The Weird Company (6 page)

Suddenly, there was a commotion at the station and beams of light leapt out onto the tracks illuminating a small grey figure that I had not noticed even though it was only yards away from my own position. The man was covered in glistening wet rags and in response to being spotted attempted to run but succeeded only in obtaining a strange lopping gait that was at the time both pathetic and comical. The soldiers yelled warnings and orders but the figure paid them no heed and continued its sad attempt at escape. One final stern warning again went unheeded and then the soldiers unleashed a volley of shots that pierced the eerie stillness of the town and sent the grey figure to the ground.

The soldiers froze on the platform, guns pointed at the strange figure which now lay unmoving on the tracks. There were frantic questions accompanied by desperate accusations and tentative orders and sheepish refusals. The soldiers seemed genuinely unprepared for the consequences of their actions. That they had fired on a man and brought him down seemed something they simply could not deal with. Slowly, lights shining back and forth across the tracks, rifles jerking wildly from place to place, the soldiers broke from the platform and fled backwards into the town for the safety of empty streets. But the streets were not empty. As the soldiers left the platform, dark shapes burst forth from basements, from closed doors and from shuttered windows and took stand against the soldiers.

The things numbered less than a dozen, large vaguely anthropoid creatures that stood half bent in the moonlight with long claws, rows of spiny teeth, and great bulging eyes along chinless heads. Strange growths behind the jaw, between the clawed fingers and along the crest of the head, implied an ichthyic or at least amphibious origin. Yet such a conclusion was contradicted by the curious state of the hideous batrachians. Such things, such lopping, bleating things, such things should not wear the tattered and soiled clothes of men.

As the things lunged at the soldiers, and the soldiers fought back, I left my place on the hill and crept down onto the tracks. Carefully I reached the downed figure and rolled him over. He was wrapped in a dark mariner’s sea coat which hung loose as if he had once been of much larger physique than he currently was. Atop his head was a black woolen cap that was pulled down to cover most of his head. On his hands he wore a pair of thick leather gloves that hung just as loose as the man’s coat, and were in a startling state of disrepair. Indeed, I quickly formed the impression that the garments had been long unused and badly looked after, for they carried with them a thick damp musty odor that seemed to mingle with a stench that reminded me of the beach at low tide, or perhaps of my mother’s kitchen on Friday when the fishmonger came. I pulled off his hat and opened his coat. My actions revealed a parody of a man. The head was nearly hairless, and what hair there was jutted out as course clumped fibers. The skin was rough and patterned in large thick pads which diminished into a fine pebbling around the face. His ears were perfunctory holes surrounded by weird atavistic nubs of flesh.

He stared up at me, weird lidless eyes, huge eyes that bulged moist and dark in the night. There was something familiar in his face, and I quickly recognized him as the driver of the now defunct bus, a man named Sargent. Strange gurgling sounds came from his mouth and throat which took me a moment to realize were words. “Yew have the look,” he gurgled, shoving something large and cold into my hands. My eyes darted toward it, something wrapped in oilskin and leather ties. “Take this,” more gurgling and heavy rasping breaths obscured his speech, “Wait . . . in Arkham.” Then the strange man-thing convulsed and was silent.

Slowly, deliberately, I quietly backed away and began briskly moving down the rail line and out of the city. The whispering voice of Pth’thya-l’yi had suddenly gone silent. There was a new voice, one that was just as insistent as that of my own ancestor, but that urged me into a new action. The words I could not understand, but their meaning was clear, I was to take the package and head to Arkham. Arkham it insisted, go to Arkham. Arkham. The name pounded in my head like a beating drum, and though I had spent the last few months of my life being driven to return to Innsmouth I turned and did as the voice in my head insisted. I headed west toward Arkham. Whatever this new compulsion was, it was stronger than the one that had called me east.

Glancing over my shoulder I left the dead man behind, the package he gave me still in my hands. I knew the western spur would take me through the marsh lands and then down through remote farm land. I paused for a moment and looked back. I could hear the screaming coming from the tiny hamlet and it touched a chord of memory. Skulking about the town, fleeing in the middle of the night, pursued by angry hordes, it was all too familiar. Panicked, I ran, just as I had done four years before, when the inhabitants of Innsmouth seemed so much more monstrous, and I at the time still had ears and eyelids, and still believed myself to be human.

CHAPTER 2

From the Account of Robert Martin Olmstead
“The Rendition of Ephraim Waite”

By all rights I should have abandoned the oilskin that had been given to me by that sad lonely man from Innsmouth. That he had died moments later should have made no difference to me, but it did. Perhaps it was guilt over my previous actions so many years ago. Perhaps it was the recognition that in some manner the two of us were kin. Regardless I kept the package and headed toward Arkham. Why I paused and hid myself I cannot say. Why I then proceeded to untie the leather strings and unfold the oilskin is a mystery to me. There were within the protective wrappings three journals, of substantial age, each filled with crabbed handwriting that was barely legible, and appeared to be written using some form of the Cyrillic alphabet. Consequently, the journals were beyond my understanding, and any hope of identifying the rightful owner was minimal at best. However, lodged in the back of one of the volumes was an envelope bearing in the same crabbed hand, but in English, a name I did not recognize, but could at least read. I lifted the flap, removed the pages and in hopes of finding out more about the recipient, read the letter. I had no right to do so, but I did, and what I found has bearing on my story, so I include it here. I am fortunate that my strange metamorphosis has come with a nearly eidetic memory, for it allows me to reproduce the contents almost perfectly. In my mind I can still see the strange paper and that tiny script.

11 August, 1918

I set pen to paper in the desperate hope that I will be able to organize the jumble of thoughts, memories and madness that has for the last day threatened my very being. Doctor Marsh has given strict orders to the servants limiting my movements to my bedroom and the library. I am not to leave the house, nor am I to have access to the thing that howls and cries in the attic. Marsh says that a kind of infectious hysteria has come over the house; he uses a French term folie á deux, and suggests that the only way to keep me from descending further into madness is to cut me off from the source of the delusion. Thus despite the fact that it calls me, pleads, begs for me to come to it, I am not under any circumstances allowed contact with the thing that raves in the attic, a man they tell me is my father, a man named Ephraim Waite.

Doctor Marsh and the servants call me Asenath, and say that I am but eleven years old, my father’s only child in his old age. When I question them about my loss of memory they sigh and talk about my mother. She went mad, or so they say, and they are not surprised that my father’s sudden madness, which they blame on age and a long debilitating illness, has triggered in me a parallel delusion. I only wish it were so. Confining me to the library may have been a mistake, for it is here that I have found hints and allegations as to what is truly happening in this house, to me and the thing that was once my father. If what I suspect is true, there is more here than madness to deal with, and poor Doctor Marsh, who is not without his own secrets, is ill prepared to deal with what has happened here.

The library is large, but not so large that I could not find what was hidden in plain sight. Amongst the old books on medicine, natural history, philosophy and other sciences, I found a set of journals, some of which were quite recent in manufacture, while others were extremely old, with poor-quality paper that had long become dark and brittle with age. All were written in a language that did not rely on the Latin alphabet, and despite the obvious centuries between the earliest and latest entries, all were written in the same cramped and flowing text. At first the contents of these volumes puzzled me, but that confusion was brief. Despite the foreign alphabet it quickly became apparent that I was familiar with this language, for the more I perused it the more I realized that I could understand what was being written. As I write this my ability to translate the journals is nowhere near fluency, but I understand much of it, and it tells me what I need to know. Some would look at the journals and their strange symbols, and suggest that my ability to translate them was madness. Others would call the contents themselves madness, or perhaps an elaborate hoax. If it be madness, some sort of shared delusion, then it is older than any of us dare to suspect, and in that itself the veracity of things lies.

Know then that, according to his journals, Ephraim Waite was born in Oakham, in the County of Rutland just north of London in the year 1618. His childhood was unremarkable, and at a very young age he decided to become a soldier. He served in the Parliament Army, became an officer, and was amongst many that signed and sealed the instrument that commanded the execution of King Charles the First. He did these things because they were right, and because they had to be done. Charles had been a monstrous regent, who condemned himself through his own words in which he maintained that no earthly power had the right to judge him, for the very tenets of the law were founded on the concept that the King himself could do no wrong. Such men and such concepts have no place in this world. All men must be subject to the law, whether they be the laws of men, or those of the world itself. The rule of law, stressed Ephraim, must be maintained.

It was not surprising that his service to the Lord Protector and Parliament went unrewarded. As was the right of all officers, he had laid claim to the properties of those whom he had defeated in battle, and in doing so accumulated some items and books that were most strange, both in their origins and in their teachings. These he studied, and on occasion, discussed, perhaps too openly with his peers. Rumors spread, and he had no doubt that it was for suspicion of witchcraft that Cromwell failed to reward his service. Likewise, when Charles the Second came to power, he was among many that were not pardoned by Charles the Second for actions against his father. Instead he was found guilty of regicide and in 1660 sentenced to be confined to Gorey Castle on the island of Jersey until his death.

Thankfully, there were some who still felt a sense of loyalty to the man, and with the cover of night spirited him out of London, first to Spain, and then, after proper negotiations, to France where he assumed a role in the training of soldiers at a small military academy. It was here near Bayonne that he continued to carry out his studies in the occult sciences, and it was here that he met the enigmatic figure that he would only ever identify as Doctor C. The doctor was a kindred spirit, a seeker after mysteries, and an explorer into those forbidden arts and sciences that were called by some witchcraft, but were far from it. Ephraim was twenty years Dr. C’s senior, but the two soon became inseparable, and by 1670 when Ephraim retired to the country, Dr. C went with him.

Their first two years of life in rural France were for the most part uneventful, and the two made some progress in the study of the laws that governed life and the world, and indeed had some success in a particular process called the Rendition of Souls, a rite carried out by natives of the Amazon region. Through a complex process involving a specially prepared drink, the two could gain influence over those with lesser strength of will, and thus accomplish the monumental task of transferring the thoughts and personality, the soul if you will, from one body to another. They did such things with lesser animals such as cats and dogs, and even birds. Using such brief transferences to gain a modicum of freedom from the pain of infirmity that had begun creeping into Ephraim’s life, but given the profound differences between human and animal brains, his occupation of such bodies was eventually always rejected, sometimes violently. There is, it seems a natural resistance to such transferences, and remnants of the previous occupant tend to reassert themselves and drive the invader out, and Ephraim saw no need to challenge such rejections. That is until the winter of 1672 when the accident occurred.

What exactly occurred and why it was so life threatening I cannot say, but by December of that year Ephraim’s leg had been amputated and C was locked in a desperate battle against infection. So severe was the struggle that C would often hire one of the villagers to sit with Ephraim while the good doctor ran errands. It was during one of C’s absences, while he was being watched by a younger man from the village, that Ephraim initiated the rite and carried out the Rendition of Souls. Then once the transference was complete Ephraim Waite, now young and vigorous, took a pillow and smothered his infirm body and the mind that dwelt within.

Even with the death of the host’s mind, the rendition did not go as smoothly as he had hoped. There were long bouts of memory loss and confusion. C had discerned exactly what had happened and attributed the mental turbulence to the process of a new mind matching and then supplanting the native rhythms and pulses of its new host. Such bouts eventually faded, and after a year Ephraim was fully in control of his new body. Yet the very act of assuring his survival had driven a rift between C and Ephraim. They had been forced to leave the village; to explain the strange behavior of the once quiet young man would have been too difficult. They rented a home in Paris, but the strain of what Ephraim had done was too great. In 1674 C enrolled in the army and left for India, while Ephraim headed for the Americas.