HP Lovecraft's Magazine of Horror - Weird Tales

these thoughts, they are too much to bear. I have locked away
that time in the deepest vault of my mind. Until now. Curse him.
I have lit all the lamps. Sleep is murdered. Brandy is called
for. Courvoisier Grand Cru, in a sparkling balloon. As I raise it
to the light it is the gold of tigers’ eyes.
!JLCF UUNBo %;LFSo There is glass on the floor, and
blood.
As I raised my brandy in a toast to no-one, my eye was
caught by a dark shimmer of movement in the far shadows of
the room, and I saw the edge of the carpet fold up on itself. It
reared up like surf at the sea’s edge and began to travel towards
me, fold on fold. I took a step back and felt the table edge
behind me.
The tsunami, the great tidal wave of Japan came into my
mind. It begins far out to sea, initiated by some fathomless suboceanic
eruption, then gathers speed driving a crescendo of
water higher and higher until it envelops all in its path—so did
the carpet come at me in lightning corrugations, rearing up as
if hungry to clutch my naked feet . . . I screamed and sprang
back on to the table top, lifting my legs. The brandy glass
crunched in my band. Blood and liquor spattered the carpet
which now stood in a peak level with my face, and in that second
something other than carpet revealed itself.
Eyes out of Hell. A long flick of tongue. A bestial stare to
paralyse and maim. And then—gone.
The carpet was flat again, flat as the day it was laid.
4hat time I was in Africa, I saw a few things. You
couldn’t always explain them away. I saw a black bloke
once, clothed himself in fire—it was real, the fire, he
let me put a stick to it, and the stick went up but he didn’t—
scorched my hand. You get so you think O.K., that stuff is here
in the world too. And then you keep away from it, because it’s
like a particular weapon you can’t ever be trained sufficiently to
handle. Or it’s like gambling, or too much drink, that you have
to learn to leave alone.
Put it this way, that change in my room, that thing that
came out of the ceiling, I didn’t have any doubts I’d seen them.
But I turned my back on it all pretty quick once it was gone.
Nevertheless, I knew who’d caused it. That guy upstairs, with
the ring and the cane.
In the next few days, I heard a couple of sounds up there.
There was some kind of music that didn’t sound right, a heavy
thick beat, like something from the East . . . Certainly not the
dainty whiff of the classics he’d put on before. Also, I heard a
woman up there one night. She sounded giggly, pissed, frankly
a bit off her head. But she’d have to be, to go after a bugger like
him, wouldn’t she?
I did my usual, and kept out of it.
Only, I started to leave the house more. I’d walk round the
streets at night, trying to stay out of the pubs. One night I
picked up a woman myself. She was all right, nothing special.
But it kept me out of the pubs and the flat.
Back at base, anyway, I started not sleeping. I mean the
worse kind, where you just don’t, as if no one invented sleep
yet. All your past starts coming back up then, like your brain’s
throwing up. In the early hours I’d be making tea and playing
patience. I never looked at the ceiling, not even in bed with the
door on the other room open. I’d moved the chairs and the
table away in there, to the sides of the room, against the wall.
One other thing, I went down to find the caretaker bod,
and for once when I was looking for him, he was there in the
lobby.
“My flat,” I said. “Any chance of changing it?”
He looked affronted, a scrawny little chap who can’t shave
himself properly, all whiskery like a rat.
“Your rooms is very nice,” he told me.
“A palace, mate, but they don’t quite suit me like I hoped
they would.”
“What’s wrong with than?” he asked. “There ain’t nothing
wrong with them,” he answered himself.
“There’s damp, and a drip,” I said. “It runs down through
the ceiling.”
I watched him closely when I said this. Not a flicker. But I
hadn’t thought there would be. He didn’t know about any of it,
or didn’t want to, like me.
“No damp,” he said.
“What about the flats below mine? Any going spare? I can
pay a bit more, if it’s right.”
“No other flats. American people pay a lot of money to
store old furniture, innit.”
And upstairs, I thought, it’s taken—presumably by a crazy
magician in league with Christ knew what. I wasn’t going to
bad-mouth him either, not to this one.
I said, indifferently, “I may have to move out then.”
The rat shrugged.
It had been worth a try.
I went back up to my place, and put the whisky I’d opened
and drunk quite a bit of back in the kitchen cupboard. I didn’t
want to move on, not yet. That was the whole idea of bivouacing
here.
So, there I am, and tonight I hear the voice.
I say voice, but was it? It was like—gravel scrunching
between someone’s teeth.
I’d been lying awake as per usual. The clock said three minutes
past 4 a.m. I’d been just about to get up and put the kettle
on, when there was this kind of rushing sound, like a high wind—
and then the first noise, like gravel whispering—and then—
I heard what it said, despite its lack of clear diction or a
posh accent. What it said was: I ARE OORL. I ARE
INWORLD. GREETINGS THEE, MY NEW-FOUNDED
DESPAIRORS.
It was exactly that. I know, because it said it over and over,
like it wanted me to learn the message off. Which I damn well
did, of course. Even the name—if it was—Oorl—that’s the
only way I can spell it. And inworld all one word. And this
other word that isn’t a word—despairors. Between each phrase
I heard something else too, a little soft sipping.
I lay there rigid. Listening, learning. It must have gone on
about fifty minutes.
In the dark, I kept my eyes on the ceiling of the outer
room. There was nothing to be seen, just the stain that had
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 85