Worlds of Cthulhu

by Robert M. Price

  As I forced my unwilling eyes along the sentences and across the diagrams and crude but compelling woodcuts in the abovementioned tomes — and in others of an even more disturbing nature — I felt often as though I had entered into the very heart of a noetic hell, wherein all the whole sight and clear-minded inquiry I as a scholar held most dear had been cast aside in favor of the rankest of inchoate ignorance. For here was the wreckage left by the complete destruction of conscious minds, the author’s sense of self and autonomy having in effect thrown up its hands in despair and resigned itself to a lingering death in the turgid waters of atavism, its last shreds of cogency abandoned to a gibbering existence among nightmares, phantasms, and shadows.

  And yet I could not entirely dismiss those nightmares, phantasms, and shadows as the ephemeral detritus of vanquished intellect, for had I not myself experienced directly and in my own physical being—alien though that being had been at the time—the origins, the bedrock foundation from which had arisen those tortured myths? Sitting in midnight garrets with the rustle of mice and rats loud in the shadows, or crouched at worm-eaten desks in impossibly isolated and improbably inhabited keeps, I was reminded again and again, if not by my own knowledge then by the overly familiar manner in which I was regarded by the owners of the filthy pages I turned, that this was not the first time my hands had held these obscenities or my eyes had focused upon their sigils and rubrics. Indeed, upon one such occasion I was driven to a fit of white-hot fury when I noticed, beside one particularly horrific illustration of human depravity, a series of notes—no: I was certain they were actually corrections—inscribed by means of a singularly modern fountain pen…and recognized the nib and ink color as my own. My predecessor had obviously used the very pen that was in my coat pocket, wielding it by means of my own flesh and blood, to make those disgusting, curvilinear markings, the meaning of which I was as yet ignorant, but whose substance I could all too clearly infer.

  Rage filled me, and I was half of a mind to hold the manuscript to the candle flame until its blasphemy vanished in smoke and blackened ash, but the crabbed little man who had been waiting in the nearby shadows, gloating and murmuring to himself with obscene chuckles, noticed my distress and rushed forward to ensure the safety of his intellectual pornography. At the touch of his reeking hand, something galvanized me as though with an electrical battery—a sense of final outrage, perhaps, at the forced and unholy juxtaposition of my body with an antique and inhuman mind—and I rose up and struck the horrid creature to the ground. And when he thereupon began uttering one of the consonant-riddled phrases I had just been reading, a barbarous invocation to gods that should, by any claim to a sane universe, be long dead and forgotten, an invocation that, judging from the eerie nimbus that began rising from the filth-strewn floor and the clutch of unseen hands at my ankles, was in fact being answered, I extracted my pistol and shot him dead on the spot.

  Isolated the house might have been, but it was nonetheless tenanted by more than its master, and the alarm was raised. I therefore made haste to leave the room, make my way downstairs, and flee in the hired automobile I had left parked before the massive stone gates, but not before I discharged my pistol twice more in the direction of the front door, for servants were by then pouring out into the moonlight, and their misshapen, shambling forms, seemingly echoing their master’s unclean origins, seemed for all that able to close on me with unnerving speed.

  As I sped away from that awful place, passing beneath bloated, overgrown oaks and yew trees whose hanging branches scraped and fumbled suggestively against the sides and roof of my vehicle, it occurred to me that to have visited violence on one who, even indirectly, was connected with the violence visited upon me years before, was only fitting. It was then that I considered once more the craven beings who, in my thoughts, now counted as considerably less than human, and I heartily wished that it lay within my power to deal with them as I had dealt with the miserable creature who lay bleeding and lifeless in the increasingly distant darkness behind me, devoutly wished that the laws of my country, ignorant as they were of the type of spiritual and mental enormities perpetrated by the Great Race and its minions, did not shield such brute beasts from the deadly force I fervently desired to direct against them.

  And then I realized that, in my haste to escape the isolated manor house, I had carried off with me, clutched thoughtlessly in my hand, the depraved manuscript that had so impelled me to my murderous frenzy. And with that, a new plan began to take form in my mind, one by which my growing appetites might be realized to their fullest extent.

  IV.

  The conjuration uttered by that perverted collector of the unspeakable opened the door, and it was a terrible world into which I subsequently entered, terrible because of the intrinsic monstrousness of the acts it demanded of its inhabitants, even more terrible because it represented, with dismaying constancy, the complete dissolution of all that separates civilized man from the brute cave dwellers who once squatted about the flickering fires of Pleistocene clearings, indulging in the rankest of propitiatory sacrifice to ancient deities they had not even a language with which to name.

  My lot was made bearable only by the goal to which my work would lead, and surely a lifelong dedication to scholastic discipline did much to mitigate the spiritual degradation inescapably concomitant with the magical practices I undertook after a lengthy study of the manuscript I had borne away from that isolated manor house. That my praxis resulted in real, perceptible, and physical effects I could not deny, and it was with a mixture of elation and disgust that I regarded the results of my first operations: elation because I knew that I had now come into possession of the key that would unlock the means to my revenge, disgust because I had now become a member of a corrupt brotherhood of cultic ignorance, one that linked with repugnant intimacy the jungle savage and the educated practitioner, and united the degenerate slum dweller with the elegant sophisticate in an incestuous amalgam of deviant methodology.

  Nor did I refrain from seizing every available opportunity to add to my knowledge and my practice, for the manuscript, while quite usable in its own fashion, contained only the most basic of the skills I would eventually require. Therefore, my progress measured out in the dribs and drabs of the days and weeks allotted to me by university holidays and recesses, I pursued my travels from city to city, from library to library, from country to country, fighting my way through the half-truths, outright lies, and darkest of hints of the sequestered knowledge of three continents, drinking deeply of the fetid springs of forbidden knowledge, penetrating intimately into dark sanctuaries where the scent of black incense mixes inseparably with the odor of decaying blood, and obeisances shunned by any sane deity mingle with the ecstatic screams of spiritual debauchery.

  In this fashion did I gain information critical to my first active prosecution of my vengeance, for with the aid of certain persuasive techniques, I extracted from a certain self-styled high priest the identities of the men who had assisted the mind that had so violated me, and who had more than likely played a major role in the eradication of my overly enthusiastic student.

  I returned directly to England after that encounter, my soul irredeemably besmirched both with the memories of the actions I had been obliged to perform and the knowledge of the actions I intended to carry out, but nonetheless burning darkly with anticipation. And though outwardly I settled back into my academic role at Magdalene College (it was about this time that, my work having been deemed satisfactory, I was granted a professorship), inwardly and in private I commenced furious preparations for the hellish ceremonies I would enact, for all questions of legal repercussions aside, while a pistol shot might have been the only appropriate manner in which to end the solitary vice of the craven wight in the mansion, it seemed to me that other, more appropriate methods would be best applied to my unfinished business with certain members of the Great Race cult.

  I cannot say that I am proud of what I did, bu
t I must admit a certain dark satisfaction. Regional newspaper accounts of the time gave evidence of the workings I performed—paranormal darkenings of the moon and stars, the disappearance of domestic animals, one or two grisly murders of nameless and inconsequential vagrants—but the wholesale mutilation and slaughter by unknown means of a handful of mere gypsies and their families elicited little notice even in the gutter press. And as even now the police in the larger cities take little heed of the impulsive violence that so frequently overtakes ill-mannered foreigners in their crowded, urban warrens, it was with complete impunity that I not only hunted down and dispatched the terrified members of the group involved in my possession, but put an end to their mates and their mewling spawn as well.

  One alone I left alive. Physically, he was a strong man, but an innate feebleness of mind and his devotion to the impurities of the cult reduced him to whimpering pliancy when I confronted him. Yes, I spared him, for he would now serve me as he had served the Great Race: cravenly and without question. And indeed, he would be necessary for the execution of the plan that was, day by day, growing ever clearer in my mind.

  But though the Great Race might treat my mundane life with a singular lack of concern, I myself could not afford to be so sanguine about financial and vocational matters, particularly when an opportunity to improve both also afforded a means to hone my private agenda to a razor edge. This happened during the summer of that year, when I was unexpectedly offered a visiting faculty position at the renowned Miskatonic University.

  I had of course long been aware of the reputation of that great seat of knowledge, and had upon occasion made use of its library, particularly the volumes in the restricted collections vault, which Dr. Henry Armitage, the librarian, seemed unwilling to make available…though he had at last bowed to my scholar’s status. Despite the horrors imputed to that collection, I found the contents of the sequestered volumes to be, in light of my other studies, relatively pedestrian, and as a result consulted them somewhat less often than might be expected, though at that time my research was, admittedly, leaning decidedly toward more empirical and experiential work, and books, in and of themselves, could provide no more than signposts pointing this humble traveler toward his next port of call.

  But my next port, it seemed, lay on American shores, and though some might imagine that my relocation would prove a complicated affair, it was, in reality, a matter of removing a few immaterial wards and fabrications from my Cambridge lodgings, packing a valise, and taking passage on a steamship. My travels had taught me thrift and simplicity, and a far greater adept than I once wrote that the garb of one who pursues the hidden roads between the shadows and the stars should be either glorious or somber…and as I had found, somber was very much the more easily realized.

  My move to a foreign country was therefore uneventful, and I was quite gratified by my reception. In the past, I had found the quaint customs of the Americans alternately amusing and infuriating, but Miskatonic University, heavily influenced as it was by Yankee Puritanism and a yearning for the elegant courtliness of bygone ages, held for me a pleasant echo of my native land, and after a warm reception at the President’s House, I found myself established in one of the stately buildings on the university grounds. My every request regarding the furnishings of what would become my chamber of art (though the university remained ignorant of its ultimate purpose) was immediately indulged by an institute of higher learning eager to bask in the reflected glory, no matter how illusory, of a visiting Cambridge professor, and I soon found my position in the school to be both congenial and comfortable. I had my tools, my place of working, full access to the restricted collections of the library, and even some passing amusement from a newspaper article that described how dear “Click-click Scratch,” himself a Miskatonic faculty member, had recently returned from an expedition to the environs of Pilbarra, Australia. I could not help but wonder why he had felt the need to make the trip. He had been there already. We both had. What possible benefit is there in washing out one’s mouth with used sputum?

  My position as visiting faculty left me free of tedious administrative encumbrances and quotidian lectures, and aware by that time of the necessity of increasing my grasp of certain theoretical underpinnings of my art, I hastened to become reacquainted with the library’s restricted collection. Thus I prepared myself for the work ahead of me and adjusted my rites in accordance with the collected wisdom of generations of thaumaturges, human and inhuman. And from their experience, written sometimes in inks of unearthly nature and sometimes in blood and sometimes in the more unsavory of physical excretions, bound variously in cheap cloth, human skin, or sometimes in leather derived from the most fabulous of extra-tellurian beasts, I profited immensely, for it was among those mildewed and rotting pages that I discovered the existence, within a distinctly separate but nearby dimensional plane, of a degenerate species—one could no longer call it a race—of once-sentient creatures which had, incredible though it might seem, voluntarily devolved themselves into such a complete state of complacent mindlessness that even the Great Race, with its voracious appetite for mental contact, was sufficiently revolted as to eschew any and all research regarding it.

  This timely information proved to be the final piece of information necessary for the realization of my desires, and I forthwith resumed contact with my servant in England, the former member of the defunct support cell of the Great Race. Much diminished by his cultic excesses, he was easily cowed once again into submission, and at my prompting he insinuated himself into another cell, one which, actively participating in the affairs and worship of their masters, had been so moved by their devotion as to retain, as an object of veneration, one of the intricate mechanisms used to effect transfers of consciousness.

  At my command, he stole the device, subsequently taking passage on a fast Atlantic steamer bound for America. No matter that his theft was speedily detected. No matter that agents of the cult were immediately dispatched with orders to capture the thief on sight and subsequently do away with him in any one of a number of very slow but anatomically ingenious methods. No matter, indeed, that I intended to save those agents the trouble. My slave would, I knew, deliver the mechanism in less than a week, and a few hours after that I would reach the goal I had so long pursued. And therefore I hastened to prepare my chamber of art, laying out the required triple circles and quadruple triangles of warding…not forgetting, as I did so, to secrete a revolver within easy reach.

  My plan, it must be understood, had been refined and annealed in the white hot furnace of vengeful lust: as I had been done to, so I would do in return. And I would accomplish my intentions not at the safe remove of tens of millions of years, but with immediate, physical brutality, for I had guessed, and my researches had confirmed, that within the greatest strength of the Great Race lay its greatest weakness. Thus, when the enemies of my cone-shaped captors (and, quite understandably, there were many) finally arose in the late Jurassic, overwhelmed the defenses raised against them, and forced the Great Race’s minds to migrate once again—into the future of our world, when a coleopterous species would attain sentience, gain ascendancy, and then be summarily annexed as hosts for the psychological cuckoo birds—I would avail myself of the opportunity to snatch, in the midst of the confusion inherent in the mental teleportation of an entire race, one of those arrogant minds so habituated to forcing itself upon the helpless with the arrogance of a medieval baron exercising his heinous claim to droit du seigneur.

  The results of my efforts—adequately confirmed, I believe, by numerous newspaper articles of late—speak for themselves. With my technique suitably fortified by careful research, I found it easy enough to open a gateway into other dimensions, and with my resolve firm and determined, it was equally easy to dispatch my slave with a bullet to his brain, thereafter filling properly arranged receptacles with the resultant gouts of blood, the scent of which I knew would act as the perfect lure for the devolved entity it was
my intention to bring forth. And so, while all of Arkham lay in repose, dreaming the twisted dreams that visit the sleepers of that uneasy town, my chamber of art, already filled with the spasmodic twitching and gurgling of a human corpse, came alive with the spiraling mental shrieks of a mindless, cosmic blasphemy that, having finished its engorgement upon the smoking fluids I had provided, found itself bound in a maze of magical restraints.

  The screams continued, the immense entity thrashing its Medusa’s head of barbed tentacles this way and that as I forced its atrophied brain functions into contact with the Great Race’s mechanism. And then the screaming redoubled, for now it was not a mindless thing that thrashed and gibbered within the confines of the glowing wards, but a hysterical, panicked consciousness of the Great Race, the intellectually precise instrument of a sentient species that after existing, unmastered, for untold billions of years, now found itself—bloody, smeared, and filled nigh to bursting with unspeakable viands—imprisoned in the loathsome form of something that, though of a dimensional nature infinitely more sophisticated than our simplistic triad of coordinates, was in mental capacity and physical appetites little more than a debased fungus.

  Such was my revenge. And thus did I bring to final fulfillment the tentative rebelliousness I exhibited during my incarceration within the repugnancy of that conical body in the distant reaches of earthly history. But as it happened, fate did not smile on me that terrible night, for so great is the strength of will innate to the Great Race’s all but deathless minds that, even imprisoned as it was in the semi-physical form of so degenerate a species, my captive, confronted with the degradation into which it had been forced, summoned up enough determination to loose itself from its magical restraints. Stretching out its immensely powerful limbs, it broke through the circles and wards, smashed the altar and the carefully arrayed talismans upon which the working depended, and destroyed my ritual tools before it turned its blazing eyes, hot with dark fire, toward myself.