Daily Ghost Anthology 33
The 33rd issue of the Daily Ghost magazine brings together all the Lovecraftian horror stories. Please share them if you enjoy them and encourage other people to subscribe.
It’s here at last.
The last week. The last weekend. July 4th marks a full year - 365 days of daily ghost stories, no days off, all originals, all scary or funny or surprising or bittersweet.
And I’m exhausted!
So on July 5th there will be no daily ghost story for the first time in a year.
But that’s not the end of the daily ghost, I hope. I’ll keep on writing stories. I’ll just be able to do it when I want to do it instead of when I have to do it, to meet a deadline every 24 hours. I’ll be able to use different formats instead of the 400 word flash fiction structure I adopted for the year.
And the Daily Ghost archive will appear again in a new format. Stay tuned. I’ll announce it here.
Someone asked me, Why write ghost stories? I think the blame must be laud squarely at the feet of the publisher Usborne and the World of the Unknown series that delighted me as a child. It’s back in print, after popular demand, so parents can raise a new generation of ghost fans.
But the interest in horror came later and through the anthologies of tales by American author H P Lovecraft that I read as a teenager. Here’s the exact editions I owned:
That’s why it seems appropriate to finish the year by anthologising the seven Lovecraftian stories from Daily Ghost, especially since five of them have audio readings on my YouTube channel. It’s fashionable these days to apologise for Lovecraft’s racism before recommending his fiction, but I think we can dispense with that. The tales here start off as very direct Lovecraft pastiches, but with David Hipple’s wry reading of A Miskatonic Seance I think they start evolving into more distinctive pieces that take inspiration from Lovecraft rather than outright copying him.
I hope you enjoy them. Thanks for supporting the Daily Ghost.
Strange Fruit
Though I am sedentary even within my academic vocation, I confess myself excited by the prospect of a field trip. The Aylesbury Register recorded a meteorite shower in the spring of 1882, later followed by the story of a local farmer, Amos Gath, complaining of ghosts in his vegetable plot. The journalist found the credulity of New England rustic folk sufficient for a merry diversion, but it occurred to me that a monograph on the folk tradition might find acceptance in the Miskatonic Journal of Social Science.
Accordingly, I wrote to Mr Gath and received in due course his eccentric reply:
“Begging pardon, sir, for my unlettered words, but the ghosts be my daughters Talitha and Abigail, both grievously dying around Lammas-tide, and speaking to us now from the pomegranate fruits, Numbers XX v.”
Clearly, correspondence would enlighten me no further, but I must visit Gath Farm and its haunted pomegranates!
There is no better backdrop for a macabre tale than the woods west of Arkham whose tangled glens resemble nothing less than one of Albrecht Pfister’s infamous woodcuts. Two odd shrubs dominated the yard at Gath Farm; suspended from their fronds were curious fruits with mouth-like apertures
Amos I found within, alone and in a stupor. A third sinister plant loomed in the kitchen and roots dangling from the rafters suggested a fourth upstairs.
Nothing would rouse Amos to full consciousness, but he shared this garbled testimony:
“We ate of the fruit, like unto Eve … first Tally, then the others … summat from the fallen star that took root … it grows in ye, changes ye … where’s Seth? is Ruth still in the kitchen? … I wouldn’t of ate, but they bid me, Tally an’ Ruth and the rest, an’ I did eat …”
He went into convulsions and a chewed fruit core dropped from his fingers.
Then I heard the voices. First two children, out in the yard, then a woman, in the kitchen, and a young man, upstairs. They called on Amos, naming him father and husband, bidding him eat and join them.
Then, to my indissoluble horror, they called my name, offering twitching fruits.
I fled that cursed place. I hear the Gath Farm subsequently burned down, but I no longer attend to queer news in the rustic press. Nor have I ever since eaten pomegranates.
The inspiration here is The Colour Out of Space (1927) in which the backwards dwellers in a remote farm are affected by a strange energy that falls from space. I was going to have Amos Gad misspell pomegranates as "pommygranites" but then it occurred to me that a man steeped in the Bible would not make that mistake.
Through the Angles
If I am rearded as a hermit, my seclusion results from Henry Annesley’s telegram.
EPHRAIM I HAVE MADE A BREAKTHROUGH STOP THE ANGLES CLOSE BUT THEY CAN BE OPENED STOP TILLINGHAST SHOWED THE WAY STOP COME AT ONCE
Annesley and I corresponded on esoteric mathematical theories, especially non-Euclidian angles, and we speculated on planes of existence above, or perhaps below, what the ignorant perceive as ‘reality.’
I possessed a key to admit me to his house in Providence, which the neighbours shunned, but found no sign of the owner, so I resolved to await him. A day passed uneventfully in the quaint, if dilapidated, colonial house but after sunset I looked up to see Henry Annesley standing in a shadowy corner, pointing upwards.
He appeared again in the attic, where the roof sloped to the rafters, pointing to the wall. Then he was gone.
Calculation confirmed the attic too small for the length of the house. Five minutes labour with a hatchet broke down a false wall, revealing Annesley’s hidden laboratory. Books were stacked everywhere; I recognised Euclid’s Elements and the obscure Almucabola of Al-Kindi. In the middle towered a machine of valves, pistons and revolving orbs, somewhat like Mascart’s devilish instruments for the investigation of luminiferous aether.
Annesley appeared in a corner, gesticulating towards his device. In obedience to his direction, I adjusted the dials until I could hear as well as see him:
“... the Tillinghast Generator, Ephraim … through the angles to dimensions undreamt …”
“Henry, is it you?” I called. “Where are you?”
He vanished, but adjusting the device made him visible again in another corner.
“… not alone here … this is their realm …”
I brought him into focus and was shocked to see his expression of abject terror.
“out of the angles, Ephraim … turn … off … the Generator!”
Then I saw it, but only momentarily. It appeared behind Annesley and also in every corner of the room. It was geometric, yet it flowed, surrounding us, and encroached, from the angular spaces, with infinite malevolence.
I smashed the machine with my hatchet, silencing the doomed Annesley and banishing his hideous pursuer.
I fled the cursed house that night and human society too. This lighthouse off the Maine coast is my sanctuary. Only here do I find relief from constant dread, living in a house without any corners.
Lovecraft fans will recognise the plot of From Beyond (1920) and the name Tillinghast alludes to the doomed scientist in that tale. 'Henry Annesley' was the name Lovecraft originally planned for the character. The idea of a reality accessible through angles turns up in Frank Belknap Long's Hounds of Tindalos (1929), which Lovecraft read and referenced. Lovecraft used this conceit to different effect in Dreams in the Witch house (1933). The narrator's name references Robert Pattinson's character in the Robert Eggers film The Lighthouse (2019) which has a Lovecraftian vibe too.
A Miskatonic Seance
It’s a privilege to exchange the dreaming spires of Oxford for the gambrel roofs of Arkham, Massachusetts; the floral Isis for the darkly muttering Miskatonic River.
Here I could research remote New England communities in their moss-covered cottages. Degenerate these people were, but where else might a scholar observe a séance mingling Calvinism with the rites of the long-vanished Pocumtucks, whose stones litter these hills?
The congregation assembled in a barn off the Aylesbury Pike, with the whippoorwills chorusing outside. Two sisters presided: Dinah and Dorcas Burroughs. Missy Dinah declaimed from the Old Testament and apocryphal texts of doubtful authority. Her sister writhed on the floor. Suddenly, she sat upright and declared:
“Ah see Earl Sawyer an’ there’s a treasure fer his wider. Eff’n yew dig in the field behind Bishop’s farm, ah calc’late yew’ll find suthin’ ye’re lookin’ fer!”
Earl Sawyer’s widow seemed glad of this ghostly intelligence. I interviewed the sisters, finding Missy Dinah articulate but her medium sister a sullen mute.
Dinah said, “We’m more to show ye, eff ye durst to larn!”
When the congregation broke up, I accompanied the sisters to an old cemetery where the whippoorwills screeched. Missy Dorcas scrabbled at the putrid earth beneath an illegibly decayed tombstone. Dinah excavated bones and strings of gelatinous flesh. My disgust struggled with scholarly fascination as the sisters concocted a “shewbread” from this necrotic filth. They chanted in fragments of Hebrew and odder tongues, then broke the shewbread and consumed fragments before offering it to me.
“Aold Wizard Whately knew his letters, but Dorcas kint channel him good. We needs larnin’ sich as yewers to read the Eibon Book.”
Nausea gagged me, but my curiosity was inflamed and the whippoorwills’ cries reached a daemonic crescendo.
I remember little of what followed. Certainly, I did eat. Did I accompany the sisters to a cavern underground? Did I read by candlelight from a crumbling book, pronouncing hideous syllables in a voice that was not my own? Did the earth shake at the name of Yog-Sothoth?
I rehabilitated in Danvers Sanatorium. When I recommenced my studies, my health was broken. My grades, once exemplary, were mediocre. Moreover, my tutor, the celebrated Henry Armitage (Ph. D. Princeton) had passed away.
“A sad loss to academia,” his secretary informed me. “To think of the learning he has taken with him.”
I licked my lips.
“Do you perhaps know where his body is buried?”
Wizard Whately is the antagonist in The Dunwich Horror (1929) who summons Yog-Sothoth to earth and Prof. Henry Armitage is the protagonist who banishes the horror. The Eibon Book is referred to throughout the works of Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith. The Danvers Sanatorium is a real enough place; Lovecraft calls it the Arkham Sanatorium.
The Innsmouth Fossil
10 November, 1931
Dear Doctor Marsh,
I have received your package, undamaged after its Atlantic journey. I confess myself perplexed by the classification. I would hazard proto-agnathian, not unlike the hagfish, although vertebrae make the assignation problematic.
As per your instructions I have transferred the fossil to saltwater.
12 November
It’s alive! It has uncoiled from the clay. As you proposed, a true case of cryptobiosis. The creature has endured countless aeons entombed in stone but now lives again.
As advised, I have stored it in a bowl in a darkened room.
17 November
How it grows! I have transferred it to a larger tank, but it certainly thrashes around in there. Rather than the nutrients you recommend, I took the liberty of feeding it a live mouse. It consumed the creature, then entered a state of dormancy, during which it grew seven inches.
Malachi, this is the find of the century. I must join you in Massachusetts next Spring and we can study Innsmouth’s coastal deposits together.
21 December
I apologise for the hiatus in our correspondence. I have been unwell. I have transferred her to a tank filling the space where my library resided. She needs more room.
She is beautiful, Malachi.
Her scales shine with a peculiar iridescence and her eyes, they are windows into an unfathomable abyss.
She is beyond mice now, or dogs for that matter.
I dreamed last night that we swam together, her and I, to a city beneath the waves. It occurs to me to enter her tank, so that I might sustain her in a way that my poor dog could not. But rest assured, I will not do so foolish a thing.
27 January 1932
I am stronger today and can write. She spends less time in the tank. Though her voice terrifies the butcher’s boy who brings the meat, it is sweet to me. We are intimately conjoined and not just in her tank and, of late, my bed. I see through her eyes.
Indeed, I rarely see through my own.
And such sights! From my jetty, she swims beyond the coastal shelf to the submerged basalt city of Zadrai-Hyraglion, where her kinsfolk have awaited her since the ice sheets advanced.
Her visions are coming upon me again! Dear Malachi, remember me. I fear I shall not be visiting Innsmouth in the Spring.
Many of Lovecraft's tales refer to the eerie coastal town of Innsmouth, MA. where the inhabitants interbreed with immortal fish-beings from the depths of the sea. It's difficult to tell stories of transformation or psychological deterioration in such a short format, but doing it through letters - what the experts call the epistolary form - is a great shorthand for doing this convincingly. David's narration conveys the mixture of degradation and exaltation in the author as he falls under the sea-creature's spell.
The Symphony of Erich Zann
Dev’s fingers glided over the mixing desk. The sound files – little coloured oblongs – lined up on the screen. He pulled on his earphones to check the recording.
“Please, don’t,” I advised him.
After discovering the score for Erich Zann’s shunned masterpiece at a Paris auction house, I presented it to Mme Auteil, an accomplished sight reader of music. She’s in the Asile Salpetriere now, scribbling crotchets on the walls of her cell in crayon.
“You don’t want me to EQ it? Maybe compress it some?” Dev asked, using his baffling terminology.
“Best not.”
After Mme Auteil’s breakdown, I invited performers to record their separate contributions without seeing the whole. A celebrated violinist sent a recording of his instrument being smashed, along with peals of deranged laughter. An eminent flautist with the Boston Sinfonietta returned a cassette tape, which, when played, contained only plaintive sobbing, abruptly curtailed by a gunshot.
That’s why I recruited a sound engineer.
“I want each note created separately,” I instructed Dev, “then combined together – synthesized, if you will – into a single musical piece.”
Dev confirmed this was achievable.
“One note at a time,” I insisted, “and I shall provide the notes in a random order, for you to rearrange into the correct sequence, without ever listening to them.”
Dev said, “You realise I charge by the hour?”
But it was completed: Zann’s blasphemous concerto for violin and ensemble, Rhapsody at an Open Portal. As a dot wav file, whatever that is.
I would experience it later, in a locked and soundproof room, revelling in Zann’s unspeakable genius.
“Play it with the volume, ah, ‘muted,’ if that’s the word.”
The spikes and troughs described the shape of the music, which bore a disquieting resemblance to a voice – or voices – barking eldritch and inhuman syllables.
“Strange,” muttered Dev, as his computer screen flickered. “It’s uploading itself to the Internet.”
“Turn it off,” I ordered. “Do it now.”
When Dev’s tapping accomplished nothing, I pulled the power cord. The screen went dark.
“We don’t want that music getting loose.”
I picked up my vibrating phone.
“Excuse me, Hello?”
The first strain of wild and daemonical violin crackled from it.
Dev’s phone vibrated too and he answered it: more hideous notes joined the chorus.
Outside, in the street, phones were ringing. In houses and offices. Across the world. The nightmare music of Erich Zann would be heard at last.
The Music of Erich Zann (1922) is a classic H.P. Lovecraft weird tale, in which a young student lodges in a Parisian tenement beneath a blind violinist - Erich Zann - whose alien music disturbs the night. Zann's music is either summoning or keeping at bay demonic entities from another world. Lovecraft considered the story his best.
Necronom Dot-Com
The website was great, when it was niche, OK? But now little kids are on necronom.com – the types that were following Taylor Swift, before she disappeared. I swear, there are 7th graders arguing at recess about how you pronounce Cthulhu Fhtagn (that’s right, right?).
It’s like, that jewellery, the gold stuff, that the site tells you how to get. When Paige and me first logged on, we had to earn that stuff. That old hobo that sleeps in the underpass, he fought back, right? It wasn’t easy pushing him off the bridge. When the underwater people gave us those crowns and necklaces in return, we’d earned that. It’s about respect.
And remember all the haters? All the SJWs online, telling you that Lovecraft was, like, super-racist, because he named his cat ‘N-word’? We had to put up with a lot of trolling, before the Mythos went mainstream. Now, those guys are the species-ist ones, who won’t let Yithians take over their bodies or talk to the Fungi from Yuggoth on Zoom.
It’s, like, ironic. That’s a real word, right?
Anyway, it got old for me pretty fast when Suzee Jukes got pregnant. She’s, like, 14, so it’s super-gross. The Mythos used to be about empowerment, but Suzee’s baby lives in the basement and her Dad has to buy cows for it to eat. I mean, where do you even buy cows? They’re not on Amazon.
Maybe they’re on GrubHub.
So, Paige started me thinking when she tweeted that the Mythos is basically gaslighting us with all that stuff about cosmic insignificance and nihil- nial- … nealism, is that right? What if futility and meaninglessness is just, y’know, to keep us in line?
Paige is awesome. I wonder what happened to her.
It’s hard to pay attention at school when you’re starting to wonder if maybe there’s a point to everything. In science, we’re learning about how the stars are finally right, but I’m like, Right for who? Now that R’lyeh’s risen from the sea, my folks want to take me, but I’m too old for theme parks.
I found this book in a thrift store. It’s by this guy Plato. Yeah, like the Disney dog. It says that everything is just an imperfect reflection of something else that’s real and true and good.
It’s a forbidden book. Kind of eldritch. But I think it’ll change my life.
If you know your Lovecraft, you'll recognise "Cthulhu fhtagn" as a much quoted and unpronounceable fragment from the Necronomicon, often quoted in Lovecraft's stories. The "underwater people" are the Deep Ones who give the inhabitants of Innsmouth weird jewellery from their undersea realm in exchange for services, the least disturbing of which include human sacrifice. The Yithians are an alien race who travel through time by possessing bodies; the Fungi from Yuggoth are also aliens who remove people's brains. The fate of Suzee Jukes' monstrous baby echoes the events in The Dunwich Horror (1929). R'lyeh is the underwater city and tomb of the demon Cthulhu, whose rising above the waves signals the end of the world (at least, for humans).
The Eldritch Heist
Modern bank vaults are works of art and science. No jacking points on those sloping hinges, cobalt plating to turn away even titanium drills and high thermal conductivity to slow down oxy-acetylene torches. Tough nuts to crack. But no lock keeps me out.
I don’t come cheap but I’m discrete. If some rich weirdo wants to me to steal an antique book from a high-security vault, I’ll do it. If the instruction is not under any circumstances to read a word of what’s inside the book, I won’t ask why.
The book is called the Necronomicon. It’s a jumble of mouldering parchments, bound in leather and lying open inside a glass case at 45% humidity. I cut through the glass. I lift the book and place it in my hermetically sealed box.
Then I notice the hatch.
There’s another vault, below this one.
Simple rule: you do the job and that’s all you do. But I’m intrigued. And no lock keeps me out.
The design on the Necronomicon’s first page is a conglomeration of spheres, strangely coded. I tap the matching symbols on the hatch’s keypad. It opens.
There’s an older vault below, steel and poured concrete, holding more books: De Vermis Mysteriis, the original 1839 edition of Unaussprechlichen Kulten, the forbidden Liber Ivonis.
And another door with a puzzle lock, but no lock keeps me out. The Necronomicon’s next page holds the solution. Beyond, granite steps spiral into a medieval cellar.
The texts down here are mould-encrusted vellum, etched with barbaric runes: the eldritch Spellboc aef Sceob-Nagiroth, thought lost to the cleansing fire at Exham Priory.
In the floor is a valve of black basalt. Ha! No lock keeps me out. The next page instructs me in the motions of the Elder Sign that waves the portal open.
The vaults below are Roman, then pre-Roman Celtic, then a grinning cavern painted with beasts. Once, the first homo sapiens, following the retreating ice, gathered here before this echoing pit and performed rites directed by their hooded priest.
The authorities will find me upstairs, absorbed in the frontispiece of the Necronomicon. Let them apprehend my body.
Fools!
They cannot apprehend my thoughts, which plunge ever deeper into the abyss of time, vaults below vaults, secrets revealing secrets, till I come at last to the earth’s centre where, howling blindly to the piping of an idiot flute, the mad faceless god Nyarlathotep awaits.