The Collected Short Fiction

  "I'm afraid I don't recall those concepts," I interrupted. "You were new to the class. To tell the truth, it didn't seem you were paying attention. But soon enough he would have gotten through to you. Told you to look up there," he said, pointing to the blackboard. "You remember that much, don't you? He was very captivating, the instructor. And always ready for anything."

  "I thought that he recovered from the sickness that caused his absence, that he was back teaching."

  "Oh, he's back. He was always ready. But somewhere he must have made some enemies. Did you know that the class is now being held in another part of the school? I couldn't tell you where, since I haven't been with Instructor Carniero as long as some of the others. To tell the truth,

  I don't care where it's being held. Isn't it enough that we're here, in this room?"

  I had little idea how to answer this question and understood almost nothing of what the man had been trying to explain to me. It did seem clear, or at least very possible, that the class had moved to a different part of the school. But I had no reason to think that the other students seated elsewhere in the room would be any more helpful on this point than the one who had now turned his spectacled face away from me. Wherever the class was being held, I was still in need of paper on which to take notes, transcribe diagrams, and so forth. This could not be accomplished by staying in that room where everyone and everything was degenerating into the surrounding darkness.

  For a time I wandered about the hallways on the main floor of the school, keeping clear of the walls which certainly were thickening with a dark substance, an odorous sap with the intoxicating potency of a thousand molting autumns or the melting soil of spring. The stuff was running from top to bottom down the walls, leaking from above and dulling the already dim light in the hallways.

  I began to hear echoing voices coming from a distant part of the school I had never visited before. No words were decipherable, but it sounded as if the same ones were being repeated in a more or less constant succession of cries that rang hollow in the halls. I followed them and along the way met up with someone walking slowly from the opposite direction. He was dressed in dirty workclothes and almost blended in with the shadows which were so abundant in the school that night. I stopped him as he was about to shuffle straight past me. Turning an indifferent gaze in my direction was a pair of yellowish eyes set in a thin face with a coarse, patchy complexion. The man scratched at the left side of his forehead and some dry flakes of skin fell away. I asked him:

  "Could you tell me where Instructor Carniero is holding class tonight?"

  He looked at me for some moments, and then pointed a finger at the ceiling. "Up there," he said.

  "On which floor?"

  "The top one," he answered, as if a little amazed at my ignorance.

  "There are a lot of rooms on that floor," I said.

  "And every one of them his. Nothing to be done about that. But I have to keep the rest of this place in some kind condition. I don't see how I can do that with him up there." The man glanced around at the stained walls and let out a single, wheezing laugh. "It only gets worse. Starts to get to you if you go up any further. Listen. Hear the rest of them?" Then he groaned with disgust and went on his way. But before he was entirely out of view he looked over his shoulder and shouted to me. "There's another one you might see. A new one. Just so you'll know."

  But by that point I felt that any knowledge I had amassed-whether or not it concerned Instructor Carniero and his night classes was being taken away from me piece by piece. The man in dirty workclothes had directed me to the top floor of the school. Yet I remembered seeing no light on that floor when I first approached the building. The only thing that seemed to occupy that floor was an undiluted darkness, a darkness far greater than the night itself, a consolidated darkness, something clotted with its own density. "The nocturnal product," I could hear the spectacled student reminding me in a hollow voice. "Drowning in the pools of night."

  What could I know about the ways of the school? I had not been in attendance very long, not nearly long enough, it seemed. I felt myself a stranger to my fellow students, especially since they revealed themselves to be divided in their ranks, as though among the initiatory degrees of a secret society. I did not know the coursework in the way some of the others seemed to know it and in the spirit that the instructor intended it to be known. My turn had not yet come to be commanded by Instructor Carniero to look up at the hieroglyphs of the blackboard and comprehend them fully. So I did not understand the doctrines of a truly septic curriculum, the science of a spectral pathology, philosophy of absolute disease, the metaphysics of things sinking into a common disintegration or rising together, flowing together, in their dark rottenness. Above all, I did not know the instructor himself: the places he had been... the things he had seen and done... the experiences he had embraced... the laws he had ignored... the troubles he had caused... the enemies he had made... the fate that he had incurred, gladly, upon himself and others. And of course I could not know anything of that "new one" about whom the man in the dirty workclothes had warned me, the one who may have also been an instructor, after a fashion-the instructor's instructor... and his accomodating enemy.

  I was close to a shaft of stairways leading to the upper floors of the school. The voices became louder, though not more distinct, as I approached the stairwell. The first flight of stairs seemed very long and steep and badly defined in the dim light of the hallway. The landing at the top of the stairs was barely visible for the poor light and unreflecting effluvia that here moved even more thickly down the walls. But it did not appear to possess any real substance, no sticky surface or viscous texture as one might have supposed, only a kind of density like heavy smoke, filthy smoke from some smoldering source of expansive corruption. It carried the scent of corruption as well as the sight, only now it was more potent with the nostalgic perfume of autumn decay or the feculent muskiness of a spring thaw.

  As I reached the first landing of the stairway, I nearly overlooked the figure standing motionless in a comer. This was certainly the newcomer to the school whose presence had been foretold to me. He was almost naked and his skin was of a darkness, an excremental darkness, that made him blend into the obscurity of the stairwell. His face was leathery and deeply lined, incredibly old, while the hair surrounding it was stringy and had been hung with objects that looked like tiny bones and teeth. They were tied up within long strands of hair and jangled in the darkness. Around the neck of this figure was a rope or thin strap which was strung with little skulls, dismembered claws, and whole withered bodies of creatures I could not name. Although I stood for some moments quite near to the ancient savage, he took no notice of me. His large, fierce eyes stared upwards, fixed upon the heights of the stairwell. His thin peeling lips were alive with a silent language, mouthing words without sound. But I could not read his speech and so turned away from him.

  I climbed another flight of stairs, which ascended in the opposite direction from the first, and reached the second floor. Each of the four stories of the school had two flights of stairs going in opposite directions between them, with a narrow landing that intervened before one could complete the ascent to a new floor. The second floor was not as well-lighted as the one below, and the walls there were even worse: their surface had been wholly obscured by that smoky blackness which seeped down from above, the blackness so richly odorous with the offal of worlds in decline or perhaps with the dark compost of those about to be born, the great rottenness in which all things are founded, the fundament of wild disease.

  On the stairs that led up to the third floor I saw the first of them a young man who was seated on the lower steps of this flight and who had been one of the instructor's most assiduous students: He was absorbed in his own thoughts and did not acknowledge me until I spoke to him.

  "The class?" I said, stressing the words into a question. He gazed at me calmly. "The instructor suffered a terrible disease, a great disease." This was all he said
. Then he returned within himself and would not respond.

  There were others, similarly positioned higher on the stairs or squatting on the landing. The voices were still echoing in the stairwell, chanting a blurred phrase in unison. But the voices did not belong to any of these students, who sat silent and entranced amid the litter of pages tom from their voluminous notebooks. Pieces of paper with strange symbols on them lay scattered everywhere like fallen leaves. They rustled as I walked through them toward the stairs leading to the highest story of the school.

  The walls in the stairwell were now swollen with a blackness that was the very face of a plague pustulant, scabbed, and stinking terribly. It was reaching to the edges of the floor, where it drifted and churned like a black fog. Only in the moonlight that shone through a hallway window could I see anything of the third floor. I stopped there, for the stairs to the fourth were deep in blackness. Only a few faces rose above it and were visible in the moonlight. One of them was staring at me, and, without prompting, spoke.

  "The instructor suffered a terrible disease. But he is holding class again. He could suffer anything and did not shun enemies. He had been everywhere. Now he is in a new place, somewhere he has not been." The voice paused and the interval was filled by the many voices calling and crying from the total blackness that prevailed over the heights of the stairwell and buried everything beneath it like tightly packed earth in a grave. Then the single voice said: "The instructor died in the night. You see? He is with the night. You hear the voices? They are with him. All of them are with him and he is with the night. The night has spread itself within him, the disease of the night has spread its blackness. He who has been everywhere may go anywhere with the spreading disease of the night. Listen. The Portuguese is calling to us."

  I listened and finally the voices became clear. Look up here, they said. Look up here.

  The fog of blackness had now unfurled down to me and lay about my feet, gathering there and rising. For a time

  I could not move or speak or form any thoughts. Inside me, everything was becoming black. The blackness was quivering inside me, quivering everywhere and making everything black. It was holding me, and the voices were saying to me, "Look up here, look up here." And I began to look. But I was enduring something that I could never endure, that I was not prepared to endure. The blackness quivering inside me could not go on to its end. I could not remain where I was or look up to the place where the voices called out to me.

  Then the blackness was no longer inside me, and I was no longer inside the school but outside of it, almost as if I had suddenly awakened there. Without looking back, I retraced my steps across the grounds of the school, forgetting about the short cut I had meant to take that night. I passed those students who were still standing around the fire burning in an old metal drum. They were feeding the bright flames with pages from their notebooks, pages scribbled to blackness with all those diagrams and freakish signs. Some of those among the group called out to me. "Did you see the Portuguese?" one of them shouted above the noise of the fire and the wind. "Did you hear anything about an assignment?" another voice cried out, and then I heard them all laughing among themselves as I made my way back to the streets I had left before entering the school grounds. I moved with such haste that the loose button on my overcoat finally came off by the time I reached the street outside the grounds of the school.

  As I walked beneath the streetlights, I held the front of my overcoat together and tried to keep my eyes on the sidewalk before me. But I might have heard a voice bid me: "Look up here," because I did look, if only for a moment. Then I saw the sky was clear of all clouds, and the full moon was shining in the black pool of space. It was shining bright and blurry, as if coated with a luminous mold, floating like a lamp in the great sewers of the night.

  Autumnal (1994)

  First published in its original form in Crypt Of Cthulhu #68, 1989 as 'Autumnal Horror', a section of Studies In Horror.

  Also published in this revised form in: Noctuary

  When all the landscape is dying, descending fragrantly to earth, we alone rise up. After light and warmth have passed from the world, when everyone stands melancholy at the graveside of nature, we alone return to keep them company. This is our season to be reborn. The supple swish of summer trees has become a dry rattle in a cooling wind, and our ears begin to tingle as we lie dark and deep in our beds. Crinkled leaves scratch against our doors, calling us from our lonely houses.

  We drift groggily out of the shadows: comfortably rooted in oblivion, we do not particularly enjoy being pulled up into the burning air for the amusement of some unknown mischief maker, some cosmic prankster, master of the trick. But perhaps there is an old farm where once abundant fields, neatly rowed, now lie fallow and abandoned by all but a few straggly stalks. We witness the scene and, with what remains of our mouths, we smile. Beneath a sharp scythe of moon, we now become eager to fulfill ourselves.

  We do not hate the living, no more than night hates day; like them, we have been assigned a task which we must execute as best we can. However put out we may feel, we are hopelessly superstitious about shirking certain obligations, for there are some which even the power of a posthumous lethargy cannot refuse.

  Thus, on nights when an icy rain is dripping from the eaves, when all barriers of light and luxuriance are down, our images appear to haunt and harrow. Crumpled silhouettes in doorways, crouching heaps in corners, emaciated shapes in cellars and attics—suddenly lit by a flash of lightning! Or perhaps illumed by the passing flame of a candle, or the soft blue flush of moonlight. But there is really no shock, no surprise. The unfortunate witnesses of our insane truth were already driven half-witless with dread anticipation. Our horror is an expected one, given the unnatural propensities of the season.

  When the world goes gray on its way to white, every living heart summons us with its fear; and, if circumstances are favorable, we will answer. We take as many as we can back to the grave with us, because that is our task. Our senseless cycle is out of nature's season: we go our own way, deviates of matter longing to bring an end to the charade of all seasons, natural or supernatural.

  And we are always dreaming of the day when all the fires of summer are defunct, when everyone like a shrivelled leaf sinks into the cooling ground of a sunless earth, and when even the colors of autumn have withered for the last time, dissolving into the desolate whiteness of an eternal winter.

  Invocation to the Void (1994)

  First published in its original form in Crypt Of Cthulhu #68, 1989 as 'Occult Horror', a section of Studies In Horror.

  Also published in this revised form in: Noctuary

  Five candles burned the whole time, at the five points of the star. They never went out. The man standing in the middle was tall, his forehead taut. His shirt was once white but had yellowed to reflect the moon in the dark sky above the twisted trees outside the window. Inside there was only that great empty room with the single star, the five candles, and the man.

  Also there was the book, which the man knelt to read at the center of the star. Book of the Damned. It told of other worlds, and the man summoned them. He had visions, visions in the smoke of the candles, in the light of the moon which shone on the dull dark floor of the room. The patterns on the walls swirled in the candlelight and in the moonlight.

  Worlds bloomed and withered, spun and stopped, flourished and decayed. In the smoke of the candles. But they were all the same. All of them had different colors, just as the one he knew, and different seasons: each beat like a hunted heart. "No more blood," he cried, choking. "These worlds merely mimic my own." And again: "No more blood!"

  The candles, the moon, the patterns on the wall, and the howling wind heard; and all agreed to welcome him to this other world, which was already theirs.

  Now it would be his.

  The flames barely fluttered as he collapsed into the star, his face so white above his yellow shirt and beneath the yellow moon. A beautiful, bloodless white.
>
  How foolish they were who thought he was dead: who buried him in that sticky earth, so moist and warm in summer. And dark as blood.

  New Faces in the City (1994)

  First published in its original form in Crypt Of Cthulhu #68, 1989 as 'Unreal Horror', a section of Studies In Horror.

  Also published in this revised form in: Noctuary

  One must speak of the impostor city.

  There is never a design to arrive in this place. Destination is always elsewhere. Only when the end of one's journey is reached too soon, or by means of a strange route, may suspicions arise. Then everything requires a doubting gaze.

  Yet everything also seems above sensible question. On the occasion that one has set out for a great metropolis, here the very site of anticipation is found. Its monuments spread wondrously across bright skies, despite an unseasonable mist which may obscure its earthward landmarks.

  But here, one soon observes, nightfall is out of pace. Perhaps it will occur unexpectedly early, bringing a darkness of an unfamiliar quality and duration. Throughout these smothering hours there may be sounds that press strangely upon the fringes of sleep.

  The following day belongs to a dim season. And all the towers of the great metropolis have withered in a mist which now lies upon low buildings and has drawn a pale curtain across the sky.