Table of Contents
COPYRIGHT INFO
A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER
INTRODUCTION
DREAMS OF YITH, by Duane W. Rimel (Poem)
OUT OF THE AEONS, by H. P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald
FISHHEAD, by Irvin S. Cobb
WHEN CHAUGNAR WAKES, by Frank Belknap Long (Poem)
THE MOUND, by H.P. Lovecraft and Zelia Bishop
THE THING ON THE ROOF, by Robert E. Howard
THE ISLE OF DARK MAGIC, by Hugh B. Cave
THE SECRET IN THE TOMB, by Robert Bloch
THE HORROR FROM THE HILLS, by Frank Belknap Long
THE TERRIBLE PARCHMENT, by Manly Wade Wellman
THE SHAMBLER FROM THE STARS, by Robert Bloch
THE DIARY OF ALONZO TYPER, by H. P. Lovecraft and William Lumley
HYDRA, by Henry Kuttner
THE SUICIDE IN THE STUDY, by Robert Bloch
MARMOK, Emil Petaja (Poem)
THE INTRUDER, by Emil Petaja
OUT OF THE JAR, by Charles A. Tanner
SKYDRIFT, by Emil Petaja
ANONYMOUS, by George T. Wetzel
WHY ABDUL ALHAZRED WENT MAD, by D.R. Smith
CAER SIDHI, by George T. Wetzel
DEAD OF NIGHT, by Lin Carter
DEATH OF A DAMNED GOOD MAN, by Avram Davidson
MEDUSA’S COIL, by Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop
PERCHANCE TO DREAM, by Lin Carter
THE WINFIELD HERITENCE, by Lin Carter
THE CHALLENGE FROM BEYOND, by Multiple Authors
THE LAST HORROR OUT OF ARKHAM, by Darrell Schweitzer
The MEGAPACK® Ebook Series
COPYRIGHT INFO
The Second Cthulhu Mythos MEGAPACK® is copyright © 2016 by Wildside Press, LLC. All rights reserved.
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Version 1.0
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The MEGAPACK® ebook series name is a trademark of Wildside Press, LLC. All rights reserved.
A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER
Here is a follow-up to our Cthulhu Mythos MEGAPACK®, this time selected by our own production manager, Shawn Garrett. The focus is on lesser-known Mythos stories (including a proto-Mythos tale, “Fishhead,” by Irvin S. Cobb, which may have influenced Lovecraft’s later writings.)
Plus there are tales by Lovecraft’s friends and contemporaries, and a few modern tales.
Enjoy!
—John Betancourt
Publisher, Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidepress.com
ABOUT THE SERIES
Over the last few years, our MEGAPACK® ebook series has grown to be our most popular endeavor. (Maybe it helps that we sometimes offer them as premiums to our mailing list!) One question we keep getting asked is, “Who’s the editor?”
The MEGAPACK® ebook series (except where specifically credited) are a group effort. Everyone at Wildside works on them. This includes John Betancourt (me), Carla Coupe, Steve Coupe, Shawn Garrett, Helen McGee, Bonner Menking, Sam Cooper, Helen McGee and many of Wildside’s authors…who often suggest stories to include (and not just their own!)
RECOMMEND A FAVORITE STORY?
Do you know a great classic science fiction story, or have a favorite author whom you believe is perfect for the MEGAPACK® ebook series? We’d love your suggestions! You can post them on our message board at http://wildsidepress.forumotion.com/ (there is an area for Wildside Press comments).
Note: we only consider stories that have already been professionally published. This is not a market for new works.
TYPOS
Unfortunately, as hard as we try, a few typos do slip through. We update our ebooks periodically, so make sure you have the current version (or download a fresh copy if it’s been sitting in your ebook reader for months.) It may have already been updated.
If you spot a new typo, please let us know. We’ll fix it for everyone. You can email the publisher at [email protected] or use the message boards above.
INTRODUCTION
Collected here for you, a sampler of stories & poems set in or related to the “Cthulhu Mythos,” as conceived by H.P, Lovecraft, expanded on by the “Lovecraft Circle” and endlessly expanded on by current writers up to the current day!
So as not to replicate material available in The H.P. Lovecraft MEGAPACK® and The Cthulhu Mythos MEGAPACK®, we start with a range of Lovecraft pieces he “fixed up” for other authors, and a round-robin story he contributed to with a variety of other pulp authors of the time (“The Challenge From Beyond”). Then, after a slight detour into a historically interesting predecessor of Lovecraft’s Innsmouth folk (“Fishhead”), it’s on into a sampling of tales and poems from Lovecraft’s peers and followers that either reference or resonate with his concepts.
Cthulhu Fhtagn!
—Shawn M. Garrett
Editor, Wildside Press
DREAMS OF YITH, by Duane W. Rimel (Poem)
Originally published in The Fantasy Fan, July 1934.
I
In distant Yith past crested, ragged peaks;
On far-flung islands lost to worldly eyes,
A shadow from the ancient star-world seeks
Some being which in caverns shrilly cries
A challenge; and the hairy dweller speaks
From that deep hole where slimy Sotho lies.
But when those night-winds crept about the place,
They fled—for Sotho had no human face!
II
Beyond the valleys of the sun which lie
In misty chaos beyond the reach of time;
And brood beneath the ice as aeons fly,
Long waiting for some brighter, warmer clime;
There is a vision, as I vainly try
To glimpse the madness that must some day climb
From age-old tombs in dim dimensions hid,
And push all angles back—unseal the lid!
III
Beside the city that once lived there wound
A stream of putrefaction writing black;
Reflecting crumbling spires stuck in the ground
That glow through hov’ring mists that no stray track
Can lead to those dead gates, where once was found
The secret that would bring the dwellers back.
And still that pitch-black current eddies by
Those silver gates of Yith to sea-beds dry.
IV
On rounded turrets rising through the visne
Of cloud-veiled aeons that the Old Ones knew;
On tablets deeply worn and fingered clean
By tentacles that dreamers seldom view;
In space-hung Yith, on clammy walls obscene
That writhe and crumble and are built anew;
There is a figure carved; but God! Those eyes,
That sway on fungoid stems at leaden skies!
V
Around the place of ancient, waiting blight;
On walls of sheerest opal, rearing high,
That moves as planets beckon in the night
To faded realms where nothing sane can lie;
A deathless guard tramps by in feeble light,
Emitting to the stars a sobbing cry.
There rolled an eyeless, huge and bloated head.
VI
Amid dim halls that poison mosses blast,
Far from the land and seas of our clean earth,
Dread nightmare shadows dance—obscenely cast
By twisted talons of archaean birth
On rows of slimy pillars stretching past
A demon fane-fane that echoes with mad mirth.
And in that realm sane eyes may never see—
For black light streams from skies of ebony.
VII
On those queer mountains which hold back the horde
That lie in waiting in their mouldy graves,
Who groan and mumble to a hidden lord
Still waiting for the time-worn key that saves;
There dwells a watcher who can ill-afford
To let invaders by those hoary caves.
But some day then may dreamers find the way
That leads down elfin-painted paths of gray.
VIII
And past those unclean spires that ever lean
Above the windings of unpeopled streets;
And far beyond the walls and silver screen
That veils the secrets of those dim retreats,
A scarlet pathway leads that some have seen
In wildest vision that no mortal greets.
And down that dimming path in fearful flight
Queer beings squirm and hasten in the night.
IX
High in the ebon skies on scaly wings
Dread bat-like beasts soar past those towers gray
To peer in greedy longing at the things
Which sprawl in every twisted passageway.
And when their gruesome flight a shadow brings
The dwellers lift dim eyes above the clay.
But lidded blubs close heavily once more;
They wait—for Sotho to unlatch the door!
X
Now, though the veil of troubled visions deep
Is draped to blind me to the secret ways
Leading to blackness to the realm of sleep
That haunt me all my jumbled nights and days,
I feel the dim path that will let me keep
That rendezvous in Yith where Sotho plays.
At last I see a glowing turret shine,
And I am coming, for the key is mine!
OUT OF THE AEONS, by H. P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald
(Ms. found among the effects of the late Richard H. Johnson, Ph.D., curator of the Cabot Museum of Archaeology, Boston, Mass.)
It is not likely that anyone in Boston—or any alert reader elsewhere—will ever forget the strange affair of the Cabot Museum. The newspaper publicity given to that hellish mummy, the antique and terrible rumours vaguely linked with it, the morbid wave of interest and cult activities during 1932, and the frightful fate of the two intruders on December 1st of that year, all combined to form one of those classic mysteries which go down for generations as folklore and become the nuclei of whole cycles of horrific speculation.
Everyone seems to realise, too, that something very vital and unutterably hideous was suppressed in the public accounts of the culminant horrors. Those first disquieting hints as to the condition of one of the two bodies were dismissed and ignored too abruptly—nor were the singular modifications in the mummy given the following-up which their news value would normally prompt. It also struck people as queer that the mummy was never restored to its case. In these days of expert taxidermy the excuse that its disintegrating condition made exhibition impracticable seemed a peculiarly lame one.
As curator of the museum I am in a position to reveal all the suppressed facts, but this I shall not do during my lifetime. There are things about the world and universe which it is better for the majority not to know, and I have not departed from the opinion in which all of us—museum staff, physicians, reporters, and police—concurred at the period of the horror itself. At the same time it seems proper that a matter of such overwhelming scientific and historic importance should not remain wholly unrecorded—hence this account which I have prepared for the benefit of serious students. I shall place it among various papers to be examined after my death, leaving its fate to the discretion of my executors. Certain threats and unusual events during the past weeks have led me to believe that my life—as well as that of other museum officials—is in some peril through the enmity of several widespread secret cults of Asiatics, Polynesians, and heterogeneous mystical devotees; hence it is possible that the work of the executors may not be long postponed. [Executor’s note: Dr. Johnson died suddenly and rather mysteriously of heart-failure on April 22, 1933. Wentworth Moore, taxidermist of the museum, disappeared around the middle of the preceding month. On February 18 of the same year Dr. William Minot, who superintended a dissection connected with the case, was stabbed in the back, dying the following day.]
The real beginning of the horror, I suppose, was in 1879—long before my term as curator—when the museum acquired that ghastly, inexplicable mummy from the Orient Shipping Company. Its very discovery was monstrous and menacing, for it came from a crypt of unknown origin and fabulous antiquity on a bit of land suddenly upheaved from the Pacific’s floor.
On May 11, 1878, Capt. Charles Weatherbee of the freighter Eridanus, bound from Wellington, New Zealand, to Valparaiso, Chile, had sighted a new island unmarked on any chart and evidently of volcanic origin. It projected quite boldly out of the sea in the form of a truncated cone. A landing-party under Capt. Weatherbee noted evidences of long submersion on the rugged slopes which they climbed, while at the summit there were signs of recent destruction, as by an earthquake. Among the scattered rubble were massive stones of manifestly artificial shaping, and a little examination disclosed the presence of some of that prehistoric Cyclopean masonry found on certain Pacific islands and forming a perpetual archaeological puzzle.
Finally the sailors entered a massive stone crypt—judged to have been part of a much larger edifice, and to have originally lain far underground—in one corner of which the frightful mummy crouched. After a short period of virtual panic, caused partly by certain carvings on the walls, the men were induced to move the mummy to the ship, though it was only with fear and loathing that they touched it. Close to the body, as if once thrust into its clothes, was a cylinder of an unknown metal containing a roll of thin, bluish-white membrane of equally unknown nature, inscribed with peculiar characters in a greyish, indeterminable pigment. In the centre of the vast stone floor was a suggestion of a trap-door, but the party lacked apparatus sufficiently powerful to move it.
Yhe Cabot Museum, then newly established, saw the meagre reports of the discovery and at once took steps to acquire the mummy and the cylinder. Curator Pickman made a personal trip to Valparaiso and outfitted a schooner to search for the crypt where the thing had been found, though meeting with failure in this matter. At the recorded position of the island nothing but the sea’s unbroken expanse could be discerned, and the seekers realised that the same seismic forces which had suddenly thrust the island up had carried it down again to the watery darkness where it had brooded for untold aeons. The secret of that immovable trap-door would never be solved. The mummy and the cylinder, however, remained—and the former was placed on exhibition early in November, 1879, in the museum’s hall of mummies.
The Cabot Museum of Archaeology, which specialises in such remnants of ancient and unknown civilisations as do not fall within the domain of art, is a small and scarcely famous institution, though one of high standing in scientific circles. It stands in the heart of Boston’s exclusive Beacon Hill district—in Mt. Vernon Street, near Joy—housed in a former private mansion with an added wing in the rear, and
was a source of pride to its austere neighbours until the recent terrible events brought it an undesirable notoriety.
The hall of mummies on the western side of the original mansion (which was designed by Bulfinch and erected in 1819), on the second floor, is justly esteemed by historians and anthropologists as harbouring the greatest collection of its kind in America. Here may be found typical examples of Egyptian embalming from the earliest Sakkarah specimens to the last Coptic attempts of the eighth century; mummies of other cultures, including the prehistoric Indian specimens recently found in the Aleutian Islands; agonised Pompeian figures moulded in plaster from tragic hollows in the ruin-choking ashes; naturally mummified bodies from mines and other excavations in all parts of the earth—some surprised by their terrible entombment in the grotesque postures caused by their last, tearing death-throes—everything, in short, which any collection of the sort could well be expected to contain. In 1879, of course, it was much less ample than it is now; yet even then it was remarkable. But that shocking thing from the primal Cyclopean crypt on an ephemeral sea-spawned island was always its chief attraction and most impenetrable mystery.
The mummy was that of a medium-sized man of unknown race, and was cast in a peculiar crouching posture. The face, half shielded by claw-like hands, had its under jaw thrust far forward, while the shrivelled features bore an expression of fright so hideous that few spectators could view them unmoved. The eyes were closed, with lids clamped down tightly over eyeballs apparently bulging and prominent. Bits of hair and beard remained, and the colour of the whole was a sort of dull neutral grey. In texture the thing was half leathery and half stony, forming an insoluble enigma to those experts who sought to ascertain how it was embalmed. In places bits of its substance were eaten away by time and decay. Rags of some peculiar fabric, with suggestions of unknown designs, still clung to the object.
Just what made it so infinitely horrible and repulsive one could hardly say. For one thing, there was a subtle, indefinable sense of limitless antiquity and utter alienage which affected one like a view from the brink of a monstrous abyss of unplumbed blackness—but mostly it was the expression of crazed fear on the puckered, prognathous, half-shielded face. Such a symbol of infinite, inhuman, cosmic fright could not help communicating the emotion to the beholder amidst a disquieting cloud of mystery and vain conjecture.
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