“This is the date. This is the place.”
“Open the gate and show your face!”
Violent winds send leaves and litter flying every which way, momentarily obscuring my vision. It’s as if some conscious malignity seeks to hide what is about to happen from prying mortal eyes. But I’m nearly there. I cannot—will not—stop now. I stagger blindly forward, fighting against the mighty force of the gale-like wind with an equal intensity of my own.
I stagger and fall multiple times. Each time I hit the ground, I pick myself up and forge onward again until, at last, I achieve what seems to be the eye of the storm. A preternatural calm descends over all things and I’m finally able to see clearly.
The first thing I see: a spectral violet glow that dances, like a drunken will-o-wisp in concert with the beat of the tom-toms, materializing in the precise center of the century-vacant lot. The glow begins to spread out, first vertically, then horizontally, until it attains the approximate shape and size of a strangely-angled, multi-storied and multi-gabled, seventeenth-century abode.
The old Witch House of Keziah Mason lives again in Arkham, Massachusetts.
Within that glowing and still expanding violet mist, shifting shadows ofttimes appear entirely grotesque and sometimes almost humanoid, as if whatever spectral creatures exist inside are now material enough to cast dark silhouettes whenever they pass between lit lamps and thin draperies masking non-existent windows.
I edge closer in a vain attempt to peer inside the mist, but my vision can’t penetrate the spectral veil. Is any of this real? Or is it only an illusion, a mad hallucination born of an irrational hope? Does my desire to once again behold the face of my dead wife cloud my vision and afflict my mind?
If it’s real, should I be afraid? Is this truly the house of the dead materializing in front of my awestruck eyes? I may be foolish, but I am not a coward. I do not fear the dead.
“Laura!” I call out in desperation. “Come to me, my beloved! Please, Laura. Come to me.”
Because I consider Laura and myself soul-mates forever—I have it in my head that we’ll naturally be drawn together like two magnets of equal but opposite polarities—it never occurs to me she won’t be the first or the only person who hears my call in the land of the dead. What fools these mortals be, especially when they’re madly in love!
For what crawls out of that violet mist is not human, nor has it ever been. Grotesque beyond imagining, blasphemous and abominable, my horrified human eyes cannot begin to fathom an earthly purpose to its shape. It slides across the threshold between worlds like slime dripping from a decomposing corpse, solid one moment, liquid the next. The smell is so fetid that fish odors from before seem like the finest French perfume.
I hear slurping and squishing sounds as it advances toward me, exuding ectoplasmic pseudopods and multiple eyes affixed to two-foot-long tentacle-like stalks that protrude from the ambulating slime.
I watch as those multiple eyes all turn in unison to focus directly on me.
And sliding behind the first monstrosity, following so closely it’s impossible to tell where one ends and another begins, comes an endless flow of putrid slime that reminds me first of afterbirth, then the overflow from a stuffed-up commode. As it exits the violet glow of the gateway, its true color is revealed as amphibian-green and not blood-red or excrement-brown as I originally thought.
I take a step back in total revulsion as the slime slowly advances toward me like sea-tides at full moon, and I’m suddenly filled with a primitive dread at beholding things that shouldn’t exist but do. There can be no doubt that those things—whatever they may be—are not only alive but conscious that I’m watching them!
Are they coming for me? Do they wish to do me harm?
For the briefest moment I wonder if somehow, inadvertently, I’d summoned them out of the abyss when I called for Laura. Surely, these things are spawn of the devil or, at the very least, spawn of demons. My rational scientific mind reminds me that devils and demons are not real, but my eyes inform me otherwise.
These bubbling protoplasmic horrors prove as adaptive as undifferentiated stem cells, able to change their shape and function to whatever their environment presently requires. They propel themselves faster and faster as their pseudopods metamorph into true legs—not two or four legs like earth beings, but eight legs like Odin’s fabled horse Sleipnir—and I turn and flee as if the devil himself pursues me.
That same mad Arab who penned the dreaded Necronomicon warned of similar entities he called shoggoths, created by the Great Old Ones to be their servants, which were not native to this earth. Shoggoths were bred to be infinitely adaptive, to mold themselves into perfect imitations of all forms, organs, and processes decreed by the telepathic hypnotic suggestions of their masters. They were not mindless creatures but intelligent beings who mocked their creators by mimicking their features and even their voices. Millions of years ago, the shoggoths rebelled against the Great Old Ones and took control of their domains.
Then they either fled the earth or disappeared beneath the sea.
Have they now returned as primal sludge?
Overhead, the gray and brown round-headed nightjars incessantly crow, “whup-a-rill, whup-a-ree. Whup-a-rill, whup-a-rheeeee!” Behind me, I hear, “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”
Is there no place to run, nowhere to hide? I pound on the locked doors of three neighborhood houses, but none of the doors open to admit me at midnight on All-Hallow’s Eve. I guess I can’t blame the residents of Arkham. Who in their right mind would open their door to a stranger at this hour because who in their right mind would be knocking at this hour?
I chance a glance over my left shoulder and notice the amorphous forms are gaining on me, their four forward legs and four rearward legs as perfectly coordinated as the massive spinning tires of a diesel-driven eighteen-wheeler. Now out of range of the violet-colored mist, they glow an eerie phosphorescent green not unlike certain species of bioluminescent deep-sea creatures. Even as they continue resolutely toward me, they’re continually changing, growing, developing, becoming.
Almost to the long bridge over the Miskatonic River, I have little hope of escaping the horror nearly upon me. If I can’t outrun it and cannot hide from it, what else can I do?
I mount the bridge, fully expecting the unholy beasts to pounce before I achieve the east bank. But the terrible odor that has plagued me since midnight abruptly diminishes, and I am once again aware of the mile after mile of dead cod floating in the salt bay. Did the winds suddenly change direction from west to east because it’s time for the gateway between worlds to close for another year?
As I cautiously peer behind me, I see the last of the not-yet fully-formed shoggoths scamper down the west bank on all eight legs to sink into the murky waters of the Miskatonic. The river momentarily glows with a green phosphorescence before the light disappears in the direction of the sea.
To what god or gods do I owe this amazing good fortune?
Without certain death hounding my backside, I’m able to think rationally and scientifically once more. Wasn’t it in the dread Necronomicon I read shoggoths were bred to mature under water, distilling essential nutrients from the sea? Did they need to be submerged in water for the next phase of their development to occur?
If so, then the call of the sea had distracted the shoggoths from their prey.
I collapse onto the bridge and take the first deep breath I’ve been free to draw since before midnight. It’s now after two. How could I have so easily lost track of time?
Less than five hours before daybreak. Although Laura won’t be here with me to see the dawn, I’m grateful to be alive myself.
Thinking of Laura, I can visualize her face as last I saw her when she was yet alive. She gave me a sack lunch she had prepared for me to eat at the airport prior to departure. We kissed goodbye, and then I was off to far-away lands. She died in an automobile accident just days before I was scheduled to return.
“Laura,
my love,” I whisper to the image in my mind. “I’d give anything to hold you once more, to feel your sweet lips pressed to mine.”
Then, amazingly, I see her, dressed exactly as I had seen her last. She steps from the waters of the Miskatonic and ascends the muddy bank to walk onto the bridge.
I stare at her in disbelief as she smiles and beckons to me. While I was running from the shoggoths, Laura must have answered my plaintive call heard in the land of the dead, crossed the threshold, and followed me here.
“Laura!” I shout in jubilation. “Laura, you’re alive!”
I get to my feet, and I’m about to rush to her and gather her into my arms when I smell that same putrid stench of decomposition which overwhelmed me when the first shoggoth slid like afterbirth from the womb of the Witch House.
“Laura,” I shout across the span of the bridge, “is it really you? Say something. If it’s truly you, tell me you love me.”
I see her lips move, but I cannot hear her answer.
“Laura,” I say again. “Tell me you love me.”
And then her baby blue eyes turn a hideous phosphorescent green as her luscious red lips form not the “I love you” I yearn to hear, but the mimicked “Tekeli-li” of the metamorphic shoggoths.
This time I don’t hesitate. I spin around and take off running at top speed.
I ran and ran until I reached the Miskatonic University library. which remains open 24/7, including Christmas and Halloween.
I’ve no idea what happened to the shoggoths. I can only speculate they followed the Miskatonic to the sea. Personally, I don’t care.
The Necronomicon claims shoggoths are as much at home in the deepest parts of the ocean as they are on dry land. They can live among the stars and thrive in the cold vacuum of outer space. They are omnivorous, but their greatest delicacy is said to be the consumption of entire human heads, especially brains and eyeballs. Shoggoths may have been the inspiration for the urban legend that zombies eat brains.
Now you know all that happened to me on the night of October 31st and the early morn of November 1st. I tried to relate these events as accurately as possible and in terms you could easily understand. I do have two earned doctorates from the University of Chicago, you know. I assure you, I’m a reputable scientist.
But I’m not certain even I can understand what dreadful things occurred in Arkham. Were the shoggoths able to read my mind? Is that how one of them knew to fashion itself into Laura to lure me into its clutches?
Although I do still believe in life after death and hope someday to be reunited with my beloved Laura, I now also believe in boogeymen and demons.
Why are you looking at me like that? You don’t believe me? I swear it’s true. Every word of it.
I assure you I am not insane. Do I look insane? Do I sound insane?
I’m not insane, I tell you. I’m not…
RONNIE AND THE RIVER, by Christian Riley
Ronnie stood with easel on the back porch, studying the distant river. At the bottom of a shallow slope this water feature winded its way, a way that was less crooked in shape, but more decisive in manner, more matter of fact. An observer might suggest that this was an obstinate river, that it lacked purpose, save for that of reaching its destination by any means necessary. It was characteristically stark, hemmed only by dead, earthly-toned grass, no trees. There was nothing remarkable standing along its borders drinking from its great vein of nutrients. Truly, a different observer might also decide that this river was overwhelmingly useless, ugly and dumb, and almost certainly depressing to look at.
Blinking, Ronnie wondered vaguely where this river went. Then he recognized it for what it was at this exact moment: a bold contrast to the bright, turquoise sky he’d painted across the top half of his canvas. The palette in his hand began to shake, prompting him to exchange it for the Mountain Dew resting on the porch railing. He took a drink, set the can down, then scratched his fingers and wrists. Before he retrieved the palette, Ronnie looked again at the river, the sky, and then finally, at his painting. And it was here, at this moment, when he recognized that the real sky, above and beyond the river, also stood in contrast to what he’d painted. The real sky, in fact, was nowhere near blue. It was a violent conglomeration of deep purple and gray, with a blood-red sun half-buried into a pocket on the horizon.
Undeterred, Ronnie picked up his brush and smudged a dazzling yellow orb at the corner of his canvas, with bright rays that shone down onto the river, reflecting miracles of the imagination. A bird (or was it a bat?) suddenly flew past the porch, and Ronnie smiled happily—his dumb, enormously wide, mysteriously contagious, toothy grin.
Moments later, a beat-up Ford Ranger lurched along the side of the house. It came to a sputtering stop in the graveled lot behind the back porch. A thick-built man with long black hair staggered clumsily out, hugging grocery bags. He closed the door with a swing from his hip, then looked over and made eye-contact, smiled at Ronnie.
At once, Ronnie’s face went cripple, leaving his mouth slack, a cave entrance for many a flying insect. He stared at the man, whom he knew as Rick, Rick who rented the room above Ronnie’s.
Rick grunted something to the effect of Howdy, then looked down and shuffled across the parking lot, up the back stairs. At this moment, a person might observe Rick and say that the man looked fatigued. Spent from his day of wrenching nuts and bolts, tooling with wheeled, combustible blocks of steel; a man with greased knuckles and hunched shoulders. Ronnie said nothing of the kind, of course, only stared vacantly, open-mouthed.
Rick climbed the stairs and emitted a faint chuckle. “Catching flies, are ya?” he said. Then he looked at Ronnie’s painting, head tilted like a mutt’s. His face screwed sideways; he glanced toward the horizon, then looked back at the canvas. Rick chuckled again, louder this time, then said, “Fucking retard. Are you color blind, also?”
Later that night, and by the light of a single lamp, Ronnie read a comic book. He was in a chair, a tired-looking Lazy Boy, the second of only two chairs in his entire dwelling. His home was all of a hundred and fifty square feet, a single room on the bottom corner of an old Victorian. The room had been renovated, half-heartedly, and accommodated for, legally, providing a bathroom and kitchenette. Ronnie wondered if the other rooms in the house were like his. Going on ten years now, and still he had no clue. He knew some of his neighbors, the other tenants, knew them by name, at least. But mostly these people kept to their selves, each of them buried amongst a host of troubles. At least once a week the police came by, affording these people with more of these troubles.
Rick, he was different, only in the manner of correspondence. The man indulged himself, so it seemed, in the way that he interacted with Ronnie, much to Ronnie’s despair.
Like now, for example; Ronnie suspected that he would soon encounter another one of these interactions from his neighbor. He could sense it in the air: a buzzing vibration emanating from the walls. A leak of sorts—a sewer leak, draining from above. The dead silence…that was the suspicious part. The silence kept Ronnie on edge, was the calm before the storm, so-to-speak. Was this feeling of impending provocation simply Ronnie’s imagination? Or was it the conditional byproduct of classical, behavior modification?
The answer to the riddle was short in coming. Before Ronnie finished his comic book, he’d heard the sounds incumbent to the concoction of one of Rick’s interactions: the arrival of another man, a buddy of his; their loud guffaws; the certain involvement of libations; and then, sometime later, the subsequent poundings on the floor, which was, of course, Ronnie’s ceiling. He figured they were wrestling but, like always, these noises ended up with both men laughing voraciously, and then screaming, “He’s a retard!” The words always seemed to hit right in Ronnie’s ear, as if they’d pressed their mouths into the floor to better effect the distance of their hollering.
* * * *
Work was Ronnie’s reprieve. Work was his salvation from the annoyances of his life, as it was simpl
e and mundane work, and could be described by an observer as being entirely lonesome—a quality which never seemed to weigh Ronnie down. Indeed, he loved his job. A low-paying janitorial position at the local university, it kept Ronnie busy, yet afforded him time to ponder, which he liked. He also worked late hours, a shift that began in the early evening, and went well into the night—hence the absence of others.
The university itself was ancient of time, with halls and rooms and courtyards having witnessed the passing of several generations of students. Such a student could observe smooth, oak columns; rustic, iron-wrought fences; aged paintings; and dark, walnut-clad walls. Reliefs, depicting great battles between man and indescribable beasts, embellished full balustrades. Certain ceilings had been styled with great murals, scenes from a pre-biblical time, perhaps, according to the pagan-like themes portrayed. And finally, straight through the university grounds drifted the same river that passed by Ronnie’s home, adding a sense of convenient familiarity for the janitor.
Gothic and nightmarish in quality, the university’s atmosphere was sorely wasted on Ronnie, who, of no fault of his own, was incapable of great leaps of the imagination. Indeed, as he dusted surfaces and swept floors late into the night, Ronnie’s mind never once taunted him with the paranormal dreams one would expect to come from such a place. Mostly, he thought about his comic books, or his paintings, and sometimes, with a hint of dread, he thought about Rick. Furthermore, there was an uncanny resolve to Ronnie’s dismissive aspect, which begged a unique form of attention. And, if distantly observed by another person—a person with a notable imagination—as Ronnie mopped floors, or emptied trash bins, it would seem that while in the quiet solitude of the night, the university as a whole also studied Ronnie.
And so it was, on one of these enigmatic nights, that Ronnie was presented with a piece of campus long forgotten.
It happened in the library, while Ronnie was dusting the bookcases. A book fell from off the shelf (was this Ronnie’s fault?), and when he reached down to pick it up, he noticed a crease in the far corner of the floor, from under the antique rug. Curious, he pulled the corner of the rug up and discovered a small, wooden door. An ancient door. A secret door, apparently. Ronnie tested it, and found that the door was unlocked. It opened with an aged, grinding wail, a metal-on-metal sound. A dank odor emerged from the depths, a cold breeze sweeping across Ronnie’s face. There was an iron ladder just below the opening, dropping quickly into dark shadow. With a shrug, Ronnie grabbed the first rung and climbed down.
The Third Cthulhu Mythos Megapack Page 9