Cthulhu Lives!: An Eldritch Tribute to H. P. Lovecraft

by Tim Dedopulos

  “I don’t even want to think about it, but I suppose there is a possibility that you could be right. If you are, we’ll have to be especially careful. I think the cult are onto me, and this certainly might explain a few things. Be vigilant, Philip. Trust no one.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll be cautious.” Some of the tension drained away, leaving him looking tired and unhappy. “This whole thing is hideous. I wish I’d never started poking into my grandfather’s work.”

  “We’ve done some good, my friend. That must count for something.” I turned to the cabinet, and poured us both a small Scotch.

  “I suppose so.” He had a sip of his drink and visibly pulled himself together. “What should we do next?”

  “We need more information. You’ve done really well in Elmwood. Why not concentrate there, see if you can find any patterns. I’ll look for any hint of unusual activity in the bay and Federal Hill, and check the usual sources for anything else that might shed light on these vanishings.”

  The discussion continued on for several hours, but at the end of it, we still didn’t have a clear theory or any stronger plan. We decided not to bring anyone else into it. Extra manpower wouldn’t have helped much, and you can never be too cautious. Loose lips sink ships!

  Sunday 9th

  There’s something happening off the Mexican coast. Unusual naval exercises, friendly fire accidents, rumors of some contagious agent. The situation is still unresolved. I fear the Mexicans may have bitten off more than they expected to have to chew. I’ll drop Etta an email, make sure she knows about it, see if she can do anything. Let’s hope it’s nothing like that thing under the Irish Sea last year.

  Tuesday 11th

  Philip believes he has struck gold. He pulled some strings in the police department that I didn’t know he had, and got a list of the missing people. Their last known locations form a shaky rectangular outline on the far side of Elmwood, and he believes that they have been taken to some place inside that area. He brought his notes over – impressively extensive – and we spent the evening going over all the possibilities.

  He’s really jumpy, though. I think he’s cracking up a bit. He’s become suspicious of Cassie, thinks she might be one of the bad guys, not one of the good. I agreed to let him leave his notes in my safe, for now.

  There is one venue in his target area that he thinks might possibly be a suitable location for cult activity – Coldharbor Court, an aging care home that finally got shut down last year. I’ve promised him that I’ll go check it out.

  Thursday 13th

  As I’ve told Philip, Coldharbor Court is an unhappy sort of place. It looks like it was built in the ’30s, all creepy point-arched windows, steep gables and shadowy, wood-pillared porches. It was white once, but now it’s mostly graffiti. The place sits in the middle of a patch of scrappy ground, walled away from the rest of the neighborhood by chain link fences, and fierce warning signs that don’t actually mean a damn thing. It must be a tax write-off. The doors and windows are boarded up real tight.

  Anything going on there would certainly be easy enough to hide. Get a security company van, and a replacement padlock, and you’d be able to drive right up. It would even keep the kids away.

  Friday 14th

  Once Philip had slept on my report, nothing would do but we had to go have a look. I offered to stake the place out during the afternoon, keep an eye on any possible comings and goings so that we didn’t blunder into something we couldn’t handle. Philip joined me once he got off work. We left our cell phones in the car – they leave a very dangerous trail in this high-tech age.

  We made our way into the grounds some time after 8:30. There’s a section of fence that the kids have opened up at the base, wide enough to squeeze through even at my age. There wasn’t much ambient light shining through, but we didn’t want to risk a flashlight, so we picked our way around in the darkness. Better safe than sorry. There was an alarm system, but nothing expensive. The owners really have been cheapskates with this property. Philip knew how to bypass the system. Then we poked around, rattling the boarded-up windows and doors.

  One of the windows was hinged, and swung open easily.

  It was at the back of the building, near the parking spaces. Philip doesn’t carry a gun, but I pulled mine, and then we slipped in carefully and got out our flashlights. The room was empty, institutional walls and a nasty, thin brown carpet. No graffiti, so no kids. We went through into the hallway.

  Philip saw it first. “That graffiti looks... Robert! My god! Look!”

  I joined him, peering at the small, crabbed characters cut into the wall. Aklo. I said so. Philip paled even further. There were other phrases further down the wall, and we followed them along, glancing into the empty rooms we were passing as we went. Poor Philip was starting to shake quite noticeably, the flashlight emphasizing his jitters. I tried to encourage him, in a kindly yet firm manner.

  Eventually, we came to a closed door. It was painted black, with strangely luminous spirals spread over its surface. I think Philip would have bolted then, but I put a friendly hand on his shoulder. “We have to look, Philip. We have a duty.”

  He shot me an unhappy look – duty is easier for the older to bear, I suppose – but eventually he nodded. “All right, Robert. We look. But then we get out of here, and call the others. We should have told them what we were doing. They need to know, in case...” He couldn’t bring himself to finish.

  “Of course,” I agreed. “But we have to make absolutely sure first.”

  “All right. Let’s do it, then. Before I change my mind.”

  I pushed the door open slowly. A staircase led downwards, painted entirely black. Not even spirals decorated it. The paint seemed to swallow the flashlight beams. I had the gun, so I went first. Philip followed, reluctantly. The staircase was only short, but it seemed to go on for an eternity. As we descended, an unpleasant smell slowly started to build, acrid and sour, like a broken car battery.

  Eventually, we came out into a large concrete root cellar. Various cupboards, shelves and partitions broke up some of the space, but there was a wide open area of floor. A strangely irregular, rune-carved stone pillar sat in the center of it, some four feet in height, with a trapdoor some distance behind it. A very strange yellow box sat on the pillar, even more asymmetric than the stone column.

  Philip gave a strangled cry and dashed over to it in a flat panic, struggling to undo his jacket. I followed, and as he fought his arms from his sleeves, I smashed him across the base of the skull with the butt of my pistol.

  The rest of the cult had arrived by the time he came round, securely bound and gagged at the foot of the pillar. I knelt down in front of him and smiled at him pleasantly as his expression melted through pain and confusion into horrified betrayal.

  I ruffled his hair fondly. “Your intuition is magnificent, Philip. The long wait is almost done. Very soon now, the stars will be right again. Great Cthulhu sent the stone back to us, borne from the mud by one of Dagon’s beasts. The Haunter knows so much... Far more than Al-Hazred or von Juntz ever dared to dream. Y’ha-nthlei is furious.”

  He grunted wildly and thrashed about, cracking his head painfully against the pillar in the process.

  “Don’t worry. There is no more you can do. You will be its thirteenth. It’s only fitting – the sins of the grandfather... But my gods, man! The eternities you’ll experience within that creature. The midnight cities of black-lit Yuggoth. The bleeding of Atlantis. The infinite gulfs at the center of the universe. Almighty Azathoth itself! Honestly, I envy you, but I’ve been told in no uncertain terms that I’m required here.”

  I gestured to the others, and they started the chant, a low, guttural phrase in a language long-dead when mankind first escaped from its creators. As Philip started screaming into his gag, I took a good hold of the trapdoor and
switched off the flashlight. The last earthly words he heard were my instructions to the creature: “The soul is yours, but leave the lower skull and jaw intact. I’ll need them later.”

  Saturday 22nd

  They held Philip’s funeral today, at a churchyard in Fox Point. Most of the investigators were there, and I shared stunned condolences with them. Cassie seemed particularly agitated, and stopped me after the service. We discussed our mutual loss, and she revealed that she had followed Philip into Elmwood in the week before his disappearance.

  I assured her that I didn’t know what he had been working on, and then recalled that he had, in fact, left some notes in my safe. She has agreed to come over to look at them tomorrow, to see if we can work out what he might have been investigating, and possibly pick up where he left off.

  HOBSTONE

  by G. K. Lomax

  Only a student of architecture would have noticed it, and possibly only then on a clear crisp spring morning, after a night of revelry and inebriation.

  James Belmont leant heavily on the wall at the mouth of the alleyway. Opposite, across Harstow Road, stood the house that for the time being he called home. He smiled triumphantly, and steeled himself for the last stretch. It was shortly after dawn, and he’d partied all night – an important rite of passage for a young man living out of reach of parental disapproval for the first time.

  The details of the party were already beginning to blur, but he was sure it had been good. He’d had a respectable amount to drink, he knew that. There had been a couple of drags on a joint that was being passed round too, a new experience, not that he’d admitted it. Then had come the dancing – energetic, uninhibited, exhilarating and prolonged – during which he had finally summoned up the nerve to make a move on Mel. To his astonishment and delight, Mel had proved equally energetic and uninhibited, only coming up for air to ask what had taken him so long. There were limits to what James was prepared to do in front of witnesses, but some clothing had been dispensed with. It seemed that Mel was every bit as interested as he was.

  Then they’d been roped into a drinking game involving tequila slammers, after which things were a bit of a blank. The one thing he was sure of was that Mel had given him her number, and had made her expectations perfectly clear. He fished his phone out of his pocket and grinned inanely at it. Yes, that was Mel’s number, right enough.

  The phone informed him that it was 5:49 am. He glanced at his watch, which seemed to agree. Wow. He couldn’t remember ever seeing 5:49 am before. All he had left to do was make it across the road, open the door, and crash for a few hours.

  He took a few deep breaths. The journey back from Paul’s place had been difficult. It was only a couple of miles, which he usually regarded as no distance at all. But the rules of the drinking game had been complex, and he’d fallen foul of them fairly regularly. Consequently, he’d consumed enough tequila to turn his walk home into a series of misadventures. London’s maze of small, twisting streets had taken their toll. He was pretty sure he’d have sore, bruised shins when he was sober enough to feel them.

  The street was quiet and empty, as befitted a Saturday morning before six, but it was surprisingly bright. Normally, Harstow Road was dull and shadowy. Apparently, when the sun shone directly down the street, it made everything look, well, if not exactly cheerful, then at least less grim. The fact that this happened when most of the residents were oblivious to it was just one of life’s little ironies.

  James gazed at his house, interested to see it at its best. Its age was hard to determine. Probably Victorian, aimed at the new and prosperous middle-class that had emerged during the nineteenth century. It was a largish but otherwise undistinguished mid-terrace affair, in need of attention. He shared it with four other students. The paint was cracked and peeling, the window-frames pitted, the brickwork in need of re-pointing, and the guttering busy sprouting vegetation. Nevertheless, he looked at it fondly, and wondered how many people had called it home since it had first been built.

  Home was a powerful word. It was why he wanted to be an architect, though he realised that this made him unusual. Most of his classmates dreamed of being the next Foster or Rogers or Le Corbusier, names associated with buildings people talked about. Vanity projects. He wanted to design for ordinary people, build houses that people lived in and turned into homes. There was satisfaction in that. Some architect had designed the house in which he now lived, had sat at his drawing-board and had placed the front door just here, the windows just there...

  The windows just there?

  He pulled himself away from the wall and stood upright. He looked again, and realised that he felt unpleasantly sober. His window was wrong. Well, not wrong, exactly. He struggled for a moment to decide what exactly he’d seen that bothered him.

  His room was on the ground floor, facing the street, to the right of the door as he was looking at it. That was his window, and that was the point where his house ended and the one next door began. But his room wasn’t that large. Which meant – he was sure of it – that his room was smaller on the inside that it ought to be when judged from the outside.

  James frowned. A reverse Tardis. A house could be made to seem smaller on the inside, he knew, through sloppy design, but to do it for real... Better make sure. Perhaps the hit of dope had slammed shut the doors of perception, rather than opening them.

  He crossed the street and stood level with the window. Then, placing heel to toe, he paced out the distance from there to the boundary of the house. Eleven, twelve, thirteen of his size nines. He measured again, just to be sure. Definitely thirteen.

  Now for the inside. He let himself in, and collided with Ron’s bike. The guy insisted on bringing it inside, despite the marks it left on the threadbare carpet. James cursed, fought free of the infernal thing, and entered his own room.

  It was long and thin – badly proportioned, to his architect’s eye. The landlord had left a bed, a table, a chair, a chest of drawers, and a small sink. To this, James had added a laptop, a printer, a guitar, two posters of impossible buildings by Escher (which tickled his sense of irony), a backpack, a pair of rollerblades, a collection of empty wine-bottles, a pile of textbooks, and a small Egyptian-style figurine of a cat, once his grandmother’s, that he’d formed an attachment to as a small boy.

  Brushing past everything, he walked over to the window. From there, he carefully measured paces to the wall – seven, eight, nine... and a half. No doubt about it. Either that wall was three feet too thick, or it was false, and concealed who knew what.

  He felt a rising tide of excitement, but with it came the exhaustion that his discovery had temporarily banished. Further exploration could wait. He aimed himself at his bed, and fell forward.

  ♦

  James woke to a thick head and an insistent bladder. Taking care of the latter problem via the sink, he made his way groggily to the kitchen in search of a cup of tea.

  “Holy shit, look at you.” Ralph was sitting at the table, demolishing a bacon sandwich.

  There were periods when Ralph seemed to subsist entirely on bacon sandwiches and Irn Bru – a combination which unnerved James at the best of times. Slightly to his surprise however, his stomach felt fine. His teeth seemed to have acquired a fur coat though, and the unshaded light-bulb hanging from the ceiling hurt his eyes. He put the kettle on.

  Ralph watched him. “Good party?”

  “Unh.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes. Score?”

  “Unh.”

  “I’ll take that as a no. What time did you get back?”

  “What time is it now?” James was not surprised by the croakiness of his voice.

  “It speaks! It’s twenty past six on a delightful Saturday afternoon. Arsenal won two-nil, and all’s right with the world.”

  “Fuck Arsenal.”

  “Well, we c
an’t all appreciate greatness. I take it you were mugged on the way home?”

  “Huh?”

  “Have you looked at your trousers recently?”

  James looked down. He had a moment of panic, fearing that he might have soiled himself or something embarrassing, but Ralph was referring to a tear in the left knee of his jeans, crusted with dried blood.

  “Oh yeah,” he said. “I think I walked into a bollard.” Now that he’d noticed it, his knee started to hurt quite badly. “Got any plasters?”

  “No.”

  The kettle boiled. James looked around for the least-dirty mug and made himself some tea. Two sugars. The finest restorative known to man. He took a sip.

  “Anyone else around?”

  “Ron’s in his room. With Dave. Call of Duty, I think. Sam’s away for the weekend, which you’d remember if your brain wasn’t so frazzled.”

  James drank some more tea. Twelve hours sleep and he still felt this awful? “Anyone call?”

  “What am I, your secretary? Check your phone. Though since you’ve got no life, I doubt it will be brimming with messages.”

  “Fuck you. And fuck Arsenal. Again.”

  “Ah, a wit. Or half of one, anyway.” Ralph finished his sandwich, licked his fingers, and stood up. “Right. I’m off out. That stuck-up cow from Surrey who thinks she can sing has somehow persuaded the powers that be to let her gig the Union. I want to grab a seat in the front row so I can make helpful suggestions. See ya. If you find yourself at a loose end this evening, might I suggest the washing-up?” He left without waiting for an answer. A moment later, the front door slammed.