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Chaosium Digest Volume 37 Number 05
Chaosium Digest Volume 37, Number 05
Date: Saturday, Jan. 11, 2003
Number: 2 of 2
"DADDY LONG LEGS"
PART A
By Michael Blenkarn with a paragraph contributed by Brooke Johnson
"Who is he that walks the night, his covered head a-swayin'
His shanks so long, his coat of black, awaiting and a-preyin'
Daddy Long Legs, Daddy Long Legs was his name of old
And naughty children stay abed when winter nights grow cold
For kiddiewinks who play the fool and act in ways they shouldn't
Who lie and steal and break the rules and mock the ones they couldn't
Will meet him in the wintry woods when next they walk astray
And ne'er again shall they return in earthly night or day"
(A modern translation of a traditional children's rhyme, originating in the
Tees region)
Corinth House, an Edwardian pile of faded brickwork, hung back beneath the
repressive stature of the surrounding trees, sheltering from the swollen
anger of the clouds. Shifting drifts of ochre leaves covered the driveway's
retreat. The wandering leaves collected in the birdbath on its weathered
stone pedestal that formed the centrepiece to the semi-circular car park.
The visitors' cars had departed, and the loose chippings of the parking area
were lined with furrows and craters that mimicked lunar terrain, as if a TV
gardener had designed the moon due to having too much time on their hands
and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
The manor was host to the psychiatric care centre of the Jensen Institute,
named obsequiously for the pioneering Austrian physicist who had funded it's
inception and suggested Corinth House as its host, formerly the residence of
a deceased colleague and isolated behind a secluded avenue of trees on the
edge of suburban Middlesbrough. The airy building, with its archaic and
involuted floor plans, wonderfully understated woodwork, stout walls, and
isolation, since provided the perfect place for psychiatric incarceration,
and maybe it was because certain of the patients were mentally disturbed to
such an arresting degree that the building had vicariously acquired an air
of unreality itself. Its Spartan corridors resonated with a preoccupied
quiet, footsteps and voices echoing diffuse and dreamlike. Because of this,
during the soothing autumn days the fact of merely being there encouraged a
laconic and reflective approach to life and affairs. At night, however, the
dreamlike state became palpably eerie and haunting, and the shadows on the
intricately carven woodwork seemed to shift and slither serpentine fashion
when the excitable torchlight of the night-watchman skittered across it,
seeking purchase, and looking for escape routes through the clouded glass of
the secured windows.
Wire frames clung to the windowpanes, further segmenting the grey light as
it filtered through the branches and into the creative therapy rooms.
Figures in uniformly blank hospital gowns, all male, wild hair askew,
attended their relative psychological traumas and delusions to an acrylic
medium onto easels that crouched like disturbed and oddly jointed spiders.
Some deftly flicked their brushes across canvas with a practised,
incongruous flourish that belied their erratic states, sedating themselves
with pastel Yorkshire landscapes. A patient named Byers, whose easel stood
inexpertly folded and unattended in the corner beside a sink covered in
intermingled rivulets of dried paint, naturally presumed to be the most
colourful exception to this rule. His painting, in all it's repugnant glory,
leant against and facing the wall, it's garish vibrancy shielding behind its
board and restrained with clips.
Goldsmith didn't care about dollops of paint spoiling the finish of the
linoleum floor - she was concerned with cleaning up dollops of ill-timed
madness and the defiant belligerence of the irreversibly irrational. She'd
only just managed to ease the other patients out of their state of agitation
back into the calm, meandering waters of docility, placing old paintbrushes
back in hands that had ceased their erratic gesticulation. As usual in times
of quiet, her gaze wandered to Crawford who lounged, staring unseeing out of
the window, without registering the whipping movements of leaves surfing the
wind with the involuntary eye twitches of the conscious brain. It had been a
few months since she had last seen him, and longer since they had both
worked in the cramped and dust-choked office near the rear of the police
station. Back then, at the judgment of the superintendent, they had been
quietly shunted into obscurity and deftly imprisoned behind meaningless
reports, trapped amid a catacomb of cracked papers, looming
filing-cabinet-obelisks and a ceiling fan that creaked gently in an
insidious way that peppered thoughts with rhythm.
Crawford had been offered an extremely cushy-sounding case to investigate,
and he had come out of the other side catatonic after overdosing on some
severely unorthodox drugs. He had summarily been dispatched to the Jensen
Institute for observation, just in time to coincide with Goldsmith accepting
a position. Now she sat idly in her chair in the James Cook Wing of the
institute, monitoring her personal cases in their occupational therapy class
while they attempted to paint away their disorders. Or in the case of Byers,
of course, exacerbate them.
She drifted over to Byers' painting now, careful not to peak the interest of
the nearest patient who blended gouache and watched fascinated as the brush
he washed in a jam jar of water erupted with swirling clouds of colour like
an octopus releasing panicked jets of ink. With a small movement shielded by
her body so as not to arouse suspicion she angled Byers' painting back from
the wall so she could view it in its full glory without exciting her charges
back to the precipice they had so recently been shepherded away from.
A repulsive figure stood against a slick and sludgy ochre landscape, in
which craters bubbled and oozed thick strings of ropy tar. Its distorted
body, grotesquely strutting on spider-like legs, was covered in tatters of
chaotically arranged moth-like wings that looked like tramps' clothing. Its
face was a mess of randomly proportioned eyes around an arachnid's mouth
stretched wide with rusted gauze. Some of its spindly and barbed legs ended
with writhing and oil-like approximations of horribly mangled human faces,
frozen mid-shriek and restrained from gibbering by the unanimated canvas.
Far in the background of the repulsive plain bloated, unkempt figures
prostrated in gestures of profound but graceless obeisance.
Or to put it another way, Goldsmith decided, it was a disgusting tasteless
mess, a fact that wholly reflected the mind of its creator.
Predictably, another patient, Danvers, had taken offence and started to
scream shrilly with his usual gratuitous spittle punctuation. Delivering a
series of shocking and mostly meaningless denunciations he had rushed over
to scribble over, and blank out the vile insect face with his black paint
before trembling and crouching down on the floor. To add the finishing touch
to the resulting pandemonium Byers had become highly agitated, screaming
about defilement and retribution, before promptly being sedated under duress
and put in restraints by the wardens. Goldsmith rearranged her face into an
attitude of unassuming blankness and decided, in view of the exertion of the
day, to grant herself an early leave of absence for the evening, and retired
to her office to gather her belongings.
Her quiet and secluded room reminded her too much of the unkempt few she had
shared at the central police station when she had provided the majority of
the common sense for the short-lived and minimally funded Department of
Supernatural Investigation, a response to the stranger connections and
habits of the Tees Estuary's seething criminal underworld. The mere three
officers, herself included, had uncovered many unexpected tendrils of
activity, polyps of bizarre supernatural occurrences that vanished to
dead-ends in the Byzantine maze of derelict tenements and squalid,
dilapidated terraces of central Middlesbrough. Their office was continually
swamped by paperwork and disorganized folders of reports, cuttings, and
recorded whimsy that spread across desks like pale, crisp fungi, too
numerous to force into the dusty and shadow-hung filing cabinets lining the
back wall. The two investigators, Swindell and Crawford, granted honorary
authority and privileges, lounged on swivel chairs in personal hazes of
cigarette smoke, the former looking shabby and unsavoury while
unselfconsciously scratching himself and grunting extravagantly, the latter
looking infinitely more debonair and irreverent in his laziness, if no more
motivated towards work. Only she appeared to put real effort into their
work, and the department inevitably, and unceremoniously, collapsed under
the weight of unattended workload and irresponsibility. Even the unexplained
a deeply dubious death of a PC Chandler soon after didn't revive the
graceless corpse.
After that, the three staff-members had immediately drifted out of the
police force, their departure barely noted or recognized, and began private
operations. After all, since the department had dissolved in a bad-smelling
cloud of disillusionment the usually unremarkable flurries of occult related
crime had defied expectation and erupted into a fully- fledged storm first
intimated by the questionable death of Chandler. There was evidently ample
work for the taking.
Now Crawford spent his days in a dressing gown in a mental hospital, gazing
blankly out of the window and seeing nothing through the veil of a catatonic
stupor, and Swindell had had a brief spell of examination at the asylum
after a series of incidents at a stately home on the North York Moors had
left him distinctly unhinged and incoherent.
Fortunately the hospital was making efforts to attend to the portion of its
inmates suffering uncannily similar delusions or catatonic states apparently
caused by the effects of an experimental drug, Crawford included, and
required an experienced researcher such as Goldsmith at the appropriate time
when the monotony of her police work had been fatiguing her particularly.
Now she had an office to herself, however uncomfortably it reminded her of
her ill-fated departmental position. At least this office had large, airy
windows that rid it of the cloying stuffiness of that dusty room tucked away
at the back of the police station. Goldsmith walked over to them now, to
draw the blinds.
Idly glancing down into the litter-choked yards coursed with crumbling
redbrick walls and contained by rusting chain-link gates, for a second
Goldsmith noticed a bloated figure peering up between the wires. Its dirty
fingers protruded through the gaps in the fence, gently trembling and
waving, too incoherently to form any communicative gesture. The evening sun
glanced out from behind the ragged trails of cloud and indicated the
figure's head squarely with an accusatory beam. Its head was covered by a
plastic carrier bag that lolled and swayed drunkenly on its unseen neck,
billowing and collapsing. Then an eager breeze fingered and tugged the bag
away and threw it across the leaf-strewn grounds towards the stark,
spreading branches of the trees that reached with skeletal twigs to catch
it, breaking
the illusion. The fingers seemed to separate and slither from the hands, the
sunlight revealing them as brown and withered leaves, which then scattered
in a disorderly frenzy through the chill evening air. The body slumped, the
headless neck nodding forward and spilling out a dribble of crisp packets,
it's fat and irregularly proportioned torso and limbs a heap of
dirt-speckled bin-bags, moist and glistening. Was it ripples caused by the
erratic breeze, or was something weakly convulsing inside the largest bag,
dribbling stagnant water from punctured orifices in their sides, the rim
mouthing silently to itself?
Disturbance in the perpetual screen, Goldsmith thought, and then wondered
where the peculiar sentence had crawled up from, collapsing into her
immediate thoughts with a character unlike her own. Twitching her head
slightly, imperiously shaking off the residue of strangeness clinging to the
moment, she thrust her arms into the struggling sleeves of her coat and
lifted her sagging leather briefcase from her desk, and left the room,
clicking the lock in place behind her.
Walking through the winding network of pale and shadowy corridors towards
the autumn night, she bumped into Mr. Waynestone, the janitor, idly dragging
the damp tendrils of a mop across a linoleum floor near the secure entrance
to the wards. On her approach he leaned on the mop-handle to broach a
conversation. Goldsmith waved him away with a mixture of apology and
unflustered busyness.
"I would stop and chat, but I've got a bus to catch," she said, crisply but
kindly, and walked on.
"That'll be very impressive as long as you don't drop it straight away!"
Waynestone called after her, trailing the sentence into a guffaw. She smiled
tolerantly without glancing back and walked briskly down the ornate spiral
staircase that formed the centrepiece of the reception. She passed the
security without any such humour or attention, the woman on duty at the
front desk watching her pass appraisingly and diplomatically, without
betraying either warmth or suspicion. Then she passed the front doors into
gathering darkness, the cold breeze reaching out and lightly touching her
before tugging childishly at her hair, ruffling it.
As she strode, across under the deeper darkness beneath the trees she
glimpsed a slightly vagrant looking figure, in dirty duffel coat and
paint-stained fingerless gloves, walking hunched and with arms hanging
uselessly at its sides, tattered imitation fur around the hood obscuring its
face. For a second as it turned slightly towards her, Goldsmith imagined for
a second that the gleam from a nearby floodlight reflected off a mouth
stretched wide by glittering metallic gauze. Then the figure rounded and
shambled off into the trees. A little unnerved, Goldsmith quickened her pace
towards the bus stop along the lengthy avenue across the quiet,
self-contained stillness and silence of the darkening grounds, occasionally
peering at the ambiguous gloom under the trees. When the column of light and
warmth that was her bus emerged from behind a cluster of semi-derelict and
unlit Victorian houses she felt inordinately relieved. On the thirty-minute
ride, she occasionally glimpsed figures walking down alleyways or lounging
at obscured corners of disused buildings. There was nothing essentially odd
about this, however clumsily they tottered and swayed drunkenly, or stood in
distorted postures and turning their heads on peculiar angles to watch the
bus slide past, but Goldsmith couldn't shake the notion that the brief
glimpses she had of their haggard faces revealed some indefinable otherness
that chilled her deeply. Notwithstanding, she was glad to get inside the
comfortable warmth of her own flat, the familiarity of the surroundings and
the reaffirmation of her character that her belongings provided. A sparse
meal, a brief flurry on a juddering treadmill, an airing of a recently
purchased video of "Titus" (engaging, striking and eminently commendable if
a little slow-paced) with a bottle of supermarket-standard red wine (it had,
after all, been a strained and turbulent day) and she drowsily retired to
her bedroom.
Goldsmith dreamed.
Nothing could be seen through the lazy, ungainly branches of the dead trees
surrounding her. She stumbled through the pathless morass, thick mud sucking
at her feet as she gasped for breath in the clammy air. The undergrowth
heaved behind her, the hedgerow bloating and pregnant as the follower
dragged itself through. Slipping and whimpering amongst the dead leaves,
Goldsmith struggled to clear herself a path away from her persistent
pursuer. A malformed head thrust through the bushes, muttering wordlessly
and was followed by a sluggish, filthy body clothed in rags. The follower
wore a grotesque all-over mask reminiscent of a long-dead hare, stretched
across a lumpy, swaying head. All that was visible beneath was a mouth in
which bloodied, broken teeth ground with formless babbling around a
brownish, lacerated tongue. Unseeing, the bulbous form had nevertheless
followed its quarry for hours through unending, ugly woods, sometimes
clambering across rot-slickened tree-stumps or pulling itself along on its
oversized stomach through the foul smelling mud and leaves, one hand
stretched forward and blindly grasping. Goldsmith, lost in her retreat,
stumbled on a root. For an instant, chubby and greasy fingers scampered at
her bared ankles, in a gentle yet repulsive manner. She screamed.
Stumbling again and again in a bitter dance with gravity, relentlessly
trying to be the dominant force in the equation, equilibrium was restored
and the woman capered on. The tramp's moist, rubbery, sinuous fingers
slipped from around the woman's ankle and let forth a chilling keening,
resonant with unbearable loss. Goldsmith surged through the undergrowth even
faster.
Wordlessly, but understanding, the follower-tramp began to scrabble forward
whilst the bulbous head scanned the leaf litter for... ah, yes, there! His
stump-like appendages began to grasp at long and sharp sticks from the
ground, binding them together into stronger structures. With a barely
suppressed giggle the follower formed crude crutches from the branches with
twine and spittle. He could still here the desperate staggering of the woman
ahead of him through the fog wreathed under-branches. Propping himself up on
a nearby boulder he hastily divested himself of lower body clothing and
began to insert the stick crutches into legs which lolled flaccid and seemed
to liquefy in the chill air. They protruded at crazy angles from his knees,
thighs and ankles, but nevertheless supported his oddly proportioned weight.
Then, with a strange swaggering but nevertheless speedy gait using his
disintegrating hands to additionally pull himself along, the follower began
his pursuit of Goldsmith anew.
She stumbled again, choking on the bitter taste of leaf-mould. Through the
maze of dead trees, thorn-armoured shrubbery and rotten logs she lapsed
between run and stagger, directionless and fatigued. Between sharply defined
branches she glimpsed other figures besides her pursuer keeping bearings
with her. A tramp with dead eyes and a straggly beard hung by his stained
duffle-coat from branches, woodlice wandering freely across his face, using
one skeletal hand to spin the handle of a battered and chipped child's music
box which emitted a feeble rendition of a familiar, puerile nursery rhyme.
Knelt beside where the tramp's feet dangled lifelessly an ancient vagrant,
hands twined together with garden wire, gaped with broken jaw around the
plastic of an eyeless baby-doll's head, his own eyes staring off in two
uncoordinated directions without interest in what either could perceive.
Distracted momentarily by the bizarre sight, she tripped on a root and
tumbled into briars. As needles cut the bare skin of her face and hands she
was dimly aware of an infantile, child-pitched voice chattering behind her,
and then the bloated, hare-headed thing rose over her.
Before she could rise, the figure lethargically rolled itself on top of her,
fingers clasping and unclasping, whispering incoherently. Beneath the
tattered, misshapen coat her attacker felt pulpy and boneless. Unable to
breath, Goldsmith scratched frantically at the fabric of the coat. Where her
fingernails ripped gashes, dead leaves, worms and unnamed insects spilled
out, revealing a framework of twigs that shuddered. Somewhere within the
mass of deadness, something unseen writhed. The attacker giggled with a wet,
high-pitched sound and began bending its head eagerly towards its horrified
victim's face. A portion of the disgusting hare-like mask began to swell
outwards at a strange angle, like a tumour forming and expanding at
monstrous speed. Little streams of earth began to trickle from between the
ruined, broken teeth, and the giggling became muffled coughing, though the
distorted, child-like grin of that horrible mouth never lessened. The
struggling woman shrieked hoarsely, then suddenly began to retch as the
hideous vagrant slid one of its greasy fingers into her open mouth. She
convulsed and gagged as she felt the vile digit lengthening and tapering
into something else as it slid into her windpipe. The bizarre mask was
splitting along a seam, a split that continued entirely down the thing's
back, and several long, insectile legs unfolded from within, legs from which
tattered moth-like wings opened. The last thing she saw before blacking out,
the portions of what she thought had been a face were sliding apart and
something that chittered and twitched its mandibles in an oddly machine-like
way was rising from within.
Far away, an infant's voice murmured.
"Beware the daddy long legs man, when the nights grow cold."
With a gasp she untangled herself from the cloying folds of her bedclothes,
which felt suddenly damp and soiled with pads and crumbs of earth. She
recoiled from the greasy and glistening mannequin arms that lifelessly clung
to her before realizing that they were her own, stiff and sweat-soaked with
shock. Streetlamps reflected through the rain-soaked window, mimicking
shadowy trails of trickling damp down walls that seemed to bloom with stains
and spider-like cracks busy twitching in the rippling gleam. Then a flailing
hand caught her touch-sensitive bedside lamp that flashed the illusion out
of existence.
While she was busy fumbling in a kitchen cupboard for a tumbler and a bottle
of whisky, a corpulent form clad in filthy, ill chosen garments rose
sluggishly from a swathe of discarded newspapers in front of her building,
withdrew the malformed appendages it had been scratching ineffectually at
the door with into the folds of its coat and assumed a lopsided posture.
Lolloping on disproportioned legs, offering the world a last glint from the
metallic gauze that held its mouth in a permanent leer, it shambled away
into the dark.
--
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