It made her profoundly sad to know that she would never read The Tempest again.
Apparently her expression clouded, because her sister added, “I think we might be the first to visit this island. We might get to name things we find! Wouldn’t you like that?”
Kmbana smiled. “Yes, I’d like that.”
DOLMEN OF THE MOON, by Deuce Richardson
It looms, as I stand in the shadows’ length,
Amazed before a cyclopean Door.
Immense it rises there, in sullen strength.
Strength that many a tempest bore.
On the threshold, with sudden pause,
I hear a ghostly echo of titanic claws.
My soul, whose fears I cannot quell
Bids me kneel down and murmur low
Incantations of warding, as I know
Therein ancient, dark secrets dwell.
~ Fr.Wm.von Junzt ~
ANCIENT ASTRONAUTS, by Cynthia Ward
We’ve been observing your Earth
And one night we’ll make
A contact with you
—Klaatu, “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft”
Penobscot County, Maine, October 31, 1979
As the Carpenters’ cover of “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft” started playing, Mike pointed at the transistor radio in the basket on Joanna’s handlebar.
“What do you think of the book?”
She realized he was pointing at the battered paperback leaning against the radio.
“Just started it,” she said. “I’ve seen the movie based on Chariots of the Gods?, though. It’s awesome.”
Mike smiled. “Bet you weren’t seven years old when you saw it. How much can you remember?”
“How could I forget alien astronauts?” Joanna said. “They were worshipped as gods. They built landing fields in South America, the ancient pyramids—all sorts of stuff!”
Mike’s smile faded. “Did they build Stonehenge?”
“I don’t remember the movie mentioning that.” Joanna frowned in concentration. “I think the Celts built it.”
Mike looked intently up the road, like there was traffic to watch for, even though their friend Bradley’s house was on a dead-end street outside the town limits of Norumbega.
Joanna said, “Indians built the standing stones at Indian Point and Chesuncook, didn’t they?”
“Those were built by nothing human,” Mike said, still looking straight ahead.
“That’s why I want to read the book,” Joanna said. “The movie missed some stuff. It didn’t mention the Old Ones or Cthulhu or the shoggoths. You hardly ever see Maine in books, unless they’re Stephen King books. But the Old Ones had outposts right here in Maine, at Chesuncook and just north of the Indian Point Reservation!”
Mike lived on the reservation with all the other Penobscots, so he should know this stuff, but he kept staring forwards.
Joanna faced forwards as they continued up the road. They both had licenses, but they didn’t have cars. Not many kids did.
The Atlanta Rhythm Section’s “So Into You” came on the radio. Joanna stole a look at Mike. He was looking at a V of migrating Canada geese and never noticed.
She risked a longer look. Mike was tall and bony and his black hair was as short as Davy’s blond hair. He had glasses and a couple of pimples, but so did she. He was as smart as his older brother but not as athletic. His brother’d gotten a football scholarship at the University of Maine at Orono, and he had broad shoulders and a square, handsome face. But Joanna thought Mike was just as good-looking. Plus, Mike liked science fiction books and Star Wars. Not many people did.
As the song went into the instrumental part, Joanna said, “You’ve never mentioned the Old Ones, Mike. Did you know the Penobscots used to worship them?”
Mike looked at her with a stony expression and touched the little silver crucifix showing at the V of his button-down shirt. “We worshipped the Creator before the fathers told us of Christ. Only a few degenerates ever worshipped devils.”
“Oh,” Joanna said. “I didn’t know.”
“It’s okay.” Mike faced forwards. “What’s Bradley doing?”
Joanna looked up the street. There were woods on both sides, but they didn’t come all the way to the hot top here, and the intervening property had a long field with a few black and white cows behind an electric fence. She and Mike could see Bradley’s parents’ property clearly, and old Harold Waite’s property on the other side.
Joanna spoke in a puzzled tone. “It looks like Bradley’s walking acrosst his dooryard to Mr. Waite’s field.”
The song faded and the deejay started talking. “It’s Halloween, when ‘devil worshippers’ used to make sacrifices to ‘Elder Things from outer space’ at the standing stones near Chesuncook and Norumbega. But—” the male voice gave a hollow laugh as “The Monster Mash” began to play “—no one’s ever seen the devils—or the worshippers. I think they’re partying with Boris Karloff’s ghost, myself.”
“The Dyer expedition saw some dead Old Ones, a long time ago in Antarctica,” Joanna said. “But nobody’s ever managed to get back to—what on earth? Bradley is going on Mr. Waite’s property.”
“You know what else is weird?” Mike said. “Mr. Waite is sitting in the middle of the seat of his pickup. And Mr. Levesque is sitting next to the passenger door.”
“Bradley doesn’t like Mr. Waite,” Joanna muttered. “Actually, no one likes Mr. Waite. Or Mr. Levesque, either.”
“And vice-versa,” Mike said.
Joanna hadn’t realized he’d know this, living on the reservation.
He frowned. “Bradley’s getting behind the wheel of Mr. Waite’s old Ford.”
Joanna noticed she and Mike had stopped their bicycles.
A chill gust cut through her flannel Bean shirt. Dry leaves swirled around them. She smelled a trace of smoke from some distant woodstove or fireplace.
She shut off the radio.
Bradley started Mr. Waite’s car and looked around.
Joanna shivered. “Bradley’s face looks weird.”
“You’re right.” Mike spoke softly, like Bradley could hear them, and Joanna realized she’d been whispering. “Bradley’s frowning just like Mr. Waite.”
Howard Waite was always scowling and suspicious-looking, when you saw him. He got shot in the leg in a hunting accident, a long time ago, and could barely walk. He lived alone in an old farmhouse he’d inherited from a distant relative long before Joanna was born, and was practically a recluse. That was okay, though, because you didn’t really like to see him. He was scary-looking, with an angry, shriveled old face that was so pop-eyed, it looked almost like a fish’s. She’d overheard Mrs. Beal, who was over a hundred years old, saying “That nasty ol’ bastid Harold Waite come to Maine from Innsmouth. There’s something not quite human in the blood of Innsmouth people.”
Her parents wouldn’t tell her what it was.
They didn’t need to, though.
She knew his ancestors were ancient astronauts.
Bradley noticed her and Mike standing on the side of the street, just far enough from the edge to avoid the poison ivy.
After glaring at them for several seconds, Bradley smiled and waved.
Joanna and Mike waved back.
Their smiles were as fake as Bradley’s.
She said, “Bradley’s smile looks like—like Mr. Waite’s would, if he ever smiled.”
Bradley started his neighbor’s truck.
“Where’s Bradley going?” Mike muttered. “He invited us over so he could teach us that game his cousin in Portland taught him—what’s it called?”
“Dragons and Dungeons, I think,” Joanna replied. “Maybe Mr. Waite got sick and Bradley’s taking him to the doc—Jeezum Crow. Bradley’s not going to the doctor. He’s driving up Mr. Waite’s driveway and right acrosst his field.”
“Mr. Waite hardly goes anywheres,” Mike said, “and he doesn’t go anywheres with any
one else.”
Joanna whispered, “You ever hear that old story—that Mr. Waite can put his mind in other people’s heads?”
“He’s from Massachusetts, what else do you expect?” Mike smiled to show he was joking, but he didn’t look like he thought it was funny. He looked kind of sick.
Following the dirt road, Bradley drove the old man’s pickup into the woods.
“You know where that road goes?” Mike asked Joanna.
“I don’t know any more than you do,” she replied.
“I know the direction he’s headed,” Mike said.
“North.” Joanna shivered. “Towards the standing stones beyond Indian Point.”
Without another word, Mike and Joanna resumed bicycling.
* * * *
Some said the hole in the woods north of Indian Point was bottomless. Others said it led to the hollow earth, where the Old Ones and shoggoths had slept since abandoning the earth’s surface, eons ago. The shoggoths and their creators were supposed to be immortal and nearly indestructible. Sometimes they came up the hole, Mrs. Beal said, but nobody reliable had ever reported seeing a shoggoth or Old One anywheres north of the Merrimack River.
The hole wasn’t too far from the west bank of the Penobscot. If the dirt road Mike and Joanna had followed for miles through the woods went to the river, or even the hole, they didn’t know. They might not find out, either. Through the denuded maples, they could see someone at a bend in the road, standing guard with a shotgun in his hands.
They kept glancing back, but he didn’t notice as they retreated up the road.
They were lucky it hadn’t rained lately, Joanna thought. The fallen leaves covering the rutted road were damp underneath, so their bicycles had slipped and almost fallen several times. But at least they weren’t riding through mud. If they had been, they probably never would’ve gotten here.
Would that be so bad? whispered a little voice in her head.
They stopped walking on the far side of a hill.
Mike looked at Joanna and spoke so softly, she had to read his lips.
“Rocky Hill overlooks the hole and the circle of standing stones.”
Joanna looked at the hill. Its slopes were bare granite, covered with rocks and boulders. The hill wasn’t very high, but it was broad, and it was steep on every side. It was hard to understand why the rocks hadn’t all rolled off long ago.
She swallowed.
“It won’t be easy to climb.”
“It’s okay,” Mike murmured. “We don’t have to climb it.”
She flushed, realizing he’d understood why she wouldn’t climb it, the one time she and Mike and Bradley had come to see the hole and standing stones.
Did Bradley realize it, too? Or did Mike tell him she was afraid of heights? The idea of them both knowing deepened her mortification.
She took a shuddering breath.
“We have to climb it,” she said. “If we try to sneak through the trees, we might be heard by the guy with the gun.”
Climbing the hill wasn’t easy.
To distract herself, Joanna remembered the time they’d bicycled to the hole with Bradley, even though Bradley didn’t like hiking or bicycling all that much. But it was the summer before their sophomore year. Nobody had a driver’s license.
Joanna had made herself glance in the hole. There were stairs carved right in the granite of the round, almost tube-like sides. The stairs went down past where the sun could reach, though it was the middle of the day.
She looked around the clearing. The standing stones were spray-painted with graffiti. A lot of McDonalds wrappers and empty bottles and cigarette butts and roaches were scattered around. Sometimes kids came here at night—the place wasn’t too far off the Old Millinocket Road—to party or have sex.
Joanna had never done any of those things, here or anywheres else. She supposed Mike and Bradley hadn’t, either. They weren’t in the party crowd at school, and she didn’t have a boyfriend, and Mike and Bradley didn’t have girlfriends.
Bradley smiled at Mike. “You ought to bring Molly Sockbeson here!”
Molly Sockbeson was a Penobscot girl who’d been in some of their freshman college-track classes at Norumbega High. Joanna hadn’t thought Mike had noticed her. But Bradley’s remark made Mike’s face darken.
“Why don’t you bring somebody?” Mike asked Bradley.
Bradley waved a hand. “I’m waiting to meet the right girl.” He laughed. “Did you forget I’m born again? Even if I had a girlfriend, we’d wait until we got married.”
Then he turned red, realizing he’d implied a good Catholic girl like Molly would have premarital sex.
Then Joanna realized Bradley wasn’t thinking that, or not only thinking that, because he looked at her and said, “I don’t mean we came here to do that with you—we’re not—I mean—”
He stopped talking with his mouth open.
Mike smiled at Joanna. “He means, you’re one of the guys.”
The ultimate compliment, she’d thought, and the ultimate insult.
She and Mike were getting close to the top of the hill.
She turned her memory to the time she overheard Mrs. Beal saying some white men had gone down the stairs to see what was in the “bottomless hole,” back when the town of Norumbega was founded, centuries ago. None of those men had ever returned. Later, the town had laid a gate made of thick, crisscrossed iron bars acrosst the hole and sunk big iron spikes in the granite to hold the gate in place. The bars and hinges were old and rusty, but nobody could break them. But every few years, a guy or couple went missing, and when the Penobscot County Sheriff’s Office investigated the area, they usually found the massive padlock broken off and the gate open. The deputies never found the missing people, or even, Mrs. Beal claimed, went in the hole.
Joanna and Mike reached the top of the hill. It was covered with tall white pines and fallen pine needles. The sun was sinking almost directly behind them, but the trees kept them in shadow as they crossed the summit and knelt at the edge.
Looking down from the crest, Joanna felt sick from the height. She couldn’t bear to look down the hole. But she could see the gate was open. The hole and several of the standing stones were still in sunlight.
They were alone on the hill, but they weren’t alone.
There were about a dozen white people within the ring of standing stones. Most of them stood facing the hole from the south side. These people were in shadow, but Joanna could tell they were all adults and all wearing gray robes. It was kind of tricky to judge from above, but they were mostly old and mostly men. She didn’t recognize anybody until one of the three men holding shotguns looked around. He’d been guarding the road earlier.
On the western side of the hole, Mr. Waite—or his body—lay on a flat, rectangular stone. Joanna shivered. She couldn’t help thinking of the stone table Aslan was killed on, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
The aged body was tied to the altar-stone with thick ropes. It writhed like its occupant was trying to escape and made sounds against its gag. The eyes were wide, with an expression like the one Bradley got the time he was almost hit by a car.
Clad in gray robes, Bradley’s body and Mr. Levesque stood on the north side of the hole. Mr. Levesque was so close to the altar, he was half in shadow. In the sunlight, Bradley’s body faced the group with an open book on his left palm and a knife in his right fist, though Bradley was left-handed. He spoke to the crowd with the expressions and intonations and Massachusetts accent of Harold Waite.
“—and I remind you,” said the voice, “the mind is independent of the body, and need never perish. Once, it could transfer from body to body forever, by means of the secret lost with my uncle, Ephraim Waite. But I have been communing with the dweller below. And tonight, I promise you:
“The Old One shall accept our sacrifice, and teach us another way to transfer our minds from body to body, and thereby live forever!”
“You were right, Joanna,”
Mike murmured. “Mr. Waite can do soul transfers. And he wants to kill Bradley in his own body, so his soul can stay in Bradley’s body and avoid God’s judgment.”
Joanna didn’t know if there was a God or not, never mind a judgment, but the question seemed irrelevant at the moment.
She whispered, “How in Hell do we stop them from killing Bradley?”
As she fell silent, a bizarre creature flew from the hole. It had a barrel-shaped body, with one starfish-shaped appendage at the top and another at the bottom. The creature’s sides sprouted five leathery wings longer than the six-foot barrel.
Recognizing the creature from descriptions she’d read, Joanna inhaled in awe.
“An ancient astronaut!” she whispered.
“A devil,” Mike muttered.
The Old One rose higher than the hill. Mike and Joanna kept motionless as the sunlit creature started circling above the circle of standing stones. The top slabs of the still-standing pairs were about ten feet below the hilltop.
Some of the five eyes and five cilia in the Old One’s starfish-like head must have detected the seventeen-year-old juniors, Joanna Saltonstall and Mike Francis, in the shadow of the pines, for the Old One started winging towards them.
“O great and wise Elder God,” cried Bradley in Harold Waite’s accent, “what are you doing?”
Breaking his crucifix off its fine chain, Mike leaped into the air.
At impact, he wrapped his arms and legs around the tapering top of the barrel-body and hung on, like a movie stunt-man jumping on a bronco’s neck from the front. Under their combined weights, the Old One dipped towards the granite cross-piece on the pair of stones standing directly below. Joanna realized Mike was pressing his crucifix against the Old One’s leathery stump of a neck.
Mike shouted, “The power of Christ compels you:
“Return to Hell!”
The Third Cthulhu Mythos Megapack Page 4