Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

He felt the elderly creature lean against him gently. “That was a long and grueling pose,” she told him. “Richard had actually constructed a low gallows with dangling rope for me to position myself with. I love how the moonlight is reflected in my wide dead eyes, and how my eyes resemble the emerald orbs of the pack that pay homage to their murdered enchantress. Richard understood the connection that exists between witches and ghouls. You may know his four-times-great-grandmother had been hanged on Gallows Hill in 1692 as Cotton Mather looked on. Mather was the inspiration for this next canvas.” They moved a short distance down the hallway. “This is me sitting on Mather’s tomb in Copp’s Hill Burying Ground. Notice how my face is mostly obscured in shadow, except for the green patina of my eyes? Richard worked from a photograph, as I obviously couldn’t pose for any extended time with a man positioned as the ghoul who sucks my breast.”

“The suggestive play of shadow all around is effective,” Malcolm responded. “It is Pickman’s talent for evoking shadow that entrances me. To look at those shadows is to feel a longing to become a part of them. When I express that to my friends they think me, well, weird — but maybe you understand.”

She nodded. “I like that — ‘evoking shadow’ — that’s exactly right. You see, I was not merely Pickman’s model, I was his student. He instructed me in certain ways, and from him I learned new . . . appetites.” She smiled coyly at the word. “It was he who instilled within me a love of fabulous darkness. I have not seen the wretched light of day for many decades. I exist in the living light of candle flame, and in the shadows such flame ‘evokes,’ as you phrased it. And there is a deeper shadow that can also be induced; it was such a shadow that inspired him to create the work at the end of this corridor. You see it there, the mammoth mirror encased in golden frame? It was so original of Richard, to use mirror as a canvas of sorts. Wait, before approaching it — we must see it in proper lighting.”

Malcolm looked down at Edith as she shut her eyes and began to hum, a sound in which there was no music, being merely a buzzing. Strangely, the flames from the candles in their sconces altered, darkening into embers of unearthly violet hue. He experienced sudden vertigo and reeled to one wall, finding he was leaning against a canvas. Pushing away from it feebly, he saw it portrayed the image to which Miss Gnome had referred: sharp and life-like, painted in Pickman’s realist technique, blasphemous shapes danced below a monstrous creature, far more ghastly than any merely satanic being ever imagined. This hideous fiend stood with arms upraised, one hand holding a carmine-dripping knife — each drop of blood glowing like a ruby. On the stone altar beneath lay a gory sacrifice. Although the body was obviously lifeless, its emerald eyes were opened wide.

He felt a hand clasp his, looked down and saw the green-hued eyes from the painting peering into his own as living liquid orbs. Not speaking, Malcolm allowed himself to be guided down the corridor, to the wall on which the enormous mirror was fastened. It looked like some gigantic canvas encased by golden frame.

“I never knew if Richard found the mirror or had some friend construct it, for you see that the glass is curiously half-blackened although still reflective. Aren’t they intriguing, the spirals of bizarre luminosity scattered about in it? He told me this piece was inspired by something he had seen in some abandoned church in Providence. It has a haunting aspect, does it not? Look how beautifully your sable skin wears that tint of purple sheen in your reflection. Marvelous. Your white shirt is a bit of a distraction, don’t you find?”

Entranced by the massive mirror, Malcolm allowed her to unfasten the buttons of his shirt and pull it from his lean torso. He stepped nearer to that blackened glass and observed the odd shadows that moved within it. They were Pickman’s shadows, alive and expressive. He watched, as their preternatural pitch moved from out of the glass and onto the paneled walls of the hallway.

“How strong is your desire, Malcolm Elioth, to dance out of time? Shall I instruct you, as Richard tutored me? It’s easily done, if one has the keen compulsion. Titus — play.”

Malcolm turned and observed the unworldly manservant had appeared, an oddly formed flute pressed to his mouth. The corridor filled with eerie music. The weird woman moved about him to the sound, as she had danced earlier. As she moved she reached out to the shadows now frolicking all around them, clutching portions of their gloom, wrapping it around her being, until she was little more than formless shadow herself. An extremely slender obsidian branch of blackness reached for Malcolm and enveloped his hand, chilling his flesh exquisitely. He did not falter as he was pulled out of the hallway, through the haunted mirror, entering into the realm for which Pickman’s enchanted glass served as threshold.

One thing Norman PartridgeNorman Partridge has always found curious about Lovecraft’s fiction is that “there’s really no reflection of his time — no sense of the Roaring Twenties or the Great Depression or the hardscrabble realities most Americans faced in those days. Along with that, I’ve always wondered how HPL’s otherworldly horror might have played if injected into other pulp forms of the day. So I dropped a chunk of Lovecraft’s mythos (“The Hound”) into thirties hardboiled territory, tossed in a pair of armed-and-dangerous California migrants on the run, and let things roll from there.”

Partridge’s first short story appeared in Cemetery Dance 2, and his debut novel, Slippin’ into Darkness , was the first original novel published by CD. Since then, he has written a series novel ( The Crow: Wicked Prayer ) which was adapted for the screen, comics for DC, and six collections of short stories. Partridge’s Halloween novel, Dark Harvest , was chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of the 100 Best Books of 2006 and has become a seasonal classic. A third-generation Californian, he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, Canadian writer Tia V. Travis, and their daughter Neve. His latest novel is The Devil’s Brood .

The Depression had been hitting California hard for years, but that year the rains hit harder. The peas turned black on the vines, withering like arthritic fingers before migrants like my brother and I could pick them with our own. Stone fruit didn’t fare any better. Peaches, apricots . . . all of it disappeared in one brutal season. Night after night and week after week a black dog of a wind howled through every orchard, and sleet rattled down and gnawed the fruit off the stone, and those dead stones hung tight to branches, inclined toward the mud like the skulls of lynched men.

Those stones weren’t worth anything to the growers, and that meant they were worth even less to men like Russell and me. Men who stooped and picked and boxed and carried. Most people said Russell wasn’t worth anything at all, just some mangled halfwit who couldn’t be trusted with a sharp spoon. Even I had to admit that my older brother hadn’t been right in the head since he’d come home from France, missing an eye and a chunk of his face thanks to a German bayonet. Of course, Russell never talked much about that. All he said about the war was that he spent it digging trenches and killing in them, but it was living in them that taught him some homes were as welcoming as the grave.

Bleak poetics aside, that wasn’t saying much at all. I figured the truth of it was that the mustard gas had done a real job on Russell, but no one wanted to hear anything about that. No one wanted to hear anything about anything in those days. Talk didn’t buy you much, and a sweet lie beat out the truth any day of the week. But Russ and I weren’t the kind who had any sweet lies in us, even in the best of times.