Worlds of Cthulhu

by Robert M. Price

  Well, this has got to be one of the very best pastiches of Lovecraft I, for one, have ever read. Unlike most would-be Lovecraft imitators, this author has discerned certain elements of structure, mood, and technique, having nothing to do with Lovecraft’s Mythos, and has reproduced them in a completely convincing and natural way. Where there are tangential contacts with other stories (“The Dunwich Horror” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth”) they, too, are entirely natural and do not exceed Lovecraft’s own gestures in that direction, as when “The Shadow over Innsmouth” and “The Shadow out of Time” make reference to At the Mountains of Madness. Of course there is a major connection to “The Dreams in the Witch House,” and this tale forms an adjunct to that one, filling in intriguing gaps and bringing what remained in the shadows of the Lovecraft story into the light. Plus, the author’s remarkable tale is replete with convincingly horrific touches of its own.

  The Statement of Frank Elwood

  Pete Rawlik

  My name, though it damns me, is Frank Elwood, and I am a resident of Kingsport where my family has lived since Thaddeus Elwood first came to that village in 1691. It is true that I was part of the events that led up to the death of Walter Gilman on May the first, 1928. It is true also that the source for the lurid tabloid account of those last days, and of Gilman’s possible involvement in the disappearance of Ladislas Wolejko, was my own statement to the police. There seems no point in denying these things. The tale of those first months of 1928, as it has been written, is accurate enough, and I can point to no portion of it and call it fiction. Still, it is only a portion of the whole truth, and it but touches on things that came before. To know the truth, to understand the end, you must know the beginning. But where to begin?

  My relationship with Gilman began in September of 1927 when he moved into the crumbling edifice on Parsonage Street, but I knew of him before then, for, like myself, Gilman worked for Professor Upham, delving deep into theoretical physics and mathematics. Our research, as directed by Upham, was equal to that of the latest theories emerging from the laboratories of Einstein, Planck and Schrödinger. Upham regularly corresponded and published with the premier minds of the age. Indeed, his paper providing mathematical proof refuting the Bohr-Heisenberg theory of quantum mechanics won high praise from both Bose and Szilard, and formed the basis for Einstein’s own later assault on the concept. The paper, published in the summer of 1927, even garnered a note from famed inventor Nikolai Tesla, who invited Upham to co-author a paper.

  It was this joint paper, between Tesla and Upham, which changed the direction of the work that Gilman had been pursuing. To my knowledge the manuscript bearing both their names and which bore the title “Historical Evidence for Non- Linear Motion through Fourth Dimensional Space,” never saw publication, but I presume that it was for this treatise that in the fall of 1927 Upham redirected Gilman to investigate the linkages between various quantum theories and certain schools of elder magic. Upham invoked his academic standing to gain Gilman access to the Medieval Metaphysics collection, an act which annoyed a score of history and philosophy students and drew protests from several other faculty members and at least two department chairs. Upham dealt with these distractions, ordering Gilman to wade through the vast holdings in search of evidence that some of the forbidden and secret knowledge of old may have been hidden precursors of current breakthroughs in modern math and physics. Gilman took to the work with glee and by the end of October had filled several notebooks with possible linkages between modern spatial theories and several branches of mystical teachings, particularly those related by John Dee in his treatise Monas Hieroglyphica, and to a lesser extent in Prinn’s De Vermis Mysteriis. Upham was pleased and urged Gilman to delve deeper into the morass of ancient and foreboding texts.

  Gilman’s studies were not without obstacles. Armitage, the old librarian, put limits on Gilman’s access to the rarer texts, particularly Dee’s translation of the Necronomicon, with which he was limited to but an hour each day. Here then is the irony of the situation, for it was the limitation placed on his use of the Necronomicon that drove poor Gilman to peruse other sources such as the trial journals of Judge John Hathorne whose details of his encounters with a number of the accused witches would lead Gilman to an obsession with Keziah Mason, in the end costing him his life.

  From Hathorne’s papers Gilman learned how in 1692, at the height of the witch panic, court officers seized Keziah Mason on the road from Innsmouth and brought her bound and shackled before the court. It took three days of torture before she admitted to being a witch and revealed to Judge Hathorne her secret name of Nahab. There were, she averred, places like the desolate island in the Miskatonic River and the dark valley beyond Meadow Hill where she would meet with the Black Man and draw curves and lines that would open doors to spaces beyond space and between space, and to the planets seen in the sky, and beyond. She was, she claimed, a vessel for the Black Goat, and through her had passed the dark hundred, and from them would arise the thousand young, and then the million favored ones. Here Mason broke into a strange quote that Gilman recognized as a translation from Prinn’s De Vermis Mysteriis. “For the Black Goat Mother doth favor her servants with such fruitfulness as would shame even the most fertile of pestilent flies, breeding in the secret wounds of man’s misery and pain, like maggots in a slaughter yard.”

  Hathorne was so disturbed by Mason’s testimony that he ordered her to await execution in a windowless underground chamber, chained to a wall, her mouth gagged, her hands and fingers bound. Despite all such precautions, the next morning Hathorne found the prison guard mad, babbling about a horrid rat thing that had scurried out of her cell. Of Keziah Mason there was no trace; only a series of strange devices, of angled lines and broken curves, painted onto the cell wall, using a viscous red fluid Hathorne refused to identify, remained to mark her passage. As astounding a story as it was, it was Hathorne’s skilled renderings of the symbols found in Mason’s cell that so intrigued Gilman. Although primitive, and whether that was a result of Hathorne’s sketch, or of the original state of the symbols themselves, they bore striking resemblances to the recent geometrically recursive works of Helge von Koch and Waclaw Sierpinski—in short, exactly the kind of thing Upham had been looking for.

  Gilman pursued this direction, poring through the antiquated library catalogs for days, but to little avail. The little old ladies who formed the core of the library reference staff, to whom he posed his questions and whom he begged for assistance, would only shake their heads and wander away to attend to other duties. That Walter Gilman was not from Arkham may have had some part in this gentle rebuff. True, he had some family in the area: there were still Gilmans in Innsmouth, which Walter’s grandparents had left in 1846, but this relationship provided no advantage, for the residents of Arkham have no fondness for those of Innsmouth. Possibly, it was neither the taciturn nature of Arkhamites nor their native prejudice against those of Innsmouth that stalled Gilman’s researches into Keziah Mason; rather, it may have been his being from Haverhill itself, easily noticed from the particular accent with which Gilman spoke, that was the cause for many to avoid him. For many of the residents of Arkham could not help but blame those from Haverhill for the sickness that had started in that small town in 1926, and which had spread, carried by careless farmers and less than reputable dairy men. The fever that had swept through the town, an illness of aching joints and low fevers accompanied by strange and horrid hallucinations, was born of unsanitary practices, and claimed a dozen or so lives amongst the Haverhill farms, but that was a fraction of the number it killed in Arkham before it burned itself out. They called it the Haverhill Fever, which was a polite term used by polite people. The older doctors and the less genteel folk called it by another, more common name, rat-bite madness.

  It was in September of 1927 that Gilman had a breakthrough, and learned that the home of Keziah Mason was still extant. His plodding through local history had turned up
a rare and somewhat forgotten treatise, A History of Miskatonic Valley by Professor Everet L. Watkins of the small but respected Arkham College. Here then was a compendium, not only of the general history of the city, but of its scandals, secrets and rumors. Watkins, who died from Typhoid in 1905, had worked for the Historical Society, and before that for the Arkham Bulletin. He knew things about Arkham, and the people in it, that most would rather have forgotten. He wrote about the Panic of 1869, which burned down the Hook Mansion, and how in 1884 Sara Latimer was killed by wild dogs. Watkins had taken photographs of Azor Sparhawk when the man finished his observatory, and had filed notice twelve years later on Sparhawk’s death in the city madhouse. To him, those dark days of witch hunts and trials were not mere history, they were vital occurrences which still lingered, permeating the landscape and molding events in Arkham even into the beginning of the twentieth century. He had known Arkham like some men know their wives; he knew her joys and beauties, her mercies and loves, but he knew her faults, her weaknesses, her dirty secrets, and the lies she liked to tell herself, and for all of it, Watkins had loved Arkham just the same.

  It was from Watkins’s book that Gilman learned that the old house was just a block away from the University on Parsonage Street. The house was nothing of note, a great box of a building with a gambrel roof, and the limited amount of charm that such examples of early colonial architecture hold. Years of neglect had not improved its appeal. Finding the exterior of the Witch House wholly unremarkable, Gilman had paid the landlord to allow him to explore several of the vacant rooms, and had even gone so far as to crawl up into the attic. Thus it was that Gilman inadvertently discovered that I resided in the moldering old edifice, and enlisted, one could even say forced, my aid in researching the legends surrounding the house and its original owner.

  Our principle source was Watkins’s text, which used a variety of sources including diaries, journals, and various village and private records to build a brief biography of Keziah Mason. Most of the stories of Keziah begin with the end, with the accusations, the trial and her mysterious escape, but in 1692 Keziah was some fifty years old, and few people tell or even know who she was or what she did prior to the scenario that ended her life. She is remembered as the witch of Arkham, but she wasn’t from Arkham, and you can’t tell the tale of Keziah without telling of her sisters as well. The Mason triplets, Abigail, Hepzibah, and Keziah were born August the twentieth, 1637, in Kingsport, to Elizabeth Talbye and her husband Roger Mason, captain and owner of the brig Cordelia Chase. Much is known of the Masons, for they were active and well respected throughout the village. A year after the birth of his daughters, Roger Mason met with Arthur Marsh and Benjamin Corey, and together the three formed the Kingsport Mercantile Company, which by 1639 maintained a fleet of seven ships plying the Caribbean trade.

  Tragedy struck Kingsport and the Masons in particular when in 1640 a great storm blew in from the south, sinking three ships in the harbor, destroying sixteen homes, and killing twelve men, women and children. The death of these poor souls including Keziah Mason is an established fact documented in municipal and church records. By all accounts, and by my own investigation, the grave of the child Keziah Mason can be found in the old burying ground near the center of Kingsport. There is no doubt that the girl born to Elizabeth and Roger Mason died that day in 1640.

  It is from the diary of Doctor Joseph Hillstrom, in an entry dated April the twelfth, 1652, that the story of Keziah Mason begins again. For it was on the morning of this date that a frantic Hepzibah Mason appeared on Hillstrom’s doorstep. A violent storm had lashed the coast the previous night, and in the morning the shoreline had been littered with the wreckage of some unknown ship. Combing the beach, the Masons had found, clinging to the debris, the body of a young girl, chilled to the bone, but still alive. Hillstrom found the girl unconscious, cold to the touch and obviously suffering from long exposure to the icy waters of the bay and beach. That she had survived some terrible ordeal was obvious, but how she had survived was what puzzled Hillstrom the most, for even now, after being wrapped in blankets and set next to the fire, the girl was colder than the doctor thought a breathing person could be. But it was the girls Abigail and Hepzibah who noticed the most startling thing about the child, which sent Doctor Hillstrom making silhouettes of all three girls to confirm the observation. For the strange unconscious girl the Mason children had found on the beach had the same features and profile as the Mason twins themselves; indeed, had he not known it to be otherwise, the child could easily have passed for either one of the girls.

  It was on the second day that the foundling began to stir and slowly regained consciousness and opened her eyes. It was immediately plain that, although she understood the words spoken to her, she herself was unable to speak. Likewise, while she could read, any attempts to have the child write ended in failure. At a loss as to what to call the girl, but recognizing that she needed a name, Elizabeth Mason declared that God had in his mercy returned to them their Keziah. In the village, a meeting was held to discuss the girl’s welfare, and whether it was proper to commit her to the Masons’ care. While much was made of the burden already carried by the Captain and his wife, none would step forward to oppose Elizabeth Mason’s claim on the child.

  While her ability to speak and write remained lost, she seemed to possess an uncanny skill with numbers and reading. This talent first manifested as she watched Roger balance books and write out missives to those who owed the Kingsport Mercantile Company money. Without benefit of pen or paper, it seemed the girl was able to carry out complex arithmetic tasks and even calculate interest in her head. On many occasions she would point to calculations in which Roger had made simple or even complex errors. It was in this manner that Keziah first learned to write, not with the alphabet, but with numbers. By the end of June, Roger Mason had moved the girl beyond math, and by August she had mastered the Masons’ entire meager library, including three volumes in Latin and one in Greek.

  Much was made of the events that occurred that September when Keziah spent nearly an hour going through the accounts of several local tradesmen. It quickly became apparent that the men had been systematically cheating the Kingsport Mercantile Company, even as Roger had suspected, but when Keziah transcribed her mental calculations onto paper, it revealed the most curious of things. While Keziah seemed perfectly capable of handling series of arithmetic calculations including addition, subtraction, multiplication and division in the most normal of ways, it was not the method she preferred. Going through her notes, Roger always found characters wholly unknown to him. When he confronted the girl about the strange symbols, Keziah was fearful at first, but proceeded to demonstrate to her adoptive father how each symbol functioned to integrate several mathematical operations into one. That using such notation allowed her to indicate the summation of vast sets of numbers hinted that she was what we would today call a prodigy. Roger and his wife recognized it as a fabulous gift but warned her not to let any strangers see her use it.

  In the fall of that year Captain Mason went to sea, leaving his wife and children behind. It was then that some women of the village complained to Elizabeth about the children’s education, particularly in the areas of cooking, sewing, and farming. Lacking such skills Keziah would never gain a husband, never have children. When Grace Watkins mentioned as much to Keziah, the girl smiled and shook her head, scrawling out a note that indicated she planned never to marry. The Watkins woman berated Elizabeth on the subject, and a few days later, after much cajoling, Keziah joined her sisters in household chores, including preparing food and cooking. It was in the process of learning how to cook that the next step in Keziah’s development was made, for it was while making a stew that the pot boiled over and scalded Keziah’s hand. So it was quite by accident that Keziah Mason found her voice and began to scream. Within a week of the accident Keziah was speaking, albeit haltingly. By November, Keziah had joined her family in singing several hymns at church se
rvices and that very same week engaged the Reverend Phillips in an extensive discussion, covering subjects best left to advanced seminary students. That the debate occurred in both English and Latin became the subject of whispered gossip throughout the village. When Roger returned in December he was greeted by a chorus of song from all three daughters.

  By the end of August 1653, the twins had reached their sixteenth birthday, and with them Keziah celebrated hers as well. Over the course of the next several months all three girls began working side by side with both parents: with Roger at the Kingsport Mercantile Company, acting as clerks and doing odd chores about the office and public store, and with Elizabeth as a midwife. The first few weeks of this venture were fraught with issues, the foremost of which were the twins’ lack of skill and speed in handling numbers and the inventory. This changed rapidly, and more so than Roger Mason would have thought possible. When Roger discovered that the twins’ progress was primarily a response to Keziah teaching the two her strange but efficient mathematical system, he was not surprised in the least.

  In September the twins became afflicted with their first bout of the curse. While normally such an event would not require mention, in this case it had a profound impact on Keziah who seemed both perplexed and irate over her own failure in the same regard. Both Elizabeth and Goodwife Hillstrom tried to explain the situation to her, going so far as demonstrating the use of clean rags to capture the flow. Unfortunately, the demonstration seemed to enrage Keziah, who grabbed one of her sister’s wasted rags and ran from the house. Her family searched for her all that night, finding her just as dawn broke in the woods that dotted Kingsport Head. She was asleep, feverish, and her face and mouth were bloody. She slept the next day away occasionally moaning and muttering in some strange language. Dr Hillstrom took down some of these utterings which he could not identify as any language with which he was familiar: Ygnaiih thflthkh’ngha n’grkdl’lh buggshugog. The next morning Keziah woke with no memory of the night before but with severe abdominal pains. By noon she had joined her adoptive sisters as a woman.