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

by Anthology

  Would the daylight never come? Would this night never end?

  Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy.

  Outside in the courtyard, all the horses were gone except mine.

  So the bastards had run off. How chivalrous of them, to leave a horse for their old comrade, who knew their sins and could perhaps absolve them.

  Was Gregorias ever really a priest? Who could remember? Who gave a damn? Surely we were all damned.

  I rode, in the darkness, through that black and dripping forest, the only sounds being the wet thudding of my horse’s hooves, and then, after a time, there seemed to be no sound at all, only effortless, helpless motion, as I rode, and came to a turning-place, and turned, and turned again, and circled in the darkness, and came, once, face-to-face with all my companions on the muddy path, in the middle of the night that would not end, that would never end. I knew that much now, for I was beginning to understand, remembering how Gregorias had fled, and turned away from his companions who had betrayed him, and fled again, turning every way, for hours without end, in darkness without end, until I found myself, again, inside the castle from which I had departed, as if I had never departed, and once more those two half-wits chased me down the corridor and slid their swords into me and carried me down onto the warm, filthy hearth to die.

  IV

  The priest was dead. Nevertheless, he sat at table with us as we feasted on cold meats. I remember him being there, with us, feasting, as no ghost could. Perhaps it was before he died. Perhaps even time was out of sequence, like pages in a book, misbound.

  I, having no name at all, sat beside Ulrich Bloody-Axe and considered my own course, whom I might take as an ally and allow to accompany me in my escape.

  Even as I remembered riding in that forest, away from the castle, around and around in the darkness, until all paths inevitably led back to the castle, and we, like doomed men, dismounted and filed one by one up the stairs, past the marble hands with their smoldering candles, into the feasting-hall, where Father Gregorias sat with us and dismissed all talk of ghosts, discoursing instead about the Chronophagos, which, he said, was a remote cousin to the medusae, but far older, a thing made of living stone, out of the stone flesh of which this castle and the surrounding forest had grown, like hair from the head of a man who lies alive but sleeping in the ground for countless centuries; a thing older than Satan, about whom Satan had much to say; some monstrosity that fell from the unimaginably remote depths of the sky long before the birth of Adam; that which lay dreaming and waited until the stars moved in their courses to announce the world’s last night, when it would be so gorged with dreams and with the stolen lives and memories of men that it would awaken to break the Earth apart in its hands as a man might crush an eggshell.

  That’s what Gregorias said, and he was dead.

  Later, Ulrich and I rose from troubled sleep and made our way out into the corridor, into the darkness, where we battled stone giants, ancient warriors turned to stone yet still alive, the days of their lives having been devoured by the Chronophagos. Now they were mere dreams given form by the sleeping monster, and we battled them, breaking our swords and our axes upon them, until stone hands seized us by our throats, crushing the life out of us both.

  Father Gregorias, awakening suddenly from some half-remembered nightmare, sat up on the ash-strewn hearth. He put his hand to his throat, remembering it crushed, and to his gut, where the sword went in.

  He, who was dead, remembered us.

  Christ have mercy.

  But we were not godly men, any of the company of twelve.

  V

  …and I awoke, to tear the world to pieces.

  The boy Jon, he of the almost luminous, pale hands and face was beside me. We heard shouting in the corridor outside, the sound of metal striking on stone, curses, cries of pain.

  “If we were brave men,” I said, “we would go out and assist our comrades, and die alongside them rather than hide from combat.”

  “But the world has enough heroes already,” said Jon.

  And I remembered all that he was going to say, as if we were rehearsing a litany we already knew.

  “If we were godly men,” I said, “we would pray to Christ for forgiveness for our many sins, for his power alone may lead us out of the darkness into which we, like all men, have fallen.”

  “Father Gregorias said the same thing at table.”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “Did you believe it?”

  We knelt, holding our swords before us like crosses, as men who dedicate themselves to the Crusade often do, and we prayed that all our sins might be washed away in the blood of our foes, that we might emerge triumphant for the glory of God, but as we prayed, Jon wept, and it was then that some answer came to me, enlightenment from within my own memory.

  I saw him as a child, still, and innocent. I remembered him as a child, barefoot, muddy, playing at his mother’s feet in some dank hovel like a tomb. I was that child too. He and I were the same, which meant that his sins and mine were shared, and I saw that his sins were not very great. Not yet.

  It was a strange feeling, something I, in all my tens of thousands of years of sleeping in the earth, had never before experienced.

  We rose, swords in hand, and went out the door, into the darkness.

  Someone shuffled away from us, muttering a Greek phrase over and over. Jon would have pursued. I caught him by the shoulder and said, “No, wait.”

  “Wait?”

  “Put your sword away,” I said, and, bewildered, he sheathed it. “Jon, I want you to leave this place. You alone shall escape and tell our tale. No more fighting for you.”

  “I cannot desert you, Lord,” he said.

  “Don’t call me that. I release you from whatever oaths may bind you. Go!”

  “How is it possible? You know it is not.”

  “If I create a diversion, the Chronophagos will not notice when you get away. If but a single morsel falls from his table.”

  “I would stay with you, my master. It is what a true knight would do.”

  I took him by both his shoulders, turned him around, and shoved him away from me, into the corridor down which Father Gregorias had fled. “If I’m your master, then I command you. Obey for once. It’s what a true knight would do. Go! Save yourself, boy, because I wish it. Go!”

  I think that long ago, before things went so terribly wrong, when we two dedicated ourselves to God and God’s holy Crusade and were filled with high-sounding ideals like flies buzzing inside our heads, I had thought to be as a father to him.

  That we two had once loved one another, as brothers, as comrades, even as we loved and dedicated ourselves to God was the incomprehensible mystery at the heart of all mysteries.

  We had fallen so very far into the darkness. Now he alone had a chance to get out. My parting gift to him, and to God.

  When he had gone, or when I had at least managed to lose him in the darkness, I ventured forth, sword in hand, groping my way into the very heart of the castle, drawn by my own mounting instinct of dread, turning again and again in the direction I feared most. I remember doing battle with warriors of stone. I remember many deaths, including my own, my several deaths, my thousand deaths, the deaths of more than a dozen rogue knights and hangers-on, but of actual heroes, the oldest of whom fought alongside Achilles. Even then the Chronophagos lay ancient and dreaming in the earth, having fallen from the stars.

  I remember how it ended, how I emerged, like one awakening from a dream, into a vast chamber in the heart of the castle, deep down, I think, in the core of the Earth, which is like a sphere within a sphere within a sphere. I passed through realms of stone and ice and fire, and suffered many torments and many deaths, yet, sword in hand, I came to a great hall, which was also a cavern, made of black ice, yet lurid with heatless fires. There, seated at table were numerous men, Ulrich Bloody-Axe and Jehan the French knight and Father Gregorias, and so many more, even those who had marched to battle alongside Achille
s. I searched among their company, and was relieved at last to discover that the boy Jon, who had been my squire and companion in my adventures, was not there. I sat down among strangers, whose dreams and memories I already shared.

  Then she who presided over the feast bade us eat and drink, and we did so.

  At the head of the table, upon a dais, was set a throne, whereon sat a queen, clad all in white, her exquisite face pale like a luminous paper cutout adrift on a black stream, her eyes grey, her hair, it seemed, stirring slightly of its own accord like the serpent-hair of the ancient medusae.

  I rose from my place, sword in hand.

  I leapt boldly onto the dais. No one made to stop me, even as I seized her by the living, wriggling hair.

  “Are you the Chronophagos?” I demanded.

  She smiled at me, revealing nothing. In her eyes there was no expression at all.

  I struck off her head, and her body collapsed like a thing of dust and crumpled paper, and I held my sword in one hand, nothing in the other.

  I felt the blade pass though my own neck, then. Some ruffian had struck off my head while asking ridiculous questions.

  “Come and I will show you,” someone said.

  I beheld another dais at the other end of the table, and another throne, on which sat an ancient king, his face more lined and weary with age that it is possible to describe or imagine, his tattered, dusty robes like cerements, his crown of gold so pale it was almost the color of bone.

  Only his eyes were alive, with a kind of fire.

  I made my way through the company of the feasting heroes, through them, as a child might pass a stick through the swirling mass of darker mud he has stirred up from the bottom of a still pool.

  He heard their thousand voices, like a whispering tide.

  I remembered them all.

  I descended into another void, the space within space, the core within core, into the earth where a great stone thing lay dreaming, its form shaped only by human fancies into something describable at all, something with serpentine hair or the face of a king or a queen or the knight called Ulrich Bloody Axe, but not like that at all. Not really.

  Its vast mouth gaped wide. My guide and I floated within like inhaled motes of dust. We walked through long, dark, winding corridors, through a labyrinth I knew would never end. We came to a feasting hall, and I, who had been called Erec of Brittany and Ulrich and Father Gregorias, and who had marched to war with Achilles and who reigned now, in darkness, as an ancient and weary king, I sat down on my throne and watched the ghosts of warriors feasting, and listened as a company of twelve knights arrived at my gate, having lost their way.

  I closed my eyes, and contemplated the incomprehensible stone face which had fallen from the stars and lay in the earth. It opened its eyes, and they were mine, and I looked out through all my memories and accumulated, stolen dreams, and understood that I was the Chronophagos.

  I felt one small satisfaction, that Jon was not there.

  VI

  I am Jon, who was a squire and gave up the sword for the harp and learned it but a little, and came to sing only one song that no one wants to hear. I have been driven from place to place, cast stones more often than bread, left to sleep in ditches rather than by warm hearths; I who am ragged and filthy and starving and no longer young, remember my adventure like a dream from which I have never awakened. I am afraid, when I lie in darkness, that the Chronophagos has already devoured the whole world, so that all our lives, all our histories and wars, are just the dreams of the Chronophagos stirring, as a child with a stick stirs mud on the bottom of a pool.

  Who can say that it is not so?

  UBBO-SATHLA, by Clark Ashton Smith

  For Ubbo-Sathla is the source and the end. Before the coming of Zhothaqquah or Yok-Zothoth or Kthulhut from the stars, Ubbo-Sathla dwelt in the steaming fens of the newmade Earth: a mass without head or members, spawning the grey, formless efts of the prime and the grisly prototypes of terrene life… And all earthly life, it is told, shall go back at last through the great circle of time to Ubbo-Sathla.

  —The Book of Eibon.

  * * * *

  Paul Tregardis found the milky crystal in a litter of oddments from many lands and eras. He had entered the shop of the curio-dealer through an aimless impulse, with no particular object in mind other than the idle distraction of eyeing and fingering a miscellany of far-gathered things. Looking desultorily about, his attention had been drawn by a dull glimmering on one of the tables; and he had extricated the queer orblike stone from its shadowy, crowded position between an ugly little Aztec idol, the fossil egg of a dinornis, and an obscene fetish of black wood from the Niger.

  The thing was about the size of a small orange and was slightly flattened at the ends, like a planet at its poles. It puzzled Tregardis, for it was not like an ordinary crystal, being cloudy and changeable, with an intermittent glowing in its heart, as if it were alternately illumed and darkened from within. Holding it to the wintry window, he studied it for awhile without being able to determine the secret of this singular and regular alternation. His puzzlement was soon complicated by a dawning sense of vague and irrecognizable familiarity, as if he had seen the thing before under circumstances that were now wholly forgotten.

  He appealed to the curio-dealer, a dwarfish Hebrew with an air of dusty antiquity, who gave the impression of being lost to commercial considerations in some web of cabbalistic revery.

  “Can you tell me anything about this?”

  The dealer gave an indescribable, simultaneous shrug of his shoulders and his eyebrows.

  “It is very old—palaeogean, one might say. I cannot tell you much, for little is known. A geologist found it in Greenland beneath glacial ice, in the Miocene strata. Who knows? It may have belonged to some sorcerer of primeval Thule. Greenland was a warm, fertile region beneath the sun of Miocene times. No doubt it is a magic crystal, and a man might behold strange visions in its heart, if he looked long enough.”

  Tregardis was quite startled, for the dealer’s apparently fantastic suggestion had brought to mind his own delvings in a branch of obscure lore; and in particular had recalled The Book of Eibon, that strangest and rarest of occult forgotten volumes, which is said to have come down through a series of manifold translations from a prehistoric original written in the lost language of Hyperborea. Tregardis, with much difficulty, had obtained the medieval French version—a copy that had been owned by many generations of sorcerers and Satanists—but had never been able to find the Greek manuscript from which his version was derived.

  The remote, fabulous original was supposed to have been the work of a great Hyperborean wizard, from whom it had taken its name. It was a collection of dark and baleful myths, of liturgies, rituals, and incantations both evil and esoteric. Not without shudders, in the course of studies that the average person would have considered more than singular, Tregardis had collated the French volume with the frightful Necronomicon of the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred. He had found many correspondences of the blackest and most appalling significance, together with much forbidden data that was either unknown to the Arab or omitted by him…or by his translators.

  Was this what he had been trying to recall, Tregardis wondered? The brief, casual reference, in The Book of Eibon, to a cloudy crystal that had been owned by the wizard Zon Mezzamalech, in Mhu Thulan? Of course, it was all too fantastic, too hypothetic, too incredible—but Mhu Thulan, that northern portion of ancient Hyperborea, was supposed to have corresponded roughly with modern Greenland, which had formerly been joined as a peninsula to the main continent. Could the stone in his hand, by some fabulous fortuity, be the crystal of Zon Mezzamalech?

  Tregardis smiled at himself with inward irony for even conceiving the absurd notion. Such things did not occur—at least, not in present-day London; and in all likelihood, The Book of Eibon was sheer superstitious fantasy, anyway. Nevertheless, there was something about the crystal that continued to tease and inveigle him. He ended by purchasi
ng it at a fairly moderate price. The sum was named by the seller and paid by the buyer without bargaining.

  With the crystal in his pocket, Paul Tregardis hastened back to his lodgings instead of resuming his leisurely saunter. He installed the milky globe on his writing table, where it stood firmly enough on one of its oblate ends. Then, still smiling at his own absurdity, he took down the yellow parchment manuscript of The Book of Eibon from its place in a somewhat inclusive collection of recherché literature. He opened the vermiculated leather cover with hasps of tarnished steel and read over to himself, translating from the archaic French as he read, the paragraph that referred to Zon Mezzamalech:

  “This wizard, who was mighty among sorcerers, had found a cloudy stone, orblike and somewhat flattened at the ends, in which he could behold many visions of the terrene past, even to the Earth’s beginning, when Ubbo-Sathla, the unbegotten source, lay vast and swollen and yeasty amid the vaporing slime… But of that which he beheld, Zon Mezzamalech left little record; and people say that he vanished presently, in a way that is not known; and after him the cloudy crystal was lost.”

  Paul Tregardis laid the manuscript aside. Again there was something that tantalized and beguiled him, like a lost dream or a memory forfeit to oblivion. Impelled by a feeling which he did not scrutinize or question, he sat down before the table and began to stare intently into the cold, nebulous orb. He felt an expectation which, somehow, was so familiar, so permeative a part of his consciousness, that he did not even name it to himself.

  Minute by minute he sat and watched the alternate glimmering and fading of the mysterious light in the heart of the crystal. By imperceptible degrees, there stole upon him a sense of dreamlike duality, both in respect to his person and his surroundings. He was still Paul Tregardis—and yet he was someone else; the room was his London apartment—and a chamber in some foreign but well-known place. And in both milieus he peered steadfastly into the same crystal.