Unholy Dimensions (33 page)

As he moved along the low-ceilinged tunnel in an uncomfortable crouch to remain at the level of the pictographs, he cleared away more and more of what appeared to be some story or myth that was unfolding. It was stifling in the confines of the tunnel, so he swept a free hand under the wide brim of his rumpled and sweat-stained hat to wipe away a trickle of sweat.

The story in stone carvings seemed to begin with stylized rays of light piercing into a burial chamber, where there was a sarcophagus inscribed with mysterious symbols. In the next uncovered image, Paxton saw the sarcophagus lid was now open and a terrible figure was revealed within...a skeletal mummy with a head like the remains of an octopus, withered tentacles where a human mouth should be.

The following panel showed the octopus-headed corpse having departed from its elaborate coffin, walking into a corridor of stone. Its body was bent forward, its bat wings were in tatters, its fingers spread like eagle’s talons.

“Remarkable!” Paxton whispered under his breath. “Such a find.” He dusted at the next picture. “Never seen anything like it! Never!”

Paxton stared at the next carving. It showed two figures. One was the resurrected bat-winged mummy, and it seemed to be sneaking up behind the other figure. A crouching figure. This crouching figure,
carved in stone thousands of years earlier, somehow carried a modern lantern and worn a rumpled, wide-brimmed hat.

Paxton turned around...

Corpse Candles

That
the old man – apparently in his nineties – was still alive was miracle enough. That he was conscious and capable of intelligible speech was, to Grange, shocking. He had been told that when the fire department answered a neighbor's call about smoke billowing from the attic windows of the old man's house, and upon discovering his charred body on the floor -- his hair and clothing entirely burned away - they had thought him dead. Until he groaned, and raked one man's leg with a hand like a blackened bird's claw.

"You know the first thing that went through my head?" this firefighter had related to Grange only an hour ago. "Spontaneous human combustion. I know, I know...but I'm telling you, the only thing burned in that attic was this guy. Even the old rug he fell on was barely scorched. There was a greasy kind of soot on the walls, but that came from him. Maybe it was spontaneous human combustion. Just, that in his case it didn't entirely do the job."

Grange didn't understand medicine, but knew there must be some good reason the elderly man's face was not entirely swathed in gauze. It had been difficult, upon entering the room, to conceal his revulsion. That hideous mask could not be the countenance of a human being. Grange had been told the body, covered in a sheet at least, was much worse. The frail little man's body barely tented the sheet; Grange had seen more substantial remains dug out of decades-old shallow graves.

"Mr. Brill, I'm Detective Grange..." he said, leaning a bit over the bed, expecting the old man's eyes to open. The nurse, before letting him in, had assured him Brill was awake. But when
Brill replied, he still did not open his eyes, and Grange queasily wondered if his eyelids were fused shut, or if those orbs had turned to gelatin beneath them.

"Detective," Brill greeted him. "Sit down. Uh, have I done something wrong?"

Taking a seat at the bedside, Grange couldn't prevent himself from chuckling uncomfortably. "Well, setting yourself on fire is wrong, I guess, but I didn't come here to arrest you...just to find out what happened."

"I didn't set myself on fire," Brill told him. His voice was both an agonized rasp, and weirdly calm.

"So it wasn't intentional...that's a good thing. How did it happen? Were you smoking?"

"I told you
- I didn't set myself on fire."

Grange took in the man's ruined profile for several beats. He was reminded of the fireman's talk of spontaneous human combustion. Stupid, he scolded himself. The old man was senile; of course he had set himself ablaze. He might not know how he had done it, but done it he surely had. Nevertheless Grange asked him again, "So how did it happen?"

There was a long pause. Life support equipment hissed, red numbers fluctuated on monitor screens as if flashing an encoded message. "It was my brother. Martin Brill. He did this to me."

"Your brother?" Grange sat forward. "Where is he? I was told you didn't have any family."

"He lives across town. On Pine Street, right on the outside of Eastborough Swamp."

"And he set you on fire? Purposely?"

A slight nod of a head like that of a peeling, unwrapped mummy, horribly contrasted against the pristine white pillows.

"Why?"

"We haven't spoken much in years. We had a falling out a long, long time ago. For a while we made up, and moved out here to Massachusetts together, but..." A cough painful even to hear. "We have...different philosophies." After a moment, Brill amended, "Different religions."

"So he came to your house and set you on fire? Where is he now?"

"He's home. But he never left his house to do this to me. He sent...something else to my house to do it for him."

Had the old man meant to say someone else? "Who was that?" he asked, wondering if this story were all a delusion born of pain, delirium, paranoia.

Again, just the hissing, the beeping, a rattling cart being pushed past the door. Then: "An elemental. A fire vampire. One of the minions of the god Martin worships."

Grange found himself sitting back in his chair, his hands untensing on his knees. Yes, the elderly man was delusional. Yes, he had to have unconsciously immolated himself. No...Grange did not believe that Brill's brother had set him ablaze...with or without the help of any "minion".

Still, he at least had to talk to this next of kin. At the very least, all feuding aside, he should know that his brother was probably not going to survive.

Before Grange sought out this Martin Brill on Pine Street, however, upon returning to Eastborough from the hospital in Worcester he first stopped at Edgar Brill's own home. He himself had not yet viewed the scene, had only spoken with the men who had sprayed the coal-like smoldering crisp of Brill's body, and the uniformed men who had initially responded to the call.

With Brill's own keys, Grange let himself into the now empty old house.

That the old man was an eccentric, strange even when he wasn't delirious with pain, was readily apparent. The squalor of the house was bad enough - filthy clothing strewn about, food-encrusted dishes resting throughout the house, newspapers, magazines and books stacked precariously in each room to the point where some rooms had mere pathways through this landscape of paper mesas and plateaus. But this in itself was not surprising for an elderly person living by himself. It was, rather, the...decor...that mystified the small town detective.

One room's ceiling was painted black, for instance. Large eye-hooks had been screwed into the ceiling, and metal wire threaded through them, making a kind of hanging web...from the middle of which dangled an intricate contraption like a box kite, but much more elaborate, constructed of sticks and paper, that twirled gently in the breeze of Grange's movement. Odd symbols or markings on the various faces of the mobile revealed themselves as it turned in the displaced air.

In another room, in amongst an abundance of crumbling ancient books that filled a number of built-in shelves, Grange's eye was drawn to a biological specimen preserved for display in a greenish-tinted block of Lucite or some such substance. The frayed, grayish-pink matter in this block was not even remotely recognizable except as something organic. This wasn't some human organ, was it? On the top he noticed a narrow label, the typed ink very faint on the yellow paper. Grange had to take the object down from the shelf to read it. It read:
Saint Augustine, Florida,
1896
. Replacing the heavy block, Grange took note of a photograph cut from a book and tacked to the wall beside the bookshelf. A similar typed label was taped across its bottom. It appeared to show some blob-like rotting carcass washed ashore on a beach, obviously in Saint Augustine, Florida. A typed letter was tacked below the photo, and read simply:
Edgar, Here is that chunk I alluded to; methinks it was a Spawn of C------. Photo enclosed, as well. Best, S. Sargent.

In other rooms, more photographs and cryptic correspondence, and articles clipped from newspapers and magazines such as National Geographic and Fate, adorned the walls, sometimes in great profusion, like a kind of patchwork wallpaper.

At last, Grange mounted a narrow, creaking staircase to the attic, passing through beams of late afternoon sunlight in which dust motes swarmed like plankton. The attic, which had once been a third floor apartment, was more of the same clutter, only worse. The walls had been stripped down to the plaster but never papered again except for more clippings. Halfway up the stairs, he had paused to read about a family plagued by poltergeist activity, including a profusion of mysterious fires. Just beyond the top of the stairs, Grange paused to read from a lengthy article -- very yellowed and crumbling, as it was dated 1971 - written on the hundredth anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire.

Grange had never realized just what a horrific tragedy that had been, or how strangely widespread the fiery devastation had been all on that night of October 8, 1871. Tremendous fires had swept through Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, North and South Dakota, and Wisconsin.
Twenty-four towns burned to charcoal, 2,000 lives lost. Of these, 1,500 had been lost in a 400 square mile area of Wisconsin. The town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin suffered the greatest violence, when monstrous windstorms of fire had descended from the sky with Biblical fury. One house had been lifted by the hellish winds one hundred feet into the air, there to erupt into flame. An eyewitness to the nightmare had written: "In one awful instant a great flame shot up in the western heavens, and in countless fiery tongues struck downward into the village, piercing every object that stood in the town like a red-hot bolt...the flaming whirlwind swirled in an instant through the town. All heard the first inexplicable roar...while a few avow that the heavens opened and the fire rained down from above."

"So much for a cow kicking over a lantern," Grange muttered. He read on...eerie details about the mysterious, often fickle behavior of the blazing tornado. One man had been found
dead, but strangely untouched by the fire...and yet some coins in his pocket were partly fused from the heat. And another man was found alive, staggering along in a stupor, his hair and clothes seared away but an oddly carved musical instrument merged with the hand that clutched it. He had been mumbling repeatedly about something called Cthugha, which he blamed for the conflagration, and spoke of as an entity, leading those who found him to believe he was referring to some Indian god. The man, one Edgar Brill, had ended up in a sanitarium, his mind blasted.

Edgar Brill. So that explained the interest of Eastborough's Edgar Brill in this story. His grandfather, perhaps, for whom he had been named?

Grange sighed, straightened, barely able to take in the enormity of the horror described. He moved further into the attic, turning into a front room from which emanated a burnt smell.

The walls in here were indeed coated in a black soot, but other than that and the blackened scrap of rug on the floor, fire damage was not apparent. The room was unsettling enough without it.

It was a small room with slanted walls, again covered in clippings, most obscured by the soot but barely scorched. One photo drew Grange closer. It showed a man presenting an object before him in both hands. Was it a carved walking stick? Some primitive club? The end of it was bell shaped, so Grange concluded it was a musical instrument. The photo was labeled:
Rick's Lake,
Wisconsin
. Wisconsin again. Was that, then, the musical instrument that had been fused to the earlier Edgar Brill's hand? If so, the photo was more recent than that.

Grange took in a kind of altar that had been set up at the end of the room, directly before its one window, and remembered what Brill had said about him and his brother practicing opposing religions. What could Edgar Brill's beliefs be, to account for this? The window had been masked off with thin black cardboard, from the cent
er of which had been cut a five-armed star shape that vaguely had a human-like form. All the sunlight in the room poured through this rough figure...though to either side of it much smaller shapes, cut perhaps with an exacto knife, let in a little more light. They were hard to make out...perhaps many-limbed insects or squid?

Grange removed a cloth from atop the table presumably used
as an altar. There was a spiral-bound notebook there, an old leather-bound book written in German, and the musical instrument he had seen in that photo only moments before.

It was scorched black, and had to be the very instrument which Edgar Brill the elder had been carrying after the Peshtigo Horror, almost a hundred and thirty years ago. Grange lifted the heavy object in both hands, turning it to scrutinize its bizarre detail. The thing didn't seem to be of metal, or even wood...seemed more grown than carved. It had a segmented, bony appearance, like the straightened spinal column of some animal.