It starts as it always does. Me waiting on the shore for the ferry, looking out across the sea, the waves thundering against the rocky jetty. The ferry arrives, and it delivers me to the island where the sickly yellow house stands alone amid that shaggy grove of hemlocks and the overgrown rose garden. Nothing’s any different until after I’ve spoken with the ravens and the silver-eyed women and the Bailiff, until after the cannibalistic banquet and the disturbing images that old film projector spits out onto the parlor wall. But then, when I’m lead [sic] to the cellar door, the women both turn back and leave me to make the descent alone! Never before have they done this, but you know that. They shut the door behind me, and bolt it, and I go by myself down those creaking wooden steps.
I think, at least for a few moments, that I’m less afraid of what I’ll see down there than I am surprised that they’ve allowed me to go without a chaperone. It’ll sound strange, no doubt, but it makes me proud, as if I have been accepted as an equal, as one of the house’s monstrous inhabitants. There is a sense of belonging. How can there be any comfort in such a thought? I can’t say, only that this is what I feel.
As always, I reach the bottom of the stairs and find the cellar flooded by several inches of stagnant saltwater. The odor is overwhelming, and bloated fish and tangles of seaweed float all about me. Tiny crabs scuttle across the submerged cellar floor. This part is the same as always, of course. I try not to smell the rot, and splash between those moldering brickwork arches until I have come to the wall of grey granite blocks and grey mortar. Like always, it’s encrusted with slimy moss and barnacles. Like always, the moss and barnacles have grown in patterns that make them look like leering skulls. All of this is the same.
But when I reach into my pocket for the skeleton key the Bailiff always gives me, it isn’t there. There’s nothing there, and for a moment I panic. They’ve trusted me to go down to this place alone, and I’ve managed to lose the damned key! I stop, trying hard to remember each step across the cellar, each step down, everything that occurred before the silver-eyed women lead [sic] me to the cellar door, how I might have possibly mislaid the key (which I always put in my dress pocket immediately, the moment the Bailiff places it in my palm). My mouth goes dry. My heart is hammering in my chest. They’ll make me leave and never ask me back again, never again send the ferry for me (and, I know, I know, I should be glad, but in the dream I am mortified).
Then I look down, and there’s something hideous crouched in the water not far from me. It’s not much larger than a very large rat, and it has the key, clutched tightly in one hand. It isn’t human, the thing with the key, and immediately I turn away, the sight of it enough to make me feel ill. Gone are those feelings that I’ve disappointed the Bailiff and his pale companions, that I belong here, below the yellow house. I only want to run back to the stairs and hammer on the door until they let me out again.
“Too late for that, Missy,” the crouched thing with the key says. I don’t look at it. I can’t bear the thought of ever setting eyes on it again.
“Daresay, took you long enough to puzzle it out. Been waiting here so long I’ve memorized the names of all the crayfish, and I think I might be waterlogged.”
“I don’t want to see any more,” I say, and it laughs at me. Or maybe it doesn’t laugh at me, but it laughs. It’s a small laugh, very small, and the sound makes me think of burning paper.
“Best be minding your P’s and Q’s, Missy. Come too far to go lily-livered on us now, don’t you reckon?”
And I hear a clattering noise that I know is the crouched thing fitting the skeleton key into the keyhole in the granite wall. And I’m thinking how all this is wrong, that I should be at the keyhole, that the women should be with me, when the granite wall swings open wide, and the barnacles scream, and . . .
Excerpt from Darkening Horizons: The American Supernatural Novel During the 1980s by Gerald Hopkins (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993):
. . . and, regrettably, the unjustly celebrated “Evil God, Out of Words” (Twilight Zone magazine #8, November 1981) isn’t much better than Chalmers’s earlier attempts to update the weird tale. Like Klein’s The Ceremonies, this story adopts the basic framework and themes of Arthur Machen’s “The White People”—a loss of innocence and the corruption of the untainted by way of induction into a secret witch cult—but does so far less effectively than Klein’s revisiting of Machen’s premise. And, to make matters worse, somehow, Chalmers has managed to write a story of only some eight thousand or so words that seems to go on forever, heedless of its size, not unlike the cursed real estate of Joseph Payne Brennan’s “Canavan’s Backyard.”
The genesis of “Evil God, Out of Words” proves a good deal more intriguing than the story itself:
The entire plot coalesced indirectly around a single childhood memory, something I saw when I was ten years old. This would have been 1946 or ’47. My mother and I accompanied my father on a business trip to Paris. We rarely took proper vacations, and I think he was trying to make up for that. Anyway, we saw the usual sights one sees in Paris, but we also visited a natural history museum, which delighted me far more than all the Eiffel Towers and Arcs de Triomphe combined. There was an enormous Victorian gallery filled with dinosaur skeletons! For a ten-year-old boy, how could the Louvre ever possibly hope to compete with Diplodocus, Allosaurus, and Iguanodon? Of course, though, none of these served as the story’s inspiration. But there was also a small glass case containing a sort of mummified hand, and the hand was gripping an old-fashioned key. I believe it was an Egyptian artifact of some sort, and it seemed entirely out of place there among the dinosaurs and mastodons. Perhaps this is why I recall it so clearly. The fingers had hooked nails or talons, and it reminded me immediately of W. W. Jacobs’s “The Monkey’s Paw,” which I’d read by then, naturally. The odd thing is, decades later, I wrote the museum to inquire about the hand, wishing to compare my memories with the reality of what I’d seen. I received a somewhat terse response to the effect that there had never been any such artifact displayed at the museum. Now, I knew better. I’d seen it with my own eyes, hadn’t I? I wrote a second time, and they didn’t even bother to answer me. But what’s important here is that it set me on the path leading to “Evil God, Out of Words.”
Though the relic Chalmers may or may not have seen while in Paris as a child doesn’t appear in the story, it is plainly echoed in the recurring motif of keys, both literal and figurative. Most notably, the terrible old man who first speaks to the story’s l’enfant innocent of “the mysteries of the worm” describes nine magical keys. Each key bears the name of one of the muses of Greek mythology, as set forth in Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (1593). The old man tells the girl that the two most powerful keys, Polyhymnia and Calliope, are required for the ritual of resurrection (“shredding the veil, casting back, fetching up”). If Chalmers’s choice of these two muses is meant to hold a particular symbolic meaning, it escapes repeated . . .
Excerpt from “The Thousand and Third Tale of Scheherazade: A Survey of the Arabian Ghûl in Popular Culture,” Esther Kensky, The Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 42, no. 6 (December 2009):
. . . will, instead, quote at length from the summary provided by Niederhausen and Flaschka (1992): “This was the time before the war between the Ghûl (plural, Arabic