Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror (50 page)

Then we rounded a thick stand of mesquites and saw the hog traps.

The hog traps were built out of obsolete cotton-bale trailers with makeshift one-way doors welded on. Everyone in the area used them; feral hogs could obliterate whole fields in a night, and they were a ready supply of pork, so they were free game. What we’d do is pour feed corn inside and prop the makeshift door open with a stick. The hogs would funnel in, knocking out the stick in their eagerness, and bang! The door would drop and the pigs were stuck. Next morning everyone would come out with their guns of choice, climb to the top of the trailers, and take aim. We’d eat hog for weeks.

Normally, when the trapped hogs hear humans coming, they’ll start charging from one side of the trailer to the other, and can be heard tramping and squealing and banging into the walls. Today, I heard nothing. Pistol’s ears were flat, his eyes rolled back, his chin thrust skyward. He danced in that unpleasant half-hopping way that preceded a bucking fit.

There must’ve been hogs in the trap at some point. I say that because there was blood and hide everywhere. Fresh yellow bones striped with raw flesh lay jumbled in roughly sorted piles—ribs with ribs, vertebrae with vertebrae, femurs with femurs. Droplets glistened redly on the steel mesh, and the mud was churned up until it had the consistency of a milkshake. Here and there was an almost intact head with the eyes, tongue, and ears cored out. The mud was scored with tracks—not the tracks of the hogs, nor boot prints, but whip-like arcs like those made by serpents. I couldn’t get Pistol much closer and frankly, I didn’t want to.

“Shit,” I said.

Quivering, Dr. Peaslee sloshed over and lifted his camera.

“Gross!” I said. “What are you taking pictures of them for?”

“Surely you know what day it is!” he said.

“April 15?”

He leaned down to take a close-up. “You mean you don’t know what this means?”

“That we should leave?”

Dr. Peaslee laughed up at me. His teeth were very white. “Oh, no!” he said. “It means that the stars are favorable, and they’re here.”

I turned white as a sheet. Wrong action. His face lit up and he clapped the camera to his chest.

“Then you know! Where? Where are they?”

Shit!

“I don’t know. Holes in the cliffs, below the waterline. They stick around the stones, generally.” My tongue felt stiff. “But if what you’re saying is right, if you’re trying to tell me they killed these hogs, then we shouldn’t go anywhere near the rocks.”

His eyes settled on the .22 hanging on Pistol’s hip. “But you are armed.”

I shook my head. “No, no, no. You’ve been watching too many cowboy flicks, man. I’m not looking for trouble here. Self-defense only.”

He relaxed. “You’re right. They might turn violent at the sight of weaponry.”

“'Might'? What stories have you heard where they brought us bouquets and chocolates?”

“Communication of the proper kind might solve everything,” he said. “That’s why I have taken the time to learn their tongue. There are books…” He licked his lips. “Very old books transcribing the language and the methods necessary to its mastery.”

My jaw dropped. He might as well have grown an extra arm right in front of me.

“Why would you do that?” I asked. “The Things’ll kill you before they stop for a chat. Didn’t you see those hog bones back there? Hogs are not easy to kill, and they fight back. What do you think the Things will do to you?”

He stretched himself up to his full height and lifted his chin.

“My dear, I must try,” he said. “For you must understand that if I can speak to these creatures, it will advance our comprehension of both human civilization and the universe. Besides, I am quite old, and have lived a full life; if I died like this, seeking the knowledge of centuries past, it would be a fitting end indeed.”

My god. Yanks have got only sentimentality where their brains should be. It’s because they watch so many movies.

“Okay,” I said, “but if we need to run, you’re out of luck. I don’t think I can keep Pistol in line long enough for you to jump on.”

“I am prepared for that!” he said, touching his heart. “Please, Ms. Byrd. Let’s go on.”

My brain was awhirl with possibilities; the possibilities of seeing the stones and the creatures versus the possibility of real trouble, perhaps death. When I didn’t reply quickly enough, Dr. Peaslee trotted up to us. Pistol backed away stiffly. Not that Pistol was a judge of character; at that point a branch in the wind would have set him off. I was trying to calm him down when Dr. Peasley pulled out his wallet and started peeling out tens and twenties.

“Doctor, no,” I said. “I don’t want your…”

He grabbed my hand and stuck a whole wad of cash in it, and when Pistol jerked away he doggedly doddered after us and stuffed some bills in my boot. I think he would have dumped his change in there if he felt it could have swayed me. God! I felt absurd, clenching that money in my hand, money balled up on my shin. For some reason, god only knows—I nodded and stuck it in my pocket. It burned against my hip.

I twisted Pistol ’round and jabbed him with my spurs. He took off at a fast trot with flattened ears and bulging eyeballs. Without a word, we ducked down the labyrinth of hog and cattle paths toward the river itself. I didn’t look to see if the doctor was following, but every now and then I heard the click and whirr of his camera. I propped my .22 on my knee, popped the safety off, and kept my eyes peeled on the brush.

We were hemmed in by a jumble of thorny branches that dropped our visibility to two or three feet at best. Every corner was a blind one, and often paths split into three or four branches that led off into winding ways unknown. The landscape was full of watchful eyes we could not see; I could feel them boring into us. I looked for shapes and shadows in the brush and strained for the sound of snapping branches, rustling leaves. Over time, the strange stink grew so powerful I could taste it. I hoped the hogs had been killed sometime in the night, when the River Things are most likely to come out of the water, and prayed that the sunlight would keep them underground.

I should’ve known from the dampness of the blood that they hadn’t been gone too long.

“So… you know about them?” Dr. Peaslee asked. “The amphibious people of the Brazos?”

“I don’t know if I would call them ‘people,’” I said.

“Well—I suppose you’re right in the technical sense.”

He was smiling about something at my expense, and I can’t say I liked it much. So I didn’t say anything.

He cleared his throat. “But you’ve seen them.”

“No,” I said. “All I know is that they move the stones around.”

“And do you know why?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Have you heard of Mnemeros, by any chance?” he asked.

That name! It was the first time I’d heard it and I didn’t ever want to hear it again. Some names are like keys; they swing doors wide open that are best left shut.

“It’s all right if you haven't,” he said. “He’s a beautifully kept secret, preserved for only the select few. An ancient god, you see, from the faraway stars.”

Prickles ran down my spine. “You’d better not be a Satanist.”

“Oh, no! Absolutely not.” His smile was expansive and bright. “There’s nothing to be afraid of, I assure you. I refer to him as a ‘god’ only to refer to his power and scope compared to ours. Here, let me explain… ah… you are a Bible-fearing type, aren’t you?”

I nodded—easier than telling the truth.

“Then you’re aware of ‘principalities and powers,’ ‘princes of the air’?”

“You mean demons?” I asked.

“No, I mean things outside of your god.”

“Yeah, demons.” I was a big book reader even then, big on apologetics in particular. No way was some lukewarm scholar going to trip me up with something as silly as semantics.

“Well, dear, imagine, if you will, these demons. Not little demons, no, but rather, awesome interdimensional lords with shapes and voices that would blast a man sightless and raving, if the experience didn’t kill him outright. Creatures on par with Beelzebub and Apollyon and Azrael.”

“Still demons,” I said.

“But demons exist, do they not?” asked Dr. Peaslee, and lifted his chin.

I went silent. I couldn’t bring myself to say
yes
.

“Would you care to hear a story?” asked Dr. Peaslee. “A story about the Great Old Ones, who flung themselves down to Earth when the stars were right?”

It took me too long to process the sentence. My loss. He kept talking.

“Many millions of years ago, the Great Old Ones descended to our world in a curtain of fire and built their holy city,” he said. “R’lyeh, a city of extraterrestrial stone and alien geometry, peopled with beings of unspeakable shape and size. For many millions of years they ruled there, lords of the Earth… until the stars were closed to them and they fell into a vast darkness like death.”

His voice quavered, but there was a richness in it, the kind of timbre born of passion. You know that dramatic way that a writer recites what they’ve written? I could tell he’d written about this, over and over and over again in a million different ways, and said it to himself like a mantra.

“But one of their brothers was late,” he said. “Whether it was from arrogance or misreading the signs, no one can say. Sixty-five million years ago, he hurtled from the sky, and because he did not arrive when the path was open, he burned the whole way down.”

“Lucifer,” I said. My words fell flat.

But Dr. Peaslee’s eyes were closed, and he did not appear to hear me.

“His smoldering remnant crawled with torturous slowness from the crater he had made, the god of a thousand faces and ten thousand hands. But the stars had not forgotten his insult; they say he burns still, and writhes as he burns. He calls and calls, casting his dreams out to his kin in R’lyeh and to the nameless, formless ones past the veil, but he is corrupted. They will not answer.”

His eyes opened. There was a light there that I did not entirely like.

“But there is a boon in this for mortal man,” said Dr. Peaslee. “For in becoming corrupted, Mnemeros became more like us. He can speak to us and we will not die. And what fortune! He contains more in one thimbleful of knowledge than twenty Libraries of Alexandria. Knowledge of hundreds of different cultures and times and locales, an intimate understanding of the natural world and realms unspeakable, all gleaned with his roving, dreaming mind. This, my dear, is as close to God as one can get!”

“So you’re going to ask him questions?” I said. “For what?”

“The expansion of history and the sciences,” he said, “for which mankind must only pay a small price, compared to what others might offer. You see, he is broken, almost past salvation; he was incinerated and shredded on his long fall, and was scattered all over the Earth. Some of his detached organs have grown conscious to help him, but they require constant access to water. That is where we come in: to find those pieces, and to find parts that can replace what he has lost, and finally, to provide the labor necessary to put him together again. His reward to us is knowledge unsurpassed.”

“Oh my god,” I said. “You mean you’re going to put a demon back together? What if he goes on a rampage or something?”

“This is not Godzilla,” said Dr. Peasley sharply. He paused and appraised me, as though looking at me for the first time. “Well, if he grows capable of it, he might move to more populated areas to harvest the organics he requires, but that requires the opening of the second gate—that is to say, the proper alignment of certain constellations. Besides, his ultimate goal lies elsewhere. He believes that, should he be returned to his glory, he will be accepted back into R’lyeh. I, on the other hand, have reason to believe he would be cast screaming into the abyss. Which means that we have a limited time if we wish to consult him before he is remade and crawls to his doom.”

Now, if I had still been devout, I might’ve said Dr. Peaslee was a devil-worshipper and ridden off fast. But I had been harboring some doubts lately—like I said, I was into apologetics—so all I said was, “Who’s crazy enough to believe all that?”

Dr. Peaslee raised his hand and ripped his glove off. Pistol and I recoiled. At a first glance, it looked like Dr. Peaslee was wearing another glove. But he wasn’t; his hand was as wet as if he had dipped it in tar.

“There is nothing to be afraid of,” said Dr. Peaslee gently. “I know that for the uninitiated, it must seem terrible. And I will not lie: it does burn so! But it is a mark that I will be one of those to whom great things are revealed.”

Now, I’ve always been poor as a church mouse, doubly so when I was a child, but it was without hesitation that I pulled the cash out of my pocket and threw it. I threw it fucking everywhere. I turned my boot over and dumped Benjamins in the mud. I noted in an offhand way that the bills were all that darker, more florid green of an older design—like Dr. Peaslee had been storing them under his bed for two decades. But Dr. Peaslee didn’t jump for the cash. He simply stared at me with that gentle old-man’s smile.

I urged Pistol away from him and we sidled down the hog path. Dr. Peaslee followed behind, tucking his hand back into his glove.

“Please don’t be afraid, Ms. Byrd,” he said.

I didn’t say anything. I was all choked up. Pistol was frantic and growing more so by the minute, but I didn’t dare let him go. I knew he’d take off, and I wasn’t sure I could control him. Dr. Peaslee walked after us—or did he herd us? It was hard to say. Suddenly I couldn’t think of the way back; as though by default, Pistol and I kept just ahead of Dr. Peaslee, taking the turns one by one. Perhaps we thought, in that simple bestial logic that panic grants us, that if we gave him what he wanted, he would leave us alone.

The roar of the river grew louder and louder. Soon we started seeing the stones. Once, perhaps, they had been stacked and sorted; now they tumbled in wild disarray, and the hog paths wandered all around them. The photocopies hadn’t done them any justice—the sheer number, I mean. Stones, stones, stones, as far as the eye could see, of every composition you could imagine, and carved in a multitude of shapes and for a multitude of purposes. Here and there they bled black soup into the undergrowth.