Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (64 page)

At the top of the hill, it struck me that I had forgotten which way I was travelling. My alarm had completely erased all memory of which way I had approached the bridge, and I had parked in a gateway, at right angles to the road. I stopped on a lonely stretch of road to look at my compass. But its black pole swung gently in circles, apparently indifferent to direction. Tapping made no difference. It was not broken; the needle was still mounted on its pivot. It was simply demagnetised. I drove on until I found a signpost, discovered I was going in the right direction, and made my way to Pontypool. The problem of the compass disturbed me vaguely, but not unduly. It was only later, when I
thought about it, that I realised that it should be impossible to demagnetise a compass without removing the needle and heating it, or banging it about pretty vigorously. It had been working at lunchtime, when I had glanced at it. It came to me then that the affair of the compass, like the boy, had been intended as a warning. A vague, indifferent warning, like a sleeping man brushing at a fly.

All this sounds absurd and fanciful; and I freely admit that I was half inclined to dismiss it myself. But I am inclined to trust my intuitions.

I was feeling shaken, enough to take a long swallow from my brandy flask when I arrived back at the hotel. Then I called the desk and complained about the coldness of my room, and within ten minutes, a chambermaid was making a coal fire in a grate I had not even noticed. Seated in front of it, smoking a pipe and sipping brandy, I began to feel better. After all, there was no evidence that these “powers” were actively hostile—even admitting for a moment that they existed. As a young man I was scornful about the supernatural, but as I have got older, the sharp line that divided the credible from the incredible has tended to blur; I am aware that the whole world is slightly incredible.

At six o’clock, I suddenly decided to go and see Urquart. I didn’t bother to ring, for I had come to think of him as an ally, not as a stranger. So I walked in the thin drizzle to his house, and rang the front doorbell. Almost immediately, it opened, and a man came out. The Welshwoman said, “Goodbye, Doctor,” and I stood and stared at her, feeling sudden fear.

“Is the Colonel all right?”

The doctor answered me. “Well enough, if he takes care. If you’re a friend of his, don’t stay with him too long. He needs sleep.”

The Welshwoman let me in without question.

“What happened?”

“Little accident. He fell down the cellar steps, and we didn’t find him for a couple of hours.”

As I went upstairs, I noticed some of the dogs in the kitchen. The door was open, yet they had not barked at the sound of my voice. The upstairs corridor was damp and badly carpeted. The Doberman lay outside a door. It looked at me in a weary, subdued way, and did not stir as I went in past it.

Urquart said: “Ah, it’s you, old boy. Nice of you to come. Who told you?”

“Nobody. I came to see you for a talk. What happened?”

He waited until his housekeeper closed the door.

“I got pushed down the cellar steps.”

“By whom?”

“You shouldn’t have to ask that.”

“But what happened?”

“I went down to the cellar to get some garden twine. Halfway down the steps—a nasty, stifling feeling—I think they can produce some sort of gas. Then a definite push sideways. There’s quite a drop down to the coal. Twisted my ankle, and thought I’d broken a rib. Then the door closed and latched. I shouted like a madman for two hours before the gardener heard me.”

I didn’t doubt his word now, or think him a crank. “But you’re in obvious danger here. You ought to move to some other part of the country.”

“No. They’re a lot stronger than I thought. But after all, I was below ground, in the cellar. That may be the explanation. They can reach above ground, but it costs them more energy than it’s worth. Anyway, there’s no harm done. The ankle’s only sprained and the rib isn’t broken after all. It was just a gentle warning—for talking to you last night. What’s been happening to you?”

“So that’s it!” My own experiences now connected up. I told him what had happened to me.

He interrupted me to say, “You went down a steep bank—you see, just like me into the cellar. A thing to avoid.” And when I mentioned the compass, he laughed without much humour. “That’s easy for them. I told you, they can permeate matter as easily as a sponge soaks up water. Have a drink?”

I accepted, and poured him one too. As he sipped, he said, “That boy you mentioned—I think I know who it is. The grandson of Ben Chickno. I’ve seen him around.”

“Who is Chickno?”

“Gypsy. Half his family are idiots. They all interbreed. One of his sons got five years for involvement in a murder—one of the nastiest that ever happened around here. They tortured an old couple to find out where they kept their money, then killed them. They found some of the stolen goods in the son’s caravan, but he claimed they had been left there by a man on the run. He was lucky to escape a murder charge. And incidentally, the judge died a week after sentencing the son. Heart attack.”

I knew my Machen better than Urquart did, and the suspicion that now came to me was natural. For Machen speaks of intercourse between certain half-imbecilic country people and his strange powers of evil. I asked Urquart, “Could this old man—Chickno—be connected with the Lloigor?”

“It depends what you mean by connected. I don’t think he’s important enough to know much about them. But he’s the kind of person they like to encourage—a degenerate old swine. You want to ask
Inspector Davison about him; he’s the head of the local force. Chickno’s got a string of convictions as long as your arm—arson, rape, robbery with violence, bestiality, incest. Just a thorough degenerate.”

Mrs. Dolgelly brought in his supper at this point, and intimated that it was time for me to go. At the door, I asked, “Is this man’s caravan anywhere nearby?”

“About a mile away from the bridge you mentioned. You’re not thinking of going there, I hope?”

Nothing was further from my thoughts, and I said so.

That evening, I wrote a long letter to George Lauerdale at Brown University. Lauerdale writes detective stories under a pseudonym, and has been responsible for two anthologies of modern poetry. I knew him to be writing a book about Lovecraft, and I needed his advice. By now, I had a feeling of being totally involved in this business. I no longer had any doubts. So was there any evidence of the Lloigor in the Providence area? I wanted to know if anyone had theories about where Lovecraft obtained his basic information. Where had he seen or heard of the
Necronomicon
? I took care to hide my real preoccupations in my letter to Lauerdale, I explained simply that I had succeeded in translating a large part of the Voynich manuscript, and that I had reason to believe that it was the
Necronomicon
referred to by Lovecraft, how could Lauerdale account for this? I went on to say that there was evidence that Machen had used real legends of Monmouthshire in his stories, and that I suspected similar legends underlying Lovecraft’s work. Had he any knowledge of any such local legends? For example, were there any unpleasant stories connected with Lovecraft’s “shunned house” on Benefit Street in Providence …?

The day after Urquart’s accident, a curious thing happened, which I shall mention only briefly, since it had no sequel. I have already mentioned the chambermaid, a pale-faced girl with stringy hair and thin legs. After breakfast, I went up to my room and found her apparently unconscious on the hearth-rug. I tried to call the desk, but got no reply. She seemed small and light, so I decided to move her onto the bed, or onto the armchair. This was not difficult; but as I lifted her, it was impossible not to become aware that she seemed to be wearing little or nothing under the brown overall-smock. This made me wonder; the weather was cold. Then, as I laid her down, she opened her eyes, and stared up at me with a cunning delight that convinced me that she had been shamming, and one of her hands caught the wrist that was trying to disengage itself from her, with the unmistakable intention of prolonging our contact.

But it was all done a little too crudely, and I started up. As I did so, I heard a step outside the door and quickly opened it. A rough-looking
man with a gypsyish face was standing there, and he looked startled to see me. He started to say: “I was looking for …,” then he saw the girl in the room.

I said quickly, “I found her unconscious on the floor. I’ll get a doctor.” My only intention was to escape downstairs, but the girl overheard me and said, “No need for that,” jumping up off the bed. The man turned and walked off, and she followed him a few seconds later without attempting an excuse. It took no particular subtlety to see what had been planned; he was supposed to open the door and find me in the act of making love to her. I cannot guess what was supposed to happen then; perhaps he would demand money. But I think it more likely that he would have attacked me. There was a definite family resemblance to the youth who had stared at me from the bridge. I never saw him again, and the girl seemed disposed to avoid me thereafter.

The episode made me more certain than ever that the gypsy family was more intimately involved with the Lloigor than Urquart realised. I rang his home, but was told that he was sleeping. I spent the rest of the day writing letters home, and examining the Roman remains in the town.

That evening, I saw Chickno for the first time. On the way to Urquart’s, I had to pass a small public house, with a notice in the window:
NO GYPSIES
. Yet in the doorway of the pub stood an old man dressed in baggy clothes—a harmless-looking old man—who watched me pass with his hands in his pockets. He was smoking a cigarette which dangled loosely from his lips. He was unmistakably a gypsy.

I told Urquart about the episode of the chambermaid, but he seemed inclined to dismiss it; at worst, he thought they might have intended to blackmail me. But when I mentioned the old man, he became more interested, and made me describe him in detail. “That was Chickno, all right. I wonder what the devil he wants.”

“He looked harmless,” I said.

“About as harmless as a poison spider.”

The encounter with Chickno disturbed me. I hope I am no more of a physical coward than the next man; but the youth by the bridge, and the chambermaid business, made me realise that we are all pretty vulnerable physically. If the chambermaid’s boyfriend—or brother, or whoever it was—had chosen to hit me hard in the stomach, he could have beaten me into unconsciousness, or broken all my ribs without my making a sound. And no court would have convicted a man trying to defend a girl’s “honour,” especially when she alleged that she woke up from a faint to find herself being ravished.… The thought gave me a most unpleasant sensation in the stomach, and a real fear that I was playing with fire.

This fear explains the next event that I must describe. But I should mention that Urquart was out of bed on the third day, and that we drove out together through the Grey Hills, trying to find out whether there was any substance in Machen’s mention of underground caves that were supposed to house his malicious troglodytes. We questioned the vicar in Llandalffen, and in two nearby villages, and talked to several farm-workers we met, explaining that we were interested in pot-holing. No one questioned our unlikely excuse, but no one had any information, although the minister in Llandalffen said he
had
heard stories of rumours of openings in hillsides, concealed by boulders.

Urquart was exhausted after his day of limping around with me, and went home at six o’clock, intending to get an early night. On my way home, I thought—or perhaps imagined—that a gypsyish-looking man followed me for several hundred yards. Someone resembling the youth was hanging around the entrance to the hotel, and walked away as I appeared. I began to feel a marked man. But after supper, feeling more comfortable, I decided to walk to the pub where I had seen old Chickno, and enquire discreetly whether he was known there.

When I was still a quarter of a mile from the place, I saw him standing in the doorway of a dairy, watching me, with no attempt to disguise the fact. I knew that if I ignored him, my feeling of insecurity would increase, and that it might cost me a sleepless night. So I did what I sometimes do to the monsters in nightmares—walked up to him and accosted him. I had the satisfaction of seeing, for a moment, that I had taken him by surprise. The watery eyes glanced away quickly—the action of a man who usually had something on his conscience.

Then, as I came up to him, I realised that the direct approach would be pointless—“Why are you following me?” He would react with the instinctive cunning of a man who is usually on the wrong side of the law, and flatly deny it. So instead, I smiled and said, “Pleasant evening.” He grinned at me and said, “Oh ay.” Then I stood beside him and pretended to be watching the world go past. I had another of my intuitive insights. He was slightly uncomfortable to be in the position of the hunter, so to speak; he was more used to being the quarry.

After a few moments, he said, “You’re a stranger ’round here.” The accent was not Welsh; it was harsher, more northern.

“Yes, I’m an American,” I said. After a pause, I added, “You’re a stranger too, from the sound of your accent.”

“Ay. From Lancashire.”

“Which part?”

“Downham.”

“Ah, the village of the witches.” I had given a course on the Victorian novelists, and recalled
The Lancashire Witches
by Ainsworth.

He grinned at me, and I saw that he hadn’t a whole tooth in his head; the stumps were brown and broken. At close quarters, I could also see that I had been completely mistaken to think he looked harmless. Urquart’s description of a poison spider was not all that far out. To begin with, he was much older than he looked at a distance—over eighty, I would have guessed. (Rumour had it later that he was over a hundred. Certainly his eldest daughter was sixty-five.) But age had not softened him or made him seem benevolent. There was a loose, degenerate look about him, and a kind of unpleasant vitality, as if he could still enjoy inflicting pain or causing fear. Even to talk with him was a slightly worrying sensation, like patting a dog you suspect has rabies. Urquart had told me some pretty disgusting rumours about him, but I could now believe them all. I recalled a story about the small daughter of a farm labourer who had accepted his hospitality one rainy night, and found it hard to keep my disgust from showing.