My grandfather was always a rather silent man; my mother used to describe him as the kind of person who didn’t lack words, but just didn’t know how to let them fall out of his mouth. I always had quite a lot of respect for him, although, on the whole, I would say it was more fear than anything else at the time because the old man during my younger years maintained a figure that still retained strength, and was quite imposing for a little boy like me; until he just stopped having it and wasted away over time.
It was never known what he died of, forensic reports say “stroke” but the reality is that by the time he was found lying in the attic of his Long Island home, the building showed signs of having been broken into, and the body bore clear marks of assault. That was when I was eighteen years old, and I simply resolved that I hoped he would be reassured if there was anything after this life and little else, the memory of him having only returned to me a month ago.
For work reasons, I had to leave my warm home in the epicenter of Hell on Earth that is Arizona for Long Island. Predictably, we agreed that I would stay in the house of the deceased, even though I was not entirely happy about the idea of living where a relative of mine died. We packed up, however, and within weeks I found myself in South Northport, in a somewhat cramped house that would be cozy in any other context.
Before that, however, I wanted to find out more about who my grandfather was, and I learned several interesting things. First of all, it turned out that the man had once been a respected professor in the humanities; he was someone who stood out more for his metaphysical theses - now lost - than for his actual work as a professor of literature at various universities. All this raised several questions for me, mainly how such a person could have reached such a state of pronounced silence, which my mother would answer without clarifying anything. The second was that he had not lived in that house all his life; this was confirmed by my mother, who told me that he moved from Arizona for no apparent reason.
At some point in his life, when my mother had already left home and begun her fateful process of independence, grandfather took a trip to New Orleans for a few months. There would be nothing strange about that except that when my mother asked him on the phone about anything to do with the city itself, he never answered anything specific to his activities in the area. And to this day I can imagine why, and the main reason is that my grandfather found himself attracted to something during those years, the nature of which I honestly don’t know myself.
In those months I was finding it quite difficult to adapt to the tide of papers that being a librarian entailed, and by dint of the archivist syndrome I developed, I decided, for some reason, that it was a good idea to go through the huge number of boxes in the attic of the house that was full of the late old man’s notes. He was a big fan of Borges, that much was obvious not only from his writings, but also from the very detailed notes he had of several of his stories early in his career, but there was something odd about the whole thing, and that is how he became obsessed with the figure of an author unknown to me - and by any scholar’s reckoning - by the name of Andrew Hudson.
I think you can save yourselves the furtive Google searches on his name, I tried to do it myself and found that there is no record of him on the net or of any of his writings, the closest I have to a record confirming his existence were the notes my grandfather made of some of his writings of short stories that the writer himself published sometime in 1974 in the magazine Weird Tales, which you may be familiar with for having been the main publication platform of a certain well-known horror author. According to the notes, Hudson’s figure was completely enigmatic even to the magazine’s editors, who were only able to see him on a few occasions.
Andrew wrote mostly surreal stories with quite remarkable horror overtones, which would be nothing truly remarkable except that the strangeness evoked by his tales was genuinely frightening and had an immediate effect on those who read his stories; Ironically, according to the old man, it was this that caused the editors of Weird Tales to gradually limit his work, which led sooner rather than later to his disappearing off the radar. After the publication of his three “magnum opus” - this in the old man’s words - he was lost from sight forever.
Hudson was also somewhat adept at poetry as each story of his began with a run of verse of a quality that was questionable to my taste, but which nevertheless managed to further exalt the overall feel of his works in some way that frankly escapes me. Here’s an example that’s in my grandfather’s early notes of his.
“I walked a crooked way
at the unspeakable land
just watching slowly and
anxious, how it is behind
you, and all that we know
is only the illusion of being.”
As is easy to guess, the next few months I was quite engrossed - during my free time - in the figure of Hudson, which beyond all the adoration he received from my grandfather seemed to be not only diffuse but non-existent. I haven’t managed to find any writings by Andrew Hudson so far. Weird Tales magazine appears to have nothing by him, which made me suspect for a while that he was either a ghostwriter or that the issues in which he theoretically appeared were simply incomplete.
After a while I decided, during October of this year, to simply take a break from it; the subject had absorbed me more than I expected and I simply felt it wasn’t doing me any good to be going through the crossed-out and sometimes messy notebooks of an old man with whom I don’t interact much.
However, the figure of Hudson didn’t go away, it kept popping up intermittently in my brain during that month, and though I tried to ignore it I couldn’t help but feel that there was something about it that was simply dismaying me in a very considerable way; something that made me feel that I should keep going through those intricate and sometimes illegible notebooks.
It happened in parallel that I hadn’t stopped hearing noises in my house since October; for a moment I felt that there was something in the walls, and to be honest, I didn’t rule out the possibility completely. It was around that week that I went through the boxes again, it being November, and I found in one of them a particular notebook; black in its embroidery and with pages of a cream color that had seen better days, probably. It had written on the cover, in white felt-tip pen letters, “While all fail”.
I’ve read it, in case you’re wondering, and I can’t help but believe that my grandfather lost his mind. Much of the notebook is just stories which, to tell you the truth, I don’t understand much of, and what I think I did understand wasn’t even half of what was there. The handwriting was radically different from what I had seen so far, so I concluded that the stories were not the old man’s, and I’m still puzzling over whose they might be.
What my grandfather had written were the final twenty pages, all of them written in magenta pen, perhaps purple from what it says.
“Behind the walls of his mind was a Duchess of purple. I should not have known.”
In case you were wondering, all twenty pages were filled with her.
It is since then that the noises I mentioned earlier got worse a fortnight ago, and as you can understand I decided to install several cameras in certain parts of the house, including the attic. How this relates to the above is as follows; I reviewed the footage from this morning, and while the darkness makes it very difficult to see what was being shown, I did notice something.
There was movement.
There was movement in the damned attic.
I replayed the recording too many times today and tried not to go in because my feelings were too strong for my legs to even go to where the entrance is. However, I relaxed, it took perhaps a bit more diazepam than I was prescribed, but I managed to force myself to do it. With the crunch of each step, I couldn’t help but feel, gradually, that my heart was going to give me a heart attack at the speeds I was reaching.
Then to the last of the steps. I was shaking; I tried to turn the switch on, stumbling several times in the process until I finally got it.
There was nothing there, or so I thought until I slowly walked around and checked the place. And that’s when I discovered why I am now posting this and decided to go to Trenton with my immediate family for an early Christmas.
There was a purple veil on the floor, one decorated in a very handmade way, and believe me when I tell you that I went through that house completely when I moved in to know that it didn’t belong there. When I touched it felt improper, and I don’t know if it was the diazepam, but I felt a bout of dissociation set in when I touched it. My dismay was such that I grabbed it with gloves and threw it into the water in a nearby harbor.
I plan to ask my mother over the holidays more about my grandfather and find out if she knows anything about Andrew Hudson. I will update this if there is anything abnormal when I get back to the house when I have to leave Trenton, have a good holiday.