Acolytes of Cthulhu

by Robert M. Price

  “Don’t call the police, Jim! Listen to me. I wasn’t going to steal it, Jim. I’d have been gone with it long ago if I had intended to steal it. Honest! Let me tell you, Jim. It’s one of Solomon’s jars, all right. I was only going to open it. Good Lord, man, haven’t you ever read about them? Listen, Jim, haven’t you ever heard those old Arabian legends? Let me tell you about them, Jim—”

  As he spoke, Denning had descended the stairs. He stepped into the room and seized Halpin by the shoulders and angrily shook him.

  “Quit babbling, Halpin. Don’t act like a damned fool. I guess the jar and its contents are still mine. Come on, snap out of it and tell me what this is all about.”

  Halpin swallowed his panic and sighed.

  “There are old Arabian and Hebrew legends, Jim, that speak of a group or class of beings called Jinn. A lot of the stuff about them is claptrap, of course, but as near as we can make out, they were a kind of super-being from some other plane of existence. Probably they were the same things that other legends have called the Elder Ones, or the Pre-Adamites. Perhaps there are a dozen names for them if they are the same beings that appear in myths of other countries. Before the time of man, they ruled the world; but fighting among themselves and certain conditions during the Glacial Period caused them to become almost extinct, here on this earth. But the few that were left caused damage enough among men until the time of King Solomon.

  “Arabian legend says that Solomon was the greatest of all kings, and from an occult standing I guess he was, in spite of the fact that the kingdom he ruled over was little more than a jerk-water principality, even in that age. But Solomon’s occult knowledge was great enough to enable him to war on the Jinn and to conquer them. And then, because it was impossible to kill them (their metabolism is entirely different from ours), he sealed them up into jars and cast the jars into the depths of the sea!”

  Denning was still dense.

  “Halpin, you’re not trying to tell me that you expect to find a Jinn in that jar, are you? You’re not such a superstitious fool as to believe—”

  “Jim, I don’t know what I believe. There’s no record of such a jar as this having ever been found before. But I know that the Elder Ones once existed and from an examination of the jar an occultist might learn much concerning—”

  While Halpin had been speaking, Denning’s eye had fallen on the jar, lying where it had tumbled at Halpin’s sudden rising. And the hair on Denning’s neck quivered with a wave of horripilation, as he stammered suddenly: “For the love of God, Halpin, look at that jar!”

  Halpin’s eyes turned at Denning’s first words and he, too, stared, unable to take his eyes off the thing that was taking place. From the mouth of the jaw was flowing, slowly, sluggishly, a thick, viscous mass of bluish, faintly luminous stuff. The mass was spreading, oozing across the floor, reaching curious curly pseudopods out in all directions, acting, not like an inert vicous body should, but like—like an amoeba under a microscope. And from it, as though it were highly volatile, curled little streamers of heavy smoke or vapor. To their ears came, almost inaudibly at first, and then more loudly, a slow deliberate “cluck—cluck—c-lu-uck” from the mass, as it spread.

  The two had forgotten their differences. Denning stepped toward Halpin and clasped his shoulder fearfully. Halpin stood like a stone statue but his breath was like that of a winded runner. And they stood there and looked and looked as that incredible jelly spread and streamed across the floor.

  I think it was the luminous quality of the mass that horrified the men the most. It had a dull bluish glow, a light of a shade that made it absolutely certain that it was not merely a reflection from the light of the flashlight which still threw its beam in a comet’s-tail across the floor. And too, it was certain properties, in the mist, for that behaved not like a normal mist, but with a sentience of its own. It floated above the room, seeking, seeking, and yet it avoided the presence of the two men as though it feared their touch. And it was increasing. It was quite apparent that the mass on the floor was evaporating, passing into the mist, and it was evident that it would soon be gone.

  “Is it—is it one of those things, Halpin?” whispered Denning, hoarsely; but Halpin answered him not at all, but only gripped his hand, tighter and tighter and tighter.

  Then the mist began a slow twirling motion and a deep sigh came from Halpin. It seemed that he was assured of something by this, for he leaned over and whispered to Denning with what seemed a certain amount of confidence: “It’s one of them, all right. Stand back by the door and let me handle it. I know a little something from the books I’ve read.”

  Denning backed away, more than a little fearful of Halpin now, seeing that the young man seemed to know something of this terrible thing, but nevertheless grateful for the suggestion. Standing there by the doorway, hoping vaguely that his traitorous legs would obey him if it became necessary to flee, he watched the dread process of materialization take place. And I think he has never quite recovered from the effects of it; for surely, at that moment, the entire philosophy of his life was changed. Denning, I have noticed, goes to church quite regularly now.

  However, as I say, he stood there and watched. Watched the smoke, or vapor, or whatever it was, whirl and whirl, faster and faster, snatching up the vagrant wisps and streamers that had strayed to the far corners of the room, sucking them in, incorporating them into the central column, until at last that column, swirling there, seemed almost solid.

  It was solid. It had ceased its whirling and stood there quivering, jelly-like, plastic, but nevertheless, solid. And, as though molded in the hands of an invisible sculptor, that column was changing. Indentations appeared here, protuberances there. The character of the surface altered subtly; presently it was no longer smooth and lustrous, but rough and scaly. It lost most of its luminosity and became an uncertain, lichenous green. Until at last it was a—thing.

  That moment, Denning thinks, was the most horrible in all the adventure. Not because of the horror of the thing that stood before him, but because at that very moment an automobile driven by some belated citizen passed by outside, the light from its headlights casting eerie gleams across the walls and ceiling; and the thought of the difference between the commonplace world in which that citizen was living, and the frightful things taking place in this room almost overcame the cowering man by the doorway. And, too, the light made just that much plainer the disgusting details of the creature that towered above them.

  For tower it did. It was, apparently, about nine feet tall, for its head quite reached the ceiling of Denning’s little room. It was roughly manlike, for it had an erect body and four limbs, two upper and two lower. It had a head and a sort of a face on it. But there its similarity to man ceased. Its head had a high ridge running from the forehead to the nape of the neck—and it had no eyes and no nose. In the place of these organs was a curious thing that looked like the blossom of a sea-anemone, and beneath that was a mouth with an upper lip that was like a protruding fleshy beak, making the whole mouth take on the semblance of a sardonic letter V.

  The front of its body had the flat, undetailed plainness of a lizard’s belly, and the legs were long, scaly and terribly scrawny. The same might be said of the arms, which terminated in surprisingly delicate, surprisingly human hands.

  Halpin had been watching the materialization with the eagerness of a hawk, and no sooner was it complete, no sooner did he notice the tautening of the creature’s muscles that indicated conscious control, than he burst out with a jumble of strange words. Now, it happens that Denning was so keyed up that his mind was tense and observant of every detail, and he clearly remembers the exact words that Halpin uttered. They are in some little-known tongue and I have failed to find a translation, so I repeat them here for any student who may care to look them up:

  “Iä, Psuchawrl!” he cried. “’Ng topuothikl Shelemoh, ma’kthoqui h’nirl!”

  At the cry, the horror moved. It stooped and took a short step toward the
uncowering Halpin, its facial rosette rose just as a man lifts his eyebrows in surprise, and then—speech came from its lips. Halpin, strangely, answered it in English.

  “I claim the forfeit,” he cried boldly. “Never has one of your kind been released that it did not grant to whoever released it one wish, were it in its power to grant it.”

  The thing bowed, actually bowed. In deep—inhumanly deep—tones it gave what was manifestly an assent. It clasped its hands over what should have been its breast and bowed, in what even the paralyzed Denning could tell was certainly mock humility.

  “Very well, then!” the heedless Halpin went on. “I want to know! That is my wish—to know. All my life I have been a student, seeking, seeking—and learning nothing. And now—I want to know the why of things, the cause, the reason, and the end to which we travel. Tell me the place of man in this universe, and the place of this universe in the cosmos!”

  The thing, the Jinni, or whatever it was, bowed again. Why was it that Halpin could not see its mockery! It clasped those amazingly human hands together, it drew them apart, and from fingertips to fingertips leaped a maze of sparks. In that maze of brilliant filaments a form began to take shape, became rectangular, took on solidity and became a little window. A silvery, latticed window whose panes were seemingly transparent, but which looked out upon—from where Denning stood, it seemed nothing but blackness. The creature’s head made a gesture and it spoke a single word—the only word which it spoke that Denning recognized.

  “Look!” it said, and obeying, Halpin stepped forward and looked through that window.

  Denning says that Halpin stared while you might have counted ten. Then he drew back a step or two, stumbled against the couch and sat down. “Oh!” he said softly—very softly, and then: “Oh, I see!” Denning says he said it like a little child that had just had some problem explained by a doting parent. And he made no attempt to rise, no comment, nor any further word of any kind.

  And the Jinni, the Elder One, demon or angel or whatever it was, bowed again and turned around—and was gone! Then, suddenly, somehow or other, Denning’s trance of fright was over, and he rushed to the light switch and flooded the room with light. An empty jar lay upon the floor, and upon the couch sat one who stared and stared into vacancy with a look of unutterable despair on his face.

  * * *

  Little more need be said. Denning called his wife, gave her a brief and distorted tale which he later amplified for the police, and spent the rest of the night trying to rouse Halpin. When morning came, he sent for a doctor and had Halpin removed to his own home. From there Halpin was taken to the state asylum for the insane where he still is. He sits constantly in meditation, unless one tries to arouse him, and then he turns on them a sad, pitying smile and returns to his musings.

  And except for that sad, pitying smile, his only look is one of unutterable despair.

  THE EARTH-BRAIN

  BY EDMOND HAMILTON

  LANDON I HAD NOT SEEN FOR TWO YEARS BEFORE THAT DAY when New York knew fear. That day is remembered yet, with its sudden and unexpected earth-tremor that shook the island shortly after noon, swaying proud towers and shaking windows to fragments and loosing a storm of panic-stricken cries that could not drown the long, grinding roll of the shifting earth beneath.

  I was in the midtown section that noon, and had been struggling through the hurrying crowds when the shock and quivering of the ground turned them suddenly into a white-faced, hoarse-voiced and terror-smitten mob. For five minutes they and all New York’s millions tasted fear as the streets quivered beneath them. Then the tremor subsided and I saw Landon.

  He was standing almost against me in the throng and his face was so strange that for a moment it held me without recognition. For Landon’s face was a mask of fear, not the panic that was passing from those about me but a fear beyond fear, a deep and alien dread. His dark eyes looked out of that white and twisted face as though into vistas of hell. And then I recognised him.

  “Clark Landon!” I cried. “Why didn’t you let me know you were back? I didn’t even know you were in the country!”

  His dark eyes surveyed me with a fixedness that chilled me. “I landed only two hours ago, Morris,” he said. “Two hours ago, and you see what has happened already.”

  “What’s the matter, Landon?” I asked anxiously. “This earth-tremor hasn’t upset you? I shouldn’t think it would bother you after the polar quake you went through—I read about it at the time.”

  “Yes, that polar quake,” he said softly. “You read that Travis and Skeel were killed in that but I wasn’t? I wasn’t killed, no; but I’ve been in all the quakes that have been racking earth since then, in Norway and Russia and Egypt, in Italy and England and now here in New York.”

  I was amazed. “Why, one would think earthquakes are following you!” I exclaimed. “But they say all these tremors and quakes are due to the big polar cataclysm you went through—they say it touched off things in some way and so caused the quakes that have been going on all over earth ever since that one.”

  “Ever since that one,” Landon repeated slowly. “Yes, they’ve been going on ever since that one.”

  He was looking beyond me, lost in a strange abstraction. By then the streets about us were near normal, the city’s millions losing their brief panic and taking up again the swift routine that even a near-earthquake could not disturb for long. Hurrying passers-by were already shouldering against the two of us.

  “Look here, Landon,” I said, “You don’t look half well at the moment. My rooms are only a few blocks from here—come up and sit a while and you’ll feel better.”

  “I’m afraid it will take more than that to make me feel better, Morris,” he said.

  Yet he came, and when we were seated at a window of my apartment with the mill-race of a cross-town street’s traffic below, he seemed to relax a little. Sitting opposite him, I strove to analyse the strange dread that still seemed holding him, but was unable to do more than to say to myself that that dread was real and that Landon had apparently changed completely.

  The Clark Landon I had known had hardly known the meaning of fear, a lithe dark fellow to whom danger spelled delight. His twin and equal interests had been geology and adventure. His inherited money had enabled him to combine the two in expeditions in which he and his inseparable comrades in science and adventure, David Travis and Herbert Skeel, had investigated the world’s far corners.

  Landon and Travis and Skeel had departed over two years before, on another such expedition, one intended to take them into the north polar region. Landon had announced their purpose as the investigation of certain geological oddities believed existent not far from the pole, but all knew that it was the lure of a new adventure that drew him and his companions as much as any hope of adding to geological knowledge.

  The three had sailed in a special ice-breaking schooner Landon had chartered, which had taken them as far as the northern shores of Grant Land. From there Landon and Travis and Skeel had started north with two dog-sledges and two Eskimos, believing that with their equipment they could reach their objectives a few hundred miles south of the pole, and return without difficulty.

  Ten days after Landon and his party started north from the ship there occurred that terrific earthquake that shook the whole polar region with unprecedented violence, and was registered by the world’s seismographs as centring not far south of the pole itself. The waiting schooner was almost destroyed, but escaped the shifting ice and continued to wait, though with scant hope, for the party.

  That first awful quake was followed in the next two weeks by a succession of less violent upheavals and tremors, trending southward. Then Landon and one of the Eskimos reappeared. The latter died the next day. Landon himself was far gone but was revived and could tell those on the ship that the great quake had indeed centred where they had been and that Travis and Skeel and the other Eskimo had perished in it. He was brought back to strength during the voyage south, and after a few na
rrow escapes from glacial fragments the ship reached Halifax.

  While Landon was at Halifax had come the sudden quake that destroyed half of the city, though he had escaped. In the succeeding two years Landon himself was forgotten, but the great polar quake he had gone through was often referred to, for earth had been torn ever since by a succession of violent quakes and upheavals. They seemed to progress from one locality to another, from Newfoundland to Norway, to Russia and Egypt and Italy and England. It was the theory of many scientists that these succeeding quakes were caused by a series of faults in earth’s structure, that had been touched off by the great polar quake Landon had gone through.

  Of Landon himself, though, I had heard nothing after his leaving Halifax, and now I was amazed at his changed appearance as he sat opposite me. He must have guessed my thoughts.

  “You think I’ve changed, Morris?” he asked. “Don’t deny it, man—I know that I have. I know what’s stamped on my face.”

  “Travis and Skeel—” I began awkwardly.

  “Travis and Skeel are dead and they’re lucky,” he said somberly. “It’s not their death that has changed me, though they were the best pals a man ever had. It’s the way they died.

  “There were three of us who went up there,” he said, gazing darkly past me. “And the third still lives. I wonder for how long?”

  “Landon, you’ve brooded too much,” I told him. “I can understand what an appalling experience that polar quake must have been to go through, but—”