HP Lovecraft's Magazine of Horror - Weird Tales

14 H .P . L O V E C R A F T ’S M A G A Z IN E O F H O R R O R
to a businessman was like a millstone to a swimmer.
One of the thugs grabbed my right wrist, pressing it against
the table where it rested. The other goon opened his jacket,
extracting a pistol with a heavy handle, flipped it in his hand
with a rehearsed motion, and brought it down across my fingers—lightly,
but with enough force to give me an idea of how
much it would hurt when he did it in earnest. His eyes glinted
with a malicious promise.
“Please don’t break my hand.” I felt tired rather than
scared. “I need it.”
“Will you come then?”
What was a man to do? I followed them out of the restaurant,
into the streets filled with silvery mist highlighted by an
occasional hazy sphere of a gas lamp. On our way, we took a
shortcut and skimmed along the edge of the deaders’ town,
where ghostly dead man’s birches shone through the droplets
of moisture in the air, their branches studded with tiny green
flickers, the condensation weeping silently down their trunks.
We walked across a wooden bridge that creaked and resonated
under our feet. I smelled something musty, and a
moment later spotted a dead beggar, who sat in the middle of
the bridge, reclining by the guardrail. His eyes bulged out of his
swollen dark face, and his thick purple tongue protruded where
his lower jaw used to be, but was now gone, lost forever. He
would not walk around for long, and seemed to know it—his
white eyes were turned upwards, greeting the stars as they
sprinkled across the darkened sky.
“Filthy rat,” said one of my guides. “He probably died a
beggar.”
“Likely,” I agreed, and couldn’t look away.
The other guide spat, propelling a gob of saliva and
phlegm that landed with a satisfying smack onto the beggar’s
left eye. “I can’t believe it. They are everywhere nowadays—
their part of town just keeps on spreading.”
“That doesn’t require a great deal of faith, to believe that,”
I said. “The dead will always outnumber the living.”
“How’s that?”
“You live, you die. Everyone who’s now alive will end up
in the deaders’ town. Even you, so be nice to them.”
The guards huffed, but their gazes slid off the beggar and
turned downward, to the slats under our feet. One could live in
this place and be carefree only if he did not think of his
inevitable demise, the inexplicable one-way traffic. I couldn’t
ignore this silent but constant shuffling from one side of the
town to the other; I couldn’t forget that the deader city swelled
with every passing year, encroaching onto the town of the living.
Soon, the alivers’ town would be but a fleck in the sea of
rotting flesh. I was never carefree.
I shook my head and stepped off the bridge onto the
quartz pavement, where the gaslights were installed with regularity,
and the trees emitted no deathly glow, but cast deep, cool
shadows, soft as crushed silk. A light perfume of jasmine scented
the night, and soft singing came from nearby—the sort of
thing the alivers enjoy.
The Areti manor squatted squarely on the hillside, its windows
shuttered, but a soft glow of lamplight seeped around the
edges, beckoning. The three of us entered the hallway.
Darkness pooled in the rounded recesses of the walls, and my
soft-soled shoes seemed too loud. There didn’t seem to be any
people here, just echoes. There were no doors either—just curtains
that billowed in the entryways, blown about by the dusty
winds that skipped around the manor, unchallenged.
“In here,” one of the goons said, and pulled open a curtain
decorated with a beaded dragon. Its eyes glinted in the firelight
that reached from within.
I entered a vast hall drenched in shadows. “Venerable
Mistress?”
“Right this way, Lonagan.” She reclined on a chaise made
of solid oak, and still it creaked under her weight. The fireplace
cast a semicircle of orange light, and I stepped closer.
Her face was oval and pretty, with large doe eyes and a
prim, full-lipped mouth. Her long auburn hair curled and cascaded,
descending onto her shoulders and chest, playing like
waterfalls across the vast terrain that was her body. She was a
landscape, not a woman—hills and valleys of flesh stretched
before me in every direction, barely contained on the gigantic
chaise. Only her face and hands seemed human.
I bowed. “What can I do for you, Venerable Mistress
Areti?”
She smiled, and for a moment I forgot about her distended
body, and looked into her ink-blue, almost black eyes. “I
hear that you can find things.”
I inclined my head. “That is indeed the case. What would
you like me to find?”
Her smile grew colder, tighter. “I thought you could figure
that out.”
“No,” I said with rising irritation. “I’m not a magician. I’m
just a thorough man.”
She undulated with laughter, sending slow, hypnotic waves
through her flesh. “All right then. I lost a gemstone—or rather,
it was stolen from me. By the deaders.”
“Are you sure?” The deaders were not known for crime—
that was the province of the still-living.
“Oh, quite sure. You see, they are recent deaders, and I fear
that my men were somehow responsible for their transition.”
It still sounded strange to me, but I nodded. Who was I to
judge? Perhaps they had the stone on them while they transitioned;
perhaps their passions were slower to die than was
common. “What is this stone like?”
“It’s a cherrystone.” She lifted a delicate, fine hand, and
spread her index finger and thumb half an inch apart. “Small,
pink. You’ll know it when you see it.”
I was certain of that. Even though I’ve never held anything
as valuable as a cherrystone in my hands, I heard enough about
them and their powers to know how rare they were. Especially
pink ones—chances were, it was the only one in town.
“What about those who took it?”
She shrugged. “Ask my guardsmen for a description.”
“Do you know their names?”
“I would imagine they’ve shed their names by now, so they
would be useless to you.”
So it was longer than a week since they were dead. Yet, I
couldn’t imagine why she would wait a week to start looking for
her cherrystone. The only conclusion that made sense was the