“That was surely heavy news he sent you,” I observed with a little yawn, indicating the telegram about Lovecraft, which he still held tightly between finger and thumb. “You know, before that wire came, I had the craziest idea—that somehow you and he were the same person. I don’t mean Danforth but—”
“Don’t say it!” he said sharply. Then his voice went immediately drowsy as he continued, “But the roster of the perished is longer far … poor Lake and poor, poor Gedney and all those others under their Southern Cross and Magellanic shroud … the mathematical genius Walter Gilman who lost heart most terribly … the nonagenarian street-slain Angell and lightning-frozen Blake in Providence … Edward Pickman Derby, Arkham’s plump Shelley deliquescing in his witch-wife’s corpse.… Gad, this is hardly the cheerfulest topic.… You know, Georg, down in San Diego young Akeley (G.G.) showed me a hidden sea-cave bluer than Capri and on its black beach of magnetite the webbed footprint of a merman … one of the Gnorri?… and then … oh yes, of course … there’s Wilbur Whateley, who was almost nine feet tall … though he hardly counts as a Miskatonic researcher … but the whippoorwills didn’t get him either … or his big brother.…”
I was still looking at the fire, and the dancing points of light in and around it had become the stars, thick as the Pleiades and Hyades, through which old Akeley journeyed eternally, when unconsciousness closed on me too, black as the wind-stirred, infinite gulf of darkness which Robert Blake saw in the Shining Trapezohedron, black as N’kai.
I awoke stiff and chilled. The fire at which I’d been staring was white ashes only. I felt a sharp pang of disappointment that I had not dreamed at all. Then I became aware of the low, irregular, inflected humming or buzzing that filled my ears.
I stood up with difficulty. My companion slumbered still, but his shut-eyed, death-pale face had a hideously tormented look and he writhed slowly and agonizedly from time to time as if in the grip of foulest nightmare. The yellow telegram had fallen from his fingers and lay on the floor. As I approached him I realized that the sound filling my ears was coming from between his lips, which were unceasingly a-twitch, and as I leaned my head close to them, the horridly articulate droning became recognizable words and phrases:
“The pulpy, tentacled head,” I heard in horror, “Cthulhu fhtagn, the wrong geometry, the polarizing miasma, the prismatic distortion, Cthulhu R’lyeh, the positive blackness, the living nothingness …”
I could not bear to watch his dreadful agony or listen to those poisonous, twangy words an instant longer, so I seized him by the shoulders and shook him violently, though even as I did so there sprang into my mind my father’s stern injunction never to do so.
His eyes came open wide in his white face and his mouth clamped shut as he came up with a powerful shove of his bent arms against the chair’s arms which his hands had been clutching. It was as if it were happening in slow motion, though paradoxically it also seemed to be happening quite swiftly. He gave me a last mute look of utter horror and then he turned and ran, taking fantastically long strides, out through the door, which his outstretched hand threw wide ahead of him, and disappeared into the night.
I hobbled after him as swiftly as I could. I heard the motor catch at the starter’s second prod. I screamed, “Wait, Albert, wait!” As I neared the Tin Hind, its lights flashed on and its motor roared and I was engulfed in acrid exhaust fumes as it screeched out the drive with a spattering of gravel and down the first curve.
I waited there then in the cold until all sight and sound of it had vanished in the night, which was already paling a little with the dawn.
And then I realized that I was still hearing those malignant, gloating, evilly resonant voices.
“Cthulhu fhtagn,” they were saying (and have been saying and are saying now and will forever), “the spider tunnels, the black infinities, the colors in pitch-darkness, the tiered towers of Yuggoth, the glittering centipedes, the winged worms.…”
Somewhere not far off I heard a low, half-articulate whirring sound.
I went back into the house and wrote this manuscript.
And now I shall place the last with its interleafed communications and also the two books of poetry that led to all this in the copper and German silver casket, and I shall carry that with me down into the basement, where I shall take up my father’s sledge (wondering in which body I shall survive, if at all) and literally carry out his last letter’s last injunction.
* * *
Very early on the morning of Tuesday, March 16, 1937, the householders of Paradise Crest (then Vultures Roost) were disturbed by a clashing rumble and sharp earth-shock which they attributed to an earthquake, and indeed very small tremors were registered at Griffith Observatory, UCLA, and USC, though on no other seismographs. Daylight revealed that the brick house locally known as Fischer’s Folly had fallen in so completely that not one brick remained joined to another. Moreover, there appeared to be fewer bricks in view than the house would have accounted for, as if half of them had been trucked away during the night, or else fallen into some great space beneath the basement. In fact, the appearance of the ruin was of a gigantic ant lion’s-pit lined by bricks instead of sand grains. The place was deemed, and actually was, dangerous, and was shortly filled in and in part cemented over, and apparently not long afterward rebuilt upon.
The body of the owner, a quietly spoken, crippled young man named Georg Reuter Fischer, was discovered flat on its face in the edge of the rubble with hands thrown out (the metal casket by one of them) as though he had been trying to flee outdoors when caught by the collapse. His death, however, was attributed to a slightly earlier accident or insane act of self-destruction involving acid, of which his eccentric father was once known to have kept a supply. It was well that easy identification was made possible by his conspicuously twisted right foot, for when the body was turned over it was discovered that something had eaten away the entire front of his face and also those portions of his skull and jaw and the entire forebrain.
* Originally published in The Disciples of Cthulhu, 1976.
Rising with Surtsey*
BRIAN LUMLEY
It appears that with the discovery of a live coelacanth—a fish thought to have been extinct for over seventy millions of years—we may have to revise our established ideas of the geological life spans of certain aquatic animals.…
—LINKAGE’S WONDERS OF THE DEEP
Surname —Haughtree
Christian Names —Phillip
Date of Birth —2 Dec 1927
Age (years) —35
Place of Birth —Old Beldry, Yorks.
Address —Not applicable
Occupation —Author
WHO STATES: (Let here follow the body of the statement)
I have asked to be cautioned in the usual manner but have been told that in view of my alleged condition it is not necessary.… The implication is obvious, and because of it I find myself obliged to begin my story in the following way:
I must clearly impart to the reader—before advising any unacquainted perusal of this statement—that I was never a fanatical believer in the supernatural. Nor was I ever given to hallucinations or visions, and I have never suffered from my nerves or been persecuted by any of the mental illnesses. There is no record to support any evidence of madness in any of my ancestors—and Dr. Stewart was quite wrong to declare me insane.
It is necessary that I make these points before permitting the reading of this, for a merely casual perusal would soon bring any conventionally minded reader to the incorrect conclusion that I am either an abominable liar or completely out of my mind, and I have little wish to reinforce Dr. Stewart’s opinions.…
Yet I admit that shortly after midnight on the 15th November 1963 the body of my brother did die by my hand; but at the same time I must clearly state that I am not a murderer. It is my intention in the body of this statement—which will of necessity be long, for I insist I must tell the whole story—to prove conclusively my innocence. For,
indeed, I am guilty of no heinous crime, and that act of mine which terminated life in the body of my brother was nothing but the reflex action of a man who had recognized a hideous threat to the sanity of the whole world. Wherefore, and in the light of the allegation of madness leveled against me, I must now attempt to tell this tale in the most detailed fashion; I must avoid any sort of garbled sequence and form my sentences and paragraphs with meticulous care, refraining from even thinking on the end of it until that horror is reached.…
Where best to start?
If I may quote Sir Amery Wendy-Smith:
There are fabulous legends of Star-Born creatures who inhabited this Earth many millions of years before Man appeared and who were still here, in certain black places, when he eventually evolved. They are, I am sure, to an extent here even now.
It may be remembered that those words were spoken by the eminent antiquary and archaeologist before he set out upon his last, ill-fated trip into the interior of Africa. Sir Amery was hinting, I know, at the same breed of hell-spawned horror which first began to make itself apparent to me at that ghastly time eighteen months ago; and I take this into account when I remember the way in which he returned, alone and raving, from that dark continent to civilization.
At that time my brother Julian was just the opposite of myself, insofar as he was a firm believer in dark mysteries. He read omnivorously of fearsome books uncaring whether they were factual—as Frazer’s Golden Bough and Miss Murray’s Witch-Cult—or fanciful—like his collection of old, nigh-priceless volumes of Weird Tales and similar popular magazines. Many friends, I imagine, will conclude that his original derangement was due to this unhealthy appetite for the monstrous and the abnormal. I am not of such an opinion, of course, though I admit that at one time I was.
Of Julian: he had always been a strong person physically, but had never shown much strength of character. As a boy he had had the size to easily take on any bully—but never the determination. This was also where he failed as a writer, for while his plots were good he was unable to make his characters live. Being without personality himself, it was as though he was only able to reflect his own weaknesses into his work. I worked in partnership with him, filling in plots and building life around his more or less clay figures. Up until the time of which I write, we had made a good living and had saved a reasonable sum. This was just as well, for during the period of Julian’s illness, when I hardly wrote a word, I might well have found myself hard put to support both my brother and myself. Fortunately, though sadly, he was later taken completely off my hands; but that was after the onset of his trouble.…
It was in May 1962 that Julian suffered his actual breakdown, but the start of it all can be traced back to the 2nd of February of that year—Candlemas—a date which I know will have special meaning to anyone with even the slightest schooling in the occult. It was on that night that he dreamed his dream of titanic basalt towers—dripping with slime and ocean ooze and fringed with great sea-mats—their weirdly proportioned bases buried in grey-green muck and their non–Euclidean-angled parapets fading into the watery distances of that unquiet submarine realm.
At the time we were engaged upon a novel of eighteenth-century romance, and I remember we had retired late. Still later I was awakened by Julian’s screams, and he roused me fully to listen to an hysterical tale of nightmare. He babbled of what he had seen lurking behind those monolithic, slimy ramparts, and I remember remarking—after he had calmed himself somewhat—what a strange fellow he was, to be a writer of romances and at the same time a reader and dreamer of horrors. But Julian was not so easily chided, and such was his fear and loathing of the dream that he refused to lie down again that night but spent the remaining hours of darkness sitting at his typewriter in the study with every light in the house ablaze.
One would think that a nightmare of such horrible intensity might have persuaded Julian to stop gorging himself with his nightly feasts of at least two hours of gruesome reading. Yet, if anything, it had the opposite effect—but now his studies were all channeled in one certain direction. He began to take a morbid interest in anything to do with oceanic horror, collecting and avidly reading such works as the German Unter-Zee Kulten, Gaston le Fe’s Dwellers in the Depths, Gantley’s Hydrophinnae, and the evil Cthaat Aquadingen by an unknown author. But it was his collection of fictional books which in the main claimed his interest. From these he culled most of his knowledge of the Cthulhu Mythos—which he fervently declared was not myth at all—and often expressed a desire to see an original copy of the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, as his own copy of Feery’s Notes was practically useless, merely hinting at what Julian alleged Alhazred had explained in detail.
In the following three months our work went badly. We failed to make a deadline on a certain story and, but for the fact that our publisher was a personal friend, might have suffered a considerable loss financially. It was all due to the fact that Julian no longer had the urge to write. He was too taken up with his reading to work and could no longer even be approached to talk over story plots. Not only this, but that fiendish dream of his kept returning with ever increasing frequency and vividness. Every night he suffered those same silt-submerged visions of obscene terrors the like of which could only be glimpsed in such dark tomes as were his chosen reading. But did he really suffer? I found myself unable to make up my mind. For as the weeks passed, my brother seemed to become all the more uneasy and restless by day, whilst eagerly embracing the darkening skies of evening and the bed in which he sweated out the horrors of hideous dream and nightmare.…
We were leasing, for a reasonable monthly sum, a moderate house in Glasgow where we had separate bedrooms and a single study which we shared. Although he now looked forward to them, Julian’s dreams had grown even worse and they had been particularly bad for two or three nights when, in the middle of May, it happened. He had been showing an increasing interest in certain passages in the Cthaat Aquadingen and had heavily underscored a section in that book which ran thus:
Rise!
O Nameless Ones:
That in Thy Season
Thine Own of Thy choosing.
Through Thy Spells and Thy Magic,
Through Dreams and Enchantry,
May know of Thy Coming;
And rush to Thy Pleasure,
For the Love of Our Master,
Knight of Cthulhu,
Deep Slumberer in Green,
Othuum …
This and other bits and pieces culled from various sources, particularly certain partly suppressed writings by a handful of authors, all allegedly “missing persons” or persons who had died in strange circumstances—namely: Andrew Phelan, Abel Keane, Claiborne Boyd, Nayland Colum, and Horvath Blayne—had had a most unsettling effect upon my brother, so that he was close to exhaustion when he eventually retired late on the night that the horror really started. His condition was due to the fact that he had been studying his morbid books almost continually for a period of three days, and during that time had taken only brief snatches of sleep—and then only during the daylight hours, never at night. He would answer, if ever I attempted to remonstrate with him, that he did not want to sleep at night “when the time is so near” and that “there was so much that would be strange to him in Deeps.” Whatever that was supposed to mean.…
After he had retired that night I worked on for an hour or so before going to bed myself. But before leaving our study I glanced at that with which Julian had last been so taken up, and I saw—as well as the above nonsense, as I then considered it—some jottings copied from the Life of St. Brendan by the sixth-century Abbot of Clonfert in Galway:
All that day the brethren, even when they were no longer in view of the island, heard a loud wailing from the inhabitants thereof, and a noisome stench was perceptible at a great distance. Then St. Brendan sought to animate the courage of the brethren, saying: “Soldiers of Christ, be strong in faith unfeigned and in the armour of the spirit, for we are now on t
he confines of hell!”
I have since studied the Life of St. Brendan, and have found that which made me shudder in awful recognition—though at the reading I could not correlate the written word and my hideous disquiet; there was just something in the book which was horribly disturbing—and, moreover, I have found other references to historic oceanic eruptions; namely, those which sank Atlantis and Mu, those recorded in the Liber Miraculorem of the monk and chaplain Herbert of Clairvaux in France in the years 1178–80, and that which was closer to the present and which is known only through the medium of the suppressed Johansen Narrative. But at the time of which I write, such things only puzzled me and I could never, not even in my wildest dreams, have guessed what was to come.
I am not sure how long I slept that night before I was eventually roused by Julian and half awoke to find him crouching by my bed, whispering in the darkness. I could feel his hand gripping my shoulder, and though I was only half-awake I recall the pressure of that strong hand and something of what he said. His voice had the trance-like quality of someone under deep hypnosis, and his hand jerked each time he put emphasis on a word.
“They are preparing.… They will rise.… They have not mustered The Greater Power, nor have they the blessing of Cthulhu, and the rising will not be permanent nor go recorded.… But the effort will suffice for the Mind-Transfer.… For the Glory of Othuum …
“Using those Others in Africa, those who took Sir Amery Wendy-Smith, Shudde-M’ell and his hordes, to relay their messages and dream-pictures, they have finally defeated the magic spell of deep water and can now control dreams as of old—despite the oceans which cover them! Once more they have mastery of dreams, but to perform the Transfer they need not even break the surface of the water—a lessening of the pressure will suffice.
Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos Page 39