FROM ARKHAM TO KADATH E-Book

Michael Minnis

• Herausgeber: BookRix
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

»There was no wind to move the eerie matter, and with growing horror Connor realized that it must be alive itself. There was no other explanation for the way it could otherwise wriggle forward and coil around the coat rack like a black snake until it threatened to swallow O'Reilly's arms.

Blind white eyes erupted like boils on the black surface, rolling back and forth madly.

O'Reilly's mouth contorted, his jaw drawing almost silently.

He looked helpless, but continued to hold the coat rack tightly in his hands.

But it wasn't the thing that resembled a black snake that made him scream.

It was something else that flowed through the portal like slime; a murky mass that flooded the attic, boiling and bubbling like sulfuric acid.«

Michael Minnis has subordinated many of his stories and novellas entirely to the cosmos of H. P. Lovecraft, and he succeeds in doing so in a workmanlike manner.

The novellas and stories included in this volume reflect the author's interest in Lovecraft's spaces, times, and places, whether they come across as dark fantasy or as tales of the early days of the Wild West.

Kadath, Leng, Arkham or Innsmouth - Michael Minnis takes the reader by the hand and leads him to the settings of his great role model.

Leseprobe

MICHAEL MINNIS

FROM ARKHAM TO KADATH

6 Novellas and Stories

Der Romankiosk

Content

The Book 

FROM ARKHAM TO KADATH 

BRICK HOUSE ON A WET STREET 

THE BEAST DRIVES A RED FERRARI 

MAASTRICHT CHALK 

BITE OF AN INSECT 

TWO FINGERS AND HALF A FACE 

A GIFT FROM LENG 

The Book

 

»There was no wind to move the eerie matter, and with growing horror Connor realized that it must be alive itself. There was no other explanation for the way it could otherwise wriggle forward and coil around the coat rack like a black snake until it threatened to swallow O'Reilly's arms.

Blind white eyes erupted like boils on the black surface, rolling back and forth madly.

O'Reilly's mouth contorted, his jaw drawing almost silently.

He looked helpless, but continued to hold the coat rack tightly in his hands.

But it wasn't the thing that resembled a black snake that made him scream.

It was something else that flowed through the portal like slime; a murky mass that flooded the attic, boiling and bubbling like sulfuric acid.«

Michael Minnis has subordinated many of his stories and novellas entirely to the cosmos of H. P. Lovecraft, and he succeeds in doing so in a workmanlike manner.

The novellas and stories included in this volume reflect the author's interest in Lovecraft's spaces, times, and places, whether they come across as dark fantasy or as tales of the early days of the Wild West.

Kadath, Leng, Arkham or Innsmouth - Michael Minnis takes the reader by the hand and leads him to the settings of his great role model.

FROM ARKHAM TO KADATH

  BRICK HOUSE ON A WET STREET

»So this is it?« Ippleston asked.  He sounded bored.  Ippleston always sounded bored.

»Yep,« Connor replied, examining the address scribbled on a PostIt note.  »2318. Corner of Wyndham and Meade.«

Ippleston brought the aging Ford pickup into a stretch of driveway broken by years of frost and thaw.  Connor squinted at the house’s address through the mist of spring rain; 231, in brass letters dark and pitted with age.  2318.  The last number was missing, which Connor thought odd – weren’t professors supposed to be fussy sorts, endlessly picking over details?  Even old, flaky ones with a Phd in –

The sound of a door slamming shut disturbed Connor out of his thoughts.  Ippleston stood beside the truck, studying the house, thumbs hooked into his low-riding jeans.  His face was that of a fat silent-movie comedian: half-sleepy, half-thoughtful, his hair a flattop brush neither red nor quite brown.  

»What was this guy’s gig again?« he asked.  »Professor of Antro...anner...«

»Anthropology,« Connor, the younger of the two, replied.  He got out of the truck.  Mist and dampness sank into his shirt, into his skin.  Drops of rain fell from leaves and branches, cold taps upon his shoulders, tiny slaps upon his baseball cap.

»Hell’s that?«

»Study of man,« Connor said.  »Means he was into different cultures, that sort of thing.  I had him for a 101-type class for one of my social science requirements coupla years ago, before the partying and everything did me in.  He was really into Oriental stuff.  China.  Southeast Asia.«

»Huh...«

»Guess his big thing was Tibet.  He was always taking trips there to do research.  He was there a lot before the Commies took it over.  Shit, he’d get started on that stuff, talkin about monks and shrines and mountains and plateaus...’I’ve been to the top of the world, ladies and gentlemen,’ he’d tell us, ‘and it is a strange, strange place.’  Then he’d smile and say, ‘Pop quiz.’«

»Huh,« Ippleston replied.  To him, Connor knew, Tibet and college were much the same: remote lands he had no intention of visiting anytime soon.

Ippleston glanced about the overgrown yard, and whistled his disappointment softly.  »Seems like Professor Kung-fu shoulda stayed home more often and looked after things.  Get a load of this yard...«

Connor nodded.  Wet grass came nearly to his jeans-clad knees.  It had gone to seed in places.  The flagstone path leading up to the front door was nearly lost as a result.  The bushes, once trim and angular, were now irregular and overgrown, thick blocks of vivid green, as was the hedge bordering the neighbors’ yard.  The house itself was half-obscured by creeping vines, scarlet sumac, and a few ill-looking fir trees of a shade between dead and dusty olive - weary soldiers at attention.  The sidewalk, like the driveway, was a tectonic slab of broken slabs and dark puddles littered with dead leaves, seeds, cottonwood spores and tiny spinners.  Worms crawled over the pavement; those that were dead lay white and still in the water.  Connor avoided them with meticulous disgust.

Neglect had made the house unattractive.  It seemed to know this, hidden as it was behind vines and bushes.  It was a singular, uncompromising block of brick, square and solid.  Large windows gave little sense of light or openness.  Instead, they seemed old and rheumy and blind, the frames paint-peeling, the glass dusty as a dead eye.  The roof was sharp and steep.  Twin brick chimneys book-ended the structure.  But otherwise, it was completely ordinary.

Except, perhaps, for a round window set high in the wall above the front door.  It was so dark that it appeared that the glass was missing entirely.  

»See that window up there?«  Connor asked, grinning.  He folded his arms, tugged on his wisp of a goatee.

»Yeah...what about it?«

»Walk around a little.  Watch what happens.«

Ippleston, true to form, shrugged his shoulders and lumbered about the yard, cutting a swath through the grass like an elephant.  For a time he seemed puzzled, unimpressed, squinting at the black portal above the door.  This way and the way he wandered, grass whispering underfoot.

»I’m getting soaked, Connor.«

»I know.  Just look.  You’ll see it in a minute.«

 Then Ippleston came to an abrupt halt, squinted again at the window.

»Huh!«

»See it?«

»Yeah.«

»What d’you think?«

»Kind of a...hell, I don’t know.  Kind of a ripplin, flashin, starry kind of thing, you know?  Like one a them oil puddles you see in a parkin lot, only different.  Shit, that’s weird.«

Connor nodded, pleased.  Getting Ippleston to register interest, or even a different facial expression, was something of an achievement.  The fat man cocked his head like a puzzled dog.  He backed away, walked forward.  From where Connor stood, the window was innocuous, blank, an ugly curiosity indicative only of a lapse in taste and judgment.  But he knew if he moved, that at certain angles the glass would change.  He had seen it before, as a beleaguered undergrad on the professor’s doorstep, anxious to negotiate a midterm failure.  What had the man’s name been?   Goddard?  Greeves?  Something stuffy and stiff.

Ippleston looked about him, and up at the sky.

»Nope,« Connor said, »it ain’t the sun or anything, ‘specially on a day like this...it does that if it’s day or night or whatever.«

»Weird.«

»I think it’s neat as hell.«

»That one a them Tibet things you were talkin about?«

»Don’t know.  I never asked.«

Connor went through his pantomime again, this way, that way staring and squinting at the window.  He looked as if he were dancing with an invisible, ungainly partner.

»Come on,« Connor said, »O’Reilly’ll get pissed if we take too long.«  He went to the back of the truck, mentally ticking off their supplies: rubber gloves; brooms; Hefty garbage bags; Windex; paper towels; carpet cleaner-

Ippleston snorted.  »Fuck O’Reilly.  He wants it cleaned that bad, tell ’im to get his ass on down here.«

»Yeah...careful what you say about him, though.  That’s about the time he shows up to check up on you.«

»I know.  Keeps rainin like this, he’s bound to drop by.  And he’ll be pissed off that his golf game got scrubbed.«

Connor chuckled and murmured assent.  O’Reilly owned a number of older houses in this neighborhood, renting them out to just about anybody and everybody who could bleed green once a month: part-time faculty; old folks living off pensions and Social Security; moody art students majoring in indifference; extended Asian families; black families; young couples coming down hard from their wedding high; even a few weirdoes and headcases.  The professor had supposedly been one of the latter.  Not that O’Reilly had cared, of course.

»Got the paint?« Connor asked, his arms loaded with cleaning paraphernalia.

»Yep...antique white, right?«

»Yeah.«

Connor unlocked the front door.  It swung back with a high, thin squeal, like a nail being pulled from wood, setting his teeth on edge.

»WD-40 that sumbitch,« Ippleston said thoughtfully.

The first room was dark, narrow, and musty.   On the right wall was an imposing fireplace, built of fieldstones, and what looked to be a dining room or study.  Ghost shapes upon the walls spoke of missing pictures.  The carpet was matted, of a shade between ochre and beige.  Of furniture there was very little left – a cheap old couch coming apart at the seams, a rocking chair, and an empty bookcase.  There was a stairway against the far wall.  

 Ippleston whistled softly again.  »Smells like a mushroom cellar in here.  Didn’t this guy ever open any windows?«

»Shit, you think this is bad?  You shoulda been here when they first found the guy.«

Ippleston’s moon face furrowed.  »What’re you talkin about?«

Connor set the cleaning tools down, relishing the moment and the attention.

»He croaked in here.  Last summer.«

»Oh, come on...«

»No.  Really.  It was last summer.  The guy just up and died.  Shit, he musta been about seventy, seventy-five years old or something.  Yeah, he croaked and it was, hell, maybe two, three weeks before somebody found him.  He was pretty damn ripe, from what I heard.  Place was crawlin with worms.  Maggots.  All sorts of nasty stuff.«

Ippleston shuddered involuntarily.  »Uhh...man, I can handle cleanin’ up after people, but not dead people.  O’Reilly sure as hell didn’t say anything about it.  Where’d they find him, anyway?«

»Up in the attic.«

Ippleston rolled his eyes.  »Oh, of course...the attic.«  He hummed a few ominous bars of music.  

»No.  Really, that’s where Kaperski said they found the guy.  I’m serious.«

»Uh-huh.  Mister »sick-day« Kaperski, right?«

Ippleston laughed.  Connor shrugged, as if the matter really didn’t concern him.  They had a lot of work ahead of them, reluctant as he was to start.  The atmosphere of the house didn’t help, either.  It was cloying, still, humid.  He banged a window open.  Rain had begun in earnest outside, a rippling susurration not unlike white noise.  The windowsills were full of dead insects and dust and cobwebs.  O’Reilly was right: it would be a chore and a half.  He reflected dismally on the small amount of money he made per hour.

»Well, where we gonna start?« Ippleston asked.

Connor chewed on his lower lip.

»I dunno.  It all looks pretty bad to me.«

»Huh.  O’Reilly said to start from the bottom, work your way up top.  Kitchen and bathroom are supposed to be the worst spots.  He also said that since Kaperski called in, to save the basement for him.  So I guess there is some justice...«

»What about the attic?«

»He said to leave it alone, that there ain’t anything up there but a bunch of old junk that that professor brought over from Tibet or wherever.  Said he ain’t too keen on one of us falling through the ceiling.«

Connor snorted derisively.  »Like he’d care.  Let’s do the kitchen first.«

With its walls painted a faded and unsightly yellow-green, the kitchen was full of unpleasant connotations in Connor’s mind: bile, poison, sickliness.  The counter tops were nicked and scarred and stained, the fixtures old and tarnished.  In the worn and dirty linoleum was repeated the same distasteful shades of the walls: pale yellow and gray-green.  The appliances were relics, given to leaking on humid days such as this one.  Plaster had sifted from ceiling to floor in spots, and crunched underfoot.

Ippleston first swept, and then began to scrub the floor with a wire brush and soap.  In a matter of moments he was sweat-soaked.  Dark circles formed under his arms and on the small of his back.  Connor went to work on the countertops, which were a crosshatched pattern of knife cuts and abrasions.  He frankly wondered how the house had avoided condemnation by the health department.

 He had been on worse jobs, of course.  Once he and Ippleston had cleaned (‘refurbished’ was the word O’Reilly preferred) a duplex O’Reilly had stupidly rented out to a bunch of teenagers for the summer.  Fifteen trash bags full of garbage, some of it bordering on the indescribable: tattered porn magazines, pizza boxes from a different geological time period, dirty clothing, unpaid bills, fast food bags and containers, rotting scraps of this or that.  And the smell!  It had taken a week to get the odor of spoiled milk out of the place.

They were nearly an hour into their work before Ippleston spoke again.

»So Kaperski says they found this guy up in the attic, dead, huh?«

»Yep.  That’s what he told me.«

»Natural causes?«

»Well...yeah and no.«

»Yeah and no?  The hell you talkin about?«

Connor scrubbed the countertop for a time before he would say anything.

»Now this is what Kaperski said.  Not me.  Kaperski said the guy – Greeves or Goddard or whatever his name is – was trampled flat.«

Ippleston’s sweaty face furrowed.  He swiped at his forehead and asked, »Trampled flat?«

»Yep.  Not flat flat.  But flat enough.  Most of his bones were broken.  His skull was crushed.  They had it on the news a while back, as some sort of homicide, but they didn’t let any details out.  It got hushed up pretty quick.  And since the guy didn’t seem to have any friends or relatives, the case probably got dropped pretty quick.  Crap like that happens over this side of town, once in a while.«

»Yeah, but trampled flat?  Seems like a lotta work to get one guy dead.«

Connor leaned against the counter.  He fancied himself something of an expert on the stranger aspects of human behavior.  »Yeah.  But people do weird stuff like that.  It was probably a psycho or something.  They’re supposed to be real ritualistic, most of the time.  They kill people in distinct ways.  So you have the Son of Sam leaving clues for the cops...that Ed Gein guy out in Wisconsin making lampshades outta peoples’ skin.  The Zodiac Killer.  Weird stuff.«

»Shit, no wonder you don’t have a girlfriend,« Ippleston said with a knowing smile.  »You talk about some warped things sometimes.«

»Heck, you think I talk about warped stuff?  You shoulda met this guy a couple times.  I mean, he was all right at the beginning of the semester, but he just started going downhill after that.  He quit showing up for class more and more often.  Gave his lecture notes to some grad student from East Europe who could barely speak English.  We had a midterm – which I blew, by the way – but no final.  Just about everybody got a Pass – not that it mattered, since half the class had dropped out by then, anyway.

»I stopped by once to discuss my grade with him.  Fucker was almost never in his office, so here I am walking two, three miles over here from campus.  It’s fall out and pretty damn cold, too, ‘specially since some asshole on my dorm floor swiped my down jacket.  I have a pretty good idea of who it was, too.  Anyway, so here I am, walking to his house.  And it looks like hell.  Lawn’s about half-gone.  Dead leaves all over.  Bushes all overgrown.«

»Kinda like now.«

»Yeah.  And I’m thinking, Damn, this place looks haunted or something.  ‘Specially since it’s getting into October and overcast out.  So I knock on the door.  No answer.  So I knock again.  Nothing.  Now I’m getting pissed, because Goddard-whatshisface told me to meet him at home after class.  Finally, the guy answers the door.

»Man, he gave me the creeps.  Funny thing was, up until that point, I’d never gotten a really a good look at the guy, I’d never seen him up close, cause he taught in a big lecture hall and I was always way up in the rows.

»It was weird...but you didn’t like looking at him.  I mean, he wasn’t out-and-out scary or anything.  But he was creepy.  Real pale, even paler than some of them computer geeks who hang out at the lab all the time.  Kinda short.  Mostly bald, with this little smudgy mustache like an old movie star and these round glasses and kind of slitted, nasty eyes.  Shit, he looked kinda Tibetan himself.  No chin, either.  And he had this expression...like he was real wary of you, but better than you, too.  Like you were a bug he wasn’t sure would sting him or just fly away.  He looked like a war criminal, is what he looked like.«

»Huh.«

»And he was really hairy, too.  Black hair.  You could see it comin out of his collar and shirt cuffs.  Looked like he had a gorilla suit on, practically.

»So he stares at me for this real long time, and I start getting uncomfortable.  Then he finally remembers me and says, ‘Oh, yes.  Connor, isn’t it?  Come in then, boy.   Have a seat.’«

»What?  You mean Lurch didn’t answer the door or anything?«

Connor glared at Ippleston.  »Look, if you’re gonna keep givin me crap, I’m not gonna tell you what happened.«

»OK.  OK.  Don’t get steamed.  I’m just havin some fun.  Be glad O’Reilly isn’t here.  He’d kick our asses for talkin, probably.«

Ippleston resumed scrubbing the floor.

»Probably...anyway, this Greeves guy sits me down in the living room – the one we were just in, with the fireplace – but that was back when the guy had all of his stuff from Tibet and Nepal.  I mean I’m talking stuff that was probably worth some money; little jade figurines; death masks; prayer beads hanging on the walls; candles; artwork.  The guy even had a little brass gong, for God’s sake.  I’m serious.  Everywhere you looked, there was something strange.  I mean, it was like an antique store, except none of it was nice or made you think of home.

»He had a fire going, and the curtains were closed, so it was kind of stuffy in there.  And there was this Godawful cuckoo clock over the fireplace, some leafy ugly thing, and it’s tickin and makin me kind of sleepy.  But I was kind of scared, too.  So he sits down in a rocker across from me.  Folds his hands.  And he asks, ‘Well?’

»And I go, ‘Well what?’«

»And he goes, ‘You’re here to discuss your grade, correct?  I don’t get many visitors of their own free will.’«

»And he smiles, like he’s in on some private joke, and says, ‘Oh, you students with you’re A’s and your B’s, your C’s and your D’s.  Letters of recommendation.  Humanities this, multicultural that.  Pass, Fail.  Sink, swim.  Pah.«

»So he asks me if I think it’s going to rain today.

»I say that I don’t know.

»He says, ‘rain brings out the worms ,’ and then he asks me if I want tea.

 »Without thinking, I say, Sure, I’ll have some tea.  So Goddard leaves the room, goes to the kitchen.  So I wait and I wait.  And he’s gone for a while.  So I get up and kinda wander around to see what this guy does in his spare time.  No TV.  No radio or anything.  No magazines.  Just all of this strange stuff, and some of it had to be really old, man.

»He’s still gone, when I hear this noise from upstairs.  A big, long creak, like the whole house is settling, a couple of cracks, and then a thump, like somebody fell.  I mean it was loud. So I go to the stairs to see what’s up.  Then I think, ‘Not a good idea,’ so I head into the dining room to look for him.  The wind’s pickin up outside, and tree branches are swayin around and makin these shadows on the walls.  Dead leaves are flyin around and scrapin against the glass.   And the house is dark, too.«

Connor rung his cloth out into a plastic bucket half-full of dirty water.  The memory of the visit made him uneasy, even now with Goddard-Greeves gone and the house empty.  Or was it the house itself that gnawed at his senses. There had been a murder here – did its pall still hang in the air like a suicide twisting slowly back and forth upon a rope?  After all, a great gnarled oak might lose its leaves, but it remained a tree.  And it was by no means dead.

»Get scared?« Ippleston asked.

»What?  You mean now?«

»Well, no...I meant then.«

Connor laughed uneasily.  »Kind of both, really.  I didn’t like this house back then, and I don’t like it now.«

Ippleston agreed:  »Huh.  Yeah...O’Reilly rents out some real piles, sometimes.  He’s got a place out on Dyer, out near the woods, looks like a big ol’ haunted house.  I mean it’s missing shingles and needs paint and everything.  This place ain’t half as bad, far as he goes.  He buys some real wrecks.  Never asks questions or looks into the places.  He’s even worse about screenin’ the people who rent.  You’d swear he likes nutcases or something.  Long as you pay, you stay.«

»Yeah...«

»Nutcases, huh?«

The voice was irritated, sharp, and authoritative; the sound of it made Connor’s stomach drop.  O’Reilly had ‘dropped’ in, like he did occasionally to check up on his workers.   Sonofabitch!