by Неизвестный
“Damn sharks,” Hoadley mutters, at least half to himself. “I’d eat better if they ate worse.”
North Sea ecology strikes Alistair as an argument for another day. Now that the shark has cleared away the little fish, he can see down to the bottom. A reddish starfish slowly crawls across the mud. Anemones grow on a piece of worked stone.
He doesn’t know what he expects to see down there. No, actually he does know. The picture he carries in his mind is of a Gothic cathedral, perfect and undamaged except for upwards of six hundred years spent underwater. It isn’t like that—nor, he realizes, should it be. There are bits here, pieces there, many of them obscured by mud and silt and sea life. He can tell these are ruins of man-made things. If he hadn’t known ahead of time that this was a church, he does not think that what he sees would be enough to tell him.
With the engine off, it’s eerily quiet out here. Wavelets softly slap the sides of the boat. The breeze mutters under its breath. Other than that, nothing. Alistair hears his own heart beating. If he listens hard enough, he wonders if he’ll hear Hoadley’s as well.
Then the silence breaks. Not from above; no airliner heading into Heathrow from Oslo or Stockholm. Not from the boat itself; Hoadley’s mobile phone doesn’t go off, nor does Alistair’s hired one. No, this sound comes from the depths: a great bronze bell, tolling once and again and yet again. Alistair glances down. The watch on his left wrist tell him it’s 2:59 p.m. He would bet his soul on the watch’s being a minute slow.
Beneath his tan, Ralph Hoadley goes chalky white. “By the God in heaven, I have heard of that happening,” he says hoarsely. “Who hasn’t? But never before this. Never in all my days have I heard the churchbells ring out myself.”
Alistair doubts that the God in heaven has anything to do with the churchbells’ chimes. Those other powers he thought of before, yes, but not that one. Which of them is apt to be eldest? Alistair has no idea. It is not a question for a singer, even for one with a taste for history. If any man could find an answer, it might have been Georg Cantor, with his mathematics of lesser and greater infinities. If.
Then Alistair stops caring about dead professors of mathematics. He cares about what is happening in the boat instead. Ralph Hoadley yawns, shrugs, curls himself up on some netting, and falls asleep in the sun like a cat. Alistair bends down to shake him by the shoulder. The fisherman makes a wordless noise. He stirs. He does not wake.
He will not wake, even when Alistair bawls in his ear. That’s when Alistair realizes his is, can be, no natural sleep. It is as unnatural as…as bells sounding from beneath the sea.
Something in the simile makes Alistair stop trying to wake Hoadley and look into the water once more. The anchor keeps the boat from going far but doesn’t stop it from moving at all. Now he finds himself above a bigger, more nearly intact chunk of church than he has seen before. Out through a shadowed doorway, sinuous as a nest of serpents, slithers not just the largest octopus Alistair has ever seen, but the largest one he has ever imagined.
As he stares down at it, so it stares up at him. He once read somewhere that an octopus’ eyes and a man’s are very much alike. Convergent evolution, the book called it. But could convergent evolution account for the glint of sardonic wisdom he sees—or thinks he sees—in the octopus’ golden stare?
And he sees—or thinks he sees—something else as well. Why would any octopus, however sardonically wise, wear a crown of silver atop its bulbous head? Alistair only thinks he sees that, for the undersea creature pulls back into the black doorway before he can be sure.
No sooner has it vanished than Ralph Hoadley stretches and climbs to his feet. He does not seem to have the slightest idea that he’s been asleep. “Well,” he says briskly, “seen what you came to see?”
“Yes,” Alistair answers in a small voice. “I believe I have.”
“All right, then. I’ll take you back.” With animal smoothness and animal strength, the fisherman hauls in the anchor. The boat shakes when it thuds down onto the planking. Hoadley starts to motor. They head west, toward the narrow strand and the cliffs behind it. Alistair is very quiet all the way in.
Alistair stays very quiet about what he saw out in the North Sea.
From that day to this, he has never said a word about it. If the truth be known, he cannot say anything about it, even to the handful of folk at Miskatonic and other like-minded places that might take him seriously. He has, with great effort, slipped a hint or two into a song or two, but somehow no one has ever taken him up on them.
Yes. Somehow.
Then who knows enough to tell this story? Who knows enough and is able to tell this story? Well may you wonder. I will say that, when seem from the water, things of the air seem even stranger than they truly are, which is saying a great deal indeed. Past that, I say no more.
The Contributors
DARRELL SCHWEITZER is a former editor of Weird Tales magazine, and, as an anthologist, editor of The Secret History of Vampires (2007), Full Moon City (with Martin H. Greenberg, 2010), and Cthulhu’s Reign (2010). He has also edited such scholarly compilations as Discovering H. P. Lovecraft and The Thomas Ligotti Reader. His fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies, including S. T. Joshi’s Black Wings series and Searchers After Horror, Robert M. Price’s The World of Cthulhu, and numerous Postscripts volumes, in addition to magazines including Twilight Zone, Cemetery Dance, Whispers, Amazing Stories, Interzone, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. He is the author of three novels: The White Isle, The Shattered Goddess, and The Mask of the Sorcerer. He has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award four times and won it once (as co-editor of Weird Tales). His 2008 novella, Living with the Dead (PS Publishing) was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award.
ESTHER FRIESNER is a longtime Lovecraft fan, even though she is still unable to pronounce squamous correctly. When not perpetrating pastiches, she is now best known for her Princesses of Myth series, including the latest title, Spirits’ Chosen. She has two Nebula Awards under her belt and on her fireplace mantel, which is a neat riff on bilocation, you must admit. She lives in suburban Connecticut, in the thrall of family (including grandbaby) and the essential author’s cat.
JOHN R. FULTZ lives in the North Bay area of California but is originally from Kentucky. The first two volumes of his Books of the Shaper trilogy, Steven Princes and Seven Kings, are available every-where from Orbit Books. The concluding volume, Seven Sorcerers, was released in December 2013. His short story collection The Revelations of Zang (01 Publishing) chronicles the adventures of Artifice the Quill and Taizo of Narr. John’s work has appeared in Weird Tales, Black Gate, Space & Time, and Lightspeed, and the anthologies Way of the Wizard, Cthulhu’s Reign, Other Worlds Than These, The Book of Cthulhu II, and Deepest, Darkest Eden: New Tales of Hyperborea. He keeps a virtual sanctuary at www.johnrfultz.com
LOIS H. GRESH is the New York Times best-selling author (six times), Publishers Weekly best-selling paperback author, Publishers Weekly bestselling paperback children’s author, and USA Today best-seller of twenty-seven books and fifty-five short stories. Her books have been published in twenty-two languages. Current books are Eldritch Evolutions, Dark Fusions (October 2013) and The Mortal Instruments Companion (June 2013). Look for upcoming weird tales in Mark of the Beast, Eldritch Chrome, Mountain Walked, Black Wings III, Madness of Cthulhu, Searchers After Horror, Expiry Date, etc. Lois has received Bram Stoker Award, Nebula Award, Theodore Sturgeon Award, and International Horror Guild Award nominations for her work.
S. T. JOSHI is the author of The Weird Tale (1990), H. P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West (1990), and Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (2012). He has prepared corrected editions of H. P. Lovecraft’s work for Arkham House and annotated editions of Lovecraft’s stories for Penguin Classics. His exhaustive biography H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (1996) was expanded as I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (2010).
JAY LAKE was the author of the Mainspring and Gr
een series from Tor, as well as several independent press novels and numerous short stories. In 2013, his steampunk novella, The Stars Do Not Lie, was nominated for the Nebula, Hugo, and Locus awards. Lake lived in Portland, Oregon but died at a tragically early age in 2014.
JOHN LANGAN is the author of two collections, The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies (Hippocampus, 2013) and Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters (Prime, 2008). He also has written a novel, House of Windows (Night Shade, 2009). With Paul Tremblay, he has co-edited Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters (Prime, 2011). He is one of the founders of the Shirley Jackson Awards, and served as a juror for their first three years. He lives in upstate New York with his wife and son.
WILL MURRAY is a lifelong Lovecraftian, the author of many celebrated mythos stories, and a contributor to numerous Cthulhuvian journals. Enormously prolific, he has penned nearly sixty novels in series ranging from The Destroyer to Mars Attacks to Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD. He is a recognized expert on all things pulp. Currently, he is writing The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage for Altus Press (www.adventuresinbronze.com), the most recent entry of which, Skull Island, pits the mighty Man of Bronze against the legendary King Kong. He is also the series producer for Radioarchives.com’s Will Murray’s Pulp Classics line of audiobooks and ebooks, which includes authors as diverse as Robert J. Hogan and H. P. Lovecraft.
RICHARD A. LUPOFF first encountered the works of H. P. Lovecraft in the First Baptist Church of a small town in New Jersey. He had smuggled an anthology containing “The Dunwich Horror” into the Sunday service and hid it inside his hymnal, then shivered to the words of the Olde Gentleman of Providence while the preacher ranted on about the torments that awaited sinners in the hereafter. Lupoff’s own novels and short stories cover a spectrum of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and mystery. He is also the author of critical works in many areas of popular culture. His massive volume Marblehead: A Novel of H. P. Lovecraft won high praise from critics as varied as Tim Pratt (writing in Locus) and Jon L. Breen (writing in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine).
WILUM PUGMIRE has been writing mythos fiction since the early 1970s, influenced by Derleth’s original edition of Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos and Lin Carter’s A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos. After years of writing for small press horror journals, he began to have collections of his work published by specialty press houses. An obsessed H. P. Lovecraft fan-boy, he plans never to stop writing Lovecraftian weird fiction. His most recent books are Encounters with Enoch Coffin (Dark Regions Press) and Bohemians of Sesqua Valley (Arcane Wisdom Press).
KEITH TAYLOR was born in Tasmania in December 1946, after his father Jack came back from Hitler’s war and married Fay Gourlay. Keith grew up at the foot of Mount Wellington and began writing at the age of nine. He was already a lover of science fiction, fantasy, and historical fiction; the bug had bitten him early. After serving in the Australian army in the 1960s, Keith’s first published stories appeared in Fantastic Stories (then edited by Ted White) from 1975 onward. They featured the Irish bard, Felimid—later the main character in a series of novels. Other stories about an Egyptian sorcerer, Kamose, then appeared in Weird Tales (The Kamose stories were reprinted in Servant of the Jackal God ). Stories drawn from the legends of King Arthur and his knights appeared in British editor Mike Ashley’s anthologies, as did whodunits with backgrounds drawn from Shakespeare, ancient Egypt, and the Middle Ages, and one naval adventure set in the 1790s, “Fountains of Resolve.” Keith’s writing lapsed for some years due to ill health. He is now making serious efforts to come back with a varied output. He lives in Melbourne, Australia, with his wife Anna and son Francis.
HARRY TURTLEDOVE is best known as a master of the alternate history novel, including whole series of books based on alternate visions of the American Civil War (The Guns of the South, etc.) and World War II (Worldwar, which posits an extraterrestrial invasion in the early 1940s) and such single volumes as Agent of Byzantium and Ruled Britannia. He has written time-travel fantasy, sword & sorcery (the Videssos series and others), and such decidedly unexpected and off-trail stories as “Under St. Peter’s” (in The Secret History of Vampires, 2007) and the one included here. He won the Hugo Award for “Down in the Bottomlands” in 1994.
DON WEBB’S latest book is Overthrowing the Old Gods, a study of Aleister Crowley. He has sold to all the major SF/F/H markets from Analog to Weird Tales. He has been writing Lovecraftian fiction for thirty years; Lovecraft himself just did it for twenty-five. Some of his weirder short fiction has been released in various Wildside Press collections. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his artist wife Guiniviere and his two tuxedo cats, Sascha and Big Pig.
That Is Not Dead
Copyright © 2015 edited by Darrell Schweitzer
The right of Darrell Schweitzer to be identified as the editor of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Originally published in printed book form by PS Publishing Ltd in 2015. This electronic version published in December 2015 by PS by arrangement with the author. All rights reserved by the author.
FIRST EBOOK EDITION
ISBN 978-1-84863-352-0
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Contents
THAT IS NOT DEAD
Introduction:
THAT IS NOT DEAD
Egypt, 1200 BC:
Mesopotamia, Second Millennium BC:
Judaea, Second Century AD:
Central Asia, Second Century AD:
Palestine, Asia Minor, and Central Asia; Late Eleventh and Mid Twelfth Centuries AD:
England, 1605:
Russia, Late Seventeenth Century AD:
Mexico, 1753:
France, 1762:
Arizona Territory, 1781:
Massachusetts, USA, Early Twentieth Century. Italy, Early Nineteenth Century:
Massachusetts, USA, and Spain, Late Nineteenth Century:
Seattle, Washington, USA, 1889:
England, Twenty-First Century and the Middle Ages:
The Contributors
That Is Not Dead