Gathered Dust and Others by W. H. Pugmire Read Free Book Online Page B

aren’t you?  You won’t find it.  It seems implausible that Randy never visited it, so many of our kindred dead have been dumped there.  His story, ‘Return of the Warlock,’ is said to have been inspired by Edmund Carter, a sensational sorcerer who barely escaped hanging and whose secret journal Randy had found in some ancestral attic – and it so disturbed him that he had the pages sealed!”
    I was half-listening to his prattling as I scanned the pages in the small book I held, the history of Carter’s seeking lost and forgotten ancestors in the burying grounds of New England.  More interesting than his historical pursuit, however, was his obvious affection for these fields of death.  The combination of my visitor’s tale, told in his faint voice, with the imaginative lines of his forebear’s diary, so beautifully expressed, filled me with an overwhelming desire to dream and write.  I sensed the beginning of my own first novel, one that would relate the history of the Carter family and its ties to witch-haunted Arkham.  I would have to alter the name and much of that history – that would be part of the creative fun of the work – but locals would certainly guess the origin of the family whose dark history I would relate.  I looked up as Carter walked away from me and to a window.  I said, “I suppose your family changed its tune about Carter’s books once the novels began to sell again.”
    “That was part of it.  We heard from some old writer in Providence, who had saved a packet of letters that Randy had written him.  The guy wanted to reprint some of Randy’s horror stories in a handsome hardcover edition and include the best of the letters as an appendix.  He had sought out my grandfather’s permission.  That was followed by someone wanting to write a biographical novel about Randy’s weird mysticism and his vanishing into the Arkham hills – and that Grandpa would not allow.  But the family sensed a growing interest in our weird one, and began to think about the possible financial assets such a thing might develop.  You know,” spoke his low faint voice as he pushed aside a curtain and peered into outer darkness through black lens, “Randy wasn’t the only Carter to vanish somewhere in the hills of Arkham.  Another of the clan went missing under mysterious circumstances in 1781.  Less than ten years later Obediah was born under what were whispered to be savage conditions linked to alchemy.  God, what a heritage!”  I studied his slim feminine figure, the tight-fitting black apparel, the impossible hair piled in coils on his head.  This was the first time I had studied that hair in decent light, and I marveled that human hair could look so artificial, more like vines or tubes than anything else.  The more I stared at it the more I was certain that it was not his natural growth but rather some clever synthetic attachment.
    I didn’t know how to respond to his talk, and so I remained silent as he moved from the window and to another wall shelf lined with books.  I watched as he removed a volume of Henry James’s ghost stories and raised the book to his delicate nostrils, and I imagined him shutting his eyes as he sucked in the old book’s fragrance, even though those eyes were concealed behind the dark lens of his absurd glasses.  Opening the book, Carter allowed some particles of dirt to fall into one hand.  His face darkened as he stared at the rubble in his palm, and then he brought that palm to his mouth and touched the debris with his tongue, as from some distant place outside a thing cried to twilight.
    V.
    My guest insisted that he wanted to walk home, and so I stood on the porch and watched him cross the road and enter into Old Dethshill Cemetery.  He turned to me, waved and smiled, and did a little jig among the stones.  He was a silly creature, but I was getting to like him.  I returned his wave and then returned into my home, happy to be alone.  I had not