The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales (9 page)

When he got back to the bungalow house, he was soaked through. The brim of his hat drooped with the weight of the rainwater it had absorbed. His clothes clung to his skin with clammy dampness, and he shivered violently as he removed them from his body. Naturally, his fever had got worse. He felt dizzy as he struggled to get a blaze going in the fireplace, and he fumbled with the matches, dropping several of them between the logs of wood. The logs had been treated with a tarry substance, doubtless to aid their combustion, but they had lain for so long in the fireplace, becoming covered with a layer of dust, that they proved impossible to light. He thought of the Indio children who sold kindling in the plaza and cursed himself for not buying one of their bundles.

He dozed for a while on the bed, wrapping the musty-smelling blankets around his naked body, and drifted in and out of consciousness. He was troubled by strange dreams, but could not grasp their meaning, nor recall the events that had transpired within them. His impression was that he had been dreaming not of scenes, but rather of atmospheres, and in particular, was haunted by a vague sensation of horrible wonder and of falling into an immeasurable gulf whose darkness pressed down upon him.

When the worst of the fever had abated, and Barron felt that he was thinking coherently once more, it was already evening, and the light had been exhausted. He tried to consume one of the tortas that he had bought earlier in the day, but his appetite was not up to the task. He left the roll of bread and its contents half-eaten, and washed down what little he had eaten with some water from the pump. He moved around the room wrapped in the blankets, for they were warmer than any of the few clothes he had brought with him.

He glanced over the books of folklore and anthropology that he had piled upon the table, remembering that he wished to track down the reference he had tried to recall during his curious experience outside the gateway of the cemetery. The indexes of the volumes yielded several entries for “Xapalpa”, and it was in the ninth book he examined that he found that for which he was searching.

It was an article written in 1950, by the Chairman of the department of anthropology at Mexico City College, one Robert H. Barlow, and was entitled “Strange Worship: the Head Cult of Xapalpa”.

The following passage from the article was what disturbed Barron most:

He had found what he was looking for, and wished he hadn’t. Barron decided that he had spent enough time in Xapalpa, and that he would leave as soon as it was possible. He had thought to bring along with him the bus timetable, and was frustrated to discover that the next service back to Guadalajara did not leave until the morning after next, since it was the middle of the Christmas period, and the frequency was reduced. He regretted the fact that he had wasted money on renting La Casa De Fuente for many more days than he would use it, but he felt that his fever was connected, in some nebulous way, with his occupancy.

Barron slept more easily that night. His fever abated slightly, as if confirming that he had made the right decision.

•

The following day could not have been a greater contrast with the one before. The wind and rain had disappeared, and hot sunshine, brilliant in its intensity, took their place. Xapalpa was transformed into a magic town that had reached up into the pure blue sky.

Barron wandered through the narrow dusty streets for hours in the sun, glad to have the opportunity to be outside and away from the decayed confines of La Casa De Fuente. He sat on benches when he tired, drawing curious looks from passers-by, for in his expression was a strange co-mixture of dread and vacancy brought on by his continued delirium. He would stare up at the naked sun, as if trying to blind himself. He seemed to be desirous of drawing some portion of its energy into his enervated frame, and thereby driving out the shadows within.

It was in the plaza of claustrophobic dimensions that he came across the children playing the game. They formed a circle around a piñata hoisted high up by a rope. The ones who took turns at hitting the star-shaped object were blindfolded. But this piñata was not brightly coloured. It was a mottled grey, and stinking of decomposition. Its cone limbs flapped desperately in the air. Barron watched with fascination as child after child battered the thing, squealing with excitement, and cheering as it was beaten into a state of ruin. Finally, one of them struck a blow that cracked open the core, the rope was released, and the piñata fell onto the dusty street below. They descended upon it as if ravenous with hunger, and from amidst the scrum, a single boy emerged carrying the prize. It was a soil-blackened human skull with a hole in the centre of its cranium.

Barron never returned to La Casa De Fuente. After dark, and having spent all of the afternoon under the burning sun, he was last seen in a cantina on Obregon, where he drank a great deal of mezcal. He babbled deliriously about piñatas, of the secret of the cemetery on Quintero, and of the old cult. In short, his talk was about everything of which one does not speak in Xapalpa. When his disappearance was investigated, the local police were satisfied that what the locals said was correct; he had drunk too much mezcal on top of a near-lethal dose of sunstroke. He had said he wished to leave Xapalpa, and had probably wandered off alone that night in his delirium, and got lost in the vast expanses of uncharted woods that cover the mountains all around the town.

•

Mason finished his beer. He did not like the story and he did not like the grin on the face of Paco Maldonado.

“
I don’t believe a word of it,” Mason said, in Spanish, “and I don’t scare easily.”

The owner of the cantina had come out from behind the counter. He had taken down and was holding one of the old rifles that decorated the walls. He began polishing the barrel with a rag.

Maldonado sipped nonchalantly at his tumbler of ice and Chivas whiskey.

Mason felt cold sweat on his brow. He could not tell whether it was a result of the fear he denied feeling or of a fever coming on.

Glickman the Bibliophile

For weeks the nation had been suffering from an epidemic of destruction at libraries, bookshops and publishers. Those persons who had been caught and charged with the crimes claimed afterwards to have no knowledge of their actions and acted as if in a trance. Any random individual could, it was claimed, enter this trance-state and begin to destroy books using whatever means they had at their disposal.

The action was apparently motiveless, unplanned and the consequence of a spontaneous, temporary mania. Theories concerning the possible origin of the behaviour were legion but none of them seemed to explain all of the facts. Some proposed that a new chemical had been used in book-production that altered the mental state of those in its vicinity, but this did not account for the destruction of antiquarian bookshops. Another theory advanced concerned an airborne germ released by a foreign power but this seemed unlikely, as reports came in of the same phenomenon striking across the world with no country being immune. One theory that was given credence for a time advanced the idea that some form of evolution had taken place in that area of the human brain concerned with linguistic recognition. It was believed that instead of recognition, this area of the brain now generated an intolerable fear of written signifiers, leading to acts of violence and memory-loss when the sufferer came into contact with text. But this was discredited after the corpses of those persons who perished accidentally in acts of book destruction were examined. Their brains showed no signs of abnormal development or damage. None of the theories advanced could be held with certainty.

•

Henry Glickman was on his way to a meeting with his new publishers, the Nemesis Press. The company that had issued his last collection of stories had recently gone into liquidation and another author who had told Glickman that their remuneration was extremely generous had recommended these new publishers to him. He was not a commercially successful author and had no agent, merely indulging in post-retirement fantasies of authorial fame.

He was in his mid-sixties, thin, with a pinched, aquiline face and a mane of grey hair. Books had been his passion for as long as he could remember and his personal library consisted of well over two thousand volumes. His books were almost his very life, the casements that had opened up magical vistas.

Glickman had never married and had long-since settled into a secluded bachelor mode. Quite honestly, women were not able to compete with the real love of his life. What money he earned he spent almost entirely on books and he had no desire to give up the pursuit of them for the pursuit of companionship. It seemed a logical step for him to begin writing some books of his own. He had the manuscript of his second collection in his briefcase.

After a time Glickman reached his destination. He parked in front of the steps leading up to the main entrance of the building. It was a huge white Art Deco structure with flaking paint and decrepit pilasters. The windows were layered with dust. On a board next to the entrance were marked the names of the companies located there and Glickman saw that the Nemesis Press now occupied the entire building. The names of the previous companies had been covered over with tape. Such expansion seemed to bode well for the financial security of the business.

The interior was a mass of activity. It seemed that attempts were being made to complete cataloguing of their stock but these were evidently well behind schedule. Passing along a corridor Glickman found himself in a vast warehouse. Books lay scattered and piled up in crates on the bare floorboards, being checked by clerks in shirtsleeves. They were too intent upon their work to pay any attention to Glickman as he mingled with them.

Glickman wandered around for a brief time, along the aisles, checking the stock more carefully. He was somewhat surprised to discover that the books here were not only Nemesis Press publications, but came from a wide variety of sources.

The editorial offices of the company were located on the third floor of the building and Glickman had to make his way up a tiled stairwell to reach them. He passed more clerks, all carrying piles of books up and down the steps. These men were all pallid and zombie-like as if they had long withdrawn from the world into the refuge of their duties.

Upon arrival at the third floor, Glickman found the editorial offices at the end of a half-lit corridor. He was shown into an adjacent interview room by one of the staff.

After he had waited a few moments a middle-aged and quite small man with an uncommonly large head and piercing green eyes entered the room. He was almost bald, with his white hair shaved close to the scalp. There was an air of quiet fatalism about him.

“
My name is Janus Yaanek. I am the Chief Editor of Nemesis Press,” he said, “and you must be Mr Glickman.”

“
I am. It’s good to meet you at last. I’ve brought the manuscript with me in which you expressed interest,” Glickman took an envelope from his briefcase containing a 200-page document; “it’s a collection of weird horror tales called
The Rotting Brain and Other Stories.
”

“
I shall be sure to give it my full attention. But first let me show you around our little empire. We take such pride in our activities that we subject all our authors to the grand tour.”

“
Of course,” Glickman replied.

The two men left the interview room and, with Yaanek leading the way, passed along the corridor and through a series of locked doors and gloomy and interminable back-and-forth stairways, worthy of Escher, until they came to a vast chamber which, in turn, could have sprung from a nightmare of a Piranesi. It was a gigantic operations centre located deep inside the building.

There were hundreds of people working in the chamber. They all seemed to share that pallid, withdrawn aspect he had noted amongst the other employees, and shuffled reports and examined the huge piles of books that lay on their desks. Some would consume the pages of the books, and then vomit the regurgitated pulp into huge bins. Every few minutes a servitor would wheel these bins away, presumably to another part of the building.

The chamber was filled with banks of decayed computer terminals. They were machines the likes of which Glickman had not previously seen or even imagined might exist: half-mechanical, half-organic structures that seemed to operate on a basis of mutual degeneracy. The clerks were wholly absorbed in their tasks. In fact, as he drew closer, Glickman very clearly saw that their limbs seemed to have moulded with the flesh-like apparatus of the keyboards. One could not determine where one began and the other ended. It was only when total exhaustion overcame one of the operatives that he was taken away to recuperate, his limbs disengaging from the apparatus like melting plastic.