It was near to twilight when they picketed their horses in a thicket a few leagues from the village—this was Bowden’s idea being a former cavalry officer. And it made good sense to the others, the rationale being that in the case of quick retreat their mares would stand ready.
Although evidently an agricultural community of sorts, they saw that the fields of Clavitt were mostly uncultivated and overgrown with briars, wild grasses, uprisings of creepers and an unwholesome umbrage that seemed to quiver though there was no discernable breeze. It was said that here were to be found splendid fields of buckwheat, rye, and Indian corn, but they saw only bramble thickets and alder bushes, and no livestock—nary a pig or guinea fowl or plow horse.
Clavitt Fields clung to a series of blighted hills that rose and fell and twisted like the convolutions of a serpent. It was hard for Blair and the others to believe it had stood less than a century, for what they beheld was a seemingly ancient, depraved uprising of rotting half-timbered houses and clustered tall buildings crouching beneath dark gabled roofs. They jutted from hilltop and dell, a crowded see-saw maze that leaned out over the cobbled and brickwork streets as if they would fall at any moment. So congested were these eldritch dwellings, Blair later noted, that the sullen windows of those above looked out over the crowded rooftops of those below. Had you but fallen from one of those high, sagging porches you would’ve landed on the neighbor’s roof and rolled out into the narrow, claustrophobic streets.
In Kenney’s mind, he could hear a voice speaking. It was clear and concise and he knew it was the voice of Dr. Blair reading from his own journals nearly two centuries before:
“How can I ever adequately convey how it felt walking into that shunned, godless village? Beneath those gnarled, twisted locust trees and misshapen elms? Would I say that the air was leaden, heavy even, thick as curdled cream and such as easy to breathe? Would I describe to you that high, noisome stink of dampness and putrefaction that seemed to visibly ooze from root cellars and gutters? Yes, perhaps, for such is true. Those high houses leered with grim secrets, shuttered and sunless, lathed in a breathing, sinister penumbra that set my flesh to crawling. As we walked those deserted, suffocating streets and weedy passages, we could hear sounds coming from behind warped doorways and planked windows. And, God, what sounds! Bleatings and snorting and gruntings akin to hogs rooting at a trough, but all with a weird, demented near-human timbre to them. We wondered silently what abominations, what verminous hybrids could utter such sounds. We could feel eyes upon us and smell ghastly, fetid odors emanating from shadowy doorways. Never was I—and am not now—one given to supernatural elucidation, but I swear as God is my witness, that there hung a malignant pall over that accursed town, a noxious ether of spiritual contamination that made me shiver, made something in me beg to cry out! Yes, had it not been for my two stalwart and robust companions, I would have fled that decadent, hellish place and lost myself most surely in those clutching black woods and lunatic verdure.”
That was what the rambling voice of Dr. Blair said in a suitably dramatic and wordy fashion.
Before long, the villagers of Clavitt Fields began to show themselves.
Blair’s voice droned on: “And what a debased, perverted assemblage of flesh they indeed were! Good Lord! A subhuman drollery! Wizened, skeletal things with peeling faces and deranged anatomies. Some hunchbacked, others missing limbs, still others—it seemed—with too many. Their eyes (and understand that some had none to speak of, merely fleshy depressions where eyes would sit in sane physiognomies) were glazed and sightless, while others sported orbs that were nearly luminous, the color of glaring autumn moons. Dressed in rags and nursing tumorous growths and leprous contusions, they shambled from the shadows to look at us. To gawk and leer.
“And laugh! For they were all laughing at us! A hideous conglomeration of morbid human mushrooms!
“And one man with colorless hair the texture of straw slid forward and fixed us with a single saffron eye set in an exaggerated face of humps and ridges. ‘Ye came, did ye? We knewed ye would!’ he said, that cyclopean face swimming close to my own. ‘Wait until sunset, he say’d! They’ll come through the weald, he say’d! They’ll be afeared of that which they find and what find them, he say’d! By my troth, he say’d, liken it to worse things! And here ye are, kind gentry, and welcome one and all! Good morrow to ye!’
“At which point—I can barely write of it, my hands tremble so—he opened his ragged, mildew-patched waistcoat and exposed the flesh of his chest, which was set with pustules, tumorlike bulbs, and what appeared to be juicy pink toadstools growing in noxious, fertile clusters! They pulsed with life! Then… yes, I must write of it… he plucked one free by its stem and offered it to us.
“‘Have a taste, would you, governor? Have a wee taste and a prosperous journey, eh?’
“He staggered away, giggling, chewing on the thing he offered me, which I swear cried out as he bit into it. A dozen others followed him—a congregation of deformed, diseased, inbred mongrels laughing at some joke we dared not know. Some howled at the stars poking out above and others gibbered and still others wept and gnawed at their own fingers.
“These, then, were the children of Corben, the demonic savior of this degenerated and stigmatical flock.
“Despite my revulsion, being a medical man I began to put questions to the afflicted concerning the nature of their abnormalities and morbid afflictions, but I received naught, only laughter and bestial sounds in reply. Some pointed to the earth, others to the sky, and one woman who lacked a mouth of all things, gestured madly towards the moon, which was then beginning to arise over the latticed tree tops and was the color of fresh blood. A child pointed to a foreboding tangle of shadows that coiled in the alleyway between two crumbling buildings. She could not stop giggling.
“We continued on, undaunted. The villagers left us alone. They were—despite their numerous physical and mental derangements—a cheerful assemblage. Laughing and dancing and jumping for what seemed great joy. But joy of what?
“The town was a knotted profusion of cul-de-sacs and dead-end crevices pressed between high houses and tall, stone buildings with black, mullioned windows when there were any at all. It was an easy enough place to lose oneself. Particularly for me since I had never once walked—nor wanted to—those crumbling brick streets. I fear that the unwholesome tales whispered about that town were more than enough to keep me at arm’s length, though I had resided in Trowden some two-and-seven years.
“Anon, we found what Silas Bowden assured us had once been a most prosperous tavern. We pushed through the rotting door and into the shadowy, umbered interior. Inside, the air was black and greasy, smudged with unpleasant odors as of tombs and crematoriums. An awful, vaporous reek of decay and slime and depravity. I found it necessary to suck air through staunchly clenched teeth. A few withered and unappetizing specimens of the village waited at dusty tables or beneath the sullen, flickering glare of a whale-oil lamp. A man was crouched in the corner near the hearth. He held his face in his hands, continually moaning as if in some dire pain or suffering some irreparable loss. But as I watched him, by God, I saw… I swear I saw… something white and wet wriggling beneath those fingers. A barmaid turned and looked upon us, immediately secreting a hand into her besoiled apron—a hand that was gray and bloated as of a fungi. And of the others? Their faces were hideous things, lumpy and leprous, distortions nature had never intended in her wisdom. It was as if their faces were composed of bread dough, warm and pliable, elastic even, that had been stretched and pulled in the most repulsive fashion so that eyes were pushed up into the vicinity of foreheads and the corners of those horrid, gashed mouths often were slit into the cheekbones themselves.