The Madness of Cthulhu Anthology (Volume One): 1

by The Madness of Cthulhu (epub)

  So he accompanied me on nocturnal adventures, participated in our delvings, our rites, even our obscene feastings as if he were one of us; and he learned much, so very much, which made him so famous in his day, which let him relish the terror he aroused in the other Warms when he showed them the images he had made of the unimaginable, blasphemous world that lay just beneath their feet, which was itself only the beginning of the further horrors that lay beyond the reach of merely human senses.

  Once, in the impossible depths of some cavern at the Earth’s center, when the mud and stone beneath our feet seemed no more substantial than a mist and we looked down through the stars in the direction of the ultimate chaos, he threw back his head and howled.

  * * *

  But it was supposed to be an exchange. I wanted my part in return.

  I don’t know how much time had passed, weeks, months, years, for we of the dark dreamlands do not reckon time as does the waking world.

  But I dreamed another kind of dream, of streetcars and houses and reading the newspaper by a cozy fire. Once I even seemed to find myself there, by the fire, in my dressing gown, with the newspaper spread over my lap. I felt the gentle warmth of the flames. The paper rustled in my hands. For a very long time I could not determine which was real and which was nightmare, whether I was a man, awakening from the awful delusion that he was a ghoul, or a ghoul dreaming that he was a man.

  Meanwhile my friend painted his pictures and gorged himself on such secrets as I might reveal to him. He found my own “progress” to be intriguing at first. He remarked that I was changing in a manner he had formerly thought impossible. I walked upright now. I spoke his language with increasing fluency. I could even read, not the Necronomicon or anything like that, but simple books for children which he brought me, and then newspapers, all of which told me about the world I so distantly and imperfectly remembered.

  But I was remembering. And changing. Even I could see that my skin was no longer the mottled gray it had once been, covered with spiky tufts of hair. My snout was receding, becoming less a malformation. My claws and teeth had receded too. I began to express the desire to wear clothing. He laughed at that at first, then finally tossed me an old coat.

  I think he was almost disappointed. He painted no more pictures of me, at least not from life. He referred instead to photographs taken earlier. Still, he listened to the tales I told him and accompanied me a few more times on our excursions, but not very far, because it was I, I think, who was starting to forget the way.

  Nevertheless, it was to be a fair exchange. He had promised that. He longed for the darkness and I had given him the darkness, yielding up as many of its secrets as I could.

  I longed for the light. In that, he betrayed me vilely.

  * * *

  The betrayal happened like this:

  I said, “I want to go out,” meaning I wanted to walk with him on the streets of the city, among the houses and streetcars, in the light.

  He merely said, “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  But I had brooded over it for a long time. I knew what I wanted and where I wanted to go. I had made preparations. Increasing what otherwise might have been prankish activities, I had haunted more iron-barred crypts on cloudy days and reached out to snatch what I could from passing funerals, a top hat, a handkerchief, a wristwatch, even a walking stick. Yes, there were shrieks when I did that, and yes, I should have found them delicious, but I was preoccupied with my future intent. Yes, you can read in the newspapers about how vandals and pranksters and thugs had created disturbances in the cemeteries, though you may not necessarily learn how certain tombs were smashed open, examined with growing disgust and horror on the part of the investigators, then sealed off entirely with newly-poured cement.

  So there I was, clad in a black suit I had pilfered from a fresh corpse, handkerchief stuffed into the pocket. I wore the wristwatch, and the smashed top hat I had hauled in through the bars. It is true that the trousers had shredded as I pulled them on, and I wasn’t wearing shoes because no shoes were ever made for feet such as mine, but still I stood upright, and I even squinted through a stolen monocle.

  I stepped toward him, walking stick in hand, and said, “What do you think?”

  And he said again, nervously, yes, on the edge of fear, but still not afraid. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  But I insisted, most urgently. I told him that I was a man and that I had a name and I actually spoke that name aloud.

  This time he was so astonished he actually did drop his camera. He sat down in a chair, limply.

  “That’s incredible. You remember who you once were. That not possible, but it has happened. So many things are impossible, but they have happened. I don’t know where to begin.”

  “I want to go out.”

  “No.”

  I picked up a bouquet of flowers I had stolen from a grave. I said my name again. I said another name too, that of someone with whom the first name had once been in love.

  This almost put him into a kind of rage. “You think you remember who you were! But I knew that man.”

  “I know I was in love,” I said. “I am in love.”

  For a moment this seemed so preposterous that he simply could not grasp it. He gaped at me in silence, his mind struggling to formulate a reply. He almost seemed to laugh, but didn’t. Then he spoke, in a rapid-fire, low-voiced staccato.

  “A random memory, like a page fallen from a book, out of order. What you don’t seem to know, my friend, is that the man in question, you, when he was very young, was indeed in love, but that ended badly. Perhaps she saw in him, already, a certain contagion. After that contagion had corrupted his soul sufficiently, he was transformed. I think you recall the rest—no, no, you clearly don’t. What you don’t seem quite able to bring to mind is that after your transformation had progressed a considerable ways, you came a-calling on the gentle lady. You burst in on her, stinking of the grave, and she died shrieking in a madhouse within weeks. It was a great scandal at the time. Now it is the stuff of fantastic legend. Sorry, old chap. I have done you a disservice. I have reminded you of too much. I have awakened too much. But don’t delude yourself. There is no going back. Sometimes oblivion is a mercy. Try to embrace it if you can.”

  Demonstrating a mastery of newly regained vocabulary and concepts I said, “You are lying.”

  “Would I make a story like that up? Would I have to?” He snatched up a mirror that he sometimes used to gain different perspectives in his painting, and held it up to my face. “Just look at yourself. Don’t be ridiculous.”

  I grabbed the mirror out of his hand and held it up to his face.

  “Just look,” I said. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  There was a split second of fear then. I tasted it on the air. The mirror crashed to the floor. I slashed at him with my claws, unimpressive though they might be. That was when he jerked back, then drew his pistol and shot me in the chest.

  Of course a bullet cannot kill one such as I, but the blow staggered me back.

  Yes, he was afraid.

  He was afraid of what he had seen, in that mirror, that his features were subtly beginning to change, as if he and I had quested in opposite directions, met midway, and had become quite startlingly alike.

  I don’t think he was ready for that yet. Even he could delude himself.

  I heard a noise in the room beyond us. There was someone else in the building. He had brought in another Warm, no doubt to show off his paintings and relish that other person’s fear.

  I could taste it on the air. A swirling mass of fear. Ravishing. Exquisite.

  I lunged forward, and he shot me again and again and again.

  He was able to make his way out the door and bolt it behind him.

  For the moment I so overwhelmed by the betrayal, by the realization that our friendship was at an end, that it had never existed, that everything had been a lie and all hopes were false hopes. In my very last truly human gesture, I stood there in stunned
silence, weeping softly.

  That gave him time to usher his visitor away.

  It was only later that I howled and clawed at the door and at the floor, that I went to the mouth of the tunnel-shaft in the floor and screamed down into the darkness, until the dark world beneath reverberated with my cries and several of my larger and more capable fellows emerged to join me and to sniff the air.

  Together we forced our way into the adjoining chamber, where a large canvas was on the easel. We smashed everything. We tasted fear in the air, thick as smoke, though the house was, for the moment, empty.

  When he came back, we were lurking in every corner, and we fell on him in a mass, but I was the one who was afraid now, because my fellows did not rend him, even as they carried him down the shaft and through many tunnels. I scurried after them on all fours. I slashed the remnants of my clothing away with my claws. I howled with the rest and followed until we came to that vast, black, inner space where the elders of our race swim like leviathans before the throne of Azathoth. There we brought him, to be judged.

  But they did not rend him.

  And I was afraid, because I knew that one day he would be our king.

  LAST RITES

  K. M. TONSO

  DR. PAUL DYER WAS ALWAYS SOMETHING OF AN OUTSIDER AMONG the Miskatonic faculty. A Geppetto-like figure with a slight build, shoulders seemingly stooped since childhood, and a prematurely graying toothbrush of a mustache, Paul was innately “old school,” a pipe-smoking dinosaur of tweed suits and bow ties; and even when the university began supplying teacher and student alike with tablet computers and digital textbooks, and the dully reflecting slate of classroom blackboards and the squeak of humdrum chalk were giving way to spacious white panels, erasable markers, and LCD displays, Paul Dyer was much more likely to be seen with real books, pen, and paper before him, polishing—slowly and thoughtfully—his bifocal glasses with a pocket handkerchief while he considered, variously, his lectures, his students, and his own research … this last so apparently unremarkable in its nature yet diligent in execution as to have secured for him his tenure and, eventually, chairmanship of the geology department.

  I first met him when I was an undergraduate frantically juggling three jobs, studies, and homework with one of the primitive spreadsheet programs available in those halcyon days when a Pentium III with a hundred-megabyte hard drive was considered fine style indeed and professors would still entertain term papers banged out on an IBM Selectric. I think what first endeared the old man (though at that time he had in truth barely passed his half century) to me was the time my typewriter broke down and he graciously accepted my final report for my science requirement in the form of a fifty-page handwritten manuscript.

  “Just so it is legible, Mr. Marsh,” he told me in his soft Swiss accent as he took the proffered sheaf of papers. “I cannot bear chicken scratches.” A wink. “Old eyes, you know.”

  Fortunately, I had by then deliberately cultivated a fine, round hand, and the paper was not only legible but, as it turned out, worthy of high marks, for it was handed back with an A and a superscripted “Not bad, young man. Not bad at all.”

  I assumed the superscript was mere politeness, but I realized later that he shared an interest in my paper’s subject: the anomalous hydrothermal vents that occasionally crop up on the abyssal plains of the oceans, far away from subduction zones or magma plumes.

  At that time, I had not given much thought to my life’s longterm course. Too much of the aforesaid juggling, not to mention the additional (but rather pleasant) complication of a young lady. But the simple graciousness of Paul Dyer had demonstrated to me that there was more to college than preparation for a lucrative corporate position, and I turned my efforts toward geology, emulating the man who eventually became both mentor and colleague.

  “Perilous work, Mr. Marsh,” he said when I informed him of my decision. “You might recall what it did to my father.”

  In truth, that was the first time I had ever heard of his father, the late William Dyer, and perhaps the son’s words were indeed meant as a warning. But I possessed the enthusiasm of youth (not to mention a profound ignorance that nameless secrets exist … and that they lurk in dark and uncharted corners of the same world that harbors such terrors as reality TV and video games) and was therefore prompted to paw my way through the resources of the university library in order to find out why something as absurdly mundane as the study of rocks might be considered perilous (leaving aside the question of particularly large specimens falling upon one’s head) and what, in fact, it had done to William Dyer himself.

  The usual references told me nothing beyond the bare fact of William’s professorship at Miskatonic University, with a vague mention of his leadership of the school’s Antarctic expedition of 1930–31. And when, finally, one of the older librarians, with an air of distaste, muttered something about “theuse people down in Special Collections” perhaps knowing about it, I at last found myself down in the basement of the library near what was usually termed “the Vault”—a section of library holdings deemed either too valuable or too controversial for normal academic perusal, and normally quite off-limits to undergraduates. I, however, appeared to have acquired permission … from Paul Dyer himself.

  It was there that I read through a yellowing typescript report and learned of the university’s ill-fated venture to the polar continent over sixty years before, when that ice-shrouded landmass was yet unprobed by satellite images or radar scans, but was instead explored and mapped, at great risk, by prop-driven airplanes, dogsleds, and the dependable simplicity of rock drills, dynamite, and geological hammers.

  Great risk indeed, for after a promising beginning, which included the discovery of some peculiarly well-developed Comanchean Era radiata and a previously unmapped but extremely high mountain range, Dyer’s expedition met with disaster. Ice storms and terrible austral winds resulted in the complete obliteration of a group of the Miskatonic explorers that had, at the urging of a biologist named Lake, unwisely separated from the main body. The devastation was total. Every one of Lake’s party, including the sled dogs, died, and so complete was the loss of life and equipment—the latter including custom ice-melting devices and a newly designed drilling rig created by Frank Pabodie of the MU engineering department (whose grandson was now a faculty member in the same field)—that there was nothing to do but terminate the operation and bring the survivors home.

  Seated in the dim reading room just outside the steel door leading to the vault, I could not but blink in bafflement when I finished the slim report held loose-leaf in a crumbling manila folder. It made no sense. If Lake and his party had perished in an ice storm, that was an explanation sufficient unto itself. Why secrete this document in Special Collections when any newspaper of the period would have told much the same story?

  A shadow at the door of the reading room proved to be the somewhat furtive figure of the Special Collections librarian, who apologized to me in hushed tones for having been required—library policy, of course—to place a telephone call to Dr. Dyer for confirmation of his permission, and while I pondered his words, he punched in the combination to the vault, swung the door wide, and in a minute returned from its depths with a thick, three-ring notebook, explaining that since what he was now putting before me was but one of two extant copies of this particular manuscript, I would be required to provide a signature.

  “It’s volume two, you see,” he said.

  Bewildered, I signed the proffered card, affirming I was now responsible for the contents of “Dyer Manuscript: Volume Two,” and noting as I did so the paucity of other signatures. There was Dyer’s, of course, and one or two others that I recognized from the faculty directory, and one that stood out because of its obviously foreign origins.

  The librarian bobbed his head at me and departed. Leaving me alone. With volume two.

  But those two simple words—volume two—could not begin to convey the strangeness of the revelations set down by William Dyer
in an attempt to prevent the Starkweather-Moore Expedition, a privately funded group, from exploring the same region as had produced the strange radiata and the mountain range. Warnings of dangerous conditions would have been perfectly understandable, but Dyer instead spun a fantastic tale of a pre-human—and decidedly non-human—civilization whose age could be measured only on the scale of geologic time and whose origins seemed to lie more in the realm of religion and flying saucers than in science; and despite the remarkably lucid exposition of his narrative, the evidence of the collapse of one of the great minds of the twentieth century left me shaking my head. But then I came upon the photographs. The sketches. The pages torn from books and curiously marked not only with drawings, but with what seemed an unintelligible, dot-based script.

  The photos … faked, of course. If two English schoolgirls had found the means to dumbfound photographic experts from all across England with the Cottingley pictures, then what heights of deception might be attained by a university professor with full access to specialized equipment? No, the photographs of the barrel-shaped monstrosities—starfish-headed and equipped with a multiplicity of eyes and mouths and tentacular appendages—could have been done up in any theater department or motion-picture studio worth its salt, and in that sense were laughably absurd. The sketches, however …

  I had friends in the university’s art department at that time, many of whose names had become something of a byword for the consumption of various recreational drugs, and as might be expected, their works reflected their reputations. But nothing they had ever produced, even when in the grip of life-threatening overdose, came even remotely close to the alien inhumanity of the strange cartouches recorded by Dyer’s flash camera or the sketches and dot-script left on the pages of the torn-up books. Regardless of deformity, futurism, style, or evidence of mental instability, a work of art made by a human being demonstrates by its very nature the axiomatic groundwork of our consciousness and psychology. But those photographed carvings and ink sketches showed, even to my inexperienced eye, a controlling consciousness that had not the faintest shred of commonality with Homo sapiens.