Karl Wagner - The Year's Best Horror Stories 21

“Where?” I cried, but she was already off with a brisk step. Then followed the most exhausting hour I have ever experienced. Rose might have been frail of form, but she set a fast pace and held it up hill and down dale.

I was soon trailing behind with a stitch, my breath steaming out into the chill drizzle. When she was obliged to wait until I caught up, the stream of invective to which she subjected me would have staggered a stevedore. I would never have guessed how rich and fruity her language could be. Eventually we came onto a steep lane where the gutters were awash, causing our sodden shoes to slip on the smooth flagstones. Beside a set of high, barred gates set in a towering wall we stopped, and I realized that we were in Swains Lane, at the old gates of Highgate Cemetery. The place should have been locked up at such an hour, but inexplicably, Rose must have known that the lock had not been turned for she threw her weight against the wet iron bars, and with a deep and ominous groan, the gates rolled back on their rusty hinges.

Here, let me confess, I loitered somewhat. Highgate Cemetery is ruinous, overgrown, shadow-haunted and choked to overflowing with more than four thousand corpses. An unwholesome necropolis of crumbling tombs, it has never figured highly in my list of daytime haunts. By night, “a blended scene of moles, fanes, arches, domes and palaces, where, with his brother Horror, Ruin sits,” it was the last place on earth I would have chosen to pursue some nameless and doubtless unpleasant errand.

Rose, though, was striding off along a gloomy, rain-washed path hemmed in by ivied slabs, stone crosses and contorted, leafless trees. An owl actually had the audacity to hoot. I stuck close and whistled carelessly as we descended some ruined steps and followed the path to a tall gate built on the design of an Egyptian temple, as if a normal gateway were not sepulchral enough. Here Rose turned and gripped my arm.

“Wait here,” she said firmly. “And no talking to strangers.”

Then she turned and disappeared up the path by which she had come.

My initial desire was to follow her, but I set my back against the wall on one side of the gate and tried to think beautiful thoughts. Although I had become oblivious to the rain, the wind seemed suddenly to penetrate my drenched mackintosh, cutting me to the bone. I began to shiver. My imagination was playing up too. There I was, trying desperately to keep my mind on something sensible and healthy, and all the while my inner eye was plagued by images of death and decay. Every novel, every theory I had ever read concerning the horrors that reach from beyond the grave unwound before me. I was scaring myself stiff.

In annoyance as much as anything, I began to pace up and down the path along which Rose had departed, that is, first away from, and then toward, the Egyptian gate. It was while turning away from it for the tenth time that I heard a distinct slow scuffing of feet walking out of the darkness toward my back! There could be no mistake. I was being approached out of the dark central labyrinth of the cemetery.

I must have aged visibly at that moment. It was my first taste of supernatural fear, and it robbed me of all volition. All I could do was to stand paralyzed as the steps drew nearer. My heart lurched violently as fingers tightened on my shoulder, then a voice close to my ear whispered, “It’s only me.”

I have never struck a woman, but it was a close thing at that moment.

“What in God’s name are you playing at?” I gasped, too shaken up to shout. Rose set off along the path.

“Nothing in God’s name,” she called back. “All the paths return to that spot—I came round that way to save time.”

“What are we doing here, Rose?” I asked, recovering a little composure as I caught up with her.

“That,” she replied wittily, “would be telling.”

Not much more than an hour later we were in Hallam’s front room drying out, and I had still received no satisfactory explanation for the adventure. The room was not what I had expected of Hallam. There were no vast cases of old tomes, no Gothic trappings and no luxurious furniture. The place had a spartan, Oriental look to it, with acres of bare floor scattered with cushions, a folded screen, and two glass cabinets of simple but sound workmanship which contained small ornaments and perhaps a dozen volumes with fine but hardly extravagant bindings. A few silken banners hanging on the walls showed brilliantly colored images of fierce Tibetan gods, and a crystal ball supported on the coils of a magnificent gilt dragon sat on a low cabinet. There was, too, a small but exquisitely detailed statue of some female deity of the East, not Kali, who has many arms and blue skin, but a being with a normal quota of limbs and skin the color of flame, her voluptuous body twisted into a dancing posture. She wore a grisly torque of human skulls.

I was squatting, a little self-consciously, in a silk kimono sipping a glass of cognac. Rose was reclining on the opposite side of the fireplace, her eyes on the vortex of steam that was swirling above our drying clothes. Hallam had just entered wearing a robe of black velvet and was pacing back and forth before the fire like a caged tiger, gesticulating grandly and chuckling, as though he were as high as a kite.

“Rose is right, of course,” he decided. “It is better that you don’t know her purposes tonight. There are some things,” he concluded darkly, “which man ought not to know.”

He took the decanter from the low cabinet and refilled my glass with cognac. “In any case,” he continued on a lighter note, “you have had an intense experience, which is surely our purpose in being here if we have one at all. To be where the vital forces of life unite most intensely. For an hour or so you did have a quickening sense of life.”

That had been the case, but I had no intention of conceding without reasoned arguments, so I said, “Piffle!”

“Pater actually,” he pointed out, quite unperturbed, “but no matter. I must admit you disappoint me, Lenihan. I had such high hopes for you, but it seems your hard, gemlike flame is guttering.”

I gave up gracefully; there was no arguing with either of them. In any case, having accepted a glass of brandy to warm me up, I had begun to see what people saw in the stuff, and with each refill had sunk deeper into the warm lagoon of intoxication. Now I had reached the point where the gears of the mind had started to slip and the commonplace takes on an unguessed profundity. Even as he spoke, I was watching the smoke of the fire billowing in slow, ghostly waves of unendurable beauty. I was suddenly overcome with an inexplicable melancholy.

“Really, I’m not mocking you, Lenihan,” Hallam was saying. “I merely wish to impress upon you one important fact—the most important it may be! Simply that life is a desperate business; you should seek experience itself and not some imagined goal that you may never live to see. You have had an experience this evening, that is all. The reasons, the rights and wrongs of it do not concern you, nor should they. Now come on, Lenihan, have another drink and relax.”

I glanced vacantly about me, searching vainly for some blade of wit that had not been blunted by the brandy. A mahogany display case just behind me, quite plain and simple but looking at that moment like no other display case in creation, caught my eyes. I moved over to look at it. The interior was lined with crumpled red silk, a waste of frozen blood across which was trekking an ivory figure no larger than a thumbnail. He was an old Japanese gentleman in short breeches and a ragged vest. His tiny arms were withered to sinew and bone, his lean jaw locked in an agony of exhaustion. The burden under which he struggled so grimly was a lion-headed demon riding his back, one foreclaw tangled in the old man’s hair, the other thrown back in a finely observed struggle for balance. So perfect was the impression of pain and unendurable weight that it seemed the old man had staggered for days across those cruel wastes while the monster threw back its finely-carved jaws in triumphant laughter. It was a beautiful and a terrible vision seen only for a second before my breath defiled the glass and swallowed the scene in mist.