Unknown, p.3
Unknown, page 3
My shout seemed to be all but drowned in my -throat by that dismal all of grass. I felt as if I were down at the bottom of a well, shouting up.
Frowning with growing uneasiness, I tramped ahead. The grass stalks kept getting thicker and tougher, and at length I needed both I began to sweat profusely; my head started to ache, and I imagined that my vision was beginning to blur. I felt the same ten most unbearable oppression which one experiences on a stifling summer's day when a storm is brewing and the atmosphere is charged with static electricity.
- Also, I realized with a slight qualm of fear that I had got turned around and didn't know which part of the yard I was in. During an objective half-minute in which I reflected that I was actually worried about getting lost in someone's back yard, I almost laughed-almost.
But there was something about the place that didn't permit laughter. I plodded ahead with a sober face.
Presently I began to feel that I was not alone. I had a sudden hairraising conviction that someone-or something-was creeping along in the grass behind me. I cannot say with certainty that I heard anything, although I may have, but all at once I was firmly convinced that some creature was crawling or wriggling a short distance to the rear.
I felt that I was being watched and that the watcher was wholly malignant.
For a wild instant I considered headlong flight. Then, unaccounta possession of me. I was suddenly furious with Canavan, furious with the yard, furious with myself All my pent-up tension exploded in a gust of rage which swept away fear. Now, I vowed, I would get to the root of the weird business. I would be tormented and frustrated by it no longer.
I whirled without warning and lunged into the grass where I believed my stealthy pursuer might be hiding.
I stopped abruptly; my savage anger melted into inexpressible horror.
In the faint but brassy sunlight which filtered down through the towering stalks, Canavan crouched on all fours like a beast about to spring. His glasses were gone, his clothes were in shreds and his mouth was twisted into an insane grimace, half smirk, half.snarl.
I stood petrified, staring at him. His eyes, queerly out of focus, glared at me with concentrated hatred and without any glimmer of recognition. His gray hair was matted with grass and small sticks; his entire body, in fact, including the tattered remains of his clothing, was covered with them as if he had groveled or rolled on the ground like a wild animal.
After the first throat-freezing shock, I finally found my tongue.
"Canavan!" I screamed at him." Canavan, for God's sake don't you know me?"
His answer was a low throaty snarl. His lips twisted back from his yellowish teeth, and his crouching body tensed for a spring.
Pure terror took possession of me. I leaped aside and flung myself into that infernal wall of grass an instant before he lunged.
The intensity of my terror must have given me added strength. I rammed headlong through those twisted stalks which before I had laboriously pulled aside. I could hear the grass and briar bushes crashing behind me, and I knew that I was running for my life.
I pounded on as in a nightmare. Grass stalks snapped against my face like whips, and thorns gashed me like razors, but I felt nothing.
All my physical and mental resources were concentrated in one frenzied resolve: I must get out of that devil's field of grass and away from the monstrous thing which followed swiftly in my wake.
My breath began coming in great shuddering sobs. My legs felt weak and I seemed to be looking through spinning saucers of light.
But I ran on.
The thing behind me was gaining. I could hear it growling, and I could feel it lunge against the earth only inches behind my flying feet.
And all the time I had the maddening conviction that I was actually running in circles.
At last, when I felt that I must surely collapse in another second, I plunged through a final brindle thicket into the open sunlight. Ahead of me lay the cleared area of the rear of Canavan's shop. Just beyond was the house itsell Gasping and fighting for breath, I dragged myself toward the door. For no reason that I could explain, then or afterwards, I felt absolutely certain that the horror at 0 the open area. I didn't even turn around to make sure.
Inside the house I fell weakly into a chair. My strained breathing slowly returned to normal, but my mind remained caught up in a whirlwind of sheer horror and hideous conjecture.
Canavan, I realized, had gone completely mad. Some ghastly shock had turned him into a ravening bestial lunatic thirsting to sayagely destroy any living thing that crossed his path. Remembering the oddly-focused eyes which had glared at me with a glaze of animal ferocity, I knew that his mind had not been merely unhinged-it was totally gone. Death could be the only possible release.
But Canavan was still at least the shell of a human being, and he had been my friend. I could not take the law into my own hands.
With many misgivings I called the police and an ambulance.
What followed was mor a session of questions and demands which left me in a state of near nervous collapse.
A half dozen burly policemen spent the better part of an hour tramping through that wavering brindle grass without locating any trace of Canavan. They came out cursing, rubbing their eyes and shaking their heads. They were flushed, furiousand ill at ease. They announced that they had seen nothing and heard nothing except some sneaking dog which stayed always out of sight and growled at them at intervals.
When they mentioned the growling dog, I opened my mouth to speak, but thought better of it and said nothing. Tiey were already regarding me with open suspicion as if they believed my own mind might be breaking.
I repeated my story at least twenty times, and still they were not satisfied. They ransacked the entire house. They inspected Canavan's files. They even removed some loose boards in one of the rooms and searched underneath.
At length they grudgingly concluded that Canavan had suffered total loss of memory after experiencing some kind of shock and that he had wandered off the premises in a state of amnesia shortly after I had encountered him in the yard. My own description of his appearance and actions they discounted as lurid exaggeration. After warning me that I would probably be questioned further and that my own premises might be inspected, they reluctantly permitted me to leave.
Their subsequent searches and investigations revealed nothing new and Canavan was put down as a missing person, probably afflicted with acute amnesia.
But I was not satisfied, and I could not rest.
Six months of patient, painstaking, tedious research in the files and stacks of the local university library finally yielded something which I do not offer as an explanation, nor even as a definite clue, but only as a fantastic near-impossibility which I ask no one to believe.
One afternoon, after my extended research over a period of months had produced nothing of significance, the Keeper of Rare Books at the library triumphantly bore to my study niche a tiny, crumbling pamphlet which had been printed in New Haven in 1695. It mentioned no author and carried the stark title, Deathe of Goodie Larkins, Witche.
Several years before, it revealed, an ancient crone, one Goodie Larkins, had been accused by neighbors of turning a missing child into a wild dog. The Salem madness was raging at the time, and Goodie Larkins had been summarily condemned to death. Instead of being burned, she had been driven into a marsh deep in the woods where seven savage dogs, starved for a fortnight, had been turned loose on her trail. Apparently her accusers felt that this was a touch of truly poetic justice.
As the ravening dogs closed in on her, she was heard by her retreating neighbors to utter a frightful curse:
"Let this lande I fall upon lye alle the way to Hell!" she had screamed.
'And they who tany here be as these beastes that rende me dead!"
A subsequent inspection of old maps and land deeds satisfied me that the marsh in which Goodie Larkins was torn to pieces by the dogs after uttering her awftil curse-originally occupied the same lot or square which now enclosed Canavan's hellish back yard!
I say no more. I returned only once to that devilish spot. It was a cold desolate autumn day, and a keening wind rattled the brindle stalks.
I cannot say what urged me back to that unholy area; perhaps it was some lingering feeling of loyalty toward the Canavan I had known. Perhaps it was even some last shred of hope. But as soon as I entered the cleared area behind Canavan's boarded-up house, I knew I had made a mistake.
As I stared at the stiff waving grass, the bare trees and the black ragged briars, I felt as if I, in turn, were being watched. I felt as if something alien and wholly evil were observing me, and though I was terrified, I experienced a perverse, insane impulse to rush headlong into that whispering expanse. Again I imagined I saw that monstrous landscape subtly alter its dimensions and perspective until I was staring at a stretch of blowing brindle grass and rotted trees which ran for miles. Something urged me to enter, to lose myself in the lovely grass, to roll and grovel at its roots, to rip off the foolish encumbrances of Cloth which covered me and run howling and ravenous, on and on, on and on…
Instead, I turned and rushed away. I ran through the windy alltumn streets like a madman. I lurched into my rooms and bolted the door.
I have never gone back since. And I never shall.
3 - Stephen R. Donaldson - The Conqueror Worm
And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of the plot.
- Edgar Allan Poe
Before he realized what he was doing, he swung the knife. (The home of Creel and Vi Sump. The livingroom. (Her real name is Violet, but everyone calls her V -. They've been Jo with his company, but he isn't moving up. In the livingroom, some of the furnishings are better than the space they occupy. A good stereo contrasts with the state of the wallpaper. The arrangement of the furniture shows a certain amount of frustration: there's no way to set the armchairs and sofa so that people who sit on them can't see the waterspots in the ceiling. The flowers in the vase on the enritable are real, married for two years now, and she isn't blooming. (Their home is modest but comfortable: Creel ha but they look plastic. At night, the lights leave shadows at odd places around the room.) They were out late at a large party where acquaintances, business associates, and strangers drank a lot. As Creel unlocked the front door and came into the livingroom ahead of Vi, he looked more than ever like a rumpled bear. Whisky made the usual dullness of his eyes seem baleful. Behind him, Vi resembled a flower in the process of becoming a wasp.
"I don't care," he said, moving directly to the sideboard to get himself another drink." I wish you wouldn't do it."
She sat down on the sofa, took off her shoes." God, I'm tired."
"If you aren't interested in anything else," he said, "think about me. I have to work with most of those people. Half of them can fire me if they want to. You're affecting my job."
"We've had this conversation before," she said." We've had it eight times this month." A vague movement in one of the shadows across the room turned her head toward the corner." What was that?"
"What was what?"
"I saw something move. Over there in the corner. Don't tell me we've got mice."
"I didn't see anything. We haven't got mice. And I don't care how many times we've had this conversation. I want you to stop."
She stared into the corner for a moment. Then she leaned back on the sofa." I can't stop. I'm not doing anything."
"The hell you're not doing anything." He took a drink and refilled his glass." If you were after him any harder, you'd have your hand in his pants."
" That's not true."
"You think nobody sees what you're doing. You act like you're alone.
But you're not. Everybody at that whole damn party was watching you.
The way you flirt-"
"I wasn't flirting. I was just talking to him."
"The way you flirt, you ought to have the decency to be embarrassed."
" Oh, go to bed. I'm too tired for this."
"Is it because he's a vice-president? Do you think that's going to make him better in bed? Or do you just like the status of playing around with a vice-president?"
"I wasn't flirting with him. I swear to God, there's something the matter with you. We were just talking. You know -moving our mouths so that words could come out. He was a literature major in college.
We have something in common. We've read the same books. Rememher books? Those things with ideas and stories printed in them? All you ever talk about is football-and how somebody at the company has it in for you-and how the latest secretary doesn't wear a bra.
Sometimes I think I'm the last literate person left alive."
She raised her head to look at him. Then she sighed." Why do I even bother? You're not listening to me."
"You're right," he said." There is something in the corner. I saw it move."
They both stared at the corner. After a moment, a centipede scuttled out into the light.
It looked slimy and malicious, and it waved its antennae hungrily.
It was nearly ten inches long. Its thick legs seemed to ripple as it shot across the rug. Then it stopped to scan its surroundings. Creel and Vi could see its mazidibles chewing expectantly as it flexed its poison claws. It had entered the house to escape the cold, dry night outsideand to hunt for food.
She wasn't the kind of woman who screamed easily; but she hopped up onto the sofa to get her bare feet away from the floor.
"Good God," she whispered." Creel, look at that. Don't let it come any closer."
He leaped at the centipede and tried to stamp one of his heavy shoes on it. But it moved so fast that he didn't come close to it.
Neither of them saw where it went.
"It's under the sofa," he said." Get off of there."
She obeyed without question. Wincing, she jumped out into the middle of the rug.
As soon as she was out of the way, he heaved the sofa onto its back.
The centipede wasn't there.
"The poison isn't fatal," Vi said." One of the kids in the neighborhood got stung last week. Her mother told me all about it. It's like getting a bad bee-sting."
Creel didn't listen to her. He lifted the entire sofa into the air so that he could see more of the floor. But the centipede was gone.
He dropped the sofa back onto its legs, knocking over the endtable, spilling the flowers." Where did that bastard go?"
They hunted around the room for several minutes without leaving the protection of the light. Then he went and got himself another drink. this hands were shaking.
She said, "I wasn't flirting."
He looked at her." Then it's something worse. You're already sleeping with him. You must've been making plans for the next time you get together."
"I'm going to bed," she said." I don't have to put up with this.
You're disgusting."
He finished his drink and refilled his glass from the nearest bottle. (The Sumps' game-room. (This room is the real reason why Creel bought this house over Vi's objectio me-room. The money that co room has been spent here. The room contains a full-size pooltable with all the trimmings, a long, imitation leather couch along one wall, and a wet-bar. But the light here isn't any better than in the livingroom because the fixtures are focused on the pooltable. Even the wetbar is so ill lit that its users have to guess what they're doing. (When he isn't working, traveling for his company, or watching football with his buddies, Creel spends a lot of time here.) After Vi went to bed, Creel came into the game-room. First he went to the wet-bar and repaired the emptiness of his glass. Then he racked up the balls and broke so violently that the cueball sailed off the table.
It made a dull, thudding noise as it bounced on the spongy linoleum.
"Fuck," he said, lumbering after the ball. The liquor he had consumed showed in the way he moved but not in his speech. He sounded sober.
Bracing himself with his custom-made cuestick, he bent to pick up the ball. Before he put it back on the table, Vi entered the room. She hadn't changed her clothes for bed. She had put her shoes back on, however. She scrutinized the shadows around the floor and under the table before she looked at Creel.
He said, "I thought you were going to bed."
"I can't leave it like this," she said tiredly." It hurts too much."
"What do you want from me?" he said." Approval?"
She glared at him.
He didn't stop." That would be terrific for you. If I approved, you wouldn't have anything else to worry about. The only problem would bel most of the bastards I introduce you to are married. Their wives might be a little more normal. They might give you some trouble."
She bit her lip and went on glaring at him.
"But I don't see why you should worry about that. If those women aren't as understanding as I am, that's their tough luck. As long as I approve, right? There's no reason why you shouldn't screw anybody you want."
"Are you finished?"
"Hell, there's no reason why you shouldn't screw all of them. I mean, as long as I approve. Why waste it?"
"Damn it, are you finished?"
"There's only one thing I don't understand. If you're so hot for sex, how come you don't want to screw me?"
You're not hot for sex? Or you do want to screw me? Don't make me laugh."
"Creel, what's the matter with you? I don't understand any of this.
You didn't used to be like this. You weren't like this when we were dating. You weren't like this when we got married. What's happened to you?"
For a minute, he didn't say anything. He went back to the edge of the pooltable, where he'd left his drink. But with his cue in one hand and the ball in the other, he didn't have a hand free. Carefully, he set his stick down on the table.
After he finished his drink, he said, "You changed."
"I changed? You're the one who's acting crazy. All I did was talk to some company vice-president about books."
"No, I'm not," he said. His knuckles were white around the cueball."
You think I'm stupid. Because I wasn't a literature major in college.
