Nocturnal Emissions by Jeffrey Thomas Read Free Book Online

preservative onto the desk. Even without his specs on, Venn was careful to avoid nearing his fingers to the blank bony hollows where he knew those demonic eyes would be lolling to keep him in view. He almost expected the decapitated head to suddenly snap at his fingers, but when he had set it down on his folded coat it merely rested there dumbly with alcohol trickling down its snout and dripping off its twisted ears.
    Venn crouched down before it, his voice kept low. “As I contemplate him, he stands at his window, no doubt, contemplating me. He is unnerved by my return. My questions about the farmer Brook.” Venn found a letter opener on the desk and picked it up, toyed with it, pressing its point against his thumb.
    Somehow, the pressure hurt him. Somehow, what looked like a bead of mortal blood, made up of mortal cells, welled from the point of contact. But it could not be living cells. Once, a Jewish acquaintance had told him of the belief that all the world and everything in it was composed of characters in the Hebrew language, all their curved hooks and barbs interlocked like the tiny pieces of a gigantic puzzle. Perhaps it wasn’t cells that made up this drop of blood, but those millions of minute letters. The thoughts, the sounds, the vibrations those letters represented.
    He whispered on to the thing he had dubbed Baphomet: “I thought it was Brook who was tampering with these forces, but he was innocent, however vile
    he might have been. Trendle was using Brook’s animals to breed the likes of you. To serve him. To smite his enemies.” Venn reversed the letter opener in his fist, so that the blade pointed downward, and he tightened his grip around its handle. “But he didn’t get you. Brook did. Then that fool at the fair. And now…me.” Venn raised his fist, the knife, high above his head. “So…even with the throat cut, even with the body gone, you are still hiding there. In the furthest corner. The skull is your nest, is it? Yes, Baphomet—as it is for us all.”
    Then he plunged the blade downward, as if to sacrifice this beast to his god.
     

 
    VI: The Black Dog
     
    There was another detonation of thunder, this time like a volley of cannons.
    As if startled to madness by the increase in the storm’s violence, that distant dog began to howl even more loudly. Even more wildly. Venn knew, now, that the sound was coming from the vicar’s church, at the edge of the sheep farm’s pastures.
    He stood at the window again, his nose almost pressed into the glass, expecting to see—in the flash of the next lightning bolt—a man with his arms spread toward the heavens, standing in the churchyard. He did not. And yet, he did see something, after all. A black shadow moving through the blackness, like a fish darting across the bottom of a murky pond. When again the sky was lit, Venn saw a great black dog, big as a Newfoundland , trotting between the headstones in the churchyard. He thought he could hear the thud of its massive paws, now. The banshee-like howling came with it as it bounded into the road. There, picking up speed, it was like a locomotive—bearing down on the farm of the Widow Brook.
    It was moving along the straight path, which ran through the heart of Candleton.
    Venn whirled away from the window, snatching up his red spectacles from where they lay folded. He left behind him the lamb’s head atop the writing desk, the handle of the letter opener jutting up from the center of its forehead.
    ««—»»
     
    “Mrs. Brook!” Venn thumped her door with the heel of his fist. “Susan!
    You must open up…hurry!”
    Only moments later, the widow opened her door, wrapped in a dressing gown, her hair in wild disarray. “Father Venn?”
    He seized her hand, nearly jerking her off her slippered feet, but she managed to catch herself and run along after him even as he drew her roughly down the stairs to her first floor.
    “What is it?” she implored.
    Venn dragged her directly to the door and