Shakespeare Vs Cthulhu

by Jonathan Green

  As darkness entirely engulfed the town, I expected that we would all settle down to rest. However, there was a marked tension in the air. Might it have some connection with the imminent arrival of visitors?

  I expressed this enquiry to the hag as best I could. Her answer was a single word, uttered with a kind of dark, deep-rooted dread, more shuddered than said.

  “Y’ha-nyarthlun.”

  Perplexity must have been writ large upon my face, for she repeated the word again, and then again, making it insistent by repetition.

  “Is that a name?” I said. “The name of a location, or perhaps a person?”

  After I had offered much gesticulation to illustrate my query, the hag nodded. I was right. Y’ha-nyarthlun was indeed a location, but also the name of the race who inhabited it.

  What the hag told me next, however, made little sense. For Y’ha-nyarthlun, by her account, lay due south, somewhere out in the ocean, not too many leagues thence. But it was not an island. It was a city. Moreover, unless I sorely mistook her, Y’ha-nyarthlun did not stand proud above the waves but rather beneath them.

  My scepticism was great. A submarine city? But what sort of beings could dwell in such a place? What form of life could a seabed city house?

  It was ridiculous. The hag was in the grip of some superstitious fantasy. People from the depths, coming to this town. The very idea of it! I did not believe then, as I do most assuredly now, that there was more to heaven and earth than was dreamt of in my philosophy. I used to be a rational man until experience taught me to be otherwise.

  The hag sensed my doubt and dismissed it with a kind of grim fatalism, as if she knew I would soon be disabused of it. She damped down the cooking fire, and then, in hazy darkness, we sat and waited. Perdita remained cuddled in the daughter’s arms. This impromptu wet-nurse seemed pleased to have a babe to care for, even if it was not her own. Her gaze was fixed on Perdita and seemed both melancholy and resolute, that of a grieving mother finding temporary solace in a substitute child.

  I was wrong about that, as I had been about so many other things.

  The night wore on. The atmosphere in the hovel grew yet more febrile, yet more freighted with dire anticipation. I myself had a hankering to see these people from Y’ha-nyarthlun, whom allegedly the storm had prompted to leave home, swim up from the deeps and grace this town with their presence. They seemed to me the stuff of travellers’ tales, like the wild reports from far-off lands of anthropophagi and men whose heads grow beneath their shoulders. I surmised that they might in truth be merely some seafaring tribe who donned outlandish guise to make themselves appear monstrous and otherworldly, as though they genuinely resided in lodgings at full fathom five. The aim of this practice was to strike fear into the hearts of those whom they called upon when they made landfall. Thus might they intimidate locals into according them veneration and paying them tribute.

  I was beginning to drowse off when a whisper of distant voices caught my ear. At once the hag and her daughter both stiffened. It sounded like chanting, and the language used was identical to that spoken by the townspeople, full of stops and starts and thick syllables and unnatural growls. But it was not a chant such as one might hear a priest employ at the altar when offering libation or sacrifice to the gods. It was, rather, in the nature of an invitation. Hypnotically it echoed through the town’s meandering streets, like a summons. The visitors from Y’ha-nyarthlun – for that could only be from whom the voices originated – were calling in lulling, beguiling unison. “Come forth” was unmistakably the tenor of their words. “Come forth and show yourselves.”

  Within the hovel I could see only the glint of wide, terrified eyes. The hag’s daughter was paying attention to Perdita no more. I could feel both women trembling, the very air vibrating with their fear. The same sentiment conveyed itself to my limbs too.

  Now, alongside the chanting, was audible the shuffle of footfalls. These were wet and sloshing, such as of creatures who found it a challenge to walk upright on land. As the sound grew louder, so did my apprehension of its unnaturalness. Nothing human, surely, could walk with such a moist and slovenly traipse.

  I dreaded to see what sort of being was the source of it. Yet I yearned to as well. Does that make sense to you, scribe? I was seized by an awful curiosity. Against the hag’s hissed imploration not to, I raised my head to the window aperture. I peered out.

  Would that I had not.

  They were furred, those things from Y’ha-nyarthlun. They had coats sleek like otters’. They had bodies much like men’s, but for hands and feet they had the clawed flippers of seals. They slouched as they moved, shoulders bent, legs slow and straining, as though their own weight was a burden to them. There were gills in their necks, gaping as they sucked in air, and their mouths had a plump-lipped, froglike cast. As for their eyes…

  Oh, their eyes were the blackest orbs imaginable. Bereft of emotion or life or anything that one looks for in a human’s eyes. Spheres of pure void.

  I was able to distinguish their features so clearly thanks to strange lights which several of them carried – stringy seaweed sacks filled with soft egg-shaped baubles which exuded a wan greenish glow. These illuminated the things from Y’ha-nyarthlun with an eldritch lambency as they shambled past the hovel. The hue and pallor of the light made the creatures even more ghastly-looking than they already were.

  As I beheld that sinister parade of inhuman sea-bred beasts, I found myself praying to the gods, in whom I had but the slimmest of belief. I entreated them to protect Perdita and me from the creatures. I begged Zeus and his kin to preserve us with all their divine might and see to it than no harm befell us. Faith comes to all men in times of extremity, scribe, does it not?

  The gods listened, or so I thought. The sea beasts, a dozen of them all told, passed the hovel by. Still they intoned their chant, but none in the town heeded it. Nobody left his hovel to face the Y’ha-nyarthlunians and receive whatever grim depravity was theirs to bestow.

  I sank back from the window, feeling bloodless and wrung-out. My gaze met the hag’s, who simply nodded with solemn wisdom, as one might to another person who has just been initiated into an unwelcome mystery.

  It was then that I noticed that her daughter was absent.

  So was Perdita.

  Neither the hag nor I had marked the daughter leaving. She must have slipped out of the hovel as the things from Y’ha-nyarthlun were approaching, Perdita still snug and fast asleep in her arms.

  The hag was appalled by this turn of events, albeit nowhere near as greatly as I. She gnashed her teeth in anger and distress. Her daughter had betrayed her trust, it would seem. She would never have given her Perdita to look after had she known the daughter might then abscond.

  She hurried from the house, I at her heels.

  The procession of Y’ha-nyarthlunians had reached that carved pillar at the landward end of the gully. There they had gathered in a small knot, and as the hag and I hastened towards them I perceived that the hag’s daughter was the nucleus of their assembly. To my disgust and utter dismay I saw her hold up Perdita before them. She was like a dignitary offering a bribe to a group of ambassadors, currying their favour. I must assume – although I do not know it for sure – that the Y’ha-nyarthlunians had taken her own child on their last visit to the town. The way she was surrendering Perdita to them now, she seemed forlornly to be hoping that they would take this child in the other’s stead and return her offspring to her. This was all some urgent ploy to recoup that which she had previously conferred, willingly or not, on the creatures.

  I gave vent to a roar of purest rage and anguish. I quickened my pace to a run and launched into the Y’ha-nyarthlunians like a ball into ninepins. The element of surprise lent me the advantage. I knocked brine-damp bodies aside and wrested Perdita from the daughter’s hands.

  The jostling awoke Perdita and she began to keen, but that was the least of my concerns. For we were right in the thick of the creatures, and their balefu
l black eyes were staring with fixity at the babe. At last I could glimpse the minds behind those glassy orbs, and they were greedy and implacable and abominable. Disturbed from their aquatic routine by the churning of the storm, the Y’ha-nyarthlunians had roused themselves to intrude on the isolated, beleaguered little town and take what they felt was theirs by right: a human life. Whatever tribulation the storm caused them in Y’ha-nyarthlun, this was the horrid reward they habitually granted themselves in exchange, time after time.

  They were all around me. The hag remained outside their circle, too fearful of them to come to my aid. The daughter was shrieking in maenad-like hysteria. I could see no way out of this predicament. The Y’ha-nyarthlunians closed in. Perdita was doomed, and so was I.

  Unless…

  I was old even then, grey-haired and spindly-limbed, with but a modicum of the strength I had known in my youth. Yet a forcefulness – a liveliness – entered me, one born of the desire to protect Perdita at all costs.

  I thrust her securely into the front of my raiment, so as to free up both my hands. Then I turned and climbed.

  The pillar bore so many carvings in its surface that it afforded numerous handholds and footholds. It was sheer but scalable. It was thin for its height, too, scarcely six feet in circumference. I had no notion of what I would do once I gained its summit. All I could think about was getting away from the Y’ha-nyarthlunians. They, with their flippered extremities, surely could not follow where I was going.

  As I ascended I was vaguely conscious of the nature of the carvings which were giving me assistance. They were images of entities that even now I shudder to recall. Among them there were figures that were humanlike but with too many limbs, too many mouths, too many eyes. There were creatures that had no analogy to any on this earth, while certain others seemed a gallimaufry of animals of differing species, part amphibian, part reptile, part mammal. The rest were mere shapes, geometrical patterns such as even wise Euclid could not have imagined, yet they evidently represented beings who possessed sentience, for the sculptor – whoever that mad genius had been – had rendered them with the same vibrant verisimilitude as the other, more obviously life-imbued likenesses. Betwixt and between all these were arrayed the forms of men, far smaller in stature, who either cringed in obeisance to the monsters or permitted themselves to be eviscerated and consumed by them.

  Sooner than I might have thought possible, I was atop the pillar. I thought myself safe, at least for the time being, but when I looked down I realised that I had underestimated the Y’ha-nyarthlunians. Several of them had elected to give chase after all. They clambered clumsily, but they were coming up nonetheless.

  I looked around me, frantic. The end of the gully was not far. Perched on that narrow pinnacle I was almost level with the land surrounding the town. I could have sprung from the pillar and grasped the lip of the gully wall and hauled myself over, were it not for the fact that the gap was some twenty paces, much too far to cover in a leap from a standing start.

  Perdita was grizzling at my breast, terrified. I contemplated hurling myself from the pillar’s apex to the ground, ending it all for both of us. Even death seemed preferable to winding up in the Y’ha-nyarthlunians’ clutches.

  Ever higher the creatures inched towards us, and I became aware that the pillar was shaking. Though wrought of solid stone, it was fragile in its slenderness. It had never been intended to support additional weight. With myself, Perdita and now several of those sleek-pelted monstrosities at its summit, the pillar was top-heavy and becoming unbalanced.

  I sensed, with gut-wrenching inevitability, what was about to happen.

  Sure enough, it did.

  The pillar began to topple. The Y’ha-nyarthlunian nearest me was within reach of my foot, and I saw its eyes register a kind of dull, panicked surprise as the column of stone tilted creakily over.

  Huge cracking noises emanating from its base, the pillar fell with a sweeping acceleration towards the gully wall.

  More through instinct than calculation, I jumped, using the pillar’s plummet to lend me momentum.

  Somehow I managed to catch onto the gully’s wall without crushing Perdita between me and it. I hung on for dear life as beneath us the pillar collided with the wall and broke into a score of shear-edged chunks. Y’ha-nyarthlunians tumbled from it, flailing, shrieking. One of them alone had aped my example and abandoned its purchase on the pillar before it struck. The creature now clung to the gully’s wall too, on a tiny ledge some ten feet below. The rest were dashed to the ground amid the rubble of the pillar.

  I scrambled up over the lip of the wall and threw myself prostrate on the horizontal terrain beyond, hunched over Perdita. I was panting and gasping and whimpering all at once, a wretch who was pathetically grateful to have survived when death had seemed a near certainty.

  When at last I raised my head, I saw the silhouette of a forest in the far distance, a touch of verdure in an otherwise unpromisingly bleak and bare landscape of blasted heath. It seemed to offer sanctuary, and I made for it, limping, weeping, with poor Perdita wailing every step of the way.

  Amid the trees I became disorientated and lost. I kept walking simply so as to put distance between us and that accursed gully and the nightmare we had endured there. In time, I spied the glitter of torchlight moving between the trunks. I halted and hallooed. The torch came to a standstill. I had been heard. Help was surely at hand.

  In relief I set down Perdita and also the scroll and fardel, which had contrived to stay on my person throughout the alarums and excursions of the night. I straightened up – and at that moment something pounced on me from behind.

  It was the Y’ha-nyarthlunian who had also leapt from the pillar. The creature had hoisted itself up from the gully and been stalking me ever since, I all unknowing, too sunk in confusion and disarray to sense it shadowing me.

  It had teeth.

  Its great thick-lipped maw resembled a frog’s in every respect save that it contained rows of fangs as sharp as needles. These it sank into my shoulder, eliciting exquisite agony. I could not help but scream. I wrenched myself away and felt a tearing and rending of flesh – my flesh. I collapsed to all fours, and my hand happened upon a fallen branch, thick as my own wrist. With next to no thought I snatched it up as a weapon and swung it round. It caught the Y’ha-nyarthlunian a smart blow across the face. A hit, a very palpable hit. I struck again. The creature wheezed in distress and emitted a string of words which I took to be invective. A third blow to its crown stunned it so that it sank to its knees. A fourth, delivered with the last of my ebbing strength, smashed open its skull and robbed those eyes of their dim, dark intelligence. The Y’ha-nyarthlunian keeled over, dead.

  I, too, keeled over. Blood poured down my back. My senses dimmed.

  I could hear Perdita crying and reckoned that it would be the last sound ever to reach my ears.

  Mayhap you know, scribe, of Perdita. You know how a girl of that name, beautiful and beloved by all, used to live in a village not far from here, raised by a shepherd and his son. You know how that shepherd enjoyed a richer estate than is habitually due one of his humble station. You may well have seen him at fairs, decked out in modest finery, pompous but well-meaning.

  You know too, I imagine, that Perdita is now betrothed to Bohemia’s Prince Florizel and resides in the country of her birth, Sicilia. There, she is reconciled with her father and has been reunited with her mother, the good queen Hermione, whose death proved to have been a mere subterfuge concocted with her favourite lady-in-waiting Paulina so as to keep her safe from King Leontes until such time as the balance of his mind was restored to him. Sixteen years it took, but for them all there has been a happy ending.

  Likewise for me, after a fashion. I was found and presumed dead by the shepherd and his clownish son. Those rude mechanicals left me where I was but took Perdita, along with the scroll and fardel, and returned the several miles to their home. The body of the Y’ha-nyarthlunian they did not discover.
It lay where it had fallen, concealed in undergrowth nearby. They should count themselves lucky that it was veiled from their view thus. Their simple minds might not have survived the shock.

  When I came round some while later, near dead from blood loss, I managed to stagger to a nearby hamlet, where I was taken in by a kindly widow who staunched my wound and brought me back from the brink of death. Eleven whole days it was before I recovered. Only on the twelfth night did I regain my senses, and even after that I was for some goodly while a gibbering, incoherent mess.

  I stayed with the widow for months thereafter, for the simple reason that I was too frail to be moved anywhere else. I ought to have tried to return to Sicilia and my dear Paulina when I was well enough, but the memory of my dream of Hermione, in all its prophetic gravity, prevented me. When I learned from a passing vagabond named Autolycus that a shepherd and his son had adopted Perdita as their own and were bringing her up together, that settled it. My duty was to ensure that she came to no harm. How could I go back to Sicilia and admit to mad Leontes that I had disobeyed his command and his daughter yet lived? Paulina and I would both be beheaded.

  The widow’s home became mine. She and I developed an understanding. She has no idea to this day who I used to be. She knows me not as a nobleman in self-imposed exile but just the poor, near-dead shipwrecked Sicilian whom she rescued and nursed back to health. I am content to leave it that way.

  And now my narrative – my confession – is done. I have told this tale to shrive myself of guilt and shame, as I face my final journey, the trip to Dis’s realm which all men must sooner or later make. I trust that Hades shall not punish me too harshly for the wrongs I have committed. The torments of Tartarus, anyway, hold no fear for me. When one has encountered the horror that is the Y’ha-nyarthlunian race, all else pales into insignificance beside.