too. Upon consulting the library’s copy of
The Cosy Room and Other Stories
I found that a vandal had cut out the pages containing a story called “The Lost Club” and, in their place, gummed in a single black page. At the time I did not realise the significance of this deed. I knew of “The Lost Club” only as an obscure Machen tale first published in the journal
The Whirlwind
in 1890. Although it had been subsequently reprinted in the American edition of
The Shining Pyramid
published by Covici-McGee in 1923, I found that, here too, the vandal had been at work.

At night, when I dragged myself back to my dingy bedsit in Soho, I would open my battered suitcase library and read again by candlelight those works I was fortunate to possess for myself; amongst which were
Holy Terrors
,
The London Adventure
,
The Hill of Dreams
and
The House of Souls.

But when at my desk, beneath the oppressive dome, it was to the bibliography I most frequently turned, and I dreamt of acquiring for myself all those fugitive items listed therein. I had consulted the book on so many occasions that the assistants of the library often brought it to me with an indulgent smile.

During one of my consultations within its pages, a gentleman who often took the desk adjacent to mine, whilst pursuing researches of his own, finally addressed me in a low whisper. For weeks we had been on nodding acquaintance, but as time passed I could not shake off the feeling he had begun to take an interest in my choice of research material. For my own part, I scrupulously tried to avoid taking an interest in the spines of the volumes on his desk.

“
Please excuse me,” he said in a low voice, “but I cannot help having noticed you have a dedicated interest in the works of Arthur Machen. I have something of an interest in his life and work myself.”

These words arrested my attention and I took the opportunity, for the first time, to properly examine his appearance and not merely glance at him. He was a striking figure, very tall and acutely thin, and dressed in an olive-coloured corduroy suit. He wore a crimson and paisley cravat rather than a necktie around his throat. With his natty little moustache he looked like an out of work actor. But for all his sartorial flamboyance, it was obvious that he was a very ill man. His skin was almost the colour of cigarette ash.

His smile was warm enough, but there was something about his eyes that was dead and emotionless. He stared for longer than was normal, as if he were involved in some game of wills, whereby he would not be the first to blink or drop his gaze.

“
My name is Aloysius Condor,” he said.

It had occurred to me that the man might be a homosexual. Since the recent legalisation of the practice by parliament, such individuals had appeared to multiply in the “let-it-all-hang-out” permissive era of Carnaby Street, the Beatles and what some had lately taken to calling the “Swinging Sixties”. Being of a liberal cast of mind, I tried not to react to the possibility by displaying any sense of unease in his presence, my duty, after all, being to respond in the manner of one polite scholar addressing another in the spirit of a commonality of interests.

“
Mine is Robert Lundwick, pleased to meet you,” I replied.

We shook hands over the desk. His grasp was cold, flabby and dry. He suggested that we continue our conversation later on, outside the hushed confines of the reading room, so as not to disturb anyone.

An hour later and we shared a table inside the Museum Tavern, on the other side of Great Russell Street, and it was swiftly clear that his bibliographic knowledge of Machen more than justified his claim to have an interest in the great author’s works. Over several pints of bitter it soon became apparent that he was, in fact, one of the foremost collectors of Machen’s work in this country.

“
You will find,” he said, “the holdings of the British Library are somewhat deficient when compared to those of the Newport Library. At present, they possess the most extensive collection of Machen’s work in public hands. But, of course, it is a trial to be constantly shuttling back and forth between London and Newport. For my own part, I boast that my collection is the most extensive in private hands.”

Condor took out a packet of Craven “A” cigarettes, jammed one between his lips, lit it with a fancy silver Zippo and proceeded to puff away nonchalantly and waited to see what effect his claim would have upon me.

“
How interesting,” I said. “My own means are so limited that the acquisition of a substantial personal library is beyond me.”