“And the sophisticated city dwellers laughed at the country cousins,” finished Dr. West. “So did the monsters win?”
“It is odd that you would call Aldini’s creations monsters. Were they not his victims?”
“He gave them life, the one thing men have fought to have since they came up from the ape. He was like a god. If he wasn’t fighting the cancer of superstition, he could have discovered how the Count’s mind had endured. He could have replicated the experiment. The Count’s sanity is the sign I am looking for.”
“The sign you are looking for . . . what do you mean, Dr. West?”
The light had left the window. The cold New Haven winds of October were rattling the pane. Well-muffled students hurried across the Quad chased by fallen leaves. The professor’s office was lit by two dim bulbs. He never spent his nights here, and he wished he were well away from the dreadful American. He had come to recognize the gleam in his eyes.
“Yes. The sign of hope that I am looking for,” said Dr. West.
“It couldn’t happen. You don’t understand the rage of the dead.”
“Tell me about the rage of the dead.”
“The Count records that the reanimated don’t dream. Strictly speaking, they need no rest, but at night they feel the hostility of certain forces in the universe. The universe is not a happy place, Dr. West. Matter does not like being constrained by form. The bending of light that you mentioned Eddington observing is a painful process. The universe is full of hatred, and dead men are the perfect empty vessels for that rage. The ‘monsters,’ as you call them, found one another in the dark. It took some years, but they had one great and unending hatred—to kill the man who had killed their deaths. You speak of humans fighting for life, but I tell you, Dr. West, they will fight for death also. They raided Aldini’s villa one night, breaking down the doors with rakes and shovels and other tools stolen from farmsteads. They cut him into pieces.”
“And the Count? He had aided Aldini. What of him? Did he once again escape a monstrous Brotherhood?”
“They seemed not to notice him. Their dull eyes only looked for Aldini. Maybe they couldn’t hate him, since he was truly their brother. He fled the villa.”
“And made his way to England. Moved by love, weren’t you, Joseph?”
Balsamo scarcely paused at this revelation. He sighed, perhaps grateful to tell someone after the centuries.
“I knew you must have figured out my identity. I am careless after so many years. I even took my family name again, Balsamo. I am ruled by nostalgia. So what do you plan to do, Dr. West—go to the Regents of Yale and complain that one of their professors should have been entombed two hundred years ago?”
“I have no desire to expose you. I had heard of the great longevity of Count Cagliostro. I had seen portraits of you from the time of your life and one painted in London scarcely fifty years ago. I just wanted to know how Aldini had succeeded. How do you cling to a sane life?”
“I have found what is slow and beautiful. I can easily spend another eighty years studying Dante. I will spend a hundred with Ovid, perhaps two hundred with Virgil. Read the papers, Dr. West: mankind will destroy itself long before I will wear out. Once I found out how to fall in love with art I knew I would have a perfect existence. Aldini did succeed. He made an undimming Eye, but
I
had to learn what to look at. How many monsters chase you, Dr. West?”
“They are many shapes seen in the shadows, but you have given me hope. Maybe they do not all have to hate me. Maybe some can love me.”
“So you will be a successful god after all?”
“All I wanted was to kill death.”
“The Egyptians had a god that killed death. Set killed his brother Osiris, who was Death himself, yet Set was the most hated god of their pantheon. He threatened their hope for peace. That is what your monsters have lost. Even I want what I remember from my few hours of lying dead in my home in Naples.”
“So my monsters will never love me.”
“It is a waste of time to love a human. I had a brief affair with Mary Shelley when she was eighteen. Stole her from her poet husband, told her everything, offered to make her as I am. She refused, and told my story in the way she needed to get its poison from her soul. She was my Beatrice.”
“Thank you for letting me know what awaits me.”
“You knew long before you tracked me down. You knew the first night when you saw any of them following you.”
“Yes, I knew. But I fought for hope. I still think I am right. Medicine will push death back, and back. Humans will live longer and longer. In the fullness of time I will be a god.”
“If that fullness comes, Dr. West, I shall write a long poem about you in the style of Dante. I write it slowly with great Beauty.”
(
For Laird Barron
)
Rats
“I only want,” said the dwarf, “my weight in gold.”
The mayor and the alderman guffawed.
“Is that all, my little friend? Not the moon or the Weserbergerlande Mountains? Or the Weser river?” asked the mayor.
“Even if we had as much gold as your little frame, what would you give us?” taunted the mayor’s younger brother.
The little man stared at the seven leaders of the town. They were inclined to fat. “I would give you your weight in gold,” he said coldly. It would be a very large quantity of gold.
Laughter left the room. Greed is always able to banish the lesser demon of mocking.
The seven men listened as darkness fell outside. A great fire was kindled in the hearth, candles were lit, and brandy was fetched. Fear tried to banish greed, but she was unsuccessful. She will come later. The aldermen learned the history of their town.
In Roman times there was a gate built into the side of Klüt Hill. The Romans bought prisoners. Once a year, the gate opened. Beings like men emerged at night. They bought the prisoners for gold. Much gold. The beings took the prisoners inside. There was screaming and music for many hours. The Romans marched away. They were not offended by the screams, for they were brutal men. It was the music, the fantastic piping. It gave them dreams of other worlds. Not pleasant worlds, but worlds that myths called Dis or Tartarus. It had begun in the time of the Caesars. In time Rome fell, and for many years the Goths visited the gate. Gold flowed out and the tiny brown creatures shaped like small men bought their prisoners, their aged, their deformed. But finally a Christian prince said, “No more!” And hardworking honest men lay stones and earth over the gate, and deaf men were brought to guard the spot for eighty years.
Then the Goth kingdoms were gone, and the gate was forgotten.
The mayor’s brother tried one last joke. “And you, my little friend, are you one of the brown little men?”
The dwarf nodded. “Many centuries ago, one of the Goth soldiers stole an ancestor of mine to keep for his amusement. Many sons and daughters have been born in the years that followed. Most were strong and healthy and tall—like you lucky men. But from time to time, the ancient blood reasserts itself. I am a hideous creature—life is hard for me with my puny limbs and short stature. Thankfully I am taller and better-looking than my brother.”
“He must be quite hideous,” said one of the men, his tongue loosened by brandy.
The dwarf looked at him and all warmth fled the room despite the fire.
“Yes, he is horrible. I fear for his life while I travel. He is not good-hearted as I am. Good-looking Christians are apt to rid themselves of such horror. With the gold we will find a secluded spot and trouble you fair men no more.”
The dwarf continued his tale. After so many scores of years, the old ones had no doubt died off. But gold does not die. He was not strong enough to unbury the gate, but he could guide them to it. Later some of the aldermen began to doubt the tale. How could the dwarf know why the Romans left? Why would a solider want such an ugly bride? Why didn’t the dwarf warn them of what they would find? Such fears chased them to an early grave.
It took a few weeks to assemble the workforce. The aldermen hired only men from other villages. Orphans and beggars were preferred. Great secrecy was maintained. But one morning they stood before Klüt Hill and began to dig at its western face. A healthy pine forest covered most of the hill, but only scraggly oak bushes covered the spot the dwarf had led them to. Beneath the rocky soil was a pile of boulders. The workers carted these off until a vast stone gate stood uncovered.
It took two days. The mayor and the aldermen brought vast quantities of food to the workers. At the end of the second day the mayor told them, “Tomorrow we will go inside the hill. Wealth beyond your greatest desires is heaped up inside. Tonight we drink!” Casks of wine were opened. Thirsty workers filled their bellies. They slept, and as the poison worked in their systems, they died. At dawn the mayor and the aldermen and the dwarf stood in front of the gate.
The bodies lay everywhere. All the wine barrels were empty save for one. Its top had been removed, and poisonous red liquid still filled it to the top. The mayor nodded. Three of the alderman seized the dwarf. They carried him to the open barrel. He screamed and struggled as they dipped him by his legs. He took nearly a quarter of an hour to drown. When he stopped struggling, a deep ringing sound came from within the hill, and the aldermen grew afraid.
“Don’t be cowardly. We agreed. We must keep this secret our own. The ghosts of his people are just welcoming him. They cannot harm us for we carry the cross.”
The men hastened to put their crosses around their necks. The mayor had asked the village priest to bless the crosses against whatever sort of demon might live in the hill. As an afterthought he killed the priest, lest the Church come hungering for money. Opening the gate was not easy. The aldermen regretted that they had slain the workers so soon. It took a day with iron pry bars to get the gate to open even a few inches. They moved away to sleep for the night. They did not relish lying with the dead. They planned to carry the bodies into the hill and close the gate after them.
The next morning a strange sight welcomed them.
The gate stood half open. The bodies of the slain workers were gone, as was the body of the dwarf. Pellets of rat dung lay everywhere. The youngest of the alderman turned to run, but the mayor caught him and pushed a knife in his belly. Now there were even fewer men to share the gold with.
“There will be more gold for all of us!”
They took torches and lit them and went into the cavern. The smell of rodent dung was overpowering. They walked on a soft and crunchy carpet of dung into the hill. The caverns led downwards. Tiny pawprints led the way. After a few hundred yards, larger footprints were seen. The good townspeople looked at them carefully. They were small prints, as though as from children. They were not many. Perhaps the dwarf’s people still lived, but certainly they did not live in great numbers.
Down they went, and still further down. They lit more torches. Maybe they should return to the surface? Maybe they were going all the way to Hades?
But gold. Their weight in gold.
The mayor’s brother spotted the crude buildings first. Low windowless stone buildings. No light coming from their open doors. It was a little village of maybe twenty buildings; most were in ruins. They carried their torches in their left hands, their swords in their right. The clothes of the workers were scattered about. Then a score of yards from the village lay the workers’ half-eaten bodies. Then piles of dead and dying rats. Poisoned by the tainted flesh, hundreds of them. Some still twitched in agony; it was not a subtle poison, for the aldermen were not subtle men. Then they saw the body of the dwarf stripped of his clothes. Soft brown fur covered his body. Small feelers grew from under his arms and his crotch. He had been careful to shave his hands and face. The rats had been busy feeding on him as well. His eyes were gone, and his genitals and anus had been gnawed away. The good alderman crossed themselves. They were glad to move away from the dwarf’s body and into the village. Prayers were said; it is good to know God is on your side.
But the village proved worse. In the biggest building, whose roof was only inches above their heads, the good Christians found a church with pews and an altar and a god and its worshippers.
There were three of them—three of the dwarf’s people. They were smaller than him and much more ratlike. Their eyes were intact and milky white, unburdened by sight. They lay in the largest building around a pedestal that bore the figure of a short, many-breasted goddess. Her face was that of a rat and the tentacles under her arms and crotch were holding flint knives and strangely shaped devices or amulets. She played a syrinx, the shepherd’s pipes. She stood four feet tall, towering almost twice the height of her worshippers. The walls of the temple had no windows. Strange letters covered the walls, painted in some greenish-brown slime; they glistened wetly. One wall bore a fresco—humans and dwarves and rats ate one another, coupled with one another, danced with one another. The rat goddess stood above them. She bowed in prayer to a white toad god, who was himself looking at some vast shadowy figure that flew in the darkness.
The mayor’s brother began to laugh. “We are the gods of the fleas that bite us, our god feeds us his flesh, and other gods feed Him. Other gods feed Them. Eat and fuck and pray. Eat and fuck and pray.” The mayor hit him with the flat of his sword. He was embarrassed at his brother’s weak will.
“Find the gold.”
They left the temple. The other buildings seemed to be holding pens, except for the last and smallest building. Here in great yellow mounds was gold. Soft massy nuggets bearing the tooth-marks of thousands of rats lay in huge heaps. Each man gathered as much as he could carry. Humans cannot carry their own weight regardless of greed. Each began to dream of how he would slay the others. They began their heavy walk back to light and air. With each squelching in the rat dung, their greed grew. Each had a thousand dreams of avarice. Their torches grew short. They began to hear the rats about halfway to the surface. Hundreds of rats may have died, but thousands lived. They could see them scurrying just beyond their circle of light. They could see their little eyes glinting. They began to trot, filled with fear, but filled with greater love for their gold. One of the rats leapt upon the mayor. He knocked it to the soft ground and stabbed it with his sword.