spittle-spraying harangue in fine Cluddite style and gesturing toward the stake where Ringard hung.
I cursed, I wept, I took it less nobly than Ringard himself when the torch dipped and his pyre blossomed up to contain him like a crystal cup. His head twisted, probably to deny these zealots the sight of one more tortured face, but it seemed to me that he was pressing his ear to the stake in an effort to hear a last message from the medium he had loved so much.
Then he turned back toward us, and that face, crawling with unknown flora, held an expression of such torment that it must have gratified even the most jaded of the Holy Soldiers. Yet his words, when they rang across the distance and over the roar of the bonfire, were absurd: “Not the stake! No, no, not the stake!”
It was over quickly enough, although the victim’s sense of time may have differed from mine. The black stake bore a black gnarl, and it was all so much indistinguishable charcoal. The sudden reports that made me cry out were only the eruptions of boiling sap, or marrow.
His last words had puzzled me. He was no imbecile, he had been alert to the end, he had known what they meant to do, so why had he protested against the stake? Trying not just to examine my memory but to relive the moment just past, to catch the words still ringing in my ears, I convinced myself that I had misunderstood him.
A prudent man would have made his exit, but I was so distraught that I seized the chief fanatic and demanded, “What was it he said? Did you hear the man’s last words?”
“’Deafen your ears to the words of wisdom, and to fine phrases be as stone,’” the captain quoted quite clearly from The Book of Cludd, and the import of his hard stare was even clearer.
There was much I would have asked him, but I had outworn my welcome. They kept my horse, my weapons and my clothing to further their good works, and I was forced to pick my cold and painful way through the sighing and creaking forest far longer after dark than I would have liked. Countryman though I am, I had never noticed that the riffle of leaves and clitter of loose bark can sound exactly like human conversations, whispered with earnest intensity. I paused often to listen, but I could identify no single, coherent word, with the doubtful but disturbing exception of my Tribal name: Sleith.
In the days that followed I noticed, too, that certain leaves, when they flashed their pale sides to the bright sun, could suggest hair the color of rain; and that the slim grace of some trees, the firm molding of others, the quality that I can only describe as the joyful nature of still others, stirred memories of a girl who had once romped with me and the hounds when she should have been counting her jewels. If Ringard had been mad, his madness had been metaphorically apt.
And he had surely been mad. The Cluddites had felled hundreds of trees and burned hundreds of victims. Coincidence can be stretched only so far. Yet I had convinced myself that his last words, after he had listened to a cry from the tree they had randomly chosen for him, had not been, “Not the stake!,” but, “Not this stake!”
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The Throne of Bones
“Several faces I recognized; though I should have known them better had they been shriveled or eaten away by death and decomposition.”
—H.P.Lovecraft: “The Tomb.”
I
Lord Glyphtard’s Tale
You’re moving good,
But you just fell down;
You’re moving good,
But you’re thrashing round;
You’re moving good,
But you’re spewing gore;
You’re moving good,
But not no more.
—“Song of the Graveyard
Watchmen”
As a child I was told not to gather souvenirs from the cemetery, but it was hard to determine where our overgrown garden blended with the overgrown fringe of Dreamers’ Hill. I had found skulls that clearly lay on our property. If Mother permitted me to collect them, although she would shudder and urge me to find a healthier pastime, why
I cursed, I wept, I took it less nobly than Ringard himself when the torch dipped and his pyre blossomed up to contain him like a crystal cup. His head twisted, probably to deny these zealots the sight of one more tortured face, but it seemed to me that he was pressing his ear to the stake in an effort to hear a last message from the medium he had loved so much.
Then he turned back toward us, and that face, crawling with unknown flora, held an expression of such torment that it must have gratified even the most jaded of the Holy Soldiers. Yet his words, when they rang across the distance and over the roar of the bonfire, were absurd: “Not the stake! No, no, not the stake!”
It was over quickly enough, although the victim’s sense of time may have differed from mine. The black stake bore a black gnarl, and it was all so much indistinguishable charcoal. The sudden reports that made me cry out were only the eruptions of boiling sap, or marrow.
His last words had puzzled me. He was no imbecile, he had been alert to the end, he had known what they meant to do, so why had he protested against the stake? Trying not just to examine my memory but to relive the moment just past, to catch the words still ringing in my ears, I convinced myself that I had misunderstood him.
A prudent man would have made his exit, but I was so distraught that I seized the chief fanatic and demanded, “What was it he said? Did you hear the man’s last words?”
“’Deafen your ears to the words of wisdom, and to fine phrases be as stone,’” the captain quoted quite clearly from The Book of Cludd, and the import of his hard stare was even clearer.
There was much I would have asked him, but I had outworn my welcome. They kept my horse, my weapons and my clothing to further their good works, and I was forced to pick my cold and painful way through the sighing and creaking forest far longer after dark than I would have liked. Countryman though I am, I had never noticed that the riffle of leaves and clitter of loose bark can sound exactly like human conversations, whispered with earnest intensity. I paused often to listen, but I could identify no single, coherent word, with the doubtful but disturbing exception of my Tribal name: Sleith.
In the days that followed I noticed, too, that certain leaves, when they flashed their pale sides to the bright sun, could suggest hair the color of rain; and that the slim grace of some trees, the firm molding of others, the quality that I can only describe as the joyful nature of still others, stirred memories of a girl who had once romped with me and the hounds when she should have been counting her jewels. If Ringard had been mad, his madness had been metaphorically apt.
And he had surely been mad. The Cluddites had felled hundreds of trees and burned hundreds of victims. Coincidence can be stretched only so far. Yet I had convinced myself that his last words, after he had listened to a cry from the tree they had randomly chosen for him, had not been, “Not the stake!,” but, “Not this stake!”
[Back to Table of Contents]
The Throne of Bones
“Several faces I recognized; though I should have known them better had they been shriveled or eaten away by death and decomposition.”
—H.P.Lovecraft: “The Tomb.”
I
Lord Glyphtard’s Tale
You’re moving good,
But you just fell down;
You’re moving good,
But you’re thrashing round;
You’re moving good,
But you’re spewing gore;
You’re moving good,
But not no more.
—“Song of the Graveyard
Watchmen”
As a child I was told not to gather souvenirs from the cemetery, but it was hard to determine where our overgrown garden blended with the overgrown fringe of Dreamers’ Hill. I had found skulls that clearly lay on our property. If Mother permitted me to collect them, although she would shudder and urge me to find a healthier pastime, why
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