by Byron Craft
Byron Craft once again takes us below the earth in this SHOGGOTH sequel enveloping us with tentacles, claws, and mucus glop. A talented fusion of Lovecraftian sci-fi, mystery, fantasy, and horror with a 21st-century twist. [Book Three]
THE ARKHAM DETECTIVE SERIES
Cthulhu’s Minions
A novelette introducing the Arkham Detective. Cthulhu’s Minions are Pilot Demons; nasty pint-sized legless creatures that crawl on their hands with razor sharp claws and fangs. The diminutive beings must be stopped before they conduct one of Cthulhu's Old Ones to the back alleys and streets of Arkham, likewise the entire planet.
The story takes place during the Great Depression, a spot in time where H. P. Lovecraft and Raymond Chandler could have collaborated. Henceforth the narrative begins, through the eyes of an Arkham Detective. [Book One]
The Innsmouth Look
The second story in the series that brings the detective back, investigating a murder and the kidnapping of a small child, which leads to Innsmouth by the sea, the frightful creatures that lurk there, and what they plan to call up from the depths. [Book Two]
The Devil Came to Arkham
Follow the Arkham Detective as he attempts to discover the source of a deadly epidemic. Is it the devil? Is it a Night Gaunt? Or both? Find out when you read about a soul sucking creature that is bent on turning Arkham, Massachusetts into a ghost town. [Book Three]
The Dunwich Dungeon
In this final chapter, a seven-foot tall man in black has caused the Detective's good friend to go missing. A woman is brutally murdered in a museum, and mysterious artifacts lead us on a trail to inter-dimensional horrors. This time the Arkham Detective is armed to the teeth, and determined to avenge murder with mayhem. [Book Four]
Keep reading for an excerpt from Byron Craft’s
“The CRY of CTHULHU”
The CRY of CTHULHU
Warning
The statute of limitations has run out. What I stole from Miskatonic University, they still want back. They want to hide the truth.
The theft of what the news media called the “Alchemist’s Papers” was made public in January of 1984 but the cover-up that followed, and the failed attempt to retrieve them, left the story only half told. The truth is about a fold in the soft and otherwise smooth surface of time. It is a harbinger of an evil so destructive that the current state of the world, plagued with terrorism and economic chaos, would only be a footnote in history by comparison.
The tabloids had a heyday with the story, claiming apocalyptic doom, while the mainstream media labeled it as another crackpot interpretation of the “Book of Revelations.” Neither were accurate. Miskatonic University of Arkham, Massachusetts had done an effective job of discrediting the papers and me, and until now, no one would publish them.
The one piece of information that they were unable to keep from the public was the existence of a covert organization within the university itself. We were a group of select scholars that investigated what appeared to be supernatural occurrences all over the world. It was alleged that during some of these investigations the group had acted like vigilantes, taking the law into their own hands, passing out judgment where they saw fit.
My name is Thomas Ironwood. I was a resident professor at Miskatonic and head of the Physics Department. I was a member of the group, known then, to only a few, as the “Mythos Department.” My confessions to the press were not out of remorse for any wrong doing, rather as a revolt against my colleagues who were becoming dangerously lax in their retaliatory measures.
I believed then, and believe even more today, that the individual stories of Faren and Janet Church, and Faren’s great Uncle Heinrich Todesfall, constitute a warning to an already endangered world and should not be suppressed. The rampant ignorance in the world has left me no alternative but to come out of hiding and go public with the documents.
The plausibility of our planet being threatened by an ageless horror may automatically arouse suspicion to the authenticity of the following chronicles and possibly create a backlash from the more serious elites in the media. How Miskatonic acquired the papers may be questioned. Why hide them if they are only a hoax?
The chronicles are authentic. They required some editing to clarify the time lines. The accounts original forms were as a journal, a diary and a series of tape recordings. They have been edited into separate narratives subsequently breaking the work down into four parts.
With the help of my publisher, we have struck out redundancies which often occur in personal journals and eliminated digressions which the elderly Todesfall was guilty of doing when his mind would stray from the story and wander unchecked into the intervening years. Faren Church’s was the least polished of the narratives, because his was a hasty account left on tape and required more extensive editing.
For the remainder, we have left well enough alone. The chronicles accurately tell the whole story without additional enhancement.
PART ONE
THE SCHLOSS
From Janet Church’s Diary
I am almost out of Valium, only one more pill left. The stress is beginning to get the best of me. The tranquilizer is the only thing that has made life bearable for me these last few days. I wonder now what will happen next, if they will come for me after the drug runs out, or if I will be allowed to numb my last few minutes.
They won’t come close to the schloss now. I have the lights burning in every room. I even have the oil lamp I found going and every candle I could lay my hands on is lit.
They won’t come this minute. They won’t come until the mist hides the stars and the moon.
Dear God! I am not even sure who they are!
***
This evening, the mist rolled up from the hollow and engulfed the schloss and beyond. It moved across the road, lingering in low spots and ditches, until the entire countryside was covered by the milky vapor. It spreads throughout the thick woods for miles, and on humid nights, such as this, it has often reached as far as Valsbach.
The countryside surrounding the house, even on the brightest days, is desolate and foreboding. Now, at dusk, the twilight lends the field behind our house a strangeness that sets it apart from the rest of the area. It suggests a watchful malevolence to the ancient trees, to the descending marshes with their thousands of chirping insects and the incessant croaking of frogs, to the time worn and vine covered stone walls pressing in upon the perimeter of the old estate, closing in upon our home as if intent upon holding me fast.
Thick vapors from the hollow swirl and eddy about the schloss and the room in which I sit fills with moisture. The fog ascends in spirals from beneath the door and its long, wet fingers creep across the carpet with caressing strokes.
Crowning a grassy summit, whose sides are wooded near its base with gnarled trees of the black forest, stands the old home of my husband’s ancestors. For centuries, its lofty tiled roofs and tower have looked down upon the rugged countryside. The exact age of the house is not known. Its roots, I guess, must go back centuries, before the beginnings of the Church family line. I know very little about the family lineage not being a Church by blood, only by marriage.
The villagers say the ancient house has always been here. They tend to be superstitious and sometimes given to fanciful tales. One teller of these stories is a homeless old woman who makes her living sifting through the back alleys and dumpsters in town. Her name is Ilsedore Hulse, and she is probably the oldest living resident of Valsbach.
Once when I was able to get her alone and ask about my husband’s ancestry, she confided in me that the house had a blackened past and that, “evil still prevailed there as sure as the trees of the Black Forest have leaves and the creatures that dwell there have eyes.” She summed up our meeting by informing me in a dramatically lowered voice that the old house was there even when her great-great-grandmother was a child.
Superstition plays an important role with these people and their fears can be justified living in an isolated area
far from anywhere you and I would consider mainstream. I can excuse their actions; their attitude towards us, however, is less than tolerable. It did not take me long to accept the shunned indifference by the shopkeepers and townspeople.
What I did consider strange is the lack of visitors to the surrounding area of the schloss. Travelers seldom enter the woods that border our property and none come within walking distance of the old house.
I have never seen any wild animals on our property. The woodland creatures, if there are any, are probably wise, because the overall aspect of the region would give anyone the impression of leering death. The ancient lightning-scarred trees seem unnaturally large and twisted, and the other vegetation abnormally thick and feverish; while curious mounds and hummocks in the weedy, pitted field behind our house, remind me of snakes and burial plots.
The strain is critical now, by tonight, I am afraid that if my husband does not return home . . . I will be murdered.
The woods appear to close in tighter about this lonely house.
***
Damn it, where is Faren? He better get here soon.
I have to remain calm. I won’t end up screaming into the night. I’ll start at the beginning. The record must be complete. I’ll tell you about my husband. I’ll tell you about Boston, Chicago and New York before receiving the telegram, and I’ll tell you about this place.
I met Faren while still living with my parents in Ipswich, that’s in Essex County, Massachusetts. At the time, I was in the midst of making what I thought were two very important decisions. One, should I keep pursuing a major in art history and, two, how to clear up my complexion, when an old Dodge van lumbered down the street and died in front of our house. “Bring our boys home” and “Impeach Johnson” were painted on its side in day-glow colors.
The sound of the ancient motor in its final death throes was followed by the slamming of the driver’s door. A moment later the hood was violently flung up and amidst the fury of clanking tools and sharp cursing, a full head of tightly curled hair shot out.
“Have you got a piece of wire?” he shouted. Then he added impatiently, “A bobby pin, a shoelace, anything? Don’t just stand there, I have to strap this distributor cap down, I’ve got to be in Chicago tomorrow.”
I wore my hair down and with a headband in those days and although I knew I didn’t look like I had just come from a hardware store, I felt embarrassed that I hadn’t and blurted, “I’m wearing sandals.”
His blue eyes looked right inside of me, and then he cracked a smile on one side of his face and said, “Hey, what’s your name?”
I was back in junior high again being asked to go steady for the first time in my life. The sensation shot through me, I became flushed, I am sure he picked up on it because he relaxed some, and with a broader smile stepped forward, wiping his hands on an oil stained rag.
“I’m Faren. Faren Church. You still haven’t told me yours.”
It didn’t take us long to get acquainted. I was able to get the required length of wire from my dad’s garage and in the time it took him to make the repairs on the van, he was off, and I went with him.
To continue reading “The CRY of CTHULHU” and other books by Byron Craft, please visit his website: www.ByronCraftBooks.com or go to Amazon.com
* * *
[1] A five-dimensional loop in the fabric of reality is impossible for any being existing in four spatial dimensions (four-space) to pinpoint with real precision. Cthulhu could see where but not exactly when one would form. The “when” to Cthulhu in four-space was just as humans’ “when” in three-space, the time dimension of spacetime being n+1 where n stands for the number of spatial dimensions. (Really, time should be considered the “0th dimension,” since spacetime, by definition, includes a time dimension that exists no matter how many or few spatial dimensions are included.) In other words, “when” is implied from changes in the “where,” and the four-space includes even more information to work with than does three-space, since closed spacetime loops are actually visible to a being in four-space.