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

by Brian Stableford

  I was on my way back from the tropical greenhouse to the house when I saw the dead man coming up the driveway. I recognized him by his gait—not that all dead men limp, of course, but I recognized that particular limp, even at a distance of a hundred yards, and I knew that the man it afflicted was dead. Indeed, he had become one of the most famous dead men in England, the very model of heroic self-sacrifice, preserved from better times.

  Another reputation blown apart, I thought. It seems that the war isn’t going to leave us any intact illusions—although it does make a change to see someone coming back from the dead, when so many hundreds of thousands like him have gone the other way, with equal futility.

  Only then did I think that I might be mistaken, and that it might not be Oates after all.

  I looked around—not that there could be any reassurance of the world’s normality in the sight of the wolds, the farms in the valleys with their neatly-cropped post-harvest fields, the ragged sheep on the slopes, the fleecy cloud obscuring the summits, or even the house itself. Except for the glittering greenhouses, it had all been there for centuries, superficially constant and inviolable, but in exactly the same way that every single wife who had greeted a husband returned from the war had declared that he wasn’t the same man that had gone away, none of it was the same, none of it was normal, and none of it could prove any defense against the absurdity of a dead man limping along the drive, crunching the gravel with his strangely-distended boots.

  He seemed to be looking around too. Oates had visited the estate twice during the summer vacation while we were at Eton, so he would have found it familiar, if....

  The closer he came, though, the more uncertain I became, not just in the negative sense of being less certain, but in the positive sense of being...well, I could see his face now. In a way, it was Oates’ face, but in a way it wasn’t. In a way, it wasn’t even human, and the way in which it wasn’t human wasn’t just something that death might have done to it. I’d seen the faces of men in the trenches, men who’d been gassed, men who’d been blown to Kingdome Come, but I’d never seen a face like that. He was wearing a hooded jacket, as if to keep it concealed from passers by on the road, but he wasn’t trying to conceal it from me. He was coming to see me, and he knew that I’d have to see him, to recognize him. He had stopped looking round and was looking directly at me.

  “Titus?” I said, when he got close enough—I’d never called him Lawrence at Eton, and in Africa I’d had to call him Captain or sir. “Is that really you? You’re supposed to be dead.”

  “Perhaps I am,” he said, proving that the uncertainty cut deeper than appearances. “It’s been seven years now, so the newspapers I’ve glimpsed inform me, but I’m still not sure. You’re the first person to have recognized me, although few others have had the chance. I wasn’t sure that you would.”

  “We were at school together,” I reminded him, “and in the dragoons. Mind you, practically everyone else with whom we were at school or in the dragoons is pushing up poppies in Flanders fields, so they won’t have the chance—unless, of course, you’re the beginning of a trend. The Day of Resurrection didn’t arrive while I was tending to my pineapples, by any chance? I’m not sure that I’m ready for Judgment yet.”

  He put out his hand, and I shook it. It was cold, and the fingers were swollen—frostbitten, it looked to me. I felt a couple of tears in the corners of my eyes, and couldn’t stop them brimming over, although I wasn’t entirely sure what had occasioned them, my emotions having been unhinged for quite some time. Conduct unbecoming an officer, of course, whatever the reason—but I’d lost track of becoming somewhere in the Ardennes, and hadn’t quite caught up with it again as yet. Unready for Judgment, as I’d said.

  “It’s good to see you, Linny,” he said. “Would you believe that you’re the first halfway friendly face I’ve seen in seven years?”

  “I’m doing my best,” I told him, although I’m sure he wasn’t criticizing the partiality of my welcoming expression. Nobody had called me “Linny” for ten years—the last time I’d seen Oates was in ’09, and he’d been the last habitual user of the nickname. “How on Earth did you get here?”

  His face shifted then, although it wasn’t what you’d normally think of as an expression. It was disconcerting to look at, and seemed to give him a twinge of some sort. All he said in reply, though, was: “I walked.”

  That wasn’t good enough. He didn’t look as if he could have made it all the way along the drive, let alone all the way from Driffield or anywhere further away. “Where the Hell from?” I demanded. “Antarctica?”

  The twinge recurred, worse this time, and I felt guilty for pressing him

  “Yes,” he said. It made no sense, but so what? I didn’t have to understand—not yet, at least. He was here, at my home, and a host has obligations.

  “It’s good to see you, too, old man,” I said, belatedly echoing his sentiment with as much sincerity as I could—genuine sincerity, in spite of the difficulty. “Come in.”

  * * * *

  We went inside, through the side door, so that the servants wouldn’t see us, and I took him straight into the study, closing the door behind us. I figured that I’d introduce him to Helen and the brat later, if he didn’t disappear in a puff of sulfurous smoke in the meantime.

  Oates seemed very glad indeed to be able to sit down. Quite apart from the limp, his feet seemed to be giving him a lot of pain. It didn’t make any sense that he’d walked far. If he’d got to Driffield by train he ought to have taken a taxi...but I only had to look at his face to know that we were beyond that kind of mundane practicality. Wherever he’d come from, and how, he was here, and he was welcome. Even if he’d stepped out of the land of the dead directly on to the drive—which actually seemed to be the likeliest possibility, such was my state of mind—he was welcome.

  I had no shortage of friendly faces around me—loving faces, even—but there was some kind of strange barrier between them and me. Dead or not, Titus was from a different world, an old world, a lost world. Maybe, I thought, he was here because I needed him.

  I poured us both a stiff brandy. It was the last of the Cognac I’d brought back from the other side of the pond, but far from the last physical reminder of Hell that I had around me.

  “I’m glad you came through it, Linny,” he said, when he’d relaxed a little and taken a long swig of the brandy. “The war, I mean.”

  “Somebody had to,” I told him, a trifle churlishly. Like Voltaire, I couldn’t see the necessity, but it was something to say when there was nothing else. I’d said it before.

  He winced again, for no obvious reason. Did he think I was criticizing him for not having gone through it? Impossible to tell. His face no longer had the capacity for readable expression. Anyway, what better excuse was there for dodging the war than being dead? Pacifism? Sanity? Neither of those had worked.

  “I’ve brought you something, Linny,” he said. “I need your help. You might be the only man in England who can help—you’re the only one I could think of, at any rate.”

  “If it’s money....”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Linny,” he said. “I could get that elsewhere....at least, I think I could, if I could face the family...which I’m really not up to, at present. I knew you could take it, after the things we saw in Africa back in ’07, but...I don’t exactly have a face that a mother could love, any more.”

  “But you have to let her know that you’re not dead,” I said, slightly shocked for the first time—which was odd, in a way. His judgment had been harsh, but possibly true—but whether she could love him or not, she was his mother.

  “Perhaps I will,” he said, “if I can convince myself. Otherwise....”

  “What the hell happened, Titus?” I said, unable to contain myself any longer. “According to Scott’s journal, you were done in. ‘I’m just going out for a walk, chaps,’ you’re supposed to have said, or words to that effect. ‘I may be gone a while!’—and then off
you went into the blizzard, trying to give the other three a chance of making it to the next supply dump. You know that they didn’t make it, I suppose?”

  “I know,” he said. He tried to grimace, but couldn’t quite do it. “I wish I had just said that,” he replied. “I was too angry with Scott, because I thought he’d killed us all with his casual recklessness and lousy planning. I couldn’t stand the sight of him any longer. Can’t blame him for leaving the rest out, mind, and I suppose I ought to be grateful to him for deleting the expletives—but no, what I actually said was a good deal less worthy. Typical of Scott, still thinking of appearances, to be writing his journal for posterity.”

  “But you did go out into the blizzard—to die?”

  “Yes, I went out into the blizzard, to die. I wasn’t intending to go far—hell, my toes were all frostbitten and that old gunshot wound from ’06 had opened up again because of the scurvy. I didn’t think I’d get a hundred yards—but it wouldn’t have been fair to Birdy or Ed just to lie down and die on the doorstep, so I figured that the least I could do was take a header into the nearest crevasse. You’ve no idea how difficult it is to locate a crevasse in a whiteout when you’re actually trying to find one. I probably did die...except that here I am, and this isn’t my first trip back to the world, or even to England. As to where else I’ve been in the meantime...well, I know that you’ve been to Hell, so I obviously wasn’t there, but that only means that I can’t put a label on it. The Mountains of Madness might just about cover it, I guess.”

  “You were on the Ross Shelf, I know—do you mean that you actually reached the slopes of Erebus?”

  “Maybe—the real one, that is, not the volcano named after it. I’ve seen mountains compared to which that one would look like a valley—and I don’t mean because it has a crater.”

  “You’re not making sense, Titus,” I told him—but not resentfully. The world had stopped making sense on day one of the Somme, and it wasn’t about to start again any time soon. I won’t say that I’d become accustomed to it, or even that I’d learned to live with it, but whether you learned or not, you still had to live it

  “I know,” he said—but he had other things on his mind. “I’ve brought you some seeds, Linny. I need you to grow them for me, if you can. It’ll need a greenhouse, mind—as hot and humid as you can make it—and some very special soil, but you’ve got those, haven’t you? Much bigger and better than when I was here before.”

  “The benefits of inheritance” I observed, brusquely. “What kind of seeds? Fruit trees?” I knew that it was a silly suggestion. Mostly I grew fruit trees in the tropical house, cereals and potatoes in the temperate enclosures, but I knew that he wouldn’t be bringing me pineapples or passion-fruit from the Antarctic.

  “No,” he said. “That is, I don’t know, exactly...but I’m pretty sure they’re not fruit. I’m pretty sure that they’re not really plants, in fact.”

  “They can’t really be seeds, then.”

  He sighed. “Maybe not. Maybe they’re eggs that just need soil and blood for incubation. Maybe they’re unnamable, because we have nothing like them. But I think of them as seeds.”

  “Seeds from the Mountains of Madness?”

  “Yes.”

  “Vampire seeds? Seeds that need blood in order to grow?”

  “Yes. They’ll also need minerals...exactly what might take a bit of figuring out, with a little trial-and-error, once I’ve given you the gist. I knew there was no point trying to plant them myself, or taking them to any common-or-garden gardener. They need an expert touch, someone used to tending...what did you used to call it? A jardin d’acclimation?”

  Being dead obviously hadn’t impaired his memory. There was no point in saying that he could have gone to Kew. He didn’t know anyone at Kew. He knew me—or had, once, when we were young and innocent, and again when we lost our innocence fighting the Boers and the blacks, not knowing that the sorry mess in question was all just a tune-up for the real show.

  “You’re lucky I went back to my hobby,” I said. “Helen says that I’m not the same man that I was when I went away, but I’ve really been able to let my old obsessions run free now that I’ve got the title, the house and the money.”

  The title hadn’t been on the cards, of course, when he’d known me before. Jack had been the heir apparent, Hal the reserve. I’d been the idle afterthought, only fit for the army or the church—or to be a dilettante dabbling in science. But the war had changed everything, and I wasn’t the same man as I had been before, according to my title. Not that anybody actually addressed me as Lord Andersley. I’d only been to the House once. London was more than two hundred miles away.

  “It’s not luck,” Oates said. “It was always a vocation. I could see that. You’re the only man I know who ever joined the army in order to further his studies in botany.”

  “It wasn’t an original idea,” I told him. “There were precedents, in France. Hell, there were even Frenchmen who became missionaries in order to further their studies in botany. In Britain it used to be the navy, following the inspiration of the great Joseph Banks and poor William Bligh, and knowing how important the science might be to the project of world colonization, to growing food where native vegetation was inadequate to the human diet: the only true conquest of the world. Not that it did them any good in the long run—or any of us. All that our great ecological adventure achieved, in the end, was to spread our war worldwide.”

  “Ecological adventure?” he queried.

  “New jargon,” I told him. “The study of organisms in relation to their environment. Acclimation—the attempt to adapt organisms to new environments by selectively breeding new strains—is its active branch. It’s not just a matter of cultivating exotic flowers any more, or of breeding crops adapted for transplantation to new continents; it’s more exploratory, delving down into the...oh, damn it: seeds? Are you serious? You’ve come back from the dead to ask me to plant some seeds for you?”

  “I’m not actually sure that I’ve come back,” he reminded me, “but yes, that was the price of my coming back. Back from the dead, if I really am back, and back to England, if....”

  “Oh, this is England, all right. Unrecognizable, in the faces and hearts of its people, but England nevertheless. What do you man, price?”

  “I mean the price I had to pay. It was the only way I could get back for more than a flying visit. I had to bring the seeds to you.”

  “To me? Specifically to me?”

  “I mentioned you. I might have sung your praises a little more loudly than was necessary. I was feeling nostalgic. I told them what a jardin d’acclimation is, and your ambition to devote your life to one.”

  “Them?”

  “Yes,” he said, nodding his head, even though a shudder ran through him as if he’d been pierced by a red hot iron. “Them.”

  He obviously wasn’t quite ready, as yet, to specify who, or what, they might be. It was something he couldn’t talk about. I could sympathize with that.

  I shrugged my shoulders. Yet again, I remembered what the enlisted men used to say, ritually, when things got too absurd: “We just have to do it; we don’t have to understand it.” They had left understanding to the officers. A bad move, as it turned out. We hadn’t understood—and even as a lowly captain, which was as far as my battlefield promotions had extended, I couldn’t dodge the responsibility of being part of that “we”—and because we hadn’t understood, the poor sods who only had to go and do it had only gone and done it, and had died without understanding. At least Titus had sacrificed himself for a cause of sorts—except that he hadn’t, apparently, made the ultimate sacrifice, and had even fluffed his line in Scott’s edited script, and the cause had turned out to be just as futile as...I was about to think “ours,” but if Judgment was just round the corner, I wasn’t entitled to that sort of lie. Theirs: their sacrifice, the poor sods.

  Am I any better off than he is, I wondered. Am I really sure that I’m alive?

>   That was self-indulgence, though. I was alive, all right. Alive, anyway.

  Oates took another gulp of brandy. Even though his face was so terrible to behold, there was an unmistakable fleshiness about it, and the way he drank left no doubt as to his solidity. He wasn’t a ghost. He wasn’t a hallucination. That was a pity, on both accounts. Like any aristocratic manor whose foundations dated back at least to Tudor times, the house must have played host to its fair share of tragedies, rapes and murders, but there wasn’t a single old soldier, crying child or white lady who walked the corridors at night, plaintively demanding succor or justice. I’d always thought that the poor old heap had been a trifle deprived in that respect. As for hallucination...well, how sweet it would have been to look back and think that some of the things I’d seen might only be have been hallucinations, and that I might simply be doolally.

  But Oates was real. Dead or not, he was real. And whatever he’d come to ask of me, however absurd or horrible it turned out to be, was real too.

  “Seeds,” I said, as if the word had become the strangest in the language. “Fair enough—let’s have a look.”

  * * * *

  Oates took a package out of the inside pocket of his greatcoat. It was made of brown paper, completed with string and sealing-wax—almost insultingly ordinary. I cut the string with my pen-knife and unwrapped the paper.

  There were seven, but I couldn’t believe, even at first glance, that they were really seeds, or even tubers. They were as big as a child’s fist, and just as knobbly, not hard without exactly being squishy. They were slightly slick to the touch, seemingly more oily than damp, although nothing came off on my fingers. The tegument was more reminiscent of a mollusk than a bean, or perhaps of some weird kind of pupa. Definitely not seeds—but Oates was right; there was no ready word. They were unnamable, except by improvisation. Seeds, then. Why not?

  They were cold. That didn’t make sense. They’d been wrapped up in Oates’ pocket next to his heart. They should at least have been equal to the ambient temperature of the air—unless poor undead Titus had a very cold heart indeed. His handshake had chilled me slightly, but it hadn’t turned my fingers to icicles. He seemed to be warming up again now, thanks to the fire in the grate and the brandy inside him. His face looked more human, relatively speaking, and I’d already caught on to the fact that I could help it stay that way by not asking questions whose answers turned out to be excessively paradoxical...at least for the time being.