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| Deathmasks and Formaldehyde by Thaddeus Morticaine, book cover |
The Lost in the Woods
During the process of moving house, I found in my attic, a box of old magazines. I’m an avid collector of conspiracy theory magazines and despite their dates ranging throughout 2001, I’d moved in many years before. Strange, I thought, I don’t ever remember buying any of them. They must’ve been left by the previous residents.
Within, I found a magazine called The Thirteenth Rhyme. Flicking through, I found this article. As it was based around events based in Derbyshire, I thought it worth sending out because of its local colour.
It was in the October of 1998 that I was employed to produce a story about a Derbyshire based Satanist cult. This particular cult, whose members shall remain nameless for legal reasons, had been particularly bloody. They’d remained unchecked for many years and had performed many atrocities at their secluded woodland altar. It was when I gleaned their motivations that I knew a bigger story was to be had.
I went to interview the cult’s leader in his prison cell one afternoon. I wanted to earn more perspective, why would this group commit such despicable exploits. Thirty minutes in, he mentioned The Curator, the man who recruited him.
In a dream, The Curator had ordered him to the woods they were to later meet in. With flash light in hand, he’d gone. He’d to find twelve CD’s, each with a strict set of ‘laws’ to advocate. For the entirety of his search, he expressed the unnerving sensation of being watched.
Afterwards, I spoke to a number of his incarcerated disciples. Many of them told me a similar tale of being spied on in their dreams. They all felt they’d been forced into an organisation that they didn’t have the desire to join.
What an amazing dream, I thought to myself.
At home I started my computer to begin my article, and what was awaiting me in my e-mail account? Twelve messages, each with the sender’s address omitted.
The body of each email was also blank and each had twelve word files attached.
Curious.
I skim read each attachment. Each was a series of twelve bullet-points that inferred a cultish pearl of false wisdom that seemed in turn to be misinterpretations of Buddhist philosophies.
I dismissed them immediately. That was, until that night. Something happened then that would mean my article would be delayed for years to come.
I was woken from a dream of silent, accusing human shadows veiled in deep mists by the sound of a window being broken.
Climbing from my bed and taking up a nearby bat for protection, I investigated.
Half expecting an intruder, I was startled to find a brick had been thrown through a kitchen window. A note was attached; ‘I’ll make you see!’
I rang the police, but this was to no avail. They’d not process the complaint, blaming it on mischievous youngsters.
Dismayed and now worrying for my safety, I’d trouble getting to sleep once more that night.
This happened twelve more nights. There was that number again! Each missive would refer me to the e-mails I’d received. All of them bar the last that is. ‘Dr H West will help. Ask of the beyond.’
The police hadn’t helped. I’d followed the e-mail’s instructions, perhaps I’d sleep soundly soon.
A fellow reporter had written an article on Dr West’ so we’d his address on file. Sleep addled by then, so, at what I thought a reasonable hour the next morning, I went to visit him.
He answered his apartment’s front door with sleep blurred eyes, replete with soup stained dressing gown. He was expecting me to have made an appointment. Lack of rest was my mumbled excuse. I was to give him thirty minutes to get ready, then I could view his latest project.
Across town his small, privately funded laboratory annexed a nuclear power research facility I saw his machine. His baby had the power to truly hold a man in awe. But this device could do a lot more.
It’d been built from disassembled Russian atomic warheads sold by the Russian Mafia once the Berlin Wall had fallen. The Oligarchy had seen the Kosovo conflict as a way of making money. The refugees would camouflage the warhead’s journey from the East. It’d seen far too much blood so far in its creation.
“I’d fire this thing up for you,” the doctor told me, “so that you could see first-hand what it’s capable of. But the fluctuators need replacing. They burn out so easily you see. But you may, if you like, flick through my journals.”
It’d have to be a quick review though, his work must continue!
Scattered among the scrawled equations and circuitry diagrams that were unfathomable to the layman, there were brief sketches of strange beasts.
There were things like mythical harpies and walking trees dancing with fish-headed men. But these were the least shocking creatures I was to find. A little after half way, these things were seen less often. Prism like things with corded tentacles sprouting from their edges and clusters of eyes took over.
I queried him about where he’d sighted these… beings, the response was astounding.
“They’re from the beyond of course!” Dr West exclaimed. “That’s what this machine is for… to break through to the beyond.”
The beyond, the doctor explained, was our parallel dimension. It was a universe that occupied the same time as ours, but, it inhabited another aspect of space. This space still had our top quarks and photon particles in common. These were the foundations that both these universes were built upon. He’d use the plutonium fuelled drives to spark a mass, controlled particle breakdown. Their re-jigging would create a ‘safe’ portal between the universes.
There, he’d communicate with the beings on a whim.
Through the doctor’s diatribe, he became increasingly more manic. If I spent too much time with him I would surely end up as crazed as he had become.
I ran out, sending a trolley laden with mechanical spares crashing to the ground. As I fled from the building I could still hear him screaming, “Ask the refugees! They’ll show you I’m right!”
I wandered the streets trying to relax before returning home. Hours passed and the sun was setting when I found myself on the old, derelict Friar Gate Station site.
A small community had set up an encampment not far away.
A strange dialect was being spoken among them, but I remembered Dr West’s last bawled words to me.
A hunch struck me. I needed to be with them, though to this day, I can only guess at what it was. I stumbled through an introduction. They were Kosovar’s I soon found. They assumed I was in a similar situation as they were. A flash of indignation hit me, I realised perhaps how I must look. It would be hard to heal from what I’d witnessed that afternoon.
I spent the evening with them, drinking and relying on the charity they were kind enough to spare me. They told me of their hardships and troubles and of bloody civil war. They’d seen hardship and abusive human traffickers escaping their homeland.
In a drunken haze, I remembered all the details of my morning’s impromptu meeting. Did they know Dr West?
The question was met with a silence that carried on until after I’d passed out from too much cheap cider.
I awoke the next morning with the previous day as fragmentary memory. I left them, promising to return their kindness sometime.
I shook each of their hands, voicing a genuine appreciation for their hospitality.
When I reached the last Kosovars, he secreted a paper slip to me, firmly hidden within the handshake. The severe expression he gave told the others didn’t know of this exchange.
Once home I dared myself to read the slip:
Those which are not dead which should eternal lie,
In their realm of life, dead gods wait,
And from outer aeons our death may die.
The Curator
It was the last bullet-point attached to the many e-mails I’d received a fortnight before.
They knew of Dr West and his experiment. Was West a fool to follow his obsession? This verse was the answer.
I wanted to record my experiences for prosperity, but, maybe, I hadn’t the story I first expected. I may be considered mad by my editors.
Once I’d found a publisher, there was one thing still on my mind. Just who was The Curator?
After vast amounts of research, I found the reporter responsible for penning this article.
He’d been committed to a psychiatric ward in 2002. He’d been confined there after twelve unprovoked attacks on the homeless. He remains an inmate with no likelihood of release.
He is deemed a violent risk to himself and others. It was recommended by staff that I don’t visit him.
The Curator: Fact or Fiction?
A few months ago, I found hidden in a corner of a Derby based house clearance store, an aged cardboard box filled with obscure Edwardian penny dreadfuls.
I’ve always had an interest in obscure literary treasures, so I bought these yellowed papers straight away.
Among them, I found a copy of a sensationalistic conspiracy journal entitled The Recluse, a magazine that ran for only a single issue in June 1927. It was an exciting rarity, especially when that magazine was never available outside the USA.
Over tea, I gave it my full attention.
Straight after an H. P. Lovecraft article entitled Supernatural Horror in Literature, was another called The Curator: Fact or Fiction?
Noticing that this article referred to an event that happened in Derby, I felt it was interesting enough to re-publish. So, please let me present to you the digitised version of that very same article.
I ask you, who is The Curator? He has been glimpsed occasionally in most major cities across the globe for nigh on 75 years, but most of his sightings have centred on an English town called Derby.
I am Derby born and bred and have regularly heard in local taprooms, stories of half seen shadows, dog men, wolf men and gaunt ethereal men in bilious coats and fedora’s. But who is this figure?
Some of the rumours even speculated he was Jack the Ripper or Spring Heeled Jack and that it was him that caused the Staplehurst Disaster that broke Charles Dickens.
But, I’d like to tell a story that made The Curator very personal to me.
Early one morning while finishing an article, I heard a missive clatter through my letterbox. Knowing I would be able to see the deliverer from my study window, I raced to it. I could see only his back. He kept to the shadows, with his dark traveller’s coat billowing out behind him and a black slouch hat pulled down firmly to his scalp. Hunched forward and of a nervous gait, I could tell he was consciously keeping himself hidden. But what I found unnerving were the black tendrils of mist that dominated the night.
I ripped open the note. Amid the ordered mass of seemingly Hebrew like symbols, I read: ‘Find the Faceless Man by R. U. Pickman, the museum archive’.
I was intrigued, a strange man who followed the description of The Curator had just paid me a visit and he had a task for me.
The next day, I met with Dr. Langford, the resident Doctor of Theology. He’d helped my career as a reporter many times. I knew I could depend on him.
I passed him the note and asked for a translation, explaining how it’d come into my possession. He was pleased to help, but expressed a theory that the text was Enochian symbols. Meanwhile, I was permitted to peruse the painting mentioned in the note.
On seeing it, I could understand why it’d been consigned to obscurity. I found it thoroughly repulsive. The male figure had a thin, canine face with a greying complexion. But most notably, it was the lack of any facial features I found most disgusting. On a closer look, the background incorporated the same Enochian lettering that surrounded my note. But curiously, the figure owned an awkwardness shared with my shadowy delivery man.
I reversed the canvas and was rewarded. An artist’s note was pasted to the back. It read ‘Portrait of The Curator. Finished May 1880. Payment in full, Countess C. Karnstein.’
The artist I knew to have died years previously, but I’d been presented with another contact; a Countess Karnstein.
Countess Karnstein I found with little difficulty. Her address was easily accessed in the parish records and on arrival at her Shambles residence, I found it spoke of her failure as a Spiritualist Medium.
` Sitting with her and another lady who was introduced as her niece over tea, she told me briefly of her past.
She was an exiled Prussian noble who had found her gift as an infant in the 1860’s and had moved here as a result of her treatment as a pariah.
In Derby, she’d been very popular but had eventually become friends with two men she called the Ersatz. A Kashmiri prince she called Vikram and a French businessman, Francis Varney. They’d paraded as friends and fellow mediums back then and had brought her to the attention of the model of the painting, who, she explained, had originally spoken with her through a séance.
The details she gave of her own down fall were sparse from then on and regularly through tears, wailed that they had betrayed her.
As I left, through her moans she blurted that a Mr. M- of Macklin Street could tell me more.
Curious, were there more than one ‘curator’, I thought, or was there spiritualist movement fakery involved? I knew I was being lead on a journey. I would follow the clues to the end before I found the truth.
I interviewed Mr. M-, a local and veteran of the Great War. He remembered The Curator’s visitation well. He had been sixteen in 1885 and had taken an interest in the multinational group of ghost whisperers. It’d been the height of the Spiritualist Movement he reminded me.
He’d witnessed the séance held with Vikram, Karnstein and Varney present. He described the only full manifestation of a spirit I’ve ever known. He’d never thought full manifestations were possible until that point.
The figure, “oo ‘ad ol the grace ofun ‘eron,” described Mr M-. “Wut must surpraased me abart ‘im wus his fizzog. Bar a maw like an ‘ound, wer ‘is features. In shot, ‘e ‘ad none.”
Mr M- went on to inform me of this strange incident. Once the figure had appeared, a strange voice spoke to him. It seemed to have been projected directly into his mind. Though with no mouth, the source was definitely the faceless man.
Mr M- was informed that the spirits as he knew them needed a token gesture. The dog faced man needed to possess him.
The last thing that Mr M- told me he remembered was Mr Varney and Vikram braying with laughter and the spirit before him turning to mist and drifting forwards to engulf him.
The morning after his encounter, Mr M- found himself in a prison cell, not remembering anything between the séance and that moment.
With the interview over, I was motivated to visit the library.
As the library adjoined the museum I could kill two birds with one stone. I’d check on Dr Landford’s translation and look up the newspaper articles for that date.
I found that specific paper and on the penultimate page, I found what I was looking for.
Late that night a couple had been strolling in Darley Park. Near the high north end entrance the couple were accosted by a translucent figure huddled within the shadows of a cluster of trees.
The male approached the figure intending on questioning the ethereal form’s intent. The incorporeal humanoid reached into the folds of its robe like shroud and pulled out what the man presumed to be a pistol.
Feeling threatened, the man swung his fist at the phantom in defence. The spirit dissipated on contact, but this wasn’t before the firearm had been flung far off towards the river. This incident had naturally been reported straight away to the police.
The supposed firearm had never been found. But after three days, at the rough spot that the couple had seen the gun slung lay three dead rats. Whether this was a joint delusion or the real thing, I’ll never know, though I genuinely suspected the later.
I marched across to Dr Langford’s office pondering on the seemingly random purpose of this phantom attack. It’d be easy to presume that the ethereal form was the possessed body of Mr M-, but the logic behind the occurrence completely escaped me.
Within moments, I picked up a translation of the symbols from Dr Langford’s office, it read:
‘The wise men know that wicked things
Are written on the sky
They paint sad oils, they pluck sad strings
Hearing the heavy black leather wings
Where the forgotten spirit kings
Still plot how you shall die’
Within days, any clue that’d lead to the identity of the individual known as The Curator ran dry. Both Mr M- and Countess Karnstein had vanished and weren’t remembered by neighbours. I can only conclude that the Curator is a sham. I feel I’ve been led on a wild goose chase.
After digitising this article I was curious. I decided to delve into the life of the reporter who wrote it –Mr Howard. At the registry office I found his death certificate. He’d been found dead three days after the article’s publication. The cause of death was by violent vermin attack. He was thirty years old.
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