by Pete Rawlik
I learned quickly to avoid that nebulous and malodorous air, and doing so took me off the path and away from Megan’s trail, but I picked it up again as I crossed Sumpter Road. Here, the trail turned toward the east, skirting the base of the White Mountain. It was slow going and at times I had to move through the brambles and bushes and undergrowth. It took longer than it should have and to travel just a few miles ended up taking hours. I had been walking, tracking, most of the night, and as the sun rose I could see the queer round shape of Sentinel Hill looming in front of me.
With the dawn came a light drizzle, which made my job more difficult. With each minute Megan’s trail was being washed away, being swallowed by the forest floor. With little choice I increased my speed, sloshing through the mud and every third step nearly sliding into a tree or bush. The boot prints were dissolving before my eyes. The raindrops were obliterating them, slowly but surely Megan’s footsteps were being erased, and there was nothing I could do about it.
Exhausted and frustrated, I found a sturdy pine and took refuge beneath it. My heart was pounding in my head, and between that and the rain, which had grown from a drizzle to a regular torrent, I could barely hear anything else. Only the distant thunder from the approaching storms, echoing through the hills, reached my ears. At least, I thought it was thunder.
As my heart slowed and the pounding of it in my ears diminished, I realized that only some of what I heard was actually coming from atmospheric disturbances. The low, short, and rapid rumblings were coming not from the sky, but from the small glen that fell between Prescott and Cromlech Mountains and Sentinel Hill. I was, at this point, not far from the Halsey cabin, where I had been spending my off hours for the last few weeks. It was a quiet place, and off the beaten path. The perfect place to experiment and practice, as it were. But those noises weren’t anywhere near the Halsey cabin, but much closer, and as I left the tree and headed toward them I recognized the familiar blasting of a pistol being discharged in a rather rapid manner.
The sounds and the realization of what they were rejuvenated me, and I was soon sprinting through the rain-drenched woods, lopping over fallen trunks and branches, desperate to reach the source of gunfire. With each step the sounds of combat grew louder, and the muffled grunts and roars that had been drowned out by the now torrential downpour grew plain to my ears. Those sounds blossomed as I mounted a ridge and there, in the low light, the rain and wind pouring down in buckets, I saw her. She was standing on a log, her legs bent and set to steady herself. A slouch hat covered her head and part of her face. A red trench coat was only partially closed and wrapped around her like a cloak whipping in the wind. A bandolier crossed her chest and I could see that on her back was the butt of a larger gun that I knew had to be one of the Thompsons she had bought. The other Thompson was in her left hand, held low, while in her right hand was a pistol, a Colt 1911. It was the Colt that was firing. Megan Halsey was standing on a log like an avenging angel wrapped in red armor and firing off round after round into the small crowd that stood in the hollow below her.
They were not men, at least not anymore.
By my quick count there were ten of them, not counting another half dozen that Megan had already laid low. They were subhuman things, drooling, hunched, and broken. They clawed at the air, clawed toward Megan like ravenous simian creatures hungry for her flesh. They clawed with broken fingers and gnashed shattered teeth, they clamored over each other like a wave of rats, desperate to feast on the uncorrupted Valkyrie who wielded lightning and thunder and slew them with it. They fell before her, one at a time; slowly but surely, they fell.
She was magnificent to watch. She was a ballerina of brutality, a diva of destruction, a whirling dervish that swept away everything that stood in her way. In England I had seen other people move in this manner, sometimes with walking sticks, sometimes with spears, but always with the same fluidity. They had called it bartitsu, and while they hadn’t used guns I could now see how easily such weapons could be added to the art of self-defense. It was beautiful, a wanton waltz that mesmerized me. So entranced was I that I didn’t see the one reanimate break off in the opposite direction until it was almost on top of me.
Its breath was fetid and sick and spittle flew from its lips onto my face as it screamed its shrieking cry in my ears. Reflex took over and my gun had only just come out of its holster when I fired and the momentum of the bullet carried my attacker away from me. It hit the ground with a terrific thud, but almost immediately sprang back to its feet. As Megan had discovered, body shots had little permanent effect on the reanimated, but I took careful aim and fired another shot into the thing’s brain. It spun backward once more, and then hit the ground with a shuddering spasm. The seizure only lasted for a few seconds, but then the thing ceased its movements and stayed dead.
I stared at it for a moment, before I realized that my shots had acted as a clarion call; not only had Megan ceased firing and looked over in my direction, but all of the monstrous things she was battling had also turned toward my position. Megan was staring at me with a puzzled look. It took her a moment, but only a moment. I suppose I had aged since the last time we had met, but even so, Hannah and I still bore a family resemblance. It took her just a moment to place my face and then I heard her say my name.
“Robert? Robert Peaslee?” There was confusion in her voice, and I could hear it above the falling rain and rustling creatures that stood between us. “Robert Peaslee, what in the hell are you doing here?”
What was I supposed to say? I couldn’t rightly just stand there and blurt out the words “I love you,” or, “I’ve spent the last five months reading your secret diaries and private papers and I know you better than anyone else in the world, and I’ve become infatuated with you.” These are not things you say while standing with guns drawn, staring down a horde of reanimated corpses. Flabbergasted and flummoxed, I did the only thing I could do in the situation.
I aimed my gun at the head of the nearest monster and pulled the trigger. This broke the spell and the once-still creatures split their forces and came after each of us. There were only ten of them and together we put them down swiftly and efficiently. In mere moments the hollow was covered with blood and brains oozing from the motionless corpses that had been trying to reach us.
As we stood there, looking at each other across the carnage, our guns smoking, Megan again raised the question. “What are you doing here?”
I paused, panting to catch my breath, to try and tamp down the heat that was running through my blood. “I found your car. I read your papers. I came here to rescue you.” It wasn’t a lie.
She dropped a cartridge out of her Colt and slid another one in. I took the hint and reloaded myself. “You came here to rescue me?” She waved the Tommy gun at the bodies beneath her. “Does it look like I need help?”
I had to admit she hadn’t really needed me. For all my bravado, for all my bluster, for all my apparent courage, Megan Halsey hadn’t needed me at all. “No, I suppose not. Megan. I wanted—I needed—I just . . .”
I saw her Colt 1911 rise up into the air. I saw her hand clench around it. I saw it swing in my direction. “Megan, I just wanted to be here, with you.”
Her face grew rigid, her eyes narrowed, and suddenly I was staring down the barrel of her gun. “You shouldn’t have come, Robert. You really shouldn’t have come.” I saw her finger tighten. “You have no idea what you’ve landed in the middle of.”
She pulled the trigger.
CHAPTER 31
“A Refuge in the Woods”
As Related by Megan Halsey September 15 1928
I fired the pistol and watched as Robert Peaslee dropped to the ground. The shot would never have hit the man, it hadn’t been meant to. My aim is good, impeccable I think, and the bullet went exactly where I intended, between the eyes of the reanimated. The creature’s head jerked back and then the eyes went dull and it crumpled to the ground in a twitching heap, just feet from where Robert had come to rest.
My would-be savior instinctively rolled away, something he had learned in the military, I suppose. His roll took him toward me, and into the small hollow where the reanimated we had just slaughtered lay still and truly dead.
Robert scrambled to his feet and began to climb up the rise. I didn’t have time to help him or make sure that his ascent was smooth. I was too busy shooting the undead as they rose up over the hill and swarmed toward us. They came at us single file, making the Tommy gun essentially useless, and I picked them off with my pistol as they stalked up over the mound. It was like watching the dead rise out of the earth, which of course they were actually doing, for the cave they were coming from was just a few yards away, hidden in the underbrush that Robert had passed in front of.
That was the secret of the reanimated: they lived in Dunwich like ants or rabbits, in burrows under the ground. The whole of Dunwich was riddled with them, or so I supposed. I had only been down into the caverns for a few hours, both on this trip and the one before, but I had seen enough. There were dozens of entrances scattered throughout the landscape that led to miles of tunnels, hosting hundreds of the reanimated. Clapham-Lee had gathered them together, West’s subjects, his experiments, his successes, his failures, West’s victims, and formed a kind of monstrous tribe, a clan of the reanimated. They lived down there in those tunnels; there was an entire village, almost as complex and robust as that which lay above. Beneath the hills of Dunwich was a village of the living dead.
And they had my mother.
I had sneaked my way in through the very entrance through which the monstrous undead minions were now emerging. I had wormed my way through the rent in the earth and crawled through those tunnels, spying on the things that dwelt there. I came armed, but it was not my intent to kill, at least not right away. I wanted to find my mother and rescue her, and then fight my way out if necessary. I didn’t get that far. I had wound my way through those stone corridors for over an hour before I had been detected and the alarms raised. They came for me, a slavering horde of broken and bent monstrosities, men and women who should have been dead, but weren’t. I retreated, fighting a running battle against the approaching legions as they swarmed out of side tunnels and forced me back. With each minute, with each step, I was forced backward, ever backward, back toward the surface.
While my intrusion had taken more than an hour, my exit took only a fraction of that time. When you aren’t trying to be quiet and unseen you can move quite a bit quicker. Of course, the half-human cannibals that were swarming in my wake provided sufficient impetus for me to apply more than a modicum of speed, and I burst onto the surface and into the rain and dawn like a bat out of hell. I sped up the low hill, turned and waited for the first and second waves of terrors to crash out upon me. It was only a moment or so later, after I had dispatched the first wave, that Robert Peaslee burst onto the scene and put himself into the line of fire.
He was clearly unprepared for the situation, and as he clambered up the hill to my side, I fired round after round until he got to his feet and took aim. He stood there for a moment before I realized that he wasn’t firing. “Mr. Peaslee, I could use some help here.”
There was something in his voice, something I recognized as fear. “Miss Halsey, I think we have a problem.” He was looking in the opposite direction, at the sun rising over Sentinel Hill. I followed his gaze. There was something on the hill, something huge and transparent that had been made at least partly visible by the rain. It was a massive thing borne on legs that were both elephantine and insectile. Colossal tentacles sprouted from the thing’s back and waved like titanic reeds in the wind. It hurt to look at it in a way I can’t explain. I’ve had foods that I found vile, disgusting either in taste or texture, sometimes both, that have made me retch. Seeing the thing on the hill produced a similar reaction, but you can’t spit out or throw up something you’ve seen.
I turned away and took two more shots. “The thing has finally broken out from the Whateley house.”
“Wilbur’s brother,” shouted Peaslee. “They told me the house was empty. I thought it was dead, banished—something like that.”
“Wrong on multiple counts, Mr. Peaslee, and I agree that whatever that thing is we will deal with it, but right now we have more pressing concerns.” As I spoke I saw the next wave of undead stream out of the cave, but instead of coming straight for us they went the opposite direction and into the woods. “We’re being flanked. We need to find a more defensible position.”
Robert fired at something that moved in the woods. “Do you know how to get to your cabin from here?”
“What? Yes, of course.” I reloaded. “But the cabin, really? That’s our best option?”
“It may be. I’ve been staying there on weekends, I’ve got some supplies laid in. Maybe even a few surprises for our friends here.”
“Guns, ammunition, a case of incendiary bombs?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then what?”
Robert Peaslee grabbed me by the wrist and spun me toward him. He looked me in the eye—his breath was hot, his own eyes burned with a kind of passion. “Reinforcements.”
And then we were running.
I was pulling Robert through the woods, across the trails filled with fallen leaves and branches and undergrowth. Behind us, the horde of the undead was in pursuit like some monstrous hydra; every time Robert or I took one down, two more surged over their fallen comrade. All of this occurred while the both of us were doing our best to ignore the strange and terrifying thing that was mounting the apex of Sentinel Hill. We skirted the base of that rise, and as we did so we were subjected to a queer, blasting wind that blew down and carried with it an odd thrumming sound like that of a titanic heartbeat in some colossal vault of a chest. It was not thunder, though as we ran the rain clouds grew darker and condensed into ominous thunderheads that churned from dark gray to black.
As we ran, the mass of things pursuing us grew. Like streams coming together into a river, the undead flowed out of the woods and in a torrent fell in behind us. Robert used my gun, the Tommy gun, to slow down the front of that macabre flood of the living dead. We wound our way through the small strip of dry land that separated Cromlech Mountain from the Sulphur Swamp and then along the North Fork of the Miskatonic River. From there it was only a few hundred yards to the cabin, and as we entered the clearing Robert handed me the Tommy gun and fumbled in his pockets for the keys to the cabin.
The door swung open and we nearly fell inside, and then slammed the door behind us. Robert flipped a switch and I heard the generator come to life, and the lights sputtered on to reveal the cabin in which I had once briefly lived, but it was no longer the place I knew. It was full of tables and shelves, and upon those were bottles and jars and pots, dozens upon dozens of them. They numbered in the hundreds and on each was a small paper tag. As I took the place in I saw that each tag bore a different name: Lee Herber, John Gibbons, Carol Snyder, Les Triplett, Charlie Brooks, Anne Crank, Sam Merritt, Keith Shirley— these were just a few of the names. Each jar bore a name and in each container was the same fine gray ash.
They were names that I didn’t recognize, but I had no time to ponder who or what they meant. Robert had sat down at one of the tables and was shuffling through some papers. The place was a veritable alchemist’s laboratory. In addition to the labeled jars of ash, on the large central table at which Robert was sitting there were also braziers and tubes and cylinders of various sizes and materials. Not just glass, but also clay and ceramic as well. There were even a few metallic containers. While all of this disturbed me, perhaps the most unsettling thing was the weird and massive sigil that had been inscribed in chalk on the wall. It was a conglomeration of circles and uneven triangles that formed a kind of aberrant pentagram. There was something about those angles, something wrong, something that violated the laws of geometry, of space and of the orderly universe. It was like that thing on the hill—it hurt the eyes to look at.
“Mr. Peaslee, what ar
e we doing here? What have you done? What is all this?”
He waved his hands at me, both in panic and frustration. “Shhh. Please, Megan . . . Miss Halsey, be quiet. I need to concentrate. The incantation must be precise, particularly with this magnitude of subjects.”
Peaslee rose from the table with a single page in his hand. He cleared his throat and in a deep and clear voice he spoke these words:
Y’AI’NG’NGAH,
YOG-SOTHOTH
H’EE-L‘GEB
F’AI THRODOG
UAAAH!
A cold wind suddenly tore through the floorboards, and the electric lights sputtered like candles. A pungent, odiferous smoke was rising from the various containers scattered about the room. They were clouds of thick, black-and-green vapor that quickly obscured vast portions of the room.
Something hit the door, and then something else hit the outside wall. I ran to the window. Even in the pale light of the storm I could see that the yard was full of the undead. They were pouring out of the forest, swarming like ants toward the house. “They’re here!” I screamed.
But Robert didn’t respond. He just kept chanting.
Y’AI’NG’NGAH,
YOG-SOTHOTH
H’EE-L‘GEB
F’AI THRODOG
UAAAH!
I looked back to the window just in time to catch the swift shadow descending toward the glass. I dropped to the floor just as the window exploded in and a thick and pasty white arm grabbed me by the back of the head. I felt the thick, bony fingers scrape against my skull as they grasped a chunk of my hair and pulled me back toward the window. “Robert!” I screamed. The shattered glass tore into my back and thigh as I was pulled outside and onto the porch.