The Madness of Cthulhu Anthology (Volume One): 1

by The Madness of Cthulhu (epub)

  Jim heard a crashing boom, as if someone had dropped a locomotive. He looked toward the sound as a huge creature moved out of the shadows behind the throne. At first all he could see were the legs, brown and goatlike, if a goat were fifty feet tall, with huge cloven hooves. The creature sat down, and Jim could see that its torso was made up of what looked like thousands of large maggots, all moving so that the body was never truly still. In place of arms it had eight masses of tentacles, four on each side.

  Worst of all was the head. It swayed on a thick, long neck and looked for all the world like a giant rattlesnake, complete with long fangs that dripped a loathsome green ichor. But it was the thing’s eyes that were the most horrible. They looked like a human’s, only they gleamed with more intelligence and malice than any human had ever managed. And they were looking right at Jim. Jim knew without asking that this was Nez-testen.

  Halla leapt up onto the altar, and now Jim could see that her boots had become goat-legs, just like the giant creature’s. She bowed to it and then spoke. “Father, I bring you the last ingredients for your next batch.”

  The monster that was her father nodded its head. “Which one will do the honors?” he asked, his voice a thundering, garbled hiss.

  Halla turned around and looked at Jim and Big Willie. She smiled her odd smile, and Jim realized she was more terrifying to him than even her father. She jumped back down, landing on her goat legs, her eyes glowing orange.

  “This one,” she said, pointing to Jim. “The other one is stronger and more necessary as an ingredient.”

  With that, Nez-testen reached out a tentacled limb and grabbed Big Willie. Jim took one last look at his former leader. Big Willie was smiling. “Thank you, master, for this honor,” he said, just before Nez-testen plunged his head into the boiling pool. Big Willie’s limbs and body thrashed for a few moments and then went still. Nez-testen let go and the last of Big Willie sank under as the liquid boiled around him.

  Nez-testen made a swirling movement with this set of tentacles and the liquid began to spin, just as if it were being stirred.

  “What happens to me?” Jim managed to whisper, as he dragged his eyes away from the horrible brew and looked back at Halla.

  She gave him her same odd smile again. “Now you will receive my thanks. You will become the vessel through which my father will create my next batch of siblings. You will enjoy all your willing women,” she said with an evil chuckle as she gestured to the altar. “At least, the part of you that will remain will do so. After all, my father must be represented to your world with outward beauty. And,” she added, “your essence will stay with me, forever, to help me find more just like you.”

  She leaned forward and kissed him, her tongue becoming long and snake-like as it entered his mouth. He could feel it moving down his throat, pulling his insides out until his body was just a shell. Then her tongue moved upwards. The last thing Jim saw was her glowing eyes and he knew there was a worse place than Hell, and that he would dwell in it forever.

  * * *

  Halla took the shell of Jim’s body and had it drink from the stew the other members of his gang had created. When it was full she led it to the altar and had it start its important work. When it emptied, she led it back to the stewpot, over and over again.

  It was tedious, particularly because the women couldn’t be shut up. They had to remain physically unharmed until they were each properly impregnated. Then they would be silenced quickly, as their bodies exploded into seven new fully-formed adult beings, beautiful and enticing new sisters for Halla to teach and train and lead. New sisters to find the evil men of this world and bring their essences back to Great Nez-testen.

  She could feel Jim’s brain inside her, nestled next to the others’. She enjoyed the way they moved, just the way the ones inside her father moved, frantically trying to escape, forever unable to do so. One day Halla knew she would have claimed so many that her torso would look just like her father’s. Then she would be ready to sit next to him, on her own throne, as his equal.

  But not just now. Just now she had to finish this latest batch and then trade seven horses to the local Apache tribes in exchange for whatever women they had kidnapped for her in the last few months.

  Then she would go out and see who else wanted to earn her thanks.

  WHITE FIRE

  JOSEPH S. PULVER, SR.

  (FOR JACK LONDON AND LAIRD BARRON)

  A MAN WHO IS ABOUT TO DIE IS NOT LIKELY TO BE VERY ELEGANT in his last words: being in a hurry to sum up his whole life, he tends to make them rigorously concise.

  —Jean Ray, “The Mainz Psalter”

  All my treasures …

  On his knees. Ice-muzzled.

  Shivering cracked lips struggling with the word. “Lost.”

  Acute white snow. Shapeless, shifting.

  A day with no sun or cloud. White, crushing light with its glaring fire. No fissure to there or free in this funeral. No pattern of charity.

  COLD. Thicker than granite under zero, or New England winter.

  The experiments of explorers uprooting history, over. Shattered by the wolf, by greed. Running from the cascade of devils.

  No way back. No out. This or there, the same blindfold of pure WHITE.

  Two sled dogs, good dogs, dead. Two more that would not dominate distance with faithful resolution. Petrified.

  Didn’t even remember their names.

  Not much longer for the other eight.

  His canvas saturated, too.

  Ice.

  Cold—curved, rough. Snarling.

  Thaw a myth no exertion could break.

  Not another step. Cold, hard as iron and steel, sank its fangs into panting, closed the circle. Trotting a behavior of instincts that won’t spread over the ground again.

  A country without inches or light, or a map that held transit to reason.

  Snow falls.

  Snow drifts.

  What is blown swirls, blinds.

  Snow, a great beast, a concrete bulk, comes and keeps coming.

  The whiteness. Conqueror flag. Its teeth shred sure as the hard end of an .8-gauge. WHITENESS. Windowless. No Christmas lawn spread before him. A dance of madness all around.

  Dream scenes. The vase empty of forget-me-nots in the mirror … Heaven handwritten on a map of the city … 2 a.m. small talk and Girl Scout cookies … Rubbing his chest with his good hand, trying to make moments and miles imaginable.

  Had there been stars, the soft vocabulary of believing? A moon that enlarged evening as it emerged from ink-stained clouds? Weather that had cleared and allowed you to see morning after the tramp of your offending huff? Other men, talking over coffee—tucking in small complaints, and laughing? Was there still a painting of a waterfall robed in gold over the fireplace in his father’s study back home?

  “Lost.” Nothing else will fit into his mouth.

  Home.

  Memories he used to live in: Little white house with its little white porch and windows recounting framed pleasures to the flower beds—late September, the compelling treat of orange, the new king of colors. On the porch, on his elbows and knees, knowing harvest was coming, tossing peanuts to the squirrels. Grinning at the fat one he called Bozo, the one who was happy to bounce from peanut to peanut.

  Was there—

  Order? Something in the oven? Intentions that paid off?

  In another universe perhaps. The one that was not swept clean by this broadside, something with appeal and crafted with habits and landings that didn’t plant you in misery, where luck and laughter were pals. Some other place, a stable harbor where you remembered to take your umbrella and didn’t sell yourself down the river. A place with a quiet sunset …

  If he could step away could he find the strength to still yearn?

  Those times; experiments and collisions, cutting the weeds and grass, discarding the growth in the mirror, the aftershave, the kiss of her picture, surveying mouths for lies or comforts, the magic of a gift accepted
, bourbon, playing cards, blue on the other side of the kitchen window—

  Plucked away from the velocity of his dreams by the soft firm voice coming from the window. “Edward, it’s time for dinner.” Warm rolls with dinner and her eyes …

  Nic’s too. He’d lost her picture in the pull of impossible weather, gust and gone. Lost sight of Nicolette’s genteel angel song.

  He should have remained in that place, should have stopped and thought things out. Thought it stricken and dulled. Thought the mundane foolish, iron that struck down amusements. Might have anchored his bones to being there if Nic stayed. Might? But aim lost its territory … Got ready to go, display his nature for investigations. Decided he’d had enough of his own cross-examinations, brushed troubled ends off his shoulders, set out for joining.

  Went to school—lit and history, and geology, they’d told him it was the easiest science. Didn’t fit, didn’t get afire. Yawned, took the Cs. Left quickly. Didn’t turn to see the doors close on the myths he no longer carried. Went to sea. Lay in his bunk, rocked and rocked, and read Moby-Dick as a joke. Thought of Grandpa’s chatty fish stories, dreamed of Nantucket sleighrides, sea ivory and terrible monsters. Sang with his mates. Found surprises and memories.

  Sailed.

  Astonished by flawless stars the first weeks. Stared in the depths for exhibitions of grandeur. Saw the sea. Day after day. Vast. Endless … No Tuesdays no Fridays. No harbor.

  Toil with the nets. Rock in his bunk. Expectations trimmed. Laughter too.

  Felt small in the wide.

  Drank some, no cure pushed back the cold revelation.

  Felt lost and bewildered.

  Wide grew.

  Locked in another day.

  Saw the sea.

  The sea did not change.

  Ran away again.

  Home, thankful for the miles of dark green forest between him and the sea. Settled back into his studies. Didn’t throw up a hallelujah, but he worked at it, a little. Met Jeanrenaud in a campus coffee shop. Followed it with pizza and Jeanrenaud’s fascination with old Antarctic accounts. Waving his cigarette about like a conductor’s baton, John-Claude spoke of Danforth and the two Poe letters from 1849, which he’d discovered in his grandfather’s papers, and spun a narrative about the allusions and assertions of something Other that waited beyond the Lighthouse at the End of the World. “Tarnished accounts of a lost land. Alien things.” The songs on the jukebox faded in space and time as the chest of destruction was opened.

  Mysteries. The clash of natures and destinies.

  As a kid he was never big on sci-fi books or books in general. Movies, sure, but not books. Yet he’d loved Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth and some Edgar Rice Burroughs and, for a heartbeat, Erich von Däniken. Thoughts of something akin to Pellucidar took flight.

  Call of the wild, sure. Back across the ferocious sea … “A spectral land of ghosts and desolation, a wild untamed place, but it may present the opportunity for an achievement like no other—I want to look into the abyss and see if there’s anything tangible there.

  “Glory, my friend. If we find it. If we bring back proof.”

  Got sucked in and signed on.

  Sailed away, some laughed, into menace. South.

  Felt the cold come, grow, it challenged the blue right out of the sky.

  Pure white. Majestic blue. Mountains immortal when the Romans held slaves, when humans first rigged hopes on the light of the moon. Picturesque. For a time.

  In the caverns below the discoveries came—

  Surroundings lost order, new time came out of its burrows in the cold ground. Silent salted afraid with wild. Abundant was burnt out of future …

  And he ran. Soiled by weakly and imprudent, carrying puniness and little else, he fled. Panic his route.

  No more mystery. Just strangeness and wind. Wind. A saraband of dissonance, of devil-music. Wind. The vigor of its bristling speech presses its muscle to shoulder, to neck, presses—slashes, threatens ribbons savagely wrought. Finds its way in, gives winter. An epidemic of wind.

  Weakened by terrors, not moving. Going under. No satin-lined box to put terrible in. No undertaker. Every breath slower than the last.

  “Nobody’s … here.

  “No—”

  Nic. The luster of her California laugh when she asked if he had a penny to have his fortune told. Nic. The new existence, built with fever arrows, he discovered as she danced to “I Feel Love” in that black slip.

  He thought it was silk. If soft moonlight was black …

  Nic. Primal, free.

  By anyone’s standards she was pretty, alluring. The right nose, right cheeks, just high enough. Perfect lips, jawline a statue in a museum would kill for, but her eyes, dig through the glimmer of a pirate’s treasure chest and you would not find better.

  Beautiful.

  Pieces of home. The sleepy village, the histories of soft, the casual flowers along Wilson Creek Road … Fourteen, staying up all night under a full July moon listening to an owl who was not rooted to branches and the pull of the stars …

  The middle years of infatuations, pushing off capacious branches to see if its wings could explain the horizon, inhaling theories, new spells some of which held, and small successes …

  Ransacking sixteen and carting away whatever true he could find …

  Socks on the rail, coffee on the back-porch with the ripe conference of yellow-tinted finches at the feeder while the smaller dark birds sat in branches waiting …

  WHITE hatching another exclamation of WHITE.

  Fun. Skiing the white majestic at Gore two days after Christmas with Mike and Lena. Eight, making snow angels with Suzy, giggling wildly the whole time. Twelve, the snowman snowball fights with Dom and shoveling the driveway and the two-story snow-fort next to Jimmy Cammarere’s pigeon coop. The cozy table by the window in Petta’s Italian restaurant on New Year’s Eve with Nic and the velvet doe standing on the frozen creek.

  Cold took it all. Every disguise and accent of memorial in the barracks of his memory. Leeched without a word, burned the layers of past in its blasting NOW. Dates. Learned. Her blue silk blouse. The words of apology that weren’t suited for the bed. There was no ledger or birthday that remained hidden or intact.

  White fire and no clock. No undo.

  They’d stood at the doors. Leveled their electric torches. Opened, the eruption of an existence that changed every man. The smell that was not friendly.

  Jeanrenaud, “This changes everything … everything.”

  Engel’s quick “Follow me.” A command burning along the slope of coveting.

  Step by step and further they climbed right into it. Chambers and passages that detailed an alien prehistory, blazing architecture—Stonehenge and the pyramids kid’s toys, carvings of both art and science, corridors and bridges and rooms it would take years to survey and penetrate. Step, standing in grim, brushed and imprinted by facts that compromised, commandeered, all that had been formalized by human understanding. Chambers that capsized the grids and structure of fact, the hammer that swept aside every model of geologic, biologic, and astronomical. They opened it and the harsh enemy targeted lives.

  Black fire raged.

  Engel screamed, “Shoggoths!” He was the first to be absorbed by violence.

  Impossible wrote.

  Forces with no middle ground whirled and hysterics encountered zero.

  And he ran—ignored the blunt of cold to be free of finished.

  Now he sat. A thing that did not flap. A thing in a land with nothing to burn. No sky in the grave of apart.

  Apart. Struck. Trapped.

  Mouse to cat’s cold, warm left. An hour ago? A day? With so many pieces missing he couldn’t tell.

  He stopped, maybe it was was stopped, stumbled. Fell and his adrenaline-fueled fight-or-flight response didn’t raise a “Get up!” Every signal of difference he had—his steps, his bowls, the speed and acts of his nerves, his tell—was pinned to this nation of W
HITE. Barely had his idiot left. Lost a mitten and followed it by dropping his goggles, got spun around and couldn’t find them.

  He wasn’t supposed to be out in this inhuman shit. Not in this vast blistering of WHITE influenced only by unsympathetic COLD. No one was. Not alone.

  Coyne, former Marine hard-stripe sergeant and still a major-league hardass laid down the rules for everyone: “No one, man or dog, goes out in Condition 5 weather. On your own, you die out there.”

  He’d heard it. Knew it.

  Wished he’d remembered it.

  Asshole.

  Stupid … How many times did he tell everyone?

  “Other side of that door is fucked all the way to dead. Shitload of pain before you get there too.”

  Alone, bent and small, whatever grit he ever possessed weathered out of him, with no acceleration to movement and no ship to turn from DEATH everywhere toward a map of places.

  Being terrified after Ancient was jarred awake hadn’t helped. Maybe a few seconds of cautious sense and he’d have taken the SnowTrac, not the dogs. Would have sealed him off from the wind and it had a heater. Instead he shot himself into a death-struggle with raw snow and exposure, from there his spirit hadn’t been enough to interfere with or challenge the solid radiation of cold.

  Tired. No climb to summer on his tongue. No wings to force into labor in this grave of WHITE FIRE.

  Tied down. Crushed.

  Dead man.

  Fleeing into a Condition 5 weather situation without proper supplies. “Asshole.”

  Asshole.

  Split.

  Leviathan-shattered.

  Dead man. Winter-sculpted.

  The white-tomb swells. His eyes cry out no name. His face froze, no longer a carpet of features.

  Sure wasn’t like this when they got past the stalactites and opened the doors and leapt past and ran with their upside-down imaginations. The air was blissful, stank, but it was warm. It was here, their lamps shone on gold’s delirium. Really here.

  “We … Christ, we found it!”

  “Glory, my friend.”

  Proof.

  Smiles, brio that needed no translation. Shaking hands.

  Behind him Herbie’s foreign accent summed things up. “Wow.”