The Madness of Cthulhu Anthology (Volume One): 1

by The Madness of Cthulhu (epub)

  True, then? Dyer’s fantastic tale? His hints of strange beings filtering down from interstellar voids to populate the nascent earth with their biological experiments … of which we, all of us—people, animals, trees and fish and paramecia alike—were the eventual products? Pre-human civilizations fighting unimaginable wars against unimaginable, equally star-born entities with unimaginable weapons?

  The appendix broke the butterfly. The Starkweather-Moore Expedition, spurred on by expectations of discovery and possible mineral exploitation, had sailed for Antarctica in the late 1930s and hauled and flown its equipment across the Ross Ice Shelf and the snowy wastes. By December, it had reached the charted locations of Dyer’s peaks.

  And it had found nothing.

  No fantastically high mountains. No mountains, in fact, at all. No city. No second range of even higher peaks hiding unnamable horrors. Only endless, windswept ice and snow.

  The final entries told of William Dyer’s disgrace. His chairmanship terminated. His tenure revoked; even threats of fraud charges leveled at him and those of his expedition rash enough to support the less outrageous parts of his story. But the university’s reputation was at stake, and so the matter was suppressed. Far from appearing in any official university publication, Dyer’s document went into Special Collections, to molder alongside the equally hysterical delusions of d’Erlette and Prinn. He was allowed to resign, and he eventually emigrated to Switzerland, where, at the advanced age of sixty, he taught school, married a Swiss girl, and raised a son: Paul.

  Paul Dyer. Dr. Paul Dyer. Who, bearing his gentle accent, eventually returned to the United States, accepted a position at Miskatonic, and supplied the final chapters of his father’s tragic story.

  But the sketches.

  But the Starkweather-Moore findings.

  But … the sketches. The technique was so assured, so unaffected. One might as well dispute the authenticity of one’s own handwriting.

  I understood now why Paul Dyer had pointed me toward the macaronic report: my discussion of hydrothermal vents dovetailed neatly with his father’s insistence that the creatures he (rather shortsightedly) called Old Ones—an unfortunate reference to the Necronomicon of Alhazred, whose lunatic ravings he was known to have read—had, at the beginning of the Antarctic freeze, taken refuge in deeper caverns where subcrustal heat still lingered. Unfortunately for them, one of their more outré biological creations—the half-sentient conglomerations of hypnotically controlled cells which he (equally shortsightedly) insisted upon calling shoggoths—had wildcatted and, at least according to Dyer’s manuscript, wreaked genocide on the whole, impossibly long-lived species.

  Which was, of course, patently impossible, because of what the Starkweather-Moore Expedition had found. Or, rather, not found.

  I left the library late that evening, my mind caught firmly and painfully between the utter conviction of William Dyer and the incontrovertible evidence of Starkweather and Moore. I therefore decided against the late lecture on Sumerian antiquities I had planned to attend and instead went directly home. Alas, when I arrived unexpectedly at the apartment I shared with my fiancée, I found it occupied by an assortment of half-clad art students and a few disreputable derelicts from the town where I was born.

  It took less than a minute to discover that my lady love was holding court in the bedroom, in the throes of a drug-fueled orgy.

  My thoughts, already fevered, impelled me to immediate action. Flushed with betrayal, frustrated, angry, I packed my bags, my books, my notes, and my typewriter, and left the apartment, abandoning that part of my life forever.

  Where to go? I would have turned to friends of whom I could have begged a night’s lodging, but I had just seen those very friends participating in the apartment’s festivities. Owing to my parents’ premature loss at sea in a boating accident, I had no resources, monetary or otherwise, save my own. Standing, then, in the middle of the large university quadrangle, with the autumn’s evening chill beginning to bite through my light jacket, my suitcase and books growing ever heavier in my hands, and my bereft, betrayed heart turning all my efforts at research—hydrothermal vents and geological anomalies alike—to dust, I all but fell to my knees and wept.

  But thoughts of my research put me in mind of one source of aid that might possibly remain to me, and a short while later I was ringing the doorbell of a house in one of Arkham’s quieter neighborhoods.

  Clad in sweatshirt and sweatpants and puffing a little from his exertions with a set of free weights, Paul Dyer opened the door, and it took him but a moment to realize my obvious distress. “Why, Alf!” he said. “What a pleasant surprise! Come in, my boy, come in!”

  * * *

  Paul Dyer was childless, unmarried, without stateside relatives, and his house was his alone, its furnishings settled in like brown smoke, its curtained windows rarely opened, the only utilized rooms being his study, his bedroom, and the kitchen; but as he was much too gracious a host to consign me to the living-room sofa, I found myself directly possessed of an initially musty but easily aired and quite reasonable guestroom. And thereby began a residency that proved to be not expedient and temporary, but comfortable and longterm, a professional relationship with a congenial colleague whose scientific interests dovetailed neatly with my own, our serenity interrupted only occasionally by the local Gay and Lesbian Coalition’s clumsy attempts to profit from our celibate Castalia.

  But though I followed in my mentor’s footsteps, eventually taking a doctorate and a faculty position at Miskatonic, and we grew old together—two confirmed bachelors with too much teaching, research, and study to bother about marriage and families—I never mentioned the notebook, and Paul referenced its contents only indirectly. But it was obvious that his father’s disgrace weighed heavily upon him, so much so as to manifest itself occasionally in bursts of anger or, alternately, depression, the underlying cause of which I could never be precisely sure. His father’s squandering of a brilliant career? Starkweather and Moore’s insistence upon prosecuting their expedition? Those strange, vegetable entities that first appeared and then vanished, leaving a reputation in shambles?

  I confess that I myself could not reconcile William Dyer and his deception any more than could the son. And so, as Paul’s progress toward a solution seemed immobilized by the profound and inherent contradiction of father and fantasy, I turned my own extracurricular efforts toward the conundrum.

  I used my faculty status to gain access to the minutiae of the original Miskatonic expedition and compared the reports Lake transmitted—the mountains, the caves, the soapstone fragments with the inhuman dot-script, the strange radiates—with the sanitized versions relayed to the world, wondering again and again at the depth of the hoax. Not just William Dyer but the entire Miskatonic expedition must have been involved in a deception so colossal it made the Piltdown chicanery seem the merest trifle.

  Which led me back to the enigma that so enmeshed the man with whom I had been living for the last fifteen years. Why? Why, why, why?

  And finally, in the pre-dawn darkness of an Arkham winter, with the wind singing Siren-like through the archaic eaves and peaked roofs of the surrounding town, I made my decision to break free of the ever-moving, ever-stationary möbius that had so ensnared my mentor. A simple assumption, really: there had been mountains. Lake had seen them. Dyer had seen them … and flown beyond them. Radiates? Star-spawn? Shoggoths? I put such questions aside and dealt only with the comparatively simple problem of the disappearance of billions of tons of Archaean slate.

  Which brought me back to Special Collections … and to that strange name on the list of those who had perused the Dyer manuscript:

  Hugo Kalpaxia.

  Neither faculty nor student. And without ever having been given access permission. Yet there his name was, floridly limned by an obviously expensive fountain pen … itself a wild luxury at a time when most of the civilized world was in the stern grasp of the Great Depression. But perhaps that explained all, fo
r in those dark days twenty dollars slipped to a sub-librarian would have guaranteed access to anything.

  It took but a little search-engine and hacking help from an acquaintance in the computer science department to ferret out the saga of the Kalpaxia Mining Company, a Greek concern that had weathered the worst of the Depression without so much as a blink, prospering from sheer, daredevil ruthlessness combined with the ready availability of a massive pool of cheap, desperate labor. And the mining expedition to Antarctica during the austral summer of 1933 to 1934, fueled by the Miskatonic expedition’s hints of mineral wealth, and involving countless vehicles and aircraft and thousands of men and sled dogs, proved to be the pinnacle of the company’s cruel exploitation. And the mechanism of its downfall.

  Cross-references and late-night hyperlinks eventually led me to a locked ward less than an hour’s drive from Arkham, where a very old man was spending his last days lashed down in emphysemic and urine-soaked squalor, his skin scabbed with age, his nights fitful and rife with screaming nightmares that even the most potent antipsychotics could not suppress. But as the nurse on call explained after I slipped her a hundred dollars, he would talk to anyone.

  “He dan’t make much sense, though,” she added in her flat, New England accent as she swung his door open and left me engulfed in a miasma of neglect and human waste.

  A common navvy, he had been present, at a much younger age, when Kalpaxia, broad-shouldered and swaggering in its corporate arrogance, had, with the intention of removing the useless slate overburden hiding what was expected to be several fortunes’ worth of iron, copper, and heavy metals, blasted Dyer’s mountains with thousands of tons of explosives tamped down into the basal strata of the range.

  “Went the wrong way, tho’,” he yammered at me in a spray of odiferous sputum. “All o’ it slid down inta what was behind, instead of comin’ forward. An’ it filled that valley straight up. An’ there was more mountains a ways away, an’ the blow bounced off’t and made that tumble in, too. Happens satimes in minin’, if yer not careful, an’ they weren’t careful, ’cause they rushed it. In an hour there wan’t anything left.”

  And thus, I thought, ended the existence of the two mountain ranges, and thus the perfectly understandable reason Starkweather and Moore found nothing more than a snowy, high-altitude plateau. Archaean slate. Of course. Slate by nature cleaves almost effortlessly into flat sheets. An unfortunate arrangement of strata had precipitated an immense orographic collapse.

  But the old man was not finished. And the nurse was wrong: he made perfect sense. Albeit not the kind I wanted to hear.

  “An’ when the dust settled, we saw it. Comin’ from where the second range’d been. Flowing like a river. With eyes. A-and mouths. And places … things … that din’t belong. And other things … comin’ up from the rubble t’ meet it. And they all came t’gether there in the rubble, bubbling an’ crawlin’ on each other like a pot o’ greasy eels. And then the ground collapsed an’ buried ’em all. And the wind brought snow t’ bury ’em deeper.”

  But when I asked what they were, he ranged off into incoherency, his voice fading into a whisper so soft I had to lean forward to catch his words—a nearly inaudible “tek … li … tek … li … tek … li …”—before his manner abruptly changed and, blind eyes wide, he began screaming. Stunned, deafened, I fell back as orderlies crowded into the room. But it was too late for either restraints or sedatives. He was well into his eighties, and the recounting of the tale to one who knew what questions to ask had proven too much for his heart.

  But I knew the rest of the story already. The mining endeavor was a complete failure. Of several thousand men who had approached the mountains, perhaps a dozen had returned to the waiting ships, half-mad from cold, hunger, and frostbite. They had scrambled aboard, babbling half-sentences and lapsing into periodic catatonia, the silence of which was broken only by the same spasmodic syllables I had heard from the final survivor’s lips.

  The rest … lost. Crushed. Frozen. Driven mad. Kalpaxia collapsed, all traces of its grandiose adventure buried, like the mountains, under ice and snow. Only chance had allowed me words with an eyewitness before death silenced him forever.

  Brooding, I drove home … to be met at the door by Paul, who seemed utterly lighthearted. “Alf!” he exclaimed. “Core samples just in from that smoker in that new Peabody-Gustaf Deep! Amazing! Soapstone fragments … with dots! We are going down to have a look: young Pabodie has a submersible and some suits that will keep us in the pink even at ten thousand meters! All the Young Turks in oceanography got cold feet, so we old fogies will be taking the plunge. We will be breathing water, of course, though that should be second nature to you, coming from up Innsmouth way and all.” He paused, noticing my expression. “Why, what is wrong, Alf? You look like you have seen a ghost.”

  * * *

  The door of possibility had swung wide, but I found myself less than enthusiastic about crossing its threshold. Though I could hardly give complete credence to the ravings of a senile derelict, neither could I ignore the sense of conviction with which he had spoken … nor put down to simple physical law the madness and destruction of several thousand men.

  I told Paul of my methods, my discoveries, and my concerns as preparations for the second Miskatonic University expedition to Antarctic waters went forward, and he, in turn, explained his own efforts. Far from being frozen into helpless inaction by inescapable contradictions, he had made his inquiries subtly, reading papers published in scientific journals and examining those sent to him for peer review, searching for signs that might point toward the lingering presence of his father’s discoveries. For where I had broken my möbius on the mountains, Paul had, rather, started off by assuming the reality of the Old Ones and their civilization, focusing on the part of their chronicles, as explicated by the cartouches documented by his father, that pointed to their continued existence amid scattered instances of geothermal warmth in the deep oceans.

  Before and during our southward voyage on the research vessel Okeanos Explorer, graciously lent to us by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, we compared our notes and, for the first time, openly discussed William Dyer’s manuscript; doing so, however, in silence for the most part, not only for the sake of privacy, but also because Pabodie’s bathysuits, designed as they were around the breathing of oxygenated perfluorocarbons—the only practicable way to keep the human body alive at the immense depths we contemplated—would not allow for speech, and therefore, so as to be able to dispense with slates and keypads and other clumsy methods of communication, we trained ourselves in lip-reading, using our conversations as practice.

  Pabodie’s microprocessor-controlled pumps worked admirably, taking upon themselves the unaccustomed effort of moving fluid in and out of our lungs in perfect synchronization with our diaphragms (though I confess that the initial liquid “breath” usually precipitated a certain panicked thrashing about), and our test dives, performed first in the safety of Boston harbor, and then again once our ship had reached the chill waters hiding the belching, hydrothermal vent located in the Peabody-Gustaf Deep a few hundred miles off the icebound coast of Antarctica, were a complete success. There seemed to be nothing that might impede our ten-thousand-meter descent for a firsthand look at the source of the warm water plume that, confined as it was by the narrowness of the deep, accounted for a rise in temperature of nearly three degrees centigrade at the ocean’s surface.

  Ostensibly, our expedition was meant to “put Miskatonic back on the map” as a vibrant center of scientific research, not to mention going some way toward expunging the stain left by that very inconvenient episode of the 1930s. And publicly, at least, Paul Dyer was in this matter an enthusiastic supporter and participant. Privately, however, he had another agenda … as did I. But where mine was simple—proof or disproof—Paul’s was, I was certain, more complex, and possibly not one to be easily explicated. Was he intent upon clearing his father’s name? Did anybody even care about
his father’s name anymore? After all, it had been almost eight decades by now: we all lived in a different world, and though Dyer père’s scandal might have shaken Miskatonic’s reputation down to the bedrock in the years before the Second World War, the twenty-first century had much more pressing concerns.

  Paul could easily have let the matter go, dismissing, as had other scientists, the soapstone fragments with their curiously arranged dot patterns as mere chance juxtapositions of mineral debris and random pitting. But he had not let it go, and he, quite obviously, had pressing reasons for not letting it go. Reasons that (I realized as we prepared the deep-diving submersible and bathysuits for their first real trial at extreme depths) led to the addition, to the hull’s external equipment, of two high-explosive devices.

  Paul followed my gaze to the mines. “I think they are down there,” was all he said.

  They again. What they? The star-headed monstrosities that had first tantalized and then disgraced his father? Perhaps. But my thoughts continually returned to what the old man in the locked ward had said about what had appeared when the mountains had fallen. Delusion, perhaps. The effect of combined shock and hypoxia … maybe.

  Though we were packed into the tiny pilots’ sphere like a pair of potted shrimp, our descent proceeded uneventfully, and our navigation, following the upwelling plume of warm water, proved effortless. Within half an hour, the darkness outside the viewing ports was complete, and since we left our external lights switched off to conserve battery power, we could easily note the presence and at times disconcerting appearance of the more phosphorescent Abyssal Zone inhabitants.

  Somewhat more disturbing, despite our absolute confidence in Pabodie’s designs, were the occasional creaks and groans as the syntactic-foam hull of the submersible adjusted to the steadily increasing pressure, responding to the growing stress by becoming all the stronger. The same adaptive material comprised much of the bathysuits as well, but I confess I still had qualms about venturing into the vast darkness and unimaginable pressures of ten thousand meters in what I could only consider to be a glorified set of fishing waders.