The Ludwig Collection

“For thin is the veil betwixt man and the godless deep. The skies are haunted by that which it were madness to know; and strange abominations pass evermore between earth and moon and athwart the galaxies. Unnameable things have come to us in alien horror and will come again.”

- Clark Ashton Smith, The Beast Of Averoigne

“The entire library is housed within this two-storey room. Each book is cataloged and contains a small tracking device that does not alter the value of the artifact itself. In 1992, three books went missing from the collection. In that same year Ezekiel Ludwig's grandson, Benjamin Worthing Jacobs paid an exorbitant amount of money to protect the remaining collection and to track the three missing books.”

A hand went up in the crowd.

“Yes, a question?”

The man was tall with pale features under a close-cropped, expensive haircut. His eyes were set deep in his head and glimmered darkly.

“In 1992, the books went missing.”

It wasn't a question and the man's deep voice had the barely contained tang of an Eastern European accent.

“Yes, during the transition of the collection from Mr. Ludwig's home in Green Falls to this home.”

The man's face grew sardonic. “What were the three,” he asked.

The tour guide checked her notes. Red streaks popped out on her cheeks. Flustered, she found the page and squinted at it. Her brow darkened.

“They were,” she began, finding it hard to meet the stranger's eyes, “The Codex Profundis, Maledictae Vitae Eternum and Sanguinem Silentii.”

The man laughed a short, harsh bark and the other people in the tour group shuddered and moved away from him.

“These were written by Hieronymus Albrecht, the renegade monk. The books were destroyed. The inquisitors put the flame to them as Albrecht burned.”

The room went silent. The tour guide cleared her throat as if to regain control of the group, but the man went on.

“The books were the dictation of dreams Albrecht had in which (he said it ‘vitch’) he held conversation with the demon Zhal'Ruun. For seven nights the demon whispered to Albrecht in his dreams. In the day, the mad monk wrote all he could remember. The demon proposed that the three books would save Albrecht from the pyre of the zealots.”

No one spoke. The man continued. “There is a legend that, within these three tomes, Hieronymus Albrecht sought and found the secret to life eternal, and supped from the cup of the blood of the god born of man, ravished the harlot, Death, and carried himself to the gates of the deeps where evil is kept barred from this mortal realm.” 

As he spoke the man's tone rose and gasps and shufflings of discomfort echoed in the airy room.

The tour guide, her face flushed dropped her chin to her chest, and fixed her eyes on the man. She moved through the press of the tour group toward him. The man did not move. As the crowd parted to let her pass, it became evident that there would be some drama and the group moved to be able to see the man be scolded or kicked out.

“Sir,” the tour guide said. She was an extremely thin woman, her hair was a lank, lusterless brown, pushed back on her scalp by a wide fabric hair band that matched the navy blue of her docent uniform. 

The man smiled and his teeth were yellow, but perfect in his bland face. His eyes shone with feverish light. Although they did not immediately understand the sensation, many in the group coughed or cleared their throats nervously in response to a growing feeling of heat and the rank scent of wood smoke.

“Sir, the Ludwig House Museum and Archive has a list of acceptable behaviors.” She stopped. Although it had not been there before, a table of rough-hewn wood stood before the man, now. The tour guide looked as if she wanted to address the table, but she stood stock still, as if carved of wood, herself. Her eyes filled with tears, but not of rage or pain, but of smoke. The room was getting warmer, the stench of smoke stronger. 

The man did not speak but opened the overcoat he was wearing and withdrew from beneath it a parcel wrapped in filthy dun-colored rags and placed it on the coarse table.

Slowly, the group became aware that someone else was speaking. The voice echoed off the walls and ceiling of the Ludwig Library’s two-storey library collection. “Janice? Is everything okay?”

A short, dusky man in wrinkled, ill-fitting business casuals bustled over to the group. When he saw the man and the table and the parcel, he stopped short, eyes wide with fear and surprise. One woman, a former teacher and volleyball coach who was taking the tour for the third time because she liked Ludwig House, saw the pallid man silence the intruder with a sharp gesture. The rest of the events of that day would be vague and disconnected but that harsh gesture would wake her in the night for many years to come.

“The books were not destroyed,” the palid man said. “As we know, they came to be owned by Ludwig, himself. But what of that? Many such rare book collectors can be found in every province of the world. Perhaps Ludwig knew what he had and their value to him was greater than the need to have them put in some library catalog.” The palid man grew paler as he spoke. The smell of smoke was becoming caustic, but the smoke alarm did not alert the museum-goers of a problem.

“His imbecile grandchild had no idea what he intended to do. To mark such books with electronics. Heresy!” This last word was so loud and harsh that some of the group became woozy and one woman swooned and collapsed.

As the smoke filled the room, one man in the group, shouted a long phrase in a strange archaic language.

Lifting up his eyes, the man yelled something that sounded like, “Ootan oh lathlac mortonos groonamos feythanor. Zhal'ruun!” At the final two words, every member of the group, even the woman who had fainted, repeated them. “Feythanor. Zhal'ruun!”

The smell of wood smoke dispersed and the group stood, unmoving, all eyes focused on the man who had started unwrapping the filthy rags.

A man was sitting in the room off the library that had once been the office of Ezekial Ludwig. He was scribbling on a shelf of large papers when the pen dropped from his hand and his eyes rolled up into his head. His face spread into a rictus grin, and his mouth opened and pronounced silent words. He rose and moved out of the office and through the library to where the group of people, the docent, and the head volunteer stood rapt as the man unwrapped his parcel. 

The man walked through the crowd without touching anyone and they moved without looking at his approach. He stood before the table and the group moved in behind him. Slowly, they whispered in unison, “Feythanor. Zhal'Ruun,” over and over, louder each time.

Beams of late afternoon sunlight which had sparkled across the library's warm parkay floors faded as storm clouds rolled up outside. The man finished unwrapping the filthy rags.

Inside was a stack of three very old books, covered in worn black leather. Topmost was a strange, angular knife that was inscribed with terrible sigils. The man standing before the table, his face stretched and disfigured by his grin, took the knife and pointed it at his wrist.

A shudder, not of terror but of excitement rattled through the group as thunder rumbled above. The stranger opened each book and placed them into a triangular formation on the table and following his long and skeletal index finger, he read, first from one book and then another a droning incantation. At the end of each pronouncement, he repeated the phrase, “Zhal'Ruun! Feythanor, Zhal'Ruun”. Each time the group whispered as if in call and repeat.

The man with the knife undressed himself and stood on the rumpled pile of his clothes. The tip of the blade swept into the white flesh at the man's wrist. As he cut, something like blood oozed from the line. The ichor smoked and stank of brimstone. Each one of the tour group chattered, their eyes wide and unseeing. As he cut up his arm and across his chest, his flesh peeled away, revealing grey, scales beneath. One by one the tour group dropped to their knees and thrust their arms forward in supplicative posture as the creature before them drew itself to its full height. Great horns surmounted its head, and black eyes gazed about at the room. The grey skin grew ruddy. The thing had great hairy legs like that of a ram but the body of a man. Black tentacles swept from its back in coiling chaos. It opened its fang-filled mouth and a serpent tongue darted and flicked. It spoke as the storm built its power. 

“Servus ubi est incantatio?”

The man behind the rough table laughed maniacally. “I have brought it to you here, Lord.” Blood seeped from his eyes and his ears as he spoke words from the three books.

Darkness came early, that day. No one knew a storm was coming. Stinging rain lashed the leaves from trees and killed the flowers as it fell. A shape wreathed in black smoke walked from the old Ludwig museum, and as it came forward, it was followed by a group of gibbering supplication, each mumbling or clawing at their eyes as they marched. People in town screamed and dashed themselves against their walls. Howls like the bellowing of the damned filled the sky and Zhal'Ruun, the Shadow of the Pit, rose on the night wind and strew madness into the world before him.

A lone man, clothed in a filthy grey robe wandered smiling from the ruins, clutching a parcel of three books. His face was a mask of madness.

Fire fell from the sky.

Ruin

 “Swiftly the remembrance of all things is buried in the gulf of eternity.”

- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

No gods, said R. There are no gods and there are no devils. But there were lives out there and in here too. He pointed at my chest.

He looked at me from under his hood. His breath smoked out from between his teeth. 

What about the strength of belief in us, I asked. What about the tendency for us all to believe?

Improbable, said R. I’m fairly certain a case could be made that, for instance, whales tell stories in their songs. They all seem to convey information to each other over great depths. It’s romantic to assume that it is the same with us. I doubt very much that whales have gods. Yet their behavior is decidedly worshipful. Some of that is anthropomorphic—a wonderfully common human skill. Nevertheless, there is no more evidence for a whale god than for a human god.

He swung his head toward me and I got the impression that there was a keen intelligence gazing at me from the dark depths of his eye sockets.

You’ve been out into the unknown, though, haven’t you?

He would have smiled if his face wasn’t a rigid rictus of grinning teeth and bone. I have been to places that the human consciousness couldn’t understand, yes. I’ve also been to the bottom of the seas on Titan and to the very heart of the universe and it is empty of life, except—here he paused and I got the distinct impression he was choosing his words in such a way as to protect me from some inside joke—here, of course. You lot are all there is in all the universe and of course, me. Until now, anyway.

We had been walking for some time. Huge skeletons of what were formerly buildings lay around us, stretching dead fingers to the skies they once scraped. R and I had been going like this for some time. He—I suppose he was a he—was quiet unless I asked him a question. Then he didn’t mince words, but he also didn’t seem reluctant to share. Smoke or possibly mist was running long, white fingers through what remained of my world. Here and there were smaller, more heart-wrenching artifacts of humanity. It was becoming more and more evident that it was all over.

I often wonder if there is a god, why didn’t he intervene before this? 

R looked at me again, from within the darkness of his hood. He stopped and stood a bit straighter. There was the distinctive sound of bones grinding under his robes.

As I said, there is no god. There have never been any. There is nothing to intervene on your behalf. No one is there. Or here, for that matter.

What are you? Aren’t you a god of sorts?

The rasping coughing sounds that resonated from within his frame must have been laughs. 

I am not a god. I have no special powers. I’m simply what remains of the humanity of the place when the humanity has fled or been destroyed. When I am gone all hope for humanity is then gone. I’m as much a part of your people as you are. In some ways, I’m what makes you human.

I thought about this as we trudged along.

R stopped and set himself down on the twisted remains of a park bench. The air was rank with cold stench but he didn’t seem to mind. I looked around and realized that I had lived here. This was my former neck of the woods. The building that had contained my apartment was damaged but still standing. The shop on the ground level had been burned out but there was still a fire escape climbing like iron ivy up the side of the building. I looked at R and he nodded.

When I arrived at what had been Mrs. V’s window, I looked in. It still seemed the same. Snow was on the floor and the curtains had become tattered, but there was still no muss. I crept in and found myself saying the old woman’s name, as I had done on countless occasions before. The room was silent. 

I stood in the window for a long time. The light was different, probably because the sky was so heavy with dark clouds. Even so, it still seemed homey. I walked into the kitchen and found it to be much the same as it always had been. Neat, clean and inviting. There was a tin on the table for cookies. There was a kettle on the stove. There were some plates in the drainer by the old, cast iron sink. I ventured down the hall. This was much farther than I had ever dared go in my previous visits. Mrs. V was an Italian immigrant, or at the very least of that descent. She always had biscotti, or homemade bread and sauce. She would very often make me meals even when I hadn’t visited. It was like she was born to feed me. Her bathroom was just as pristine as the rest of the flat. The room at the end of the hall, which I assumed was her bedroom, seemed miles away and yet I managed to go the distance. The door was ajar.

R and I had become fast friends. He wasn’t talkative, as I’ve said but in a world suddenly eliminated of people to talk to you take the chance with the strangers. He had taken my hand, his bony fingers interlaced in mine in a most intimate way. I had only held the hand of a few people, before. There was always something missing in the act. It was as if they had held something back from me even in close physical contact, but when I held R’s bony hand, I felt truly loved, truly adored. As if I was the last person on the planet. And maybe I was.

Mrs. V was lying on her bed, propped up on pillows. Her eyes were open. She was dressed and her bedroom slippers were by the side of the bed, as they might always have been. Her hands were clasped on her stomach. A handmade blanket crocheted of brown and yellow and green and orange yarn lay across her. A cup of cold tea was beside her on the nightstand. 

As I looked at her, I felt the presence of my new friend behind me.

She’s dead, he said.

I know.

She died peacefully, he said.

I’m glad.

She was your friend?

She was, in a way. In an adopted grandmother or elderly aunt sort of way. She used to bring me food. The whole upstairs used to smell of garlic and herbs. 

She didn’t have any pain.

I’m glad. Should we do something for her? I looked at the picture of a family on her dressing table. There were several younger people who all looked like her, which I assumed were her own children. She also had grandchildren. I wondered why no one had ever come to see her.

The end, which had also been the beginning for me and R, had been fast and painless for most life in the world. I don’t know what happened and R hasn’t told me, but the end came and it was swift and sudden. One minute, life was still struggling through its large and small battles. The next there was absolute silence. Unless you call the screaming of the last person alive silence.

R put his hand on my shoulder and I backed up against him. Underneath his robes, he felt like a regular human, but I suspected that he was merely skeletal, like his face and hands. 

I sighed. I don’t think I ever really knew anyone, R. I think I lived alone in a much more final way than this.

It’s true, he said. You were forced into a solitary kind of existence by the rigors and strictures of the world you inhabited. Nothing to do about it. You stayed alive. You’re here now.

I turned to him and looked at him for a long time. There were depths in his dark eye-sockets that could barely contain the feeling and emotion that rushed out of them. I moved in, to hug him and I felt his strong arms go around me. 

There’s nothing left, for me, is there?

No.

Am I dead?

Not yet.

Can I die?

 Yes.

Will you stay with me?

Of course. We will be together now, forever. The last of your humanity and its death.

Take me away from this place, R.

There was a sigh from deep within him, like sand in a storm. 

There are stars. Brighter than they ever were in my life. They coat the landscape in silverlight. R, whose real name I now know better than my own former name, is always with me. We share a love of mutual aloneness. He holds my hand with unbridled intimacy. We walk under these neverending stars. We talk. I make him laugh. I make Ruin laugh. Too bad no one is here to see that.

The world as I knew it and the world as I left it is now gone. It is simply a dead place, revolving in a dead dance of other small worlds bereft of life. I never knew what ended my world or how I ended. I only know that my only friend in the entire night that is now what remains of my life—my death, is the one who made it all happen. The memory of my own people’s demise resides with us but it won’t matter. There is no longer any life left to record it.

So, we walk under the stars, my beloved Ruin and I, and the world has moved on.

The Mower

 “Suddenly, in the midst of his toil, without understanding what it was or whence it came, he felt a pleasant sensation of chill on his hot, moist shoulders. He glanced at the sky in the interval for whetting the scythes. A heavy, lowering storm cloud had blown up, and big raindrops were falling.”

-Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

The afternoon sun was ripe upon the grass before him. The gleaming, verdant blades beckoned to him wantonly in the gentle breeze. 

He plucked up his scythe.

He admired the tool, caressing it with his brown hands, the wood of the snath having been worn to the smooth polish of use. The grips, the blade, the whole outfit seemed less a tool and more an apparatus of his own body. He grinned, though he didn’t know it, to feel this old friend back with him again, sharp and wieldy, ready to mow. 

He stepped from the shadow under the eaves of the tool shed and into the waving grass humming and ticking with Summer’s insects. He brought the scythe back, twisting at his waist, and swung it through with an effortlessness of ages of practiced movement. This was the blinking of his eye, the drawing of his breath, the beating of his heart. This was the machinery of his life: a backswing and a following through. 

This first swing, the gentle kiss of the blade through the stalks of grass, for him was like the nervous beginning of any long task. Here, now, his was a life of simplicity. No extra movements, no extra words, just the slow rhythmic swing. After a path was cut, he’d stop to roll a smoke and stone the edge back to keen. He’d glance at the sky, looking, watching, always watching. He'd survey his farm and then get back to his work. 

When he was a young boy, mowing had been hard for him to master. The tool was heavy and ungainly. The weather was hot and buggy, and he wanted nothing more than to be done. Especially since on most days, his brothers were either working on other chores or had been loaned out to other farms for other work. On those days, his father expected him to get no less done than if all of the boys were working together.

He would try to make a good start of it, but he would forget to keen the blade edge, or he would hit a rock, or he would stop to examine some oddity in the wilderness of grass that he hadn’t seen before, and he would become enraptured. His mind was always running some imaginative story; whether he was a knight laying siege to a castle with a beautiful captive damsel or a tough sergeant leading a platoon against an unwavering enemy depended on the day and the book he was reading. 

His distracted mind often got him in trouble. He’d gone to bed many nights, ears ringing from the cuffing he’d gotten from his father for poor or unfinished work.

Once in a while, he did get finished, though, or he finished the previous day’s work early and was then free to go off and find his friends or lose himself in his imaginary worlds.

On those days, he would come home for dinner exhausted, filthy, and often bruised or skinned from his battles. But on those days, the pain was earned in a different way, and he didn’t mind so much.

He swung and swung. The grass fell away. He watched the sky.

One such day, he and his brothers had finished the whole field by just before lunchtime, and their father had given them permission to spend the rest of the day how they chose. He had gone in to a quick lunch of bread and cheese and tea, prepared by his grandmother, and then headed to the woods.

He and the other boys made a fort, of sorts, by an old beech tree near the creek, and that was the meeting place for their forays into the wild impetuosity of youth.

That day, no other boys were there, and he decided to go back to the farm to see what the others were doing. 

He noticed how dark the sky had gotten, and he felt a pang of jealousy that the weather would take a free afternoon so full of promise from him. By the time he topped the first hill and came out from the eaves of the wood, he saw that the sky to the west had become black with storm. And he saw with livid terror a huge whirling cone dip and snake from the belly of the black monstrosity, like a hand feeling around for destruction.

He broke into a mad, full-out run toward the white farmhouse, coming across the hill and reaching the gravel lane that led from the country road to the farm. He flew along as fast as he could, but the terrible swirling horror, he knew, would reach the farm first. The air filled with a sound like millions of bees, huge and furious, and dust whipped by and stung his arms and face. He faltered, wondering whether to proceed. Should he help his family or turn and flee?

Then he saw two white lights, like eyes burning through the dust. Holding his hands to the sides of his face, he strained to see what it could be.

Then he realized what came toward him. His father and brothers, his grandmother and sister, all cowering in the back of the family pickup, as it sped along the lane, away from the raging monster behind.

He stood to the side of the road and jogged along to make pace with the old truck, and his father slowed only enough to let him hop the running board and in through the passenger window to squeeze by his grandmother cowering there. They made the country road and the high hill before they stopped, and looking back, they saw the vicious thing run through their home and their land, destroying blindly as it went.

He had helped to rebuild their home, had helped his father farm, and other work to make up for the loss of that day. His brothers had all gone off to war or to work; his grandmother left them in her sleep. His father had worked hard and was slowing now but would still tend the kitchen garden and walk the old lane. His wife and children lived and grew older.

And still, he mowed when he could, taking up the old tool, slowly making the lines of cuttings up and down the field. The adventurousness of youth had faded, but he still remembered those days and the storm that had nearly ended them.

He swung and sharpened and mowed and lived and breathed. He watched the sky like an eagle. 

He mowed.