And when after an interval of unholy madness, he at last did awaken, the stickiness that covered him was not cold sweat, nor was it nightmare the half-devoured heart he clutched in one fist.
· ix ·
Leverett somehow found sanity enough to dispose of the shredded lump of flesh. He stood under the shower all morning, scrubbing his skin raw. He wished he could vomit.
There was a news item on the radio. The crushed body of noted archeologist, Dr. Alexander Stefroi, had been discovered beneath a fallen granite slab near Whately. Police speculated the gigantic slab had shifted with the scientist’s excavations at its base. Identification was made through personal effects.
When his hands stopped shaking enough to drive, Leverett fled to Petersham—reaching Dana Allard’s old stone house about dark. Allard was slow to answer his frantic knock.
“Why, good evening, Colin! What a coincidence your coming here just now! The books are ready. The bindery just delivered them.”
Leverett brushed past him. “We’ve got to destroy them!” he blurted. He’d thought a lot since morning.
“Destroy them?”
“There’s something none of us figured on. Those stick lattices—there’s a cult, some damnable cult. The lattices have some significance in their rituals. Stefroi hinted once they might be glyphics of some sort; I don’t know. But the cult is still alive. They don’t want their secrets revealed. They killed Scotty…they killed Stefroi. They’re on to me—I don’t know what they intend. They’ll kill you to stop you from releasing this book!”
Dana’s frown was worried, but Leverett knew he hadn’t impressed him the right way. “Colin, this sounds insane. You really have been over-extending yourself, you know. Look, I’ll show you the books. They’re in the cellar.”
Leverett let his host lead him downstairs. The cellar was quite large, flagstoned and dry. A mountain of brown-wrapped bundles awaited them.
“Put them down here where they wouldn’t knock the floor out,” Dana explained. “They start going out to distributors tomorrow. Here, I’ll sign your copy.”
Distractedly Leverett opened a copy of Dwellers in the Earth. He gazed at his lovingly rendered drawings of rotted creatures and buried stone chambers and stained altars—and everywhere the enigmatic latticework structures. He shuddered.
“Here.” Dana Allard handed Leverett the book he had signed. “And to answer your question, they are elder glyphics.”
But Leverett was staring at the inscription in its unmistakable handwriting: “For Colin Leverett, Without whom this work could not have seen completion—H. Kenneth Allard.”
Allard was speaking. Leverett saw places where the hastily applied flesh-toned makeup didn’t quite conceal what lay beneath. “Glyphics symbolic of alien dimensions—inexplicable to the human mind, but essential fragments of an evocation so unthinkably vast that the ‘pentagram’ (if you will) is miles across. Once before we tried—but your iron weapon destroyed part of Althol’s brain. He erred at the last instant—almost annihilating us all. Althol had been formulating the evocation since he fled the advance of iron four millennia past.
“Then you reappeared, Colin Leverett—you with your artist’s knowledge and diagrams of Althol’s symbols. And now a thousand new minds will read the evocation you have returned to us, unite with our minds as we stand in the Hidden Places. And the Great Old Ones will come forth from the earth, and we, the dead who have steadfastly served them, shall be masters of the living.”
Leverett turned to run, but now they were creeping forth from the shadows of the cellar, as massive flagstones slid back to reveal the tunnels beyond. He began to scream as Althol came to lead him away, but he could not awaken, could only follow.
•
Hand of Glory
Laird Barron
From the pages of a partially burned manuscript discovered in the charred ruins of a mansion in Ransom Hollow, Washington:
That buffalo charges across the eternal prairie, mad black eye rolling at the photographer. The photographer is Old Scratch’s left hand man. Every few seconds the buffalo rumbles past the same tussock, the same tumbleweed, the same bleached skull of its brother or sister. That poor buffalo is Sisyphus without the stone, without the hill, without a larger sense of futility. The beast’s hooves are worn to bone. Blood foams at its muzzle. The dumb brute doesn’t understand where we are.
But I do.
CP, Nov. 1925
* * *
This is the house my father built stone by stone in Anno Domini 1898. I was seven. Mother died of consumption that winter, and my baby brothers Earl and William followed her through the Pearly Gates directly. Hell of a housewarming.
Dad never remarried. He just dug in and redoubled his efforts on behalf of his boss, Myron Arden. The Arden family own the politicos, the cops, the stevedores and the stevedores’ dogs. They owned Dad too, but he didn’t mind. Four bullets through the chest, a knife in the gut, two car wrecks, and a bottle a day booze habit weren’t enough to rub him out. It required a broken heart from missing his wife. He collapsed, stone dead, on a job in Seattle in 1916 and I inherited his worldly possessions, such as they were. The debts, too.
The passing of Donald Cope was a mournful day commemorated with a crowded wake—mostly populated by Mr. Myron Arden’s family and henchmen who constituted Dad’s only real friends—and the requisite violins, excessive drinking of Jameson’s, fistfights, and drunken profanities roared at passersby, although in truth, there hadn’t been much left of the old man since Mother went.
My sister Lucy returned to Ireland and joined a convent. Big brother Acton lives here in Olympia. He’s a surgeon. When his friends and associates ask about his kin at garden parties, I don’t think my name comes up much. That’s okay. Dad always liked me better.
I’ve a reputation in this town. I’ve let my share of blood, taken my share of scalps. You want an enemy bled, burnt, blasted into Kingdom Come, ask for Johnny Cope. My viciousness and cruelty are without peer. There are bad men in this business, and worse men, and then there’s me. But I must admit, any lug who quakes in his boots at the mention of my name should’ve gotten a load of the old man. There was Mr. Death’s blue-eyed boy himself, like mr. cummings said.
* * *
A dark hallway parallels the bedroom. Dad was a short, wiry man from short wiry stock and he fitted the house accordingly. The walls are close, the windows narrow, and so the passage is dim even in daylight. When night falls it becomes a mineshaft and I lie awake, listening. Listening for a voice in the darkness, a dragging footstep, or something else, possibly something I’ve not heard in this life. Perversely, the light from the lamp down the street, or the moonlight, or the starlight, make that black gap of a bedroom door a deeper mystery.
I resemble Mother’s people: lanky, with a horse’s jaw and rawboned hands meant for spadework, or tying nooses on ropes, and I have to duck when passing through these low doorways; but at heart, I’m my father’s son. I knock down the better portion of a bottle of Bushmill’s every evening while I count my wins and losses from the track. My closet is stacked with crates of the stuff. I don’t pay for liquor—it’s a bequest from Mr. Arden, that first class bootlegger; a mark of sentimental appreciation for my father’s steadfast service to the cause. When I sleep, I sleep fully dressed, suit and tie, left hand draped across the Thompson like a lover. Fear is a second heartbeat, my following shadow.
This has gone on a while.
* * *
The first time I got shot was in the fall of 1914.