Four of the beings then went into the sea, so that they were submerged, and came out again bearing an iron chest. They placed it in the receding surf, and threw it open. A resplendence of gold was revealed to all.
Their leader rumbled and burped its speech.
“Gold!” said their translator.
“Dominion,” said another of the twenty-one, a Dutchman. “Speed our ships across the world, let us claw back land from the sea.”
At this, the lead of Neptune’s throng croaked and whistled at length.
“English ships, Hollander ships, all pass safe, all over worldsea,” said the Frisian. “This shallow sea your land, if you take it. But there must be a reckoning paid. My lord demands more flesh. Flesh of the English, German and Dutch. Flesh for his sport, flesh for our children to grow within.”
“More flesh shall be procured,” said another Englishman. And then I knew that voice, oh but I did not.
The chief piscean bowed, a mockery of courtliness, and the creatures returned to the water. As they went, several of the islanders shuddered horridly, and departed after them into the surf, shedding clothes and human form it seemed as they went into the waves, apprenticed to new and awful masters. Was this the trade? A tithe of flesh like Athens’ pay to Crete for Minos’ dread son? Vessels for the creature’s seed to grow and live, before taking to the water? Spies of Neptune upon the shores of the Low Countries, and perchance too soon, of England?
The company dispersed, the men to their ship and the islanders down the coast. Baines said nothing of me; doubtless he was afraid of my pistol, for he knew I had the will to use it. When I dared come down, he was gone with all the rest. Why Baines did not reveal me immediately he was beyond the range of my shot, I know not. He means me ill, I am sure of it. I am drawn into his intrigue.
At the bottom of the stairs waited an islander so hideous I thought one of the mer-men had remained. I dispatched him from behind with a thrust to the neck. I rolled him over with my foot and beheld his face. Truly, this was the offspring of a devil, a creature born of woman but sired by one of the monsters from the sea. A hag-seed.
Up the stairs from the crypt, candlelight shone. I heard the weeping of the youths, but the gate was locked fast, and I could do nothing to aid them. Regret clawing at my innards, I ran.
As I made haste to the far side of the island and drew nigh to the further shore, a cry went up, and shortly torches dotted all the dunes. Baines, perhaps, or the body of the mixed man had been discovered. A further possibility was the boatman, who sharing some talk with his fellows had divined the truth. Howsoever it came to be, I was pursued. I ran like a hart with hounds behind, coming once more to the place where the boatman had brought us. A guard had been set about the little boats on the shore, six of the islanders, many ugly and afflicted with the squamous features of the dwellers in the deeps, waited my arrival. I came out of the dark into their torchlight, and had the advantage, for they were night-blind and they were plain for me to see. Two I ran through before a shout might pass their misshapen lips. The rest, though four, were no match for an armed man, and I finished them all without need of the pistol. Precious time I spent in the slaying. Already more came out of the isle’s interior, flaring torches in their hands. I slashed the boat’s painter and pushed out into the water, now after the falling of the tide some yards away. As I reached the sea, so the islanders reached the beach, shambling after me. It was to my fortune they kept no dogs.
I scrambled aboard, putting all my strength to the oars. They came at me, splashing into the water, the most fishlike hurling themselves headlong into my wake, but though they swam well, they could not catch a man rowing so hard as I. They ceased their chase and instead they stood in long line and let out a shrieking, savage call.
The events of the night were not done, not yet. I rowed hard, the shore of the mainland so desperately far. Things surged through the waves, and came at the boat. They knocked me hard, lifting the side of the craft and slopping water at me, and I feared I would sink. I could row, but these were the masters of the ocean, Neptune’s deadly warriors. I put up the oars, though it seems foolhardy now, and watched them, and brought out my gun. There I waited in stillness. A lamp flash of eyes rising drew my gaze. I took aim, waited so that the water would not stop the shot, and when the head broke streaming through the surface, I discharged the pistol, slaying the piscean with a ball to the brain. At this the islanders let out horrible wails, though we were far away, and set up a great commotion, and the other shapes receded. More fool them, for I had time once again to recharge the pistol.
The next time I fired I did so too early, and the water broke the impetus of my shot, but I inflicted some hurt, for the second thrashed the water into spume, and sped off. That was enough. I had shown my teeth, and the dwellers in the sea retreated. I took up my oars again. The current speeded my efforts toward the land, and I was nearly free.
I did not step out of that boat until wood kissed sand and I could leap onto the beach without a drop of saltwater touching my boots. Then I was away as quick as I might toward the lights of Zoutkamp and its garrison of State’s Men. Let the deep ones try to take me there, I thought.
I returned to Flushing via land.
Marlowe finished his story along with his wine. Skeres and Poley looked aghast.
“Have you lost your mind?” said Skeres. “Frizer lures us here with promise of revelation, and you tell us this bogey-tale?”
“I cannot credit such a story,” said Poley, all mirth gone.
“Not at all.”
“You might not, and Skeres won’t,” said Marlowe, “but there is one here who knows full well of my report’s sincerity, is there not, Ingram?”
“Be careful whom you accuse, lest you be accused yourself.”
“Well then, we are done,” said Marlowe, locking eyes with Frizer. “I think I shall keep the identity of the man whose voice I knew so well to myself, it may yet prove useful to me.”
“Not all things are as they seem,” said Frizer.
“Yet some most assuredly are,” said Marlowe. “I shall depart now to await my Lord Burghley’s next command. You shall hear from me anon.”
Frizer gripped at Marlowe’s arm, displaying a hand adorned by a large ring of strange design, made of greenish gold.
“Wait! We must pay the reckoning first,” said Frizer.
“Aye. Such gold as that must be accounted for in blood,” said Marlowe, and grabbed for Frizer’s knife.
On 30th May, 1593, the spy and playwright Christopher Marlowe was killed in mysterious circumstances involving Poley, Frizer and Skeres — three known government agents — shortly after being arrested by the Privy Council and interviewed at a meeting of which no record was kept.
Though his death allegedly came about after an argument over the bill for the feast, it is possible that Marlowe was assassinated on the orders of the government. Numerous theories abound as to why, but one is that he was about to expose members of the Privy Council as atheists.
Richard Baines was hanged in 1594.
Ingram Frizer, who struck Marlowe dead, was cleared of murder by reason of self-defence. He became a church warden, and lived a life of respectability. He died in 1627.
The Green-Ey’d Monster
Danie Ware
A coil of pain and eyes that seethe with green
As loyal foe brings clever words to flaunt
And horror rises where there was no grief foreseen,
A heart now mock’d by jealous jab and taunt.
Beneath the surface curls a roil of hate
And darkness flares, a fury without name;
It rages beyond reason, fact or fate,
Is blinded to the truth, sees only blame.
And Desdemona cries with her denial,
But cries ignored, her protests lost unheard,
Love’s innocence rejected and reviled
And breath all stops, death caught on final word.
The tale end
s in truth stark in cold air.
The gods have drunk their fill, and do not care.
Act Three
“As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods.
They kill us for their sport.”
King Lear, Act IV, Scene I.
Exit, pursued by…?
James Lovegrove
I will tell you this, scribe: it is not as I have always said it was.
For nigh on twenty years now, whenever anyone asks me how I came by my injury, I have lied. I have rigorously maintained that the stiffness in my shoulder, the jagged scars which extend from it halfway up my neck, the chunks of missing meat, are all the gruesome handiwork of a bear. The culprit was no more uncommon a creature than that. A roaming black bear pursued me, caught me up in its claws, and tore a pound of flesh from my body with its ravening teeth.
No one queries this reply. Bears are a familiar enough sight in these parts. Bohemia’s forests are riddled with them. Few who dwell in the country’s rural areas can say they have not encountered one at some point in their lives. Most have lived to tell the tale, although some have not been so lucky.
At any rate, with this explanation I have been able to deflect such slings and arrows of curiosity as are loosed at me. Upon hearing it people will offer sympathy, perhaps, or wince as they contemplate the agonies I suffered. I will in turn dismiss their coos and blandishments. “Let us not make a fuss about it,” I will say, sounding brave. “It is much ado about nothing.”
Now, at last, as I lie upon what must surely be my deathbed, I wish to confess the truth. For the first and final time in my life since the terrible events of that night on the storm-tossed southern shore of this land, I, Lord Antigonus, formerly a noble of Sicilia and once close associate of and trusted advisor to her monarch King Leontes, hereby state for the record that I was not attacked by any bear.
No, it was no bear.
It was something stranger and much worse.
This will sound like a tale for a winter’s eve, the sort of ghoulish, phantasmagorical story that should be recounted by a bard beside a roaring hearth to an audience whose faces are illuminated by the flickering firelight and also carry the inner glow that derives from a tankard or two of good sack. It may, contrarily, seem like some feverish dream of the kind that visits us on a hot, sweltering midsummer night.
It is, I assure you, scribe, neither. Everything I am about to say to you is gospel. Do not judge as you write it down. Do not attempt to assess its reliability as your quill traverses the paper. Merely copy verbatim what I say, and save your incredulity, if such is the sentiment I am to engender in you, for after. I bid you enshrine these words measure for measure, as though they are my last testament, my Will. Thus shall you earn the purse of coins I have promised you.
It began with a storm.
I do not mean a meteorological tempest, although there was one of those too, later on.
I mean a mental storm, and it afflicted King Leontes, who got the notion into his head that his queen, his beloved, fragrant Hermione, had been unfaithful. Worse, she was dallying behind his back with King Polixenes of Bohemia, who was not simply Leontes’s lifelong friend but like unto a brother to him. Worse still, said dalliance had resulted in the conception of an as yet unborn child, a sibling to young Prince Mamillius.
What provoked Leontes into this mania of misconstruction, I cannot say. It may have been the eating of some improperly cooked food, or a temporary inflammation of the brain. Note that I am trying to attribute it to a physiological cause, but I fear that it was actually a madness with an emotional basis, arising from some deep-rooted insecurity – a defect in his personality which had long lain buried but rested unquiet in its grave until, needing only the right prompting, it came squirming to the surface.
Hermione could not have been more innocent of the charges Leontes levied at her, and likewise Polixenes of the calumnies Leontes uttered against him. Great affection indeed was there between the queen and Polixenes, as was only meet and proper. She regarded him as any wife ought her husband’s bosom friend, with the purest love and respect. Only in Leontes’s mind was there aught other to the relationship than that. He alone supposed that the seed swelling in Hermione’s womb was any man else’s but his.
I know this beyond a shadow of a doubt because I had become well-acquainted with Queen Hermione through my years of service at the royal court and knew her character; but also, a surer test, because my then wife, my lovely Paulina, was her confidante and intimate companion. Paulina, if anyone, would have been aware had Hermione betrayed her marriage vows. She insisted to me that she had not. Therefore, as doting, trusting spouse to that most intelligent and insightful of females, I could be in no doubt that this was so.
How dreadful it was to see Leontes belittle and spurn his queen and make that merry wife of his so wretched. How saddening to watch the king leer and sneer at a woman for whom he had previously had only looks of adoration. I sought to guide him away from his unwarranted jealousy and spite, as did my fellow lords-in-waiting, yet our voices of reason fell on deaf ears. Hermione, though great with child and near term, was consigned to prison. Polixenes fled Sicilia, fearing with justification an attempt on his life by Leontes. Mamillius – sensitive, lisping little Mamillius – perished of a seizure, which was doubtless brought on by anxiety over his mother’s plight. Then, to compound the misery, came the report that Hermione herself had died, having succumbed to the bloody throes of labour, for all the ministrations of the midwife Lady Margery. Such an outcome is, alas, all too often the case for a woman during childbirth, but the privations of imprisonment cannot have helped, nor the intolerable strain Hermione was under owing to her husband’s cruelties.
Where once life in the royal palace had afforded all the laughter and gaiety of a comedy, now it was riven with tragedy. But that is not the real problem with this history of mine.
For I, loyal Antigonus, was charged with a task such as no man should be entrusted to perform. I, at my king’s express edict, was to take the babe whom Hermione had lately brought into the world, at the cost of her own life, and bear it to a “remote and desert place”. There I was to abandon it in the wild and let Mother Nature, as unforgiving as she is giving, determine its fate. I was threatened with death were I to refuse to obey this abhorrent order, and I would fain have faced the executioner’s axe than do as the king demanded. However, the penalty extended to my Paulina as well, and I could not in all conscience imperil her life. I was forced to choose between my wife and the newborn, which Leontes reckoned a bastard, and I chose the latter. I defy any man to say he would have done differently.
Such a beautiful little girl she was, scribe, that babe. Every inch the image of her mother, but also showing the dignity of bearing that typified her father, at least until his antic fit overtook him and turned him spiteful and cold. As I voyaged from Sicilia by sea with the infant, I nursed and cared for her and grew entranced by her eyes, which seemed wise beyond their years, and by her sweet little smile. I dandled her and fed her and let her grasp my finger with her tiny hand, and I grew as fond of her during those days of travel as I was of any of my own three daughters.
Our ship rounded the heel of Italy and sailed northward up the country’s eastern flank, and by the time we moored at Venice to buy supplies from merchants there, I could almost not bear the prospect of being parted from the girl. It was agony to think that I must leave her in some uninhabited spot and hope against hope that she would somehow survive. As we set forth from Venice and headed east along the curve of coastline adjoining Italy to Greece, I spied many a desolate stretch of land where I might fulfil King Leontes’s command. Yet I kept postponing the evil hour. The captain would ask me when he should give the order to put in and weigh anchor, and I would say repeatedly, “Tomorrow. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.”
In the end I could not delay any longer. We had arrived at Bohemia – and to those who claim the country has no coastline, I say that geography is malleab
le and borders shift. Believe me, it had a coast back then; perhaps it does not now. There seemed a kind of symmetry in depositing the child there, at any rate, for though she had not been sired by Bohemia’s ruler King Polixenes, nonetheless she had been accused of it and been born into the turmoil created by Leontes’s calamitous suspicions about his erstwhile friend.
Further informing my decision was the fact that I had a dream – although it was more like a nightmare – about the babe’s dear departed mother. The shade of Queen Hermione visited me in my cabin and instructed me to discharge my onerous duty at the next suitable location. Moreover she told me to name the child Perdita, meaning “She Who is Lost”, and foretold that never again would I see my Paulina, a punishment by the Fates for the wicked deed that I was being forced to commit.
Dreams like that, so vivid that they seem more akin to reality, are not to be ignored. They have the same power of augury as divine oracles, such as the one that was delivered to Leontes immediately prior to Mamillius’s death, a message from the shrine of Apollo himself at Delphos, which the king stubbornly rejected even though it exonerated Hermione.
At first light the ship hove to at the mouth of a rocky natural harbour and launched its boat, with a mariner aboard, myself, and little swaddled Perdita.
Now we come to the point where my account stops being a comedy of errors and darkens into a litany of terrors.
Kindly pour me some water, would you, scribe? I am desirous of taking a sip and moistening my throat. Ah! The hurting is upon me again. I must wait. It will pass. It will pass. There.
A canker festers within me, you see. I am no stranger to pain. My shoulder alone is testimony to that. The wound may have healed but its ache has been my constant companion since its infliction. That pain, though, is naught compared with the pain of my disease, which waxes and wanes but never fully fades. The gnawing in my innards has worsened steadily in the months gone by, like a hunger that can never be quenched. At the very first I reckoned it no more than the colic. Within a fortnight, as no relief came and no physic seemed to ease the discomfort, I realised that I was experiencing the onset of mortality. There would be no surcease. Something was growing in my belly that would, as Perdita did Hermione, end my days. I was, in a sense, giving birth to death.
Shakespeare Vs Cthulhu Page 23