Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

by H. P. Lovecraft; Various

“This is incredible!” Leverett protested. He tried to mouth the alien syllables. It could be done. He even detected a rhythm.

  “Well, I’m relieved that you approve. I’d feared these last few stories and fragments might prove too much for Kent’s fans.”

  “Then you’re going to have them published?”

  Dana nodded. “Scotty was going to. I just hope those thieves weren’t searching for this—a collector would pay a fortune. But Scotty said he was going to keep this secret until he was ready for announcement.” His thin face was sad.

  “So now I’m going to publish it myself—in a deluxe edition. And I want you to illustrate it.”

  “I’d feel honored!” vowed Leverett, unable to believe it.

  “I really liked those drawings you did for the trilogy. I’d like to see more like those—as many as you feel like doing. I mean to spare no expense in publishing this. And those stick things …”

  “Yes?”

  “Scotty told me the story on those. Fascinating! And you have a whole notebook of them? May I see it?”

  Leverett hurriedly dug the notebook from his file, returned to the manuscript.

  Dana paged through the book in awe. “These things are totally bizarre—and there are references to such things in the manuscript, to make it even more fantastic. Can you reproduce them all for the book?”

  “All I can remember,” Leverett assured him. “And I have a good memory. But won’t that be overdoing it?”

  “Not at all! They fit into the book. And they’re utterly unique. No, put everything you’ve got into this book. I’m going to entitle it Dwellers in the Earth, after the longest piece. I’ve already arranged for its printing, so we begin as soon as you can have the art ready. And I know you’ll give it your all.”

  VII

  He was floating in space. Objects drifted past him. Stars, he first thought. The objects drifted closer.

  Sticks. Stick lattices of all configurations. And then he was drifting among them, and he saw that they were not sticks—not of wood. The lattice designs were of dead-pale substance, like streaks of frozen starlight. They reminded him of glyphics of some unearthly alphabet—complex, enigmatic symbols arranged to spell … what?

  And there was an arrangement—a three-dimensional pattern. A maze of utterly baffling intricacy …

  Then somehow he was in a tunnel. A cramped, stone-lined tunnel through which he must crawl on his belly. The dank, moss-slimed stones pressed close about his wriggling form, evoking shrill whispers of claustrophobic dread.

  And after an indefinite space of crawling through this and other stone-lined burrows, and sometimes through passages whose angles hurt his eyes, he would creep forth into a subterranean chamber. Great slabs of granite a dozen feet across formed the walls and ceiling of this buried chamber, and between the slabs other burrows pierced the earth. Altar-like, a gigantic slab of gneiss waited in the center of the chamber. A spring welled darkly between the stone pillars that supported the table. Its outer edge was encircled by a groove, sickeningly stained by the substance that clotted in the stone bowl beneath its collecting spout.

  Others were emerging from the darkened burrows that ringed the chamber—slouched figures only dimly glimpsed and vaguely human. And a figure in a tattered cloak came toward him from the shadow—stretched out a claw-like hand to seize his wrist and draw him toward the sacrificial table. He followed unresistingly, knowing that something was expected of him.

  They reached the altar, and in the glow from the cuneiform lattices chiseled into the gneiss slab he could see the guide’s face. A mouldering corpse-face, the rotted bone of its forehead smashed inward upon the foulness that oozed forth.…

  And Leverett would awaken to the echo of his screams.…

  He’d been working too hard, he told himself, stumbling about in the darkness, getting dressed because he was too shaken to return to sleep. The nightmares had been coming every night. No wonder he was exhausted.

  But in his studio his work awaited him. Almost fifty drawings finished now, and he planned another score. No wonder the nightmares.

  It was a grueling pace, but Dana Allard was ecstatic with the work he had done. And Dwellers in the Earth was waiting. Despite problems with typesetting, with getting the special paper Dana wanted—the book only waited on him.

  Though his bones ached with fatigue, Leverett determinedly trudged through the graying night. Certain features of the nightmare would be interesting to portray.

  VIII

  The last of the drawings had gone off to Dana Allard in Petersham, and Leverett, fifteen pounds lighter and gut-weary, converted part of the bonus check into a case of good whiskey. Dana had the offset presses rolling as soon as the plates were shot from the drawings. Despite his precise planning, presses had broken down, one printer quit for reasons not stated, there had been a bad accident at the new printer—seemingly innumerable problems, and Dana had been furious at each delay. But the production pushed along quickly for all that. Leverett wrote that the book was cursed, but Dana responded that a week would see it ready.

  Leverett amused himself in his studio constructing stick lattices and trying to catch up on his sleep. He was expecting a copy of the book when he received a letter from Stefroi:

  Have tried to reach you by phone last few days, but no answer at your house. I’m pushed for time just now, so must be brief. I have indeed uncovered an unsuspected megalithic site of enormous importance. It’s located on the estate of a long-prominent Mass family—and as I cannot receive authorization to visit it, I will not say where. Have investigated secretly (and quite illegally) for a short time one night and was nearly caught. Came across reference to the place in collection of 17th-century letters and papers in a divinity school library. Writer denouncing the family as a brood of sorcerers and witches, references to alchemical activities and other less savory rumors—and describes underground stone chambers, megalithic artifacts etc. which are put to “foul usage and diabolic praktise.” Just got a quick glimpse but his description was not exaggerated. And Colin—in creeping through the woods to get to the site, I came across dozens of your mysterious “sticks”! Brought a small one back and have it here to show you. Recently constructed and exactly like your drawings. With luck, I’ll gain admittance and find out their significance—undoubtedly they have significance—though these cultists can be stubborn about sharing their secrets. Will explain my interest is scientific, no exposure to ridicule—and see what they say. Will get a closer look one way or another. And so—I’m off! Sincerely, Alexander Stefroi.

  Leverett’s bushy brows rose. Allard had intimated certain dark rituals in which the stick lattices figured. But Allard had written over thirty years ago, and Leverett assumed the writer had stumbled onto something similar to the Mann Brook site. Stefroi was writing about something current.

  He rather hoped Stefroi would discover nothing more than an inane hoax.

  The nightmares haunted him still—familiar now, for all that its scenes and phantasms were visited by him only in dream. Familiar. The terror that they evoked was undiminished.

  Now he was walking through forest—a section of hills that seemed to be close by. A huge slab of granite had been dragged aside, and a pit yawned where it had lain. He entered the pit without hesitation, and the rounded steps that led downward were known to his tread. A buried stone chamber, and leading from it stone-lined burrows. He knew which one to crawl into.

  And again the underground room with its sacrificial altar and its dark spring beneath, and the gathering circle of poorly glimpsed figures. A knot of them clustered about the stone table, and as he stepped toward them he saw they pinned a frantically writhing man.

  It was a stoutly built man, white hair disheveled, flesh gouged and filthy. Recognition seemed to burst over the contorted features, and he wondered if he should know the man. But now the lich with the caved-in skull was whispering in his ear, and he tried not to think of the unclean things that peered from that clove
n brow, and instead took the bronze knife from the skeletal hand, and raised the knife high, and because he could not scream and awaken, did with the knife as the tattered priest had whispered.…

  And when after an interval of unholy madness, he at last did awaken, the stickiness that covered him was not cold sweat, nor was it nightmare the half-devoured heart he clutched in one fist.

  IX

  Leverett somehow found sanity enough to dispose of the shredded lump of flesh. He stood under the shower all morning, scrubbing his skin raw. He wished he could vomit.

  There was a news item on the radio. The crushed body of noted archaeologist, Dr. Alexander Stefroi, had been discovered beneath a fallen granite slab near Whately. Police speculated the gigantic slab had shifted with the scientist’s excavations at its base. Identification was made through personal effects.

  When his hands stopped shaking enough to drive, Leverett fled to Petersham—reaching Dana Allard’s old stone house about dark. Allard was slow to answer his frantic knock.

  “Why, good evening, Colin! What a coincidence your coming here just now! The books are ready. The bindery just delivered them.”

  Leverett brushed past him. “We’ve got to destroy them!” he blurted. He’d thought a lot since morning.

  “Destroy them?”

  “There’s something none of us figured on. Those stick lattices—there’s a cult, some damnable cult. The lattices have some significance in their rituals. Stefroi hinted once they might be glyphics of some sort, I don’t know. But the cult is still alive. They killed Scotty … they killed Stefroi. They’re onto me—I don’t know what they intend. They’ll kill you to stop you from releasing this book!”

  Dana’s frown was worried, but Leverett knew he hadn’t impressed him the right way. “Colin, this sounds insane. You really have been overextending yourself, you know. Look, I’ll show you the books. They’re in the cellar.”

  Leverett let his host lead him downstairs. The cellar was quite large, flagstoned, and dry. A mountain of brown-wrapped bundles awaited them.

  “Put them down here where they wouldn’t knock the floor out,” Dana explained. “They start going out to distributors tomorrow. Here, I’ll sign your copy.”

  Distractedly Leverett opened a copy of Dwellers in the Earth. He gazed at his lovingly rendered drawings of rotting creatures and buried stone chambers and stained altars—and everywhere the enigmatic latticework structures. He shuddered.

  “Here.” Dana Allard handed Leverett the book he had signed. “And to answer your question, they are elder glyphics.”

  But Leverett was staring at the inscription in its unmistakable handwriting: “For Colin Leverett, Without whom this work could not have seen completion—H. Kenneth Allard.”

  Allard was speaking. Leverett saw places where the hastily applied flesh-toned makeup didn’t quite conceal what lay beneath. “Glyphics symbolic of alien dimensions—inexplicable to the human mind, but essential fragments of an evocation so unthinkably vast that the ‘pentagram’ (if you will) is miles across. Once before we tried—but your iron weapon destroyed part of Althol’s brain. He erred at the last instant—almost annihilating us all. Althol had been formulating the evocation since he fled the advance of iron four millennia past.

  “Then you reappeared, Colin Leverett—you with your artist’s knowledge and diagrams of Althol’s symbols. And now a thousand new minds will read the evocation you have returned to us, unite with our minds as we stand in the Hidden Places. And the Great Old Ones will come forth from the earth, and we, the dead who have steadfastly served them, shall be masters of the living.”

  Leverett turned to run, but now they were creeping forth from the shadows of the cellar, as massive flagstones slid back to reveal the tunnels beyond. He began to scream as Althol came to lead him away, but he could not awaken, could only follow.

  * Originally published in Whispers, March 1974.

  The Freshman*

  PHILIP JOSÉ FARMER

  The long-haired youth in front of Desmond wore sandals, ragged blue jeans, and a grimy T-shirt. A paperback, The Collected Works of Robert Blake, was half stuck into his rear pocket. When he turned around, he displayed in large letters on the T-shirt, M.U. His scrawny Fu Manchu mustache held some bread crumbs.

  His yellow eyes—surely he suffered from jaundice—widened when he saw Desmond. He said, “This ain’t the place to apply for the nursing home, Pops.” He grinned, showing unusually long canines, and then turned to face the admissions desk.

  Desmond felt his face turning red. Ever since he’d gotten into the line before a table marked Toaahd Freshmen A-D, he’d been aware of the sidelong glances, the snickers, the low-voiced comments. He stood out among these youths like a billboard in a flower garden, a corpse on a banquet table.

  The line moved ahead by one person. The would-be students were talking, but their voices were subdued. For such young people, they were very restrained, excepting the smart aleck just ahead of him.

  Perhaps it was the surroundings that repressed them. This gymnasium, built in the late nineteenth century, had not been repainted for years. The once-green paint was peeling. There were broken windows high on the walls; a shattered skylight had been covered with boards. The wooden floor bent and creaked, and the basketball goal rings (?) were rusty. Yet M.U. had been league champions in all fields of sports for many years. Though its enrollment was much less than that of its competitors, its teams somehow managed to win, often by large scores.

  Desmond buttoned his jacket. Though it was a warm fall day, the air in the building was cold. If he hadn’t known better, he would have thought that the wall of an iceberg was just behind him. Above him the great lights struggled to overcome the darkness that lowered like the underside of a dead whale sinking into sea depths.

  He turned around. The girl just back of him smiled. She wore a flowing dashiki covered with astrological symbols. Her black hair was cut short; her features were petite and well-arranged but too pointed to be pretty.

  Among all these youths there should have been a number of pretty girls and handsome men. He’d walked enough campuses to get an idea of the index of beauty of college students. But here … There was a girl, in the line to the right, whose face should have made her eligible to be a fashion model. Yet, there was something missing.

  No, there was something added. A quality undefinable but … Repugnant? No, now it was gone. No, it was back again. It flitted on and off, like a bat swooping from darkness into a grayness and then up and out.

  The kid in front of him had turned again. He was grinning like a fox who’d just seen a chicken.

  “Some dish, heh, Pops? She likes older men. Maybe you two could get your shit together and make beautiful music.”

  The odor of unwashed body and clothes swirled around him like flies around a dead rat.

  “I’m not interested in girls with Oedipus complexes,” Desmond said coldly.

  “At your age you can’t be particular,” the youth said, and turned away.

  Desmond flushed, and he briefly fantasized knocking the kid down. It didn’t help much.

  The line moved ahead again. He looked at his wristwatch. In half an hour he was scheduled to phone his mother. He should have come here sooner. However, he had overslept while the alarm clock had run down, resuming its ticking as if it didn’t care. Which it didn’t, of course, though he felt that his possessions should, somehow, take an interest in him. This was irrational, but if he was a believer in the superiority of the rational, would he be here? Would any of these students?

  The line moved jerkily ahead like a centipede halting now and then to make sure no one had stolen any of its legs. When he was ten minutes late for the phone call, he was at the head of the line. Behind the admissions table was a man far older than he. His face was a mass of wrinkles, gray dough that had been incised with fingernails and then pressed into somewhat human shape. The nose was a cuttlefish’s beak stuck into the dough. But the eyes beneath the white c
haotic eyebrows were as alive as blood flowing from holes in the flesh.

  The hand which took Desmond’s papers and punched cards was not that of an old man’s. It was big and swollen, white, smooth-skinned. The fingernails were dirty.

  “The Roderick Desmond, I assume.”

  The voice was rasping, not at all an old man’s cracked quavering.

  “Ah, you know me?”

  “Of you, yes. I’ve read some of your novels of the occult. And ten years ago I rejected your request for Xeroxes of certain parts of the book.”

  The name tag on the worn tweed jacket said: R. Layamon, COTOAAHD. So this was the chairman of the Committee of the Occult Arts and History Department.

  “Your paper on the non-Arabic origin of Alhazred’s name was a brilliant piece of linguistic research. I knew that it wasn’t Arabic or even Semitic, but I confess that I didn’t know the century in which the word was dropped from the Arabic language. Your exposition of how it was retained only in connection with the Yemenite and that its original meaning was not mad but one-who-sees-what-shouldn’t-be-seen was quite correct.”

  He paused, then said smiling, “Did your mother complain when she was forced to accompany you to Yemen?”

  Desmond said, “No-n-n-o-body forced her.”

  He took a deep breath and said, “But how did you know she …?”

  “I’ve read some biographical accounts of you.”

  Layamon chuckled. It sounded like nails being shifted in a barrel. “Your paper on Alhazred and the knowledge you display in your novels are the main reasons why you’re being admitted to this department despite your sixty years.”

  He signed the forms and handed the card back to Desmond. “Take this to the cashier’s office. Oh, yes, your family is a remarkably long-lived one, isn’t it? Your father died accidentally, but his father lived to be one hundred and two. Your mother is eighty, but she should live to be over a hundred. And you, you could have forty more years of life as you’ve known it.”