Acolytes of Cthulhu

by Robert M. Price

  “No, Jack, not precisely—but then, I don’t know exactly how this watch works”—Corelli pointed at his expensive digital wristwatch—“or what makes a jet fly, or how acid consumes a man’s head. And I don’t know how the H-bomb works, either—but let me assure you, old boy, I wouldn’t hesitate using any of those things if necessary, available, and convenient… You don’t have to be a mechanic to drive an automobile. It was fortunate that the old chink told us all we needed to know about that crazy book before he died—he must have really hated the guy that did him in. Those collectors are something else! No, Jack, I don’t understand the damn book, and I’m no mechanic… but I know how to drive a car, and how that book must be used!”

  “But this is different, this is not at all like a car, a flask of acid, or a bomb—there is something devilish about it, Mr. Corelli. I don’t like it!” Davis shuddered visibly, and seemed to become even smaller for a moment.

  “Aw, don’t be a fool, old boy. I’ll tell you what’s the matter with you. You have too much imagination! Here, you can look at this article—I think you will be able to figure out for yourself exactly how and when and where our little toy took effect. Look…”

  Carlo Corelli turned the newspaper around, and pointed at several paragraphs in the report of the strange deaths which had shocked the Boston community that morning. Davis read, feeling a deep chill inside, in spite of himself:

  The condition of the two bodies was described by the janitor who discovered them as having suffered partial decomposition, “puss-like rotting,” although the unusual condition was apparently localized in specific areas. Dr. Ericson’s body exhibited the puzzling condition on the sides of the head—particularly the ears, which seemed to have melted away, along with adjacent areas of the skull and the brain—while his butler showed similar decomposition in the mouth area, as well as on the sides of his head.

  According to Jim Martin, the janitor, the butler’s mouth had completely rotted away, exposing parts of the jaw and mandible bones. The police have refused to comment on the Martin story, or to allow examination of the remains by members of the press. The officer in charge of the investigation also refused to indicate whether or not the autopsy reports would be made public.

  Dr. Ericson owned a valuable collection of occult and rare books. The presence of gaps in the shelves of the room where the bodies were found has led some friends to speculate on theft as a possible motive, although the evidence for foul play is not clear, since the cause of death has not been determined, much less any possible weapon. The possibility of acid has been suggested, although Martin rejects this explanation, insisting that the heads of the victims looked as if they had burst from inside, which is patently absurd. He also admitted having had several drinks earlier that evening.

  Jack Davis had paled considerably while reading the report, and now stood up, his face as gray as his unkempt beard, only to stagger and grab hold of the lamp-post decorating a corner of the room, for support.

  “My God, Mr. Corelli, the same as with the other—there must be things that are truly unspeakable, horrors that cannot be tolerated by a human brain or heard by a human ear… this is sheer madness… this is more than madness… if I hadn’t seen that other one with my own eyes… Gawd, Corelli, how can you be so calm? I don’t… I don’t want to have anything more to do with this kind of thing… no more!” Davis’s eyes protruded slightly as he addressed the plump man sitting at the gold and onyx desk, peacefully puffing at his cigar.

  “Aw, Jack, c’mon! Too much imagination, I tell you. And besides, surely you haven’t forgotten your daughter, have you? Cynthia Davis is such a pretty girl, such a little innocent birdie… Now, we wouldn’t like for anything like this to happen to little Cindy, would we, eh, Jack? Sit down, old boy, and calm down.”

  Davis remained standing for a moment, then collapsed on his chair as if all his strength had left him. He was a broken man, and a resigned look appeared on his face.

  “Did… did… did the thing… come back?”—he asked with a tremulous voice.

  “Yup, never fails!” laughed Corelli, and opened a large drawer in his desk. “Here, buddy-boy.” His thick, bejeweled fingers removed a large black box, with an ornate design on the top. “Just like the old chink said—look!”

  Jack Davis recoiled in horror as his boss removed from the inside of the black box the smaller box he knew so well, the hellish Pandora’s box of the demented Tomeron the Decayed, with all its waxen seals intact.

  “Here, Jack, take it…”

  “Please, Mr. Corelli, I’m afraid, dammit, I’m scared, hell, aren’t you human—doesn’t this thing bother you? Such things should not be! Please, Mr. Corelli, couldn’t someone else?…”

  “Enough! Basta!” Corelli’s fist slammed on the top of his desk. “Don’t you be a fool, Davis! This has been a most profitable enterprise for both of us—you know I can’t use anyone else. You have the connections and the reputation as a dealer in kook books. No one else would do. Here, take that crazy toy—c’mon, it won’t bite you. And I know you can’t read Arabic, so you are pretty safe, even if curiosity got the best of you—not that I think you’d ever open the little box! You’d rather open your own coffin, huh? Ha! Take it, and perhaps I won’t have to give your little Cindy a personal visit, not yet, anyway!” He winked an eye and flashed a lascivious smile.

  Visibly shaken, Jack Davis accepted the odd-looking box with the waxen seals with obvious repugnance, and immediately proceeded to wrap it with the newspaper pages on the desk, as if anxious to avoid further physical contact with the instrument of death and madness it contained.

  Corelli laughed loudly. “My, Jack, old boy, one would think I had asked you to finger a snake! Well, you’ll get over it, won’t you? Yeah—well, those crazy book freaks do get good stuff, you know? The quality of the latest batch was the best ever. The poor nuts will do anything to get the book they want. Well, to each his fetish, no, Jack? Gimme good ol’ greenbacks any time, and I’ll give you the world… how about you, Jack—what is your fetish?”

  Davis did not reply, sullenly staring straight ahead.

  “Oh, my, don’t look so pissed! Think of the good side—your commission on the last one is ten per cent, as usual, and I’ll add a grand to your account, to show my appreciation! By the way… you may soon be hearing from a wealthy occultist, a kook known by the name ‘Stag’ Dawoud, who gets really high on them crazy nut books. You know, he recently learned, quite by accident”—here Corelli grinned and winked at his silent interlocutor—“that a copy of the fabled and legendary book of Tomeron, the loathsome Necrotic Book, exists in this country… Should I add that he is extremely anxious to add it to his collection? I’m sure he has heard your name mentioned as a possible source of information, if not of the actual thing…”

  Corelli started laughing hysterically. “The price has been doubled, of course. You know how those rare books increase in price, particularly the out of print ones, when there is a lot of demand… But I shouldn’t be telling you this, should I, Jack? I understand this guy Dawoud has quite a few connections in the Orient, and has access to some of the best stuff, and in quantity—it should be a pleasurable transaction, don’t you think? And there will be more—a great gold mine, my boy—who would have thought books could be that much fun? I don’t think I’ve read any since my dear departed mother gave up on teaching me the Catechism! Ciao, amigo, and keep in touch, huh?”

  Jack Davis whispered—“Forgive me, Cindy…”

  He stood up, slowly, leaves of the newspaper falling at his feet.

  “I have been reading, and I have learned many things, Mr. Corelli—even some lghat-ul-’arabyah, you bastard, ibn-sharmtah…”

  Carlo Corelli stopped smiling.

  “Hey, Jack, you gone nuts? Armando! Arturo! Hey, don’t…”

  It was too late—Jack Davis had opened the box, and the book within, and commenced reading in a deep voice…

  * * *

  There was stiff bidd
ing at the auction disposing of some of the stuff the recently widowed Signora Maria Corelli decided to get rid of. Particularly noticeable was the extremely high bid a certain Stagnus Dawoud made for a queer oriental box. Maria Corelli felt strangely relieved to see it sold, although she could not explain why…

  NIGHT BUS

  BY DONALD R. BURLESON

  I CAUGHT MY MIDNIGHT BUS FOR BRATTLEBORO IN A QUIET, nameless town in northern Vermont, at one of those typical little ramshackle bus stations that deepen one’s sense of vague depression at traveling alone at night, with their dull-eyed and incommunicative ticket sellers, their dingy rows of well-thumbed magazines and tabloid newspapers beneath bare lightbulbs, their dirty floors, and their faint odours of perspiration and urine. The air was still and humid, and as I stood with my valise among nondescript people, I sighed at the seemingly frozen clockhands on the wall over the ticket counter. It was with some relief that I finally saw the bus pull up and stop in front of the station. I got in line, handed my ticket to the driver, and boarded the bus, which already carried a number of passengers; I was able, however, to find a seat all to myself on the right-hand side of the bus near the back, and no one sat next to me. I leaned back in the cushioned seat, knowing that I had never been able to sleep on a bus, but hoping to get some rest during my four-hour ride, which I knew would be interrupted by unwelcome stops at other colourless little terminals along the way. Soon the bus had pulled out of the station, and dark, low hills were slipping by in the night outside the window, slipping by like amorphous and evanescent thoughts.

  I stretched and tried to relax. The bus had no sooner found its stride on the road, however, when the driver slowed suddenly and stopped to pick up a straggling passenger who had waited on the side of the road. I could see his form only dimly in silhouette while he fumbled for money to pay the driver and then picked his way back among the seats as the bus jolted into motion again. He paused a couple of times, but, to my displeasure, finally chose the seat next to me and dropped into it.

  My sidelong glances in the near-dark gave me no favourable impressions of this new fellow-rider, nor was my olfactory assessment of him any more promising. He seemed to be a gaunt, elderly man, though I could not clearly see his face, and his clothes were tattered and musty. He exuded an odour which I found difficult to characterize, but decidedly unpleasant, and this impression grew in potency as the minutes wore on. I had the vague sense that he was ill with some obscure and detestable malady, and this feeling in me was not diminished when he cleared his throat with a sticky-fluid sound that made me shudder. When I reflected on the prospect of a long night’s ride next to this repellent companion, my mood grew ineluctably sombre.

  After a while I managed, staring out the window at the dark, domed hills gliding by, almost to lose him in the dreamy tangle of my thoughts, though his offensive odour was still such that I breathed shallowly and would have kept my face averted even if there had been no window to look out upon the night. But I was brought sharply back to awareness of him when, as I think I had unconsciously dreaded, he actually spoke to me.

  “Gonna meet my wife jes’ this side o’ Akeleyville.”

  “Hm,” I replied, with a slight nod, trying to convey a tone which neither seemed rude nor particularly invited further conversation. His voice had had a repulsively liquid quality almost like an articulated gargling. Turning my head to glance at the man, I received impressions in the dim, sporadic flashes of light, from passing autos, that were not reassuring at all. The man’s face, only glimpsed momentarily, seemed to have an odd greyness about it, an unclean quality that heightened, or was heightened by, the ghoulish way in which his lips seemed drawn back from his stained teeth, and the way in which his eyes peered hollowly out at me from deep, tenebrous sockets. The face was not unlike a death-mask, and when a passenger two seats in front of me flicked on an overhead reading light, I was startled to see in the dim peripheral glow of the bulb that from the stranger’s eyes there welled a trickle of some yellow, pus-like fluid. I shuddered anew; I felt, indeed, almost choked by the proximity of this loathsome wraith, and only a curious sort of dullness in my muscles kept me from rushing up to the driver and demanding to be let off the bus at once.

  A seemingly endless stretch of time ensued, during which the man, I could see from the corner of my left eye, turned to look at me from time to time. As the minutes passed, the stench of the man grew well-nigh intolerable, and the thought crossed my mind that only the fact that the immediately adjacent passengers were asleep could have kept them from noticing it; I wondered that the man with the reading light, though two seats away, had not caught the odour, if indeed he had not. As I struggled to keep the smell from invading my nostrils, I could not help trying at the same time to place it; and it gradually dawned on me that it was very much like the odour of organic decay—like rotting meat neglected in a kitchen.

  “Say.”

  The word came at me with a sibilant rush of foetid breath that very nearly made me retch. I turned with the greatest reluctance to glance at him as he spoke again.

  “We’re gettin’ near Akeleyville. I’ll be biddin’ ye good night in a minute or two.”

  I smiled wanly and hoped that my sigh of relief was not noticeable. Then, just as he began to rise from his seat, he sent a thrill of ineffable horror straight to my bones with his next, last words to me.

  “Ya know me, don’t ye? Wal, it’s true—I ain’t like yew, young feller. Yew’re still among th’ livin’. But it ain’t so bad—my wife is like me. Keeps a body from bein’ too lonely.”

  Just as he turned to stand up in the aisle, a quick flash of pale light revealed him to be scratching his cheek with a scaly and malodorous hand, and I saw that pieces of flesh were coming off in a rubbery, sliding cascade as his fingers seemed to slip into his face. It took all the fortitude I had, then, to keep from vomiting, but I only moaned as he turned and was gone, picking his way back up the aisle to the front of the bus and gesticulating with the driver, apparently to be let off on the road.

  As the bus disgorged this revolting creature, I caught sight of another figure waiting for him on the side of the road, illumined faintly by the lights of autos that had stopped behind the bus, evidently unable to get around because of traffic in the other lane. She was as tattered and loathsome of aspect as he, with a face that, like his, was a death-mask now burned dreadfully into my memory. They embraced loathsomely as the bus pulled away, and they were grinning cadaverously at each other as the night swallowed them up again. Would to heaven that I had taken my gaze from them a moment earlier—in the dark I might not have noticed. Oh God, I might not have noticed!

  I might not have noticed that the woman, in all her charnel ghastliness, was obviously eight or nine months pregnant.

  THE PEWTER RING

  BY PETER CANNON

  HIS COMING TO NEW YORK HAD PROBABLY BEEN THE SMARTEST move of his life—though he had not begun to think so until, after months of monotonous job-hunting, he had settled on some stimulating and marginally profitable publishing work. Scion of an ancient French Huguenot family, Edmund Aymar had left suburban Westchester for the metropolis of his forefathers, who had been among the island’s earlierand more prominent citizens. There he had anticipated making his mark on the world—not as a lawyer or banker or stockbroker, professions customarily pursued by Aymar men—but in one or another of the more Bohemian, less financially remunerative trades.

  With the support of inherited money, wisely husbanded by the intervening generations since his great-great-grandfather, John Marshall Aymar, laid the foundation of the modern family fortune before the Civil War, Edmund Aymar was used to enjoying all the privileges of his class. (Educated privately, he had always been a dreamer who felt himself apart from the conventional classroom routine. Given his prep school record as an underachiever, he had failed like many of his background in these latter days to gain entrance to the Ivy League college traditionally attended by his people.) His independent income
covered his basic needs: a one-bedroom, ground-floor rear West Side apartment; a wardrobe of Brooks Brothers clothes; and a freezer filled with Stouffer’s dinners. Freed from the anxieties faced by most young men embarking upon careers in the city, Aymar could indulge in cultivating his already richly refined aesthetic sensibilities.

  An avid amateur student of architecture, Aymar delighted in strolling past the quaint brownstones that lined the side streets of his neighborhood, picking out such pleasing details as an elegant cornice here or an exquisite balustrade there. On occasion he ventured farther afield, exploring the curved lanes and irregular by-ways of Greenwich Village and other antique districts of the city. At first the imposing Manhattan skyline served only to oppress his spirit, but in time he came to relish the rugged beauty of those concrete and glass monoliths that soared, especially at night, like so many Arabian Nights arabesques to the starless haze above.

  He took a keen interest in the history of New York, in particular in the activities of his ancestor, John Marshall Aymar, who had figured so eminently in the city’s business, political, and social life in the eighteen-forties and fifties. Spending much of his free time either at the New York Historical Society near him or else at the Museum of the City of New York (a brisk twenty-minute walk across Central Park), Aymar became increasingly fascinated with his great-great-grandfather the more he learned of him. The official accounts depicted the conscientious man of affairs, who had built a shipping empire, contributed generously to the Whig Party, and entertained lavishly at his Fifth Avenue mansion. Contemporary letters and diaries, however, gave hints of the inner man: a seeker after truth and beauty, sensitive and retiring, a poet, author of a slim volume of verse privately published in 1849. Portraits showed him to be slender, youthful, and fair, with the trace of an ethereal smile on delicate lips. (Oddly enough perhaps, Aymar looked nothing like his ancestor—but then everyone told him he strongly resembled his mother.) In no portrait did John Marshall Aymar betray the encroachment of age, for he had died in his forties of a queer, lingering disease that had baffled his physicians.