The Second Wish and Other Exhalations
By Brian Lumley
(New English Library, 1995)
❖
The Second Wish (1980)
A cunning tourist story. It takes time, but Lumley eventually overcomes the adjectival over-determination of the opening paragraphs:
....The scene was awesomely bleak: mountains gauntly grey and black towered away to the east, forming an uneven backdrop for a valley of hardy grasses, sparse bushes, and leaning trees. In one corner of the valley, beneath foothills, a scattering of shingle-roofed houses, with the very occasional tiled roof showing through, was enclosed and protected in the Old European fashion by a heavy stone wall.
A mile or so from the village — if the huddle of time-worn houses could properly be termed a village — leaning on a low rotting fence that guarded the rutted road from a steep and rocky decline, the tourists gazed at the oppressive bleakness all about and felt oddly uncomfortable inside their heavy coats. Behind them their hired car — a black Russian model as gloomy as the surrounding countryside, exuding all the friendliness of an expectant hearse — stood patiently waiting for them....
The young couple visit a haunted structure near a black stone in those mountains of southeastern Europe. There they view the "tomes," bibelots and other collectibles of a man named Möhrsen.
That night Julia returns to the hotel. Harry attends a local festival, where he meets an intriguing woman.
....They sat at their tiny table overlooking the dance floor, toying with their glasses and pretending to be interested in completely irrelevant matters. He spoke of London, of skiing in Switzerland, the beach at Cannes. She mentioned the mountains, the markets of Budapest, the bloody history of the country, particularly of this region. He was offhand about his jet-setting, not becoming ostentatious; she picked her words carefully, rarely erring in pronunciation. He took in little of what she said and guessed that she wasn't hearing him. But their eyes — at first rather fleetingly — soon became locked; their hands seemed to meet almost involuntarily atop the table.
Beneath the table Harry stretched out a leg towards hers, felt something cold and hairy arching against his calf as might a cat. A cat, yes, it must be one of the local cats, fresh in from mousing in the evening fields. He edged the thing to one side with his foot … but she was already on her feet, smiling, holding out a hand to him.
They danced, and he discovered gypsy in her, and strangeness, and magic. She bought him a red mask and positioned it over his face with fingers that were cool and sure. The wine began to go down that much faster …
It came almost as a surprise to Harry to find himself in the car, in the front passenger seat, with the girl driving beside him. They were just pulling away from the bright lights of the Schützenfest, but he did not remember leaving the great barn. He felt more than a little drunk — with pleasure as much as with wine.
"What's your name?" he asked, not finding it remarkable that he did not already know. Only the sound of the question seemed strange to him, as if a stranger had spoken the words.
"Cassilda," she replied.
"A nice name," he told her awkwardly. "Unusual."
"I was named after a distant … relative."
***
The Sun, the Sea, and the Silent Scream • (1988)
A Greek holiday nightmare, a superb story in every way.
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De Marigny's Clock (1971)
My note on "De Marigny's Clock" can be read here.
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The Luststone • (1991)
My note on the fine "The Luststone" can be found here.
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Mother Love • (1971)
Gritty post-apocalyptic stories are a acquired taste which I have never seriously acquired.
..."I lived in the town on the coast back there, where the walls shine at night," she gestured vaguely behind her. "That place at the foot of the hills, just a heap of rubble now, you must have come through it to get up here. I was only eighteen then … when the war came. One of the first bombs landed in the sea, threw radioactive water all over the town. When my baby was born he was — different. The radiation …" She faltered, lost for words. "… My husband died quickly. What few people lived through it wanted to have my baby put … they wanted to kill him. Said it would be better for him. Said it would be better for both of us. I ran off. I stole the rifle, shells, some seeds and one or two other odds and ends. Been here ever since. I get along fine…"
***
What Dark God? • (1975)
Another traveler's tale, set aboard a crowded train at night.
....I have always been a comparatively shy person so it was only the vaguest of perfunctory glances, which I gave to each of the three new faces before I settled back and took out the pocket book I had picked up earlier in the day in London. Those merest of glances, however, were quite sufficient to put me off my book and to tell me that the three friends of the pin stripe jacketed man appeared the very strangest of travelling companions — especially the extremely tall and thin member of the three, sitting stiffly in his seat beside Jock. The other two answered to approximately the same description as Pin-Stripe — as I was beginning mentally to tag him — except that one of them wore a thin moustache; but that fourth one, the tall one, was something else again.
Within the brief duration of the glance I had given him I had seen that, remarkable though the rest of his features were, his mouth appeared decidedly odd — almost as if it had been painted onto his face — the merest thin red line, without a trace of puckering or any other depression to show that there was a hole there at all. His ears were thick and blunt and his eyebrows were bushy over the most penetrating eyes it has ever been my unhappy lot to find staring at me. Possibly that was the reason I had glanced so quickly away; the fact that when I had looked at him I had found him staring at me — and his face had been totally devoid of any expression whatsoever. Fairies? The nasty thought had flashed through my mind unbidden; nonetheless, that would explain why the door had been locked.
Suddenly Pin-Stripe — seated next to me and directly opposite Funny-Mouth — gave a start, and, as I glanced up from my book, I saw that the two of them were staring directly into each other's eyes.
"Tell them …" Funny-Mouth said, though I was sure his strange lips had not moved a fraction, and again his voice had seemed distorted, as though his words passed through weirdly angled corridors before reaching my ears.
"It's, er — almost midnight," informed Pin-Stripe, grinning sickly first at Jock and then at me.
"Aye," said Jock sarcastically, "happens every nicht aboot this time … Ye're very observant…"
"Yes," said Pin-Stripe, choosing to ignore the jibe, "as you say — but the point I wish to make is that we three, er, that is, we four," he corrected himself, indicating his companions with a nod of his head, "are members of a little-known, er, religious sect. We have a ceremony to perform and would appreciate it if you two gentlemen would remain quiet during the proceedings …" I heard him out and nodded my head in understanding and agreement — I am a tolerant person — but Jock was of a different mind.
"Sect?" he said sharply. "Ceremony?" He shook his head in disgust. "Well; Ah'm a member o' the Church O' Scotland and Ah'll tell ye noo — Ah'll hae no truck wi' bleddy heathen ceremonies …"
Funny-Mouth had been sitting ramrod straight, saying not a word, doing nothing, but now he turned to look at Jock, his eyes narrowing to mere slits; above them, his eyebrows meeting in a black frown of disapproval.
"Er, perhaps it would be better," said Pin-Stripe hastily, leaning across the narrow aisle towards Funny-Mouth as he noticed the change in that person's attitude, "if they, er, went to sleep …?"
This preposterous statement or question, which caused Jock to peer at its author in blank amazement and me to wonder what on earth he was babbling about, was directed at Funny-Mouth who, without taking his eyes off Jock's outraged face, nodded in agreement...
This story should be read only after Lumley's sublime "The Picnickers."
***
The Thief Immortal • (1990)
Lumley's obsession with numbers (see the Titus Crow stories) is put to good use here: a vampire compulsively calculates how much of life on earth must be consumed to keep him going.
***
The House of the Temple • (1980)
A strong and well-told story about a young ma who inherits an ancestral house and pond or pool in the wilds of Scotland. Not too much Cthulery.
...."A year ago," Asquith continued, "your uncle was one of the most hale and hearty men you could wish to meet. He was a man of independent means, as you know, and for a good many years he had been collecting data for a book. Ah! I see you're surprised. Well, you shouldn't be. Your great-grandfather wrote Notes of Nessie: the Secrets of Loch Ness; and your grandmother, under a pseudonym, was a fairly successful romanticist around the turn of the century. You, too, I believe, have published several romances? Indeed," and he smiled and nodded, "it appears to be in the blood, you see?"
....I believe I understand the reason for the pool. Grandfather knew. His interest in Nessie, the Lambton Worm, the Kraken of olden legend, naiads, Cthulhu … Wendy Smith's burrowers feared water; and the sheer weight of the mighty Pacific helps keep C. prisoned in his place in R'lyeh — thank God! Water subdues these things …
"But if water confines It, why does It return to the water? And how may It leave the pool if not deliberately called out? No McGilchrist ever called It out, I'm sure, not willingly; though some may have suspected that something was there. No swimmers in the family — not a one — and I think I know why. It is an instinctive, an ancestral fear of the pool! No, of the unknown Thing which lurks beneath the pool's surface…
The thing which lurks beneath the pool's surface …
....I gazed out the open window on a scene straight out of madness or nightmare. The broken columns where they now stood up from bases draped with weed seemed to glow with an inner light; and to my straining eyes it appeared that this haze of light extended uniformly upwards, so that I saw a revenant of the temple as it had once been. Through the light-haze I could also see the centre of the pool, from which the ripples spread outward with a rapidly increasing agitation.
There was a shape there now, a dark oblong illuminated both by the clean moonlight and by that supernatural glow; and even as I gazed, so the water slopping above the oblong seemed pushed aside and the slab showed its stained marble surface to the air. The music grew louder then, soaring wildly, and it seemed to me in my shocked and frightened condition that dim figures reeled and writhed around the perimeter of the pool.
Then — horror of horrors! — in one mad moment the slab tilted to reveal a black hole going down under the pool, like the entrance to some sunken tomb. There came an outpouring of miasmal gases, visible in the eerie glow, and then—
Even before the thing emerged I knew what it would be; how it would look. It was that horror on Carl's canvas, the soft-tentacled, mushroom-domed terror he had painted under the ancient, evil influence of this damned, doomed place. It was the dweller, the familiar, the tick-thing, the star-born wampyre … it was the curse of the McGilchrists.
Except I understood now that this was not merely a curse on the McGilchrists but on the entire world. Of course it had seemed to plague the McGilchrists as a personal curse — but only because they had chosen to build Temple House here on the edge of its pool. They had been victims by virtue of their availability, for I was sure that the pool-thing was not naturally discriminative.
Then, with an additional thrill of horror, I saw that the thing was on the move, drifting across the surface of the pool, its flaccid tentacles reaching avidly in the direction of the house. The lights downstairs were out, which meant that Carl must be asleep …
Carl!
The thing was across the drive now, entering the porch, the house itself. I forced cramped limbs to agonized activity, lurched across the room, out onto the dark landing and stumbled blindly down the stairs. I slipped, fell, found my feet again — and my voice, too.
"Carl!" I cried, arriving at the door of his studio. "Carl, for God's sake!"
The thing straddled him where he lay upon his bed. It glowed with an unearthly, a rotten luminescence which outlined his pale body in a sort of foxfire. Its tentacles writhed over his naked form and his limbs were filled with fitful motion. Then the dweller's mushroom head settled over his face, which disappeared in folds of the thing's gilled mantle.
"Carl!" I screamed yet again, and as I lurched forward in numb horror so my hand found the light switch on the wall. In another moment the room was bathed in sane and wholesome electric light. The thing bulged upward from Carl — rising like some monstrous amoeba, some sentient, poisonous jellyfish from an alien ocean — and turned toward me.
I saw a face, a face I knew across twenty years of time fled, my uncle's face! Carved in horror, those well remembered features besought, pleaded with me, that an end be put to this horror and peace restored to this lonely valley; that the souls of countless victims be freed to pass on from this world to their rightful destinations.
The thing left Carl's suddenly still form and moved forward, flowed toward me; and as it came so the face it wore melted and changed. Other faces were there, hidden in the thing, many with McGilchrist features and many without, dozens of them that came and went ceaselessly. There were children there, too, mere babies; but the last face of all, the one I shall remember above all others — that was the face of Carl Earlman himself! And it, too, wore that pleading, that imploring look — the look of a soul in hell, which prays only for its release....
***
Back Row • (1988)
My thoughts on "Back Row" can be found here.
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Name and Number • (1982)
The bad taste of pulling Hitler into a horror story is only the signal error in taste and style Lumley makes in this story. My thoughts on the story can be found here.
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Snarker's Son • (1980)
My note on the excellent story "Snarker's Son" can be found here.
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Rising with Surtsey • (1971)
In my book, a story has two strikes against it when, in its opening paragraphs, it says something like this:
....Yet I admit that shortly after midnight on the 15th November 1963 the body of my brother did die by my hand; but at the same time I must clearly state that I am not a murderer. It is my intention in the body of this statement — which will of necessity be long, for I insist I must tell the whole story — to prove conclusively my innocence....
Strike three:
....He began to take a morbid interest in anything to do with oceanic horror, collecting and avidly reading such works as the German Unter-Zee Kulten, Gaston le Fe's Dwellers in the Depths, Gantley's Hydrophinnae, and the evil Cthaat Aquadingen by an unknown author. But it was his collection of fictional books, which in the main claimed his interest. From these he culled most of his knowledge of the Cthulhu Mythos — which he fervently declared was not myth at all — and often expressed a desire to see an original copy of the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, as his own copy of Feery's Notes was practically useless, merely hinting at what Julian alleged Alhazred had explained in detail....
***
David's Worm • (1971)
A wonderfully entertaining and black-humored short story worthy of Collier or Dahl.
....David never discovered just how Planny swam. He could see that there were no fins or anything, no legs, yet somehow the animal managed quite nimbly in the water without such extensions — and especially after dining on the first of the larger fish. It had been noticeable, certainly, how much the freakish flatworm 'learned' from the minnows: how to hunt and hide in the reeds, how to sink slowly to the bottom if ever anything big came near, things like that. Not that Planny really needed to hide, but he was not aware of that yet; he only had the experience ('inherited' of course) of the minnows and other fish he had eaten. Minnows, being small, have got to be careful… so David's worm was careful too! Nor did he get much from the bigger fish; though they did help his self-assurance somewhat and his speed in the water; for naturally, they had the bustling attitude of most aquatic adults.
Then, when Planny was quite a bit bigger, something truly memorable happened!
❖
Jay
16 June 2020
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