The Legacy of Erich Zann and Other Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

by Brian Stableford

  “It’s odd, though,” I observed, as he opened one of the glass-fronted cases that contained older books, “that you’ve come all the way from America to the Isle of Wight in search of this trigger molecule. I’d have thought you’d stand a much better chance of finding it in the Boston subway, or the old Copp’s Hill Burying Ground—and if it’s not there, your chances of finding it anywhere must be very slim.”

  “You might think so,” he said, “but if my theory is correct, I’m far more likely to find the trigger here than there.”

  My sinking heart touched bottom. He really had figured it out—all but the last piece of the jigsaw, which would reveal the whole picture in all its consummate horror. He began taking the books off the shelves one by one, very methodically, opening each one to look at the title page, checking dates and places of publication as well as subject-matter.

  “What theory is that?” I asked, politely, trying to sound as if I probably wouldn’t understand a word of it.”

  “It wasn’t just the syphilis spirochaete that was subject to divergent evolution while the Old World and the New were separated,” he told me. “The same thing happened to all kinds of other human parasites and commensals: bacteria, viruses, protozoans, fungi. Mostly, the divergence made no difference; where it did—with respect to such pathogens as smallpox, for instance—the effect was a simple loss of immunity. Some of the retransferred diseases ran riot briefly, but the effect was temporary, not just because immunities developed in the space of four or five human generations but because the different strains of the organisms interbred. Their subsequent generations, being much faster than ours, soon lost their differentiation. The outbreak of monstrosity that occurred in Boston in the twenties, as variously chronicled by Pickman and Reid, was a strictly temporary affair; it hardly spanned a couple of human generations. My theory is that the trigger lost its potency, because the imported organism carrying it either interbred with its local counterpart or ran into some local pathogen or predator that wiped it out. The reverse process might easily have occurred, of course—at least in big cities—but I believe that there’s a better chance of finding the trigger molecule over here, where families like the Pickmans and the Eliots probably originated, than there is in Boston or Salem.”

  “I see,” I said. While he was leafing through the books, I went to the window to look out over the chine.

  To the right was the English Channel, calm at present, meekly reflecting the clear blue September sky. To the left was the narrow cleft of the chine, thickly wooded on both sheer slopes because the layers of sedimentary rock were so loosely aggregated and wont to crumble that they offered reasonable purchase to bushes, whose questing roots could burrow deep enough not only to support their crowns but to feet them gluttonously on the many tiny streams of water filtering through the porous rock. Because the cline faced due south, both walls got plenty of sunlight in summer in spite of the acute angle of the cleft.

  Directly below the window, there was only a narrow ledge—almost as narrow now as the pathway leading down from the cliff-top—separating the front doorstep from the edge. When the house had been built, way back in the seventeenth century—some fifty or sixty years before Richard Upton Pickman’s ancestor had been hanged as a witch in Salem—the chine had been even narrower and the ledge much broader, but it had been no fit home for acrophobes even then. If it hadn’t been for the vital importance of the smuggling trade to the island’s economy, the house would probably never have been built, and certainly wouldn’t have been kept in such good repair for centuries on end by those Eliots who hadn’t emigrated to the New World in search of a slightly more honest way of life. The bottom had dropped out of the smuggling business now, of course, thanks to the accursed European Union, but I didn’t intend to let the place go—not, at least, until one landslip too many left me no choice.

  By the time I turned round again, Alastair Thurber had sorted out no less than six of Pickman’s old books, along with a mere four that just happened to be of similar antiquity.

  “That’s about it, I think,” he said. “Would you care to show me around the rest of the house, pointing out anything that your grandfather might have brought back from Boston?”

  “Certainly,” I said. “Would you prefer to start at the top or the bottom?”

  “Which is more interesting?” he asked.

  “Oh, most definitely the bottom,” I said. “That’s where all the most interesting features are. I’ll take you all the way down to the smugglers’ cave, via the spring. We’ll have to take an oil-lamp, though—I never have got around to running an electric cable down there.”

  As we went down the cellar steps, which he handled with rigid aplomb, I filled in a few details about the history of smuggling along the south coast—the usual tourist stuff—and added a few fanciful details about wreckers. He didn’t pay much attention, especially when we went down through the trapdoor in the cellar into the caves. He was a little disappointed by the spring, even though he was obviously relieved to reach the bottom of the parrot-ladder. He had obviously expected something more like a gushing fountain, and probably thought that the Heath-Robinsonesque network copper and plastic tubing attached to the pumps wasn’t in keeping with the original fitments. I was careful to point out the finer features of the filtration system.

  “The water’s as pure as any mains water by the time it gets up to the tank in the loft,” I told him. “Probably purer than much mainland water, although it’s pretty hard. The real problem with not being connected to the mains is sewerage; the tanker that comes once a fortnight to drain the cesspool has to carry a specially-extended vacuum tube just for this house. They have to do it, though—regulations.”

  He wasn’t interested in sewerage, either. In fact, he lost interest in the whole underground complex as soon as he realized how empty it was of artifacts that might have been brought back to the old country from the home of the bean and the cod. The smugglers’ cave left him completely cold; there obviously wasn’t a lot of romance in his soul.

  He didn’t notice anything odd about the kitchen, but he scanned the TV room carefully, in search of anything un-modern. Then I took him upstairs. He didn’t waste much time in the bedroom, but when he got to the lumber room, his eyes lit up.

  “If there’s anything else,” I said, unnecessarily, “This is where you’ll find it. It’ll take time, though. Help yourself, while I fix us some lunch.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” he said, for politeness’ sake.

  “It’s no trouble,” I assured him. “You’ll probably be busy here all afternoon—there’s a lot of stuff, I’m afraid. Things do build up, don’t they? It was a lot tidier when I last moved back in, but when you live alone....”

  “You haven’t always lived here, then?” he said, probably fearing that there might be some other premises he might need to search.

  “Dear me, no,” I said. “I was married for ten years, when we lived in East Cowes, on the other side of the island. This is no place for small children. I moved back here after the divorce—but anything that came back from the USA in the thirties will have stayed here all along. Couldn’t rent the place, you see, even as a holiday cottage. It was locked up tight and nobody ever broke in. Not a lot of crime on the island.”

  I left him alone then in order to make the lunch: cold meat from the farmers’ market and fresh salad, with buttered bread and Bakewell tarts, both locally baked, and a fresh pot of tea. This time I used two bags of Earl Grey to one of Brown Label, and I ran the water from the other tap.

  “What I don’t understand,” I said, as he tucked in, “is where the anatomy of the terrible and the physiology of fear fit in. What do cancers and trigger molecules have to do with latent instincts and hereditary memories?”

  “Nobody understands it yet,” he told me. “That’s why my research is important. We understand how genes function as a protein factory, and the associated pathology of most cancers, but we don’t understand the h
eredity of structure and behavior nearly as well. The process controlling the manner in which the fertilized ovum of a whale turns into a whale, and that of a hummingbird into a hummingbird, even though they have fairly similar repertoires of proteins, is still rather arcane, as is the process by which the whale inherits a whale’s instincts and the hummingbird a hummingbird’s. Most of human behavior is learned, of course—including many aspects of fear and horror—but there has to be an inherited foundation on which the learning process can build. The fact that Pickman’s recessive gene, once somatically activated, caused a distinctive somatic metamorphosis rather than simple undifferentiated tumors indicates that it’s linked in some way to the inheritance of structure. It’s a common fallacy to imagine that individual genes only do one thing—usually, they have multiple functions—and the genes linked to structural development routinely have behavioral effects too. I suspect that the effects Pickman and his relatives suffered weren’t just manifest in physical deformation; I suspect that they also affected the way he perceived and reacted to things.”

  “You think that’s why he became an artist?”

  “I think it might have affected the way he painted, and his choice of subject-matter—his understanding of the anatomy of the terrible and the physiology of fear.”

  “That’s interesting,” I said. “It took your grandfather differently, of course.”

  Mercifully, he wasn’t holding his tea-cup. It was only his fork that he dropped. “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “Art isn’t a one-way process,” I said, mildly. “Audience responses aren’t created out of nothing. Mostly, they’re learned—but there has to be an inherited foundation on which the learning process can build. It’s right there in the story, if you look. Other people just thought that Pickman’s work was disgustingly morbid, but your grandfather saw something more. It affected him much more profoundly, on a phobic level. He knew Pickman even better than Silas Eliot—they, your grandfather and Reid were all members of the same close-knit community. It must have been much easier for you to obtain a sample of his DNA than Pickman’s, and you already had your own for comparison. Are you carrying the recessive gene, Professor Thurber?”

  A typical academic, he answered the question with a question: “Would you mind providing me with a sample of your DNA, Mr. Eliot?” he asked, reaching the bottom line at last.

  “You’ve been trampling all over my house for the last two hours,” I riposted. “I expect you probably have one by now.”

  He’d picked up his fork automatically, but now he laid it down again. “Exactly how much do you know, Mr. Eliot?” he asked.

  “About the science,” I said, “not much more than I read in your excellent book and a couple of supplementary textbooks. About the witchcraft...well, how much of that can really be described as knowledge? If what Jonas Reid understood was vague, what I know is...so indistinct as to be almost invisible.” I emphasized the word almost very slightly.

  “Witchcraft?” he queried, doubtless remembering the allegation in Lovecraft’s story that one of Pickman’s ancestors had been hanged in Salem—although I doubt that Cotton Mather was really “looking sanctimoniously on” at the time.

  “In England,” I said, “they used to prefer the term cunning men. The people themselves, that is. Witches was what other people called them when they wanted to abuse them—not that they always wanted to abuse them. More often, they turned to them for help—cures and the like. The cunning men were social outsiders, but valued after their fashion—much like smugglers, in fact.”

  He looked at me hard for a moment or two, and then went back to his lunch. You can always trust an American’s appetite to get the better of his vaguer anxieties. I watched him drain his tea-cup and filled it up again immediately.

  “Is the ultimate goal of your research to find a cure for...shall we call it Pickman’s syndrome?” I asked, mildly.

  “The disease itself seems to be virtually extinct,” he said, at least in the form that it was manifest in Pickman and his models. To the extent that it’s still endemic anywhere, the symptoms generally seem to be much milder. It’s not the specifics I’m interested in so much as the generalities. I’m hoping to learn something useful about the fundamental psychotropics of phobia.”

  “And the fundamental psychotropics of art,” I added, helpfully. “With luck, you might be able to find out what makes a Pickman...or a Lovecraft.”

  “That might be a bit ambitious,” he said. “Exactly what did you mean just now about witchcraft? Are you suggesting that your cunning men actually knew something about phobic triggers—that the Salem panic and the Boston scare might actually have been induced?”

  “Who can tell?” I said. “The Royal College of Physicians, jealous of their supposed monopoly, used the law to harass the cunning men for centuries. They may not have succeeded in wiping out their methods or their pharmacopeia, but they certainly didn’t help in the maintenance of their traditions. A good many must have emigrated, don’t you think, in search of a new start?”

  He considered that for a few moments, and then demonstrated his academic intelligence by experiencing a flash of inspiration. “The transfer effect doesn’t just affect diseases,” he said. “Crop transplantation often produces new vigor—and the effect of medicines can be enhanced too. If the Salem panic was induced, it might not have been the result of malevolence—it might have been a medical side-effect that was unexpectedly magnified. In which case...the same might conceivably be true of the Boston incident.”

  “Conceivably,” I agreed.

  “Jonas Reid wouldn’t have figured that out—he wouldn’t even have thought of looking. Neither would my grandfather, let alone poor Pickman. But your grandfather...if he knew something about the traditions of cunning men....”

  “Silas Eliot wasn’t my grandfather,” I told him, unable this time to repress a slight smile.

  His eyes dilated slightly in vague alarm, but it wasn’t the effect of the unfiltered water in his tea. That wouldn’t make itself manifest for days, or even weeks—but it would make itself manifest. The contagion wasn’t the sort of thing that could be picked up by handling a book, a damp wall or even a fungus-ridden guard-rail, and it wouldn’t have the slightest effect on a local man even if he drank it...but Professor Thurber was an American, who’s probably already caught a couple of local viruses to which he had no immunity. The world is a busy place nowadays, but not that many Americans get to the Isle of Wight, let alone its out-of-the-way little crevices.

  I really didn’t mean him any harm, but he had got too close to the truth about Pickman, and I had to stop him getting any closer—because the truth about Pickman had, unfortunately, become tangled up with the truth about me. It wasn’t that I had to stop him knowing the truth—I just had to affect the way he looked at it. It wouldn’t matter how much he actually knew, always provided that the knowledge had the right effect on him. Pickman would have understood that, and Lovecraft would have understood it better than anyone. Lovecraft understood the true tenacity and scope of the roots of horror, and knew how to savor its aesthetics.

  “You’re not claiming that you are Silas Eliot?” said Professor Thurber, refusing to believe it—for now. His common sense and scientific reason were still dominant.

  “That would be absurd, Professor Thurber,” I said. “After all, I can’t possibly have the fountain of youth in my cellar, can I? It’s just water—it isn’t even polluted most of the time, but we have had a very wet August, and the woods hereabouts are famous for their fungi. Some poor woman in Newport died from eating a death-cap only last week. You really have to know what you’re doing when you’re dealing with specimens of that sort. The cunning men could probably have taught us a lot, but they’re all gone now—fled to America, or simply dead. The Royal College of Physicians won; we—I mean they—lost.”

  The trigger hadn’t had the slightest effect on him yet, but my hints had. He looked down at his empty tea-pot, and he was already
trying to remember how many taps there had been in the kitchen.

  “Please don’t worry, Professor Thurber,” I said. “As you said yourself, the disease is very nearly extinct, at least in the virulent form that Pickman had. The attenuated form that your grandfather had, on the other hand...it’s possible that you might still catch that—but what would it amount to, after all? You might become phobic about subways and cellars, and your acrophobia might get worse, but people mostly cope quite well with these things. The only that might be seriously inconvenient, given your particular circumstances, is that it might affect your attitude to your hobby...and to your work. Jonas Reid had to give it up, didn’t he?”

  His eyes were no longer fixed on me. They were fixed on something behind me: The painting that he had mistaken, understandably enough, for a Pickman. He still thought that it was a Pickman, and he was wondering how the mild fear and disgust it engendered in him might increase, given the right stimulus. But biochemistry only supplies a foundation; in order to grow and mature, fears have to be nurtured and fed with doubts and provocations. Pickman had understood that, and so had Lovecraft. It doesn’t actually matter much, if you have the right foundation to build on, whether you feed the fears with lies or the truth, but the truth is so much more artistic.

  “Actually,” I told him, “when I said that I knew who’d painted it, I didn’t mean Pickman. I meant me.”

  His eyes shifted to my face, probing for tell-tale stigmata. “You painted it,” he echoed, colorlessly. “In Boston? In the 1920s?”

  “Oh no,” I said. “I painted it right here in the chine, about twenty years ago.”

  “From memory?” he asked. “From a photograph? Or from life?”