The Year's Best Horror Stories 9 (25 page)

On the field of rippling green fled the small brown shapes, still pursued by some unseen doom. In the center stood the black man, black horn to his lips, man and horn a single line of unbroken black.

“Are the Tcho-Tchos a superstitious people?” I asked.

“They
were”
he said pointedly. “Superstitious and not very pleasant. They’re extinct as dinosaurs now. Supposedly wiped out by the Japanese or something.”

“That’s rather odd,” I said. “A friend of mine claims to have met up with them earlier this year.”

Richmond was smoothing out the robe; the branches of the snake-trees snapped futilely at the brown shapes. “I suppose it’s possible,” he said, after a pause. “But I haven’t read anything about them since grad school. They’re certainly not listed in the textbooks anymore. I’ve looked, and there’s nothing on them. This robe’s over a hundred years old.”

I pointed to the figure in the center. “What can you tell me about this fellow?”

“Death’s Herald,” he said, as if it were a quiz. “At least that’s what the literature says. Supposed to warn of some approaching calamity.”

I nodded without looking up; he was merely repeating what I’d read in the pamphlet. “But isn’t it strange,” I said, “that these others are in such a panic? See? They aren’t even waiting around to listen.”

“Would you?” He snorted impatiently.

“But if the black one’s just a messenger of some sort, why’s he so much
bigger
than the others?”

Richmond began folding the cloth. “Look, mister,” he said, “I don’t pretend to be an expert on every tribe in Asia. But if a character’s important, they’d sometimes make him larger. Anyway, that’s what the Mayans did. But listen, I’ve really got to get this put away now. I’ve got a meeting to go to.”

While he was gone I sat thinking about what I’d just seen. The small brown shapes, crude as they were, had expressed a terror no mere messenger could inspire. And that great black figure standing triumphant in the center, horn twisting from its mouth—that was no messenger either, I was sure of it. That was no Death’s Herald. That was Death itself.

I returned to my apartment just in time to hear the telephone ringing, but by the time I’d let myself in it had stopped. I sat down in the living room with a mug of coffee and a book which had lain untouched on the shelf for the last thirty years:
Jungle Ways,
by that old humbug, William Seabrook. I’d met him back in the twenties and had found him likable enough, if rather untrustworthy. His book described dozens of unlikely characters, including “a cannibal chief who had got himself jailed and famous because he had eaten his young wife, a handsome, lazy wench called Blito, along with a dozen of her girl friends,” but I discovered no mention of a black horn-player.

I had just finished my coffee when the phone rang again. It was my sister.

“I just wanted to let you know that there’s another man missing,” she said breathlessly; I couldn’t tell if she was frightened or merely excited. “A busboy at the San Marino. Remember? I took you there.”

The San Marino was an inexpensive little luncheonette on Indian Creek, several blocks from my sister’s house. She and her friends ate there several times a week.

“It happened last night,” she went on. “I just heard about it at my card game. They say he went outside with a bucket of fish heads to dump in the creek, and he never came back.”

“That’s very interesting, but . . .” I thought for a moment; it was highly unusual for her to call me like this. “But really, Maude, couldn’t he have simply run off? I mean, what makes you think there’s any connection—”

“Because I took Ambrose there, too!” she cried. “Three or four times. That was where we used to meet.”

Apparently Maude had been considerably better acquainted with the Reverend Mortimer than her letters would have led one to believe. But I wasn’t interested in pursuing that line right now. “This busboy,” I asked, “was he someone you knew?”

“Of course,” she said. “I know everyone in there. His name was Carlos. A quiet boy, very courteous. I’m sure he must have waited on us dozens of times.”

I had seldom heard my sister so upset, but for the present there seemed no way of calming her fears. Before hanging up she made me promise to move up the month’s visit I’d expected to pay her over Christmas; I assured her I would try to make it down for Thanksgiving, then only a week away, if I could find a flight that wasn’t filled.

“Do try,” she said—and, were this a tale from the old pulps, she would have added: “If anyone can get to the bottom of this, you can.” In truth, however, both Maude and I were aware that I had just celebrated my seventy-seventh birthday and that, of the two of us, I was by far the more timid; so that what she actually said was, “Looking after you will help take my mind off things.”

I couldn’t live a week without a private library.

—Lovecraft, 2/25/1929

That’s what I thought, too, until recently. After a lifetime of collecting I’d acquired thousands upon thousands of volumes, never parting with a one; it was this cumbersome private library, in fact, that helped keep me anchored to the same West Side apartment for nearly half a century.

Yet here I sit, with no company save a few gardening manuals and a shelf of antiquated best-sellers—nothing to dream on, nothing I’d want to hold in my hand. Still, I’ve survived here a week, a month, almost a season. The truth is, Howard, you’d be surprised what you can live without. As for the books I’ve left in Manhattan, I just hope someone takes care of them when I’m gone.

But I was by no means so resigned that November when, having successfully reserved seats on an earlier flight, I found myself with less than a week in New York. I spent all my remaining time in the library—the public one on Forty-second Street, with the lions in front and with no book of mine on its shelves. Its two reading rooms were the haunt of men my age and older, retired men with days to fill, poor men just warming their bones; some leafed through newspapers, others dozed in their seats. None of them, I’m sure, shared my sense of urgency: there were things I hoped to find out before I left, things for which Miami would be useless.

I was no stranger to this building. Long ago, during one of Howard’s visits, I had undertaken some genealogical researches here in the hope of finding ancestors more impressive than his, and as a young man I had occasionally attempted to support myself, like the denizens of Gissing’s
New Grub Street
, by writing articles compiled from the work of others. But by now I was out of practice: how, after all, does one find references to an obscure Southeast Asian tribal myth without reading everything published on that part of the world?

Initially that’s exactly what I tried; I looked through every book I could find with “Malaya” in its title. I read about rainbow gods and phallic altars and something called “the
tatai
,” a sort of unwanted companion; I came across wedding rites and The Death of Thorns and a certain cave inhabited by millions of snails. But I found no mention of the Tcho-Tcho, and nothing on their gods.

This in itself was surprising. We are living in a day when there are no more secrets, when my twelve-year-old nephew can buy his own grimoire and books with titles like
The Encyclopedia of Ancient and Forbidden Knowledge
are remaindered at every discount store. Though my friends from the twenties would have hated to admit it, the notion of stumbling across some moldering old “black book” in the attic of a deserted house—some lexicon of spells and chants and hidden lore—is merely a quaint fantasy. If the
Necronomicon
actually existed, it would be out in Bantam paperback with a preface by Lin Carter.

It’s appropriate, then, that when I finally came upon a reference to what I sought, it was in that most unromantic of forms, a mimeographed film-script.

“Transcript” would perhaps be closer to the truth, for it was based upon a film shot in 1937 and that was now presumably crumbling in some forgotten vault. I discovered the item inside one of those brown cardboard packets, held together with ribbons, which libraries use to protect books whose bindings have worn away. The book itself,
Malay Memories
, by a Reverend Morton, had proved a disappointment despite the author’s rather suggestive name. The transcript lay beneath it, apparently slipped there by mistake, but though it appeared unpromising—only ninety-six pages long, badly typed, and held together by a single rusty staple—it more than repaid the reading. There was no title page, nor do I think there’d ever been one; the first page simply identified the film as “Documentary—Malaya Today,” and noted that it had been financed, in part, by a U.S. government grant. The filmmaker or makers were not listed.

I soon saw why the government may have been willing to lend the venture some support, for there were a great many scenes in which the proprietors of rubber plantations expressed the sort of opinions Americans might want to hear. To an unidentified interviewer’s query, “What other signs of prosperity do you see around you?” a planter named Mr. Pierce had obligingly replied, “Why, look at the living standard—better schools for the natives and a new lorry for me. It’s from Detroit, you know. May even have my own rubber in it.”

INT: And how about the Japanese? Are they one of today’s better markets?

PIERCE: Oh, see, they buy our crop all right, but we don’t really trust ’em, understand? (Smiles) We don’t like ’em half so much as the Yanks.

The final section of the transcript was considerably more interesting, however; it recorded a number of brief scenes that must never have appeared in the finished film. I quote one of them in its entirety:

PLAYROOM, CHURCH SCHOOL—LATE AFTERNOON.

(DELETED)

INT: This Malay youth has sketched a picture of a demon he calls Shoo Goron. (To Boy) I wonder if you can tell me something about the instrument he’s blowing out of. It looks like the Jewish
shofar
, or ram’s horn. (Again to Boy) That’s all right. No need to be frightened.

BOY: He no blow out. Blow in.

INT: I see—he draws air in through the horn, is that right?

BOY: No horn. Is no horn. (Weeps) Is
him.

Miami did not produce much of an impression . . .

—Lovecraft, 7/19/1931

Waiting in the airport lounge with Ellen and her boy, my bags already checked and my seat number assigned, I fell prey to the sort of anxiety that had made me miserable in youth: it was a sense that time was running out; and what caused it now, I think, was the hour that remained before my flight was due to leave. It was too long a time to sit making small talk with Terry, whose mind was patently on other things; yet it was too short to accomplish the task which I’d suddenly realized had been left undone.

But perhaps my nephew would serve. “Terry,” I said, “how’d you like to do me a favor?” He looked up eagerly; I suppose children his age love to be of use. “Remember the building we passed on the way here? The International Arrivals building?”

“Sure,” he said. “Right next door.”

“Yes, but it’s a lot farther away than it looks. Do you think you’d be able to get there and back in the next hour and find something out for me?”

“Sure.” He was already out of his seat.

“It just occurs to me that there’s an Air Malay reservations desk in that building, and I wonder if you could ask someone there—”

My niece interrupted me. “Oh, no he won’t,” she said firmly. “First of all, I won’t have him running across that highway on some silly errand—” she ignored her son’s protests, “—and secondly, I don’t want him involved in this game you’ve got going with Mother.”

The upshot of it was that Ellen went herself, leaving Terry and me to our small talk. She took with her a slip of paper upon which I’d written “Shoo Goron,” a name she regarded with sour skepticism. I wasn’t sure she would return before my departure (Terry, I could see, was growing increasingly uneasy), but she was back before the second boarding call.

“She says you spelled it wrong,” Ellen announced.

“Who’s she?”

“Just one of the flight attendants,” said Ellen. “A young girl, in her early twenties. None of the others were Malayan. At first she didn’t recognize the name, until she read it out loud a few times. Apparently it’s some kind of fish, am I right? Like a suckerfish, only bigger. Anyway, that’s what she said. Her mother used to scare her with it when she was bad.”

Obviously Ellen—or, more likely, the other woman—had misunderstood. “Sort of a bogeyman figure?” I asked. “Well, I suppose that’s possible. But a fish, you say?”

Ellen nodded. “I don’t think she knew that much about it, though. She acted a little embarrassed, in fact. Like I’d asked her something dirty.” From across the room a loudspeaker issued the final call for passengers. Ellen helped me to my feet, still talking. “She said she was just a Malay, from somewhere on the coast—Malacca? I forget—and that it’s a shame I didn’t drop by three or four months ago, because her summer replacement was part Chocha—Chocho?—something like that.”

The line was growing shorter now. I wished the two of them a safe Thanksgiving and shuffled toward the plane.

Below me the clouds had formed a landscape of rolling hills. I could see every ridge, every washed-out shrub, and in the darker places, the eyes of animals.

Some of the valleys were split by jagged black lines that looked like rivers seen on a map. The water, at least, was real enough: here the cloudbank had cracked and parted, revealing the dark sea beneath.

Throughout the ride I’d been conscious of lost opportunity, a sense that my destination offered a kind of final chance. With Howard gone these forty years I still lived out my life in his shadow; certainly his tales had overshadowed my own. Now I found myself trapped within one of them. Here, miles above the earth, I felt great gods warring; below, the war was already lost.

The very passengers around me seemed participants in a masque: the oily little steward who smelled of something odd; the child who stared and wouldn’t look away; the man asleep beside me, mouth slack, who’d chuckled and handed me a page ripped from his “in-flight” magazine: NOVEMBER PUZZLE PAGE, with an eye staring in astonishment from a swarm of dots. “Connect the dots and see what you’ll be
least
thankful for this Thanksgiving!” Below it, half buried amid
“B’nai B’rith to Host Song Fest”
and advertisements for beach clubs, a bit of local color found me in a susceptible mood: