The Ghastly Death of Professor Noel Carlisle

Cedar: I knew somthing boded ill when one of Professor Noel Carlisle's graduate assistants leaked me the news that no trace of Amos Dues' remains had been found (see Amos Dues' Home For Wayward Girls, July, 1996, vol. 3, Issue #7). I knew with more certainty when Professor Carlisle himself phoned, entreating me to see him in his office at Georg von Podebrad College.

     Professor Carlisle greeted me at the door to his office, a large bag of potato chips under his arm. He acted jittery, looking furtively up and down the hallway as he beckoned me inside. A ponderous collection of journals and books stood in neat attention on the high shelves ringing the room. A computer hummed quietly in its sleep on the corner of his broad desk comforted by a pizza box lying across its keyboard. Adjacent to this in the center of the desk stood a large white box.

     Carlisle was young; in his early forties with curly light brown hair and scruffy beard. I had met him before at the Dues' Home site; we hadn't gotten on well at all and so we didn't spend much time together but I distinctly remembered him as being shorter than I. It gave me an artificial feeling of superiority to look down onto the crown of his head. I'm six feet three inches, he came up to my nose or around five feet ten inches.

     But the gaze of this nervous, agitated man clutching an extra-large bag of chips under his arm met my own, eye to eye. I snuck a glance to the floor but saw only his fleet clad in dingy grey socks.

     "What is it?" he asked, stepping away, startled.

     "Nothing," I answered, dismissing my observation as a mistake. "I thought you looked different."

     "Oh," he answered without saying more and for an instant, fear flickered across his face. I gave it no further thought, however. Perhaps, I thought he was concerned about gaining weight and I merely said the wrong thing.

     He gobbled another handful of chips as he moved behind his desk. "I have something I want you to see," he said still chewing. "Nobody in the department is taking this seriously---they think there's something wrong with the imaging software or that I cooked it up. But you tried to warn me about something like this and I thought you were a kook. Come take a look."

     He moved the large pizza box off the computer keyboard and typed a command. I moved around to see.

     There on the screen was a thing too incredible to be believed. I read the scale tag printed at the bottom of the photo: .15 millimeters.

     I was looking at a human face, possibly an entire body, wrapped in what looked for the world like the chrysalis of a worm. I looked up to see Carlisle stuffing his face with a slice of pizza. My shocked expression made him grin broadly and chew hastily.

     "Remember the skeleton---the one that was all black? There's dozens of these little guys all over it; there's one on each bone---'cept for one but that probably fell out somewhere."

     "What are they?"

     "I hoped," he paused to swallow, "that you'd know. Each one looks exactly like this one: same face, length, width---all exactly the same. They're all tucked into a spoon-like depression at a foramen on the bone; it's where the muscle inserts."

     "Is it alive?"

     "Oh, Christ, no!" he chortled, pulling the last slice from the pizza box and flinging the box into the corner of the room. "They're very dead. I disected one­ooked like a tiny human head grafted onto a grub. Disgusting little thing. Naw, I picked each one off the skeleton and put them all in a jar of formaldehyde and sent the lot off to Dr. Weber in Zoology. 'Scuse me a second---."

     Carlisle picked up the phone and called a pizza and sub place. "Christ, I'm hungry. Want anything?" he asked.

     I shook my head. The nauseating anthromorphic-grub turned my stomach into a catarach of loathing. Suddenly, a particularly repulsive thought seeped into my consciousness. Around the world, the souls of the dead are said to leave the body in the form of an insect, sometimes as a butterfly or moth. What if, I mused with grisly fascination, what if...

     "Name's Carlisle and it's my office in Putnam Hall. Yes, I said 'Carlisle'. No---just very hungry. 'Bye." He hung up and shrugged, "Damn college kids. Listen, that verdiris on the black skeleton wasn't what we originally thought---."

     I waved my hand, "I'm more concerned with that bottom sub-basement."

     "The whole thing was very strange. There was no reason to suspect there was a third sub-basement when we finished cleaning the floor of the level above. We didn't notice anything odd until we looked at the photos. The film's color temperature picked up the door's outline quite clearly. But even when we knew what we were looking for, nobody could see the door. It was invisible to human sight. Anyway, I went down first with a flashlight; it was about 14 feet or so down---about the distance from the floor to ceiling here. The first thing I saw was the black skeleton lying on the floor in the middle of the room. It was incredibly bright; the walls, the floor and the ceiling were whitish-gray bedrock, you see, but they had been scraped absolutely flat and polished so smooth that it was like looking at a bottle of milk up close. And all over was this strangely shaped glassware; big triangular bottomed flasks set in green-encrusted metal stands all tangled up in this dried up tubing with each other. The tubing turned out to be pig intestine. There was also a number very large, thick books that still defy translation, thirteen brazers made entirely of gold, pots and jugs containing all sort of organic stuff that we're still analysing, and long eight-foot tall incised staff made entirely from the polished thighbone of some gargantuan animal---no one has ever seen anything like it. And there were two pairs of big copper rings, one was set into the ceiling, the other in the floor. That's where Craig found the fly."

     "A fly?" I echoed growing alarmed.

     ""Yeah, it was lying on the floor." He breathed in suddenly, slamming his fist into his solar plexus as if to force a belch. "The only thing that seemed out of place in a sort of odd way. It was a techinid fly; a Bombyliopsis abrupta to be exact." He grabbed his stomach. "Oh Christ! Now that hurts."

     I helped him into his desk chair and he remained there until the pain left him. "Gas. It'll pass," he smirked. "Now that skeleton...I initially thought that the bones had been subjected to a rare subliming of soot when the main house was torched. But there was no way for the air to get down there, the room was cut off from the other floors. The chemical analysis showed it was a resin commonly found as fossilized amber belonging to the extinct trees of the genus Lebachia which flourished during Jurassic times. Hey, I'm not making this up. What the hell was Dues' doing down there, anyway?"

     "He wasn't an eccentric fascinated by science and eastern religions?" I taunted.

     "Ha-ha, very fun---oh, Christ!" he suddenly shrieked and doubled over. I laid my hand on his shoulder but he brushed me aside. A minute later, the pain passed. Someone knocked on the door. He got to his feet and stumbled to answer it.

     I blinked. He had grown a head taller than me!

     The door closed and he put the food on the desk, pushing the computer off the end and tore into the first of two large pizzas. There were also two quart buckets of spaghetti and a two foot long turkey sub.

     "So what do you think Dues' was doing down there?" he said between bites.

     "I don't know," I answered, entranced by this spectacle. "Some of the journals I've read say he was working on the transmigration of souls."

     I don't know if he heard me or not. He was forcing whole slices of pizza and fistfuls of pasta down his throat. A goatee of thick saliva dangled from his chin to the middle of his chest, thrashing disgustingly like the tail of a trapped rodent in a snake's mouth. I noticed he had been cautious not to move the large white box from the middle of his desk and when I made to open it, he slammed a ham-sized fist across the lid.

     "Don't touch these. Not ever! The body must be kept intact. The body must be preserved." he snapped, his mouth crimson-ringed with tomato sauce and strands of pasta. I backed away. I immediately knew the black skeleton was inside the box. I also knew the situation was very dangerous and growing worse all the while. I started out from behind the desk, but Carlisle hurled the telephone into my chest with enough force to knock me to the floor.

     "MUST EAT!" he thundered, "ORDER NOW!"

     Abruptly, his face screwed up with strain. His clothes split and tore from his body. "FOOD! FOOD! MUST EAT MORE!" he bellowed.

     The man cornering me in his office who had once been a jittery little professor and professional scholar was now a naked bellowing hungry beast standing more than ten feet tall. I called several pizza and sub shops. The first subs came a mercifully quick. What the delivery boys saw must have appeared as a William Burroughs' nightmare. They knocked on the office door and opened it, only to have the food snatched away. They catch a glimpse of a giant hand and pair of giant buttocks just before the door slams in their face. That was enough; they never tried to get their money.

     Carlisle's gluttinous orgy continued for another hour until his head bent over for having outgrown the room. He had grown to more than fourteen feet tall. Soon afterwards, he started shaking with cold. He lay down on the floor and unfortunately in front of the door.

     "You cold?" I asked. The giant nodded.

     "Need some more food, you gotta keep up your strength, afterall."

     Carlisle said nothing but grabbed about thirty books from a shelf in one hand and hurled them at me. By the time I crawled out from under them, he was quite still. His breathing came in shallow rythmic gasps as saliva gurgled in his throat. He started singing unintelligibly, his voice high whiny like a child. I decided then to try to get out.

     But as soon as I ventured near him, a chewing sound froze me in my tracks. My skin crawled at it. Suddenly, right in front of me, protruding from within Carlisle's side was the face I had seen on the computer screen only now it was the size of normal man. And it was rapidly eating its way out of Carlisle's body!

     Revulsion and horror flooded my soul. I leapt over the desk just as the giant human grub burst out of Carlisle's body. It looked around, licking its bloody lips and opened wide its bloody mouth revealing a set of wicked fangs. It delayed no more, but set to work busily devouring its oblivious host with as much gusto as Carlisle had fed himself. Carlisle, meanwhile, continued his pathetic whining singing until the ghastly thing munched away his larnyx. The professor lingered for a few moments more, twitching his jaw as if he still sung until much to my relief and sanity, he died.

     I could stand the sight no longer. I stood quietly, resolved to kill the vile monster if it saw me. Instead, it continued its grisly banquet, voraciously tunneling its way through Carlisle's dwindling remains until several large gaps appeared in the professor's monstrous carcass. I approached the corpse; the pancretin stink was devastating, but the still the thing paid me no heed. Through a large hole in the remains, just on the other side of the spine, I glimpsed the door's knob. Steeling my nerve, I dove in , slid over chewed and torn innards, and eased myelf out. The shock of my movement shook the carcass. The grub paused its eating and looked about. I froze momentarily. At once, I panicked, and pulled hard at the door, bumping it against the body. There wasn't enough room for me to fit. The grotesque thing saw me and came slithering and sliding through bones and shredded bowels after me. I pulled at the door again and again, each time more frantically. Just as the thing coiled scarcely two feet from my head, its jaws opened wide to strike, I jerked the door open and ducked out. The grub drove its hideous face into the door slamming shut behind me.

     After about twenty minutes, I was able to get the campus police to Carlisle's office. There was little left of him and what there was boggled the town's medical officer. The white box containing the black skeleton meanwhile, was also gone and there was no sign of the disgusting monstrosity. I can venture no rational conclusion to my experience save that something sinister and evil had slept for 80 years in that terrible house in Kossuth County and that Professor Carlisle had woken it at the cost of his own life---an evil which may be Amos Dues himself.