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

by Brian Stableford

  Their appetite for blood showed no sign of diminishing in week two; they were definitely going to grow up to be vampires of some sort—but I kept reminding myself that that didn’t mean, necessarily, that they were going to develop apparatus for biting, or that they would suck victims dry with whatever apparatus they did develop for parasitizing live prey.

  Prudent parasites don’t kill their prey, I told myself; it’s in their interests to keep them alive and healthy. If you live on blood, what’s good for the organisms whose blood you drink is good for you: you want to keep them in the pink.

  It did occur to me to wonder, though, how such organisms could every have found an environment of blood-soaked fields in which to evolve and thrive. Even the battlefields of Flanders wouldn’t have sufficed. Ergo...but that was an uncomfortable thought, to begin with, and I shelved it for a while.

  It was in week two that the two survivors began to peep above the surface—and it’s possible that peeping was exactly what they were doing. They didn’t have anything that looked like vertebrate eyes, or even insectile compound eyes, but the short stalks that began to protrude from the ground did have black shiny tips that were not entirely unlike the stalked eyes of lobsters. They did seem to be light-sensitive, and they seemed to appreciate the bright electric lighting with which I prolonged the shortening days of early November—though not as much, I presumed, as they appreciated the gas-powered underfloor heating and the humidifiers. The specimen that I briefly placed in cooler circumstances, by way of experiment, almost immediately fell behind its twin, so I soon stopped experiments of that sort and gave them both as much heat and humidity as I could without prejudicing the health of their Earthly neighbors.

  Oates seemed to be a little disappointed with the Earthly neighbors. He didn’t altogether disapprove of the pineapples, but the bananas seemed to him to be banal.

  “Why bananas?” he asked, at one point. “I mean, there are bananas all over the world. They grow anywhere that’s hot, with no difficulty at all”

  “They do indeed,” I told him. “There are Banana Republics in consequence, offering testimony to the awesome accomplishments of transplantation in the service of colonization. And it’s all artifice. Bananas are dioecious: they have separate male and female trees—but only the female trees produce fruit, so they’re the only ones of commercial interest. All the banana plantations outside of south-east Asia—and there are, as you say, an enormous number of them, scattered far and wide—consist entirely of female trees produced vegetatively, from cuttings of cuttings of cuttings; and none of their flowers is ever fertilized. There are only a handful of male banana trees left in the wild, and they’re in danger of extinction, even while their female counterparts go on to ever-increasing triumphs of producing human fodder—but there’s one over there in that corner: perhaps the only one in England, unless there’s one at Kew. My harem of female bananas is the only population in the western world that ever gets any satisfaction”

  He didn’t seem particularly interested, any more than Helen had been when I had explained it to her. Mercy wasn’t old enough yet to have that kind of intimate detail included in explanations—not in Helen’s opinion, at any rate. Mercifully, she had never queried my bananas. The brat did, however, ask at dinner one night why Oates called me “Linny.”

  “It was his nickname at school,” Oates explained.

  “Yes,” said Mercy, “but why? It’s nothing like any of his names.”

  “I carried a key to British Flora around whenever I went out on the river,” I explained. “I was learning to identify plants. The other boys called me Linny because it was short for Linnaeus, although his un-Latinized name was Linné, so it didn’t really have to be a contraction. He produced the classification on which the key was based.”

  I refrained from adding that part of the joke was that Linnaeus’ classification of plants was based on their sex organs, and that my Etonian comrades were trying to imply, in a tortured and silly way that only schoolboys can, that what I was doing was a kind of pornography. Oates knew better, of course.

  Mercy wasn’t frightened of Oates, as some of the maids still were, in spite of the manifest improvement in his condition. Even Hollis avoided him to the extent that he could, and if Helen didn’t, it was mostly out of a sense of obligation, but Mercy seemed quite comfortable in his company, and would probably have sat on his lap if he’d let her.

  He didn’t. Oates seemed more uncomfortable in the brat’s presence than she was in his, not because he didn’t like her but because he was anxious that he was not fit company for a child. Helen hadn’t tried to hide the sanitarium patients from Mercy while the house had been doing double duty, though, and the poor kid had not only grown accustomed to the proximity of the maimed and the shell-shocked but had joined in, to the extent that she could, with the work of their redemption.

  Helen, of course, continued to help with the dressing on Oates’ wounds, and took considerable relief from the fact that the old gunshot wound had stopped bleeding and begun to scar over again, and that his toes actually seemed to be getting better, impossible though that was.

  “He’s not so cold now,” she reported to me, one night, after Oates had gone to bed. “He’s actually coming back. I didn’t think it was possible, but he is.”

  “That’s good,” I said, hoping that she wasn’t going to make some remark about thawing me out in my turn.

  “What about the things?” she asked. “Are they still cold to the touch?”

  “Strangely enough, yes,” I said. “Given the ambient temperature, I have no idea how they do it, but they do. It’s as if they’re negatively endothermic, needing a high external temperature but maintaining their internal temperature at a much lower level. It doesn’t make sense metabolically; even though their metabolic cycles are obviously different from ours, they should still have the same optimum temperature—except, of course, that they’re not mayflies.”

  “No,” she said, “they’re terrestrial starfish that live underground in baths of blood.”

  “That’s not what I mean—Oates calls Earthly life-forms mayflies because they’re short-lived. The creatures that used to live in Antarctica billions of years ago, according to him, live more slowly, and for much longer.”

  She ignored the correction. “At least,” she said, modifying her own judgment, “that’s what they are in their larval form.”

  “I’m not so sure,” I said. “I think we might already have missed out on one form—but that doesn’t mean that they only have two. They might have three—or thirty.”

  “Are the two you have the same sex, or different sexes?” she asked, obviously worried that they might start breeding, perhaps after some further metamorphosis.

  “They seem to be identical,” I said. “If they’re different sexes, there don’t appear to be any obvious external sexual characteristics. Being alien, of course, they might not have different sexes, or might have more than two. Even our kind of life only makes limited use of sex, although it’s a pretty good shuffler of the Mendelian deck. If you’re right about them being analogous to larvae, mind, they might not develop sex organs until the next phase.”

  “You don’t sound as if you think I’m right,” she observed, without too much injury in her tone.

  “I don’t know enough to know what to think. Extra phases increase an organism’s ecological requirements, though, so I’m reluctant to make guesses based on the insect analogy.”

  “Is there any guess you do feel confident making?” she probed.

  I took it as a challenge, although I’d been keeping the notion under wraps for a while. “I’m obviously supplying the two that are developing with makeshift incubators,” I said. “Given their appetite for blood, their natural habitat must be inside some other organism—some quasi mammalian organism.”

  “Not dinosaurs then?” Helen concluded.

  “Too recent,” I said, “although it’s possible that their blood would do in a pinch. Prob
ably something we’ve never seen, even in fossil form. Fossils are mortal, and entire strata of the crust can be eroded away or pulverized, in the right catastrophic circumstances. If the Earth really is billions of years old, there might have been time for more than one evolutionary process, and if it really has been an object of colonization for more than one extraterrestrial species....”

  “Do you still doubt what Oates says because you think he might be mad, or because you think he might be lying?” she asked, picking up on the covert implication of the “reallys.” Her tone was a trifle sharp. If I really had thought that Oates was mad or lying, she thought that I ought to have warned her.

  “Neither,” I told her. “But I don’t know how much faith one can place in tales told in dreams. Something saved him, or preserved him, in Antarctica—something with powers we can hardly imagine...but that doesn’t mean that it’s a reliable informant.”

  “How are your dreams?” she asked, not sharply at all. I was still suffering from night terrors. That was one of the reasons why we had separate bedrooms.

  “No measurable change,” I said. I hadn’t been keeping a scrupulous log, so I wasn’t absolutely sure that the frequency of the terrors wasn’t decreasing, but they were still too frequent and too violent. I could almost have wished that Oates’ mysterious manipulator, whatever it might be, had reached into my dreams and doused me in some kind of cosmic perspective: some kind of slow and monstrous consciousness of being. Anything but the front: the mud, the shells, the gas. Objectively speaking the latter might be the lesser of the evils now on the menu, and the lesser of the horrors too, but they were the ones that were still saturating my soul.

  Mercy didn’t say anything about having bad dreams, though, and nor did Helen. Whatever state Oates was in, it didn’t seem to be contagious. Oates did admit that the Other Antarctica was still present in his head, in some mysterious fashion, while he was awake as well as in his sleep, but he didn’t complain about it. He was glad not to be entirely dead, and he wasn’t the kind of man who could be terrified by the mere thought of human insignificance in a vast and hostile universe.

  I told him what Helen had hypothesized about the possibility of a further metamorphosis of the “starfish,” and he nodded to concede the possibility, but I could tell that it wasn’t what he was expecting—or maybe hoping for. I guessed that he was hoping for something, but I couldn’t guess what it was, and it was something that he was keeping to himself.

  By week three, the surviving creatures began to move bodily as well as wiggling their “eyestalks.” They didn’t move fast or far, but they did move. At the very least, they squirmed, as if testing their five limbs. They didn’t seem to me to be at all threatening, even when I imagined them dragging themselves out of the soil and walking away like five-legged spiders balanced on the tips of their “feet.” Indeed, they seem to me to be rather frail, unready to suffer any reduction in their daily bloodfest, let alone to suffer the English weather, which had grow markedly colder since the relatively mild day on which Oates had arrived.

  If they showed any sign at all of becoming dangerous, I thought, all I had to do was turn off the gas and seal the padlock, and they’d probably be rendered helpless. I was being wildly optimistic. It seemed odd, though, given that—if any of what Oates had said was true—they must have been lying dormant beneath the Antarctic ice for a long time, but that they had had to come to me, and to very different conditions, in order to break out of their dormancy. It didn’t seem paradoxical that they might be plunged back into it, even by something as simple as cold.

  They were still cold to the touch themselves. Oates had warmed up to normality—I had taken his temperature and clocked it at ninety-eight point two—but that was natural for him. The “starfish” were presumably doing what was natural to them.

  The more they moved, the longer their “legs” became. I’d already put them in bigger pots twice in weeks one and two, but at the end of week three I had to put the into much larger vessels, more like troughs—and had to move out some of the potted fruit-trees in consequence. If it went on, I thought, I might have to adopt an entire greenhouse for their exclusive use. As the “legs” got longer, the “feet” were physically modified, but not into something more like any kind of animal feet, or even cephalopod tentacles. The tips became soft, and covered in delicate hairs, like a cat’s whiskers. Better than a scorpion’s sting, I thought; the hairs looked to me like sensory organs—but what did I know?

  “Nothing like your barrel-shaped entities, except for the pentamerous symmetry,” I suggested to Oates. I wanted to know whether he had seen anything like them in his Other Antarctica, but didn’t dare ask point-blank.

  “No,” he agreed, unhelpfully. “Nothing like them.” He didn’t bother to echo the qualifier.

  “Perhaps you wouldn’t have seen them,” I mused, figuring that the cat was out of the bag now I’d mentioned out to Helen. “Their need to bathe in blood suggests that their natural habitat is inside a larger organism.”

  I hadn’t asked him a direct question, but I knew I’d hit a dream-nerve by the way his face changed. His face would probably have gone pale, if it had remained capable of holding any color at all. I didn’t feel guilty; I had only pointed out the obvious.

  Maybe the barrel-boys’ slave race had been their natural hosts, I suggested. They were plenty big enough, apparently, and, being domesticated, might have been adaptable as hosts to some other creature.

  He wasn’t even listening. He was looking up, at the glass roof. Dusk was only just falling, so I hadn’t switched on the electric lights yet.

  “Is that snow?” he asked.

  I looked up, squinting at the glass. The reason why he was uncertain was that the flakes were melting as soon as they hit the warm glass, and then fusing into streams of water. The glass was a very poor conductor of heat, though, so the outer surface wouldn’t take long to cool down if snow or sleet fell upon it any volume.

  “It’s very light,” I said. “Just flurries drifting in on an east wind, at a guess. We don’t usually get serious snow until one of the Atlantic fronts comes barging in from the west and hits the colder air of a high-pressure area. Then you’ll see a blizzard—not much by comparison with the Antarctic, mind. The worst of it usually arrives in January—that’s when the roads inevitably get blocked and everything grinds to a standstill. Might have trouble with blood supplies from the abattoir then, although I dare say that I could lodge some sheep in the old stables, just in case.”

  “I doubt that I’ll be here that long,” Oates said, dully, still looking upwards. His face had settled again, to a near-human expression. Anxiety?

  “Why do you doubt it?” I asked. “I’ve seen no sign that Tweedledum and Tweedledee are fully-grown yet, or that they’re about to do anything spectacular that might justify their existence.”

  “I just have a feeling,” he said. He didn’t say it the way Helen might have said it, though. He said it like a man who knows that his feelings mean something.

  “A bad feeling?”

  “Just a feeling,” he said—but he added: “Do you want to send Helen and Mercy away, just in case?”

  “Do I need to?”

  “I don’t know—but I have a feeling. That is snow, you know—and not just a flurry.”

  I looked up. He was right. It was snowing quite hard. Judging by the slant of the flakes I could see through the side walls, the wind was actually blowing from the north now. The cold air was probably streaming all the way from the pole, picking up moisture over the ocean.

  The Arctic, I knew, was just ice, sitting on top of water. Which didn’t mean that there mightn’t be Another Greenland, echoing ancient Hyperborea. The snow did seem somehow reassuring. It was unusual, but not wrong—not, at least, according to my vague feeling.

  Oates had gone to the door and opened it. He was peering out into the snow, uncertainly.

  “Shut the door,” I said. “We don’t want the starfish getting fros
tbite—or the bananas and pineapples, for that matter.”

  “I haven’t seen snow for a long time,” he said, perhaps a trifle bizarrely, considering that he’d fallen down a hole in the Antarctic seven years ago, and had only made brief trips to England since.

  Perhaps, I thought, it didn’t snow in the Other Antarctica. Perhaps the barrel-boys were too familiar with snow to bother to dream it. Oates certainly seemed puzzled by this particular snow, continually catching flakes in the palm of his hand and lifting them up to his eyes in order to inspect them.

  “I’ll mention the possibility to Helen of taking a little trip,” I said. “Mind you, if it keeps on snowing like that for a few more hours, we might have difficulty getting out. Snow drifts in the wolds and the dales—we could get cut off, even in November. Mercy loves it, though. Children do, don’t they?”

  He didn’t know. He seemed to have forgotten about Helen and Mercy already. Something was worrying him—or them.

  “If the starfish do turn on us,” I said, “you and I are the ones in the firing-line—and your blood seems to be in good condition, now that it’s no longer leaking out. If the addicts get antsy because the slaughterhouse truck can’t get through, it’ll be you and me they turn on.”

  “If anything does happen,” Oates promised, perhaps attempting to lighten the mood, or perhaps meaning exactly what he said, “I’ll try to make sure that it happens to me first, so that you can watch and act as necessary.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I don’t have a case of grenades hereabouts, but I do have my revolver close at hand—and the stopcock of the gas-supply. They’re not exactly lightning-fast, are they?”

  “No,” he admitted. “Not fast.” Whatever he was worrying about, it wasn’t their speed over the ground.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go up to the house. Dinner will be ready soon enough, and I’ll need to have a word with Hollis about contingency plans, if the snow does continue. If we do get cut off, we’ll have to make accommodation for the girls, and the staff that don’t live in. We should have plenty of supplies laid in, but it’s not like before the war, when we still had half a dozen horses. We’ve only got one tractor, and if its engine won’t start....”