Acolytes of Cthulhu

by Robert M. Price

  The mists are all I claim them to be, Mr. Hasrad, and more. They are evil, and threaten mankind with a danger perhaps unequalled in the history of his evolution! About three weeks ago the farmers began finding their stock killed in a most peculiar manner, which I attribute to the mists, and two weeks ago it took the life of an old farmer—at least I’m nearly positive it was responsible, although I couldn’t prove it in a court of law. The nature of these attacks I prefer not to describe on paper lest you put me down as a mildly interesting lunatic and suggest I seek psychiatric help. But join me here at Shadow Lake, and I will give you full details.

  This letter was signed: “Bayard C. Fletcher”.

  Alan’s eyes moved to the nearby bookshelves in his study after he read the signature, strayed and paused on a tall volume in red leather bearing the gilt words along its spine: Before the Stone Age—Bayard C. Fletcher. The writer of this letter was more than likely the very same Bayard C. Fletcher, a renowned paleontologist and author of sundry technical works of which Before the Stone Age was the last and most exhaustive and regarded by his colleagues as a rare contribution to the progress of their science.

  Alan felt his doubts as to the sanity of the writer dissolve as salt does in water. If this were indeed the Bayard Fletcher, it might well be that something strange was haunting the vicinity of Shadow Lake. Alan knew Fletcher by reputation to be a man along in years, possibly sixty-seven or -eight, but certainly not far beyond the prime of his mental faculties. As Alan recalled, he had only recently retired from his Miskatonic University curatorship to gain more time for writing and private research. Known as a quiet man, with little social contact among other scientists, Fletcher had only recently dropped from sight completely. Probably only his publishers, intimate friends, and museum officials knew of his whereabouts.

  Mists that were sentient? Alive? Capable of intelligent action, perhaps? A vague suspicion began to stir in Alan’s mind, prompted by shuddering passages he recalled from midnight readings of the Necronomicon. But, no; the thought crossing his mind was unworthy of further consideration as it simply could not be possible.

  Originating from almost any other man than the reserved, levelheaded old scientist, the thought of sentient mists would have been too preposterous for comment. And even so, Alan certainly did not believe for one moment that Fletcher’s flamboyant assertion was correct. He merely paid Fletcher’s genius the tribute of assuming that he had stumbled onto something decidedly abnormal and markedly outside and beyond the ordinary. And, in his lonely isolated quarters, the manifestation had probably gripped his mind and prayed upon his imagination until he had come to unreservedly admit to an impossible condition. But Fletcher still needed help; and, if a visit from Alan would cheer and reassure him and perhaps find an obvious, easily overlooked explanation for these unnatural happenings, he decided he could do no less than go.

  Alan prepared to leave, with the grudging approval of his editor, for Shadow Lake the following afternoon.

  The drive from Arkham, that festering, witch-cursed community squatting along the Atlantic, led southeast to Bramwell and was one he had always enjoyed. Something in his own restless nature responded to the wild primitive call of old, nearly impenetrable forests that stood sentinel along his route, barren meadowlands stripped of their harvests that undulated into the distance, stone fences falling into disrepair, and dilapidated farms and barns that tottered and rotted on the brink of irrestorable decay. Alan marveled at the hills and woods arrayed in their autumn colors of assorted golds and oranges and crimsons.

  The slanting rays of a late afternoon sun were throwing shadows across the main street of Bramwell as Alan came to a stop at its single traffic light. He turned his car to the right, crossed the railroad tracks, and drove to the pumps of the town’s only filling station. A sign above the door indicated the owner of this establishment to be Harold Webber, a round-faced middle-aged man whom Alan had met before.

  Out of the gas station, with leisurely strides, stepped the proprietor. As he approached the car, wiping his hands on torn and grease-smeared overalls, he recognized its driver; he squinted and the grim line of his mouth curved in the suggestion of a smile.

  “Afternoon. Mr. Hasrad, ain’t it?”

  Alan nodded. “How you been, Hal? Fill it up, please.”

  Harold retreated to the pumps. Inserting the nozzle into the gas tank and setting it to automatic, he ambled over to where Alan waited with window still rolled down.

  “Haven’t seen you in a spell,” he said idly, beginning to wash the windows.

  “No, I haven’t been out this way for a few months. Bramwell seems to be about the same.”

  “Well, it ain’t!” was Howard’s terse, unexpected assertion. He rubbed briskly at a few insect specks then drew his squeegee across the window, wiping it dry.

  “Oh?” Alan looked at him curiously. “Something new? Story in it for me?”

  “Well, now, I don’t know. You might think so.” The gas station attendant shifted uneasily from one foot to another and the level of his voice dropped.

  “We’ve had two extremely queer killings—any killing hereabouts would be queer, of course—within a mile of the village; not to mention the loss of considerable livestock in the same—ah, manner.”

  “I heard about one of the deaths—fellow named Moss Kent?”

  “Yup. That was the first un. We had another just three days ago.”

  Webber shifted his gaze, looking up and down the street, as though he were about to reveal something that perhaps he shouldn’t. “Well, this time it was the Widow Fisher. She was found dead ’bout ten o’clock at night in her own rear doorway. She lived just down the road from here. She’d gone out back for fire wood, and when she didn’t return her children thought she’d dropped in at one of the neighbors. So it was a couple of hours before she was found.”

  “Certainly strange,” Alan commented.

  “I’ll say it’s strange! I don’t suppose the deaths themselves would seem startling to a city man like you, especially a newspaper feller, but they’ve surely created one big excitement in this county; most people around here are getting to be afraid for their lives when it comes to going out after dark.”

  “As bad as that?”

  Webber nodded. “There was no outcry—no noise of any sort.” He leaned closer, his head almost inside the automobile. “But she had been crushed and was found limp and cold, lying across her own back steps! No one here ’bouts is anxious to go out after dark—especially with that damned mist that seems to invade Bramwell every night—if it can be avoided!”

  “I can understand why. But you said she was crushed?”

  “Yes, sir, crushed she was; just like Moss Kent. That’s about all I know, and them that does know more don’t seem to be saying much about it to anyone.”

  This was indeed news of a startling nature, and Alan could not help but wonder if the strange occurrences in the village were connected in some way with the uncanny activities occurring at nearby Shadow Lake. Leaving the station, he drove down the darkening street. Already, lights were beginning to glow from the forlorn huddle of houses. He turned at the general store at the crossroads onto a dusty gravel road which he knew led to Shadow Lake and picked up speed. Webber, he reflected, had seemed almost morbid with his unexplained inferences.

  Dreary fields passed before his gaze, their harvests taken in, and dismal second growth accompanied the mile of gravel road. The scene was not more depressing than Alan’s thoughts as it shaded them with a subtle, insidious aura of gloom. Fletcher’s suggestion that some unknown dread was stalking the countryside was certainly confirmed by the words, although emotionally tainted, of Hal Webber. All sorts of possibilities occurred to him which before had not hitherto presented themselves. At first he had feared the letters might turn out to be the hoax of someone pretending to be Bayard Fletcher, or that Fletcher himself had somehow lost his reason. But now he strongly entertained the notion that the unnamed and unknown men
ace was not purely imaginary at all but perhaps very genuine. Not what Fletcher thought it to be, of course, but still something very real and noxious and deadly.

  Could it be that his earlier suspicions were not so untenable after all?

  And what was that ahead of him? He had been driving parallel to a meadow when something decidedly strange leaped into his vision, causing him to slow down for a closer look. Leaning motionless against the fence, obviously dead, was a cow looking as though it had been tossed there like a rag doll discarded by an irked child. But the proportions of its body seemed to be all wrong. It looked as though it had been deflated, like a basketball from which most of the air had leaked, much thinner and flatter than one would expect.

  Alan shook his head, absently noting another huddled, unmoving mass much farther away in the meadow, and continued to Shadow Lake.

  Presently he reached the narrow, winding lane which had been described by Fletcher, leading off to the left of the road. He carefully maneuvered through an aisle of rotting leaves carpeting the shallow wheel ruts; above, naked branches whipped the roof of his car.

  His keen blue eyes searched the gathering dusk intently as the car wound through the clustering trees down the narrow gravel road to the lake and along the shore. Occasionally he passed cottages which were dark and unoccupied. Shadow Lake’s long narrow expanse, as seen through a break in the trees, stretched cold and somber and still. Alan could just make out a gray barrier beyond the sullen surface of the water which was the tree-shrouded heights of the opposite shore. The lake was certainly desolate and lonely in the autumn after the departure of the summer residents and the closing of the few isolated cottages. But its very solitude probably appealed to Fletcher as a welcome contrast to the unpleasant features of big city life. Fletcher, he thought, would probably have the lake to himself from now until the following summer.

  The cottage on the knoll, which presently came into view, was long and low. It appeared to be a late Victorian dwelling, spacious and in reasonably good repair, but looking somewhat bleak and desolate behind a wild tangle of uncut grass and bushes.

  Alan turned into a clearing hemmed in by patches of unkempt shrubbery and small trees, parked the car, and started to the cottage. Dusk continued to settle about the quiet countryside and the pine-fringed cleft in the knoll at his left was already shadowy and indistinct as was the narrow tree-screened path. Alan walked faster through the somberly rustling leaves, piled by the early autumn winds and seemingly undisturbed by human feet.

  Fletcher opened the door at Alan’s knock. He seemed to be almost painfully glad to see him and led him to his rustic study, a long, booklined room tastefully paneled with dark oak. They sat before a small fire pleasantly burning in a huge fireplace and talked.

  Fletcher was tall and lean and slightly stooped, but still handsome and distinguished in bearing, with snowy hair and precise eyeglasses. His voice, cordial and controlled, gave little hint of the strain under which he had been living.

  “I’m delighted that you could come, Mr. Hasrad,” he assured his guest after drinks were mixed and they were comfortably seated. “This thing I wrote of in my letters is so utterly at variance with anything normal and understandable that I almost believe I’d have pulled out rather than remain here alone much longer.” His voice trembled momentarily and Alan had a flashing glimpse of the iron fortitude and determination of this man who would not run when retreat would so easily have solved his problem.

  “I’ve heard talk in Bramwell that life has been threatened,” Alan observed carefully.

  Fletcher nodded confirmation.

  “Yes.” With slender, symmetrical hands he began to load a blackened briar. “This morning I found one of my neighbor’s cats on the front porch. It had been crushed to a shapeless, furry pulp, just like a goat I saw on the road the day before, and flung there. Terror has struck this area, Mr. Hasrad, a terror which most people couldn’t even begin to understand. In the past two weeks two people have been killed.”

  “I’ve heard of their deaths,” Alan said, “although only sketchy and incomplete accounts of what had occurred.”

  Fletcher, sprawled in his comfortable chair, drew lazily at his pipe. “I can probably fill in some of the details; I must, in order to convince you that the trouble here is very real. It’s a terrible business that is getting worse all the time. Those in charge are being very careful as to just what news they release. I suppose they think people will believe a hoax is being perpetrated upon them. But I can tell you some of the facts, as I was present at the autopsies—county Medical Examiner’s my cousin—and what I’m going to tell you just might be the strangest thing you’ve ever heard.”

  Fletcher leaned forward and peered through his spectacles, his gaunt face a study in earnestness.

  “Now here’s the really strange part. I saw the bodies myself, and there didn’t seem to be a scratch on them anywhere. But they were limp as rags; the bones, subjected to some terrific pressure, had been crushed and splintered and broken to pieces. I could hear crepitation in a dozen places before my cousin started to cut.

  “I suppose explanations, remote and far-fetched, could account for such conditions, but something else was discovered which makes it even more unbelievable if that could be possible. It seems that in both cases the cells of most organs of the bodies had been somehow drained of nearly every trace of their enzymes, hormones, and antibodies; in fact, nearly all the amino acids which make up these complex substances are gone! This has resulted, in terms a layman might better understand, in most of the protein matter being missing from the interior tissues! Protein, you might know, makes up a large part of each body cell, so you can imagine the incredible scene we viewed after a few simple incisions!”

  Alan gazed at the professor nonplussed, and sipped from his glass.

  “Yes,” Fletcher nodded. “It’s unbelievable but true. With the exception of certain organs and the skin, which seems in both cases not to have been touched, it would appear as though the bodies had been robbed in some inexplicable manner of nearly every molecule of protein within them! As you can imagine, there was little left to examine but flimsy husks!”

  Alan, remembering the cow he had earlier seen, was thoughtful for a time. Finally: “And what does your cousin the Medical Examiner have to say?”

  Fletcher smiled weakly. “What can he say? The only possible explanation that he and his colleagues can offer is that the countryside is being terrorized by an animal that swallows its prey, ingests the bodily matter its diet requires, then spits out or otherwise eliminates the carcass!”

  Alan’s lips tightened but he offered no comment.

  “That, of course,” Fletcher continued, “is the most absurd rubbish that one could hypothesize! And yet… I have no better theory myself to offer. To compound one’s incredulity is the utterly impossible condition of the intact, unbroken skin.”

  Alan was thinking swiftly. “But, Doctor Fletcher—really, there must be a reasonable explanation for all of this. One of the constrictor snakes could have crushed them,” he feebly offered, realizing as he spoke the unlikelihood of such a reptile being found anywhere near Bramwell.

  Fletcher waved his hand. “Certainly,” he returned quickly, a hint of disparagement in his voice, “and so could a steamroller; but a snake would have swallowed its prey. And explain a conceivable way in which it could extract most of the protein from the bodies. No,” Fletcher shook his head with positive conviction, “obviously snakes don’t feed that way.” He fell into a troubled silence while he pondered his next words.

  “But these killings were not the beginning,” he finally continued, relighting his briar. “It started about a month ago with the destruction of the insects in this area; and within four or five days it was nearly impossible to find an insect or a spider of any sort. Fed upon in the same manner, countless numbers of their broken remains lay scattered about. Within a week the small rodent population was in the process of being decimated; and it wasn’t
long before dogs and cats and other small mammals that remained outdoors at night met with the same fate. Farmers then began to find livestock killed with all the same attributes, and these losses continue to increase. There’s no doubt about it, Mr. Hasrad, this thing is strong enough now to attack humans and even the larger animals and anything else unfortunate enough to be outside after dark. In all, I know of at least a dozen full grown cows and four or five sheep that have been found—and there are probably many more—crushed and drained of the sustenance this… this, whatever it is, craves!

  “No,” he concluded, “we may as well face the fact that it’s not a natural happening susceptible of an ordinary explanation.” He rose and crossed to the bay window. “It won’t be long now,” he stated cryptically, “before you can see for yourself.”

  After a sketchy meal cooked on the gas range, they retired to the living room. Fletcher fed the small blaze in the fireplace with pieces of dried driftwood, and shadows danced and jerked over the paneled walls, bringing into momentary clearness the pastoral paintings suspended about, then hiding them in a shadowy background that was vague and indistinct.

  Alan could hear the faint sounds of the wind outside grow louder as the autumn darkness deepened. Across the sky it whipped gray storm clouds, sending them scudding before its wild breath. He studied Fletcher seated in his chair beneath the probing rays of a nearby floor lamp which highlighted his face in shocked relief as he stood before one of the windows facing the swamp.