Graveyard reader, p.15
Graveyard Reader, page 15
The cries were shocking; and as I stood in the brilliant apartment alone and dazed, listening to their vanishing echoes, I trembled at the thought of what might be lurking near me unseen. At a casual inspection the room seemed deserted, but when I moved toward one of the alcoves I thought I detected a presence there— a hint of motion beyond the golden-arched doorway leading to another and somewhat similar room. As I approached the arch I began to perceive the presence more clearly; and then, with the first and last sound I ever uttered—a ghastly ululation that revolted me almost as poignantly as its noxious cause—I beheld in full, frightful vividness the inconceivable, indescribable, and unmentionable monstrosity which had by its simple appearance changed a merry company to a herd of delirious fugitives.
I can not even hint what it was like, for it was a compound of all that is unclean, uncanny, unwelcome, abnormal, and detestable. It was the ghoulish shade of decay, antiquity, and desolation; the putrid, dripping eidolon of unwholesome revelation, the awful baring of that which the merciful earth should always hide. God knows it was not of this world—or no longer of this world—yet to my horror I saw in its eaten-away and bone-revealing outlines a leering, abhorrent travesty on the human shape; and in its moldy, disintegrating apparel an unspeakable quality that chilled me even more.
I was almost paralyzed, but not too much so to make a feeble effort toward flight; a backward stumble which failed to break the spell in which the nameless, voiceless monster held me. My eyes, bewitched by the glassy orbs which stared loathsomely into them, refused to close, though they were mercifully blurred, and showed the terrible object but indistinctly after the first shock. I tried to raise my hand to shut out the sight, yet so stunned were my nerves that my arm could not fully obey my will. The attempt, however, was enough to disturb my balance; so that I had to stagger forward several steps to avoid falling. As I did so I became suddenly and agonizingly aware of the nearness of the carrion thing, whose hideous hollow breathing I half fancied I could hear. Nearly mad, I found myself yet able to throw out a hand to ward off the fetid apparition which pressed so close; when in one cataclysmic second of cosmic nightmarishness and hellish accident my fingers touched the rotting outstretched paw of the monster beneath the golden arch.
I did not shriek, but all the fiendish ghouls that ride the night-wind shrieked for me as in that same second they crashed down upon my mind a single and fleeting avalanche of soul-annihilating memory. I knew in that second all that had been; I remembered beyond the frightful castle and the trees; and recognized the altered edifice in which I now stood; I recognized, most terrible of all, the unholy abomination that stood leering before me as I withdrew my sullied fingers from its own.
But in the cosmos there is balm as well as bitterness, and that balm is nepenthe. In the supreme horror of that second I forgot what had horrified me, and the burst of black memory vanished in a chaos of echoing images. In a dream I fled from that haunted and accursed pile, and ran swiftly and silently in the moonlight. When I returned to the churchyard place of marble and went down the steps I found the stone trap-door immovable; but I was not sorry, for I had hated the antique castle and the trees. Now I ride with the mocking and friendly ghouls on the night wind, and play by day amongst the catacombs of Nephren-Ka in the sealed and unknown valley of Hadoth by the Nile. I know that light is not for me, save that of the moon over the rock tombs of Neb, nor any gayety save the unnamed feasts of Nitokris beneath the Great Pyramid; yet in my new wildness and freedom I almost welcome the bitterness of alienage.
For although nepenthe has calmed me, I know always that I am an outsider; stranger in this century and among those who are still men. This I have known ever since I stretched out my fingers to the abomination within that great gilded frame; stretched out my fingers and touched a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass.
Theodore Sturgeon
THE GRAVEYARD READER
This brand-new story is pure and lovely
Sturgeon, Sturgeon at his understated best,
Sturgeon with an even better than usual
firecracker in the tail of his tale. A quiet
kind of firecracker, true; quietly devastating
and perhaps, for some people, almost inaudible.
But it’s there, all right, and it burns, too.
The stone was included in the price of the plot; I hadn’t known. I hadn’t wanted a stone because stones have to say something, and what can you say in a case like this? but unwittingly I’d bought the thing and because I had, the man had put it up—what else? I had anger enough to scatter around heart-deep, but, reasonably, not a flake for the men who had put up the stone.
It was a right and proper stone, I supposed, if one must have one of the things at all: bigger than many of the cheating, bargain sort of stones that stood nearby, and tastefully smaller than the hulking ostentatious ones. Here ties my wife between poverty and vulgarity. Now there you go. Have a single elevating thought about that woman and it comes out sounding like that. Soils everything she touches.
The stone called me a liar for that. It was of a whitish granite that would weather whiter still. It had edges of that crinkly texture like matted hair that nothing would stick to because nothing could possibly want to, and a glassy face that nothing would stick to if it wanted nothing else. Whited sepulchre, that’s what the hell. The stone is its own epitaph, because look: it’s white forever, white and clean, and it has no words—which is to say, nothing. Nothing, and clean, ergo, Here lies nothing clean.
What I always say is, there’s a way to say anything in the world if you can only think of the way to say it, and I had. I liked this epitaph just fine. There would be no words on this stone, and it had its epitaph.
Laughing out loud is bad form in a graveyard, and stepping down hard on a man’s instep is bad form anywhere. This was the moment when, backing off for some perspective on this my masterpiece, I did both these things. The man, apparently, had been standing behind me watching. I whirled and looked him up and down, hoping sincerely that he was offended. There are times in a man’s life when he wouldn’t want even his friends to like him, and such a time is no time to pay court to the esteem of a stranger.
He wasn’t offended. All I got out of him (just then) was a pleasant smile. He had a sort of anybody’s face, the like of which you might encounter anywhere, which is to say he had the kind of face you wouldn’t be surprised to see visiting a cemetery. I’ll say this for him: he was harmonious; his voice and clothing exactly suited his face, and though he wasn’t an old man, the things he said weren’t hard to figure, coming from a man like that. You could tell he was experienced.
Neither of us said anything right away when I bumped him. He sort of put his hands on my shoulders for a second either to hold one of us up or to keep the other from falling, which gave the gesture a full fifty per cent chance of being selfish, and I am not about to give away a thank-you in the face of those odds. As for an excuse-me, I didn’t want to be excused, I wanted to be blamed. So I glared at first, while he smiled, and after those things got used up there was nothing for it but to stand where we were, side by side, looking at my wife’s grave because that was straight ahead and we couldn’t just go on looking at each other. It was while we were doing this that he said, “Mind if I read it?”
I looked at him. Even if this had been the perfect time and place for joking, a face that looked the way his face looked contained no jests. I looked from him to the bland, uncommunicative sheet of stone and the raw mound with its neat planes still unslumped by wind or water, and I looked back at him. It occurred to me then that maybe his eyes weren’t so good, and he honestly didn’t know there was nothing on the stone. “Yes,” I said as offensively as I could, “I mind.”
He put up his hands placatingly, and said in that same good-natured way, “All right, all right! I won’t.” And he gave me a sort of friendly half-wave and started off.
I looked at the grave and at his retreating back and “Hey!” I called before I realized I wanted to.
He came back, smiling. “Yes?”
I felt robbed, that’s why I had called him back. I’d realized I wanted to see his face when he got close enough to squint at that unmarked stone. I said, “What I mean is, I’d mind if anyone read anything off that. It would give me the creeps.”
He didn’t even glance toward the grave, but said patiently, “It’s all right. I promised you I wouldn’t.”
I said, “Oh for God’s sake,” disgustedly, and with an angry motion beckoned him to follow me. I had that oafish feeling you get when you tell a joke and somebody doesn’t get it, so instead of letting the matter drop you lay your ears back and start explaining, knowing perfectly well that when you finally get the point across it isn’t going to be funny, either to your victim or to yourself. I ranged up on one side of the grave and he came up and crossed over and stood at the other side, not four feet away from the headstone. He was looking right at it, but didn’t say anything, so I barked, “Well?”
“Well,” he asked politely, “what?”
The oafish feeling intensified. “Don’t you find the language of that epitaph a little on the terse side?” I said sarcastically.
He glanced at it. “There’s never very much on the stone,” he said, and added, as if to himself, “while it’s new.”
“New or old,” I said, and I guess I showed something of the anger I felt, “the way it is is the way it stays. Anything that gets written on that rock is not going to be written by me.”
“Naturally not,” he said.
To make it quite clear, I said, “Or by anyone I hire.”
“Well,” he said comfortingly, “don’t worry. I won’t read it, now or later.”
“You can say that again,” I growled. I was finally coming to a certainty about this grave. “The less said about this whole thing, including her and her slab, the better. That was her strong point anyway; keeping her mouth shut. At long last, anything she’s hiding, she can keep. I don’t want to hear it.”
“Then you won’t,” he said peacefully, “and neither will I, because I’ve promised.” After a sort of pause, he added, “I think I ought to warn you, though, that somebody else might come along and read it, not knowing of your objections.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m not the only one in the world who can read graves.”
“I told you—I’m not putting any inscription on. Not a monogram. Not so much as Herr, or even—hey, this would be cute: Her lies. Not that she was really ever a liar. She just wouldn’t say.”
“The inscriptions never say very much by themselves,” he said in his patient voice, “taken out of context.”
“What do you mean, context?”
“I don’t think you quite understood me. I didn’t say I read gravestones. I said I read graves.”
I looked blankly at that tidy, tamped-down mound and the virgin stone, and back at the shovel-patted yellow earth turning grainy in the late warm sunlight, and a more uncommunicative arrangement I had never laid eyes on. It conveyed nothing about her and, for that matter, nothing about anyone else. Me, for instance. No flowers.
“Not this one, you can’t,” I said finally.
“I wouldn’t.”
“That promise of yours,” I said with a certain amount of smug enmity, “comes in pretty handy, doesn’t it? I think I see what you’re driving at, and I don’t think it’s any too funny. You’ve spent a lot of time ghouling around places like this until you can tell to a dime what the planting cost, how much the survivors give a damn, if any, how long the box has been buried, and how good a job the crew did on the detail. But any time there’s a little more than readily meets the eye, like a guy who says he won’t have an inscription after paying for a stone, you don’t have to risk a wrong guess. You just make a gentlemanly promise, casual-like.” I snorted through my nostrils.
He still wouldn’t let me annoy him. He simply explained where I was wrong. He said, “It isn’t like that at all. There’s nothing to deduce, or to guess at. It’s all there,” he said, nodding at but not looking at the grave, “to be read. I’ll admit that it’s a little harder to do on a very new grave; you might say that it’s all in very fine print and a little hard to see unless you read well. But in time it all comes dear—very clear. As to the promise, it’s very obvious that you wouldn’t want a stranger like myself to know everything about her.”
“Everything?” I laughed bitterly. “Nobody knows everything about her.”
“Well, it’s all there.”
“You know what’s happened to me,” I said a little too loudly and a little too fast, “I’m a little bit out of my head from all that’s happened the last week or so, which makes me stand here listening to you as if you made sense.”
He didn’t say anything.
“By God,” I mumbled, not talking to him or to anyone special at the moment, “it wasn’t too long ago I’d given anything you like to know some things about that woman. Only since I made up my mind I don’t want to know, I feel much better,” I said, feeling miserable. “You know what she did, she wasn’t home when I got there that night, we’d had a little sort of fight the morning pack anything or take anything but that one green tweed suit and that stupid hat she used to wear with it. If she had any money it wasn’t much. Then, nothing for three whole days and nights, until that phone call.” My hands got all knotted up and then seemed to get too heavy, pulling my shoulders into a slump. I sat down on the edge of an iron-pipe railing at the edge of the next grave and let the heavy hands dangle down between my thighs. I hung my head down so I could watch them while I talked. Watching them didn’t tell me anything. “Phone call from the police who found her driver’s license in her handbag, the one that matched that stupid hat.”
I raised my head and looked across the grave at the man. I couldn’t see him too clearly until I hit myself across the eyes with my sleeve. The cuff buttons had got themselves turned around, and it hurt. “Eight hundred miles from home with some guy in a sports car, and all she had on was one of those fancified bathrobes, you know, hostess gown, a good one, I never saw it before. Don’t know where the green suit got to or the stupid hat either. Bag was in the car. Car was in an oak tree. No kidding. Upside down in an oak tree fifteen feet off the ground. The police said he had to be going a hundred and twenty to hit as hard as that. I never heard of him before. I don’t know how she got there. I don’t know why. Well,” I said after I thought about it for a minute, “I guess I do know more or less why, but not exactly why; not exactly what was in her mind when she did whatever it was she did to get herself into that. I never knew exactly what was in her mind. I could never get her to say. She would—”
I guess at that point I stopped talking out loud, because it all turned into a series of swift pictures, one after the other, inside my head, too fast for words, and too detailed. What’s the matter? I’d be saying, and her, kissing my hands, looking up at me with tears in her eyes: Can’t you see? And again: me yelling at her, Well if what I do makes you unhappy, why don’t you tell me what you want? Go ahead, write the script, I’ll play it. And the way she’d turn her back when I talked like that, .and I’d hear her voice sofdy: If you’d only—and I just—and then she’d stall, inarticulate, shake her head. She never talked enough. She never said the things that … that … World of feeling, spectrum of sensitivity, and no words, no dammit dammit words. Picture of her smiling, looking off, out, a little up; I say What are you so happy about? Oh, she says, coming back into the world, Oh … and whispers my name four times, smiling. Now what is that—communication?
“I got so there was nothing in the world for me, sleeping or waking or working or mixing a drink,” I said aloud to the man, “but Why won’t she tell me? And right to the end, she did that to me. Wondering why she does this or that, why she wears one particular kind of look instead of another, maybe, after all, these things don’t matter. But look how she winds up, dead in that new housecoat I didn’t buy for her, eight hundred miles from home with a guy I don’t know; all in the world I have now is why? why? and the idea that she wound it up in the one way where I’d never find out. I mean,” I added as soberly as I could, because I was unaccountably out of breath, just from talking to a man, imagine? “I mean, not that I want to find out. Because I don’t give a damn any more.”
“Well, that’s good then,” he said, “because you’ll save yourself a lot of trouble.”
“What trouble?”
“Learning to read graves.”
I got enormously tired of this conversation suddenly. “Now what good would it do me to learn a thing like that?”
“None,” he said in that pleasant way of his. “You have just finished saying that you don’t want to know anything about her, any more.”
“It finally sinks in,” I said sarcastically, “that what you’re trying to tell me is that a person who can read graves can stand in front of one and read it like a book.”
“A biography.” He nodded.
“And get out of it everything that person ever did.”
“Or said, or thought,” he agreed.
I looked at the grave, its empty crumbling bare planes, its empty-faced headstone. I looked again, but briefly, at the events that had made it be Here just where it was, when it was, containing what, and I wet my lips and said, “You’re kidding.”
He never seemed to answer what deserved no answer, that man.
I asked him, “Even things nobody ever knew before?”
“Especially those things,” he said. “What you can see of a human being is only the outside of the top part of the surface. Now if everything—is there—” he pointed—“to be read—everything—then it follows that you can read far more than the most penetrating analysis of anything living.” When I had no response to this, he said, “Living things aren’t finished, you see. Everything they have ever been in contact with, each thought they have had, each person they have known—these things are still at work in them; nothing’s finished.”
