The Lovecraft Squad

by John Llewellyn Probert

  Where a door was waiting.

  Chambers hoped it was a door. Unlike the others they had encountered, this one was merely a patch of powder-dry earth about three feet across. When Chambers put his foot on it, he sank in up to his knee.

  “Do you think this might be it?”

  “It could be.” Dr. Cruttenden was scratching her head. “If it’s not, then I don’t suppose you’ll live very long to find out.”

  “Perhaps we should go up the steps on the other side, just to make sure?”

  “I don’t think so, Karen.” Chambers pointed. From here it was possible to see the blood oozing down the walls from the sodden staircase. And the angry dead, free from their bonds, who were now glowering at them. “If we don’t try this, I think we’re going to be here forever anyway.”

  Karen chewed her lip. “Well, you go first, then.”

  Chambers grinned. “I rather thought you’d say that.” He took six steps back, drew a deep breath, and then ran forward, jumping the last couple of feet so that he would land dead center in the dry area. At the last minute he closed his eyes.

  And felt himself falling.

  TWENTY-NINE

  THE GROUND WAS HARD and cold. And, Chambers discovered as he stretched out an exploratory hand, as smooth as polished glass.

  He was yet to open his eyes as he had only just landed, if that was what the sensation he had just experienced could be described as. His left leg had twisted under him and felt bruised but not broken. The rest of him felt uninjured.

  Time to see where he was.

  His first impression was that he was in the corridor of some great building. He was lying on his right side on pale gray floor tiles. If he turned his head to the left, he could see, high above him, an ornate ceiling decorated with ornamental plasterwork. He couldn’t quite make out what these decorations were meant to be as the light was too poor, but at least it was bright enough for him to see where he was.

  Where were Karen and Dr. Cruttenden?

  He heaved himself to his feet, noting that he had been quite right about his left leg and he would probably be limping a bit as a result of it.

  How had he gotten here?

  The ceiling looked intact, but of course that could be an optical illusion. Any second now Karen and Dr. Cruttenden might come tumbling through it. With that in mind, he shuffled over to the right-hand wall and leaned against a pillar. Now that he could inspect it more closely, he could see it was a column of Corinthian design. There was an identical one across the way. Wherever he was, it was quite extravagantly decorated, which made for a pleasing change. The walls on either side were of red marble, through which ran veins of gold and white. They were surprisingly warm to the touch.

  Well-decorated and warm, Chambers thought. Could this be the Comfortable Circle of Hell?

  Suddenly reminded of where he was, he looked about him for any trace of those damned to imprisonment here, but there was no one. He waited for Karen and Dr. Cruttenden to turn up. Nothing.

  Perhaps they had already arrived, but were elsewhere? Chambers tried his weight on his left leg and was rewarded with searing pain shooting up from his ankle to his knee.

  I need a crutch.

  Doing his best to ignore the discomfort, Chambers hobbled forward a few steps to find himself confronted by a robed figure. He almost fell backward with fright as he stifled a cry.

  Then he saw the figure wasn’t real.

  It was remarkably lifelike, though, as his probing fingers revealed both the face and fingers to be made of wax. The scarlet robes were real enough, and had been fixed to the torso sufficiently well that they could not be removed.

  The scepter that the figure was holding in its right hand, however, came away easily. Chambers examined it carefully. It appeared to be made of a heavy dark wood, possibly ebony, and the tip had been carved into a point. Two spirals of tiny dancing figures made loops down the shaft to the brass ferrule fitted over the bottom end. Most important of all, it was sturdy enough to take his weight.

  Grasping the engraved shaft of his new walking aid, Chambers began to make his way down the corridor, the brass ferrule clicking on the floor tiles as he moved.

  It wasn’t long before the walls parted, and he found himself in a vast, high-ceilinged chamber filled with statues like the one he had borrowed the staff from. Some were in glass display cases, others stood free. All were different—dressed in different clothes, arranged in different positions—but all seemed to represent some religious office. Some weren’t even human.

  Chambers came to a crossroads, where an eight-foot-tall statue of the Egyptian god Anubis stared at him, its face half in shadow. He resisted the urge to stare back.

  Which way?

  He debated calling out, but figured that might only attract whatever cursed creatures were probably wandering the corridors. There was still no sign of Karen or Dr. Cruttenden, and he was starting to get worried.

  He looked up at Anubis.

  “Which way do you think I should go?” he said before he could stop himself.

  The figure remained silent. Was it his imagination, or was more of its face in the light than had been before?

  He took a step back. The eyes of the figure seemed to follow him. After all he had been through, he could not bring himself to dismiss the thought as ridiculous.

  Chambers took a step to the left. Now he was standing at the center of the crossroads. He was also out of the eye-line of the statue.

  Until it turned its head toward him.

  Chambers didn’t wait to see if he had been mistaken. Instead he set off down one of the aisles, hobbling faster now. Almost immediately he regretted his choice. The exhibits here seemed to be a collection of the worst creatures from an Aztec’s nightmare. A group of huge, bird-like creatures with jutting, blood-streaked fangs had been poised over a monstrous ape with tusks, frozen in the moment of tearing its heart out. Was he hearing things, or was that the rustle of feathers behind him as he passed by?

  He tried to ignore the distant sound of slow, heavy footsteps as he rounded another corner. Here the exhibits seemed to be marine-based, but were no less terrifying for it. A barracuda with bat-like wings atop a pedestal was being worshiped by tiny human figures, while further on something that seemed to consist of nothing but a mass of tentacles and teeth hung over an altar of polished granite.

  The footsteps behind him were getting louder.

  There were other noises now as well, and Chambers suddenly found himself loath to look behind him in case each of the displays had somehow come to life with his passing.

  “Karen?” If the exhibits were alive it wouldn’t matter if they heard his cries, and it was far more important now that he find his friends. His voice caused a flurry of activity behind him and he began to move faster, his ankle protesting with a grumbling ache that he was just going to have to put up with.

  “Karen? Anyone?” He rounded another corner and barely looked at the primitive creatures displayed there. One seemed to be devouring the sun, while another held the moon in arachnodactylic fingers. The noise behind him was louder still and, though he had been trying hard not to, Chambers finally gave in and risked a glance over his shoulder.

  The scene behind him was terrifying.

  It was what a painting might look like, he thought, a painting designed to show all the horrors of Hell bursting forth from it in one huge, heady onslaught. Pig-creatures, squid-like monstrosities, wolf-men, hyena-things and much, much worse, all hindering each other in their mad scramble to reach their quarry.

  His attention was on the mass of creatures pursuing him, and so Chambers failed to notice the hand reaching out to grab him and drag him into a shadowy alcove. He gave a cry, but stopped the moment he saw who it was.

  “Karen! How long have you been here?”

  “About half an hour,” Dr. Cruttenden whispered from behind her. “Waiting quietly here and deciding what to do next.”

  “What are those things?”

/>   Karen clamped a hand over his mouth as the hideous, otherworldly entourage passed them by.

  “We are in the Circle of Heresy,” Dr. Cruttenden explained once the creatures were gone. “Therefore it follows that everything you have seen is the product of some religion that has existed in the past. You were being pursued by false gods.”

  “But that makes no sense,” Chambers hissed back. “Where are the souls who are meant to have been banished to this level?”

  “You haven’t worked it out, then?” Even in the darkness Chambers could see Karen wasn’t impressed. “Those are the dead, the heretical dead, cursed to a never-ending torment as the very idols they worshipped in life. Now we’ve come down here and upset everything because, like on every other circle we’ve been to, we’re the ones who could offer them a potential way out.”

  “Did you work all that out yourself?” Chambers nodded at Dr. Cruttenden. “Or did you have help?”

  “Don’t be childish, Professor Chambers.” Dr. Cruttenden was admonishing him, and he deserved it. “We have survived here for a good thirty minutes without making a sound, and consequently without disturbing a single of the exhibits out there. You, on the other hand, seem to have caused quite a rumpus. You’ve even stolen something that belongs to them.”

  Chambers looked at his staff. “I couldn’t walk without this.”

  Karen sniffed. “Then perhaps you should have stayed where you were.”

  Chambers wasn’t going to let that pass. “That wouldn’t have helped us get out of here, would it?”

  “Stop it, both of you. We know there must be a way out, but what we don’t know is how big this place is. We also now have the added difficulty of having a pantheon of undead deities looking for us.” Dr. Cruttenden looked at Chambers. “Or rather, they are looking for you.”

  “Well, I’d love to act as bait and draw them off while you two hunt for the way out”—Chambers was gripping his staff defensively—“but in case you hadn’t noticed I can’t actually walk terribly quickly, much less run from those things out there.”

  “Nobody’s suggesting it should be you who distracts them.” Dr. Cruttenden licked her lips and looked at Karen, who visibly flinched.

  “I’m not going out there,” she said.

  “I was merely suggesting that we will have to watch out for Professor Chambers as we all go together to try to find the way out.”

  Dr. Cruttenden’s explanation helped Chambers pull himself together. “I should be okay,” he said, pressing on his ankle and doing a fine job of keeping a straight face as the sprained joint did its best to cause him all kinds of agony.

  Karen peered out from their hiding place. “They seem to have gone.”

  “I imagine it won’t be long before they’re back.” Dr. Cruttenden gave Chambers a prod. “You go first so we can keep an eye on you.”

  It was sensible, of course, although Chambers hated the idea of being watched, doing his best to hobble along and pretend nothing was wrong. He also wished the ferrule on the end of his staff was a bit quieter, but his attempts to remove it while they had been talking had met with little success.

  The staff clicked on the polished floor as he levered his way out.

  “Can’t you—?”

  “No, I’ve already tried,” he hissed, cutting off Karen before she could say any more.

  Dr. Cruttenden followed, with Karen bringing up the rear.

  “Which way?” Chambers asked.

  “Well, we came from down there.” The lecturer pointed straight ahead.

  “And I came from there.” Chambers pointed to the left.

  “Right it is, then,” said Karen, urging them on.

  They came to another crossroads, each length of corridor lined with display cases alternating with religious tableaux. It was difficult to tell what many of the specimens were meant to depict in the semi-darkness, but Chambers saw creatures covered in hair and wielding tapering claws, and harpy-like monstrosities tearing the flesh from human bodies that looked uncomfortably lifelike.

  Straight ahead of them, at the very end of the corridor they were following, was a painting on the wall. If Chambers squinted, he could just make out the segmented body arching up over its tiny worshippers, and the strange, tripod-like arrangement of its hind limbs. Above and beneath it were words in a foreign language.

  It was the painting from the wall in All Hallows Church.

  Chambers recognized it just as the things in the tableaux around them began to move.

  “Keep going,” he said as Karen and Dr. Cruttenden shrank back from the creatures advancing on them from four directions. “Keep going until you get to that picture.”

  “But it’s a dead end!” Karen looked around her, but there was nowhere else for them to go.

  “A dead end that’s guarded by the Anarch!” Dr. Cruttenden grabbed Karen’s hand and urged her to follow Chambers. “If there was a secret way out of here, I would have expected it to be guarded by Him.”

  The corridor was filling with creatures now, moving slowly but gaining strength as they awoke from their deep sleep. A long, drawn out wolf-howl from far behind them signified that Chambers’s pursuers from earlier knew where they were now as well.

  “Come on!” Dr. Cruttenden placed a hand on his shoulder to help Chambers forward. He was having to lean more heavily on the staff now, and as the things from either side plucked at his sleeves he found himself slowing down and almost overbalancing.

  “Not far!” That was Karen, as she put his left arm around her shoulders so now he could lean on her as well as the staff.

  But it seemed hopeless. As tentacles and claws brushed his face, and he sensed barbed insectoid limbs digging into his clothes, he felt both of them being dragged to a standstill.

  “We can’t give up now!” A hearty thrust from Dr. Cruttenden shoved them both forward as she bellowed above the noise of the things that were pursuing them, that were either side of them, that seemed to be all around them, clutching and pawing and scratching.

  Suddenly, they were there.

  Chambers did not so much see the wall as collide with it, his staff clattering to the floor as he put out both hands to stop himself from dashing his face against the surface. He almost expected his outstretched palms to pass straight through the painting, but they didn’t. Instead they came up against cold, damp-feeling plaster.

  “There’s no way through!” he said. His searching hands felt their way around as much of the image as his reach would allow.

  “There has to be.” Dr. Cruttenden was at his side now, while Karen had picked up the staff and begun to beat at the creatures that surrounded them. “Perhaps if we say the words?”

  “You’ll have to,” Chambers gasped. He couldn’t move away from the wall without suffering appalling pain. “I can’t get back far enough to see what they say.”

  Karen thrust the staff at a hawk-beaked monstrosity with arms thick with copper-colored feathers and the dead eyes of a psychopath, as Dr. Cruttenden took a step back and hesitantly read aloud the legend that had been painted on the wall in thready black ink. It was the same as the words that Dr. Chesney had uttered back in the church what seemed a lifetime ago now.

  “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”

  Nothing.

  “Perhaps you have to read it more than once?” Chambers didn’t know what else to suggest, but he knew the power that the ancient chant possessed.

  Dr. Cruttenden tried again and again, but still nothing.

  “How many churches were there?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Karen swiped at a green-skinned thing low to the ground, its only facial feature a round hole lined with suckers. “I asked how many models of churches were there, back in the crypt?”

  “Seven.” Chambers remembered counting them as each one was encountered.

  “Then try saying it seven times.”

  Three down, four to go. Dr. Cruttenden mouthed the words as
rapidly as possible. As the last twisted syllable left her lips, the outline of the flea god became a blinding white light and Chambers suddenly felt the wall give beneath his touch.

  “It’s working!” he said, feeling himself start to pass through. “What’s waiting for us in the next circle?”

  He could feel Karen beside him as the world turned white, but Dr. Cruttenden’s voice seemed very far away as she uttered a single word that filled him with dread.

  “Violence.”

  THIRTY

  SCREAMS.

  That was what Chambers’s senses encountered first on his arrival in the new realm. Tortured, agonized screams. And they were coming from close by.

  He opened his eyes to discover he was standing on a rough wooden balcony, or viewing platform, that ran the entire circumference of the chamber in which he found himself. A dim, smoky glow was provided by flaming torches set high into the damp stone walls at regular intervals. The light was too poor for him to see how high the ceiling was, but he guessed it must be low as the smoke was refusing to rise very far.

  There were other people on the balcony with him. Too many.

  Crowded against him to his right were Karen and Dr. Cruttenden, and he acknowledged their presence with relief. He was about to look at those buffeting him to his left and behind him when his attention was distracted by another scream from below. He looked down on a spectacle straight out of the Middle Ages, or perhaps something the Spanish Inquisition might have devised.

  The balcony looked onto a torture chamber.

  It had to be at least twenty feet below where he was standing, but there was no doubting what was taking place there. He could see five different devices, each bearing a helpless victim. He only caught the briefest glimpse of what was being done to them before he tried to close his eyes tightly.

  And found he couldn’t.

  “I think that’s meant to be part of it,” Dr. Cruttenden shouted to him over the noise. “You have to endure the violence as part of your damnation.”