Cthulhu Cymraeg

by Probert, John Llewellyn

  Mr Lewis related to me one last anecdote; a boy, in the 1860s, claimed to have been led to the lakeside by ‘fairy music’, and found, in the reeds, a strange ‘pipe’ or ‘whistle’, which seemed to want him to ‘play upon it’.

  Frightened, the boy threw the pipe into the lake, and ran home.

  THE NECRONOMICON

  Charles Black

  At first I did not recognise the man on my doorstep, and had half a mind to pretend to be out. Yet, when he glanced briefly upwards, there was something about his face that stirred my memory. Not so much the features, but rather the man’s superior expression, that seemed somehow familiar.

  He was a little under six feet in height, and had thinning, sandy-coloured hair. He was carrying a brown leather briefcase.

  As I observed the caller surreptitiously from the upstairs window, I saw him look at his watch impatiently. And although I anticipated he would only turn out to be a door to door salesman, I hurried downstairs to open the door.

  Before I could speak, he boomed out a greeting, “Hello Durward.”

  At once I recognised the distinctive, deep, Welsh voice. “My Goodness, Rhys-Morgan!” I said in amazement.

  “Yes it is,” he said, granting me the briefest of smiles.

  “Well, this is a surprise,” I said, as we shook hands. For it had been many years since I had last seen, or even spoken with Gwyn Rhys-Morgan.

  “I hope you don’t mind me turning up like this, all unannounced,” he said, as I ushered him into the house.

  “Not at all,” I replied. “Come on in.”

  “In here, is it?” he said, ignoring the door to the sitting room, and selecting the door to my library.

  “Unerring as usual, Gwyn.”

  “Of course,” he said, entering the room.

  “Make yourself comfortable,” I invited, taking his overcoat, though my visitor declined my offer to take his briefcase.

  Instead of seating himself in one of the pair of armchairs, Rhys-Morgan began studying the books that lined the shelves – that came as no surprise.

  I was about to ask what he would have to drink, but my guest pre-empted me. “I’ll have a scotch please, Durward.”

  “It must be nearly fifteen years,” I said, handing him his drink. And I still found it annoying how he would call me ‘Durward’ after the Walter Scott novel rather than use my name.

  “Yes it must,” he replied.

  We had been at Cambridge together. Although we weren’t exactly good friends, it was through our shared interest in rare books that we knew each other.

  A silence ensued, as Rhys-Morgan scanned the titles of my books. I was about to comment on how I had obtained a particular volume, but he held up a hand as if to stop me.

  Awkwardly I waited until he had finished his silent perusal.

  “An impressive collection,” he said at last, taking a seat.

  “Thank you,” I said, as I seated myself.

  “I suppose you’re wondering what’s brought me to your door after all this time.” Once again he had pre-empted my question.

  “Well, yes, I was actually.”

  “I have it.”

  “It?” I queried.

  “It.” Rhys-Morgan nodded.

  I was puzzled. “I don’t understand, Gwyn.”

  What he said next astounded me.

  “The Necronomicon,” he stated simply.

  I gasped audibly. “The Necronomicon?”

  The Necronomicon: The book of the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred. A legendary book of blasphemous and cosmic revelations. That utmost grail for seekers of occult knowledge, and of many bibliophiles. And Rhys-Morgan’s taste had always leaned towards the outré.

  “Yes.”

  “But how? Where did you find it?”

  “My search was long, and often frustrating, but I always remained persistent. I began with libraries, and museums, antiquarian book shops, eventually widening my search.

  “Do you know, the British Museum had the audacity to deny me access to their rare books collection. I wonder if they had some inkling of my intention to make their copy my own?” Rhys-Morgan paused, apparently brooding.

  “It was the same story again and again, at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, and in Rome, and Cairo. Miskatonic University in America as well. Have you ever been to America, Durward?”

  I shook my head.

  Rhys-Morgan frowned. “Terrible place. You’d do well to avoid it,” he advised.

  “In so many places, either I was refused permission to view the book, or my enquiries met with denials that the book even existed.”

  I found what Rhys-Morgan said next to be somewhat far-fetched.

  “I have travelled the world, not just in body, but in astral form. My quest has taken me to many strange places and I have witnessed even stranger things.”

  “How extraordinary.”

  “You think I’m being fanciful don’t you, Durward?”

  “Well, I’m not sure I follow you exactly, Gwyn.”

  “It’s all right.” He waved a hand dismissively. “How could you know? You have spent your life blissfully ignorant of the true nature of the world around us.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said nothing.

  “From major cities of the world to rundown and decrepit towns in rural New England. I have infiltrated cults of diabolic purpose, and searched the tombs of necromancers, that lie in ghoul-haunted graveyards.”

  Fanciful was the word all right.

  “But all this was without success. Yet I did not give up. Then after hunting high and low, and far and wide, I finally tracked down a copy. Would you believe that after all my travels, I located one in an obscure part of Gloucestershire, of all places?”

  “However did you afford it? You must have come into a great deal of money, or had one of those incredible pieces of luck where you found it going for a song.”

  “It was in the possession of a man called James Goodman. I managed to make him part with it.”

  “Congratulations, Gwyn. I must say I’m honoured that you should think to inform me after all this time,” I said.

  I refilled our glasses, and asked, “But have you read it?” At the same time eager that he had, but also afraid that he might have done so. For The Necronomicon has a dark reputation. It is said that its contents can drive a man insane.

  “Oh yes, I have read it. My mind reeled at the cosmic revelations, the unholy and unimaginable truths it contains. Yes, I have drank deep of its forbidden knowledge.”

  Despite what Rhys-Morgan said, I wanted to see it for myself. I eyed his briefcase. “And you have it with you now,” a statement rather than a question.

  He nodded.

  “May I see it?”

  “Of course.” He rose, and took his briefcase to my desk. I joined him, and he opened the case, and took out the fabled Necronomicon.

  It was a large volume – a folio, I estimated at least a thousand pages in length, and bound in dark black leather.

  “Incredible.”

  With a trembling hand I caressed the cover, then carefully opened the book. “My God, Gwyn! This becomes even more incredible. I had anticipated John Dee’s translation – but this is remarkable.”

  Rhys-Morgan had managed to obtain the Italian printing of 1501, printed in black letter gothic type.

  “Yes,” he replied, “I too thought that there were no longer any copies of this edition extant. However, I suspect that it is not the original binding.”

  I marvelled at the pages of text – the fantastic legends that were the ravings of a man thought insane.

  Here and there were marginal notes written by numerous different hands. There were stains that might well have been blood. Some pages were torn and a few entirely missing – not surprising considering the book’s great age.

  I puzzled over strange cosmological diagrams. Wondered at perplexing rituals of sorcery and a blasphemous religion. And shuddered at illustrations of monstrous creatures l
abelled: From Life.

  “Wonderful!” I declared. My thoughts were covetous. “How much do you want for it?” I asked,

  “Oh, it’s not for sale.”

  I sighed. It was the answer I’d expected.

  “I doubt whether you’d be prepared to pay the price anyway,” he said cryptically.

  Then after a moment he said, “At the back of the book you will find there is a list of names, such as is sometimes found in a family bible.”

  I turned towards the rear of the book and found the list.

  The first name was Anotonio Carlucci with a set of dates 1501-1505. Gian Mollisimo 1505-1519 was next. Then Ricardo Del Vascao, 1519; followed by Fernando Diaz 1519-1535. After him was John Maltravers, 1535-1554.

  “It’s impossible that these are dates of birth and death,” I said. “They must be dates of ownership of the book.”

  Another thought occurred to me, “These names, they appear to be written all in the same hand.”

  Rhys-Morgan nodded.

  “For someone to have traced the ownership of the book back through its history is a remarkable act of scholarship. But you are not responsible?”

  Rhys-Morgan shook his head. “No.”

  I read further down the list. Raschid Ibn Malik caught my eye. His dates read 1609-1759. “But that’s impossible, a hundred and fifty years.”

  Rhys-Morgan smiled at my bewildered expression.

  “Imagine, how I impatiently turned the pages to find the end of the list, eager to add my name and thus confirm my rightful ownership.

  “Then imagine how my mind reeled when I saw beneath the name of James Goodman, already written in that same red ink, my own name.”

  “What? But that’s impossible.”

  “Is it?”

  I turned to the end of the list. Sure enough below James Goodman 1934-1936, was Gwyn Rhys-Morgan 1936-.

  “Well then perhaps Goodman, knowing he was going to sell the book to you, had already appended your name to the list”

  “That’s just it. You see, Durward; Goodman wouldn’t sell. No matter how much I offered him he refused.”

  “Then how?”

  “I killed him.”

  “You did what?” I don’t know which stunned me more: the fact that Rhys-Morgan had killed a man, or the casual way that he had admitted it.

  “You do see that I had to? Don’t you, Durward? I had to have it, it was rightfully mine.”

  I smiled and nodded, thinking it wise not to antagonise him.

  Rhys-Morgan continued, “You said that the dates were dates of ownership rather than dates of birth and death. You were partly right. Ownership yes, but also year of death.”

  I frowned. “Are you sure?”

  “I did do some research of my own, and found out about some of the names on the list.”

  “And?”

  Rhys-Morgan began picking out names from the list. “Ricardo Del Vascao, tortured to death by the Inquisition in 1519. Agnes Lamprey was burnt at the stake in 1603. In 1759 Raschid Ibn Malik was stoned. In 1793 Louis Rocheteau was—”

  I interrupted, “Let me guess, another victim of the Reign of Terror?”

  “Perhaps. It’s not clear what happened exactly. Although what is certain, is that he was torn to pieces, various parts of his body were found all over Paris.”

  Rhys-Morgan continued his morbid recitation, “Matthew Horne was killed in the Indian Mutiny of 1857—”

  “Well, lots of people were killed during the Indian Mutiny,” I pointed out.

  “Yes, but Horne’s body was found covered in curious bite marks and completely drained of blood.” Rhys-Morgan smiled. “Josiah Wellsby had it after him – he committed suicide in 1859. Every one of them died in the latter year listed.”

  “What about Goodman? How did he come to have the book?” I consulted the list, the name above Goodman’s was Victor Goodman.

  “His father,” Rhys-Morgan said. “He inherited it from his father.”

  “There you are then, he died in bed, after living to a ripe old age,” I said, with an optimism I did not really feel.

  “Actually, you are almost correct, Goodman senior did die in bed. Goodman boasted that he smothered his father with a pillow. His father got it during the war, looted it off a German he killed.” Rhys-Morgan pointed to the name above Victor Goodman’s: Pieter Mueller.

  Suddenly Rhys-Morgan began to laugh wildly. “Don’t you get it yet, Durward?”

  “Calm down, Gwyn,” I urged. “What ever do you mean?”

  “What does the title Necronomicon actually mean?” he asked.

  “The title’s in Greek,” I said. “It’s the name given to the book by its translator, Theodorus Philetas. “Mentally I translated the title. “It means… My God!”

  “Yes, Durward, imagine how I felt reading my name in The Book of Dead Names.”

  It was not long after his visit that the police arrested Rhys-Morgan following an anonymous tip-off.

  He was found guilty of James Goodman’s murder. And when the death penalty was carried out, the year marking his demise, and the end of his period of ownership of The Necronomicon, appeared written by that unknown hand, in that same red ink.

  And the name of the book’s new owner duly appeared beneath his.

  Rhys-Morgan was wrong; I am prepared to pay the price – eventually.

  You see, I believe that somewhere in its pages Raschid Ibn Malik found the secret of a preternaturally long life, and I shall find it too.

  Quentin Richley,

  April 1938.

  Addendum: Quentin Richley died in August 1940, one of the many casualties of the Second World War.

  UN-DHU-MILHUK WOULD (IF HE COULD)

  Liam Davies

  Early December, 1990

  To begin, it is winter in the Valleys, and it is a moonless, starless night in the village. The blanket of night spreads out and up over the beached whales of the surrounding hills. Gorse skeletons rustle to the melody of the evening breeze and beneath the snoozing township of Treorchy, Elder God, Un-dhu-miluhk writhes between blanket seams of coal, on the cusp of wakefulness. Above his snug, gaseous head, the houses are as still as churches along the frosted edges of the hunched high street and all the people are sleeping too, slumbering deep in the snug-still, still breathing town.

  Hush, the babies are sleeping now, and the butcher, baker, punter, bookmaker; the callous-handed handymen, the farmers, fishmongers, and clacking-tongued pensioners, and, perhaps the most of important of all, the new breed of ground-digging men and their protective canaries, intent on pulling tar-black rocks from the ground in the nearby colliery to keep mankind marching to the beat of the electricity drum. Power.

  Young girls lie, tangle-limbed beneath gossamer, marshmallowed duvets, gliding through dreams adorned with hoop earrings and charm bracelets to the melody of Un-dhu-miluhk’s soothing, sonorous snoring that rumbles the Rhondda and rocks their beds, as if they sleep within the lilting snuggeries of babies. The boys are dreaming naughty, of copping fondles and unhooking brassieres behind the bottle bins round the back of the Co-op. The cotton bud sheep sleep in the fields, the cows in the byres and the dogs in the concrete-cool back yards; and the cats either nap in the nooked ledges, or slink, weaving and wandering along the terraced roofs.

  And in spite of His sleeping, from the bottom of the big-pit, Un-dhu-miluhk can hear the frost crystals forming, the blind houses breathing, the coal miners dreaming. And as He sleeps, the songs of His dreams drift through the transoms of the dreamers above him, drawing the miners ever deeper in their pursuit of coal, coaxing them down with their picks and their shovels and their drills, ever deeper towards His goal, of seeping out through the mine caves and, CROESO, out into the Rhondda atmosphere. He dreams of the black and folded night above him, fast, and slow, asleep. He dreams of moving, circling Treorchy, wider and wider, swooping invisibly over Treherbert and Pontygwaith, ever increasing in arcs over the valleys so He can become embalmed in Her scent upon the gil
ded winds and find her once again. Even through the mists of dreams, She is as clear as a window onto his own gaseous soul: Rhu-thmar-duhk, the eternal concubine, Widow of the Western Winds. He dreams of her. He dreams of that one night when they came into contact. Her curves, her soft, weighty breasts, the mouths that adorn every inch of her abdomen, bosom, neck and face, each capable of the most exquisite song. Every inch of her bewitched His being. All thoughts of dominion, destruction and rule disappeared. There was only Her. He was nought but a spent abstraction of his forebear, Cthulhu, nought but a passing of gas from the vile passage of a worthier deity, for Un-dhu-miluhk was wasted, diluted by love. He dreams of his vaporous tendrils, clinging to Rhu-thmar-duhk’s wrists and ankles, pulling her pale, furred limbs apart; he dreams of creating a sensuous breeze with his own being and letting it lick gently against the folds of her sex; he dreams of her orgasm, the eternal wailing winds from each of her bodily mouths, the earthly storms that followed, that scattered his airy form on the gales, his blind drift across the earthly realm, until he settled, amidst peat and grass, spent, barely there, a million years ago; He allowed sediment and trees to form a blanket above him, and as the earth folded him into its embrace, he fell into a satisfying, dream-filled sleep.

  Dreams.

  Dear Rhu-thmar-duhk, my love

  There are bonds more literal than ours,

  And singing hills and summer doves

  And valleys bejewelled with flowers.

  So love, why don’t you fly to me?

  On winds that eddy and bole

  Above this nation, of daffs, Taffs and leeks

  To my bed, twixt two seams of coal.

  Should you come, and come you should

  I’d enflame you with song and with verse

  There we’d canoodle, our romance would bud

  And I’d wed you for better, for worse.

  Oh mouthy madam, malevolent vessel