Bone Idle in the Charnel House: A Collection of Weird Stories by Rhys Hughes

Author:Rhys Hughes
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Hippocampus Press
Published: 2015-01-25T21:00:00+00:00

All Christian vampires are deterred by a cross. Such vampires are no better than cretins, utter failures in business, science, engineering, even in domestic affairs, hampered by their inability to perform basic arithmetic due to an aversion to the addition sign. The cross is omnipresent. Struts, nets, the masts of ships, every grid reference on a map, every scarecrow with arms outstretched, every lattice, every gunsight. Fear of the cross is fear of the interstices of the world.

The Muslim vampire cannot endure the light of a certain moon, the sight of a curved stick, a scimitar, banana, crooked finger, a bent back or fishing rod when a fish has taken bait, or a wave in profile, the camber of a road. For those forms are crescents.

The Buddhist vampire fears the wheel, the lotus.

The Hindu vampire, the lotus also. And whatever resembles a lotus, so they cannot tolerate the idea of a night of passion with a woman. Thus the female vampires who profess that faith are frightened, shrivelled, and ultimately destroyed by themselves.

For the Sikh vampire the presence of a sword or knife or closed loop is anathema. He must flee from them, his rotting turban unwinding. Every circle is his bane, every cutting edge.

Stars invoke a disabling horror in vampires of the Jewish and Bahá’í persuasions, six pointed stars for the former, nine for the latter. But as the atmosphere of the world we stand on refracts the light that passes through it, stars with six or nine, or as many points as might be desired or feared, glitter every night in a clear sky. For those who are Bahá’í the situation is truly hellish, for they regard all religious symbols as holy. There is almost nothing that does not agonise them.

Taoist vampires falter when confronted with equal amounts of black and white, cold and hot, active and passive. The mere passing of the days and nights is a chessboard on which their profound grief and despair play against each other, both triumphing.

The vampire who professes Jainism must avoid all representations of the hand, including the hand itself.

Shinto vampires cannot bear to view a gate.

It might be argued that Zoroastrian vampires are slightly freer than many others, for a winged disc does not often present itself to the casual onlooker, but fire is their other symbol. Besides, it is a dying faith and its adherents and vampires are few.

The atheist vampire has chosen doubt itself or disbelief as his faith. Perhaps science has become his religion. The symbols that he must avoid are even more prevalent than variations of any religious sign. For him, the question mark, atom, shrug, blankness, negative, vacuum, minus sign, all hints of progress, every artefact of technology, the critic and the cynic are abominations. Every chemical reaction, every mechanical principle, every law of physics, burns him like acid. . . .

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