Worlds of Cthulhu

by Robert M. Price

  The Descendant, H.P. Lovecraft, 1927

  Angelene did not know anyone when she arrived in Scarborough, and she was still a stranger nine months later, when she departed.

  The staff at Springwood Convalescent Home assumed she suffered from an addiction, like their other patients, though they never discovered whether it was drugs, alcohol, men, or work. As spring turned to summer Angelene realised that the cost exceeded the benefits, and moved into a ‘licensed private hotel’ in Rutland Terrace, on Castle Hill. The next day she paid her first visit to the fortress, set atop the town on the promontory that dominated the coastline. The headland had apparently been occupied for three thousand years, but she was only interested in the last hundred when she bought her ticket at the gift shop in the barbican. Angelene had chosen the seaside resort for two reasons: it was remote from Canary Wharf, and her grandfather had been stationed there during the First World War. Stanley Cunningham had been a trooper in the Yorkshire Hussars when Scarborough was shelled by two German battleships on the 16th December 1914.

  She walked up the steep path to the keep, surprised by the sense of power emanating from the stones. To her left she could see the North Bay, between the castle and the next headland, which jutted out even further into the dark blue sea. To her right the keep loomed, exposed and ruined from an artillery bombardment during the English Civil War. Beyond, the great curtain wall, and below that—out of sight—the town, harbour, and beach hugging the South Bay. As Angelene reached the top of the bluff, a field surrounded by the sea on three sides, a crisp breeze tugged at her long hair.

  She ignored the Master Gunner’s House and walked around the inner bailey, looking for the remains of the Old Barracks. The German attack had killed nineteen people and destroyed the lighthouse. Private Cunningham had defended it with a machine gun before being posted to guard what was left of the barracks. He survived the shelling to be gassed and twice wounded on the Western Front. By the time he was demobbed, he’d served in three different regiments in the army and as an ambulance driver in the Royal Flying Corps—all before he was twenty-one. Angelene wished she’d been old enough to remember him, and wished she’d inherited his resilience.

  She was disappointed with the barracks, which were no more than a few great stones piled against the curtain wall, all heavily corroded by the wind and sea salt. She continued to the sally port, leading down to the South Steel Battery commanding the lighthouse and harbour. The iron gate was locked as the battery was unstable. She’d hoped for a view of the new lighthouse, but there was nothing to be seen through the bars other than decayed masonry and abundant vegetation. Angelene walked around the diamond-shaped field until she reached what had once been the Roman signal station, identified only by a ditch and the foundations of an enclosure wall and tower. As she walked into the wind, she saw a partially buried construction which, according to the guide book, was St Mary’s Chapel. She shuddered at the thought of an underground place of worship, and made for the fence that marked the eastern boundary of the castle.

  The Romans had established a chain of coastal watchtowers to warn of seaborne invasion by the Jutes. Archaeologists believed they were constructed as lighthouses, from fifty to a hundred feet high, with at least five floors and a beacon at the top. Around this was a square wall, then a berm, and finally a ditch. Angelene could see the outlines of it all, the stones overgrown by grass as the centuries had passed. She reached the fence and stared down at a sheer drop of well over two hundred feet to Marine Drive. The road had its own defences, great blocks of concrete piled up in the sea to protect it from being reclaimed. As she watched, a wave lapped lazily against the wall—the contact shot it high into the air—the water crashed down onto the promenade, spray whipped by the wind.

  Angelene felt unpleasantly exposed to the elements. She decided to go to the exhibition in the Master Gunner’s House, but paused at the chapel. It was horrible: a single step descended to a small portcullis, the stones built into the side of a mound like an ancient burial barrow. She wanted to look through the bars into the darkness, but her nerve failed her, and she read the plaque instead. St Mary’s Chapel had first been built in 1000, when Scarborough was a Viking settlement, then rebuilt twice after. She hurried away to the Master Gunner’s House.

  She wandered through the exhibition, finding a reference to the chapel in the section on the Vikings. The town was believed to have been founded by Thorgils Scardi, Thorgils the Hare-Lipped, in 966. There were very few artifacts from this period, the most significant being a book mount and a pair of jet crosses. One of the crosses was in a glass case. Angelene examined it closely. It was a black Maltese cross, with another cross engraved on it. This cross had a semi-circle at each end. Once again, she trembled. She wasn’t sure why, but the little black cross with its four sickle shapes was repulsive. The chapel and the cross, there was something offensive about both.

  She had a cup of tea and a pastry in the café before braving the fresh air again. The wind blew gently when she emerged and she walked up the steel steps to the keep, marveling at the bizarre patterns on the eroded stones. It was as if they were calcified or hosted parasites like barnacles or molluscs… or something else from the sea. Then she crossed the bailey, passed the well, and walked up another safety staircase to the viewing platform on the curtain wall. She could see several headlands miles away to the south, before the furthest stretched into the sea like a giant pier. To the north, her view was impeded by the very next headland—which was when she had her first epiphany. The geography was wrong: the promontory at Scarborough didn’t extend far enough into the sea to make a signal station worthwhile.

  She left the castle for the nearest bookshop, where she bought a set of Ordnance Survey maps covering the Roman province of Holderness. She returned to her hotel room, moved her bed, and spread them out on the floor. She had a vague recollection of how to interpret the contour lines and marked the signal stations with a red pen. The total distance from Flamborough to Huntliffe was about fifty miles. Even if the watchtowers were only fifty feet high, the burning beacon would be visible for at least a dozen miles. The coastline could easily have been covered by four stations—five at most—but there were six, all built at the end of the fourth century: Flamborough Head, Filey, Scarborough, Ravenscar, Goldsborough, and Huntcliffe. The most unlikely place for a tower was quite obviously Scarborough, as the fire from Ravenscar to the north would be seen as far south as Filey, if not Flamborough.

  Angelene looked out the window to the North Bay and decided that researching the history of the castle was exactly what she needed. She would begin with the German attack in 1914, follow her original plan to discover more about her grandfather, and then work her way back in time until she had solved the mystery of the signal station. It would exercise her mind, and provide a focus where the massages and saunas and holistic therapies had failed.

  Angelene quickly established a morning routine which became a meditation. After breakfast she would walk down the meandering path to Royal Albert Drive in North Bay; follow Marine Drive around Castle Hill, past the lighthouse and harbor onto Foreshore Road to the south; then she’d cut up through the Old Town, back to her hotel. On her return, she’d draw a bath, change her clothes, and walk back into town to begin her researches. She started at the library, moved on to the Rotunda Museum a few days later, and then the Creative Industries Centre a few weeks after that.

  At the Centre she met Chloe, a freckled brunette with a childlike mouth, sparkling eyes, and a penchant for Celtic jewellery. Chloe instructed her in methodical study and lent her a book called The Day the East Coast Bled. Angelene was thrilled to find her grandfather mentioned by name, but her real interest now lay a millennium and a half prior to his small part in the castle’s history. As week succeeded week, she ploughed back century by century, ever vigilant for references to the Roman occupation. Weeks became months and she spent less time in the Centre and more scouring the dozen
rare and secondhand book dealers in town. She came to know all of them by name, and two in particular benefited from her armchair detection.

  At great cost Angelene acquired a modern English translation of Robert Mannyng of Brunne’s Story of Inglande, completed in 1338. The author claimed to quote from lost Icelandic sagas written about Thorgils and his family founding towns along the Yorkshire coast in the tenth century. There was a reference to a settlement on the headland—as opposed to in the bay—which had been burnt to the ground by Harald Hardrada during his invasion of 1066. It seemed strange that Harald had destroyed whatever was on Castle Hill; commonsense suggested he would have found allies there. A week later Angelene read a scholarly work on the chronicler William of Newburgh, a monk whose writings on Scarborough were dated to the end of the twelfth century. He referred to an Anglo-Saxon monastery on the headland, which William Le Gros had destroyed before beginning to build the castle in the 1130s. It was the second time the structure on the headland had been purposefully destroyed in less than a century.

  There was a gap of nearly six hundred years before the next evidence of a settlement, for which Angelene was grateful. It allowed her to reach the Roman period more quickly without sacrificing the rigour of her studies. One of the first volumes she consulted appeared to solve one mystery, but create another. The author postulated that the purpose of the Scarborough signal station was to alert people inland, rather than on the coast. Angelene was pleased to see he’d used the same geographical evidence she had. She was not, however, convinced. Referring to her maps again, she confirmed that all the Roman settlements inland would’ve been alerted by the beacon at Filey, which was much better situated.

  The new mystery was the archaeological evidence that the watchtower had been occupied for a single year only. Its construction was dated to 383, probably on the orders of Magnus Maximus, the military ruler of Britain. Shortly after, Maximus was proclaimed emperor by his soldiers and left for Gaul. He fought a bloody civil war until his defeat five years later. Fourteen years after his execution, the Romans began their withdrawal from Britain in the face of increasingly bold Anglo-Saxon incursions. The last decade of the fourth century and first decade of the fifth would therefore have been the years when the signal station was most needed.

  Angelene read widely on Roman Britain, trying to find as much as she could about the military occupation of Yorkshire. It had begun when the Legio IX Hispana crossed the Humber in 71, invading the territory of a Celtic tribe called the Brigantes. She wasn’t interested in the headland before the Romans arrived, but she wanted to increase her understanding of their culture. The more she read, however, the further she strayed from her goal. She took to visiting the castle regularly, in order to maintain her focus, but always kept away from the entrance to the chapel. Eventually, she felt her research had stalled entirely. The feeling of well-being which had accompanied her newfound purpose faltered, and she feared the accompanying mental clarity was in danger of being undone. One autumn morning she returned to the Centre and sought out Chloe, and was pleased when she agreed to meet for lunch at a restaurant in the high street.

  Angelene was nervous. Her self-induced solitude had made her uncomfortable with people. As soon as they’d ordered their food, she blurted out what was on her mind: “You’ll probably think I’m crazy—and maybe I am—but I’m trying to get to the bottom of the Roman signal station, and I thought you might be able to help.”

  Chloe’s mouth dropped open and she touched her chest reflexively. Or perhaps it was the Celtic torc around her neck. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  Angelene noticed her tongue dart between her small teeth, pearly white, and felt self-conscious because of the coarseness of her own features. “I don’t think the signal station in Scarborough Castle is part of the coastal chain. I think it was constructed for another reason, but I can’t work out why. You seem to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of Scarborough’s history…” She trailed off.

  Chloe looked relieved. “I see. Well, there are two theories. First, that the signal station was part of the chain built by Flavius Theodosius in 368, when the Romans restored control of Britain following their losses in the Great Conspiracy. Second, that they were built later, by Magnus Maximus in 383, when he tried to take the Empire for himself. Their purpose would’ve been to alert the forts inland of an invasion. The Yorkshire Wolds were heavily fortified, because the Brigantes were forever revolting against their Roman overlords.” She touched her torc again.

  “Which do you think is right?”

  “There’s no more historical evidence for either, but I prefer the latter.”

  Angelene leaned forward, lowering her voice as if she was betraying a secret. “What about the evidence that it was only occupied for a year?”

  Chloe cleared her throat delicately. “That’s one of the points in favour of Maximus constructing it. As soon as his armies proclaimed him emperor he left for Gaul to fight for control of the Empire. One of the beautiful things about ancient history is that it’s more art than science, and open to different interpretations.”

  “But what about the Viking attack in 1066? Why did they burn everything on the headland? And what about William of Newburgh? He wrote that William Le Gros destroyed an Anglo-Saxon monastery on the headland before he started building the castle seventy years later! I think… I’m not sure what to think…” She felt her confidence disappear.

  Chloe reached over and placed her dainty hand on Angelene’s forearm. Her touch was light and cool. “I’ve got something you might be interested in reading. Come back to the Centre with me after lunch and I’ll give you a copy. Read it, then you can tell me what you think.”

  Angelene tried to smile. “What is it?”

  “My doctoral dissertation. It has a dreadfully long title, but it’s basically about Caesar’s invasion of Britain, viewed from the Britons’ perspective, and it draws on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regnum Brittania, The Matter of Britain, and Nennius’s Historia Brittonum. It deals with the period four hundred years before the signal station was built, but you may find it… relevant. No more questions until you’ve read it, yes?”

  Angelene agreed, wondering what the signal station could possibly have to do with Caesar’s invasion when the Romans hadn’t reached Yorkshire until long after the famous emperor’s death.

  She was still wondering in the early hours of the next morning when she was about a third of the way through the five hundred page manuscript. A large part of the dissertation was about the druids, their slaughter at Anglesey, and the belief that the Romans had called upon malign powers to defeat the magic of the British. There were theories concerning the importance of Stonehenge, Glastonbury, Cerne Abbas, Wilmington, Uffington, and various other ancient places she’d heard of. When she could no longer keep her eyes open, she dropped the manuscript on the floor next to her—probably waking the whole household—and closed her eyes.

  Angelene forced herself to rise when the alarm went off a few hours later, had breakfast, and took her morning exercise. After her bath, she removed Chloe’s dissertation downstairs to the residents’ lounge, and picked up where she’d left off. There was more about druids and bards, and their beliefs, traditions, and practices. These included the significance of torcs, skulls, standing stones, and the ogham script, as well as notes on the gods they worshipped, including Belenus, patron of the druids, and the goddess Brigantia, from whom she assumed the Brigantes tribe had taken their name. There was only a brief mention of the acknowledged gods of the Romans, with more detail about the sea demons they were supposed to have summoned.

  Chloe had used ‘sea demons’ as a descriptive term for these creatures, called the Cth by the Romans, Fomorians by the Parisii, and Old Ones by the Brigantes. They were a powerful, ancient race of immortals that lived under the waves and were summoned by human sacrifice. They were said to feed on the fear of humans and steal the souls of the dead
and living alike. The presence of the sea demons explained why the druidic stronghold in Anglesey had been defeated so easily: it was an island, completely surrounded by the water from which the creatures came. With the help of the Cth, the Romans had taken the island and completely obliterated the druidic religion.

  Angelene wondered if Chloe had actually been awarded her PhD. She never used the title ‘doctor’ and Angelene couldn’t recall seeing it mentioned at the Centre. Her thesis had probably been rejected.

  Nonetheless Angelene applied herself to it all through the day and long into the evening, breaking only for supper. She finished around midnight, her eyes aching and her mind racing, full of Chloe’s wild ideas and fanciful speculations. As she prepared for bed, Angelene made a conscious effort to try and understand why Chloe felt the thesis was relevant to the signal station. She agreed with Chloe that it had been built by Maximus in 383, but what purpose had it served him? Angelene didn’t believe the beacon was meant to communicate with the Wolds to the west. It didn’t feel right. Nor was it meant to be seen by the other coastal stations to the north and south. If not west, north, or south…

  Angelene had her second epiphany the moment she switched off the light.

  Maximus had been preparing to usurp the emperor and steal the crown of the mightiest empire the world had ever known. He’d believed in the sea demons. He’d built the station as a temple to them and tried to summon their assistance in his bid for the Empire. That was it. It explained everything. It had only been occupied for a short time because Maximus had left Britain soon after. She knew she was right and planned to find out more about Maximus’ final years in Gaul. She was filled with optimism that her peace of mind had finally been restored, and slept more soundly than she had in years.