She took me to the House of Artemis on a Saturday morning, and it stood there by the main road which bustled with the open market and trucks and people and hawkers, the pollution hanging low in the air and itching the back of my throat. The building, along with the rest of the world, was dirty and grey.
Taking me by the hand, she led me through the square façade, adorned with a smile as cool as the wind. We had met several weeks earlier in some obscure memory, and had impressed me with her big brown eyes and that black hair cut into dense yet flowing bangs across her forehead.
We paid the man at the desk, him dressed peculiarly in his buttonless shirt and pantaloons, and entered the first room to see the exhibits, or at least what I hoped would be the exhibits.
I had not known what to expect, her lips and the lips of others having been sealed, but I recoiled when we came across the first item: an absurd stuffed animal, which stood on a purple plinth. It was about eight foot tall, and built like a Tyrannosaurus Rex, but with elements of flamingo and giraffe blended in, and coated in panda-like fur. Its grotesque beak-like jaw hung with teeth that looked stolen from a tiger shark, and it had glossed, opaque white eyes that sliced through me like hot razorblades.
“What the hell is it?” I asked her, gripping her hand. There were no labels or signs for anything.
“Good fun!” she giggled, and led me to the next room.
The second exhibit was even more awful: a kind of rhino-like beast, furred in bearskin, and with eyes like portholes carved from nephrite.
“It’s hideous!” I said to her, and only then noticed how we appeared to be the lone visitors to the place.
She just giggled again, and dragged me onto the subsequent horror; so became the pattern of our visit.
She towed me from room to room, exposing me to abomination after abomination, the sense of trepidation welling within as I ended up staring into their undead eyes, unable to escape. Gruesome limbs hung from impossible torsos, disgusting heads and their counterparts lifted high at condemning angles, and other things too sinful to even begin to recount.
What abhuman creature could have designed such things? No common madman, no matter how insane, could have such a twisted imagination. The repugnance surged through the trough of my guts.
“Can we please leave?” I asked her in a whisper. “I don’t think I can stand it anymore.”
“No way,” she said, still pulling me about like a toddler. “We’re not even halfway through yet!”
And so it went on and on, the House seemingly without end.
After a time, my fear turned to numbness, even as I began to see out of the corner of my eyes these non-animals slowly start to turn their heads towards me, to wink and leer with crooked maws.
We finally reached the last exhibit, and I almost breathed a sigh of relief: it was a model of a naked human male, normal enough it first seemed, and not furred, but skinned in orangey leather with a strawberry blonde wig. However, as I leaned in, something about its face struck me as odd. It was smirking with malice, and its eyes were all too human. Then it blinked.
I gripped her hand tighter, only for her to suddenly vanish and leave me grasping air. I was left alone as the exhibits began to laugh and howl all through the House of Artemis. It was a terrible chorus, the soundtrack of a hellscape!
Abandoned, I ran towards the exit signs to find only blank walls, forcing me to run back out through the entire building. The laughs grew more and more vicious and nasty as I struggled across the corridors, holding my arms tight against me.
At last I broke into daylight back through the entrance, falling onto the pavement, to find the streets empty, and no signs of life apparent, human or otherwise.
I looked behind me, and the House of Artemis was shuttered and sealed, maybe with the slightest echo of a feminine giggle leaking from its cracks.
I have been wandering ever since, and I cannot find a soul, and a darkness chases me so relentlessly that I cannot lie down to sleep even in the most open spaces of this forsaken city.
—
Harris Coverley has short fiction published or forthcoming in Curiosities, Lovecraftiana, and Mystery Tribune, as well as poetry in Gathering Storm, Bewildering Stories, and the Weird Poets Society anthology Speculations. He lives in Manchester, England.
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