Read Goat Mother and Others: The Collected Mythos Fiction of Pierre Comtois Online
Authors: Pierre V. Comtois,Charlie Krank,Nick Nacario
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Genre Fiction, #Horror, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Thrillers & Suspense, #Supernatural, #Suspense, #Paranormal
“Oh, there is, professor; there is!” He turned and began writing something down on a scrap of paper then handed it to me. “That’s the address of my home in Dean’s Corners. It’s still in my name although my family have been trying to get it transferred into theirs. For now though, all the material I’ve managed to gather since my memory began to return is still there. You’ll find the key to the house hidden in the gutter over the back door. My family is in Florida for the season so you should be able to stay as long as you need without fear of being disturbed. My notes and other things are in the study. With the door key, you’ll find a second, smaller key. That’s for the locked cabinet in my desk. Use it. And professor, you shouldn’t waste any time in getting to Dean’s Corners. It won’t take long for those who’ve been following me to figure out that they need to search my home for anything they need to destroy.”
“Thank you…”
“No need to thank me if you’ll do one small favor.”
“If it’s nothing…”
“When you open the cabinet, you’ll find a star shaped stone object inside; can you bring it back to me here?”
“Yes, if it’s not against the hospital’s rules.”
“I assure you it isn’t. Just remember to bring it to me. You will, won’t you?”
I assured him I would and taking the note with the address on it, I bid him goodbye. He watched me leave by the open door.
Although when Walker had given me the assignment I’d been somewhat annoyed at the whole thing, I admit that by the time I left the hospital, my curiosity had been piqued. I found myself eager for a little expedition of my own out to Dean’s Corners, a small town in the central part of the state known mostly for its number of elite private academies.
Although I gave no credence to Sanders’ story, his invitation to visit his home in Dean’s Corners, which is next door to often mysterious and backward Dunwich, struck me as possibly being of some interest. So, with Walker’s permission, I set out the following Saturday traveling north on Route 128.
Near noon, I left the highway at the old Aylesbury Pike interchange and gradually, the urban landscape of the eastern part of Massachusetts gave way to more open country. By the time I’d driven another hour or so, farmland predominated with the occasional roadside produce stand deserted and waiting for warmer months. At last, a roadside marker welcomed me to Dean’s Corners, established 1742.
Private homes began to make their appearance again as the strange, steep hills that gave the town much of its character came into view. Historic signs named them off: Gibbet Hill, Throne Hill, Castle Hill. From what I could tell, Dean’s Corners was a typical New England town with a main street lined with local businesses including the usual attorney and real estate offices, a café or two, a local branch bank, and a dozen or so consignment and antique shops. Consulting my GPS device, I turned off at Hollis by the Congregational Church and, driving past the public cemetery, found the road I wanted. Sanders’ home was only a few hundred feet farther on. I’m not sure what I’d expected but it wasn’t the pleasant little Cape that I found. It was set a ways back from the road behind some overgrown hedges that Sanders’ family obviously hadn’t been keeping up with.
I drove a little ways up the paved drive and stopped in front of the garage which was attached to the house. Paint was peeling on the door and pretty much everywhere else. The front lawn was shaggy to say the least, and branches downed by some recent storm littered the roof.
At least it looked as if I wouldn’t have to worry about any family members wondering what a stranger was doing entering the house.
Leaving the car, I took my briefcase and made my way around the back. There, the yard was also unkempt but screened from the view of any neighbors by overgrown pine trees and other brush. There was evidence that local deer had been nosing about.
I discovered the back door and after climbing onto a wooden garden chair and feeling about the gutter, found the keys secured against the weather in a plastic sandwich bag. The larger key fit the lock. Pushing in the swollen door, I stepped into the garage where a vehicle was stored covered in a sheet. Ignoring it, I entered the kitchen through an inside door and wasted little time locating the study.
Luckily, it was at the back of the house where any activity wouldn’t be noticed by the neighbors. I set down my briefcase and shrugged out of my overcoat. The furnace was operational but was obviously set at a low temperature. At a glance, the desk top was clear with the usual accoutrements in their proper places. So I picked out the smaller key from the plastic bag and sitting in the padded swivel chair, tried it in the cabinet door.
It worked, and the door sprung open revealing a few folders stuffed with papers and to my surprise, a number of other items as well.
Taking them out, I immediately recognized the star shaped stone that Sanders had asked me to bring to him. It was a Mnar stone, an object believed by some to help in warding off danger. I struggled to recall what I’d heard about them from other members of the Miskatonic faculty, but all I could remember was that it had something to do with the Cthulhu myth cycle.
Pocketing the stone, I inspected a cast made of some kind of print that I soon associated with those of the deer outside the house. It struck me as strange why Sanders would bother producing such a thing, or storing it in the cabinet with papers dealing with his delusions. But seeing the print at closer range, it did strike me as somewhat strange and not like a deer’s at all.
In one of the folders I found a group of photographs, among them those showing the same kind of prints as they appeared in the ground behind the house. Turning the photo over, I saw that someone, most likely Sanders, had scribbled a note reading “Tracks found in the backyard: Mi-Go?”
Recalling what he had told me about alien creatures by the same name, I wondered if Sanders believed that the same beings had been congregating on his property? I smiled at the imagined scenario until I remembered that the same kinds of tracks were reported around the Pickerton hospital, and a vague feeling of discomfort suddenly came over me. Shaking it off, I continued to look through the photos coming across a group shot obviously of the Hughbanks Expedition with a young Sanders smiling in the back row. A few other photographs showed a number of ruins virtually hidden among thick jungle growth.
Immediately, the shape of the stone structures, whose size was only hinted at in the photos due to there being little in the jungle setting to compare them with, caught my attention. The culture of the ancient Mayan people was my field of special study, so my eye was trained to recognize the architectural styles they used over the centuries of their development and, though the structures in the photos had some familiar aspects, they were overall completely new to me, representing a heretofore undiscovered era of Mayan history.
Suddenly fascinated, I set the photos down and began going through the other material in the folders. I soon found some old receipts indicating that the jungle photos were copies made by the University of Pennsylvania and forwarded to Sanders’ home address. An invoice showed that Sanders had purchased the Mnar stone from a dealer in Boston a few months before his commitment to Pickerton.
A letter signed by the head of the antiquities department at the University noted that photos of the ruins arrived there by separate post while the Hughbanks Expedition was still in Belize, in fact, before the expedition had even left on its ill fated trip into the El Cacao region. As per Sanders’ request, copies were made of the photos and sent along to his home address.
Finally, I picked up pages filled with what I was sure was Sanders’ neat penmanship (looking about I noticed for the first time the lack of a computer anywhere about the room) and began to read.
They turned out to be an informal diary of sorts in which Sanders detailed the return of his memory…or his increasing paranoia, depending on whether or not I was to believe his hospital rantings. Nevertheless, I began to read and discovered that the photos had duly arrived at his home and placed in the desk cabinet by family members when they arrived. There they remained undisturbed for many years due to Sanders’ memory loss.
If I was to believe the story of his loss of memory, it apparently began to return to him a few years before. Not all at once, but gradually, as details of his participation in the Hughbanks Expedition grew more clear and the horror of it started to prey on his mind.
March 12: I woke up from a short nap this afternoon with recollections of Belize. I must have had a particularly vivid dream because I remembered walking with the rest of the expedition members along a narrow jungle trail that was overhung by low hanging branches and lianas. This was not the coastal region where we’d spent much of our time excavating ancient Mayan farmlands but inland, where the temperatures were a good deal higher.
March 20: Thoughts of the jungle trek keep nagging at me and I can’t help feeling that they weren’t the figment of a dream but recollections of a real excursion into the interior of Belize…
April 9: I came across an envelope in my desk today and was surprised it contained some photos I’d never seen before…or at least at first I thought I hadn’t. But almost immediately, I changed my mind. I had seen them before. They were given to Hughbanks by local Indians as proof that there were undiscovered ruins deeper inland. I remembered then how we gathered around them by the lamp light in Hughbanks’ tent, and how none of us were able to identify which era of Mayan history the structures belonged. The next day, we questioned the Indians more closely and were convinced that we had an opportunity to make history ourselves. It took little after that for Hughbanks to decide to form a secondary expedition to explore the El Cacao region to confirm the new findings and we began to make preparations.
April 10: Like a fog breaking up, my memory continues to clear, amazing me with events that I’d completely forgotten about. I remember it all now: how the expedition marched into the El Cacao country, how we met local tribesmen whom we were shocked to learn were descendants of white men who had migrated there a century before, how they guided us to the ruins, and how stunned I was to discover that the ruins represented a totally different architectural style than any ever seen in that country, with angles that didn’t seem quite right, that appeared to bend in different directions depending on your angle of view. I remembered how our guides seemed to grow more nervous until one day, they suddenly disappeared. After that, items began to disappear from camp until we figured out it must have been the natives. We were definitely beginning to feel unwanted in the valley. I struggled to remember more, but for some reason, my memory again began to fail me so I gave it up for the day.
May 1: After a series of inexplicable nightmares, I’ve finally been able to piece together what happened to us after the natives disappeared but even as I write these lines, I can hardly bring myself to believe it. After a day spent scrambling among the ruins taking measurements, making drawings, and doing some preliminary digging, we were all exhausted and fell into camp looking forward to a good night’s sleep. But before we even reached our tents, we found ourselves attacked. My memory is still hazy on the details, but what we at first took to be an attack by the natives who had guided us was nothing of the sort. Instead, we found ourselves being overwhelmed by hideous, crab-like things that at first we took for some kind of new species of jungle life, but that we soon learned to our dismay were intelligent, alien life forms whom the natives merely served. Thankfully, details of the creatures themselves and the attack have been clouded in my mind I think by the sound they made, a kind of buzzing that had the effect of numbing the human brain and interfering with basic motor functions. In any case, we were all quickly captured…except for a few whom the buzzing sound had less effect upon and who were able to give a better account of themselves. Would that the same had happened to me so that I might have been simply killed with them. But that was not to be. Instead, I joined Hughbanks and the others as we were herded away and into one of the larger ruins. I’m still not sure what happened after that but it must have been some kind of conditioning that erased our minds because up until a few months ago, I had completely different recollections of the expedition, ones that included an attack by drug dealers rather than the Mi-Go…the insect like creatures who captured us.
June 20: The story of what happened to myself and the Hughbanks Expedition is now clear to me but it’s so fantastic I’m afraid no one will believe it. When I tried to explain it all to administrators at the university, I was mocked. They thought I was just trying to make excuses for the shambles Hughbanks had made of his expedition. I was warned never to step foot on the campus again or I would be prosecuted for trespass and libel and anything else the administration could come up with. The rage I encountered was truly vehement convincing me that the wounds resulting from the legal battles fought over the expedition were still open with the school’s archeology department deathly afraid of having what little reputation still remaining to it destroyed.
July 1: Failing with the university but still hoping to convince anyone of the veracity of my story, I tried to broach the subject with my family members but, there too, I was rebuffed. I’m afraid I may have put my case too strongly, because some of them clearly think I’ve gone crazy. And maybe I have, I don’t know.
Sept. 2: I had a real scare yesterday. When I went out back today I noticed the ground had been disturbed somewhat. Thinking it was only squirrels digging for nuts, I looked a little closer and discovered that the ground was covered in strange prints similar to those of deer. But they weren’t. I’m afraid I panicked and ran into the house and locked myself in. For the rest of the day, I couldn’t make myself leave. That night was endless. Finally, this morning, I ventured back outside and confirmed my worst fears. The tracks I found yesterday were the same as those left by the Mi-Go. My only conclusion is that somehow, they’ve discovered that my memory has returned…they have humans who serve them like the natives of El Cacao…maybe word came to them after I visited the university…it’s perfectly logical that they’d have spies there as it would be the first place that any news of expedition members’ returning memories would likely be reported.
Sept. 14: I’ve made a plaster cast of one of the prints outside, but it’s failed to convince my family that I’m telling them the truth about the Mi-Go. I’ve tried to stop talking about them but I can’t help it. My fear gets the better of me. I’m afraid that my family thinks me mad.
Sept. 15: Sent off for a Mnar stone today. Hope it gets here in time to be of use.
Sept. 16: Today I overheard my youngest daughter talking with a cousin about placing me in a “home.” They didn’t know that the window was open and that I could hear everything they said. The irony was that even as they spoke about my madness and placing me somewhere for my own good, they were standing amid a crowd of footprints belonging to the Mi-Go.