The Dark Rites of Cthulhu (28 page)

I stared at the bell for a moment, then left the library.

I crept through the immense house, fearful I would turn a corner and bump into Paul at any moment. I managed to find what I was sure, by its pink trappings and popular band posters, must have been Paul’s daughter’s room upstairs. The bed was unmade. It could be the slovenly habits of an adolescent, of course. I went to her walk-in closet. Rows of clothing. Nothing to be gleaned here. Except above one shelf there were two pink designer suitcases. The girl was wealthy. She might conceivably have more than two suitcases. She might have a different color suitcase for every day of the week.

I vacated the room and headed down to the basement, my pulse accelerated. What would I say to Paul if he caught me snooping around? Didn’t seven million dollars buy a modicum of discretion? Apparently not.

I walked through the basement corridors, past the various rooms, till my nose detected that sweet smell again and I fumbled for the light switch in the dark candle making room.

The big vat of buttery yellowish tallow was cooling now, like old soup.

On the workbench table I found strands of long blonde hair. Scissors. I opened the cabinet over the
table. Nothing but spools of cotton, premade wicks, pillar molds, oils, and ceramic holders. I sat down heavily on the stool, and noticed the metal wastebasket next to the bench.

It was full of women’s clothes. I arranged them on the table. A woman’s and a girl’s.

Heart sinking, all the saliva in my mouth evaporating, I went to the vat, found the wooden stirrer sitting outside on the concrete floor, splashed with old tallow and colored wax.

I broke the hardening skin and dipped it inside, stirred the thick mixture, ground against something on the bottom.

After a few tries, I dragged it to the surface.

A gory human skull broke through the yellow patina, the blue eyes still staring out of the mournful sockets.

I let the stirrer tumble to the floor and backed out of the room, deaf from the blood coursing in my ears.

I ran back upstairs. I had a thought that made me gag. When I’d asked Paul if he’d gotten the beef suet for the candles from the same place he’d gotten the veal…he had smiled without answering. It was just a thought, but I vomited on the floor.

I returned to the library.
The Infernalius
was gone, along with my pronunciation key. God, I should call the police. Paul had gone over the deep end at last, in his crazy pursuit of….of what? How could he do this? Throw all this away? That lovely woman, their child.

I don’t know why, but I returned to the basement stair, suddenly more angry than afraid. I wasn’t afraid of Paul, surely. I don’t know what I intended to do.

I made my way down to the locked door, found it ajar.

My legs felt like they were strapped with sandbags as I slowly mounted the stair to the Oratory, where I could hear Paul chanting. A red glow permeated the stairway the higher I got.

I crept up to the top and peered over the edge.

Paul stood in the circle, decked in his silk robes and tall miter.
The Infernalius
lay open on the lectern. The curtains and shutters were open, the dark sky all around. There were no stars, no moon, only black clouds that blotted out the stars, like in the fore-edge painting.

He was turning slowly in the circle, chanting the old dead words I’d transcribed, over and over again, touching the braided human hair wicks of the black tallow candles made from the fat of his own wife and child with the lit end of a ceremonial candlelighter.

“Paul…,” I managed.

He paid no mind to me. Didn’t hear me, maybe. My voice was no better than a croak. The last candle was lit.

He lay the snuffer on the altar and raised up his arms, as I’d seen them in the painting. He roared the invocation I’d transcribed one last time. I couldn’t have pronounced it better myself.

I stood and leaned in the doorway, sick at the mad spectacle.

Paul Woodson turned and faced me in the last, but he was looking downward. The horrid, flanged candles flared, and he was lit from below in the resulting blaze.  I saw his expression fall slack in utter surprise.

Then he fell through the floor.

Or rather, into it, up to his waist.

From where I stood, I saw the floor on which he stood within the strange chalk diagram shimmer and fade to darkness.

It was as if a hole opened beneath his feet. A pit.

But it was no pit.

It was more like a throat. The walls pulsed with unnatural life, and were lined with whirling, counter rotating rows of teeth, like some kind of combine. The teeth were flanged, exactly like the black candles surrounding its outer maw. A black, inky breath seemed to exude from it, and the oils and incense of the room was overpowered by a stench of rot that made me gag.

He screamed as he fell, and the circle folded and closed on him exactly like a mouth, the burning candles snapping together, biting him in half through the middle with a sickly sound and a splash of copious blood.

The surrounding windows exploded inward, showering him with a hail of broken glass. A hurricane wind roared through the Oratory, extinguishing the candles, but not before the silk robes caught flame.

I saw his detached upper half ablaze, tumble flopping from the circle. Dying, he managed to lift himself from the floor by his hands, and I saw his expression, framed in fire. It was one of absolute, sublime ecstasy. He began to giggle, or perhaps scream. Both. I couldn’t be sure. Then his flesh curled and he collapsed. The billowing drapes caught fire.

I turned and ran from the room.             

I half fell down the stairs, careened from the basement, in total animal flight, staggered upstairs, and burst out the front door.

I saw the smoke rising from the center of the roof as the Civic turned over and I wrenched the wheel about and tore down the driveway, smashing through the gate and out into the Hinsdale streets.

Paul Woodson was dead. Devoured by…what? I didn’t want to think about it. My brief stab at fortune was gone. The book was real.

The book.

Did that mean what Paul had said about it was true, too, that it would give a man his heart’s desire? At the very least, it was physically worth a bundle to the right people. Mr. Zell at the bookshop could’ve set me up with a buyer, no doubt. Hell, I could’ve done it myself. Paul had said the previous owner had made a mint just lending it out.

Well it was gone now, consumed in the fire.

And yet….I found myself wondering.

The painting on the fore-edge. Paul hadn’t seen it. Maybe it had been a warning, not to evoke the powers he’d called attention to. Or maybe, it had been a final, obscured step in the procedure. In the painting the sacrifices had been lain on the altar, not left to melt in a tallow vat.

Maybe Paul, for all his care and precision, had overlooked an important detail of the ritual.

Well, there was no way to test my theory at any rate.

The blare of a car horn broke me out of my racing thoughts, and I squealed to a stop near the entrance ramp. I lay my head against the steering wheel, I don’t know how long, until a second bleat of a horn from an impatient driver behind me, roused me again.

I accelerated up the ramp, fancying I could hear the clanging of fire engines in the distance. I angled the car for Chicago and my miserable, empty apartment, thinking of the picture on the library wall, of Cherie Woodson and that grand house.

The streetlights pulsed down the length of my car like intermittent lightning, or the strobe of a grocery store scanner ascertaining my value.

Something caught my eye in the middle of the backseat.

Something pale, squarish, and mottled.

The Mindhouse

By Christine Morgan

What do they tell you about me, I wonder?

The truth, now that you’re old enough to hear it? The truth, because families are about honesty, about trust?

Or do they tell you the same lies they told the rest of the world? The lies they wish they themselves could believe, the lies they wish were true?

Maybe it was with what they considered the best of intentions. To protect you. To spare your feelings. Why should
you
have to grow up with so much hanging over your head? Besides, it was easier for them. Preferable. Less painful. Safer.

At least I can be sure they’ve had to tell you
something
. You may not have been old enough to remember when I went away, but they can’t deny I ever existed. No, you must know you have a sister.

Or … had one, at least.

They could claim I’d died, I suppose. Who would have doubted it? And if so, how far did they go with the ruse? Was there a funeral? A faked death certificate? Would I see my own name on a headstone, or engraved on some urn, if I ever went home?

Not that I can leave Evergate.

Well, I
could
. Maybe. I’ve made great progress.

I
am
all right.

Now. I’m all right
now
.

That’s the catch.

Well, that and the rest of it. What we do in the mindhouse helps
us
, but what about the long run, the big picture, the grand scale? The fate of humanity? The fate of the world?

It’ll happen anyway, though. Why fight it? It’ll be far in the future, long after we’ll still be around. We can’t change things. We can’t stop it. We have to look out for ourselves and our own best interests. Is that so wrong?

My friend Nathan agrees with me. Of course, he also knows what would be waiting for him outside of Evergate. It’s one thing to admit the guilt and feel the remorse. Having to be held accountable, to take responsibility … it’s daunting. It’s daunting for people who’ve done lesser wrongs than his.

We can’t help wanting to take the easier way, the less painful or less shameful way. It’s just instinct, preservation, simple human nature.

Like our parents did all those years.

I was never sick.

Not that way. Not in the way they wanted everyone to think.

There was no cancer. Chemotherapy and radiation treatments didn’t make me the way I was. That’s just how they explained it away. It looked better, you see. It made
them
look better. How
brave
they had to be. How brave and noble and strong. To be pitied, and admired, for bearing up so heroically.

And did they make the most of it! Basking in the sympathy, milking the attention for all it was worth, if not quite to a Munchausen’s-by-proxy level. They didn’t try to
exacerbate
my condition. They didn’t want to
keep
me like that. When it finally really got to be too much, they relented and sent me to Doctor Hasturn.

What I did to them was beyond unforgivable.

Worse than if I
had
gottten cancer.

Worse than drug habits, sex scandals, pregnancy or a criminal record. Any of those could be written off as a phase, the wild waywardness of youth.

Or joining a cult … which would have been ironic enough, the way things turned out …

These days, some things once deemed shameful carry a certain cachet; our parents would have earned bonus points among their social circle if I’d been a lesbian, and they could be just
so
very tolerant, so open-minded and progressive and trendy about it. 

But, no. No such luck. Nothing that dramatic, exciting or politically correct. I couldn’t even be something controversial like a vegan, a liberal, an atheist.

All right, at least I wasn’t
fat
, but still!

Insanity is never going to be a cool stigma. 

I don’t mean eccentricity, oh, no. That’s for the quirky, temperamental artistes. I don’t mean ordinary mood swings or picky people calling themselves OCD. I certainly don’t mean edgy but endearing sociopaths as depicted on television.