The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales (6 page)

“
No sudden movements, please,” he said, “you’ve taken a nasty bump to the head. Concussion is quite likely.”

Barclay’s mind raced. He wanted to believe that the horrific images that assailed him were a nightmare brought on by the damage he’d sustained. He longed to believe that none of what he’d seen had been real. His blurred vision denied him a clear view of the face of the doctor who was close at hand. He could not make out the man’s mouth as being anything but vague black smear, too indistinct to be discerned as either normal or monstrously decayed.

“
I’m Doctor Pearce,” he said, “you’re in University College Hospital. Can you see how many fingers I’m holding up?”

Barclay squinted. It looked like three to him. The fingers swam in and out of focus. Three, well, maybe four.

“
Swallow these tablets,” the doctor said, “they’ll put you to sleep for a while and we’ll talk again in the morning. I want you to stay in overnight for observation. Just to be on the safe side.”

He lifted Barclay’s head, put a couple of pills into his mouth and then brought a paper cup half full of water with which to wash them down.

Barclay gurgled, swallowed the tablets and fell into a deep sleep shortly afterwards.

•

When he awoke, his head felt clearer and his vision had cleared substantially. He found himself in a deserted hospital ward. The beds were unmade and had been slept in and then abandoned only recently. He got up, clutched the white gown in which he was clad tightly to his body, and wandered barefoot across the cold linoleum on the floor. There was no-one behind the nurse’s desk in the middle of the ward. The only noise he could hear was coming from the corridor. As he approached the source, he recognised it as the sound of a television programme, and it seeped through the windowed door of a patients’ recreation room. He opened the door and found himself inside a dingy space with several chairs and their occupants, all facing a television set mounted two-thirds of the way up the far wall.

The occupants, all patients in hospital gowns, were staring at the screen and miming along to the words being spoken by a newsreader. This broadcaster was talking, Barclay was certain, in Thyxxolqus. His mouth was deformed as if eaten away by decay. Moreover, the mouths of the patients listening were the same; like a soggy hole in a crumpled sheet of paper. Now he realised what the Thyxxolqu language reminded him of, as he listened to the swarm of people speaking it all at once. It was like the buzzing of infuriated bluebottle flies.

Barclay felt a hand grasp his shoulder. He turned around and the man in the white coat who stood behind him leant forward and whispered into his ear. It was Doctor Pearce.

“
Let’s get out of here and find somewhere where we can talk.”

They exited, took a couple of turns, and then Pearce let Barclay into an office. Once they were inside, he locked the door after him and slumped down into a wing-backed chair behind a desk. He drew out a packet of cigarettes from a drawer, offered Barclay one (who refused it) and then lit up. His hands were trembling and he coughed after the first drag. It looked as if he’d not smoked for a very long time.

“
What do you think is going on?” the doctor said.

“
What do
I
think is going on?” Barclay replied, suddenly feeling, given the circumstances, ridiculously self-conscious in his patient’s gown. He was arrested by the thought that this might be an examination of his own mental state. Had the doctor seen what he had seen?

“
I’ve known nothing like it. The disease, or whatever it is, appears to be airborne, attacks orally and causes rapid and massive cellular degeneration,” Pearce said.

Barclay exhaled, letting out an audible sigh of relief.

“
I’m not even sure,” Pearce continued, “that it’s a disease at all. I’ve been up all night, taking blood samples from patients afflicted with it. There’s no trace of invading bacteria, no trace of a virus. And yet the symptoms point towards leprosy or something of that ilk. It’s like the ghost of a disease possessing people.”

“
The unearthly language they’re speaking,” Barclay replied, “that seems to be the key.”

“
Do you know,” said Pearce, “I believe that the corruption allows the infected to articulate the language more clearly than uncorrupted mouths. I wonder if it doesn’t go right down into the throat, affecting the larynx and the voice box. What if the language is the disease itself?”

“
I can’t follow what you’re saying. How can a disease be a ghost, how can language affect the material world?” Barclay, having felt a surge of relief at the fact that Pearce was able to share his comprehension that something had gone horribly wrong with the world, now felt disorientated at the bizarre explanation Pearce had formulated.

“
I think the process begins in the mind. And then it goes on to alter the brain. You see? If one is able to recognise what’s happening, it is the first sign xxghixh of one’s having been infected. One is first only aware that the language exists, and only later does one begin to comprehend its meaning. You and I must be in the first stages of the disease.”

“
But what of Thyxxolqu and Qxwthyyothl?”

“
They are the xxtghzz names for death and disease. Xxguxxh familiar, we are on the edge of a great revelation one that dfgxx immaterialism in an insane mind gzzzh...”

Pearce’s mouth hung open. His tongue bubbled with a mixture of saliva and blood. One side of his mouth then drooped fantastically, all the way to his jawline. His lower teeth and gums were visible, and had become brownish fragments set in rotting flesh. He put his hand up and rested it over the deformity, covering the awful sight, in an act of denial and self-consciousness. He tried to smoke from the other side of his mouth, and carry on as if nothing were amiss. Barclay was pained by the horror and absurdity of it.

Pearce got up from behind the desk, walked past Barclay, unlocked the door and opened it wide. He acted silently, and his eyes flashed towards the aperture, indicating that Barclay should leave.

Once Barclay had returned to the still-deserted ward, he took his clothes from the locker adjacent to the bed he had occupied, dressed, and made his way out of the hospital.

•

It was not far from University College Hospital to the British Library, just a six minute walk along the Euston Road. Barclay tried hard to retain his composure as he set off for his destination, and clung to the idea that if he acted normally, then he might keep absolute terror at bay. He told himself it was vital that he consulted the article by De Quincey as he had planned.

All around him, however, the evidence of unearthly intrusion intensified. The adverts on the side of taxis and buses, the road signs, the foreign restaurants and the language that people spoke into their mobile phones was undiluted Thyxxolqus. It had completely replaced all other languages. He tried to avoid looking at the faces of people, but despite this, was conscious, out of the corner of his eye, that nine in ten of them suffered from deformed mouths.

He crossed the plaza outside the British Library, with its titanic statue modelled upon William Blake’s drawing of Newton, and entered through the heavy glass doors. He took the escalator up to the first floor Humanities reading rooms and went inside. The attendants at the desk, with mouths like caves, waved him through as usual, casting the merest glance at his pass and it was only as he returned it to his wallet that Barclay noticed that its lettering was no longer in English.

He collected the book, volume four of the
Collected Works of Thomas De Quincey
that he’d ordered, and took his place at one of the long rows of the readers’ desks. He looked left and right over the shoulders of the other readers between whom he sat and saw that the volumes they were consulting were written in Thyxxolqus. The language had spread into the books, transforming the texts, working its way like a virus through them all.

Barclay turned to the section of the De Quincey tome containing the article “Voices from the Grave” and read the following passage:

Barclay finished the sentence and closed the book. He left the reading room and went outside in order to gurgle and spit some water from one of the loo washbasins. His mouth was suddenly suffused with a coppery taste.

The sound of conversation amongst people milling around in the first floor area was in stark contrast to the silence of the reading room. He caught snatches of talk as people passed by and was astonished to find that he could now understand every word perfectly. Moreover, they were conversing of matters fantastically complex and yet rendered lucid by the words they used. Barclay delighted in the awful play of meanings within meanings revealed. He pulled open the door to the men’s loo, turned a corner and came face to face with his reflection in a mirror above the washbasins. His mouth, unsurprisingly, was now quite as deformed as everyone else’s.

He had left the book by De Quincey at the desk and could not wait to return to it. He would sit all day in the library staring at it, if need be, until such time as its text was rendered into Thyxxolqus and yielded up even greater revelations.

The Black Mould

The mould first appeared in a crater on a dead world at the rim of the universe. This world, with a thin atmosphere and a surface that comets and meteors had battered for millions of years, spun in a void of sunless dark. Perhaps it had been one of those comet collisions that had brought the mould into existence, some unique arrangement of molecules mutated by radiation and lying dormant in the comet’s slushy ice, something waiting to awaken and grow. The mould may have taken aeons to reach maturity and begin the process of reproduction. But when it did so, it grew rapidly and spread unchecked over the surface of that dead world, across its valleys and craters and mountains, across the equator and from pole to pole.

Once it had conquered that first world it became conscious, such was the size and complexity of the mould. The billions upon billions of simple cells formed a network that developed into a debased, gigantic hive-mind. The mould experienced a progressively horrible sequence of nightmares, a spiral of nameless dread without a centre. Its form of consciousness did not include the faculty of reason, but was a unique faculty; that of derangement. And its monstrous visions grew more intense as it spread, ever more profound in their ineffable malignity.

When it had conquered that dead and distant world, after everything lay under its ghastly black embrace, its nightmares demanded that it reach out across the void. And so trillions of spores were ejected into space.

In the end it brought ghastly, complete darkness to that unknown quarter of cosmic space, for it learnt how to suffocate stars.

It was terror, deepening without cessation, which bore aloft the spores of the mould on their voyage through interstellar space. Nightmarish ecstasy was the soul of the mould. It hungered and sought to consume the universe itself. Its dread was of a nameless horror, a stark madness beyond imagination; an ultimate horror that lurked somewhere in the universe but which it could not yet identify.

The mould had no means of recognising any other form of consciousness apart from its own. As it reproduced, the nameless dread that assailed it became exponentially complex. It existed only in order to experience the ultimate nightmare, the heart of horror, the petrifying vision that ends only in oblivion. It was in the attempt to destroy itself that the mould consumed everything around it, and dimly it looked forward to a time when there was nothing left to consume, when the entire universe was laid waste, and it would wither and die for want of sustenance. It was one entity, eventually separated by the inconceivable vastness of the intergalactic void, and with each spore exhaled between worlds still a component of the whole. Its nightmares were communicated telepathically and were not slowed by the immensity of the cosmos. Dreams are swifter than light.

When the spores found a world, be it asteroid, moon or planet, they would drift to its surface like soft rain and begin the process of assimilating whatever was found there. Where once there was a mighty empire with towers that reached to the heavens, soon after there were only ruins, and the black mould consumed the creatures of that world. Only husks remained as evidence that they had ever existed at all.