Children of Lovecraft by Various (Datlow Ellen - Ed.)

Author:Various (Datlow, Ellen - Ed.) [Various (Datlow, Ellen - Ed.)]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Anthologies (various), Fantasy, Fiction, Horror, Lovecraft
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
Published: 2016-09-20T03:00:00+00:00

Who among us has not known a Mr. Doornail?

Bernardine held her own wedding ring in her hand, and then she put it around the finger of the bookseller. She unspelled Anguish, and the eldest daughter felt an unknotting, the spell dismantling itself.

Behind the door, Mr. Doornail moved in a way that could not truly be described. It climbed the wood with all its suckers at once; a soft, clinging climbing, like that of a fly moving along the surface of milk, or a maggot making its way out from the nostril of a dear, dead man and into the air.

Mr. Doornail was darkness, but Mr. Doornail was loved.

The grandmother danced, clapping her hands, her brightest jewels and most flamboyant petticoats, a flamenco in slow motion.

Bernardine put a key to a lock.

“Father,” she said. Perhaps she was a monster after all. She had never denied it. She was a monster’s daughter.

There was no answer.

“What will you give me if I give you a new heart?”

The door shook, and Mr. Doornail sent seven tentacles out from above and below, clutching the door frame, twisting through the locks. The door shuddered, and Mr. Doornail pulled back the bars and dismantled the chains.

The five daughters shuddered, and Mr. Doornail sent out tentacles with their faces, each one dressed in a black gown, each one a futureless daughter with no notions of her own.

The bookseller walked toward the door, not Mr. Doornail’s door, but the door to the street.

The bookseller had not been bewitched into this by Bernardine or by Mr. Doornail. He had been bewitched by goats.

Who among us has not tried to live forever? It takes work, immortality, just as does immorality. Meanness is laborious. One has to pay for it. It is expensive. Some of us have tried to achieve immortality with olive oil and oranges, and others have tried it with bribes to witches, and still others have tried to get it by hanging by our heels over the heads of monsters, waiting for our chance to strike.

There was a thundering, a raging, a rattling of goats. There was a drift of white fur, and the ringing of bells, loud and certain, bells like a church gone chaos. All the ringing of a thousand goats, and all the singing of a thousand goats, goats for miles around come to pay their respects to the old man. The goats were stampeding into the villa, knocking down the door.

Outside, the fedora quivered, emptied of bats, and in the chimney, bats hung upside down, each one a beating heart with wings.

In the villa, there was a green edge to a petticoat, and then an entire green dress, as Tear tore the front of her black gown and revealed the springtime beneath it, as the bookseller opened his eyes to see what was coming for him.

Mr. Doornail stretched its thousand tentacles, each with the face of a townsperson, and in the band, men’s hearts beat frantically, wanting to offer themselves to the monster, ensorcelled by Bernardine and by the magic of Mr.

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