object:1f.lovecraft - The Loved Dead
author class:H P Lovecraft
subject class:Fiction
genre class:Horror
class:chapter
By C. M. Eddy, Jr.
and H. P. Lovecraft
It is midnight. Before dawn they will find me and take me to a black
cell where I shall languish interminably, while insatiable desires gnaw
at my vitals and wither up my heart, till at last I become one with the
dead that I love.
My seat is the foetid hollow of an aged grave; my desk is the back of a
fallen tombstone worn smooth by devastating centuries; my only light is
that of the stars and a thin-edged moon, yet I can see as clearly as
though it were mid-day. Around me on every side, sepulchral sentinels
guarding unkempt graves, the tilting, decrepit headstones lie
half-hidden in masses of nauseous, rotting vegetation. Above the rest,
silhouetted against the livid sky, an august monument lifts its
austere, tapering spire like the spectral chieftain of a lemurian
horde. The air is heavy with the noxious odors of fungi and the scent
of damp, mouldy earth, but to me it is the aroma of Elysium. It is
still—terrifyingly still—with a silence whose very profundity bespeaks
the solemn and the hideous. Could I choose my habitation it would be in
the heart of some such city of putrefying flesh and crumbling bones;
for their nearness sends ecstatic thrills through my soul, causing the
stagnant blood to race through my veins and my torpid heart to pound
with delirious joy—for the presence of death is life to me!
My early childhood was one long, prosaic, and monotonous apathy.
Strictly ascetic, wan, pallid, undersized, and subject to protracted
spells of morbid moroseness, I was ostracized by the healthy normal
youngsters of my own age. They dubbed me a spoil-sport, an “old woman”,
because I had no interest in the rough, childish games they played, or
any stamina to participate in them, had I so desired.
Like all rural villages, Fenham had its quota of poison-tongued
gossips. Their prying imaginations hailed my lethargic temperament as
some abhorrent abnormality; they compared me with my parents and shook
their heads in ominous doubt at the vast difference. Some of the more
superstitious openly pronounced me a changeling, while others who knew
something of my ancestry called attention to the vague mysterious
rumors concerning a great-great-grand uncle who had been burned at the
stake as a necromancer.
Had I lived in some larger town, with greater opportunities for
congenial companionship, perhaps I could have overcome this early
tendency to be a recluse. As I reached my teens I grew even more
sullen, morbid, and apathetic. My life lacked motivation. I seemed in
the grip of something that dulled my senses, stunted my development,
retarded my activities, and left me unaccountably dissatisfied.
I was sixteen when I attended my first funeral. A funeral in Fenham was
a pre-eminent social event, for our town was noted for the longevity of
its inhabitants. When, moreover, the funeral was that of such a
well-known character as my grandfather, it was safe to assume that the
townspeople would turn out en masse to pay due homage to his memory.
Yet I did not view the approaching ceremony with even latent interest.
Anything that tended to lift me out of my habitual inertia held for me
only the promise of physical and mental disquietude. In deference to my
parents’ importunings, mainly to give myself relief from their caustic
condemnations of what they chose to call my unfilial attitude, I agreed
to accompany them.
There was nothing out of the ordinary about my grandfather’s funeral
unless it was the voluminous array of floral tributes; but this,
remember, was my initiation to the solemn rites of such an occasion.
Something about the darkened room, the oblong coffin with its somber
drapings, the banked masses of fragrant blooms, the dolorous
manifestations of the assembled villagers, stirred me from my normal
listlessness and arrested my attention. Roused from my momentary
reverie by a nudge from my mother’s sharp elbow, I followed her across
the room to the casket where the body of my grandparent lay.
For the first time I was face to face with Death. I looked down upon
the calm placid face lined with its multitudinous wrinkles, and saw
nothing to cause so much of sorrow. Instead, it seemed to me that
grandfather was immeasurably content, blandly satisfied. I felt swayed
by some strange discordant sense of elation. So slowly, so stealthily
had it crept over me, that I could scarcely define its coming. As I
mentally review that portentous hour it seems that it must have
originated with my first glimpse of that funeral scene, silently
strengthening its grip with subtle insidiousness. A baleful malignant
influence that seemed to emanate from the corpse itself held me with
magnetic fascination. My whole being seemed charged with some ecstatic
electrifying force, and I felt my form straighten without conscious
volition. My eyes were trying to burn beneath the closed lids of the
dead man’s and read some secret message they concealed. My heart gave a
sudden leap of unholy glee, and pounded against my ribs with demoniacal
force as if to free itself from the confining walls of my frail frame.
Wild, wanton, soul-satisfying sensuality engulfed me. Once more the
vigorous prod of a maternal elbow jarred me into activity. I had made
my way to the sable-shrouded coffin with leaden tread; I walked away
with new-found animation.
I accompanied the cortege to the cemetery, my whole physical being
permeated with this mystic enlivening influence. It was as if I had
quaffed deep draughts of some exotic elixir—some abominable concoction
brewed from blasphemous formulae in the archives of Belial.
The townsfolk were so intent upon the ceremony that the radical change
in my demeanor passed unnoticed by all save my father and my mother;
but in the fortnight that followed, the village busybodies found fresh
material for their vitriolic tongues in my altered bearing. At the end
of the fortnight, however, the potency of the stimulus began to lose
its effectiveness. Another day or two and I had completely reverted to
my old-time languor, though not to the complete and engulfing
insipidity of the past. Before, there had been an utter lack of desire
to emerge from the enervation; now vague and indefinable unrest
disturbed me. Outwardly I had become myself again, and the
scandal-mongers turned to some more engrossing subject. Had they even
so much as dreamed the true cause of my exhilaration they would have
shunned me as if I were a filthy, leprous thing. Had I visioned the
execrable power behind my brief period of elation I would have locked
myself forever from the rest of the world and spent my remaining years
in penitent solitude.
Tragedy often runs in trilogies, hence despite the proverbial longevity
of our townspeople the next five years brought the death of both
parents. My mother went first, in an accident of the most unexpected
nature; and so genuine was my grief that I was honestly surprised to
find its poignancy mocked and contradicted by that almost forgotten
feeling of supreme and diabolical ecstasy. Once more my heart leaped
wildly within me, once more it pounded at trip-hammer speed and sent
the hot blood coursing through my veins with meteoric fervor. I shook
from my shoulders the harassing cloak of stagnation only to replace it
with the infinitely more horrible burden of loathsome, unhallowed
desire. I haunted the death-chamber where the body of my mother lay, my
soul athirst for the devilish nectar that seemed to saturate the air of
the darkened room. Every breath strengthened me, lifted me to towering
heights of seraphic satisfaction. I knew, now, that it was but a sort
of drugged delirium which must soon pass and leave me correspondingly
weakened by its malign power, yet I could no more control my longing
than I could untwist the Gordian knots in the already tangled skein of
my destiny.
I knew, too, that through some strange Satanic curse my life depended
upon the dead for its motive force; that there was a singularity in my
makeup which responded only to the awesome presence of some lifeless
clod. A few days later, frantic for the bestial intoxicant on which the
fullness of my existence depended, I interviewed Fenham’s sole
undertaker and talked him into taking me on as a sort of apprentice.
The shock of my mother’s demise had visibly affected my father. I think
that if I had broached the idea of such outré employment at any other
time he would have been emphatic in his refusal. As it was he nodded
acquiescence after a moment’s sober thought. How little did I dream
that he would be the object of my first practical lesson!
He, too, died suddenly; developing some hitherto unsuspected heart
affliction. My octogenarian employer tried his best to dissuade me from
the unthinkable task of embalming his body, nor did he detect the
rapturous glint in my eyes as I finally won him over to my damnable
point of view. I cannot hope to express the reprehensible, the
unutterable thoughts that swept in tumultuous waves of passion through
my racing heart as I labored over the lifeless clay. Unsurpassed love
was the keynote of these concepts, a love greater—far greater—than any
I had ever borne him while he was alive.
My father was not a rich man, but he had possessed enough of worldly
goods to make him comfortably independent. As his sole heir I found
myself in rather a paradoxical position. My early youth had totally
failed to fit me for contact with the modern world, yet the primitive
life of Fenham with its attendant isolation palled upon me. Indeed, the
longevity of the inhabitants defeated my sole motive in arranging my
indenture.
After settling the estate it proved an easy matter to secure my release
and I headed for Bayboro, a city some fifty miles away. Here my year of
apprenticeship stood me in good stead. I had no trouble in establishing
a favorable connection as an assistant with the Gresham Corporation, a
concern that maintained the largest funeral parlors in the city. I even
prevailed upon them to let me sleep upon the premises—for already the
proximity of the dead was becoming an obsession.
I applied myself to my task with unwonted zeal. No case was too
gruesome for my impious sensibilities, and I soon became master at my
chosen vocation. Every fresh corpse brought into the establishment
meant a fulfilled promise of ungodly gladness, of irreverent
gratification; a return of that rapturous tumult of the arteries which
transformed my grisly task into one of beloved devotion—yet every
carnal satiation exacted its toll. I came to dread the days that
brought no dead for me to gloat over, and prayed to all the obscene
gods of the nethermost abysses to bring swift, sure death upon the
residents of the city.
Then came the nights when a skulking figure stole surreptitiously
through the shadowy streets of the suburbs; pitch-dark nights when the
midnight moon was obscured by heavy lowering clouds. It was a furtive
figure that blended with the trees and cast fugitive glances over its
shoulder; a figure bent on some malignant mission. After one of these
prowlings the morning papers would scream to their sensation-mad
clientele the details of some nightmare crime; column on column of
lurid gloating over abominable atrocities; paragraph on paragraph of
impossible solutions and extravagant, conflicting suspicions. Through
it all I felt a supreme sense of security, for who would for a moment
suspect an employee in an undertaking establishment, where Death was
supposedly an every-day affair, of seeking surcease from unnamable
urgings in the cold-blooded slaughter of his fellow-beings? I planned
each crime with maniacal cunning, varying the manner of my murders so
that no one would even dream that all were the work of one
blood-stained pair of hands. The aftermath of each nocturnal venture
was an ecstatic hour of pleasure, pernicious and unalloyed; a pleasure
always heightened by the chance that its delicious source might later
be assigned to my gloating administrations in the course of my regular
occupation. Sometimes that double and ultimate pleasure did occur—O
rare and delicious memory!
During long nights when I clung to the shelter of my sanctuary, I was
prompted by the mausolean silence to devise new and unspeakable ways of
lavishing my affections upon the dead that I loved—the dead that gave
me life!
One morning Mr. Gresham came much earlier than usual—came to find me
stretched out upon a cold slab deep in ghoulish slumber, my arms
wrapped about the stark, stiff, naked body of a foetid corpse! He
roused me from my salacious dreams, his eyes filled with mingled
detestation and pity. Gently but firmly he told me that I must go, that
my nerves were unstrung, that I needed a long rest from the repellent
tasks my vocation required, that my impressionable youth was too deeply
affected by the dismal atmosphere of my environment. How little did he
know of the demoniacal desires that spurred me on in my disgusting
infirmities! I was wise enough to see that argument would only
strengthen his belief in my potential madness—it was far better to
leave than to invite discovery of the motive underlying my actions.
After this I dared not stay long in one place for fear some overt act
would bare my secret to an unsympathetic world. I drifted from city to
city, from town to town. I worked in morgues, around cemeteries, once
in a crematory—anywhere that afforded me an opportunity to be near the
dead that I so craved.
Then came the world war. I was one of the first to go across, one of
the last to return. Four years of blood-red charnel Hell . . .
sickening slime of rain-rotten trenches . . . deafening bursting of
hysterical shells . . . monotonous droning of sardonic bullets . . .
smoking frenzies of Phlegethon’s fountains . . . stifling fumes of
murderous gases . . . grotesque remnants of smashed and shredded
bodies . . . four years of transcendent satisfaction.
In every wanderer there is a latent urge to return to the scenes of his
childhood. A few months later found me making my way through the
familiar byways of Fenham. Vacant dilapidated farm houses lined the
adjacent roadsides, while the years had brought equal retrogression to
the town itself. A mere handful of the houses were occupied, but among
these was the one I had once called home. The tangled, weed-choked
driveway, the broken window panes, the uncared-for acres that stretched
behind, all bore mute confirmation of the tales that guarded inquiries
had elicited—that it now sheltered a dissolute drunkard who eked out a
meager existence from the chores his few neighbors gave him out of
sympathy for the mistreated wife and undernourished child who shared
his lot. All in all, the glamour surrounding my youthful environment
was entirely dispelled; so, prompted by some errant foolhardy thought,
I next turned my steps toward Bayboro.
Here, too, the years had brought changes, but in reverse order. The
small city I remembered had almost doubled in size despite its wartime
depopulation. Instinctively I sought my former place of employment,
finding it still there but with an unfamiliar name and “Successor to”
above the door, for the influenza epidemic had claimed Mr. Gresham,
while the boys were overseas. Some fateful mood impelled me to ask for
work. I referred to my tutelage under Mr. Gresham with some
trepidation, but my fears were groundless—my late employer had carried
the secret of my unethical conduct with him to the grave. An opportune
vacancy insured my immediate re-installation.
Then came vagrant haunting memories of scarlet nights of impious
pilgrimages, and an uncontrollable desire to renew those illicit joys.
I cast caution to the winds and launched upon another series of
damnable debaucheries. Once more the yellow sheets found welcome
material in the devilish details of my crimes, comparing them to the
red weeks of horror that had appalled the city years before. Once more
the police sent out their dragnet and drew into its enmeshing
folds—nothing!
My thirst for the noxious nectar of the dead grew to a consuming fire,
and I began to shorten the periods between my odious exploits. I
realized that I was treading on dangerous ground, but demoniac desire
gripped me in its torturing tentacles and urged me on.
All this time my mind was becoming more and more benumbed to any
influence except the satiation of my insane longings. Little details
vitally important to one bent on such evil escapades escaped me.
Somehow, somewhere, I left a vague trace, an elusive clue, behind—not
enough to warrant my arrest, but sufficient to turn the tide of
suspicion in my direction. I sensed this espionage, yet was helpless to
stem the surging demand for more dead to quicken my enervated soul.
Then came the night when the shrill whistle of the police roused me
from my fiendish gloating over the body of my latest victim, a gory
razor still clutched tightly in my hand. With one dexterous motion I
closed the blade and thrust it into the pocket of the coat I wore.
Nightsticks beat a lusty tattoo upon the door. I crashed the window
with a chair, thanking Fate I had chosen one of the cheaper tenement
districts for my locale. I dropped into a dingy alley as blue-coated
forms burst through the shattered door. Over shaky fences, through
filthy back yards, past squalid ramshackle houses, down dimly lighted
narrow streets I fled. I thought at once of the wooded marshes that lay
beyond the city and stretched for half a hundred miles till they
touched the outskirts of Fenham. If I could reach this goal I would be
temporarily safe. Before dawn I was plunging headlong through the
foreboding wasteland, stumbling over the rotting roots of half-dead
trees whose naked branches stretched out like grotesque arms striving
to encumber me with mocking embraces.
The imps of the nefarious gods to whom I offered my idolatrous prayers
must have guided my footsteps through that menacing morass. A week
later, wan, bedraggled, and emaciated, I lurked in the woods a mile
from Fenham. So far I had eluded my pursuers, yet I dared not show
myself, for I knew that the alarm must have been sent broadcast. I
vaguely hoped I had thrown them off the trail. After that first
frenetic night I had heard no sound of alien voices, no crashing of
heavy bodies through the underbrush. Perhaps they had concluded that my
body lay hidden in some stagnant pool or had vanished forever in the
tenacious quagmire.
Hunger gnawed at my vitals with poignant pangs, thirst left my throat
parched and dry. Yet far worse was the unbearable hunger of my starving
soul for the stimulus I found only in the nearness of the dead. My
nostrils quivered in sweet recollection. No longer could I delude
myself with the thought that this desire was a mere whim of the heated
imagination. I knew now that it was an integral part of life itself;
that without it I should burn out like an empty lamp. I summoned all my
remaining energy to fit me for the task of satisfying my accursed
appetite. Despite the peril attending my move I set out to reconnoiter,
skirting the sheltering shadows like an obscene wraith. Once more I
felt that strange sensation of being led by some unseen satellite of
Satan. Yet even my sin-steeped soul revolted for a moment when I found
myself before my native abode, the scene of my youthful hermitage.
Then these disquieting memories faded. In their place came overwhelming
lustful desire. Behind the rotting walls of this old house lay my prey.
A moment later I had raised one of the shattered windows and climbed
over the sill. I listened for a moment, every sense alert, every muscle
tensed for action. The silence reassured me. With cat-like tread I
stole through the familiar rooms until stertorous snores indicated the
place where I was to find surcease from my sufferings. I allowed myself
a sigh of anticipatory ecstasy as I pushed open the door of the
bedchamber. Panther-like I made my way to the supine form stretched out
in drunken stupor. The wife and child—where were they?—well, they could
wait. My clutching fingers groped for his throat. . . .
Hours later I was again the fugitive, but a new-found stolen strength
was mine. Three silent forms slept to wake no more. It was not until
the garish light of day penetrated my hiding-place that I visualized
the certain consequences of my rashly purchased relief. By this time
the bodies must have been discovered. Even the most obtuse of the rural
police must surely link the tragedy with my flight from the nearby
city. Besides, for the first time I had been careless enough to leave
some tangible proof of my identity—my fingerprints on the throats of
the newly dead. All day I shivered in nervous apprehension. The mere
crackling of a dry twig beneath my feet conjured mental images that
appalled me. That night, under cover of the protecting darkness I
skirted Fenham and made for the woods that lay beyond. Before dawn came
the first definite hint of renewed pursuit—the distant baying of
hounds.
Through the long night I pressed on, but by morning I could feel my
artificial strength ebbing. Noon brought once more the insistent call
of the contaminating curse, and I knew I must fall by the way unless I
could once more experience that exotic intoxication that came only with
the proximity of the loved dead. I had traveled in a wide semicircle.
If I pushed steadily ahead, midnight would bring me to the cemetery
where I had laid away my parents years before. My only hope, I felt
certain, lay in reaching this goal before I was overtaken. With a
silent prayer to the devils that dominated my destiny I turned leaden
feet in the direction of my last stronghold.
God! Can it be that a scant twelve hours have passed since I started
for my ghostly sanctuary? I have lived an eternity in each leaden hour.
But I have reached a rich reward. The noxious odors of this neglected
spot are frankincense to my suffering soul!
The first streaks of dawn are graying the horizon. They are coming! My
sharp ears catch the far-off howling of the dogs! It is but a matter of
minutes before they find me and shut me away forever from the rest of
the world, to spend my days in ravaging yearnings till at last I join
the dead I love!
They shall not take me! A way of escape is open! A coward’s choice,
perhaps, but better—far better—than endless months of nameless misery.
I will leave this record behind me that some soul may perhaps
understand why I make this choice.
The razor! It has nestled forgotten in my pocket since my flight from
Bayboro. Its blood-stained blade gleams oddly in the waning light of
the thin-edged moon. One slashing stroke across my left wrist and
deliverance is assured. . . .
Warm, fresh blood spatters grotesque patterns on dingy, decrepit
slabs . . . phantasmal hordes swarm over the rotting graves . . .
spectral fingers beckon me . . . ethereal fragments of unwritten
melodies rise in celestial crescendo . . . distant stars dance
drunkenly in demoniac accompaniment . . . a thousand tiny hammers beat
hideous dissonances on anvils inside my chaotic brain . . . gray ghosts
of slaughtered spirits parade in mocking silence before me . . .
scorching tongues of invisible flame sear the brand of Hell upon my
sickened soul . . . I can—write—no—more. . . .
Return to “The Loved Dead”
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