Not much difficulty was encountered, or effort required. Even the noise was minimal, or at least the disturbance; largely because the elderly couple had prudently selected a time which was well after dark, but well before most people had taken to their beds—in fact, when most people were likely to be most preoccupied, with one distraction or another.
In no time, Armand came hurtling all the way down again, nearly doing himself an injury in the feeble light. What he had to say was that he had quite clearly seen Madame lying there in the mirror, but no Madame in the room itself.
However, this summary proved possibly erroneous on at least two counts. The figure seen in the mirror proved, upon Armand’s cross-examination by his adoring aunt and all the community, to be not Madame at all but Mademoiselle perhaps, and therefore beside the present point. And Madame was in the room herself, though as to what had happened to her, the pathologist ultimately declined to make a declaration. The press thought it might have been rats, and it was mainly that hypothesis which caused the scandal, such as it was.
THE WILLOW PLATFORM
by Joseph Payne Brennan
Joseph Payne Brennan’s “Slime” and “Green Parrot” are two of my favorite horror stories. Mr. Brennan’s work has appeared in Weird Tales, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Magazine of Horror, Macabre, and, of course, Whispers. “The Willow Platform” closed out Whispers #1 and has since appeared in a British Best-of-Year anthology. It is a Lovecraftian tale of forbidden books and dimensions best left unopened . . .
Thirty years ago Juniper Hill was an isolated township, with a small village, dirt roads and high hilly tracts of evergreen forest—pine, hemlock, tamarack and spruce. Scattered along the fringes of wood were boulder-strewn pastures, hay fields and glacially formed, lichen-covered knolls.
Ordinarily I stayed in Juniper Hill from early June until late September. As I returned year after year, I came to be accepted almost as a native—many notches above the few transient “summer people” who stayed for a month or so and then hurried back to the world of traffic, tension and tedium.
I wrote when I felt like it. The rest of the time I walked the dirt roads, explored the woods and chatted with the natives.
Within a few years I got to know everyone in town, with the exception of a hermit or two and one irascible landowner who refused to converse even with his own neighbors.
To me, however, a certain Henry Crotell was the most intriguing person in Juniper Hill. He was sometimes referred to as “the village idiot,” “that loafer,” “that good-for-nothing,” etc., but I came to believe that these epithets arose more from envy than from conviction.
Somehow, Henry managed to subsist and enjoy life without doing any work—or at least hardly any. At a time when this has become a permanent way of life for several million persons, I must quickly add that Henry did not receive one dime from the township of Juniper Hill, either in cash or goods.
He lived in a one-room shack on stony land which nobody claimed and he fed himself. He fished, hunted, picked berries and raised a few potatoes among the rocks behind his shack. If his hunting included a bit of poaching, nobody seemed to mind.
Since Henry used neither alcohol nor tobacco, his needs were minimal. Occasionally, if he needed a new shirt, or shoes, he would split wood, dig potatoes or fill in as an extra hay-field hand for a few days. He established a standard charge which never varied: one dollar a day plus meals. He would never accept any more cash. You might prevail upon him to take along a sack of turnips, but if you handed him a dollar and a quarter for the day, he’d smilingly return the quarter.
Henry was in his early thirties, slab-sided, snuff-brown, with a quick loose grin and rather inscrutable, faded-looking blue eyes. His ginger-colored hair was getting a trifle thin. When he smiled, strangers assumed he was wearing false teeth because his own were so white and even. I once asked him how often he brushed his teeth. He doubled up with silent laughter. “Nary brush! Nary toothpaste!” I didn’t press the point, but I often wondered what his secret was—if he had one.
Henry should have lived out his quiet days at Juniper Hill and died at ninety on the cot in his shack. But it was not to be.
Henry found the book.
Four or five miles from Henry’s shack lay the crumbling ruins of the old Trobish house. It was little more than a cellar hole filled with rotted boards and fallen beams. Lilac bushes had forced their roots between the old foundation stones; maple saplings filled the dooryard. Old Hannibal Trobish, dead for fifty years, had been an eccentric hermit who drove off intruders with a shotgun. When he died, leaving no heirs and owing ten years’ taxes, the town had taken over the property. But the town had no need of it, nor use for it, and so the house had been allowed to decay until finally the whole structure, board by board, had dropped away into the cellar hole. There were hundreds of such collapsed and neglected houses throughout New England. Nobody paid much attention to them.
Henry Crotell, however, seemed fascinated by the moldering remains of the Trobish house. He prowled the area, poked about in the cellar hole and even lifted out some of the mildewed beams. Once, reaching in among the sagging foundation stones, he was nearly bitten by a copperhead.
Old Dave Baines admonished Henry when he heard about it. “That’s an omen, Henry! You’d better stay away from that cellar hole!”
Henry pushed out his upper lip and looked at his shoes. “Ain’t ’fraid of no old snake! Seen bigger. Last summer I rec’lect. Big tom rattler twice as big!”
Not long after the copperhead incident, Henry found the book. It was contained in a small battered tin box which was jammed far in between two of the foundation stones in the Trobish cellar.
It was a small, vellum-bound book, measuring about four by six inches. The title page and table of contents page had either disintegrated or been removed, and mold was working on the rest of the pages, but it was still possible to read most of the print—that is, if you knew Latin.
Henry didn’t, of course, but, no matter, he was entranced by his find. He carried the book everywhere. Sometimes you’d see him sitting in the spruce woods, frowning over the volume, baffled but still intrigued.
We underestimated Henry. He was determined to read the book. Eventually he prevailed upon Miss Winnie, the local teacher, to lend him a second-hand Latin grammar and vocabulary.
Since Henry’s formal schooling had been limited to two or three years, and since his knowledge of English was, at best, rudimentary, it must have been a fearful task for him to tackle Latin.
But he persisted. Whenever he wasn’t prowling the woods, fishing, or filling in for an ailing hired hand, he’d sit puzzling over his find. He’d trace out the Latin words with one finger, frown, shake his head and pick up the textbook. Then, stubbornly, he’d go back to the vellum-bound volume again.
He ran into many snags. Finally he returned to Miss Winnie with a formidable list of words and names which he couldn’t find in the grammar.
Miss Winnie did the best she could with the list. Shortly afterwards she went to see Dave Baines. Although, in his later years, Baines held no official position, he was the patriarch of the town. Nearly everyone went to him for counsel and advice.
Not long after Miss Winnie’s visit, he stopped in to see me. After sipping a little wine, he came to the point.