The Madness of Cthulhu Anthology (Volume One): 1

  Finn saw his face. Saw the horror, the absolute disbelief in his eyes. And he heard the scream, deep and primal and terrible, that ripped from his body, so loudly that it seemed to tear apart the heavens and the dark night sky. His eyes … they were so huge, so filled with horror—and then they weren’t because the black and green gelatinous mass of the thing was sliding over his forehead and then he was blinded, and his scream was choked off because the oozing thing filled his mouth …

  And Barringer was no more.

  Frantically he worked at the ropes. He found the winch, and he began to lower the boat. Devon was in it; Hampton tried to crawl in it with her. Michael Corona ran over and pushed Hampton.

  “Stop, stop!” Devon pleaded. “Slowly, balance—!”

  Her words of warning were too late. Michael Corona’s mad shove to get on the lifeboat sent both him and Hampton screaming and plunging off the lifeboat together, cascading in an elongated howl of terror as they both crashed down into the inky darkness of the sea.

  “We’ll find them!” Finn lied as he saw Devon’s face. The boat was lowering; it was now far down and he turned to Granger. “Hop—hop now!”

  “What about you?”

  “I’ll get her another twenty feet … and take a dive. You’ll get me.”

  Bull—what the hell was he doing, what was he saying? He was too far; he was going to die. He was no kind of a hero. He was a geek, a nerd—a scientist. And he was surely suffering some kind of a neuro-break because this couldn’t be happening.

  There was a sudden sound; a fierce banging sound. He turned. The thing was coming. It had thrown open the doors to the deck with a fury and a hunger.

  Finn stared. There it was, eyes all over … like a giant bowl of extremely ugly and miscolored Jello. It was hideously black and green and yet …

  Somehow see-thru.

  And thus he could see Barringer. See the man in his half-digested state. Eyes, soft tissue, all dissolved within while the acids in the thing’s stomach continued to work and gnaw away at bone, at the skeleton of the man, at the skull that still looked frozen in a scream …

  He dropped the winch. He heard the plop as the lifeboat hit the water. He looked back.

  It had a thousand eyes, so it seemed now, but it was looking at him. And Finn knew that he’d rather freeze to death. He hiked himself up to the rail and tried to judge the distance in the night. He saw only the blackness of the water, but he made his best attempt at a high dive …

  He plunged deep. So deep into the water that he didn’t think he’d make it up again. His lungs burned. That might have been because he could no longer hold his breath … it might have been because of the fierce, icy cold that enveloped him, almost as if the freezing waters were alive themselves, eating him as the thing had intended to do.

  With his last strength, his last will, his last, desperate human longing to survive, he kicked hard against the water.

  And he shot to the surface, gasping, tasting salt, barely cognizant.

  “Finn!”

  He heard Devon’s voice. He was almost by the lifeboat. He couldn’t feel his muscles, couldn’t feel his body at all. Something in the human involuntary system designed to help with life kicked in. He was moving; he was at the boat. And Devon and Granger were reaching for him, drawing him into the lifeboat. He fell inside it; Devon had found the blankets and one came around him and still he shivered, still, his body remained numb.

  He heard a splash. Granger was rowing. They were moving away from the horrid ship Guinevere.

  In the night, he heard the sound of its anger. The thing. The heinous, despicable thing.

  The—dare he say it, dare he think it?—shoggoth.

  “Shoggoth!”

  Granger said it aloud.

  It screeched; it screamed. Its fury was complete—they still existed, and the thing wanted them. But it didn’t plunge into the sea. Somehow, Finn made his muscles work and he grabbed a set of oars, and he didn’t know how long or how furiously they moved, but the lifeboat moved far from the Guinevere. Finally, when the sound of the thing’s fury faded into the night and all they could hear was the lap of the oars, he fell back, exhausted.

  Warmth invaded him. It was Devon, crawling over him, trying to share her body warmth with him. She’d gotten the tarp from the stowage compartment and more blankets, and she had him and Granger covered and warm and …

  She didn’t scream and she didn’t fail. She looked at him with her beautiful eyes. There was strength in her voice. “We’re going to make it,” she told him. “You got us this far; we will make it.”

  * * *

  Somehow, somewhere in the nightmare darkness, he must have dozed. Because he woke and there was sunlight all around him.

  Devon was still curled against him. Granger was awake, drinking from an emergency thermos, staring up at the sky.

  “Listen!” Granger said. Finn listened. He heard a whirr.

  “It’s a helicopter,” Devon said.

  They all stared. Yes, it was a helicopter.

  Granger stood up. “Hey, hey!” He jumped up and down, rocking the rowboat precariously.

  “Granger, stop!” Finn warned.

  The boat teetered.

  “Granger!” he cried.

  He reached for the man, but Granger went toppling over. Finn swore, crawling to the edge of the hull, trying to find Granger and get the lifeboat back to stability at the same time.

  Granger had disappeared into the inky depths of the sea.

  He half rose to crawl over the hull and get into the water. He had to save the man, but he couldn’t capsize the lifeboat with Devon still in it.

  “Finn, no!” she cried with horror. “I have the flare—they’ll come, rescue will come!”

  To prove her point, she fired the flare gun. The helicopter would see them; rescue would come.

  “I have to—have to try to save Granger!” he told her.

  Their eyes met. It was the story he would have loved for his life; it was the beautiful woman staring at him. It was him—a most unlikely hero.

  He fell into the water.

  It was still freezing, even more bitterly cold by day. But he looked. He dove and he rose and he dove and he rose until he could no more.

  Then he was back at the lifeboat, not so much of a hero, but Devon was there, helping him, desperately tugging at his weight to get him back on.

  And the helicopter was nearly there. Seated, freezing, huddled on their knees in the middle of the lifeboat, he and Devon waved.

  Then it happened.

  The sea seemed to explode about two hundred yards from them. Water spewed everywhere, as if a geyser had erupted from the ocean bed. Something began to rise …

  It was massive. It stood, Finn knew, on two legs, because the tips of its thighs were visible just at the water’s surface. It had two arms … weblike fingers. There were tiny wing structures folded at its back. It was horrible, black and green, nearly opalescent …

  Ten-foot-long tentacles seemed to emerge from a ten-foot face that had massive eyes and a mouth with a hooklike beak.

  The helicopter tried to bank …

  One tentacle shot out. It wrapped around the helicopter.

  Finn could hear the men aboard it screaming …

  He could look no more. He fell back in the boat and closed his eyes. He opened them when he heard the explosion. It was the chopper. The gas … something … somehow, it had exploded and it lit up the sky.

  Next to him, Devon sobbed softly. He tried to smooth back her damp hair with numb fingers. There was nowhere else to go; nothing to do. He watched as bits and pieces of the helicopter rained down around them.

  And he waited.

  And Devon waited, sobbing and curled in his arms.

  And then …

  Nothing.

  They probably lay so for hours. Or perhaps it was minutes. Eventually, he felt the fact that he was freezing and stirred to gather blankets and the tarp again. And finally, he looked out
at the sea.

  There was no sign of the creature that had risen from the sea. Cthulhu.

  Impossible, of course.

  They drifted for he didn’t know how long. He couldn’t see the Guinevere anywhere on the horizon.

  They stirred enough to find emergency rations. They drank water and ate dried food and energy bars. He didn’t taste the food, didn’t know what it was—or care.

  How much time they spent on that boat Finn would never know. He’d lost all sense of it. But as they sat together, huddled together, Devon stirred.

  “A ship,” she said.

  And it was. It was a huge United States Navy vessel, and it was headed their way.

  “They’ll never believe us,” Devon murmured.

  And they never would. As the vessel approached, Finn wondered what he would say. What truth could he possibly give them?

  They would try—and they would probably be locked away. Maybe they’d even be suspected of having gone mad and killed their fellow passengers and the crew.

  “What do we say?” she whispered.

  He didn’t know. Maybe he’d figure it out by the time the ship reached them. Maybe he’d think of a plausible lie.

  And maybe, one day, he’d sit in a bar, and he’d start talking to the fellow next to him. He’d find out the guy was a writer and he’d tell him, “Well, huh. Have I got a story for you.”

  And maybe the guy would listen …

  THE WARM

  DARRELL SCHWEITZER

  NAME. PERHAPS I WAS THE ONLY ONE OF MY KIND WHO STILL HAD a name. I could not say it, not at first. I could not say much of anything, for my mouth no longer formed the old speech I once spoke—in the before time, before I was transformed, such as I had been transformed, however inadequately, however minimally. As for that new speech of gibbering and of howls, which we speak directly into the earth, pressing our faces into the mud, so that the very stones and the fires beneath it all tremble with our rages, our curses, and our jests—well, I was not very good at that either.

  But I could think my name. I knew it. I remembered it, for all it stuck in my throat, like something I could neither swallow nor vomit up. If the others called me anything at all beyond mere insults, it was “Little,” because I had not grown great as they, because I remained one of the immature or deviant few who still looked back at the world from which we all had come. I was still one of those who made sport, for instance, by glaring out of ancient, iron-barred crypts on cloudy days, and if by chance my sickly, greenish gaze met the wide-eyed blue or brown or hazel of one of them and I was rewarded with an indescribable shriek, then—joy, a paroxysm of merriment, followed by bitterness beyond words, as I howled and pounded my head in sorrow against the walls and door of the tomb, smashing coffins in my rage, as I longed to recall something that, like my name, I could not articulate.

  Sometimes I just stood there and reached out through the bars, trying to grasp the moon.

  Being as I was, then, a rather pathetic excuse for my kind, I continued to burrow beneath the great city, lurking in cellars, and even—ecstasy upon ecstasy—emerging into the open air on certain moonless nights, to caper among the half-tumbled stones.

  That was how I met the Warm. I felt a lightening of the air, down there in the dark, as the heavy wooden cover of a shaft was lifted off. I climbed toward the distant opening. I heard a sound, which might have been a summons, a kind of chanting, maybe even an incantation, and I followed it, until I emerged into an ancient and decayed cellar, deep underground still, but for me a place of almost unbearable brightness.

  A lantern hung from a rafter. There, in that room, he was waiting for me.

  The Warm. That is what we call them. Warm blood still circulating through fresh meat. Too fresh for taste, really, but if he had shown the slightest trace of fear, I would have tasted that and gone into a frenzy, and my own underdeveloped claws, however otherwise unimpressive, would have sufficed to tear him to shreds.

  But he was not afraid. I tasted wonder, amazement, even a kind of dark joy—in the air, on his odor and his breath perhaps—but, no, he was not afraid.

  He spoke some words gently in his own speech, almost as if, absurdly, he were trying to put me at ease. I could almost make them out, almost remember what those words meant, because they were words I had once known.

  He motioned me away from the aperture from which I had emerged. I shuffled across the stone floor, almost upright, a mocking caricature of what I once was; for it came to me then, by the slow turnings of my thought, that I, too, had been a Warm, before the contagion within my own blood began to manifest itself.

  I might have raged. I might have sorrowed. But I perceived that he had supplied that on which my kind feasts, and the frenzy overwhelmed me, and I forgot all else.

  While I was thus occupied, there was a sudden, blinding flash of light. I yelped and leapt back, letting go of the morsel. I slammed against the cellar wall. Dust and bits of stone rained down on me. I turned on him, snarling, shaking my head, claws manifest, black fangs, however puny, bared, but he was not afraid. There was no fear in him.

  The thing he held in his hand. I knew the word. I remembered it, from my former existence. I spoke it.

  “Camera.”

  He started at that. He almost dropped the object I had named. I shuffled toward him. He stepped back, but not afraid. I could taste his heart racing, his mind turning, as he said, in the language of the Warm, “My God! It’s true then! This is incredible! More than I had hoped for, more than I dreamed!”

  Not afraid.

  He was chattering excitedly, more to himself than to me. “We shall be friends. Yes. You will tell you all your secrets, and I will tell you mine. A fair exchange, no? Yes! Yes!”

  I knew that word, too, friends, and it hurt me. But I said nothing.

  I watched in fascination as he arranged certain items. He lit another lamp. I cringed, but he soothingly repeated that word friend over and over. After a while I sat down and turned my attention once more to that which he had provided.

  He set up his easel. He got out his pencils and brushes. Much later, when he had taught me to understand these things, when I knew much about his life and his world and how the other Warms turned away with shrieks and loathing from the results of this evening’s project, I understood that he had gloatingly entitled the painting he began that night Ghoul Feeding. It’s famous.

  * * *

  But I am ahead of myself. How could I, who am a monstrosity in the night, a thing that wriggles with the worms in the earth, a devourer of the dead, have a friend?

  Yet I had a name.

  He drew me to him, night after night, unafraid. He lifted up the heavy lid from the aperture and summoned me with something like a whistle, like a cough, almost as if he knew the speech of my own kind. He drew me up, out of the dreaming beneath the world, into that cellar, and our fair exchange continued.

  There was always a gift for me, obtained I cared not how, to keep me occupied while he painted, or sketched, or drew. Several times, without warning, he used the infernal camera, in order, I think, to catch me in expressions of surprise or menace, which he particularly prized.

  When the painting Ghoul Feeding was finished, he showed it to me, and spoke laughingly.

  “Whaddya think? Ya like it? It’s you.”

  I sniffed the canvas. I sniffed him. There was no fear.

  I said nothing then, but he required of me speech. He demanded words. In exchange, he gave me words. He spoke to me more and more, as if I understood his words, and in time I did begin to understand them, as he stirred memories within me.

  In time I was able to tell him something of my world. I tasted his excitement, the thrill he felt, but no fear. I told him how the whole city was honeycombed with tunnels such as the one from which he had called me, some of them made by Warms in ancient days for whatever purpose, but most of them dug by us with our sharp claws. I gave him the perspective from which he produced the picture called Subway Acciden
t, for I had known many who were there and heard them tell the story over and over again, with much hilarity.

  For there are indeed others like myself, who linger near to the surface, on the borderlands of the Great Darkness, and who engage in such pranks.

  There are those among us who laugh, whose laughter can drive one such as him mad.

  But I did not laugh.

  Instead I begged him to tell me about the world of houses and streetcars and of reading the newspaper before a comfortable fire.

  And he described such things to me, at first fascinated that one such as I would care about them, but finally, quite obviously, impatient. I don’t think he understood that each precious word was reconstructing a world I had once known, like a shattered mosaic being reassembled piece by piece.

  I wanted more. I was greedy for more.

  But he was greedy for the darkness. I told him how the great ones of my kind are utterly transformed and swim like whales far down, deep into the Dream, having turned away from the living world entirely. They no longer defile graves. They no longer devour rotting flesh. They sink deep into the uttermost depths, where the world of men and even the world of ghouls is but a thin scum floating on the surface of some tenuous black bubble that may burst at any moment. They who pass mystically through the membrane of this bubble, into the chaotic center of all things, behold and worship Azathoth, who is Chaos, whose mad, dancing, mindless flute players shriek out the music of death into all the universe.

  He was not afraid. He was filled with amazed, hideous joy. “It is like in the books,” he said, exalting, and he spoke of the Necronomicon and others. He told of dark secrets he laughingly said would shock even me.

  I told him a story about a common guidebook to the city, and three ghouls who found it very funny indeed. From that he painted his famous Holmes, Lowell, and Longfellow Lie Buried in Mt. Auburn.

  But he was not afraid.

  * * *

  He was the one who wanted to go with me, and he did go, clambering down the shaft he had opened. First I covered him with my scent, so that when we met with others of my kind, as we soon did, they would take him for one of our number, because he was not afraid.