The Terror of the Night

THE TERROR OF THE NIGHT

By Joseph Rubas





(Dedicated to H.P. Lovecraft)





When I first joined forces with the late Professor Howard Peircesen of Fredericksburg’s Mary Washington University, I was a hale and healthy young man of twenty with a clear head, a powerful body, and a consuming passion for all things macabre. Now, three months after the old couple found me in their hayloft cringing and shrieking in terror, I am dulled in both body and mind. I cannot control my bladder after hostile sleep has taken me, and shudder and become nearly inconsolable when the sun has sunk from the western sky. Whereas I was a voracious reader of occult lore and accounts of wretched night fantasies before my encounter, I now find that I cannot so much as hear of the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred without a quickening of the heart and a loss of breath.

But I must set down the horror that I faced in the town of Port Royal on that early spring night. The strange disappearance of Professor Peircesen, a noted writer and lecturer on the national folklore circuit, has caused a sensation in certain circles, and the public at large, made aware of the whole affair by the antagonistic column writing of the Richmond Democrat’s Steven Faye, has been demanding answers. I am wildly reluctant to recall the frightful night in March when I came up against a true night-beast, for further recollection and description of the terror of the night may very well drive me forever into the chasm of madness that I so recently escaped. The public is not ready, nor will it ever be, for what I have to say, and the horrid ramifications therein, but they clamor insufferably night and day. I have spoken by phone with the brother of Howard Peircesen, a retired construction foreman residing in south Florida, and he personally assured me that he wanted to know nothing of his estranged brother’s vanishing. He knew, he said, of the type of things that piqued his brother’s interest, and of the stomach turning books from which studied. He is the only one to whom I felt obligated in regards to my tale, as I was with his brother during his final moments. But the masses at large, at least locally and in the academic world, refuse to let the matter lie. The fools beg and beseech; they will not accept what I have to give, but it is the whole truth, bizarre or not. I may be thought of as a madman or a lying scoundrel, but I frankly don’t care; I am past petty vanities.

I met Professor Peircesen at the home of a mutual friend on the evening of March 7, and quickly found him to be a genius of epic proportions. He was a small bald man with tiny horn-rimmed glasses and a yellow and black stripped bow-tie which, I later learned, was an ever-present accessory of his. His voice was soft, nearly effeminate, and his smooth, creamy hands betrayed him as a man who had never known a day of manual labor.

As I have before said, his area of expertise was folklore, which excited my mind in no small degree. I quickly engaged him, and we spoke at length on such topics as the Native American windigo, the witch-cult still prevalent in the dark ancient forests of Europe, and of the shunned, legend-haunted Miskatonic region of Massachusetts, portrayed so vividly in several volumes by expert Howard Lovecraft.

He at great length, as we sat in the dim living room of my friend’s home installed in plush armchairs, discussed Alhazred’s demonic Necronomicon, and hinted that he had also studied the whispered works of Chinese sadist Lee Yu-Kang, who was rumored to have concocted a foul formula to turn man into lustful animals, and then to have fled in fear after seeing what several of his followers had become. I was at once impressed by Peircesen’s knowledge, and was ashamed to say that I had never so much as seen a copy of the Necronomicon, and had gleaned all of my meager knowledge from Lovecraft. He smiled when I, head hung in shame, told him of my relative naiveté.

“I have poured over the Arkham copy,” he said proudly, “and have even seen the unfinished French translation by madman Michel Navritil. Though I fear that even these works pale in comparison to Kang’s Forbidden Book.”

Our conversation turned to the reputed Cthulhu cult whispered about by even Alhazred. I found that I could not keep up with Professor Peircesen’s mighty brain. I was appalled at and enamored with the man as he told me of the various books and artifacts that he encountered in his travels to feared and exotic locations from the Himalayas to the Yucatan, which was still home to a small coven of violent Cthulhu adherents.

When the mood of our talk reached vampires, however, I saw at once that this was his true passion. His eyes lit up and he flashed a knowing smile when I mentioned the case of Serbian Arnold Paole who, in 1728, supposedly vampirized nearly an entire village before his body was disinterred and burned by frightened townspeople. He dismissed me with a chuckle and a flap of one frail hand.

“Interesting, yes, but unreal. William of Newburgh’s Historia Rerum Anglicarum also contains several such ‘true’ cases. There is an actual form of vampire in the world, though it bears little resemblance to the classic ‘suck-your-blood’ Dracula of modern literature and cinema.”

He slowly and comprehensively explained to me the theory of astral vampirism, first put forth by the fifteenth century alchemist Paracelsus, who penned several accursed volumes of whispered lore from the darkest reaches of night before dying a raving lunatic in a Paris madhouse. He deduced, in part from noticing that a vampirish vapor hung over certain cursed churchyards, that each person had not only a physical body but also an astral body, which was invisible until death, when it could be observed leaving the deceased’s nostrils in the form of a white mist. He also thought that in cases of accidental burial the astral body could, on its own accord or on the behalf its host, go forth into the night to seek grizzly nourishment. The blood or “life-force” gained from the attacks passed immediately to the organs of the physical body lying in the tomb, closely followed by the victorious astral body. In this way, a body prematurely laid to rest could survive, conceivably for many years.

I listened enraptured as he related several cases supporting his belief in a casual manner. The one which struck me the most was a local case which had seized Peircesen’s entire being, both academic and leisure; both folkloric and scientific; both intellectual and primal. It seems that a young man by the last name of Benson had died over the winter from a curious fever he developed after he spent several hours hunting in the snowy woods near his home in Port Royal, a miserable little berg huddled on the muddy banks of the Potomac. His family, being of uneducated backwoods stock, chose to have him promptly buried by the local undertaker. He was installed in the family plot in the old cemetery on Prospect Hill south of town, a barren green hump of shaggy ground arising out of the dark foreboding forest.

Not long thereafter, the mother of the Benson family reported horridly vivid nightmares in which a queer disembodied mist invaded her bedroom and settled over her head. In the mornings after these dreams, she was noticeably pale and weak, as if suffering from anemia, and was more easily frightened and excitable. The town doctor found nothing physically wrong with her, but did prescribe a sedative, ascribing the nightmares to her mourning. She improved in mind only over the next week, suffering none of the former ghastly dreams which had intensely disquieted her. Her frame became less and less until she was nothing but a skeleton held together by ashy gray flesh. Her hair, once a lovely shade of deep red, soon became the color of iron, and her formerly smooth face was besieged by deep wrinkles and queer blemishes. Those close to her reported that her mouth emitted a vile odor not unlike human decomposition.

Most days she left the daily house duties to her gruff husband, who fished the gray water of the Potomac for a living. Rapidly she became so weak that it was impossible for her to remain at home under her own power. Reluctantly, the husband agreed for his wife’s sake to have her admitted to Mary Washington hospital in Fredericksburg. She seemed to improve somewhat over the next three weeks, while an almost identical illness descended over her husband, who, apparently not of the same steely fiber as his wife, quickly succumbed.

The wife returned home a broken and grief stricken woman, who had, within a short time, lost her husband and her only son. At the graveside service, she flung herself weeping onto the casket and refused to move. She was carried away by three strong family members, and taken home to rest. That night, as she slumbered on, she quietly passed away.

Some people had said that she died of one foreign malady or another, and others said that her intense grief had claimed her. The official cause of death on the certificate, signed by the country doctor, who’d most likely received his degree from a Cracker-Jack box, was congestive heart failure. Per the instructions of her family will, she was immediately laid to rest next to her son and husband in the cemetery on the remote hill.

Professor Peircesen, however, believed that she and her husband had died as the result of a campaign of attacks waged by a desperate astral vampire, franticly seeking to continue its own endangered life. Peircesen was sure that the astral vampire in question was the younger Benson, who, due to the haste with which he was buried, was mistaken for dead when he in fact wasn’t.

He justified his adamant belief in the Benson boy’s guilt by reiterating a widly known trait pertaining to folkloric vampires: they attacked those closest to them in life.

I had never personally believed in the wretched legends and whispered rumors set down in the horrible likes of the Necronomicon, but Peircesen had a point. There had been a lot of talk of the soul over the many eons that man has trod the topmost crust of the earth, and I wholeheartedly believed in that and the afterlife. Perhaps the “astral double” was in fact the soul.

Of course Professor Peircesen had no doubts save as to whether the astral double was actively hostile or motivated by blind self-preservation. Did the body belong, he wondered, to an evil man or to an unwilling victim damned to fatten in his grave whilst those he loved died?

“If I can prove that there is indeed an astral body, it would been a boon to science. If we can verify that man has an astral body, a soul if you will, we can benefit greatly. Not only would ghost and vampire legends be in a way proven, but…just think! It could be possible for science to beat death itself in one way or another. The body, deplorable sack of flesh, would cease to matter, if you could transfer the soul of a person, the traits and memories and personality, to another body or medium; it would be possible for man to live forever. No more dusty textbooks and unreliable accounts; you could simply talk to historical participants. And, it could conceivably come to pass that man can be taught to use his astral double at will. This would prove most valuable in war. Why, a grunt could be in the same room as Bin Laden and never be seen!”

He leaned toward me further, our mutual friend having left the room to answer a cellular call in a different room, his face sober. Regarding me as a student of the occult and a kindred spirit, he spoke to me of his intentions:

“This is why I mean to exhume the Benson boy. I may meet with crushing failure, but I cannot pass up this opportunity. We can do all of the aforementioned great things, and have a concrete grounding for supernatural folklore the world over. Maybe we can even harness the energy that at one time had been men like Washington and Jefferson. We could…find their astral bodies, wherever they may be, and restore them to life. Not to mention that monsters like Hitler and Stalin can finally answer for their crimes.”

He went on in this intriguing vein for a long time, the excited pitch of his voice rising. Despite being profoundly disturbed by the idea of “bringing back” men thought long dead, I felt a growing fascination. Wondrous things could happen if it were proven that each had an astral body, and men of science were given ample chance to study it; things inconceivable. The computer technicians of the nineteen-forties never in their wildest fever dreams imagined that one day an entire machine could be balanced atop the lap. Millions could be saved whereas they would formerly have died. The essence of car crash victims could be caught and detained until their mangled bodies were repaired. Death would no longer be the menace that it had since the primordial dawn of time.

If Professor Peircesen’s hypothesis could be proven, then he would be, possibly, the single man to add the most knowledge to the scientific field ever. One day he would be revered the world over; I was vastly honored and humbled.

Of course I was brimming with innumerable questions, some which only time and evolution would be inclined to answer, but I did pose to Professor Peircesen one question that had immediately set about gnawing me once he had mentioned “harnessing” the energy of this person and that.

“Oh, no,” Professor Peircesen assured me with a smile, “the astral body is only dangerous if it is still…tethered to a living anchor. Adolf Hitler and John Gacy are undoubtedly dead, but it is wholly possible that, if the astral body does indeed exist, their “souls” are still about somewhere on this earth. They are totally harmless.”

Despite what Professor Peircesen had said, I was deeply unnerved by the thought that fully intelligent beings could be about at anytime without one being aware. I shuddered at imagining some of those hypothetical bodies watching malevolently as I slept at night, refraining from shocking violence only because of the physical impossibility of such things.

“I could use an extra set of hands and a steadying companion,” he was saying, rescuing me from my ghastly thoughts, “provided that that companion can keep a tight lip. Would you like to accompany me? If we meet with success you will be remembered and celebrated by history. If, however, we find but an average corpse, we will return all to the way it was, and go about our normal lives.”

I eagerly accepted his offer, curiosity and excitement burning within me. Though I knew that there was an inherent danger in doing what we planned, there was no way that I could pass a quiet night at home while such a singular and curious scene took place not twenty miles away.

I shook Peircesen’s hand, and we made arrangements to meet at the King George public library the next night at 11:30. I would leave my car in the side parking lot, and we would ride across the river to Port Royal together. We would park his car on a dirt road near the cemetery, and would trek two miles through the nocturnal forest which flanked the south side of the cemetery. If all went well and we were not accosted by police or the restless astral body itself (provided that there was an astral body to be restless), we would cross the old concrete bridge and be back safely in King George County with our unprecedented trophy long before the sun rose.

As the hour was growing late, I bid my friend and Professor Peircesen farewell, and walked to my own rented room just down the street. Later at my desk which, being at the window, gave a nice view of the brightly lit cyclone fence along the parameter of the Naval Support and Research facility, I thought deeply of the work that lay ahead. I desperately wanted to avoid any unpleasantness with the police; grave robbing was a serious crime. And astral vampirism…had I been a fool to believe in such things? The soul, either good or evil, was a far cry from a gothic white mist which floated through open windows to attack sleepers. Yet while I was apprehensive about the prospect of jail time, and a tad unsure of my own previous belief, I knew deep inside that to abandon the novel task ahead was out of the question.

I passed the next day in slow, expectant boredom. I sat at my cheap computer desk rereading a tome by Lovecraft and one by Giorgio Lekonzi of Italy, who was burned at the stake during the Inquisition for heresy. I occasionally glimpsed the clock, which sluggishly ticked off the hours. At 11:00 that night, after what had felt like several eons, I redressed and crept out of the dark house, aware that the mistress, a beefy Lutheran woman in her mid-fifties, frowned upon and would not stand nocturnal comings and goings. I kept my Intrepid parked along the curb just up the street. I hustled down the dark sidewalk, lit at intervals by the glow of streetlamps, and passed only a late jogger in a sweat suit and an elderly man being pulled along by a small bulldog.

In the car, I started the engine and quieted the radio, which I kept on 105.9. I drove through the ghostly late night streets of Dahlgren, and then into the black untamed between that and King George proper. In town there was still a trickle of traffic, denoted only by clean white headlights and seemingly demonic red taillights, moving slowly toward Warsaw to the south.

The library, a squat yet stately brick building on a small grassy commons separated from the ancient courthouse by a narrow asphalt lane, was still yet alit by the eye stingingly harsh orange glow from tall lamps in the parking lot. I pulled into the empty side lot and parked before the tall brick wall running the length of the lot. I killed the headlights and passed several anxious moments there, listening to the low staticky sounds of one glam/rock band after another, dreadfully sure that Professor Peircesen would not show. Either he had been held up by something or he had decided to go about the important midnight work himself.

After a line of traffic passed, followed by a black gulf, I soon saw a creeping pair of sickly yellow headlamps approaching from the north. The car jerked and sputtered, and, unsure of itself, pulled into the parking lot. With a shockingly loud backfire, the car pulled into the slot next to mine in a whirl of smoke, and came to a stop. I watched bemused as Professor Peircesen struggled from the driver’s seat, waving a hand before his crinkled nose to ward away the astringent smoke.

I rolled down my passenger window and joked that a famous professor should have had a better vehicle, but he must not have heard me from some deep well of thought. He moved around the crippled hatchback and removed a green oblong tarp from the storage well. Understanding, I took the keys from the ignition and proceeded to fumble open the trunk for him. He tossed the tarp in with a metallic clang, and I slammed the hood down.

“We had better take yours,” Peircesen said simply, “mine met with an accident today.”

I moved to ask the nature of the accident, but before I could he was gone, sitting patiently in the passenger seat.

I got back into the car and put us under way. At a well lit four way intersection, a hub of activity with a Sheetz on one side and a 7-11 on the other, I took a right, and we entered another black waste, lit only by the full moon, the twinkling stars and the occasional human habitation near the road.

We were bathed the entire way in silence. I was soothed by the motions of the car, but curiosity and childish anticipation burned still within me. Professor Peircesen seemed sullen and thoughtful as we made our way into Caroline County. Across the ancient bridge, he motioned for me to take a left at the first road we came to.

“About a mile up you will see a little dirt roadway to the right. Take that and drive for another two miles. It is an old logging road and not used very much today. It’s narrow, but we shouldn’t meet anyone.”

I took the road passing behind the crumbling brick and stone buildings of the seemingly deserted town. The small dirt road of which Professor Peircesen had spoken was indeed nearly indiscernible amongst the liquid black forest.

The dirt road was terribly rutted and under-cared for, my grip on the steering wheel tightened as I was jostled about like a schooner in a tempest-tossed sea. Next to me, Professor Peircesen held rigidly onto the handhold above the door.

Before the two miles were up, I came to an impassible point. Long ago, during one violent summer thunderstorm or another, a giant oak had come crashing down, and now laid across the road, impeding further access. That the tree was still in such a position gave testament to the fact that the road was indeed grossly neglected.

“We’ll just go from here,” Professor Peircesen said as he climbed out into the night. I grudgingly killed the headlights and plunged the area into a deep black, for the trees overhanging the road blocked the feeble light of the moon.

There was a queer expectant stillness in the forest. Aside from the occasional croak of distant bullfrogs and a smattering of cricket violin, my soul squirmed under a dreadfully oppressive silence.

I moved around to the truck where Professor Peircesen stood patiently, his head cocked to one side as if he were listening for something out of the ordinary. I opened the trunk and removed the green bundle, which was only slightly cumbersome. With that over my right shoulder like a frontline bound soldier’s Springfield, I followed Professor Peircesen into a small clearing by the roadside. Here the spongy ground was bathed in the silvery light of the moon, which lent a ghastly tint to everything. Quiet and soft, perhaps afraid of alerting the astral body possibly lurking nearby, Professor Peircesen slowly crept across the field and into the luminous forest with me in tow. A layer of dead brown leaves from autumns past covered the forest floor; and with every crunch underfoot I damned wicked Mother Nature. I don’t know why, maybe it was the whole gloomy mood of the place, or Professor Peircesen’s own paranoia was infecting me, but by the time we reached the humped hill, black against the stars, my heart was racing and my breath came in shallow gasps, even though the hike had been rather pleasant. It was easy, I reflected, to damn astral vampires when cradled in the electric bosom of civilization.

We stood at the foot of the hill for a moment, I being frightened into starts and near exclamations by owls hooting from high tree branches; the crush of small animals in the underbrush; and the total lack of noise from Professor Peircesen. It was as if the breath had been terrified out of the man, for he stood like a statue, looking toward the damned summit of the hill. I don’t know why this would be so, for apparently he was a more mature, levelheaded intellect than was I. But, then again, the works of Abdul Alhazred, Lee Yu-Kang, and the damnible like could have instilled in him not fear but sure knowledge.

“Okay, come on,” he whispered to me, shaking the fear away.

We climbed the sloping hill and made the summit moments later. A low stone wall, eroded and affecting a prehistoric look, encircled the small tract of overgrown land. From my vantage point, as Professor Peircesen struggled over the wall, I had a wondrous rolling view of the Virginia countryside, shinning in the cold moonlight. Beyond the tall trees close, I could see across the dark Potomac to the opposite shore. There was a small cluster of lights near the dark, reflective water, and a pair of slow moving headlights on the road parallel to the river. Back further were bare hilly farmlands, each fenced in with weak rows of barbed wire. Such a breathtaking and awe-inspiring sight. I was at once filled with a fierce love and admiration for Virginia, and resolved that I would properly portray this beautiful landscape in my own short stories.

“Come on,” Professor Peircesen hissed from behind me. Startled, I turned and found him peering over the wall, his face obscured by shadows.

I handed over the burdensome bundle and scaled the wall more fluidly than Peircesen had. On the other side, in tangled grass up to my ankles, Peircesen handed me the bundle and motioned for me to follow him to the western most section of the cemetery. I inferred from his obvious knowledge of the layout that he had been here before, possibly scouting our route in the daylight hours. I followed him past rows of crooked headstones, and I for the first time noticed the curling ground mist that had suddenly sprang up. At once I was alerted and vigilant. My mind played me scenes from a dozen horror films from the latter half of the twentieth century in which just such a thick marrow-chilling mist was present. I felt a strange desire to once more peer over the wall and see if there was a mist there too, but I dared not.

Finally, Professor Peircesen stopped before a simple wooden cross at the head of a freshly turned pile of dark soil. I bent, unrolled the bundle, and found two spades, two drab olive army issue flash lights, and an antiquated crowbar. Wordlessly, Peircesen took up one of the shovels and commenced digging. I did likewise.

I repeatedly threw glances over my shoulder as we worked, sure that I would see an approaching set of headlights below an even brighter search lamp, gleaming into the night like a satanic eye. Or worse: A disembodied ball of floating mist.

Finally, the disheartening mound of dirt had disappeared, and we were faced with the dry packed earth further down. From beside me I heard Peircesen grunting from exertion, and when I looked over, I saw the moon playing on the sheen of sweat covering his face. He glanced up at me and smiled.

“Not much for hard work,” he said a bit regretfully, “I used to teach high school in my younger days. Before that I did much of nothing, save for studying.”

I told him that it was fine; I had more than enough nervous energy to expend.

Finally, arms sore and torsos covered in perspiration, our spades scraped wood. I threw my shovel aside and bent to brush away the fine film of dust still atop the casket, but Peircesen stopped me.

“Climb out and hand me the crow bar.”

Reluctantly obeying, I climbed out of the hole and found that a chilly breeze had sprung up; my clothes were plastered to my shivering body, and I wished that I had brought a heavier jacket. I retrieved the crowbar from the bundle and handed it to Professor Peircesen.

“Take one of those flashlights and train in on the head,” he said as he retrieved a red handkerchief from the hip pocket of his tan trousers and wrapped it around his face in the case that he was greeted by the fetid reek of decomposition.

I took one of the flashlights and switched it on. I splashed the clean beam of light into the grave as Professor Peircesen bent down and began to apply the crowbar.

After a brief struggle, in which he uttered curse words and breathless grunts, Professor Peircesen managed to rip open the lid of the coffin, the rusted metal hinges shrieking gruesomely.

“Dear God… I was right!” Professor Peircesen exclaimed excitedly. For bathed in the soft electric glow of the flashlight, reposing peacefully like the sleepers it victimized, was the astral vampire. He appeared that he had only the day before been interred. His dark mongrel face was plump and ruddy, his fingernails appeared to be long and unshorn, and his mouth, slightly parted as if to admit the fresh night air, was smeared with dark red blood.

“Hold steady,” Professor Peircesen spat, noticing my fright from the way that the beam bounced in my trembling hand. “This is your future. The future of the world…my God, feast your eyes!”

My straining sight clung to the form in the coffin, a dark cloak of amazement over me. I had expected something, and I had thought that I would be more able to cope with whatever it was, but to actually see an impossibility before you is always more shocking than anticipated.

I went to say something, what I did not know even then, but before I could the unutterable horror began. My eyes clung to the corpse, and it was I who first saw the gruesome white mist flowing smoke-like from each one of its flaring nostrils. My blood ran cold and my heart stopped in my chest; blood thumped against my temples; and my breath caught in my throat and refused to be pushed out or drawn in.

“Christ, Christ!” I muttered franticly, unable to speak above a loud whisper.

Inferring from my wide-eyed terror, Peircesen’s own eyes expanded and, without turning his head to the thing behind him, moved to flee the pit, howling unintelligible sounds of muffled fright from under his mask. I ripped my eyes away from the mist, which had now totally left the body, and moved to help Professor Peircesen from the grave, but I found that I was paralyzed with fear. Finally, after a few moments or so, I was able to uproot my leaden right foot, and stumbled back and collapsed onto the ground. From there, in disbelieving horror, I watched as the mist settled around Professor Peircesen’s head like a demonic crown. Hysterical, Professor Peircesen abandoned his attempt at escape and fell backward into the hole, screeching dreadfully. The last I saw of the man was his eyes, his horrible, beseeching eyes. They bulged sickeningly from his moon washed face like the strained orbs of a Ripley’s Believe It or Not anomaly.

Here was when my mind snapped and blessed oblivion overtook me. I don’t remember anything until I awoke in the hospital nearly a month later. When I was discovered, my clothes had been muddy and torn, and there had been small twigs and leaves in my hair, adding credence to the theory that I, in a mindless state of abject fright, leaped over the stone wall and tumbled down the hill head over feet. The old couple in whose hayloft I sought refuge lived just outside of Bowling Green, north of Port Royal; I had fled an incredible six miles through the moon-splashed woodlands in less than an hour.