Here's another short horror story, sort of a sequel to the Tablet of Teh Ri'Teth, or at least part of that Mythos. Not sure what to call my Lovecraft-esque pantheon... Teh Ri'Teth Mythos isn't quite right. Suggestions?
And here's the story. As per usual, it got a bit long on me.
Fresh Paint
By McCallum J. Morgan
“Odd,” said Perkins.
“Not so very odd,” I said. “I’ve seen paint used to cover blood stains before.”
“In an abandoned house?” Perkins asked, kicking a pile of rotten newspapers. “We haven’t found a body, we don’t even know if this is a murder.”
“We have the missing persons report,” I said. “This was the last place they were seen. I’m just saying, the case where blood was covered by paint was that insane woman who slaughtered her husband. Why else would a wall be covered with fresh paint in a derelict house? No one buys paint to slather on crumbling wallpaper—unless they’re crazy. I’m just saying it’s a possibility.”
“Well, you can’t prove there’s blood behind that grey paint. The crazy lady confessed. That’s the only way we knew.”
“Do you have an explanation for this paint?”
“Perhaps someone wanted to test the color out,” Perkins said, shuffling through the old newspapers with a toe. Crumbled plaster littered the floor amidst other bits of garbage. A dead rat. No sign that anyone had been recently squatting in the place. Perkins turned his bowler between his fingers nervously.
“He WAS here,” I said, holding up the monogrammed scarf we’d found in the entry hall.
“You’ll have to have his wife confirm that piece before we know that with any certainty,” Perkins said. “I’m going to search the yard and the trees behind the house. Unless I find disturbed earth or a discarded weapons—or something—I’m not jumping on your hysterical bandwagon. Murder right away!”
“There’s no painting garbage! No brushes or cans, why would they clean up like that in this heap? Unless they hoped the paint would dry and get dirty and no one would ever know any different.”
“And blood dries, too,” retorted Perkins. “Into unidentifiable brown splotches. Could be coffee. Could be spaghetti!”
“Then let’s search the grounds,” I replied coolly. Perkins was right, of course, but something about that still sticky paint was too…too perfect. Whoever had done it had been careful to cover the wall thoroughly. The whole wall…cutting in the edges with precise care and a heavy recoat. Still damp. They’d put it on too thick and the house was humid inside in this weather with all the broken windows.
A thorough perusal of the shrubberies outside produced nothing. We searched through the woods behind the house, but still found nothing but an ancient deer skeleton. We found no body, no freshly turned earth, no discarded weapon or garment. It grew dark and Perkins glowered at me.
“What? Am I keeping you from your occult thriller?” I teased. “I’m surprised you haven’t suggested he was spirited away.” Perkins rolled his eyes.
“Illiterate swine,” he growled. I grinned.
“Pulp fiction is great literature.”
“We still haven’t found our man,” Perkins grumbled.
“No, but we’d better get back to the station,” I sighed. “Getting dark and we won’t find much in the dark.”
We headed back to the car and I kicked a pile of yellow aspen leaves. “Just odd,” I muttered as we climbed in and Perkins started the engine. I shivered and pulled my scarf closer around my neck. Wood smoke followed us into the car, along with the peculiar cold mustiness of fall.
Back at the station, Curew was waiting.
“We’ve got another missing person report,” he grumbled. “A neighbor says they haven’t been home in days and they NEVER leave their cat.” Curew’s eyes bounced off the ceiling. “She’s afriad they’re lying in the house, dead. Better go and talk to the poor thing in morning.”
“To the cat?” Perkins joked.
“The neighbor, Mrs. Blanchard,” Curew corrected humorlessly.
“Who’s the purported missing person?” I asked.
“A Mr. R. Gutring, she wasn’t sure what the R stood for as she didn’t know him ‘all that well, really.’”
“Well, we’ll have our work cut out,” I said, “patching up from your lack of sympathy.”
Curew snorted. “There’s a lot more to worry about in this town than the odd bachelor who doesn’t feed his cat for three days. Virtuous neighbors seem to take care of them just fine.”
“Perhaps she’s actually concerned about the missing human?” I suggested, but Curew just shook his head.
“Humans don’t care about each other!” he scoffed. “For instance, I don’t give a damn about you two. Now go and get home before it gets any later.”
“Says the uncaring one,” Perkins chimed in.
“I’m just concerned about the shoddy work you’ll do tomorrow if you don’t get enough sleep.”
“We’ll need all the sleep we can get to empathize with this virtuous neighbor,” Perkins agreed. “Goodnight, Curew, Mathis.”
“Goodnight,” I said. Curew just grunted.
The next morning found Perkins and I on the stoop of a ramshackle house, shivering in the bitter morning mist.
“Here you go,” Mrs. Blanchard sang, bursting out with a tray of hot chocolate.
“Thank you, ma’am,” Perkins said, scooping up a mug.
“Can you describe Mr. Gutring?” I asked, accepting a mug with a cold, eager fingers.
“Gaunt fellow,” Mrs. Blanchard said. “Dark-haired, and rather yellow-eyed, if you ask me, though I suppose they were brown or something. Always struck me as yellow. Like his teeth. Didn’t keep himself quite clean enough, nor his house, as you can see.” She nodded across the street to the dilapidated house with a broken front window. “But he had a warm voice, and always spoke kindly to Mr. Tinkletoes.”
Mr. Tinkletoes?” Perkins blinked.
“The cat.”
“Ohhh.”
“You can tell a lot about a man by the way he treats his animals,” Mrs. Blanchard went on while I sipped my chocolate and shivered. “So, I believe Mr. Gutring was alright. Despite his friends.”
“Why, what were they like?” Perkins asked.
“Shady,” Mrs. Blanchard replied without hesitation. “They came to visit at odd hours, usually late. Three of them, in coveralls. More shifty-eyed blokes, but they avoided Mr. Tinkletoes. They were over the last time I saw Mr. Gutring. Late at night, and I woke up to a strange sound—not a scream—but, I don’t know how to describe it…almost a musical note, but it chilled my bones. I got up and saw his friends leaving. In the morning, Mr. Tinkletoes was on my doorstep and I never saw Mr. Gutring leave.”
“Are you intimating that Mr. Gutring’s friends killed him?” Perkins asked. I jolted. Hot chocolate dripped over my cold fingers.
“Perkins,” I chided. “Did Curew steal your empathy?”
“That’s exactly what I’m intimating,” Mrs. Blanchard nodded solemnly. “Mr. Tinkletoes was frightened. He hasn’t gone anywhere near his master’s house. It’s not normal behavior. Animals always know when something’s not right.”
“Well,” I said. “We can ring his doorbell, but not much more than that…”
“Just look inside,” Mrs. Blanchard insisted. “I’ve already asked at his work. They haven’t seen him, either.”
“Where did he work?”
“Bookshop, just down the road, Palisades Books and Novelties.”
“We’ll take a look,” Perkins assured her. “Thanks for the hot chocolate.”
“Oh, no, thank you,” Mrs. Blanchard said. “It’s my pleasure.”
After finishing our chocolates, we headed across the frosty street. Mr. Gutring’s bicycle leaned against the faded shingle siding, coated in a sheen of rust and ice.
There were no lights on inside and no one answered my knock. I thought the curtain by the broken window stirred, as if in a breeze…but there was no breeze. The frigid morning air was still, the mist clinging steadfastly to the grass.
I knocked again.
“Hello?” Perkins called. “Is anyone home?”
Nothing. The house sat quiet and grey. Mrs. Blanchard watched from across the street, a huge grey tabby in her arms. Mr. Tinkletoes, presumably.
I smiled weakly at her and knocked again, louder. The thump-thump echoed inside, lonely and hollow. Perkins called again and we listened intently. Tick. Tick. A clock. Nothing more.
“Let’s check around back,” Perkins suggested and I followed him around the house, peering in at the tattered curtains. Through a gap I spotted an empty room, strangely devoid of furniture, but otherwise clean, save for a few clumps of something on the floor. We came to the back door and when Perkins knocked, it creaked inward.
“Anybody home?” Perkins called. We looked at each other and shrugged. Perkins pushed the door open and stepped inside. “Hello?”
“Do you smell something odd?” Perkins asked, sniffing.
“No,” I said. The cold morning air was crisp. “Leaves.”
“Come here,” Perkins said, stepping further inside. I sighed and followed him in.
“We can’t investigate every missing person so thoroughly,” I said. “We’d be doing nothing else.”
“You were the one who wanted to search the forest for a body last night,” Perkins pointed out.
“There was more concerning info about our last vanisher,” I said. “That cult business and the debts…” I trailed off. “That smells like paint.” Perkins was already down the hall, opening another door. I followed quickly after him and found it to be the room I’d glimpsed through the curtains—empty save for blobs of what looked like candle wax, dotted around in a circle. And the wall to the left of the door had been recently painted over with grey paint. The other walls were faded green floral wallpaper.
“Did you say cult?” Perkins asked.
“What, the candles?” I said, scanning the room for anything else. “Circle of candles…same paint…ritual murder, maybe? Blood hexes on the wall….covered by paint. You think this disappearance is connected to the other one?”
“I don’t know,” said Perkins.
“You’re the one pointing things out,” I said. “We didn’t notice any candle spots at the abandoned house, but could have been easy to miss in the detritus and dust.”
“Might not be ritual murder,” Perkins said. “They might just want to cover up their witch scribbles.”
“Then why the disappearances?” I asked.
“We don’t know if Henry Apindon’s disappearance really coincides with the abandoned house. He was last seen in the area, that’s all. And note: Our Mr. Gutring vanished three days ago. This paint still smells and—” Perkins marched over to the wall and touched it gingerly, “—still not totally cured. Painted last night or yesterday…paint can’t have dried properly last night. Too cold in here.”
“The paint in the abandoned house was fresh, too,” I added. “Perhaps they knew we would be coming?”
Perkins shivered. “I don’t like that.”
“I guess we should search the house,” I said.
“What, hope to find the bodies this time? They wouldn’t still be here. Not after they came back to cover the wall.”
“Other evidence,” I insisted.
“Or maybe Mrs. Blanchard is right and he’s dead upstairs,” Perkins said. “Although…then he couldn’t have painted the wall.”
I was staring at the corner. There was…something there.
“P-Perkins,” I said, taking a step deeper into the room. My legs wobbled, rubbery and strange. I blinked. “What is that?”
Perkins stared at it with me in silence.
It was not what I had expected to see and I was confused as to why it should be so disturbing. Why were my legs funny? The sight was strangely dizzying. But why? What was wrong? Something about it was indescribably off…
“If I had to say,” Perkins coughed out at length. “I would say it is yellow?”
I looked again. Yes…if I had give it one word…yellow would be the closest. Though the word did not hold any of the disquiet and unease that I felt looking upon it. It was too fearful to be yellow—too malignant. Too slimy.
What was it?
Perkins stepped closer. I held out a hand as if to stop him.
“They were in a hurry,” Perkins said. “They were trying to cover this…this…yellow.”
“Can’t say I blame them,” I muttered, following Perkins reluctantly into the corner.
We stared at it in silence until we could no longer bear it— It was like something you would see in a dream. A color that didn’t really exist. A shade beyond the natural spectrum. A thing of unsettling nightmare. The yellow seemed to bubble and writhe as we watched.
“We should go back to the abandoned house and check it over again,” I said.
“After we look upstairs,” Perkins said.
We found nothing in the rest of the house, as we had both expected.
We drove quietly back to the old derelict and poked through the rubbish. There was a circle of wax drips in front of the painted wall.
“Apindon was last seen about a month ago,” I mused. “Gutring three days ago. Perhaps there’s a clue in their cult markings?” I took out my pocket knife.
“Then they would have covered them right away,” Perkins said. “But you saw that color?”
“Too unique…maybe they were afraid someone would match it with them somewhere else.”
“What if there are no cult markings?” Perkins suggested quietly. I breathed out a cloud of fog into the cold air and applied my blade carefully to the wall.
I peeled off a chunk of the thick paint layer. Two layers stuck together. The grey paint took off the yellow with it. I peeled off another. The whole wall had been yellow.
“You mean the…color…is the cult marking?” I asked.
“We’re clearly not meant to see it, whatever the case,” Perkins said.
“This doesn’t make sense,” I muttered.
“Not ritual murder, but we’re still missing two men,” Perkins mused.
“And this—this color is connected somehow. But how?”
Curew was not amused with our findings.
“The disappearances are connected?” he asked. “By paint?”
Perkins rolled his eyes and I scowled. “If you will, yes,” I said. “No it doesn’t make sense, but there’s definitely a connection. I don’t know what. I don’t think we can really say murder, but their disappearances are not normal. I’m going to go and ask Apindon’s relations if he knew anyone by the name of Gutring.”
“That wasn’t a normal color,” Perkins said.
“You’re not a normal color,” Curew said, squinting at him. “Mathis, get him a coffee on your way to interrrogate these poor relations.”
“See, you do care,” I said.
“No, once again it’s the quality of your work,” Curew said. “Or Perkins’ to be exact. You two will get nothing done if he’s incapacitated.”
I rolled my eyes and we set off. But it was a dry run. Apindon's wife knew nothing of any Mr. Gutring, but she was able to confirm that the scarf we’d found at the derelict had belonged to her husband.
The next day proved to be too busy with overdue paperwork to go back and search either house again and I was rather put out with the thought that there was no more evidence to be gathered from either location…though I still felt we were missing something important.
A month went by before we had any further hint. And when it came it arrived like a slap of icy seawater in the face. My telephone jangled obnoxiously one evening while I was enjoying the last of the sunshine through my sitting room window.
“Mathis!” it was Perkins. “I've seen it!”
“Seen what? Where?”
“The color! That abnatural yellow hue!” Perkins exclaimed breathlessly. “I’m visiting my girl over here in Grunwich. We went for a walk and—" Perkins paused for a breath. “We were passing a house. A new one that was being painted—the inside—there were painters going in and out. And the door was open—and I saw—it was on their paintbrushes, too—the COLOR!”
I was silent for a few moments, listening to Perkins panting. “Did you ask them where they got it?” I asked.
“No,” Perkins said, falling back into a rushed stream of words, “they were already packing up for the day—they seemed to be careful not to let the yellow paint show on their tools, washing it all behind the house—I was so unsettled that I went back to my girl’s house and took a shot—just a small one, mind—and when I went back, they were all gone and the house locked up.”
“Did you get their company?” I interrupted.
“No! I’m afraid I was too excited to pay attention. I want to say their logo had a bird of some kind but I’m not sure—I asked the neighbors, but they weren’t sure, either. Really, odd, none of them seemed to know anything about the painters. They didn’t know who owned the house, either. But I peered through the windows and the walls—the walls—”
“Were yellow,” I finished, forcing myself to loosen my grip on the telephone receiver. My hand was beginning to cramp.
“They oozed with it,” Perkins shuddered.
“Are you sure it was the same…hue?” I asked.
“Sure?!” Perkins exclaimed. “There was no mistaking it.”
“All right,” I said. “Did the painters seem suspicious to you, other than washing everything in the back? That’s not that odd.”
“Now you’re trying to be the skeptic?” Perkins huffed. “Not really. But they did seem to take extra care not to show off their paint unnecessarily and they eyed us as we walked past. I think they noticed my reaction to the paint and they seemed even more guarded after that.”
“Hmm,” I mused.
“Well?” Perkins asked. “Are you going to come over here?”
“I thought you were sure it was the same paint?”
“Bring a flashlight,” Perkins grumbled. “I'm at my girl's place. 14 Gryphon Road, Grunwich.” And he hung up. I sighed and replaced the receiver.
This was our only lead on this so far. And it had also been too long…Curew would not approve of our wasting time on this vague mystery. But something was undeniably going on.
I found my flashlight and my pistol, just in case, and drove over to Grunwich as fast as I could. It was a twenty minute drive to Grunwich, and then I got lost looking for Gryphon Road. It was well after dark by the time I finally found Perkin’s girlfriend’s house.
“Timmy already went back to look at the house,” his girlfriend told me. “He sure was pale. Is everything alright? He kept going on about a color.” My heart ticked faster and I felt for my hidden gun.
“Where is the house?”
“I’ll show you,” she said.
“No, you’d better stay here,” I said, glancing around at the darkness. “Did he have a light?”
“I gave him Dad’s light. Is everything ok?”
“Yeah, yes. How do I find the house?”
“Just go down two blocks and take a right onto Hayward, then one block and a left onto Aspen. It’s the third house on the left.”
“Thanks,” I said and hurried off into the night. The air had that strange heavy emptiness that comes with extreme cold and I shivered in my greatcoat. The cold seemed to assault my skin with an almost tangible presence. It had snowed three days before and the dusty film was slippery on the pavement. My nose and the tips of my ears stung with the chill.
I found Hayward and hurried down in, my light bouncing off snow-dusted mailboxes and dead hedges. And there was Aspen. I stumbled to a halt, petrified, thinking the ground had turned…yellow…in front of me, but it was only a layer of fallen aspen leaves peering through a snowless patch. My heart didn’t resume a normal pace, though. I couldn’t see Perkins’ flashlight.
Maybe he didn’t feel the need to be seen standing there outside the house…damn, it was cold, why would he have come down here ahead of me? Why was he still here? Or was he?
I approached the third house on the left. This had to be it…but…there was a light on inside! In fact—it was the only house on the entire street that had any light on. And then I saw the old truck in the drive, hidden partially by a large bush. There was a logo on the side. And it looked like some kind of bird. My breath chuffed huge clouds out in front of my flashlight beam and I switched it off. Where was Perkins?
The golden light danced inside the quiet house…like candlelight. Ducking, I tiptoed up the icy steps to the door. The handle turned and I slipped into the dark warmth of the entry hall. I closed the door quietly behind me and squinted into the gloom. Stairs led up into blackness. The light was coming from down the hall, and by it, I could see that the entry was not yellow. Not that yellow. I thought the walls must be white, but the candlelight made them buttery. The warmth was a relief but the sounds I heard quietly drifting down the hall chilled me worse than the air outside.
Whispers rose and fell in an unworldly cadence, shuffling up and down through almost inhuman registers, but so, so quiet. I trembled and nearly dropped my flashlight.
A horrifynig shadow fell across the light coming from the open door down the hall. I stepped back, pressing up against the frigid front door.
“In ancient days,” intoned a crisp, dry voice, “he knew the earth, and the earth bled, for it could not bear the presence. And men offered of their blood, that the earth might not be consumed, and they worshipped the Lord of all, the King of Hell.”
I trembled anew as more rasping voices joined in a chorus: “And his house shall be painted in the hue of his glory and all who enter in shall know his madness.”
“We have touched the sacred pigment,” said the first voice, “and we have let loose the blood and tasted the glory of pure insanity—hell’s own love. Tonight, our king requires another sacrifice! Behold!”
“Teh Ri’Teth!” chanted the chorus. I gripped the doorknob, as if to flee. But then Perkins’ voice cut through the fiendish whispering.
“Don’t do this!”
Sacrifice!
I pulled out my pistol and advanced on the candlelit shadow.
“Erah!” chanted the worshippers. “Teh Ri’Teth semmi rarat.”
An insane laugh rattled the chandelier above my head. I was almost to the door but I stopped, unable to advance against that horrible sound. It trailed into a sinister giggle and I swallowed shakily.
But Perkins was in there. And I had a gun. I took the last few steps to the door and thrust my pistol into the room to a chorus of “Teh Ri’Teth!”
“Nobody move!” I ordered, stepping through into the—the—the color.
The entire room swelled and glowed with that sickening hideous shade. The walls seemed to breathe it out, as if they were not merely painted with it, but were it. The paint looked still wet, sweating, dank and alive. I staggered, the pistol shaking in my hand. The candlelight danced like whirling figures on the shimmering walls of the color.
Four painters sat on the floor around the circle of candles and their shadows twisted agonizingly on the yellow walls. Their coveralls were splattered with various colors and their faces bore a ludicrous glee as they all turned to look at me. Perkins was sitting with them—and he was the one giggling.
I advanced on the circle with clumsy, numb steps. Only Perkins made any sound. The giggle whispered in the back of his throat and his eyes gleamed with…with that color!
“P-Perkins?” I stuttered. His giggle trailed off into a quiet, high-pitched squeal. “Stop that!” I shrieked, much louder than I meant to. “What’s happening?” I knew I couldn’t hit anything. The pistol’s sights danced before my eyes on the rubbery ends of my arms.
The door slammed behind me and I whirled, heart blocking my trachea, to see a fifth painter locking the door.
“Open it!” I hissed, my pistol tracking a delirious arc after the man as he grinned insanely at me and stepped away from the door.
“Ha!” Perkins guffawed.
“Shh!” the painters hissed, and then they all began murmuring under their breath in that bizarre cadence. Perkins joined them.
“Perkins, damn it! What are you doing?” I gasped and turned back to the fifth painter. “Give me that key!” I demanded. He just stepped back and began humming. I advanced on him. He wasn’t armed. He kept backing away, humming madly.
“Give it here!” I hissed, charging at him. He stumbled against the wall and cried out. I skidded to a stop and dropped my pistol. The painter screamed as—the wall—he writhed—the wall—he was stuck to it—and the color seeped into his clothes, his skin, like a dye spreading into fabric…his scream rose to a terrible pitch and his eyes dilated—as yellow as the wall.
And the color absorbed him. The other painters held their breath and all was silent. I stared at the blank yellow wall where the painter had disappeared, my chest heaving and my fingers twitching. I stooped and picked up my pistol, turning back to the door. I fired madly at the lock, but as I did so, I saw that the door, too, was yellow…
My bullet missed the handle and vanished into the paint, leaving a ripple that passed out from the door and across the wall, as if it were all liquid.
Liquid paint. Liquid yellow. Liquid madness.
And then I heard a voice.
“In my house, all must be the color of glory.”
The painters screamed and scrambled across the floor to grasp each other in terror, knocking over candles as they did so. Perkins among them.
The walls were dripping onto the floor. The color was seeping across the old wood toward the center of the room. I backed away from it, firing madly at the advancing wave, but my bullets just splashed into the floor as if it were nothing more than a veneer of reality.
I found myself huddling with the painters and Perkins as the color surrounded us, oozing ever closer.
“You were supposed to be the sacrifice,” Perkins whispered in my ear. “We shouldn’t have painted a whole room.” He began to sob.
“He told us to,” rasped one of the painters. “Teh Ri’Teth. A whole room, he said. For his glory.”
“And so it is,” hissed that unfathomable monster-voice I had heard earlier. I clutched Perkins.
A few of the candles still stood or guttered on the floor around us. The yellow tide eased closer, snuffing them out, one by one, until we were in darkness.
But there was no darkness in his house.
The color was the light and it began to absorb us, one by one, as we screamed in the agony of knowledge.
