The Madness of Cthulhu Anthology (Volume One): 1

by The Madness of Cthulhu (epub)

  “The poor man,” said Mr. Gladstone. “The poor empty-souled man. If only I could set him straight, somehow!”

  There it was again: the compassion, the pity. For Charlie, of all people! Fascinating. Fascinating.

  “I doubt that you’d succeed,” I told him. “He’s inherently a skeptical person. He’s never been anything else. And he’s a scientist, remember, a man who lives or dies by rational explanations. If it can’t be explained, then it probably isn’t real. He doesn’t have a smidgeon of belief in anything he can’t see and touch and measure.”

  “He is incapable of giving credence to the evidence of things not seen?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “‘The substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’ Book of Hebrews, 11:1. It’s St. Paul’s definition of faith.”

  “Ah.”

  “St. Paul was here, you know. In this town, in Ephesus, on a missionary journey. Gods that are fashioned by human hands are no gods at all, he told the populace. Whereupon a certain Demetrius, a silversmith who earned his living making statuettes of the many-breasted goddess whose images we saw today in the museum, called his colleagues together and said, If this man has his way, the temple of the great goddess Diana will be destroyed and we will lose our livelihoods. ‘And when they heard these sayings, they were full of wrath, and cried out, saying, “Great is Diana of the Ephesians.” And the whole city was filled with confusion.’ That’s the Book of Acts, 19:28. And there was such a huge uproar in town over the things that Paul was preaching that he found it prudent to depart very quickly for Macedonia.”

  “I see.”

  “But the temple of the goddess was destroyed anyway, eventually. And her statues were cast down and buried in the earth, and now are seen only in museums.”

  “And the people of Ephesus became Christians,” I said. “And Moslems after that, it would seem.”

  He looked startled. My gratuitous little dig had clearly stung him. But then he smiled.

  “I see that you are your brother’s brother,” he said.

  * * *

  I was up late reading, and thinking about Charlie, and staring at the moonlight shimmering on the bay. About half past eleven I hit the sack. Almost immediately my phone rang.

  Charlie. “Are you alone, bro?”

  “No,” I said. “As a matter of fact, Mr. Gladstone and I are hunkering down getting ready to commit abominations before the Lord.”

  “I thought maybe one of those horny Kraut ladies—”

  “Cut it out. I’m alone, Charlie. And pretty sleepy. What is it?”

  “Can you come down to the ruins? There’s something I want to show you.”

  “Right now?”

  “Now is a good time for this.”

  “I told you I was sleepy.”

  “It’s something big, Tim. I need to show it to somebody, and you’re the only person on this planet I even halfway trust.”

  “Something you discovered tonight?”

  “Get in your car and come on down. I’ll meet you by the Magnesian Gate. That’s the back entrance. Go past the museum and turn right at the crossroads in town.”

  “Charlie—”

  “Move your ass, bro. Please.”

  That “please,” from Charlie, was something very unusual. In twenty minutes I was at the gate. He was waiting there, swinging a huge flashlight. A tool-sack was slung over one shoulder. He looked wound up tight, as tense as I had ever seen him.

  Selecting a key from a chain that held at least thirty of them, he unlocked the gate and led me down a long straight avenue paved with worn blocks of stone. The moon was practically full and the ancient city was bathed in cool silvery light. He pointed out the buildings as we went by them: “The baths of Varius. The basilica. The necropolis. The temple of Isis.” He droned the names in a singsong tone as though this were just one more guided tour. We turned to the right, onto another street that I recognized as the main one, where earlier that day I had seen the gate of Hercules, the temple of Hadrian, the library. “Here we are. Back of the brothel and the latrine.”

  We scrambled uphill perhaps fifty yards through gnarled scrubby underbrush until we came to a padlocked metal grate set in the ground in an otherwise empty area. Charlie produced the proper key and pulled back the grate. His flashlight beam revealed a rough earthen-walled tunnel, maybe five feet high, leading into the hillside. The air inside was hot and stale, with a sweet heavy odor of dry soil. After about twenty feet the tunnel forked. Crouching, we followed the right-hand fork, pushing our way through some bundles of dried leaves that seemed to have been put there to block its entrance.

  “Look there,” he said.

  He shot the beam off to the left, and I found myself staring at a place where the tunnel wall had been very carefully smoothed. An upright circular slab of rough-hewn marble perhaps a yard across was set into it there.

  “What is it?” I asked him. “A gravestone? A commemorative plaque?”

  “Some sort of door, more likely. Covering a funeral chamber, I would suspect. You see these?” He indicated three smaller circles of what looked like baked clay, mounted in a symmetrical way over the marble slab, arranged to form the angles of an equilateral triangle. They overlapped the edges of the slab as though sealing it into the wall. I went closer and saw inscriptions carved into the clay circles, an array of mysterious symbols and letters.

  “What language is this? Not Greek. Hebrew, maybe?”

  “No. I don’t actually know what it is. Some unknown Anatolian script, or some peculiar form of Aramaic or Phoenician—I just can’t say, Timmo. Maybe it’s a nonsense script, even. Purely decorative sacred scribbles conveying spells to keep intruders away, maybe. You know, some kind of magical mumbo-jumbo. It might be anything.”

  “You found this tonight?”

  “Three weeks ago. We’ve known this tunnel was here for a long time, but it was thought to be empty. I happened to be doing some sonar scanning overhead and I got an echo back from a previously uncharted branch, so I came down and took a look around. Nobody knows about it but me. And you.”

  Gingerly I ran my hand over the face of the marble slab. It was extraordinarily smooth, cool to the touch. I had the peculiar illusion that my fingertips were tingling, as though from a mild electrical charge.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked.

  “Open it.”

  “Now?”

  “Now, bro. You and me.”

  “You can’t do that!”

  “I can’t?”

  “You’re part of an expedition, Charlie. You can’t just bust into a tomb, or whatever this is, on your own. It isn’t proper procedure, is it? You need to have the other scientists here. And the Turkish antiquities officials—they’ll string you up by the balls if they find out you’ve done a bit of secret freelance excavating without notifying any local authorities.”

  “We break the seals. We look inside. If there’s anything important in there, we check it out just to gratify our own curiosity and then we go away, and in the morning I discover it all over again and raise a big hullaballoo and we go through all the proper procedure then. Listen, bro, there could be something big in there, don’t you see? The grave of a high priest. The grave of some prehistoric king. The lost treasure of the Temple of Diana. The Ark of the Covenant. Anything. Anything. Whatever it is, I want to know. And I want to see it before anybody else does.”

  He was lit up with a passion so great that I could scarcely recognize him as my cool brother Charlie.

  “How are you going to explain the broken seals?”

  “Broken by some tomb-robber in antiquity,” he said. “Who got frightened away before he could finish the job.”

  He had always been a law unto himself, my brother Charlie. I argued with him a little more, but I knew it would do no good. He had never been much of a team player. He wasn’t going to have five or six wimpy colleagues and a bunch of Turkish antiquities officials staring over his shoulder whi
le that sealed chamber was opened for the first time in two thousand years.

  He drew a small battery-powered lamp from his sack and set it on the ground. Then he began to pull the implements of his trade out of the sack, the little chisels, the camel’s-hair brushes, the diamond-bladed hacksaw.

  “Why did you wait until I got here before you opened it?” I asked.

  “Because I thought I might need help pulling that slab out of the wall, and who could I trust except you? Besides, I wanted an audience for the grand event.”

  “Of course.”

  “You know me, Timmo.”

  “So I do, bro. So I do.”

  He began very carefully to chisel off one of the clay seals.

  It came away in two chunks. Setting it to one side, he went to work on the second one, and then the third. Then he dug his fingertips into the earthen wall at the edge of the slab and gave it an experimental tug.

  “I do need you,” he said. “Put your shoulder against the slab and steady it as I pry it with this crowbar. I don’t want it just toppling out.”

  Bit by bit he wiggled it free. As it started to pivot and fall forward I leaned all my weight into it, and Charlie reached across me and caught it too, and together we were able to brace it as it left its aperture and guide it down carefully to the ground.

  We stared into the blackest of black holes. Ancient musty air came roaring forth in a long dry whoosh. Charlie leaned forward and started to poke the flashlight into the opening.

  But then he pulled back sharply and turned away, gasping as though he had inhaled a wisp of something noxious.

  “Charlie?”

  “Just a second.” He waved his hand near his head a couple of times, the way you might do when brushing away a cobweb. “Just—a goddamn—second, Tim!” A convulsive shiver ran through him. Automatically I moved toward him to see what the matter was and as I came up beside him in front of that dark opening I felt a sudden weird sensation, a jolt, a jab, and my head began to spin. And for a moment—just a moment—I seemed to hear a strange music, an eerie high-pitched wailing sound like the keening of elevator cables far, far away. In that crazy incomprehensible moment I imagined that I was standing at the rim of a deep ancient well, the oldest well of all, the well from which all creation flows, with strange shadowy things churning and throbbing down below, and from its depths rose a wild rush of perfumed air that dizzied and intoxicated me.

  Then the moment passed and I was in my right mind again and I looked at Charlie and he looked at me.

  “You felt it too, didn’t you?” I said.

  “Felt what?” he demanded fiercely. He seemed almost angry.

  I searched for the words. But it was all fading, fading fast, and there was only Charlie with his face jammed into mine, angry Charlie, terrifying Charlie, practically daring me to claim that anything peculiar had happened.

  “It was very odd, bro,” I said finally. “Like a drug thing, almost.”

  “Oxygen deprivation, is all. A blast of old stale air.”

  “You think?”

  “I know.”

  But he seemed uncharacteristically hesitant, even a little befuddled. He stood at an angle to the opening, head turned away, shoulders slumping, the flashlight dangling from his hand.

  “Aren’t you going to look inside?” I asked, after a bit.

  “Give me a moment, Timmo.”

  “Charlie, are you all right?”

  “Christ, yes! I breathed in a little dust, that’s all.” He knelt, rummaged in the tool sack, pulled out a canteen, took a deep drink. “Better,” he said hoarsely. “Want some?” I took the canteen from him and he leaned into the opening again, flashing the beam around.

  “What do you see?”

  “Nothing. Not a fucking thing.”

  “They put up a marble slab and plaster it with inscribed seals and there’s nothing at all behind it?”

  “A hole,” he said. “Maybe five feet deep, five feet high. A storage chamber of some kind, I would guess. Nothing in it. Absolutely fucking nothing, bro.”

  “Let me see.”

  “Don’t you trust me?”

  In fact I didn’t, not very much. But I just shrugged; and he handed me the flashlight, and I peered into the hole. Charlie was right. The interior of the chamber was smooth and regular, but it was empty, not the slightest trace of anything.

  “Shit,” Charlie said. He shook his head somberly. “My very own Tut-ankh-amen tomb, only nothing’s in it. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “Are you going to report this?”

  “What for? I come in after hours, conduct illicit explorations, and all I have to show for my sins is an empty hole? What’s the good of telling anybody that? Just for the sake of making myself look like an unethical son of a bitch? No, bro. None of this ever happened.”

  “But the seals—the inscriptions in an unknown script—”

  “Not important. Let’s go, Tim.”

  He still sounded angry, and not, I think, just because the little chamber behind the marble slab had been empty. Something had gotten to him just now, and gotten to him deeply. Had he heard the weird music too? Had he looked into that fathomless well? He hated all mystery, everything inexplicable. I think that was why he had become an archaeologist. Mysteries had a way of unhinging him. When I was maybe ten and he was thirteen, we had spent a rainy evening telling each other ghost stories, and finally we made one up together, something about spooks from another world who were haunting our attic, and our own story scared me so much that I began to cry. I imagined I heard strange creaks overhead. Charlie mocked me mercilessly, but it seemed to me that for a time he had looked a little nervous too, and when I said so he got very annoyed indeed; and then, bluffing all the way, I invited him to come up to the attic with me right then and there to see that it was safe, and he punched me in the chest and knocked me down. Later he denied the whole episode.

  “I’m sorry I wasted your time tonight, keed,” he said, as we hiked back up to our cars.

  “That’s okay. It just might have been something special.”

  “Just might have been, yeah.” He grinned and winked. He was himself again, old devil-may-care Charlie. “Sleep tight, bro. See you in the morning.”

  But I didn’t sleep tight at all. I kept waking and hearing the wailing sound of far-off elevator cables, and my dreams were full of blurry strangenesses.

  * * *

  The next day I hung out at the hotel all day, breakfasting with Charlie—he didn’t refer to the events of the night before at all—and lounging by the pool the rest of the time. I had some vague thought of hooking up with one of the German tourist ladies, I suppose, but no openings presented themselves, and I contented myself with watching the show. Even in puritanical Turkey, where the conservative politicians are trying to put women back into veils and ankle-length skirts, European women of all ages go casually topless at coastal resorts like this, and it was remarkable to see how much savoir faire the Turkish poolside waiters displayed while taking bar orders from saftig bare-breasted grandmothers from Hamburg or Munich and their stunning topless granddaughters.

  Mr. Gladstone, who hadn’t been around in the morning, turned up in late afternoon. I was in the lobby bar by then, working on my third or fourth post-lunch raki. He looked sweaty and tired and sunburned. I ordered a Coke for him.

  “Busy day?”

  “Very. The Cave of the Seven Sleepers was my first stop. A highly emotional experience, I have to say, not because of the cave itself, you understand, although the ancient ruined church there is quite interesting, but because—the associations—the memories of my dear wife that it summoned—”

  “Of course.”

  “After that my driver took me out to the so-called House of the Virgin. Perhaps it’s genuine, perhaps not, but either way it’s a moving thing to see. The invisible presence of thousands of pilgrims hovers over it, the aura of centuries of faith.” He smiled gently. “Do you know what I mean, Mr. Walker?”r />
  “I think I do, yes.”

  “And in the afternoon I saw the Basilica of St. John, on Ayasuluk Hill.”

  I didn’t know anything about that. He explained that it was the acropolis of the old Byzantine city—the steep hill just across the main highway from the center of the town of Seljuk. Legend had it that St. John the Apostle had been buried up there, and centuries later the Emperor Justinian built an enormous church on the site, which was, of course, a ruin now, but an impressive one.

  “And you?” he said. “You visited with your brother?”

  “In the morning, yes.”

  “A brilliant man, your brother. If only he could be happier, eh?”

  “Oh, I think Charlie’s happy, all right. He’s had his own way every step of his life.”

  “Is that your definition of happiness? Having your own way?”

  “It can be very helpful.”

  “And you haven’t had your own way, is that it, Mr. Walker?”

  “My life has been reasonably easy by most people’s standards, I have to admit. I was smart enough to pick a wealthy great-grandfather. But compared with Charlie—he has an extraordinary mind, he’s had a splendid scientific career, he’s admired by all the members of his profession. I don’t even have a profession, Mr. Gladstone. I just float around.”

  “You’re young, Mr. Walker. You’ll find something to do and someone to share your life with, and you’ll settle down. But your brother—I wonder, Mr. Walker. Something vital is missing from his life. But he will never find it, because he is not willing to admit that it’s missing.”

  “Religion, do you mean?”

  “Not specifically, no. Belief, perhaps. Not religion, but belief. Do you follow me, Mr. Walker? One must believe in something, do you see? And your brother will not permit himself to do that.” He gave me the gentle smile again. “Would you excuse me, now? I’ve had a rather strenuous day. I think a little nap, before supper—”

  Since we were the only two Americans in the place, I invited him to join me again for dinner that night. He did most of the talking, reminiscing about his wife, telling me about his children—he had three, in their thirties—and describing some of the things he had seen in his tour of the biblical places. I had never spent much time with anyone of his sort. A kindly man, an earnest man; and, I suspect, not quite as simple a man as a casual observer might think.