Gathered Dust and Others Read online

  4: The Video

  I decided to check another venue where Pugmire has created a presence for himself; the video-sharing website YouTube, at which, as “MrWilum,” he has posted many “vlog” entries – a vlog being a video blog. Here, he has discussed his current projects, and the works of other authors he admires such as, of course, H. P. Lovecraft.

  But again, I was to find that the most recent video Pugmire posted was over a week old. Videos up to that point had discussed his work on this very book, with titles such as: W. H. Pugmire reads from his work in progress; ‘Depths of Dreams and Madness’ – a reading; and the second-to-last last video posted: A Weary, Rambling Vlog. But even that video, with its perhaps significant title, turned out to contain nothing more alarming than Pugmire – as always, speaking intimately to his webcam in the basement of his mother’s place, with a mundane wall hanging of two extinct Kennedy brothers peering over his shoulder – again discussing his work on the collection GATHERED DUST AND OTHERS. No, it was only the most recent vlog entry uploaded to the site that caused me concern.

  The video, which was untitled, showed nothing much more than a field of shifting static, like a sandstorm of volcanic grit raging just beyond a thin glass windowpane. I persisted and stared at this video throughout its full fifteen minutes, however, and gradually I could just make out a head and shoulders somewhere behind all that static, darker as the vague figure apparently leaned in closer to the camera -- but then it would fade entirely from view again, before once more briefly surfacing. I had never before known Pugmire to use any special effects such as my own webcam possesses to make his videos look bizarre, but that isn’t to say he might not experiment thus.

  Even so, wouldn’t he at least want his viewers to hear his voice? And yet the sound accompanying the blizzard of pixels was also just a sizzling, hissing barrage of static. Only when the vague figure almost became a familiar outline did I hear half-drowned, greatly distant snatches of words. I believe I heard: “Sesqua Valley…I made it feel (or, I made it real?)…she wants her mask back…seven worlds…Gershom! This is Gershom!”

  The only other thing I discerned occurred at 14:52 in the video, just before it ended. In a corner of the video window, I caught a brief glimpse of several faces. Surely, those portraits of John and Robert Kennedy on the wall hanging behind Pugmire, as always. But when I played the video back and paused it at 14:52, freezing those obscure visages, they proved to be something else. Something not quite human – gazing back at me with mouths open far too wide in hunger.

  No…no…again, surely this was a product of my own writer’s imagination.

  I can only – I must! – assume that Pugmire erred somehow in uploading this video, or that the video itself was corrupted, unbeknownst to him. I can only hope that he will delete this disturbing fifteen minutes soon, and in its place leave one of his more familiar videos, in which his soft voice reads enthusiastically from whatever wonderful new piece of work he is bending his talents to.

  Though I cannot wait until then to complete this introduction and submit it to my publisher, I will check back constantly for that next video to appear. Hoping, yes, hoping that it will show more clearly Pugmire’s own face next time, and not reveal more clearly, instead, those other faces I believe I glimpsed floating hungrily in the raw stuff of unknown dimensions.

  –Jeffrey Thomas, Massachusetts, 4/25/11

  Gathered Dust

  (Dedicated to ye memory of J. Vernon Shea)

  I.

  I never solved the mystery of how my Uncle Silas came to own Elmer Harrod’s haunted house in Arkham, but I suspect it had something to do with his fondness for campy horror films. Harrod owned an impressive collection of such cinematic silliness, which filled the area that had been turned into a tiny movie house where he invited guests to view his favorite films as well as his own home movies that had been filmed in the nearby cemetery. These homemade efforts served as Harrod’s introductions to horror films on the television program where he served as horror host, and I used to love watching them when, as a teenager, I would spend two weeks of every summer with my uncle; and I recall how something caught my attention, an expression reflected in Elmer Harrod’s shadowed eyes, momentary hints of authentic mental disturbance and bewilderment and subtle fear. Harrod’s local fame as weekend host to televised horror films was matched by the legend of his haunted house, a mammoth Victorian pile that had been the subject of nameless rumors for decades in Arkham. Harrod was less renowned for the paperback anthologies of weird fiction that he had edited over the years, short-lived titles with lurid covers; nor was his one novel, Underneath Witch-Town, what could be called a success, although I had found it an enthralling read after having found a box of copies after my uncle had purchased the residence and its contents. It was the library of the place that really influenced me, however, for it was stuffed with the horror host’s extensive collection of weird phantasy. I spent summer after summer poring over those books, and it was under the spell of their authors that I became determined to join their ranks and write horror fiction professionally. It was while stumbling through the high grass of Old Dethshill Cemetery that I came up with my pen name, Deth Carter Hill. There were many Carters buried in the forsaken place, but I had been peculiarly drawn to the hidden grave of Obediah Carter, whose tabletop tomb dated 1793 to 1887 was decorated with a faded photograph of the elderly gentleman beneath an oval of glass that has been fastened to the slab of stone. There had long been legends that the Carters of Arkham had been tainted with witch blood, and one could well believe it when examining the stern and satanic countenance of Obediah Carter as it peered from its aged photograph.

  I came to inherit the queer Victorian residence after my uncle’s insane suicide, and I happily made the move from my cramped apartment to the spacious abode, where I was surrounded by elements of ghastly horror collected from various pockets of the globe by the two previous owners, things that I knew would aid my career as a weaver of weird tales. It did not deter me to bask in the notoriety that came my way, to the aid of my creative reputation, by the scandal that arose from my uncle’s incomprehensible self-extinction. The papers had been full of it for a little while, of how my uncle’s corpse had been discovered hanging from a strong length of vine attached to a hideous tree in Old Dethshill Cemetery, and of how the end of the vine that had tightened around his broken neck had implanted itself into the flesh of Uncle’s ravished throat.

  I found, during my first two months of residence in Arkham, that Uncle Silas had gained a curious reputation in the town, for it was whispered that he never ate, was never known to shop for groceries or dine out; and the fact that he was often seen haunting the abandoned cemetery at night gave way to gossip of vampirism and other such nonsense. It was when I discovered my relation’s own home movies that I learned how uncanny truth can eclipse the wildness of paltry rumor; for Uncle Silas had followed Elmer Harrod in the practice of being filmed within the wild confines of the haunted burying ground; but where the horror host had brought in a film crew to record his outlandish behavior among the tombs, it seemed that my uncle’s was a one-madman’s crude operation. On one spool of film he had recorded himself dancing among the rotting stone slabs and speaking the most outlandish gibberish I have ever heard, in what must have been a language of his own invention. He seemed almost to chew his lips as he drooled and muttered a name I could not quite make out. I found a film that showed him reclined on the slab beneath which Obediah Carter slept, and the dim electric light that he had somehow been able to set up caught to perfection the weirdness of his facial distortions, with which he mimicked the actual visage of the dead sorcerer. The most disturbing images that I found, however, were caught on the three rolls of film that showed my old relation twitching before the unwholesome tree on which he had ended his life. On one spool of celluloid he is shown wrapping the tree’s weird pale vines around his arms and ankles and then pirouetting like some deranged puppet; and it was so disturbing to see how the
withered old tree, in the uncanny light of my uncle’s source of illumination, took on the imagined semblance of a gigantic bestial claw that curled its grotesque distended digits in night air.

  My uncle’s experiments with filming seemed to incorporate some kind of trick photography near the end, for on the last spool of film he is shown in close up, dangling from the vines of the tree, vines that resembled cloudy veins through which a dark substance flowed in the direction of my uncle’s upraised arms, into which the vines had penetrated. Uncle Silas did not regard the camera as he muttered, “More, more – my arms are hungry.” I watched all of these films with a sense of growing horror, and then I stored them away and tried to forget them; but the memory of their images haunted my dreams, and I knew that the only way to expel them from my mind was to use them as fictional fodder. Thus it was that I composed my first novel, Beneath Arkham, the publication of which brought me a modicum of fame.

  Uncle Silas was not a literary man, and when I realized that as I approached manhood I felt a distinct disappointment. There he was, surrounded by Elmer Harrod’s magnificent library, and he let the books gather dust, except for the summers when I visited, at which times I was often alone in the mammoth library devouring the nameless fictive lore. I don’t think that Uncle Silas recognized that I was having less to do with him during my summer visits, or that my youthful high opinion of him had been tarnished when I realized that he did not share my love of literature. I was amazed and deeply grateful, of course, when he casually mentioned over one quiet dinner that he would bequeath me his house and its delirious contents, and it was then that I arranged for his portrait to be painted and replace the one of Harrod that hung over the fireplace in the living room. I never detected any strangeness in my uncle’s demeanor, and his sudden suicide came as an unpleasant shock. I was ecstatic, of course, about leaving my small and pathetic apartment and moving into the mammoth house in Arkham, and yet everywhere I looked there were items that reminded me of the sad situation that had allowed me to move there. Still, the spacious library became my happy little world, and I devoted myself to the genre in which I plotted to become an active and popular voice, working on my own book by using Harrod’s antiquated manual typewriter with which to compose my rough drafts. I felt a cool kind of communion knowing that the keys I pressed had felt the other fellow’s touch. I could not help, at times, to look around me and laugh out loud at the world I had inherited; for as a television host, Harrod had crammed his abode with props from films and nightmarish gifts from fans and friends, so that his home came to resemble something out of Charles Addams. Yet for all of his outlandish behavior, his mugging before the camera as he filmed his campy introductions to forgotten horror films, I began to feel a kinship with Harrod, for he had loved weird literature. There were, on the walls, framed stills of Harrod with certain celebrities, many of them horror film players, but some few the actual authors of the books he had collected. I had discovered a large scrapbook in which Harrod had pasted some few newspaper articles or photos from the local media, who enjoyed writing about him around Halloween; and I was charmed by a photo of him reading an edition of Arthur Machen in Old Dethshill Cemetery. On a whim I decided to hunt for and peruse that very edition, which was easily found. As I opened the book, dry soil spilled onto my lap, and I suspected that the debris was graveyard dirt. In the newspaper cutting, Harrod was reading the book with the aid of a large flashlight – but that seemed wrong to me, and thus I was happy to find, in the back tool shed, an antique oil lamp. I was determined to journey into the graveyard that very night, book in hand, and read a story from it with the aid of lantern light.

  I had turned a small room adjacent to the library into my bedroom and thus rarely visited the three upstairs bedrooms; but I was feeling a bit clownish that night and decided that I wanted to dress up for my first nighttide visit to Old Dethshill Cemetery, and so I climbed the carpeted stairs and went into Harrod’s old room, which my uncle had preserved just as the horror host had left it and where many outlandish television costumes remained hanging in various closets. He had been as lean as I and about the same height, and so the tuxedo decorated with synthetic spider webs fitted rather well. Thus attired I took the lantern and edition of Machen and stepped into night’s calm air. I could not see a moon, but the stars that dotted the cosmos seemed brighter than usual. The cemetery was just across the road from where I lived, and I felt a kind of joy as I climbed over its low stone wall and listened to the subtle sounds of the place. I was rather amazed at the aura of the place – it felt weirdly inhabited, although I was the lone individual there, and I heard no birds and glimpsed no scurrying vermin. I turned to look across the road at my home, where I had left some few lights on that illuminated various windows; and I marveled at the fantastic aura of the house in which I lived, at its sinister aspect that was aided by the rooftop gargoyles and other such paraphernalia with which Harrod had decorated it. I continued my exploration, walking through yellow grass that sometimes reached my knees, passing weed-choked markers and weathered tombstones on which names and dates had been erased by elemental time. I crossed over a creek that trickled through the cemetery and looked at the thickening trees that grew on the surrounding Arkham hills. There was no wind, yet the late August air was chilly, and so I stopped and lit my lantern, which aided sight but gave no warmth.

  I heard a sudden wailing cry from somewhere in the trees just beyond me, a sound that seemed to summon nature’s breath and coax a wind to exhale and thus stir up the scents of the place in which I lingered. Something in the sound of bestial cry touched my imagination, and I parted my mouth in imitation of the wail; and my noise was answered above me as a dark cloud melted and thus the moon that had been secreted behind it was exposed. I blinked as dead lunar light fell onto my eyes, as another sphere arose, as if from buried earth, small and delicate, with black pits where a human visage would wear eyes. A scarlet line, its mouth, parted, from which a patch of vapor poured forth, accompanied by a voice.

  “ Ses yeux profonds sont faits de vide et de ténèbres…”

  The figure ceased its recitation and cocked its head. I watched as it hopped from the tabletop tomb and walked a few steps nearer, and as it approached I noticed the book it held. The young thing smiled and spoke again.

  “I suppose you don’t know French, judging from your dumb expression. Let me translate and sing the verse again, thus:

  ‘Her eyes, made of the void, are deep and black;

  Her skull, coiffured in flowers down the neck,

  Sways slackly on the column of her back,

  O charm of nothingness so madly decked!’

  Delicious, is it not? And how clever of Luna to show her form just now, so as to aid with ghastly light. One should always read poetry by moonlight, don’t you think?”

  “Certainly, if the poet is Baudelaire.”

  “Ah! An educated soul.” The voice was high and nasal, yet masculine. His eyes were concealed behind round black lenses of what looked like antique wire spectacles. His fantastic mauve hair was piled high upon his dome in thick tube-like coils, and moonlight shimmered on the crimson gloss with which his simpering lips had been coated. “I’ve been looking for mine kindred dead, for I’ve been told that many of us are planted here.” He looked at me from behind his queer eyewear and spoke his name. “Randolph H. Carter, of Boston. And yes, I am ruefully related to the writer and man of mystery. Have you read his infamous book?”

  “I’ve inherited a first edition, but I haven’t looked at it yet. What was his mystery?”

  “Oh, there are many, a multitude of riddles. What, for example, happened to his friend and mentor, Harley Warren, who was last seen with Randy on the day of Warren’s disappearance? I actually know a direct relative of Warren’s here in town, a fabulous painter who has a studio on French Hill. It was she, actually, who informed me of this place, for she often paints it and its denizens. Just now she is conjuring a life-size doppelganger of Obediah Carter, who was wh
ispered to have been a wizard.”

  “That was his tomb you were standing on just now.”

  “Yes – I was drawn to it, but could not make out the inscription. I recognized him from his photograph, of course. Such a sinister face, don’t you agree?” He began to walk but stumbled over a clump of weed. “Damn, this terrain is treacherous.”

  “Perhaps,” I ventured, “you should remove the shades…”

  “Don’t be absurd.” He cautiously moved away from me through tall dry grass, and so I held my lantern high so as to light our way as I followed. We both saw the tree at the same time, and I could not repress a shudder. “Some fool hanged himself on that tree last year.” He turned and frowned at the expression on my face. “How sad you look – but then, who wouldn’t, dressed like that. You look like some Gothic hobo. Well, I must depart, morning classes come so early. What are you reading?” I told him. “Ah,” and he winked. “Best be on guard for the little people. This is so their demesne, one would imagine.” He waved a petite hand and I watched him saunter toward the trees and vanish within their darkness, and suddenly I felt alone and vulnerable. Turning, I found my way homeward, climbed over the stone wall and examined my home. It looked a grotesque thing in the sallow moonlight, with its cupola, widow’s walk and many gables. Lunar light feasted on the face of the gargoyle that Elmer Harrod had added as a feature to be seen when the house was filmed as part of the introductory footage of his television show, in which Elmer could be seen peering from a window, his face made up to resemble a rapacious ghoul. Standing as it did at the end of a dead end street on which most of the other houses were decayed and uninhabited, the Victorian pile wore an aura of desolation on this particular night. It looked very much a haunted house. And so it was, haunted by my lonely life, my strange imagination, my spectral dreams.