by Neil Gaiman
There it was that finally the younger brother’s toupee came away from his head in the silent struggle—and in a burst of strength engendered of sheer loathing Anderson managed to turn the knife inward and drive it to the madman’s heart. He was quick then to be on his feet and away from the thing that now lay twitching out its life upon the sawdust floor—the thing that had been his brother—which now, where the top of Hamilton’s head had been, wore a cap of writhing white worms of finger thickness, like some monstrous sea-anemone sucking vampirishly at the still-living brain!
Later, when morning came, even had there been someone in whom he might safely confide, Anderson Tharpe could never have related a detailed or coherent account of the preceding hours of darkness. He recalled only the general thread of what had passed; frantic snatches of the fearful activity that followed upon the hideous death of his brother. But first there had been that half hour or so of waiting—of knowing that at any moment, attracted perhaps by strange lights or sounds, someone might just enter the tent and find him with Hamilton’s body—but he had been obliged to wait for he could not bring himself to touch the corpse. Not while the stubby white tentacles of its head continued to writhe! Hamilton died almost immediately, but his monstrous crown had taken much longer…
Then, when the loathsome—parasite?—had shuddered into lifeless rigidity, he had gathered together his shattered nerves to dig a deep grave in the soft earth beneath the sawdust. That had been a gruesome task with the lights turned down and Cthulhu’s stone effigy casting a tentacled shadow over the fearful digger. Anderson later remembered how soft the ground had been—and wet when it ought to have been dry in the weatherproof tent—and he recalled a powerful smell of deep ocean, of aeons-old slime and rotting seaweeds; an odour he had known on occasion before, and always after one of Hamilton’s “sacrifices.” The connection had not impressed itself upon his mind as anything more than mere coincidence before, but now he knew that the smell came with the green light, as did that strange state of soundlessness.
In order to clear what remained of the fetor quickly—having tamped down the earth, generally “tidied up” and removed all traces of his digging—he opened and tied back the canvas doors of the tent to allow the night air a healthy circulation. But even then, having done everything possible to hide the night’s horror, he was unable to relax properly as daylight had crept up and the folk of the funfair began to wake and move about.
When finally Hodgson’s Funfair had opened at noon, Anderson had something of a shaky grip on himself, but even so he had found himself drenched in cold sweat at the end of each oratorical session with the crowds at the freak-house. His only moments of relaxation came between shows. The worst time had been when a leather-jacketed teenager peered through the canvas inner door to the partitioned section of the tent; and Anderson had nearly knocked the youth down in his anxiety to steer him away from the place, though no trace remained of what had transpired there.
On reflection, it amazed Anderson that his fight with his brother had not attracted someone’s attention, and yet it had not. Even the fairground’s usually vociferous watchdogs had remained silent. And yet those same dogs, since Hamilton’s return from his travels abroad, had seemed even more nervous, more given to snapping and snarling than ever before. Anderson could only tell himself that the weird “silent state” which had accompanied the green light must have spread out over the entire fairground to dissipate slowly, thus disarming the dogs. Or perhaps they had sensed something else, remaining silent out of fear…? Indeed, it appeared his second guess was correct, for he discovered later that many of the dogs had whimpered the whole night away huddled beneath the caravans of their masters…
Two days later the funfair packed up and moved on, leaving Hamilton Tharpe’s body safely buried in an otherwise empty field. At last the worst of Anderson’s apprehensions left him and his nerves began to settle down. To be sure his jumpiness had been marked by the folk of the funfair, who had all correctly (though for the wrong reasons) diagnosed it as a symptom of anxiety about his crazy, bad-lot brother. So it was that as soon as Hamilton’s absence was remarked upon, Anderson was able simply to shrug his shoulders and answer: “Who knows? Tibet, Egypt, Australia—he’s just gone off again—said nothing to me about it—could be anywhere!” And while such inquiries were always politely compassionate, he knew that in fact the inquirers were greatly relieved that his brother had “just gone off again.”
Another six weeks went by, with regular halts at various villages and small towns, and during that time Anderson managed to will himself to forget all about his brother’s death and his own involvement—all, that is, except the nature of that parasitic horror which had made itself manifest upon Hamilton’s head. That was something he would never forget, the way that awful anemone had wriggled and writhed long after its host was dead. Hamilton had called the thing a symbol of his priesthood—in his own words: “The Mark of Cthulhu”—but in truth it could only have been some loathsomely malignant and rare form of cancer, or perhaps a kind of worm or fluke like the tapeworm. Anderson always shuddered when he recalled it, for it had looked horribly sentient there atop Hamilton’s head; and when one thought about the depth at which it might have been rooted…
No, the insidious gropings of that horror within Hamilton’s brain simply did not bear thinking about, for that had obviously been the source of his insanity. Anderson in no way considered himself weak to shudder when thoughts as terrible as these came to threaten his now calm and controlled state of mind, and when the bad dreams started he at once lay the blame at the feet of the same horror.
At first the nightmares were vague shadowy things, with misty vistas of rolling plains and yawning, empty coastlines. There were distant islands with strange pinnacles and oddly angled towers, but so far away that the unknown creatures moving about in those island cities were mere insects to Anderson’s dreaming eyes. And for this he was glad. Their shapes seemed in a constant state of flux and were not pleasant. They were primal shapes, from which the dreamer deduced that he was in a primal land of aeons lost to mankind. He always woke from such visions uneasy in mind and deflated in spirit.
But with the passing of the months into summer the dreams changed, becoming visually sharper, clearer in their insinuations, and actually frightening as opposed to merely disturbing. Their scenes were set (Anderson somehow knew) deep in the dimly lighted bowels of one of the island cities, in a room or vault of fantastic proportions and awe-inspiring angles. Always he kneeled before a vast octopoid idol… except that on occasion it was not an idol but a living, hideously intelligent Being!
These dreams were ever the worst, when a strange voice spoke to him in words that he was quite unable to understand. He would tremble before the towering horror on its throne-like pedestal—a thing one hundred times greater in size than the stone morbidity in the freak-house—and, aware that he only dreamed, he would know that it, too, was asleep and dreaming. But its tentacles would twine and twist and its claws would scrabble at the front of the throne, and then the voice would come…
Waking from nightmares such as these he would know that they were engendered of hellish memory—of the night of the green glow, the deep-ocean smell, and the writhing thing in his brother’s head—for he would always recall in his first waking moments that the awful alien voice had used sounds similar to those Hamilton had mouthed before the green light came and after it had taken the florid explorer away. The dreams were particularly bad and growing worse as the year drew to a close, and on a number of occasions the dreamer had been sure that slumbering Cthulhu was about to stir and wake up!
And then, himself waking up, all the horror would come back to Anderson, to be viewed once more in his mind’s eye in vivid clarity; and knowing as he did that his brother too had been plagued by just such dreams prior to his second long absence from the fairground, Anderson Tharpe was a troubled man indeed. Yes, they had been the same sort of nightmares, those dreams of Hamilton’s; had
n’t he admitted that “Cthulhu comes to me in dreams?” And had the dreams themselves not heralded the greater horrors?
And yet, in less gloomy mood, Anderson found himself more and more often dwelling upon Hamilton’s weird murder weapon, the pulsating green light. He was by no means an ignorant man, and he had read something of the recent progress in laser technology. Soon he had convinced himself that his brother had used an unknown form of foreign science to offer up his mad “sacrifices to Cthulhu.” If only he could discover how Hamilton had done it…
But surely science such as that would require complex machinery? It was while pondering this very problem that Anderson hit upon what he believed must be the answer: whatever tools or engines Hamilton had used, they must be hidden in the octopoid idol, or perhaps built into those ugly stone tablets which had formed a semicircle about the idol. And perhaps, like the electric-eye beams which operated the moving floors and blasts of cool air in the fairground’s Noah’s Ark, Hamilton’s chanted “summons” had been nothing more than a resonant trigger to set the hidden lasers or whatever to working. The smell of deep ocean and residual dampness must be the natural aftermath of such processes, in the same way that carbon monoxide and dead oil are the waste from petrol engines and the smell of ozone is attendant to electrical discharges.
The tablets, the idol too, still stood where they had stood in the time before the horror—the only change was that now the canvas partition was down and Hamilton’s ancient artifacts were on display with the other paraphernalia of the freak-house—but just suppose Anderson were to arrange them exactly as they had been before, and suppose further that he could discover how to use that chanted formula. What then? Would he be able to summon the green light? If so, would he be able to use it as he had tried to convince Hamilton it should be used? Perhaps the answer lay in his dead brother’s books…
Certainly that collection of ancient tomes, now slowly disintegrating in a cupboard in the caravan, were full of hints of just such things. It was out of curiosity at first that Anderson began to read those books, or at least what he could read of them! Many were not in English but in Latin or archaic German, and at least one other was in ciphers the like of which Anderson had only ever seen on the stone tablets in the freak-house.
There were among the volumes such tides as Peery’s Notes on the Cthaat Aquadingen, and a well thumbed copy of the same author’s Notes on the Necronomicon; while yet another book, handwritten in a shaky script, purported to be the Necronomicon itself, or a translation thereof, but Anderson could not read it for its characters were formed of an unbelievably antiquated German. Then there was a large envelope full of yellowed loose leaves, and Hamilton had written on the envelope that this was “Ibn Shoddathua’s Translation of the Mum-Nath Papyri.” Among the more complete and recognizable works were such tides as The Golden Bough and Miss Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, but by comparison these were light reading.
During December and to the end of January, all of Anderson’s free time was taken up in studying these works, until finally he became in a limited way something of an authority on the dread Cthulhu Cycle of Myth. He learned of the Elder Gods, benign forces or deities that existed “in peace and glory” near Betelgeuse in the constellation Orion; and of the powers of evil, the Great Old Ones! He read of Azathoth, bubbling and blaspheming at the center of infinity—of Yog-Sothoth, the “all-in-one and one-in-all”, a god-creature coexistent in all time and conterminous with all space—of Nyarlathotep, the messenger of the Great Old Ones—of Hastur the Unspeakable, hell-thing and “Lord of the Interstellar Spaces”—of fertile Shub-Niggurath, “the black goat of the woods with a thousand young”—and, finally, of Great Cthulhu himself, an inconceivable evil that seeped down from the stars like cosmic pus when Earth was young and inchoate.
There were, too, lesser gods and beings more or less obscure or distant from the central theme of the Mythos. Among these Anderson read of Dagon and the Deep Ones; of Yibb-Tstll and the Gaunts of Night; of the Tcho-Tcho people and the Mi-Go; of Yig, Chaugnar Faugn, Nyogtha, and Tsathoggua; of Atlach-Nacha, Lloigor, Zhar, and Ithaqua; of burrowing Shudde-M’ell, flaming Cthugha, and the loathsome Hounds of Tindalos.
He learned how—for practicing abhorrent rites—the Great Old Ones were banished to prisoning environs where, ever ready to take possession of the Earth again, they live on eternally. Cthulhu, of course, having featured prominently in his brother’s madness—now supposedly lying locked in sunken R’lyeh beneath the waves, waiting for the stars to “come right” and for his minions, human and otherwise, to perform those rites which would once more return him as ruler of his former surface dominions—held the greatest interest for Anderson.
And the more he read, the more he became aware of the fantastic depth of his subject—but even so he could hardly bring himself to admit that there was anything of more than passing interest in such “mumbo-jumbo.” Nevertheless, on the night of the second of February, 1962, he received what should have been a warning: a nightmare of such potency that it did in fact trouble him for weeks afterwards, and particularly when he saw the connection in the date of this visitation. It had been Candlemas, of course, which would have had immediate and special meaning to anyone with even the remotest schooling in the occult. Candlemas, and Anderson Tharpe had dreamed of basaltic submarine towers of titanic proportions and nightmare angles; and within those basalt walls and sepulchers, he had known that loathly Lord Cthulhu dreamed his own dreams of damnable dominion…
This had not been all. He had drifted in his dreams through those walls to visit once more the inner chambers and kneel before the sleeping god. But it had been an unquiet sleep the Old One slept, in which his demon claws scrabbled fitfully and his folded wings twitched and jerked as if fighting to spread and lift him up through the pressured deeps to the unsuspecting world above! Then, as before, the voice had come to Anderson Tharpe—but this time it had spoken in English!
“Do you seek,” the voice had asked in awesome tones, “to worship Cthulhu? Do you presume to His priesthood? I can see that YOU DO NOT, and yet you meddle and seek to discover His secrets? Be warned: it is a great sin against Cthulhu to destroy one of His chosen priests, and yet I see that you have done so. It is a sin, too, to scorn Him; but you have done this also. And it is a GREAT sin in His eyes to seek to use His secrets in any way other than in His service—AND THIS, TOO, YOU WOULD DO! Be warned, and live. Live and pray to your weak god that you are destroyed, in the first shock of the Great Rising. It were not well for you that you live to reap Cthulhu’s wrath!”
The voice had finally receded, but its sepulchral mind-echoes had barely faded away when it seemed to the paralyzed dreamer that the face tentacles of slumbering Cthulhu reached out, groping malignantly in his direction where he kneeled in slime at the base of the massive throne!
At that a distant howling sprang up, growing rapidly louder and closer; and as the face tentacles of the sleeping god had been about to touch him, so Tharpe came screaming awake in his sweat-drenched bed to discover that the fairground was in an uproar. All the watchdogs, big and small, chained and roaming free alike, were howling in unison in the middle of that cold night. They seemed to howl at the blindly impassive stars, and their cries were faintly answered from a thousand similarly agitated canine throats in the nearby town!
The next morning speculation was rife among the showmen as to what had caused the trouble with the dogs, and eventually, on the evidence of certain scraps of fur, they put it down to a stray cat that must have got itself trapped under one of the caravans to be pulled to pieces by a Great Dane. Nevertheless, Anderson wondered at the keen senses and interpretation of the dogs in the local town that they had so readily taken up the unnatural baying and howling…
During the next fortnight or so Anderson’s slumbers were mercifully free of nightmares, so that he was early prompted to continue his researches into the Cthulhu Cycle of Myth. This further probing was born partly of curiosity and p
artly (as Anderson saw it) of necessity; he yet hoped to be able to employ gainfully his brother’s mysterious green light, and his determination was bolstered by the fact that takings of late had been dismal. So he once more closed off the previously partitioned area of the tent, and his spare-time studies now became equally divided between Hamilton’s books of occult lore and a patient examination of the hideous idol and carved tablets. He discovered no evidence of hidden mechanical devices in the queer relics, but nevertheless it was not long before he found his first real clue towards implementing his ambition.
It was as simple as this: he had earlier noted upon the carved tops of the stone tablets a series of curiously intermingled cuneiform and dot-group hieroglyphs, two distinct sets to each stone. This could not be considered odd in itself, but finally Anderson had recognized the pattern of these characters and knew that they were duplicated in the handwritten Necronomicon; and more, there were translations of that work into at least two other languages, one of them being the antiquated German in which the bulk of the book was written.
Anderson’s knowledge of German, even in its modern form, was less than rudimentary, and thus he enlisted the aid of old Hans Moller from the hoopla stall. The old German’s eyesight was no longer reliable, however, and his task was made no easier by the outmoded form in which the work was written; but at last, and not without Anderson’s insistent urging, Moller was able to translate one of the sequences first into more modern German (in which it read: Gestorben ist nicht, was fur ewig ruht, und mit unbekannten Aonen mag sogar der Tod noch sterben), and then into the following rather poor English: “It is not dead that lies still forever; Death itself dies with the passing of strange years.”