Authors: Jeffrey Thomas
He set the instrument back down, paged through the journal. Grange was further convinced of Brill's senility - perhaps, even, insanity - by entries like, "Last night summoned the Messenger...heard His howling from the swamp. Martin, being closer to the swamp, must have had a restless night. Ha!" and, later: "Martin sent a letter. The usual ranting. That the great Faceless Messenger is too close to the world of men, sometimes moving amongst us as one of us, and draws the curious too close to knowledge of Those Who Wait Outside...that His works and movements are not truly in the best interest of those Outsiders. He again threatens to bring his god against me, to stop my communion with N-----------. He is a fool to think that he would survive such an onslaught himself. One cannot predict or control the fire vampires beyond a certain point. And N----------- and His servitors will let no harm come to me..."
Grange wagged his head, closed the journal. With his obsession with fire, it was not surprising that Brill had immolated himself. But now to go talk to the brother...and see if he was
just as crazy.
As he began to descend from the attic,
Grange thought he heard music - a kind of faint, high piping - coming from downstairs. He quickened his pace, oddly conscious of the gun holstered under his jacket.
By the time he had reached the ground floor, the distant music was fading away. He cracked the cel
lar door, peered down into damp-smelling blackness. Flicked the switch at the head of the stairs. It didn't work. Had the music truly seemed to have come from down here, when he reached the ground floor? No, he decided, it had to have come from outside. A kid practicing on a flute or recorder, or a radio somewhere. The house was as still as a tomb. Grange shut the basement door.
Before leaving, he decided to avail himself of Brill's bathroom. He found it, opened the lid of the toilet with the toe of his shoe, and began to unzip his fly...but paused at a soft hissing sound as if something were being dragged across the floor of the bathtub.
Swinging around, Grange tore aside the mildew-blackened curtain.
He saw the thing for only two instants, before it was whipped down the drain of the bathtub. A black eel or snake, it must have been. Grange was badly startled, and clawed at his holster, but the slithering thing was gone before he even had the snap off.
Yes, it had to have been a snake, though he had not seen its head, already in the drain. Black, with a lighter belly. But that the belly had been covered in grayish-pink disks like suckers was surely an illusion.
By the time Grange's car turned onto Pine Street and began crawling along it in search of the house of Martin Brill, evening had begun to fall. Grange remembered trick-or-treating along this row of old houses as a boy in the early sixties, remembered the delightful terror of having Eastborough Swamp looming vast, deep and dark on the opposite side of the street. Quicksand in there, the parents said. Coyotes, and snapping turtles large enough to take your hand off (he had once found a tiny baby, at least, and carried it into the swamp a short ways to set it free, it hissing at him all the while).
He glanced now at the thickly massed trees, blackly silhouetted with the summer sun sunk behind them, in between glancing at the houses in an effort to determine which might be Brill's (he wasn't listed in the phone book; might Grange have accepted candy from him as a boy?). People had indeed disappeared in the swamp a number of times, their remains never found. There had also been talk of ghosts in the swamp, over the years: distant lights drifting through the trees, and in the back of Pine Grove Cemetery, which also bordered the swamp, reports of ball
lightning flitting about. Will-o'-the-wisps, people called them, or jack-o'-lanterns, and the Welsh had dubbed them corpse candles. Grange had read up on the phenomenon one time, after hearing a variety of local reports. Swamp gas, that was all, he was told...but in some of the cases reported, as in many he read, the ball lightning seemed to move as if an intelligence directed it, as if it might be some ethereal but living creature.
The detective was eliminating houses by reading mailboxes, observing toys and new vans in driveways, when the large Victorian caught his eye; hulking, badly in need of paint, an obsolete TV antenna lying on its side like a giant insect poised on the roof, a tall chimney tottering
dangerously, the lawn a miniature jungle, every window black, it was the twin of Edgar Brill's house, right down to the obviously sizable third story attic.
Grange pulled into the driveway. If there was a car, it was shut up in the garage. For a moment he sat in his own vehicle, staring up th
rough the windshield at a three-eyed bay window projecting from that third story, as if he were reluctant - afraid, for some reason - to leave his enclosing shelter. But then, he cracked the door and stepped out onto the driveway.
He had gone only a few steps when his car radio squawked, calling to him specifically, and he went back to answer it. "Yeah; Grange," he said, leaning half inside.
The dispatcher told the detective that he had been asked to return to the hospital where Edgar Brill had been admitted. "The patient just passed away suddenly," the dispatcher related.
Suddenly? thought Grange. Hardly. He would have been surprised to see the poor eccentric
old-timer last the week. And what good could he do there now that there was nothing else to gleam from the man? But he had been requested by the Worcester police themselves, and they must want to know how far he had gotten in the investigation on his end. Grange told the dispatcher he was on his way.
As he slipped back into the car, he glanced up again through the windshield at the dilapidated old edifice. Martin Brill would just have to wait a bit longer to learn of his brother's fate...and from what Grange had learned thus far, he might not even care.
Grange started his car, but hesitated in backing out, for he had heard a sound underneath the awakening of his engine. He thrust his head out the open window, and shut the motor off. Had it really been a distant sound like a flute playing...coming from the dense woods of Eastborough Swamp?
For nearly a minute he listened, but the sound did not resume; just the whirring music of summer insects. Dismissing the notion as his own imagination, he again started the car, and this time backed out onto Pine Street, headed off for Worcester.
When Grange turned into the hall and saw the nurse crying outside Edgar Brill's room, a quivering hand clamped over her mouth and two Worcester cops soothing her, he knew that Brill's death hadn't been quite so expected after all. And the smell...
And was there really a slight smoky haze in the air of the hallway?
Seeing him approach, one of the two uniformed boys hurried breathlessly forward to meet him. "You better come see this," he said as he came.
"What happened?"
"We're not sure. The doctors don't know. We think maybe Brill set himself on fire again somehow. But it was almost like the fire was never entirely out...still smoldering away inside him...until it just erupted again. But you better see for yourself..."
Grange continued down the corridor and halted in the threshold of Brill's room. It was close enough for him.
The walls were black with a greasy soot, though the sheets of the bed Brill lay in were barely scorched. Brill himself was another matter. A blackened stick figure, a mere skeleton crusted in peeling ash, his empty eye sockets still curling tendrils of smoke, his arms bent and reaching into the air above him like two denuded branches. In his mid-section, revealed by the sheets Brill must have kicked off in his agony, there was a gaping, smoking pit.
Grange took a step back into the hall, twisting to face the nurse. "What did you see?" he asked her.
"I...I was in his room, but my back was turned...only for a second." Her voice kept hitching, and she paused to suck back a sob. "I heard this...whump...and saw a flash, and when I turned around, he was screaming...moving...and this fire...this weird fire was coming out of his belly."
Grange nodded impassively, but inside he gave a shudder. He had once heard it said that in the past, if a body were not embalmed a puncture would sometimes be made in it and the leaking gases ignited to burn them away.
The nurse went on, "Then the fire...it like rose up out of him...like a ball, floating over his bed...then it just kind of exploded. There was a loud bang. But that was all...it was gone."
Grange continued nodding, remembering as he did so his research on "swamp gas", how alike this story was to so many cases of ball lightning, often so weirdly sentient in their movements, and frequently disappearing with a loud report. And he thought again of the house of Martin Brill, facing onto Eastborough Swamp, where so many ghostly lights had been witnessed over the years...
When Detective Grange had no success in getting Martin Brill to come to his door, he assumed the old man was hard of hearing, or had gone to bed. After all, night had now fallen. (He kept looking over his shoulder at the woods, but they remained solidly black.)
But the next day, when Brill again did not reply to his loud knocking, he called into the station and received permission from the chief himself to enter the premises to check on the old man's welfare. After all, there was no surviving family member to give consent or objection.
Grange found the front and back doors locked, but was able to dislodge a screen window on the ground floor and through that slipped into a gloomy living room, thick with dust and stillness and silence.
"Mr. Brill?" he called. And his eyes roved across the shelves heavy with books older than Brill himself, across the strange photographs, paintings and astronomical charts mounted on the walls. He saw a staircase in the room beyond, went to it, called up into the murk. "Mr. Brill?"
Grange ascended the loudly complaining stairs. On the second floor, no one. But he found another set of stairs...narrower...proceeding on into the attic...
He mounted them. Slowly. His heart seemed to be thumping from all his climbing. "Mr. Brill?"
In the room just off the stairs, he found him.
The elderly man sat in a chair before a bay window, the central window of which was open, the dusty curtains stirring in a welcome breeze. There were odd geomet
ric patterns drawn on the white-painted walls. Star charts? If so, only one star in them had been labeled, if that were indeed the meaning of the word Fomalhaut.
Martin Brill was dead. His eyes bulged hideously
in a face turned almost black - but not from burning. The man had apparently been strangled, for around his neck there were terrible marks. And in the midst of this bruising there were raw abraded circular scars in double rows...as if suckers had pressed into his flesh...
Grange shifted his gaze past the slumped, staring figure, out to the shadowed fringe of Eastborough Swamp, upon which the bay windows faced.
He waited to see a ghostly light moving through the trees. Waited to hear distant, frenzied piping. But there was neither. The brothers Brill were dead...and the trees of Eastborough Swamp merely whispered to him with mocking secrecy in the new cool breeze.
Yoo-hoo, Cthulhu
Up
from Stygian depths – whatever that means
An inky-black dark murk devoid of sun beams
Looms a monolithic creature trailing gelatinous foam
If Cthulhu calls tell him that I’m not home.
When evil cults gather and passages are read
From the
Necronomicon
of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred
And demons called forth from that nasty old book
If Cthulhu calls I’ll leave my phone off the hook.
His age-old power makes me nervous
Better stick to my tape-recorded answering service
When up through fetid soil he’s dug
If Cthulhu calls I’ll pull the plug.
When monsters stir in slimy lairs
Disturb our sleep with hellish nightmares
When graveyard vapors start to misting
I’ll change my number to a private listing.
When rusty-hinged crypt doors start to creak
And bat-things spread their wings on jagged rock peaks
When lost islands rise from the cold ocean deep
And the Great Old Ones grumble in their sleep
When Dark Gods rise from endless night
Filled with healthy appetite
When Cthulhu awakens from his timeless slumber
In deepened voice: “Sorry, sir, you have the wrong number.”
Lost Soul
“
The
Book of Awe
,” read Andrea, in a mocking tone of great gravity.
Leaning over her shoulder to read the table of contents was easy for Meredith, who was as tall as Andrea was short in addition to being as dark-.haired as Andrea was blond. Meredith’s half-brother Leonard called her Lulu – after the character portrayed by the similarly bob-haired, similarly lovely Louise Brooks in the 1929 German film
Pandora’s Box
. It was one of Meredith’s favorite films.