Collected Stories and Poems Read online

  Collected Short Stories and Poems

  Joseph Payne Brennan

  (Version 4.1)

  Contents

  Introduction

  STORIES

  The Green Parrot (1952)

  Slime (1953)

  The Calmander Chest (1954)

  The Hunt (1958)

  Canavan's Back Yard (1958)

  The Horror at Chilton Castle (1963)

  Mr. Octbur (1967)

  Long Hollow Swamp (1976)

  The Business About Fred (1975)

  The House on Stillcroft Street (1975)

  Mrs. Clendon's Place (1984)

  Road to Granville (1985)

  Jendick’s Swamp (1987)

  POEMS

  The Humming Stair (1953)

  The Wind of Time (1959)

  Grandfather's Ghost (1959)

  One Day of Rain (1961)

  Ghost-Town Saloon: Winter (1961)

  The Scythe of Dreams (1961)

  Recognition of Death (1961)

  The Chestnut Roasters (1961)

  The Man I Met (1961)

  The Serpent Waits (1961)

  The Last Pagan Mourns for Dark Rosaleen (1961)

  Ossian (1961)

  Avery Anameer (1961)

  Nightmare (1961)

  Winter Hours (1979)

  Contagion (1979)

  Encounter (1981)

  Imminence of Snow (1985)

  Because (1988)

  Haunted House (1988)

  John Mason Sidd (1988)

  Introduction

  Joseph Payne Brennan (December 20, 1918 – January 28, 1990) was a prolific American writer of fantasy and horror fiction, and also a distinguished poet. Of Irish ancestry, he was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut and he lived most of his life in New Haven, Connecticut, and worked at the Sterling Memorial Library of Yale University for over 40 years. Brennan published several hundred short stories (estimates range between four to five hundred), two novellas and reputedly thousands of poems. His stories appeared in over 200 anthologies and have been translated into German, French, Dutch, Italian and Spanish.

  Brennan's first professional sale came in December 1940 with the publication of the poem, "When Snow Is Hung", which appeared in the Christian Science Monitor Home Forum, and he continued writing poetry up until the time of his death. As a horror writer, Brennan started out writing stories for Weird Tales in 1952 and then began publishing his own magazine Macabre, which ran from 1957 to 1976. Several of his short story collections concern an occult detective named Lucius Leffing in the vein of Carnacki and John Silence. His 1958 collection Nine Horrors and a Dream, containing classic stories like "Slime" (which has been reprinted at least fifty times) and "Canavan's Back Yard", is celebrated in an essay by Stephen Gallagher in the book Horror: 100 Best Books, edited by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman. Stephen King has called him "a master of the unashamed horror tale". Don D'Amassa considers that "His stories were noteworthy for their effective development of suspense and terror without the excesses of violence which characterise modern horror fiction".

  The Green Parrot

  (1952)

  Some years ago, finding that urban interruptions were threatening to prevent my completion of a new novel on the deadline set by the publishers, I moved back to a room at the Winford Inn where I had spent the previous summer, Winford, a tiny village tucked in the northern Connecticut hills, offered very few formidable interruptions.

  I arrived at the Inn, during October and worked steadily until late November. At length, well pleased with my progress, I decided to take a day off.

  I got into my car and-drove rather aimlessly around the countryside, admiring the scenery and in general enjoying myself. Although most of the leaves were down, and in certain lights the cold hills looked rather bleak, I felt that the little excursion was doing me a world of good.

  Late in the afternoon, as I was approaching Winford, looking forward to a quiet evening in my cozy room at the Inn, I turned down a narrow dirt road, which branched off the main route and was reputed to be a shortcut.

  I immediately regretted it. The road was in a bad state of disrepair and was crowded on both sides by large overhanging hemlock trees whose branches scraped against the car.

  I was just about to switch on the car lights when a large green parrot suddenly flew out of the hemlocks on one side of the road, fluttered frantically away from the windshield, and disappeared under the trees on the other side.

  I was so startled I very nearly ran the car off the road. Braking to a stop, I sat staring into the woods, wondering if my eyes were playing tricks on me. If a pheasant, or woodcock, or hawk, had flapped across the road, I might have been momentarily startled, but no more. But a large green parrot, in New England, late in November...

  I was still scowling into the woods, when a cracked and quavering voice began calling out plaintively, "Here Toby! Here Toby!”

  At first I thought it might be the parrot; then I saw a little old lady appear out of the hemlocks and step into the road. She looked around uncertainly, while a most woebegone expression came over her wrinkled face. In her shapeless housedress and funny little poke bonnet she made an odd and pathetic-figure.

  I got out of the car and approached her. "Your parrot,” I said, "just flew across the road. He went toward the woods.” And I pointed toward the clump of hemlocks where I guessed he had headed.

  She stood stone still and stared at me. Apparently she hadn’t even noticed my car. Finally a slow unfathomable smile wrinkled her face.

  Her faded eyes sought my own. "Help me,” she-whispered.-"Help me find Toby. I’ve been trying to catch him so long. I’m so tired.”

  It was impossible for me to refuse. Her pale eyes held-such a piteous appeal— and she was so old and frail and helpless-looking.

  "You’d better wait here,” I said. "I’ll see if I can catch him.”

  Without waiting for her reply, I plunged into the hemlocks. I knew there was little time to spare. It was already/twilight under the trees; in another hour the forest would be dark.

  I began calling the parrot by name: "Here Toby! Here Toby!"

  From far away in the woods a faint, mocking echo came back, "Here Toby! Here Toby!”

  Once I thought I caught a glimpse of the bird, high up on a branch in one of the hemlocks. But I couldn’t be sure. It might have been merely a last ray of sunlight glinting briefly against a green bough. - As I moved away from the road, the hemlock wood became denser. The trees grew closer together; briars and underbrush barred the way.

  Darkness closed in more swiftly than I had thought possible. With it came cold. In spite of my exertions, I began to shiver.

  When I finally stopped to catch my breath, I was, for the first time, struck with the absurdity of the situation.

  Here I found myself, at twilight, scrambling through brambles and briars deep in a hemlock wood which stretched for miles—in search of an escaped parrot whose owner I didn't even know!

  I shrugged and turned to retrace my footsteps. While I hated to go back and admit my failure to the little old lady in the poke bonnet, I felt that I could accomplish nothing by searching further. In a very short time it would be impossible to see anything at all in the woods.

  In a few minutes, however, I pretty much forgot about facing the old lady—because. I realized that I was lost. I hadn’t gone far from the road, but for the life of me I couldn’t find it again.

  It got completely dark and I became extremely cold. I lost all sense of direction and although I kept assuring myself that I couldn’t possibly be very far from the road, a kind of panic began building up in me. My thin topcoat was not, I knew, designed for overnight wear i
n cold November woods.

  At length, purely by accident, I stumbled into the road. Luckily, the car was not far away. I climbed into it, stiff and literally aching with cold, and started the motor.

  As I had expected, the little old lady had left. Probably she had gone home far more concerned about the loss of her parrot than about my failure to reappear.

  Back at the Inn, I took a hot bath, changed clothes, drank two tumblers of brandy— and made the dining room only a few minutes late.

  As had been my custom since returning to the Inn, I seated myself at the table which I usually shared with Colonel Buff, Miss Grover and old Mrs. Spence.

  When Colonel Buff joshed me about my late arrival, my first impulse was to answer testily. I held my temper, however, and presently when the brandy and warm food began to take effect, I decided to reveal the entire ridiculous episode from which I had so recently emerged.

  I determined to relate the bizarre incident without—and it was a temptation-adding any trimmings or melodramatic trappings of my own invention.

  I soon saw however, that; oddly enough, even without embroidery my little narrative was producing an extraordinary stir. From the very start, when I first mentioned the parrot, Colonel Buff stopped eating and laid down his fork as if he didn’t want to risk-missing a single word. I thought old Mrs. Spence turned somewhat pale, and Miss Grover appeared unaccountably agitated. She mumbled something about snow and kept glancing at the windows.

  I finished amid a strained silence. At length, Colonel Buff, after exchanging pregnant glances with Mrs. Spence and Miss Glover, cleared his throat.

  "My lad,” he said, "this is as good a time and place as any for you to be informed of a very peculiar and pertinent fact about your, ah, experience.”

  "What fact is that?” I inquired.

  "You must be prepared to be startled.”

  "Well...?”

  "The fact is,” he continued, "that the two chief protagonists in your recent experience—excluding yourself, of course— were ghosts.”

  He nodded his head at my expression of blank amazement and disbelief.

  "I know it must seem incredible to you,” he went on, "but that little old lady in the poke bonnet disappeared in those hemlock woods eighty-odd years ago.”

  Mrs. Spence nodded, shivering. "It’s a well known story hereabout,” she said. "Leastways, it is to the old folks.” -

  After dessert, Colonel Buff lit a cigar and settled back to tell the "well known” local story which I had never, heard. I had, meanwhile, eaten my remaining food in such a state of suspense that I hardly tasted a morsel of it.

  "The little old lady in the poke bonnet,” the Colonel began, "was a spinster named Miss Meerchum. At one time her people were moderately prosperous farmers. They occupied a large tract of land bordering the hemlock woods on that dirt road which you came over.

  "Well, to make a long story short, the Meerchums gradually died off until finally only old Miss Meerchum was left. She continued to live on in the farmhouse, eking out a sparse existence.

  "Her only solace was a large green parrot which she kept as a pet. Being alone in the world, she became inordinately attached to the bird. It was said—and this is probably sheer nonsense—that the bird could carry on a sustained conversation and that old Miss Meerchum held lengthy gossip sessions with it. In any case, Miss Meerchum undoubtedly valued the parrot above everything else in her world.

  "Well, one dismal day in late November, in the year 1868 to be exact, Miss Meerchum came stumbling into Winford in a vastly agitated state. Tearfully, she explained to the villagers that Toby, heir pet parrot, had escaped into the hemlock woods. She pleaded for help in locating the-prized bird.

  The local menfolk, deeply touched by her piteous appeal, organized a searching party and plunged into the woods in an attempt to retrieve the aged woman’s companion.

  “When they started out, the skies were somewhat overcast but there seemed no threat of imminent-storm. The-party—men and boys—struck boldly into the hemlocks. Apparently the search, in the beginning, was considered something of a lark.

  "Toward evening however, when more than half of the searchers were still far in the woods, a blinding snowstorm struck. It quickly turned into a raging blizzard. A terrific wind- roared through the forest, drowning out all other sound.

  "Those men and boys who had already come out of the woods were forced to return to town in order to save themselves. There was no possibility of attempting to save the others. Some of them were not found until the following spring. In all, seven men and four boys perished in the hemlock woods.”

  "And the old lady?” I inquired after a long silence.

  "Contrary to instructions,” the Colonel said, "she followed some of the searchers into the woods, calling out for her beloved parrot. She perished with the others, and to this day her poor bones have never been located. They still lie somewhere in those woods—and whatever might remain of the parrot lies there also, for it, too, was never found.”

  The Colonel, relit his cigar. "Since that tragedy over eighty years ago, at least a dozen different people, at different times, have reported an encounter with the little old lady in the poke bonnet. Always in the fall of the year. And, invariably, not many hours after their meeting with the pathetic apparition, a severe snowstorm has settled on the area.”

  Miss Glover looked toward the window. "We’ll be snowed in by tomorrow,” she said resignedly.

  When I looked outside that evening before retiring, I could see stars. I drank another stiff tumbler of brandy, shrugged, and went to bed. In spite of my experiences and Colonel Buff’s story-in-explanation, I slept soundly.

  But the next morning when I got up, I shivered in spite of the warmth of my cozy room.

  The world outside was muffled and heaped with a half foot of snow, and the flakes, driven by a howling wind, were still rushing down.

  Slime

  (1953)

  It was a great grey-black hood of horror moving over the floor of the sea. It slid through the soft ooze like a monstrous mantle of slime obscenely animated with questing life. It was by turns viscid and fluid. At times it flattened out and flowed through the carpet of mud like an inky pool; occasionally it paused, seeming to shrink in upon itself, and reared up out of the ooze until it resembled an irregular cone or a gigantic hood. Although it possessed no eyes, it had a marvellously developed sense of touch, and it possessed a sensitivity to minute vibrations which was almost akin to telepathy. It was plastic, essentially shapeless. It could shoot out long tentacles, until it bore a resemblance to a nightmare squid or a huge starfish; it could retract itself into a round flattened disc, or squeeze into an irregular hunched shape so that it looked like a black boulder sunk on the bottom of the sea.

  It had prowled the black water endlessly. It had been formed when the earth and the seas were young; it was almost as old as the ocean itself. It moved through a night which had no beginning and no dissolution. The black sea basin where it lurked had been dark since the world began - an environment only a little less inimical than the stupendous gulfs of interplanetary space.

  It was animated by a single, unceasing, never-satisfied drive: a voracious, insatiable hunger. It could survive for months without food, but minutes after eating it was as ravenous as ever. Its appetite was appalling and incalculable.

  On the icy ink-black floor of the sea the battle for survival was savage, hideous - and usually brief. But for the shape of moving slime there was no battle. It ate whatever came its way, regardless of size, shape or disposition. It absorbed microscopic plankton and giant squid with equal assurance. Had its surface been less fluid, it might have retained the circular scars left by the grappling suckers of the wildly threshing deep-water squid, or the jagged toothmarks of the anachronistic frillshark, but as it was, neither left any evidence of its absorption. When the lifting curtain of living slime swayed out of the mud and closed upon them, their fiercest death throes came to nothing.


  The horror did not know fear. There was nothing to be afraid of. It ate whatever moved, or tried not to move, and it had never encountered anything which could in turn eat it. If a squid’s sucker, or a shark’s tooth, tore into the mass of its viscosity, the rent flowed in upon itself and immediately closed. If a segment was detached, it could be retrieved and absorbed back into the whole.

  The black mantle reigned supreme in its savage world of slime and silence. It groped greedily and endlessly through the mud, eating and never sleeping, never resting. If it lay still, it was only to trap food which might otherwise be lost. If it rushed with terrifying speed across the slimy bottom, it was never to escape an enemy, but always to flop its hideous fluidity upon its sole and inevitable quarry - food.

  It had evolved out of the muck and slime of the primitive sea floor, and it was as alien to ordinary terrestrial life as the weird denizens of some wild planet in a distant galaxy. It was an anachronistic experiment of nature compared to which the sabre-toothed tiger, the woolly mammoth and even Tyrannosaurus, the slashing, murderous king of the great earth reptiles, were as tame, weak entities.

  Had it not been for a vast volcanic upheaval on the bottom of the ocean basin, the black horror would have crept out its entire existence on the si'ent sea ooze without ever manifesting its hideous powers to mankind.

  Fate, in the form of a violent subterranean explosion, covering huge areas of the ocean’s floor, hurled it out of its black slime world and sent it spinning towards the surface.

  Had it been an ordinary deep-water fish, it never would have survived the experience. The explosion itself, or the drastic lessening of water pressure as it shot towards the surface, would have destroyed it. But it was no ordinary fish. Its viscosity, or plasticity, or whatever it was that constituted its essentially amoebic structure, permitted it to survive.

  It reached the surface slightly stunned and flopped on the surging waters like a great blob of black blubber. Immense waves stirred up by the subterranean explosion swept it swiftly towards shore, and because it was somewhat stunned it did not try to resist the roaring mountains of water.