Cthulhu Cymraeg

by Probert, John Llewellyn

  Llanroath vicarage was probably the grandest building in the village. Set back in its own grounds, the Victorian redbrick could have passed for the old village school. Or, Martin thought as he approached it, the old village hospital, the kind of place where you were locked away until someone came to claim you.

  If anyone ever did.

  Stop thinking like that, Martin told himself as he rang the bell and waited in the drizzling rain.

  Fortunately he was not left waiting, or worrying, for long.

  “Are you feeling better, now?” the Reverend Idris Clements asked as he showed Martin into his study. With his stocky build and balding, bullet-shaped head that betrayed the scars of what Martin hoped were sporting injuries and nothing more serious, the vicar looked more suited to the role of a rugby international prop forward than the pastor of a small Welsh village. He motioned Martin to sit and then dropped himself into a swivel chair that creaked alarmingly as his bulk made contact with it.

  “I am, thank you,” Martin replied. “Although I have to say I am rather embarrassed, especially as I’ve come here to be your new organist.”

  “Have you now?” The vicar grinned and there was a glint in his eye. “So what exactly were you doing? Getting a bit of practice in before you came to see me?”

  Martin could feel his heart pounding against his chest. “Actually,” he said, “there are probably a few things I should explain about myself.”

  The vicar was very understanding which, when Martin thought about it later, was hardly surprising. Of course, he only mentioned his medical diagnoses and omitted the bit about the hallucinations he’d had last night.

  Clements steepled his fingers. “And music stops these...voices, does it?” he said.

  Martin nodded. “Lots of types of sound will, but I’m sure you can understand why the organ works the best.”

  The vicar nodded while reaching into his right hand desk drawer. He took out a small bunch of keys and tossed them over. “These should get you into the church and the organ whenever you feel the need to play,” he said. “I can’t explain why you were able to get into the church so late the other night, nor why the organ had been left open.” He gave Martin a beatific smile. “Perhaps the Lord had something to do with it,” he said.

  Clements rose to indicate their meeting was over, and Martin followed him into the hallway.

  And gasped as he saw the picture hanging there.

  There was nothing in what was depicted that shocked him. It was a landscape painting, probably of somewhere local, depicting rolling hills curling around a sandy beach. No, it was not what was depicted.

  It was the style of the picture.

  The whole thing had been rendered in the same murky colours as the background of the painting of Christ in the church. The mountains had not been coloured the vibrant emerald of a summer’s day, but rather the muddy, unappetising green of midwinter. The sand was the colour of old flesh, washed out and dying. But the strangest thing was that it was obviously meant to depict a view through a window while a storm was raging. The sky was so clogged with thick grey clouds that the heavy raindrops looked filthy against the glass, and Martin could almost feel the wind rattling the pane of the picture’s frame.

  “That’s quite an...odd picture,” Martin said, trying to find a word that wasn’t too damning.

  “Local artist,” said Clements. “Or rather he was. You probably saw the painting he did for us behind the altar up at the church.”

  Martin nodded. Was it his imagination or was something moving in the murk of those black waves? Something just below the surface but yearning to break through, yearning to drag itself onto that flaccid corpse of a beach and feast on the necrotic tissue of the land.

  Nonsense.

  “It’s a bit...grim,” he said.

  “I suspect he was influenced by the weather,” Clements chuckled. “It does rain rather a lot here.” He took a step back and cocked his head sideways. “It’s called ‘The Land in Anger’.” He gestured at the picture. “All this roiling, swirly stuff is apparently intended to signify that whatever lives beneath the soil could one day break through if sufficiently angered.”

  Martin raised his eyebrows. “What’s it doing in your house?” he said.

  Clements shrugged. “An artist, down on his luck – what else could I do when he came calling? I bought it from him as an act of charity and gave him a commission to repaint the figure you can see behind the altar. I thought it might help his state of mind but, alas, it was not to be.”

  Martin didn’t like the sound of that. “I’m guessing he’s no longer with us?” he said.

  Clements shook his head. “Despite our best efforts,” he replied as he showed Martin out. “And I wouldn’t want the same thing to happen to you so please, if you feel I can be of any help at all, do not hesitate to get in touch.”

  Martin nodded. “I promise I will,” he said.

  “Remember you can use the organ at any time. And if your head gives you trouble, I’ve been told it often helps if you write things down,” the vicar gave Martin a knowing look. “I believe it is said to have a purging effect.”

  Martin’s new room was slightly bigger, and the window that looked out over the street gave him a view of the church tower that should have reassured him but which instead he found disconcerting. His fear of what he imagined he had seen there was stronger than any comfort the building could offer.

  The ringing in his ears had dulled for now. But for the occasional piercing whine he could live with it, and his white noise generator, plugged in and by the bedside, was off for the moment. He had not brought any means of playing music as he had been warned this in itself could be damaging.

  So Martin sat in the near-silence, the only sounds the gentle scraping in his head mixed with the occasional vehicle passing by. On the table in front of him sat the blank exercise book he had purchased from the village newsagent’s on his way back from the vicarage. His pen was yet to violate the sheer white of the paper and his thoughts were already turning to another walk, perhaps even another visit to the church – anything rather than this gaunt, maddening isolation that was meant to be recuperative but instead stood a chance of driving him more insane than the city life that had caused him to come here.

  It began to rain, the heavy, filthy drops that struck the glass reminding him of the painting at the vicarage. Before he knew it, the sounds in his head were beginning to worsen as well – scraping, clawing, whining, constantly changing as if they were trying to make themselves understood.

  And then he did understand.

  Not everything, but enough for Martin to realise they weren’t like the voices he had heard during his breakdown, or even during what had happened in the church last night. They had a different timbre, a different urgency, and most important of all, they didn’t seem to be trying to destroy his self-confidence. In fact the few words he could make out were strange.

  Very strange indeed.

  Martin picked up his pen and began to write, if only to see if it might help. He was putting nonsense on the page – he knew that , but it didn’t stop him, and as he wrote the words down the voices in his head gave him new ones. Before he realised it he had filled a page with odd combinations of letters. A few of which were familiar, most of which were unrecognisable.

  And then the voices went away.

  Just as it stopped raining.

  Martin put down his pen, took a deep breath, and realised he felt much better. Perhaps the vicar had been right after all. He grabbed his jacket and left for the church, intending to confront the altar painting while he was still in his current state of wellbeing.

  The way looked very different in the grey light of day, and as he approached the building Martin felt some of his anxiety beginning to creep back. His head was still refreshingly empty of noise, however, and this spurred him on, through the lychgate, along the path and into the building.

  The picture was still there, but it looked much less t
hreatening now. It was still as disturbing as an image of a man crucified against a murky background could be, but today Martin could not see any evidence of shapes lurking close to the body, and of course there was no blood.

  Blood which had flowed in response to his playing.

  Martin licked his lips and looked at the organ console, which had now been replaced and locked after the events of last night.

  Of course he had the keys now, he thought, fingering them in his jacket pocket. It would only take a minute to play something, to run through a few bars of a Bach cantata and keep his eye on the picture to prove to himself that what he had seen was just the product of his tired, overworked and unhappy mind.

  He unlocked the console cover, slid it back, and flicked on the power switch.

  After he had drawn stops that would allow for a soft, reassuring timbre, Martin paused, his fingertips hovering over the keyboard. He took one more look at the picture, decided what he was going to play, and began.

  For the first couple of minutes he didn’t dare look away from the instrument, allowing the music to calm him, the repetitive lines of the fugue overlying each other, mingling and taking on new variations that were so familiar to him he could have played the piece in his sleep.

  It was nearly over before Martin realised he was too scared to look up.

  He finished the piece, and selected stops that would produce a more bombastic sound, as if his playing might act as a shield for what awaited him behind the altar.

  He managed two pages of Bach’s Fantasia in G Minor before he forced himself to turn his head to the right.

  At first it was difficult to see what had happened. It was as if the entire wall behind the altar had been replaced by a black void, an empty nothingness from which not even light could escape. As Martin continued to play he realised the space below the stained glass window wasn’t black at all.

  It was red.

  Deep red.

  And now there were things coming out of it.

  Martin watched in horror, his fingers still playing of their own accord, as the surface of the slick crimson was broken by multi-jointed thread-like appendages as red as the scarlet pool from which they were arising. Searching for purchase, some quickly found the grey stone on either side, while others met with the polished tiled floor, scrabbling as they attempted to lever out whatever bloated, unholy bodies were still concealed within the ghastly place from which they were attempting to escape.

  Were they real? Hallucination? An effect of the drugs he had been given in the hospital? Or would they actually look even more terrifying if he hadn’t been given the medication?

  As more of the spider-like limbs appeared, and thread-like antennae began to probe the new, strange atmosphere, Martin realised that deliberation was not going to save him.

  He slid himself off the organ stool and ran, down the aisle and out through the doors, closing them behind him in case they offered some barrier to what was coming after him.

  When he turned round, the world had changed.

  The sky had darkened and, worse, reddened to the point where it was almost as if he were looking up from the surface of an alien planet. Clouds that resembled amoebae crawled across the heavens, enveloping stars and leaving trails of black dust behind them.

  The cemetery was still there, as was the road, and Martin tore himself toward it, turning right and heading for the sea, where he could see a few scant traces of normal blue sky on the horizon.

  The road ended and became a dirt track which soon also faded away. Martin turned to see that the path he had just fled along had now vanished, and that the landscape looked different, barren, unearthly.

  He clutched his temples. This could not be happening! It had to be inside his head! He turned toward the sea, towards the cliffs he knew towered there.

  A lone figure was standing at the cliff’s edge. As Martin got closer he realised he recognised who it was.

  Idris Clements.

  “You don’t look too well, my boy.” The vicar extended a hand as Martin approached. “You don’t look too well at all.”

  Martin, his hands clutched to his temples, fell to his knees as he reached the man in black. He looked up to see red flooding across the sky, obliterating the last vestiges of blue. The unhealthy burnt-looking sun that now hung in the alien heaven bathed everything with pallid light, lending the landscape a sickly ochre hue that made Martin feel nauseous.

  “What’s happening?” he asked.

  Clements shook his head. “Nothing,” he replied. “Nothing to me, anyway. What might be happening to you, of course, could be an entirely different story.”

  Martin narrowed his eyes as the pounding in his head worsened and the light surrounding him seemed so ugly as to be almost malefic. “What do you mean?” he croaked.

  “So many of them come,” said Clements. “And so many of them die. All of them, eventually.” He indicated the waves tearing at the rocks below. “And all of them down there.”

  Martin looked at the water, at the way it swirled beneath the unnatural light of the new sun, creating patterns that he could almost believe were intentional.

  “They are,” said Clements, as if reading his thoughts. “Or at least I believe them to be. Just another method of communication we no longer understand, like the things you, and others, have heard and seen.”

  Martin shook his head. “But what I could hear was just part of an illness,” he said. “An imbalance of brain chemicals and electrical impulses.”

  “And what do you think caused those imbalances in the first place?” Clements gestured around him. “There are myths about the creatures that live beneath these hills, that slumber out there in salt water that is far deeper than anyone could ever know. But there are other myths as well, stories of the servants of these old ones who are the very opposite in terms of size. They are as tiny as their masters are vast, and are perfectly capable of crawling along nerve fibres and sending their own messages to them.”

  In the changing world around him the vicar was the only constant, and now Martin hung onto that desperately. “How do you know so much about them?” He looked at Clements in disbelief. “And you being a man of God!”

  Clements smiled. “I’m a man who likes to be on the winning side,” he replied. “Two thousand years ago it was Christianity. Two million years ago it was beings much older even than that, and very soon they will rise again. I haven’t decided which side to take yet,” he added. “I’m just trying, in the fashion of the true scholar of theological matters, to gather as much information about them as possible. Which is where people like you come in.”

  “What do you mean, people like me?” Martin said, having to shout to be heard above the roaring of the blood-tinged surf.

  “Sensitive people come here,” Clements said. “They are both drawn to this place and are receptive to the things here that the less gifted amongst us are unaware of. They see and they hear, but they don’t understand. That poor artist fellow was one. I tried to help channel what was revealed to him in the hope he might be able to make some sense of it, but it all became too much for him. His legacy remains, however, for the scholars amongst us to try and interpret, just as your crude attempts at describing your experiences in that notebook will be added to the increasing body of documentation we have about those that slumber beneath these hills.”

  “I can hear them again!” Martin was shaking now. “I can hear them, but not out here, not out in this world.” He clutched at his temples. “The world has changed but I can still hear them inside my head,” he moaned. “They make scratching sounds, clicks and squawks. How can I make them stop? How can I get them to realise that I don’t understand them? That I’m not a part of this world they’re showing me? And that I never will be?”

  “Perhaps not ever,” said Clements. “Perhaps all it might take is a leap of faith.”

  He looked down into the swirling scarlet foam below. Martin followed his gaze.

  “It’s the only
way, you know,” said Clements. “I’ve seen too many like you. Once it’s gone this far there is only one way to stop the madness, if madness it is, rather than truth.”

  He helped the organist to his feet.

  “That’s the problem with you sensitive types,” he said. “You’re the only ones who can see, the only ones who can communicate, and yet it’s just all too much for your minds to deal with.”

  Martin peered over Clements’ shoulder at the vast lobulated creature towering behind him, its multifaceted eyes focused on Martin, one huge serrated claw poised to take him in its grasp.

  “Whatever it is you’re looking at,” Clements said, “it can’t see me. I haven’t revealed myself to it. But you have. And there’s only one way out. Unless you wish to wait for its friends to catch up with it. They want to meet you too.”

  That was it. That was enough. Martin took a single, deep breath, thrust himself forward into the air, and then he was gone. The waves swallowed him and left not a trace.

  And on a lonely Welsh hillside beneath a sky that now threatened rain, a solitary figure made its way back to where it, and others like it, lived, to await the coming of others sensitive to the ancient horror that lurked beneath the seemingly silent landscape. Others who would be able to see, and hear, and unwittingly break down barriers that were already so thin as to be almost absent.

  Almost.

  THE BICYCLE-CENTAUR

  Rhys Hughes

  I am a bicycle-centaur. No point in pedalling about the bush. My name is Sadulsor Raleigh but it seems I’m not a descendant of that famous and fabulous pirate and explorer, Sir Walter. Too bad. It could even be the case that I wasn’t born at all but created by some mad inventor somewhere in a crepuscular garage cluttered with the tools and spare parts of a true tinkerer’s den.

  That does seem the most likely and plausible explanation for my existence. I have met several similar beings on my varied travels, including a man-clock and a lady-waterwheel, and they too might have been designed by the same insane boffin somewhere. I have heard a name proposed, a certain Dr Mondaugen, as a candidate for the honour, and so I’m curious about him.