The Cthulhu Mythos Megapack (40 Modern and Classic Lovecraftian Tales)

by Anthology

  Stroking the massive chest, I realized that I felt no stitches. I looked closely. I saw no obvious wounds at all. I felt no heartbeat or respiration either, but it was possible, just barely, that he had shut down all his systems hard when faced with the horror of a landlocked metamorphosis. As Grandma was so fond of quoting, “That is not dead which can eternal lie.…”

  I dashed back to the next room, where I had seen a sink. I looked about for a bucket of some kind, but—better! I smashed the glass case holding a firehose, oblivious to the shrieking alarm this set off, and wrenched the wheel over until the hose came to life like a wrathful dragon, spewing a destructive jet that smashed cases of fiendish instruments and foul drugs open and hurled their contents clattering and crashing through the torture-chambers.

  I manhandled it back to the morgue and directed the stream on the ceiling above the Deep One, bouncing down a flood of life-giving water on the poor victim.

  I didn’t notice when the alarm was silenced. I couldn’t understand why the hose suddenly went limp and dry. Then I became aware of the man quacking furiously at the door to the next room.

  “Put that down, you goddamn loony! Drop it, asshole, or you are dead meat!”

  I had found what I wanted, a human being to absorb the full force of my rage, and I threw the hose aside and stalked toward him.

  “Don’t you realize what you’re doing here?” I screamed. “Don’t you know—”

  “I know what I’m doing is catching a goddamn loony who’s fucking up the hospital. Stop! Stop right now! This here is a .357 Magnum, shit-head, and it’s about to tear out your spine and pin it to the far wall. I am not joking with you.”

  I stopped. What could I have been thinking of? All hope of escape was lost. Dr. Saltonstall would lock me up tight. More probably he would take no more chances with me, and I would be filling one of these morgue-drawers before lunchtime tomorrow.

  “That’s better. Assume the position.”

  I knew what he meant. I turned to the wall, leaning forward to support my weight with my hands on a closed drawer. He strutted up behind me and took great delight in kicking my ankles wider apart.

  “Scabby son of an Innsmouth bitch,” he snarled, “I’m really hurting to blow your baldy-ass head all over the wall just for laughs, so don’t try nothing, you hear? I just want an excuse to blow one of you scum-suckers away. What the hell you got here?”

  He had found the rocks I had been saving, which he hurled on the floor. He thrust his hand into my other pocket and extracted Ondine’s panties. After a moment of baffled silence, he made a gagging noise of utter loathing.

  “You goddamn pervert!” he screamed.

  The wall hit me in the face, cracking teeth. I only then became aware of a worse pain where he had hit the back of my head with his gun. I wondered how I had wound up on my knees. They hurt, too.

  “Bastard bastard bastard!” he screamed, kicking me in the back as if trying to squash a bug to paste. “You got me to touch your goddamn frogspawn jackoff rag—”

  He stopped kicking me. I tried to stop my sobbing and groaning so I could hear what he was saying, though his words were strangely muffled. It sounded as if he were choking. Was it too much to hope that he was dying of apoplexy?

  I managed to twist my head around. I couldn’t imagine what was happening to him. Most of his face was covered by a wet, black cloth, and he was apparently standing a foot off the floor, his heavy-duty oxfords and white tube-socks jerking spasmodically.

  But it was no cloth that covered his face. It was the huge, webbed hand of the dark figure that loomed behind him, the Deep One I had revived.

  “Praise Mother Hydra!” I sobbed.

  “Praise her name!” a rich, deep, croaking voice responded.

  * * * *

  “’Sokay, sweetie,” I slurred, dumping Ondine Gilman into a lobby chair of the hotel that, most inaccurately, bore her name. “Jus’ get us a room, okay?”

  “Wha…? Where?”

  I leaned forward and, under the pretext of giving her a kiss, pressed her carotid arteries until she lost consciousness again. After changing my modus operandi in the Northwest, I had learned that this was every bit as effective as an ice-cream locker for draining the will of baptismal candidates.

  “Excuse me, Sir! Just what—oh. It’s Mr. Smith, isn’t it?”

  “Bob. It’s good ol’ Bob,” I said, steering a wayward course for the desk and the clerk I had seen before, the one who had used a bandanna to pick up my bag. He was still wearing his Munch necktie. The image was a deliberate slur against my people.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Celebrash. Celebration. We’re outta that damn crazy-house.”

  “I can see that. What’s going on outside, I meant.”

  I pretended to hear the sirens for the first time. And there were indeed screams, too.

  “They’re celebratin’, I guess.” I heard a burst of automatic gunfire.

  “God!” he cried, starting from behind the desk.

  “Hey, wait. Need a room for me and my sweetie.”

  “I can’t rent you a room, you’re drunk. And I’m closing.”

  “Then gimme my bag,” I said. “Left my bag, remember?”

  “Oh. Sure. Then will you go?”

  “Drunk, huh?”

  “Where am I?” Ondine cried.

  “‘Sokay, honey.”

  He dumped my bag on the counter, forgetting to protect his precious hand from my contagion in his confused haste. He fretted and fussed as I opened it, and he grew even more flustered at another burst of automatic fire in the distance.

  “I’m not really drunk,” I said clearly as I pulled the nine-millimeter Browning out of the bag and jacked a Black Talon round into the chamber.

  “What?”

  “I’m just very different from you, that’s all.”

  I put the bullet right through the Screamer’s bald, distorted head and through the clerk’s breastbone.

  “I’m coming, dear,” I told Ondine, and hurried over to deprive her simian brain of yet more oxygen.

  I was afraid she might not be able to understand what I was doing after I had stripped her and tied her to the bed in the room I had assigned us, but she came around as good as new. Nobody would have paid attention to her screams and curses over the similar noises in Town Square.

  I took all the time I wanted to amuse myself, but it surprised me when dawn broke while I was still thrusting into her. I turned and saw that it was a dawn of floodlights, powerful floodlights from the section of town sealed off by razor-wire. The gunfire had become constant, but it seemed as if fewer guns were in use.

  “You fucking bastard!” Ondine sobbed.

  “You got part of that right,” I grunted, “but I’m the one who’s legitimate, remember?”

  “Freak!”

  I’d had enough of her and her filthy mouth. I pulled out and rummaged among my clothing for the stones. Her screams found surprising new energy as I inserted them in the secret places, but I managed to ignore her as I recited the words. I’m not sure if the words and the procedure are exactly right, since Grandma explained them fully only at the very last, when she had passed over and was in a fearful hurry to rejoin her people, but I have always used them.

  I suspect that any human being who reads this account may think that my baptism of forty-eight women between 1982, the year Grandma passed over, and 1984 was somehow excessive. On the contrary, it was based on an exact calculation of the yearly baptisms Grandma was prevented from performing while she was interned in Oklahoma (four), and while she was confined in the nursing-home (forty-four). Despite all the hard work and laborious planning involved, to say nothing of the danger, I wanted to complete Grandma’s hecatomb and ensure that she was granted full honor among the Deep Ones as quickly as possible. Don’t you think she had suffered long enough and waited long enough already? If you still believe someone should be censured for upsetting the public with such a concentrated flurry o
f “criminal” activity, you might look to President Herbert Hoover, whose agents disrupted her life and prevented the free exercise of her religion, or to Sidney Newman, my grandfather, who did the same.

  It was my turn to scream as the door opened. I recoiled from the figure in black that stood there, but then I saw that it was Old Lady Waite.

  “I don’t know what you did, Bob,” she said admiringly, “but you sure stirred up the Host of the Sea. However,” she added as she set a crocheted bag on the bedside table and withdrew a large black book and a butcher-knife, “that’s not really the way to go about this business.” To Ondine she said, “Hush, now, child, this won’t take much longer at all. To baptize your soul we have to separate it from your body. Take heart from the fact that your suffering won’t be wasted. Even now your pain and shame are floating out like incense to feed those whose glory you can’t even begin to comprehend.”

  While I watched and listened, she showed me exactly how it should be done.

  The flapping roar of helicopters deafened us as we ran through the marsh. They raced toward us, flying barely higher than the reeds. I thought this was the end, but they passed right over us to the town, where they blasted the beach with rockets and cannon-fire.

  “They’re killing them!” I cried.

  “I doubt it,” Old Lady Waite said. “The Deep Ones are not stupid, you know. They wanted to destroy the Facility and give the boys in the back room something to chew on, and they’ve done it. They’re long gone by now, taking their dead with them. You’ll read in the papers tomorrow how some foreign fishermen got out of line when they thought they saw a sea monster, or maybe a mermaid, and how the dumb state troopers called in an air strike. There’s no fun on earth like reading the papers, if you know what to look for.”

  Whatever the papers might say, our position was untenable. Dr. Saltonstall knew what I’d done in the Northwest, he hadn’t just been on a fishing expedition, and he couldn’t be the only one who knew. I had made no attempt to hide the remains of Ondine and the hotel clerk. As for Old Lady Waite, she was sure that they would come hunting for any lingering Dagonites in Innsmouth, whatever the papers might say, with her at the head of their list.

  She had kept a small sloop ready for just such an emergency, and now it ghosted through the black creek under a small jib while she steered it expertly.

  “Where are we going?”

  “You mentioned Fiji. It’s nice there. There’s an island where the Deep Ones mix freely with the people, just like they used to do in Innsmouth. Just like they’ll do again here when this blows over and Ramon does what I told him.”

  “We’re going to…to the South Pacific in this?”

  “Not we. I’ll be passing over before very long at all.” She laughed at the horror on my face. “What’s the matter, can’t you swim?”

  “Yes, of course, but—”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll make sure you know how to sail it before I pass over. Then I’ll stick by you, or maybe our friends will.”

  Old Lady Waite—but that was merely the name of her larval shell, soon to be discarded as she assumed the glorious form that I came to know and love, in every sense of those words, as Pth’th-l’yl-l’yth.

  It was the magnificent soul of that companion and lover-to-be who had guided me, and who now gestured at the black water. I saw nothing at first, then a glow in the depths, a trail of phosphorescence to one side of the boat. A second followed on the other side. Large, submarine creatures escorted us.

  THE NAMELESS OFFSPRING, by Clark Ashton Smith

  Many and multiform are the dim horrors of Earth, infesting her ways from the prime. They sleep beneath the unturned stone; they rise with the tree from its roots; they move beneath the sea and in subterranean places; they dwell in the inmost adyta; they emerge betimes from the shutten sepulcher of haughty bronze and the low grave that is sealed with clay. There be some that are long known to man, and others as yet unknown that abide the terrible latter days of their revealing. Those which are the most dreadful and the loathliest of all are haply still to be declared. But among those that have revealed themselves aforetime and have made manifest their veritable presence, there is one which may not openly be named for its exceeding foulness. It is that spawn which the hidden dweller in the vaults has begotten upon mortality.

  —From the Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred

  In a sense, it is fortunate that the story I must now relate should be so largely a thing of undetermined shadows, of halfshaped hints and forbidden inferences. Otherwise, it could never be written by human hand or read by human eye. My own slight part in the hideous drama was limited to its last act; and to me its earlier scenes were merely a remote and ghastly legend. Yet, even so, the broken reflex of its unnatural horrors has crowded out in perspective the main events of normal life; has made them seem no more than frail gossamers, woven on the dark, windy verge of some unsealed abyss, some deep, half-open charnel, wherein Earth’s nethermost corruptions lurk and fester. The legend of which I speak was familiar to me from childhood, as a theme of family whispers and head shakings, for Sir John Tremoth had been a schoolmate of my father. But I had never met Sir John, had never visited Tremoth Hall, till the time of those happenings which formed the final tragedy. My father had taken me from England to Canada when I was a small infant; he had prospered in Manitoba as an apiarist; and after his death the bee ranch had kept me too busy for years to execute a long-cherished dream of visiting my natal land and exploring its rural by-ways.

  When, finally, I set sail, the story was pretty dim in my memory; and Tremoth Hall was no conscious part of my itinerary when I began a motorcycle tour of the English counties. In any case, I should never have been drawn to the neighborhood out of morbid curiosity, such as the frightful tale might possibly have evoked in others. My visit, as it happened, was purely accidental. I had forgotten the exact location of the place, and did not even dream that I was in its vicinity. If I had known, it seems to me that I should have turned aside, in spite of the circumstances that impelled me to seek shelter, rather than intrude upon the almost demoniacal misery of its owner.

  When I came to Tremoth Hall, I had ridden all day, in early autumn, through a rolling countryside with leisurely, winding thoroughfares and lanes. The day had been fair, with skies of pale azure above noble parks that were tinged with the first amber and crimson of the following year. But toward the middle of the afternoon, a mist had come in from the hidden ocean across low hills and had closed me about with its moving phantom circle. Somehow, in that deceptive fog, I managed to lose my way, to miss the mile-post that would have given me my direction to the town where I had planned to spend the ensuing night.

  I went on for a while, at random, thinking that I should soon reach another crossroad. The way that I followed was little more than a rough lane and was singularly deserted. The fog had darkened and drawn closer, obliterating all horizons; but from what I could see of it, the country was one of heath and boulders, with no sign of cultivation. I topped a level ridge and went down a long, monotonous slope as the mist continued to thicken with twilight. I thought that I was riding toward the west; but before me, in the wan dusk, there was no faintest gleaming or flare of color to betoken the drowned sunset. A dank odor that was touched with salt, like the smell of sea marshes, came to meet me.

  The road turned at a sharp angle, and I seemed to be riding between downs and marshland. The night gathered with an almost unnatural quickness, as if in haste to overtake me; and I began to feel a sort of dim concern and alarm, as if I had gone astray in regions that were more dubious than an English county. The fog and twilight seemed to withhold a silent landscape of chill, deathly, disquieting mystery.

  Then, to the left of my road and a little before me, I saw a light that somehow suggested a mournful and tear-dimmed eye. It shone among blurred, uncertain masses that were like trees from a ghostland wood. A nearer mass, as I approached it, was resolved into a small lodge-building, such as would guard the
entrance of some estate. It was dark and apparently unoccupied. Pausing and peering, I saw the outlines of a wrought-iron gate in a hedge of untrimmed yew.

  It all had a desolate and forbidding air; and I felt in my very marrow the brooding chillness that had come in from the unseen marsh in that dismal, ever-coiling fog. But the light was promise of human nearness on the lonely downs; and I might obtain shelter for the night, or at least find someone who could direct me to a town or inn.

  Somewhat to my surprise, the gate was unlocked. It swung inward with a rusty grating sound, as if it had not been opened for a long time; and pushing my motorcycle before me, I followed a weed-grown drive toward the light. The rambling mass of a large manor-house disclosed itself, among trees and shrubs whose artificial forms, like the hedge of ragged yew, were assuming a wilder grotesquery than they had received from the hand of the topiary.

  The fog had turned into a bleak drizzle. Almost groping in the gloom, I found a dark door, at some distance from the window that gave forth the solitary light. In response to my thrice-repeated knock, I heard at length the muffled sound of slow, dragging footfalls. The door was opened with a gradualness that seemed to indicate caution or reluctance, and I saw before me an old man, bearing a lighted taper in his hand. His fingers trembled with palsy or decrepitude, and monstrous shadows flickered behind him in a dim hallway, and touched his wrinkled features as with the flitting of ominous, batlike wings.

  “What do you wish, sir?” he asked. The voice, though quavering and hesitant, was far from churlish and did not suggest the attitude of suspicion and downright inhospitality which I had begun to apprehend. However, I sensed a sort of irresolution or dubiety; and as the old man listened to my account of the circumstances that had led me to knock at that lonely door, I saw that he was scrutinizing me with a keenness that belied my first impression of extreme senility.

  “I knew you were a stranger in these parts,” he commented, when I had finished. “But might I inquire your name, sir?”