Acolytes of Cthulhu

by Robert M. Price

  The spokesman for the group opened his eyes, and Peter saw no iris or pupil, only an empty expanse of glowing green, as when a ray of sunlight penetrates the sea water above a diver. The figure started to speak. It seemed as if he had been speaking for some time, as if someone had turned on a radio in the middle of a speech. But the content was definitely directed to him. “We know it is knowledge that you seek. The true seekers come to us sooner or later, as you have come. Here they learn the higher path, the path to the past. Which can come again. But you are special, Young Sir. The Old Ones have sent you to us for a purpose. You can help us to bring back the past of the Old Ones.”

  Peter felt he should be sitting in a posture of respect or veneration to these old saints, these elders of the community. But he was utterly empty, barely able to grasp what was being said. He lay there like a limp doll, hoping they would take no offense.

  “We know you want to learn our secrets so you may gain fame by betraying them to the outside world. That you cannot do. But you will gain your fame. You will write your book. We will tell you what you may say. Others will even be able to verify what you say. And when you have your fame, we will have it. And then we will send one to you with something else you may tell your world. It is a world that loves the drugs. Substances.” A ripple of laughter followed this.

  “In that day, maybe two, three years down the road, when you are the so-famous professor, you will tell them you have discovered something great among us. You will tell them the old island witch doctors are not so stupid. That they have chemical secrets from the rain forests. Powders that can lift the spirit, than can extend the manhood, that will shrink the fat from the white man’s ass. And it will. And it will do other things their tests will not show. And in this way, you, my son, will open their hearts to love the past of the Old Ones. And in that day you white men will sing as we sing: That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange eons, even death may die!”

  He didn’t see them leave. Maybe he had blacked out, lost consciousness even within the dream. But at length he roused again, sure by this time that he had been secretly drugged, even before being brought here to the sweat lodge. Now the fumes were making him cough. That’s it—he had coughed himself awake. There was something in the smoke that was playing hell with his sinuses, that kept him confused, too. But that, of course, was part of the regimen. It didn’t worry him unduly. But it entered his head to wonder about Metellus. Was he elsewhere in the camp, undergoing something similar?

  And then: there he was! Peter flinched with shock, as welcome as the sight of him was.

  “Peter! I made a big mistake bringing you here!” The image of his friend hovered nearby. The man must be kneeling to look into Peter’s sodden face. Peter smiled and reached out to touch the other’s shoulder in reassurance, but he could not reach him somehow.

  “No, no, Met. It’s all going well! Better than I could have… Say, that’s quite a scar you’ve got there… How’d you…?”

  The black visage, curiously dim and gray in the smoky interior of the hut, waited for Peter to compose himself, to get his thoughts straight.

  “Hear you passed your initiation rite, or test, or.. Give me a minute…”

  “Yes, mon ami, I took the Third Oath of Damballah, all right. With the Third Oath one renders oneself entirely to the Old Ones.”

  “Well, I can tell you, buddy, the Second Oath’s not s’bad! I never had such a…”

  “What about the First Oath, my friend? Did you taste the drink? The salty cup?”

  “Yes, it was blood, I know. I knew it would be. Very common in these things. Probably one of their goats.”

  “I think it was a goat named Metellus,” the black man said, closing the mouth in this face and opening the new lips of his throat into a horrible grin. “It is no mere scar. You now have my blood in you. That is why I may come to you in this manner, while your mind has been opened to the influences. I have little time left. You have little time left.”

  Peter was shaking himself awake, shruggingly gathering himself into a sitting position. His wide eyes looked on the face of his dead friend, and the greater his sobered clarity became, the dimmer the features of Metellus became. “No, Metellus, I…”

  The words came as a sourceless whisper: “You dare not leave and disobey the Old Ones now. They will not permit it. Do not openly defy them. But do not serve them. I will…” And there was no more. But Peter was now very definitely awake. His head pounded without benefit of drums. The smoke was about dispersed, which, he figured, was probably what allowed his head to clear. He lay down for a second, found that this only made his head hurt worse. So he rolled over to kneel and stand, but as he rolled, he encountered a supine form and recoiled. At first, his memories mixed up, he imagined it was the woman from a few hours before. But it wasn’t.

  He sprang backwards away from the machete-butchered carcass of Metellus. It hadn’t been just his throat. That must have been only the beginning. He hadn’t looked like this in the dream Peter had just awakened from. But he could no longer begin to guess, in this place, what was a dream and what was waking reality, or even what the difference was supposed to be. Anything was equally real, it seemed.

  He flung open the fragile door and staggered out. A semicircle of the cult elders, a couple of their musclemen, and a few little boys awaited him. His dramatic appearance caught some by surprise, awakened others. The little fellows scattered, their interest in the stranger at an end for the time being. The others, rising to meet him, seemed subtly to come too close, their chests hoisted as if to signal threat, forming a cordon around him. A strange way to treat a guest and a new brother in the faith! But they must have a pretty good idea what was going through his mind. Mustn’t he be weighing his old loyalties against his new ones? He would in a short time seal off the past and identify fully with the cult. That would be easier, of course, the longer they could keep him here among themselves, isolated from his professional colleagues and family members back home.

  He met their polite questions as to his welfare with equally empty answers. He knew he was meant to see the corpse of Metellus. It must somehow be part of the ritual experience, “the secrets of life and death.” It also no doubt stood for a warning that the same thing could happen to him should he have second thoughts. Peter thought better of expressing his sorrow and rage at the ritual murder of his friend. It could only increase their suspicion. Better for the moment to let them think, as they no doubt did, that as a white man (oh yes, they knew all right: “you white men”), he regarded Metellus merely as an expendable hireling.

  “I… saw great things. Heard great words. Words of destiny…” The older men smiled and looked at one another. He knew they had been waiting to hear something like this.

  During the long afternoon, Peter listened and took extensive shorthand notes as the oldest of the cult elders fulfilled the promise made to him, that initiation should carry the privilege of disclosure. He got an earful of the lore of the cult. There was very little about the history of the group. Life changed very little in their tiny world from year to year, even from century to century, with the exception of the disruption of slavery. But the faith could go on and did go on, with only the temporary lack of sacrifices, in the slave quarters. And occasionally they had been able to get to the swamps on certain nights. By far most of their lore concerned the Old Ones, old gods, as he already knew, but now he sat entranced with morbid fascination at tall tales and weird theogonies unlike any he had encountered in his wide study of folklore and mythology. It was a treasure trove, and a genuine ancient tradition. There was far more here than he had dreamed of when he first dared hope there might exist in remote Haiti an untapped trove.

  Most of what they told him, he was made to understand, he would be permitted to communicate to the outside world in the form of scholarly monographs. It was a sacrifice of traditional secrecy, to be sure, but even that was necessary to pave the way for the past of the Old Ones to come again. All men
must know their Masters so that they might render them a fitting welcome when the great day came. Peter understood that there were yet greater arcana to which his two degrees of initiation did not yet entitle him, and of these he dared not ask, nor were the elders likely to permit them to be spread abroad.

  Nor was Peter especially eager to advance farther along on the cult’s path of discipleship, given what he knew had happened to poor Metellus at the climax of his initiation. He kept thinking of those last words his friend’s shade had uttered in the dream vision. He had left him a dilemma, a riddle. He dared not give any sign of resisting or renouncing his role in their insane conspiracy, yet neither could he afford to become their accomplice, really their puppet, in it. He waited, as if for a signal he knew could never come: a signal from a dead man.

  The catechism went on for days and then weeks. He could hardly imagine there was so much to the religion! It must be ancient indeed for the legendry to have become so complex, so fulsome, so baroque! There was no way of knowing how old the belief was. Their own lore said that it went back, of course, to the Old Ones themselves, and that they had come to this planet from somewhere else entirely. But here history had shaded off into mythology. The true story would never be known. Peter found he was beginning to think like an anthropologist again. He found himself, as he looked over his notes by firelight each evening, musing over possible methodologies to make sense of the seemingly confused symbols and myths. He felt even Levi-Strauss would find himself outwitted by these old myth-mongers! Well, one thing anyway: if he managed to get out of here alive and unharmed, he had more than enough for a monograph, no, a series of them that would make Victor Turner’s famous studies of the Ndembu look like a kid’s description of a birthday party!

  If only he could leave it at that. But a dark pall hung over him. There was little chance, he now realized, that they would hinder his return to the outer world (he once would have called it “the real world,” but who knew what that was anymore?). Indeed, his role in their plan depended on that. But how many more atrocities must he be implicated in before he left? Back home, he could put that part of it out of his mind. Cultural relativism and all: who was he, a Westerner, to judge their ancient customs? And so on. But there was a ritual tonight in which the Old Ones would be invoked, and believers would receive their expected foretaste of the ecstasy of the past of the Old Ones, a past which now looked closer than ever to returning, thanks to their new brother. He knew he could not stand seeing any more of the poor wretches picked out of the crowd to die in a bloody holocaust as part of the ritual. Yes, he now remembered all too well what had transpired on that first night.

  He had a seat of honor alongside the ranks of shamans and bocors inside the circle. Behind him gathered a number of children, whom he hated to contemplate seeing what he feared they would see, though he knew they must be hardened to it by now. Peter was a favorite of the children, especially as his skin, free of the dye, had begun to lighten and lighten, until it approached very nearly its original hue. This fascinated the children, who followed him around like baby ducks.

  The time came, and soon, as he feared, one of the priests began to intone the familiar invocations. He was interested to note that, even though they no longer had to be judicious in the presence of outsiders, the crowed persisted in the ancient formula, calling on the names of the vodun deities that masked the terrible entities they actually served. He knew that traditions endure even absent their original rationale. So here came the names: Legba, Ogoun, Erzulie, Damballah, Samedhi…

  As before, the crowd’s enthusiasm was pent and building. But suddenly something surprised them. Something was going on at the rear of the circle. Peter craned his neck, trying to see over the shoulders of the old men. In a moment he could tell that the same thing, whatever it was, was going on all around the outer perimeter. Instinctively, he turned to his young entourage, gathered behind him, and sternly told them in his clearest Creole to get out, go to their homes, even out of the village, now.

  The commotion was building. He could hear numerous physical impacts—bodies falling? Crowds clashing in battle? Was a riot beginning? Were some already intoxicated? Screaming began, and not just screams of alarm or of pain. There were shrieks of holy terror that ripped through the cotton humidity of the jungle night. Peter was on his feet, moving around aimlessly, uncertain what to do. If it was a fight, what side should he be on? How could a company of men approach the compound undetected? He began to slip on skids of blood on the packed ground, then to trip over bodies. A bloody harvest was progressing with amazing speed. He guessed that he, too, would momentarily fall under the scythe. Lanterns swung wildly and were extinguished. Torches bobbed and some went out. Some were swung as weapons, but ineffectively.

  Suddenly, in the midst of the melee, Peter was sure that his sweat-stinging eyes glimpsed the impossible visage of Metellus, his livid gash gaping. But the gross wound did nothing to impede his prowess with the machete. He hacked and hacked without the fatigue of the living. Dead, he had himself become the Grim Reaper. But he did not fight alone. Like a gang of laborers chopping down jungle growth to clear a field or the path for a road, there was a whole crew of forms wielding knives, clubs, machetes. All silent. None of their faces was visible given the bad lighting. But the nearest one seemed incongruously to be sporting a top hat and sunglasses over a gaunt form one would not have thought sturdy enough to inflict the blows he was dealing.

  The bocors and cult priests, taken by surprise, began to rally. They had no earthly weapons, but Peter could see their hands and arms flailing as if they bore deadly cudgel and sword. He knew they must be conjuring. It looked like superstitious pantomime, but Peter could tell something was happening because of what he heard, or thought he heard. He seemed to catch the echoes of explosions without the explosions themselves. Aftershocks of invisible eruptions. Something was occurring on a plane he could not see. But whatever it was, it had little effect on the invaders. One or two seemed to vanish, not to fall smitten, but just to disappear. But then perhaps they were leaving of their own accord now that the massacre was near its end. In the hacking fury of Metellus’s vengeance, with the aid of his mysterious hosts, tattooed heads flew like coconuts in a windstorm. Blood rained down, and Peter found himself spitting it out as he could not prevent a good deal of it entering his nose and mouth. Indeed, there seemed a red fog which made him gag and cough till he thought his lungs would burst.

  He made for the edge of the clearing, where he could see the terrified yet curious young faces following the whole ghastly business. Their eyes grew even wider, if possible, as he approached, a wild and terrifying sight, he knew. But once he was upon them, and they kept looking past him, he knew another was the object of their gaze, and he turned to face it. It was Metellus. He gave a look to his dripping machete and cast it away, into the trees. He extended an arm toward Peter, but when the latter made a move to join him, Metellus waved him off. He tried to say something, but there was no sound, and Peter could not read his lips. He knew it was a final parting gesture, though. And then there was no one.

  Peter’s ears felt the pressure of sudden and total silence. None of the adults could have survived. But neither were their conquerors anywhere to be seen. Yet he knew where they were: wherever Metellus was. The true loa had taken their revenge, and Metellus had shared in it. As for him, Peter knew what he must do next. He would round up the newly orphaned children of the village and, with them in tow, begin the long journey back down the mountainside to the cottage. A few could return with him to town in the Jeep; the rest could be picked up by the authorities. He hoped they could all find homes, and anything would have to be an improvement.

  He paused for a moment, looking in the direction of his hut. His papers and notes were there, even a tape recording or two. His book, yet unwritten, was there. His career was there. But now who would believe any of it? The myths and rituals of a small community—now all dead in a massacre? A massacre he alone had survived? How w
ould any of that look? He turned his back on the village, counted the children, and started for the foot path.

  THE JEWELS OF CHARLOTTE

  BY DUANE RIMEL

  “YOU WILL PERHAPS QUESTION MY STORY OF INCIDENTS which occurred in the mouldering old town, but I think they will be of interest nonetheless.” Constantine Theunis leaned back in his chair luxuriously.

  We were seated in his elaborate parlor before a crackling fireplace blaze. The lights were extinguished, and a chill autumn wind howled eerily about the house, giving a threat of snow. But the flickering shadows and austere atmosphere were secondary to Theunis himself. Lighting his pipe, he gazed steadily at the roaring flames, clearly deep in thought. He had asked me over to hear a story of some sort—the exact nature of which he had not yet explained.

  “You remember my vacation in July, Single?”

  “Of course,” I replied, recalling that the old town he spoke of must be Hampdon, where he had for a week visited in search of solitude and antiques.

  “While there, a peculiar train of events occurred which I’ve been keeping quiet all this time. Two federal agents, a sheriff and myself were the only ones who dug into the whole thing—they from duty and I from curiosity; and we found—but first I must go back a bit.

  “As you know, Hampdon is a most curious mixture of the new and the old; that being one reason for my sojourn there. It is an isolated place, stuck down between forbidding hills and inhabited by natives who believe every bit of gossip that comes to their ears. They do not exactly welcome strangers, and my arrival at the hotel was not a very pleasant occasion. But I wished to look over some of the stone carvings near the village and explore a bit in the nearby caverns. For five days I had a splendid time, absorbing an abundance of good mountain air, peering into the hillside caverns and soaking in some local gossip as well. On every hand I heard mutterings of varied description, subdued whispers which seemed to occupy the whole time of the village wits and loafers. My efforts to persuade some of them to confide in me met with failure—in fact, at times, they appeared to resent even my presence. The landlord was noticeably sullen, and never seemed to care whether the meals were served or not.