Acolytes of Cthulhu

by Robert M. Price

  * * *

  The diving helmets were functioning flawlessly. Their copper globes gleamed in the sun and threw fanciful shadows on the spongy ground, from which the lethal gas swirled up in tiny geysers. Sir Roger had chosen a fast pace so that the compressed air would last them long enough to pass through the entirety of the gas zone. He saw everything before him shift unstably, as if through a thin film of water. The sunlight rose in ghostly green and colored the distant glaciers, the “Roof of the World” with its gigantic profile, like an eerie dead landscape.

  Soon we found that he and Pompeius had emerged onto a fresh grassy field, and he lit a match to test the atmospheric quality first. Then he doffed his helmet and unencumbered himself of his air tank.

  Behind him lay the wall of vapor, shimmering like a living mass of water. The scent of amberia blossoms in the air was overwhelming. Shimmering butterflies, strangely marked and as large as a man’s hand, rested like open magical tomes upon the unmoving blossoms.

  The pair walked at a considerable distance from one another towards the west in the direction of the forest which obscured their field of vision. Sir Roger signaled his deaf servant; Pompeius cocked his rifle.

  They walked along the forest edge, and before them lay a clearing. Barely a quarter of an English mile ahead of them, a group of men (clearly Tibetans, with red, pointed caps) formed a semi-circle. They had obviously been waiting for the intruders. Fearlessly Sir Roger advanced to meet the crowd, Pompeius only a few steps from his side.

  Only the customary sheepskin costumes of the Tibetans seemed familiar. Otherwise, they scarcely even seemed human: expressions of hideous hate and supernatural, terrifying evil had distorted their countenances beyond recognition. At first they let the pair draw near. Then, as one, obeying their leader’s signal, they clapped their hands over their ears in one lightning-fast motion and began screaming at the top of their lungs!

  Pompeius Jaburek looked questioningly at His Lordship, then raised his rifle: the bizarre actions of the crowd suggested imminent attack. But what happened next sent his heart straight for his throat. A trembling, swirling gas cloud began to gather about His Lordship, somewhat resembling the fumes they had walked through earlier. Sir Roger’s shape began to blur, to grow indistinct, as if its contours had been eroded by the whirling funnel. The man’s head seemed to elongate to a point, the entire mass collapsing onto itself as if… melting. And on the very spot where only moments before the Englishman had stood was a pale violet cube, about the size and shape of a small sugarloaf.

  The deaf Pompeius shook with a terrible rage. As the Tibetans kept up their screaming, he squinted to focus on their dancing lips and read whatever it was they might be saying. It was always the same word, over and over again. At once the leader came forward, and the rest left off screaming, took their hands off their ears, and rushed toward Pompeius. At this, he commenced firing wildly at the crowd with his repeating rifle, which halted them momentarily.

  Then instinctively he shouted the word back at them, the word he had read off their lips: Ämälän—“Ämälän!” He yelled it so loudly that the ravine trembled as with an earthquake. Dizziness overcame him; he saw everything as if peering through thick glasses, and the ground heaved and swayed beneath him. This lasted just a moment, and then he could see clearly again.

  The Tibetans had disappeared, just as His Lordship had. Before Pompeius only countless purple cones lay scattered.

  The leader still lived. His legs had already transformed into blue mush, and even the torso was beginning to shrink. It was as if the whole man were being digested inside some transparent being. Instead of a red hat, the leader’s head was covered by a thing shaped like a bishop’s mitre in which golden, living eyes moved.

  Jaburek smashed the leader’s skull with his rifle butt, but he was not in time to prevent the dying man in his last moment stabbing him in the foot with a sickle. Then he surveyed the scene around him.

  Not a living thing far and wide. The acrid scent of amberia blossoms had intensified and was almost stinging. It seemed to emanate from the purple skittles, and these Pompeius now investigated. They were all exactly alike, composed of a pale violet gelatinous mucus. As for the estimable Sir Roger Thornton, he could not now possibly be distinguished among the field of purple pyramids.

  Pompeius gnashed his teeth and ground his heel in what remained of the dead leader’s face. Then he turned and ran back along the way he had come. At a distance he beheld the copper helmets gleaming in the sun. Gaining them, he lost no time pumping his diving canister full of air and made his way across the gas zone. Oh God, Oh God, His Lordship was dead! Dead, here in remotest India! The ice-capped mountains of the Himalayan range yawned at the heavens: after all, what cared they for the suffering of one tiny beating human heart?

  * * *

  Pompeius accurately wrote down, word for word, everything he had experienced and seen, although he was still far from beginning to comprehend it. Then he sent his account to the secretary of His Lordship in Bombay, in 17 Adheritolla Street. The Afghan promised to ensure its delivery. Thus assured, Pompeius Jaburek died, the result of the poison with which the Tibetan’s sickle had been smeared.

  “There is no God but God and Muhammad is his Prophet,” mumbled the Afghan, touching his forehead to the ground before the corpse, which the Hindu servants had strewn with flowers and now proceeded to cremate atop a bier, to the accompaniment of customary hymns.

  Ali Murrad Bey, the secretary, receiving the horrible news, blanched and immediately sent the letter to the editorial office of the Indian Gazette. The Deluge broke out from there. The paper, which published “The Downfall of Sir Roger Thornton” the very next day, issued the morning edition a full three hours later than usual. A strange and indeed horrifying incident was blamed for the delay. It seems that Mr. Birendranath Naorodjee, the editor of The Indian Gazette, along with two assistants, was abducted without a trace from the closed work room where they sat reading the galleys around midnight. All that stood to mark their places was a trio of blue gelatinous cylinders, with sheets of freshly printed newsprint scattered between them. The police announced with pompous bluster that they had concluded their protocols and declared the case closed, albeit an insoluble mystery.

  But that was only the beginning. Dozens of gesticulating men, who had only moments before been quietly perusing their newspapers, simply disappeared before the eyes of the terrified crowd which thronged the streets. In their places countless little violet pyramids stood about, on the steps, in the marketplace and side streets, everywhere the eye could see.

  Before evening, Bombay had lost half its considerable population. An official health edict mandated that all ports be closed at once and that Bombay be sealed to all traffic with the outside world in an effort to contain the new epidemic. Only such drastic measures, it was thought, could hope to stem the tide. Meanwhile, telegraphs and cables were going day and night, sending the frightening report, including of course the entire transcript of the Thornton case, syllable for syllable, across the oceans and throughout the world.

  By the very next day, the quarantine, imposed too late, was lifted.

  From countries all over the world came the horrible news that the “Purple Death” had broken out everywhere simultaneously and threatened the population of the entire world. All lost their heads, and the civilized world looked like a teeming anthill into which some farm boy had thrust a burning tobacco pipe. In Germany, the plague broke out first in Hamburg. Austria, however, where they read only local news, remained impervious for weeks.

  The first case in Hamburg was especially shocking. Pastor Stuhlken, a man whom advanced age had rendered practically deaf, sat down to an early breakfast surrounded by his beloved family: Theobald, his eldest, with his long-stemmed student pipe, Jette, his devoted wife, Michen, Tinche, in short, everyone, all fourteen members of his family. The graybeard had only just opened the newly-arrived English newspaper and begun to read to the others the report o
f “The Downfall of Sir Roger Thornton”. He had just gotten past the strange word Ämälän when he paused in his reading to fortify himself with a sip of coffee. Just then, to his horror, he discovered that the breakfast table was circled with naught but purple blobs of slime. In one of them was stuck a long-stemmed pipe.

  All fourteen souls had been taken by the Lord. The pious old man fainted dead away.

  One week later, more than half the population was dead.

  It was left at last to a German scholar to shed some light on the situation. The fact that only the deaf and the deaf-mutes seemed to be immune sparked the accurate theory that the epidemic was not a biological but rather an acoustic phenomenon. In the solitude of his study he had written a long scientific paper on the matter, then scheduled a public lecture, advertising it with several slogans.

  His explanation was based on his knowledge of a very obscure Indian religious text which described the creation of astral and fluid tornadoes through the speaking aloud of certain words contained in spells. This apparent superstition, the savant claimed, could now be made sense of through the modern sciences of vibration and radiation theory.

  He held his lecture in Berlin and was required to employ a megaphone to read the long sentences of his manuscript, so great was the crowd of the interested public.

  The memorable speech concluded with concise words: “Go now to the audiologist and have him render you deaf, and so protect yourselves from the spoken word ‘Ämälän’.”

  A second later, the scholar and his entire crowd of listeners were nothing more than slime blobs, but the manuscript remained behind. Over the course of time it became widely known and spared mankind from complete extinction.

  A few decades later, about 1950, a new and universally deaf population inhabited the globe. Customs and habits were different, rank and possessions all rearranged. An audiologist ruled the world. Musical scores were relegated to the same dustbin with the alchemists’ formulas of the Middle Ages; Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, all as laughable as Albertus Magnus and Bombastus Paracelsus. Here and there in those torture chambers called museums a dusty piano bears its yellowing teeth.

  (Author’s postscript: The esteemed reader is hereby advised against a public recital of the forgoing.)

  MISTS OF DEATH

  BY RICHARD F. SEARIGHT & FRANKLYN SEARIGHT

  PneephTaal waited.

  Patiently.

  For over four billion years PneephTaal had patiently waited, biding its time. It knew that one day, conceivably five or ten or fifteen million years or more in the future, its opportunity would come.

  It would wait. It would be ready.

  PneephTaal had come to earth while the youthful planet was still recovering from the titanic shock of cosmic birth, and since that time its sentient awareness had not dimmed. Although sealed within a cavernous rock-hewn vault by the authority of the Elder Gods—a force which even it could not overthrow—its life essence existed in a dormant state fired by an alien intellect which could never accept its own conquest. When it first had arrived, the planet had barely begun its primordial existence, being little more than some 500 million years old, still a fiery mass of unsolidified, molten rock.

  Billions and many more millions of years passed as the land cooled and the atmosphere evolved to a state wherein life, shocked into nativity by a majestic flash uniting certain elementary molecular particles, could be sustained. And when this new life demonstrated its uniqueness by splitting into equal and identical units, PneephTaal regarded the embryonic creations with disinterest.

  It paid little heed to the evolving, many-celled animals that swam in the salty seas and eventually developed a primitive intelligence; it sensed with total indifference the mutating life forms that later ventured forth to conquer the land. Nor was PneephTaal bored with its captive existence for its perceptive faculty was able to span the vastness of interstellar space probing the secrets of distant galaxies and individual star systems, invading in thought the inhabitants of a nearly endless array of tenanted planets that held even the tiniest shred of interest for it. There was little in the entire cosmos it did not know—except how to escape its bondage imposed by the Elder Gods. Millions upon millions of years continued to elapse and gigantic reptiles thundered over the earth, dimwitted creatures whose lives were spent in satisfying their never-ending need for sustenance to feed their ever-empty stomaches.

  PneephTaal knew how they felt.

  It waited, as man first began to tread the earth. And it brooded, as civilizations leaped to flaming heights, then perished. And it hungered with a craving that could have devoured galaxies! It thought of what it would do when once again it regained the freedom it once had known, when again it could feast throughout the star-flecked universe.

  Paraphrased from the Eltdown Shards

  With shocking suddenness, this sentient entity—mighty, seemingly indestructible, quasi-immortal—was aware of an amazing truth which momentarily stunned its intellect with a blinding flare. It was no longer imprisoned!

  ALAN HASRAD, REPORTER FOR THE ARKHAM DAILY NEWS, sat in his book-lined study reading the afternoon mail. He rubbed thoughtfully at his large nose and pondered the curious letter from B. C. Fletcher he had just finished reading for the second time.

  An indefinably sinister undertone ran through it, although the nature of the menace at which Fletcher hinted was not disclosed, and Alan was left with the haunting impression of some unnamed but very real evil affecting the writer. A genuine dread—not terror, for the man wrote with perfect calmness—seemed to raise a spectral head from behind his apparently casual words.

  Fletcher was a complete stranger to Alan. He wrote in a rapid, scholarly script with diction and construction suggesting a man of more than average attainment. The letter explained how he had read of different arcane exploits in which Alan had been involved, events savoring of the fantastic and bizarre, and for this reason, along with Alan’s standing as a respected journalist, regarded him as a possible source of help in the problem confronting him. He mentioned briefly that he had retired nearly a year ago to a small and semi-isolated cottage on Shadow Lake near Bramwell, a region of Massachusetts with which Alan had some familiarity. His next paragraphs spoke with ambiguous restraint about an inexplicable phenomenon which was causing the neighboring countryside great alarm, but suggested it would be inadvisable to attempt details by mail, believing an interesting and convincing demonstration would be witnessed by Alan if he would come in person.

  The letter was an odd mixture of old-fashioned formality coupled with an obvious bewilderment and deep-seated uneasiness, which doubtless combined to produce the impression of dread on the part of the writer. He concluded with a rather formal invitation to visit him, with full directions for reaching his cottage near the lake should Alan drive and a promise to meet him if he came by train.

  Scrawled beneath the closing was the flourishing signature of B. C. Fletcher.

  Ordinarily, such a letter would have evoked little enthusiasm in Alan. As a journalist and minor participant in certain unusual phenomena which tended to escape the notice of most, he had grown accustomed to receiving all sorts of communications from cultured cranks, and had come to pay little attention to most of them. But this was different from the usual run of such letters. Its sincerity was undeniable and the sanity of the writer did not seem to be in question.

  He reflected about Shadow Lake and the nearby town of Bramwell. Alan had several relatives living in the area, whom he visited from time to time, and was casually acquainted with some of the local town folks. Come to think of it, he considered, hadn’t there been recent mention of that locality in the papers? Something to do with a killing which had some very interesting features? Alan seemed to think this was the case and spent the next few minutes examining back issues of the Arkham Daily News before locating the account he had recalled.

  Slowly, with much more care than he had given to his first hasty perusal a week ago, he reread the article. It tol
d of the death of Moss Kent, a farmer who had lived out on the Somersville Road a half mile east of Shadow Lake. Kent had been an old bachelor and hadn’t been missed till one of his neighbors found him sprawled in the yard before his unpainted shack.

  There was more, but no further information of practical importance was offered other than the notion that unnatural features were still being investigated by the authorities. It was a curious article, thought Alan, not because of what had been stated, but because of the provocative nature of that which had been left unsaid.

  Alan debated the advisability of snatching a day or two to investigate. What finally decided him against it was the fact that Fletcher had declined to even suggest the nature of his trouble, and Alan felt slightly piqued to be called upon in such a manner. He wrote briefly, saying he was interested but busy and invited Fletcher to come to Arkham to discuss the matter or else write full details.

  Fletcher’s second letter arrived five days later. In part it read:

  I cannot blame you for not wishing to come to Bramwell without full information. However, I have few tangible facts to offer you. It was with the thought that if you accepted my invitation you would see and perhaps understand and explain these terribly unnatural happenings…

  Even as I write, the Mists are rising again from the swamp in back of my cottage. Each night between dusk and darkness I see the same sight as I sit at my library window, and it is not a pleasant one. More and more it suggests to me the steady, purposeful advance of an army. First comes the vanguard, stray scouts swirling and spiralling upwards from the dank marsh nearby, to feel the way for the dense murky phalanxes that follow. The advance does not take long. Soon the main body closes in, and my little cottage on its knoll between the swamp and the lake is besieged by the chill, writhing dampness which blots out the dim lights of Bramwell beyond the marsh like a stone wall.

  Mr. Hasrad, the mist is sentient! Oh, I know how it sounds, but I’m not crazy; I know I’m not having hallucinations. Do you wonder that I hated to write this? Why my first letter was intentionally so vague? I wanted you to see for yourself—to look at these vast banks of lazily twisting vapor, slowly writhing and turning in chill, unnatural convolutions, encircling my dwelling with a living wall of frightfulness. Then you would understand and be convinced. When on a windless night you heard the timbers of the cottage creak and give beneath a hideous, external constriction, you would know! And if you sat through the long hours till dawn and watched their sullen retreat before the anemic rays of the pale watery sun…