Cthulhu Cymraeg

by Probert, John Llewellyn

  Of course it had been difficult to believe. Not so much the part about palliation: Martin had always considered his music to be a panacea, a welcome salve for the wounds of everyday life. It was more the fact that it had been the cause of the constant and persistent ringing in his ears from which he now suffered in the first place. Surely such a condition was the province of machine operators and heavy metal music fanatics?

  “You have a demonstrable degree of deafness,” the specialist had said, pointing to lines on the audiogram printout that meant nothing to Martin. “And from your history I can determine no risk factors other than the fact that for much of your life you have listened to far more music than the average human being, some of it no doubt louder than is strictly safe. I agree that it’s rare for someone to suffer deafness from the kind of music you say you listen to, but it’s always possible that your auditory nerves are more sensitive than others, and that they are more prone to damage than one might normally expect.” Mr Ramply-Watson had put down his pen and given Martin a hard stare, “Either way, the fact of the matter is that you have partial hearing loss and that is the most likely cause of your tinnitus. I don’t think a hearing aid is going to do much good, but there are other treatments available and we can explore those. In the meantime background music will probably help. As long as it’s not too loud.”

  As is sometimes the nature of the medical profession, especially of those in different specialties, Dr Montague the psychiatrist had objected to this, but not as vehemently as Mr Ramply-Watson had proposed it. After all, aggression tends not to be part of the nature of a doctor of mental health, but he did voice his concerns in slightly louder tones than usual.

  “It could be the music that was the cause of your breakdown in the first place,” he said as Martin shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Not necessarily the listening to it, but the constant requirements of your job, the need to perform perfectly those intricate five-part organ sonatas you told me about, the constant complaints from parents who felt you weren’t doing your job properly, the pupils themselves who either refused or were unable to rise to your very exacting standards. Your auditory hallucinations, your feelings of frustration and low self-esteem, all of these have most likely arisen from your everyday working practice. Take a break.” The psychiatrist had crossed his legs at this point. Perhaps, Martin had thought, it was his way of emphasising a point. “Take a break and get away from it all, somewhere you can feel safe. The medication I’ve prescribed will help with the worst of your symptoms, but it’s the change of environment that will do you the world of good.”

  The change of environment.

  William Martin arrived in Llanroath early on a Wednesday evening, the bus that took him south from Carmarthen railway station having been delayed by an accident just two miles from his destination. It was a hot day, even for late May, and it was with breathless relief that he was finally able to escape the baked air and step down onto the deserted main street. It wasn’t yet dark, and the clouds in the twilit sky above him were like black ink in blue water. The bus pulled away, leaving him alone, the gentle breeze blowing sufficient to block out the tinnitus that was threatening to return, now he no longer had the sound of the vehicle’s engine to keep it at bay.

  Martin put down his case and rubbed his temples. To his left the street disappeared into darkness. Further on was a hill the silhouette of which he could just make out, as well as the crooked crenellations of the ruined castle that he guessed must be perched at its summit. To his right the street led to a T-junction running perpendicular, and on the other side of this T stood the pub where he had booked a room.

  The Rugged Cross was tiny and ancient, and so was the cramped attic room in which Martin found himself after being guided up two flights of creaking stairs of reasonable width, and then up a third staircase that had to be the narrowest ever contrived by an architect. The landlord’s name was Meillir Harris. He seemed pleasant enough as he apologised, explaining that the tavern’s other rooms were occupied at present, but that as soon as a larger one became available, Martin would be moved. Martin thanked the man, who seemed as relieved to leave the room as Martin was to finally have space to move within it. The sloping roof meant that he could only stand up straight if he stood in the very middle, and the single bed with its unwelcoming-looking grey blanket creaked when he sat down. A tiny window set just below the apex of the roof gave him a view, but he would have to wait until tomorrow to see what it was. Right now, the splintered wooden frame enclosed merely darkness made all the blacker by the light of the bare bulb that hung from the ceiling. Opposite the bed, which filled one side of the room, a rickety wooden bureau provided space for Martin to unpack. The three drawers were lined with newspaper yellow with age and tinged with dots of mould, and so it surprised him to read the date on one of the spread out pages as being just last month.

  The tiny bathroom was two floors down and Martin witnessed not a soul as he made his way there and back again. He had not eaten since lunchtime but found his appetite lacking after the events of the rest of the day, and so he decided to make an early night of it.

  There was nowhere to plug in his white noise generator.

  The thorough search Martin performed of the entire room failed to yield a single plug socket, and so the device he had been provided by the hospital’s ENT department went back into its box as Martin’s anxiety rose a few notches.

  How was he going to stop the ringing sounds now?

  They were always worse at night. Everything was always worse at night. It was in the unyielding darkness that he had finally had his breakdown as the whispering, piercing noises that had plagued him for weeks had finally resolved themselves into whispered words he could not ignore. While Dr Montague had assured him the medication he was on would keep the voices at bay, the thought of a night alone with nothing but silence terrified him.

  Once Martin knew he was too scared to undress and get into bed, and that if he were to stay in that room his symptoms of mounting panic would only worsen, he realised there was only one alternative.

  Despite the lateness of the hour, he would explore the town.

  The landlord was calling last orders as Martin passed through the tiny bar. The two customers refused to be distracted from their cloudy beer, and even the landlord seemed unconcerned by behaviour that must surely have looked strange to them.

  The main street was deserted, and the light breeze made just enough sound to distract Martin from the noises that were beginning to build inside his head. It wouldn’t last, though, and Martin knew that soon the tinny whispering would become loud enough to upset him.

  Where could he go?

  The moon was out now, and the silhouette he had first mistaken for a castle was now bathed in silver, revealing the crenellations to belong to a bell tower, the crooked walls to be merely the angle at which the little church was positioned on the hill, much closer to the village than Martin had imagined.

  There was a light on inside.

  His mind made up, and with the night still warm, Martin set off up the main street, the lamps seeming to flicker in time with the whispering inside his head as he passed. Soon the buildings and the lights were gone and the road had narrowed to a single track lane. A cloud passed over the upper half of the moon, like a mask attempting to cloak a damaged mind, and Martin found himself groping in semi-darkness, his only guide the dull glow from the church.

  By trial and error and several collisions with damp undergrowth, Martin discovered that the road curved round to the right and, as it crested a hill, it ended at the low stone wall of the cemetery. As if to reward his efforts, the moon suddenly divested itself of its coverings and he was allowed a metallic-grey view of the cold, unyielding building before him.

  The gate in the stone wall swung open at his touch. In the darkness of the lane Martin had walked as fast as he could. Now he could see where he was going, his footsteps were more cautious, perhaps because whatever might be watching would now also
be able to see him. He made his way along the gravel path that led to the door. The church was bigger than he had expected. It looked fourteenth century and had probably been built at a time when its congregation would have numbered over a hundred from the local farming and seafaring communities. Martin approached the door with a mixture of trepidation and indecision. What was he going to say to whomever he found inside? Would there be anyone in there? Was leaving a light on in the local church a custom in these parts? A traditional guiding of the lost soul to the sanctity and protection of the Lord?

  Or could there be some other reason?

  Martin had scarcely had time to consider this when he realised that now there was no light within the church. The dull glow that had guided him after the moon’s temporary abandonment had now vanished.

  The vibrations within his head were starting to make themselves known again now that he had stopped walking, the silence of the evening the perfect canvas for their delicate, insidious brushstrokes of paranoia. Martin ignored what he thought he could hear and rattled the door handle, emboldened now by the presumed absence of anyone within.

  It took a little struggling, and for a moment he thought the door was locked, but eventually it creaked open to reveal a panoply of pews awash with ethereal silver-tinged shades of ruby, emerald and sapphire from the moonlight’s passage through the stained glass of the windows opposite.

  Martin took a step inside and the door banged shut behind him. It made him jump but, once he appreciated that it had failed to arouse the interest of anyone who might be in the building with him, it was in a slightly more relaxed state that he proceeded up the aisle to where he could see the organ, positioned to the left of the altar.

  It looked open.

  He could see the manuals, two of them, arranged in stepwise fashion, the protective wooden shutter that one would normally expect to be locked over them slid back to also reveal the organ stops that were arranged in two corresponding rows above the two sets of keyboards.

  The sounds in his head were more piercing now, like wire being scratched across steel, the grating tones resolving themselves into words that told him how useless he was, how worthless, how he could never succeed in anything. He would never have thought the word ‘failure’ could sound so abrasive until he began to hear it inside his own head.

  There was only one cure.

  Martin located the brown power switch in its circular plastic moulding and flipped it upward.

  A sound like a dragon taking a breath filled the room as the organ’s working mechanism filled with air, readying itself to breathe pure music through the pipes that stood proud above him. All it would take would be the merest touch of his fingertips, both to make the instrument before him sing, and to make the voices stop.

  He sat himself on the polished wooden stool and was about to begin playing when something made him hesitate.

  Made him look to his right.

  Made him see the picture above the altar.

  It should have been comforting, that painting. At least, Martin assumed that must have been the intention, depicting as it did Jesus Christ at the time of his crucifixion, the arms outspread, the face bloodied by the crown of thorns, the single nail through both feet pinning them to what was probably cypress wood, or so some scholars apparently believed.

  It wasn’t comforting, though. It wasn’t comforting at all.

  It was positively hideous.

  As Martin stared at it he realised it wasn’t so much the image of the Christ figure itself that was disturbing, but what surrounded it. Now he could see that what had initially looked like a murky fog done in unsavoury shades of charcoal grey and muddy brown actually served to conceal horrors that seemed to lurk deeper within. Martin tried hard, but he could not quite make out the shapes that he felt were crawling just beneath the paint.

  But he was sure they were there.

  He shook his head and looked again. It was easier to see them now, those things with tiny segmented bodies and multi-jointed limbs that seemed absurdly, supernaturally long as they plucked at the skin of the dying man on the cross.

  As he watched, one of them turned and looked at him.

  And spoke.

  It was too much of a coincidence for it to be anything else. The high-pitched whine that pierced Martin’s left ear had him clutching his skull in pain. The noise that now filled his head began to vary, as if the pointed tip of one of those insectoid claws was being dragged across his eardrum. It was all Martin could do to reach the organ stops with his right hand and blindly draw as many of them as he could before playing the first thing that came to mind.

  The Bach fugue was not meant to be performed with such an inappropriate combination of pipes as he had selected, but it served to blot the worst of the ringing in his ears. Within a few bars Martin was able to open his eyes, and within a few more the scratching on the inner wall of his skull had subsided. Another line of music, and a modulation from G Minor to D Minor, and Martin realised the only thing he could now hear was the music. He relaxed but didn’t stop playing. How silly he had been, how foolish, letting his tinnitus get the better of him to the extent that he had started hallucinating like that.

  Without taking his fingers from the keys, Martin looked to his right to reassure himself that the picture above the altar was nothing more than the sort of image one might find in any ordinary country church.

  What he saw made him scream.

  The painting was bleeding.

  Tiny pinpricks of dark red were erupting from the murk surrounding the crucified figure. As they coalesced they began to run down the painting, trickling over the pale form of Christ and adding crimson rivulets to the tortured body on the cross.

  Martin took his fingers from the keys and swung himself off the organ stool to get a better view. Almost immediately the whining, scraping, screaming sounds were back, and this time they were much, much worse, as if the organ music had inflicted some terrible torture on the things he thought he had seen, as if it was their bodies that had broken and burst and bled as a result of his playing.

  Martin tried to get back on the stool but now the noise was so bad all he could do was clutch his head and sway from side to side as the creatures screamed, as the creatures cursed him.

  As the creatures swore revenge.

  The nearest hospital was Glangwili General in Carmarthen, and so Martin was taken there after being discovered early the next morning collapsed in front of the altar. The doctor who saw him in the A&E department diagnosed a combination of lack of sleep, stress, and most importantly a lack of attention to his treatments and medications as having caused the episode, and Martin was discharged with the promise that he would keep any nocturnal wanderings to a minimum.

  It was another baking hot day and the taxi that drove him back to Llanroath had all its windows open. Martin welcomed the breeze as the depot injection he had been given at the hospital began to do its work.

  “Don’t forget you’ve been given it,” the doctor had warned. “Taking your regular medication on top of this could prove disastrous. It should last for five days and then you should start on the tablets again. And find somewhere to plug in that white noise machine!”

  Back at The Rugged Cross Martin was met by the landlord and his wife, Llinos, both of whom looked worried.

  “I’ll be fine,” Martin reassured them. “But if it’s at all possible I’d like a different room.”

  “Of course,” said Mrs Harris, taking his arm and leading him into the snug. “Meillir will sort that out for you, won’t you, Meillir?”

  Her husband nodded as she sat Martin down and asked him what he would like for breakfast. Martin shook his head, explaining that he was still feeling queasy from the medication he’d been given.

  “Well you have to have something,” the woman replied, looking shocked. “How about some lovely eggs? And tea with lots of sugar – that should have you back on your feet in no time.”

  Before Martin could object she had dis
appeared into the back. He rubbed his eyes, stretched his arms, and looked around him at the empty seats and polished wooden tables.

  He frowned. Surely if the pub was as full as Mr Harris had claimed there should have been one or two late eaters? Or at least the evidence of their passing in the form of greasy plates, toast crumbs and coffee rings on the tables?

  Martin took a breath and the tang of stale beer assailed his nostrils. In the background, the pleasant clatter of Harris and his wife going about their morning duties helped to keep what little noise there was now inside his head at bay. Llinos had sat him in sunshine, and now it was beginning to hurt his eyes. He was about to move when she returned, bearing a plateful of food he knew he could never hope to consume.

  “Just have as much of it as you can,” she said in reaction to his shocked expression. “It’ll do you good.”

  Martin regarded the mixture of greying scrambled eggs and crumbling rust-coloured black pudding.

  “I’ll try,” he promised, wondering how he could turn attention away from the unappetising pile before him. Then he remembered the slip of paper in his wallet on which he had scribbled the details of who he was supposed to report to when he arrived. “Can you tell me where this is?” he said, taking it out and showing it to her.

  Llinos Harris frowned as she peered at Martin’s cramped handwriting. “Take a right out of here and keep going,” she said. “You can’t miss it. I don’t know how happy he’ll be to see you, though.”

  Martin frowned. “Why not?”

  Llinos nodded at the paper again. “That’s the vicar’s place,” she said. “And it was the vicar that found you.”