Tales of Mystery and Imagination

Lisa Morton: Poppi's Monster

Poppi had hurt her bad this time, worse than usual. She'd known it would be bad as soon as he'd walked in the door. It was after ten p.m., he was late and her baby-sitter Heather from down the street had left at seven.

She was sprawled in front of the blaring t.v., working on an ALADDIN coloring book she'd bought last year with lunch money she had secretly saved. She hadn't seen the movie, of course, but she liked to look at the bright printed scenes on the cover and the line drawings inside and pretend that she had. With her box of 64 Crayon colors, she could make the movie within the drawings look the way it did in her imagination. She liked the pictures in her head because they all hers, Poppi couldn't touch them.

When he'd come in he was muttering under his breath. He immediately crossed to the television set and lowered the volume to an inaudible level.

"Christ almighty, Stacey, you always have to blast the goddamn t.v.? Last thing I need is some complaint from the neighbors."

As he turned, his foot kicked the box of Crayons, and they flew in a multihued arc across the room. "Aw, what is this... ?"

Poppi picked up the coloring book, glanced at it once and then shook it in her face. "Stacey, how many times do I have to tell you, you're too old for this nonsense. You're ten years old, too old to play with this little-kid bullshit."

Stacey heard her Crayons crack under his shoes. Vermilion, Burnt Sienna, Cornflower Blue, three broken colors she'd never use again.

Of Herbert West, who was my friend in college and in other life, I can speak only with extreme terror. This terror is not due altogether to the sinister manner of his recent disappearance, but was engendered by the whole nature of his life-work, and first gained its acute form more than seventeen years ago, when we were in the third year of our course at the Miskatonic University medical school in Arkham. While he was with me, the wonder and diabolism of his experiments fascinated me utterly, and I was his closest companion. Now that he is gone and the spell is broken, the actual fear is greater. Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities.

The first horrible incident of our acquaintance was the greatest shock I ever experienced, and it is only with reluctance that I repeat it. As I have said, it happened when we were in medical school, where West had already made himself notorious through his wild theories on the nature of death and the possibility of overcoming it artificially. His views, which were widely ridiculed by the faculty and by his fellow students, hinged on the essentially mechanistic nature of life; and concerned means for operating the organic machinery of mankind by calculated chemical action after the failure of natural processes. In his experiments with various animating solutions he had killed and treated immense numbers of rabbits, guinea-pigs, cats, dogs, and monkeys, till he had become the prime nuisance of the college. Several times he had actually obtained signs of life in animals supposedly dead; in many cases violent signs; but he soon saw that the perfection of his process, if indeed possible, would necessarily involve a lifetime of research. It likewise became clear that, since the same solution never worked alike on different organic species, he would require human subjects for further and more specialized progress. It was here that he first came into conflict with the college authorities, and was debarred from future experiments by no less a dignitary than the dean of the medical school himself- the learned and benevolent Dr Allan Halsey, whose work in behalf of the stricken is recalled by every old resident of Arkham.

While the uniformed attendants of Marriner's Waxworks were ushering the last stragglers through the great glass-panelled double doors, the manager sat in his office interviewing Raymond Hewson.

The manager was a youngish man, stout, blond and of medium height. He wore his clothes well and contrived to look extremely smart without appearing overdressed. Raymond Hewson looked neither. His clothes, which had been good when new and which were still carefully brushed and pressed, were beginning to show signs of their owner's losing battle with the world. He was a small, spare, pale man, with lank, errant brown hair, and though he spoke plausibly and even forcibly he had the defensive and somewhat furtive air of a man who was used to rebuffs. He looked what he was, a man gifted somewhat above the ordinary, who was a failure through his lack of self-assertion.

The manager was speaking.

"There is nothing new in your request," he said. "In fact we refuse it to different people — mostly young bloods who have tried to make bets — about three times a week. We have nothing to gain and something to lose by letting people spend the night in our Murderers' Den. If I allowed it, and some young idiot lost his senses, what would be my position? But your being a journalist somewhat alters the case."

Hewson smiled.

Ella tenía 50 años cuando heredó el antiguo piso de sus padres, situado en el casco antiguo de la ciudad y donde había vivido hasta que decidiera independizarse, hacía ya 20 años. Al principio pensó en alquilarlo o en venderlo, pero después empezó a considerar la idea de trasladarse a aquel lugar querido y detestado a la vez y, por idénticas razones, le parecía que aquella decisión podría reconciliarla consigo misma, y con su historia, y de ese modo sería capaz de afrontar la madurez sin grandes desacuerdos, contemplando la vida con naturalidad, sin fe, pero también sin esa vaga sensación de fracaso bajo cuyo peso había vivido desde que abandonara la casa familiar. Coqueteó con la idea durante algún tiempo, pero no tomó ninguna decisión hasta encontrar argumentos de orden práctico bajo los que encubrir la dimensión sentimental de aquella medida.

El piso tenía un gran salón, de donde nacía un estrecho pasillo a lo largo del cual se repartían las habitaciones. Al fondo había un cuarto sin ventanas, concebido como trastero, en donde ella —de joven— se había refugiado con frecuencia para leer o escuchar música. Se trataba de un lugar secreto, aislado, y comunicado con el exterior a través tan sólo de la queña puerta que le servía de acceso Decidió que rehabilitaría aquel lugar para las mismas funciones que cumplió en su juventud, y tiró todo lo que sus padres habían ido almacenando allí en los últimos años. Después colocó en puntos estratégicos dos lámparas que compensaran la ausencia de luz natural, e instaló su escritorio de estudiante y el moderno equipo de música, recién comprado. Un sillón pequeño, pero cómodo, y algunos objetos que resumían su historia completaron la sobria decoración de aquel espacio.

Another story, collected near Oldenburg; in the Duchy of Holstein, is about a lady who ate and drank merrily and she had everything as a heart could desire and wanted to live forever. In the first hundred years everything was fine, but then she began to shrink and shrivel until she could not walk or stand, or eat or drink, but she could not die either. At first, she was fed like a little girl, but she was so tiny that she was put inside a glass bottle and hung in the church. She is still there, in the church of Santa María, Lübeck. She is the size of a rat, and once a year she moves.

Laurell K. Hamilton: Those Who Seek Forgiveness

«Death is a very serious matter, Mrs. Fiske. People who go through it are never the same.»

The woman leaned forward, cradling her face in her hands. Her slim shoulders shook quietly for a few minutes. I passed another box of tissues her way. She groped for them blindly and then looked up. «I know you can't bring him back, exactly.»

She wiped at two tears, which escaped and rolled down flawless cheekbones. The purse she clutched so tightly was reptile, at least two hundred dollars. Her accessories—lapel pin, high heels, hat, and gloves—were all black as her purse. Her suit was gray. Neither color suited her, but they emphasized her pale skin and hollow eyes. She was the sort of woman that made me feel too short, too dark, and gave me the strange desire to lose ten more pounds. If she hadn't been so genuinely grief-stricken, I could have disliked her.

«I have to talk to Arthur. That's my husband . . . was my husband.» She took a deep breath and tried again. «Arthur died suddenly. A massive coronary.» She blew delicately into a tissue. «His family did have a history of heart disease, but he always took such good care of himself.» She finished with a watery hiccup. «I want to say good-bye to him, Miss Blake.»

I smiled reassuringly. «We all have things left unsaid when death comes suddenly. But it isn't always best to raise the dead and say it.»

Her blue eyes stared intently through a film of tears. I was going to discourage her as I discourage every one of my clients, but this one would do it. There was a certain set to the eyes that said serious.

«There are certain limitations to the process.» My boss didn't allow us to show slides or pictures or give graphic descriptions, but we were supposed to tell the truth. One good picture of a decaying zombie would have sent most of my clients screaming.

«Limitations?»

Septiembre había vuelto a abrir, tras una semana de abstinencia de sol, su muestrario de colores y matices que, desde las alturas, el clima había escogido para la fugaz temporada del preámbulo otoñal. Las lluvias anteriores habían servido para borrar toda muestra del verano, para cerrar el aguaducho, para llevarse los restos de meriendas campestres y dejar desierta la playa y sus alrededores —el promontorio y la carretera suspendidos en el inconcluyente calderón de su repentina soledad, como el patio de un colegio que tras un toque de silbato queda instantáneamente desprovisto de los gritos infantiles que le otorgan toda su entidad, un mar devuelto a su imposible progresión hacia las calendas griegas, apagado el bullicio con que había de intentar su falsa impresión en el presente.

«Es uno de los pocos privilegios que nos quedan.»

Fueron paseando a lo largo de la carretera, cogidos del brazo, deteniéndose en los rincones de los que habían estado ausentes durante toda la usurpación veraniega, como quienes repasan el inventario de unos bienes arrendados por una temporada. Y aun cuando no pasara un día que no celebrasen los beneficios de la paz que les era devuelta cada año al término del mes de septiembre, en su fuero interno no podían desterrar la impresión de enclaustramiento y derelicción que les embargara con la casi simultánea desaparición de la multitud que tantas incomodidades provocaba.

Un rezagado veraneante, un hombre de mediana edad que paseaba con su perro, que en un principio les había devuelto la ilusión de compañía hasta el verano de San Miguel, había de convertirse por la melancolía de su propia imagen en el mejor exponente de un abandono para el que no conocían otros paliativos que las —repetidas una y otra vez sin entusiasmo pero con la fe de la madurez, con la comedida seguridad de la persona que para su equilibrio y confianza necesita atribuir a una elección libre y voluntaria la aceptación de una solución sin alternativa posible— alabanzas a un retiro obligado por motivos de salud y economía.

A woman is sitting alone in a house. She knows she is alone in the whole world: every other living thing is dead. The doorbell rings.

Jeffery Farnol: Black coffee

Professor Jarvis sat among piles of reference-books, and stacks of notes and jottings, the silence about him unbroken save for the ceaseless scratching of his pen.

Professor Jarvis hated bustle and noise of all sorts, for they destroyed that continuity of thought, that following out of proved facts to their primary hypotheses, which was to him the chief end and aim of existence; therefore he inhabited the thirtieth storey.

He had seen none but John, his valet, for nearly a month, sitting night after night, perched high above the great city, busied upon the work of which he had dreamed for years, his treatise upon "The Higher Ethics of Philosophy," and already it neared completion. A spirit of work had come upon him these last few weeks, a spirit that was a devil, cruel, relentless, allowing of no respite from the strain of intricate thought and nerve-racking effort; hence the Professor sat writing night after night, and had of late done with little sleep and much black coffee.

To-night, however, he felt strangely tired, he laid down his pen, and, resting his throbbing temples between his hands, stared down vacantly at the sheets of manuscript before him.

As he leaned thus, striving against a feeling of nausea that had recurred frequently the last few days, the long, close-written lines became to him "things" endowed with sinuous life, that moved, squirming a thousand legs across the white paper.

Vine porque aquella tarjeta, tan curiosa, me hizo recordar su existencia. La encontré en un libro olvidado cuyas páginas habían reproducido un espectro de la caligrafía infantil. Estaba acomodando, después de mucho tiempo de no hacerlo, mis libros. Iba de sorpresa en sorpresa, pues algunos, colocados en las estanterías más altas, no fueron leídos durante mucho tiempo. Tanto, que el filo de las hojas se había granulado, de manera que sobre mis palmas abiertas cayó una mezcla de polvo de oro y escama grisácea, evocadora del barniz que cubre ciertos cuerpos entrevistos primero en los sueños y después en la decepcionante realidad de la primera función de ballet a la que somos conducidos. Era un libro de mi infancia -acaso de la de muchos niños- y relataba una serie de historias ejemplares más o menos truculentas que poseían la virtud de arrojarnos sobre las rodillas de nuestros mayores para preguntarles, una y otra vez, ¿por qué? Los hijos que son desagradecidos con sus padres, las mozas que son raptadas por caballerangos y regresan avergonzadas a la casa, así como las que de buen grado abandonan el hogar, los viejos que a cambio de una hipoteca vencida exigen la mano de la muchacha más dulce y adolorida de la familia amenazada, ¿por qué? No recuerdo las respuestas. Sólo sé que de entre las páginas manchadas cayó, revoloteando, una tarjeta blanca con la letra atroz de Amilamia: Amilamia no olbida a su amigito y me buscas aquí como te lo divujo.

Y detrás estaba ese plano de un sendero que partía de la X que debía indicar, sin duda, la banca del parque donde yo, adolescente rebelde a la educación prescrita y tediosa, me olvidaba de los horarios de clase y pasaba varias horas leyendo libros que, si no fueron escritos por mí, me lo parecían: ¿cómo iba a dudar que sólo de mi imaginación podían surgir todos esos corsarios, todos esos correos del zar, todos esos muchachos, un poco más jóvenes que yo, que bogaban el día entero sobre una barcaza a lo largo de los grandes ríos americanos? Prendido al brazo de la banca como a un arzón milagroso, al principio no escuché los pasos ligeros que, después de correr sobre la grava del jardín, se detenían a mis espaldas. Era Amilamia y no supe cuánto tiempo me habría acompañado en silencio si su espíritu travieso, cierta tarde, no hubiese optado por hacerme cosquillas en la oreja con los vilanos de un amargón que la niña soplaba hacia mí con los labios hinchados y el ceño fruncido.

Mr. Bessel was the senior partner in the firm of Bessel, Hart, and Brown, of St. Paul's Churchyard, and for many years he was well known among those interested in psychical research as a liberal-minded and conscientious investigator. He was an unmarried man, and instead of living in the suburbs, after the fashion of his class, he occupied rooms in the Albany, near Piccadilly. He was particularly interested in the questions of thought transference and of apparitions of the living, and in November, 1896, he commenced a series of experiments in conjunction with Mr. Vincey, of Staple Inn, in order to test the alleged possibility of projecting an apparition of one's self by force of will through space.

Their experiments were conducted in the following manner: At a pre-arranged hour Mr. Bessel shut himself in one of his rooms in the Albany and Mr. Vincey in his sitting-room in Staple Inn, and each then fixed his mind as resolutely as possible on the other. Mr. Bessel had acquired the art of self-hypnotism, and, so far as he could, he attempted first to hypnotise himself and then to project himself as a "phantom of the living" across the intervening space of nearly two miles into Mr. Vincey's apartment. On several evenings this was tried without any satisfactory result, but on the fifth or sixth occasion Mr. Vincey did actually see or imagine he saw an apparition of Mr. Bessel standing in his room. He states that the appearance, although brief, was very vivid and real. He noticed that Mr. Bessel's face was white and his expression anxious, and, moreover, that his hair was disordered. For a moment Mr. Vincey, in spite of his state of expectation, was too surprised to speak or move, and in that moment it seemed to him as though the figure glanced over its shoulder and incontinently vanished. It had been arranged that an attempt should be made to photograph any phantasm seen, but Mr. Vincey had not the instant presence of mind to snap the camera that lay ready on the table beside him, and when he did so he was too late. Greatly elated, however, even by this partial success, he made a note of the exact time, and at once took a cab to the Albany to inform Mr. Bessel of this result.

From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent. Sometimes it enters directly into the composition of the events, while sometimes it relates only to their fortuitous position among persons and places. The latter sort is splendidly exemplified by a case in the ancient city of Providence, where in the late forties Edgar Allan Poe used to sojourn often during his unsuccessful wooing of the gifted poetess, Mrs. Whitman. Poe generally stopped at the Mansion House in Benefit Street—the renamed Golden Ball Inn whose roof has sheltered Washington, Jefferson, and Lafayette—and his favourite walk led northward along the same street to Mrs. Whitman’s home and the neighbouring hillside churchyard of St. John’s, whose hidden expanse of eighteenth-century gravestones had for him a peculiar fascination.

Now the irony is this. In this walk, so many times repeated, the world’s greatest master of the terrible and the bizarre was obliged to pass a particular house on the eastern side of the street; a dingy, antiquated structure perched on the abruptly rising side-hill, with a great unkempt yard dating from a time when the region was partly open country. It does not appear that he ever wrote or spoke of it, nor is there any evidence that he even noticed it. And yet that house, to the two persons in possession of certain information, equals or outranks in horror the wildest phantasy of the genius who so often passed it unknowingly, and stands starkly leering as a symbol of all that is unutterably hideous.

The house was—and for that matter still is—of a kind to attract the attention of the curious. Originally a farm or semi-farm building, it followed the average New England colonial lines of the middle eighteenth century—the prosperous peaked-roof sort, with two stories and dormerless attic, and with the Georgian doorway and interior panelling dictated by the progress of taste at that time. It faced south, with one gable end buried to the lower windows in the eastward rising hill, and the other exposed to the foundations toward the street. Its construction, over a century and a half ago, had followed the grading and straightening of the road in that especial vicinity; for Benefit Street—at first called Back Street—was laid out as a lane winding amongst the graveyards of the first settlers, and straightened only when the removal of the bodies to the North Burial Ground made it decently possible to cut through the old family plots.

Gender paused at the top of the bald rise, mopped his streaming red forehead beneath the wide hat-brim, and gazed backward at his forty-nine captives. Naked and black, they shuffled upward from the narrow, ancient slave trail through the jungle. Forty-nine men, seized by Gender's own hand and collared to a single long chain, destined for his own plantation across the sea… Gender grinned in his lean, drooping moustache, a mirthless grin of greedy triumph.

For years he had dreamed and planned for this adventure, as other men dream and plan for European tours, holy pilgrimages, or returns to beloved birthplaces. He had told himself that it was intensely practical and profitable. Slaves passed through so many hands - the raider, the caravaner, the seashore factor, the slaver captain, the dealer in New Orleans or Havana or at home in Charleston. Each greedy hand clutched a rich profit, and all profits must come eventually from the price paid by the planter. But he, Gender, had come to Africa himself, in his own ship; with a dozen staunch ruffians from Benguela he had penetrated the Bihe-Bailundu country, had sacked a village and taken these forty-nine upstanding natives between dark and dawn. A single neck-shackle on his long chain remained empty, and he might fill even that before he came to his ship. By the Lord, he was making money this way, fairly coining it - and money was worth the making, to a Charleston planter in 1853.

So he reasoned, and so he actually believed, but the real joy to him was hidden in the darkest nook of his heart. He had conceived the raider-plan because of a nature that fed on savagery and mastery. A man less fierce and cruel might have been satisfied with hunting lions or elephants, but Gender must hunt men. As a matter of fact, the money made or saved by the journey would be little, if it was anything. The satisfaction would be tremendous. He would broaden his thick chest each day as he gazed out over his lands and saw there his slaves hoeing seashore cotton or pruning indigo; his forty-nine slaves, caught and shipped and trained by his own big, hard hands, more indicative of assured conquest than all the horned or fanged heads that ever passed through the shops of all the taxidermists.

It’s funny how things happen, Burton used to tell me. The very moment you’re engaged in some task of mind-numbing insignificance–cutting your toenails, maybe, or fishing in the sofa for the remote–the world is being refashioned around you. You stand before a mirror to brush your teeth, and halfway around the planet flood waters are on the rise. Every minute of every day, the world transforms itself in ways you can hardly imagine, and there you are, sitting in traffic or wondering what’s for lunch or just staring blithely out a window. History happens while you’re making other plans, Burton always says.

I guess I know that now. I guess we all know that.

Me, I was in a sixth-floor Chicago office suite working on my résumé when it started. The usual chaos swirled around me–phones braying, people scurrying about, the televisions singing exit poll data over the din–but it all had a forced artificial quality. The campaign was over. Our numbers people had told us everything we needed to know: when the polls opened that morning, Stoddard was up seventeen points. So there I sat, dejected and soon to be unemployed, with my feet on a rented desk and my lap-top propped against my knees, mulling over synonyms for directed. As in directed a staff of fifteen. As in directed public relations for the Democratic National Committee. As in directed a national political campaign straight into the toilet.

Then CNN started emitting the little overture that means somewhere in the world history is happening, just like Burton always says.