The Children of Cthulhu

by John Pelan

  “I guessed,” she replied, now allowing her animal to drink. “But it wasn't hard. Everyone in the village is talking about this business. I'm Cora Maynard, by the way.”

  Now that she said it, the resemblance to Lady Langdon was obvious. The girl's snub-nosed but rather pretty face was framed by tawny locks. She was tall and lithe, and fitted her riding slacks and white silken blouse very neatly.

  “Hallo,” he muttered.

  “Are you alright?”

  “Er… yeah. City boy, you see.” He tried to smile. “Bit lost out here.”

  “You do seem like a fish out of water,” she replied, steering her horse away from the river's edge. “I'd offer you a ride, but I don't think you'd fit in the saddle.” And with a tinkling, minxlike laugh, she trotted away into the trees.

  Nick gazed after her, more bewildered now than terrified, but shivering violently all the same.

  6

  Nick returned to Barrowby around lunchtime, plodding sodden through the village streets.

  When he entered the Packhorse, Mirarda gazed at him wide-eyed: “Dear me, whatever happened?”

  “I could tell you,” he said sheepishly, “but I'd rather not.”

  “Is there anything I can do?” she called after him as he went upstairs.

  Nick gave it some thought. “I don't suppose there's any chance of a sandwich?”

  “The lunchtime menu's on now.” She. smiled. “We do a lovely steak and Guinness pie.”

  “That'd be great,” he said, going on up. “I'll be down in ten.”

  Once in his room, he swapped his jeans for tracksuit pants and his jersey for a sweatshirt. Then he sat on the bed and thought. He thought about the incident in the trees, and how it surely couldn't have happened the way hz remembered it. Could he really have mistaken a galloping horse for that… that prodigious something? It was inexplicable, but it was also unnerving. During the course of his career, Nick had faced down blackguards and gangsters, gunmen and knifers, terrorists, muggers, sex killers, wife-beaters… the worst criminal lunatics Britain could offer, yet he'd never been as frightened as he had during that two or three minute chase through the woods.

  He checked his mobile phone and found it waterlogged and useless. Instead, he grabbed the bedroom line, punching out Andy's number. It was answered almost immediately. The detective constable sounded as if he was in a diner of some sort.

  “Yeah, McClaine,” he said, as he chomped on something.

  “Where are you?” Nick asked.

  “A Little Chef off the A688.”

  “Did you find anything?”

  “Not a lot, to be honest.” Andy swallowed his food. “Seems that about three weeks ago, Caleb started packaging and posting his books to a P.O. box in Penrith… presumably where he intended to collect them once he'd busted out.”

  “Or where someone else intended to collect them.”

  “Like who?”

  “Not sure yet,” Nick said, though he couldn't help but picture Barbara Maynard's shelves, impressively stacked with musty old tomes.

  “There was one thing,” Andy said. “I don't know.… This might be something.” There was a rustling of pages. “It's a notebook of his, got left behind… dog-eared as anything, full of scribbles and diagrams and stuff.”

  “Anything in it you recognize?” Nick asked.

  “Well, his handwriting's like spider shit, plus it's in some code or something. There's a couple of hand-drawn maps, though. One of them is that stone circle.”

  Nick stood up. “How do you know?”

  “Well … it looks like it. There's a circle of seventy blobs and a separate blob a few centimeters away. P'us, there's some handwriting here I recognize. It looks like ‘loig’ … you know, as in Long Meg.”

  “What do you mean 'it looks like?”

  Andy considered. “Well … it could be ‘leng,’ but what does that mean?”

  Nick thought about it for a second. Leng? Leng Meg? Leng Meg and Her Daughters? For some reason, that had a disquieting resonance.

  Andy was still talking. “It appears again a few pages on.… It's another map. God knows what this is. Looks like an island. Does ‘M… T… Terr’ mean anything to yo j?”

  “No.”

  “It's a point on this map. How about ‘M… T… Erb’?”

  “No.”

  “Thought not. Anyway… this Leng is heie, too.”

  “Hang on… whoa!” Nick suddenly said. “ ‘M T Terr’ and ‘M T Erb’? How about… Mount Terror and Mount Erebus?”

  “Come again?”

  “Two volcanoes,” the sergeant said.

  “Oh.” The D.C. didn't sound much the wiser. “Where?”

  “The Antarctic.”

  Andy almost laughed. “Well… that screws that.”

  “Not necessarily,” Nick cautioned, having trouble believing what he was thinking. “How deeply frozen did the doctor say Alun Caleb was?”

  “What?”

  “Whereabouts is this Leng?”

  “Well … if this is Antarctica, smack-ba ig in the middle. Probably on the Pole.”

  “Get that burger and chips down, and get your arse back here!” Nick interjected. “Quick.”

  “No probs,” Andy replied. “Two hours tops.” And he hung up.

  Nick walked downstairs in a virtual daze. He met Miranda in the lobby. She smiled brightly. “Ready to order?”

  “Er… maybe later,” he said. “Tell me, is there a library round here?”

  “Directly opposite,” she replied. “Straight over the green. You can't miss it.”

  Nick thanked her, but when he opened the door to go out, found himself staring across the grass at a small country church … an old one, very basic, possibly Saxon in origin.

  He turned questioningly to Miranda, who seemed to have been expecting this. She nodded. “That's right… in there.”

  “The library's in the church?”

  “It isn't a church,” she said. “It just looks like one. Barrowby doesn't have a church anymore.”

  “This town of yours is full of surprises, isn't it?”

  “Is it?” she said. Her manner had altered slightly, as if the comment had offended her.

  Nick nodded. “Yeah… yeah, it is.”

  Then he walked away over the green. It was now early afternoon, yet there was hardly anybody about. Cars were parked here and there, but there was little traffic on the move. For the first time, it began to strike him how odd this was. Almost hurriedly, he made his way to the library.

  It clearly had been a church at some time or other. Inside, the glass in the tall casements was richly colored, each window depicting a famous Bible scene, while the ceiling was arched in vintage eccelesiastic fashion. Virtually everything else, however, had changed. In the alcove where the font had once stood, a librarian sat behind a desk; where once there'd been pews, now there was a maze of bookcases.

  “May I help?” asked the librarian, standing. She was tall and slim, and wore her glasses on a chain. Unlike most librarians, however, she made no effort to modulate her voice.

  “I was wondering where I might find Geography?” Nick said.

  She indicated the nearest rack. Nick thanked her, then began a quick search. Several of the books were v/eighty reference works, with substantial sections on the Antarctic, but nowhere in their indexes could he find any allusion to a place called Leng. Even a quick scan through the general encyclopedias and atlases failed. Disappointed, but knowing he couldn't afford to waste too much time, Nick strolled back to the main door… only to stop in his tracks. Just to the right of where he'd come in, sandwiched between two filir g cabinets, there was another desk, and on top of it a computei terminal.

  Nick turned to the librarian. “Excuse me, are you on the Net here?”

  She looked at him over her glasses. “We are… are you wanting to use it?”

  “If I can.”

  She came cautiously over, eyeing his tracksuit pants and sweatshirt.
/>   “I promise I won't damage anything,” he said, showing her his warrant card.

  She didn't seem convinced, but booted up the machine anyway. “I'm afraid we have to charge for this,” she said, as the search engine intro appeared on screen. “It's one pence a minute.”

  “Fine,” Nick said, knowing he didn't have a penny on him, but determined somehow to busk it.

  He pulled a chair up and sat down. The m ament the woman left him, he typed in a general search on the word Leng.

  Several seconds passed, then a single refe ence appeared. It was a link to a website entitled Lost Places, Forbidden Cities.

  Nick felt a surge of adrenaline. He followed the link, and a moment later was staring at a wall of arcane frescoes. A variety of additional links appeared across them. One of these read: Leng. Nick clicked on it. At first nothing happened, but then a chunk of text materialized:

  LENG: Fabled seat of an ancient civilization, now lost. On a par with Atlantis, Lemuria, and Shangri-La, Leng was reputedly a city of awesome might and magnificence, and the capital of a thriving prehistoric empire, the traces of which exist only in scraps of myth and rumor. In keeping with the tradition, there are few certainties about where Leng was supposedly located, or even whether it existed at all. Scholars have placed it on a vast and otherwise barren plateau, in regions as far apart as central Asia, east Africa, and even the wild wastes of Antarctica…

  Nick knew he was on to something, though it still seemed too incredible to be real.

  According to legend, Leng was old even when the Mi-noans flourished, and was neither constructed nor inhabited by any of the ancient world's known peoples. Written references to it can be found on a papyrus dated to Egypt's Middle Kingdom (2000-1750 B.C.), in ancient Sanskrit tablets retrieved in the Indus Valley by Wheeler in 1944, and in the mysterious and tantalizingly incomplete series, the Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan, currently residing in the library of the Miskatonic University, U.S.A.…

  Nick sat back. Hsan! He'd seen a reference to Hsan before. And he knew where. Again, he recalled the eldritch volumes on the shelves at Halkin Grange.

  Just then, there was a deafening crash from the far end of the library, as if some huge piece of furniture had been thrown over. Nick whirled around in his chair. Deep shadows filled the library's farthest recesses; the stained-glass windows threw curious pink-and-green patterns through the aisles of dusty books. Nothing moved, however. Nick glanced toward the librarian's desk, but found it vacant, which meant she was probably the one who'd made the noise.

  Nick turned back to the rows of shelves. “Everything okay?” he called.

  The librarian didn't respond.

  But something else did… something wet and squishing, like a person walking in sodden shoes, but a person of tremendous size and weight. Nick rose slowly to his feet, eyes scanning the vast chamber. With a sudden bang, an entire rack of books fell over… and then he saw it.

  It was only a glimpse, but he felt his scalp start to prickle, because whatever it was, creeping stealthily forward, it was indeed an “it.” Though it was nebulous in the shadows, still half-hidden by shelving, Nick had no doubts. … In his mind's eye, he perceived every inch of it: its massiv2 trunklike body, the myriad arms that roiled about it in muscular, octopoid fashion. For an incredible moment, he thought he was looking at the hydra, the seven-headed monster from his favorite childhood film, Jason and the Argonauts, but this was no beast of heraldry or classical myth. This was something worse. Far worse.

  Its sickly, sulfurous stench rolled forward t3 engulf him… and even as it did, books began to shoot from their shelves as if projected by catapults, not one or two; more a deluge. Teleki-netic firepower launched volley after volley at him. They crashed across the desks with frightening force, slamming loudly into the wall. Those that struck Nick dealt painful blows. Even so, he was too transfixed by the swaying shadow-shape to duck or dodge. Only when something the thickness of a Bible smacked him on the nose and burst it wide open did he become alert to this second danger.

  Almost drunk with shock, he stumbled toward the library door, but it slammed itself shut before he cculd reach it. He grappled with the handle, but it remained jammed upward as if by an invisible bar. Behind him, the slithering thing came closer… perhaps halfway up the library. Nick could sense its bulk, could hear its nauseating squelch. With a thundering roar, more cases of shelving overturned, more fluttering missiles precipitated forward. One hit the computer, dislodging the monitor from its plinth. It fell heavily to the floor, exploding in a shower of sparks and circuitry.

  Nick beat madly on the door. A book struck the back of his hand with numbing force. Another caught him midthigh, inducing a dead-leg. He doubled over. He wanted to throw himself down, to shield his head with his arms, to whimper and scream. But to do that, he knew, would be to invite death… not only from the books, which still rained down like birds of prey, but from this blasphemous monstrosity, this daemonic invader that now filled the cavernous room from floor to ceiling. Its shadow was black as night, its stench a miasmic gas that choked off his air supply and glazed his eyes with peppery tears.

  Another book—a huge ledger with a wood-reinforced spine— cracked him square on the temple. A bomb went off in Nick's head. He knew nothing more.…

  7

  The man was in a great and echoing hall, the distant ceiling of which was hung with icicles. A rolling carpet of mist obscured its immense floor, but he strode forward all the same; the chill, it seemed, held neither agony nor fear for him, even though he was naked. A high portal stood to his left, a casement, he realized. It was unglazed, and beyond it, snowflakes blizzarded over warped roofs and twisted towers. Beyond those lay only a searing glacial whiteness.

  Even then, the man was unaffected by cold. He walked on, in zombie fashion. Lowering through the gloom toward him came a lofty archway. Again, it was misshapen, oddly angled, too ill-proportioned to be designed for human use, even a human of gigantic stature. The man passed through it all the same and sensed that he'd entered an even larger chamber, one to which there were no visible limits.

  Even in this dream state, the man felt faint heady, his vision blurring. Slowly, however, the frozen fog began to shift, so that a titantic throne—carved, it seemed, from purest ice—swam into view. And on that throne squatted an abomination from beyond the man's worst imaginings… something that was both squid and toad, yet mountainous in bulk. Glistening with odorous slime, it was punctuated by innumerable quivering vents from which brown, sulfurous steam exhaled. Folded to either side of it there were four sets of limbs… spindly, yet jointed and clawed and bristling with fibrous hair, like the legs of some loathsome, colossal spider.

  At the first sight of it, the man felt his sanity reel. The horror of what he beheld was too appalling to conceive. Goose pimples ran over his skin, his hair prickled like thorns.… He wanted to shriek hysterically, to cry out so hard that his lungs might rupture, but a stonelike paralysis had seized him. He could only gape and stare, goggle-eyed, at the repellent being, and as he did, it stared back… one gelid orb winking open after another all over its miscreated form. More hideous yet, from some central lower portion of it, a grotesque object raised itself up in proud erection, a rigid shaft of blue-veined muscle, two feet long at least, nobbed and gristled and slick with mucus.

  The man felt his gorge rise at the very sight of it, but now some force, some irresistible power compelled him forward… good Lord, to possess this abhorrent thing, to accommodate it, to nourish himself on its vile fluids.…

  He awoke with a start, and immediately found himself under a restraining belt. Somewhere close by, there was a rumbling and rattling sound. Vaguely, Nick could sense motion.

  “What… what the hell?” he mumbled.

  “Take it easy,” came a woman's voice. “You've had a nasty bump.”

  “Where am I?” Nick asked.

  Even though he was lying down, his vision was fuzzy. It felt as if someone was hammering
a spike into the side of his skull. The woman came into view. She was handsome and blond, wearing a white paramedic's smock. She also had rubber gloves on and was holding a wad of bloodstained cotton wool. “You're on your way to the hospital,” she said.

  “What… happened?”

  “Try to relax.”

  Nick drifted back out of consciousness, and for several carefree moments was afloat in a void filled with crow-black feathers. Then he realized he was waking again. Daylight flooded his vision. Weakly, he tried to sit up, and this time he was able to; for some reason, the restraining belt had been removed, though by the looks of things he was still in the ambulance. It was a narrow, low-roofed compartment with double doors at one end. Woolen blankets had been laid over him; a tray, laden with medical equipment, sat to one side.

  Nick probed gingerly at his wounded temple and found a thick dressing, held in place by surgical tape. A minute passed, then he swung his feet to the floor and shifted slowly along the bed to the doors, pushing them open. He'd expected to see a hospital parking lot, perhaps the entrance to an ER unit; what he actually saw… was Long Meg and Her Daughters.

  The ambulance was parked in the very center of the stone circle.

  Nick felt a thrill of fear. He climbed quickly down onto the grass, though he was still groggy and at first he almost toppled over. He grabbed at the ambulance door to support himself, but in that same instant the vehicle growled to life and pulled sharply away. Nick gazed helplessly after it as it drove out of the circle and bumped its way across the pasture to the farm track, whereupon it vanished downhill.

  A few moments later, its engine faded away to silence. Nick didn't think he'd ever felt so lonely or vulnerable. He looked around at the obelisks. Beyond them, the late afternoon sun embossed the sward in dusty gold. Then he found himself searching for the crime scene, which by rights should now be roofed with tarpaulin and have a uniformed officer guarding it. There was no sign even of the pegs or tape. Only by chance did the cop glance down and spot the flattened grass below his feet. He was standing on the very spot where Caleb had been found. In knee-jerk reaction, he jumped backward, though it set his head spinning. Dizzily, he went down on one knee. Then he heard a voice … a very familiar voice.