spider, biggest of the summer, crawling only a few inches from my ankle. It must have been living behind the bureau next to this table.
When you can hear a spider walk across the floor, you know it's time to keep your socks on! If only I could find the damned bug spray. Had to kill the thing by swatting it with my shoe, amp; think I'll just leave the shoe there on the floor until tomorrow morning, covering the grisly crushed remains. Don't feel like seeing what's underneath tonight, or checking to see if the shoe's still moving… Must get more insecticide.
Oh, yeah, that game – the What if Game. The one Carol says Rosie taught her. For some reason I've been playing it ever since I got her letter. It's catching. (Vain attempt to enlarge the realm of the possible? Heighten my own sensitivity? Or merely work myself into an icy sweat?) I invent the most unlikely situations, then try to think of them as real. Really real. E. g., what if this glorified chicken coop I live in is sinking into quicksand? (Maybe not so unlikely.) What if the Poroths are getting tired of me? What if, as Poe was said to fear, I woke up inside my own coffin?
What if Carol, right this minute, is falling in love with another man? What if her visit here this weekend proves an unmitigated disaster?
What if I never see New York again?
What if some stories in the horror books aren't fiction? If Machen told the truth? If there are White People out there, malevolent little faces grinning in the moonlight? Whispers in the grass? Poisonous things in the woods? Unsuspected evil in the world?
Enough of this foolishness. Time for bed.
Adrift – afloat – adream – he was spinning down the river on a narrow wooden raft, speeding toward the falls. He heard them ahead, a monstrous cataract of mist and white smoke and a rumbling deeper than thunder. He was almost upon them now, the raft was tilting forward, he felt it rock frenziedly as the raging current caught it.
And suddenly the raft tipped over and flipped him out of bed. He landed on the floor.
And the floor itself was moving.
Two miles down the road and a mile nearer town, Ham Stoudemire fought his way to the window and peered out, muttering snatches of prayer. His jaw fell. Outside in the moonlight the cornfield was rising, the land tilting as if from giant limbs beneath a patchwork quilt. 'Dear Lord,' he gasped, 'is it the Final Judgment?'
Adam Verdock had been sleeping on a cot beside his wife's bed. He dreamed his daughter Minna was shaking him, and felt a sudden half-formed hope, he was to say afterward, that she had good news of Lise. But Minna was nowhere about when he awoke, and Lise's eyes were closed, and he felt himself tossed around the little bedroom -'like a terrier shaking a rat' was how he'd put it later. And still his wife's eyes failed to open.
Deborah's eyes were open. Sarr awakened with a start to find her shoved roughly against him in the bed. He heard the sound of glass breaking somewhere below. The walls of the house were bending and creaking like the masts of a ship in a storm. 'Honey,' he said, 'come on, we've got to get out!'
She stared at him glassy-eyed; perhaps she was dreaming with her eyes open. She seemed not to hear.
'Honey,' he said, voice rising now, 'come on, 'tis another quake.' He lifted her from the bed, the two of them in their nightgowns, and started toward the stairs.
Shem Fenchel, dead drunk, slept through it all.
In the darkness of the woods, by the tiny mud-packed altar at the margins of the swamp, the thundering vibrations tore the forest floor and threw up great jagged chunks of rock. Part of the ground trembled and gave way, swallowing up all that remained of the fire-blackened cottonwood and the tiny mound of mud. Animals fled the area in terror. Trees still standing bent as from a violent storm. With an awesome cracking sound the earth split, bulged, and lifted, as if from some immense form pressing upward from beneath, straining toward the moon.
Gradually the trembling subsided, the land settling back upon itself. Ham Stoudemire saw his field grow still, the giant asleep again beneath its coverlet. Sarr, carrying Deborah's stiff form down the stairs, felt the tremors stop; Freirs picked himself nervously from the floor. They walked out to the yard and stood with relief upon the firm ground, and the two men talked until the rain came.
And in the forest a gigantic shape, furred with foliage and humped like the back of some huge animal, stood upreared against the stars.
The next morning, in the drizzle, they picked up the pieces. Bert and Amelia Steegler walked up and down the aisles of their store sweeping up the broken shards of bottles. A grieving Adam Verdock roamed through the countryside rounding up his cattle, which had kicked down their already damaged stalls. Old Bethuel Reid, summoning his courage, brandished a rake and chased the snakes that swarmed over his land into the forest.
And young Raymond Trudel, while searching the swampy region of the woods for an escaped hog, came upon the scene of the worst devastation and went running back to his family's farm, screaming in terror about the monstrous hill that had risen in McKinney's Neck during the night.
Book Ten: The Scarlet Ceremony
There are the White Ceremonies, and the Green Ceremonies and the Scarlet Ceremonies. The Scarlet Ceremonies are the best.
Machen, The White People
July Twenty-eighth
Rain spatters the sidewalk; the morning sun glows dimly behind a veil of cloud. Poised between the twin spires of a cathedral, the gibbous moon, just three days short of full, is a blob of smoke against the greying sky. As he wanders through the city, peering from beneath his black umbrella as he catalogues all that will be gone, the Old One perceives the moon's true meaning:
It is a portent of imminent completion.
The two initial Ceremonies are behind him, the woman has been tested and found ready, the Dhol lives clothed in human form… Yet a single step remains now, one last transformation, and the final act, the Voola'teine, can be performed.
All that's needed now is one more body, that of the man; and watching the fall of rainwater from a spout shaped like a gargoyle's mouth above him to an oil-rainbowed puddle at his feet, he is suddenly filled with certainty that the man will meet his end this very day – and with a vision of how that end will come about.
He can see it. It is as real as the rain upon the grimy streets around him.
Death by water.
He awoke to the patter of rain on the already wet grass, as if last night's cataclysm had been, in truth, just thunder and a vivid, violent dream. But no, he recalled, it had been more than that; there really had been a quake of some sort… The memory made this morning's rain seem a kind of absolution, something that would turn the earth into mud which, like mortar, would seal all last night's cracks.
He lay on his bed for a few more minutes, lulled by the sound, but gradually became aware that he was cold. The air was damp today, and a cool wind had sprung up. Across the lawn the house looked dry and cheerful. His watch said ten thirty. He roused himself and hurried out, keeping beneath the nearest line of trees for as much of the way as he could.
Worms had crawled out of the grass and were wriggling like drunken things on the flagstones as he dashed up the walk toward the porch. To his left the cornfield looked drenched, the thinner stalks drooping wearily in the mud. Hard to believe, on such a day as this, that the sky above the farm had ever been sunny.
The radio in the kitchen was tuned to a religious station. Sarr and Deborah were sitting across the table glaring into one another's eyes, like two card players suspecting each other of cheating and waiting to see who would draw first. Freirs could feel the tension break as he came in. Deborah smiled with obvious relief. Rising, she switched off the radio and went to the stove. 'We've no milk today,' she said -her voice had improved dramatically overnight – 'and no new eggs from any of the hens, and the two downstairs were broken when the shelf collapsed last night. So unless my husband-'
'I'm going,' Sarr said loudly. 'I'm going into town this afternoon, to see about the damage and how Aunt Lise is doing, and when I'm there, I told you, I'll stop at the Co-op and buy whatever we need.'
'Why don't you go now? Before it's all gone?'
He snorted with annoyance. 'I told you, I'll not be panicked by what happened last night, and I'll not have it look to the community, when I march into the store and ask for credit to buy powdered milk and eggs and other provisions, that I tried to get there first. Besides, I want to get that broken glass cleared from the cellar.'
'Well, why don't you?'
