Acolytes of Cthulhu

by Robert M. Price

  The more intelligent of the townsfolk dismissed these tales as fantasies. Yet all knew that Ligea exerted a strange hold on Captain Hugh. The gruff skipper was quite deferential to her in public, a far cry from his callous treatment of his first wife. There were some who even noticed more than a touch of fear in his attitude toward the tall woman whom he bore on his arm.

  However, in her public behavior the woman was impeccable—haughty of mien, knowledgeable in the social graces, distant yet polite. During the couples’ visits to town she comported herself as befitted the wife of a monied landowner. Only a few noted that occasionally she exchanged knowing glances with the most depraved of the town’s moral outcasts.

  A year after her arrival in Sabbathday, Ligea was big with child. At this time Hugh Cullum ceased his frequent visits to town and seemed to enter retirement at the end of Windham Road. The village believed that he had secluded himself in deference to his wife’s condition. Not a soul understood that behind the captain’s bluff facade lay a spirit sorely harried by some knowledge which he could impart to no other person.

  Several days after her confinement was due to end the news reached Sabbathday that both Ligea and her babe had perished in childbirth. The father of Nathan Buttrick had been in attendance. In answer to the many queries he replied that there was nothing he could have done, and divulged no other details of the tragedy. Nathan recalled that his father had been unusually silent for days after the event, as though meditating on some incomprehensible problem. Once he had told his son that if he aspired to be a physician, there was something about the Cullums that he should know in the future. But then the normal course of town life was resumed. The remains of Ligea were cremated and transported to her native land as she had wished. The small casket of the child took its place among the Cullum ancestors in the family crypt. And Nathan Buttrick never heard the Cullum secret from the lips of his father, for the man died of a heart seizure a few months later.

  “She was a witch, damn her eyes!” cried Cullum. The heir had become noticeably less calm toward the end of Buttrick’s narration of the few facts he knew of Ligea. Now a torrent of suppressed emotion broke forth. “And it is not dead, do you hear? Not dead!”

  Buttrick leapt to restrain Cullum, who seemed ready to run from the room. At the same moment a hideous clamor issued from the direction of the tapestry, a scarcely human screeching accompanied by thudding impacts as though a body were hurling itself at the wall.

  “It heard—it heard!” raved Cullum. He swung around and faced the cloth. “You cannot hold me in bondage any longer. The guardianship is at an end! At last, an end…” His final words choked off in a sob. Cullum pitched into a faint on the settee.

  The vicious sounds from the tapestry grew in intensity until the cloth and the wall behind it trembled. Amadee entered the room on the run, his features contorted with rage. Apparently he had overheard the entire scene.

  “The weak pig,” he snarled, “he has doom’ us all—we are dead men, M’sieur, dead men!” He vanished down the hall, his footsteps giving way to the grind of a heavy door being swung on its hinges. In a few moments Buttrick heard the crack of a bullwhip over the horrid ululations. A note of pain entered the screams. They tapered off into piteous whimpers, until silence returned to Cullum House.

  Buttrick knelt beside the heir, struggling to revive him. For a moment he feared the aneurism had burst. But the eyelids trembled, and slowly the man regained his senses.

  “Ah, the relief, Nathan,” Cullum sighed. “No longer a prisoner in my own house. No longer keeper of the vile heritage Emma passed on to me.”

  “Great God, Laurence,” cried Buttrick, “what have you hidden behind that wall?”

  “I could not describe it,” he answered. “Walk to the tapestry. You shall see it for yourself.”

  Buttrick moved unsteadily toward the rich cloth, his breathing suspended in anticipation of whatever was to occur.

  “Open the tapestry with the cord by your hand,” directed Cullum.

  The doctor grasped the weighted end of the cord. He closed his eyes for a moment, opened them, then tugged at the cord. The tapestry slid back smoothly across the wall. Beneath it, the wall was discolored but blank, except for a small glassed orifice at eye level. Buttrick hesitated. He glanced at Laurence, who feebly motioned to him from the settee, then fixed his eye to the peephole. A low moan escaped the physician’s lips as his hand came up to clutch his throat.

  The orifice gave a view through the thick wall into a smaller chamber behind the drawing room. Immediately opposite was a heavy steel door, with a similar peephole and a sturdy grating at the bottom through which a man might crawl, were it open. Gnawed bones and a basin of water lay before the grill, which was apparently an opening for inserting food into the chamber. A grayish light emanated from tiny clerestory windows along two sides beneath the ceiling. Knots of thread-like filaments—black, brown, and yellow—littered the floor.

  Crouched in the far corner was the tenant of this chamber, a spectre so inhuman that Buttrick’s vision momentarily blurred from the shock. It hulked panting on its hands, a living human torso, if such a distortion of man’s form can be designated thusly. Raven hair fell in hanks and tangles from a misshapen skull. Bright, feverish eyes glared out from beneath the shaggy brows. From the face projected only a rudimentary nose, its nostrils dilating as an animal would breathe. The lips were tensed in a snarl, revealing discolored teeth more like the fangs of a carnivore.

  The thing was naked save for a ragged breechclout tied about its middle. The torso showed superhuman muscular development—arms as thick as fenceposts, a barrel chest partly covered by a pelt. The lower extremities were piteously withered, dragging behind the upper body. Yet that monstrous form carried itself to and fro in the chamber with remarkable agility, supporting its weight on the arms and talon-like hands. As it lunged from one corner to the other, the creature sounded an ominous murmur from deep within its dark breast.

  “Oh my dear God,” whispered Buttrick, unbelieving before the grisly sight. He had seen men mangled by awful accidents in the logging camps, and even the pitiable distortions of infant bodies in stillbirths. But never had the physician’s entire consciousness writhed before such a gross malformation of the human body. He slumped weakly against the wall beside the peephole.

  “What is it, Laurence?” he asked. “Where—where did it come from?”

  “Now you realize the desperate burden I have carried these months, Nathan,” replied Cullum. “That thing has been in our charge since the death of my father’s second wife. It is—Ligea’s Hell-Child!”

  As he watched Buttrick’s reaction to the spectacle behind the tapestry, a transformation overcame Cullum. He seemed more in control of himself, as though the sharing of the secret with another not in the bloodline had relieved a great pressure within his spirit. Seeing Buttrick’s revulsion, Cullum had the presence of mind to fill another glass from the squat ship’s decanter and offer the stimulant to the doctor, who had moved slowly away from the wall like a sleepwalker.

  “Sit down, Nathan, and calm yourself,” ordered the heir. “I’m sure you must have many questions about our—bad seed.”

  When Buttrick had composed himself, Cullum spoke volubly about the origin of the chamber-dweller. The doctor listened as his host told him of Ligea’s dying threat to the house of Cullum. Unless they maintained her infant in secrecy until its maturity, they would perish. The Guardianship, as she called it, must be passed from member to member. Only death could release a guardian, who was responsible for the care and nourishment of the creature. They would know, Ligea said, when the child no longer needed their protection.

  Captain Hugh Cullum had always scoffed at superstitions and curses. But suddenly the occult had come under his own eaves in the presence of that incredible child, surrounded by a brooding evil even then in its infancy. He knew that he had not fathered such a monster. Gradually the conviction grew within his mind that Ligea had consorted wi
th a spirit of darkness, and that the babe was the token of their devilish love.

  Captain Hugh would allow the child no baptism. It was placed in the strong-room behind the main parlor, a chamber which the guardians came to call, sardonically, the Crib. From that time forward, the tenant of that dark room behind the tapestry was known as the Hell-Child.

  “And so, Nathan, if Ligea’s words were true, then you are listening to a dead man. The guardian who betrays the secret must die, you know.”

  “Superstitious nonsense!” cried Buttrick, who had recovered from his initial shock. “Why, look at you, man. You’re more relaxed than I’ve seen you in months. Now, Laurence, I can’t yet explain that thing in there, or why it’s survived so long despite its grave malformation. But it must have a natural explanation. I admit that at first I was shocked. It’s a hideous thing. Yet I can see nothing that you should fear in it. Perhaps we can arrange for an institution to take over its care, relieving you of the burden. As to its being a Hell-Child—really, Laurence, I’d expect this type of thinking more of an upland farmer than the Cullum heir!”

  “That is because you do not fully understand the terrible threat of the creature!” cried Cullum. “It must be destroyed, Nathan, before it can commit more of its evil. It’s just begun, I tell you!”

  Buttrick put out his hand to steady Cullum, who was becoming agitated again. “What evil? What are you talking about, Laurence?”

  “Do you remember that first night I called you—how frantic I was?” The doctor nodded. “And do you remember Rupel Oldham?”

  Buttrick involuntarily winced. Oldham had been found lying in a foot of stagnant water near a fire-road through Mohegan Swamp. Buttrick had signed the death-certificate of the aged muskrat trapper. The body had been badly mutilated, and a look of utter horror was indelibly stamped on its face.

  “You don’t mean—that?” asked Buttrick, pointing toward the wall.

  Cullum nodded. “It broke out,” he said helplessly. “We had underestimated its strength, and it burst through the wooden door which the steel door you saw later replaced. Amadee and I followed it as quickly as we could. It was dark. The spring rains had muddied the ground.” Cullum’s voice became dreamy as he relived the gruesome event.

  “At first Amadee and I didn’t know where to look. We stood in the drive, he with the bullwhip and myself carrying the lantern. It could have gone off in any direction. But then—then we heard the nighthawks crying over Mohegan Swamp in the valley behind the estate. A terrible, fierce sound, Nathan. They were swarming as though mad.

  “We ran through the forest on the fire-road. The sound of the birds got louder, more shrill, until we could see against the gray sky the place over which they were swarming. I remember wishing that I had had the presence of mind to bring a pistol. But then the light from the lantern showed us its form ahead. Oh Nathan, Oldham had come down to check his traps, and it caught him there in the mud and scummy water. When we ran up it was—feeding!

  “Amadee lashed it with the whip, and it drew back. I saw that we could do nothing for Oldham. The expression on his face—terrible. Between the two of us we drove the creature back to the house and into the Crib. It was more docile then, feared the bite of the whip more than now.” Cullum paused and wet his lips with the sherry. “But the atrocity so unsettled me that I had to call you for relief, or I would have lost my mind.

  “We should have recognized this murderous act as an unmistakable sign that it was approaching its maturity, Nathan. But we thought the killing of Oldham was an accident, a chance encounter. No more than a month later, Arnold, my groundskeeper, passed away. He was the last of the servants, save Amadee. At night the beast broke out again. I was awakened by the nighthawks massing over the house. The coffin lay within the parlor. That thing had overturned it, and was tearing, slashing…” Cullum clenched his fists in agony. “Do you understand what I’ve been living with, Nathan? Do you wonder that my nerves are gone?”

  Buttrick stirred uncomfortably. He was being drawn into the macabre web of Cullum’s narration. The doctor began to feel unsafe sitting only a few yards away from the tapestry. How may times had he entered the decaying drawing-room to treat the master of Cullum House, oblivious to the existence of a horror separated from him by only a few inches of plaster and lath?

  “We then knew,” continued Cullum, “that its ghastly appetite had been whetted. We realized that these events were not mere chance. The evil thing mothered by my father’s second wife—I cannot call her my stepmother—had reached its maturity. For a week after we interred Arnold it screamed. I shall hear its cries until my ears are stopped by death. Ravenous, ferocious howls which sounded even beyond the walls of the house. Amadee and his bullwhip could not control it. I stuffed my ears with cotton, took laudanum, drank myself into unconsciousness—everything failed. That hideous keening could not be suppressed. It was then, at the end of my wits, that I made the decision for which, if ever a man were damned, I shall be. I had to stop the screaming, Nathan, do you understand that?”

  Buttrick shook his head slowly, scarce daring to consider what awful revelation he would hear next.

  “I ordered Amadee—ah, even now I cannot bring myself to pronounce the words!” Cullum fought visibly to control his rising emotion. He sprang from the settee and paced the room. “Amadee, in addition to being my only servant, is also,” he blurted the words out, “custodian of the Sabbathday Burial Ground. Do you understand my meaning?”

  “Then the bones in the chamber, and those fibers—hanks of hair?” Buttrick asked incredulously.

  “How many evenings have I slumped in that very chair, listening to that beast at its unholy supper! How often have I considered suicide, anything to free me of this vile guardianship. Even Amadee has become infected by it—I truly believe he enjoys tending the creature and disciplining it with his bullwhip. He derives a sense of power from those duties. The old man thinks me weak and scorns me because my nerves cannot stand the strain. But what a burden—God help me, I am the protector of a ghoul!”

  A long silence followed the impassioned confession. The room had become oppressively thick-atmosphered. Buttrick opened the French doors which led to a terrace and thence the drive. The sky was yet aglow, and only the drone of frogs at Mohegan Swamp heralded the approach of night. The birds roosting in the trees about the house had not yet begun their darkling flights.

  The doctor turned and addressed Cullum. “Is there any danger that it will break out again, Laurence?”

  “The steel door has thus far resisted its attempts,” he replied. “Occasionally it hurls itself at the door for an hour at a time. Its ferocity is appalling. But the door and its frame remain fast.” The heir sighed deeply. “Yet a mere steel door cannot be sufficient to hold such a malignant evil. It must be destroyed, Nathan, and quickly. I can no longer protect the town from its appetite. And now that I have discovered the Cullum secret to you, I feel that if we do not act soon the thing will be at large, with no one to stop it. For it heard me betray it, I am sure, and craves my death.”

  Buttrick was convinced. Now his mind no longer operated in accord with the civilized virtues of reason and mercy. His own experience that day at Cullum House, and his host’s desperate words, had brought to life within him the savage’s fear of the unknown. He agreed to assist in the extermination of the creature, and swore that no word of the proceedings would ever pass his lips.

  Since Cullum assured him that he could spend another night in the house with the Hell-Child, Buttrick decided to return to Sabbathday. On the morrow he would return to the estate to plan the destruction and interment of the beast, for they would need daylight to dig its unholy resting place.

  On the portico of the mansion beneath the arched jawbones, Cullum seized Buttrick’s hand in a firm grip. “I only wish my father had taken this course in the beginning,” he said. “Then perhaps he, Emma, and myself would have been spared the blight which has sapped our lives.” He ran his hand along the cool
ivory of the curving white monoliths. “I know that wherever he is, my father approves the action we must take.”

  Buttrick nodded in silent agreement. He bade the heir a good night, and turned his team onto the darkness of Windham Road. As he left the grounds of the estate, the nighthawks were beginning their evening clamor. Their rasping cries banished the peace of the autumn evening. After his return to the bungalow the doctor lay sleepless, distracted by vivid mental phantasms of what he had heard and witnessed that evening. Each time he closed his eyes the scene in the Crib flashed across the screen of his conscious mind in all its loathsome detail. He could not erase from his memory the glowering countenance of the Hell-Child, a face so evil it seemed impossible that flesh and bone could be tortured into receiving the stamp of such malignancy. Buttrick could well understand why Captain Hugh had disclaimed parentage of the child.

  And now Buttrick himself had been drawn into the Cullum horror. He had sworn to aid in the destruction of the thing which might still bear within it a spark of humanity, despite Cullum’s heated denials and the mystery of its parentage. Vicious, instinctively homicidal, yes; but was this enough, he asked himself, enough cause to betray a greater oath—that one which bound Nathan Buttrick to use his skills only for the preservation of life? It was a quandary, and the man writhed under the weight of his contradictory obligations.

  The doctor had thus lain staring at the slowly rising patch of moonlight on his wall for three hours, when the telephone beside his bed rang. With a sudden clairvoyance Buttrick knew that this was no ordinary call summoning him to the sickbed of a villager. He swung out of the bed and snatched the earpiece from the hook. The voice of Laurence Cullum dinned in his ear.