by Joshi, S. T
The damnable ghoul slyly rocked the boat as I tried to board, nearly swamping us and conveniently causing Augustus to lose his oars.
We beat our way upriver with a forceful tempo, but we saw no landmarks to gauge our progress—only the walls of the endless cavern, broken every so often by branching tunnels from which legions of staring eyes observed our passage. Many were not half so pleasant to regard as our ghoulish guide, but none came out to menace or molest us, though to overturn our boat and drag us beneath the black water would have been no great chore.
All the while, our uncouth oarsman chortled and chuckled to himself, as if he were not our captive, but quite the reverse. Augustus retreated into his own morbid fancies, and I was too overtaxed in trying to match the ghoul’s effortless strokes to try to engage my friend in a debate.
Presently, the stagnant air gave way to a clammy Stygian breeze that made me shiver in my sodden clothes. We were harried by an unseen, flapping thing that circled us on vast, featherless wings and nearly capsized by something else that leapt out of the water to seize the flyer in its jaws.
The sluggish current subsided, and the roof and walls of the tunnel retreated into the mottled darkness, leaving us rowing on the face of a sunless sea.
The light from my lantern picked out monolithic shapes rearing up out of the murk; fluted spires and broken arches that I, clutching at any semblance of the familiar, mistook for the wreckage of gigantic sailing ships. And yet, these ruins were not hewn out of wood or stone, but petrified bone. This Sargasso of the underworld was a sink where the remains of land leviathans from before the Great Flood were swept away, out of the sight of God. Or perhaps they were the remains of fauna that still survived, even today, in the bowels of the earth….
Augustus was not to be drawn into a discussion on the prodigies all around us, however. Heedless of tipping the boat, he stood and threw my lantern overboard.
The absolute gloom enclosed us like a colossal fist, pressing the breath from me and exciting a jackal’s cry from our vulgar boatman.
Only by painful degrees did my eyes begin to adjust to the faint phosphorescence of the cavern’s distant roof. The sharpening of my straining senses gradually revealed a flickering glow emanating from an island of bones off our port bow. It was the light of a bonfire, though what must be burning, to produce such lurid violet flames, I couldn’t begin to guess.
Augustus bade us row for the island as fast as we could, and I needed little encouragement. I began to suspect that something paced us, down below, something large enough to make our little boat tremble like a leaf in a flood, merely by stirring the gelatinous black water with its unimaginable bulk.
When at last the island loomed up before us, I was perversely reminded of a church on a hill. But the hill was a new Golgotha, a jumble of bones larger than redwood trees; and perched atop the mound, seeming to sneer down at us with eyes of purple flame, was a single gargantuan skull.
Crocodilian in aspect, it dwarfed any dinosaur known to natural historians—indeed, the skull alone was larger than any church in Arkham. The unwholesome purple flames licked out of the gauntlet of teeth, limning a parade of bestial silhouettes engaged in some unholy celebration, within.
Augustus leapt out to drag our boat onto the slimy banks of the island and graciously helped me ashore. He offered me a jot of cognac from his flask, which I gratefully accepted. I was past exhaustion, deep in the trackless territory of shock, but I had to try to learn what Augustus hoped to gain by this insane descent, if not to make him see reason and turn back.
“We are in no danger, Lennox, unless you show fear. Like all dogs, the smell of it maddens them.” His sallow face leapt out of the dark as he ignited a taper and rekindled his pipe. “Think on the rewards we’ll reap! Half of what we dismiss as magic is but the fragmentary remnant of a bygone science, far superior to our own!
“The forbidden books are laced with truths disguised as myth and folklore, just as the alchemists hid their chemical discoveries in arcane symbolism. Some scholars have it that the first ancestor came down from the stars, while others claim that it lives still and sleeps in the earth’s core. It matters not where our original ancestor came from, or if it exists at all. The secret ways of all flesh, the keys to heal, to perfect and change at will the fundamental properties of the body! All this wisdom has been entrusted to the Ones Who Know, the ghoulish acolytes of Nyogtha! I have seen that power with my own eyes, Lennox! The wonders we could work …”
“And you expect them to just hand it over?” I snapped, once and for all at my wits’ end.
“Of course not. I am prepared to offer them exactly what they want.” I thought of poor Linus Keebler, and the canine hymnal howling that had trailed us into the bowels of the cursed Arkham earth, and I took up an oar from the boat, before I followed Augustus Odum up the twisting path to the court of the One Who Knows.
The violet flames and roiling clouds of noxious smoke cast the scene into lurid chiaroscuro relief, which made it difficult to tell form from phantom. The leaping shadows everywhere concealed packs of slavering ghouls creeping all about us, cutting off all hope of escape.
For his part, Augustus seemed quite at ease. He strutted down the sunken gallery of the colossal jaw to warm his hands at the bonfire. Draining his flask at a gulp, he roared out a guttural challenge in some tongue that might have been archaic French, mingled with some gutter Latin—the lingua franca, as Augustus had told me once, of graveyards.
The bonfire roared as if fed by gas jets. The fuel it feasted upon was a mound of fossils, split like kindling. The antediluvian marrow within them stained the flames and released a foul vapor that made the osseous walls seem to shimmer like serpent scales.
The growling horde gathered closer about us, until Augustus drew his revolver and fired a shot into the vaulted roof of the palate. They drew back then, but not in a panic.
Those fiendish yellow eyes smoldered as the pack took our measure and found us to be no real threat. Much larger and even less manlike in aspect than the denizens of the cemetery, they loped on all fours or upright with equal ease, but they also seemed far older, misshapen and battle-scarred. Notched and missing ears, split muzzles, and grievous scars were proudly displayed, but I saw no halt or lame, no blind or maimed, among these grizzled tomb-jackals.
From somewhere deep in the unbroken gloom of the cranial dome, where erosion or gnawing teeth had hollowed out the optical canals and maxillary walls to join it with the oral cavity, came a spine-tingling peal of unhinged, half-human laughter, plunging the gibbering tomb-hoard into silence.
The skirmish line of ghouls parted to reveal a mound of bones surmounted by a barbaric throne. Sprawling upon it with the blasphemous majesty of a Duke of Hell, wielding the bloody scepter of a woman’s half-devoured leg, was the one Augustus had come to see.
Augustus holstered his revolver and bowed deeply to the throne. “There are stories,” he murmured in an aside to me, “tall tales told by the same ignorant hill-people who slander my family … of a traveling witchfinder, a Puritan general of Cromwell’s army who came to Arkham uninvited, to rout the notorious nest of freethinkers and diabolists. The town fathers led him into the woods on the trail of a local witch, put out his eyes, and left him to die. Blind and raving, the Puritan wandered in the woods for days, killed the first game he found, and ate it gratefully, though it walked on two legs.”
Grinning, Augustus took my shoulder and continued the story, faking better than I could unconcern as the lord of the ghouls slouched down from its throne, stretched and lumbered toward us with its forepaws dragging across the offal-strewn floor. It easily doubled my height, even before it drew itself fully erect.
“Now, the witchfinder didn’t believe that he would become a wendigo if he lost his way in the woods or ate human flesh, but the Indian he ate certainly did. And so he discovered a secret of nature that men have shunned, and so lost out on preserving the genius of minds like Newton, Da Vinci, and von Juntz, sim
ply out of superstitious ignorance.
“But he squandered his wisdom. Legend had it that he stole back to Arkham and dug out a home beneath the village cemetery. He believed himself a judge of the dead, whom he devoured in their graves to uncover their sins. The town fathers never caught him, and somewhere in the depths of the earth he was touched by the Obsidian Wisdom of the Unbegotten Source, and he was changed—”
“It’s no secret,” I put in, “how to make a beast of a man. Strong drink and crazy ideas usually do the trick.” But trying to rein in his mania only threw kerosene on it.
“A beast! In every respect that counts, he is a god! They say he can raise the dead and mold flesh like clay. He guards all that a man could ever need to know, to heal the dying—and the dead. Think of the lives we will save, Lennox!”
I tried, I truly did, but I held only an oar as a god advanced to deal with us.
Plowing through the skulking retinue of lesser ghouls, the jackal-headed judge of the dead reared up on his hind legs and executed a deep bow of his own. Rawboned and powerfully built, yet his rugose hide was sparely clothed in mangy silver hair and deeply etched with hideous, half-healed scars. His arms were mismatched, one longer and more thickly muscled than the other, which was stunted, pink, and hairless. His deformed muzzle, wattled neck, and barrel chest were gnarled with clumps of leprous growths that seemed not so much symptoms of disease or decay, as of a rampant if misdirected vitality. The yawning black orbits of the creature’s massive skull were bereft of eyes, yet he seemed to sense us quite well enough. Branching black tendrils of quivering slime extruded from the empty holes to probe the air with the delicacy of a snake’s forked tongue.
Turning away from us, the ghoul lord snatched a tiny, shrouded bundle from one of his lackeys and rudely unwrapped it. An infant, freshly perished, its cherubic face blotchy with dull lesions from scarlet fever, rested in the crook of his stunted arm, as if it might awaken to this fathomless nightmare at any moment.
I thanked God that the helpless infant was only a cadaver, after all, like those we ourselves callously dissected. But the doomed infant awoke and gave a pitiful cry as the arch-fiend took it by its feet, bit off its head in his massive jaws, and ripped the wriggling body in two over his yawning muzzle.
Drunk on the innocent newborn life it had so savagely consumed, the ghoul roared a blood-curdling challenge, rounded on us, and charged.
I turned away to be sick, but Augustus stood fast and met the howling horror head-on. At the last moment, he plucked some tiny item out of his coat and dove between the monster’s legs.
I threw myself prone as the ghoul lurched past me. His slimy surrogate eyes withdrew into their sockets like a snail’s eyestalks as he toppled headlong at my feet with a whipped beast’s whine. Trembling with shock and relief, I could only silently admire what Augustus had done.
Armed with only a scalpel and the deft reflexes of a true surgeon, he had hacked the posterior femoral tendons of the monster’s right leg and the Achilles tendon of its left. The creature may have been a god, but he was still built like a man.
Augustus sauntered over and, with a leisurely peck of his scalpel, cut the ghoul’s spinal cord neatly at the base of the neck, between the sixth and seventh cervical vertebrae. He barked a litany of savage sounds that made the ghoulish court gasp, and then, in English, he addressed their fallen lord.
“General Jubal M’Naghten, I presume. I have come for the Obsidian Wisdom. I know you possessed it of old and have it still. I know the ways of your flesh and can give you pain such as only a witchfinder could deserve.
“Oh, and this,” he added, while he unbuttoned his waistcoat to reveal a bandolier of red paper cylinders, “is dynamite. Do you require a demonstration?”
He took a stick from his belt and made to toss it into the bonfire, but the ghouls formed a snarling, whining wall around the flames. They knew about dynamite.
But even Augustus Odum knew all too little about ghouls. For the crippled giant at his feet rose up and shook himself so the scalpel popped out of its spine, and his disabled canine legs flexed and stretched as if they’d only gone to sleep.
Augustus stood paralyzed on his feet as the ghoul seized his shoulders in massive, taloned paws. When the slavering horror finally spoke, his voice was a silken, syrupy purr. “Do ye want it so bad, laddie?”
Talons dug into flesh, ripping away Augustus’s sleeves and wringing gouts of blood from mangled muscle. He gasped with agony, but still managed to nod.
“Ye had only to ask …”
Augustus’s arms popped out of their sockets as if a bear had him, but a bear would not have taken such gleeful joy in torture, never mind the awful power to do what he did next.
From the ruins of one broken arm, great arterial vines sprang out and climbed the air, and blossoms like cherries popped out like spring and summer in the blink of an eye. But then, the fruit ripened to reveal a bumper crop of staring, terror-stricken eyes.
The other arm gagged and spat blood as it emitted high-pitched wheezing cries that grew horribly coherent. The awful wounds had sprouted teeth and tongues, and they were crying my name.
Incredibly, Augustus still lived, but the ghoul lord was ready to deliver an early judgment. He dropped Augustus and squatted over him, eyestalks curling back into his beetling brow. The giant gagged and unhinged his own jaw, like a snake preparing to swallow an egg. He gave me no more notice than one gives a fly when I broke the oar over his head.
Augustus opened his God-given mouth to speak, but no sound escaped his straining jaws. Instead, his tongue lolled out like a dog’s, stretching and swelling until it touched the bony cavern floor, where it clung with suction cups budding like soap bubbles on its glistening pink surface.
Like the questing tentacle of an octopus, his tongue thrust out for traction on the ground and tried to crawl away on millipede feet, when a torrent of white, scuttling pestilence spilled from his lips. Blind albino crickets and absurdly long-legged spiders scuttled away from the river delta of his sickness, but the lord of ghouls was far from done with my poor friend.
Something gurgled deep inside the monster’s belly, wracking his misbegotten form with seizures as it climbed up the esophagus and tumbled out of his gaping jaws, and into my friend’s captive mouth.
A black abomination, a squirming mess of aborted livestock and scrambled shellfish shapes, squirming with the unfulfilled promise of life everlasting. There were no stone tablets inscribed with medical miracles at the end of our insane quest. The Obsidian Wisdom was itself a living secret, which could only be conveyed with a kiss.
As well as he was able, Augustus opened wide. Lapping greedily with that obscenely overgrown tongue, he choked it down even as the endless deluge seemed to reach an unsustainable peak.
The ghoul lord seemed to shrivel and shrink as he vomited his abominable power into Augustus, who swelled like a leech, every internal cavity bulging and swelling as the black stuff filled him up and kept coming …
Only when I could recognize no scintilla of surviving humanity in Augustus Odum did I manage to take control of my fear and dare to approach my friend. The rash of mouths all over him might have been pleading for me to take his hand, but he had nothing like a hand left.
“There is no ancestor,” he moaned, “only one flesh, one organism of which we are only cells … and it is Ubbo-Sathla. All pain and disease are the sorrow of stolen flesh. With this knowledge, all things are possible … except forgetting …”
He reached out to me with a perfect human hand, though whether to be saved, or merely to demonstrate his newfound mastery, I know not. The hand he thrust out to take mine was perfectly formed, though it shifted and changed before my incredulous eyes.
Each finger on that hand split open at the tip and gave forth a miniature, equally perfect human hand; and from each digit on each of those tiny hands sprouted yet a smaller crop of beckoning hands, so that each digit was a forest of clutching flesh.
Shudd
ering at his endlessly bifurcated touch, I reached into the tatters of his overcoat and stripped him of certain necessities, cocking his revolver and trying to make the monsters all around me believe I had more than four bullets left.
I need not have bothered. They bowed before the new ghoul lord’s unspeakable embrace with the reverence of a coronation, and I slipped away unmolested.
I was not proud of leaving my friend to the tender mercies of those monsters, but I have since come to believe that my great failure lay in taking the revolver without using it on him while some fragile strain of mortal humanity yet remained, or in not attempting to ignite his bandolier of dynamite and blow the whole unholy tableau back to Hell.
I tumbled down the ossuary slope to the black and silent shore, and almost wept for joy to find our trusty Miskatonic U rowboat still beached there, and the ichor-spattered shackles empty on the forward bench.
I shoved the boat off and leapt into it. I sat in the bow and took up the only remaining set of oars, heedless of the slime I sat in. My last reserves were spent in a frenzy of rowing away from that damned island and trusting to providence to lead me back to the subterranean river.
When something leapt out of the water and into the boat, I could only kick at it. Our guide had returned and in a trice nimbly overpowered me, took away my revolver, and clapped his manacle onto my right wrist.
The ghoul lolled on the stern and used the spare oar as a rudder with one arm, while the other was clasped tight to his side. Clearly, he had cut off his own paw to get free. Now, he seemed to stare fixedly and covetously at me, and to lick his rubbery black lips—and his oozing stump—with his gray, barbed tongue. “Handsome hands,” I thought he said.
Too soon, we passed from the subterranean sea and rode the aimless current of the river. Far from relieved, I feared that when we reached our destination the ghoul would turn on me, and I tried to slack off to give myself time to hatch a plan; but whether I rowed or not abruptly became moot, for the current began to pick up speed.