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quill-of-thoth · 6 years ago

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House Haunters

Caveat Lector: ghosts.

My house is haunted.

Before you dismiss that as the ramblings of a senile old woman, I’ll have you know that it is the opinion of Dr. Clay, Father Gerst, and all my neighbors that I’m still as sharp as a tack. I just haven’t gotten out much since my Amos died, that’s all.

The first thing I noticed was the knocking. It kept me awake early in the morning, a sound like someone was taking a sledgehammer to the walls. My bed shook with it, and my first thought wasn’t of ghosts, it was of what would happen if whoever was making that awful racket managed to bring a wall down. The whole house would cave in like a poorly baked cake.

Naturally, I threw on my robe and went downstairs, intending to find out just what exactly was going on. Someone had broken into my house, and I wasn’t about to take that lying down.

Imagine my surprise when I saw two workmen, blurry figures in overalls, hammering away at my lovely wallpaper! Thankfully, I couldn’t see the damage they were doing to the irises too well - my sight isn’t what it used to be and I have to hold my knitting up to my face to count the stitches - but I was angry enough without seeing any of the details. “Just what in the name of the good lord above do you think you’re doing, young men?” I said loudly from the foot of the stairs. They ignored me, and I thought perhaps they couldn’t hear me over the pounding. So I walked up behind one and tapped him on the shoulder of his overalls, and my hand went right through him. It was at that point that I noticed they were blurrier than usual, and also at that point that I screamed and fled, faster than I had in years.

When I finally got up the courage to go back downstairs and get a hot water bottle for my bad knee, the workmen were gone, but the ugly crater they’d left in my lovely iris wallpaper wasn’t. You can still see it.

The second thing was the lights. At first I thought it was my sight getting worse, but in that case the house should be getting dimmer, not brighter. Then, I started walking through chilly drafts where no drafts should be, but since I didn’t encounter any other ghostly figures, I simply walked around the house pointedly opening the windows to let the fresh air in.

They’d always be closed again when I walked by after.

Well, I had no intention of something as trivial as a ghost driving me out of the home I’d lived in for sixty three years. As I walked around the house, I told whatever spirits had invited themselves in so, at great length.

“I know you’re not my Amos,” I told the icebox, shining white in the strange new light, “Because my Amos was a good carpenter, and anyway he had better manners. If you’re those two workmen from before, find another house to work on! I like mine the way it is, thanks.”

Nevertheless, the ghosts continued to tear up my lovely house, usually while I was asleep. It wasn’t always the two workmen, and I couldn’t always see them at all. I’d hear indistinct voices from the other side of the house and there would be no one there when I got to them.

They peeled every scrap of my lovely Iris wallpaper down and painted the walls a drab and ugly green-grey. I was just about as angry with them as I’ve ever been, especially since they spent so much time ignoring me.

“You can’t scare me,” I told the blackened mirror hanging on the parlor wall when they were done destroying my favorite room and moving in strange new ugly furniture. “I’m too old to scare. As soon as the weather turns and I can get to town, I’m going to have Father Gerst come and give you what-for.”

As far as I knew, Father Gerst hadn’t ever performed an exorcism, but there was a first time for everything. I did hope that the weather would clear soon, though - the ghosts worked quickly and it was a long walk into town, what with my knee.

The ghosts painted my cabinet doors white, tore up my wallpaper and my carpeting, and put up paint all over the house. I caught them at it only once or twice more, and yelled at them until they saw me and ran - from a safe distance, of course. I wasn’t about to touch one again: it was worse than the cold feeling the first time I reached into a casket to touch the waxy hand of my dead father, of the trembling of my mother’s hand in her last days, the look on my dear Amos’ face after they stuffed his poor cheeks to hide the fact that all his teeth had gone as he lay like a waxwork in the coffin.

After a while, the ghosts stopped destroying my house, having fixed it up to their liking, no doubt. I sat in the only comfortable chair that they’d left me and knitted resentfully.

“I hope you’re happy now,” I told the lights and the awful bare walls, ugly grey curtains, and the cold drafts. “Though god knows why you think you can just come in all helter skelter and tear my house apart. Are you my children? No, they’re all in Peoria or Moline or Bloomington. Are you my neighbors? No, I wouldn’t let such awful neighbors set foot in the door. I should charge you rent. I should have the police arrest you, except that I suspect you’re beyond their mortal jurisdiction. As soon as my knee stops bothering me I’m getting father Gerst and he’s putting you right back where you belong, though I doubt it’s behind the pearly gates.”

The rest of the time I just prayed the rosary at them pointedly. It didn’t seem to have any effect.

A little while after the workmen ghosts stopped tearing down my house, a woman ghost, wearing an indecently short skirt, started walking into my parlor at all hours of the day. She’d strut around the house in her heels and nylons, talking I guess to herself, though I could never catch any of it. However I pushed and pulled the furniture around, she’d shove it back, making disapproving noises. She hung up pictures on the walls and laid fake plants on the hall sideboard and in the useless gap the workmen had knocked in the wall between the foyer and the parlor, above the door they’d taken out to leave an arch like a missing tooth.

I was even angrier at her than at the workmen. The workmen had been easy to scare, though they’d never stayed away for long. I walked behind her, banging a pot with a spoon, I shouted at her, I tried to throw her keys at her, and she ignored me. I started to be able to hear a little of what she was saying.

None of it was very complimentary.

“Useless to modernize it, really,” was one of her favorite complaints, along with “No, that won’t do at all,” and, when her ugly square pocket watch chimed, “My God, have I spent that long fixing up this dump?”

I’d had quite enough of her when she was the only ghost I saw regularly, so naturally I lost it when she started bringing other ghosts into my house. If I couldn’t get rid of her, I could at least try to head off the two men in their shirtsleeves she brought along with her. I lurked in the hall closet, working myself up to be as nasty as possible to chase her out, to show her that I couldn’t be scared away. With the pain in my knee and the awful bright lights, it was easy enough.

“As you can see, the house has been completely modernized,” she was saying as she passed, “Though it still retains that old fashioned charm -”

Screaming like a banshee, I shot out from behind the closet doors, brandishing my cane to great effect. “Get out of my house, you spectral hooligans!” I shrieked at them, “Get out, get out, GET OUT!”

The ghost man with the moustache screamed and the lights flickered like lightning, while the clean shaven man cursed worse than any sailor. They booked it out the front door like the devil himself would take the hindmost - which might have been literally true - with the woman fleeing after them, leaving her heels where they flew off her feet and fell to the floor.

She dropped her ugly pocket watch too, and the whole face of it is all cracks and splinters, black behind the shattered glass. It still chimes, sometimes, and buzzes across the floor.

I hope she doesn’t come back for it.

#MonthOfHalloween #ghosts

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quill-of-thoth · 6 years ago

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Nemo Me Impune Lacessit

Caveat Lector: Death by suffocation, dementia, the catacombs are small and dark and creepy. Also, this is 4k words of me mimicking Poe’s writing style.

As I listened to the rantings – no, the ravings! – of Montressor, there remained no doubt in my mind that the man had finally gone mad. The fits of pique and passion to which he was subject, the whims that I must needs indulge him or face his wrath, the very mercurial aspects of his personality: these I had patiently borne, knowing my company his only comfort in his decline and considering that, in all other ways, my position in the crumbling manse of the Montressors was an easy one. The old man, perhaps seeing something of his youth in me, preferred my company to that of all others as his health failed and his world narrowed to the scope of his ancestral halls, then finally to his own private rooms, where he pored over the tomes of his forefathers and dreamed of the long faded glory of his progenitors until he was half convinced that he was in fact imbued with the power and the authority of his forefathers, the utmost master of his own domain, untouchable, beyond reproach so long as his honor remained unsullied, and the family motto Nemo Me Impune Lacessit gleamed proud underneath the ancient heraldic crest, a serpent rampant striking, with its last breath, the human foot that crushed it.

For the better part of a year, I had watched the decline of the mind of the last of the Montressors, and smiled in his face as he decayed from a man of unparalleled brilliance to the decrepit wreck that he was now, infected by honor, raving about the imagined slights of other gentlemen of the city, some of whom I was convinced had never existed. I showed my teeth at his purposeless ramblings, feigned a laugh at his imagined triumphs over his neighbors, lied with kind eyes as I explained why men long dead would not visit – not that the living ever haunted our halls! No, I, and I alone, bore the changing of days and the decay of the house around us – I alone, too distant a cousin to bear the old man’s name or any resemblance to the gloomy portraits hung upon the walls, cared enough about the old man to let him die in peace. All other friends and relations had abandoned him; little wonder that it was I who he addressed as one who knew the very nature of his soul. None other still addressed him as anything other than a patient, to be dosed and quieted and sent to bed.

The months had served to all but wipe away my memories of a happier time before the old man’s mind had begun to rot away – I had long since ceased to think of him as anything other than the wreck he was – when I noticed a new turn in his mind. Where before he had told boastful stories of his youth, his prowess at debating, the respect he was afforded by the town, hunting parties, whatsoever else came to mind – a mind previously as quick as a steel trap, which now resembled a selection of lost pieces from a child’s jigsaw puzzle – his tales, (or perhaps some still were memories,) began to take a much more sinister, even grotesque turn. He claimed that he had been a member of any number of secret societies – had overseen arcane rituals to turn lead into gold – had seen one midwinter night the ghost of his father, begging him to dig him up out of his grave and release him from the suffocating earth. I paid these stories as little mind as I possibly could, as he rambled by candlelight in the dank, empty house with the winter wind whistling through the gaps in the shutters.

The story of Fortunato I dismissed almost instantly as pure phantasm.

There was no family named Fortunato in the city, nor had Montressor spoken before of such a man – though when he spoke, it was with the deepest and most vehement hatred of him, such that I shuddered to think – for the old man’s mood had been angry and volatile for so long, now – what he should do if he had any such enemy living, and was not kept under constant watch. For in some things, Montressor’s mind was still as cutting and agile as ever: he spoke with the same impassioned fluidity of old, but he knew not to whom he was speaking; each crevice and cranny of the old house was still known to him, yet it had been over half a year since I could trust him outside of its doors; he would in a day remember events from fifty years ago and forget the events of the day before. In time, the preposterous imaginings of the old man grew far more bizarre – ominious, confused, and at times disturbing despite his growing bewilderment and vitrol towards the world – and his story of vengeance in the crypts below the palazzo was all but blotted out of my mind, replaced with more trials and tribulations of the old man’s dwindling life, such as a night spent tending to a detailed delusion that he was dead already, with centipedes crawling about under his skin. After that, I took the advice of the local pharmacist, and Montressor grew quiet at last.

In the bitterest dark of the winter – in fact, just after Carnival – that the old man caught influenza, then pneumonia, and finally died, though not quite peacefully. More people came to his funeral than had come to see him in the last year. They toasted to his memory – to a friendship that they pretended to fondly remember, though all the while I watched, knowing what the late, great Montressor had thought of them in his final months, and saw nothing on their faces but condescension and smirking deceit.

Then they were gone, and I was left alone with the crumbling wreck that was the manse of the Montressors; fit, I thought for a few wild moments, only for burning to the ground. Yet it was mine now, for the old man had no closer kin, and loathe as he was to allow it to pass out of the family proper, he would have been horrified to see it leave his bloodline entirely. How he had thought I would manage to keep the moldering skeleton in one piece was entirely beyond me – had there been money for the necessary repairs, it would already have been spent on them – so I resolved all at once to sell it, crush that last ounce of patrician vanity, the only legacy of a dead man, take whatever I could get, and make a new life far away, in a land where my connection to the Montressors raised no eyebrows and my name carried with it no shame.

And yet, as I lay listening to the rats scratching through the walls of the newly emptied house, alone save for my candles, I could not sleep.

I did not miss the old man’s waking nightmares, his mirages cut from whole cloth, the way he had laughed smugly at the world outside, seemingly unaware that his lot in life had diminished to little but delusions of grandeur – but it had covered the noise of the questing rats and the wind whistling about the house. It had kept the shadowed portraits at bay, and the thousand morbid fantasies that the night bears to a waking brain – and I could not go on in that house, not without knowing the answer to the thought that had begun in that night to gnaw at my soul.

Surely, the old man had only imagined it all – far stranger things had he told me, of a woman buried alive, of guilty murderers who heard the hearts of their victims beating on and on even after death until the drumming drove them insane, of secret signs and symbols, of pirate codes and buried treasure, of portraits that stole the youth of their subjects, of vengeance extracted after years through slow poison, of the tortures of the inquisition, and of impenetrable mystic rites that conferred upon the recipient of a draught of lamb’s blood the ability to read men’s souls and find precious metals in the earth. Next to such fuel for dreadful fantasy, such a thing should have quickly been forgotten.

And yet, I had not forgotten, for the old man’s eyes had flashed so, the spittle had flown from his lips, the cold and unholy light of vengeance had lit up his whole countenance, the words fell from his lips with an inviting surety: he had felt sure, I thought, that I should celebrate with him his great victory over the oafish, the drunken, the bumbling Fortunato! I should feel in the marrow of my bones that the insult to our house by the smug aficionado could not be borne – that Montressor’s course of action was the only which was right, which was just, which would preserve the dignity of those who, no matter how poor and how decayed, should never suffer such impudence against them without swift and terrible retribution. The untold numbers of our ancestors – his, not mine, though at the moment he had extended to me the hand of acknowledgement, perhaps not even remembering who I was – should turn over and over again in their crypts, should have haunted him until he destroyed that serpent, that buffoon, that motley bedecked dunce for daring to –

I had not the least idea what insult Fortunato was supposed to have offered my recently deceased cousin.

Nor did I have any belief that such a man had ever existed, save as a confused compilation of all Montressor’s most abhorrent acquaintances, a face to attribute every imagined slight of his youth – a face that he had conjured in the absence of his so-called friends during his slow decline, and hung upon the hated visage every bewildered memory of the indignity that he had suffered – old, childless, poor and yet too proud to do aught but rot in it, draining the dregs of the family fortune that my own father’s cowardice had barred me from with each pipe of Amontillado!

No, I no longer had to smile and bear the old man’s diatribe with placid blandishments – I was free, free from the long-forgotten heraldry, from the often translated motto – for there was nothing left of the Montressors! I was soon to wash my hands of it all! I resolved to go as far as I could, to Britain or Austria, for the company of millionaires reviled by the rest of the town for their gauche and presumptuous ways was far preferable to the poisoned insincerity of genteel poverty and a slow, agonizing slide into the darkness of ignorance and obscurity, pitied by all and valued by no one! No, I had no sympathy left for the old man – for he knew not what it meant to be truly, and honestly, despised for circumstances he could not change, nor what it was to scrabble for acceptance, to curse his paternity at every sly smile, at every moment of condescension, knowing that it was impossible to gain that which he so desperately sought – for should you please anyone, you are “well mannered, considering your birth,” and should you give offense, you are instantly lowered – for who should truly consider one so misbegotten worthy even of their anger? Even in his old age, when I was willing to aid him in his illness, the old man had always had a self-righteous look about him, as if to say “I give you the crumbs off my meager table only so your mouth may water at what little more I have,” the cruelty of one beggar to another. It was only as his mind had begun to fade and his fair-weather friends, his creditors and his connoisseurs, had abandoned him, that I, my ancestry forgotten, became his bossom companion, his only confidante. But for an accident of birth, I should have shared equally in the name, the reputation of the Montressors – and I should not have drank and gambled myself into poverty and obscurity! Yet he sought to give me his bleakness, his desolation, his macabre mockery of gentility and his obsession with a dead era of nobility and honor!

How then, should I believe in his fearful chimeras, why then, should I lay awake near-drowning in the impression of his voice, his boundless arrogance, his certainty of purpose?

Why should I shiver at the thought of a dead man in the crypts below? There were any number of dead men, for the crypts had been used as an ossuary for many years before my cousin had taken possession of the house. Rationality told me that they were naught but bones, that being aware, so suddenly, of where they lay unburied underground, behind perhaps only a few doors, did not change this – for no ill had come of them in the past decades, and no ill would come of them tonight. Yet it seemed I heard, in the voice of Montressor, hushed and yet gleeful, as he was wont to be when he told me of his superstitious exploits or his exaggerated prowess in revenge, the words, “No harm has yet come to a Montressor from the remains of his ancestors.”

I lay awake as the candle guttered: I thought that Fortunato would not have died quickly, even bricked up in the vaults. He first would have exhausted himself, testing his chains and shouting, hoping fiercely that it was all a fit of dark humor on the part of my cousin, that he had now been well and truly humiliated for whatever offense he had given, that any moment now he would be released… as hours passed, that perhaps someone would hear him beyond the catacombs, that he should be rescued by a steward lost in search of some rare wine, that he would miraculously be encountered. If his chains had been long enough, he would have tested the wall – he would have clawed at it until his fingers bled, his nails worn down to stubs – he would have thrown his weight against it, tried to break the shackles, tried to knock the bricks loose before they set – known that the bricks were what would kill him quickest, had they been properly set, for soon he would run out of air –

No! For the last time, there was not – never had been – a man by the name of Fortunato! Therefore, no man had suffocated alone in the vaults of the manse that I now owned, nor starved, nor died of fear and despair and betrayal; therefore there was no body hanging, shackled, behind a wall, mute evidence to the depravity of my line; therefore I must snuff the candle so that I may sleep through the night and wake in the morning to make the preparations to sell the wasting pile as fast as I may. Yet when I reached for the candle, my hand was shaking.

All at once I stormed up from the bedclothes, candle in hand, and was halfway to my chamber door before the freezing stones against my feet became unbearable. I dressed with undue haste in some of my warmest clothes, and then, candle in hand, I descended to the depths of the vaults.

It was indeed as damp and cold as I had thought: nitre hung from the walls and the ceiling like frost stiffened moss, and my breath fanned out in front of my face like a silent shroud. Everywhere there were racks, filled haphazardly with empty bottles of wine stacked one upon the other, and glass fragments of brilliant colors that would have dignified a cathedral glittered on the floor. As I searched amongst the wreckage for a torch, I cursed the biting air and my cousin’s drunken, wastrel heart – then, warming my hands one at a time by the new flame that threw the lurking shadows of the catacombs into stark relief, I blew out my candle and placed it upon the steps.

The catacombs of the Montressors were vast, descending deep beneath the Palazzo in long, winding passages cut into the rock of the hill beneath – vaults and caverns older by far than the Montressors. It would be far too easy to lose myself amidst the walls of piled bones, the emptied barrels and flagons, which grew only more deeply encrusted with white nitre as I descended yet another stair, passed under another series of low arches, and began to come upon the small bones of rats mixed in with the powdery debris of human existence. The air became oppressive – not yet foul, but heavy with the weight of the earth above me, the dust that stirred at my footsteps, the ever-present smoke of my torch and the silence that, save for my footsteps and the hiss and crackle of my light, reigned inviolate. Though I knew it to be only a trick of the mind, I fancied myself able to see a deeper weight to the shadows, as if they had passed beyond mere darkness, out of the reach of my torch, and into some life and animation of their own – as if they moved of their own accord, a sort of antithesis to light rather than it’s mere absence. As I stood and the faint, wet echo of my footsteps died away, the silence grew louder, until I felt that my heartbeat must be as loud as a drum, my breath the sound of a whirlwind, the very blood in my veins the roaring of the ocean.

I should be pleased when I was finally quit of this place, and all the morbid fascination that it contained. Let some foolish scholar, some young pomp pleased with his own fortune inherit this gloom, this reproachful silence!

Gripping the torch in fingers that felt raw with cold, I descended once more to the lowest level of the crypts, far below the bed of the river. The air had grown from merely still to actively foul, and the flame of my torch sank low against the wood. Although there seemed no reason for any rational being to enter, these chambers were also filled with bones - in the smallest, they were stacked on three sides and scattered across the floor, surrounding a curious wall, where some bones were clumsily stacked across three feet of space between a pair of rough hewn pillars was sealed with badly mortared stones.

Though I did not remember all that my departed cousin had said on the matter, I knew without a doubt that this was the place. Here were the bones of the quiet dead, thrown down to clear the way for his delusions. There was a dark niche fit only for hiding the most gruesome of secrets: here too was the foul air that would quickly kill a man with a chronic shortness of breath, the oppressive darkness and the silence that might drive him mad with fright when he recognized the onrushing pace of his own death. How must he have gasped, fighting to breathe against the crushing weight of the earth above him, when my own breathing was even now a little labored? How must his heart have beat its way out of his chest as he saw the face of one he counted friend distended by the madness of vengeance for some unforgotten ill? How must he have died, despairing, alone save for the nameless, faceless bones complacent in their tomb, filled with the body and yet empty of the soul of the house of the Montressors –

With a cry I threw down my torch and seized the first object to hand – a trowel thrown down amidst the bones – and I hacked at the wall. I would prove that this was nothing but a phantasm, brought on by the disturbed mind of my mad cousin! I would open the wall and see only a dark passageway, bricked up to stop the foul vapors from rising, the memory of which had prompted Montressor to elaborate upon his invented revenge! I would have peace, would sleep at night in the house I now owned, would, by destroying the very foundations of his delusions, exorcise the ghost of the last of the Montressors!

The masonry crumbled beneath the tip of my trowel, never having been dry enough to set, and the first block fell almost upon my feet. I could see nothing beyond it in the dim light, so I yanked out first one stone, then another, until they came crashing down in a ragged wave and I jumped back, seized my torch, and thrust it into the opening, already giving a little cry of exultation as the light reached smooth granite, empty of all save a rusty band of what must be metal, no, two, a pair of chains depending from them –

My cry of exultation gave way to a gasp of horror as I saw the truth. The years had not quite mummified him, though the nitre must have to some degree counteracted the damp – in places the sagging skin peeled back from the bones, and there was no way of knowing , save for the rags of the oversized garb he wore, that the corpse had once been a large and fleshy man. Yet I knew – I knew it with a certainty that to this day shakes my bones, that still causes me to see in my mind the skeletal, half-rotted face with hair that might pass for a living man’s hanging down around it – that this was the mortal remains of Fortunato, bound in chains to the stone wall. His cap bore three bells: it must once have been motley.

#Cask of Amontillado #MonthOfHalloween #quill does a fanfic #technically pastiche?#this has to be public domain #Poe's zombie is invited over for tea #And a complimentary tuberculosis screening #Have some penicillin you ancient corpse

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