object:1f.lovecraft - The Ghost-Eater
author class:H P Lovecraft
subject class:Fiction
genre class:Horror
class:chapter
By C. M. Eddy, Jr.
with H. P. Lovecraft
I.
Moon-madness? A touch of fever? I wish I could think so! But when I am
alone after dark in the waste places where my wanderings take me, and
hear across infinite voids the demon echoes of those screams and
snarls, and that detestable crunching of bones, I shudder again at the
memory of that eldritch night.
I knew less of woodcraft in those days, though the wilderness called
just as strongly to me as it does now. Up to that night I had always
been careful to employ a guide, but circumstances now suddenly forced
me to a trial of my own skill. It was midsummer in Maine, and, despite
my great need to get from Mayfair to Glendale by the next noon, I could
find no person willing to pilot me. Unless I took the long route
through Potowisset, which would not bring me to my goal in time, there
would be dense forests to penetrate; yet whenever I asked for a guide I
was met with refusal and evasion.
Stranger that I was, it seemed odd that everyone should have glib
excuses. There was too much “important business” on hand for such a
sleepy village, and I knew that the natives were lying. But they all
had “imperative duties”, or said that they had; and would do no more
than assure me that the trail through the woods was very plain, running
due north, and not in the least difficult for a vigorous young fellow.
If I started while the morning was still early, they averred, I could
get to Glendale by sundown and avoid a night in the open. Even then I
suspected nothing. The prospect seemed good, and I resolved to try it
alone, let the lazy villagers hang back as they might. Probably I would
have tried it even if I had suspected; for youth is stubborn, and from
childhood I had only laughed at superstition and old wives’ tales.
So before the sun was high I had started off through the trees at a
swinging stride, lunch in my hand, guardian automatic in my pocket, and
belt filled with crisp bills of large denominations. From the distances
given me and a knowledge of my own speed, I had figured on making
Glendale a little after sunset; but I knew that even if detained over
night through some miscalculation, I had plenty of camping experience
to fall back on. Besides, my presence at my destination was not really
necessary till the following noon.
It was the weather that set my plans awry. As the sun rose higher, it
scorched through even the thickest of the foliage, and burned up my
energy at every step. By noon my clothes were soaking with
perspiration, and I felt myself faltering in spite of all my
resolution. As I pushed deeper into the woods I found the trail greatly
obstructed with underbrush, and at many points nearly effaced. It must
have been weeks—perhaps months—since anyone had broken his way through;
and I began to wonder if I could, after all, live up to my schedule.
At length, having grown very hungry, I looked for the deepest patch of
shade I could find, and proceeded to eat the lunch which the hotel had
prepared for me. There were some indifferent sandwiches, a piece of
stale pie, and a bottle of very light wine; by no means sumptuous fare,
but welcome enough to one in my state of overheated exhaustion.
It was too hot for smoking to be of any solace, so I did not take out
my pipe. Instead, I stretched myself at full length under the trees
when my meal was done, intent on stealing a few moments’ rest before
commencing the last lap of my journey. I suppose I was a fool to drink
that wine; for, light though it was, it proved just enough to finish
the work the sultry, oppressive day had begun. My plan called for the
merest momentary relaxation, yet, with scarcely a warning yawn, I
dropped off into a sound slumber.
II.
When I opened my eyes twilight was closing in about me. A wind fanned
my cheeks, restoring me quickly to full perception; and as I glanced up
at the sky I saw with apprehension that black racing clouds were
leading on a solid wall of darkness prophetic of violent thunderstorm.
I knew now that I could not reach Glendale before morning, but the
prospect of a night in the woods—my first night of lone forest
camping—became very repugnant under these trying conditions. In a
moment I decided to push along for a while at least, in the hope of
finding some shelter before the tempest should break.
Darkness spread over the woods like a heavy blanket. The lowering
clouds grew more threatening, and the wind increased to a veritable
gale. A flash of distant lightning illuminated the sky, followed by an
ominous rumble that seemed to hint of malign pursuit. Then I felt a
drop of rain on my outstretched hand; and though still walking on
automatically, resigned myself to the inevitable. Another moment and I
had seen the light; the light of a window through the trees and the
darkness. Eager only for shelter, I hastened toward it—would to God I
had turned and fled!
There was a sort of imperfect clearing, on the farther side of which,
with its back against the primeval wood, stood a building. I had
expected a shanty or log-cabin, but stopped short in surprise when I
beheld a neat and tasteful little house of two stories; some seventy
years old by its architecture, yet still in a state of repair
betokening the closest and most civilized attention. Through the small
panes of one of the lower windows a bright light shone, and toward
this—spurred by the impact of another raindrop—I presently hurried
across the clearing, rapping loudly on the doors as soon as I gained
the steps.
With startling promptness my knock was answered by a deep, pleasant
voice which uttered the single syllable, “Come!”
Pushing open the unlocked door, I entered a shadowy hall lighted by an
open doorway at the right, beyond which was a book-lined room with the
gleaming window. As I closed the outer door behind me I could not help
noticing a peculiar odor about the house; a faint, elusive, scarcely
definable odor which somehow suggested animals. My host, I surmised,
must be a hunter or trapper, with his business conducted on the
premises.
The man who had spoken sat in a capacious easy-chair beside a
marble-topped center table, a long lounging-robe of gray swathing his
lean form. The light from a powerful argand lamp threw his features
into prominence, and as he eyed me curiously I studied him in no less
detail. He was strikingly handsome, with thin, clean-shaven face,
glossy, flaxen hair neatly brushed, long, regular eyebrows that met in
a slanting angle above the nose, shapely ears set low and well back on
the head, and large expressive gray eyes almost luminous in their
animation. When he smiled a welcome he showed a magnificently even set
of firm white teeth, and as he waved me to a chair I was struck by the
fineness of his slender hands, with their long, tapering fingers whose
ruddy, almond-shaped nails were slightly curved and exquisitely
manicured. I could not help wondering why a man of such engaging
personality should choose the life of a recluse.
“Sorry to intrude,” I ventured, “but I’ve given up the hope of making
Glendale before morning, and there’s a storm coming on which sent me
looking for cover.” As if to corroborate my words, there came at this
point a vivid flash, a crashing reverberation, and the first breaking
of a torrential downpour that beat maniacally against the windows.
My host seemed oblivious to the elements, and flashed me another smile
when he answered. His voice was soothing and well modulated, and his
eyes held a calmness almost hypnotic.
“You’re welcome to whatever hospitality I can offer, but I’m afraid it
won’t be much. I’ve a game leg, so you’ll have to do most of the
waiting on yourself. If you’re hungry you’ll find plenty in the
kitchen—plenty of food, if not of ceremony!” It seemed to me that I
could detect the slightest trace of a foreign accent in his tone,
though his language was fluently correct and idiomatic.
Rising to an impressive height, he headed for the door with long,
limping steps, and I noticed the huge hairy arms that hung at his side
in such curious contrast with his delicate hands.
“Come,” he suggested. “Bring the lamp along with you. I might as well
sit in the kitchen as here.”
I followed him into the hall and the room across it, and at his
direction ransacked the woodpile in the corner and the cupboard on the
wall. A few moments later, when the fire was going nicely, I asked him
if I might not prepare food for both; but he courteously declined.
“It’s too hot to eat,” he told me. ‘Besides, I had a bite before you
came.”
After washing the dishes left from my lone meal, I sat down for a
while, smoking my pipe contentedly. My host asked a few questions about
the neighboring villages, but lapsed into sullen taciturnity when he
learned I was an outsider. As he brooded there silently I could not
help feeling a quality of strangeness in him; some subtle alienage that
could hardly be analyzed. I was quite certain, for one thing, that he
was tolerating me because of the storm rather than welcoming me with
genuine hospitality.
As for the storm, it seemed almost to have spent itself. Outside, it
was already growing lighter—for there was a full moon behind the
clouds—and the rain had dwindled to a trivial drizzle. Perhaps, I
thought, I could now resume my journey after all; an idea which I
suggested to my host.
“Better wait till morning,” he remarked. “You say you’re afoot, and
it’s a good three hours to Glendale. I’ve two bedrooms upstairs, and
you’re welcome to one of them if you care to stay.”
There was a sincerity in his invitation which dispelled any doubts I
had held regarding his hospitality, and I now concluded that his
silences must be the result of long isolation from his fellows in this
wilderness. After sitting without a word through three fillings of my
pipe, I finally began to yawn.
“It’s been rather a strenuous day for me,” I admitted, “and I guess I’d
better be making tracks for bed. I want to be up at sunrise, you know,
and on my way.”
My host waved his arm toward the door, through which I could see the
hall and the staircase.
“Take the lamp with you,” he instructed. “It’s the only one I have, but
I don’t mind sitting in the dark, really. Half the time I don’t light
it at all when I’m alone. Oil is so hard to get out here, and I go to
the village so seldom. Your room is the one on the right, at the head
of the stairs.”
Taking the lamp and turning in the hall to say good-night, I could see
his eyes glowing almost phosphorescently in the darkened room I had
left; and I was half reminded for a moment of the jungle, and the
circles of eyes that sometimes glow just beyond the radius of the
campfire. Then I started upstairs.
As I reached the second floor I could hear my host limping across the
hall to the other room below, and perceived that he moved with owlish
sureness despite the darkness. Truly, he had but little need of the
lamp. The storm was over, and as I entered the room assigned me I found
it bright with the rays of a full moon that streamed on the bed from an
uncurtained south window. Blowing out the lamp and leaving the house in
darkness but for the moonbeams, I sniffed at the pungent odor that rose
above the scent of the kerosene—the quasi-animal odor I had noticed on
first entering the place. I crossed to the window and threw it wide,
breathing deep of the cool, fresh night air.
When I started to undress I paused almost instantly, recalling my money
belt, still in its place about my waist. Possibly, I reflected, it
would be well not to be too hasty or unguarded; for I had read of men
who seized just such an opportunity to rob and even to murder the
stranger within their dwelling. So, arranging the bedclothes to look as
if they covered a sleeping figure, I drew the room’s only chair into
the concealing shadows, filled and lighted my pipe again, and sat down
to rest or watch, as the occasion might demand.
III.
I could not have been sitting there long when my sensitive ears caught
the sound of footsteps ascending the stairs. All the old lore of robber
landlords rushed on me afresh, when another moment revealed that the
steps were plain, loud, and careless, with no attempt at concealment;
while my host’s tread, as I had heard it from the head of the
staircase, was a soft limping stride. Shaking the ashes from my pipe, I
slipped it in my pocket. Then, seizing and drawing my automatic, I rose
from the chair, tiptoed across the room, and crouched tensely in a spot
which the opening door would cover.
The door opened, and into the shaft of moonlight stepped a man I had
never seen before. Tall, broad-shouldered, and distinguished, his face
half hidden by a heavy square-cut beard and his neck buried in a high
black stock of a pattern long obsolete in America, he was indubitably a
foreigner. How he could have entered the house without my knowledge was
quite beyond me, nor could I believe for an instant that he had been
concealed in either of the two rooms or the hall below me. As I gazed
intently at him in the insidious moonbeams it seemed to me that I could
see directly through his sturdy form; but perhaps this was only an
illusion that came from my shock of surprise.
Noticing the disarray of the bed, but evidently missing the intended
effect of occupancy, the stranger muttered something to himself in a
foreign tongue and proceeded to disrobe. Flinging his clothes into the
chair I had vacated, he crept into bed, pulled the covers over him, and
in a moment or two was breathing with the regular respiration of a
sound sleeper.
My first thought was to seek out my host and demand an explanation, but
a second later I deemed it better to make sure that the whole incident
was not a mere delusive after-effect of my wine-drugged sleep in the
woods. I still felt weak and faint, and despite my recent supper was as
hungry as if I had not eaten since that noonday lunch.
I crossed to the bed, reached out, and grasped at the shoulder of the
sleeping man. Then, barely checking a cry of mad fright and dizzy
astonishment, I fell back with pounding pulse and dilated eyes. For my
clutching fingers had passed directly through the sleeping form, and
seized only the sheet below!
A complete analysis of my jarred and jumbled sensations would be
futile. The man was intangible, yet I could still see him there, hear
his regular breathing, and watch his figure as it half turned beneath
the clothes. And then, as I was quite certain of my own madness or
hypnosis, I heard other footsteps on the stairs; soft, padded, doglike,
limping footsteps, pattering up, up, up. . . . And again that pungent
animal smell, this time in redoubled volume. Dazed and dream-drowsed, I
crept once more behind the protecting opened door, shaken to the
marrow, but now resigned to any fate known or nameless.
Then into that shaft of eerie moonlight stepped the gaunt form of a
great gray wolf. Limped, I should have said, for one hind foot was held
in the air, as though wounded by some stray shot. The beast turned its
head in my direction, and as it did so the pistol dropped from my
twitching fingers and clattered unheeded to the floor. The ascending
succession of horrors was fast paralyzing my will and consciousness,
for the eyes that now glared toward me from that hellish head were the
gray phosphorescent eyes of my host as they had peered at me through
the darkness of the kitchen.
I do not yet know whether it saw me. The eyes turned from my direction
to the bed, and gazed gluttonously on the spectral sleeping form there.
Then the head tilted back, and from that demon throat came the most
shocking ululation I have ever heard; a thick, nauseous, lupine howl
that made my heart stand still. The form on the bed stirred, opened his
eyes, and shrank from what he saw. The animal crouched quivering, and
then—as the ethereal figure uttered a shriek of mortal human anguish
and terror that no ghost of legend could counterfeit—sprang straight
for its victim’s throat, its white, firm, even teeth flashing in the
moonlight as they closed on the jugular vein of the screaming phantasm.
The scream ended in a blood-choked gurgle, and the frightened human
eyes turned glassy.
That scream had roused me to action, and in a second I had retrieved my
automatic and emptied its entire contents into the wolfish monstrosity
before me. But I heard the unhindered thud of each bullet as it
imbedded itself in the opposite wall.
My nerves gave way. Blind fear hurled me toward the door, and blind
fear prompted the one backward glance in which I saw that the wolf had
sunk its teeth into the body of its quarry. Then came that culminating
sensory impression and the devastating thought to which it gave birth.
This was the same body I had thrust my hand through a few moments
before . . . and yet as I plunged down that black nightmare staircase I
could hear the crunching of bones.
IV.
How I found the trail to Glendale, or how I managed to traverse it, I
suppose I shall never know. I only know that sunrise found me on the
hill at the edge of the woods, with the steepled village outspread
below me, and the blue thread of the Cataqua sparkling in the distance.
Hatless, coatless, ashen-faced, and as soaked with perspiration as if I
had spent the night abroad in the storm, I hesitated to enter the
village till I had recovered at least some outward semblance of
composure. At last I picked my way down hill and through the narrow
streets with their flagstone sidewalks and Colonial doorways till I
reached the Lafayette House, whose proprietor eyed me askance.
“Where from so early, son? And why the wild look?”
“I’ve just come through the woods from Mayfair.”
“You—came—through—the Devil’s Woods—last night—and—alone?” The old man
stared with a queer look of alternate horror and incredulity.
“Why not?” I countered. “I couldn’t have made it in time through
Potowisset, and I had to be here not later than this noon.”
“And last night was full moon! . . . My Gawd!” He eyed me curiously.
“See anything of Vasili Oukranikov or the Count?”
“Say, do I look that simple? What are you trying to do—jolly me?”
But his tone was as grave as a priest’s as he replied. “You must be new
to these parts, sonny. If you weren’t you’d know all about Devil’s
Woods and the full moon and Vasili and the rest.”
I felt anything but flippant, yet knew I must not seem serious after my
earlier remarks. “Go on—I know you’re dying to tell me. I’m like a
donkey—all ears.”
Then he told the legend in his dry way, stripping it of vitality and
convincingness through lack of coloring, detail, and atmosphere. But
for me it needed no vitality or convincingness that any poet could have
given. Remember what I had witnessed, and remember that I had never
heard of the tale until after I had had the experience and fled from
the terror of those crunched phantom bones.
“There used to be quite a few Russians scattered betwixt here and
Mayfair—they came after one of their nihilist troubles back in Russia.
Vasili Oukranikov was one of ’em—a tall, thin, handsome chap with shiny
yellow hair and a wonderful manner. They said, though, that he was a
servant of the devil—a werewolf and eater of men.
“He built him a house in the woods about a third of the way from here
to Mayfair and lived all alone. Every once in a while a traveler would
come out of the woods with some pretty strange tale about being chased
by a big wolf with shining human eyes—like Oukranikov’s. One night
somebody took a pot shot at the wolf, and the next time the Russian
came into Glendale he walked with a limp. That settled it. There wasn’t
any mere suspicion now, but hard facts.
“Then he sent to Mayfair for the Count—his name was Feodor Tchernevsky
and he had bought the old gambrel-roofed Fowler place up State
Street—to come out and see him. They all warned the Count, for he was a
fine man and a splendid neighbor, but he said he could take care of
himself all right. It was the night of the full moon. He was brave as
they make ’em, and all he did was to tell some men he had around the
place to follow him to Vasili’s if he didn’t show up in decent time.
They did—and you tell me, sonny, that you’ve been through those woods
at night?”
“Sure I tell you”—I tried to appear nonchalant—“I’m no Count, and here
I am to tell the tale! . . . But what did the men find at Oukranikov’s
house?”
“They found the Count’s mangled body, sonny, and a gaunt gray wolf
hovering over it with blood-slavering jaws. You can guess who the wolf
was. And folks do say that at every full moon—but sonny, didn’t you see
or hear anything?”
“Not a thing, pop! And say, what became of the wolf—or Vasili
Oukranikov?”
“Why, son, they killed it—filled it full of lead and buried it in the
house, and then burned the place down—you know all this was sixty years
ago when I was a little shaver, but I remember it as if ’twas
yesterday.”
I turned away with a shrug of my shoulders. It was all so quaint and
silly and artificial in the full light of day. But sometimes when I am
alone after dark in waste places, and hear the demon echoes of those
screams and snarls, and that detestable crunching of bones, I shudder
again at the memory of that eldritch night.
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