The Private Life of Elder Things

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  All but one.

  One of the reflections did not move. Standing with its back to him: in every detail it was a perfect reflection of him, except that it was motionless. Fixing his gaze upon this, Richmond started across the abyss, ignoring the phantoms, lurching toward that one static point. His free hand reached out and thumped against a solid surface: wood. It was a painting on a wooden panel. Richmond more or less fell against it and it crashed outward, pitching him face down on a floor made of slats. His head spun and his stomach heaved as the candle slipped from his hands and went out.

  Richmond found himself clinging to a vertical wooden ladder. That much he could tell, but blackness was absolute once more; there was no guessing how far he would fall, should he let go. The ladder was pinned to a brick wall. He eased himself up two rungs, and at once the top of his head met a hard surface. Raising one hand he felt wood that yielded to pressure. A line of light opened horizontally in front of his face.

  Richmond crawled out of the big toy-chest onto the floor of the Nursery and then stayed on hands and knees for some time until he was sure of his bearings. His first action upon standing was to brush the dust from his clothes.

  The Nursery clock ticked softly in one corner. Richmond looked carefully around him. Two small beds, a table covered in a worn candlewick throw, a dresser, and a huge rocking-horse made up the furnishings. There was a door in one corner. The walls were painted with a mural depicting, in all the glorious colour and realistic detail of a Pre-Raphaelite master, a processional Dance of Death.

  After a few minutes’ work Richmond went over to the door. Behind it was a flight of worn stone steps and, ascending these, he emerged into the great fire-lit belly of the Library.

  *

  Shortly after the bell had rung nine o'clock, Naotalba knocked quietly upon the door of the Drawing Room and slipped within. Thale lay on his couch before the fire, fiddling with a beautifully carved pornographic Chinese chess-set. Aldones was pacing up and down the room, reading a book of Sappho’s poems. Camilla was in a window seat, staring out into the dark beyond the pane.

  Naotalba coughed softly. “Sir. Mr Richmond has returned.”

  The young man entered the room as he spoke and took up a place on the carpet at a polite distance from his host. Naotalba’s eyes were anxious, but he got no further chance to speak.

  “Ah – splendid, Richmond,” Thale said, stretching. “Do you play chess? We are expecting guests very shortly, so it will not be a long game. Mr Machen and some of his thespian friends are coming over for a few days. Are you fond of the performing arts?”

  “I regret I will not be staying to meet them,” Richmond said. “I have finished my work here and will be going at once.”

  “What?” exclaimed Aldones. Camilla looked around.

  “Finished?” Thale said thickly. The colour was draining from his cheeks. “You found the Library then?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  At that moment the door opened further and a young woman in a filthy dress stumbled into the room. She brushed past Naotalba and, without paying the slightest attention to anyone else, hurried over to the window seat, threw herself to her knees and buried her face in Camilla’s lap.

  Camilla gave a gasp and sank her hand into the other woman’s hair. “Cassilda!” she whispered.

  “You found her,” observed Aldones, eyebrows raised.

  Richmond inclined his head. But Thale was not looking at his daughter; he was staring at the book in Richmond’s hand.

  “Ah, yes,” said Richmond, noticing his gaze. “There is also the matter of this volume, and my instructions.”

  “The book has nothing to do with this,” said Thale. His face was so pale now that it looked as if it had been carved from bone. “I have been master of this house for many decades. The book was only written a few years ago. There was a Frenchman, a playwright…”

  “Castaigne?” Aldones offered, frowning.

  Thale shot him an agonised look. “Yes. A nothing. He never wrote anything else of significance. He stayed here a few weeks, and he was inspired, as so many. He wrote a play. When it was printed in Paris he sent me a copy. Then he—” But Thale swallowed the rest of his sentence.

  “He killed himself,” said Richmond. “Yes, I know.”

  “What is going on here?” asked Aldones.

  “The play,” said Richmond, laying the book on the table next to him, “you read it.”

  “Ah. Hh. Yes,” Thale said. “It is…”

  “It is a mirror. Castaigne wrote a play that was a mirror that you could hold up to yourself. Lithly House is a prism for the soul, but it splits and distorts and enlarges and hints; you can so easily pretend that what you see is not you. But the play – ah, the magic of the written word. It showed you your soul, and reflected over and over to infinity, in perfect clarity, your despair and your emptiness and your unmeaning. Isn’t that so?” Richmond’s fingertips brushed the book’s binding.

  Thale squirmed in his chair, fists clenching. “I put it away,” he groaned.

  “Yes. I imagine you tried your best to forget it. But you could not, could you? You had to reread it. How often, I wonder? Your self-loathing has permeated this entire house. Your nightmares stalk the corridors.”

  Thale shut his eyes, to stop himself staring at the slim volume on the table. Across the room, Camilla said in a low voice, “You disobeyed our father and left your room, did you not? I shall have to punish you, Cassilda.”

  And Cassilda, sobbing, replied, “Please. Oh yes, please.”

  “In the end,” said Richmond mildly, “your fear became so strong, and your compulsion to read so strong, that the only way out was to lose it somewhere you could never return to. So you crippled yourself, and lost the Library.”

  “That was an accident,” Aldones protested. “He sent for you.”

  Richmond spared him a glance. “Oh yes. He still desired the book. He wanted to retrieve it, just as much as he wanted to lose it. It is like finding a picture so shocking that one cannot help but look at it again and again, until one’s nerves are cauterised and one becomes hardened to the pain. You should know how that is. But with this play one cannot become numb.”

  “It changes things,” Thale said. “With every reading, it changes the world; the house; the people. They draw closer to the world in the book. He has written us into his play, and now it closes around us. Lithly House did not always stand beside a lake. Camilla was not always my daughter. Cassilda had another name – I don’t remember now what it was… I stood in the Conservatory and watched the moon rise in front of the chimneys. Oh God. My dreams are broken … I behold the tatters of the King.” He seemed then to recollect his mind from its wanderings and finished weakly, “That – that play feeds off reality; truth is shredding away under my hands.”

  “Truth?” said Richmond. “Truth is a phantom.”

  “What are we to do?” Camilla asked in a low voice.

  “Read the book,” said Richmond, “and find out.”

  “You bastard,” said Aldones with something like awe.

  “I am not joking.” Richmond fixed Thale’s drained and sweating countenance with a cold stare. “I have recovered your rooms, but I will not be back to repeat the operation. Read the book. Read it once a month, every month. It will shape and hold the house. Those are your instructions.”

  “I don’t understand!” Thale protested. “I have always done as I was bid… What have I…? Why will you not aid me?”

  Richmond folded his hands. “You have fulfilled your role admirably. We have no complaints at Roy and Johns about your tenure. But we have now entered a new phase of our work and you must all adapt to these changed conditions. Castaigne wrote the play at our instigation. You will read it. Others will come; you must play host to them as you have always done and you must encourage them to read it too.”

  “But,” said Thale weakly, pushing himself up in his seat, “I am the Last King, in the play. And at the start of Act Two—�
�

  “Cowardice is hardly an acceptable trait in the employees of Roy and Johns Associates,” Richmond reminded him. “You know your contract.” He pulled the gold watch from his pocket and flicked it open. “Now, much as I have enjoyed my stay here, I am afraid I must be going…”

  “Hold him!” Aldones yelled, springing forward. His hand closed around the watch and he wrenched it out of Richmond’s grasp. The gold chain ripped free and tiny links rattled across the furniture. At almost the same moment Naotalba jumped in, locked an arm around Richmond’s neck, grabbed his right hand and shoved it hard up between his shoulder blades.

  Richmond collapsed. His head came off in Naotalba’s arm and fell to the floor. His trapped hand tore from the sleeve and the limb within and the young man’s body slumped to the ground. For a moment everyone froze. Then out from the crumpled shape of the corpse began to flood a hoard of glittering insects, yellow dung-beetles, heaving and scuttling across the floor. Naotalba stepped back in horror. Aldones writhed onto a chair, green with revulsion. The beetles poured across the room, disappearing into cracks between floorboards and into the dark shadows beneath furniture. In a few moments they had dispersed and vanished. They left only an empty suit of clothes and the flimsy remnants of Richmond’s face and two hands, white and papery like the chewed pulp of wasps’ nests.

  “Bastard!” Aldones shrieked. He tore open the gold watch cover and the contents went flying across the carpet: a few loose springs, a dead moth, a piece of crumpled paper bearing the words More Light! and the spinal column of a mouse. On the back of the watch-case was engraved a curious sign, identical to that embossed on the cover of the play.

  “Shit!” cried Aldones, throwing the case across the room. “Shit! Shit!”

  Thale, voiceless, started to shake as if with tears or laughter, though neither emerged. Blood began to trickle from between his lips. Naotalba dropped the grisly trophies of his would-be captive, covered his eyes with his hands and shook his head back and forth, back and forth. Camilla threw open her throat and howled with empty mirth, knotting her hands in her sister’s golden hair. For a while there was pandemonium, and then slowly the inhabitants of the room grew still.

  Dust settled in the breathless air.

  Into the silence of the drawing room stole the distant chime of the doorbell.

  Naotalba suddenly stood up and bowed.

  “Your Majesty,” he said. “Mr Machen and his entourage have arrived for their audience with you.”

  Thale raised a composed face and empty, empty eyes. He wiped the line of blood from his chin. “My royal daughters,” he said, his voice somehow cracked, somehow different. “Our vassals stand at the palace gate. You should go forth to receive them, and convey our welcome.”

  Story Notes

  Donald

  “The Shadow over Innsmouth” is one of Lovecraft’s later stories and generally regarded as “core Mythos”. The Deep Ones are perhaps the “race” most often drawn upon for Lovecraftiana, and also the most common recipients of a sympathetic eye. One reason for this is that “Innsmouth” is a story about race. There’s no avoiding the admission that a lot of HPL’s stories are intensely racist and, while the worst of these belong to his earlier New York period, he remains fixated on issues of racial mixing and purity which are significant in “Innsmouth”. The idea of the poor Innsmouth denizens rounded up in camps at the end of the story, however, strikes a different note to the modern reader than it might have done to Lovecraft. Even the final section of the story does not go as far as to ask “who are the real monsters” but the question arises out of the story whether HPL intended it or not. Deep Ones become less unfathomable entities and more another people with whom we share the planet, and with whom some manner of détente must eventually be brokered. (AT)

  Pitter Patter

  I used to work for the Reserve Forces and Cadets Association. I remember Holloway TAC, and how we tried to keep it going. I was sorry to hear about its sale.

  At one point when I was between apartments I was allowed to stay temporarily in a TAC’s guest accommodation. There’s no lonelier feeling on earth than when you’re wandering in the darkened halls of a building intended for several hundred people and you the only one in it. You can hear traffic, and you know that only a short distance away one of the busiest intersections in all of London is going about its nightly routine. For you, it might as well not exist. It’s just a muffled, far-off noise. You’re all alone with your thoughts. Your thoughts, and whatever else might be out there in the dark.

  If you’re wondering whether the building in this tale is meant to be Exham Priory, I deliberately leave the question open. (AG)

  Special Needs Child

  I fell in love with ghouls thirty years ago when I read the scenario “Paper Chase” in the third edition Call of Cthulhu rulebook. It was the lines: “As a ghoul, his life is great. He does not need money. He does not have to dress for dinner. He does not have to meet people … except at meal-times.” That ice-cold Addams-esque humour delighted me. Ghouls are proof that being a blasphemous abomination doesn’t mean you have to be miserable about it; much like the Addams Family, they are merrily oblivious to how horrific they are. (Brian McNaughton’s ghoul stories showcase this, though they are not for the faint of heart.) Ghouls are so nearly human – mocking caricatures of ourselves – that as long as you can overlook the putrescence, the cannibalism and the necrophilia, they are good company. Of course, if you can overlook those things you’re already on the slippery slope downhill into the dark, as my protagonist Gina discovers… (KM)

  Irrational Numbers

  Here are the Fungi from Yuggoth, aka the Mi-go, which apparently continue whatever operation they were conducting in Vermont in “The Whisperer in Darkness”. They make an odd contribution to the Mythos non-canon. They are scientifically advanced, but their science is very science-y – brains in jars and tools to augment their physical capabilities, very much the stuff of alien-invasion creature features. They don’t show up on film, and they work closely with human servants whom they claim to reward by allowing them (or their brains) to ride along on interstellar voyages. And they’re unusually fragile for Lovecraftian entities.

  With “Irrational Numbers” I confess to having taken liberties with the breed as presented in “Whisperer”. There is a definite malice, or at least callousness, in the original, but at the same time they plainly value what they can use, which in this case includes my narrator. Still, I have ventured to cast the mysticism of the cult rituals from “Whisperer” as the crustaceous aliens bringing their idiom down to a level the superstitious Vermontian hill people could follow, inferior to the pan-dimensional mathematics of the narrator (“Dreams in the Witch House” again?) More, the reintroduction of our old friend Noyes at this late remove suggests a veracity to their claims of rewarding loyalty that is probably beyond the original intent. But I can honestly say, as a writer whose oeuvre has mostly concerned the doings of the chitinous, who wouldn’t want to work for intergalactic crab-mushrooms if they’ve a jar with your brain’s name on it? (AT)

  New Build

  In Frank Belknap Long’s “The Hound of Tindalos”, the last thing would-be explorer of the fourth dimension Halpin Chalmers does before expiring messily is write “Their tongues – ahhhh—” Speaking for myself, I’ve always felt that if you have time to actually write down, with an honest to God pen, the word “ahhhh”, you’re not in as much danger as you’d like me to believe. However, a phone call works just fine, he says guiltily.

  There’s something mesmeric about Long’s original. I strongly suspect it once mesmerised Stephen King, and as evidence I submit his short fiction “Sun Dog” from the Four Past Midnight novella collection. That one has juice. The idea that you can’t see a thing, but that you can look into its world; that a creature might inhabit a world parallel to and yet utterly unlike ours, and wants to break through, all that sounds remarkably like Long to me.

  That, and I happen to like
Victorian pubs. If you get the chance, the Princess Louise at High Holborn is the one I had principally in mind. Long may it stand, and mine’s a bitter, thanks. (AG)

  Branch Line Repairman

  The Old Ones or Elder Things are Lovecraft’s most explicitly described monsters, historically and literally anatomised in “At the Mountains of Madness” where we also meet their counterparts, the Shoggoths. In that book their intricately detailed civilization is long dead, overthrown by their own creations. However, we also meet them in “Dreams in the Witch House”, not because HPL was engaged in intentional, Mythos-building, but because he hadn’t found a publisher for “Mountains” and so had the creatures lying unused on his conceptual cutting room floor. In that story the Old Ones are alive and well in some extraterrestrial city of their own, and from there it was a short step to wonder what those well-to-do alien magnates might make of their horrifically failed Earth colony. The Old Ones were also very much the inspiration for this collection. “They were men,” HPL writes of them in “Mountains”. They are his very best line in creatures simultaneously alien, and yet logical enough for humans to halfway understand and even sympathise with. Like humans, they are capable of great achievements and great excesses. Their reliance on slavery brings on their ruin, although I don’t know that HPL, even at his most socialist, would have conceded such a left-wing narrative to the Shoggoths and their ilk. After all, it’s hard to be a good Marxist when you are the means of production… (AT)

  Devo Nodenti

  I’m a big fan of the Dreamlands stories, though it annoys me when the setting is treated as just another fantasy world. I strongly lean to keeping the Dreamlands as surreal and symbolic and as rife with avatars and metaphor as the dreams they are supposed to be; a part of the shared subconscious of humanity. I’m also interested in how HPL picked Nodens as a Dreamlands god – clearly he’d done his research into the Lydney dig even without benefit of Wikipedia, since the description of Nodens is based on a mosaic from that site, and I’m assuming he knew all about the incubation chambers there. What I wanted to do was make Nodens (and his Nightgaunts) as creepy as possible: “hoary”, “gray” and “awful” with a “wizened hand” are descriptors I take to be more significant than the cheesy dolphins. The Lydney digs in the 1920s and 1980s really happened (and yes, Tolkien wrote on the meaning of Nodens’ name), though there wasn’t one in the 1960s as in the story. Rory DeAngelo is roughly based on Mortimer Wheeler though, who was by all accounts constantly embroiled in adulterous affairs with his assistants. I can’t find any details on the 1980s dig at all. Not even which organisation carried it out. Weird, that… (KM)