Goat Mother and Others: The Collected Mythos Fiction of Pierre Comtois (20 page)

The Martense and Meir lines had degenerated into incest and mongrelization nearly a century ago, until the families eventually vanished. But people, especially whole families, just do not disappear, they go somewhere, even if it is into other family units. But in the case of the Martense and Meir lines, there was no evidence that they had ever merged with other local families. In fact, the people round about shunned and feared the two clans because of their insular and eccentric ways. So where did they go? Zarnak believed he had the answer. There were hints in some of the papers of “deep cellars” beneath the Martense and Meir properties that, in fact, the tunnels that honeycombed the area were the very reason that the families built their homes here. Through the papers, the news articles and scattered information provided by Dr. Strange, Zarnak deduced that far from vanishing, the degenerate remains of the Meir family had retreated to these “deep cellars” and never reemerged. It was his intention to explore the house basement to find the entrance to these catacombs.

There was one other thing. He had discovered what Henry Geddes had meant by the Meir “taint.”

Zarnak retreated to the bedroom and took a flashlight from his travel bag. He pocketed some extra batteries. Going back into the darkened parlor, he found the door to the basement where he expected it beneath the front stairway. He pushed it open and found a light switch on the wall. He flipped it on and immediately the gloom below became lit in the sickly yellow glow of a bare bulb just visible beyond the end of the staircase. At the bottom, Zarnak saw that the floor was bare earth with here and there, naked ledge clearly exposed. There was evidence of some storage but not of a recent variety, the dank of the basement would have damaged any items of a more modern manufacture. Parts of the basement were divided by a wooden framework stapled over with chicken wire and overhead, the ancient beams were choked with cobwebs.

In a few minutes, Zarnak had arrived at the furthest reaches of the basement where the flooring was all of rock that gently sloped toward the corner of the house. A few moldy boxes and barrels of wood were enough to hide the cavern entrance beyond as the top of its arched entrance barely rose above the level the floor. Zarnak shone the beam of his flashlight into its inky depths but saw nothing. So this was the “deep cellar.” It was incredible that human beings could actually retreat there to live, but if the accounts were to be believed, the Meir’s did exactly that. Whether any of them were still alive, Zarnak now intended to find out.

Slowly, he negotiated the uneven slope to the entrance of the cave; he played the beam of his flashlight inside, but again saw nothing. In another moment, he was swallowed up within its confines and almost immediately, he came upon evidence of human habitation. But by the appearance of scattered bones and such bits of metal as a belt buckle and buttons, it had been many years, perhaps decades, since anyone had disturbed them. He continued on. Time passed. According to his watch, he had been walking for nearly an hour in total silence except for the scuffling of his own feet on the uneven floor when the tunnel widened into a large cavern where his beam had difficulty reaching the opposite end. A thin stream of water, heavy with sediment, passed through one corner of the room and on the shelf of rock that sloped up from its bank, Zarnak was able to see the terrible fate that had finally caught up to the vanished Meir clan.

A dozen corpses, some mutilated in an obviously cannibalistic manner, lay bunched together, almost mummified in the peculiar atmospheric conditions that existed this far beneath the earth. A few more corpses lay scattered farther away, but these fifteen or so bodies were all that had remained of the Meir family when finally, after generations of in-breeding had produced human strains unable to survive in the world and when even the ability to reproduce had at last been bred out of the poor creatures, they had succumbed to the relentless law of nature.

With care, Zarnak played the beam of his flashlight over the desiccated faces and in some he could yet see, in the dried and sunken sockets, the Meir “taint.” Satisfied, Zarnak returned to the surface world.

Zarnak rose early the next morning both because he was habitually an early riser and because the rambunctious Luke, trailed by his mother, were preparing for a school day. For his morning ablutions, Zarnak was compelled to use the house’ sole bathroom on the second floor. When he was finished, he passed the open door to the boy’s room and decided to take a cursory look about the scene of the attempted murder. It proved to be no different than any other boy’s room except for one thing.

Zarnak picked up the book that rested on the night table by the boy’s bed. By its thin wooden covers and rumpled pages held together by bits of twine, he could tell immediately that it was of homemade manufacture. Curious, he flipped it open and saw that each page contained Georg Meir’s neat handwriting and what was more, his experienced eye recognized the words as an English translation of segments of the dread
Necronomicon
, a very rare tome of a sorcerous and blasphemous nature. It was plain that Meir had somehow made a selective translation of the original, but what was it doing in the child’s room?

Just then, Mrs. Geddes stepped into the room and before she had time to say anything, Zarnak asked, “Sondra, what is this book doing here?”

She recognized it immediately. “Oh, Henry found it in the library and thought it’s
Arabian Nights’
stories would make good bedtime reading for Luke.”

To say that Zarnak was taken aback at this facile explanation would be an understatement. But then, as he reflected further, what else would an untrained eye see in the evil parables of Abdul Alhazred’s book but simply more tales of the
Arabian Nights
? Then, idly thumbing through the book’s pages, it fell open to a bookmark that rested on the last page of an entry that Zarnak recognized as an elaborate Spell of Reversal that was intended by the author as a method of counteracting spells, curses, and even mistaken summonings of antediluvian gods.

He took the book to the breakfast table with him and had it beside him when Luke and his mother joined him.

“Luke, this is Doctor Zarnak,” said Mrs. Geddes introducing the boy. “He’ll be staying with us for a few days.”

“How do you do, Luke?”

“Fine sir,” said the boy approaching Zarnak with his hand extended.

Zarnak smiled at this mature display and in taking the boy’s hand, looked into his eyes and was taken by surprise for the second time that morning. What a fool he had been! The answer to the whole problem had literally stared him in the face from the beginning!

“Sondra, the boy’s eyes…”

Mrs. Geddes showed a bit of irritation when she replied, a mother’s natural defensiveness toward her progeny.

“What about them?”

“They’re both the same color!”

“Well, yes.”

“But members of the Meir family have always sported dissimilar eyes; one blue and one brown.”

“That’s true, but I just assumed Luke’s eyes adjusted somehow, that the two colors turned out to be just a childhood thing that he grew out of…like his blond baby hair darkening…”

“But your husband’s eyes have normalized as well!”

“What? They…they have?”

“When did you first notice this change in your son?”

“Why, come to think of it, it was soon after we moved into this house.”

“Sondra, have Luke finish his breakfast, he won’t be going to school today,” Zarnak said.

A few hours later, Zarnak, Mrs. Geddes and Luke met with Scopes in his office. Scopes was having trouble with their explanations.

“I’m still not quite sure I understand you, Anton,” said Scopes.

“You say Geddes’ delusion has something to do with his eyes? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Evan, just let me ask you a single question: Has Geddes looked at himself in the mirror since he’s been here?”

“Why no; too dangerous. It’s against Resthaven’s rules to allow a patient anything with which he might harm himself or others. A mirror could be broken into sharp pieces…”

“Then I suggest we overlook the rules in this instance, supply Geddes with a mirror and further explanation may be moot,” said Zarnak.

Scopes shook his head in puzzlement but the imploring look on Mrs. Geddes’ face overcame whatever objections he might still have had. A few minutes later, the orderly had unlocked the door to Geddes’ room and, with his wife and son out of sight up the corridor, Scopes and Zarnak entered.

“Dr. Zarnak,” said Geddes rising from his cot. “I didn’t expect you back so soon.”

“I never expected to be able to help you so quickly,” replied Zarnak modestly. “Mr. Geddes, do me the small favor of looking into this mirror?”

“A mirror? Why, are you trying to mock me by drawing attention to my affliction?”

“Not at all.”

Geddes took the hand mirror from Zarnak and hesitantly brought it up to his face. There was a moment of silence, then a sharp intake of breath. Suddenly, Geddes dropped the mirror with a crash, buried his face in his hands and broke out in heavy, wracking sobs.

Zarnak signaled to the orderly at the door and in moments Geddes’ wife and son were in the room. Mrs. Geddes took her husband’s hands in hers and drew them from his face. “It’s all right, dear,” she soothed. “Everything will be all right.”

Then, she deliberately placed Luke in front of him. Geddes’ gaze immediately went to the boy’s eyes and when he saw the change there, grabbed the boy in a great hug and crushed him to his body saying, “Oh God, forgive me!”

“I’m still not sure I understand all you’ve told me, Anton,” Scopes was saying some time later in his office. “You say it all came down to the color of his eyes?”

Zarnak nodded. “You’ll recall that I said I did not think Geddes was insane, that his delusion was the result of facts he had gathered from reading his ancestor’s private papers. Well, the most telling of these facts involved the color of the eyes sported by members of the Meir family, one blue and one brown. Geddes took this reality, a reality he himself had lived with his whole life, as the corroborating, the final proof of the horrific Meir legacy. Logically, it did not make sense, since the fate of the Meir’s was the result of radical, extended inbreeding, not a curse. In point of fact, there was nothing wrong, nor could there ever be anything wrong with Geddes or his son beyond the inherited color of their eyes. In effect, Geddes over-reacted. It was only with the fortunate change in father and son’s eye color that provided the logical point upon which Geddes’s mind could take hold and convince itself that the ‘curse’ had been lifted.”

“Are you sure it will be safe to allow Geddes to return home with his family?”

“Absolutely. With Sondra’s permission, I took all of Georg Meir’s papers and many of the older, unwholesome books in his library out into the yard and burned them all.”

Zarnak did not think it necessary to tell his friend of the real cause of the sudden change in the Geddes’ eye color; let him think it mere coincidence, a lucky chance. But the irony was not lost on Zarnak that the father who had tried to kill his son because of a perceived “taint,” had himself unknowingly cured the boy by reading him a “fairy tale.”

It was another fine autumn day when Zarnak exited Resthaven so he put the top down on the BMW and took a leisurely route back to the city. On the seat beside him lay Georg Meir’s handwritten translation of the
Necronomicon
, kept by Zarnak as a reminder that he was, after all, only human.

old!”

Mervyn Stalls smiled and stood.

Altogether, it had been a most satisfactory day, most satisfactory!

Pushing his way past the score or so of men crowding the cellar space, Stalls headed to the table at the front of the room. Finally shouldering a few losing bidders aside, he produced a crumpled handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the sweat from his forehead.

Man, it’s hot in here
, he thought, eagerly anticipating his return to the air conditioned atmosphere of his hotel room.

“Congratulations, Mr. Stalls,” said a swarthy man whose head was covered in a burnoose that both protected him from the heat and helped to hide his features from too closely prying eyes. “I’m sure you’ll feel much pleasure in its possession.”

The man referred to the stone jar that he was just setting down on a wooden table laden with a number of similar objects.

“At the price I just bid, I better had,” said Stalls, replacing his handkerchief and pulling a roll of American bills from inside his shirt.

“You know as well as I, Mr. Stalls, that in this kind of market, it’s buyer beware,” said the man, leaning forward slightly in expectation of being paid. “But I assure you, the jar is genuine and what’s more, unopened.”

“Which is why you started the bidding so high,” Stalls said, peeling some bills from the roll. “If I hadn’t had a chance to have it appraised before, I wouldn’t give two hoots in hell for your assurances.”

The man chuckled, taking the proffered money. “And I don’t blame you. Cheats and forgers are as thick as cockroaches here in Cairo and they’re far more accomplished than those elsewhere. How anyone fell for that ossuary from Israel that was supposed to have held the bones of James, the “brother” of Jesus, a few years ago is beyond my capacity to understand.”