Terrors (20 page)

May I never
again gaze upon a countenance so filled with wise and cynical malignity as that of the hackman! His hair hung uncouthly to the grimy collar of his ancient and tattered camisole, his eyes glared
redly out of a sallow skin marked with the awful signs of foreign blood and indescribable dissolution. His teeth showed blackened stumps of what once must have been hideous yellow fangs, while most terrible
of all his frightful and malevolent nose showed incontestable signs of a fatal and hideous convexity.

Emitting from his aged and terrible throat a chuckle of indescribable hideousness the driver threw his gears into motion with a terrifying clash that rattled and boomed horribly off the echoing rocks that surround the rutted roadway leading away from the stagnant and odorous river. I cast fear-sharpened
vision into the rear compartment of the hack where the dread creatures I had so narrowly escaped awful moments earlier were gathered in evil comity, nodding and hissing scabrously over stacks of books whose very titles I dared not whisper under my breath lest the ancient gods of madness come crashing up from the abyss into which they had long been cast and uncertainly chained by sorcerers
of incredible antiquity and wicked puissance.

“You girls all going to the college,” the driver hissed in a dry and serpentine sibilance that sent tremors shuddering up and down my well-clad spine. From the terrifying creatures in the rear compartment there echoed a terrible cackle of affirmation, whereupon the aged but somehow dreadfully
strong
driver turned to me, his baleful gimlet eyes taking
in my noble native-born countenance and modern garb. “And you, sir?” he mouthed arcanely.

Aye had I but had the presence of mind to cancel then and there my projected interview, to return even with that mind-blasting monstrosity of a driver to the terrible towering terminal and return to the metropolis where I had my mad and abandoned abode in those days, what horrors might have I avoided! But
no, driven by the noble honesty of mine ancestors I whispered fearsomely, “To the factory.”

What expression of terror those words provoked upon his face, what new paleness infused his mottled and wattled epidermis when he heard me croak those foully portentous words, and yet, pursuing his evil course to the end, he replied in that terrible and incredibly malign voice, “What building number?”

Numbed with fear at this new demand I clawed frantically at my breast, extracting from the neatly-tailored pocket of my modern jacket the very invitation in response to which I had undertaken this terrible and unprecedented journey. My eye slithered across the deathly pale document which, claw-like, my fingers unfolded and, reading the
terrible words again I hissed back in terror and remorse the
number which he required.

Down decaying byways and along rutted lanes the terrible hack swayed and clattered, its ancient frame protesting with frightful squeaks each new turn and grade. Hideous buildings of terrifying and unholy antiquity leered down upon us, cracked and discoloured windows peering balefully at the noisome intruders while rotting walls, long bared of cracked and flaking paint,
loomed obscenely in the terrible afternoon sunlight. What horrors had they witnessed in untold eons that stretched hack before the recollection of infant humanity!

For what seemed endless intervals we swayed and rattled between the shacks and shanties of Dutchess City. My blood crept fearfully through my terrified veins and arteries while tremors of fear shook my gorgeous frame as my terrified
glances into the rear compartment were met by impudent and unfathomably evil glares from the kohl-lined orbs of the terrible creatures there clustered.

At length the hack drew up before the vine-coated and stone-walled buildings of the college, buildings in which untold rites were performed by flickering tapers as the horrible creatures of which a clutch gathered and writhed behind me pursued
such blasphemous studies as the merest syllabus of which would drive any sane and wholesome Celt gibbering and drooling down the awful corridors of madness in horror and fright.

The hackman exited mercifully from his side of the ancient vehicle to aid the
creatures
in extricating themselves from the rear compartment while I fearsomely sought to ascertain that the lock which might hold any menace
out of my own section of the conveyance was well secured. With savage cries and malign laughter the creatures retrieved their noisome and menacing luggage from the rear of the hack and made their way into the menacing gate-arch of that savage institution.

I cringed away from that terrible
strong
driver as he remained in his seat at the wheel of the hack and, engine droning menacingly, we rolled
once more in the direction of the establishment to which the terrible pale document had summoned my pitiable but handsome figure. The hackman sought to draw from me, as we rode down one decrepit thoroughfare after another beneath looming structures of ramshackle menace, such pitiful few secrets as remained mine. “Up from the city, huh?” he queried in that dry, frightening voice of his. “Come t’
work at the factory?”

My throat too dry with terror and apprehension to permit the formation of even simple answers, I nodded a silent yes or no as each question threatened the poor tottering remnant of my once proud sanity. What awful motive could this hideous and clammy driver have for probing, digging, seeking out the very secrets of my existence?

Finally he pulled up at the frightful doors
of the building to which I had been summoned. I pressed the full sum demanded into the hideous claw and fled in terror through the awful and aged portal which presented itself to my terrified eyes. Another of those frightful
creatures
awaited within, but thankfully, even as I could feel a scream of indescribable terror welling up within my throat, I espied a figure of tolerable horror hastening
down a balefully lighted corridor to conduct me, trembling as with an ague, into a cubicle where I was permitted to sit in a frightful chair of incalculable antiquity and gradually regain possession of my shattered wits.

My host made small talk of a dark and foreboding nature, then, drawing from his pocket a packet of rolled tobacco, offered me a smoke which I declined with a violent wave of
my trembling hand and fearful shake of the head. He lit a terrible cylinder of tobacco himself, dropping his baleful and malevolent matchstick into an ancient and hideously menacing ashtray that stood in all its menacing frightfulness on the edge of his cruel and impious desk.

What events then transpired I shudder to recollect. The terrors to which I was subjected no sound mind could comprehend
and yet retain its sanity as, mine host ever at my elbow, murmuring obscenities foul beyond decent repetition, we toured corridors and chambers of untold horror wherein laboured pale-faced and pale-shirted creatures whose awful and scabrous countenances bespoke such horrors as only some denizen of the nether regions might conceive in a hideous nightmare of terrifying decay.

Whether the creatures
we viewed, at once terrifying and pitiable, were the malign perpetrators of unfathomable horrors, or wore themselves the whimpering victims of indescribable maltreatment it was impossible to fathom, for upon each visage there was written a foul compendium of the terrifying characteristics that tend to mark eldritch fiend and tortured subject alike: cruelty, vice, greed, dissipation, suffering,
nausea, hatred, bitterness, ineffable sadness and fierce ambition, indescribable yearnings for unnameable satisfactions, these and a thousand more emotions met and were blended into the expressions
of anger, misery, and terrible satisfactions far more revolting than their denials.

Beside each of the things that we saw, both pitiable and fearsome in their visage, stood either or both of a pair
of artefacts of malign and baleful significance. Many of the wretches had seemingly been furnished by their masters with ashtrays as terrible as that which I had seen on the desk of my terrible host, ashtrays which they perpetually filled and emptied, filled and emptied with a terrible nervous compulsiveness which caused me to avert my eyes in nausea and pity.

Others seemed to have chosen to
forgo the questionable relief of the ashtrays, and were furnished instead with little pasteboard cups the exteriors of which were blazoned with arcane slogans of such mind-blasting savagery that I dare not set them down in this document, even though my keepers assure me that I am perfectly safe and even though they permit me, nay, encourage me to record with my soft crayon every detail of the horror
which sent me shrieking and capering to the very doorways of madness and beyond.

Ho! There are some blasphemies too horrid to be repeated, even in a private document such as this, which is unlikely to be read save by my keepers and, if they deem it helpful, perhaps someday by those members of my family adjudged strong and calm-natured enough to face truths more horrible than the average man can
even imagine.

And yet those pasteboard cups were filled, many of them, with a brownish and murk-tempered liquid of such disgusting appearance that only once did I permit myself to approach a cup closely enough for my nostrils to he assailed by the fetor that rose from the noxious brew along with a hideous and unwholesome steam. Further, and by far the most terrifying of all, those frightful creatures
of pity and cruelty were compelled by some unseen agency to take that disgusting and horrifying liquid into their very mouths, where some I saw swirling it about with signs of the most frightful agony before swallowing, whereupon it might commence whatever work of terrible malignity as its manifest evil nature might dictate.

Aye, the rooms in which those poor demons, if such be what they were,
and may such gods as exist and loom terribly over mankind, take rare pity and grant that I never again return there to find out, the rooms I say in which they were penned, were small, there being in most cases a mere handful of the brutes in each, a few being penned in solitary misery, while hideous black objects resting near them would
eternally burst upon what peace they might attain through
resignation to their miserable state, shrilling hellishly until they would detach part of the object and hold it to their tortured faces, hold it like a half-mask covering one side of their countenance from ear to mouth, while to my sickness I could hear the murmuring tones of their masters oozing slimily from the ear-piece into their poor organs while they made quick and obsequious obeisance in
their own pained murmurs into the mouth pieces of the instruments, replacing them and returning to whatsoever terrible and
squishy
task they might have been engaged in when the shrill summons came, thus to occupy themselves miserably until such time as another shrill summons should again call them to the terrible black
things
.

For what seemed unending centuries my terrible host, a look of detached
glee fixed firmly upon his terrible face, led me from doorway to corridor, from corridor to lobby, from lobby to hallway, from hallway to room, through occasional changes of furnishing and dress, but yet always the omnipresent terrible ashtrays and hideous cups with their disgusting brown contents and blasphemous slogans, until shuddering with terror and revulsion I prayed succour.

Mine host
now led me down yet another terrible corridor, through a line in a hideous room filled with terrible odours and the sounds of hundreds of the poor demon-slaves whispering over the blasphemous details of their awful tasks while they shovelled mouthfuls of nauseating stuff which I assumed to be the dreadful food of the demon-slaves, into their sweating and pasty-complexioned faces.

Guided by my
host I seated myself near the end of a long table and waited, immobile, crushed beyond protest or the impulse to escape by the horrors which I had witnessed, until that tormentor returned with two trays of the demon-slave food, one of which he placed before me, apparently convinced that I would be capable of drawing nourishment from the vile concoctions which these dreadful creatures were forced
to consume.

Dreadful chunks of burned cadavers littered my tray, drenched to a soft and disgusting consistency by rancid gravies, while clumps of deceased vegetation, long boiled to a pale and uniform tastelessness from which there yet emanated a horrid and disgusting, odour on waves of lukewarm fetor, lay mouldering between the partial corpses. Most horrifying of all, a dread china cup stood
at one edge of the tray, filled with the horrible brown fluid I had seen
earlier in the slave pens I had been compelled to tour.

So filled was I with horrified disgust that I permitted myself to mouth pewling inanities in response to my host’s questions and remarks during that horrid meal, after which he led me through long and terrible corridors until we exited from that building of torment
and walked painfully across a field covered with rank vegetation until we reached a second edifice of even more gigantic and unnatural proportions than that we had just exited.

To the reader of this crayoned account it may now seem that my tale is merely a recounting of horror piled upon horror, of one repellent experience following another equally dreadful, and indeed, now that it is all over
(pray God that it
is
all over, that my present refuge is a reality and not merely the figment of a fevered somnambulism from which I may reawaken to find myself once more ensnared in Dutchess City!) it seems that such was the case. But I am a plain man, not accomplished in the construction of tales, and I seek merely to record with my soft crayon on my floppy-edged paper the reality which overtook
me that day in that terrible town.

For the second edifice was larger even than the first, and instead of the many small chambers in which there laboured the pale-garbed demon-slaves, my host now conducted me into a single quarter of inconceivable dimensions, a room—if so puny a word as room may he applied to so vast and terrible a place as that one—filled with the clattering and pounding of machinery.

And yet you must understand, you who read these words scrawled with my soft crayon on my floppy-edged paper, that the machines were not making the noises, nor were the machines the permanent occupants of this room through which passed humans or whatever pitiable creatures these were which I saw before my terrified and decaying eyes. Ah, no!