The Empty Grave of Edgar Allan Poe

THE LIBRARY OF THADDEUS TRIPP

2. The Lost Story of Lionel Monk

          "I acquired this the other day," said Thaddeus, handing me a couple of typewritten A4 sheets. "It was in a sale of items belonging to the late Lionel Monk. Do you know his work?"
          "Local lad made good," I said. Of course I knew him. He never made it really big, he was no Stephen King, or Clive Barker for that matter, but you'd see his name staring out of the twiddly bookstands in supermarkets and he made a pretty good living; until he died. "Where was the auction?"
          "The Grand Hotel in Hanley. It was a small affair, I think some branch of the family were hoping to cash in on the poor chap's unfortunate demise. I thought I might pick up a bargain but the Americans had caught wind of it and were out in force. I did manage to secure that though." And he pointed at the papers in my hand. "There was some confusion as to its provenance, so the main dealers wouldn't touch it. It's typed, not handwritten and there's no name on it. It's unpublished of course, and there's no record of his ever sending it out, no rejection slips, nothing. There's no reference to it anywhere amongst his other papers and there are no other drafts, no rough notes. So, it may not even be his. It was found in a 1966 Corgi edition of Machen's "Black Crusade" which belonged to Monk. In fact that fetched a much higher price than what you now hold in your hand."
          I read the title and said, "A Harryhausen fan." I had managed to raise a quizzical look on Thaddeus' face. "The title's a quote from 'The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad', you know, the Cyclops film."
          "Oh, a cinematic reference, I'm sorry I didn't catch it."
          I loved it when that happened. I was to films what Thaddeus was to books. He had a passing acquaintance with adaptations of the literary classics and a totally incomprehensible regard for the Carry On series, but one mention of Rutger Hauer or Dolph Lundgren would set him adrift in uncharted seas, totally reliant upon me to throw him a lifeline. I would usually press home my advantage and regale him with cast lists and assorted trivia, but I let this one go. I was too eager to read this lost story of Lionel Monk. Thaddeus had parted with his cash to acquire it and for me that was a good enough indication that it was genuine.
          No story written by Lionel Monk could be entirely worthless and even if this was a piece of juvenilia it might give a clue to the source of his nightmare visions. Monk was not the typical horror hack, no mere spinner of scare stories designed to raise the hairs on the back of the neck. His tales of terror touched deeper nerves. He shared that quality you find in the old masters of the genre, H.P. Lovecraft and Arthur Machen and William Hope Hodgson, that feeling that they knew of what they wrote and that they did not feel obliged to reveal everything to their readers. Monk's early books were collections of short stories which reworked all the old standbys, ghosts and vampires and things that go squelch in the night. Then he turned to longer works, completing two trilogies of novels, the "Gre'ngth" series, which invented a mythology fit to rival Cthulhu, and the "Hell Walker" books, which dug into our deepest fears of eternal damnation and added flesh to the bones of death. He was in his mid-forties and working on his third "Hell Walker" book when he discovered he had cancer,  but he managed to finish it before he died. Knowing he was facing death he refused to compromise his vision or his talent, but continued to invent fresh horrors which he might have to face in reality at any moment. I admired him for that.
          Thaddeus selected a Josquin Desprez CD and I began to read.

The Land Beyond Beyond

     When I was seven my granddad died. My mum's father. He lived across the road from us with my grandma, and I used to go over there a lot when I was little. Thing I liked most about their house was my granddad's room. It was a normal terraced house, two up two down, kitchen jutting on the back, coal house and toilet up the yard, same as ours. My mum and dad lived there when they were first married, then moved over the road when they'd got the money together, leaving my grandparents alone.

     That was when my granddad took over their old bedroom, the room upstairs at the front of the house overlooking the main road. He called it his study and filled it full of the stuff he'd collected over the years and hidden away in boxes down the cellar. When I came over he'd take me up to his room and he'd show me his treasures. He was a kiln fireman, worked on a potbank all his life, but his great dream was to run away to sea. The closest he ever got to realising his ambition was riding the Knott End ferry on their annual week's holiday in Fleetwood. Still, you need your dreams to keep you going. So he built model ships and collected nautical instruments and old sea charts, and he'd spend hours in his room planning imaginary voyages all over the world. On a table in front of the window stood a magnificent old globe, and I remember staring across the street to our house and spinning the globe with both hands, half-expecting the real world to spin round outside, the globe some magical device, my grandfather's room a mystic vessel that could sail through space.

     On the walls were bookshelves stretching up to the ceiling, all jam-packed with ancient leather-bound volumes: old atlases and travel books, outdated encyclopaedias full of glorious lies. The few spaces of book-free wall were filled with travel posters and a few old prints: 'The Fighting Temeraire', 'The Boyhood of Raleigh'. Above the fireplace was a dark painting in a grime encrusted frame. You could stare at it for hours and be none the wiser, it would remain an abstract wash of muddy blues and greys and greens. But once the magic word was whispered - "whale" - the kaleidoscope would be given a final turn and the sludgy mess would take on real shape, natural form. That splash of white was the harpoon, that blob of black the whale's eye, that jumble of lines in the corner the face of a screaming man. On the mantelpiece below the whaling picture was a line of shells, massive white conchs that my granddad would hold in turn to my ear. I'd close my eyes and hearing the sound of waves crashing on the shore would be transported to a South Sea island paradise.

     By the door was a large roll-top desk where he did his calculations, marking out his voyage on the chart, then writing up an account of the day's imaginary happenings in the Captain's log. He'd found a pile of old empty cashbooks somewhere and these he used for his logs. Each voyage was accorded a fresh book, its heavy binding and yellowing paper infusing his dream with the musty aroma of history. He would consult calendars and almanacs, fix himself into a bygone age and sail away.

     Sometimes he would read me extracts from past voyages: whaling trips to Greenland, pleasure cruises in the Mediterranean, the abortive English attempt to find a western trade route to India that ran foul of mutiny and mast-cracking weather in 1482, and the fantastic adventures he underwent in the Indian Ocean on Sinbad's first voyage when he served as my grandfather's cabin boy. My granddad had sailed with Nelson, had crossed the Atlantic in convoy being hounded by German U-boats, had been attacked by pirates and sunk by icebergs. When he died all the logs would be mine. He pointed at them on the shelf above his desk, a line of solid cash books, recounting all the voyages of my grandfather's mind. When he died they would all be mine, that he promised me, but I was still on 'Janet and John', what use would they be without my granddad to read them to me. I remember I ran down the stairs, out of the house and across the street, in tears. My grandmother shouted at him for upsetting me. My mother shouted at them both for letting me run across the road on my own.

     Sometimes I'd sleep over there at my grandparents' house. There was an old brown leather sofa in my granddad's room and they would put sheets and blankets on that for my bed. I used to smuggle a torch in with me and when they said goodnight and switched off the light I would wait until they'd gone downstairs then get out the torch and shine it around the room, letting it play off the pictures, the globe, the telescope, the sextant, the books, the maps and the logs. Then I would switch off the light, close my eyes and try to imagine myself sailing with Sinbad and Nelson, fighting sea serpents, marrying mermaids, harpooning whales.

     My granddad died when I was seven. I didn't go to his funeral, didn't get to see him laid out in grandma's front room; I had scarletina. My mother told me he was dead and I cried and then that was it. It was sudden, his death. He choked on a fish bone. Because there was no long illness, no visits to a sickbed or hospital, and because I hadn't seen his dead body, or watched the coffin drop into the ground, I don't think I quite believed it. So the first time I went over the road to my granddad's house after he'd died I think I somehow imagined he'd still be there. He wasn't. My grandma had bought me comics and sweets and she taught me how to play clock patience; she never mentioned my granddad.

     I waited till she went to the toilet. It was up the yard, she'd got arthritis in her knees, it would be a long trip, there'd be time. I watched her go out the back door then made my way upstairs. I crept, knowing she couldn't possibly hear me but stopping every time a stair creaked, guilty as any kid. I went into the back bedroom first, I knew he wouldn't be there but I went to the window to check on my grandmother's progress. I couldn't see her, she must be in the toilet. The bedroom was spotlessly clean and tidy, like the rest of the house, apart from my granddad's room of course.

     I went there now. Stood at the top of the stairs and put my hand on the doorknob. I turned it and pushed. Nothing happened. I pushed again, harder this time. Still nothing. I rattled the doorknob, then turned it slowly. Nothing. I looked through the keyhole, I could make out the end of the sofa and the bookcase on the far wall next to the window, but that was all. I tried the doorknob again but it was no use. Then my grandma bellowed up the stairs, "I've locked it!"

     I jumped out of my skin and let go the doorknob, then  looked down the stairs expecting to see my grandma purple-faced and raging as I'd seen her several times before, while peeping through the back window waiting till she stopped shouting before knocking on the door and going in. She was a big woman, my granddad was a little man. After one of those rows and we were upstairs safe in his room, he'd call my Grandma Bluto. "I wonder what Bluto's getting for tea?" She was Bluto, he was Popeye. I looked down the stairs but my grandma was not angry, she shouted because she was going deaf. She watched me, sweetly smiling. So she had locked my granddad's room. "Why?" I asked.

     "Because your granddad's in there," she said. "Come down and I'll get your tea."

     I never went up there again. I'd visit my grandma often, but the visits were always short, and I never spent the night there. I never told anybody what my grandma had said, not even my mum. And my grandma never said anymore about it. I had asked her why my granddad's room was locked and she had said it was because my granddad was in there. And being seven years old and never having seen where they'd put my granddad, I naturally assumed that they'd put him in his room. That was where he was happiest after all.

     My dad had an old pair of binoculars, they'd belonged to my other grandfather who'd died before I was born. He let me play with them sometimes and I'd take them upstairs into our front bedroom and would look across the street into my granddad's room, hoping for a glimpse of him. What I expected to see I don't know. I think I thought he'd be up and walking about, not of this world, but not of any other, just granddad in his proper place, his room. One day I found a dead dog under a bush in Bluebell Wood. I poked at it with a stick, turned it over, saw the maggots. When I got home I took the binoculars upstairs and searched for signs of crawling decay. I never saw anything. The room was always dark. All I could make out was the globe. Sometimes at night, before my parents came up to bed, I'd creep into their room and look across the road, hoping to see a light in my granddad's window, but I never did.

     About a year after my granddad died we moved house, went to live out in the country on a new housing estate. We still went over to visit my grandma, but more and more often she came over to stay with us. As the years passed she began to lose more of her mind, we called it old age then. One winter's day on the way to the toilet she slipped on the ice and broke her hip. She was taken to hospital and there her mind went completely. I was sixteen, I'd got my own problems, I didn't much care about what my grandma was going through, she seemed pretty much out of it anyway, just a matter of time. If she ever left the hospital then she would have to come and live with us. It wasn't safe for her to live alone anymore. The last few months before the accident my mother had been spending more and more time with her, cooking and cleaning, sometimes staying overnight, sleeping on the sofa in the living room. So one day my mother asked me to help her sort out my Grandma's things, get the house ready to be sold, and for once I said yes.

     Whenever I thought about my granddad's room, whenever I remembered how I'd sat and stared at it for hours from across the road, then I'd get embarrassed with myself and the fool I'd been. I'd seen my granddad's grave now, been with my mum to change the flowers lots of times. I knew he was dead and buried in the cemetery and all that other stuff was just the overactive imagination of a stupid little kid, but even so there was still something that niggled and giggled in the back of my brain. That wasn't why I was so keen on helping my mum tidy the house though, it wasn't a matter of laying a ghost, it was just the thought of laying my hands on all that treasure again, all the treasure in my granddad's room, the books, the globe, the charts and the logs, most especially the logs. The stories of his imaginary voyages, I was desperate to read them again. No, to actually read them for the first time.

     We started in the front room, packing the china, the Wedgwood and Minton, the Doulton and Spode, all the priceless treasures from the glass-fronted cabinet that I'd never been allowed to touch. All worthless compared to what lay upstairs. Then the living room, emptying the sideboard, my mother stopping every few seconds to look through old photographs, read letters and birthday cards that were shoved to the back of the drawers. The kitchen, all the cutlery packed away, the everyday crocks, the odd tins of food. Finally upstairs and into my grandma's bedroom. The dressing table was emptied. I recognised my Christmas gifts of the last few years, soap, scent, handkerchieves, untouched.

     Everything packed away and the day growing dark, I watched my mother carry the last box downstairs. I stood outside my granddad's room, my hand on the doorknob, and I heard my mother shout up the stairs, "That's it, come on, your dad'll be here in a minute." That's it? How could that be it? There was one more room. It was getting late, I knew my dad would be coming any minute to pick us up and take us home, I knew that my granddad's room would take hours to clear, knew we hadn't got time, had to leave it till another day, but I'd been waiting so long, I couldn't just go, I had to at least look inside. I'd have to go and get the key off my mother. But try it first, just in case. Seven again, hand on the doorknob, turn it and push and the door gives. My granddad's room was no longer locked. I pushed the door open and stepped inside.

     "Your granddad's in there," my grandma had said, shouting up from the foot of the stairs. The phrase had echoed round the narrow stairwell then and had continued to echo in my mind ever since. Have you ever walked up a staircase, a familiar staircase, in the dark and you know there's one more step to go so you raise your foot and bring it down and it hits air and thuds onto the landing? You're already at the top but you thought there was an extra step and there isn't. For a brief instant your stomach churns and you lose all sense of time and place. The briefest of instants and you're nowhere, in the dark and not even falling, not moving, just nowhere. Nowhere. I opened the door of my granddad's room, stepped inside and my stomach churned as though I'd hit that final non-existent step. The room was empty. Completely empty. Absolutely empty. The walls and floor were bare, the only things in there were the curtains at the window and a bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling. It was getting dark, I reached out for the light switch and flicked it on. Nothing happened. The bulb had gone. I leant with my back against the wall and then slid slowly to the floor. I sat there watching the room go black until my mother came up to get me.

     On the way home she explained what had happened to my granddad's stuff. My grandma had been werritting herself sick about the room. At first she was content to let it lie undisturbed, but gradually it had begun to nag at her that there was a room in her house that was unused, unusable and most of all, untidy. She began to have nightmares about the dirt in the room taking hideous shape and battering down the door. She would wake up screaming, smothered in her blankets, suffocating in the imaginary dust. But what held her back from emptying the room was the fear of harming my granddad's memory. She had read the logs, had seen the charts of his voyages and she had pronounced him mad. She would need help to move all the junk from the room and burn it; who could she trust with the knowledge of her husband's insanity?

     As she mithered about it more and more, my mother finally managed to piece together the cause of her worry, and one day a few months before my grandma's accident, she called in a house-clearing firm and they removed everything from the room. My grandma had insisted it be done that way, she didn't want anyone to go through my granddad's belongings apart from total strangers, and they were given strict instructions to burn all the books. My mother had objected at first, she knew that some of my granddad's things were valuable, certainly the globe and the nautical instruments, but my grandma had insisted and my mother was too scared for her health to go against her wishes. So everything in my granddad's room was removed, except the curtains, which were for the benefit of the outside world. The room was left unlocked, but my grandma never used it. She brushed the floor every day but that was it. My mother had told my father about it, but I'd heard nothing, I had my own problems. That night, before I fell asleep, I lay in the dark and thought about nothing.

          As the final words of `De profundis clamavi` echoed into silence, I handed Lionel Monk's lost story back to Thaddeus.
          "Well?" he enquired.
          "It's not what I was expecting. I mean, if you'd found the germ of the idea for 'Gre'ngth' or 'Hell Walker', then o.k., it might be worth something."
          "You think this is worth nothing then?"
          I didn't want to hurt Thaddeus' feelings, I know he prided himself on his nose for a bargain. "It doesn't even read like Monk's early stuff. The kid misses his granddad, so what? Maybe he wrote it for a women's magazine."
          "If he wrote it at all?"
          Well, he'd said it. "Exactly."
          "You don't find it remotely ..... terrifying."
          "No, not at all. I mean that's why I question it's genuine Monk. I mean, the guy could create monsters, he made them live, he conjured up all the demons of hell and made them leap off the page. He made death come alive." I admit I was laying it on a bit thick but I was a fan.
          "That's a nice turn of phrase," said Thaddeus, stroking his beard and letting a thin smile play over his lips. "Perhaps you're right. Maybe I got carried away with the excitement of finding a lost story; maybe my enthusiasm imbued it with a spurious significance. When I read it I did not question its authenticity, I merely tried to fit it into the chronology of Monk's work. I imagined it to be his first story. I thought maybe he had tried to write the most horrific tale he could conceive."
          "But there's no monsters," I interrupted.
          "No, there are no monsters, and no demons and no ghosts. Nothing to populate the eternal abyss and bring some comfort."
          "Monk's monsters are not ..... comfortable!"
          "No, a bad choice of words on my part. What was your phrase? 'He made death come alive'."
          It sounded sillier when he said it.
          "If this was his first story then maybe the remainder of his career was an attempt to do just that. Even Milton had trouble bringing Heaven to life, but Hell, that was another matter entirely; a much simpler proposition. So, all the ghosts and goblins, the ghouls and vampires, the witches and warlocks, the demons and zombies ..... all a 'comfort', to one who believes that death is the end. For anyone it is a terrifying thought, but for a writer, whose mind is constantly engaged in internal conversations, dreaming up possibilities, almost living a separate life outside the norm, to face the fact that death just brings an end to it all, would be almost unbearable. Don't you think?"

*

          As I left Tripp's house that night I looked up at the sky and saw it was empty. The clouds had blotted out the moon and stars. I considered the vastness of the universe and I remembered the sermon on eternity. And I thought of myself and shivered in the chill wind blowing from nowhere.