Worlds of Cthulhu

by Robert M. Price

  Her mother and I wept for her and at the same time were afraid of her and almost wished her dead, just so it would be over.

  But it wasn’t over, was it, Justin? Just one more turn of the fucking screw, like, you know, when the business failed, even in these prosperous times, and we had to sell the house, and daughter Carol flipped us the bird one last time and vanished on the back of a motorcycle. And then there was the small matter of Melanie coming down with lymph cancer at a statistically unlikely, early age; which metastasized; and on the night when she died, when I sat for hours by her bedside in the hospital and held her hand and whispered little stupid nothings that she couldn’t hear anyway; on that night of all nights I fell asleep, finally, out of sheer exhaustion, and dreamed for the first time in a very long time of deep spaces and dark planets.

  I dreamed that I was hanging naked, like a trapped insect amid the frozen spiderwebworks of the Gardens of Ynath, beneath the brilliant stars in a black sky. And I heard the whispers of many voices, of those hanging there with me, frozen forever, suspended against time until the ultimate ending of the universe, and I conversed long and profoundly with a pharaoh of ancient Egypt, who had found his way hence four thousand years ago, and with an artisan and scientist of medieval Italy who had delved into forbidden mysteries and contrived to be carried off one step ahead of the Inquisition; and I spoke too, with a member of the beetle race which will succeed mankind on the Earth two million years hence, and with minds which had never known or imagined our species at all.

  For in the Gardens of Ynath there is no time, and the future is as negligible as the past.

  I dreamed of all those minds and voices, and it seemed, in my dream, that all of them were glorious and transfigured and greatly expectant; and also, I think, in part, afraid, of the one who is to come at the end of time, who was described to me in a manner I couldn’t quite understand as the Darkness (or Chaos) that walks like a man, before whose feet we shall all, in the end, fall down in abject worship.

  Such was my dream, and when I awoke alarms were going off and all the TV monitors around Melanie’s bed had flatlined and the nurse hauled me aside to make room for frantic doctors and their useless ministrations.

  I almost felt that you were with me in the room, Justin, and I cannot believe it was a coincidence that I reached into my pocket and took out your postcard, and read the address: a rural route, familiar zip code, the old Akeley place. I think you were there. I think you guided me as I walked out of the hospital unchallenged, as if I were invisible, and looked up into the bright New York sky and saw, hovering above the parking lot, one of the Outer Ones, like a crab or a jellyfish with membraneous wings, waiting, visible for just a short time before it faded into the glare of the city lights.

  * * * * *

  We sat by candlelight at the table inside the old farmhouse, and you said to me, “It’s all lies, Opie. Crap.”

  You wept then, and I looked at you with terror and amazement.

  “No,” I said. “You can’t mean that.”

  “I mean all this messianic garbage, the idea that They were watching over us and guiding us and would take the faithful few off to the Gardens of Ynath to dwell in glory and wisdom forever —”

  “I know,” I said. “I read your book.”

  “All crap.”

  “Well what is the truth then?”

  “This.”

  And you showed it to me. You reached under the table and lifted up something heavy, then thumped it down in front of me, the black stone, square, about the size and weight of a bowling ball, covered on all its surfaces with very worn, hieroglyphic writing. When I saw it, when I ran my hands over it, I knew that it had not been manufactured on this planet, and I knew, too, what it was; for I had seen such things in my dreams.

  In the Gardens of Ynath there is a great altar of pale, powdery stone, with many niches in it, where such objects are placed, and some of those niches are empty.

  “It’s all too absurd,” you said. There were tears on your face, gleaming in the candlelight. You looked very old then, exhausted, defeated. “The purpose of this entire exercise, the reason for the manipulation and ruin of generations of human lives, was not to uplift the human race with any goddamn cosmic message or to reward any faithful believers, but simply to recover this stone. It is one of five brought to Earth millions of years ago. One was recovered in Wales in the late 19th Century. All of the others have storied histories. This one was found, and lost again, in the 1920s. I can’t give you all the details. I don’t know them. There was a lot of intrigue, subterfuge, something about a fake being sent away, by rail freight, intercepted as it was supposed to be, a decoy…I don’t even know why they want it. For reasons they’ve never bothered to tell us. Shit…They went through such trouble for decades at a time, when all this while, the fucking thing was buried under the floorboards of this farmhouse. Old Man Akeley fooled them, recovered it, or never lost it, and stashed it…Somehow they never figured it out. That was his last victory over them, before…whatever happened to him. Well, the only thing that makes any sense, when you think about it, is that the Outer Ones are just as stupid as we are.”

  “No,” I said quietly. “For once I must tell you that you’ve got it all wrong. For once, at last, I am the master and you are the acolyte.”

  You merely turned to me in a daze and said, “What?” or maybe it was “Huh?” before I hefted the black stone and brained you with it.

  I did so because I understood what you could not, that it isn’t a matter of messiahs or movements or even of serving them in some semi-intelligent way. It’s about joining the flea circus. They carried you off, because you promised them the black stone. But you did not have it, so they brought you back, to complete your trick. Now you have. That stone is a ticket to the Beyond. Not out of gratitude will they take the bearer of the stone off with them, but for reasons of their own. It is not the faithful who shall be transported, but whoever holds the ticket, that’s all.

  Me. You brought me to this point. It is only logical that I should go.

  After I struck you, I stood over you, and though you lay in a puddle of your own blood, I was not convinced that I had killed you.

  I say that you will rise again, awaken out of your long dream and find me gone. But, being as I am such a normal fellow, a paragon of business-like efficiency, I conveniently have in my pocket a palmtop computer, into which I type this account, this imagining, for your benefit. I leave it here on the tabletop, for you to read when you’ve sufficiently recovered.

  Because we were friends once. Because I want you to understand.

  * * * * *

  Now an absurd image comes: the stars are swirling like the water down a bathtub drain; no, like a vast cyclone stretching over light years of space and aeons of time, and the great numbers of the winged ones are like gnats, like mayflies, swarming into that brilliant abyss, into the mouth of eternity, which shall swallow up the bearer and the stone together; and I shall dwell without pain in the Gardens of Ynath amid my companions, until the ending of time, when the Crawling Chaos takes shape and walks like a man. Then shall I fall down at his feet and worship, and, like an animal, reach up to lick his outstretched hands.

  That’s what you wanted in the end, isn’t it?

  It is all too rare when a writer understands that “Lovecraftian” fiction does not necessarily depend upon a check list of unpronounceable names and magical grimoires. Nor even on a particular “cosmic,” pessimistic vision. Lovecraft spun a finer product than that, using a narrative gossamer (among other styles and techniques). At the commencement of “The Dunwich Horror” and “The Colour out of Space,” for instance, we feel ourselves to be entering into a misty radiance issuing on some Twilight Zone or other. Will Murray, that most versatile of both writers and critics, has somehow managed to create an authentically Lovecraftian tale that sustains that fragile spell throughou
t. It is not “Dunsanian.” No, that is a very different sort of magic. Murray eschews the bejeweled and fabulous lexicon for something even more subtle. The result is a fascinating and effective hybrid between two great Novanglian masters of the spectral: Lovecraft and his much admired Nathaniel Hawthorne. You lovers of old New England, see how well Will Murray serves that kingdom here!

  Finally, as you may know, Foxfield was the last of Lovecraft’s fictive towns. He supplied sufficient background and description in one of his letters, but he never got around to using it in a story. He bequeathed it, I believe, to Will Murray, a wise choice.

  The Arcade

  Will Murray

  In the neutral bureaucratic parlance of that era, they were condemned to be “discontinued.”

  In reality, the doomed ones were inundated. Dunwich, Aylesbury and Belton—all remorselessly engulfed by the waters of the new Miskatonic Reservoir on the bitter day the Passiquamstook tributary of the Miskatonic River was dammed back in 1938. Once thriving, today they are recalled in legend and lore as the “dead drowned towns” of Massachusetts. The Athol Branch of the New York-Albany line—the so-called “Fox Run”—no longer runs through the Miskatonic River Valley. The warped train tracks stop at the edge of the placid water and drop gently into it, rusty but intact. Aylesbury Pike was cut in twain—a sorry close to what had been, back to the days of its primitive Bay Path origins, the chief civilizing road from Boston.

  The old stations with their quaint names, too, are long gone. Dunwich Village. Soapstone. North Foxfield.

  Foxfield still exists in a way. It was only partly discontinued. Once the westernmost frontier of Colonial Massachusetts, Old Foxfield had several times fallen to savage Pocumtuc raids during the French and Indian Wars and been abandoned, each time to be resettled anew. The attacks finally ceased when man pushed the frontier outward, ever outward, into New York State and beyond, long before the westward march inevitably climaxed at the Pacific Ocean.

  Only tourists come to drowsy Foxfield now. Tourists and mourners who dimly recall when Foxfield was whole, and not partially submerged under the broad cold impoundment of Miskatonic Reservoir. They come to marvel at the proud Colonial homes in their traditional dress of subdued reds and sedate blues and sombre grays. They nightly hike into the surrounding dells to study the phosphorescent fox-fire of decaying woods, which local folk like to suggest inspired the settlement’s present name—although official histories credit the native red fox population.

  But most of all they come to see the Arcade.

  Of a once-common rural Massachusetts sight, Foxfield’s arch of interlacing American elms was the last survival. Some swore that they exceeded 300 years in age, but that is hopeless romantic fancy. For Passiquamstook (as Foxfield was known in its earliest settled phase) did not exist in any form or manner prior to 1700. And the wild Pocumtuc Indians would have no reason to plant twenty elms in two orderly arboreal ranks, creating a mystic woodland grove of no discoverable purpose. This was not their way.

  Scientists from the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, Miskatonic University and the Grange inspected the Arcade at one time or another. All came away insisting the Arcadian formation was no more than 200 years old—although chronicles of the early days held no record of the Foxfield town fathers planting such an ambitious array along what in time came to be known as the Way.

  In private, these learned men admitted that the height (for each spreading crown topped one hundred feet) and impressive circumference of the least of these mighty boles was consistent with three centuries of growth. But short of felling one of these stalwart sentinels and counting its growth rings, it was impossible to say for certain. Of course, scientific curiosity was not so bold as to suggest sacrificing a hoary Foxfield elm tree merely to determine its true age. It was unthinkable.

  Yet none of the Foxfield elms showed signs of blight—another proof, they said, of their relative youth. Dutch elm disease would certainly have claimed one or two over the relentless decades.

  So the mystery endured. And the Arcade endured. In the Spring, fireflies seemed to dart and disappear about the grayish furrowed trunks and interweaving branches in unusual numbers, especially after dark. It reminded many of Christmas trees—a notion that would have disturbed the old Foxfield Puritans, who abominated Christmas.

  Yet times and mores change. By the late 19th century, Christmas, that pagan custom, finally penetrated even to the remote Miskatonic River Valley. The Arcade was for the first time festooned with Christmas tinsel. Electric lights made their appearance many years later. The prismatic fireflies came and went with the seasonal processions, as always.

  Whatever their true origins, the elms of Foxfield were as much an attraction as the Colonial-style homes that watched them change with the seasons. Historically speaking, elms are common in Massachusetts, so after satisfying their curiosity, visitors were more wont to fix their attentions on the quaint architectural styles that were said to be unknown outside the ancient valley.

  In particular, the so-called Miskatonic Valley door was much photographed and studied by those who appreciate such refinements. Exquisitely carved, they flourished between 1700-95. Almost all were double doors of the simple two-leaf style. Remarkable for the five fan lights marching across the top, the glass cut in neat squares, or more rarely, an arched design. By contrast, the doorway carvings were after the baroque fashion, profuse with rosettes, foliage, keystones and classical pilasters. Pediments were especially notable, being largely surmounted by the broken-scroll motif, or the simple and serviceable triangle.

  The house wrights and master joiners who executed these studied extravagances would doubtless have been shunned in eastern Massachusetts or Europe, where such innovations flouted pious Puritan sensibilities. But that was the Miskatonic Valley in those days, where even doorway carvings grew wild and strange.

  It was from a double-leaf door of the broken-scroll variety, it is averred, that Remembrance Tyler was dragged from her home one August evening in 1704. This was at the height of Queen Anne’s War. The only daughter of the millwright, Shubael Tyler, she fell prisoner to no less than Waban (otherwise called King William), chief of the Pocumtuc tribe which dominated the Miskatonic Valley in those dim-remembered days. King William’s heavy oaken warclub dispatched her parents cruelly and Remembrance was dragged from the only house she had ever known, down the Way, under the trembling limbs of the Arcade, to an unknown fate.

  In those gruesome days, the French were wont to forcibly march captives to Canada where they faced a stark choice— death, or conversion to dreaded Catholicism. Many captives expired on those bitter treks. Others embraced new lives, never to see their old homes or families again.

  Others were, in the language of the times, “redeemed”—restored to their families, but seldom to their homes.

  Remembrance Tyler was neither redeemed nor restored. No account or document was ever discovered by historians of a woman by that name being taken to wife or giving birth in the far Catholic wilds of Canada. Many assumed Remembrance had perished on the march. But no living person knew the truth. The generations of that era have long ago been gathered to their fathers. The Pocumtucs died out in the 1700s. None remained to tell her story.

  Yet neither was Remembrance Tyler ever completely forgotten.

  Few could agree on when first the scoop-bonneted figure was spied picking her uncertain way amid the winding ravines and deep declivities northeast of Foxfield. The first reports were, as might be expected, anecdotal. Some say 1753. Others made oath that the phantom of the fireflies was first encountered no earlier than 1777.

  The earliest recorded sighting (to use a modern word) was in 1779. Young Polycarp Surriage, it was said, was blackberrying near the Old Stone Mill (even then fallen into disuse) when he spied a youthful maid trudging along the Gorge of Passiquamstook’s eastern side, seeking, it seemed to him, a safe crossing.

 
Once there had been a wooden bridge near the mill, washed out in 1750, and never rebuilt. Its stout iron anchorage still survived back then, and it was at these the scoop-bonneted maid hovered and fretted amid much hand-wringing.

  Mistaking her for his sweetheart, one Huldy Sparks, Master Surriage was said to have called out in greeting. Whereupon, the nameless maid wheeled and took flight like a fluttery gray crane.

  Other accounts agreed in like manner. Soon, those with long memories and glimmering hope in their hearts linked the forlorn figure with the lost Remembrance Tyler. In those days, when a chimney refused to draw, this was solemnly ascribed to a perching witch blowing down soot and curses, and such auguries were not lightly dismissed.

  The reports of Miss Scoop Bonnet (for such was her 18th Century nickname) did vary. Sometimes she was espied by day. On rare occasions, at night. The moonlight encounters all agreed in one respect. She followed—or was followed by—a guardian host of fireflies, much like those which made ephemeral magic about the Arcade.

  There were some in the late 19th century (a time of rising interest in Spiritualism) who gathered along in the east side of the gorge to “lead Remembrance home.” Mason jars filled with lazy lightning bugs served as candles in those harmless rites.