“I don’t think so.” I can’t hold it back any more.
“Why won’t you—”
“Your last worker is on its way home to visit, carrying your last Renfield. But it’s not going to be allowed to get here, Shubby. We’re not going to let you distribute your spawn via the girls at Saint Ninian’s. The school’s on lock-down, and they know what to search for. Acid baths, Shubby. Anything that looks like My Little Pony is going to take a one-way trip through an acid bath and a furnace on sight. Snails, too.”
A snarling animal scream cuts through the air behind me, from beyond the closed doors. It’s cut short by a harsh chatter of automatic gunfire.
The thing above me roars in existential pain and heaves its bulk up, then brings it smashing down on the ceiling. Paint dust and splinters fall and the light bulb shakes, the shadows flickering across the room. “My children! My beautiful future flesh! My babies! Traitor! I would have loved and cherished your memories forever!” The snails and tiny horses swarm on the skeletonizing remains of the dead soldiers. Another voice cuts through the cacophony: “Dadd-ee! Help me!”
I step back towards the door. I tap my throat mike and speak quietly: “Got samples. No—” I glance at the ladder “—survivors. Over.”
“Roger,” Alan says calmly. “Target neutralized in yard behind you. Come on out. We’re falling back now. Over.”
I throw myself backwards at the woodshed doors. The ceiling creaks and screeches and then begins to buckle, giving way and drooping from the edges of the loft stairwell opening. Something huge is pushing through from above, something like the rasp of a slug the size of a bus, iridescent and putrefying and bubbling with feculent slime. It vents a warbling roar, “ShubShubShub.” The door gives way behind me as I topple, getting a vague impression of writhing tentacles, a huge nodding eyeless horse-head, something like a broken doll impaled on a wooden stick—
Someone catches me and then I’m sprawling across a back as they pick me up and run across a farmyard, dodging around the fallen bulk of another of the horses from hell. I can see stars and a high overcast of cirrus whirling overhead as my rescuer pounds across the packed earth. Wall to one side, reflecting the livid glare of a burning building. “Get down!” someone shouts in my ear as he drops me on the ground in the lee of a drystone wall.
“Got it—” I scramble for cover as the incendiary fireworks surge overhead and the woodshed lights off with a whump I can feel in my bladder.
And then I lie there until Sergeant Howe gives everyone the all clear and sends a medic to look me over for triage, clutching the sample box like grim death and telling myself that it was all over for Ada Doom Edgebaston long before I walked through the woodshed door.
Because reincarnation only works for alien group mind horrors, doesn’t it?
Keep telling yourself that, Bob. Take your sample tubes back to R&D in London, leave the burning wreckage of the farm behind. Take your cold comfort where you can, and keep telling yourself that the nasty thing old HPL saw behind the woodshed was lying or mistaken, and that you’ll never meet it again.
Who knows? You might even be right . . .
HOME OFFICE
CONFIDENTIAL
Procurement Specification: HO/MPMU/46701
Date of Issue: May 3rd, 2006
Requirement for:
Enhanced-Mobility Operational Capability Upgrade Mounts for Police Mounted Units
It is becoming increasingly clear that in the 21st century mounted police are seen as an anachronism by the public. Despite their clear advantages for crowd control and supervision of demonstrations and public sporting events, mounted operations are expensive to conduct, require extensive stabling and support infrastructure, and compete for resources with other specialist units (e.g. airborne, tactical firearms, scene of crime investigation).
This document contains the operational requirements for upgraded genetically engineered mounts that will enhance the capabilities and availability of our mounted officers . . .
Desirable characteristics:
Mounts should exhibit three or more of the following traits:
• Endurance in excess of 6 hours at 30 miles/hour over rough terrain (when ridden with standard issue saddle, rider, and kit)
• Endurance in excess of 30 minutes at 50 miles/hour on metaled road surfaces (when ridden with standard issue saddle, rider, and kit)
• Ability to see in the dark
• Ability to recognize and obey a controlled vocabulary of at least 20 distinct commands
• Invisible
• Bulletproof
• Carnivorous
• Flight (when ridden with standard issue saddle, rider, and kit)
State of Requirement:
CANCELLED September 5th, 2006
by Order of Cabinet Office in accordance with recommendation of SOE (X Division) Operational Oversight Audit Committee
Reason for cancellation order:
• Sussex mounted constabulary has no conceivable operational requirement for sentient weapons of mass destruction.
• This requirement document has no identifiable origin within the Home Office.
• It echoes historic attempts to induce adoption of Equoid-friendly facilities within the armed services via requirements raised within the MoD. All of these have been successfully resisted.
• It is speculated that someone is trying to pull a fast one on us: does Shub-Niggurath have a posse in Whitehall? This matter warrants further enquiry, and has therefore been referred to External Assets for investigation and permanent closure.
Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness.
“The Outsider” . H. P. Lovecraft (1926)
THE BOY WHO FOLLOWED LOVECRAFT
Marc Laidlaw
Douglas sits alone at the side of the house, waiting for the Aunts to call him in, alert to the slightest creak of the front door or to one of their hard-toed shoes sounding upon the porch. They cannot see him from inside the house, so he always has time to hide the magazine, shoving it into the crawlspace along with the rest of his collection. There is a trace of autumn in the Sunday evening air, and the summer-blanched leaves of the old sycamores send a rustling shade over the crumbling pages he turns so slowly and savoringly. The paper feels soft and rough as a kind of leafy bark, not dissimilar to the earth where he crouches and thumbs through his issues of Weird Tales again and again.
The date on the magazine is April 1929. This is only September, yet he has read the copy cover to cover so many times that the magazine appears as worn as one twenty years old, its bright reds faded to vermilion, the fearsome masked priest now a colorful faceless smudge. The other issues are in worse shape, what’s left of them. Hard to imagine that once they had been bright and crisp—as bright as the quarters or the stacks of pennies he’d shoved across the newsstand counter. Some, found in downtown secondhand shops, were old when he’d bought them for a fraction of their cover price. But they are no less precious for it. His only regret is that the oldest ones suffer more from his constant rereading, and he has been forced to stop carrying them around with him, away from the house and the watchful Aunts, to the parks and libraries and quiet private places where a boy might hide and read in peace, and seek the strange thrills these stories provide.
Douglas hides the magazines from the Aunts because they have already shown they do not understand. They have forbidden him to spend his allowance on such things; forbidden them in the house; forbidden him from reading such horrors. “Nightmares, trash, and madness,” they had called the tales; and that word alone had ensured his disobedience, for it was madness he sought to understand. Madness was the reason he lived here, after all; it was the reason the old women had brought him in as a foster child: “A kind of madness took them,” was all they ever said when he asked about his parents. More than that, and the nature of madness, he was left to investigate on his own; and it came to him in these tales which spoke openly of unreason, of madne
ss caused by fear. And as he read, he became enwrapped in a kind of beauty, borne by the words. Madness became a key, opening the door to new worlds where he could lose himself while feeling that he could go beyond himself . . .
Hinges squeal. “Douglas? Douglas, child, where are you?” Aunt Melissa steps onto the porch and comes quickly toward the corner. Douglas shoves the magazine into the dark opening and slips back around the side of the house until he stands in the back yard. He makes her call again, louder, and then responds. “I’m back here, ma’am!”
She cranes around the side of the porch, looking exasperated. He strides toward her, passing the crawlspace, and hurries up the front steps to stand at her side.
“Well, I promise you, I looked back there and didn’t see a thing. Come in now and have your supper. Aunt Opal and I have things to do—we can’t be waiting past dark while you dig your holes or arrange your soldiers, or whatever it is you get up to back there. School tomorrow, so early to bed tonight.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“That’s a good child. Come and eat then. Oh, and before I forget.”
She produces from one deep pocket a bright silver quarter. His heart leaps at the thought of what it will buy him. He hides not his smile but only its meaning. “Thank you, Aunt.”
“Remember now, it’s more than many have these days. Spend it wisely, as I’m sure you will. God bless you, child, you’re a good boy.”
The school day drags. Douglas sits alone, as ever, in the back of the sweltering classroom, writing slowly, scarcely seeing the columns of numbers he must add and manipulate, the dull rote words he must read. At recess he remains inside with his treasured April issue, gazing at the jumbled, nightmarish illustration that accompanies “The Dunwich Horror.” Miss Marsh leaves him to his solitude. She has long since stopped trying to convince him to go out with the other children. She frowns, he thinks, whenever he produces one of his magazines; but she has never tried to confiscate one, never questioned what he reads. In this sense, the classroom is safe—perhaps the safest place he knows. Certainly safer than the schoolyard.
Today, a shadow falls over his desk. Miss Marsh hovers over him. “Douglas?”
Feeling his cheeks flush, he looks up at her, closing the magazine, pushing it under the desk.
“That’s all right, dear. I was just wondering . . . I believe you might have just enough time to make it to the newsstand and back before lunch is over. Unless I’m very much mistaken about what day it is.”
Her smile is knowing. He starts to speak, but whatever he might blurt, as he rises from his desk, banging his knees, nearly knocking his papers to the floor, remains unsaid.
“Don’t be long now, Douglas.”
He runs.
Out the schoolhouse, out the gate, and down the busy street. A streetcar jangles past; as he waits on the curb, he digs into his pocket, fails to find the quarter, and experiences a moment’s terror—until his fingers brush the warm disk, and he pinches it, brings it out to reassure himself of its presence. He rubs it like a good luck charm. The streetcar passes and he darts across the street to the row of shops across the way, the newsstand at the corner.
For a moment the racks confuse him, and he seizes up with dread. What if it isn’t here yet? There are piles of periodicals wrapped in twine, still to be unpacked and set out. Another thrill of disappointment, as when he thought his quarter lost, grips him. Then he spies the bright lettering, in an unaccustomed spot, peering out above the top of a mystery magazine: Weird Tales, The Unique Magazine.
He pulls it from the rack, slaps his quarter on the counter, cutting off the newsdealer’s nasty snarl, and rushes away with hardly a glimpse at the cover: An enormous ape carries off a woman in a gauzy pink slip. More than that, he won’t allow himself to see until he has time to truly savor it.
He slips back into the classroom with a few minutes of recess remaining. Miss Marsh gives him a smile, and as he lays the issue reverently on the desk, she comes a few steps closer. For the first time, he refrains from hiding the magazine. Although it pains him to hold still, he looks up and sees her gazing at the cover. Her eyebrows arch; she laughs. “Oh, my,” she says. “That looks like a very exciting story. Who wrote that one, do you think? Are these the authors?” She reads down the names listed on the cover: “Sophie Wenzel Ellis. Seabury Quinn. H. P. Lovecraft . . . ”
His heart leaps at the name. Lovecraft! A new story! Douglas almost opens the issue right then, but Miss Marsh’s expression gives him pause.
“H. P.,” she says again. “I wonder if that could be the same . . . Howard Phillips . . . of Providence itself. Do you know his stories, Douglas? You do? I believe he is a local man. In fact, I think he lives not far from you on College Hill. Perhaps he’d like to know he has a bright young reader right here in Providence.”
Miss Marsh suddenly catches sight of the clock, and gives a little gasp. Rushing to the door, she leans outside and bangs the triangle. The clanging blends into the shouts of children, and the room fills up again with the greater noise of students. Miss Marsh catches and holds his gaze through the crowd, but what she has promised seems too great to acknowledge. He looks away, rolling up the magazine and shoving it under his desk. What else does she know about him, he wonders? Does she understand how madness haunts him? Would the writer, H. P. Lovecraft, understand? It all seems too secret, too personal, to discuss with anyone. But if anyone might understand, it would be a man like the one who writes such stories.
He hardly notices the passage of the afternoon, wondering if what she said could be true. At home, the Aunts have gone off on some errand, leaving him free to surround himself with his collection. He sorts through the magazines and pulls out everything by Lovecraft.
Combing through the issues, he sees how many of these stories are by one man—by this same Lovecraft of Providence. He had not recognized the pattern until Miss Marsh pointed it out. The thought that a living person could have written these stories had never occurred to him. He had not required that of them. They existed, that was enough. They carried him away to other lands, other places exotic and faraway—with names like Celephais and Sarnath, Ulthar and Ilek-Vad—all so different from the names he saw around him: College Hill and Federal Hill, worlds, he saw now, which were locked away in the stories of Lovecraft. From one mind, then, so many of Douglas’s own dreams had sprung. The knowledge is a key turning in a lock, revealing a new dimension to what he had already known. Indeed, Lovecraft had written “The Silver Key,” in which Randolph Carter found a secret path into a land of dream; he had written “The White Ship” and “The Cats of Ulthar,” and other tales of dream. But he had also written “The Rats in the Walls,” a tale of madness that had chilled and fascinated Douglas in equal measure; “The Festival,” “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Outsider,” “Pickman’s Model” . . . and these truly are tales of madness. They hold secrets dark as the ones that haunt Douglas, the nightmares that torment him when he tries to think beyond his own memories, to a time before the Aunts had taken him in, a muddled dream which tells him nothing, a dream which remains impenetrable, approachable only, perhaps, through a deeper understanding of what madness itself might mean.
He crouches by the house in the deepening gloom, reading and rereading, searching for clues. The latest issue holds a story of Lovecraft’s called “The Hound,” a tale of grave robbers who pilfer a cursed amulet and are pursued relentlessly by its winged guardian. Douglas has read the story before, in one of his older issues of Weird Tales, but it takes him some time to recognize it. Everything seems altered by the fact that it was written here in Providence. He pictures the story taking place somewhere nearby—the graveyard might be Swan Point; the baying hound pursues the robbers through familiar neighborhoods rendered strange and mysterious, filtered through the light of Lovecraft’s words. His whole world feels changed in much the same way as the story. Providence itself has acquired a twilight tinge, a mysterious beauty he had never noticed until now. It took Lovecra
ft to make him see it.
Lovecraft . . .
His Aunts would know how to find the man. They have lived here all their lives; they know everyone, from the oldest families to the newest residents of the neighborhood. They had grown up in Providence when it was a much smaller town, and they still treat it as their own village. But how is he to question their knowledge without letting them know what he’s asking? For Douglas is quite certain they would not approve.
He decides on a sacrifice. He will pose a riddle and watch them attempt to answer it, and in the attempt learn much.
Douglas sorts his tattered magazines, looking for a cover that features Lovecraft’s name in suitably large letters. There are few appearances, and most are in small characters, rubbed illegible by constant use. Cringing inwardly, he returns to the latest, September, issue. With a pair of Aunt Opal’s sewing scissors, he slices into the brand-new cover, painstakingly cutting around Lovecraft’s name, removing the block of bright text. The wounded magazine he carefully replaces in the crawlspace, then slips onto the porch and puts the slip of colorful writing under the brass knocker, just at eye level. Then he lets himself into the house and busies himself with homework until he hears a clatter at the door: the Aunts are home. Muffled exclamations. They enter the house in a state of heightened excitement, their voices high chirps of curiosity.
“That’s Lillian Clark’s nephew, isn’t it?”
“I know who it is, and I certainly don’t intend to encourage him.”
“Missy, whatever do you mean? He’s no harm, that one. The poor fellow.”
“He’s not right and never has been. The hours he keeps. I hear he is an atheist, did you know that?”
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