Lovecraft eZine Megapack - 2011

by Mike Davis (Editor)

  “Cthulhu fhtagan…Cthulhu fhtagan…Cthulhu fhtagan…”

  Joss heard splashing sounds behind him, then the thudding of booted feet on the sand. Jem grabbed his shoulder.

  “I said ‘twasn’t natural, Joss!” he cried. “These be devils.”

  “Aye,” his older brother replied. “Maybe. But the real devil lurks yonder, calls himself a man of God.”

  Now Davey had pulled free the shrouds covering the figures. He held aloft the first golden image of something that looked like an octopus, or squid – but no octopus that Joss Merlyn or any of the wrecking crew had seen. No creature could have had that amount of teeth.

  The light bouncing off it was strange, it didn’t gleam the way gold should. It was almost as though the golden statue was soaking the natural November dawn sunlight, and then…throwing it back, corrupted. Unnatural.

  A false light.

  A light that imparted a strange glow to the albino’s sickly white skin, his eyes burning like the polished and faceted rubies embedded in the face of the statue.

  And the chilling, beatific smile that broke out on Francis Davey’s face was something that Joss Merlyn never wanted to see again. He’d make sure of it.

  “Take him!” he screamed, his shaking paw of a hand trembling with as much hatred as fear. As his men hurried to obey, he turned back to the flotsam and jetsam on the beach, grunted in satisfaction at the sight of the coils of rope spilling from one of the brig’s crates. He grabbed one, fighting the urge to drop it in revulsion at its slimy texture.

  He turned and strode along the strand towards the three spars that had been flung far from the body of the wreck, to form a natural ‘A’ frame in the sand. He smiled grimly as he formed a loop at one end of the slimy rope. Within moments he had fashioned a crude but serviceable noose.

  The wreckers dragged the screaming albino over to the makeshift gallows. Joss smiled when he saw that Davey still had the gold statue of that octopus-like thing in his hands. His fingers were rigid, fixed around the wings sprouting from the flurry of tentacles on the creature’s back, as though he was determined to take it to the grave with him. That could be arranged, Joss thought grimly.

  “Too far, Francis,” Joss snapped. “You’ve gone too far. You’ve brought the Devil himself upon us – we’ll not kill for the Dark One, nor his foul gold.”

  The noose was tightened around the albino’s neck. Even now, watching the other end tossed over the makeshift gallows and knowing what would happen, he still would not relinquish his hold on the statue.

  Joss himself pulled on the other end of the rope, his huge bulk and strength making assistance from his men unnecessary. When Davey was hoisted a clear five feet in the air he tied the rope around the lower spar and stood back to watch the vicar die.

  The wreckers watched in grim satisfaction for a full seven minutes. That’s how long it took for the albino’s legs to stop kicking, for his writhing to slow and cease. And all this time, even though the spars creaked and protested, they remained firm and true, a solid gallows. The light from the autumn sun rose stronger and brighter with each moment that passed.

  Davey’s body slumped, but still his hands remained rigid around the gold statue.

  “He will take that to Hell with him,” Jem muttered. Joss nodded in silent agreement.

  Then he turned to the crew. Behind them the tide continued to batter the remnants of the Imboca. The shrouds had become unfurled from the spars and were moving across the shattered hull of the brig, as though trying to hide the corpse of the vessel from the accusing glare of daylight.

  “What now, Joss?” Mark Jarrold, the man who had raised the false light on the cliff top stared at him with searching eyes. “Do we take this accursed gold?”

  “Leave it where it lays,” Joss answered curtly. “Let the sea take it – and him!”

  He turned and walked along the shoreline, stepping past the opened crate, fighting the temptation to look within. There were things inside that were glowing that same hideous, unnatural light emitted by Davey’s carving.

  Soon the tide would roll in and reclaim it, he told himself. Banish it to the depths from whence it came, forever dim its false light.

  At least now they were free from Davey. Now he, Joss Merlyn, was the true master of the wreckers. He smiled in anticipation of a celebratory drop of brandy in Jamaica Inn.

  The wind stiffened, swaying the body of Francis Davey. The rope stretched with its weight, the spars bowing and finally collapsing.

  Joss Merlyn’s men halted and turned to stare. Then they turned back, grinned at their true master, and ran on to join him.

  The albino vicar had landed face down, his dead hands pressing the icon firmly into his chest.

  An icon – an article of faith. For it was faith that had sustained Francis Davey, the albino priest of Altarnun all his life, through the bullying he had suffered in his younger days, the revulsion he had seen on the faces of women, the contempt that had driven him to the church. And to find that even God had no answer for him.

  Then he had found a new faith. A promise of life eternal, a life he knew the Christian God could not provide.

  The noose unravelled, the green tentacle that Joss Merlyn had taken for slime-encased rope slipping from the albino’s neck. It burrowed under the sand, seeking the light from the buried gold icon that still burned brightly in the darkness caused by Davey’s body.

  Francis Davey’s body jerked several times as the tentacle did its work. Then his eyes opened, burning brightly red with the same intensity as those rubies in the gold icon.

  He got to his feet and looked downwards at the sand. The icon and tentacle had gone. He smiled, knowing they hadn’t really disappeared. He stroked the sharp-edged bulge in his abdomen and stared at the welcoming darkness of the ocean – and the light beckoning him. Light that only he could see, shining brightly from the depths of the ocean.

  He stared at the sickly yellow disc in the sky and sneered.

  “False light,” he spat, and made his way to the sea.

  -

  -

  Adrian Chamberlin’s works have appeared in Guy N Smith’s Graveyard Rendezvous and the websites Spinetinglers.co.uk, the British Horror Novels Forum and the DF Underground, where he’s a contributing author to the Underground Rising fiction collaboration. Published and forthcoming works can be found in the following anthologies: Warpigs (John Prescott’s M is for Monster); Winter Sun (Tasmaniac Publication’s sell-out Festive Fear 2: Global Edition); The Bodymen (Dark Continents Publishing’s The Spectrum Collection); Daughters of the Night (HorrorBound’s Fear of the Dark); Wonder and Glory (Static Press’s Monk Punk) and Fishers of Men (Hersham Horror’s’ ALT-DEAD). He is a founding member of Dark Continents Publishing and his first novel The Caretakers, a supernatural thriller set in a fictional Cambridge College, will be released at the World Horror Convention in Austin, Texas in 2011. He is currently working on his second novel Fairlight.

  Visit Adrian Chamberlin’s page at Amazon.com to buy books his stories have appeared in!

  Story art by mimulux.

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  NOTE: Images contained in this Lovecraft eZine are Copyright ¬©2006-2012 art-by-mimulux. All rights reserved. All the images contained in this Lovecraft eZine may not be reproduced, copied, edited, published, transmitted, borrowed, duplicated, printed, downloaded, or uploaded in any way without my express written permission. These images do not belong to the public domain. All stories in Lovecraft eZine may not be reproduced, copied, edited, published, transmitted, borrowed, duplicated, printed, downloaded, or uploaded in any way without the express written permission of the editor.

  Allure

  by Josh Wagner

  When the creature washed up on our shore, I was among the first witnesses. Taking the same walk I took every morning along the cliff trail overlooking Surfer’s Cove, I passed a small beach bound on each side by rocky shoals and tide pools. Four or five tourists had already
gathered beside the creature, which at first glance I mistook for a giant tangle of seaweed. The moment I saw the eye, however, my mind recognized its animal form. It almost reminded me of a walrus, or an inverted bowling pin—thought not in size. The creature would out-span a 737. Razor teeth lined its gaping jaws, each one as long as a child’s coffin. Curiosity possessed me and without even asking myself whether the thing was dead or alive I ran for the path leading down to the waterfront. Soon I nestled among the murmurs of strangers as we ogled the towering corpse.

  From atop the cliff the creature had seemed almost angelic, nestled to the neck in ocean foliage the way a blanket might cradle an infant. Now, standing next to it, I felt dwarfed, as if I were at the far end of a long lens that stretched out to an invisible eye the way this creature stretched along the waterline and tapered off into the tide. I stood beneath its white eye, a looming gypsum moon. Waves splashed uselessly against the ridge of its back. The jaw protruded stiff as an iron fishhook, and its sunken cheeks outlined a nightmarish skull. I peered into its mouth, throat receding toward a dark sphincter. A salty, slaughterhouse stench slathered the sea air. I removed my sweater and wrapped a sleeve over my nose.

  Subconsciously, my hands had dug out my cell phone and were snapping pictures. I changed my facebook status to, “big fish”. I sent texts and photos to close friends, morbid acquaintances, and a girl I’d been trying to sleep with. I updated my blog with a slideshow consisting of:

  The eye: Milky white, harboring a ghostly blue aureole almost as a trick of the light.

  Its teeth: Lining a jutting under-bite, in three rows, jagged and scarred, chipped in places but never broken. Black stains of blood and decay carved lightning traces along each surface.

  Skin: Patches where the scales flaked off revealed a translucent, leathery epidermis. Slime dripped by the handfuls, slowly congealing to crust over into scabs of purple mucous. A shredded scar cut across its ribs, as if it had barely dodged a thrust from Poseidon’s spear.

  The scales: Where they remained, each was as large as the hood of a Volkswagen. Even smeared with murk and crusted over in barnacles and starfish, they reflected the color of the sky, a crumpled form of the cliff behind us, and occasional distortions of my own curious face.

  Tentacles: tangled up in the kelp and slime. Though miniature in comparison with the overall size, each was as round as a tree branch and some as long as a tree. There were dozens of them in bunches along the creature’s back. Not appendages, I thought. Possibly they served the function of antennae or whiskers on kittens.

  Claws: Dozens in tandem, coiled up in two rows flanking the underbelly—like a centipede. Occasionally impaled on one claw or another, the blubber of a seal, or the severed snout of a shark.

  Though introverted by nature I was drawn toward the other gawkers and compelled by raw social forces to engage in inane conversation. Only stupidly obvious remarks seemed appropriate. Anything else would strike too intimate a chord. So we followed the default round of typical questions and comments

  “What could it be?”

  “It’s so big.”

  “Look at the teeth.”

  “Did you see its eyes? Ugh, the stench.”

  Yes, rot and fish guts, just as you’d expect. My own idiotic contribution was the question, “Do you think it’s alive?”

  The girl I was hoping to get into bed (and somehow thought that pictures of a decomposing sea monster might help) texted me back.

  < omg, wut is it? >

  Blithering chatter in person was one thing; over text it was intolerable.

  < just come down here > I replied.

  Already more and more onlookers gathered at the beach, winding down the trail in groups of three and four. The press beat the cops to the scene by fifteen minutes. Cell phones and cameras flashed in unison. The drone of whispers punctuated by the clicking of pocket devices. “Everyone please move along,” was the obligatory police mantra, but they didn’t have enough manpower to hold back our burgeoning horde. It was a public beach and no crime had been committed. Every few minutes, as if tethered to a metronome, some moron tried to touch it and some other moron had to scream at him to stop. An old woman picked up a piece of driftwood and poked at the monster to see if it would respond. Teenagers threw rocks from a distance.

  Theories began to trickle in. The crowd grew large enough that anonymity loosened tongues to even the most absurd notions. The irrationality of one’s apperceptions grows with proximity to death. The larger the corpse, the greater its impact on the imagination. Every idea encouraged another, and thoughts spiraled wildly out of control.

  “Toxic mutations.”

  “Polution. Dumping. Floating barges of trash.”

  “A result of global warming.”

  “Nuclear testing drives them to the surface.”

  “It’s Caddy…Cadborosaurus.”

  “Morgawr.”

  “Benthic alien civilizations.”

  “Dead for eons, drifting. Probably didn’t start rotting until it beached.”

  “Elder gods.”

  Whatever it was, it was certainly dead, and probably long before it surfaced. I couldn’t locate gills, and the amphibious possibility remained. I refused to express my own theory, that this carcass was a shell or vehicle housing one or more living creatures, or at the very least a host of insects and foreign bacteria. I expected the soft belly to explode any minute, for spiders and crustaceans to emerge and scuttle over our bones.

  There was one moment, scanning the crowd, where I noticed that people were no longer looking directly at the creature. All eyes pressed against viewfinders, downcast upon the screens of iPhones, flipping through Wikipedia in attempts to identify. Police writing reports. Reporters turning away to make phone calls with fingers in their ears. Collectors hunting for more clues along the beach. Only two or three children, still rapt in attention, fixated upon the beast itself as though to a siren’s song. I felt an uneasy sense that every moment spent here was out of our control. We were flooding in too rapidly, summoning one another at an unsustainable rate. The distant crackle of a bullhorn dutifully ordered the crowd to disperse, but no one obeyed.

  A hand touched my shoulder and I jumped, turning to face the girl I had messaged. Her gaze drifted over my shoulder, pupils engorged with light. Her green fingernails slid slowly across parted lips and a gasp that was almost palpable. “Hi,” I said.

  The word “Jesus,” fell off her lips. I caught a glimpse of her neckline and cleavage and for a moment forgot why we were standing on the beach to begin with.

  “I guess the tide brought it in,” I said.

  “Thanks for texting me.”

  “You didn’t bring your camera.”

  “I have my phone,” she said. “How long has it been here?”

  “They’re estimating three or four hours. The slime is still drying.”

  “Ew. I want to see its eyes.”

  A wave of Japanese tourists fresh off the cliff cut between us. Panic flashed across my friend’s face as she plunged back into the mob. Instinctively I reached for her, grabbing only the tips of her fingers, which wiggled frantically up my arm, clutching. I pulled her toward me. Our chests mashed together between the sway of people. I could feel her breath on my skin. She giggled nervously and looked around, but didn’t let go of my hand. “Come on,” I said.

  By now it had become an ordeal to move among the crowd. The beach was packed. I glanced back to the cliff and saw it lined with those unwilling or unable to come closer. I heard the distant whir of helicopter blades. More arrived every minute, drawn in by texts, by tweets, by facebook posts, flickr images, reddit upvotes, google news headlines, radio broadcasts, word of mouth, and the old fashioned allure of seeing a mob on the horizon. Thick like rats in a gutter, shoulder-to-shoulder, no one able to move without displacing two others. The girl and I groped through the membrane of bodies to where a film crew was setting up to take sweeping, cinematic footage of the roof of the creature�
��s mouth.

  The girl crouched down to examine its eyes, then, tightening her grip on my hand, brought us in closer. Soon there would be nowhere to go but past its gristle lips or into the sea. I experienced sudden futility. Trapped, pinned, hopelessly avowed to a fate I could not yet fully understand. I told myself to resist, but I could not. Even as she yanked my fingers I felt another terrible pull, a dragging and sinking sensation, and I feared we were at the center of ceaseless time. I imagined each of us torn to pieces by an infinitely receding whirlpool of teeth and claws. I looked down to see that the dragging feeling came from a small wave washing past my legs, and the sinking was the sand it stripped out from under my feet.

  New waves burst forth, splashing over my knees. Several people shrieked and jumped back from the sudden cold. My girl leapt upright and splashed around in surprise.

  “Waves just sneak up and grab you, huh?” she laughed it off. Backwater filled the dead jaws of the creature before us, and then drained away with the shifting sand.

  Tectonic plates seem to crack. I stay rooted while the earth moves.

  “What was that?”

  “A quake?”

  “Come on, everyone get back.”

  But it’s too late. The surf returns higher than before, thrusting into my chest. Cold spray slaps my face with the taste of salt. We are packed like sardines on the shelf, and now something else is rising out of the sea. At first it’s like a great ship cresting the horizon, then a jungle island breaking the surface of the deep. I hear screams and I understand—it is all suddenly so clear.

  Like tossing bread to the gulls, or fish guts to sea lions. The lure of curious meat. What had he hoped to snare? Certainly not these miniscule morsels.

  Out at the shallows’ edge the crown of his head bursts forth, a behemoth compared to which our previous curiosity was merely a snail. Its emergence displaces the depths of the cove, filling the beach with swells that lift me off my feet. Instinctively I fling my cell phone into the sea, like a fox trying to shake the tag pinned to its ear.