It was a strange landscape dominated by a trembling star hanging in a sky across which drifted elliptical clouds. The star, which was the source of the green glowing, shed its light upon a landscape where great, black triangular rocks were scattered among vast metal buildings, globular in shape. Most of these seemed to be in ruins, for whole segmentary plates were torn from the lower walls., revealing twisted, peeling girders which had been partially melted by some unimaginable force. Ice glittered greenly in crevices of the girders, and great flakes of vermilion-tinted snow settled toward the ground or slanted through the cracks in the walls, drifting out of the depths of that black sky.
For but a few moments the scene held—then abruptly it sprang to life as horrible white, gelatinous shapes flopped across the landscape toward the forefront of the scene. I counted thirteen of them, and watched them—cold with terror—as they came forward to the edge of the opening—andacross it, to flop hideously into the vault where I stood!
I backed toward the steps, and as in a dream saw those frightful shapes move upon the statues nearby., and watched the outlines of those statues blur and begin to move. Then, swiftly, one of those dreadful beings rolled and flopped toward me. I felt something cold as ice touch my ankle. I screamed—and a merciful unconsciousness carried me into my own night…
When I woke at last I found myself on the stones between two slabs some distance from the place on the steps where I had fallen—a horrible, bitter, furry taste in my mouth, my face hot with fever. How long I had lain unconscious I could not tell. My light lay where it had fallen, still glowing with enough illumination to permit a dim view of my surroundings. The green light was gone—the nightmarish opening had vanished. Had I but fainted at the nauseating odors, at the terrible suggestiveness of this charnel crypt? But the sight of a singularly frightening fungus in scattered patches on my clothing and on the floor—a fungus I had not seen before, dropped from what source I could not tell and about which I did not want to speculate—filled me with such awful dread that I started up, seized my light, and fled, plunging for the dark archway beyond the steps down which I had come into this eldritch pit.
I ran feverishly upward, frequently colliding with the wall and tripping on the steps and on obstacles which seemed to materialize out of the shadows. Somehow I reached the church. I fled down the central aisle, pushed open the creaking door, and raced down the shadowed steps to the car. I tugged frantically at the door before I remembered that I had locked the car. Then I tore at my pockets—in vain! The key ring carrying all my keys was gone—lost in that hellish crypt I had so miraculously escaped. The car was useless to me—nothing would have induced me to return, to enter again the haunted church in High Street.
I abandoned it. I ran out into the street, bound for Wood Street, and, beyond it, the next town—open country—any place but accursed Temphill. Down High Street, into Market Square, where the wan moonlight shared with one high lamp standard the only illumination, across the Square into Manor Street. In the distance lay the forests about Wood Street, beyond a curve, at the end of which Temphill would be left behind me. I raced down the nightmarish streets, heedless of the mists that began to rise and obscure the wooded country slopes that were my goal, the blurring of the landscape beyond the looming houses.
I ran blindly, wildly—but the hills of the open country came no nearer—and suddenly, horribly, I recognized the unlit intersections and dilapidated gables of Cloth Street—which should have been far behind me, on the other side of the river—and in a moment I found myself again in High Street, and there before me were the worn steps of that repellent church, with the car still before them! I tottered, clung to a roadside tree for a moment, my mind in chaos. Then I turned and started out again, sobbing with terror and dread, racing with pounding heart back to Market Square, back across the river, aware of a horrible vibration, a shocking, muted whistling sound I had come to know only too well, aware of fearful pursuit…
I failed to see the approaching car and had time only to throw myself backward so that the full force of its striking me was avoided. Even so, I was flung to the pavement and into blackness.
I woke in the hospital at Camside. A doctor returning to Camside through Temphill had been driving .the car that struck me. He had taken me, unconscious and with a contusion and a broken arm, taken me from that accursed city. He listened to my story, as much as I dared tell, and went to Temphill for my car. It could not be found. And he could find no one who had seen me or the car. Nor could he find books, papers, or diary at No. 11 South Street where Albert Young had lived. And of Clothier there was no trace—the owner of the adjacent house said he had been gone for a long time.
Perhaps they were right in telling me I had suffered a progressive hallucination. Perhaps it was an illusion, too, that I heard the doctors whispering when I was coming out of anaesthesia—whispering of the frantic way in which I had burst into the path of the car— and worse, of the strange fungus that clung to my clothes, even to my face at my .lips, as if it grew there!
Perhaps. But can they explain how now, months afterward, though the very thought of Temphill fills me with loathing and dread, I feel myself irresistibly drawn to it, as if that accursed, haunted town were the mecca toward which I must make my way? I have begged them to confine me—to prison me—anything—and they only smile and try to soothe me and assure me that everything will “work itself out”—the glib, self-reassuring words that do not deceive me, the words that have a hollow sound against the magnet of Temphill and the ghostly whistling echoes that invade not only my dreams but my waking hours!
I will do what I must. Better death than that unspeakable horror…
- Filed with the report of P.C. Villars on the disappearance of Richard Dodd, 9 Gay ton Terrace, W.7. Manuscript in Dodd’s script, found in his room after his disappearance.
The Horror From The Bridge (1964)
I
Clotton, Gloucestershire, is not a name which can be found on any map, and of the inhabitants of the few leaning red-brick houses which remain of the uptown section of the once-prosperous town, there is not one person who can remember anything of that period of horror in the town in 1931. Those in Brichester who heard the rumours that filtered out of the terror-clutched town deliberately refrain from recounting what they learned, and they hope that the monstrous series of events will never become generally known. Nobody, in fact, knows quite why that twenty-foot-high concrete building was erected on the bank of the Ton, the tributary of the Severn which flows near what used to be the riverside section of Clotton. Nor can they tell why a band of men tore down all the buildings which lay anywhere near the river, leaving only that sparse remnant of uptown Clotton. And of the eldritch sign which was clumsily engraved in each wall of the concrete riverside building, Brichester folk do not like to think. If one asks the professors at the University, they will answer vaguely that it is an extremely ancient cabalistic symbol, but one is never told exactly what the symbol is supposed to invoke, or against what it may be intended as a protection. The whole affair, in fact, is a curious conglomeration of hints and avoidances; and perhaps it would never have been known what actually took place in Clotton in 1931, had not a typed document been found in the house of a deceased Brichester recluse. It seems that this recluse had recently been preparing the document for publication, and possibly it may be better that such a document was never published. For, in fact, the document is a description of the horror, by one of those who tore down the riverside buildings; in view of what he recounts, it is understandable that he became reclusive.