by Неизвестный
The Stones went to the south of France. He doesn’t have their fame or their cash, even if you do still hear his songs on the radio now and again. He settled in the south of California instead. It suits him. He likes the weather. Any British expat will. It’s not far from the Wine Country. He does have the money and the taste to be a bit of a wine snob.
And he likes the people. They’re open and friendly. To them, his accent sounds exotic, intriguing, even classy. They all talk pretty much the same way, with sharp vowels and cookie-cutter consonants, every h and r in place.
You hear plenty of accents in Los Angeles. You hear English flavored by Spanish, Farsi, Korean, Hindi, Mandarin, Hebrew—anything under the sun. In Los Angeles, anybody white who speaks without one of those accents counts as an Anglo. Ginsberg? Szymanski? Papastegios? Anglos all, so long as they talk like Anglos.
Not like that here. Here you hear English flavored by history, accents far older than the BBC and the American public-school system (accents older, even, than the British public-school system, which is not at all the same thing). Here, people judge you, weigh you, every time you open your mouth. They know where you come from. They know how much money your people had. They know how much education you got. They know where your piece fits in the puzzle, and they insist on sticking you there.
One more reason to like Los Angeles! There, you can shape your piece as it suits you. Hell, you can make a whole new puzzle for yourself if it suits you. That doesn’t work on this side of the pond. Here, you’re stuck with your history as much as you’re stuck with your accent.
Not that history is bunk. Alistair is no Henry Ford. He’s written songs about both world wars, about a French prophet and an Ottoman sultan and a Carthaginian explorer. He loves history. If you don’t understand what we were, how can you understand what we are? But he doesn’t care to be trapped in history like an ant in amber.
He drives inland from Southwold, where he’s staying. He doesn’t care for driving on the left anymore either or for shifting with his left hand. He doesn’t care for shifting at all, come to that. His American cars have all had automatic transmission. The hired auto feels like going back to a typewriter after years on a Mac. He can do it, but it’s awkward as the Devil.
To get from Southwold to Dunwich, you have to drive around three sides of a rectangle. It’s less than five miles as the crow flies, but you can’t go as the crow flies. Well, you can, but you’ll need an ATV and you’ll break several laws. There is no seaside road—only a narrow beach, seaside cliffs, and a nature preserve in back of them. In back of them! Alistair laughs. There’s an Americanism that never would have crossed his mind when he was growing up over here.
He turns left off the 12 for the 1125, which is half as wide. He turns left off the 1125 for a road too obscure to earn a number. The numberless road isn’t much more than a long piss from one side to the other. Alistair doesn’t think two cars will have an easy time getting past each other. He also doesn’t think anybody’s likely to be coming the other way while he’s on the road. By the potholes and cracks in the faded asphalt, hardly anyone uses it or cares about it.
It’s a warm summer’s day. It will be in the seventies—in the twenties, they’d say here, but he’s more used to Fahrenheit now—in Southwold. But, half a mile outside of Dunwich, the sunlight…changes. Not a cloud in the sky, but it does. It becomes at the same time duller and more metallic-seeming.
Alistair nods to himself. The odd effect may be his imagination, but he doesn’t think so. He was looking for it—hoping for it, in fact. He’s seen it once before, in north-central Massachusetts, when he took the wrong fork (the right fork, actually) on the Aylesbury Pike just past Dean’s Corners.
Many places in the States are named after older places in England. Boston, Plymouth, Portland (Portland, Maine, that is, for which, in turn, Portland, Oregon, is named)… Dunwich. The Puritans who named the haunted New England hamlet for the eldritch town on, and in, the North Sea—surely wrought better than they dreamt even in their wildest, most fearful nightmares.
More than eighty years ago now, horror came to Dunwich, Massachusetts. No one was left alive who’d beaten back the demoniac assault of eight-foot-tall Wilbur Whateley and his yet more monstrous half brother, if that was what the thing truly was. But sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters of those who had beaten it back still survived in and around the New World Dunwich. The tales they told surely had not shrunk with the passage of time. Even though not told by eyewitnesses, they could still freeze the blood. They’d frozen Alistair’s.
Yet the original Dunwich knew older and worse horror. It got off to a fine start. As Dommocceaster and then as Dunwyk, it housed East Anglian kings. In the seventh century, St. Felix came thither from Burgundy to bring Christianity back to this part of England. In the Domesday Book, Robert Malet and the monastery of St. Æthelthryth are mentioned as holding land there. At one time, the town boasted nine churches.
Folklore says three holy silver crowns are buried along the coast of East Anglia to ward England against foreign invasion. One was at Dunwich. It might be the crown St. Felix set on the head of Sigebert, son of Raedwald. Or, of course, it might not. But in Southwold, even now they remind you that neither Napoleon nor the Nazis ever did come ashore.
These days, not one of those nine churches survives. The sea has taken them all—the sea and, old books whisper, things that came out of the sea under cover of storm and night. The cliffs in these parts have been crumbling for centuries. If you believe the old books, sometimes the crumbling has help.
Alistair doesn’t know whether he believes the whispery old books or not. They also talk about the church bells tolling under the waves of the North Sea. By twenty-first-century logic, that’s plainly impossible. He’s put it in a song anyway. It may be impossible, but it makes a striking image. When you’re writing a song, that counts for more.
Debussy wrote a piece about a cathedral engulfed by the sea. If the theme’s good enough for a classical musician, it ought to be good enough for an aging rock ‘n’ roller. But when Alistair thinks of Dunwich and its vanished churches, he also thinks of “La Valse.” While Ravel was working on that one, some of the shuddery creatures from those old books must have crept out and whispered in his ear and ruffled the hair at the back of his neck with cold, bony fingers.
“La Valse” would make a terrific short film, or Alistair has always thought so. Plump, dignified musicians in white ties and tailcoats playing somewhere outdoors, like the Hollywood Bowl, at night. The full moon going in and out of clouds. Every time darkness falls, a few more musicians disappear, to be replaced by…other things. By the end, a whole demon orchestra—still in white ties and tails, naturally—saws away at its monstrous music.
Alistair sighs. He knows it’s one more thing he’ll never get around to. A man’s life has room for only so much. The rest is moonshine and might-have-beens.
A neat sign, enamel on aluminum (aluminium, actually, in this part of the English-speaking world), warns of the town ahead: dunwich. In the States, plinkers would colander a sign like this in the middle of nowhere. Not here. Here, guns aren’t as easy to buy as takeout (or even takeaway) Chinese.
Up a little rise. Down the other side. Yes, that’s Dunwich ahead, what there is of it, shadowed under the somehow brassy sun. No great city, this. A few houses, set well back from the cliffs. A church among them, a sort of replacement for its nine drowned predecessors. All Saints, the last of those, started falling in 1904 and was completely lost by 1919. A few headstones still stand in what was the All Saints churchyard. One of these days, storm—or something worse than storm—will sweep them into the sea too.
MUSEUM, says a sign in front of one of the Victorian cottages. By what will do for a miracle in these sorry days, it’s even open. The little old man at the front door seems astonished to see a visitor so early, but he’s not too astonished to take Alistair’s three quid. He walks through the place with him, a little slower than Alistair might.
Alistair realizes he lives here.
A Roman coin from the reign of Carausius. A silver crucifix clumsy enough to be from the time of St. Felix, as the yellowing typed label claims. Something odd about the arms. Alistair points to the dusty glass case. “What are those marks?” he asks.
“Well, no one quite knows,” the old man replies, “but they may be octopus tentacles: to show how the saint came from the sea, the thinking goes. You’ll see the motif on other exhibits.”
And Alistair does. A small limestone gargoyle from the long-sunk cathedral has a round head, big staring eyes, a parrotlike beak, and more tentacles. Two brass weights from a miller’s shop—their labels say one represents a quarter-pound, the other half a pound—are also octopus-shaped.
“Where were these found?” Alistair asks.
“On the strand by the sea,” the old man answers. “Such scavenging’s not allowed anymore, but no one complains if we show what was uncovered aforetimes.” He knows his onions, the old man, and seems glad to have someone so interested going through his little museum.
Alistair is likewise glad the place has such a knowledgeable curator. When he finishes the walk-through—it doesn’t take long—he says, “Thank you for your kindness, Mister, ah …?”
“Bishop, sir. Silas Bishop, at your service.” The old man knuckles his forehead, a gesture Alistair has thought long obsolete, even on this side of the Atlantic.
Nor has he looked to find that name here—not when it is also well known in the other Dunwich. Now rather more than idly curious, he asks, “Are there Whateleys here too?”
Silas Bishop stares at him in surprise. “How would you know that, sir? Benedict Whateley was bishop of Dunwich, yes he was, when the great storms in the fourteenth century washed so much of the town into the ocean. And Sebastian Whateley—not a direct descendant of Benedict’s, you understand, but in the family even so—runs the Cliff House now. If you’re looking for a bite to eat here, you can’t do better than the Cliff House.”
Alistair has been to the Cliff House in San Francisco, eating lunch looking out over a different sea. Here, he has some excellent prawns, along with Brussels sprouts and salad greens from local gardens and a chablis better than he would have expected to find in a village literally on the edge of nowhere—all quite reasonable too.
His host is most kind and attentive. Sebastian Whateley has very pink skin, blond hair almost white, eyes of the palest blue, and a receding chin. He bears a family resemblance to the Whateleys of Dunwich, Massachusetts. In other words: one more thing Alistair has not looked for.
“Yes, you can go down to the beach if you like,” Sebastian tells him when he inquires. “There’s a stairway behind my establishment. Iron, not wood. Safe as can be, unless the whole cliffside decides to come down. Nothing anyone can do about that.” The propitiatory gesture he makes is not the sign of the cross. Alistair has seen it before, though not often. It calls upon powers other than He who was crucified outside the walls of Jerusalem.
Down the stairway he goes. He wears running shoes; the soles do not ring on the wrought iron like swallowed churchbells. Whatever sounds he hears beyond the wind’s whistle and the skrawk of seabirds, he hears only inside his mind.
On the narrow beach of mud and stones and sand are a few wooden fishermen’s huts. Hand-painted signs shout fresh fish! A couple of small boats bob in the waves. A couple of others are pulled up on the strand.
A fisherman in a black Greek-style cap and a thick wool sweater nods as Alistair walks up to his shack. He touches the cap’s brim in an almost-salute. “Good day to you, friend,” he says. “How can I help you?”
Alistair wishes for a cap of his own. The wind off the North Sea plays with his hair, and he’s getting thin on top. Well, no help for it now. “Can you take me out over the drowned churches?” he asks.
“For forty pounds I can,” the man answers at once. “I wish it were less, honest to God I do, but fuel keeps going up and up.”
For a little while, half a lifetime ago, Alistair was rich. Sometimes these things slip through your hands—but not too badly, not if you’re careful. He knew plenty of people who were richer…and are poorer, now that fame has passed them by. He takes two twenty-pound notes from his wallet and hands them to the fisherman. They seem big to Alistair; he’s used to smaller American bills.
“Obliged,” the man says and makes the notes disappear. Chances are, Inland Revenue will never hear about them. He sticks out his hand. “I’m Ralph Hoadley, by the way.”
Alistair shakes it and gives his own name. There was a Hoadley in the other Dunwich too; perhaps he should give up being surprised at such correspondences.
This Hoadley shows no sign of recognizing his name in turn. Yes, fame has passed him by. The fisherman points toward the boat. “Come along, if that’s what you fancy.”
The engine chugs and belches acrid exhaust. The North Sea, greenish-gray, looks cold. Well, the Pacific looks green-gray and cold off the Southern California coast too. It looks that way because it damn well is. In Florida, the ocean is warm as a bath. Los Angeles weather is as warm as Florida’s, or near enough. But the first time Alistair charged into the waves breaking on the beach at Santa Monica, he charged right back out again a split second later. He was all over gooseflesh too.
Only a light chop here: nothing to make his stomach unhappy. He leans over the side of the boat all the same. He wants to see as much as he can. The water may be cold, but it is clearer than he expected. He can see down to the bottom, which is part sand, part mud. The fishing boat passes over a piece of carved stone and then another. An octopus, its body bigger than his fist, scuttles for cover under the second one when the boat’s shadow touches it.
“I have heard,” Alistair says slowly, “that when the great storms came all those years ago and swept away so much of Dunwich, it wasn’t wind and wave alone clawing at the land.”
“People hear all kinds of things.” Hoadley’s voice shows next to nothing. He puffs on a Marlboro. A moment later, after blowing out a stream of smoke, he adds, “What else could it have been?”
“I’ve heard it might have been…tentacles.” Not without trepidation, Alistair decides he needs to show some of his cards. “Is the name of Great Cthulhu known in these parts?”
The fisherman studies him while he smokes the cigarette down to a tiny nub and then tosses it into the sea. Under the brim of his cap, his wary eyes are the same color as the water. “It’s known, yes,” he says at last, “but seldom spoken.”
“Good,” Alistair says. On the other side of the Atlantic, they take that name too lightly. You can buy T-shirts with prancing octopoids in fishnet tights and the legend the dunwich horror picture show.
Like so many American things, that’s too clever and not clever enough at the same time. Cthulhu had nothing to do with the horror spawned in Dunwich, Massachusetts. No, that horror came from Yog-Sothoth, another of the Old Ones who walk between the spaces known to mortal man. But Cthulhu was his cousin, at least if Olaus Wormius’ Latin translation of the Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred was reliable. Alistair had to persuade several somber librarians at Miskatonic University that they should turn the iron key to the locked volume to let him examine the relevant passage with his own eyes.
Research at Miskatonic University—and, here in England, in the British Museum reading room, where they also had to unlock a couple of seldom-consulted antique tomes—has convinced Alistair that Cthulhu was most responsible for the downfall of this Dunwich. Whether Cthulhu worked in concert with Yog-Sothoth or for some strange purpose of his own, the singer cannot say even now. Nor is he sure whether, should a mere man find the answer to such a question, it would mean anything to him.
After a minute’s thoughtful silence, Ralph Hoadley says, “There were divers here a few years ago, poking through the churches on the seabottom. I didn’t take ‘em out; Joe Biggles did.” He points toward a shack on the beach that isn’t his and presumably is Joe Biggles’. “He says they k
new that name, knew it and laughed at it.”
“Ah?” Alistair says, and then, seeing something more is called for, adds, “That would have been the crew from the National Trust, wouldn’t it?”
“It would indeed.” Hoadley tosses the second Marlboro, or what’s left of it, into the water and waits.
“I heard one of them…didn’t come up again,” Alistair says.
“You heard right, I’m sorry to tell you.” Hoadley nods. “Did you hear why she didn’t come up?”
“I didn’t know it was a woman,” Alistair says, which is true and which lets him evade a straight answer.
Another nod. “She was. Pretty gal—a redhead, and I quite fancy ‘em. But not so pretty after an octopus bigger’n the one we saw a little while ago yanked off her faceplate.”
“I daresay not.” Alistair has heard this detail. It gives him pause—but not enough pause, or he wouldn’t be out here on the sea, would he? “I hope I know better than to laugh at such things.”
“I hope you do too,” Ralph Hoadley says matter-of-factly. “If you don’t, you have no need to come out here looking for trouble. Trouble will come looking for you—and it’ll find you, no matter how far from the ocean you go.”
Alistair’s house in Los Angeles isn’t far from the ocean at all. But he is sure the Dunwich man has the right of it. That kind of trouble would find him if he lived in the deserts of Turkmenistan, at the heart of the greatest land mass the planet boasts.
Hoadley swings the boat a little, then stops the engine and, grunting, drops the anchor over the side to hold them in place. “We’re straight above the old cathedral now,” he says, “or near enough as makes no difference. Look all you please.”
At first, Alistair sees little of what he wants to see. A school of small, silvery fish obscures the view, as clouds might if he were looking up rather than down. Herrings? Sprats? He knows next to nothing of small, silvery fish and their varieties. Then, all at once, they vanish. So long, so long, so long. A deadly, dark-gray shape, as long as he is tall, suddenly has this stretch of the North Sea to itself.