Sam closed the cover and wiped his fingers on his jacket. His attempt to return the scrapbook to its perch was made sloppy by his unsteady hand. Something fell from the shelf and landed on the table with a clunk. Not wanting to touch anything else in the room, Sam tugged his jacket sleeve down to protect his hand while he lifted the Mason jar from the tabletop. Whatever the brownish substance was inside, it certainly had heft. Sam rotated the jar slowly, trying to discern its contents without truly wanting the answer. He took a step toward the window. Through the boards he could see the capped well, looking much like an ugly coin lying within the weedy lawn.
Holding the jar up to the light, Sam saw enough to suggest that what it held was indeed a wad of centipedes preserved in some sludgy liquid. His stomach turned, and he quickly returned the jar to the shelf. Next to it Sam noticed what looked to be a wooden phallus. But this sexual aid was spiked with a number of toothpick legs. He did not bother to count them.
Shock was the only force that retarded Sam. Had his brain not registered the sight of the closet door opening, had his eyes not caught the suggestion of the shape in the darkened alcove, he would have run wildly, been out of this house, been racing through the sunlit woods, his car keys in his fist.
But the image of the seated cadaver was strange enough, stunning enough, to momentarily stifle Sam’s instinct to flee. Its flesh was the colour of fresh concrete, causing it to glow like greying embers within the lightless closet. The legs were spindle-thin and the chest was sunken. Its head was obscured by a cowl of some kind.
What an awful way to be interred, Sam thought. He marvelled at how the mind almost short-circuits when its limitations are exposed.
When the figure suddenly rose and bounded into the room it was clear it had not been left to rot in some locked farmhouse room. It had been waiting in the closet, like an ascetic in a confessional. Its face was shaded by what looked to be a flowing habit of fringed brown leather that crackled as the figure advanced, sounding like something dry, something moulted.
Sam wondered if he had stumbled into one of the improved scenes he’d been imagining.
But in the movies the dead do not move this quickly.
In a swift and seamless motion the monkish figure reached into one of the piled trash bags, causing it to tip. The bones it held clattered out onto the dusty floor like queerly shaped dice. The skulls stared with grinning indifference as the figure clutched Sam with one hand, while the other raised the chunky femur and brought it down like a primitive club. Sam never even had time to scream.
The pain in the back of his skull woke Sam and also played havoc with his perceptions. What else could explain the presence of the moon or the fact that everything else around him had been swallowed by darkness?
He pressed his hands down on the cushiony surface beneath him and slowly, achingly, pushed himself upright before slumping right back down again. The air was frigid and damp. He could see his breath forming ghosts on the blackness. Confusion over where he was gave way to a sharp panic as memories of the farmhouse shuffled their way back into Sam’s consciousness like cards being dealt: the tomes and the symbols and the grey attacker…
With an unsteady hand Sam prodded his trouser pockets, pleading silently that his smart phone was still there. It was, though its screen was cracked. He mashed at it with bloodless fingers, trying to connect with the world by any means possible. But the device’s only use was as a source of weak glowing light. Its graphics were but a smear of colour.
Sam waved the phone about like a torch. What it illuminated was an upright tunnel of textured wood. Grubs and clumped soil dangled here and there. The atmosphere was uncomfortably moist.
The well…
Craning his aching head, Sam watched as clouds scuttled across the moon’s face and he wondered how long he had been down here. The light on his phone began to flicker like a guttering candle.
Another shadow suddenly blocked the moon. This one did not pass but instead stretched across the crude mouth of the well.
The figure that was bent over the rim then made a gesture.
Only after Sam had screamed out “Help me! Please!” did he conclude that this shadowy visitor must be the man who’d attacked him.
Words came down the chute, ricocheting off the wooden walls. They were indecipherable, guttural, almost inhuman. Whether there was meaning to them or whether it was merely the vibration of the alien voice, the ground began to shift in response to the stimuli. And soon Sam felt himself being flung as the cushioned base upon which he’d been lying began to rise and scale the side of its den.
It was immense. Sam foolishly wondered how long it must have taken his attacker to find a log large enough to shelter such a creature. By the moon’s pallor-glow Sam could just see the man raising his arms to imitate the flailing mandibles of the great scuttling thing that bucked its head in mirror-perfect mimicry of these gestures. The barbarous words were now being bellowed in a euphoric tone. Their rhythm matched the clacking of the thick stingers that parted and shut on the insect’s rump.
Horror and irony besieged Sam in a great steely wave. He could only listen to the sound he’d so longed to hear: the patter of tiny feet. Only this time they were multiplied a hundredfold. Sam almost laughed, and a second later his light went out.
Ron Weighell
THE FOUR STRENGTHS OF SHADOW
RON WEIGHELL lives in Horndean, Hampshire, with his wife Fran. Published story collections include The White Road, The Irregular Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, Tarshishim and Summonings.
A novella, ‘The Chapel of Infernal Devotion’, was recently been published in the Sarob Press anthology Romances of the White Day: Stories in the Tradition of Arthur Machen. He is currently working on another novella for a follow-up volume from the same publisher, and is engaged in the Sisyphean task of trying to get The White Road reprinted.
“‘The Four Strengths of Shadow’ reflects an interest in Cabinets of Curiosities, macabre holy relics and Venetian Renaissance books,” Weighell reveals. “It is informed by many hours seeking out the secret gardens, hidden water gates and old libraries of Venetian palazzi.”
THE STORM, WHICH had been prowling the lagoon all morning, fell with a roar upon Venice just as Summers alighted at the fondamenta of Ca’ Mortensa. As he raced the rain to the marble encrusted water gate, he saw Signor Bramanti waiting for him, his bulk dwarfed by winged lions of corroded bronze that flanked the entrance. A cordial shaking of hands, a gesture of mock despair to the heavens, and Bramanti led the way into the Andron.
Skirting an ancient well head, they climbed a winding marble stair into the Portego, an echoing space that ran the depth of the building. It was floored with terrazzo, its walls decorated with once exquisite architectural features in stucco, now crumbling into picturesque ruin. The space struck cold, but not, Summers noted with relief, particularly damp.
Having been told that Ca’ Mortensa was unoccupied, he was surprised when a door opened and a woman every bit as round as Bramanti, but resplendent in a flowing gown, and what looked like a fright wig of bright red hair, began to shout in a dialect too thick for Summers to follow. Two pairs of short, fat arms waved madly in the air as Bramanti shouted back. At length the woman withdrew with a parting curse. Bramanti shook his head.