HP Lovecraft's Magazine of Horror - Weird Tales

28 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
“Yes, Jonah.”
“An’ that it’s some kindae magical booby-trap?”
“Yes.”
“Well, why are they makin’ us do it?”
“Because they’re no stupid enough to do it themselves, ya
bam,” Malky reminded him.
“There’s got to be more to it than that, Malky,” I said.
“Someone or something wants these rituals performed at last,
but no one in their right mind would want to muck around with
these forces. There’s something very weird going on because, if
the play works as Doctor Dee intended, then it’s curtains for
everyone.”
.ow, boys,” Miss Sim said, “let me explain the long or
medial ‘s’ to you. You need to understand this archaic
spelling to be able to pronounce the words in Dee’s
script correctly.”
We shuffled nervously in the moth-eaten seats of the theatre
as our drama coach went on. It was a shadowy barn of a
place and the flock wallpaper seemed to writhe with a life of its
own.
“It’s a form of the lower case letter ‘s’ that was once used
at the beginning of or within a word. A good example is ‘sinfulness’.”
Miss Sim wrote “finfulnefs” on the blackboard standing
on the middle of the stage before giving us a meaningful look.
“The form we use now was called the terminal or short ‘s’.”
“Short arse!” Wullie shouted.
Miss Sim gave him a venomous stare, flicked her wrist and
stotted her chalk off his forehead so hard it vaporized on contact.
Wullie collapsed, stunned, and our teacher returned to her
lesson.
“The medial ‘s’ is often mistaken for a lower case ‘f’, and
sometimes even has an f-like cross-stroke drawn through its
middle. The confusion between the medial ‘s’ and ‘f’ has been
the subject of some low humor, but if any of you attempt to
have fun at my expense by referring to me as ‘Mifs’, I will have
your tongues tied in granny knots.”
Wullie groaned as he came round, his pale face made even
whiter by its dusting of chalk.
“Miss,” I asked carefully, “can you tell us what the play is
for?”
“What’s it for?” For a moment, our teacher looked fazed,
then she smiled as if receiving an unseen prompt. “It’s for
entertaining the school board during the festive season.”
“Pardon me, but I meant the text itself.”
“Well, like any play, it’s a work of self-expression,” our
teacher told us with a smile so distant it looked like it was being
faxed in from abroad. “A story told by performers who act out
the highs and lows of human experience, tugging the heartstrings
of their audience like emotional puppeteers . . .”
Miss Sim was drifting away, remembering her former
career on the stage. We’d been told her days as an actress had
ended when her immersion in character had gone too far and
she’d begun to channel the characters she played. Her performance
in Medea as the enchantress herself had been her last.
While no one would have suggested that she’d died on stage,
everyone else in the cast had.
s
“She doesn’t realize,” I whispered to the rest of the class
while our teacher was distracted. “They’ve set her up too . . .”
This was worse than I’d thought. We were in serious danger
of becoming the world’s first kamikaze theatre company.
“Miss, Miss!” I shouted, trying to bring her to her senses.
“Are you sure we should even be rehearsing this play if all the
magic works?”
She shook her head and was back in the room with us
again, no longer hypnotized by her memories, but still under a
glamorous spell. Miss Sim had been charmed into thinking only
in terms of acts—theatrical acts—not their actual consequences.
“Oh, you don’t have to worry about peaking too early,
boys. All drama needs an audience, and the Head has told me
that the stars have to be right for the performance to work
properly. You just have to be ready for opening night.”
“I wannae know what we’re opening,” Malky whispered as
we were sent down to the props room under the stage.
“Uck-uck-uck,” went something in a tea chest covered by
a rotting piece of backdrop.
I hauled the manky cloth away and saw Mr Wood’s peeling
head staring back at me.
“You’re ‘ucked!” our old teacher cackled. “Every last
gloody one o’ you!”
Malky hauled the remains of the evil ventriloquist’s
dummy out of the chest and stuck an exploding cigar in its
clacking mouth. I waved a box of matches in Woody’s face.
“So that’s where you got to,” I said.
I looked the wooden head in its painted eyes and made the
sign of the evil eye, saying, “Tell us what you know, or we’ll
smuggle you into woodwork and use the sander to turn what’s
left of you into a cue ball . . .”
Before we stuffed the dummy back with the other props,
the little blockhead had spilled the magic beans.
MAKING your way through the unlit corridors of Boleskin
House after curfew is no picnic if you’re a pupil—not least
because things get let loose at night which would happily make