The Philovores | Part 2
Madness and horror descended upon us just after 5:00 the following morning. What woke us was Elizabeth’s phone, jingling and vibrating in the pocket of her pants at the foot of the bed. By the time she had extricated herself from my arms and the quilt and retrieved it, the caller had left a message informing her that her father had died in the night, but that she should not come right away, and in fact she should await the hospital’s notification to come, as there were “certain precautions” that had to be taken. The nature of these precautions, and the precise matter to which they pertained, the caller did not see fit to explain.
Elizabeth dressed in silence, occasionally going rigid to stifle a sob. She developed a sudden aversion to me, shrinking away when I approached, responding with curt dismissal when I attempted to speak. I began to dress as well, and she seized my arm in a rough grip.
“What are you doing?” she hissed. “You’re not coming.”
“I am coming,” I said, prising her fingers away from my arm and continuing to don yesterday’s clothes. “God knows what’s going on there. You heard that message. They’re holding something back.”
She said nothing in reply, but didn’t interfere as I continued to prepare.
The lobby was empty, the parking lot dark, with a single streetlamp fritzing overhead. Elizabeth got in her car and slammed the door, I climbed in the passenger side, and we sped off towards the hospital.
When we arrived, an ambulance was just pulling up to the emergency entrance, its doors opening, paramedics bringing a stretcher forth from within. Elizabeth parked near the main entrance, exited the car, slammed the door with even greater savagery, and stalked towards the building, while I followed about ten feet behind.
The automatic doors slid apart to admit us, and she went up to the desk. The receptionist gave her a guarded look.
“I’m here to see my father,” she said. “He just died.” She specified the ward.
“That ward’s closed,” he responded. “No visitors until further notice.”
She clenched her fist and opened her mouth to speak again, but stopped when I laid a warning hand on her shoulder.
“Is there someone we can speak to who can tell us how long the wait might be?” I asked.
He looked unhappy. “You can try the desk outside the ward, but they probably don’t know anything more than I do.” He inclined his head towards Elizabeth. “I’m sorry about your father.”
She didn’t reply, just turned on her heel and headed for the elevator. I joined her. The doors opened right away, and the ride up was silent, Elizabeth standing as far away from me as she could.
Right away I noticed a change in the upper lobby’s atmosphere. The receptionist was different, an old man with a craggy face and a bad combover, and two guards flanked his desk. No one was in the waiting area, although CNN still played on mute.
Elizabeth fixed the man with an accusing glare. “Why is the ward closed?”
He spread his hands. “Hey, I can’t fix it. There’ll be an official announcement in an hour or two.”
“An official announcement of what?”
“I can’t share that, I’m sorry.”
She leaned over the desk, and the guards tensed. “My dad just died in there, and I want to know how, and my sister-in-law is still in there!”
The man remained calm. “No visitors are permitted at this time,” he said. “There should be an official announcement no later than 7:30. You’re welcome to wait here until then.”
Elizabeth abandoned her interrogation of him and walked towards the hallway that led to the double doors. The guards followed her with their eyes but made no actual move to stop her.
“Fuck,” she spat.
I caught up to her and saw that the doors were guarded by two more security personnel. She returned to the waiting area, sat at one of the metal tables, and began to cry. I seated myself across from her, a sick feeling in my gut.
After a while she looked up at me, devastation in her eyes. “What do we do?”
“Claire,” I said. “She knows Anna, and they’ll both know others here. Inside information.”
“Right,” she said. “Fuck. I’m so stupid.” She pulled out her phone. “God damn it, the sun’s not even up.”
“Desperate times,” I said. “If she really saw the thing killing Tom, she’ll understand.”
We headed out of the hospital; while we did so, Elizabeth called Claire twice but received no reply. She insisted on going straight to the nurse’s house, and this time I was happy to support her aggressive approach.
The eastern sky was beginning to lighten by the time we pulled up to the curb in front of 40 Thornbush Avenue. We went up to the door, and I used the knocker, driving it against the wood four times, then waiting.
Nothing. I knocked again, harder.
Half a minute passed. I was about to knock a third time, this time with my fist, when a light shone through the tiny window set high in the door, and the door itself opened just wide enough for us to see Claire’s beleaguered face.
“This had better be really good,” she said.
“Her father died, and they closed the ward to visitors,” I told her. “No word why.”
She pushed the door open wider and stood aside. “Come in. I’m so sorry, Elizabeth.”
We crossed the threshold, removed our shoes, and hung our coats in the closet just off the landing while Claire closed the door, locked it, and went into the kitchen.
“I’m putting on coffee,” she said. “Then I’ll call Anna. You came to see who we knew at the hospital, right?”
“Yes,” I said.
Soon we all stood in the kitchen slurping black coffee, Elizabeth’s left hand entwined in my right, Claire eyeing her phone with displeasure.
“She’s not picking up,” she said. “I’ll try every half hour until she does, though.”
“Can you give us her number?” I asked.
“I’ll text you,” she said, and as she did so she continued: “What’s going on at MisGen?”
I described the scene at the hospital, and Elizabeth played the message she’d received, subjecting my hand to a white-knuckle squeeze.
“Pompous assholes,” said Claire. “They’ve never met a problem they couldn’t run from.”
“Elizabeth,” I said. “Call Mary’s mom, tell her not to come under any circumstances.”
She loosened her grip on my hand and gave me a bewildered look. “What?”
“My bad news sense is tingling,” I explained. “Something awful’s going on. We shouldn’t get anyone involved who isn’t already here.”
“We have to get Mary out of there,” she said. “I’m going to go sit down.” She dropped my hand and went into the living room, placed her mug on the coffee table, and flopped down in one of the attendant chairs, leaning her head back and closing her eyes. “Wake me when you get some news.”
I followed her, but stayed standing, wandering towards the back of the room, where a square window, considerably smaller than its east-facing counterpart, gave me a view of grassy, sparsely wooded country still sunk in the gloom of retreating night. In the distance I thought I discerned a large dark manmade shape in faint silhouette against the sky.
“Elizabeth,” I said. “Where’s that house your parents lived in?”
“Mm,” she mumbled. “About half a mile west of here.”
“I might be looking at it,” I said. “Can you check for me?”
She slowly got up and plodded to my side, peering past my shoulder. “Point it out?”
I pointed.
“That’s it,” she said. She went back to her chair and closed her eyes again.
“I do have a spare bedroom,” said Claire, standing in the entrance to the living room. “If you need some sleep. It wouldn’t be any trouble.”
Elizabeth shook her head.
Claire turned to me. “Do you need some sleep?”
“Sleep is for the second-in-command,” I said. “I’m taking point. As it were. I think I’ll scout that house.”
Elizabeth’s head jerked forwards. “No!”
“This is only a preliminary investigation,” I assured her. “While we wait for Anna. I’m not going to pick a fight with any ghosts, I just want to see if anything jumps out at me.”
She stood. “I’m coming.”
I laid a firm hand on her shoulder. “I absolutely insist that you both stay behind, or else I won’t be fucking you anymore, and”—I turned to Claire—“I won’t be drinking any more of your tea.”
Elizabeth slapped me hard across the face, then addressed Claire. “I think I will take you up on that bedroom. Where is it?”
Claire, a little red in the face, gestured for Elizabeth to follow her, and they headed through the kitchen and out of my sight. I pulled my shoes on, shrugged into my coat, unlocked the door, and strode into the early morning sun.
I elected to walk straight across the countryside so as not to waste time or risk losing my way. The grass came nearly up to my knees, and soon my shoes and lower pants were wet with melting frost. My breath misted a little on my glasses, and my cheek still stung where Elizabeth had struck me. The trees I passed seemed, on the whole, rather unhealthy; short and twisted, even the evergreens marred by bare and brown-needled branches. At one point I crossed a rotting waist-height wooden fence, at another a tiny rivulet, not more than a foot wide, that trickled through decaying vegetation. I inhaled deeply, trying to calm myself, and then remembered the now-dead Peter’s words.
Don’t be happy.
My heart beat faster.
I stopped about a hundred feet from the back of the three-story colossus. It stood at the end of a long gravel path that led to a cul-de-sac populated by a few small homes. The structure was composed of a curious mix of stone and different shades of wood, as though it had begun as a one-story stone dwelling, then expanded to a two-story affair with an extra wing on the first floor, then finally grown to its current height. As my eyes travelled upwards I noticed increasing dilapidation and disrepair, culminating in the attic window in the back, broken and open to the elements.
I made a semicircle around the house, giving it a wide berth, peering at it with suspicion. It certainly inspired unease, but I could not trace this sensation to a definite source. I noted ivy crawling up the walls, little burrow entrances in the soil next to the foundation. A tiny whiskered head poked out of one of these holes and regarded me cautiously before disappearing back into its lair.
My feet crunched gravel, and I found myself regarding the front of the building. The door sported a half-eroded dark red paint job, and to its right was a large window, the curtains behind which were drawn aside. Looking in, I descried a few signs of recent habitation, but overall the interior looked ancient, shabby, cobwebbed.
I tilted my head up, inspecting first the second story, then the circular window that fronted this side of the attic. A few feeble rays of sunlight floated through it from the other end, but they failed to illuminate what lay inside. I gazed at it, allowing my mind to wander, reflecting that it was unfortunate the cellar was not at all visible from outside the house.
Something white moved behind the glass.
I stumbled several paces back, my pulse hammering in my throat. As I did so I heard a faint sound behind me in the distance: a high wail, growing louder with each passing second.
I turned around and watched in mute horror as an ambulance pulled up to the cul-de-sac dwelling closest to the ancient house. The siren stopped; two paramedics emerged and went into the house; several minutes passed; one paramedic returned to the vehicle and retrieved a stretcher, upon which he placed a small black object before wheeling both over the shorn grass of the yard and through the front door; several more minutes passed; the paramedics reemerged, one at each end of the stretcher, the black object now unfurled on top, its contents occupying only half its length; a woman followed them, clawing at her face, screaming herself raw; they loaded the stretcher into the ambulance and got in after it; the vehicle trundled off, and the woman remained, kneeling on the lawn, screeching in mad agony.
After what felt like a considerable amount of time, I roused myself enough to pull my phone from my pocket.
No service.
I set off towards Claire’s at a jog.
I pounded on the back door to 40 Thornbush, which, I realized when a bleary-eyed Elizabeth opened it, served as one of the entrances to the guest bedroom.
“Fuck you,” she greeted me.
I barged in. “A kid just died on the cul-de-sac by that house. I saw them take the body out.”
“Oh,” said Elizabeth. She swayed a little, then sat heavily on the folded-out futon on which she had slept.
I shut the door with a kick of my foot. “And I saw one of the things myself, in the attic window. Only a glimpse, but it was white, just like Claire said.” I paced back and forth, running a trembling, sweaty hand through my hair.
The door to the kitchen opened, and Claire walked in. “Of course it’s just like I said. What happened?”
I recounted my adventure. By the time I had finished, Claire had joined Elizabeth on the futon.
“So,” I concluded. “What this looks like to me is expanding territory. It’s unlikely we can do any good at the hospital, seeing as—”
A knock came from the front door.
“That’s Anna,” said Claire, rising and crossing the guest room and kitchen. “I invited her. She said she’d text Prakhar on the way.”
All four of us congregated in the living room. Claire and Anna sat, while Elizabeth and I stood near them, her hand once again gripping mine.
“He says they locked down the ward about four in the morning,” said Anna, rubbing her eyes. “That’s when they found Dr. Howard drooling on the bathroom floor with a huge red rash on the side of his neck. No one knows how he caught it, so they have to sanitize everything and start a real quarantine.”
“What about Peter Schwarz?” I asked.
“He doesn’t know when he died, and he hasn’t seen the body, but he heard there was a second rash on his neck.” She looked at Elizabeth. “I’m sorry.”
I looked at Elizabeth as well. “Call your mom and tell her to stay away. It’s not safe here, and as long as they’re quarantining the ward they won’t let Mary out no matter who shows up.”
She frowned, her neck muscles clenching, but she crossed the landing to the kitchen, tapping her phone’s touchscreen as she went.
“Right,” I said. “Anna. First of all, I think Claire’s right about what she saw, I don’t think this is something you catch.”
Again I related what I had seen at the old house, and the awful scene that had taken place nearby. As I wrapped up, Elizabeth returned.
“She’s already on the road, and I can’t convince her to go back,” she said. “Fuck, she’s old and dotty. She’s not going to handle all this well.”
“Keep her in the dark if you think that’s better,” I advised.
Anna’s face was pale. “Should I try to get people out of the ward?”
“The whole hospital,” I said. “As many as you can convince.”
She pulled out her phone and began texting.
“Elizabeth,” I said. “I think I’ll have to go back to the house.”
“You were just there,” she protested.
“We don’t know how to stop this thing, or these things. I need to see your dad’s cellar, in case the paraphernalia in there contains pertinent information.”
“You think there might be more than one of them?”
“There’s no way to know how many there are,” I said. “We’ve been assuming one, because that’s reassuring, but we’ve seen… five attacks in or near the house, three at the hospital. If there’s only one ghost it’s a hungry one. And I think I recall your father referring to something plural.”
The motion of Anna’s hands slowed. “Hungry.”
“I don’t know if that’s the right word,” I continued. “The attacks definitely leave people with less gray matter than they had before, but there’s no actual incision that leads from the neck to the brain, just the patch of cold-burned flesh, so… I don’t know how that works.”
There was a pause while we took stock of our collective ignorance.
Elizabeth spoke haltingly: “I saw one rash on my mom’s neck, but it took… it took two, um, two each to kill Tom and my dad.”
I thought for a moment. “Who was healthier, your mom or your dad?”
“My dad.”
“There you go,” I said. “As for the kid… assuming they didn’t keep him at home after an earlier attack, that was one hit. So, one hit you’re brain-damaged, two you’re dead, unless you’re sick or small, in which case one you’re dead. And the attacks at the hospital, those didn’t start until well after they brought in people who were attacked at the house. So maybe they, or it, went to the hospital to finish the job, found all sorts of tasty people around, branched out to Dr. Howard and now God knows who’s next.”
“Fucking shit,” said Elizabeth. “I can’t believe Mary’s trapped in there.”
“Based on what’s happened already,” I said, “if we moved her elsewhere the attacks could spread to the new location.”
Her face twisted with rage. “We have to fight these things.”
“We have no idea how fightable they are,” I said.
“Then let’s find out!”
“I’ll go to the cellar,” I said. “I’ll see if—”
“You’ll go to the cellar,” Elizabeth interrupted, “and the white thing will get you, and you’ll be a wreck on the floor, and you’ll accomplish nothing. If two of us go, let’s say I get attacked, you have to carry me out, your arms are full, you can’t take any paraphernalia. We need at least three, maybe more. If we have enough people, and we bring weapons, and we all know what’s coming, we might be able to keep everyone safe. Strength in numbers.”
I opened my mouth to retort, but before any words could emerge I realized she was right.
“What if there are multiple things, and more of them come because there are more of us?” asked Claire.
“There are tons of people at the hospital,” said Anna, “and Prakhar hasn’t told me about anyone ‘catching it’ since Dr. Howard.”
“Let’s go, then,” said Elizabeth. “Before they get hungry again.”
“Well…” said Claire. “I’m in. Before they kill any more kids.”
Anna shivered and hugged herself. “I suppose I’m in too.”
Fifteen minutes later we were striding down the back route towards the sinister dwelling. I held a hoe with a sharp triangular blade; Elizabeth held a letter opener in one hand and a vegetable knife in the other; Anna held a baseball bat; Claire held a large pitchfork, and a loaded handgun bulged from her back pocket. She had it, she had explained, in case her ex-husband ever returned. The weak sun now fully illuminated the grassland, exposing the poor health of the retreating autumn flora.
When we came to the fence, Elizabeth gave it a few hard kicks, felling enough planks and fragments of crossbeam to permit us to walk through single file. Thereafter she took the lead, stepping directly in the little rivulet and not bothering to shake the resultant mud off her shoe, marching forwards without word or pause.
Soon we had reached the house. I grasped Elizabeth’s arm, and she whirled on me.
“We have to be quick!” she exclaimed. “I know the house, you don’t!”
Claire and Anna stopped behind us, their wary eyes fixed on the decaying structure.
“Show a bit of control,” I said. “You’re worrying me. I lead the way to the door, I hold it open. Then you take us straight to the cellar.”
She glared at me and pointed at a rickety storm door on the side of the house, near the back corner. “There. It’s faster.”
I walked up to the door in question and opened it; finding a thin wooden door behind the first, I gave the knob an experimental twist and was surprised to find it unlocked. Elizabeth pushed it open and went inside. Claire and Anna followed after a moment’s hesitation, and I brought up the rear.
We found ourselves in a small, dark, rectangular room with a washer, dryer, and water heater set against one long wall and an off-white door with a gold knob set into the other. The end of the rectangle opposite us opened onto a hallway. Elizabeth reached up and pulled a beaded metal cord, and a bare bulb flared to life; the sickly yellow light illuminated the dust and cobwebs coating everything but the laundry apparatus. A large black spider skittered down the heater’s cylindrical body.
We turned right into the hallway beyond, then left. Elizabeth flipped a switch on the wall, activating a globular ceiling fixture in the corner. This light was even weaker and more pallid than the bulb in the laundry room, and it cast weird shadows on the grayish-brown planks of wood that constituted the floor. A thick smell of mold assaulted my nostrils. A Mondrian print hung on the cracked plaster beside me, one of his earlier works, an abstract tree in muted colors.
The back hallway led to the inky blackness of a far room whose purpose was from this distance unidentifiable. To our right hung several more outré paintings; to our left, from farthest to nearest, the wall was interrupted by an ornate oaken door, a carpeted flight of stairs leading to the second floor, and a dark, yawning aperture whose crooked stone steps provided access to the cellar. Down this last Elizabeth began to march. Claire tiptoed after her.
“No lights?” came Anna’s quaver.
“At the bottom,” snapped Elizabeth.
Anna braved the descent. I cast an uneasy glance around the gloomy hallway before following a few steps behind.
As I reached the foot of the stairs I tasted dank, musty air on the roof of my mouth. Fingers of mold, reaching out of cracks in the floor to colonize the wall, were barely visible in the faint filterings of light from the hallway above. Our breaths and footsteps were loud in the utter silence of the place. I ran my hands along my hoe, reassured by the polished smoothness, the heft of the wood. Then Elizabeth turned on the lights, and garish fluorescent bars affixed to the ceiling flickered in lazy acquiescence to the electronic command, throwing harsh clarity on the scene before us.
What immediately arrested my attention were the two huge diagrams drawn in white paint on the age-stained concrete floor. Each was the mirror image of the other; each was composed of a circle about five feet in diameter, intersecting which was a tall isosceles triangle, the two wider-angled points touching the edge of the circle, the narrow-angled point jutting past the circle’s circumference. This large-scale image was repeated in ever-decreasing fractal manifestations clinging to the sides and interiors of the diagrams, the smallest of which were about the size of my palm. Staining the center of each drawing was a voluminous dark brown smear.
Piles of old boxes and tangles of rusted machinery loomed from the edges of the room, and abutting the far wall was a large desk, really no more than a slab of pressed wood over stacks of cinder blocks. At the desk was a skeletal wooden chair; under the desk was a small wooden chest, looking like nothing so much as a treasure chest from an old pirate film, its dully gleaming brass clasp retrofitted with a padlock.
Atop the desk lay an orgy of evidence confirming Peter Schwarz’s interest in the occult. Several books in varying states of decay; scrolls, some strewn haphazardly about, others tightly wound and held with rubber bands; sheaves of both fresh and yellowed paper, with some of the more delicate specimens of the latter encased in sheet protectors. One scroll lay open, held by two books, and as I drew nearer I saw that in addition to the messy scrawl, which appeared to be in Arabic, the crinkled parchment featured a minute version of one of the floor diagrams.
There were stopped glass jars of paint on the desk as well, ranging in size from tiny deposits of pastel hues to a nearly gallon-sized supply of white. Old soft drink bottles with the labels removed were filled partway with curious varicolored powders. Then there were the animals. Beetles, wasps, moths, pinned directly to the wood of the desk; tadpoles, mice, hummingbirds, floating in jars of alcohol; in pride of place, in the middle of the desk against the wall, a tiny kitten suspended in clear liquid, its empty eye sockets gazing out at us in blank obscenity.
I noticed needles and syringes scattered over the papers, some clean, some used.
“That chest,” I said, drawing aside the chair and pointing. “The real dirt will be in there. Claire, Elizabeth, pick it up. Anna, start gathering the papers. I’ll photograph the floor stuff.”
Claire and Elizabeth knelt and began dragging the chest out from under the desk, while Anna walked over, placed an uncertain hand on one of the books, and then stopped, her eyes fixed on the opthalmectomied kitten. I snapped pictures: both diagrams together, each one separately, then the smaller features of the designs.
“Christ,” said Claire. “This is heavy. I think we’ll both need two hands.”
“Give me the pitchfork,” I said. “Elizabeth, leave the knife.”
Claire handed me her instrument, while Elizabeth stood, pocketed the letter opener, and plunged her larger blade into the wood of the desk with a swift stabbing motion.
Anna jumped and gave a small shriek.
“Anna, collect yourself,” I said, pocketing my phone. “Papers.”
She shook herself, tucked her bat under one arm, and began gathering scrolls, papers, and sundry scraps of parchment. I propped the garden implements against the desk and began to appraise the books, trying to determine which would make the most valuable souvenirs. That scroll with the diagram, of course, was of paramount importance; I pushed aside the tomes holding it open, rolled it up, and stuffed it in an inside coat pocket. Other pockets I filled with small volumes and sheet-protected documents. Almost all the loose papers were handwritten, and quite a few of the books, I saw as I flipped back their covers, were as well.
Claire and Elizabeth hefted the chest to waist height and began waddling across the floor. “Back the way we came!” Elizabeth grunted, her shoes chipping bits of paint off the diagrams as she went. She stepped gingerly around the brown stains, whereas Claire didn’t even look down.
I looked over the desk again. Together Anna and I could transport about half the contents in one trip; that would have to do. I placed a couple of books atop her armful of papers, carefully lifted a heavy stack until it was balanced between my chest and my right arm, and cursed myself for not having thought to bring bags. It is the simplest and most mundane errors, really, that cause us the greatest amount of trouble.
Claire and Elizabeth trundled up the staircase with agonizing slowness, Claire higher, Elizabeth lower. Elizabeth trembled a little as the weight strained her arms. Anna went after them, and I again brought up the rear, holding both hoe and pitchfork in my left hand, using a well-placed knuckle to flip the light switch down as I mounted the first step. Just before the cellar vanished into night-black obscurity my eyes lingered on a small red thing in an alcohol-filled jam jar, a little glob of gelatinous matter shaped like a tadpole with vestigial arms.
“No,” Anna murmured as the light disappeared.
“We’ll be out of here in a minute,” I said.
Gradually we inched up the stairs, around the corner, back to the laundry room. As the two chest-bearers entered that room I turned off the hallway light. Unaccountable shivers ran through my flesh as I looked back and forth. I felt watched, monitored, subject to intense scrutiny.
At last Claire and Elizabeth exited the building. At Elizabeth’s signal they put the chest on the ground with a thump, and she gave an exhausted groan. Anna stepped outside with her bundle of books and papers, and I raised my left hand, freeing one finger to pull the bare bulb’s chain.
“Hang on,” said Elizabeth. “I’m heading back in to get some things I left.”
“The whole point of this is to get in and out as soon as possible,” I reminded her.
“I know, it’s only myself I’m risking. Help with the chest, I’ll grab your stuff when I come out.”
“How will you carry my stuff when you’re—”
“Bag!” she shouted, crossing the laundry room and disappearing into the house.
“Alright,” I said. I stepped outside, deposited my books and garden tools on the ground, and bent down to dig my fingers under the chest. “Despite this mutiny we’ll continue with the original plan. Claire, help me?”
Together we lifted our cumbersome burden and began to walk away from the house, but we didn’t get far. After six steps I heard behind me a faint moan and the flutter and crash of falling papers and books, and Claire screamed, dropping her end of the chest. The thing landed with an ugly splintering noise. Claire was drawing her gun. I turned around.
A tall white humanoid thing, its paper-colored skin veritably blazing in the mid-morning light, stood beside Anna, one hand gripping her shoulder, the other curled around her hip, its mouth pressed to the back of her neck, the muscles of its face working to drain and suck. It had no hair anywhere, no eyebrows or eyelashes, none between its legs—in fact there was nothing, either male or female, between its legs, no orifices of ingress or egress as far as I could see. No navel, no breasts or nipples. No nostrils on its nose, just a blank white outcropping of flesh, and below that a lipless hole fastened with terrible eagerness to Anna’s skin. It had no fingernails or toenails, and its white eyelids were closed. Anna herself struggled in weak spasms, tiny, pitiful sounds issuing from her gasping mouth.
I ran forwards and pulled at the arm clutching her hip as hard as I could. It didn’t budge. Not an inch. The creature showed no awareness of my presence.
“Out of the way!”
Claire was at my side, gripping her gun with both hands. I stumbled backwards, and she pressed the barrel right against the side of the thing’s head—I noticed as she did so that it had no ears, not even the tiniest openings—before pulling the trigger.
A horrendous deep crack cleaved the air, and Claire reeled, falling, landing on her back, her hands empty. I gazed in bewilderment at the spot where she’d fired.
Nothing. Not a mark, not a scratch.
Elizabeth appeared in the doorway holding a duffel bag. She froze, an expression of utter horror stealing across her face, dropped the bag, sank to her knees and retched all over the grass.
All the time, the thing just kept on sucking.
Elizabeth recovered herself and picked up the hoe. Ignoring my weak-voiced protestation that it wouldn’t work, she took a vicious swing at the creature. The blade glanced off its back, and the force, transferred back along the shaft, rent the tool from her arms.
Finally the ghastly figure relaxed its hold, and Anna crumpled. As it closed its mouth I caught a glimpse of a pulsating snow-colored mass detaching from her neck. For a moment it stood still, but then it turned, facing straight towards Elizabeth, and its eyes opened.
They blazed with white light.
At this point, several things happened at once: first, I scrambled to reach Elizabeth’s shaking form, meaning to insert myself as a shield between her and the monster; second, Claire gave voice to an animal roar and launched herself at the creature’s leg; third, the thing itself began to disappear into thin air, as if from every conceivable viewpoint there were some invisible corner behind which it was stepping. Claire reached the leg, wrapped her arms around it, and tried to bite into it. Her teeth made no discernible impact, and the creature took no notice, simply continuing its vanishing act. Its leg was the last part to disappear, and for just a second or two, Claire’s upper body disappeared with it. The inimitable sight of her lonely legs and abdomen burned itself onto my eyes. Then she reappeared, sans white leg, and slumped to the ground, eyelids fluttering, limbs twitching.
I embraced Elizabeth and held her tight as irregular, hiccoughing sobs racked her body.
For nearly a minute, no one did anything.
I remembered Anna. I stood up, walked over, and squatted beside her; her breathing was shallow, drool hung from her mouth, her eyes roved wildly.
“What… Was that…” she struggled to speak. “Was… Was that…”
“That was it,” I said. “We have to take you to the hospital.”
“No!” It was Claire, rising to her knees. “Not there!”
I stood again.
“You will stay here with her, call 911, and accompany her to the hospital, or I will use that gun on you,” I told Claire. “Elizabeth!”
Still crouching on the grass, Elizabeth raised a fearful face towards mine.
“You and I are carrying the chest to Claire’s house, and we are doing it now,” I continued. “If you don’t help me with this I’m leaving you here.”
I grasped her arm and made her stand, then led her to the chest. New seams ran across the wood, but it didn’t fall apart as we got our hands under it and heaved it up to waist level. Elizabeth didn’t look at me, and she didn’t speak.
As Claire tapped at her phone with unsteady hands, we bore our heavy burden into the countryside.
The clock on the mantelpiece ticked past noon. I lounged on the small sofa near the back window, sharing the spongy cushions with a pile of recent newspapers. The ruins of the chest, overflowing with musty papers and books with odd-looking bindings, lay in a rough pile on the floor. We had let it fall to the carpet after staggering into the room, and this second blow had proved its undoing. The padlock, still intact, perched atop the mess, fastened to two lonely wooden fragments.
Elizabeth too lay on the floor, crying.
“It’s my fault,” she moaned. “It’s my fault. I went back for the fucking bag.”
“We didn’t get out of there any slower than we would have otherwise.”
“It was my plan too. Bring everyone, I said.”
“It was the right plan.”
“It got Anna!” She yanked at a clump of hair with a closed fist.
“It was always going to get one of us,” I said. “It was bound to go down like that. Now we know. We go to the house, we lose one.”
“You’re so fucking callous.”
“You know exactly why I’m being callous,” I hissed. “At least one of us has to be.”
“God,” she said. “Fucking hell. I never thought anything like that could exist. What should I do? Should I go to church?”
“I don’t remember anything like that from the Bible.”
She giggled, then laughed out loud, and couldn’t stop laughing for over a full minute.
“Elizabeth,” I ventured, as her convulsions of mirth subsided.
“Wh-what?”
“Why didn’t the paper print your mom’s maiden name?”
I was looking at her mother’s obituary. The page containing it topped the stack of newspapers beside me. Helen Schwarz, it said.
“Oh,” she said. She looked confused. “That is her maiden name. My dad took it.”
A tiny, tingling suspicion began to grow at the back of my head. “What was his last name before?”
“Curwen.”
The Curwens. One of the New England wizard families of yore. First of Salem, then of Providence, then extinct, or so it had been said. I had never thought much of the tales, but then I had never seen an invulnerable man-shaped predator from another dimension.
“Does that… mean something?” she continued.
“Your dad was descended from a family of colorful repute,” I explained. “Back when he tossed the name, people must still have remembered some of the old stories.”
“Colorful repute?”
“Wizards,” I clarified. “They were wizards.”
She gave me a slow nod before succumbing to another long spell of laughter.
“Nice laugh,” I said.
She crawled over to me, put the newspapers on the floor, and sat on the sofa, leaning her body against mine, rubbing her nose against my jawline.
“Fucking wizards,” she mumbled.
“Until now I was pretty sure they didn’t exist.”
“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” she said. “Maybe God sent these things to punish the whole town for harboring my family.”
“Maybe God is dead, and they escaped from Tartarus,” I said. “All sorts of possibilities, really.”
She kissed my neck and started to unbutton the top of my shirt.
“Claire could arrive home unannounced,” I said, even as I responded to her advance, running my hands up and down the sides of her body.
“Mm-hm.” She straddled me and rubbed her crotch against mine. I kissed her, hard, biting down on her lower lip.
My phone rang.
“God damn it,” swore Elizabeth. “Don’t—”
I withdrew it from my pocket and looked at the display. It was Claire. I put it on speaker and answered.
“Did you make it?” I said, as Elizabeth, fuming, sank to the floor and rested her head on my left leg.
“We’re here,” said Claire. “They took her in. It’s crazy here, though. There are police. They still haven’t made an announcement.”
“If there’s nothing more you can do for Anna, come back here. We’re at your house, we got the chest.”
“Do you need me back there?”
“Not… strictly speaking, no,” I said. “But it’s not safe at the hospital.”
“They want me to come back to work,” she said. “I think I will. I’ll see if I can keep Anna safe.”
“You saw how it went,” I said. “Brute force is no good against those things.”
“There has to be some way to hurt them. And I can’t just leave. I dragged Anna into this.”
“I advise against, but I can’t stop you.”
“There’s something else,” she said. “I saw something when it dragged me through.”
“Through?”
“To… to its place. However you’d say it. I think I could’ve held on, but I got scared and let go, and then I was back on the grass.”
“What did you see?” I asked.
“White. Everything was white. White ground, like milk glass, and white sky. And there were so many of them, just standing everywhere, frozen…”
“As in standing still, or encased in something?”
“Stan—” She broke off for a few seconds, then returned. “Standing still. Gotta go, sorry. But that’s about it. That’s what I saw.”
She hung up.
“So many of them,” I echoed. “We could have an invasion.”
Elizabeth, apparently uninterested, turned her attention to the zipper of my pants, but a moment later her own phone rang.
“Motherfucker,” she groaned, and pulled it out. “It’s Mary’s mom. Fuck.” She stood and put the little rectangle to her ear.
“Hi, Kathy… sorry, I’m… I’m out… I don’t think we should, but let me explain why in person, I’ll be at Marigold in a few minutes… no, just wait! I’m coming! Don’t go anywhere.”
She pocketed the phone. “She’s at the motel, I have to stop her going to the hospital. Have fun.” She gestured to the books and papers on the floor. “Do your research.”
A minute later she was gone.
Alone in the house, I showered, dressed in the most androgynous outfit I could assemble from Claire’s wardrobe, and settled down to investigate the occult trove we had extracted from the cellar. After a few minutes of sifting, I selected a small leather-bound tome with ink stains on the cover and opened it at random.
April 16, 20—
He whispers to me every night now. He curses me for my refusal to wake him and tells me I am unworthy of the name Curwen. I thought it was unworthy of me, but I am having doubts. Before his presence first obtruded upon my mind I did not think such unholy survivals possible, and it sickens me to imagine his form rising from its unmarked grave to dominate and overpower me, but as the Reaper draws close to me too I understand his wish and may even mimic his action, without, of course, allowing him to waken and walk again even as I lay down to a long sleep.
April 17, 20—
He has left off urging me to wake him. I suppose he has finally realized I will not accede to this demand. But he still tells me I am unworthy. He tells me I have failed to honor the great legacy to which I am heir, the history of servitude to a master he calls Yog-Sothoth, and that he despairs to see his grandson wasting away in obscurity when power is his for the taking. Mine for the taking, that is. He says there is something buried in the woods near his own remains, though his description of the spot raises no recollection in my mind. It is an ancient thing, he says, a granter of valuable knowledge, carried out of Arabia many centuries ago.
April 18, 20—
I cannot find it, but I shall keep looking. He whispers such dreams of power in my ear. I still do not trust him, but I am too weak to resist the lure he dangles before me, the promise of access to the secrets of the known and unknown worlds, views onto planes whose existence those who hunt for Earth-copies with telescopes barely suspect, the hidden history of our species, and of those who preceded us.
April 19, 20—
I still cannot find it. He is angry and impatient. Again he tells me I am unworthy, a failure. He says a true scion of his line would have sensed and found it long ago.
April 20, 20—
It is mine! O glorious day! I now need his guidance no longer. I must learn Arabic.
What followed was a strange and disturbing journey into the twilight. All late spring and summer Peter Curwen had studied an archaic Arabian dialect, aided in his dreams by the constant sibilant encouragement of his grandfather, Nathaniel Curwen. The latter apparently lay buried in the woods near the old house, and had gradually worked his influence upon his descendant ever since Peter and Helen had come to the place, his appearances growing from once every few months in the first year to nightly in the current year. Peter had discovered some occult material already present in the house upon moving in, mostly in the cellar, and had made a hobby of studying it. For a long time, Nathaniel tried to convince Peter to use the knowledge contained therein to raise him to a second life, but Peter refused to give in, until finally Nathaniel gave up the attempt and proceeded to guide Peter in a more oblique fashion by helping him find the item whose discovery triggered the commencement of his linguistic study.
Peter was quite guarded in his description when he had occasion to mention this item, but from context I gathered it was some sort of manuscript. Come autumn his knowledge of Arabic had progressed far enough for him to decipher its contents, and he became fixated on its claims regarding a certain race of beings from a world parallel to but in another sense infinitely distant from our own, a race that on our plane could be made servitors of those who summoned them with the requisite skill and protections. The ancient name for them he rendered as “joy-eaters,” but in a spasm of creativity he christened them philovores. First he learned how to see them without crossing into their realm, for which purpose he synthesized various compounds for ingestion, inhalement, or cutaneous application. This explained most of the animals, including the kitten, whose eyes were a crucial ingredient of a sight-enhancing drug, and the human fetus, which he obtained on a black market connected to Miskatonic General. Then he imbued himself with wards and sigils which he believed would not only protect him from the philovores but allow him to command their obedience. Finally, practicing with miniature versions first, he learned to draw the great summoning circle that would bridge our world and the one he sought to reach, and he concocted the special paint needed to establish the connection.
The circle was duly painted, and the ritual duly performed—but alas, Peter found he could not control the philovore he summoned, and it killed Helen before departing of its own accord.
The last entry in the diary ran thus:
November 2, 20—
Horror and agony. It killed Helen. I could not command it. The protections are worthless. It tossed me aside like a paper doll. That foul thing in the ground lied. Its words are poison. It wants nothing but my ruin. I must close the gateway so that the being I summoned does not come again. A mirror image to seal the hole.
I shut the book, leaned back with my head against the sofa, and closed my eyes. The mirror image had evidently not done the trick. I remembered what Claire had said.
There were so many of them.
With a chill in my gut, I turned back to the spread of books and papers before me.
By the time Elizabeth called an orange-red glow was seeping through the back window. I put the phone to my ear and spoke: “You’ve been quiet. What’s going on?”
“God,” she said. She sounded upset. “I managed to keep her at the motel for a while, but finally she said she’d go to the hospital with or without me, so I went with her.”
“You’re not still there, are you?”
She barked out a short laugh. “We didn’t get in the door. No visitors for the whole place now. There were police there.”
“You can’t contact Mary?”
“They say she’s alive, and doing a little better, in fact, but no, we can’t.”
“Are you at the motel?” I asked.
“Yes. Kathy’s off making calls. She won’t believe me about anything, she says I’m obviously cracked in the head and should be at the hospital myself, in the psych ward.”
“It would be nice if you could get her to leave.”
“You just try,” she said.
“I found your dad’s diary,” I told her. “You were right. He called them up, thinking he could control them, they killed your mom, he tried to put them down, but the putting-down spell didn’t work.”
“Great.” She sniffed, and I could imagine her wiping tears from her eyes. “What do we do?”
“Find a better spell, I guess. I’m going through the contents of the chest. Want to help?”
“Has Claire contacted you?”
“No,” I said. “You?”
“No.” She paused. “I’ll come back. I’ll be there soon.”
The call ended.
I refocussed my attention on the thing I had been studying when she’d called. It was the scroll that had lain open on the desk in the cellar. The Arabic I could not decipher; what interested me was the miniature diagram. I placed the parchment between a large book and a piece of tracing paper and slowly etched the outline with a pencil, first the large shapes, then the smaller ones. Then I laid the tracing paper aside, where it joined a stack of similar attempts. Practice was key. I might have to reproduce the image on a greater scale if I wanted to banish the philovores. I was hardly a genius when it came to spatial reasoning, but I found the collection of overlaid figures curiously easy to remember; already I felt I could almost draw it from memory.
The mirror image, though, was a whole other problem.
A siren sounded in the distance. It was the fourth one that afternoon, or maybe the fifth.
I picked up the book I’d been using as a flat surface, the age-worn, half-disintegrated testament of a man named Borellus, and began to peruse it.
It was dusk when the door swung open and Elizabeth made her way into the living room. Her hair was wet and stringy, and she held a brown bag, which she dumped on the sofa.
“Bagels,” she said. “If you’re hungry. I haven’t eaten all day. I walked. I felt like I’d puke if I got in the car again.”
She crouched down beside me. I grabbed hold of her, and we began to devour each other. We fucked quickly, Elizabeth riding me and fingering herself; I came first, and she kept my shrinking cock between her legs until she had brought herself to orgasm. Afterwards, we re-covered our private parts, and she turned her attention to the occult smorgasbord on the floor.
I handed her the diary. “Start with this.”
Another siren wafted over the darkening streets.
Elizabeth gazed out the front window. “How bad is this going to get?” she said, her voice soft.
“As bad as it can.” I retrieved two bagels from the sofa and handed one to her. “Let’s get to work.”
Over the next few hours I continued my investigation of what I deemed the relevant parts of Peter Curwen’s collection. I gathered those pieces of parchment that I thought belonged to the same work as the scroll with the diagram; I looked at the scattered, disorganized notes in which Peter had recorded some of his translations of passages from that work; I began the painstaking process of learning to draw the mirror image of the summoning circle, a task rendered—I hoped—merely difficult instead of impossible by the pictures on my phone and my seemingly instinctual grasp of the original; I read more of the writings of Borellus, in which I found formulae purporting to allow the user to raise, tame, resomnify, or altogether eradicate the properly prepared dead. In these formulae I again saw the name Yog-Sothoth. I copied them down and began to memorize them in case they proved useful. Elizabeth, meanwhile, read her father’s diary cover to cover, then took up Borellus as I chanted the copied formulae under my breath.
A little after 11:00 my phone lit up with a text from Claire.
whole hospital quarantined. staying the night. feel free to use house.
Elizabeth and I shared a grave look. I placed a hand over hers and stroked it, moving a thumb up and down along one of her veins. As I did so we heard the faint sound of a siren.
Her lip trembled. “Maybe we should just leave.”
“What’s to stop them from taking over the whole world?”
“Nothing,” she said. “That’s why we should leave. To buy time.”
“What about Mary and Anna?”
She lowered her head. “I don’t think we can save them.”
“I’m not leaving.”
“Alright.” She laid her other hand on top of mine so that my hand was between both of hers. “I’ll stay too, then.”
“Tell you what,” I said. I had reached the point where a soft prickling sensation persisted behind my eyes and written words floated across the surface of my consciousness without imparting their meaning. “I’m too tired to be useful here. I’ll be in the guest room.”
I kissed her, got to my feet, and crossed the house to the room with the folded-out futon, throwing myself onto the soft, inviting surface fully clothed. A few minutes later, when Elizabeth straggled in and lay down next to me, her arms enfolding my chest, the fragrance of her hair enveloping my guttering thoughts, I was already half-asleep.
At 2:00 in the morning the blaring of our phones subjected us to a painful reawakening. I had mine out first, and I squinted at the screen in disbelief. It was a government alert.
VALEFORD IN QUARANTINE. NO ENTRY OR EXIT PERMITTED.