The Zombie by Robert E. Howard & H.P. Lovecraft & Jack Dann & Seabury Quinn & Ron Goulart

Author:Robert E. Howard & H.P. Lovecraft & Jack Dann & Seabury Quinn & Ron Goulart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: zombie, walking dead, undead, monster, horror
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2016-06-09T16:00:00+00:00

WHAT THE MOON BRINGS, by George T. Wetzel

Originally published in HPL, 1972.

I would never have become a specialist in oriental languages (and thus never had the strange experience to be related) if it had not been for certain family heirlooms—souvenirs of my dad’s navy service in the China Seas in 1905. These souvenirs, up to twenty years ago, reposed on the family mantelpiece, where even as a small boy I never tired of minutely scrutinizing them and wondering what stories were behind them.

On opposite sides of the mantel stood the two brown age-stained vases, each made of an entire hollow bamboo tree trunk, filigreed with bearded Chinese figures standing within a delicately carved, columned portice. My dad called each a representation of the “Goddess of Evil” and a superstitious older brother years later, having received them as a legacy, declared them “bad luck” and passed them to me.

Sitting somewhere near one of the vases was a small Buddha of tarnished brass which my dad often said would have cost him his life if a Chinaman saw it. (He would tell simultaneously of a Buddhist temple he had visited after climbing an enormous rock cut staircase; and I suspect now he had stolen the idol from there.) The third item was a blackened, brass Chinese pipe with a large detachable mouth piece (for the owner) and two smaller ones (for guests). It always reeked faintly of an odd odor that in retrospect I feel was due to opium. And one more was a fairly bright brassy bowl with Chinese engraving on the outside circumference which served to hold dad’s pipe or tobacco ashes.

All these objects now sit atop my bookcase, having been passed on to me. But there is one more which I acquired myself recently: an amulet with Tibetan-Sanskrit writing on it, which I keep locked away and dare only look at in the dark of the moon.

* * * *

I was sitting one summer evening in my little study in Calcutta, contemplating all these family heirlooms while I wrestled with a philological problem, when there came a soft tapping on the glass of the opened balcony door.

As I glanced up a burnoose-garbed man came in, and, fearing a bandit, I reached on the desk for some weapon.

“May I see you? I have something to show you.” The voice was apologetic and familiar, but the little of the face visible was that of a stranger, an incredibly aged man.

I recognized the voice as belonging to a vagabond, named Haldane, a European whom I first saw about a year ago, who surprised me by his affecting the garb of a nomadic Kirghiz: wearing a pointed cap bordered with lambskin, a heavy fur coat despite the heat of the day, and boots. He made a precarious living by wandering in the short summer months across the deserts and steppes of Central Asia, looking for old Mongolian manuscripts in the ruins of monasteries, or buying them from livestock breeders or former Buddhist monks, for high re-sale to bibliophiles and scholars (like myself).

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