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Cover Art: Lucas Wurdulak - www.instagram.com/lucaswurdulak

A Deal Between Bats illustration: Desmond Rhae Harris

The Dust of Nyarlathotep illustration: Maxwell Marais

The Music of Erich Zann illustration: Luke Spooner / Carrion House

Cosmic Horror Monthly

www.cosmichorrormonthly.com

Greetings Dear Reader

“I am Providence, and Providence is myself.”

-H.P. Lovecraft

This month we celebrate the literary contributions of a man who did a lot to define the genre we love. Cosmic Horror Monthly might not endorse everything the man believed (and wrote) , we do share a belief in the power of fear and terror and we still believe that the oldest and strongest fear is the fear of the unknown.

So we present to you now six tales that combine the glory that was turn-of-the-century cosmic horror with bold modern voices along with two classics from the man himself. First a resurrection of my personal favorite shapeshifting abomination in The Dust of Nyarlathotep. Then, a follow up to the events of the Dunwich Horror with The Hogansburg Horror. Moving right along, we find out what happened in the aftermath of The Colour Out of Space and what could happen should you gaze into a shining trapezohedron in The West Arkham Reservoir and A Deal Between Bats respectively. To wrap up our original offerings we get a glimpse into a possible origin story for the man of the hour.

Following that, a reprint of a unique tale about the NFL champions from Providence, and a descent into the crypt for The Music of Erich Zann and another personal favorite of mine, The Hound.

Enjoy.

The Dust of Nyarlathotep

By Scott Michael Hutchings

Of all the substances that men have believed to hold aphrodisiac properties, the strangest was certainly the dust of millennia old corpses, but such was the case in my youth. During the reign of our Queen Victoria, the young rakes and their young ladies attended mummy unwrapping parties, ostensibly to further their scientific and cultural education, but the stimulation they sought was not of an intellectual nature.

I’ve read that the majority of arousal occurs in the mind. So, if you believe that something is an aphrodisiac, it will suffice. Still, I remember those days, and when the lecturer opened the case and began snipping the wrappings, the room filled with scents of exotic spices and ancient decay, the nostrils tingled, the heart quickened. You could see young women’s breasts rising and falling beneath their gowns. We knew in our souls it was a violation, a crossing of forbidden boundaries that only added to the thrill, the illusion of danger when we were perfectly safe. After all, how can the dead punish our transgressions?

Following just such an exhibition, I escorted a certain young lady home, and in the closeness of the cab we gave in fully to our passions. The marriage was a happy one, if hastily arranged, and Egyptian Studies lost all interest for me while she lived. I lost contact with most of my old associates, put my misspent youth behind me, and established myself in medical practice.

A year after my wife’s passing, I was up past midnight, reading and sipping brandy, when I heard a faint, erratic knocking at the front door. Having no idea who it could be, I grabbed a cane from the umbrella stand before opening. I recoiled and raised my stick as a haggard looking man, wrapped in a tattered blanket, stumbled into my hall.

“Thank God you’re up,” he gasped. “I couldn’t have knocked loud enough to wake you.” He dropped to his knees, the blanket fell away from his head, and I recognized the face of one of my oldest friends, Roger Updike. We’d had lunch only two weeks prior, and he’d been hale and hearty, rich and scandalous as ever. Now his hair was matted with sweat, his skin pale and clammy, his hand trembling as it clutched the ragged blanket around his shivering frame. His eyes, wild and reddened, darted about the entry hall.

I helped him to his dirty and bloodied bare feet, and into a chair by the fire in my study, giving him a snifter of brandy to calm his nerves. When he’d composed himself, save for his left hand which twitched unseen under the blanket, he looked more steadily around the room, almost as if he was assuring himself, he was there. He turned to me. I looked into his pale face, his reddened eyes, and understood that some men are truly damned.

He spoke softly, haltingly, quite unlike his old, snappy patter. “Is… anyone else here?”

“Brinson, of course, asleep in his quarters.”

He smiled ruefully. “I don’t know why I should care, but the old habits die hard. Something horrible happens and our class is more concerned with gossip than tragedy.”

“What’s happened?”

He stared at me, wide-eyed, “What’s happened? Oh God… What’s happened? …No, I must tell someone, even if it means Bedlam… Wait, let me back up a bit.”

He paused for a gulp of brandy, sat up straighter, arranged his blanket like a Roman Senator smoothing his robe, and once composed, began, “You must remember David Scofeld, do you not?”

“How could I forget,” I nodded. “He was the most decadent rogue I’ve ever known.”

Roger smiled wryly,” I bumped into him last week and he invited me to a special party he was having, a mummy unwrapping. I asked if that sort of thing wasn’t somewhat out of fashion, but David laughed and said this was more than just the dusty corpse of some ancient Egyptian bellhop. He claimed to have laid his hands on the mummy of a Pharaoh. Oh, but not just any old Pharaoh, the legendary Black Pharaoh himself.”

He held out his glass and I splashed more brandy in. He gulped some down and continued. “I was interested, of course. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the legend.” I shook my head. “Well supposedly, at the end of the First Dynasty, the Black Pharaoh, Nyarlathotep, came out of nowhere and seized control of the whole Nile valley. He ruled bloody-handed for nearly a century, perverting the religion of Ancient Egypt to some twisted worship of dark Elder Gods, performing unholy rites, and siring monsters with the daughters of slaves and nobles alike. When he was finally overthrown, he was buried in an unmarked tomb in the trackless desert and all formal records of his rule were erased. David believed he’d obtained the mortal remains of an unholy demigod.”

“Sound like one of Scofeld’s flights of fantasy,” I said.

“Yes…” His face twitched and the hand under the blanket spasmed oddly. “Pretty fantastic stuff, I agree, and certainly not accepted in serious archaeological circles. I was quite certain poor old David’d been swindled. Still, I was intrigued and promised to attend, warning him that I might be late. In fact, I had arranged for a most interesting assignation for the hours before his party and intended to make the most of it.

He drained his glass, held it out for a refill, poured some more down his throat, and stared blankly into the fire. From the movement of the blanket, his unseen hand positively squirmed, but he paid it no mind and went on with his story.

“When I arrived, no one answered my knock, but the door wasn’t latched, not even fully closed, so I just let myself in. The scent hit me immediately, like any mummy, but more so. It was the very essence of ancient Egypt; exotic, ancient, and carnal. Even after my lascivious afternoon, I was instantly aroused. The sounds of pleasure wafted into the hall, and I followed them to the drawing room and into a scene from my most fevered fantasies; torn clothing scattered everywhere, naked flesh writhing on the floor in every form of sexual congress, a sweating, moaning mass of raw passion.”

Roger stared into his drink, then looked up at me with an ironic smirk. “Yes, a roman orgy in a London townhouse.” He laughed, bitterly. “Be careful what you wish for. The dust—God—the dust drifting like a faint cloud over the room. The dust stole my will and I ripped at my clothes, flinging them aside as I rushed to join the orgiastic spectacle. Madeline Chancellor was at the front edge of the tangle of flesh, her hair undone, her bare skin flushed and glistening with perspiration. She was so beautiful in that moment. I grabbed her arms, yanked her partially free of the tangle, and kissed her, pressed her hot, glowing flesh to my own. I don’t believe I’ve ever known a more perfect moment of physical pleasure.”

He looked down at his unseen hand, crawling beneath the blanket, drained his third glass of brandy, and carelessly set it down on the edge of the lampstand. His hand, now free, clamped down on the blanket, pinning the one underneath. It subsided to a feeble twitching. He looked up again, face pale and stretched, his voice cracking.

“Then, I saw, over her shoulder, what I’d been too besotted to see before; the mummy was standing up in its case, shriveled arms spread wide, head back, leather face stretched in ecstasy over its half-exposed skull. A whirlwind of dust surrounded it, stretching out gritty tendrils to obscenely stroke the skins of the fornicators.”

He clenched his eyes shut. “I tried to pull away, but Madeline was clinging to me. Behind her, moans turned to shrieks, erotic motion to desperate struggle, lustful, blissful expressions to pain and terror. Madeline pulled back from me, her face twisting in ecstatic horror, staring downward. Her leg melted as I watched, like wax, flowing into the flesh of a man dissolving beneath her. Obscene tendrils crawled up under her skin. I threw myself away from her as she was sucked into a Hellish mound of twitching flesh. I fell back against the door as the thing began to surge forward, parts of its flesh taking on half-formed shapes of faces, limbs, torsos, but all sliding across the floor towards me. Over its heaving bulk, the mummy stared at me with eye sockets of empty blackness. I could feel the infinite, empty, cold of its soul, the cruel mockery directed at mankind. Its laugh pierced me like daggers of ice.”

He shuddered violently. “I ran from the house, naked as the day I was born. Out in the street, three matronly ladies screamed when they saw me. I was about to seek cover when I realized they were staring at this.”

He pulled back the blanket and I shuddered. His arm looked quite normal down to the elbow, but the forearm was drawn out to a point like warm taffy. The end slowly squirmed like a searching tentacle while strange throbbings pulsed redly up the shaft.

Roger covered it quickly and looked up, “I must’ve pushed away from poor Madeline a little too late. I have no idea where this blanket came from, or how I made my way here, but I can feel this thing spreading under the skin, growing, trying to claim me. You have to help me, you’re a surgeon, you have to cut it off.”

I nodded, the whole story was too fantastic, but the thing on his arm was real and had to be dealt with.

Let me wake Brinson, he can assist. Just wait here while I make the preparations.”

He looked up at me, shaking, “Please hurry, I… think I can feel it, that thing, that horrid mound of flesh from that awful room. It’s moving under the city, through the sewers maybe, searching for me, searching…” He grimaced at his arm. “…for its missing flesh. Part of me wants to go to it, meet it, wants to… oh God… join with it.”

I promised I would hurry, then roused Brinson and told him to prepare the treatment room for an amputation. He seemed befuddled but dressed and headed to the back of the house. I headed to my own chamber, not wanting to perform surgery in my dressing gown. I was just pulling on a shirt when I heard a scream. Running into the hall and down the stairs, I heard a horrendous banging and clattering from the back of the house, where the treatment room was. A crack of splintering wood like the door to my office bursting, which meant the source of the disturbance—I refused to think about what that might be—was one flimsy door away from the study, where Roger was waiting. I ran down the lower hall and into the room, grabbing my shotgun from over the mantelpiece and fumbling in the desk for shells. Roger was slumped in the chair, looking resigned, or maybe expectant.

Just as I loaded the second barrel, the door from the office exploded in a spray of splinters, and a deluge of flesh cascaded through, rising into a wave of melting limbs, twisting torsos, and writhing faces. I fired both barrels, tearing a gaping hole in the hideous flesh that melted together before it could bleed, if it could bleed. Roger rose from his chair with an unholy craving on his face and it poured itself over his naked skin, engulfing him in a fraction of a second. I backed into the hall, desperately trying to reload, but the thing just quivered for a few seconds, strange emotions flashing across the half-formed faces thrusting out of its mass, then slid back through the office door. I hesitated then followed to see the last of its horrid bulk disappearing down the ruptured floor drain. One of Brinson’s slippers lay, stained and crumpled, under the examination table. I could sense the thing moving through the sewers under the house, felt it pass under the street as it crept down the lines towards the river.

There was a clunk as my gun hit the floor. I could feel that thing, feel it moving in the distance. My hand tingled strangely, and I held it up to the light. A single pink speck pulsated on the back. It must’ve splashed there when I shot the thing. By all that is Holy, I felt the monster turn back, felt it coming for me. I fumbled for my surgical kit, grabbed a scalpel and hurriedly slice the alien flesh from my hand. With a hast bandage in place, I picked up the tiny, throbbing mass with tweezers and held it over a lamp flame. It squirmed and released a horrid stench, but was incinerated to black ash in seconds.

I could still feel the thing coming nearer. I emptied my safe and bolted from the house. A few days later, in Paris, I felt the creature crossing the Channel floor. Pink tendrils of infection were crawling under the skin of my hand. I paid a back-alley surgeon to amputate it, made him promise to burn it, and took the Orient Express to Istanbul. It was still following, so I took ship for India, then Singapore, where I had my arm removed above the elbow. I’m in San Francisco now. It’s followed me two thirds of the way around the globe. I’m sitting by a dirty window in a rat-infested hotel room I rented with near the last of my life’s savings. The rest went for a beer and a roast beef dinner and a gun. It can have my flesh, I won’t be needing it anymore. I should do it now. Why the hesitation? Fear? Or desire?

A scream just echoed from downstairs. It is here.

End.

*~*~*

Scott Michael Hutchings graduated from Grand Valley State University with a degree in creative writing. He worked a wide variety of jobs from farm worker to pizza cook before settling into Barnes and Noble. This is his fourth professional sale, and he is currently attempting to find an agent for his first novel, The Empire of the Night, about a Vampire Accountant’s midlife crisis.

The Hogansburg Horror

By Mike T Lyddon

I have been witness to many strange things in my life but the events on the night of December 11th in the secluded, sleepy town of Hogansburg, Georgia, make all other encounters seem quaint and pedestrian by comparison. It is now 2:30 in the early morning, December 12th. For three hours I have been sitting in the study of my house pondering the concept of reality versus fantasy and wondering if there is any difference at all between the two. While I frantically try to save what's left of my fragile sanity, I keep waiting, listening for that sound in the night. The sound that came from the Hogansburg forest. The terrible din that creeps through the dark woods and down the rolling hills into the valley I call home.

Only a few days earlier I'd received a call from my old friend, Nate Chapman, who'd been living in Hogansburg for the last several years. He spoke excitedly of the upcoming full moon and unsettling noises in the forest situated directly across from his old, dilapidated shack. Naturally, I chocked it all up to a bit of cabin fever. Winter was starting to settle in and already the massive Oaks and Pines had shed their respective leaves and needles onto the piles of dead and rotting detritus from last season and the seasons before that. People weren't inclined to go out as much as temperatures started dropping to near freezing at night and the late fall rains were a weekly occurrence. Nate had been watching the weather predictions and concluded that due to forecasted clear skies and a full moon hanging low in the southern hemisphere, Tuesday the 11th would be optimum. “Just arrive by 8 pm and you'll see—and hear!” He said, in an obsessed voice that made me think the poor fellow had finally snapped.

That Tuesday night I made the drive from Newland Valley about 10 miles southeast of Hogansburg to Nate's old house in the woods. The serpentine route climbed steadily into those dark hills, and with every mile, the landscape grew heavier with ancient, twisted Oaks consumed by the ever-encroaching Kudzu sprawling over ground and trees with such abundance that everything else would occasionally disappear save for those eternally voracious vines. On Nate's road, houses were few and far between. There were the Rollins, a kindly old couple that lived a hundred yards to his left, and a few other dwellings further down on his right, barely within shouting distance. I suppose Nate liked it that way. As I pulled into his driveway, I could see him sitting on his porch, smoking his pipe as I'd seen a dozen times before. He stood up and waved as I approached the rickety steps to his earthy bungalow.

“Evening, Lewis. Great night for it.” Nate nodded as he drew from his pipe.

“And I guess you're gonna tell me what it is.” I chuckled as I shook his hand and took a seat. He seemed a bit calmer than he was on the phone, and for that, I felt relieved.

“Oh, yes, my friend. Tonight, you'll know what it is, I guarantee it.” Nate smiled, took a drink of hooch from his flask and passed it to me. He was about my age, mid-fifties, but in remarkably better shape than I. However, I was taken aback by how ashen and gaunt his face was now, the beginnings of dark rings encircling his tired eyes.

The night was calm and clear as a bell save for a few sinewy strands of clouds that crept slowly past a beautiful full moon hanging above the low hills in the distance, casting an ethereal blue glow over the forest in front of us. As I gazed across the road, I became aware of a few things I'd never noticed before, the main discovery being that of an old red metal gate that straddled about twelve feet of ground to the left. It was mostly consumed by Kudzu vines, but I was still surprised that I'd never noticed it before. In the middle of the gate, on the crown there appeared to be a large letter W. No fence was attached to it on either side, just the old red gate.

“Hey, Nate, do you know what the W...”

“Stands for Whateley,” Nate quickly offered. “The old man who owns or used to own a good portion of that forest acreage.”

Whateley. I'd heard that name before, and not in a pleasant way. “I recall a scandal about a Whateley family from up north. Bad business with the occult, was it? But that was up near Boston and a long time ago if I remember correctly.”

“Yep, that's the one.”

Nate's tone became somber as he took another swig of whiskey.

“A few months ago, I was out here on the porch, same as always, having a drink and a smoke, when I became aware of a strange sound coming from the forest. And after that night, I always heard the sound. To this day I can hear the sound, Lewis. I can hear the sound right now, coming from the forest right in front of us.”

I looked at Nate, then looked at the forest. I became aware of something very peculiar. There was no sound at all. Not a bird, not a dog barking in the distance, no rustling of leaves through the trees. It was absolute dead silence.

“I'm sorry, my friend, but I can't hear a damn thing. I mean, literally nothing.”

He continued staring into the forest as though he didn't hear what I'd just said.

“After I started hearing that sound, I had to find out who owned the property. I went to City Hall a few weeks back and found the records. The land was purchased by Jeremiah Whateley in 1931, and I reckon he and his family came down here after the scandal involving his father, Curtis. The story went that people were terrorized by an 'unseen force' responsible for the destruction, described by some as ‘the implosion’ of many houses and the bizarre deaths of livestock in Dunwich. Seems like Curtis and his associates confronted another Whateley said to have been responsible for this series of gruesome events, and in the process, poor ol' Curtis went completely insane. Not long after the whole ordeal, Jeremiah brought him and some of his immediate kin down to Georgia to start life anew. Where they ended up making their home is anyone's guess. I could not find any records of other properties purchased by the Whateleys. But Jeremiah bought this here land, and for a while it was being used... for something. The tax records indicate that the land was being paid for every year up until 1963, and since then, nothing. Strange thing is, the county never repossessed it or tried to sell it. The land was abandoned and remains so to this day.”

I grabbed the flask from Nate and took a good hit. If he wanted to give me the creeps, he succeeded in spades.

“About a week ago, I decided to take a little hike in there to find the source of that damnable sound.” He turned to me, a hint of fear in his eyes. “I found it, Lewis.”

At that moment, I heard something in the distance.

“Nate. Listen.”

A very slow, shuffling sound came from the far end of the street. We both stared intently down the dark road as the rhythmic movement grew louder.

“What the hell... ?”

“Wait a second,” Nate whispered.

In a few moments there appeared the shadowy form of a man shambling down the middle of the street.

Nate squinted, then relaxed. “It looks like Mr. Rollins. I've seen him walking around at night before.”

While I was relieved at my friend solving the mystery, I was still bothered by the movements of the old man. He did not walk in a normal cadence, but more like a step, then a falter, then another longer or shorter step. To add to the strangeness of it all, his head was slightly tilted up and to the left in the direction of the forest, and he seemed to be muttering something to himself.

"Do you hear that? What's he saying?"

Nate took a long drag on his pipe and hunched forward in his chair.

"Who knows. He was muttering the same thing the last time I saw him, and for the life of me I couldn't figure it out. I'm not even sure if it's English."

As old man Rollins shuffled past us, I noticed something even more peculiar just behind him. The branches of the trees in the forest seemed to move and sway with the wind as he passed. But there was no wind. The air was remarkably calm, almost stagnant as we sat on the porch. Perhaps it was an anomalous disturbance in that finite space, but it was weird to say the least.

Then I heard it.

At first, so low that I thought it to be an aberration with my hearing, but as the volume rose it took on a distinct, disquieting repetition, like something mechanical scraping against wet, draping flesh. It seemed far off in the distance, but from what direction I could not ascertain. Nate cracked a weak smile knowing that my ears finally picked up the strange disturbance.

He let out a trembling sigh. "Thank God you can hear it. I finally have a witness. I just hope you're prepared to see it."

I pondered his statement for a moment. If I was going to back out, this would be the time.

But, what the hell. You only live once.

"Well, Nate old friend, that's what I came here for, right?"

I got up, went to my car, and retrieved a few necessary items for our little excursion.

A good flashlight, a hunting knife, and a solid maple, heavy hiking stick. It made for a nice club in a pinch.

“Almost grabbed my revolver, but I thought, ‘Nah’…”

Nate grinned. "Don't worry my friend. I'll have my .38 holstered... just in case."

*~*~*

As we entered the forest from the road, the weird sound was already stronger and even more disturbing than before. I paid close attention to the trees and the myriad branches strangled by vines that reached down and wrapped around the trunks then dug themselves into the ground itself, spreading out in a wild orgy of anarchic growths across the dark forest floor. As we trudged deeper into this wooded maze, I thought about what might happen if I lost track of Nate and had to get back to the road. Just don't lose track of Nate, was the preferred plan.

“About one hundred yards to go. Not much longer,” Nate chimed in.

Luckily, we were nearing winter and the trees were mostly bare of their leaves allowing more moonlight to shine down and illuminate outer areas of the path that our flashlights couldn't reach.

Suddenly, Nate stopped in his tracks. He was looking at something intently in the distance to our right.

“I didn't see that before. Just want to have a quick look.”

As we approached, what appeared to be a large pile of brownish-white scrap metal buried under seasons of leaves and Kudzu vines revealed itself to be a flattened old mobile home, of a design from the 1940s or 50s.

“Crushed by the mighty Kudzu. I hope they got out in time,” I mumbled.

Nate angled his light inside the thick vines, revealing more of the rusted structure.

"I don't think the Kudzu crushed it. Look at those huge, slashing marks on the top, as though something ripped into it."

"Maybe someone decided to do a little demolition," I suggested.

"Yeah, maybe. But then again, the marks look uneven and natural, not mechanical."

"So what are you suggesting?"

A sudden shriek of terror and pain like I'd never heard before shot through the forest.

"What the hell was that!?" I cried.

Nate tilted his head at an angle and listened intently.

"Sounded like a buck, but I..."

Then came a thundering sound from just ahead, of something big moving rapidly right for us.

"Get down!" yelled Nate. We both hit the ground as a 200 pound, Five-point Buck lept over us and hit the ground galloping for dear life. The branches of the trees suddenly shook violently as something else moved through the forest at lightning speed for the poor animal. I shined my flashlight on the Buck in the distance and watched in horror as it was lifted into the air like a rag doll and torn in half, blood and gore flying in every direction.

My eyes widened in horror as I turned to Nate. "Jesus Christ! Did you see that?!"

"Come on, Lewis!" Nate yelled. We jumped up and ran quickly in the opposite direction, toward that ever-increasing terrible sound. The trees and vines were alive now, moving wildly and menacingly as we darted up an incline leading to a short, narrow ridge. Nate made it to the top first, and then turned to me, almost triumphant.

"Here it is! Now, you will understand!"

The horrible metallic-flesh vibration rattled my eardrums as I reached the ridge and looked down. There in the small clearing below was the source of the insane cacophony... a huge, black rock formation jutting out of the ground about 15 feet high and at least 12 feet wide at the base. The thing resembled a massive, ebony-colored ocean wave spewing black foam and detritus from the earth, as though it had broken through from the bowels below only to be frozen instantly in its tracks as it reached for the sky to escape its earthly bonds.

I followed Nate down to the base of the formation, the trees swaying madly all around us and that damnable sound vibrating through my body as I gazed in awestruck horror at the obsidian obscenity towering before us. Nate dropped to his knees and pulled a large plastic-wrapped package from the inside of his jacket and laid it out on the ground underneath the petrified monstrosity. Four sticks of dynamite wrapped together and fashioned with a single, long fuse.

"Are you out of your damned mind!?" I yelled at Nate, having realized his true intentions all along.

Then Nate started laughing. A low, triumphant laugh.

"I'm sorry, friend, but I had to do it. I had to have a witness to prove that I wasn't completely insane...and you are my witness!"

Nate unrolled the fuse and wedged the dynamite under the base of the rock. "Do you want to live the rest of your days with that infernal sound in your head? It's the only way to stop it! Now get the hell out of here!"

I ran back to the top of the ridge and watched below as Nate lit the 5-foot fuse and turned to run. He stopped abruptly in mid-motion as though he'd run into an invisible brick wall. Something unseen picked him up and hurled him against the black rock. I heard a sickening crack as Nate's lifeless, bloodied body sunk to the ground below. The fuse was mere inches from the explosives as I turned and jumped off the ridge, landing with a hard thud on the other side. A tremendous blast shook the hill, raining branches, leaves, dirt, and pieces of black rock down upon me. I waited a few moments until there was relative quiet in the forest, then slowly dug myself out of the pile of debris and crawled back up to the ridge to survey the scene in the clearing below. Nate had done it. The hideous rock formation was blasted to bits, obsidian chunks strewn all over the floor of the clearing and upon the ridge where I stood. The noise was gone, and I collapsed on the ground weeping like a child. My friend was dead, and as I lay there looking up at the clear night sky I realized I had one hell of a tale to tell the police. No doubt others heard the explosion, and I was sure that the local officials would be combing the area soon.

Then I felt something hot and pulsating on the back of my neck. I turned to see a piece of the black rock resting in the ground where I'd laid my head. The explosion had surely heated the fragments, I theorized as I picked it up for closer examination. It was still very warm...and felt as though it was vibrating in my hand. For some reason, at that moment I was compelled to place the thing to my ear. My blood ran cold as I heard the familiar, sickening sound emanating ever so faintly, but ever so surely, from the cursed fragment. I threw it over the ridge and ran down the hill like a madman through the trees for what seemed to be a lifetime until I finally emerged from the forest a few blocks from Nate's house.

In a matter of minutes, I was in my car, speeding down the road, desperate to retreat to the sanctity of my own home.

And now, as I sit in my study trying to make sense of the insanity of the last several hours, I realize that my old friend, Nate Chapman, had been terribly wrong in his calculations. Blowing up the rock did not stop the entity or entities that dwelled within the obscene formation from Hell, but rather, spread the infection further across the forest so it could take hold, multiply and intensify its infernal grip upon the land.

As I sit alone in the darkness, I cup my hands over my ears, fearful of what I might hear, while dreadfully certain of what approaches in the distance from the dark hills of Hogansburg.

End.

*~*~*

Mike Lyddon has been making indie feature films since the early 1990s. His latest movie entitled "Witch Tales" (2020) is a Halloween horror anthology based upon 50s pre-code horror comics filmed entirely in Lima, Peru where he lived for several years. He's currently editing a documentary about pre-code comics called "Haunted Thrills." In his spare time he enjoys kayaking with the gators on Florida's waterways and making weird noises with his Fender Telecaster.

Website: http://www.horroranthologymovies.com

The West Arkham Reservoir

By J.M. Faulkner

Have you looked at the records from Miskatonic University,” General McGuiness yelled over the helicopter’s roaring blades. His jowls trembled whenever the aircraft banked to one side, soaring over New England’s rolling hills and emerald grass. “You can discredit it, I think. Several of the professors and investors were found to be cultists. State of Massachusetts shut it down… right about the first time the Beatles rolled into New York.”

Ellenton said nothing.

“This, on the other hand, might be of interest.” He produced a stack of papers from a briefcase and pressed the headset’s microphone closer to his mouth. His voice came rich with static over the comms system. “A woman found these letters cooped up in her Pa’s attic in Boston, six years after his death. Held onto them for forty years—until the quarantine became worldwide news—before she coughed ‘em up. Writer was one Arthur Matheson, surveyor of the now defunct New England Waterpoint Inc. By ‘attic’ I mean ‘loft’, in Brit talk.”

Ellenton accepted the letters without comment (when threatened, men in uniform often took stabs at his Britishness) and began browsing. The pertinent sections were highlighted a neon yellow, and he got the crux of it without poring over the towersome paragraphs.

Matheson had been responsible for surveying an area the locals called Blasted Heath, which was to serve as the location for the West Arkham Reservoir. Ammi Pierce related to Matheson the story of Nahum Gardner, his family and the misfortune that had befallen them in spring 1882.

The letters read, Ellenton folded them and exhaled. Heathland flashed by the cabin window.

“So,” McGuiness said, “maybe we can’t discount what the eggheads at Miskatonic reported, there being two written accounts of the meteorite’s impact. Do you believe in the supernatural, Mr. Ellenton?”

Discount the professors, don’t discount the professors; what type of push-pull game was the general playing?

“I once investigated a man who claimed to have picked up the ability to smell Death after serving in Iraq. He abducted his dying sister from a hospital. Leukaemia. From a psychiatric unit, some months later, he told me Death reeked of a pumpkin, bloated and rotting in the sun. What do you think of that?”

McGuiness’ brow furrowed. Not to be outsmarted, he said, “Psychiatric unit? My guess is he was a few cards short of a full deck.”

“PTSD, General McGuiness, nothing more.”

“I’ll make you a believer,” McGuiness said, shaking his forefinger. “As Matheson documented in the ‘20s, something evil blighted Gardner’s farm. And once you’ve seen what I have, you’ll credit the third-party accounts.”

“It’s not the supernatural you’re asking me to believe in.”

A grin spread the length of McGuiness’s mouth. “It came from out of space, that’s all I know. Purple, magenta, burgundy—none of these things? Yes. It’s not of this world.”

Ellenton ignored this grandiosity. “Matheson’s daughter, did she give you other clues?”

“ ‘fraid not. Suffered a stroke three weeks after the military erected fences. She was ninety-one. Anyone who knew anything about this, after that thing flew out of Gardener’s drinking well, fled the area and never spoke of it again.” McGuiness sucked his lip and added, “Like holocaust survivors, they buried it. They thought it was buried, literally, under the West Arkham Reservoir.”

That’s what Matheson planned, Ellenton thought, praying everyone might sleep a little easier knowing it was entombed beneath the depths, but the colour survived—thrived, if McGuiness was to be believed.

Ellenton sniffed. No, it couldn’t be real; had to be yank hysteria.

“We’re coming up on the checkpoints.” McGuiness tapped the window. “When the colour expanded, we moved the barricades. Now, though, the colour’s outpacing us.”

The helicopter climbed over a ridge. From there, the hillside sloped away and fences appeared on the new horizon. Tanks and soldiers dotted the road like action figures. The rifles propped on their shoulders looked like toothpicks.

Ellenton opened his mouth to comment when his tongue knotted. He gasped, and McGuiness chuckled.

Chuckled!

Beyond the fences and barbwire, beyond a stark ring of greenery the width of two tennis courts, a luminous colour rippled and tumbled. A storm without anger, a cloud without darkness, but with all of the vibrance and colour. It reminded Ellenton of the aurora borealis, yet the comparison struck him as wholly inadequate, like comparing the spark of a matchstick to a nuclear explosion.

“That’s the beautiful part,” McGuiness said, an edge coming to his voice. No, something closer to a growl. “President thinks you’re important, so you get to see the back half. The bad half. Hope you’re as important as she thinks.”

The glow went on and on, and Ellenton found himself grinning. Grinning! The colour, he thought, was like looking upon the face of—

He wanted to say God but settled on divinity.

“It’s wonderful,” he stammered.

And then the colour—like his euphoria—turned to ash. Beyond the light, the world blanched into a decaying and a lifeless grey, flaking away like old paint. A despair, he thought, as the chop of the helicopter blades fell away, that stretched as far as the eye could see.

When Ellenton turned from the window, he found McGuiness hadn’t been growling at all. A blubber rattled the military’s man’s body. His visible eye, beneath it flooded a sheet of tears.

The general said, “Take a look, Ringo.”

The reservoir came into view. Its water churned and great peels of the landscape drifted within. Bricks, stretches of road and tainted earth. It reminded Ellenton of whiskey spilt in an ashtray.

Above, a haze muddied the sky. Looking out the helicopter’s window, it gave the impression of peering through curtains yellowed by a smoker’s cigarettes.

“For over a hundred years, that reservoir soaked up the meteor’s colour, slowing the spread. It’s taken Arkham and a number of other towns already. At this new rate of acceleration, it’ll span the whole of Massachusetts in a month.”

“The residents?” Ellenton cleared his throat. “The ones inside… the ones who didn’t make it out?”

“Insane to the last one,” McGuiness said, snorting back another blubber, a hitch of breath. “They wither first. Attack people second. Then flake away on the wind, like vampires at sunrise. Do I have to convince you of that, too?”

“No,” Ellenton said, but he little more than mouthed it.

If the colour was heaven, then Hades pervaded in its wake. Ellenton shook his head and found himself suppressing a giddy, morose laugh.

None of this was real. It couldn’t be.

“So,” McGuiness said, “do you have a solution the US hasn’t put on the table? Clock’s ticking.”

A stench permeated the cabin. Ellenton thought, Like a bloated and rotting pumpkin in the sun.

“Tell the pilot to go back. We can, can’t we?” A bead of sweat—or tear—wet his lips. He stood, palmed the window with one hand and loosened his collar with the other. He yanked out his tie and threw it on the seat beside General McGuiness. “Please, I can’t breathe. Please, before I snap.”

“You best sit down, son. Here—”

McGuiness stood, but Ellenton shoved him back into his seat.

“Don’t touch me.”

The general stared up at him, every drop of colour drained from his face. He no longer looked sad. Something had replaced it. Something, Ellenton thought, like fear.

“Mr Ellenton, are you feeling yourself?”

Am I?

His throat was chaffed, the walls of the helicopter suffocatingly close, and something boiled inside of him. A scream pounded his sternum, clawing to escape. If he opened his mouth, he was certain he would whistle like a witch put to fire.

McGuiness squinted, seemingly at Ellenton’s chin. “No. No, no, no.” His jowls trembled. “It’s impossible.”

Ellenton swiped at his face, checking, and something crusted his fingers. He flicked his wrist and a crumb-like patter sprinkled the floor.

He sank back into his seat, holding his fist at arm’s length. A grated substance clung to his skin. “Wh-what’s happening to me?”

McGuiness grabbed the briefcase and shielded his body. He leapt into his seat, squatted, and pressed himself into the wall, repelled by the contaminated hand. “Can’t be. No. We’re not even touching the ground.”

“I’m… What did you say? Withering?”

McGuiness banged on the door that separated them from the cockpit. “Open up. Quick.”

The door banged open and the pilot filled the frame. Above a line of drool hanging from a puckered lip, his eyes shone vivid magenta.

McGuiness squashed himself into the corner, covering his body with the briefcase that protected little more than his chest. “It’s impossible,” he repeated. “Get a grip of yourselves!”

Just then, Ellenton realised he had been seeing everything through a purple filter—or a close approximation of purple. If God painted, it would have been this colour. Or God did paint, and this was his colour.

And McGuiness wanted to destroy the colour. McGuiness had called him Ringo. McGuiness had taken him away from…

The pumpkins cooking in the sun.

No, the pumpkin king cooding pumpthings.

“At least,” he said to no one in particular, “I think there werdid. Did? Where pumpthings.”

“Losing altitude,” the pilot said flatly.

Mr Ellenton, Death is coming. Big this time. I can smell it, and you’ve got to get me out of here so I can help. I can find it before it finds you!

“No,” Ellenton shouted, and stamped to his feet. “It’s PTSD.”

Triggered, the pilot launched himself at McGuiness, who swung the briefcase with all his might and connected with the pilot’s face.

The briefcase burst open and Arthur Matheson’s letters exploded in the cabin, decorating every surface in A4.

The pilot crashed into the far wall, his helmet flipping off his head and skating across the floor. He kneeled there, disorientated, as if the victim of an unprovoked assault.

His left cheek had caved in. The hollow—underneath the yellowed trickle of blood from a broken orbital bone and the bulging eyeball within—skin had a threaded, parchmentlike texture. His mouth twisted into a grimace, then he threw himself at McGuiness.

Ellenton turned to the window, deaf to the general’s screams, watching as the sky rushed past them and into the heavens. The pumpkin man had been wrong. Here there was no stench of Death.

Eyes shut, he inhaled deep through his nostrils, deep into the back of his skull. It smelled like growth.

Like Life.

When finally he opened his eyes, the crashing waters of the West Arkham Reservoir welcomed him with an iridescent embrace.

End.

*~*~*

J.M. Faulkner is a British English teacher living in Prague, Czech Republic. It is the perfect place for him to steep himself in the architecture and tumultuous history that fuels his curiosity. Outside of work, you can find him hiking in splendid, Bohemian forests with his beagle.

Website: www.jmfaulkner.com

Art by Mike T Lyddon

A Deal Between Bats

By Erica Ciko Campbell

Thirty years ago, I fell in love with the star-kissed, static echoes of a time long dead. These tears running from the corner of my eyes in the dead of night are the only proof it ever existed at all—but somehow, those visions of living in another skin, another world, another life are more real than anything I’ve ever tasted in all my years of riding the starwinds on the Hierophant: And the children of Earth stole them from me.

This is the story of how I got them back.

I. The Gift

When the vagabond race of men finally came crawling to the heart of the Alpha Persei Cluster, I knew the future of the Insavatu and all races of light would be warped forever. A seed of bleak and ancient evil such as them knows nothing but underhanded desperation—but as the Arch-Navigator for the Hierophant, the pride of the Uvari Pirates, I knew I had no choice but to welcome the refuse of Earth with open wings. After all, our troupe was known for its unquestioning acceptance of all miscreants and thieves—so these human refugees from their doomed, dead hellscape at the edge of the galaxy were no different, right?

Until the entire Cluster was ripped in half, I almost believed it.

But before entire Insavatu cities devolved into little more than mass graves, before half of Alpha Persei choked on their own tongues and the the rest fell to their knees for a death god from beyond time, I called one of them a friend.

Astafer couldn’t have been more different from the usual tramps I sent off on salvage jobs and bounty missions. While the other humans cringed back from me each time we passed in the corridors of the ship, smiling with their flat and broken fangs only when it came time to collect my coin, Astafer and I discussed the meaning of existence.

We were an unlikely pair, since I towered over him at three times his height. I had more horns than he had fingers, and if I wanted to, I could have squished his pallid flesh to to pulp beneath the slightest twitch of my scaled violet exoskeleton. But there was trust in his sad green eyes when he stared into my three pairs of blackened pits, and against all odds, we understood each other.

He had no family or friends to speak of, and more often than not, the other humans acted as if he wasn’t there at all. He was no Insavatu, to be sure—but I considered him a natural-born Uvari Pirate, even though he came from across the stars and a million furions away: And I knew our respect was mutual when one night he gave me a gift.

We met on the Farside Viewing Deck of the Hierophant as we always did when the night was growing old. We’d chosen this spot because the rest of the crew avoided it at any cost, swearing that it was haunted—but these days, Astafer and I were the only ghosts who lingered there.

That night, however, something far more sinister than baseless old legends hung over that starlit gunmetal grey sanctuary at the back of the ship. I suspected something was bothering my friend since the moment we arrived, but it isn’t the Insavatu way to pry. So we stared out the window for many hours and left each other alone, lost in our own thoughts.

We always sat together on a bench that overlooked the splendors of Valfar’s Nebula and all that lied beyond. The first time I drank in those ethereal pillars of vapor that seemed to penetrate the bounds of infinity itself, a wonder that I’d never known stirred within my core—a deep and primal awe that I dreamed would haunt me forever. But now, after traveling the galaxy for more years than I’d been alive back then, the blood-crimson swirls screaming out across the stars seemed vapid and dull.

“There’s something I’ve wanted to show you since the first day we met,” Astafer finally confessed. To this day I still don’t know if it was my imagination, but I swore Valfar’s Nebula flickered the slightest bit when he reached into the folds of his cloak to procure my gift. And since that night, it’s always been dimmer.

His frail, fleshy hands suddenly seemed formidable enough to crush my own as he clutched an egg carved from blackest crystal. Each glimmer of the stars revealed a bizarre new protrusion along its surface that seemed to rebel against the bounds of reality itself. Crimson veins as real as the ones pulsing within the hand that clutched it boiled along the orb’s glassy obsidian surface. It bore a thick and terrible density that made the entire room around us feel airless and unreal, and before I knew its name I felt like I’d known it all my life.

“Long ago, men called it the Shining Trapezohedron,” Astafer revealed, seemingly immune to its charms as he studied my reaction. “But now, there are only a few in all the cosmos who remember its name. Old Earthen legends claim the master of this orb once held the form of a long-extinct creature known as a bat—you always reminded me of one, with your webbed wings and penchant for eternal night . . . So perhaps you’ll find what I couldn’t in its depths.”

I had no idea what to say as I reached out to cradle the object in my own palm. It was nearly impossible to support its shocking weight without resting my arm on my thigh. The longer I stared into its stygian recesses, the easier it became to imagine the faintest stirrings of sentience beneath the glass. I reassured myself that my eyes were playing tricks on me as the veins beneath its surface began to flicker and dance.

“Thank you, Astafer,” I muttered, unable to pry my gaze away from the Trapezohedron to look him in the eye. There was something more I wanted to say, but my words soon slipped away into the aether as if they were never there at all, along with the rest of the Hierophant.

Suddenly, Valfar’s Nebula was alight with the fires of hope and wonder once more, just as it was in the halcyon days of youth. Then, the corporeal world melted entirely, and I lost all concept of time, and fear, and anything aside from pure astonishment. I drifted through a vacuum of absolute silence populated by darkly gleaming crystals larger than entire worlds. I stirred through the dreamless oceans where dark and light have been one since before the first particles of life were formed, and will be long after the universe dies. From the peak of the highest mountain in any reality or dream, I looked down over a thousand interwoven cities cast from shivering holograms, each gleaming a million times brighter than any star I’d ever seen.

I felt Astafer tugging on my arm, and by some involuntary instinct, I yanked my gaze away from the orb. The splendors of the otherworld faded, and I was back on the Hierophant, far emptier than I had been mere moments ago when I’d left.

“Stare not into its wonders for too long—for they may stare back. And each time, it will become harder to look away.”

A wave of dizziness washed over me as I slowly grew re-acquainted with the realms of the living, coming to terms with the deep sense of loss that now gnawed at me from between every cell.

“All I ask is that you guard it with your life.” Astafer’s smirk was mischievous, almost childish. It was as if that he knew he was asking far too much without caring in the slightest. “Carry it with you always, and if you ever meet another living creature who knows what it is or where it came from, kill them on sight.”

I nodded weakly, agreeing to his terms. Before I slid it into the pocket of my coat, I couldn’t resist the urge to stare into it one final time. I glimpsed the rifling of night-black wings whose sharpened points were eerily similar to my own, and for a fleeting second I swore I could sense the faintest stirrings of curiosity from the orb’s abominable master, far beyond the bounds of time or death.

The assassination attempts began soon after. I never saw Astafer again.

II. The Yearning

They called themselves the Order of Starry Wisdom, just as they had ten thousand years ago back on Earth. Their goal was to kill every last Insavatu in the cosmos until they found the Shining Trapezohedron in the ashes of our decimated worlds.

They started by dropping Vorstygian Dismantlers down on our cities, and then they moved on to Terrorboric Incinerator Mines left over from a nameless war that was lost by either side, countless aeons ago. After all they had to show for it was a few shattered ecosystems and a hundred billion deaths, they moved on to the plague.

For thirty years, it slowly wormed through even the most remote corners of the galaxy, sterilizing our settlements, annihilating our armies, and driving the Insavatu towards a rapid, untimely extinction. Its true name was YORIX-9, but most people called it “The Creeping Silence” because of its unusually-long incubation period: By the time you knew you had it, you’d already infected your entire family and everyone you’d come into contact with over the past two weeks. Humans, of course, were completely immune.

The first discernable sign of the disease was the blackening of the wing tissue due to sudden, localized internal necrosis. This triggered a catastrophic immune response which caused the body to rapidly overheat, essentially cooking the host within their own exoskeleton. It was nearly 90% fatal, and most who caught it were dead before the metal in their bones began to soften: But for those unlucky outliers, it’s difficult to imagine a more painful death in reality or nightmare.

But strangely, a very small percentage of the Insavatu population found themselves completely immune to it. And by some bizarre and mocking twist of fate, I, the one who the plague was designed to find, was one of those few.

I knew this because fifteen years ago, I watched every Insavatu on the Hierophant boil from the inside out without ever developing as much as a tickle in the back of my throat. After I suspected foul play and began to pick off and torture the human crew members for information, one was foolish enough to let it slip that they had access to some kind of spectra-neural network that let them know any time someone gazed into the orb—and they’d traced it back to me.

I was responsible for the death of every man, woman, and child of my own kind on the Hierophant, and I desperately wished I could have died along with them. But I knew that if I had, I wouldn’t be able to stare into the Trapezohedron anymore. My only reprieve was those snow-kissed cities of gold and lush groves of silent firs taller than mountains in the heart of Astafer’s gift—and I needed to return to that realm of boundless freedom outside time at any cost, even my own constant turmoil.

Strangely, by then the orb had begun to show me glimpses of our own galaxy’s future as well as visions of other worlds that would never come to pass: Visions that proved integral to my own survival and made me wonder if it was reluctant to leave my grasp.

By its infinite, otherworldly mercy, I knew that the human crew members would soon rebel against me and demand the Trapezohedron in exchange for my life. So I engaged the ship’s self-destruct sequence and keyed in an ultima override to bolt all the hatches from the outside in thirty seconds—it gave me just enough time to flee in an escape pod.

Everything I ever owned except for the Shining Trapezohedron went down with the ship. So for the past fifteen years, I’ve lived on the streets of Orcalium VI where no bastard of Earthen blood could ever find me. But I never forgot what the humans stole from me. Even though I carried the relic in my pocket the entire time, it may as well have been a thousand worlds away: For the greatest pleasure I’d ever known was now as forbidden to me as cannibalism or blood magic.

Life on the streets of Orcalium VI was dull and fruitless without the Trapezohedron’s wisdom, but not as gruesome as you might expect—for the sleepy city on the edge of the galaxy was known far and wide as “the Last Insavatu Stronghold” for being one of the few that hadn’t been completely ravaged by the Silence.

I passed the years carrying out odd jobs for food, most of which consisted of collecting debts from unlucky peasants and making others disappear. Sometimes, I even had time to throw scraps to the birds that perched atop the city’s countless castles, or to lay on the banks of the River Quarvith in the dead of night and stare off into Valfar’s Nebula. But above all else, I dreamed of losing my troubles in the glassy depths of the Shining Trapezohedron once more—and I began to edge slowly towards a point where I no longer cared whether or not it would be the final time.

There was a sick, strange irony to gambling paltry coin with the alley urchins of Orcalium VI with a relic from a dead world worth more than entire galaxies buried deep within my pocket. But I held true to the promise I made to Astafer all those years ago, and I never let anyone know the orb was always at my side. I hadn’t had a single assassination attempt since I sent the Hierophant off to its death, and I intended to keep it that way.

But I was about to learn the hard way once again that things rarely turn out as they’re intended to.

I fell asleep beneath the eaves of the abandoned poultice shop, as I had every night since its owner died in a robbery over two years ago. It was a deep and impenetrable slumber that marked the first night in ages I didn’t wake up in the throes of delirium to stare at the pink clouds painted on the sign overhead.

Instead, I found myself at the gates to the holographic kingdom outside time, beneath purple seas crashing through a sky of nameless constellations mystifying and bright. Vortices of nebulous black shadow swirled with the contents of entire galaxies on a horizon bleeding with every color known to Insavatu or man. I drifted far beyond all these wonders to walk through hollow, empty castles formed entirely from unrecognizable bones—undoubtedly the remnants of some civilization that had died off long before the first stirrings of my own. In those lightless halls of dust and eternal death I was free again, and I finally remembered what it felt like to want for nothing at all.

Only when I stood before a mirror formed of pure ethereal energy and beheld the reflection of a monstrous, winged fiend whose countless black eyes were chillingly similar to my own did I awake in a puddle of sweat, staring down at my hand.

Even then, I could feel the eyes of Starry Wisdom burning into me from across the ages with elated, blood-drenched victory. I knew at once they would arrive by the time the night was through.

In truth, I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner. My longing for those secrets I should never have known, my craving for that which made even the brightest suns seem dark in comparison, had finally written my demise in stone.

Frantically, I gathered my sack of belongings, as if I would need them while I was rotting in the back of some forgotten cell or worse. I took off on my usual route through the run-down back alleys of Orcalium VI, kicking up sand with my wings and rousing the other street-dwellers huddled up on the doorsteps of the sleeping city.

When I reached the the River Quarvith weaving between the dunes, I wondered if it was the last time I’d ever see it. Something about the reflection of the stars off those hypnotic purple waters was so blissfully vivid, so intoxicatingly sharp that it didn’t seem real. It was the first time since I stared into the Shining Trapezohedron all those years ago that the beauty of the real world surpassed that of the wonders within. The way the reeds swayed in perfect unison on the warm summer breeze was somehow too perfect to be anything more than a dream, and the moonlight on the water reminded me of the longing I felt when I stared off into the night when I was a child at my mother’s side.

That was when I realized I’d never woken up.

III. The Absolution

Somehow, before the first depraved effervescence stirred beneath the surface of the Quarvith, before the water turned black and necrotic and drained into the planet’s depths, I knew he was coming: The master of the orb that Astafer warned me about all those years ago.

He towered over me at such an imposing height that now I knew how the humans must have felt when they stood in my own shadow. His wore the skin of a man, but there was a jarring, unnatural blackness to it that made it painfully clear the similarities ended there. The golden bands which covered his muscular black arms still bore the pride of the original artisan who forged them aeons ago in some long-dead kingdom, filling me with an all-consuming nostalgia for a time I never knew.

A deep and gnawing sadness brought me to my knees when my eyes fell upon the shimmering headdress he wore over his tentacled skull—for it seemed to have sucked the light of every sun in this universe and all others. His face was an amalgam of flesh and chitin suspended somewhere between Insavatu and man. The three pairs of night-black wings lashing out from his back made me wonder whether him and I were carved by the same hands at the dawn of time, or if he himself had done the carving in his own image.

“You dare to call me here, Apteryx Eg? After abandoning my call for half your life?” His whisper stimulated sublime electric synapses deep within my brain that had never fired before and would never fire again—while simultaneously filling every cell of my body with a raw and inescapable sense of defeat.

“I-I didn’t mean to summon you, I assure you,” I stammered, partially out of sheer reverence, and also because it had been fifteen years since I heard another living creature speak my name.

“Why not?” He demanded, his tone sinking to such dangerous depths of calmness that I half-expected it to extinguish the stars themselves. “Is the favor of Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, not worthy of dying a thousand slow and painful deaths?”

“Yes, a thousand-and-one . . .” I rasped by some deeply-buried instinct, knowing it was the only right answer. For although I’d never heard his name in the waking world, something deep within my core remembered him more clearly than I recalled my mother’s face or my childhood dreams.

“What could I ever have done to deserve to stand in the shadow of the Crawling Chaos?” I finally asked, desperate for a distraction, sensing that if his eyes bore into me for even a moment longer I would never be the same.

“This realm is a manifestation of everything you thought you’d lost as your youth faded away,” he swept his arm up towards Valfar’s Nebula with a chilling “crunch” that sounded suspiciously like the cracking of a thousand bones. When I looked back over my shoulder, the entire city was gone, replaced by a snow-covered hill drenched in blood from which spindly black trees grew. “My Trapezohedron has stolen the dreams of all living creatures who once possessed it, and these are what you glimpse when you look inside. You have only yourself to blame for my arrival: For if you had no dreams to steal, I would not be here.”

I nodded slowly, painfully, daring to turn away from him so I could drink in the morbid delights the black god had summoned. I could no longer tell if those crimson-stained hills were a product of the orb’s twisted memories of my own mind.

“So tell me, Apteryx Eg: What is it that you sought above all else when you stared into my Shining Trapezohedron so many countless times?

My entire reality dissolved yet again, and I found myself floating next to the dead god above a roiling crimson ocean which drowned entire civilizations beneath its starving, planet-sized waves. I contemplated his question for a long time, and at long last I realized that all those decimated worlds beneath the water were a representation of one thing to me, and one thing alone: The doomed Earth, and the wellspring of all human life forever dried up.

It felt like I was possessed by a resolve I’d never known until that moment, born again in the inextinguishable black flame behind the Pharaoh’s lurid gaze as I finally rasped, “I dream that no Insavatu will ever again fall from the Silence: And for the slow and painful death of every man, woman, and child spawned from the ashes of the dead world known as Earth.”

“For a moment, I feared you were going to stop at asking for an end to the plague.” His laugh was so cold that the entire ocean below us turned to ice in the eternity of an instant. “Your request is bolder than most, and twice as wicked. But since I’m the Father of All Bats—and since you’ve proven yourself far more deserving of my gift than the children of Earth—I’ll bring your dreams to life: Under one condition.”

“Tell me,” I implored, as new meaning was brought to my dear friend Astafer’s mention of the extinct Earthen creature so many lifetimes ago on the Hierophant.

“The Order of Starry Wisdom lives on,” he rasped, each word sharp enough to cut the stars from the sky. “You will share the visions of the Shining Trapezohedron with all the Insavatu of Alpha Persei and beyond, as the children of Earth did with their own kind ten thousand years ago. You will spread the dominion of the God of a Thousand Forms across the stars, now and for all eternity.”

“How?” I implored him, stepping out of his shadow at last and staring up at the innumerable moons that had now flickered to life in the night, each at a different stage of decay, each reflecting the fallen hopes of another dead world.

“With the Hierophant at your command once more it would be fairly straightforward, wouldn’t you say?” Nyarlathotep gurgled, performing a curious sign with his right hand and summoning a blanket of deep and gnawing blackness to smother the entire world. Just as I began to wonder if all light was snuffed forever, everything faded to a muted sanctuary of grey metal illuminated by the starlight.

At first, I had no reason to believe that it was anything more than another delusion of the orb. But when I stared down and found that the Trapezohedron was no longer resting in my palm, but within my pocket, I could manage nothing but a visceral gulp of disbelief.

The Crawling Chaos laughed again, but this time his voice was much more distant, like a faraway crash of thunder from a fading storm. I spun around wildly searching for any trace of his infinite glory, but there was nothing but the pulsing shadows in the silent corners of the Hierophant to remind me that Nyarlathotep had ever been there at all.

“Where did you go?” I begged in a small and desperate murmur, suddenly longing for one last glimpse of him with a ferocity that burned a thousand times deeper than any craving I’d ever had to stare into the orb. I sank down onto the cold metal bench of the Farside Viewing Deck, just as I had a thousand times before with Astafer at my side. Everything was exactly as it was when I destroyed the ship fifteen years ago, from Valfar’s Nebula gleaming through the impossibly-smooth glass to the eerie hum of the ventilation shafts.

“Nowhere: Have I not told you that I am the God of a Thousand Forms and the Father of All Bats? I am at your back every time you walk through an empty corridor alone in the dark—I am behind your eyes every time you gaze into the mirror.”

As his words trailed off into the aether, my wish was answered, and my own reflection flickered into a faint bastardization of his visage in the viewing glass. Even the distorted echo of his world-ending eyes was more beautiful than anything I’d ever glimpsed in reality or the Shining Trapezohedron.

“Remember our promise, Apteryx Eg: Remember that every time a child of Earth chokes on their own tongue, another Insavatu has been spared. And when the last drop of human blood evaporates into the starwinds, I’ll be back to make sure you’ve upheld your end of the deal. . .”

With that, the last traces of him dissolved with a shivering hum that bore the ghastly screams of a thousand dead civilizations.

IV. The Rebirth

From that day forth, I returned to the stars on the wings of the Hierophant, the pride of the Uvari Pirates—and now the Harbinger of Starry Wisdom as well. Every Insavatu from Arcturus to Algol celebrated for thirty days and thirty nights when the Silence’s infection rate dropped to zero: And after that, it took me no time at all to put together a new crew and pick up where I’d left off fifteen years ago.

Now, we handle everything from routine salvage jobs to high-profile bounty missions, just like we used to in the old days—the only difference is that wayward humans no longer come knocking on our doors looking for work every time we dock. But with their numbers dwindling by the hour with no end in sight, who could blame them for not wanting to venture outside?

For the first time since long before I was born, Insavatu philosophers and politicians both agree that we’re at the start of an unprecedented Golden Age. Our numbers are increasing rapidly and our morale has never been higher—and while the human influence in Alpha Persei rapidly fades by the hour, we’re well on our way to retaking our rightful throne as the masters of the galaxy and all that lies beyond.

The human Order of Starry Wisdom was a force to be reckoned with back in its glory days: But our research team has hypothesized that we’ve already surpassed their numbers three-fold. Of course, due to the lack of reliable human contacts, it’s impossible to confirm their data.

Insavatu from every side of the Nebula have arrived in droves to gaze into the wonders of the Shining Trapezohedron even once. It no longer rests in my pocket, but in an obsidian pedestal at the heart of the ship, where Nyarlathotep’s chosen can gather freely to drink in the amorphous wonders of the void.

A far greater tragedy than the billions of Insavatu lives lost to the plague, or to the countless human souls who are next in line, is how the orb had to be muzzled for all those years. But the age of Silence is over at last, and ten thousand children of the Crawling Chaos are staring into the Shining Trapezohedron night after night to usher in the glorious return of its master.

Past frozen lakes so deep and black that no light has ever grazed their surface, far beyond the crystalline pyramids of pure energy never glimpsed by any creature of flesh or bone, he waits for us at the heart of all shadows. I no longer have to gaze into the Trapezohedron to bask in his glory: For he is with me always, lurking in the quiet spaces between my darkest thoughts. After I resolved to spend every waking moment spreading the glory of his ascendance to the seekers of Starry Wisdom, I began to see his visions every time I closed my eyes.

But as much as it delights me to spread his word to every corner of the cosmos, there’s one veiled truth the Crawling Chaos shared with me that I’ll carry to my grave.

It wouldn’t mean much to the rest of the galaxy, and most of my followers would undoubtedly dismiss my secret without a second thought. But to me it invokes the same raw and blood-chilling fear as it did when his gaze burned into me for the very first time. No matter how deeply I crave his eternal reign, no matter how many souls I’d sacrifice for his swift return, I keep this single grain of knowledge buried in the last corner of my mind that is mine and mine alone.

That night, when he spared me from the humans and reformed the Hierophant from dust, you may recall how I caught Nyarlathotep’s reflection one last time before he faded away.

His three-lobed eyes, one with mine in the glass, were the same sad, contemplative green as Astafer’s.

End.

*~*~*

Erica Ciko Campbell is an Active Member of the SFWA and an Affiliate Member of the HWA. Her stories have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, most recently the "Through Other Eyes" collection by All Worlds Wayfarer. She's the Editor-in-Chief of Starward Shadows Quarterly, and a First Reader at Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores. If you’re still craving the whispers of war-torn, dead galaxies, check out her website: www.starless-imperium.com. You can also find her on Twitter at@ECikoCampbell.

The Child

By Gregg Chamberlain

Doctor Bedford frowned, tapped softly but firmly against the bony little chest. “Cough for me, son.”

The response sounded almost like a cat sneezing.

“Mmhmm.” The doctor adjusted the circular end of the stethoscope. “Again.”

Another slight hissing cough.

“Hum.” The doctor took the ends of the stethoscope out of his ears, rested them around his neck, and regarded his patient.

The small boy standing before him, fully dressed but with his collar-less shirt opened to expose his thin, pale chest, regarded the doctor with solemn eyes. Doctor Bedford returned the solemn look from where he sat on the horsehair-stuffed parlor sofa. Then he leaned forward, fingers steepled together on his knees.

“So, tell me then, young man, about these ‘friends’ of yours that your mother mentioned.”

*~*~*

“It’s all right now, ma’am, you can come in now.”

Doctor Bedford stepped back from the doorway leading into the parlor to allow a worried-looking woman entry. The first thing she looked for and saw was the little boy, now sitting in the middle of the worn but still brightly-patterned carpet, with the doctor’s stethoscope in his hands, the round ‘ear’ pressed against his buttoned-up shirt, studiously listening to the sound of his own heartbeat. He looked up at her quiet but quick approach, got to his feet without a word, and stood close beside her as she turned towards the doctor.

“Please tell me, Doctor. Is he all right?”

Worry fought with fear for supremacy in the woman’s eyes. Narrow fingers clutched the boy’s thin shoulders.

He smiled reassurance, holding out a hand towards the boy, receiving his stethoscope back in return.

“Nothing to worry about, m’dear.” He nodded at the boy. “You can run along outside and play, son, while your mother and I talk about grownup things.”

Sombre little eyes regarded the doctor, then turned upwards, seeking permission from the mother. She nodded without saying a word.

Silent, the small boy slipped out of the parlor room. He stopped for a moment at the doorway, turned and sketched a quick but still very formal bow. Such adult manners, thought the doctor, for a child not yet age ten. Then he was gone. There was the click of the front door latch opening and then closing.

“He is fine, isn’t he?” asked the woman, her voice almost pleading. “My Howard is all I have now since…since his father had to…go away.”

Doctor Bedford looked over the top of his spectacles as he tucked the stethoscope away in his black medical bag. “Gone away?”

The woman bit a thin lower lip. “He had a—” she paused. “An upset while away on one of his business trips. He was a dealer in jewelry and gold and such. It happened in his hotel room. There was nothing…anyone…could…do.”

He closed the mouth of the bag, fastened it. “Where is your husband now?” he prompted.

The woman hesitated then, “Butler Hospital.”

He made a show of examining the fastenings of his black bag, without any visible reaction to the name of the asylum. “I see. Does your son know?”

“No!” The woman’s fingers twisted at phantom knots. “No, he doesn’t. We told him—my sisters and I, my sisters live with us, and my father too—no, we told him that his father passed away, died in an accident.”

“Hmmm.”

The woman’s hands wrung and knotted together. “Was I wrong? Should Howard…?”

Dr. Bedford shook his head. “No, no, of course not. The boy’s too young as yet to understand adult things like that. Best leave such things as they are, at least until he’s older.”

The woman sighed. “Howard has always been such a…sensitive soul, with his books and his poetry.”

She fidgeted, paced back and forth across the parlor rug. Suddenly she rushed over to a small secretary tucked away in a corner. “I have some of his poems here,” she said, lifting the top and rummaging through a small pile of loose papers revealed underneath.

“That won’t be necessary,” Doctor Bedford said, sudden irritation and his own discomfort mixing in a grimace.

He glanced out a parlor window fronting on the yard outside. He could see the boy, crouched down before a small circle of pebbles, some of them piled one atop another with pieces of bark laid across the stony tops. His pale features pinched in concentration, Howard seemed focused on scratching some kind of series of squiggles with a stick in the dirt in the centre of the stone circle.

Love of reading’s a fine thing, he thought, but that boy could use a bit more time outside in the sun. And more time playing with yo’uns his own age. Too much time alone, even with adults, is no good for a child.

“I wouldn’t worry too much about your Howard,” he said, instead, in a reassuring tone, as he picked up his medical bag. He approached the fretting mother, still sorting through her son’s papers, and placed a gentle hand against the small of her back, guiding her away from the secretary towards the parlor doorway. Like a sheep before the shepherd’s crook, she obeyed his prompting hand.

“Madam, I am just a plain Yankee doctor, a general practitioner,” he told her, measuring out the words with care and for comfort, “not one of those alienist fellows who play with people’s minds, and claim to know what folks think, and hint at dark things about the real reasons men do what they do.”

The two of them left the cozy parlor behind. “No, ma’am, just a simple country doctor, but, just like our good reverend, I do know a thing or two about the way people behave.”

He looked the anxious woman right in the eye, and he smiled, as they approached the front door.

“What I know is that children are children all over, and at Howard’s age it is not unusual for children to still have imaginary playmates.”

“So, you don’t think Howard needs…?”

“No, madam, I do not.” He plucked his homburg off the hat rack and set it square atop his head. “Such attentions would only…alienate the lad.” He allowed himself a slight smile of satisfaction at his own small jest.

He opened the door and stepped out onto the porch. The woman followed, quietly.

Out in the yard, the boy continued to scratch his childish signs and symbols in the dirt, this time around the curious circle of pebbles and bark.

“No, ma’am, it’s not an unusual situation at all,” he continued, sparing the child another brief glance. “Make-believe friends are quite common with all children. And most every one of these friends have names that sound so very strange or odd to we grownups. I would suggest that you and Howard maybe go visit around to your neighbours, help introduce him to playmates of his own age. Those friends of his will then fade away soon enough.”

The doctor stepped off the porch and strode the short distance to the small gate and the street beyond. He stopped, with his hand on the gate latch, and turned once more.

“Take my advice and don’t fret yourself too much, ma’am. I expect things will work out just fine, Mrs. Lovecraft.”

Unnoticed by the adults talking behind his back, in the little circle of pebbles and twigs, young Howard watched as a tiny whirlwind began to form.

End.

*~*~*

Gregg Chamberlain lives in rural Ontario, Canada, with his missus, Anne, and their two cats, which are NOT from Ulthar though they are of a benevolent nature, allowing the humans to think that they are in charge.

The Final Touchdown of Zebulon Warren

By James A. Wolf

Originally printed in Strange Aeon: 2020

The world of football holds no more interest for me, though in my younger days I earned a good living by writing about the game and its players. What for many is a glorious contest of team athletics has taken on a loathsome and unwholesome aspect for me. Ironically, this taint arose from viewing a taut—indeed, thrilling—championship match; and from an association with two of the finest players to have ever donned shoulder pads: David Goldman, a passer who must be regarded as superior to Baugh or Luckman, and Zebulon Warren, an end whose gridiron acumen was literally beyond the standards of normal men.

I feel an obligation, after all these years, to put to paper my recollections of the curious events surrounding the Eastern Football Association championship game of 192-. Today, the EFA is defunct, but in its heyday, it was as popular in New England and New York as its Mid-Western analogue, the NFL. Though many people associated with the league will deny any knowledge of the Arkham Spinners, and fewer still will say anything about their star Zebulon Warren, it was his actions and the unspeakable occurrences in the final game of that season that force my hand after over a decade of silence.

I was a sensitive youth who grew up disinclined to athleticism, making my subsequent career all the more incongruous. Living in what was euphemistically described as genteel poverty, in a ramshackle house College Hill in Providence, I read Poe and Dunsany, as well as darker lore in the unusual collection gathered by my grandfather: The Worm Ouroborus; the Pnakotic Manuscripts; Liber Ivonis; De Vermis Mysteriss; the Unaussprechlichen Kulten; and the mystical writings of the brothers Singh.

After college I obtained employment with the Arkham Advertiser, a daily newspaper, as a sports writer (their only opening). Fortunately I had covered athletics for my collegiate publication. My editor was often handicapped by his proclivity for drink. This meant little as the sports section was generally no more than a page and on more than a few occasions entirely omitted. Since he preferred to concentrate on boxing, baseball and speakeasies, my beat was both Miskatonic University athletics and the Arkham Spinners, so named for their textile magnate sponsor.

The Spinners’ tenure in the league was mostly unspectacular, rarely managing a winning record nor contending for a league crown, until their final season. But its demise was as glorious as the fiery flare of a meteorite hurling towards the Earth from the dark heavens.

I likely met Zebulon Warren sometime in the first games I had covered. Going through my old articles, my first mention of Warren was following the game against the Manchester Granite Carvers, when he took a short pass over the middle among a field of defenders and, with a grace that would have shamed Hutson, ran through the opponents for a 63 yard touchdown.

A walk-on player, he had only one season of collegiate experience and no high school play to his credit. While such a dearth of scholastic experience would have been remarkable in the mid-western NFL, in the EFA, it was less infrequent. Warren was not yet a starter and was ever taciturn. He sulked in his locker in the most obscure corner possible of the changing room.

He played sparingly in his first season, mostly as he was still learning the fundamentals of the game. However, his uncanny athleticism made him an extremely quick study. If he knew little of the game’s stratagems, he had strong instincts for the way the opponent intended to maneuver the spheroid.

On the offense, though he played end, he served as more of a blocking back. He charged forth to open prodigious holes for the runners. He would lower his shoulder and slam into burly linemen a foot taller than he, leveling them to let the ball carrier scamper through.

While a Hercules, he startled spectators by becoming a Mercury. For an iron-hard brawler, his hands were surprisingly soft. In Portland during a driving blizzard, halfback ‘Tex’ Howard threw an ill-advised forward pass that wobbled fitfully through the air. Warren launched himself from the muddy, slippery field for the interception. Then, with a dainty grace surprising for his bulk, he landed and danced through the awestruck defensemen until he reached the end zone to score the only points of that contest.

With the ball in his hands, he was nigh impossible to tackle. Both brute strength and astonishing dexterity combined to make a formidable target. In a game against the Albany Mohicans, Marc McCann threw a desperation pass to Warren. Despite a driving rain, Warren leapt up over Jacob Rust (one of the league’s few Negro players), catching the ball in one hand while flattening Rust’s nose with the other. Warren landed, brought the ball to his chest, lowered his shoulder and slammed into Robert Bruce McCoy, the ‘Flying Scotsman.’ That day McCoy indeed flew, landing on his shoulder. Thankfully the ground was a cushioning quagmire, otherwise he would have never played again. As it was, McCoy was never the same player. Warren did not score on that possession (being tackled at the seven by Rust and three other Mohicans), but he kicked the extra point.

While passing with the ‘fatter’ ball of those days was difficult, kicking was facilitated by the object’s dimensions. Warren was an adept at both dropkicking and punting. During a practice session, he dropkicked the ball sixty yards.

However, his truest talents lay in the combative facets of the game. Warren was a hardy brute who eschewed even the flimsiest helmet, unafraid of the carnage of the field. His blocks were crushing and his tackles horrifying to behold. Many a ball carrier was obliged to leave the game after a shattering tackle. Many would never play again. He positively relished his role as a gridiron assassin and was likened to Trafton, though I would say that Trafton should be the one who was compared to Warren. Ironically, because he was so unused to the game, he helped to develop it. Instead of crouching down like the other defensemen on the line, he stood up and backed slightly away from the line. Thus was born the linebacker.

The next year he burst forth. After the Albany game he began a powerful streak which awed the EFA. In a rematch against Manchester he intercepted two passes and forced three fumbles, one of which he recovered. Against the Rhode Island Reds, he had a rare turn in the backfield, lowering his shoulder and plowing ahead for sixty-one yards before being tackled by his shoe laces in the shadows of the goal posts. The Charlestown Saint Patricks were next; Warren took out Gino Donatelli with a shattering shoulder tackle. The ‘Golden Guinea’ would be out the rest of the season and the lion’s share of the next. The Hartford Elks were merrily outmatched as he sliced through their weak secondary for 142 yards of offense. Defensively, he tore through their front seven to wreak havoc in the backfield. In Worcester he systematically eliminated the Zephyrs’ starting backfield—all before halftime. Remarkably, all the hits were well within the normal parameters of play, unusual only in the force that powered them.

Only the Brooklyn BlueJackets, led by player-coach David Goldman, stymied him with a scoreless tie—their only shut out that season. He recovered his form for the last game of the season. In a near blizzard in Montpelier, against the Green Mountain Boys, Warren scored the only points of the game. He crushed Clark ‘Ashy’ Smith for a safety, then went on to score five touchdowns and four of the extra points, all on the ground.

Following the Hartford game, my (and my readers') curiosity piqued about this phenomenon who emerged ex nihlo, I resolved to write an extended piece about Warren.

My editor was dubious. “Lad,” he said, wrapping a flabby avuncular arm around me, “D`ye wanna write so much about one player- and not even a back at that? Linemen are never stars, even when they catch a ball.”

Whatever disquiet Warren induced in me up to that moment, it could not have bested the revulsion I felt for my editor. You may imagine hearing a brogue as you read his words. Rest assured it was as phony as the ill-fitted toupee that slid about his round, pink skull. He reeked of bathtub gin, nickel cigars and perspiration, despite cool November. I still shudder to recall his presence was like during the summer.

“Prior to his emergence, the Spinners fervently aspired to mediocrity. With him, a league crown is near at hand. Remember, without the seven blocks of granite, the four horsemen cannot excel.”

To his credit, he consented. Research, however, proved exasperating. Eliciting a comment from the notoriously laconic girder was the challenge. For four days I would corner him asking where he played his college ball. He glowered at me in reply.

The fellow had an uncanny and most unwholesome air about him. His teammates, who respected him on the field, had nothing to do with him after the final whistle blew. Those close enough to observe Warren found his presence unsettling and treated him warily. As he trudged from a ramshackle rooming house on the edge of town in a stoop-shouldered march, dogs snarled and barked while cats echoed with hisses. He eschewed the speakeasies and pool halls where the boisterous players, like the Daniels clan, idled away their leisure time. Neither did he go to the library where the brighter players like Michael Zegers or Marcus McCann sought enlightenment or continued their graduate studies. When he could eat alone, he preferred a disreputable inn or grubby café where he dined in seething solitude.

His unnerving presence and lack of social acumen was not aided by his appearance. Shabby, unkempt clothes covered his hulking frame. He favored clothing that was somewhat too loose, as if his body was not truly meant for the confinement of ordinary garb. He preferred overcoats of a rough weave that those who sought to ape workingmen often donned. His posture was simply appalling. He perpetually slouched as if his knuckles sought the earth to walk in simian fashion.

His extraordinary physique was complimented with a startlingly unhandsome countenance: wide mouth framed by thin, rubbery lips and eyes that bulged out grotesquely; and a nose flattened by innumerable collisions. Some called his frog-like visage the Innsmouth look, after that unsavory town.

In his Spinners’ uniform, the shambling mockery was transformed to a muscular and well-proportioned figure. His visage was irrelevant to his dynamic performance on the gridiron. His blocks slammed the mightiest linemen to the earth. His tackles were seemingly lethal and, in one case, literally so.

Warren was not a conversationalist; a taciturn grunt was his usual offer. Desiring to see his ‘human side,' I inquired if his parents were proud of him.

“My maw is daid. She died abirthing me.” He then laughed uproariously as I stood open-mouthed before him, the pencil and notepad sliding from my fingers.

He stopped laughing with a startling suddenness and, in a tone that seemed to have crawled out from the bowels of the earth, continued. “My paw, he watches the games from afar. I know he wants me ta plays well. And I plays fer him.”

“Is he deceased as well?”

Warren’s grotesque lips stretched across his homely face into a slow, carnivorous smile. It may have been my imagination, but I thought either he had several sets of canines in his mouth or some of his incisors were oddly pointed. The smile held for only a few seconds that felt like an eon. He spoke again in a husky whisper.

"That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange eons even death may die.”

The turn of phrase was familiar from my eldritch studies and was even more startling than his obscene contempt for his late mother. A shadow crossed his face and his menacing air increased. He seemingly grew in size and his shape became more animalistic, as if he were decaying evolutionarily back to Piltdown man or something equally troglodytic. His brows furrowed deeper and his canines grew more prominent. Then the impression vanished and he returned to his ordinary simmering malevolence.

His teammates regarded him an enigma best avoided off the playing field. “Makes you wonder,” said one of the Daniels, “how such a loner got into the sport to begin with. Someone with such a piecemeal education and a solitary nature would be more at home in the squared circle than the football field.”

That casual remark piqued my unwise curiosity. I wondered if Warren’s surly demeanor was not a factor in his collegiate play. Since his college and even high school were in the Conference records, I went there as soon as politeness permitted.

As mentioned previously, Warren had little experience in collegiate football—unusual, even in those days. He was a walk-on at Miskatonic University during his junior year. Much like his professional career, he rose from a physically talented benchwarmer who barely understood the playbooks to a dynamo ravaging his college conference. He proved particularly devastating against Ivy League Universities, hurling the scholars aside with contemptuous ease. Against the colleges whose teams were composed of players held to less diligent academic standards those recruited essentially to simply play football—his performance diminished but slightly.

Surprisingly, Warren’s initial notoriety was for his academic pursuits rather than his athletic achievements. Miskatonic admitted him after he passed their rigorous entrance examinations. He had no high school of record—rare even then, even amongst backwoods and slum communities. His professors recalled him well; perhaps too well. He was intensely studious in the more arcane fields of lore, mythology and archeology for which Miskatonic is justly renowned.

“Lad had a foul temper,” said one of his educators, Professor Edwin Winchester. “Not that he ever fought or misbehaved that way. He threatened. Quietly, granted, but there was an implication that he was understating his potential for violence. He did once destroy a chair after being snubbed. He had his hands on the back of it and twisted, utterly shattering the chair. Well, I suggested that such energies would be best spent on the football field. In fact, I insisted on it. It also proved beneficial in that it gave him an extracurricular activity. His lack of what some call social skills was something I found worrisome. Before that he was almost never seen outside of classes. Nor did he have any dalliances with women at all.”

“Were there any untoward rumors about him?”

“Not in the way you imply. He had no friendships. He had no associates. He ate alone. He walked between classes with only his lengthening shadow for company—”

“Oh, very good.”

“Thank you. Was using that image for my poetry. Anyhow, he walked between classes with only his lengthening shadow for company. He never crossed the cinema’s threshold; never sat before a stage as actors trod the boards. He remained a solitary phantom in the library—And so on and so forth. It will be in the literary quarterly next year.”

“Back to Warren...”

The professor deflated. Clearly he wanted to continue the emphasis on his literary endeavors. “Rumors about Warren—not as such. Merely whispers about his latest display of fury, comparing their unease. Of course such were always whispered with careful glances over everyone’s shoulders. I suppose that sort of thing is inevitable when someone is from Innsmouth—especially with the peculiar things that have been happening there of late.”

Thus Innsmouth was where I had to go next.

Getting there proved to be a challenge. Bus service had been discontinued and I was an unsure driver and a worse navigator. The roads to the city were a shambles of disrepair, though I did see one crew from the state roads department filling in a pothole. They seemed dissolute, even by the wretched standards of government employees.

After driving most of the day, I finally gave up and pulled into a filling station on the Amesbury Pike. There I asked for directions to Innsmouth from the attendant as he refueled my Model-T.

“Doan’t say thet name aloud!” He regarded me with edginess bordering on hostility. Then he wrote down directions, but not to Innsmouth—to a reputable roadside hotel. “Yah not going to get there afore night., and well, it ain’t healthy to be there in the dark, even now that it’s...quieter.” And that was the last he spoke of anything beyond our commercial transaction. The next day I purchased a good map at the hotel and found my way to the town.

Innsmouth, the notorious, decaying fishing port, retained an evil reputation following a series of extensive Treasury raids in search of violations of the Volstead act. The result was a brigade of National Guardsmen patrolling the streets. They had relieved the Marines who had been initially posted to the town. This raised the question of why such patrols were absent from the immigrant neighborhoods of Chicago, New York, and Boston. Apparently the information had reached the authorities obviated Posse Comitatus, but my curiosity as to the nature of those discoveries still remains unsatisfied.

From my mercifully brief stay, Innsmouth gave me the ominous impression of a husk of a city—the shell, no carcass—after the beast within has devoured all and flown off. Many of the main thoroughfares were flanked by structures that were either boarded up of utterly torn down. Only a handful of shattered looking people could be seen, darting furtively, with a manner more befitting the Western Front than eastern Massachusetts.

I wish I could say my time in Innsmouth was productive, but no more than a handful of people cared to talk and all but three were utterly ignorant of the man. His family was prominent in the town; many were whisked away along with the Marshes. His mother was well regarded. Suspiciously, her interment in the family crypt was a hasty, clandestine affair conducted at an inconvenient hour. Of Zebulon they said little out, of ignorance or fear. I could not publish wisps of smoke and innuendo, so I merely discussed his on-field actions, colored with a brief and dryly factual paragraph telling of his collegiate experience.

My journalism failure off the field was mitigated by the Spinners’ gridiron success. Player-coach Douglas Robert (a tackle) used the radical innovation of the T formation to best exploit his available talent. Warren normally lined up close to the linemen, whilst Zegers, the other end, was split wide on the opposite side. A back (usually McCann) was flanked wide, generally on the side of the center Warren lurked. ‘Tex’ Howard and the Daniels brothers behind the line of scrimmage provided a powerful run threat. From this configuration they became a formidable passing threat as well as a more flexible running team. Passing on first down became frequent. Once the backs passed for 258 yards- the second highest in league history.

The fellow who held the passing record was the star of the formidable Brooklyn BlueJackets, David Goldman, known as the ‘Heroic Hebrew.’ Born to parents who fled pogroms, his skills both in mind and body propelled him from the Lower East Side slums to the institutions of learning which, though leery of members of his race, found their quotas shredded by his superiority. Though initially against intervention (even after the Lusitania), he interrupted his studies to serve in the trenches. His fervent patriotism demanded that he volunteer as soon as America officially entered the hostilities. He received a commission, distinguishing himself in the relief of the ‘Lost Battalion’ and receiving a Distinguished Service Cross for the heroic rescue of a downed British pilot.

At home, he graduated from Columbia Summa Cum Laude and promptly embarked on legal studies—clearly with a political career in mind. He continued his athletic endeavors, both in minor league baseball (he was a workmanlike pitcher) and football, pausing only long enough to clerk for Justice Brandies. He married Leah Berger, a Jewess of solid family. Their young family lived in the respectable Park Slope neighborhood. He was a general of men behind his center; and off the field he was gaining a reputation as an officer of the court with an influence in Tammany incongruous with his honorable nature.

He founded the BlueJackets (the name was chosen in acknowledgement of the nearby Navy Yard) as a showcase for his talents and to display innovations that could not be conjured on the baseball diamond. Under his leadership Brooklyn used the double wing, the precursor of the T formation. Like the single wing, the tailback was far in the backfield, but with no fullback. Instead, there were two wingbacks flanking the ends and a blocking back closer to the line of scrimmage. In this alignment, the BlueJackets were the power of the Association; and golden Goldman was the brightest star in the firmament and a triple threat. Though an acolyte of the passing game, he could still grind out running yards. He was also an adept punter and a dangerous defensive back—once intercepting the ball thrice in a match against the Spinners. But for his membership in the Hebraic race he was a paragon of virtues. Truly, those whom the gods most love they take young.

The spark that ignited the conflagration was Leon Robinson, the talented Negro at the center of the BlueJacket’s line. He too had an interesting past. His father was an itinerant boxer who disappeared near Bolton—none too far from Arkham—following an illegal bout. Eventually, his naked remains were found in a makeshift grave, a sextet of bullets inside his corpse. Leon paid his way through a Negro university in Ohio working as a Pullman porter. The athletic talents of the father were magnified in the son. The instant he snapped the ball with his magnificently long arms, he flew off in a fury.

A sizeable portion of that fury was directed toward the Spinners. His father had been murdered in Arkham’s environs and the team was proudly ‘All White.' Robinson regularly destroyed the Spinners. The antipathy was shared by both teams. Prior to the scoreless tie in Arkham’s second-to-last season, the Spinners had lost every match against Brooklyn.

During that game, Robinson brought down one of the Daniels (I always got them confused), stripping the ball. A scrum ensued; Robinson scooped up the ball and backed up, circumnavigating the melee. Warren, for once not the epicenter of violence, launched himself at Robinson.

Robinson not only ran over Warren, he audaciously planted a cleat-shod foot into the lineman’s face. Had he not paused to grind his heel into that repulsive countenance, he could have scored an easy six. Instead he was brought down in a swarming cloud of angry brutes. Warren immediately sprang up and ran to the sideline, covering his jaw and left cheek. He darted into the cavernous entrance to the locker room.

After the final whistle, the moods in the respective lockers were as ugly as the mashed faces of the brawling linemen. Warren tended his own wound, carefully bandaging that side of his face. He claimed it was practically shredded, though when he removed the bandages by the next game, the cuts had vanished. He minced no words about the incident, vowing explicit vengeance against Robinson. “Damn dirty ape! You saw what he done!”

While Goldman privately scolded Robinson for letting his animosity get in the way of his play, his public statements were unusually pointed coming from the diplomatic Hebrew. “I can not say I entirely blame Robinson. Zebulon Warren is a thug and blight on the Association.”

On the train back to Arkham I asked Warren for his reaction.

“I used to like Sheeneys fer killin’ Christ. Guess I gotta rethink that.”

Needless to say, I did not print those highly incendiary remarks, though I did indicate the animosity between the clubs had reached new heights. Brooklyn was disliked by all, as they were a perennial contender. That season saw another crown. Despite their late run, the Spinners would not be in contention for a title match, though they achieved a club high in victories.

The next season, the BlueJackets and Spinners rampaged through the league. The two teams who rejected the single wing scored in double digits in all their games and defeated all comers with superlative performances. In one contest Goldman passed for 412 yards—besting his own mark by over 120 yards. The same day, Warren scored four defensive touchdowns. That season, Goldman averaged seven points a game and grabbed at least one interception in every game while Warren notched an unheard-of quartet of safeties.

Because the EFA was bifurcated, teams in the Western Division played the teams in the Eastern Division once a year during the regular season. That year the match was scheduled for Arkham.

The Spinners played their home games at the Miskatonic Municipal Park on River Street, a cyclopean structure close by Miskatonic University, very near the banks of its namesake tributary. The exterior, sculpted to resemble a Roman coliseum, brought to mind images of unhallowed pagan rituals of the gladiatorial games in honor of the lemures and deities of battle. More than once I imagined we were watching, not gentle grass (or winter mud) painted with the alabaster lines of football, but sand splattered with crimson gore. The desire for carnography was the same, with football providing enough violence to slake the crowd’s thirst for blood.

The day before the game I desired to obtain some quotes for the Advertiser. I entered the High Lane House Hotel, where opposing teams generally stayed prior to crossing the Miskatonic to play at Miskie Muni.

I found the Brooklynites in the hotel lobby at repose following a vigorous practice. The atmosphere was full of collegial bon ami. One of the guards was playing a minstrel ragtime tune on the piano with most of the others singing along in varying keys. Despite my association with the hated Spinners, they were cordial toward me and offered a few polite, if perfunctory, words.

Robinson, however, had many words for me that evening. He sat in a corner over a mug of cocoa (his one vice, he joked). He extinguished his cigar in a ceramic ashtray emblazoned with an illustration of a clipper ship. Following a few minutes of indirect inconsequentialities, he leaned forward to whisper to me.

“That Zebulon Warren, sir, is not natural. He's a fiend.”

“Well, I concede his bad reputation as a player. Even as an aficionado of the team, one must acknowledge—”

“You misunderstand. He is unnatural. A fiend.” His dark eyes darted around the room and he lowered his deep, melodic voice. “Goldman helped me track down the boxer who killed my father in their match. He’s now a Kosher butcher in the Bronx. He said that two local doctors took the boxer’s body away. One of those doctors went mad. The other vanished. Mysterious, no? How about the shooting of someone named Whateley in the Miskatonic University library? Heard of the ‘Blasted Heath’ to the west of the town that was once a prosperous farm? And what of the queer military action in Innsmouth? Indeed, many singular events seem to happen around Arkham and Miskatonic.”

“So? Does not New York have peculiarities as well? Witness what happened in the Red Hook section of your own borough. And what of the man who died gruesomely for want of air conditioning?”

Initially tempted to dismiss his speculation as nothing more than an articulate version of superstitions common to all colored races. I recalled those obscure tomes I pored over in my youth. I wondered if my natural prejudgemental disdain made me overlook a critical truth.

An uncanny eerieness settled in the room. The darkened wood paneling, overstuffed chairs and faux colonial decor took on a shade of the sinister. I rose, stammered some form of thanks and made my clumsy way to the door. I collided with Goldman, who was apologetic. Regaining my self-possession, I asked him for comment.

“I will merely say that I know that all issues shall be settled tomorrow on the field of play.” With that, he bade me good night and sought to enforce something of a curfew on his players.

Game day brought a monotonous slate gray overcast. The first half was as dismal as the sky and slightly less interesting. Neither team even remotely threatened to score before trudging into the lockers to permit the Arkham High School marching band to march in and around the puddles as they played Sousa.

Both sides demonstrated a more sanguine attitude the next half. At the line of scrimmage caution gave way to enthusiasm. The home squad lived up to its name with many plays of misdirection and reverses. One such reverse resulted in six points with Howard sprinting a third of the field as Warren guarding him like a battle cruiser escorting a merchant vessel. The extra point failed. Goldman answered with a duo of consecutive drives that ended in successful dropkicks.

A portentous chill northern wind picked up at the start of the fourth quarter and groaned like a damned soul as it danced around the stadium. Brooklyn re-acquired the ball after forcing an Arkham punt from their own end zone. Warren’s heavy foot sent the ball nearly to the BlueJackets’ fifteen yard line. Goldman orchestrated a masterful drive, with precise short passes and well executed run plays into the teeth of the defensive line. This was the football equivalent of the death of a thousand cuts for Arkham; the Brooklyn eleven became the Hindi juggernaut, its deliberate, inexorable march crushing all it its path. However, the Arkham defense stiffened in the shadow of their goal posts.

The drive stalled at the twenty. The BlueJackets ran a third down play, which was less common in those days (teams often kicked on third down; in case the first attempt failed, they had another down to retry). The fateful play was a comparatively simple pass pattern. Right wingback Auggie ‘the Aggie’ Derleth was the intended receiver. He ran a ‘slant’ pattern (the receiver would run approximately six yards directly downfield, then would turn inwards, over the middle of the field at a 45 degree angle). Goldman, being right-handed, had his back to Warren and the left part of the line. ‘Blocking’ Bobby Bloch (the blocking back, of course) focused on Warren. Bloch teamed up with either a tackle or guard wherever Warren lined up to occupy the star during Brooklyn’s offensive series.

Warren, generally held in check by the double teaming until that play, maneuvered outside of Bloch with a motion of his arms that resembled a swimmer performing the crawl. He accelerated around the end of the pocket and charged directly at the unaware Goldman. Goldman was in the process of releasing the ball to Aggie when Warren struck with murderous fury. I heard a hideous wet snap at the moment of collision though I stood by the Spinners’ bench. Goldman crumpled with a horrific bonelessness as crimson flew from his lips. Dimenstein, the hulking Spinner center, gracelessly flopped on the ball for the turnover.

It may have been crass to consider the flow of the match as physicians from both teams ran to Goldman’s side. He appeared deflated, laying in a fetal position in a pool of rainwater rapidly transforming from a muddy hue to carmine. The long shadows of the goalposts lay funereally across his remains. For indeed, Warren’s blow was mortal, as even a cursory inspection proved to the doctors who rushed out into the dismal field. The medical men went through the motions until the stretcher men arrived. The ambulance siren was mute as it drove off. The silent audience was overcome with shock from the horror they witnessed.

As the spectators in attendance were contemplating morbid reflections, it was doubly so for the players, who became lackadaisical except for Warren. His ferocity and capacity continued unabated until, in a blatant example of headhunting I have ever seen until that point, Robinson unleashed a forearm block across Warren’s face. Had Warren worn a helmet, the blow would have sent it flying. Warren’s face remained in the Negro’s arm as his legs, obeying Newton, continued their momentum forward, then upwards until his body was parallel to the ground. Newton dictated that gravity would take over and indeed, Warren plummeted to the muddy field in that ludicrous position. He rose unsteadily to his feet, only to be met by Bobby and Aggie. The back hit him low, while the end took him high and Warren staggered for a bit. Coach Roberts swiftly benched an unrepentant and seething Warren for the remainder of the game, an act that spurred scattered angry applause and catcalls of derision aimed at Warren.

The remainder of the game ended in a desultory tie. After phoning my editor at his home and relaying the shocking events, I ran home to fetch a few items for my overnight bag, deciding to accompany the BlueJackets back to Brooklyn. My editor would record the events in Arkham during my absence. “Laddie,” he said, “looks like ya were right about Warren’s noteworthiness.” His admission was cold comfort.

I filed my article by Western Union at the New Haven Station. On the train, sorrow and numbness gave way to fury. Some of the players had unkind, curt words for me, though Robinson interrupted with a warning note—a C sharp in basso profundo—from the back of his throat.

The funeral, as per the custom of his faith, was the next day, during an incongruously glorious afternoon. His widow, Leah, a handsome woman with pronounced Semitic features, appeared remarkably composed at the funeral. But her composure was mere facade for the seething cauldron that simmered beneath her ample bosom.

That evening I made a condolence call. The man who answered the door had an impressive ash gray Assyrian beard, giving him the appearance of an Old Testament prophet. He glowered at me with considerable dislike.

“Undt you vant...?” His accent was redolent of Tsarist ghettos. Doubtless the extirpated Romanovs were scarcely mourned in this household.

“I am here to pay my respects. My name is—”

“I know who you are. And you and any Arkham lout are unwelcome.” The speaker was a relative youth, clean-shaven, wearing a skullcap. He glared at me with blatant viciousness.

“Jacob,” said Leah. She sat in the black garments of dignified widowhood. “He is merely a reporter and not one on whom you should vent your spleen. Let him in. Indeed, I want to speak with him.”

I removed my hat as I entered. It seemed not to be a faux pas. As I was helped out of my coat, I could not help but notice a looking glass in the front hall shrouded by a bedsheet, to a most eerie effect.

“Religious law,” the patriarch remarked. “No vanity in the house during shiva.”

“Ah.”

“And what sort of, ‘Ah,’ was that?” sneered Jacob.

“Entirely innocent, I believe. You must forgive my brother and his desire to see malice where it is not,” said the widow Goldman. “I, on the other hand see where the malice is.” Her leveling gaze was full of meaning as she scanned the room.

She led me to the parlor, through halls occupied by family and friends helping the family in their time of bereavement. In the parlor were the BlueJackets, standing mulishly. She shooed out a younger cousin before closing the door and addressing us.

“Gentlemen, I want to have you here a moment. There has been much loose and foolish talk following my husband’s...” she paused to grit her teeth, “his death. You will stop it. Let there be no talk of revenge or contemplating retaliation from any of the players. It is what my husband would have wanted.” She watched me to make sure I wrote down her words. “I expect that to appear in your publication,” she said to me.

“I shall see to getting this printed right away.”

She nodded a dismissal. The team filed out politely. I was the last in line and paused as the graybeard squeezed in. He carried several tomes in his arms. Though the titles were in Hebraic letters, these volumes did not have the appearance of normal liturgical books. I peered at them curiously, but Leah cleared her throat. Her glower of disapproval sent me scurrying out of the room, stammering an apology.

I sent my report via Western Union. Its publication in the Advertiser caused some controversy. The police questioned Warren, but the district attorney decided that even a manslaughter charge would be too weak to be worth even empanelling a grand jury, so the matter was dropped, though with an ostentatious lack of permanency.

After the tragedy, Brooklyn soldiered on, eventually placing first in the Empire State Division. Instead of relying on Goldman in the double wing, they shifted to an ‘A’ formation, where Robinson had the choice of hiking the ball amongst a trio of backs. Arkham won the New England Division title. The clash for the championship was set and would be played the Sunday before Yuletide. Men called the day Christmas, but the festival was of such profound antiquity it preceded memory and was observed by more than churchgoing mortals.

Perhaps it was my recent renewed researches in arcane lore that accounted for my singularly grotesque nightmare the night before the game. I was researching the word ‘Shoggoth,’ which cropped up not infrequently in my studies. Apparently they are unearthly amorphous fiends—obscene grotesqueries that should not be beheld by any who desire to retain their sanity. They appeared in my dreams, cavorting hideously in repulsive parodies of sports. They ran plays from scrimmage with a bloodied, jawless skull as the football. A sightless eye stared out of one of the sockets while in the background bizarre musical instruments not of this sphere played a seemingly atonal version of the traditional ‘Drunken Sailor’ shanty.

That dawn pewter clouds hung low, deluging the field. Lurid violet streaks of lightning crisscrossed the sky, followed swiftly by cannon blasts of thunder. The field was a veritable marsh. These were the most brutal conditions under which I had ever seen any athletic event held.

If this tale were cheap fantastic fiction for a pulp, dramatic needs would dictate that the game would be the most spectacular ever played. Foul weather and a playing surface that was essentially a lake prevented any acumen from showing. Skill, having no place, was replaced by brutality.

The inhabitants of the pressbox grew restless and easily distracted. Next to me sat Leah Goldman lost in an oversized, yet elegant, cloth coat, scarf and fashionable hat. I attempted repeatedly to strike up a conversation with the widow, but she only answered with rebuking glares.

Finally, Robinson somehow gained some purchase in the quagmire and with his new footing, managed to cobble together a lengthy drive. The BlueJackets had a first and goal with roughly a minute left in the game when I noticed Leah Goldman moving closer to the field in the largely empty stadium.

The first down was a tangled scrum, with Zegers and both Daniels stopping Derleth. The next play had Straczynski plow ahead for three yards off-tackle right. Third down was a setback as Bloch proved why he rarely touched the ball after he was dragged down in the backfield at the nine.

The ink-stained wretches in the pressbox leaned forward, salivating at the prospect of a do or die fourth down. I did not notice Leah had moved to sit in the front row. I would have wondered why she chose getting soaked over the covered pressbox. I would have wondered why she slunk onto the sidelines.

Robinson hiked the ball to King. Bloch slammed into Zegers and Derleth cut McCann down. Warren flew from the opposite end of the field and enveloped King. Somehow Warren stripped the ball from the BlueJacket and dashed toward the other end, with all the other players trailing him. He sped towards six points and victory, a comet through khaki water. No Brooklyn player had a chance to stop him, but one Brooklyn fan did.

Leah stepped onto the mud of the playing field. She reached into her coat and produced a pistol. Warren slowed as he neared her. He cocked his head as if the weapon was more worthy of curiosity than any other reaction.

I later learned the revolver was a Webley, a gift from the British æronaut Goldman rescued in France. Leah held it in both hands. Its mass almost ludicrously dwarfed her slender fingers. With the first deafening report, Warren’s neck jerked back violently as the bullet went directly through his head. He shook his lumpen skull as if to clear his head. Then he regarded Leah again, giving her the opportunity to look at the horror the bullet revealed. Yes, revealed—not created. For the hideous sight that made the widow shriek and faint, that made the spectators flee in panic, was not the expected gore of a gunshot wound; it was far worse. Her bullet ripped his mask and it was falling off!

He shrugged and turned to regard the rest of the players, Spinners and Bluejackets alike. Though all paradigms of masculinity, they blanched and ran when they saw the horror of his torn face and the loathsome sight revealed beneath his mask. A foul trail of ichor dribbled from the bullet holes.

The hulking brute turned and lurched his shambling way down the field, unmolested. He staggered from his mortal wound. Finally he reached the end zone. He placed the football down on the rain-saturated grass. He raised his arms to the sky. By now the ribbons that remained of his countenance had blown away, revealing the hideous spectacle that caused me to shriek with horror. His skin resembled nothing so much as the leathery hide of some saurian beast. His rubbery lips framed a maw that almost split his head in two. Rows and rows of ragged fangs lined his mouth. His eyes glowed with a hideous, eldritch fire.

He raised his hands to the tempestuous sky in a grotesque parody of the referee’s gesture signifying a touchdown. “Iä! Iä!” he shouted in some unwholesome and unfathomable tongue. But he finished in English, albeit with an accent that was clearly inhuman. “Father! I am victorious! I have won this petty crown of the puerile creatures, father—the first of many we shall win!”

Then he decayed into a foetid pool of grayish white ichor. Repulsive features melted into a puddle washed away by the maelstrom. His unspeakable features twisted into a parody of a smile as the fiend disintegrated. We who remained sat in a choked silence, broken only by the soft sobbing of the avenged widow.

When the subsequent season started, the Spinners had ceased operation, and the franchise was replaced by a franchise based in Springfield christened ‘The Rifles.’ The vacant crown fell to Rhode Island, but the triumph was hollow. The BlueJackets moved across the East River and became the New York Americans. Today, some deny that the Spinners ever existed.

Leah Goldman returned to New York and remarried. Robinson now writes for the Negro press. I continue to write on sports. But now I focus on boxing and baseball, football having since taken on a loathsome aspect.

To this day, I wake in terror from nightmares that Warren’s father was indeed watching and he was proud of his son’s achievement.

End.

*~*~*

James A. Wolf is a Boston based lawyer, writer and long-time SF fan. As the gentle reader can tell, it came about because he delved too deeply into the eldritch lore of the NFL. It says nothing good that he has used the names of members of his fantasy football league in the story. Several real-world NFL players were used as the basis for Warren (George Trafton and Hardy Brown), Goldman (Benny Friedman) and Robinson (Fritz Pollard and Paul Robeson).

As for Mr. Wolf, himself, several years he was on a drive-time radio program as an expert on the local nerd scene. He has previously published stories both under his own name (including one in an anthology from Marvel) and under pseudonyms. Presently he is shopping an alternate history superhero novel.

The Music of Erich Zann

By H.P. Lovecraft

Originally published in National Amateur March 1921

I have examined maps of the city with the greatest care, yet have never again found the Rue d’Auseil. These maps have not been modern maps alone, for I know that names change. I have, on the contrary, delved deeply into all the antiquities of the place; and have personally explored every region, of whatever name, which could possibly answer to the street I knew as the Rue d’Auseil. But despite all I have done it remains an humiliating fact that I cannot find the house, the street, or even the locality, where, during the last months of my impoverished life as a student of metaphysics at the university, I heard the music of Erich Zann.

That my memory is broken, I do not wonder; for my health, physical and mental, was gravely disturbed throughout the period of my residence in the Rue d’Auseil, and I recall that I took none of my few acquaintances there. But that I cannot find the place again is both singular and perplexing; for it was within a half-hour’s walk of the university and was distinguished by peculiarities which could hardly be forgotten by anyone who had been there. I have never met a person who has seen the Rue d’Auseil.

The Rue d’Auseil lay across a dark river bordered by precipitous brick blear-windowed warehouses and spanned by a ponderous bridge of dark stone. It was always shadowy along that river, as if the smoke of neighbouring factories shut out the sun perpetually. The river was also odorous with evil stenches which I have never smelled elsewhere, and which may some day help me to find it, since I should recognise them at once. Beyond the bridge were narrow cobbled streets with rails; and then came the ascent, at first gradual, but incredibly steep as the Rue d’Auseil was reached.

I have never seen another street as narrow and steep as the Rue d’Auseil. It was almost a cliff, closed to all vehicles, consisting in several places of flights of steps, and ending at the top in a lofty ivied wall. Its paving was irregular, sometimes stone slabs, sometimes cobblestones, and sometimes bare earth with struggling greenish-grey vegetation. The houses were tall, peaked-roofed, incredibly old, and crazily leaning backward, forward, and sidewise. Occasionally an opposite pair, both leaning forward, almost met across the street like an arch; and certainly they kept most of the light from the ground below. There were a few overhead bridges from house to house across the street.

The inhabitants of that street impressed me peculiarly. At first I thought it was because they were all silent and reticent; but later decided it was because they were all very old. I do not know how I came to live on such a street, but I was not myself when I moved there. I had been living in many poor places, always evicted for want of money; until at last I came upon that tottering house in the Rue d’Auseil, kept by the paralytic Blandot. It was the third house from the top of the street, and by far the tallest of them all.

My room was on the fifth story; the only inhabited room there, since the house was almost empty. On the night I arrived I heard strange music from the peaked garret overhead, and the next day asked old Blandot about it. He told me it was an old German viol-player, a strange dumb man who signed his name as Erich Zann, and who played evenings in a cheap theatre orchestra; adding that Zann’s desire to play in the night after his return from the theatre was the reason he had chosen this lofty and isolated garret room, whose single gable window was the only point on the street from which one could look over the terminating wall at the declivity and panorama beyond.

Thereafter I heard Zann every night, and although he kept me awake, I was haunted by the weirdness of his music. Knowing little of the art myself, I was yet certain that none of his harmonies had any relation to music I had heard before; and concluded that he was a composer of highly original genius. The longer I listened, the more I was fascinated, until after a week I resolved to make the old man’s acquaintance.

One night, as he was returning from his work, I intercepted Zann in the hallway and told him that I would like to know him and be with him when he played. He was a small, lean, bent person, with shabby clothes, blue eyes, grotesque, satyr-like face, and nearly bald head; and at my first words seemed both angered and frightened. My obvious friendliness, however, finally melted him; and he grudgingly motioned to me to follow him up the dark, creaking, and rickety attic stairs. His room, one of only two in the steeply pitched garret, was on the west side, toward the high wall that formed the upper end of the street. Its size was very great, and seemed the greater because of its extraordinary bareness and neglect. Of furniture there was only a narrow iron bedstead, a dingy washstand, a small table, a large bookcase, an iron music-rack, and three old-fashioned chairs. Sheets of music were piled in disorder about the floor. The walls were of bare boards, and had probably never known plaster; whilst the abundance of dust and cobwebs made the place seem more deserted than inhabited. Evidently Erich Zann’s world of beauty lay in some far cosmos of the imagination.

Motioning me to sit down, the dumb man closed the door, turned the large wooden bolt, and lighted a candle to augment the one he had brought with him. He now removed his viol from its moth-eaten covering, and taking it, seated himself in the least uncomfortable of the chairs. He did not employ the music-rack, but offering no choice and playing from memory, enchanted me for over an hour with strains I had never heard before; strains which must have been of his own devising. To describe their exact nature is impossible for one unversed in music. They were a kind of fugue, with recurrent passages of the most captivating quality, but to me were notable for the absence of any of the weird notes I had overheard from my room below on other occasions.

Those haunting notes I had remembered, and had often hummed and whistled inaccurately to myself; so when the player at length laid down his bow I asked him if he would render some of them. As I began my request the wrinkled satyr-like face lost the bored placidity it had possessed during the playing, and seemed to shew the same curious mixture of anger and fright which I had noticed when first I accosted the old man. For a moment I was inclined to use persuasion, regarding rather lightly the whims of senility; and even tried to awaken my host’s weirder mood by whistling a few of the strains to which I had listened the night before. But I did not pursue this course for more than a moment; for when the dumb musician recognised the whistled air his face grew suddenly distorted with an expression wholly beyond analysis, and his long, cold, bony right hand reached out to stop my mouth and silence the crude imitation. As he did this he further demonstrated his eccentricity by casting a startled glance toward the lone curtained window, as if fearful of some intruder—a glance doubly absurd, since the garret stood high and inaccessible above all the adjacent roofs, this window being the only point on the steep street, as the concierge had told me, from which one could see over the wall at the summit.

The old man’s glance brought Blandot’s remark to my mind, and with a certain capriciousness I felt a wish to look out over the wide and dizzying panorama of moonlit roofs and city lights beyond the hill-top, which of all the dwellers in the Rue d’Auseil only this crabbed musician could see. I moved toward the window and would have drawn aside the nondescript curtains, when with a frightened rage even greater than before the dumb lodger was upon me again; this time motioning with his head toward the door as he nervously strove to drag me thither with both hands. Now thoroughly disgusted with my host, I ordered him to release me, and told him I would go at once. His clutch relaxed, and as he saw my disgust and offence his own anger seemed to subside. He tightened his relaxing grip, but this time in a friendly manner; forcing me into a chair, then with an appearance of wistfulness crossing to the littered table, where he wrote many words with a pencil in the laboured French of a foreigner.

The note which he finally handed me was an appeal for tolerance and forgiveness. Zann said that he was old, lonely, and afflicted with strange fears and nervous disorders connected with his music and with other things. He had enjoyed my listening to his music, and wished I would come again and not mind his eccentricities. But he could not play to another his weird harmonies, and could not bear hearing them from another; nor could he bear having anything in his room touched by another. He had not known until our hallway conversation that I could overhear his playing in my room, and now asked me if I would arrange with Blandot to take a lower room where I could not hear him in the night. He would, he wrote, defray the difference in rent.

As I sat deciphering the execrable French I felt more lenient toward the old man. He was a victim of physical and nervous suffering, as was I; and my metaphysical studies had taught me kindness. In the silence there came a slight sound from the window—the shutter must have rattled in the night-wind—and for some reason I started almost as violently as did Erich Zann. So when I had finished reading I shook my host by the hand, and departed as a friend. The next day Blandot gave me a more expensive room on the third floor, between the apartments of an aged money-lender and the room of a respectable upholsterer. There was no one on the fourth floor.

It was not long before I found that Zann’s eagerness for my company was not as great as it had seemed while he was persuading me to move down from the fifth story. He did not ask me to call on him, and when I did call he appeared uneasy and played listlessly. This was always at night—in the day he slept and would admit no one. My liking for him did not grow, though the attic room and the weird music seemed to hold an odd fascination for me. I had a curious desire to look out of that window, over the wall and down the unseen slope at the glittering roofs and spires which must lie outspread there. Once I went up to the garret during theatre hours, when Zann was away, but the door was locked.

What I did succeed in doing was to overhear the nocturnal playing of the dumb old man. At first I would tiptoe up to my old fifth floor, then I grew bold enough to climb the last creaking staircase to the peaked garret. There in the narrow hall, outside the bolted door with the covered keyhole, I often heard sounds which filled me with an indefinable dread—the dread of vague wonder and brooding mystery. It was not that the sounds were hideous, for they were not; but that they held vibrations suggesting nothing on this globe of earth, and that at certain intervals they assumed a symphonic quality which I could hardly conceive as produced by one player. Certainly, Erich Zann was a genius of wild power. As the weeks passed, the playing grew wilder, whilst the old musician acquired an increasing haggardness and furtiveness pitiful to behold. He now refused to admit me at any time, and shunned me whenever we met on the stairs.

Then one night as I listened at the door I heard the shrieking viol swell into a chaotic babel of sound; a pandemonium which would have led me to doubt my own shaking sanity had there not come from behind that barred portal a piteous proof that the horror was real—the awful, inarticulate cry which only a mute can utter, and which rises only in moments of the most terrible fear or anguish. I knocked repeatedly at the door, but received no response. Afterward I waited in the black hallway, shivering with cold and fear, till I heard the poor musician’s feeble effort to rise from the floor by the aid of a chair. Believing him just conscious after a fainting fit, I renewed my rapping, at the same time calling out my name reassuringly. I heard Zann stumble to the window and close both shutter and sash, then stumble to the door, which he falteringly unfastened to admit me. This time his delight at having me present was real; for his distorted face gleamed with relief while he clutched at my coat as a child clutches at its mother’s skirts.

Shaking pathetically, the old man forced me into a chair whilst he sank into another, beside which his viol and bow lay carelessly on the floor. He sat for some time inactive, nodding oddly, but having a paradoxical suggestion of intense and frightened listening. Subsequently he seemed to be satisfied, and crossing to a chair by the table wrote a brief note, handed it to me, and returned to the table, where he began to write rapidly and incessantly. The note implored me in the name of mercy, and for the sake of my own curiosity, to wait where I was while he prepared a full account in German of all the marvels and terrors which beset him. I waited, and the dumb man’s pencil flew.

It was perhaps an hour later, while I still waited and while the old musician’s feverishly written sheets still continued to pile up, that I saw Zann start as from the hint of a horrible shock. Unmistakably he was looking at the curtained window and listening shudderingly. Then I half fancied I heard a sound myself; though it was not a horrible sound, but rather an exquisitely low and infinitely distant musical note, suggesting a player in one of the neighbouring houses, or in some abode beyond the lofty wall over which I had never been able to look. Upon Zann the effect was terrible, for dropping his pencil suddenly he rose, seized his viol, and commenced to rend the night with the wildest playing I had ever heard from his bow save when listening at the barred door.

It would be useless to describe the playing of Erich Zann on that dreadful night. It was more horrible than anything I had ever overheard, because I could now see the expression of his face, and could realise that this time the motive was stark fear. He was trying to make a noise; to ward something off or drown something out—what, I could not imagine, awesome though I felt it must be. The playing grew fantastic, delirious, and hysterical, yet kept to the last the qualities of supreme genius which I knew this strange old man possessed. I recognised the air—it was a wild Hungarian dance popular in the theatres, and I reflected for a moment that this was the first time I had ever heard Zann play the work of another composer.

Louder and louder, wilder and wilder, mounted the shrieking and whining of that desperate viol. The player was dripping with an uncanny perspiration and twisted like a monkey, always looking frantically at the curtained window. In his frenzied strains I could almost see shadowy satyrs and Bacchanals dancing and whirling insanely through seething abysses of clouds and smoke and lightning. And then I thought I heard a shriller, steadier note that was not from the viol; a calm, deliberate, purposeful, mocking note from far away in the west.

At this juncture the shutter began to rattle in a howling night-wind which had sprung up outside as if in answer to the mad playing within. Zann’s screaming viol now outdid itself, emitting sounds I had never thought a viol could emit. The shutter rattled more loudly, unfastened, and commenced slamming against the window. Then the glass broke shiveringly under the persistent impacts, and the chill wind rushed in, making the candles sputter and rustling the sheets of paper on the table where Zann had begun to write out his horrible secret. I looked at Zann, and saw that he was past conscious observation. His blue eyes were bulging, glassy, and sightless, and the frantic playing had become a blind, mechanical, unrecognisable orgy that no pen could even suggest.

A sudden gust, stronger than the others, caught up the manuscript and bore it toward the window. I followed the flying sheets in desperation, but they were gone before I reached the demolished panes. Then I remembered my old wish to gaze from this window, the only window in the Rue d’Auseil from which one might see the slope beyond the wall, and the city outspread beneath. It was very dark, but the city’s lights always burned, and I expected to see them there amidst the rain and wind. Yet when I looked from that highest of all gable windows, looked while the candles sputtered and the insane viol howled with the night-wind, I saw no city spread below, and no friendly lights gleaming from remembered streets, but only the blackness of space illimitable; unimagined space alive with motion and music, and having no semblance to anything on earth. And as I stood there looking in terror, the wind blew out both the candles in that ancient peaked garret, leaving me in savage and impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium before me, and the daemon madness of that night-baying viol behind me.

I staggered back in the dark, without the means of striking a light, crashing against the table, overturning a chair, and finally groping my way to the place where the blackness screamed with shocking music. To save myself and Erich Zann I could at least try, whatever the powers opposed to me. Once I thought some chill thing brushed me, and I screamed, but my scream could not be heard above that hideous viol. Suddenly out of the blackness the madly sawing bow struck me, and I knew I was close to the player. I felt ahead, touched the back of Zann’s chair, and then found and shook his shoulder in an effort to bring him to his senses.

He did not respond, and still the viol shrieked on without slackening. I moved my hand to his head, whose mechanical nodding I was able to stop, and shouted in his ear that we must both flee from the unknown things of the night. But he neither answered me nor abated the frenzy of his unutterable music, while all through the garret strange currents of wind seemed to dance in the darkness and babel. When my hand touched his ear I shuddered, though I knew not why—knew not why till I felt of the still face; the ice-cold, stiffened, unbreathing face whose glassy eyes bulged uselessly into the void. And then, by some miracle finding the door and the large wooden bolt, I plunged wildly away from that glassy-eyed thing in the dark, and from the ghoulish howling of that accursed viol whose fury increased even as I plunged.

Leaping, floating, flying down those endless stairs through the dark house; racing mindlessly out into the narrow, steep, and ancient street of steps and tottering houses; clattering down steps and over cobbles to the lower streets and the putrid canyon-walled river; panting across the great dark bridge to the broader, healthier streets and boulevards we know; all these are terrible impressions that linger with me. And I recall that there was no wind, and that the moon was out, and that all the lights of the city twinkled.

Despite my most careful searches and investigations, I have never since been able to find the Rue d’Auseil. But I am not wholly sorry; either for this or for the loss in undreamable abysses of the closely written sheets which alone could have explained the music of Erich Zann.

End.

The Hound

By H.P. Lovecraft

Originally published in Weird Tales February 1924

In my tortured ears there sounds unceasingly a nightmare whirring and flapping, and a faint, distant baying as of some gigantic hound. It is not dream—it is not, I fear, even madness—for too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts. St. John is a mangled corpse; I alone know why, and such is my knowledge that I am about to blow out my brains for fear I shall be mangled in the same way. Down unlit and illimitable corridors of eldritch phantasy sweeps the black, shapeless Nemesis that drives me to self-annihilation.

May heaven forgive the folly and morbidity which led us both to so monstrous a fate! Wearied with the commonplaces of a prosaic world, where even the joys of romance and adventure soon grow stale, St. John and I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our devastating ennui. The enigmas of the Symbolists and the ecstasies of the pre-Raphaelites all were ours in their time, but each new mood was drained too soon of its diverting novelty and appeal. Only the sombre philosophy of the Decadents could hold us, and this we found potent only by increasing gradually the depth and diabolism of our penetrations. Baudelaire and Huysmans were soon exhausted of thrills, till finally there remained for us only the more direct stimuli of unnatural personal experiences and adventures. It was this frightful emotional need which led us eventually to that detestable course which even in my present fear I mention with shame and timidity—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the abhorred practice of grave-robbing.

I cannot reveal the details of our shocking expeditions, or catalogue even partly the worst of the trophies adorning the nameless museum we prepared in the great stone house where we jointly dwelt, alone and servantless. Our museum was a blasphemous, unthinkable place, where with the satanic taste of neurotic virtuosi we had assembled an universe of terror and decay to excite our jaded sensibilities. It was a secret room, far, far underground; where huge winged daemons carven of basalt and onyx vomited from wide grinning mouths weird green and orange light, and hidden pneumatic pipes ruffled into kaleidoscopic dances of death the lines of red charnel things hand in hand woven in voluminous black hangings. Through these pipes came at will the odours our moods most craved; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies, sometimes the narcotic incense of imagined Eastern shrines of the kingly dead, and sometimes—how I shudder to recall it!—the frightful, soul-upheaving stenches of the uncovered grave.

Around the walls of this repellent chamber were cases of antique mummies alternating with comely, life-like bodies perfectly stuffed and cured by the taxidermist’s art, and with headstones snatched from the oldest churchyards of the world. Niches here and there contained skulls of all shapes, and heads preserved in various stages of dissolution. There one might find the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen, and the fresh and radiantly golden heads of new-buried children. Statues and paintings there were, all of fiendish subjects and some executed by St. John and myself. A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, held certain unknown and unnamable drawings which it was rumoured Goya had perpetrated but dared not acknowledge. There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, brass, and wood-wind, on which St. John and I sometimes produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodaemoniacal ghastliness; whilst in a multitude of inlaid ebony cabinets reposed the most incredible and unimaginable variety of tomb-loot ever assembled by human madness and perversity. It is of this loot in particular that I must not speak—thank God I had the courage to destroy it long before I thought of destroying myself.

The predatory excursions on which we collected our unmentionable treasures were always artistically memorable events. We were no vulgar ghouls, but worked only under certain conditions of mood, landscape, environment, weather, season, and moonlight. These pastimes were to us the most exquisite form of aesthetic expression, and we gave their details a fastidious technical care. An inappropriate hour, a jarring lighting effect, or a clumsy manipulation of the damp sod, would almost totally destroy for us that ecstatic titillation which followed the exhumation of some ominous, grinning secret of the earth. Our quest for novel scenes and piquant conditions was feverish and insatiate—St. John was always the leader, and he it was who led the way at last to that mocking, that accursed spot which brought us our hideous and inevitable doom.

By what malign fatality were we lured to that terrible Holland churchyard? I think it was the dark rumour and legendry, the tales of one buried for five centuries, who had himself been a ghoul in his time and had stolen a potent thing from a mighty sepulchre. I can recall the scene in these final moments—the pale autumnal moon over the graves, casting long horrible shadows; the grotesque trees, drooping sullenly to meet the neglected grass and the crumbling slabs; the vast legions of strangely colossal bats that flew against the moon; the antique ivied church pointing a huge spectral finger at the livid sky; the phosphorescent insects that danced like death-fires under the yews in a distant corner; the odours of mould, vegetation, and less explicable things that mingled feebly with the night-wind from over far swamps and seas; and worst of all, the faint deep-toned baying of some gigantic hound which we could neither see nor definitely place. As we heard this suggestion of baying we shuddered, remembering the tales of the peasantry; for he whom we sought had centuries before been found in this selfsame spot, torn and mangled by the claws and teeth of some unspeakable beast.

I remembered how we delved in this ghoul’s grave with our spades, and how we thrilled at the picture of ourselves, the grave, the pale watching moon, the horrible shadows, the grotesque trees, the titanic bats, the antique church, the dancing death-fires, the sickening odours, the gently moaning night-wind, and the strange, half-heard, directionless baying, of whose objective existence we could scarcely be sure. Then we struck a substance harder than the damp mould, and beheld a rotting oblong box crusted with mineral deposits from the long undisturbed ground. It was incredibly tough and thick, but so old that we finally pried it open and feasted our eyes on what it held.

Much—amazingly much—was left of the object despite the lapse of five hundred years. The skeleton, though crushed in places by the jaws of the thing that had killed it, held together with surprising firmness, and we gloated over the clean white skull and its long, firm teeth and its eyeless sockets that once had glowed with a charnel fever like our own. In the coffin lay an amulet of curious and exotic design, which had apparently been worn around the sleeper’s neck. It was the oddly conventionalised figure of a crouching winged hound, or sphinx with a semi-canine face, and was exquisitely carved in antique Oriental fashion from a small piece of green jade. The expression on its features was repellent in the extreme, savouring at once of death, bestiality, and malevolence. Around the base was an inscription in characters which neither St. John nor I could identify; and on the bottom, like a maker’s seal, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull.

Immediately upon beholding this amulet we knew that we must possess it; that this treasure alone was our logical pelf from the centuried grave. Even had its outlines been unfamiliar we would have desired it, but as we looked more closely we saw that it was not wholly unfamiliar. Alien it indeed was to all art and literature which sane and balanced readers know, but we recognised it as the thing hinted of in the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred; the ghastly soul-symbol of the corpse-eating cult of inaccessible Leng, in Central Asia. All too well did we trace the sinister lineaments described by the old Arab daemonologist; lineaments, he wrote, drawn from some obscure supernatural manifestation of the souls of those who vexed and gnawed at the dead.

Seizing the green jade object, we gave a last glance at the bleached and cavern-eyed face of its owner and closed up the grave as we found it. As we hastened from that abhorrent spot, the stolen amulet in St. John’s pocket, we thought we saw the bats descend in a body to the earth we had so lately rifled, as if seeking for some cursed and unholy nourishment. But the autumn moon shone weak and pale, and we could not be sure. So, too, as we sailed the next day away from Holland to our home, we thought we heard the faint distant baying of some gigantic hound in the background. But the autumn wind moaned sad and wan, and we could not be sure.

II.

Less than a week after our return to England, strange things began to happen. We lived as recluses; devoid of friends, alone, and without servants in a few rooms of an ancient manor-house on a bleak and unfrequented moor; so that our doors were seldom disturbed by the knock of the visitor. Now, however, we were troubled by what seemed to be frequent fumblings in the night, not only around the doors but around the windows also, upper as well as lower. Once we fancied that a large, opaque body darkened the library window when the moon was shining against it, and another time we thought we heard a whirring or flapping sound not far off. On each occasion investigation revealed nothing, and we began to ascribe the occurrences to imagination alone—that same curiously disturbed imagination which still prolonged in our ears the faint far baying we thought we had heard in the Holland churchyard. The jade amulet now reposed in a niche in our museum, and sometimes we burned strangely scented candles before it. We read much in Alhazred’s Necronomicon about its properties, and about the relation of ghouls’ souls to the objects it symbolised; and were disturbed by what we read. Then terror came.

On the night of September 24, 19––, I heard a knock at my chamber door. Fancying it St. John’s, I bade the knocker enter, but was answered only by a shrill laugh. There was no one in the corridor. When I aroused St. John from his sleep, he professed entire ignorance of the event, and became as worried as I. It was that night that the faint, distant baying over the moor became to us a certain and dreaded reality. Four days later, whilst we were both in the hidden museum, there came a low, cautious scratching at the single door which led to the secret library staircase. Our alarm was now divided, for besides our fear of the unknown, we had always entertained a dread that our grisly collection might be discovered. Extinguishing all lights, we proceeded to the door and threw it suddenly open; whereupon we felt an unaccountable rush of air, and heard as if receding far away a queer combination of rustling, tittering, and articulate chatter. Whether we were mad, dreaming, or in our senses, we did not try to determine. We only realised, with the blackest of apprehensions, that the apparently disembodied chatter was beyond a doubt in the Dutch language.

After that we lived in growing horror and fascination. Mostly we held to the theory that we were jointly going mad from our life of unnatural excitements, but sometimes it pleased us more to dramatise ourselves as the victims of some creeping and appalling doom. Bizarre manifestations were now too frequent to count. Our lonely house was seemingly alive with the presence of some malign being whose nature we could not guess, and every night that daemoniac baying rolled over the windswept moor, always louder and louder. On October 29 we found in the soft earth underneath the library window a series of footprints utterly impossible to describe. They were as baffling as the hordes of great bats which haunted the old manor-house in unprecedented and increasing numbers.

The horror reached a culmination on November 18, when St. John, walking home after dark from the distant railway station, was seized by some frightful carnivorous thing and torn to ribbons. His screams had reached the house, and I had hastened to the terrible scene in time to hear a whir of wings and see a vague black cloudy thing silhouetted against the rising moon. My friend was dying when I spoke to him, and he could not answer coherently. All he could do was to whisper, “The amulet—that damned thing—.” Then he collapsed, an inert mass of mangled flesh.

I buried him the next midnight in one of our neglected gardens, and mumbled over his body one of the devilish rituals he had loved in life. And as I pronounced the last daemoniac sentence I heard afar on the moor the faint baying of some gigantic hound. The moon was up, but I dared not look at it. And when I saw on the dim-litten moor a wide nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I shut my eyes and threw myself face down upon the ground. When I arose trembling, I know not how much later, I staggered into the house and made shocking obeisances before the enshrined amulet of green jade.

Being now afraid to live alone in the ancient house on the moor, I departed on the following day for London, taking with me the amulet after destroying by fire and burial the rest of the impious collection in the museum. But after three nights I heard the baying again, and before a week was over felt strange eyes upon me whenever it was dark. One evening as I strolled on Victoria Embankment for some needed air, I saw a black shape obscure one of the reflections of the lamps in the water. A wind stronger than the night-wind rushed by, and I knew that what had befallen St. John must soon befall me.

The next day I carefully wrapped the green jade amulet and sailed for Holland. What mercy I might gain by returning the thing to its silent, sleeping owner I knew not; but I felt that I must at least try any step conceivably logical. What the hound was, and why it pursued me, were questions still vague; but I had first heard the baying in that ancient churchyard, and every subsequent event including St. John’s dying whisper had served to connect the curse with the stealing of the amulet. Accordingly I sank into the nethermost abysses of despair when, at an inn in Rotterdam, I discovered that thieves had despoiled me of this sole means of salvation.

The baying was loud that evening, and in the morning I read of a nameless deed in the vilest quarter of the city. The rabble were in terror, for upon an evil tenement had fallen a red death beyond the foulest previous crime of the neighbourhood. In a squalid thieves’ den an entire family had been torn to shreds by an unknown thing which left no trace, and those around had heard all night above the usual clamour of drunken voices a faint, deep, insistent note as of a gigantic hound.

So at last I stood again in that unwholesome churchyard where a pale winter moon cast hideous shadows, and leafless trees drooped sullenly to meet the withered, frosty grass and cracking slabs, and the ivied church pointed a jeering finger at the unfriendly sky, and the night-wind howled maniacally from over frozen swamps and frigid seas. The baying was very faint now, and it ceased altogether as I approached the ancient grave I had once violated, and frightened away an abnormally large horde of bats which had been hovering curiously around it.

I know not why I went thither unless to pray, or gibber out insane pleas and apologies to the calm white thing that lay within; but, whatever my reason, I attacked the half-frozen sod with a desperation partly mine and partly that of a dominating will outside myself. Excavation was much easier than I expected, though at one point I encountered a queer interruption; when a lean vulture darted down out of the cold sky and pecked frantically at the grave-earth until I killed him with a blow of my spade. Finally I reached the rotting oblong box and removed the damp nitrous cover. This is the last rational act I ever performed.

For crouched within that centuried coffin, embraced by a close-packed nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping bats, was the bony thing my friend and I had robbed; not clean and placid as we had seen it then, but covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and hair, and leering sentiently at me with phosphorescent sockets and sharp ensanguined fangs yawning twistedly in mockery of my inevitable doom. And when it gave from those grinning jaws a deep, sardonic bay as of some gigantic hound, and I saw that it held in its gory, filthy claw the lost and fateful amulet of green jade, I merely screamed and ran away idiotically, my screams soon dissolving into peals of hysterical laughter.

Madness rides the star-wind... claws and teeth sharpened on centuries of corpses... dripping death astride a Bacchanale of bats from night-black ruins of buried temples of Belial... Now, as the baying of that dead, fleshless monstrosity grows louder and louder, and the stealthy whirring and flapping of those accursed web-wings circles closer and closer, I shall seek with my revolver the oblivion which is my only refuge from the unnamed and unnamable.

End.

Dear beloved reader,

I hope you found the chills you were looking for. Perhaps while entrenched in the pages of this issue of Cosmic Horror Monthly, you questioned both your own sanity and your place amongst the malevolent whims of our cold universe. If so, let not your thirst for more cosmic terror go unquenched. Simply visit WWW.COSMICHORRORMONTHLY.COM/SUBSCRIBE and offer your tribute to the old ones at a reduced rate!

Again, thank you for taking the time to read our fiction. I hope we meet again soon.

Charles Tyra

Editor