Acolytes of Cthulhu

by Robert M. Price

  I revived shortly before dawn, groggy at first, then wide awake. The paralysis and pain had left me; now I experienced a wild desire to run, to leave the damned campsite. I loped to the brush near the river and lay amid the wet leaves expecting the reappearance of the awful Thing at any moment. Thoughts of Prester Varnum, the curse of Pauquatoag on the Varnum house, and the empty grave seethed through my mind, dominated by the image of that inexorable blue nimbus moving across the clearing and through the fire like a mad surrealist’s rendering of the Angel of Death.

  With the coming of dawn I returned to the campsite and hurriedly packed the more important gear and the precious rolls, leaving the tents and utensils to rot away. I paused briefly at the burial ground to pack the few cases of unprocessed rolls I had left there. Then I rode headlong through the forest, toward Dunstable, as fast as the pack horses and Varnum’s riderless mount would permit.

  A cloying fear hung over the town where I arrived after a two-day journey. Work had halted at the mill. The inhabitants gathered in tight knots along the main street. At the police office the Sheriff of Sussex County was talking with the district coroner. Varnum’s body had been found that morning in the millpond, borne like the animal corpses on the flood of the Penaubsket.

  Given the circumstances of his death, I chose to edit my statement—the events of that night seemed too fantastic to be believed. Accordingly, I reported that I had heard Varnum screaming in the underbrush as he ran toward the river, and that he had apparently tumbled down the bank in his frenzy and drowned.

  The officials received my statement with no sign of disbelief. We walked to the local undertaking parlor to view the corpse. Although in the water for only thirty-six hours, the body was badly mangled from snagging on obstacles in the Penaubsket. However, it was unmistakeably Varnum, but with the remains of his face twisted into an uncannily ironic smile, a true risus sardonicus. The areas of unscratched flesh were covered with numerous reddish weals and puckers.

  The coroner saw me stiffen at the sight of the marks. He tapped the cold flesh with his pencil. “Bee stings,” he said. “He must have tramped down on a bee nest, and run from them down the bank into the river.” His tone was that of a man disbelieving his own diagnosis. I nodded my head in false agreement, for I had seen such marks once in Alexandria. They were unmistakeably the first tokens of smallpox.

  On the following morning I ended my stay in Dunstable, not wishing to remain for the funeral of a man who had perished in such a loathsome manner before my eyes. As I sat in the passenger coach lurching southward toward Boston and civilization, I mused over the events at the burial ground as if they were dreams remembered from the delirium of an illness. But they were real enough, as real as the pictographs in the baggage car, recording the extinction of the tribe and the curse on the Varnum house. Thinking of this I wondered who would believe me if I ever let it be known that on the morning after Varnum’s death, while collecting the rolls at the burial ground, I saw at the very bottom of the open grave a faint area of bone-colored powder outlining the form of a man, and knew that after three centuries, Pauquatoag of the Massaquoits had come to rest.

  THE CRIB OF HELL

  BY ARTHUR PENDRAGON

  WHAT DARK SECRET HAD DRIVEN LAURENCE CULLUM TO THE edge of nervous hysteria? What unutterable obligation had forced him to cry out for succor like an agonized madman? These and other questions relevant to the desperate condition of the master of Cullum House perplexed Doctor Nathan Buttrick as he clucked his team homeward through Penaubsket Bridge on the fringe of Sabbathday in northern New England. In other circumstances, he might have been dozing, lulled by the cries of the nighthawks aloft and the peace of an upland twilight. But now, although his body craved sleep, his mind was vitally awake.

  Doctor Buttrick was baffled by the peculiar malady which made each day a living horror for Cullum. All of the sedatives of the 1924 pharmacopeia had failed to quell the anxiety which gnawed at the mind of his patient. In his frustration at the failure of the tablets and injections, the physician had even resorted to folk remedies whispered by black-gummed grandmothers in the hills back from the sea. Infusions of tea and henbane, petals of amaryllis held under the tongue—he had tried all the high-country nostrums which once he held in professional scorn. They were as futile in calming Cullum as the most advanced drugs the age could offer.

  As the feeble lights of Sabbathday came into view around the granite mass of Gallowglass Hill, Buttrick reviewed once again the particulars of the case. Laurence Cullum, age 47. Afflicted with a cerebral aneurism, a soft patch in a brain artery which might burst tomorrow, in five years, or never. He was the last of the Cullum line, a prominent family begun by Draper Cullum, the leader of the 1706 expedition which struck northward from Dunstable to find, on an August Sunday, the protected harbor on the North Atlantic around which would grow the seacoast town of Sabbathday.

  The Cullums had always been influential in the town, yet oddly retiring. Laurence was the most hermitic of the lot. Since the death of his sister Emma and the diagnosis of his aneurism, he had shut himself up in the gray New England Gothic mansion at the end of Windham Road. His controlling hand was still felt on many of the town’s business affairs, but this was merely the ghost of the man. His physical presence was sequestered behind the grotesque archway of Cullum House—two enormous jawbones of a sperm whale, erected during the tenancy of the last patriarch, Captain Hugh.

  These facts and the few pleasantries that Buttrick had exchanged with Cullum during the man’s infrequent visits to town were all that the doctor knew of the Cullum heir before treatments for the aneurism began. Except for the grim scene on the night of Emma’s death two years before. The physician had been in attendance, accompanied by Cullum and most of the household staff. Buttrick would never forget the last words of Emma, spoken as she clutched her brother’s arm in a white-knuckled hand.

  “Laurence, you will keep—the guardianship?”

  “I—I shall, my dear,” Cullum replied as a mad, trapped look appeared in his eyes. Then the life of the frail spinster eked out its last heartbeat, and Buttrick’s usefulness had ended.

  The doctor heard nothing of Laurence Cullum for a year and a half after his sister’s demise. Then came the midnight telephone call. Buttrick rolled groggily from his bed, expecting a summons to the side of any one of three wives who were awaiting childbirth. Instead, he was shocked into full awareness by an almost hysterical voice begging him to administer relief. Although years of medical practice had somewhat jaded his sensibility to human pain, Buttrick heard a voice so filled with a frantic tension that the listener himself became afraid in an unconscious resonance with the pleading tones. He whipped his team across the surly Penaubsket River and along Windham Road, guided only by the chill light of a three-quarter moon. At the end of the headlong ride he found Cullum in a state of extreme anxiety within the mouldering drawing room of the mansion. The earpiece of the telephone was still off its hook as the man cowered in a great wing chair, whimpering like an injured child in shocking contrast to the manliness of his six-foot frame.

  Although he was wrapped in a dressing gown, Cullum’s trouser cuffs bore traces of drying mud.

  Buttrick quickly administered the standard dosage of a sedative. It had no effect. A second injection calmed Cullum, or rather removed the physical manifestations of his hysteria. But even as the drug subdued his trembling, Cullum retained a spark of horror in his eyes.

  Repeatedly Buttrick questioned the sufferer about the cause of his alarming discomposure. And each time the gaunt-faced Cullum had burrowed deeper into the plush of the wing chair, mumbling under the sedation, “Can’t say—mustn’t say. No one must ever know. The guardianship!” Despite himself the physician felt a growing fear at the recurrence of that ominous term first uttered in his hearing by the dying lips of Emma Cullum.

  At last the opiate calmed the man’s chaotic nerves. With the aid of Amadee, an aged Acadian man-servant, the doctor wrestled the drugge
d weight onto a settee near the fire. He left a vial of tablets with the servant, and the assurance that he would visit his master on the next day. Then Buttrick returned to town exhausted physically but unable to quell the incessant questioning of his curiosity. What event or obsession could explain the mental disintegration of Cullum? What arcane significance had that curious term muttered by Laurence even in his narcotic stupor?

  During the months of treatment which followed the first nighttime summons, the doctor had learned little else about the trouble at Cullum House. He had diagnosed the aneurism, but was certain that his patient’s extreme nervousness and loss of weight were by no means related to his physical affliction. Rather there was some obligation, burden, perhaps something in the house itself, under whose presence the mind of the Cullum heir was slowly crumbling.

  Besides the strange term spoken by both Emma and Laurence, there was one other fact which increased the peculiarity of the case. Buttrick had noticed that Cullum always avoided approaching a large tapestry hanging in the drawing room, another remnant of the patriarchy of Captain Hugh. The subject and rendition were unsettling at first glance—a highly realistic depiction of a Witches’ Sabbath. The naked bodies of cabalistic women were ruddy in the glow from a fire which also illumined a bleeding victim. After a few visits, Buttrick had inured himself to the grisly scene. But Cullum would never pass within five feet of the cloth. Sometimes the doctor had the uncomfortable conviction that his patient was listening to the tapestry, as though hearing the whickering laughter of the coven.

  Gradually Buttrick resigned himself to the frustration of trying to quell a malady of the spirit by chemical means. A difficult task, at best. With such a secretive, uncooperative patient, it was almost an impossibility.

  Such were the reflections of the toil-worn leech of Sabbathday as he reined his team before the weathered frame bungalow from which his father had practiced before him. After stabling the horses he ate a light supper, then willingly gave himself to his mattress with a sighed hope that no major illnesses or accidents would befall the populace of the village that night. His last conscious thought was not a prayer to his Creator, but a mindless repetition of the eldritch phrase so full of puzzlement and, in Emma’s tones, a taint of evil: “The guardianship.”

  In late afternoon of the following day Buttrick stood beneath the whale-jaw archway of Cullum House, marvelling at the curving bone monoliths of this striking manifestation of the family’s eccentricity. It was one of the two days of the week on which Cullum was treated both for his aneurism and for the frenzy attacking his nerves. Amadee was waiting behind the door. He ushered the doctor into the dank coolness of the mansion. Once inside the entry-way, the aged Acadian drew close to Buttrick and seized his elbow in a surprisingly strong grip, a liberty he had never before taken.

  “M’sieur le docteur,” he said hoarsely, “do not be surprise’ if the master, he tell to you some strange thing’ today.” There was a smile on the seamed lips, but the coldness of Amadee’s eyes removed all traces of amiability from his manner. “It is some time now that the master, he has been saying strange thing’ that you should not believe. C’est la maladie—it is the sickness, nothing more.”

  Buttrick was repelled by the servant’s familiarity. During his visits to the house he had found Amadee a strange figure, given to eavesdropping impassively as Cullum made pitiful attempts at conversation with his physician. For some inexplicable reason, the presence of the Acadian always put Buttrick on his guard as though the stooped valet carried with him a hint of evil. Certainly the man added to the foreboding gloom of Cullum House.

  Buttrick pried his arm out of Amadee’s grip and strode quickly into the drawing room. As was his habit, Cullum was seated as far away from the tapestry as was physically possible. He rose unsteadily as the doctor entered the room.

  “So—so good of you to come, Nathan,” he said. Although his mind was on the verge of splintering into a thousand shards of madness, automatically the heir preserved the vestiges of a courtesy reserved for calmer spirits.

  Buttrick placed his bag on a richly damasked ottoman, inspecting his patient’s appearance with a quick, professional glance. He was appalled by Cullum’s decline since the last visit. The man was wrapped in a crimson sitting-robe that seemed made for a larger frame, so grievously had his body wasted under the bearing of his mental burden. The eyes were preternaturally bright, staring from dark sockets. Cullum nervously plucked at the cord of the gown with a hand which shocked Buttrick by its resemblance to Emma’s—blanched, and with yellowed nails. The doctor had seen patients harboring within them vile malignancies fall into such decay. But Cullum’s dissolution was the result of a mental cancer which threatened to destroy both mind and body. It was moot which—soul or flesh—would perish first.

  Now the man seemed inflamed by a strange eagerness. He motioned Buttrick to close his bag, and cleared his throat nervously.

  “I fear, Nathan, that I have not been the best of patients. All your medications, all your attentions—useless.” He dismissed them with a wave of his blue-veined hand. “Nothing will relieve me. Nothing can ease the weight of this hideous charge I labor under…” Cullum stopped briefly and seemed to listen to the tapestry. Recovering his train of thought, he continued. “Unless—unless I somehow ease my mind of this guardianship!” He spat the word out in mingled tones of fear and loathing.

  “Unless I tell the secret I shall die, and the secret shall die with me. And if I tell the secret, the secret shall die, and I shall die with it. Almost a conundrum, eh Buttrick? A true gnomic riddle, eh my friend?”

  The physician rose to steady Cullum, for his speech was assuming the peculiar cadence of madness. The man rallied, mumbling, “Not yet—not yet.” In a moment his face took on a grave cast as he spoke in cooler, more ominous tones.

  “You must have suspected, Nathan, that the cause of my agony was exceedingly strange. The aneurism,” he tapped his temple, “it is nothing. We Cullums have suffered more unusual maladies than that. My trouble lies deeper than the fragile flesh.” The heir paused reflectively, then continued. “I—I have stood it as long as I could, endured under this hideous burden longer than I thought possible. I am not as strong as Emma was. Not so much of a Cullum, perhaps. She was like my father, Captain Hugh, amazingly strong-willed. The secret of our family horror—I know no other name for it—was safe with her while she lived. But I—two years, man! Two years of ceaseless anxiety. And the last few months have been a waking terror!”

  Buttrick had been engrossed by Cullum’s narration. But suddenly he started. A sound, a muffled moan or cry, had issued from the direction of the cabalistic tapestry. Cullum saw the doctor’s apprehensive glance.

  “Not yet, my friend. Later you shall know all. For now, Nathan, hear me out.” He flicked his hand at Amadee, who was loitering in the door of the drawing-room. “That will be all, Amadee. Go to your duties.” The Acadian shuffled reluctantly into the bowels of the house. When his footsteps no longer sounded off the flaking walls of the passage, Cullum resumed his monologue.

  “It is now time, Nathan, that you knew the well-kept secret of this house, for I shall tell you or die in the attempt. Only by sharing this intolerable weight have I any chance of keeping my sanity.” His lips trembled as he fought to maintain calmness. “It is n-not easy to disburden oneself of such knowledge, but I must, despite the warning, or I shall most surely go mad. Be patient, Nathan, and let me tell it in my own way.”

  Buttrick settled uneasily into a sofa. For a moment he felt a sudden impulse to deny Cullum the opportunity to tell his tale. Why should he, Nathan Buttrick, participate in this secret? His precinct was the body, not the diseased mind. With its austere inhabitants and wild setting between the forest wastes and the sullen North Atlantic, Sabbathday was eerie enough without compounding it by a knowledge of the secret of Cullum House.

  But gradually Buttrick’s professional instincts exerted themselves. If Cullum did not gain some mental reli
ef, either the torments he underwent would render him mad, or his aneurism would burst under the strain. The doctor settled back and accepted a dark sherry from his patient’s trembling hand.

  “Nathan,” said Cullum, “have you ever heard the name—Ligea?”

  “Ligea was the… second wife, I believe, of your father, Captain Hugh,” answered Buttrick.

  “Yes, if she can be called—a wife!”

  Immediately Buttrick knew the reason for Cullum’s bitter statement. The doctor had been only a child when Ligea came to Sabbathday, yet the bizarre tales the townspeople told about her were preserved in his memory. After the death of his first wife, the mother of Laurence and Emma, Captain Hugh Cullum had consigned his children to the care of a relative. He then embarked on his last voyage as master of the steamer Ogunquit to the Baltic port of Riga. When he returned to Sabbathday almost two years later, he brought with him the numerous spoils of Yankee trading and a mistress for Cullum House, the dark Ligea.

  Grotesque rumors about this woman soon sprang up amidst the villagers. Perhaps some originated in the mouths of goodwives who envied her exotic charms. For Ligea was oddly beautiful—a tall woman, with a luminous Eastern complexion, sinuous in her movements, heavily accented in her speech. Ligea’s most distinctive feature was her long raven hair of a black deeper than the northern forest night.

  Whatever their origin, the stories about Ligea soon were the common coin of conversation around the hearths of Sabbathday. It was said that she had brought the nighthawks to Cullum House. Before her coming, these nocturnal flyers had soared only over the backlands far from town. Now they roosted in the trees of the estate, trembling the night air with the beat of wings.

  More serious, some reported that Ligea had been seen on Walpurgis Night wantoning naked through the woods at the fringe of town. One individual who had been abroad at that hour swore that a glowing cloud had passed in from the sea over Sabbathday, and that voices could be heard mumbling in strange tongues from within the floating mass. An ancient dame who dwelt alone near Gallowglass Hill averred that Ligea had spent many afternoons with the few Indian sachems still alive, the degenerate remainder of the Pequot tribe. This nearly extinct race, it was said, held powers over air and sea.