The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

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.”