The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales by Mark Samuels

the decayed confines of La Casa De Fuente. He sat on benches when he tired, drawing curious looks from passers-by, for in his expression was a strange co-mixture of dread and vacancy brought on by his continued delirium. He would stare up at the naked sun, as if trying to blind himself. He seemed to be desirous of drawing some portion of its energy into his enervated frame, and thereby driving out the shadows within.
    It was in the plaza of claustrophobic dimensions that he came across the children playing the game. They formed a circle around a piñata hoisted high up by a rope. The ones who took turns at hitting the star-shaped object were blindfolded. But this piñata was not brightly coloured. It was a mottled grey, and stinking of decomposition. Its cone limbs flapped desperately in the air. Barron watched with fascination as child after child battered the thing, squealing with excitement, and cheering as it was beaten into a state of ruin. Finally, one of them struck a blow that cracked open the core, the rope was released, and the piñata fell onto the dusty street below. They descended upon it as if ravenous with hunger, and from amidst the scrum, a single boy emerged carrying the prize. It was a soil-blackened human skull with a hole in the centre of its cranium.
    Barron never returned to La Casa De Fuente. After dark, and having spent all of the afternoon under the burning sun, he was last seen in a cantina on Obregon, where he drank a great deal of mezcal. He babbled deliriously about piñatas, of the secret of the cemetery on Quintero, and of the old cult. In short, his talk was about everything of which one does not speak in Xapalpa. When his disappearance was investigated, the local police were satisfied that what the locals said was correct; he had drunk too much mezcal on top of a near-lethal dose of sunstroke. He had said he wished to leave Xapalpa, and had probably wandered off alone that night in his delirium, and got lost in the vast expanses of uncharted woods that cover the mountains all around the town.
    •
    Mason finished his beer. He did not like the story and he did not like the grin on the face of Paco Maldonado.
    “ I don’t believe a word of it,” Mason said, in Spanish, “and I don’t scare easily.”
    The owner of the cantina had come out from behind the counter. He had taken down and was holding one of the old rifles that decorated the walls. He began polishing the barrel with a rag.
    Maldonado sipped nonchalantly at his tumbler of ice and Chivas whiskey.
    Mason felt cold sweat on his brow. He could not tell whether it was a result of the fear he denied feeling or of a fever coming on.

 
    Glickman the Bibliophile
     
    For weeks the nation had been suffering from an epidemic of destruction at libraries, bookshops and publishers. Those persons who had been caught and charged with the crimes claimed afterwards to have no knowledge of their actions and acted as if in a trance. Any random individual could, it was claimed, enter this trance-state and begin to destroy books using whatever means they had at their disposal.
    The action was apparently motiveless, unplanned and the consequence of a spontaneous, temporary mania. Theories concerning the possible origin of the behaviour were legion but none of them seemed to explain all of the facts. Some proposed that a new chemical had been used in book-production that altered the mental state of those in its vicinity, but this did not account for the destruction of antiquarian bookshops. Another theory advanced concerned an airborne germ released by a foreign power but this seemed unlikely, as reports came in of the same phenomenon striking across the world with no country being immune. One theory that was given credence for a time advanced the idea that some form of evolution had taken place in that area of the human brain concerned with linguistic recognition. It was believed that instead of recognition, this area of the brain now generated an