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

by Tim Dedopulos

  Though the constable informed me in the morning that officers would be coming up from Edinburgh, I knew whatever evil was in this place was beyond the power of these earthly men. I returned to Edinburgh, and whilst I lodged in the New Town, and kept well away from Fleshmarket Close, even after several weeks I could not shake a lingering fear, an uneasiness that went everywhere with me. The police found no trace of my brother, and I despaired of ever knowing the fate of my son.

  ♦

  MR ROBERT WALKER

  GLENVIEW STREET

  PADDINGTON, NEW SOUTH WALES

  RETURNING TO SYDNEY STOP NO HOPE HERE STOP EXPECT TO ARRIVE END APRIL STOP

  AONGHAS CROWTHER

  I wandered into the train station by the Waverley Bridge, a great weight pressing on me. I could not grieve again for my son, but I had been so certain I would find resolution here. The combination of loss and failure is a bitter draught for any man, and I had drunk more than my share.

  I paused atop the stairs, looking down into the station below. The platforms were crowded, its bustle a contrast to the emptiness I felt, a yawning hopelessness in the face of the unnatural malice to which I had been witness.

  I made my plodding way down the stairs. As I stepped into the main station, I felt again a sensation of being watched. I felt a sharp pang in my chest, and I looked around nervously. I felt as though the world had slowed around me as I looked this way and that, searching faces in the crowd. Nothing. No one I recognised. And then I looked back up the stairs I had just stepped from.

  There, in the very place I had paused and looked down but a few moments before, stood Cormack, watching with a dark, crooked smile.

  The slumbering fear that I carried awoke with a start into terror, and I shook uncontrollably. I was stuck in place. The hammer of my pulse in my ears drowned out all other sound, and I was lost in my own little purgatory.

  Until Cormack took a slow, almost nonchalant step down. The spell seemed broken, and in a desperate hysteria I fled through the crowd. I ducked and darted, knocking people aside, jumping behind doors and waiting for a moment, before dashing off in a new direction. I must have looked like a madman, and I cannot, thinking back on it, understand how I did not make myself that much more conspicuous in my panic.

  Eventually I found a narrow space, a little recess into which I squeezed myself, beside the door to the guard’s room on my platform. I watched, as best I could, the other passengers boarding the train for London, and waited until the last moment, when the guard blew the whistle, before I leapt out of my hiding place and onto the train, as it pulled away.

  I stood inside the door, peering surreptitiously out of the window at the station. I did not see Cormack, and neither had I seen him board the train. But I could not be sure, and when I found my seat, I was still in a state of great anxiety. I slumped low in my seat, trying to make myself as invisible to the rest of the train as possible.

  I did not notice how far south I had gone by the time my heartbeat relaxed, but the fear stayed with me the entire journey, and I was beset by a frequent palsy, shaking so that I could barely put a cup to my lips. I was in such a state when I arrived in London that I left the train without my belongings.

  My fear it seemed, was entirely justified, for in the crowds at Waterloo Station, I saw Cormack again. I reeled away, terrified, shoving people from my path as I fled. And then he was there again, and again, seemingly in every crowd, always ahead of me. Eventually I stumbled into quieter streets, and he did not find me again.

  I found a cab, and instructed the cabbie merely to drive. I was in London early, and had thought to hide in my berth aboard ship until departure two days later. But now, I had no desire to bring attention to my plans, were I to be seen at the port. Instead I took the cab across the river to the Westminster Palace Hotel, where I paid a fortune by most measures to hide myself away. It was no small luxury, and despite myself, I was much recovered by the time I made my way to the port on the morning of departure.

  To my alarm, however, I discovered that my ship, the Rosebud, had sailed. Consulting the Port Authority, I was informed that the Rosebud had departing according to schedule – at dawn that morning, and with its full complement of passengers, on which list I was included.

  Though I produced the telegram confirming my date of passage and the noon time of the Rosebud’s departure, there was, as the clerk informed, little point in argument. The ship was simply not there for me to take. When I questioned the fact that, despite the ledger, I had quite clearly not sailed upon the Rosebud that morning, the clerk became very much less than affable.

  “Are you suggesting, sir, that I am telling an untruth? Or that the Port Authority does not keep factual records?” He shot up from his chair, face twisting savagely.

  I was quite taken aback by his violent reaction, and somewhat in shock, simply left. In the end I sailed upon the Samuel Plimsoll itself, from Plymouth. I did not relish a voyage upon that ship, but neither would I remain in Britain any longer than necessary. Thankfully, for the sake of my sanity I believe, the old sailor who had sent me to Fleshmarket Close was not aboard, and no one else seemed to know me.

  Upon the open ocean, with fresh air and time to reflect, I became convinced that I had been suffering some sort of delusion. Even had I seen my brother as I left Edinburgh, though in the end I doubted even this, there was simply no reasonable explanation for him to be following me about and terrorising me. If he had been so intent on causing me distress, why had he not done so upon the train? And if he was not on the train, as I came to believe, it simply wasn’t possible that he could have made it to London for me to see him there.

  This realisation, that I was not in my right mind, was, I believed, the turning point, and I wondered what else had been the product of my clearly fevered mind. I sought the counsel of the ship’s surgeon, and even the chaplain. So it was that I arrived in Sydney, hale and whole, on a bright, cold winter’s morning toward the end of July.

  Without my baggage, I had spent the voyage with a little spare clothing given to me by the chaplain. Not having anything now to encumber me, I eschewed a cab, and walked the miles home from the harbour.

  When I turned the key in my front door, I was assaulted by the dust and musty air of a home closed up and uninhabited for the best part of a year. The shutters and curtains were all closed, and the house dim and gloomy. I went about the house, opening windows and letting in the fresh air. The door to the parlour was shut, which was unusual, and as I reached out to open it, I was struck by a sudden echo of that old fear. Shrugging it off, I opened the door and stepped into the darkened room.

  Even without much light, I could see it.

  The terror and sickness rose in me again. Upon the far wall, utterly drained, mouth open in a silent, lifeless scream, was nailed the corpse of Cormack. His limbs were twisted grotesquely to form a human version of that nightmare sigil, and behind him on the wall, like a shadow upon a shadow, was the image of some monstrous, esoteric creature of writhing tentacles tipped with talons.

  My vision swam, and as I reached out to steady myself, a strong hand gripped my elbow. I looked up to see Robert Walker standing by my side. In a voice wholly not his, but horribly familiar, he said, “Hello, father.”

  AFTERWORD

  When H. P. Lovecraft died on March 15, 1937, no book of his stories had been published, and only a single, poorly printed edition of one story (The Shadow over Innsmouth, 1936) had come out. All his other stories were consigned to the pages of already crumbling pulp magazines like Weird Tales and Astounding Stories, and Lovecraft was probably already envisioning the ultimate oblivion that would overtake his work as he himself lay dying.

  That oblivion was averted only by the help of his friends and colleagues, who rescued his work and preserved it in hardcover and, later, paperback editions. For decades Lovecraft was
a writer known only to the select few; but his tales unexpectedly gained a wide following beginning in the later 1960s, and ever since then his fame and popularity have continued to grow exponentially. Now his work has been translated into more than thirty languages, and he has been officially canonised as a major writer in world literature.

  Much of that popularity has been the result of an unprecedented array of writers of weird fiction, science fiction, and even mainstream fiction who have chosen to adapt or expand upon the provocative ideas found in his work. This is an almost unparalleled phenomenon, and its only possible parallel is the wide-ranging imitations of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Over the decades, writers as eminent as Arthur C. Clarke, Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King, and Jorge Luis Borges have written pastiches of or homages to Lovecraft, and there seems to be no end in sight.

  What has led writers of such differing literary bent to pay their respects to Lovecraft in novels and stories? Part of the answer is the remarkable timelessness of Lovecraft’s visions. He deliberately eschewed writing about mundane or transient political or social phenomena of the 1920s and 1930s, when most of his fiction was written; instead, he focused on “big” issues that affected all humanity. What is our place in the universe? What can we do in the face of alien incursion? How do we define the self? It is these “cosmic” issues that constitute the essence of Lovecraft’s fictional world.

  Lovecraft was also a pioneer in the development of weird fiction. A devotee of science from early childhood, he realised that the standard motifs of supernatural writing—the vampire, the werewolf, the witch, the haunted house, and so on—had become played out through overuse, and, more significantly, had become implausible through the advance of science. Accordingly, Lovecraft believed that the only means to keep weird fiction aesthetically viable was to reinterpret weird conceptions by means of cutting-edge science. “The time has come,” he wrote in a 1931 letter, “when the normal revolt against time, space, & matter must assume a form not overtly incompatible with what is known of reality—when it must be gratified by images forming supplements rather than contradictions of the visible & mensurable universe. And what, if not a form of non-supernatural cosmic art, is to pacify this sense of revolt—as well as gratify the cognate sense of curiosity?” And so we have such great weird/science fiction hybrids as the Antarctic novella At the Mountains of Madness or that intriguing examination of mind-exchange over time, “The Shadow out of Time.”

  At the same time, Lovecraft’s intense devotion to landscape—especially the landscape of his native New England—made him something of a regional writer, with a meticulously recreated topography (even though it included such invented towns as Arkham, Dunwich, and Innsmouth) that became the springboards of incredible cosmic imaginings. It is this intimate fusion of the real and the imaginary that makes Lovecraft’s work so distinctive.

  The writers who have contributed to this book have seized upon these and other aspects of Lovecraft’s vision in their own imaginative ventures. A fair number of them make only the most tangential allusions to themes, motifs, and conceptions in Lovecraft’s work, but that is their great virtue. There was a time, some decades ago, when would-be pastichists of Lovecraft were content to mention one of the “gods” or “forbidden books” of his pseudomythology, or to create new ones of their own; but time has passed, and writers today realise that a much more searching and allusive approach is needed. The contributors to Cthulhu Lives! have found intriguing elements in Lovecraft’s stories—whether it be the documentary style of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, the threat of hybrid monsters in “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” or supernatural rats in “The Rats in the Walls”—and infused them with their own imaginations. The result is a series of sincere and well-crafted tributes to H. P. Lovecraft that rise far above mechanical pastiche.

  Lovecraft once wrote: “The imaginative writer devotes himself to art in its most essential sense ... He is a painter of moods and mind-pictures—a capturer and amplifier of elusive dreams and fancies—a voyager into those unheard-of realms which are glimpsed through the veil of actuality but rarely, and only by the most sensitive.” By this standard, the writers included in Cthulhu Lives! are indeed imaginative writers in the truest sense.

  —S. T. Joshi

  SPECIAL BONUS STORY

  from Red Phone Box: a Darkly Magical Story Cycle, available now from Ghostwoods Books

  THE BOXED GOD by Kate Harrad

  How red the box was. Redder than the sun, redder than splashes of rust on the ground, redder than Ravi’s blood. How beautiful it was. They worshipped its beauty. They chanted from sunrise to sunset, surrounding it in a circle of praise, raising their hands towards it, committing every feature to memory: the clouded glass, the dusty handle, the mysterious word sprawled across the top, TELEPHONE. They had never seen anything like it.

  It was new, but it had always been there. Ravi knew both things were true, though she did not know how. She only knew that it blazed in the sunlight like a flower, and they, the children, were the bees drawn to its vital, vivid energy. How they loved it, how they loved it.

  And how they loved the god who lived inside the box. For the box was not merely a box; it was a container, a glass cabinet designed to display the god in all her pale glory. How beautiful she was. They worshipped her for all they were worth. The god in the box represented the living spirit in the body, the soul inside the flesh. She was life itself, and everything she did was symbolic of the divine.

  Ravi liked it especially when she slept, her body hunched in the corner of her narrow red cell like a broken insect caught in a jar. She could watch the god for hours like that, even when everyone else had left. She was the god’s most fervent devotee, she knew. Her biggest fan. The god called her that sometimes, when it was the middle of the night and she woke up to find Ravi still watching her. “You’re my biggest fan,” she would say. And usually she would add, “Please let me out. Please. Do you understand?” And Ravi would bow down to her. But she would not approach the box. Neither she nor any of the children would dare touch the box or reply to the god. That wasn’t what they were for.

  The best thing of all was when the god sang to them. That happened more in the early days, before she grew weak. She made other noises too, early on – loud noises, sometimes, but they didn’t like those much. They had heard screaming before. What they liked was the singing. Sing to us, they begged, and the god sometimes obliged. Ravi suspected, secretly, that the god’s singing voice was not that good, but she wanted her to sing as much as the others did. More. The songs were like the sound of love. Although the words meant almost nothing to her, she committed them all to memory.

  Once, the god stopped after the first line of the song, and began to shout instead of singing. This is not where I belong! Where am I? Please, please let me out! The children recognised this as the eternal cry of the god. They knew that eventually the cries would stop, so they merely kneeled and praised the god’s suffering, enduring spirit. After a while, she began to sing again.

  But that was in the early days, when the god was still going strong. Now she was near the end of her span, and Ravi knew it, for this was not their first sacrifice. She mourned, but she was grateful too, to have experienced such a transforming, glorious thing as the boxed god.

  No more sounds came from inside, now. As the god began to die, the children gathered in their dozens, waiting at a respectful distance for the miracle of death to occur, to thrill them with the profound, necessary knowledge that they were still alive.

  Ravi was the closest to the red box. And after the miracle occurred, and the god’s eyes finally closed, and gradually everyone drifted away, she stepped through the invisible circle around the box and finally she opened it. She lifted the thin body and took it out to the air and held her close, and they watched the sun go down together, and she sang her goodbyes.

  But she was happy as well as s
ad – soon, the box would create another god for them to love, and the singing would begin again.

  RED PHONE BOX

  A darkly magical story cycle

  Shatter a mirror, and rearrange the pieces. What shapes will you find in the splintered glass?

  Sinister forces roam London’s streets, skulking through the neon-lit rain. They are not alone. Haunted by memories of the man who abandoned her, Amber goes walking in the deep night. The phone box she enters takes her on a journey she could never have imagined, one in which the past and the future will be rewritten. Others follow in her footsteps, their lives intertwining, and the fate of the world hanging on their dance. Safran, pawn of unfathomable powers. Jon, who has lived and died and lived again. Gloria, who only intended to annoy her daddy. Cory, from a different world, on a desperate quest for allies. They and others will find themselves swept up as the playthings of gods who have managed to get along peacefully for millennia — until now.

  Red Phone Box is a darkly magical story cycle, a network of interweaving tales by a dazzling range of masterful authors, including Gun Machine’s Warren Ellis. Let them take you to a very different London — one that hides on the other side of the fractured glass.

  Red Phone Box is waiting for you…

  Written by: Warren Ellis, Robert Bal, Chris Bissette, Joff Brown,

  Francesca Burgon, David Church Rodríguez, Gábor Csigás, Peter Dawes, Tim Dedopulos, James ‘Grim’ Desborough, Hollis Dorian, erisreg,