by Brian Lumley
“I can’t answer that. I only … glug … know what They are interested in, not why. Over the years They have drained it all from my mind. All I know, everything. Now I have nothing … glug … that They are interested in … glug … and this is the end. I thank God!” The horror in the chair paused. Its swaying and nodding became wilder in the flickering light.
“Now I must be … going.”
“Going? But where?” I babbled. “Back to—Them?”
“No … glug, glug, glug … not back to Them. That is all … glug … over. I feel it. And They are angry. I have said too much. A few minutes more and I’ll be … glug … free!” The pitiful horror climbed slowly to its feet, sloping somehow to one side, stumbling and barely managing to keep its balance.
Titus Crow, too, started to his feet. “Wait, you can help us! You must know what they fear. We need to know. We need weapons against them!”
“Glug, glug, glug—no time—They have released Their control over this … glug … body! The protoplasm is … glug, glug, ggglug … falling apart! I’m sorry, Crow … gluggg, aghhh … I’m sorry.”
Now the thing was collapsing in upon itself and waves of monstrous, venomous fetor were issuing from it. It was swaying from side to side and stumbling to and fro, visibly spreading at its base and thinning at its top, melting like an icicle beneath the blast of a blowtorch.
“Atomics, yes! Glugggg, urghhh, achhh-achhh! You may be … gluggg … right! Ludwig Prinn, on … glugggughhh … on Azathoth!”
The stench was now intolerable. Fumes of black vapor were actually pouring from the staggering, melting figure by the open door. I followed Crow’s lead, hastily cramming a handkerchief to my nose and mouth. The horror’s last words—a gurgled shriek—before it collapsed in upon itself and slopped across the planking of the floor, were these:
“Yes, Crow … glarghhh, arghhh, urghhh … look to Prinn’s De Vermis Mysteriis!”
In a matter of seconds, then, there was merely a spreading stain on the floor—but, God help me, within the pattern of that stain was a hideously suggestive lump!
A human brain in an alien, protoplasmic body!
I was paralyzed, I don’t mind admitting it, but Crow had leaped into action. Already the paraffin-lamp was back to full power, filling the cabin with light, and suddenly my friend’s commands were echoing in my ears:
“Out, de Marigny. Out onto the gangplank. The stench is positively poisonous!” He half pushed me, half dragged me out through the door and into the clean night air. I sat down on the gangplank and was sick, horribly sick, into the obscenely chuckling river.
Crow, though, however affected he was or had been by the occurrences of the last half hour, had quickly regained control of himself. I heard the latticed cabin windows being thrown open, heard Crow’s strangled coughing as he moved about in the noisome interior, heard his footsteps and labored breathing as he came out on deck and crossed to the other side to fling something—something which splashed loudly—into the flowing river.
Too, as my sickness abated, I heard him drawing water and the sounds of his swilling down the cabin floor. I thanked my lucky stars I had not, as had once been my intention, had the cabin carpeted! A fresh breeze had sprung up to assist greatly in removing from the Seafree the poisonous taint of our visitor, and by the time I was able to get back on my feet it was plain that the houseboat would soon be back to normal.
It was then, just before midnight, as Crow came back on deck in his shirt sleeves, that a taxi pulled up on the river path level with the gangplank. Crow and I watched as the passenger alighted with a large briefcase and as, in the glow from the rear lights, a suitcase was taken from the trunk. Plainly I heard the newcomer’s voice as he paid his fare:
“I thank you very much. They’re in, I see, so there’ll be no need to wait.”
There was the merest trace of cultured, North American accent to that dignified voice, and I saw the puzzled look on Crow’s face deepen as the second visitor of that fateful night made his way carefully to the foot of the gangplank. The taxi pulled away into the night.
“Hello there,” the newcomer called as he stepped up the sloping walkway toward us. “Mr. Titus Crow, I believe—and Mr. Henri-Laurent de Marigny?”
As he came into the light I saw an elderly gentleman whose gray hair went well with his intelligent, broad-browed head and wide, searching eyes. His clothes, I saw, were cut in the most conservative American style.
“You have us at a disadvantage, sir,” said Crow, carefully holding out his hand in greeting.
“Ah, of course.” The stranger smiled. “Please forgive me. We’ve never met, you and I, but we’ve found a number of occasions in the past on which to correspond!”
For a moment my friend’s frown deepened even further, but then the light of recognition suddenly lit in his eyes and he gasped as he gripped the other’s hand more firmly. “Then you’ll be—”
“Peaslee,” the newcomer said. “Wingate Peaslee of Miskatonic, and I’m delighted to make your acquaintance.”
VIII
Peaslee of Miskatonic
(From de Marigny’s Notebooks)
Never before in my life had I experienced a night of such revelation.
Peaslee had flown in from America as soon as he got Crow’s first letter, setting out from the university in Arkham even before the arrival of the eggs, which would now be put to certain as yet unspecified uses in America. Upon his arrival in London, he had tried to get in touch with Crow by telephone, eventually contacting the Reverend Harry Townley. But even then he had to present himself at the reverend’s residence, with such credentials as he had with him, before he could learn of Crow’s whereabouts. Our ecclesiastical doctor friend was not one to neglect a trust!
“Solid as a rock,” Crow said when he heard this. “Good old Harry!”
Once the reverend had cleared Peaslee, then he had told the professor of my own involvement in Crow’s “mysterious” activities. Though one of his prime objectives in journeying to England was to see Crow, he was not displeased at my presence or at my participation in my friend’s adventures. He had heard much of my father—the great New Orleans mystic, Etienne-Laurent de Marigny—and assumed correctly from the beginning that much of the paternal personality, particularly the love of obscure and macabre mysteries, had rubbed off on me.
He had come, he told us, among other things to welcome us into the membership of an organization, or rather, a “Foundation,” the Wilmarth Foundation. The direction of this unofficial institute was under Peaslee’s own control—his and that of an administrative board formed by certain of Miskatonic’s older, more experienced professors—and the Foundation’s formation proper had been initiated after the untimely death of the sage for whom it was named. Its prime aim was to carry out the work that old Wilmarth, before his death, had stated he wished to commence.
Peaslee recognized immediately and was amazed at Crow’s erudition regarding the Cthulhu Cycle of myth (mine to a lesser degree); and, once Titus had mentioned them in conversation, pressed him for details of his prophetic dreams. It appeared he knew of other men with Crow’s strange brand of “vision”; a somnambulant psyche, as it were! But the professor’s own revelations were by far the night’s most astounding, and his fascinating conversation was to carry us well into the early hours of the next day.
Before he would even begin to explain in detail, however, his unforeseeable arrival at the houseboat, seeing our obvious state of distress, he demanded to know all that had passed since the Harden eggs came into Crow’s hands. In the earlier occurrences of the night in particular, Peaslee was interested—not in any morbid sense or out of grotesque curiosity, but because this was a facet of the Cthonians of which he knew nothing: their ability to preserve the identity of their victim by prisoning the brain in living tissues of their own construction. He carefully made notes as we told him of our awful, pitiful visitor, and only when he knew the most minute of the horrific details was he satisfied.
Then, and with considerable attention to detail—if occasionally prodded by our eager questions—he told us of the Wilmarth Foundation; of its inception at the deathbed of his one-time companion in dark and legendary arcana; of its resultant recruitment of scores of dedicated men—the “horror hunters” as foreseen by Sir Amery Wendy-Smith—and of their now almost worldwide organization aimed at the ultimate destruction of all the extant Cthulhu Cycle deities.
But before I go into Peaslee’s fantastic disclosures too deeply, I feel I should make plain the truly astonishing sensations of relief enjoyed both by Titus Crow and myself from the moment the professor set foot aboard Seafree. If I had thought before that Crow had “freed” me with his chantings and splashings on that morning when the Cthonians had held me in their mental grasp—well, what was I to make of this new and fuller feeling of mental and physical freeness? The harsh lines on the face of Titus Crow lifted in less than half an hour, his unaccustomed nervousness gave way to an almost euphoric gayness quite out of character even in his lightest moments; and as for myself—why, I had not known such sheer joie de vivre for years, for longer than I could remember, and this despite my surroundings and the horror they had known only a few hours earlier. Without Peaslee’s explanation for this mental uplifting—which did not come, except as a hint, until later—it was far from obvious whence these sensations sprang. He did eventually clear up the matter for us (after my friend and I had remarked once or twice upon this remarkable and sudden exhilaration) with an explanation both enlightening and gratifying. At last, it seemed, Crow and I were to have penultimate protection against the Cthonians, and against their mind- and dream-sendings. For although we had not known it, even with Crow’s expert use of the Vach-Viraj Incantation and the Tikkoun Elixir, the Cthonian mastery of dreams and subconscious mind and mental telepathy had still held over us at least the echoes of their evil influence. Only the Elder Gods themselves had ultimate power—and, even if it were known how, what man would dare conjure them? Would they even permit such a conjuring? Everyone, Peaslee had it, was subject to the influence of the forces of evil to one degree or another, but there was a solution to such moods and states of psychic depression. We were, as I have said, later to learn what that solution was.
The professors reason for coming to England, as he had already half stated, was not wholly to invite Titus Crow into the company of the Wilmarth Foundation; but on receipt of Crow’s letter he had realized at once that its author desperately needed his help—his immediate help, if it was not to be Wendy-Smith and Wilmarth all over again!
He explained how Professor Albert N. Wilmarth, long interested in and an authority on Fortian and macabre occurrences, especially those connected with the Cthulhu Cycle of myth, had died quietly following a long illness many years ago. At the height of this illness Wendy-Smith was sending Wilmarth imploring telegrams—telegrams which, because of his comatose condition at the time, the ailing professor was never able to answer! On his partial recovery and not long before his relapse, slow decline, and eventual death, he had blamed his English colleague’s monstrous demise on himself. Then, while he was able, Wilmarth had gathered to him all references available in literature to the subterranean beings of the Cthulhu Cycle. Upon receipt of a copy of the Wendy-Smith manuscript (before its first publication in alleged “fiction” form), he had taken it upon himself to form the nucleus of that Foundation which now secretly spanned the greater part of the Earth. Shortly thereafter he died.
Peaslee told us of the Foundation’s early years, of the skepticism with which Wilmarth’s posthumous report was at first met, of the subsequent explorations, scientific experiments, and researching which had gone to prove the elder “eccentric’s” theories, and of the gradual buildup of a dedicated army. Now there were almost five hundred of them—men in every walk of life, who, having chanced upon manifestations of subterranean horror or other signs of alien presences, were members of the Wilmarth Foundation—a body sworn to protect its individual members, to secretly seek out and destroy all the elder evils of Avernus, to remove forever from the Earth the ancient taint of Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Shudde-M’ell, Nyogtha, Yibb-Tstll, and all the others of the deities, their minions, and spawn.
The great occult books had early been researched, studied endlessly by sincere and single-minded men until each clue, every pointer, all references and allusions were known to the horror hunters by heart—and then the hunt had begun in earnest.
But before all this had got under way those Demogorgons of the mythology, the Cthonians, had spread into many areas (although Africa was still their true stronghold), until the spawn of Shudde-M’ell was seeded far and wide, throughout all Asia, Europe, Russia, even China and Tibet. Finally, as lately as 1964, and against all the efforts of the Wilmarth Foundation, the Americas themselves had been invaded. Not that this invasion constituted the first dealings of these beings of elder myth and their minions with the Americas. On the contrary; the United States particularly—and especially the New England seaboard—had known diverse forms of the horrors many times, and Their presence in the domed hills and wooded valleys of that area was immemorially recorded and predated the very Indians and their forebears. This was the first time, however, that Shudde-M’ ell’s kind had gained a foothold upon (or rather, within) the North American landmass!
Crow had found this invasion just a fraction too hard to understand, until Peaslee reminded him of the Cthonian ability to get into the minds of men. There were, beyond a doubt, people temporarily and even permanently in the employ of the burrowers beneath—usually men of weak character or low breeding and mental characteristics—and such persons had transported eggs to the United States for the further propagation of the horrors! These mental slaves of the Cthonians had, on a number of occasions, attempted to infiltrate the Foundation—had even tried to get inside Miskatonic University itself. But again the as yet unspecified “protections” of Foundation members had been sufficient to ward off such deluded men. After all, their minds were in effect the minds of the Cthonians, and therefore that same power which worked against all Cthulhu Cycle deities worked against them!
The main trouble in dealing with Shudde-M’ell’s sort (Peaslee was quite matter-of-fact in his treatment of the theme) was that any method used against them could more often than not only be used once. Their telepathic contact with one another—and, indeed, with others of the mythology—was of course instantaneous. This meant that should a means be employed to destroy one nest of the creatures, then it was more than likely that the other nests knew of it immediately and would avoid any such similar treatment. Thanks to Miskatonic’s technical theorists, researchers, and experimentalists, however, an as yet untried plan had been formulated to destroy certain of the earth-dwelling types of the CCD (Peaslee’s abbreviation for Cthulhu Cycle deities) without alerting other of the horrors. This plan was now scheduled for use both in England as well as America. Preparations had already been made for the initial American experiment, which would now have to be delayed until arrangements could be made for a simultaneous attack upon the Cthonian nests of Britain. Crow and I, as members of the Wilmarth Foundation, would see the results of this project.
While the professor was sketching in the details of these facts for us, I could see Crow growing more restless and eager to speak by the second. Sure enough, as soon as Peaslee paused for breath, he put in: “Then there are known ways of killing these things?”
“Certainly, my friends—” the professor looked at us both—“and if your minds hadn’t been so fogged over these last few weeks I’m sure you would have discovered some of them for yourselves. Most of the earth-dwelling types—such as Shudde-M’ell and his lot—can be done away with simply by the use of water. They corrode, rot, and evaporate in water. Their internal organs break down and their pressure-mechanisms cease to function. Their makeup is more alien than you can possible imagine. A sustained jet of water, or immersion for any appreciable length of time, is quite fatal; and t
here’s damn little left to look at afterwards! It’s strange, I know, that Shudde-M’ell’s ultimate striving is toward freeing Great Cthulhu—which the Foundation, in Wendy-Smith’s footsteps, believes—for Cthulhu would appear essentially to be the greatest of the water-elementals. The fact of the matter is, though, that R’lyeh once stood on dry land, possibly has on a number of occasions, and that the ocean now forms the very walls of Cthulhu’s prison. It is the water, thank God, that keeps down his monstrous dream-sendings to a bearable level. Even so, you’d be surprised how many inmates of the world’s lunatic asylums owe their confinement to the mad call of Cthulhu. Of course, dreaming as he is in Deep R’lyeh—wherever that hellish submarine city of distant aeons hides—he is served in his slumbers by Dagon and the Deep Ones; but these in the main are creatures more truly of the great waters. Water is their element.”
“Cthulhu in fact lives, then?” Crow asked.
“Most assuredly. There are some occultists who believe him to be dead, I am told, but—”
“‘That is not dead which can eternal lie …’” Crow finished for him, quoting the first line of Alhazred’s much discussed couplet.
“Exactly,” Peaslee agreed.
“I know a different version of it,” I said.
“Oh?” The professor cocked his head at me.
“‘That which is alive hath known death, and that which is dead yet can never die, for in the Circle of the Spirit life is naught and death is naught. Yea, all things live forever, though at times they sleep and are forgotten.’”
Crow raised his eyebrows in question, but before he could speak I said: “From the ninth chapter of H. Rider Haggard’s She, from the lips of a hideous phoenix in a dream.”
“Ah, but you’ll find many allusions and parallels in fiction, Henri,” Peaslee told me. “Particularly in that type of fiction so marvelously typified in Haggard. I suppose you could say that Ayesha was a fire-elemental.”