PYRATE CTHULHU

Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (vol.2)

(Version 5.0)

***

Contents

Out of the Jar by Charles R. Tunner (1941)

Bothon by Henry S. Whitehead & H.P. Lovecraft (1946)

Something From Out There by August Derleth (1951)

Confession in Darkness by Gerald W. Page (1979)

Jendick’s Swamp by Joseph Payne Brennan (1987)

The Big Fish by Kim Newman (1993)

The Vicar of R'lyeh by Marc Laidlaw (2007)

Dark Blue by Alan Dean Foster (2007)

Copping Squid by Michael Sea (2009)

Crawlin’ Chaos Blues by Edward M. Erdelac (2010)

The Nyarlathotep Event by Jonathan Wood (2011)

Out of the Jar

by Charles R. Tunner (1941)

I am presenting here, at the insistence of my friend, James Francis Denning, an account of an event or series of events which, he says, occurred to him during the late summer and early fall of 1940. 1 do so, not because I concur in the hope which Denning has that it may arouse serious investigation of the phenomena he claims took place, but merely that a statement of those phenomena may be placed on record, as a case history for future students of occult phenomena or—psychology. Personally, I am still unpersuaded under which head this narration should be placed.

Were my mind one of those which accepts witches, vampires and werewolves in the general scheme of things, I would not doubt for a moment the truth of Denning’s tale, for certainly the man believes it himself; and his lack of imagination and matter-of-fact mode of living up until the time of the occurrence speak strongly in his favor. And then too, there is the mental breakdown of the brilliant young Edward Barnes Halpin, as added evidence. This young student of occult history and the vague lesser known cults and religions was a fairly close acquaintance of Denning’s for years, and it was at Denning’s home that he suffered the stroke which made him the listless, stricken thing that he is today.

That much is fact and can be attested to by any number of people.

As to Denning’s explanation, I can only say that it deserves a thorough investigation. If there is any truth in it at all, the truth should certainly be verified and recorded. And so, to the story.

***

It began, Denning says, in the summer of last year, when he attended a sale disposing of the stock of one of those little secondhand stores that call themselves antique shops and are known to most people as junk shops. There was the usual hodge-podge of Indian curios, glassware, Victorian furniture and old books; and Denning attended it as he did every event of this kind, allowing himself to indulge in the single vice which he had—that of filling his home with a stock of cheap and useless curios from all parts of the world.

At this particular sale he emerged triumphantly with a carved elephant tusk, an Alaskan medicine man’s mask and—an earthenware jar. This jar was a rather ordinary thing, round-bodied, with a very short cylindrical neck and with a glazed band around its center, blue glaze, with curious angular characters in yellow that even the rather illiterate Denning could see bore a certain relation to Greek characters, The auctioneer called it very old, said it was Syraie or Samaritan and called attention to the seal which was affixed to the lid. This lid was of earthenware similar to the jar and was set in the mouth after the manner of a cork and a filling of what seemed to be hard-baked clay sealed it in. And on this baked clay, or whatever it was, had been stamped a peculiar design—-two triangles interwoven to form a six-pointed star, with three unknown characters in the center. Although the auctioneer was as ignorant as Denning as to the real significance of this seal, he made a mystery of it and Denning was hooked. He bought the tiling and brought it home, where it found a place, in spite of his wife’s objections, on the mantle in the living room.

And here it rested, in a questionable obscurity, for a matter of four or five months. I say questionable obscurity, for as near as I can gather it was the bone of contention, during most of that time, between Denning and his wife. It was but natural, I think, that this estimable lady should object to having the best room, in their little home filled, with what were to her a mass of useless objects. Yet nothing was done about it. In the light of Denning’s story of subsequent events, it seems almost incredible that that frightful thing could sit there, day after day, in that commonplace living room, being taken down and dusted now and then, and carelessly placed back.

Yet such was the case, and such remained the case until the first visit of young Halpin. This young man was an acquaintance of Denning’s of long standing, and their friendship had been slowly ripening during the last year, owing to the fact that Halpin was able to add much to Denning’s knowledge of the curios which Ire accumulated. Both of them worked for the same company and, seeing each other every day, it was not unusual that they had become quite friendly in spite of the fact that neither had ever visited the other’s home. But Denning’s description of certain carvings on the elephant’s tusk which he had bought interested young Halpin sufficiently to cause him to pay a visit to Denning’s home to make a personal examination of the tusk.

Halpin, at this time, was still under thirty, yet he had become already a recognized authority in this country of that queer borderland of mystic occult study that Churchward, Fort, Lovecraft and the Miskatonic school represent. His articles on some of the obscure chapters of d’Erlette’s “Cultes des Goules” has been accepted favorably by American occult students, as well as his translation of the hitherto expurgated sections of the Gaelic “Leabhar Mor Dubh.” In all, he was a most promising student and one in whom the traits of what now seem to have been incipient dementia praecox were conspicuous by their absence. Indeed, one of his strongest characteristics, Denning tells me, was a pronounced interest in almost everything about him.

“He was like that, the night that he first visited me,” says Denning. “He looked over the tusk, explained all the curious carvings that he could and made little sketches of the remaining figures, to take away and study. Then his eyes began roving about the room and pretty soon they noticed some other little thing, I don’t remember just what, and he began talking about that. I had a couple of Folsom points—those curious flints that are supposed to be much older than any other American artifacts—and he spoke about them, for nearly twenty minutes.

“Then he laid them down and. was up and around the room again; and presently he picked up something else and was talking about that. I used to learn an awful lot from Ed Halpin, but I think I learned more that night than I ever did at any other one time. And at last his eyes lit on that jar.”

***

Yes, his eyes lit on the jar, and started the series of happenings that at last made this story necessary. For Halpin was stricken with a sudden curiosity, picked up the jar and glanced over it, and then suddenly became wildly excited. “Why, it’s old!” he ejaculated. “It’s ancient Hebrew, Jim. Where in the world did you get it?”

Denning told him, but his curiosity was unappeased. He spent several minutes trying to extract from Denning a knowledge which it became obvious that the latter did not possess. It was easy to see that Halpin already knew more concerning the jar than did Denning, and so his questions ceased.

“But surely you know what it is supposed to be. don’t you?” quizzed Halpin. “Didn’t the auctioneer tell you anything about it? Didn’t you see tfe previous owner? Lord, Denning! How can you find interest in these things, if you don’t learn all you can of them?”

Denning was rendered apologetic by his evident exasperation, and Halpin suddenly relented, laughed and started to explain.

“That six-pointed star, Jim, is known as Solomon’s seal. It has been a potent sign used in Hebraic cabala for thousands of years. What has me interested is its use in connection with Phoenician characters around the body of the vase. That seems to indicate a real antiquity. It might just be possible that this is actually the seal of Solomon himself! Jim,” his attitude suddenly changed, “Jim, sell me this thing, will you?”

Now, it seems incredible that Denning saw no slightest gleam of light in this guarded explanation of Halpin’s. The young student certainly was aware of much of the importance of the jar, but Denning insists that the explanation meant nothing- whatever to him. To be sure, Denning was no student, he had probably never heard of the Cabala, nor of Abdul Alhazred or Joachim of Cordoba, but surely, in his youth he had read the “Arabian Nights”. Even that should have given him a clue. Apparently not—he tells me that he refused Halpin’s offer to buy the vase, simply because of a collector’s vagary. He felt that, well, to use his own words; “If it was worth ten dollars to him, it was worth ten dollars to me.”

And so, though Halpin increased the offer which he first made, Denning was obdurate. Halpin left with merely an invitation to come back at any time and examine the vase to his heart's content.

***

During the next three weeks, Halpin did return, several times. He copied down the inscription on the blue band, made a wax impression of the seal, photographed the vase and even went so far as to measure it and weigh it. And all the time his interest increased and his bids for the thing rose higher. At last, unable to raise his offer further, he was reduced to pleading with Denning that he sell it, and at this, Denning grew angry,

“I told him,” says Denning, “I told him that I was getting sick and tired of his begging. I said I wasn’t going to sell it to him and that, even If it cost me our friendship, that vase was going to stay mine. Then he started on another line. He wanted to open it and see what was inside.

“But I had a good excuse for not complying with that plea. He himself had told me of the interest that attached to the seal on the clay and

I wasn’t going to have that broken if I knew myself. I was so positive on this score that he gave in and apologized again. At least, I thought he gave in. I know different now, of course.”

We all know different now. Halpin had decided to open the vase at any cost, and so had merely given up the idea of trying to buy it. We must not think, however, that he had been reduced to the status of a common thief in spite of his later actions. The young man’s attitude was explainable to any one who can understand the viewpoint of a student of science. Here was an opportunity to study one of the most perplexing problems of occult art, and obstinacy, combined with ignorance, was trying to prevent it. He determined to circumvent Denning, no matter to what depths he had to stoop.

***

Thus it was that several nights later Jim Denning was awakened, sometime during the early morning hours, by a slight, unusual noise on the lower floor of his home. At first but half awake, he lay and listlessly pondered the situation. Had his wife awakened and gone downstairs for a midnight snack? Or had he heard, perhaps, a mouse in the kitchen? Could it be — a sleeping sigh from his wife’s bed made him realize that it wasn’t she and at the same moment came a repetition of the sound—a dull “clunk” as of metal striking muffled metal. Instantly alert, he rose from his pillow, stepped out of bed, fumbled for robe and slippers and was tiptoeing down the steps, stopping only long enough to get his revolver from the drawer in which he kept it.

From the landing he could see a dim light in the living room, and again he heard the “clunk’' that he had heard before. By leaning far over the banister, he was able to look into the living room, where he could see, by the light of a flashlight lying on the floor, the dark form of a man; his long overcoat and hat effectively concealing all his features. He was stooping over a round object, and as Denning looked, he raised a hammer and brought it down sharply but carefully on a chisel which he held in his hand. The hammer’s head was wrapped in rags and again Denning heard the dull .noise which had awakened him.

Of course, Denning knew at once who the dark form was. He knew that the round object was his vase. But he hesitated to make an outcry or even to interrupt the other for several seconds. He seemed a little uncertain as to the reason for this, but I am convinced, from what I know of Denning’s character, that curiosity had gotten the better of him. Half consciously, he was determined to find out just why Halpin was so interested in the vase. So he remained silent, and it was only after several seconds that some slight noise he made caused Halpin to turn in a panic. As he did so, the last bit of seal crumbled from the jar, and rising, he still clung unconsciously to the lid. The jar turned over on its side and lay there for a moment unnoticed. Halpin was almost horror-stricken at the realization that he had been caught, as the lawyers say, in flagrante delicto. He burst into chattering, pleading speech.

“Don’t call the police, Jim! Listen to me. 1 wasn’t going to steal it, Jim. I’d have been gone with it long ago if I had intended to steal it. Honest! Let me tell you, Jim. It’s one of Solomon’s jars, all right. I was only going to open it. Good Lord, man, haven’t you ever read about them? Listen, Jim, haven’t you ever heard those old Arabian legends? Let me tell you about them, Jim—”

As he spoke, Denning had descended the stairs. He stepped into the room and seized Halpin by the shoulders and angrily shook him.

“Quit babbling, Halpin. Don't act like a damned fool. I guess the jar and its contents are still mine. Come on, snap out of it and tell me what this is ali about.”

Halpin swallowed his panic and sighed.

“There are old Arabian and Hebrew legends. Jim, that speak of a group or class of beings called Jinn. A lot of the stuff about them is claptrap, of course, but as near as we can make out, they were a kind of super-being from some other plane of existence. Probably they were the same things that other legends have called the Elder Ones, or the Pre- Adamites. Perhaps there are a dozen names for them if they are the same beings that appear in myths of other countries. Before the time of man, they ruled the world; but fighting among themselves and certain conditions during the Glacial Period caused them, to become almost extinct, here on this earth. But the few that were left caused damage enough among men until the time of King Solomon.

***

“Arabian legend says that Solomon, was the greatest of all kings, and from an occult standing I guess he was, in spite of the fact that the kingdom he ruled over was little more than a jerk-water principality, even in that age. But Solomon’s occult knowledge was great enough to enable him to war on the Jinn, and to conquer them,.

And then, because it was impossible to kill them (their metabolism is entirely different from ours), he sealed them up into jars and cast the jars into the depths of the sea!"

Denning was still dense.

“Halpin, you’re not trying' to tell me that you expect to find a Jinn in that jar, are you? You’re not such a superstitious fool as to believe—”

“Jim, I don’t know what I believe. There’s no record of such a jar as this having ever been found before. But I know that the Elder Ones once- existed, and from an examination of that jar an occult might learn much concerning—”

While Halpin had been speaking, Denning’s eye had fallen on the jar, lying where it had tumbled at Halpin’s sudden rising. And the hair on Denning’s neck quivered with a wave of horripilation, as he stammered suddenly: “For the love of God, Halpin, look at that jar!”

Halpin’s eyes turned at Denning’s first words and he, too, stared, unable to take his eyes off the thing that was taking place. From the mouth of the jar was flowing, slowly, sluggishly, a thick, viscous mass of bluish, faintly luminous stuff. The mass was spreading, oozing across the floor, reaching curious curdly pseudopods out in all directions, acting, not like an inert viscous body should, but like—like an amoeba under a microscope. And from it, as though it were highly volatile, curled little streamers of heavy smoke or vapor. To their ears came, almost inaudibly at first, and then more and more loudly, a slow deliberate “cluck—cluck—c-lu-uck” from the mass, as it spread.

The two had forgotten their differences. Denning stepped toward Halpin and clasped his shoulder fearfully. Halpin stood like a stone statue but his breath was like that of a winded runner. And they stood there and looked and looked as that incredible jelly spread and steamed across the floor.

I think it was the luminous quality of the mass that horrified the men the most. It had a dull bluish glow, a light of a shade that made it absolutely certain that it was not merely a reflection from the light of the flashlight which still threw its beam in a comet’s-tail across the floor. And too, it was certain properties, in the mist, for that behaved not like a normal mist, but with a sentience of its own. It floated about the room, seeking, seeking, and yet it avoided the presence of the two men as though it feared their touch. And it was increasing. It was quite apparent that the mass on the floor was evaporating, passing into the mist, and it was evident that it would soon be gone.

“Is it—is it one of those things, Halpin?” whispered Denning, hoarsely; but Halpin answered him not at all, but only gripped his hand, tighter and tighter and tighter. Then the mist began a slow twirling motion and a deep sigh came from Halpin. It seemed that he was assured of something by this, for he leaned over and whispered to Denning with what seemed a certain amount of confidence: “It’s one of them, all right. Stand back by the door and let me handle it. I know a little something from the books I’ve read.”

***

Denning backed away, more than a little fearful of Halpin now, seeing that the young man seemed to know something of this terrible thing, but nevertheless grateful for the suggestion. Standing there by the doorway, hoping vaguely that his traitorous legs would obey him if it became necessary to flee, he watched the dread process of materialization take place. And I think he has never quite recovered from the effects of it; for surely, at that moment, the entire philosophy of his life was changed. Denning, I have noticed, goes to church quite regularly now.

However, as I say, he stood there and watched. Watched the smoke, or vapor, or whatever it was, whirl and whirl, faster and faster, snatching up the vagrant wisps and streamers that had strayed to the far corners of the room, sucking them, in, incorporating them into the central column, until at last that column, swirling there, seemed almost solid.

It was solid. It had ceased its whirling and stood there quivering, jelly-like, plastic, but nevertheless, solid. And, as though molded in the hands of an invisible sculptor, that column was changing. Indentations appeared here, protuberances there. The character of the surface altered subtly; presently it was no longer smooth and lustrous, but rough and scaly. It lost most of its luminosity and became an uncertain, lichenous green. Until at last it was a -thing.

That moment, Denning thinks, was the most horrible in all the adventure. Not because of the horror of the thing that stood before him, but because at that very moment an automobile, driven by some belated citizen passed by outside, the light from its headlights casting eerie gleams across the walls and the ceiling; and the thought of the difference between the commonplace world in which that citizen was living, and the frightful things taking place in this room almost overcame the cowering man by the doorway. And, too, the light made just that much plainer the disgusting details of the creature that towered above them.

For tower it did. It was, apparently about nine feet tall, for its head quite reached the ceiling of Denning’s little room. It was roughly man-like, for it had an erect body and four limbs, two upper and two lower. It had a head and a sort of a face on it. But there its similarity to man ceased. Its head had a high ridge running from the forehead to the nape of the neck—and it had no eyes and no nose. In the place of these organs was a curious thing that looked not unlike the blossom of a sea-anemone, and beneath that was a mouth with an upper lip that was like a protruding fleshy beak, making the whole mouth take on the semblance of a sardonic letter V.

The front of its body had the flat, undetailed plainness of a lizard’s belly, and the legs were long, scaly and terribly scrawny. The same might be said of the arms, which terminated in surprisingly delicate, surprisingly human hands.

Halpin had been watching the materialization with the eagerness of a hawk, and no sooner was it complete, no sooner did he notice that tautening of the creature’s muscles that indicated conscious control, then he burst out with a jumble of strange words. Now, it happens that Denning was so keyed up that his mind was tense and observant of every detail, and he clearly remembers the exact words that Halpin uttered. They are in some little-known tongue and I have failed to find a translation, so I repeat them here for any student who may care to look them up:

“Ia, Psuchawrl!” he cried. “’Ng topuothikl Shelemoh, ma’kthoqui h’nirl!”

***

At the cry, the horror moved.

It stooped and took a short step toward the uncowering Halpin, its facial rosette rose just as a man lifts his eyebrows in surprise, and then— speech came from its lips. Halpin, strangely, answered it in English,

“I claim the forfeit,” he cried boldly. “Never has one of your kind been released that it did not grant to whoever released it one wish, were it in Its power to grant it.”

The thing bowed, actually bowed, In deep—inhumanly deep—tones it gave what was manifestly an assent. It clasped its hands over what should have been its breast and bowed, in what even the paralyzed Denning could tell was certainly mock humility.

“Very well, then!” the heedless Halpin went on. “I want to know! That is my wish—to know. All my life I have been a student, seeking, seeking—and learning nothing. And now—I want to know the why of things, the cause, the reason, and the end to which we travel. Tell me the place of man in this universe, and the place of this universe in the cosmos!”

The thing, the Jinni, or whatever it was, bowed again. Why was it that Halpin could not see its mockery! It clasped those amazingly human hands together, it drew them apart, and from fingertips to fingertips leaped a maze of sparks. In that maze of brilliant filaments a form began to take shape, became rectangular, took on solidity and became a little window. A silvery, latticed window whose panes were seemingly transparent, but which looked out upon—from where Denning stood, it seemed nothing but blackness. The creature’s head made a gesture and it spoke a single word —the only word which it spoke that Denning recognized.

“Look!” it said, and obeying, Halpin stepped forward and looked through that window.

Denning says that Halpin stared while you might have counted ten, Then he drew back a step or two, stumbled against the couch and sat down. “Oh!” he said softly — very softly, and then: “Oh, I see!” Denning says he said it like a little child that had just had some problem explained by a doting parent. And he made no attempt to rise, no comment, nor any further word of any kind.

And the Jinni, the Elder One, demon or angel or whatever it was, bowed again and turned around—and was gone! Then, suddenly, somehow or other, Denning’s trance of fright was over, and he rushed to the light switch and flooded the room with light. An empty jar lay upon the floor, and upon the couch sat one who stared and stared into vacancy with a look of unutterable despair on his face.

***

Little more need be said. Denning called his wife, gave her a brief and distorted tale which he later amplified for the police, and spent the rest of the night trying to rouse Halpin. When morning came, he sent for a doctor and had Halpin removed to his own home. From there Halpin was taken to the state asylum for the insane where he still is. He sits constantly in meditation, unless one tries to arouse him, and then he turns on them a sad, pitying smile and returns to his musings.

And except for that sad, pitying smile, his only look is one of unutterable despair.

Bothon

by Henry S. Whitehead & H.P. Lovecraft (1946)

Powers Meredith, at his shower-bath before dinner in the bathroom adjoining his room in his New York City club, allowed the cake of soap to drop on the tiled floor. Stooping to recover it he rapped the side of his head against the marble sidewall. The resulting bruise was painful, and almost at once puffed up into a noticeable lump...

Meredith dined in the grill that evening. Having no after-dinner engagement he went into the quiet library club, empty at this hour, and settled himself with a new book beside a softly-shaded reading lamp.

From time to time a slight, inadvertent pressure of his head against the chair's leather-upholstered back would remind him unpleasantly of his accident in the shower-bath. This, after it happened several times, became an annoyance, and Meredith shifted himself into a preventive attitude with his legs draped over one of the chair's rounded arms.

No one else came into the library. Faint, clicking noises came in from the nearby billiard-room where a couple of men were playing, but, absorbed in his book, he did not notice these. The only perceptible sound was that of the gentle, steady rain outside. This, in the form of a soothing, continuous murmur, came through the partly-opened, high windows. He read on.

Precisely as he turned over the ninety-sixth page of his book, he heard a dull sound, like a very large explosion coming from a vast distance.

Alert now, his finger, holding his place in the book, he listened. Then he heard a rumbling roar, as though countless tons of wrecked masonry were falling; falling; clearly, unmistakably, the remote thunder of some catastrophic ruin. He dropped his book, and, obeying an almost automatic impulse, started for the door.

He met nobody as he rushed down the stairs. At the coatroom, which he had to pass on his way to the doorway, two fellow members were chatting easily as they took their checks. Meredith glanced at them, surprised. He rushed on, to the doorway, and out into the street, where he paused. An empty street!

The rain, reduced now to a mere drizzle, made the asphalt shimmer in the street lights. Over towards Broadway, certainly, there must be clamor! But when he reached it he found only the compound eleven o'clock bedlam of Times Square.

Along Sixth Avenue, countless taxicabs weaved in a many-hued stream, jockeying for position in the maelstrom of the night-traffic about the Hippodrome. On the corner, a solitary rubber-coated policeman, swung long efficient arms like a pair of mechanical semaphores, and skillfully directed the crawling traffic. To his ever-increasing wonderment, everything seemed normal. But what then had been that catastrophic sound?

Returning to the club entrance, he hesitated, a frown creasing his brow. He mounted the three steps hesitatingly, and entered, pausing at the door-man's desk.

"Send me up an 'extra,' please, if one comes out," he told the clerk. Then he went up to his bedroom completely puzzled.

Half an hour later as he lay in bed wakeful and trying to compose in his thoughts the varying, incongruous aspect of this strange affair, he was all at once acutely conscious of a distant, thin, confused, roaring hum. The most prominent element in this sound was the deep, soft, and insistently penetrating blending of the countless voices. Through it ran a kind of dominant note—a note of horror. The sound chilled his blood. It was eerie. He found himself holding his breath as he listened, straining every faculty to take in that faint, distant, terrible clamor of fear and despair.

Of just when he fell asleep he had no recollection, but when he awakened the next morning there hung over his mind a shadow of remembered horror, not wholly dissipated until he had bathed and begun to dress. He heard none of the sounds at the time of his awakening.

No "extra" lay outside his bedroom door, and a little later at breakfast he opened expectantly and scanned several newspapers vainly and with a mounting sense of wonderment for an account of a catastrophe which would have caused the sounds. Gradually the implication grew upon him. He had, actually, heard the convincing, unmistakable evidence of such a catastrophe—and no one else knew anything about it!

He fell asleep immediately after turning in.

The following morning was Sunday. The reading-room was full, and he carried his book up to his bed-room after late breakfast to read the rest of it in peace. Soon after he became immersed in it, his attention was distracted by the tapping of a window-shade, blown in and out by the breeze. It was annoying and he paused in his reading, intending to rise and adjust the shade.

As he withdrew his eyes, and part of his attention, from his book, all at once he heard a new sound. It was precisely as though a distant, sound-proof door had been abruptly opened.

As he listened, fascinated, there came back to him and grew upon him a paralyzing, cold fear. There seemed to be no stopping it. The faint penumbra of a slight nausea shook him. He could distinguish overtones now, high tones, cries of battle; the impact of a charge against a resistant horde; noise of plied weapons.

The window-shade tapped again against the window casing. He snapped back into the familiar environment of his bedroom. He felt a little sick and weak. He rose shakily, walked across the room and into the bathroom, and, noisily splashing the water about, washed his hands and face.

Then he paused, suddenly to listen again, a towel gripped between clenched hands. But he could hear nothing now, nothing except the tapping of that window-shade in the fresh breeze blowing through the open window. He hung the towel on its porcelain rod and walked back to his chair.

It was an hour too early for lunch, but he wanted urgently to be where there were people about, even waiters, people who were not "hearing things!"

In order to prolong his companionship with old Cavanagh, the only early luncher, Meredith ate somewhat more than usual. The unaccustomed heavy meal at such an hour made him drowsy, and after lunch he stretched out on a davenport before one of the two open fireplaces in the now unoccupied reading-room, and fell at once into an uneasy sleep.

A little before three he awakened, stale, and as he came to conscious wakefulness he began to hear, at first quite distinctly, and then with increasing loudness and clarity as though a steady hand were opening up a loudspeaker, that same sound of fire and human conflict, and the dreadful, menacing roar of a thunderous ocean's incalculable anger.

Then, Old Cavanagh, napping on the other davenport, struggled with senile deliberation to his feet with many accompanying "hums" and "ha's," and began lumbering across the room towards him.

"Lord's sake, what's the matter?" he demanded.

Kindly goodwill looked out of the old man's distorted countenance. Meredith, unable to control himself any longer, stammered out his incredible story.

"Hm! Strange..." was the old man's comment when Meredith ended. He produced, lighted deliberately, and puffed upon an enormous cigar. He seemed to cogitate as the two sat side by side in a pregnant silence of many minutes. At last he spoke.

"You're upset, my boy, naturally. But, you can hear everything that's going on around you, can't you? Your actual hearing's all right, then. Hm! This other 'hearing' starts up and goes on only when everything's perfectly quiet. First time, you were here reading; second time, in bed; third time, reading again; this time—if I wasn't snoring—you were in perfect quiet once more. Let's test that out, now. Keep perfectly still, and I'll do the same. Let's see if you hear anything."

They fell silent once more, and for a while Meredith could hear nothing of the strange sounds. Then, as the silence deepened, once again came that complex of sounds indicating devastating battle, murder, and sudden death.

He nodded silently at Cavanagh, and at the old man's acquiescent murmur the sounds ceased abruptly.

It took urging before Meredith could be persuaded to consult an aorist. Medical men, Cavanagh reminded him, would keep quiet about anything strange or embarrassing. Professional ethics

They went uptown together that afternoon to Dr. Gatefield, a noted specialist. The doctor heard the story with close-lipped, professional attention. Then he tested Meredith's hearing with various delicate instruments. Finally he gave an opinion.

"We are familiar with various 'ear-noises,' Mr. Meredith. In some cases the location of one of the arteries too close to the ear-drum gives 'roaring' noises. There are others, similar. I have eliminated everything of that kind. Your physical organism is in excellent condition, and unusually acute. There is nothing wrong with your hearing. This is a case for a psychiatrist.

"I am not suggesting anything like mental derangement, you will please understand! But I recommend Dr. Cowlington. This seems to be a clear case of what is sometimes called 'clairaudience,' or something similar—his department; not mine. The aural equivalent of 'clairvoyance' is what I am indicating, you see what I mean. 'Second-sight' has to do with the eyes, of course, but it is mental, although there is often some physical background. I have no knowledge of those phenomena. I hope you will take my advice and allow Dr. Cowling—"

"All right!" interrupted Meredith. "Where does he live? I might as well go through with the thing now as later."

Dr. Gatefield showed traces of sympathy under his rather frosty professional exterior. He dropped the diagnostician, became the obliging, courteous gentleman. He telephoned to his colleague, the psychiatrist, and then surprised both Meredith and Cavanagh by accompanying them to Dr. Cowlington's. The psychiatrist proved to be a tall, thin, and rather kindly person, with heavy, complex spectacles on a prominent nose, and then, sand-colored wisps of hair in a complication of cowlicks. He showed marked interest in the case from the start. After hearing Meredith's story and the aurist's report he subjected Meredith to an examination of more than an hour, from which, feeling more or less as though he had been dissected, he nevertheless derived a considerable sense of relief.

It was decided that Meredith should arrange at once to take several days off, come to Dr. Cowlington's house, and remain "under observation."

He arrived at the doctor's the next morning and was given a pleasant, upstairs room, with many books and a comfortable davenport on which, in a recumbent position, the psychiatrist suggested, he should spend most of his waking hours, reading.

During Monday and Tuesday, Meredith, now after Dr. Cowlington's skillful reassurances no longer upset at hearing the strange sounds, listened carefully for whatever might reach him from what seemed like another—and very restless— world! He heard as he listened for long periods uninterrupted by any aural distractions, the drama of a great community in the paralyzing grip of fear—fighting for its corporate life—against irresistible, impending, dreadful doom.

He began, about this time, at Dr. Cowlington's suggestion, to write down some of the syllabification of the cries and shouts as well as he could manage it, on a purely phonetic basis. The sounds corresponded to no language known to him. The words and phrases were blurred and marred by the continuous uproar of the fury waters. This was invariably, and continued to be the sustained, distinctive background for every sound he heard during the periods while he remained passive and quiet. The various words and phrases were entirely unintelligible. His notes looked like nothing which either he or Cowlington could relate to any modern or ancient tongue. When read aloud they made nothing but gibberish.

These strange terms were studied over very carefully by Dr. Cowlington, by Meredith himself, and by no less than three professors, of Archeology and Comparative Philology, one of whom, the Archeologist, was a friend of Cowlington's and the other two called in by him. All of these experts on ancient and obsolete languages listened with the greatest courtesy to Meredith's attempt to explain the apparent setting of the sounds—most of them were in the nature of battle- cries and what Meredith took to be fragments of desperately uttered prayer—some of the material having come to him in the form of uncouth, raucous howls—and with the greatest interests to his attempts at reproducing them orally. They studied his written notes with the most meticulous care. The verdict was unanimous, even emphatic on the part of the younger and more dogmatic philologist. These sounds were quite utterly at variance with any known speech, including Sanskrit, Indo-Iranian, and even the conjectural Akkadian and Sumerian spoken tongues. The transcribed syllables corresponded to nothing in any known language, ancient or modern. Emphatically they were not Japanese.

The three professors took their departure, and Meredith and the psychiatrist Dr. Cowlington went over the list again.

Meredith had written: "I, I, I, I;—R'ly-eh!—Ieh nya,—Ieh nya;—zoh, zoh-an-nuh!" There was only one grouping of the words which formed anything like a section of continuous speech, or sentence, and which Meredith had been able to capture more or less intact and write down—"Itoh, Itoh,—natcal-o, do yank ho thutthut."

There were many other cries and, as he believed, desperately uttered prayers quite as strange and off the beaten tracks of recognized human speech as those noted down.

It was quite possibly because of his concentration on this affair of the remembered words—his own interest in them being naturally enhanced by Dr. Cowlington's and that of the three experts—that Meredith's dream-state impressions just at this time, and suddenly, became markedly acute. These dreams had been continuous and consecutive since their beginning several nights before, but on this night after the rather elaborate investigation of the words and syllables, Meredith began in earnest to get the affair of his environment in the strange city of the flames and conflicts and confusion and of a roaring ocean, cleared up with a startling abruptness. His dream impression that night was so utterly vivid; so acutely identical with the terms of the waking state; that he couldn't tell the difference between his dream slumber and wakeful consciousness!

Everything that he had derived mentally out of that night's sleep was clearly and definitely present in his mind. It seemed to him precisely as though he had not been asleep; that he had not emerged from an ordinary night's rest into the accustomed circumstances of an early morning's awakening. It was, rather, as though he had very abruptly passed out of one quite definite life into another; as though, as it came to him afterwards, he had walked out of a theatre into the wholly unrelated after-theatre life of Times Square.

One of the radical phases of this situation was not only that the succession of dream experiences had been continuous, with time-allowances for the intervening periods of those days-in-between which he had spent here in Dr. Cowlington's quiet house; not only that, extraordinary as this realization seemed to him. The nearly consecutive dream experiences had been the events of the past few days in a life of thirty-two years, spent in that same environment and civilization of which the cataclysmic conditions which he had been envisaging appeared to presage a direful end.

He was, to set out plainly what he had brought out of that last night's dream-experience, one Bothon, general of the military forces of the great district of Ludekta, the south-westerly provincial division of the continent of Atlantis, which had been colonized, as every Atlantean school child was well aware, some eighteen hundred years before by a series of emigrations from the mother continent. The Naacal language—with minor variations not unlike the differences between American speech and "English English"—was the common language of both continents.

From his native Ludekta the General Bothon had made several voyages to the mother land. The first of these had been to Ghua, the central eastern province, a kind of grand tour made just after his finishing, at the age of twenty-two, his professional course in the Ludekta College of Military Training. He was thus familiar by experience, as were many other cultivated Atlanteans of the upper classes, with the very highly developed civilization of the mother continent. These cultural contacts had been aided by his second visit, and further enhanced not long before the present period of the dream- experiences when, at the age of thirty-one, Bothon, already of the rank of general, had been sent out as Ambassador to Aglad-Dho, joint capital of the confederated south-eastern provinces of Yish, Knan, and Buathon, one of the most strategic diplomatic posts, and the second most important provincial confederation of the mother continent.

He had served in his ambassadorial capacity for only four months, and then had been abruptly recalled without explanation, but, as he had soon discovered upon his arrival home, because of the privately communicated request of the Emperor himself. His diplomatic superiors at home offered him no censure. Such Imperial requests were not unknown. These gentlemen were, actually, quite unaware of the reasons behind the Imperial request. No explanations had been given them, but there had been no Imperial censure of any kind.

But the General, Bothon, knew the reasons very well, although he kept them strictly to himself. There was, indeed, only one reason, as he was acutely and very well aware.

The requirements of his office had taken him rather frequently to Alu, the continental capital, metropolis of the civilized world.

Here in the great city of Alu were assembled from all known parts of the terrestrial globe the world's diplomats, artists, philosophers, traders and shipmasters. Here in the great ware-houses of solid stone and along the innumerable wharves were piled the world's goods—fabrics and perfumes; strange animals for the delectation of the untraveled curious.

Here in the endless stalls and markets were dyed stuffs and silks; tubas and cymbals and musical rattles and lyres; choice woods and implements for the toilet—strigils, and curiously carved hand-fitting little blocks of soap-stone, and oils innumerable for the freshening of beards and the anointing of bodies. Here were tunics and sandals and belts and thongs of soft-tanned, variously perfumed leathers. Here were displayed carved and cunningly wrought pieces of household furniture—glowing, burnished wall-mirrors of copper and tin and steel, bedsteads of an infinite range and design, cushions of swans' feathers, tables of plain and polished artizanship and of intarsia with metal scrolls set flush to their levels; marquetry work of contrasting woods—chairs and stools and cupboards and chests and foot-rests. Here were ornaments innumerable—fire-screens, and spindles for parchment-rolls, and tongs, and shades for lamps made of the scraped skins of animals; metal lamps of every design, and vegetable oils for the lamps in earthenware jars of many sizes and shapes. Here were foods and wines and dried fruits, and honey of many flavors; grains and dried meats and loaves of barley and wheat- meal past computation. Here in the great street of the armorers were maces and axes and swords and daggers of all the world's varieties and designs; armor of plate and chain—hauberks, and greaves and bassinets, and shelves with rows and rows of the heavy plate and helmets standardized for the use of such fighting men as Bothon himself commanded in their thousands.

Here were to be seen and examined costly canopies and the elaborate litters in which the slaves of the rich carried their masters through the narrow streets and broad, airy avenues of Alu. Rugs there were in an endless profusion of size and shape and design; rugs from distant Lemuria and from Atlantis and from tropical Antillea, and from the mountainous interior regions of the mother continent itself, where thousands of cunning weavers of fabrics worked at their looms; ordinary rugs of pressed felt, and gorgeous glowing rugs of silk from the southern regions where the mulberry trees grew; rugs, too, and thin, soft draperies of complex patterns made of the wool of lambs and of the long, silk-like hair of the mountain sheep.

Here in Alu, center of the world's culture, were philosophers with their groups of disciples, small or great, propounding their systems on the corners of streets and in the public squares, wrangling incessantly over the end of man, and the greatest good, and the origin of material things. Here were vast libraries containing the essence of all that had been written down concerning science and religion and engineering and the innumerable fine arts, of the civilization of forty thousand years. Here were the temples of religion where the hierarchs propounded the principles of life, colleges of priests studying incessantly more and more deeply into the mysteries of the four principles; teaching the people the endless applications of these esoteric affairs to their conduct and daily lives.

Into this fascinating treasure house of a great civilization the ambassador Bothon had penetrated as often as possible. The excellence of his family background, his own character and personal qualities, and his official position, all combined to make him a welcome guest in the mansions of the members of the emperor's court and of the highest stratum of social life in Alu.

An impressionable young man, most of whose life previous to his appointment as ambassador had been spent in hard training for his military duties and in the rigorous prosecution of these as he rose rapidly grade by grade by hard man's work in camp and field during his many campaigns in the standing army of Ludekta, the general, Bothon, reveled in these many high social contacts. Very soon he found within himself and growing apace, the strong and indeed natural desire for a type of life to which his backgrounds and achievements had amply entitled him, but of which he had been, so far, deprived because of the well-nigh incessant demands upon him of his almost continuous military service.

In short, the ambassador from Ludekta very greatly came to desire marriage, with some lady of his own caste and, preferably, of this metropolitan city of Alu with its sophistication and wide culture; a lady who might preside graciously over his ambassadorial establishment; who, when his term of office was concluded, would return with to his native Ludekta in Atlantis, there permanently to grace the fine residence he had in his mind's eye when, a little later, he should retire from the Ludektan army and settle down as a senator into the type of life which he envisaged for his middle years.

He had been both fortunate and unfortunate in his actual falling in love. The lady, who reciprocated his ardent advances, was the Netvissa Ledda, daughter of the Netvis Toldon who was the emperor's brother. The fortunate aspect of this intense and sudden love affair which set all social Alu to commenting upon it, was the altogether human one of a virtually perfect compatability between the two. Their initial mutual attraction had become a settled regard for each other almost overnight. Within a few days thereafter they were very deeply in love. Humanly considered, the affair was perfection itself. Every circumstance save one, and that a merely artificial side of the case, gave promise of an ideal union.

The single difficulty in the way of this marriage was, however, most unfortunately, an insuperable one. The Netvissa Ledda, niece of the emperor, belonged of right to the very highest social caste of the empire. The rank and degree of Netvis lay next to Royalty itself and in the case of the family of the Netvis Toldon partook of royalty. Against this fact basic in the structure of the empire's long-established custom, the Ambassador, General Bothon of Ludekta—although a gentleman of the very highest attainments, character, and worth, whose family record reached back a thousand years into the dim past before the colonization of Atlantis, whose reputation was second to none in the empire—the General, Bothon, was a commoner. As such, according to the rigid system prevalent at the court in Alu, capital of the Empire, he was hopelessly ineligible. The marriage was simply out of the question.

The Emperor being called upon to settle this awkward affair, acted summarily, quite in the spirit of one who destroys a hopelessly wounded and suffering creature as an act of mercy. The Emperor took the one course open to him under these circumstances, and the General, Bothon, without any choice being open to him save submission to an Imperial request which had the force of law, took ship for Ludekta, leaving behind him in Alu the highest and dearest hope of his life, irreparably shattered.

For the subsequent conduct of the General Bothon, recently Ludektan Ambassador to Aglad-Dho, there were three very definite contributing reasons. Of these the first and most prominent was the depth and intensity and genuineness of his love for the Netvissa Ledda. Beyond all possible things, he wanted her; and the proud soul of Bothon was very grievously racked and torn at the sudden unexpected and arbitrary separation from her which the Imperial request had brought about.

The voyage from Aglad-Dho to Ludekta, across two sections of the globe's great oceans and through the ship canals and lakes which bisected the southern continent of the western hemisphere, occupied seven weeks. During this period of enforced inaction the bitter chagrin and deep disappointment of Bothon crystallized itself by means of the sustained reflection inevitable under the circumstances. General Bothon arrived in Ludekta in a state of mind which made him ready for anything, provided only it was action. This state of mind was the second of these contributory factors.

The third was the immediate satisfaction of his desire for activity. During the course of his voyage home the ghoulish and, indeed, sub-human factory slaves, the shockingly Simian Gyaa-Hau, had inaugurated a revolt. This had spread, by the time of Bothon's arrival, throughout the entire province of Ludekta. The state sorely needed the efficient services of this, the youngest and most brilliant of its generals, and his reception on landing was more nearly that of a savior of his country than what a virtually disgraced diplomat might expect.

Into this campaign, which he prosecuted with the utmost vigor and a thorough-going military effectiveness, Bothon threw himself with an abounding energy which even his most ardent Ludektan admirers had not anticipated. At the end of an intensive campaign of less than three weeks, with this very dangerous revolt completely crushed and the leaders of the Gyaa-Hua hanging to a man by great hooks through their neck muscles in dreadful rows along the outer city walls on either side of the great archway that pierced the defense of Ludekta's capital, the General Bothon found himself the hero of Ludekta and the idol of his admiring troops. A rigid disciplinarian, the attitude of the officers and men of the Ludektan standing army towards this general had hitherto been based upon the respect which his great abilities had always commanded. Now he found himself the recipient of something almost like worship because of this last brilliant campaign of his. It had been a tour deforce.

Although it is highly probable that they would have advanced him because of this achievement in any event, the actual occasion for the action of the Ludektan Senate in rewarding Bothon with the supreme command of the standing army was the speech before that body of the aging generalissimo Tarba. Old Tarba ended his notable panegyric by laying his truncheon, emblem of the supreme command, on the great marble slab before the presiding senator, with a dramatic gesture.

Bothon thus found himself suddenly possessed of that intensive hero worship which would cause the state to acquiesce in anything which its object might suggest. He was, at the same time, in supreme command of the largest sectional standing army of the entire continent of Atlantis; an army, thanks chiefly to his own efficiency, probably the best trained and most effective fighting unit then extant.

Under the combined effect of the contributing causes and his new authority General Bothon made up his mind. On the eleventh day after his triumphal entry into Ludekta's capital city forty-seven Ludektan war vessels freshly outfitted, their oar-slaves supplemented by a reserve of the Gyaa-Hau, selected for the power and endurance of their gorilla-like bodies, with new skin sails throughout the fleet, and the flower of the Ludektan army on board, sailed out from Ludekta westward for Alu under the command of the General Bothon.

It was precisely simultaneous with the arrival of this war fleet off the shores of the great city of Alu that there began unprecedented natural disturbances affecting the entire area of the mother continent. These were comparable to nothing recorded in the capital's carefully kept slate and parchment records, which went back over a period of thousands of years.

The first presage of these impending calamities took the form of a coppery tinge which replaced the blue of the sky. Without any warning the long ground-swell of this Western Ocean changed abruptly, along with the color of the water, into a kind of dull brick-grey, to short, choppy, spray-capped waves. These tossed even the great Ludektan war galleys so violently as to shatter many of the sweeps. The wind, to the consternation of several of Bothon's captains, appeared to come from every quarter at once! It tore the heavy skin sails of the Ludektan galleys away from their copper rings and bolts in some cases. In others it split the sails in clean straight lines as though they had been slit with sharp knives.

Undaunted by these manifestations and the reports of his augurs who had cast their lots and slain their sheep and fowls in a hasty series of divinations to account, if possible, for this unfavorable reception at the hands of the elements, the indomitable will of Bothon forced his fleet to an orderly landing. He sent forthwith as his herald to the Emperor himself, his highest ranking sub-general, accompanied by an imposing guard of honor. On slate tablets Bothon had set forth his demand in his own hand. This was in the form of a set of alternatives. The Emperor was asked to receive him as Generalissimo of the military forces of Ludekta, and to consent to his immediate marriage with the Netvissa Ledda; or, he, Bothon, would proceed forthwith to the siege of Alu and take the lady of his heart by force and arms.

The message prayed the Emperor to elect the first alternative. It also set forth briefly and in formal heraldic terms the status of the ancient family of Bothon.

The Emperor had been very seriously annoyed at his challenge, as he chose to regard it. He felt that his office and dignity had been outraged. He crucified Bothon's entire delegation.

The siege of Alu began forthwith under that menacing copper-tinted sky and to the accompaniment of a rumbling series of little earthquakes.

Not only not within the memory of living men, but, as the records indicated, during its entire history over thousands of years as the metropolis of the civilized world, had there been any previous hostile manifestations against the great city of Alu. That anything like this terrible campaign which the renowned General Bothon of Ludekta set in motion against her might come to pass, had never even remotely occurred to anyone in Alu. So promptly did Bothon launch his attack that the tortured bodies of the members of his delegation to the Emperor had not yet ceased writhing on their rows of crosses before he had penetrated, at the head of his trained legionaries, to a point within two squares of the Imperial Palace which stood at the center of the great city.

There had been virtually no resistance. This intensive campaign would have been triumphantly concluded within twenty minutes, the Emperor probably captured along with all his Palace guards and household, the person of the Lady Ledda secured by this ardent lover of hers, and the entire objective of the expedition accomplished, save for what in modern legal phraseology would have been described as An Act of God.

The premonitory earth-shakings which had accompanied this armed invasion culminated, at that point in the advance of Bothon's army, in a terrific seismic cataclysm. The stone-paved streets opened in great gaping fissures. Massive buildings crashed tumultuously all about and upon the triumphantly advancing Ludektans. The General, Bothon, at the head of his troops, dazed and deafened and hurled violently upon the ground, retained consciousness long enough to see three quarters of his devoted following engulfed, smashed, torn to fragments, crushed into unrecognizable heaps of bloody pulp; and this holocaust swiftly and mercifully obliterated from before his failing vision by the drifting dust from millions of tons of crumbled masonry.

He awakened in the innermost keep of the dungeon in Alu's citadel.

Coming quietly into Meredith's bedroom about ten o'clock in the morning, Dr. Cowlington, who had made up his mind overnight on a certain matter, quietly led his initial conversation with his observation-patient around to the subject which had been most prominent in his mind since their conference of yesterday over the strange linguistic terms which Meredith had noted down.

"It has occurred to me that I might very well tell you about something quite out of the ordinary which came under my notice seven or eight years ago. It happened while I was chief intern in the Connecticut State Hospital for the Insane. I served there for two years under Dr. Floyd Haviland before I went into private practice. We had a few private patients in the hospital, and one of these, who was in my particular charge, was a gentleman of middle-age who had come to us because of Haviland's enormous reputation, without commitment. This gentleman, whom I will call 'Smith', was neither legally nor actually 'insane'. His difficulty, which had interfered very seriously with the course of his life and affairs, would ordinarily be classified as 'delusions'. He was with us for nearly two months. As a voluntary patient of the institution, and being a man of means, he had private rooms. He was in every way normal except for his intensive mental preoccupation with what I have called his delusions. In daily contact with him during this period I became convinced that Mr. Smith was not suffering from anything like a delusive affection of the mind.

"I diagnosed his difficulty—and Dr. Haviland agreed with me—that this patient, Smith, was suffering mentally from the effects of an ancestral memory.

"Such a case is so rare as to be virtually unique. The average psychiatrist would go through a life-time working at his specialty without encountering anything of the sort. There are, however, recorded cases. We were able to send our patient home in a mental condition of almost complete normality. As sometimes occurs in mental cases, his virtual cure was accomplished by making our diagnosis very clear to him—impressing upon his mind through reiterated and very positive statements that he was in no sense of the word demented, and that his condition, while unusual, was not outside the range and limitations of complete normality."

"It must have been a very interesting case," said Meredith. His reply was dictated by nothing deeper than a desire to be courteous. For his mind was full of the affairs of the General, Bothon, raging now in his prison-chamber; his mind harried, anxious over the fate of his surviving soldiers; that lurid glare, dimmed by the remoteness of his flame-tinted prison-chamber, in his eyes; his mind tortured and his keen sense of hearing stultified by the sustained, dreadful roaring of that implacable sea. He, Meredith, for reasons far too deep for his own analysis, felt utterly incapable of telling Dr. Cowlington what was transpiring in those dreams of his. All his inmost basic instincts were warning him, though subconsciously, that what he might tell now, if he would, could not possibly be believed!

Dr. Cowlington, looking at his patient, saw a face drawn and lined as though from some devastating mental stress; a deeply introspective expression in the eyes, which, professionally speaking, he did not like. The doctor considered a moment before resuming, erect in his chair, his knees crossed, his finger-tips joined in a somewhat judicial attitude.

"Frankly, Meredith, I emphasized the fact that the man I have called Smith was in no sense insane because I feel that I must go farther and tell you that the nature of his apparent 'delusions' was, in one striking particular, related to your own case. I did not wish to give you the slightest alarm over the perfect soundness of your own mentality! To put the matter plainly, Mr. Smith remembered, although rather vaguely and dimly, certain phases of those ancestral memories I mentioned, and was able to reproduce a number of the terms of some unknown and apparently prehistoric language. Meredith—" the doctor turned and looked intensely into the eyes of his now interested patient "—there were three or four of Smith's words identical with yours!"

"Good God!" Meredith exclaimed, "What were the words, Doctor? Did you make notes of them?"

"Yes, I have them here," answered the psychiatrist.

Meredith was out of his chair and leaning eagerly over the doctor's shoulder long before Cowlington had his papers arranged. He gazed with a consuming intensity at the words and phrases carefully typed on several sheets of foolscap; listened, with an almost tremulous attention, while Dr. Cowlington carefully reproduced the sounds of these uncouth terms. Then, taking the sheets and resuming his chair, he read through all that had been written down, pronouncing the words, though very quietly, under his breath, his lips barely moving.

He was pale, and shaking from head to foot when he rose at last and handed back, hands trembling, the thin fascicle of papers to its owner. Dr. Cowlington looked at him anxiously, his professional mind alert, his fears somewhat aroused over the wisdom of this experiment of his in bringing his former case thus abruptly to his patient's attention. Dr. Cowlington felt, if he had cared to put his impression into words, somewhat baffled. He could not, despite his long and careful training in dealing with mental, nervous, and "borderland" cases, quite put his acute professional finger upon just which one of the known simple and complex emotions was, for this moment, dominating this very interesting patient of his.

Dr. Cowlington would have been even more completely puzzled if he had known.

For Meredith, reading through the strange babblings of the patient, Smith, had recognized all the words and terms, and lit upon the phrase:

"Our beloved Bothon has disappeared."

Dr. Cowlington, sensing accurately that it might be unwise to prolong this particular interview, concluded wisely that Meredith would most readily regain his normal poise and equanimity if left alone to cope with whatever, for the time- being, held possession of his mind, rose quietly and walked over to the bedroom door.

He paused there, however, for an instant, before leaving the room, and looked back at the man. Meredith had not, apparently, so much as noted the doctor's movements towards departure. His mind, very obviously, was turned inward. He was, it appeared, entirely oblivious to his surroundings.

And Dr. Cowlington, whose professional outward deportment, acquired through years of contact with abnormal people, had not wholly obliterated a kindly disposition, noted with a certain emotion of his own that there were unchecked tears plainly visible in his patient's inward-gazing eyes.

Summoned back to Meredith's room an hour later by one of his house nurses, Dr. Cowlington found his patient restored to his accustomed urbane normality.

"I asked you to come up for a moment, Doctor," began Meredith, "because I wanted to inquire if there is anything that you would care to give a patient to induce sleep." Then, with a deprecating smile: "The only such things I know about are morphine and laudanum! I don't know very much about medicine and naturally you wouldn't want to give me one of those any more that I would want to take it."

Dr. Cowlington resumed his judicial manner. He thought rapidly about this unexpected request. He took into consideration how his story about the patient, Smith, had appeared to upset Meredith. He deliberately refrained from inquiring why Meredith wanted a sleeping potion. Then he nodded his head.

"I use a very simple preparation;" he said. "It is non-habit-forming; based on a rather dangerous drug, chloral; but, as I use it for my patients, compounded with an aromatic syrup and diluted with half a tumbler of water, it works very well. I will send some up to you but remember, please, four teaspoonfuls of the syrup is the outside dose. Two will probably be enough. Never more than four at any time, and not more than one dose in twenty-four hours."

Dr. Cowlington rose, came over to Meredith, and looked at the place where he had struck the side of his head against the marble wall of his shower-bath. The bruise was still there. The doctor passed his fingers lightly over the contusion.

"It's beginning to go down," he remarked. Then he smiled pleasantly, again nodded his head at Meredith, and, started to leave. Meredith stopped him as he was about to go out of the room.

"I wanted to ask you," said Meredith, "I wanted to ask you, Doctor, if you would be willing to put me in touch with the man to whom you referred as 'Smith'?"

The doctor shook his head. "I'm sorry, Mr. Smith died two years ago."

In ten minutes the house nurse fetched in a small tray. On it was a tumbler, a mixing spoon, and a freshly put up eight-ounce bottle containing a reddish colored, pleasant-tasting syrup.

Twenty minutes later, Meredith, who had compromised on three teaspoons, was deeply asleep on his bed; and the General, Bothon, in the innermost dungeon-chamber of the great citadel of Alu, was standing poised in the center of that dungeon's smooth stone floor, tensed to leap in any direction; while all about him the rending crashes of thousands of tons of the riven and falling masonry of the citadel itself was deafening him against all other sounds except the incessant and indescribably thunderous fury of the now utterly maddened ocean. The lurid glare of the fires from without had been markedly heightened. Detonation after detonation came to Bothon's ears at frequent intervals. The Aluans were blowing up this central portion of the great city, in order to check the advance of the conflagration which had raged for days and nights and was utterly beyond control. These detonations seemed actually faint to the alert man in that prison room against the hideous crashing of the sections of the citadel itself, and the sustained roar of the ocean.

Abruptly the crisis for which he had been waiting arrived. The stone flooring beneath his feet buckled and sagged at his right. He whirled about and leaped far in the other direction, pressing himself, hands and arms stretched out above his head, against the wall of the prison-chamber, his heart pounding wildly, his breath coming in great gasps and sobs as the stifling, earthquake-deadened air about him shrank to a sudden and devastating attenuation. Then the solid wall opposite split in a tearing gap from top to bottom, and an even more stifling cloud of white dust sifted abruptly through the room as the ceiling was riven asunder.

Stifling, choking, fighting for breath and life, the General, Bothon, lowered his arms and whirled about again in the direction of this thunderous breakage, and groped his way across the now precarious flooring in the faint hope of discovering an avenue of escape. He struggled up a steep mound of debris through the grey darkness of the hanging dust where a few seconds before there had been a level floor of solid masonry. He groped his way through thicker clouds of the drifting, settling stone-dust, skirted the irregular edges of yawning holes and toiled up and down mounded heaps of rubble, far past the place where the confining wall of his dungeon had stood, onward and forward resolutely towards that vague goal of freedom.

At last, the resources of his mighty body spent, his eyes two tortured red holes, his mouth and throat one searing pain, Bothon emerged across the last hill of rubbish which had been the citadel of Alu and came out upon the corner edge of one of the largest of the city's great public squares.

For the first time in the course of his progress out of that death trap, Bothon suddenly trod on something soft and yielding. He paused. He could hardly see, and he crouched and felt with his hands, under the thickly mounded dust.

It was the body of a man, in chain mail. Bothon, exhaled a painful breath of satisfaction. He rolled the body over, freeing it from the pounds of dust upon it, and slid his hand along the copper-studded leather belt to where a short, heavy, one-handed battle-axe was attached. This he withdrew from its sheath. Then from the dead man's silken tunic he tore off a large section and cleansed his eyes and mouth and wiped the sweat-caked dust from his face.

Finally he took from the corpse a heavy leathern purse.

He lay down for a few moments beside the dead soldier on the soft dust for a brief rest. Some ten minutes later he rose, stretched himself, testing the heavy axe with three or four singing strokes through the clearing air, and dusted out and readjusted his garments, finally tightening a loosened sandal thong.

He stood free now in the center of Alu. He was adequately armed. A great gust of energy surged through him. He oriented himself; then he turned with an instinct as sure as a homing bee's in the direction he had been seeking, and began to march at the unhurrying, space-devouring pace of a Ludektan legionary, straight for the Imperial Palace.

Bothon had thoroughly settled in his mind the answer to a question which, for the first few days of his captivity had puzzled him greatly. Why had he been left alone and undisturbed in that confinement; food and water brought to him a regular intervals in accordance with the ordinary routine of the citadel? Why, to put the matter plainly, having been obviously captured by the Emperor's retainers while lying unconscious within two squares of the Imperial Palace, had he not been summarily crucified? His keen trained mind had apprised him that the answer was to be found in the hideous turmoil of the raging sea and in the fearful sounds of a disintegrating city. The Emperor had been too greatly occupied by those cataclysms even to command the punishment of this leader of such an armed attack against the world's metropolis as had not been known in all the long history of the mother continent.

Skirting its enormous outer walls, Bothon came at last to the massive chief entrance-way to the Imperial Palace. This enormous structure, its basic walls eight feet thick, stood massive, magnificent, intact. Without any hesitation he began mounting the many broad steps straight towards the magnificent entrance-gates of copper and gold and porphyry.

Before these gates, in the rigid line and under the command of an officer beneath whose corselet appeared the pale blue tunic of the Emperor's household-guards, stood a dozen fully armed soldiers. One of these, at a word from the officer, ran down the steps to turn back this intruder. Bothon slew him with a single crashing stroke and continued to mount the steps. At this a shouted command of the officer sent the entire troop down upon him in close order. Bothon paused, and, waiting until the foremost was no more than the space of two of the broad steps above him, leaped lightly to his right. Then as the foremost four of the soldiers passed beyond him under the impetus of their downward charge, Bothon as lightly leaped back again, his heavy axe falling upon the troop's flank with deadly, short, quick-swinging blows.

Before they could collect themselves the officer and five of his men lay dead upon the steps. Leaving the demoralized remainder to gather themselves together as best they might, Bothon leaped up the intervening steps and was through the great entrance-doors, and, with a pair of lightning-like right-and-left strokes of his axe, had disposed of the two men-at-arms stationed just inside the doorway.

His was into the Palace now entirely unobstructed, Bothon sped through well-remembered rooms and along broad corridors into the heart of the Imperial Palace of Alu.

Within thirty seconds he had located the entrance to the brother of the Emperor, Netvis Toldon's apartments, and had passed through the doorway.

He discovered the family reclining about the horseshoe-shaped table in the refectory, for it was the hour of the evening meal. He paused in the doorway, was met with surprised glances, and bowed low to the Netvis Toldon.

"I beseech you to pardon this intrusion, my Lord Netvis. It would be inexcusable under other circumstances, at a more favorable time." The nobleman returned no answer, only stared in surprize. Then, the dear lady of his heart, the Netvissa Ledda, rose to her feet from her place at her father's table, her eyes wide with wonderment. A dawning realization of what this strange invasion might mean, made her lovely face suddenly the hue of the Aluan roses. She looked at this heroically formed lover of hers, her soul in her eyes.

"Come, my lady Ledda!" said Bothon quickly, and as lightly as a deer the Netvissa Ledda ran to him.

He took her arm, very quietly, and, before the assembled members of the family of Toldon had recovered from their surprise, the two were hastening along the corridor towards the palace entrance.

From around the first corner before them came then abrupt sounds of armed men. They paused, listening, and Bothon shifted his axe into his right hand and stepped before the lady Ledda, but she laid firm hands upon his left arm. "This way, swiftly!" she whispered, and led him down a narrow passage-way at the wide corridor's left. This they traversed

in haste, and had barely negotiated a sharp turn when they heard the guard-troop rush along the main corridor, and a voice, commanding:

"To the apartment of my Lord, the Netvis Toldon!"

The narrow passage-way led them past cook-rooms and scullery-chambers, and ended at a small door which opened upon a narrow court. Rapidly traversing this, they emerged upon a square at the west side of the palace, and well before any pursuit could have traced their course, were indistinguishable among the vast concourse of the people who thronged the wide avenues of Alu.

Bothon now resumed the direction of their course of escape. Leading the way across a larger adjacent square, he reached the secluded corner, mounded about with debris, where he had secured his weapon. It was not yet past the early dusk of a mid-summer evening, and now there was nothing to interfere with his keen vision.

Yes, it was as he had guessed from the quality of that torn fragment of silken tunic with which he had wiped his tortured eyes free of the stone-dust. The dead man was an officer of one of the Imperial Legions.

Seating the Lady Ledda upon a block of granite and requesting her to watch, Bothon knelt swiftly beside the dead body and busied himself upon it.

At the end of the two intensive minutes the Netvissa Ledda looked up at his touch upon her shoulder to see her lover appareled from head to foot in the uniform, armor, and accoutrements of an Elton of the Imperial Legion of the Hawk.

Then they hurried southward, side by side, across the great square with its desolation of the shattered buildings, towards one of the few remaining residences of the rich before which four coal-black slaves in the livery of their household were lowering an ornamental litter to the ground.

From the luxurious vehicle, as they arrived beside it, there emerged a stout citizen who stared at them inquiringly, his initial fear disappearing at recognition of the Emperor's niece and the uniform of an Imperial Legion.

"We request the loan of your litter, my lord," said Bothon.

"Most willingly," returned the citizen, bowing.

Bothon expressed thanks, handed his companion into the litter, distributed a handful of silver among the four slaves, and gave the destination to the Negro who stood beside the forward left-hand pole. Then he climbed in himself and drew the red silk curtains together.

The strong litter-poles strained and creaked as the load was hoisted to four brawny shoulders, and then the litter swung away from the residence of its still bowing and smirking owner towards the military enclosure which housed and guarded the flying-vessels of the Aluvian standing army.

"You may have observed how very completely I have entrusted my Imperial person to you," remarked the Netvissa Ledda, smiling. She was very well aware of the reasons for the Imperial request which had sent Bothon back to Ludekta, and for the first armed invasion against the Aluvian metropolis. "I have not so much as inquired as to our destination!"

"It is my intention to seek safety to the northwest," answered Bothon gravely. "I am convinced the prediction of Bal, Lord of Fields, as to the destruction of the Mother Continent, is not a mere classic to be learned, as we learned it in our childhood, as a formal exercise in rhetoric. Here, all about us, in the evidence. More, my four augurs warned me of the continent's danger ere I brought my war-galleys up upon the beaches of Alu. The four great forces, they insisted, were in collusion to that end. Do we not see and hear them at work? Fire raging through the land; earth shaking mightily; winds such as never were encountered hitherto upon the planet, else the old records lie! Water, the commotion of which surpasses all experiences;—is it not so, my beloved? Am I not constrained to speak thus to be heard amidst this hellish tumult?"

The Lady Ledda nodded, grave now in her turn.

"There are many deafened in the palace," she remarked. "Where are we to go for refuge?"

"We depart straight this night, for the great mountains of 'A-Wah-Ii,'" answered Bothon, "If so be the four great forces allow us possession of a war-chariot. And, to that end, your ring, my beloved."

The Lady Ledda nodded again, understandingly, and removed from the middle finger of her right hand the ring of the two suns and the eight-pointed star which, as a member of the Royal Family, she was entitled to wear. Bothon received it, and slipped it upon the little finger of his right hand.

The sentinel on guard before the barracks of the officer commanding the military enclosure of the Aluvian supply- barracks, saluted the commanding-looking Elton of the Legion of the Hawk who stepped down from the ornamented litter. The Elton addressed him in formal military phrases.

"Report at once to the Ka-Kalbo Netro, the arrival of the Elton Barko of the Legion of the Hawk, conveying a member of the Imperial household into exile. I am requisitioning one battle-chariot of capacity for two persons, and officer's rations sufficient for fourteen days, together with the medicinal supply for a full kit-va of men. My authority, the Imperial Signet. Behold!"

The sentinel saluted the sun-and-star ring of the Emperor, repeated his orders like an efficient automaton, saluted the Elton of the Hawk Legion, and departed at the double to fetch the commandant, the Ka-Kalbo Netro.

The Ka-Kalbo arrived promptly in answer to this summons. He saluted the Imperial Signet, and, as a Ka-Kalbo outranked an Elton by one full grade, was punctiliously saluted according to military usage by the Elton Barko of the Legion of the Hawk, an officer whose personal acquaintance he had not previously made.

Within ten minutes the Netvissa Ledda had been ceremoniously carried to and placed upon her seat in the commandeered battle-chariot, and the Elton Barko had taken his place beside her. Then, the dozen sweating mechanicians who had carried out the commandant's orders in record time, standing in a stiff, saluting row, the battle-chariot started off at a stiff gallop, the driver standing and plying his long thong with loud, snapping reports over the horses' backs, while at the great chariot's rear the spare-horse leader whistled continuously to the four relay animals which galloped behind.

The heights of 'A-Wah-Ii,' to the northwest, gave some promise, in Bothon's opinion, of security from the anciently predicted submersion of the continent. Those towering mountains would, at least, be among the last sections to sink, should the gas belts, hypothecated by the scientists of the mother continent, explode, and remove the underseas support of this great land of the globe's most ancient and noble civilization.

Shortly after daybreak, and accurately, according to the map and careful explanations of the painstaking Ka-Kalbo Netro, the chariot paused in the centre of a great level table-land one quarter of the way to his destination. The country was utterly uninhabited. They were relatively safe here in a region only lightly visited by the earthquakes, and not at all by fire. The roar of the north wind troubled the Netvissa Ledda severely. Bothon barely noticed it. He was now convinced that he was losing his sense of hearing.

They ate and slept and resumed their journey at noon after a readjustment of the provisions and a change of the now rested animals.

Their four days' journey steadily northwest was uneventful. The charioteer drove onward steadily. On the fourth day, as the coppery ball which was the smoking sun reached and touched a flat horizon, they caught their first view of the lofty summits of the 'A-Wah-Ii' region, a goal of a possible immunity.

Dr. Cowlington, an anxious look on his face, was standing beside Meredith's bed when he awakened in midmorning. He had slept twenty hours. However, what the doctor thought of as his patient's mental condition was so entirely normal, and his cheerfulness so pronounced after his protracted sleep, that Dr. Cowlington was reassured, and changed his mind about removing the bottle of sleeping medicine. Plainly it had had an excellent effect on Meredith.

Stretched out in his usual quiet-inducing attitude on the davenport just before lunch, Meredith suddenly ceased reading and put down his magazine. It had occurred to him that he had heard none of the turmoil of Alu during that waking period. He sat up, puzzled. Bothon, he remembered, had been hearing the sounds about him only dimly, a strange, perhaps a significant, coincidence.

He felt the bruise behind his right ear. It was no longer even slightly painful to the touch. He pressed his fingertips firmly against the place. The contusion was now barely perceptible to the sense of touch.

He reported the apparent loss of what the ear-specialist Gatefield had named his "clairaudience" to Dr. Cowlington after lunch.

"Your bruise is going down," said the doctor significantly. He examined the posterior edge of Meredith's right temporal area.

"I thought so," remarked the doctor, nodding. "Your secondary 'hearing' began with that injury to your head. As it goes down, some obscure stimulation of the auditory apparatus, which accounts for your ability to hear those sounds, diminishes accordingly. You could probably hear only some stupendous sound from there now. And in a day or so I predict that you will be hearing nothing more, and then you can go home!"

And, within an hour came the "stupendous sound" in very truth. It broke in upon Meredith's quiet reading once more as though someone had opened that sound-proof door.

A curious, secondary, mental vision accompanied it. It was as though Meredith, in his own proper person, yet through the strange connection of his personality with the General, Bothon, stood on the heights of Tharan-Yud, overlooking the stricken city of Alu. The utter fury of mountainous waves accompanied the now titanic rumblings of malignant earth, the wholesale crashing of the cyclopean masonry of Alu as the vast city crumbled and melted beneath his horrified eyes. With these hellish horrors went the wild roaring of ravaging flame, and the despairing, hysterical cacophony of Alu's doomed millions.

Then there came, at last, a sound as of the veritable yawning of the nethermost watery gulf of earth, and the high sun itself was blotted out by a monstrous green wall of advancing death. The sea rose up and fell upon accursed Alu, drowning forever the shrieks of utter despair, the piping and chittering of the obscurely gnawing Gyaa-Hua distracted at last from their loathsome banquet—hissing, roaring, shriekings, whinings, tearings, seethings—a cacophony more than human ears might bear, a sight of utter devastation more onerous than man might look upon, and live.

There came to Meredith a merciful stupor, as the waters of Mu-Iadon closed in forever over the mother continent, and as his consciousness failed him, he emerged once more out of that quiet bedroom—away from his overlooking of the world's major catastrophe, and as Bothon, walked beside the Lady Ledda along a wooded ravine in 'A-Wah-Ii,' goal of safety, among laden fruit trees, yet not, it seemed, upon the towering heights of those noble mountains but upon an island about the shores of which rolled and roared a brown and viscid ocean choked with the mud which had been the soil of the mother continent.

"We are safe here, it would appear, my Bothon," said the Netvissa Ledda. "Let us lie down and sleep, for I am very weary."

And after watching for a little space while the Lady Ledda reclined and slept, Bothon lay down beside her and fell at once into the deep and dreamless slumber of utter physical exhaustion.

Meredith awakened on his davenport. The room was dark, and when he had risen, switched on the lights and looked at his watch, he found that it was four o'clock in the morning. He undressed and went to bed and awakened three hours later without having dreamed.

A world and an era had come to its cataclysmic end, and he had been witness of it.

The contusion on his head had disappeared, Dr. Cowlington observed later in the morning.

"I think you can go now, you'll never hear again," said the doctor, in his judicial manner. "But, by the way, Meredith, what, if you can remember, was the name of that 'mother continent' of yours?"

"We called it Mu," said Meredith.

The doctor was silent for a while; then he nodded his head. He had made up his mind.

"I thought so," said he, gravely.

"Why?" Meredith asked.

"Because Smith called it that," replied the doctor.

Something From Out There

by August Derleth (1951)

There is a tendency on the part of the vast majority of people not only to take one another for granted, but to take all the aspects of their existence in the same manner. I sometimes think we are all too prone to accept as immutable law the scientific order of things, and not ready enough to challenge that order. Yet scientific laws are being altered and broken daily; new concepts come to the fore and take the place of the old; and they in turn are replaced by yet newer theories based on seemingly equally irrefutable facts.

But in actuality many only recently discovered facts have their beginnings in time before man's recording, and it was certainly in such a distant past that the so-called "Malvern mystery" had its origin. To some extent it is a mystery still, for no one can satisfactorily explain what was found at Hydestall, nor where it came from, nor how it came to be there in the first place.

My own involvement in the mystery dated only to the night the Lynwold constable, John Slade, roused me from sleep by pounding on the door of my combined office and home and, on my raising a window to call down, told me he had brought Geoffrey Malvern to see Dr. William Currie."Found him out of his head," offered Slade in brief explanation. I dressed, went downstairs, and helped Slade bring the young man into my office, where he managed to sit down without collapsing, though he seemed ever on the verge of falling together; there he huddled, hands covering his face, shuddering and trembling as if from the effects of a profound shock.

I glanced at Slade, who stood fingering the rough stubble on his chin, and my eyes apparently asked the question that was on my tongue, for Slade shook his head helplessly and shrugged; so it was obvious that he had come upon Geoffrey in this condition, and brought him directly to my office. I went over to Geoffrey and put my hand gently but firmly on his shoulder.

He groaned. But in a moment his hands slid away from his face and he looked up. I was unable to keep from betraying my surprise: I could hardly believe that this drawn, chalk-pale, mud-splattered face, with blank, unrecognizing eyes yet lit with a burning, intense, haunted light, could be the face of Lord Malvern's son. Though there was not the slightest sign of recognition, the expression on his face, the intentness of his eyes now that they had become accustomed to the light, were evidence that he looked at someone or something he saw in his mind's eye, for his face began to work, his lips twisting and trembling, and his fingers clenched.

"What happened, Geoffrey?" I asked persuasively.

At the sound of my voice, he doubled up once more, huddling in the chair, burying his distraught face in his hands, and made a kind of whimpering, moaning sound, as of a man in deadly terror --- one of the most unpleasant sounds a medical man can hear.

***

It was then, when he opened his hands wider than before, that the stone dropped from one of them and fell to the floor. Geoffrey did not appear to have noticed his loss; so I stooped and retrieved it. It was a queer, oddly-shaped stone in the form of a five-pointed star, suggesting manufacture; and yet its appearance gave the lie to that suggestion. Nevertheless, it was in part at least the product of human hands; for it bore an inscription, now partly encrusted over, but one I felt confident could be read. Indeed, I could make out three letters of what appeared to be a signature following the inscription: AV. V.... The age of the stone was indeterminable, but the inscription being Latin, its general aspect and its encrustations, which suggested that the stone had been in the sea, indicated that it was at least several centuries old.

But the most curious aspect of the stone and that first contact with it was this: I had no sooner taken it up than I was conscious of a strange sense of power, a kind of benign strength that seemed to flow through me as a medium from some other place; this was a sensation I was destined never to be without as long as the stone was on my person. Moreover, there was in addition as noticeable a sense of urgent direction, as if there was something connected with the stone that most vitally needed to be done. It seems to me now, writing in retrospect, that it was this more than Malvern's condition which impelled me to probe into the mystery and so perhaps save Lynwold and the surrounding countryside from the horror which might have broken loose upon them.

At the moment, however, I was too disturbed to heed these strong impressions. I held the stone before Geoffrey's eyes, raising his head by his tousled dark hair, and forcing him to look at it.

"Where did you get this, Geoffrey?" I asked.

"The stone!" he murmured. For a moment his eyes were clear of the haunting horror that filled them, but he gave no sign of having heard my question. Then he began to sway a little, back and forth, muttering and murmuring brokenly to himself, and groaning as if in physical agony.

Clearly, nothing could be done, save to give him a sedative and get him to bed. This I did, sending Slade to take him in my car to Lord Malvern's gaunt old home up the sea-coast. Then I telephoned Lord Malvern to explain that Geoffrey had been found wandering on the streets in a dazed condition, saying that I had given him a sedative and recommending that he be put to bed at once. I promised to be up in the morning and take a look at him. Lord Malvern was unusually abrupt, but this I interpreted as prompted by his suspicion that his son had been up to mischief, for relations were strained between father and son, owing to Geoffrey's not infrequent escapades.

***

It was not until the following day that I learned Geoffrey Malvern's movements in outline. He had set out from home alone the previous morning for a long walk over the lowlands near the seashore. In a meandering way he had made for the ruined priory near his father's estate, which he had reached shortly after noon. At about four in the afternoon, he had stopped off at a tavern near the priory along the coast road and eaten a light lunch; subsequently he had paused briefly at the small cottage where Malvern's former gardener now lived. The young man had seemed quite natural; both the tavern-keeper and the ex-gardener testified that Geoffrey had joked quite heartily before continuing on his way.

He had been seen returning to the priory before five o'clock, and several Lynwold motorists had seen him reading in the shade of a yew grove near the ruins during the course of the hours between five and dusk. At or near dusk, Jeremy Cotton, a schoolmaster, had passed the priory on foot, and, catching sight of Geoffrey, had cut off the coast road and into the priory grounds to talk to him. Geoffrey had been at this time busy poking about the ruins. When Cotton came up, he had evidently just come upon a queer sort of stone which he had shown to the schoolmaster; Cotton's description of it, and his recital of their attempt to decipher its inscription, convinced me that the stone was identical with the one now in my possession. Cotton remembered that Geoffrey had been intensely curious about the star-shaped stone; he had been struck at the time by what he now thoughtfully termed an "undue fascination". Asked about the book Geoffrey had been carrying, Cotton identified it as James's Cathedrals of England, and added that Geoffrey had told him he intended to visit the ruined cathedral of Hydestall, which loomed just over the horizon not far from the priory.

These facts I managed to establish. Thereafter followed a blank interval, and then, shortly after midnight, occurred Geoffrey's entrance into Lynwold, in the condition in which Slade had found him. Something had happened in that interval between dusk and midnight to temporarily unbalance Geoffrey Malvern. The mystery intrigued me more than anything in my previous experience, and I was, moreover, impelled to solve it, I know now, by a power beyond my control, though I had not anticipated at that time that Geoffrey Malvern might recover and be able to tell his own story, confirming such discoveries as were made.

Far from having any light thrown on the mystery in my visit to Malvern-by-the-Sea that morning, I was more mystified than ever --- not so much by Geoffrey's condition, which had changed very little; but rather because of Lord Malvern's attitude. He asked me to say nothing of the affair to anyone, and in the course of his conversation with me he dropped several hints that seemed to link Geoffrey's inexplicable madness with certain of the young man's Oxford activities. However, he did not seem to want the mystery investigated at all, and yet in his reference to the Oxford episodes as scandalous, Lord Malvern provided the second of the clues which was to solve the puzzle. The first was the star-stone itself, but this I did not then know. But I began to wonder that evening whether there might not be some connection between some affair at Oxford and the muttering of Malvern in delirium? Perhaps even between the five-pointed stone and the Oxford scandals? I remembered distinctly that several disgraceful occurrences had led to the sending down of four young men from Oxford, and only Geoffrey's influence had saved him from a like fate.

So, that evening I turned to the stone and cleaned away some of the encrustations so that I could decipher the inscription on it. Fortunately, the most important parts of the inscription could still be read, though they required study, and even the fact that all the key words were present did not make my task much lighter. Such words and letters as had been rubbed completely away were few, and could easily be supplied. The inscription, when I had translated it, was enigmatic and vague. It read:

The five-pointed star being the key, with this key I imprison you in the Name of Him Who created all things, Spawn of Elder Evil, Accursed in the Sight of God, Follower of Mad Cthulhu, who dared return from ever damned R'lyeh, I imprison you. May none ever effect your freedom.

Augustine, Bishop 

The inscription appeared to be that of Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, famed among churchmen. This was the first intimation of fact I had in regard to the stone's actual age.

***

The translation strengthened the connection in my mind between the stone and Geoffrey's derangement. And did the stone not refer to "dark things" by inference at least in its inscription? There had been "dark things" done at Oxford, according to guarded accounts which had been made public. I began to believe then that the key to the mystery might possibly lie in the Oxford activities, or, if not the key, at least some tenable explanation that might help to discover the key. Why not, I thought, ask down one or two of the boys who had been dismissed from Oxford and question them frankly about the affairs which had brought them to disgrace?

Accordingly, I dispatched a wire to Soames Hemery, whose address I found on a letter he had sent to the Times anent the affair which had resulted in his being sent down from college. I suggested that Hemery bring along one or two of the other young men implicated in the scandal, if possible, and explained that Geoffrey's health and well-being lay in the balance.

Hemery and Duncan Vernon, both friends of Geoffrey, arrived early next morning. Both seemed to be energetic and enthusiastic young men, though with a certain air of restraint about them, and both were anxious to be of all assistance possible. Their questions were curiously insistent once they knew Geoffrey's condition. Above all, what had Geoffrey said?

"Nothing coherent," I answered promptly. And yet I could not help reflecting that he had spoken distinctly enough, if one but had the keys to his subject. He had said several times, "Something from out there!" I repeated this, and mentioned the star-stone Geoffrey had been carrying.

Vernon's eyes were far away, and there was a slight, if troubled smile on his lips."You saw the stone, Doctor?" he asked presently."What became of it?"

I went to the cabinet where I had put the five-pointed star-stone and brought it, together with the inscription and my translation, to Vernon. Hemery, too, came crowding close, and the two of them, unable to conceal a mounting excitement, handled the stone wonderingly.

"He did find it then," Vernon murmured."Pried it off something, by the look of it."

"And called it out," added Hemery.

"This translation is excellent, Doctor," said Vernon.

"I'm afraid you have some knowledge I don't have," I admitted.

At this point our discussion was interrupted by Slade, who came in hurriedly, and said without preamble, "Old Cramton's been found dead and they want you to examine his body."

Cramton was a solitary fisherman who lived in a hut on the far side of Lynwold. I assumed instantly that his death was a natural one, since he had been an old man for as long as I could remember.

"What seems to have taken him off?" I asked conversationally.

"Nobody knows. He was found in the cave those boys discovered under the old priory."

Hemery and Vernon leaned forward, suddenly interested. I, too, was surprised at mention of the priory, and at the introduction of a hitherto unknown cave beneath it.

"One thing at a time, John," I said."What boys?"

"The three who got lost yesterday, Doctor."

"I'm afraid I know nothing about them," I admitted."Suppose you just tell us."

"Henry Kopps's two boys, and Jibber Cloy's Albert, they were," said Slade, and launched into his story, which was simple enough.

***

On the afternoon of the previous day, the three small boys had gone up to the ruins of the priory and failed to come back. Dusk fell, and night came down, and still the boys did not return. A group of older boys set out to look for them, and found them at last, safe on the seashore far beyond Lynwold and still farther from the priory, dazed and frightened, and with no idea how they had got there. Questions put to them had brought forth a queer story. They had gone to the ruins, where they had found a cave and passageway leading beneath, and had gone down to explore. They had crept along the cave until they had come upon a queer bundle in the darkness. They had felt around this, it being too dark to see anything, and had pulled a button off what seemed to be a coat or cloak. Then their hands had come into contact with a face, and they had got terribly frightened and had run. They thought they were lost, and for a long time wandered around in a perfect maze of caves, in some of which there was water --- lots of it --- until finally they had come out on the seashore, with no idea where they were until the exploring party had come upon them. That was well after midnight. Had they seen anything at the priory? Yes, they had. Just at dusk, but there was no describing it."Like something from the animal park in London," said one of the boys.

The button the boys had found was identified as an old brass button belonging to a coat well-known as the property of Cramton. He was accordingly sent for, but could not be found. It came out finally that he had not been seen for the last few days --- not since the evening of Geoffrey's strange attack. The button, coupled with the disappearance of the fisherman and the story of the curious bundle with the face the boys felt, caused a search for his body. It had been found in the priory cave when the tide was low, but in a strange, incomprehensible condition. As medical examiner, I was needed at the undertaker's shop.

The suggested connection with Geoffrey's experience was too patent to ignore. I wasted no time asking further questions but, inviting my guests to accompany me, went along with Slade to view Cramton's body, which was indeed in a remarkable condition --- cold almost to iciness, and as rigid. He might well have been frozen, if this had not been so utterly impossible. As it was, the cause of death could be set down to whatever it was had crushed Cramton; for he was crushed, fully as much as if the priory had collapsed on him, his bones splintered and his flesh horribly mangled.

It was the sight of Cramton's body which impelled Geoffrey's young friends to forego further reticence. I had felt that they were in possession of information I did not have, but I realized also that both were reluctant to speak. Sight of Cramton, however, had an ominously depressing effect on both of my companions, though it was not until I had signed the certificate and left the undertaker's shop that they broke their silence.

"I'm afraid that somehow we've got into something too dangerous to drop," said Hemery."It isn't only Geoffrey who's in danger --- there's not much to be done for him. I may as well tell you, Dr. Currie, if Geoffrey hadn't had hold of that star-stone, he'd have been found like that fellow back there."

"Go on," I said quietly."I'm beginning to see that I was right in suspecting that this thing had its origin in your 'dark doings' at Oxford."

Neither denied it. Vernon admitted that their expulsion had been on justifiable grounds.

And what were the "doings"?

Old magic, sorcery -worse than that. They had practiced it, not really seriously, of course. But being sent down had put a more uncompromising aspect on the affair.

"But what exactly did you do?" I asked.

***

Vernon took up the story."The whole business had an accidental beginning. Geoff shouldn't have gone in search of the stone alone. Perhaps it was because of our group he believed least; if he'd had more faith, he'd have known what he was likely to find if he tried to get at the secret of the star-stone.

"It was by accident that we stumbled on a strange chapter of occult lore that would have been much better hidden. We were students of occult literature, and we had often come upon curious hints and suggestions of unnamable horrors --- not precisely the kind of thing you run across in Black Mass jargon --- and there were always strange names allied to such hints, and references to the Older Gods, the Ancient Ones, and certain others purporting to be mad genii of evil who inhabited outer space before the world was born, and who descended to ravage Earth and were vanquished by the Elder Gods and banished to various parts of the cosmos --- one of them to the bottom of the sea, where its accursed spawn is reputed to live deep in caverns in a lost sea kingdom variously called R'lyeh or Ryah or Ryche.

"Of course, these references had no meaning for us; they were tantalizing, certainly, with their very real suggestions of outer horrors, and in their curious parallelism to similar legends in the ancient lore of primitive peoples in all parts of the globe. But at length Hemery stumbled on a set of books that told us things hidden for centuries --- one by a reputedly mad Arab, another by a German doctor, and finally the Confessions of Clithanus, a monk who was likewise supposed somewhat deranged. At the same time another of us found disturbing parallels in the fiction of certain British and American writers, suggesting that they, too, were aware of this strange mythology.

"Clithanus made direct mention of Hydestall --- that is, the old cathedral --- and told a story of Augustine --- yes, the St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, who visited Hydestall, where Clithanus was. Clithanus had found on the seacoast the five-pointed stone, emblem of the power of the Elder Gods, and feared by the Ancient Ones and their minions. There are in the Confessions disquieting hints of sea passages, unmentionable chambers and horrors beneath the aea off the coast from Hydestall, and an opening on the coast somewhere along here."

"Then it's possible," I put in, "that the 'passages' in which those three boys who were lost yesterday are the same ones the monk had reference to?"

Hemery nodded, and went on with the story Vernon had begun.

"Clithanus writes of furtive treks down into the passages, and of faint horribly suggestive sounds from far below the surface of the sea. The displacement or removal of the stone Clithanus found seems to have left an opening for something out of the depths, away from a lost sea kingdom --- or some place, let us just say, in the sea. At that point, Clithanus became frightened and took his fright to Augustine. It was the bishop who caused the thing, by the power of the five-pointed star-stone, to be imprisoned in a stone casket far beneath the cellars of the priory near the cathedral. In an old letter, Augustine writes that the monk was mad, that he, Augustine, had banished him to Rome, and it is true that the Confessions were originally published in Rome. But of the thing that came, Augustine says nothing save for one cryptic line written to his Pope: 'Something from out there returned to these shores, and I have attended to it.' There is nothing more."

I drew the inference that the young men intended I should.

"Then you think that something like the 'thing' mentioned by Clithanus and Augustine, killed Cramton, frightened Geoffrey Malvern, and was seen by the three boys lost in the passages?"

Both nodded without hesitation.

"There are strange stories in certain of those old books --- of the need these evil beings have of the life force drawn from human beings, the need for sacrifice of at least three living men to gain sufficient power to enable them to resume once again their former nefarious activities. One man hereabouts is dead --- so far there would not seem to have been more. The old legends all describe the victims as icy, frozen and crushed, as Cramton was found. I'm afraid, Doctor, that the thing is even now lurking about the priory in search of other victims. Cramton vanished on the night Geoff unwittingly liberated it by removing the stone. It is left for us to send this thing back, if we can, back to the sunken kingdom from which it came."

"And the sooner we reach the priory, the better," added Vernon.

"Yes, it's dusk now; the thing isn't likely to walk by light --- not yet. We shall need to take the stone."

I had listened to this fantastic tale with the medical man's known skepticism. But there was a quiet persuasiveness about both Vernon and Hemery which carried its own conviction. Moreover, it could not be gainsaid that, had they intended a hoax, either could have concocted a far more credible tale. Their story, in fact, was so preposterous as to just possibly be true, and it did fit such facts as were available to any disinterested observer. Even if but part of their tale were true, there was certainly something lethal at the priory, and some attempt must be made to get at it.

***

A faint, silvery sickle of moon shone low in the afterglow when the three of us emerged from the house. I carried the star-stone in may own pocket, one hand closed over its rough outlines, the inscription pressed against my palm. The evening was quiet, save for a faint wind off the sea. Apart from a casual remark about the mildness of the evening by Hemery, and my own reply, there was no conversation.

We walked to the outskirts of Lynwold, and were just about to shortcut across fields, when I saw a figure running down the road toward us. I recognized him as Jasper Wayne, a retired farmer who lived near the priory.

Wayne came on at a recklessly headlong speed, shouting and crying out to us, for he had seen us also. He came up presently to where we waited, but it took a few moments before he had calmed down sufficiently to speak coherently, and then the story he told was garbled. But it was no less alarming, for it supplemented damnably the tale I had listened to so dubiously only a short time ago.

Wayne had been outside just at sundown, sweeping the countryside through a pair of field-glasses. Happening to look toward the priory, his eye was caught by a shadowy movement. He had fixed his glasses on the ruins, just as his man, Herbert Green, who had been coming down the coast road with the horses, approached the priory. As Green came abreast of the ruins, the shadow reappeared, took on substance, and seemed to roll awkwardly with some speed toward the road. The horses leaped forward, but not quickly enough to prevent the shadowy thing from throwing itself upon Green. For a few moments Green had been obscured, the horses dragging both him and the attacking shadow along the road in a cloud of dust. Then the thing rolled away, vanishing once again in the darkness shrouding the ruins. The horses had dragged Green to the farm, but Green was oddly dead --- icy cold, crushed horribly.

"Where is he?" I asked.

"Over on the verandah at my place, covered with a blanket. The horses got away, and I was just coming in for you --- but he's dead, he don't need a doctor."

"We'll go on," I said. "You keep on to Lynwold for the undertaker. If we're not at your place when you get back, we'll have gone on to the priory."

Wayne started away again through the deepening twilight.

"That makes two," said Hemery quietly, but his voice betrayed that he was deeply upset.

***

We found Herbert Green's body at the farmhouse of Jasper Wayne. The marks showing where the body had been dragged away from the traces of the horses were still in evidence. I drew back the blanket --- and from that examination I turned away in badly shaken state, reflected in my companions. For Green's was an exact repetition of Cramton's death --- the same iciness, the same rigidity, the same crushed pulp. One such case had been enough to disturb me; a second was more than enough to fill me with terror and horror --- not only because of what had happened, but because of what might yet take place in the light of the story Hemery and Vernon had told.

Yet it was certain that if any solution were to be found, it lay within our power to seek and find it. There was nothing to be gained here at the mutilated body of the second victim to fall to the thing at the priory; there was everything to be gained by proceeding without further delay to the priory itself and prevent, if possible, any further outrage.

The shadows were deepening around the ruins as we approached the priory. There was neither sound nor movement among the ruins. For what, after all, were we searching? What manner of thing? I put my question in a whisper to Vernon.

"I've no more idea than you," he replied. "Something horrible beyond description, or else it would never have driven Geoff mad. But if the thing's here, it will feel the power emanating from the stone."

We waited in motionless silence. The night's voices had diminished to the sound of the resurgent waves of the nearby sea and the faraway cries of a skycoasting nightjar. For a long few minutes the scene held. Then there rose a new sound, fraught with terror, a lumbering, scraping sound, accompanied by a terrible slavering. The sounds came from below the level at which we sat, from that level where, presumably, the legendary stone casket had been hidden.

"Thank God we have the stone!" murmured Vernon.

Abruptly an indescribable shape rose up among the ruins, giving forth a low ululation that seemed to roll up from deep within its misshapen hulk. It hesitated for but a moment, then rolled clumsily out into the lowland surrounding the ruins. There it gathered speed as it moved forward.

"Give me the stone," asked Vernon.

I surrendered it without hesitation.

Vernon shouted and ran toward the thing, Hemery and myself close behind him. But the entity from the ruins had apparently not seen us; it moved steadily toward the cathedral at a speed which forced us to exert ourselves to the utmost to keep up with it. Even so, it vanished into the ruined church before we could catch up to it. Once at the cathedral's roofless walls, Vernon called a halt. It would not do for us to separate, he warned, lest the thing caught Hemery and myself alone, and increased its own power by killing one of us separated from the strength of the stone, which might then be powerless against it.

Accordingly the three of us entered the shadowed corridors of the cathedral together in search of our quarry. We crept silently through the ruins and back again, and then, becoming bolder, went forward with less care. But the thing was not in evidence. It had altered its course somewhere. Could it have doubled back to Wayne's house, I wondered apprehensively. After half an hour, my companions were despondent and spoke of returning either to the ruins of the priory or to Lynwold.

It was then that a shocking, greenish hulk rose from the floor of the corridor before us and came directly toward us. At once Vernon faced it with the stone. The thing paused --- but only for a moment; then a tentacle lashed forth and struck at Hemery. But Vernon sprang forward, bearing the stone as a sheath, and the thing in the corridor fell back, whistling weirdly. Out of the darkness before us shone a trio of cruel, malignant eyes, and the opening which served as its mouth gaped yawningly below. At the same moment, its body began to glow with an eerie sea-green light. Then once more the thing came at us.

What happened after that remains like a nightmare of mad and fantastic images in my memory. The battle with the monster from outside seemed endless, but eventually it lumbered awkwardly away from Hydestall Cathedral and made for the priory. There it fought anew, fought a long time before it vanished into the depths of an underground passage.

I suppose that at the end we were no longer human in our battle with the inhuman monster, fighting it back inch by inch, forcing its retreat until at last it crouched in hiding in the very casket from which it had been liberated when Geoffrey Malvern --- as we learned later --- had so ill-advisedly pried the star-stone off the lid. How long the battle lasted I could not say, but it was dawn when the three of us returned from the seacoast, exhausted. The casket, sealed once more by the stone, lay in the ocean's depths, and already the events of the night seemed like a tenuous and incredible nightmare, as unreal as the amorphous being which had so briefly returned to its ancient life in the priory ruins.

***

But as to whence it came, in truth, no one could tell. Nor could anyone say by what laws it had existed for so many centuries, to fatten and grow again in a time far beyond its own, to bring its horror into a distant future. And what if sometime in years to come another searcher takes up the stone once more and looses the thing from outside anew? Who knows? In other corners of this earth there may be others biding their time. 

Confession in Darkness

by Gerald W. Page (1979)

Forget whatever you may have read, those facts of record, those reported actualities, all of them the product of constables and journalists more devoted to their own advancement than to the truth. If you insist on my story you will have to hear it told my way. The Times, for example, described my first victim as unattractive -I think the term they used was "drab". Of course the Mirror was more generous, but as far as they were concerned, no woman who was ever murdered in a colorful enough manner was less than striking. I choose to make her lovelier, though. In my protean mind she is beautiful, unbelieveably beautiful, that first woman I ever murdered.

Those were the days when I called myself a scientist. Where, I have often wondered, can there be found a greater irony than the idea that there's a dividing line between science and sorcery? Oh, the so-called informed in either field will deprecate the other's advocates as blind or superstitious, and neither faces the utter reality that they polish backing sides of the same coin.

I was very interested in certain things pertaining to the nature of the universe in those days, and though I knew a bit about chemistry and astronomy and so on, I suppose I was even then the crude beginning of a sorcerer or worse. With growing frequency the books I delved into were less and less scientific. I suppose by the standards of some I was quite mad. But the more I learned the more my enjoyable, corrupt madness was revealed to me as bright reality. Marie Ostroff was blonde and young, her body all that your imagination could demand of it. Pay no attention to the press reports. They saw her afterwards. I saw her alive.

No woman so young and beautiful should have been out alone that late and passing so temptingly close to dark doorways. I won't impugn her virtue by saying she might have had some purpose in such actions; that might tend to justify my act in certain minds and I don't want that. What I did I did wantonly and for no reason stronger than idle experimentation, to put to the test those things I had learned from my books, to discover if there was some modicum of truth behind the extraordinary madness I had found. Intellectual exercise, no more.

Yet through it my life became an exercise in passion...

She wasn't murdered in the street. I took her elsewhere. My hiding place was within four blocks of where I found her. Was it laboratory or altar or simple crypt? Satisfy yourself, I leave such details to your taste in cinema. I took her to that place and performed certain rites at certain hours -is this mysterious enough for you? The actual killing of her took days.

It was a complex experiment, this one involving the murder of Marie Ostroff, involving a number of ideas. One of them was that there were circumstances where excruciating pain blended with excruciating delight, an overwrought delight. But I'm ashamed to confess that whatever pleasure she got from the rites, little of it was due to my efforts. I was most inept in those days. The disgrace of Victorian England.

In other areas the experiment was less a failure. When it was done I could already feel the change in myself. Not those changes which might ordinarily arise from the simple act of murder but changes that came about from actions beyond my own, the actions of the One to Whom my murderous act was dedicated.

I was so pleased that I went to see my old friend Leffler to tell him what I had done and discovered.

It was Leffler who had shown me the books from which I had learned the ritual. More than that. He had taught me things not in the books, things that had never been in the books. He knew so much. His problem was that he knew them only as theory because he lacked the courage to pursue the things he taught. As I told him my experiences he nodded somberly and drank steadily.

He once told me he had summoned something up —he wouldn't tell me what- and at the sight of it had wet his pants. It was a confession in a moment of rare lucidity among the alcoholic stupors that were, by the time I had met him, the only moments in which he'd talk about himself at all. He said he hadn't started drinking until after he'd conjured that thing. The story impressed me because Leffler had as strong a stomach and as little conscience as anyone I'd ever met. It was a valuable object lesson to me, that story. I've always been extremely careful about anything I ever summoned up.

So there was old Leffler who had given up his dabblings, though he remained something of a demon in his gourmet's fondness for dead flesh, but he was willing enough to teach what he feared to do.

So I learned from him about the Great Old Ones and how to transcend space. He taught me the chants and cries of the worshippers of Great Cthulhu and described to me the appearance and habits of the Mi-Go and the Deep Ones, informed me about the things that occur on the Plateau of Leng in certain seasons, and of the appearance and nature of R'lyeh where Great Cthulhu dreams. From him I also learned what Hastur has need of, what Cthugha's flames must feed on. I learned the ways in which Shub-Niggurath may be compelled and the dangers of such action. I was an excellent student. I learned well, very well indeed.

Poor Leffler. In spite of all he knew he was too afraid of it to use it even to save himself.

And that despite his other fear.

Oh yes, his other fear, for he had a second one. Not of dying, but of what might happen to his corpse after he died.

He'd been indulging his ghoulish inclinations for so long that he had begun to fancy that he had certain enemies. He told me about the nightmares he had where he could see them coming from their graves. He had vivid impressions of the way clumps of dirt and bits of broken root clung to doughy, rotting flesh. His fear of what might become of him after death was as ungovernable as his fear of what might happen if he made a mistake while using his sorcerous powers. He described his terror to me that he might 'be allowed to bloat and -his word— ripen; and then become a feast from certain enemies he had. It seemed to me a pointless fear.

Leffler had taught me what he had on one condition. I had promised to stay with him until his death, to protect him from ghouls, attend to his burial arrangements, see that his grave was too well hidden to ever be discovered by his enemies.

He was very grateful for my assurances. I wonder what he would have done if he had ever guessed how thoroughly and ironically I intended to betray him? Not that it matters now. The dead are notorious for their inattention.

Anyway, it was  his own fault. It was a portion of certain ceremonies he had led me to; and what better repast than my own teacher for a ritual to increase my own powers?

Not that it was total betrayal. I kept my word to him. No pasty-fleshed ghoul reeking of the ground and marking its passage with unwholesome leavings came anywhere near Leffler. And his bones, at least, found that hidden and unmarked grave he wanted. Several, in fact. And I arranged funeral for him, however it might have differed from what he wanted. The only shame is that Sheffler was so lacking in any real sense of irony. He wouldn't have appreciated it, had he known.

But I am an ironist and I assume you must be also, to ask me to relate these brief memoirs like this; although I suppose sensationalism could be your motive, in which case you must have loved it when I began all this with my description of my first murder. Your readers will love it too, no doubt, not that it much matters. After a century murder fails to mean much to anyone except sensation seekers and no court in this sane and balanced world of ours will try a man for sorcery, so I am safe and even have another irony to enjoy. And your readers? They'll call this fantasy, a lie.

I love them, your readers.

But there's not much time, certainly not for such digressions. I was telling you about Leffler's death.

After that I was on my own and, to be quite honest, somewhat uncertain about my future. But I had ambitions and a good many theories I wanted to test. I also had time, more than most people. So I decided the first thing to do was relax.

By then my ideas of relaxation were very well refined by long years of selected perversions, atrocities, to say nothing of alignments and assignations with certain non-human entities. Weep not that I omit a few details here. Better things are coming. A memoir this brief must be selective.

The murder of Marie Ostroff was performed in accordance with a ritual I first discovered in oblique reference in The Book of Eibon. I found a fuller outline of it in the notorious fifth canto of Mallius' Gates of Transformation. Because of it I was now in position of being able to satisfy certain desires. I spent a year and a half roaming Scandinavia, sometimes in the shape of a wolf.

There is a simple -pardon my choice of words here- animalistic pleasure in the very act of physical transformation from human to wolf shape. There is a real pleasure in the hunt, also. Tracking your victim -animals for the most part, but not always by any means. Real wolves can be forced to serve a werewolf, though they can't be made to like one. You can't imagine their fear, or what excellent prey they make.

But humans make better. To pit the wolf's instinctive cunning in mixture with human intelligence against some hunter, to leap snarling from cover, fangs bared, straight for the throat...

The fear smell rises in an olfactory crescendo; you learn to time the leaps so that the fear stink reaches its height just as the teeth sink into the neck. I was so expert I could render my victim unable to really fight back without killing him too quickly. I could then tear, eat, drink.

In winter especially fresh blood is a warming drink.

But the fools caught on. If a silver bullet comes close to you there is no question as to what it is. Only if it hits you can you not know.

I preferred to know.

And since my lycanthropy was by choice, not curse, I retired and went south in human form, seeking other ways to spend my energy.

And that, I think, brings us to Catherine.

If you really know about me, as you must if you have tracked me here of all places to ask questions, then you must have done a certain amount of research. Did you ever learn anything about Catherine? If you did then you know it isn't necessary to refurbish history regarding her beauty. Catherine was like a goddess.

Oh, and so mysterious. I never did really learn anything about her past. Parts were apparent. She was almost as gifted in necromancy and the crafts of the Great Old Ones as I was, implying she was much older than she seemed to be. Her unblemished youth and immeasurable beauty were things she could have received as gifts from one of the Ancient Ones, perhaps even from Cthulhu, though she at least was fortunate enough to possess none of those regrettable physical characteristics that seem to touch all of Cthulhu's more avid followers sooner or later. No. There was more of the cat than the fish about Catherine.

I suspect it more likely her gifts came from Ptar-Axtlan, the Leopard That Stalks the Night.

But even I hesitate to think of what in return that particular creature would ask for such gifts...

I saw her for the first time at the opera in Paris. She was across the gallery from me, standing in the private box of some prince or grand duke or other. Nothing marked her outwardly as an adept, but I knew instantly that she was.

Her face and figure were that of an eighteen year old girl but there was about her an aura of assurance that could not belong to any woman under forty. Our eyes met, possibly by accident, a momentary encounter, two people gazing at one another across a distance, nothing more than that.

I received a note from her, very discreetly, not long after, inviting me to her chambers. Not too many days after that we moved in together.

A woman who had made the proper offerings and obeisances to the Ancient Ones has an advantage over all other women, for women are expected to age. It is the great tragedy of every woman's life, magnified either through her own fears or the fears of those around her. However beautiful a courtesan of fifty may be, she is still a former courtesan while her male counterpart is still expected to regularly make a fool of himself. Her fascination no longer lies in herself but in those secrets it is believed she could tell if she would of the men she has known. But this is not the case with a woman like Catherine. Her youth is assured for a good many years and no one may look at her and suspect she is anything but what she appears. Men find such beauty more hypnotic than birds find a snake's gaze. The only drawback is that a woman who does not age attracts attention.

It becomes a problem only gradually, however.

A woman in her thirties who looks younger gains an air of mystery. But after much longer the whispers begin and suggestions are made that aren't altogether wholesome. Periodically it was necessary for her to vanish and assume a new life and name, a new place to live. The problem was that Catherine was extravagant. Came the time when she should have been seeking herself a new identity and there she was without money and not a little desperate.

And me? I was tired of her by this time.

There was a man named Jerome in Paris who ran a bookstore. There among the dusty worn reprints of Hugo and Dumas, the translations of the English and Italian poets, the cheap editions of Balzac, and fading volumes of forgotten novelists and essayists, there a properly identified person might locate books more rare than those displayed upon the shelves. Jerome had on several occasions shown me books which were close to my own interests though none of them were rare enough or complete enough to justify my paying his price. I did not realize how much Jerome knew about me.

Whether he was a student or friend of Leffler's or merely a lucky opportunist I can't be sure.

But one day he summoned me to his shop. I arrived in my new automobile and busied myself perusing the three-franc novelists until Jerome could rid himself of a customer who was seeking a book suitable to give to her niece on the occasion of the niece's sixteenth birthday. It seemed forever to locate anything that uplifting but at last it was done and Jerome and I were alone in the shop.

I anticipated some deteriorating tome or manuscript of spells or chants or incantations and it was without much conviction that I told myself they might be superior to those he had offered me in the past. Jerome surprised me, however. It was no book he produced. It was a bone.

It was human and marked with striations and certain colorations and telltale teethmarks that could only have resulted from one cause. The bone was undeniably Leffler's.

To this day I don't know how Jerome had located one of the hidden gravesites I had so carefully arranged, but he had. This particular bone was carved with a few words in a certain language not common among humans, and the phrase necessarily carried a definite allusion to Leffler.

Even to Jerome there was no question whose it was.

Jerome, Jerome, Jerome. A stupid, incautious man. His purpose was blackmail, naturally. But he had the evidence to back it up. It was nothing that would stand up in conventional courts but there were some who would understand it, including a few of Leffler's friends I was reasonable enough to fear more than any legal tribunal. Jerome produced some other information about me, too, and that was just as dangerous and a lot more embarrassing. It was obvious that his source was a girl named Nathalie. She meant nothing to me, but Catherine was such a jealous woman, and if she saw the letter which Jerome claimed to hold...

But Jerome was in an expansive mood. His terms were simple. For money he would forget it all. I agreed, of course, but insisted it would take time to raise the amount. The idiot believed me.

His other mistake was in assuming that I was content with the way things were. Aside from the situation with Catherine, it was evident that Europe was on the verge of war and I was anxious to take certain steps that would assure both my safety and my fortune when war came. I might have even walked out on Catherine if she had not been such a powerful sorceress, but no one lightly incurs the enmity of any follower of Ptar-Axtlan. Fortunately, Catherine was in spite of her wisdom in arcane matters, dull in most ways. I gave the matter sufficient thought to work out the details of my own safety and sprung my trap.

I regret that I didn't have the time to give her the same lingering death I had once given to Marie Ostroff, but Catherine's power was too great to permit that sort of risk; in only a few hours she would have broken through my spells. So it was not an artist's job, but it expressed my boredom with her adequately enough, and it strengthened my own powers.

Poor Jerome was taken completely by surprise;

I said he was stupid. His death was also rather quick but by now time was of the essence. I left Catherine and Jerome together in the middle of the bookstore.

I located what Jerome had of Leffler's bones in a cheap tin box in a dark corner of his apartment. They were bones from the left leg, including that distinctive left kneecap of his. The damned things had been buried near Brussels.

Jerome's apartments were in the back of his shop. In his kitchen I found a meat cleaver and some crude oil. The instrument was just crude enough to be totally satisfying in the chore I needed it for. When the bits and pieces of the two were intermingled and strewn around the floor I doused the place with oil. Then I stepped outside into the brisk Parisian spring night and lit myself a cigar. I savored it until I had smoked it down to a third its length.

I watched the glow of it trail an arc as I tossed it back into the shop before locking Jerome's door and going on my way. Jerome, I fear, had paid too little heed to the municipal fire regulations. That entire block burned. Three days later when I left Paris the officials had still not discovered the mutilated corpses.

I should have loved to remain in Europe through the coming war and, indeed, I tried. I sailed to England as the next best thing, but the climate there wasn't to my liking. America held little lure for me, but the truth is I had no choice. I sailed to Boston; I hated Boston. But I discovered that the state held certain other towns where there were people who knew as much about the Ancient Ones as I did. In fact I spent several years in New England, learning much. In the port of Innsmouth I found men with wide and varied contacts in both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. I used a dream-draught described in Von Juntz's Unaussprechlichen Culten and swam among the spires and monoliths of Y'ha-nthlei where in those days the Deep Ones gathered by the thousands. Three months later the American government had Devil's Reef bombarded. There were arrests throughout Innsmouth and most of the buildings near the waterfront were burned. I might have been caught or killed like so many others except that I had suspected Innsmouth was growing too conspicuous and had arranged a certain route of escape. It was a grave blow, the destruction of Innsmouth. It has weakened the intentions of the Deep Ones and their human and other allies to this day.

Under another name I made my way to Baltimore, remaining there only long enough to establish a useful reputation. Then on to New Orleans. There I learned of other followers of the Ancient Ones who lived on or near Caillou Bay but I had learned my Innsmouth lesson well and avoided them. A few years later I went to Dallas and from there, after a time, to San Francisco. My caution was paying dividends. No one suspected me but my power was growing.

My knowledge also -and my suspicions.

Consider. I have told you something of the Ancient Ones. You might know a bit more: where they come from, their war with the Elder Gods, and so on. But suppose... suppose there is something beyond even the Elder Gods and the Ancient Ones. Suppose there is another plane of existence which draws from ours, from us, even from the actions of the Elder Gods and the Great Old Ones and the Ancient Ones...

More and more I've come to think that this or something like this must be so. That the use of power here on our plane creates an energy or prana or force needed or desired elsewhere. We feed that place... We feed it by practicing certain skills and arts. The arcane arts, of course, but probably murder as well. If it does nothing else, this theory accounts for the rise of violence and interest in the occult in such a technological period as the one we now live in.

After San Francisco I travelled throughout the Orient. I operated one of that sort of sophisticated slavery rings that arose in the early part of this century and still flourishes today. In addition to the conventional uses for young women and boys we provided slaves for other purposes to people I had met through my special contacts. It was more profitable than selling those same customers copies of forbidden and rare occult books. Very businesslike, lucrative, dull.

I stayed away from Europe until the Second World War. It was a whim, going back, but the war was an experience just made to order for the person I'd become. It provided ideal cover under which to indulge my taste for gruesome and prolonged murder. Who could possibly pay any attention to Jack the Ripper in the shadow of that war?

But we are running short of time, aren't we, so I must leave most of my wartime experiences to your imagination. It's almost light after all, and I have places to go. These days I keep moving.

For a time after the war I found Europe a fine place to be. I had developed, curiously, a taste for human blood, a penchant for vampirism.

I apologize to you for being unable to provide here the traditions made so famous by Mr. Stoker's novel, of course, but this was only a love for the stuff which I could control utterly. An indulgence. No furtive returns to the casket before dawn... There was no casket involved at all -of mine.

My powers and knowledge were growing in these years, but strangely I found myself spending less and less time with the arcane, with my rituals and offerings to the Ancient Ones. My greatest interest now became simple murder. I look unprepossessing, perhaps, but I assure you that no ordinary man could prevent me from breaking his neck if I attempted it. I tested that assumption many times.

It became necessary again to leave Europe but there was still the rest of the world. South America. I worked as a high official of a certain government for a while, helping them devise municipal tortures and certain private amusements which they would otherwise never have discovered. My wealth of invention in those things is a source of pride to me. But I was too skillful for my own good. My associates turned on me, forcing a return to Asia. There are always opportunities in the Orient.

But the years pass and here I am back again in South America, though I fear it was a mistake coming back so soon. Oh, I don't make many mistakes, but this one might be sufficient. Letting my picture get in a newspaper like that, which never happened before, not even in those days when Catherine and I were the most celebrated couple in Paris. I surmise that photograph led you to me, just as you surmise I would be willing to tell you my story, that I need the money you offer. The irony is that I am not broke; I have enormous sums. But that fiasco, you understand, off Madagascar, of all the unlikely places, makes it impossible for me to touch most of my funds just now. It's almost unimaginable that the slave trade would change so drastically in just a few short years that I'd almost blunder into a police trap. And now that photograph here. It may be decades before I can reach that money.

So it is to your good fortune. You have guessed the truth, though I don't know how, and asked for my story and I told it to you. No one is going to believe the silly thing; I doubt that you can even get it published though that is your problem, not mine. It is easy enough a way for me to make some pocket change until I can establish myself again.

Look at the sky... Out over the bay. Soon the sun will be up. I'll have to leave then, I have people to meet if I'm to get out of this country. But I have one more thing you might want to hear before I go. A point of irony, for you.

The dreams.

You don't understand. Dreams. Like old Leffler's, like those stupid alcoholic dreams of his. I see pallid ghouls crawl from their fresh turned graves, moist clumps of dirt still clinging to rotted naked flesh. There's four of them... and parts of them are burned... charred.

Did I tell you how I spent those three days after the fire before leaving Paris? I visited Nathalie. I even made a joke of it. Before I left, while the police still investigated the fire, I hid her bones in the ruins of Jerome's shop.

Now I wonder if it could have been a mistake -that common crematorium, I mean. Nathalie was no sorceress, and Jerome mediocre at best.

But Catherine was a queen of sorceresses. And Leffler, for all his cowardice, had no peer in those days, not even I. He would no longer be afraid, now. Death would have ended his fear.

And now these dreams... their faces. Twisted, distorted, but recognizably theirs...

But, do you see? It is all in my mind. I look young, but I contract an old man's disease.

I permit my imagination to run wild, without call, without any call whatever.

And yet-

Yet it grows light and now I see your face.

For the first time it causes my mind, my imagination to stir. In the line of your forehead... Nathalie. And your eyes are as hazel as Catherine's. That chin of yours might pass for Jerome's and that mouth... forgive me for Jerome was no man whose mouth suggested any desirable attribute but you possess that sort of mouth. And your hands-

So slender, well formed, yet so strong-looking. Like Catherine's...

Please, I don't mean my words to sound insulting. It is my mind, it is only the way my mind works which I am showing you, the combined quirks of old age and the morning light. I know I don't look out of my twenties yet, but I am still old and my mind is very old. And too tired to be fully reliable. Some times...

Your walk... Have you limped long?

It — how foolish of me. It is your left leg.

How stupid of me. I make a mistake and don't even credit it. The face -the hands- I could tell myself those things were merely my overactive imagination at work. Even the eyes. But that leg, that left leg. The deformity of the knee is obvious even through the cloth of your trousers...

So now I know whether the dreams are true or not, don't I? Look...

A bit of dirt has fallen from your clothing...

Jendick’s Swamp

by Joseph Payne Brennan (1987)

At the time, Chris Kellington was only a constable in Greystone Bay; he didn’t have much to do. Occasionally he was called out by a farmer whose fences had been damaged by a neighbor’s cows. Now and then there were minor thefts—pumpkins lifted from somebody’s back lot, a few tools taken from the town truck.

Sometimes he stopped at my place for a chat. If I was hunched at my typewriter, hammering away, he’d merely remark on the weather and stroll off. If I was puttering around, he’d stay and talk.

One afternoon, after I’d finished my writing chores, he came in and sat down. No matter what the weather was, he’d head for a worn and somewhat rickety kitchen chair near my old wood-burning stove. He’d prop his feet on the edge of the wood-box and lean back.

It was late August, warm and sultry. I broke out some chilled apple cider. Chris sipped appreciatively. “Best cider I’ve had all summer!" After some routine remarks, he looked up with a quizzical expression. “Kirk, any chance you remember the Jendicks?”

I had to ponder a minute. “I remember some rumors. A sort of inbred, run-down family. Squatters, kind of. Built a big house on a knoll in the middle of a quicksand bog. Lived by hunting mostly. A wild bunch best avoided. Died out many years ago.”

Kellington nodded. “You’ve summed it up fairly well. Wasn’t a bog, though; it was the marshes on the other side of North Hill. A treacherous enough place, no matter what you call it. I was in there only once and I was glad when I’d sloshed my way out. I didn’t sink in any quicksand but probably I was close to it. It’s pretty certain that a number of hunters went in there and never returned.”

“What brought the Jendicks and their quicksand swamp to mind?” I asked.

He set down his cider glass. “Funny thing. About a week ago some New York character named Lawton was visiting the Clarksons in the Bay—cousins, I think. He considered himself a hunter. Brought along a brand-new sporting rifle. Well, he wandered around the back end of North Hill without any luck and was about to give up when he spotted a deer. Spooked it but caught sight again and kept following. Tracked it into the marshes. The deer got clean away; before long Lawton was lost. Trudged around for hours getting soaked up to his belt line and finally glimpsed a house standing on a knoll—he called it a hill. Said the house was a wreck, rotted and moldy-looking, and he naturally assumed it was uninhabited. Well, he climbed up the knoll to rest and dry off a bit, if that was possible. While he was sitting there, he had a strange feeling that he was being watched. The Clarksons quoted him as saying: ‘I had the worst sense of impending danger I’ve ever experienced.’ Stood up and turned around and there were two eyes glaring at him from one of the dark window apertures. Eyes like those of a wild animal. But he swears he saw the shadowy form of a man.”

Kellington shrugged. “That’s about it. He rushed away, back into the swamp, and never turned around. Found his way out by sheer luck. Doesn’t know whether he was followed or not. By the time I got the story secondhand from the Clarksons, Lawton had left for New York.”

I refilled the cider glasses. “Makes a spooky little anecdote. I imagine a tramp had settled down in the old Jendick house and didn’t welcome visitors.”

Chris frowned. “Well—maybe. But I’ve got a nagging urge to check it out.”

“What’s to check, Chris? A squatter in an abandoned house surrounded by a swamp where scarcely anybody ventures? Sure, you can get yourself half-drowned going in there but what’s accomplished? You evict some halfwitted derelict and like as not he takes up quarters in somebody’s barn and causes real trouble."

“I’d make sure he cleared right out of town. Aside from that, I guess maybe I have a hankering to get a look at that old Jendick house—or what’s left of it.”

He rearranged his feet on the wood-box and leaned back. “They were a weird bunch, Kirk. You’ve heard some rumors, but maybe not all. Seems old Jendick was part Indian—Pequot, I guess, though I’m not sure. Anyway, there’s a legend that some of the early tribes worshiped a so-called Spirit of the Swamp. I think he—it—was named Iththaqua. In exchange for sacrifices, Iththaqua was supposed to guide his worshipers safely through the labyrinths of the swamp and eventually grant them other favors as well. I’ve heard it said that during a hunt in the swamp, the Jendicks always tried to catch one creature alive—even though wounded—in order to sacrifice it to Iththaqua.”

“And in exchange, Iththaqua kept them from getting lost or drowned?” I interposed.

“Something like that. Anyway, there might be some clue left in the house.”

I shook my head. "The Jendicks don’t sound like the kind who kept written records. And even if they did, any journal would be long gone by now—weather, rats, roaches.”

“You’re probably right," he agreed. “But I'd still like a look in the house before it rots away completely.”

I grinned at him. “You always were a stubborn cuss! Well, let me know when you plan to drown yourself and I’ll tag along. My current yarn’s hit a dry plateau and I need to get away from it for a day or two.”

“How about tomorrow, then? Midmorning. Say, ten. I’ll bring a Thermos and sandwiches.”

“Fine. I’ll be ready.”

He turned at the door. “Better wear hip boots!”

The next day was overcast and humid. The hip boots were hot and highly uncomfortable, but once we started into the swamp, I was grateful for Chris’ suggestion that I wear them.

The swamp was a world to itself. On the north end of the marshland, it was shadowy, nearly silent, filled with the smell of still water and dissolving vegetation. Dense stands of hemlock, spruce, and black ash crowded along narrow aisles slippery with sphagnum moss. Tall cinnamon ferns and tangled patches of nettles clustered around the trunks. In some places the remains of fallen and decaying trees had created little hummocks which rose above the level of the surrounding pools. I recognized a few bird sounds but the only bird I glimpsed was a small green heron which glided away over the glistening water.

Although many of the pools were relatively shallow, the old-time quicksand rumors held us to a slow and hesitant advance.

While we paused as Chris adjusted his shoulder pack, I questioned him in regard to the location of the Jendick house.

“I might as well admit,” he confessed, “that I’m trusting largely to luck. I do know that the place is supposed to be situated in the middle someplace and that—at one time at least—there was a stand of black-gum trees alongside the knoll the house is set on.”

We slogged along in silence most of the time. The footing was treacherous; our attention was concentrated on the terrain immediately ahead. At one point, I slipped and went to my knees in algae-scummed water. The hip boots helped.

The silence became oppressive. Although sun seldom penetrated the overhead screen of tree branches and climbing vines, heat and humidity increased as the morning wore on.

“Does this devil’s morass have a name?” I asked, by way of conversation.

Turning, Chris looked at me in surprise. “Jendick’s Swamp, of course.”

Around noon, chancing on a cleared and relatively dry patch of ground, we stopped and sat down. Coffee and an egg-salad sandwich revived my spirits a bit.

“We’ll stumble on the place soon,” I predicted with forced optimism.

“Sure,” Chris agreed, “if we don’t travel in a big circle.”

“Didn’t you bring a compass?”

“There’s one in the pack somewhere. We’ve been moving north so far. But the trouble is, I’m not positive about the knoll’s location. I think it’s about in the middle, but I can’t vouch for it. And I’m not sure of the size of the swamp. It may have shrunk—or spread—drastically over the years. I think we’ll swing toward the northwest. That means we veer left. I don’t need a compass for that.”

We moved on. Conversation dwindled away. The silence seemed all- pervading and somehow ominous. We plodded through an acre or more where close-growing, creeper-laden swamp oaks proved nearly impenetrable. More than once, we waded through pools up to our waists. Our boots, luckily tight at the tops, kept out most of the water.

As I slogged doggedly along behind him, I noticed that Chris was becoming increasingly hesitant. Frowning, he paused frequently while he peered through the moist, matted tangle of trees and twisting vines which surrounded us.

I feared he was lost but I said nothing. The heat and the unaccustomed exercise were taking their toll, however. My legs ached; I was starting to feel dizzy. I was on the point of suggesting a ten-minute break when Chris stopped and pointed.

“There! To the left, ahead!”

Squinting in the direction he indicated, I saw a line of dark trees which rose slightly above the level of the others around us.

“Look like black gums to me. Let’s check!”

Minutes later we pushed our way through underbrush beneath a stand of tall black-gum trees.

Pointing ahead, Chris nodded. “Jendick’s house!”

Sprawled on an overgrown knoll before us lay a half-collapsed, ramshackle building which nearly defied description. Rooms appeared to have been added at random with no regard for uniformity. A sagging second story stretched over only part of the first. All windowpanes were broken or missing; two window apertures had been boarded up; the others gaped open. Shingles hung askew alongside patches of loose tar paper. A wooden front door, panels split, hung by one rusty hinge. A green mold, abetted by the damp air of the swamp, lay like a slimy glaze of hastily applied paint over the entire house. Shaggy clumps of juniper, burdock, and willow saplings crowded alongside the structure.

There was no sign of life, much less occupancy. Save for the metallic chirr of a cicada, far off in the swamp, unbroken silence prevailed.

Chris spoke first. “A few years more and it’ll just sink into the cellar— if there is one. Let’s take a closer look.”

Moving through a barrier of burdock and juniper shrubs, we walked up to a window aperture and looked into a plank-floored dusty room, empty except for a heap of sticks and straw in one corner plus a scattered litter of rusting cans, cracked bottles, and miscellaneous rags of discarded clothing.

What struck me at once—almost literally—was the smell. Part of it was merely the musty pungency of mold and rotting wood, but there was something else—-a sickening rancid stink which I could not identify but which I found more repellent that any other odor I could remember.

I pulled away from the window. “What is that?”

Chris drew back as hastily as I and shook his head. “I guess some critter crawled in there to die. Maybe it’s the combination of mold and maggots!"

Treading cautiously, we circled the house. In the rear we stumbled on some discarded remnants of broken furniture, a split cask, and the nearly liquescent remains of a rotting carpet. Whenever we paused to peer into a window, an overpowering reek drove us back.

“The chances of any written record surviving in that reeking shambles is remote,” I observed.

“I sure wouldn’t bet on it,” Chris agreed.

We made our way to the far edge of the knoll, away from the house, and sat down on some dry ground near a juniper bush. Sunlight had glinted through the overcast sky several times during the morning but now the sky was filled with dark gray clouds again.

Seen from the knoll, the surrounding swamp appeared even more forbidding than when we were actually slogging through it. At a distance, the fetor emanating from inside the house was no longer detectable, but I loathed the mere sight of the sagging mold-covered clapboards.

“After we’ve rested a few minutes, let’s get started out of here,” I suggested.

Chris remained silent for a minute or two. Looking out over the swamp, he scrubbed his chin. “Well, it would be sort of a shame, having come this far, to leave without even going inside.”

I stared at him as if he had gone insane. “Inside? We’d never get that smell out of our clothes—or off our skins!”

He grinned. “Bad, isn’t it? But I think after we’d beaten our way back out of the swamp it would be pretty well worn off.”

Knowing Chris, I sighed and stood up. “Let’s get it over with, then. My stomach is doing flip-flops already.”

As we shoved aside the splintered front door, the one remaining hinge fell out and the door dropped to the ground.

Chris smiled wryly. “Vandalism, that is. I’ll bring charges against myself when we get back.”

As soon as we stepped inside, the smell overwhelmed us. Hoping Chris would hurry, I tried to take only shallow breaths.

We tramped through a succession of grimy, dust-laden rooms. One contained the frame of an armchair, another a ripped mattress, sprinkled with mold. A rear room, whose floor and walls were saturated with congealed grease, we assumed had served as kitchen.

Glancing up a staircase which appeared on the verge of total collapse, we saw gray daylight filtering through a sagging roof.

“We’ll skip the second floor,” he said. “If the stairs didn't tumble under our weight, the roof would probably fall on our heads.”

I sighed with relief. “That’s it, then. Let’s get out.”

“Well, I guess. Wait—” Crossing back through the kitchen, he called to me. “There’s a corner door here.”

I heard a door creak as I reluctantly returned to the kitchen. Chris stood in front of an open door in one corner. He pointed downward. “We forgot the cellar.”

My stomach tightened at the smell which swept through the open door. It was the same sickening odor which seemed to permeate the entire house—only stronger.

"We forgot the cellar?” I repeated. “Let’s forget the cellar! We’re apt to pass out down there.”

He was already pulling a small flashlight out of his pack. “Pretty awful, isn’t it? But I ought to take a look. Stairs look fairly good. You stay here.” He started down. Shaking my head, I followed.

Once at the bottom of the stairs, the rancid reek all but overcame us. By the light of the flashlight, we saw that the floor of the place was dirt, shiny with spreading snail tracks and gray-green fungus. A cobwebbed open doorway just beyond the bottom of the flight of stairs led into a large room which was obviously the main cellar space.

As we entered, the light picked out a heap of crates and cartons piled in the center of the room. Beyond, near the far wall, stretched a long double row of big vats, interspersed with smaller casks.

The stench here was insufferable.

Chris played his light along the lines of vats. "We’d better look in one of those. There’s the source of our sweet aroma.”

The first vat was empty, as was the adjacent one, but Chris stood frozen as he directed his light into the third.

“What is it?” I moved to his side, curiosity overcoming my initial hesitation.

The vat was loosely packed with irregular-shaped chunks of bloody- looking gray-white meat immersed in a yellowish liquid which appeared to be some kind of brine.

I stared down at the vat contents for a long half minute before I realized what I was looking at.

When I finally looked up—white-faced, I’m sure—Chris was watching me. He nodded. “I’m pretty sure it’s what we think it is.”

He flashed his light around the cellar. A two-pronged, long-handled, skewer-like fork hung from an overhead hook.

Taking it down, he probed into the vat.

When he lifted the fork, it held a forearm with the hand still attached. The brine had prevented decay but the flesh looked puffy and discolored.

Chris shook it back into the vat and we went on down the rows.

About a third of the vats and a few of the small casks were partially filled with ghastly chunks and gobbets of human flesh. The last vat at the end of one row was crammed with human bones.

Chris played the light over them and spoke one word which made me shudder. “Gnawed,” he said.

“Maybe,” I whispered desperately, “they fed—some kind of swamp animal.”

Chris shook his head. “No sense kidding ourselves, Kirk. The Jendicks became cannibals at the last. No other explanation.”

“But you said the Jendicks died out a long time ago.”

“I thought they had. And even strong brine wouldn't preserve flesh year after year—at least I don’t believe it would.”

I didn’t think the time or place was suitable for a discussion on the preservation properties of brine.

“Chris,” I urged, “let’s get out of this butcher shop! We can talk later!”

"Agreed.” He moved toward the doorway.

We were just starting up the stairs when the thing appeared at the top. We both froze, staring upward with shock and disbelief.

It looked human, but barely so. A huge greasy mass of tangled white hair. Wild staring eyes of a rabid animal. Writhing lips around a toothless hole of a mouth. A cadaverlike body, hairy, gaunt, scab-covered. Clothing, a tattered remnant of trousers ending at the knees. A nightmare shape straight out of Goya.

The thing’s voice was a high-pitched, half-coherent scream. “Thought ye the Jendicks been all gone, eh? Old Asa ain’t! Come snoopin’, hah? Ah’ll pickle ye both!”

It had been holding out of sight a massive length of tree limb, or trunk, which it now swung into view. The club looked like an oak sapling tom up by the roots. One huge hairy hand circled the base of it.

As it started down the stairs, Chris gripped my arm. “Back into the other room! Quick!”

As we ran into the brine-vat room, the creature’s shrill, mirthless chuckle followed us. ‘“Twon’t do ye no good ta hide! Old Asa c’n see in the dark!”

Chris stuck the flash into my hand. “Shine it in his eyes. Give me a minute.”

As he groped somewhere behind me, the murderous thing appeared in the doorway. I directed the light straight into its eyes.

It froze, startled and obviously blinded, for a moment. Abruptly, squealing with rage, it flung itself sideways into the room.

At that moment Chris moved up beside me. As I swung my light, I saw that he was holding the long-handled, skewer-like fork.

“Keep it on him!” he warned me.

I quickly swept the light in a half circle but the thing which called itself Asa Jendick had disappeared in the darkness.

“Crawling,” Chris whispered. “Lower the light.”

As I did so, both of us heard a slight scraping sound somewhere among the vats. Instinctively, we dropped to a crouch. Something hurtled through the air where our heads had been a second before and crashed against the farther wall. I assumed it was a cask. It seemed to have been hurled with the force and speed of an artillery projectile.

I aimed the flash along the row of vats and casks. Before the cone of light reached the far end of the row, something came rushing toward us from the near end. By the time I swung the light back, it was only feet away. In the circle of light it seemed like an impossible apparition materialized from the darkness and the foul, seething corruption of the cellar itself.

Chris dropped something at my feet. “Backpack. Thirty-two."

Holding the skewer fork at the ready, he sprang in front of me to meet the lunge of the crazed creature.

I heard a tearing impact followed by a scream of rage and pain. Chris stepped backward, nearly tripping over me. “God!” he exclaimed in a shocked voice.

My frantic groping closed on the butt of the .32 automatic at the bottom of the pack. Yanking it out with one hand and aiming the light with the other, I saw what had caused Chris’ exclamation.

Asa Jendick’s huge hands were tugging at the skewer projecting from his chest. It had been driven into his ribcage up to the handle.

As we watched in disbelief, he managed a fierce final tug. The fork came out. Blood poured out of the wound; when he opened his mouth in another squeal of rage, blood spilled out of that as well.

Holding the skewer in both hands, he lurched toward us. I fired the .32 six times without stopping and at that range I couldn’t miss, but he kept on coming.

We sprang aside as he stabbed the air between us with the lethal fork.

He fell to his knees, stood up, still holding the bloody skewer, raised his head, and screamed shrilly: “Iththaqua!”

For just a moment, he seemed to be listening. He dropped, rolled, twitched, lay still.

I held the light on him. Neither of us spoke.

For relief, I looked off into the cellar darkness, away from the last Jendick lying on the fungus-covered floor.

“Kirk!” Chris said suddenly. He stood looking down at the hideous hairy thing.

It appeared to be undergoing some kind of degenerative transformation. The facial skin, matted hair and all, had loosened. As we watched, it slid off, exposing the skull bones. The body skin began to shrivel. Instead of blood, a yellowish ichor began oozing out of the gaping chest wound.

We went on watching, horrified but hypnotized, as the process of decay and dissolution accelerated. Within minutes we stared down at a half-mummified skeleton. Even this, swiftly turning black and desiccated, started to disintegrate.

Chris heard it first and raised his head—a roaring sound in the distance, a sound like a hundred tractors suddenly revved up and rolling fast.

“Let’s go!” Grabbing his pack, he ran through the doorway, up the stairs. I bolted behind him.

When we charged out of the ruinous charnel house, through the juniper bushes, across the overgrown knoll, the sky was already black. The roaring sound seemed nearly overhead.

“Swamp’s our only hope! Far as we can get!” Chris yelled.

“Tornado?” I yelled back, he didn’t answer.

Plunging into the swamp, we ran like madmen. Chris grabbed my arm and pulled me down where dense tangles of shrub and brush surrounded us.

“Too dangerous near trees!” he shouted. "Lie flat!”

A darkness like that of moonless midnight closed on the swamp. The roaring increased, obliterating all else. A mighty wind swept through the swamp. Rain cascaded down. I was aware of toppling trees nearby. Bushes were torn out by the roots and tossed away. I felt that at any moment I would be scooped up by the wind, pitched and pummeled to death.

I lay prone, arms over my head, as the tornado-like torrent of wind, rain, and sound raged on. Suddenly aware of light, I moved an arm and glanced aside at Chris. He was watching the sky. I looked up.

Etched above, against a background of rushing sulfurous cloud masses, was the huge fiery image of a distorted Indian face, a diabolical face, blazing with fury, filled with the evil of the Pit itself.

It hung there, its flaming outline crowding the sky over the swamp. I felt convinced that the glaring eyes in that malevolent face were fixed upon us.

“Iththaqua!” Chris gasped.

Slowly, at first almost imperceptibly, the roaring sound began to abate. As it did so, the lurid countenance towering above us gradually faded. Contours of the burning, hate-twisted face became blurred. The glaring eyes turned blank. At length only the jagged yellow outline of a face remained. Finally even this was swept away in the tumult of racing, gale- driven clouds.

Soaked and shaken, we stood up unsteadily. The sky was still black, and though the wind had dropped noticeably, it remained strong enough to fling wet leaves and other debris into our faces.

Our trip out of the swamp was a suspense story in itself. All trails and landmarks appeared to have been torn away. The swamp was flooded. Hillocks and ridges we had traversed on our way in were now under water. The heavy rain never slackened. It was a miracle that we both escaped from that mud-laden watery morass without drowning.

By the time we emerged from the swamp, skirted the marshes, and found our way over North Hill and back to my place, we were at the end of our strength.

After I had started a fire in the wood stove and poured two stiff brandies, we sat down in the kitchen.

Chris scarcely spoke until ws had finished one glass and poured a second.

“Well, Kirk, I’m feeling half human again, but I’m too dragged out to talk much. I’ve been thinking that I ought to do a little research. Meanwhile, I’d be grateful if you kept our little adventure to yourself—at least for a time. I’m hoping the town folks think it was just a random tornado centered around the swamp. If they saw the sky image, it will complicate matters. But maybe even that could be explained away as a freak of lightning combined with funny cloud formations.”

I gave him my word. Over a week passed before I saw him again.

He sat down in his favorite kitchen chair and propped his feet on the wood-box.

“As I hoped,” he told me, “the natives shrugged it off as an early tornado spinning around near the swamp. Not a soul noticed the sky image." He chuckled. “I guess nobody stayed outdoors to watch cloud formations!” “You’ve done that research?” I asked.

He nodded. “I found some information about Iththaqua in an old volume at the Hartford library. A collection of local Indian legends. Iththaqua was supposed to be a sort of swamp demon who granted favors to Indians who made sacrifices to him—both animal and human. In return for blood sacrifices, he would protect hunters in the swamp. And—listen to this—in some cases he would grant unheard-of longevity to faithful worshipers!”

I thought back to that repulsive, bullet-riddled body on the floor of the cellar, quickly decaying before our eyes.

“That was Old Jendick, then?”

“I’m convinced of it. So far as I can figure, he would be nearly a hundred and fifty years old!”

“How do you explain that fiery face looming in the sky above us?”

“In his last extremity, old Jendick called on Iththaqua for help—and Iththaqua responded. Jendick must have been the very last of his worshipers, however, and with Jendick s death, Iththaqua’s power immediately started to wane. Iththaqua, you might say, was kept alive by the faith of his followers—and by the blood of their sacrifices, perhaps. When none of his followers remained alive, he himself could no longer exist. The best he could do was to summon up enough final strength for a kind of thunderbolt exit while he glared down at us—boiling with fury but basically impotent.” “What about—what we found in those brine barrels?”

Chris shifted uneasily. “I feel guilty about that. You know, about eight months ago, a tramp was staying in the remains of a shack in woods near the edge of the swamp. Never bothered anybody, so I let him alone. After he suddenly disappeared, I looked in the shack and found quite a cache of new canned goods, crackers, coffee, and so on. Seemed strange to me that he’d leave all that stuff, but I shrugged it off. Now I’m wondering if he wandered into the swamp and ended up as a sacrifice to Iththaqua—and subsequently an occupant of the brine vats!”

He stood up. “I’m also wondering about those hunters of years ago who were supposed to have been caught in quicksand. You’ll remember that we didn’t see any sign of quicksand, bad as the swamp was in other respects. Maybe those lost hunters were caught by the Jendicks!”

After he left, I regretted that I hadn’t asked him what he proposed to do about the pickled human flesh we had found in that charnel-house cellar. I had an answer a month or so later when he stopped by.

“I have an aviator friend at the Hartford airport,” he told me. “We took a helicopter ride over the swamp one afternoon. The Jendick house—in fact, the knoll itself—was washed away. The row of black-gum trees has disappeared. Not a stick of wood visible. The chances of recovering any brine-preserved human remains is gone forever. And I can’t honestly say I’m sorry!” I’ve tramped through the woods and meadows around Greystone Bay many times since my adventure with Chris, but I never again ventured into Jendick’s Swamp. In fact, I've been very active in all movements to preserve the marshland as a wildlife preserve. I’m not protecting it against people so much. It’s the swamp. It keeps moving south.

The Big Fish

by Kim Newman (1993)

The Bay City cops were rousting enemy aliens. As I drove through the nasty coast town, uniforms hauled an old couple out of a grocery store. The Taraki family’s neighbours huddled in thin rain howling asthmatically for bloody revenge. Pearl Harbor had struck a lot of people that way. With the Tarakis on the bus for Manzanar, neighbours descended on the store like bedraggled vultures. Produce vanished instantly, then destruction started. Caught at a sleepy stop light, I got a good look. The Tarakis had lived over the store; now, their furniture was thrown out of the second-storey window. Fine china shattered on the sidewalk, spilling white chips into the gutter like teeth. It was inspirational, the forces of democracy rallying round to protect the United States from vicious oriental grocers, fiendishly intent on selling eggplant to a hapless civilian population.

Meanwhile my appointment was with a gent who kept three pictures on his mantelpiece, grouped in a triangle around a statue of the Virgin Mary. At the apex was his white-haired mama, to the left Charles Luciano, and to the right, Benito Mussolini. The Tarakis, American-born and registered Democrats, were headed to a dustbowl concentration camp for the duration, while Gianni Pastore, Sicilian-born and highly unregistered capo of the Family business, would spend his war in a marble-fronted mansion paid for by nickels and dimes dropped on the numbers game, into slot machines, or exchanged for the favours of nice girls from the old country. I’d seen his mansion before and so far been able to resist the temptation to bean one of his twelve muse statues with a bourbon bottle.

Money can buy you love but can’t even put down a deposit on good taste.

The palace was up in the hills, a little way down the boulevard from Tyrone Power. But now, Pastore was hanging his mink-banded fedora in a Bay City beachfront motel complex, which was a real-estate agent’s term for a bunch of horrible shacks shoved together for the convenience of people who like sand on their carpets.

I always take a lungful of fresh air before entering a confined space with someone in Pastore’s business, so I parked the Chrysler a few blocks from the Seaview Inn and walked the rest of the way, sucking on a Camel to keep warm in the wet. They say it doesn’t rain in Southern California, but they also say the U.S. Navy could never be taken by surprise. This February, three months into a war the rest of the world had been fighting since 1936 or 1939 depending on whether you were Chinese or Polish, it was raining almost constantly, varying between a light fall of misty drizzle in the dreary daytimes to spectacular storms, complete with De Mille lighting effects, in our fear-filled nights. Those trusty Boy Scouts scanning the horizons for Jap subs and Nazi U-boats were filling up influenza wards, and manufacturers of raincoats and umbrellas who’d not yet converted their plants to defence production were making a killing. I didn’t mind the rain. At least rainwater is clean, unlike most other things in Bay City.

A small boy with a wooden gun leaped out of a bush and sprayed me with sound effects, interrupting his onomatopoeic chirruping with a shout of “die you slant-eyed Jap!” I clutched my heart, staggered back, and he finished me off with a quick burst. I died for the Emperor and tipped the kid a dime to go away. If this went on long enough, maybe little Johnny would get a chance to march off and do real killing, then maybe come home in a box or with the shakes or a taste for blood. Meanwhile, especially since someone spotted a Jap submarine off Santa Barbara, California was gearing up for the War Effort. Aside from interning grocers, our best brains were writing songs like “To Be Specific, It’s Our Pacific,” “So Long Momma, I’m Off to Yokahama,” “We’re Gonna Slap the Jap Right Off the Map” and “When Those Little Yellow Bellies Meet the Cohens and the Kellys.” Zanuck had donated his string of Argentine polo ponies to West Point and got himself measured for a comic-opera Colonel’s uniform so he could join the Signal Corps and defeat the Axis by posing for publicity photographs.

I’d tried to join up two days after Pearl Harbor but they kicked me back onto the streets. Too many concussions. Apparently, I get hit on the head too often and have a tendency to black out. When they came to mention it, they were right.

The Seaview Inn was shuttered, one of the first casualties of war. It had its own jetty, and by it were a few canvas-covered motor launches shifting with the waves. In late afternoon gloom, I saw the silhouette of the Montecito, anchored strategically outside the three-mile limit. That was one good thing about the Japanese; on the downside, they might have sunk most of the U.S. fleet, but on the up, they’d put Laird Brunette’s gambling ship out of business. Nobody was enthusiastic about losing their shirt-buttons on a rigged roulette wheel if they imagined they were going to be torpedoed any moment. I'd have thought that would add an extra thrill to the whole gay, delirious business of giving Brunette money, but I’m just a poor, 25-dollars-a-day detective.

The Seaview Inn was supposed to be a stopping-off point on the way to the Monty and now its trade was stopped off. The main building was sculpted out of dusty ice cream and looked like a three-storey radiogram with wave-scallop friezes. I pushed through double-doors and entered the lobby. The floor was decorated with a mosaic in which Neptune, looking like an angry Santa Claus in a swimsuit, was sticking it to a sea-nymph who shared a hairdresser with Hedy Lamarr. The nymph was naked except for some strategic shells. It was very artistic.

There was nobody at the desk and thumping the bell didn’t improve matters. Water ran down the outside of the green-tinted windows. There were a few steady drips somewhere. I lit up another Camel and went exploring. The office was locked and the desk register didn’t have any entries after December 7, 1941. My raincoat dripped and began to dry out, sticking my jacket and shirt to my shoulders. I shrugged, trying to get some air into my clothes. I noticed Neptune’s face quivering. A thin layer of water had pooled over the mosaic and various anemone-like fronds attached to the sea god were apparently getting excited. Looking at the nymph, I could understand that. Actually, I realized, only the hair was from Hedy. The face and the body were strictly Janey Wilde.

I go to the movies a lot but I’d missed most of Janey’s credits: She-Strangler of Shanghai, Tarzan and the Tiger Girl, Perils of Jungle Jillian. I’d seen her in the newspapers though, often in unnervingly close proximity to Pastore or Brunette. She’d started as an Olympic swimmer, picking up medals in Berlin, then followed Weissmuller and Crabbe to Hollywood. She would never get an Academy Award but her legs were in a lot of cheesecake stills publicizing no particular movie. Air-brushed and made-up like a good-looking corpse, she was a fine commercial for sex. In person she was as bubbly as domestic champagne, though now running to flat. Things were slow in the detecting business, since people were more worried about imminent invasion than missing daughters or misplaced love letters. So when Janey Wilde called on me in my office in the Cahuenga Building and asked me to look up one of her Ill-chosen men friends, I checked the pile of old envelopes I use as a desk diary and informed her that I was available to make inquiries into the current whereabouts of a certain big fish.

Wherever Laird Brunette was, he wasn’t here. I was beginning to figure Gianni Pastore, the gambler’s partner, wasn’t here either. Which meant I’d wasted an afternoon. Outside it rained harder, driving against the walls with a drumlike tattoo. Either there were hailstones mixed in with the water or the Jap air force was hurling fistfuls of pebbles at Bay City to demoralize the population. I don't know why they bothered. All Hirohito had to do was slip a thick envelope to the Bay City cops and the city’s finest would hand over the whole community to the Japanese Empire with a ribbon around it and a bow on top.

There were more puddles in the lobby, little streams running from one to the other. I was reminded of the episode of The Perils of Jungle Jillian I had seen while tailing a child molester to a Saturday matinee. At the end, Janey Wilde had been caught by the Panther Princess and trapped in a room which slowly filled with water. That room had been a lot smaller than the lobby of the Seaview Inn and the water had come in a lot faster.

Behind the desk were framed photographs of pretty people in pretty clothes having a pretty time. Pastore was there, and Brunette, grinning like tiger cats, mingling with showfolk: Xavier Cugat, Janey Wilde, Charles Coburn. Janice Marsh, the pop-eyed beauty rumoured to have replaced Jungle Jillian in Brunette’s affections, was well represented in artistic poses.

On the phone, Pastore had promised faithfully to be here. He hadn’t wanted to bother with a small-timer like me but Janey Wilde’s name opened a door. I had a feeling Papa Pastore was relieved to be shaken down about Brunette, as if he wanted to talk about something. He must be busy, because there were several wars on. The big one overseas and a few little ones at home. Maxie Rothko, bar owner and junior partner in the Monty, had been found drifting in the seaweed around the Santa Monica pier without much of a head to speak of. And Phil Isinglass, man-about-town lawyer and Brunette frontman, had turned up in the storm drains, lungs full of sandy mud. Disappearing was the latest craze in Brunette’s organization. That didn’t sound good for Janey Wilde, though Pastore had talked about the Laird as if he knew Brunette was alive. But now Papa wasn’t around. I was getting annoyed with someone it wasn’t sensible to be annoyed with.

Pastore wouldn’t be in any of the beach shacks but there should be an apartment for his convenience in the main building. I decided to explore further. Jungle Jillian would expect no less. She’d hired me for five days in advance, a good thing since I’m unduly reliant on eating and drinking and other expensive diversions of the monied and idle.

The corridor that led past the office ended in a walk-up staircase. As soon as I put my size nines on the first step, it squelched. I realized something was more than usually wrong. The steps were a quiet little waterfall, seeping rather than cascading. It wasn’t just water, there was unpleasant, slimy stuff mixed in. Someone had left the bath running. My first thought was that Pastore had been distracted by a bullet. I was wrong. In the long run, he might have been happier if I’d been right.

I climbed the soggy stairs and found the apartment door unlocked but shut. Bracing myself, I pushed the door in. It encountered resistance but then sliced open, allowing a gush of water to shoot around my ankles, soaking my dark blue socks. Along with water was a three-weeks-dead-in-the-water-with-sewage- and-rotten-fish smell that wrapped around me like a blanket. Holding my breath, I stepped into the room. The waterfall flowed faster now. I heard a faucet running. A radio played, with funny little gurgles mixed in. A crooner was doing his best with “Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries,” but he sounded as if he were drowned full fathom five. I followed the music and found the bathroom.

Pastore was face down in the overflowing tub, the song coming from under him. He wore a silk lounging robe that had been pulled away from his back, his wrists tied behind him with the robe’s cord. In the end he’d been drowned. But before that hands had been laid on him, either in anger or with cold, professional skill. I’m not a coroner, so I couldn’t tell how long the Family Man had been in the water. The radio still playing and the water still running suggested Gianni had met his end recently but the stench felt older than sin.

I have a bad habit of finding bodies in Bay City and the most profit-minded police force in the country have a bad habit of trying to make connections between me and a wide variety of deceased persons. The obvious solution in this case was to make a friendly phone call, absent-mindedly forgetting to mention my name while giving the flatfeet directions to the late Mr. Pastore. Who knows, I might accidentally talk to someone honest.

That is exactly what I would have done if, just then, the man with the gun hadn’t come through the door...

Ihad Janey Wilde to blame. She’d arrived without an appointment, having picked me on a recommendation. Oddly, Laird Brunette had once said something not entirely uncomplimentary about me. We’d met. We hadn’t seriously tried to kill each other in a while. That was as good a basis for a relationship as any.

Out of her sarong, Jungle Jillian favoured sharp shoulders and a veiled pill-box. The kiddies at the matinee had liked her fine, especially when she was wrestling stuffed snakes, and dutiful Daddies took no exception to her either, especially when she was tied down and her sarong rode up a few inches. Her lips were four red grapes plumped together. When she crossed her legs you saw swimmer’s smooth muscle under her hose.

“He’s very sweet, really,” she explained, meaning Mr. Brunette never killed anyone within ten miles of her without apologizing afterwards, “not at all like they say in those dreadful scandal sheets.”

The gambler had been strange recently, especially since the war shut him down. Actually the Montecito had been out of commission for nearly a year, supposedly for a refit although as far as Janey Wilde knew no workmen had been sent out to the ship. At about the time Brunette suspended his crooked wheels, he came down with a common California complaint, a dose of crackpot religion. He’d been tangentially mixed up a few years ago with a psychic racket run by a bird named Amthor, but had apparently shifted from the mostly harmless bunco cults onto the hard stuff. Spiritualism, orgiastic rites, chanting, incense, the whole deal.

Janey blamed this sudden interest in matters occult on Janice Marsh, who had coincidentally made her name as the Panther Princess in The Perils of Jungle Jillian, a role which required her to torture Janey Wilde at least once every chapter. My employer didn’t mention that her own career had hardly soared between Jungle Jillian and She-Strangler of Shanghai, while the erstwhile Panther Princess had gone from Republic to Metro and was being built up as an exotic in the Dietrich-Garbo vein. Say what you like about Janice Marsh’s Nefertiti, she still looked like Peter Lorre to me. And according to Janey, the star had more peculiar tastes than a seafood buffet.

Brunette had apparently joined a series of fringe organizations and become quite involved, to the extent of neglecting his business and thereby irking his long-time partner, Gianni Pastore. Perhaps that was why person or persons unknown had decided the Laird wouldn’t mind if his associates died one by one. I couldn’t figure it out. The cults I’d come across mostly stayed in business by selling sex, drugs, power or reassurance to rich, stupid people. The Laird hardly fell into the category. He was too big a fish for that particular bowl.

The man with the gun was English, with a Ronald Colman accent and a white aviator’s scarf. He was not alone. The quiet, truck-sized bruiser I made as a fed went through my wallet while the dapper foreigner kept his automatic pointed casually at my middle.

“Peeper,” the fed snarled, showing the photostat of my licence and my supposedly impressive deputy’s badge.

“Interesting,” said the Britisher, slipping his gun into the pocket of his camel coat. Immaculate, he must have been umbrella-protected between car and building because there wasn’t a spot of rain on him. “I’m Winthrop. Edwin Winthrop.”

We shook hands. His other companion, the interesting one, was going through the deceased’s papers. She looked up, smiled with sharp white teeth, and got back to work.

“This is Mademoiselle Dieudonne.”

“Genevieve,” she said. She pronounced it “Zhe-ne-vyev,” suggesting Paris, France. She was wearing something white with silver in it and had quantities of pale blonde hair.

“And the gentleman from your Federal Bureau of Investigation is Finlay.”

The fed grunted. He looked as if he’d been brought to life by Willis H. O'Brien.

“You are interested in a Mr. Brunette,” Winthrop said. It was not a question, so there was no point in answering him. “So are we.”

“Call in a Russian and we could be the Allies,” I said. Winthrop laughed. He was sharp. “True. I am here at the request of my government and working with the full co-operation of yours.”

One of the small detective-type details I noticed was that no one even suggested informing the police about Gianni Pastore was a good idea.

“Have you ever heard of a place called Innsmouth, Massachusetts?”

It didn’t mean anything to me and I said so.

“Count yourself lucky. Special Agent Finlay’s associates were called upon to dynamite certain unsafe structures in the sea off Innsmouth back in the ’20s. It was a bad business.”

Genevieve said something sharp in French that sounded like swearing. She held up a photograph of Brunette dancing cheek to cheek with Janice Marsh. “Do you know the lady?” Winthrop asked.

“Only in the movies. Some go for her in a big way but I think she looks like Mr. Moto.”

“Very true. Does the Esoteric Order of Dagon mean anything to you?”

“Sounds like a Church-of-the-Month alternate. Otherwise, no.”

“Captain Obed Marsh?”

“Uh-huh.”

“The Deep Ones?”

“Are they those coloured singers?”

“What about Cthulhu, Y’ha-nthlei, R’lyeh?” “Gesundheit.”

Winthrop grinned, sharp moustache pointing. “No, not easy to say at all. Hard to fit into human mouths, you know.”

“He’s just a bedroom creeper,” Finlay said, “he don’t know nothing.”

“His grammar could be better. Doesn’t J. Edgar pay for elocution lessons?”

Finlay’s big hands opened and closed as if he were rather there were a throat in them.

“Gene?” Winthrop said.

The woman looked up, red tongue absently flicking across her red lips, and thought a moment. She said something in a foreign language that I did understand.

“There’s no need to kill him,” she said in French. Thank you very much, I thought.

Winthrop shrugged and said “fine by me.” Finlay looked disappointed.

“You’re free to go,” the Britisher told me. “We shall take care of everything. I see no point in your continuing your current line of inquiry. Send in a chit to this address,” he handed me a card, “and you’ll be reimbursed for your expenses so far. Don’t worry. We’ll carry on until this is seen through. By the way, you might care not to discuss with anyone what you’ve seen here or anything I may have said. There’s a War on, you know. Loose lips sink ships.”

I had a few clever answers but I swallowed them and left. Anyone who thought there was no need to kill me was all right in my book and I wasn’t using my razored tongue on them. As I walked to the Chrysler, several ostentatiously unofficial cars cruised past me, headed for the Seaview Inn.

It was getting dark and lighting was striking down out at sea. A flash lit up the Montecito and I counted five seconds before the thunder boomed. I had the feeling there was something out there beyond the three-mile limit besides the floating former casino, and that it was angry.

I slipped into the Chrysler and drove away from Bay City, feeling better the further inland I got.

I take Black Mask. It’s a long time since Hammett and the fellow who wrote the Ted Carmady stories were in it, but you occasionally get a good Cornell Woolrich or Erle Stanley Gardner. Back at my office, I saw the newsboy had been by and dropped off the Times and next month’s pulp. But there'd been a mix-up. Instead of the Mask, there was something inside the folded newspaper called Weird Tales. On the cover, a man was being attacked by two green demons and a stereotype vampire with a widow’s peak. “‘Hell on Earth,’ a Novelette of Satan in a Tuxedo by Robert Bloch” was blazed above the title. Also promised were “A new Lovecraft series, ‘Herbert West - Re-Animator’ ” and “‘The Rat Master’ by Greye la Spina.” All for 15 cents, kids. If I were a different type of detective, the brand who said nom de something and waxed a moustache whenever he found a mutilated corpse, I might have thought the substitution an omen.

In my office, I’ve always had five filing cabinets, three empty. I also had two bottles, only one empty. In a few hours, the situation would have changed by one bottle.

I found a glass without too much dust and wiped it with my clean handkerchief. I poured myself a generous slug and hit the back of my throat with it.

The radio didn’t work but I could hear Glenn Miller from somewhere. I found my glass empty and dealt with that. Sitting behind my desk, I looked at the patterns in rain on the window. If I craned I could see traffic on Hollywood Boulevard. People who didn’t spend their working days finding bodies in bathtubs were going home not to spend their evenings emptying a bottle.

After a day, I’d had some excitement but I hadn’t done much for Janey Wilde. I was no nearer being able to explain the absence of Mr. Brunette from his usual haunts than I had been when she left my office, leaving behind a tantalizing whiff of essence de chine.

She’d given me some literature pertaining to Brunette’s cult involvement. Now, the third slug warming me up inside, I looked over it, waiting for inspiration to strike. Interesting echoes came up in relation to Winthrop’s shopping list of subjects of peculiar interest. I had no luck with the alphabet- soup syllables he’d spat at me, mainly because “Cthulhu” sounds more like a cough than a word. But the Esoteric Order of Dagon was a group Brunette had joined, and Innsmouth, Massachusetts, was the East Coast town where the organization was registered. The Esoteric Order had a temple on the beach front in Venice, and its mumbo-jumbo hand-outs promised “ancient and intriguing rites to probe the mysteries of the Deep.” Slipped in with the recruitment bills was a studio biography of Janice Marsh, which helpfully revealed the movie star’s place of birth as Innsmouth, Massachusetts, and that she could trace her family back to Captain Obed Marsh, the famous early-19th-century explorer of whom I’d never heard. Obviously Winthrop, Genevieve and the FBI were well ahead of me in making connections. And I didn’t really know who the Englishman and the French girl were.

I wondered if I wouldn’t have been better off reading Weird Tales. I liked the sound of Satan in a Tuxedo. It wasn’t Ted Carmady with an automatic and a dame, but it would do. There was a lot more thunder and lightning and I finished the bottle. I suppose I could have gone home to sleep but the chair was no more uncomfortable than my Murphy bed.

The empty bottle rolled and I settled down, tie loose, to forget the cares of the day.

Thanks to the War, Pastore only made page 3 of the Times. Apparently the noted gambler-entrepreneur had been shot to death. If that was true, it had happened after I’d left. Then, he’d only been tortured and drowned. Police Chief John Wax dished out his usual “over by Christmas” quote about the investigation. There was no mention of the FBI, or of our allies, John Bull in a tux and Mademoiselle la Guillotine. In prison, you get papers with neat oblongs cut out to remove articles the censor feels provocative. They don’t make any difference: all newspapers have invisible oblongs. Pastore’s sterling work with underprivileged kids was mentioned but someone forgot to write about the junk he sold them when they grew into underprivileged adults. The obit photograph found him with Janey Wilde and Janice Marsh at the premiere of a George Raft movie. The phantom Jap sub off Santa Barbara got more column inches. General John L. DeWitt, head of the Western Defence Command, called for more troops to guard the coastline, prophesying “death and destruction are likely to come at any moment.” Everyone in California was looking out to sea.

After my regular morning conference with Mr. Huggins and Mr. Young, I placed a call to Janey Wilde’s Malibu residence. Most screen idols are either at the studio or asleep if you telephone before ten o’clock in the morning, but Janey, with weeks to go before shooting started on Bowery to Bataan, was at home and awake, having done her 30 lengths. Unlike almost everyone else in the industry, she thought a swimming pool was for swimming in rather than lounging beside.

She remembered instantly who I was and asked for news. I gave her a precis.

“I’ve been politely asked to refrain from further investigations,” I explained. “By some heavy hitters.”

“So you’re quitting?”

I should have said yes, but “Miss Wilde, only you can require me to quit. I thought you should know how the federal government feels.”

There was a pause.

“There’s something I didn’t tell you,” she told me. It was an expression common among my clients. “Something important.”

I let dead air hang on the line.

“It’s not so much Laird that I’m concerned about. It’s that he has Franklin.”

“Franklin?”

“The baby,” she said. “Our baby. My baby.”

“Laird Brunette has disappeared, taking a baby with him?”

“Yes.”

“Kidnapping is a crime. You might consider calling the cops.”

“A lot of things are crimes. Laird has done many of them and never spent a day in prison.”

That was true, which was why this development was strange. Kidnapping, whether personal or for profit, is the riskiest of crimes. As a rule, it’s the province only of the stupidest criminals. Laird Brunette was not a stupid criminal.

“I can't afford bad publicity. Not when I’m so near to the roles I need.”

Bowery to Bataan was going to put her among the screen immortals.

“Franklin is supposed to be Esther’s boy. In a few years, I’ll adopt him legally. Esther is my housekeeper. It’ll work out. But I must have him back.”

“Laird is the father. He will have some rights.”

“He said he wasn’t interested. He... um, moved on... to Janice Marsh while I was... before Franklin was born.”

“He’s had a sudden attack of fatherhood and you’re not convinced?”

“I’m worried to distraction. It’s not Laird, it’s her. Janice Marsh wants my baby for something vile. I want you to get Franklin back.”

“As I mentioned, kidnapping is a crime.”

“If there’s a danger to the child, surely...”

“Do you have any proof that there is danger?”

“Well, no.”

“Have Laird Brunette or Janice Marsh ever given you reason to believe they have ill-will for the baby?”

“Not exactly.”

I considered things.

“I’ll continue with the job you hired me for, but you understand that’s all I can do. If I find Brunette, I’ll pass your worries on. Then it’s between the two of you.”

She thanked me in a flood and I got off the phone feeling I’d taken a couple of strides further into the LaBrea tar pits and could feel sucking stickiness well above my knees.

I should have stayed out of the rain and concentrated on chess problems but I had another four days’ worth of Jungle Jillian’s retainer in my pocket and an address for the Esoteric Order of Dagon in a clipping from a lunatic scientific journal. So I drove out to Venice, reminding myself all the way that my wipers needed fixing.

Venice, California, is a fascinating idea that didn’t work. Someone named Abbot Kinney had the notion of artificially creating a city like Venice, Italy, with canals and architecture. The canals mostly ran dry and the architecture never really caught on in a town where, in the ’20s, Gloria Swanson’s bathroom was considered an aesthetic triumph. All that was left was the beach and piles of rotting fish. Venice, Italy, is the Plague Capital of Europe, so Venice, California, got one thing right.

The Esoteric Order was up the coast from Muscle Beach, housed in a discreet yacht-club building with its own small marina. From the exterior, I guessed the cult business had seen better days. Seaweed had tracked up the beach, swarmed around the jetty, and was licking the lower edges of the front wall. Everything had gone green: wood, plaster, copper ornaments. And it smelled like Pastore’s bathroom, only worse. This kind of place made you wonder why the Japs were so keen on invading.

I looked at myself in the mirror and rolled my eyes. I tried to get that slap-happy, let-me-give-you-all-my-worldly-goods, gimme-some-mysteries-of-the-orient look I imagined typical of a communicant at one of these bughouse congregations. After I’d stopped laughing, I remembered the marks on Pastore and tried to take detecting seriously. Taking in my unshaven, slept-upright-in-his-clothes, two-bottles-a-day lost soul look, I congratulated myself on my foresight in spending 15 years developing the ideal cover for a job like this.

To get in the building, I had to go down to the marina and come at it from the beach-side. There were green pillars of what looked like fungus-eaten cardboard either side of the impressive front door, which held a stained-glass picture in shades of green and blue of a man with the head of a squid in a natty monk’s number, waving his eyes for the artist. Dagon, I happened to know, was half-man, half-fish, and God of the Philistines. In this town, I guess a Philistine God blended in well. It’s a great country: if you’re half-fish, pay most of your taxes, eat babies and aren’t Japanese, you have a wonderful future.

I rapped on the squid's head but nothing happened. I looked the squid in several of his eyes and felt squirmy inside. Somehow, up close, cephalopod-face didn’t look that silly.

I pushed the door and found myself in a temple’s waiting room. It was what I’d expected: subdued lighting, old but bad paintings, a few semi-pornographic statuettes, a strong smell of last night’s incense to cover up the fish stink. It had as much religious atmosphere as a two-dollar bordello.

“Yoo-hoo,” I said, “Dagon calling...

My voice sounded less funny echoed back at me.

I prowled, sniffing for clues. I tried saying nom de something and twiddling a non-existent moustache but nothing came to me. Perhaps I ought to switch to a meerschaum of cocaine and a deerstalker, or maybe a monocle and an interest in incunabula.

Where you’d expect a portrait of George Washington or Jean Harlow’s Mother, the Order had hung up an impressively ugly picture of “Our Founder.” Capt. Obed Marsh, dressed up like Admiral Butler, stood on the shore of a Polynesian paradise, his good ship painted with no sense of perspective on the horizon as if it were about three feet tall. The Capt., surrounded by adoring if funny-faced native tomatoes, looked about as unhappy as Errol Flynn at a Girl Scout meeting. The painter had taken a lot of trouble with the native nudes. One of the dusky lovelies had hips that would make Lombard green and a face that put me in mind of Janice Marsh. She was probably the Panther Princess’s great-great-great grandmother. In the background, just in front of the ship, was something like a squid emerging from the sea. Fumble-fingers with a brush had tripped up again. It looked as if the tentacle-waving creature were about twice the size of Obed’s clipper. The most upsetting detail was a robed and masked figure standing on the deck with a baby’s ankle in each fist. He had apparently just wrenched the child apart like a wishbone and was emptying blood into the squid’s eyes.

“Excuse me,” gargled a voice, “can I help you?”

I turned around and got a noseful of the stooped and ancient Guardian of the Cult. His robe matched the ones worn by squid-features on the door and baby-ripper in the portrait. He kept his face shadowed, his voice sounded about as good as the radio in Pastore’s bath and his breath smelled worse than Pastore after a week and a half of putrefaction.

“Good morning,” I said, letting a bird flutter in the higher ranges of my voice, “my name is, er...”

I put together the first things that came to mind.

“My name is Herbert West Lovecraft. Uh, H.W. Lovecraft the Third. I’m simply fascinated by matters Ancient and Esoteric, don’t ch’know.”

“Don’t ch’know” I picked up from the fellow with the monocle and the old books.

“You wouldn't happen to have an entry blank, would you? Or any incunabula?”

“Incunabula?” He wheezed.

“Books. Old books. Print books, published before 1500 anno domini, old sport.” See, I have a dictionary too.

“Books...”

The man was a monotonous conversationalist. He also moved like Laughton in The Hunchback of Notre Dame and the front of his robe, where the squidhead was embroidered, was wet with what I was disgusted to deduce was drool.

“Old books. Arcane mysteries, don’t ch'know. Anything cyclopaean and doom-haunted is just up my old alley.”

“The Necronomicon?” He pronounced it with great respect, and great difficulty.

“Sounds just the ticket.”

Quasimodo shook his head under his hood and it lolled. I glimpsed greenish skin and large, moist eyes.

“I was recommended to come here by an old pal,” I said. “Spiffing fellow. Laird Brunette. Ever hear of him?”

I'd pushed the wrong button. Quasi straightened out and grew about two feet. Those moist eyes flashed like razors.

“You’ll have to see the Cap’n’s Daughter.”

I didn’t like the sound of that and stepped backwards, towards the door. Quasi laid a hand on my shoulder and held it fast. He was wearing mittens and I felt he had too many fingers inside them. His grip was like a gila monster’s jaw.

“That will be fine,” I said, dropping the flutter.

As if arranged, curtains parted, and I was shoved through a door. Cracking my head on the low lintel, I could see why Quasi spent most of his time hunched over. I had to bend at the neck and knees to go down the corridor. The exterior might be rotten old wood but the heart of the place was solid stone. The walls were damp, bare and covered in suggestive carvings that gave primitive art a bad name. You’d have thought I’d be getting used to the smell by now, but nothing doing. I nearly gagged.

Quasi pushed me through another door. I was in a meeting room no larger than Union Station, with a stage, rows of comfortable armchairs and lots more squid-person statues. The centrepiece was very like the mosaic at the Seaview Inn, only the nymph had less shells and Neptune more tentacles.

Quasi vanished, slamming the door behind him. I strolled over to the stage and looked at a huge book perched on a straining lectern. The fellow with the monocle would have salivated, because this looked a lot older than 1500. It wasn’t a Bible and didn’t smell healthy. It was open to an illustration of something with tentacles and slime, facing a page written in several deservedly dead languages.

“The Necronomicon,” said a throaty female voice, “of the mad Arab, Abdul Al-Hazred.”

“Mad, huh?” I turned to the speaker. “Is he not getting his royalties?”

I recognized Janice Marsh straight away. The Panther Princess wore a turban and green silk lounging pyjamas, with a floorlength housecoat that cost more than I make in a year. She had on jade earrings, a pearl cluster pendant and a ruby-eyed silver squid brooch. The lighting made her face look green and her round eyes shone. She still looked like Peter Lorre, but maybe if Lorre put his face on a body like Janice Marsh’s, he’d be up for sex-goddess roles too. Her silk thighs purred against each other as she walked down the temple aisle.

“Mr Lovecraft, isn’t it?”

“Call me H.W. Everyone does.”

“Have I heard of you?”

“I doubt it.”

She was close now. A tall girl, she could look me in the eye. I had the feeling the eye-jewel in her turban was looking me in the brain. She let her fingers fall on the tentacle picture for a moment, allowed them to play around like a fun-loving spider, then removed them to my upper arm, delicately tugging me away from the book. I wasn’t unhappy about that. Maybe I’m allergic to incunabula or perhaps an undiscovered prejudice against tentacled creatures, but I didn’t like being near the Necronomicon one bit. Certainly the experience didn’t compare with being near Janice Marsh.

“You’re the Cap’n’s Daughter?” I said.

“It’s an honorific title. Obed Marsh was my ancestor. In the Esoteric Order, there is always a Cap’n’s Daughter. Right now, I am she.”

“What exactly is this Dagon business about?”

She smiled, showing a row of little pearls. “It’s an alternative form of worship. It’s not a racket, honestly.”

“I never said it was.”

She shrugged. “Many people get the wrong idea.” Outside, the wind was rising, driving rain against the Temple. The sound effects were weird, like sickening whales calling out in the Bay.

“You were asking about Laird? Did Miss Wilde send you?”

It was my turn to shrug.

“Janey is what they call a sore loser, Mr. Lovecraft. It comes from taking all those bronze medals. Never the gold.”

“I don’t think she wants him back,” I said, “just to know where he is. He seems to have disappeared.”

“He’s often out of town on business. He likes to be mysterious. I’m sure you understand.”

My eyes kept going to the squid-face brooch. As Janice Marsh breathed, it rose and fell and rubies winked at me.

“It’s Polynesian,” she said, tapping the brooch. “The Cap’n brought it back with him to Innsmouth.”

“Ah yes, your home town.”

“It’s just a place by the sea. Like Los Angeles.”

I decided to go fishing, and hooked up some of the bait Winthrop had given me. “Were you there when J. Edgar Hoover staged his fireworks display in the ’20s?”

“Yes, I was a child. Something to do with rum-runners, I think. That was during Prohibition.”

“Good years for the Laird.”

“I suppose so. He’s legitimate these days.”

“Yes. Although if he were as Scotch as he likes to pretend he is, you can be sure he’d have been deported by now.”

Janice Marsh’s eyes were sea-green. Round or not, they were fascinating. “Let me put your mind at rest, Mr. Lovecraft or whatever your name is,” she said. “The Esoteric Order of Dagon was never a front for bootlegging. In fact it has never been a front for anything. It is not a racket for duping rich widows out of inheritances. It is not an excuse for motion-picture executives to gain carnal knowledge of teenage drug addicts. It is exactly what it claims to be, a church.”

“Father, Son and Holy Squid, eh?”

“I did not say we were a Christian church.”

Janice Marsh had been creeping up on me and was close enough to bite. Her active hands went to the back of my neck and angled my head down like an adjustable lamp. She put her lips on mine and squashed her face into me. I tasted lipstick, salt and caviar. Her fingers writhed up into my hair and pushed my hat off. She shut her eyes. After an hour or two of suffering in the line of duty, I put my hands on her hips and detached her body from mine. I had a fish taste in my mouth.

“That was interesting,” I said.

“An experiment,” she replied. “Your name has such a ring to it. Love... craft. It suggests expertise in a certain direction.”

“Disappointed?”

She smiled. I wondered if she had several rows of teeth, like a shark.

“Anything but.”

“So do I get an invite to the back-row during your next Dagon hoe-down?”

She was businesslike again. “I think you’d better report back to Janey. Tell her I’ll have Laird call her when he’s in town and put her mind at rest. She should pay you off. What with the War, it’s a waste of manpower to have you spend your time looking for someone who isn’t missing when you could be defending Lockheed from Fifth Columnists.”

“What about Franklin?”

“Franklin the President?”

“Franklin the baby.”

Her round eyes tried to widen. She was playing this scene innocent. The Panther Princess had been the same when telling the white hunter that Jungle Jillian had left the Tomb of the Jaguar hours ago.

“Miss Wilde seems to think Laird has borrowed a child of hers that she carelessly left in his care. She’d like Franklin back.”

“Janey hasn’t got a baby. She can’t have babies. It’s why she’s such a psycho-neurotic case. Her analyst is getting rich on her bewildering fantasies. She can’t tell reality from the movies. She once accused me of human sacrifice.”

“Sounds like a square rap.”

“That was in a film, Mr. Lovecraft. Cardboard knives and catsup blood.”

Usually at this stage in an investigation, I call my friend Bernie at the District Attorney’s office and put out a few fishing lines. This time, he phoned me. When I got into my office, I had the feeling my telephone had been ringing for a long time.

“Don’t make waves,” Bernie said.

“Pardon,” I snapped back, with my usual lightning-fast wit.

“Just don’t. It’s too cold to go for a swim this time of year.”

“Even in a bathtub.”

“Especially in a bathtub.”

“Does Mr. District Attorney send his regards?” Bernie laughed. I had been an investigator with the DA’s office a few years back, but we’d been forced to part company.

“Forget him. I have some more impressive names on my list.”

“Let me guess. Howard Hughes?”

“Close.”

“General Stillwell?”

“Getting warmer. Try Mayor Fletcher Bowron, Governor Culbert Olson, and State Attorney General Earl Warren. Oh, and Wax, of course.”

I whistled. “All interested in little me. Who’d ’a thunk it?”

“Look, I don’t know much about this myself. They just gave me a message to pass on. In the building, they apparently think of me as your keeper.”

“Do a British gentleman, a French lady and a fed the size of Mount Rushmore have anything to do with this?”

“I’ll take the money I’ve won so far and you can pass that question on to the next sucker.”

“Fine, Bernie. Tell me, just how popular am I?”

“Tojo rates worse than you, and maybe Judas Iscariot.”

“Feels comfy. Any idea where Laird Brunette is these days?”

I heard a pause and some rumbling. Bernie was making sure his office was empty of all ears. I imagined him bringing the receiver up close and dropping his voice to a whisper.

“No one’s seen him in three months. Confidentially, I don’t miss him at all. But there are others Bernie coughed, a door opened, and he started talking normally or louder. “... of course, honey, I'll be home in time for Jack Benny.”

“See you later, sweetheart,” I said, “your dinner is in the sink and I’m off to Tijuana with a professional pool player.”

“Love you,” he said, and hung up.

I’d picked up a coating of green slime on the soles of my shoes. I tried scraping them off on the edge of the desk and then used yesterday’s Times to get the stuff off the desk. The gloop looked damned esoteric to me.

I poured myself a shot from the bottle I had picked up across the street and washed the taste of Janice Marsh off my teeth.

I thought of Polynesia in the early 19th century and of those fish-eyed native girls clustering around Capt. Marsh. Somehow, tentacles kept getting in the way of my thoughts. In theory, the Capt. should have been an ideal subject for a Dorothy Lamour movie, perhaps with Janice Marsh in the role of her great-great-great and Jon Hall or Ray Milland as girl-chasing Obed. But I was picking up Bela Lugosi vibrations from the setup. I couldn't help but think of bisected babies.

So far none of this running around had got me any closer to the Laird and his heir. In my mind, I drew up a list of Brunette’s known associates. Then, I mentally crossed off all the ones who were dead. That brought me up short. When people in Brunette’s business die, nobody really takes much notice except maybe to join in a few drunken choruses of “Ding-Dong, the Wicked Witch is Dead” before remembering there are plenty of other Wicked Witches in the sea. I’m just like everybody else: I don’t keep a score of dead gambler-entrepreneurs. But, thinking of it, there’d been an awful lot recently, up to and including Gianni Pastore. Apart from Rothko and Isinglass, there’d been at least three other closed-casket funerals in the profession. Obviously you couldn’t blame that on the Japs. I wondered how many of the casualties had met their ends in bathtubs. The whole thing kept coming back to water. I decided I hated the stuff and swore not to let my bourbon get polluted with it.

Back out in the rain, I started hitting the bars. Brunette had a lot of friends. Maybe someone would know something.

By early evening, I’d propped up a succession of bars and leaned on a succession of losers. The only thing I’d come up with was the blatantly obvious information that everyone in town was scared. Most were wet, but all were scared.

Everyone was scared of two or three things at once. The Japs were high on everyone’s list. You’d be surprised to discover the number of shaky citizens who’d turned overnight from chisellers who’d barely recognize the flag into true red, white and blue patriots prepared to shed their last drop of alcoholic blood for their country. Everywhere you went, someone sounded off against Hirohito, Tojo, the Mikado, kabuki and origami. The current rash of accidental deaths in the Pastore-Brunette circle were a much less popular subject for discussion and tended to turn loudmouths into closemouths at the drop of a question.

“Something fishy,” everyone said, before changing the subject.

I was beginning to wonder whether Janey Wilde wouldn’t have done better spending her money on a radio commercial asking the Laird to give her a call. Then I found Curtis the Croupier in Maxie’s. He usually wore the full soup and fish, as if borrowed from Astaire. Now he’d exchanged his carnation, starched shirtfront and pop-up top hat for an outfit in olive drab with bars on the shoulder and a cap under one epaulette.

“Heard the bugle call, Curtis?” I asked, pushing through a crowd of patriotic admirers who had been buying the soldier boy drinks.

Curtis grinned before he recognized me, then produced a supercilious sneer. We’d met before, on the Montecito. There was a rumour going around that during Prohibition he’d once got involved in an honest card game, but if pressed he’d energetically refute it.

“Hey cheapie,” he said.

I bought myself a drink but didn’t offer him one. He had three or four lined up.

“This racket must pay,” I said. “How much did the uniform cost? You rent it from Paramount?”

The croupier was offended. “It’s real,” he said. “I’ve enlisted. I hope to be sent overseas.”

“Yeah, we ought to parachute you into Tokyo to introduce loaded dice and rickety roulette wheels.” “You’re cynical, cheapie.” He tossed back a drink.

“No, just a realist. How come you quit the Monty?”

“Poking around in the Laird’s business?”

I raised my shoulders and dropped them again. “Gambling has fallen off recently, along with leading figures in the industry. The original owner of this place, for instance. I bet paying for wreaths has thinned your bankroll.”

Curtis took two more drinks, quickly, and called for more. When I’d come in, there’d been a couple of chippies climbing into his hip pockets. Now he was on his own with me. He didn’t appreciate the change of scenery and I can’t say I blamed him.

“Look cheapie,” he said, his voice suddenly low, “for your own good, just drop it. There are more important things now.”

“Like democracy?”

“You can call it that.”

“How far overseas do you want to be sent, Curtis?” He looked at the door as if expecting five guys with tommy guns to come out of the rain for him. Then he gripped the bar to stop his hands shaking.

“As far as I can get, cheapie. The Philippines, Europe, Australia. I don’t care.”

“Going to war is a hell of a way to escape.”

“Isn’t it just? But wouldn’t Papa Gianni have been safer on Wake Island than in the tub?”

“You heard the bathtime story, then?”

Curtis nodded and took another gulp. The juke box played “Doodly-Acky-Sacky, Want Some Seafood, Mama” and it was scary. Nonsense, but scary.

“They all die in water. That’s what I’ve heard. Sometimes, on the Monty, Laird would go up on deck and just look at the sea for hours. He was crazy, since he took up with that Marsh popsicle."

“The Panther Princess?”

“You saw that one? Yeah, Janice Marsh. Pretty girl if you like clams. Laird claimed there was a sunken town in the bay. He used a lot of weird words, darkie bop or something. Jitterbug stuff. Cthul-whatever, Yog-Gimme-a-Break. He said things were going to come out of the water and sweep over the land, and he didn’t mean U-boats.”

Curtis was uncomfortable in his uniform. There were dark patches where the rain had soaked. He’d been drinking like W.C. Fields on a bender but he wasn’t getting tight. Whatever was troubling him was too much even for Jack Daniel’s.

I thought of the Laird of the Monty. And I thought of the painting of Capt. Marsh’s clipper, with that out-of- proportion squid surfacing near it.

“He’s on the boat, isn’t he?”

Curtis didn’t say anything.

“Alone,” I thought aloud. "He’s out there alone."

I pushed my hat to the back of my head and tried to shake booze out of my mind. It was crazy. Nobody bobs up and down in the water with a sign round their neck saying “Hey Tojo, Torpedo Me!" The Monty was a floating target.

“No,” Curtis said, grabbing my arm, jarring drink out of my glass.

“He’s not out there?”

He shook his head. “No, cheapie. He’s not out there alone.”

All the water taxis were in dock, securely moored and covered until the storms settled. I’d never find a boatman to take me out to the Montecito tonight. Why, everyone knew the waters were infested with Japanese subs. But I knew someone who wouldn’t care any more whether or not his boats were being treated properly. He was even past bothering if they were borrowed without his permission.

The Seaview Inn was still deserted, although there were police notices warning people away from the scene of the crime. It was dark, cold and wet, and nobody bothered me as I broke into the boathouse to find a ring of keys.

I took my pick of the taxis moored to the Seaview’s jetty and gassed her up for a short voyage. I also got my .38 Colt Super Match out from the glove compartment of the Chrysler and slung it under my armpit. During all this, I got a thorough soaking and picked up the beginnings of influenza. I hoped Jungle Jillian would appreciate the effort.

The sea was swelling under the launch and making a lot of noise. I was grateful for the noise when it came to shooting the padlock off the mooring chain but the swell soon had my stomach sloshing about in my lower abdomen. I am not an especially competent seaman.

The Monty was out there on the horizon, still visible whenever the lightning lanced. It was hardly difficult to keep the small boat aimed at the bigger one.

Getting out on the water makes you feel small. Especially when the lights of Bay City are just a scatter in the dark behind you. I got the impression of large things moving just beyond my field of perception. The chill soaked through my clothes. My hat was a felt sponge, dripping down my neck. As the launch cut towards the Monty, rain and spray needled my face. I saw my hands white and bath-wrinkled on the wheel and wished I'd brought a bottle. Come to that, I wished I was at home in bed with a mug of cocoa and Claudette Colbert. Some things in life don’t turn out the way you plan.

Three miles out, I felt the law change in my stomach. Gambling was legal and I emptied my belly over the side into the water. I stared at the remains of my toasted cheese sandwich as they floated off. I thought I saw the moon reflected greenly in the depths, but there was no moon that night.

I killed the engine and let waves wash the taxi against the side of the Monty. The small boat scraped along the hull of the gambling ship and I caught hold of a weed-furred rope ladder as it passed. I tethered the taxi and took a deep breath.

The ship sat low in the water, as if its lower cabins were flooded. Too much seaweed climbed up towards the decks. It’d never reopen for business, even if the War were over tomorrow.

I climbed the ladder, fighting the water-weight in my clothes, and heaved myself up on deck. It was good to have something more solid than a tiny boat under me but the deck pitched like an airplane wing.

I grabbed a rail and hoped my internal organs would arrange themselves back into their familiar grouping.

“Brunette,” I shouted, my voice lost in the wind.

There was nothing. I’d have to go below decks.

A sheet flying flags of all nations had come loose, and was whipped around with the storm. Japan, Italy and Germany were still tactlessly represented, along with several European states that weren’t really nations any more. The deck was covered in familiar slime.

I made my way around towards the ballroom doors. They’d blown in and rain splattered against the polished wood floors. I got inside and pulled the .38. It felt better in my hand than digging into my ribs.

Lightning struck nearby and I got a flash image of the abandoned ballroom, orchestra stands at one end painted with the name of a disbanded combo.

The casino was one deck down. It should be dark but I saw a glow under a walkway door. I pushed through and cautiously descended. It wasn’t wet here but it was cold. The fish smell was strong.

“Brunette,” I shouted again.

I imagined something heavy shuffling nearby and slipped a few steps, banging my hip and arm against a bolted-down table. 1 kept hold of my gun, but only through superhuman strength.

The ship wasn’t deserted. That much was obvious.

I could hear music. It wasn’t Cab Calloway or Benny Goodman. There was a Hawaiian guitar in there but mainly it was a crazy choir of keening voices. I wasn’t convinced the performers were human and wondered whether Brunette was working up some kind of act with singing seals. I couldn't make out the words but the familiar hawk-and-spit syllables of “Cthulhu” cropped up a couple of times.

I wanted to get out and go back to nasty Bay City and forget all about this. But Jungle Jillian was counting on me.

I made my way along the passage, working towards the music. A hand fell on my shoulder and my heart banged against the backsides of my eyeballs.

A twisted face stared at me out of the gloom, thickly-bearded, crater-cheeked. Laird Brunette was made up as Ben Gunn, skin shrunk onto his skull, eyes large as hen’s eggs.

His hand went over my mouth.

“Do Not Disturb,” he said, voice high and cracked.

This wasn't the suave criminal I knew, the man with tartan cummerbunds and patent-leather hair. This was some other Brunette, in the grips of a tough bout with dope or madness.

“The Deep Ones,” he said.

He let me go and I backed away.

“It is the time of the Surfacing.”

My case was over. I knew where the Laird was. All I had to do was tell Janey Wilde and give her her refund.

“There’s very little time.”

The music was louder. I heard a great number of bodies shuffling around in the casino. They couldn’t have been very agile, because they kept clumping into things and each other.

“They must be stopped. Dynamite, depth charges, torpedoes...”

“Who?” I asked. “The Japs?”

“The Deep Ones. The Dwellers in the Sister City.” He had lost me.

A nasty thought occurred to me. As a detective, I can’t avoid making deductions. There were obviously a lot of people aboard the Monty, but mine was the only small boat in evidence. How had everyone else got out here? Surely they couldn't have swum?

“It’s a war,” Brunette ranted, “us and them. It’s always been a war.”

I made a decision. I’d get the Laird off his boat and turn him over to Jungle Jillian. She could sort things out with the Panther Princess and her Esoteric Order. In his current state, Brunette would hand over any baby if you gave him a blanket.

I took Brunette’s thin wrist and tugged him towards the staircase. But a hatch clanged down and I knew we were stuck.

A door opened and perfume drifted through the fish stink.

“Mr. Lovecraft, wasn’t it?” a silk-scaled voice said.

Janice Marsh was wearing pendant squid earrings and a lady-sized gun. And nothing else.

That wasn't quite as nice as it sounds. The Panther Princess had no nipples, no navel and no pubic hair. She was lightly scaled between the legs and her wet skin shone like a shark’s. I imagined that if you stroked her, your palm would come away bloody. She was wearing neither the turban she’d affected earlier nor the dark wig of her pictures. Her head was completely bald, skull swelling unnaturally. She didn't even have her eyebrows pencilled in.

“You evidently can’t take good advice.”

As mermaids go, she was scarier than cute. In the crook of her left arm, she held a bundle from which a white baby face peered with unblinking eyes. Franklin looked more like Janice Marsh than his parents.

“A pity, really,” said a tiny ventriloquist voice through Franklin’s mouth, “but there are always complications.”

Brunette gibbered with fear, chewing his beard and huddling against me.

Janice Marsh set Franklin down and he sat up, an adult struggling with a baby’s body.

“The Cap’n has come back,” she explained.

“Every generation must have a Cap’n,” said the thing in Franklin’s mind. Dribble got in the way and he wiped his angelmouth with a fold of swaddle.

Janice Marsh clucked and pulled Laird away from me, stroking his face.

“Poor dear,” she said, flicking his chin with a long tongue. “He got out of his depth.”

She put her hands either side of Brunette’s head, pressing the butt of her gun into his cheek.

“He was talking about a Sister City,” I prompted.

She twisted the gambler’s head around and dropped him on the floor. His tongue poked out and his eyes showed only white.

“Of course,” the baby said. “The Cap’n founded two settlements. One beyond Devil Reef, off Massachusetts. And one here, under the sands of the Bay.”

We both had guns. I'd let her kill Brunette without trying to shoot her. It was the detective's fatal flaw, curiosity. Besides the Laird was dead inside his head long before Janice snapped his neck.

“You can still join us,” she said, hips working like a snake in time to the chanting. “There are raptures in the deeps.”

“Sister,” I said, “you’re not my type.”

Her nostrils flared in anger and slits opened in her neck, flashing liverish red lines in her white skin.

Her gun was pointed at me, safety off. Her long nails were lacquered green.

I thought I could shoot her before she shot me. But I didn’t. Something about a naked woman, no matter how strange, prevents you from killing them. Her whole body was moving with the music. I’d been wrong. Despite everything, she was beautiful.

I put my gun down and waited for her to murder me. It never happened.

I don’t really know the order things worked out. But first there was lightning, then, an instant later, thunder.

Light filled the passageway, hurting my eyes. Then, a rumble of noise which grew in a crescendo. The chanting was drowned.

Through the thunder cut a screech. It was a baby’s cry. Franklin’s eyes were screwed up and he was shrieking. I had a sense of the Cap’n drowning in the baby’s mind, his purchase on the purloined body relaxing as the child cried out.

The floor beneath me shook and buckled and I heard a great straining of abused metal. A belch of hot wind surrounded me. A hole appeared. Janice Marsh moved fast and I think she fired her gun, but whether at me on purpose or at random in reflex I couldn’t say. Her body sliced towards me and I ducked.

There was another explosion, not of thunder, and thick smoke billowed through a rupture in the floor. I was on the floor, hugging the tilting deck. Franklin slid towards me and bumped, screaming, into my head. A half-ton of water fell on us and I knew the ship was breached. My guess was that the Japs had just saved my life with a torpedo. I was waist deep in saltwater. Janice Marsh darted away in a sinuous fish motion.

Then there were heavy bodies around me, pushing me against a bulkhead. In the darkness, I was scraped by something heavy, cold-skinned and foul-smelling. There were barks and cries, some of which might have come from human throats.

Fires went out and hissed as the water rose. I had Franklin in my hands and tried to hold him above water. I remembered the peril of Jungle Jillian again and found my head floating against the hard ceiling.

The Cap'n cursed in vivid 18th-century language, Franklin’s little body squirming in my grasp. A toothless mouth tried to get a biter’s grip on my chin but slipped off. My feet slid and I was off balance, pulling the baby briefly underwater. I saw his startled eyes through a wobbling film. When I pulled him out again, the Cap’n was gone and Franklin was screaming on his own. Taking a double gulp of air, I plunged under the water and struggled towards the nearest door, a hand closed over the baby’s face to keep water out of his mouth and nose.

The Montecito was going down fast enough to suggest there were plenty of holes in it. I had to make it a priority to find one. I jammed my knee at a door and it flew open. I was poured, along with several hundred gallons of water, into a large room full o stored gambling equipment. Red and white chip; floated like confetti.

I got my footing and waded towards a ladder. Some thing large reared out of the water and shambled at me, screeching like a seabird. I didn’t get a good look at it. Which was a mercy. Heavy arms lashed me, flop ping boneless against my face. With my free hand, pushed back at the thing, fingers slipping against colt slime. Whatever it was was in a panic and squashed through the door.

There was another explosion and everything shook. Water splashed upwards and I fell over. I go upright and managed to get a one-handed grip on the ladder. Franklin was still struggling and bawling which I took to be a good sign. Somewhere near, then was a lot of shouting.

I dragged us up rung by rung and slammed my head against a hatch. If it had been battened, I’d have smashed my skull and spilled my brains. It flipped upwards and a push of water from below shoved up through the hole like a ping-pong ball in a fountain.

The Monty was on fire and there were things in the water around it. I heard the drone of airplane engine and glimpsed nearby launches. Gunfire fought with the wind. It was a full-scale attack. I made it to the deck-rail and saw a boat fifty feet away. Men in yellow slickers angled tommy guns down and sprayed the water with bullets.

The gunfire whipped up the sea into a foam. Kicking things died in the water. Someone brought up his gun and fired at me. I pushed myself aside, arching my body over Franklin and bullets spanged against the deck.

My borrowed taxi must have been dragged under by the bulk of the ship.

There were definitely lights in the sea. And the sky over the city, in the distance, I saw firecracker bursts. Something exploded a hundred yards away and a tower of water rose, bursting like a puffball. A depth charge.

The deck was angled down and water was creeping up at us. I held on to a rope webbing, wondering whether the gambling ship still had any lifeboats Franklin spluttered and bawled.

A white body slid by, heading for the water, instinctively grabbed at it. Hands took hold of me and I was looking into Janice Marsh’s face. Her eye: blinked, membranes coming round from the sides and she kissed me again. Her long tongue probed my mouth like an eel, then withdrew. She stood up, one leg bent so she was still vertical on the sloping deck. She drew air into her lungs -if she had lungs- and expelled it through her gills with a musical cry. She was slim and white in the darkness, water running of her body. Someone fired in her direction and she dived into the waves, knifing through the surface and disappearing towards the submarine lights. Bullets rippled the spot where she’d gone under.

I let go of the ropes and kicked at the deck, pushing myself away from the sinking ship. I held Franklin above the water and splashed with my legs and elbows. The Monty was dragging a lot of things under with it, and I fought against the pull so I wouldn’t be one of them. My shoulders ached and my clothes got in the way, but I kicked against the current.

The ship went down screaming, a chorus of bending steel and dying creatures. I had to make for a launch and hope not to be shot. I was lucky. Someone got a polehook into my jacket and landed us like fish. I lay on the deck, water running out of my clothes, swallowing as much air as I could breathe.

I heard Franklin yelling. His lungs were still in working order.

Someone big in a voluminous slicker, a sou’wester tied to his head, knelt by me, and slapped me in the face.

“Peeper,” he said.

They’re calling it the Great Los Angeles Air Raid,” Winthrop told me as he poured a mug of British tea. “Some time last night a panic started, and everyone in Bay City shot at the sky for hours.”

“The Japs?” I said, taking a mouthful of welcome hot liquid.

“In theory. Actually, I doubt it. It’ll be recorded as a fiasco, a lot of jumpy characters with guns. While it was all going on, we engaged the enemy and emerged victorious.”

He was still dressed up for an embassy ball and didn’t look as if he’d been on deck all evening. Genevieve Dieudonne wore a fisherman’s sweater and fatigue pants, her hair up in a scarf. She was looking at a lot of sounding equipment and noting down readings.

“You’re not fighting the Japs, are you?”

Winthrop pursed his lips. “An older war, my friend. We can’t be distracted. After last night’s action, our Deep Ones won’t poke their scaly noses out for a while. Now I can do something to lick Hitler.”

“What really happened?”

“There was something dangerous in the sea, under Mr. Brunette’s boat. We have destroyed it and routed the... uh, the hostile forces. They wanted the boat as a surface station. That’s why Mr. Brunette’s associates were eliminated.”

Genevieve gave a report in French, so fast that I couldn’t follow.

“Total destruction,” Winthrop explained, “a dreadful set-back for them. It’ll put them in their place for years. Forever would be too much to hope for, but a few years will help.”

I lay back on the bunk, feeling my wounds. Already choking on phlegm, I would be lucky to escape pneumonia.

“And the little fellow is a decided dividend.” Finlay glumly poked around, suggesting another dose of depth charges. He was cradling a mercifully sleep-struck Franklin, but didn’t look terribly maternal.

“He seems quite unaffected by it all.”

“His name is Franklin,” I told Winthrop. “On the boat, he was...”

“Not himself? I’m familiar with the condition. It’s a filthy business, you understand.”

“He’ll be all right,” Genevieve put in.

I wasn’t sure whether the rest of the slicker crew were feds or servicemen and I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to know. I could tell a Clandestine Operation when I landed in the middle of one.

“Who knows about this?” I asked. “Hoover? Roosevelt?”

Winthrop didn’t answer.

“Someone must know,” I said.

“Yes,” the Englishman said, “someone must. But this is a war the public would never believe exists. In the Bureau, Finlay’s outfit are known as ‘the Unnameables,’ never mentioned by the press, never honoured or censured by the government, victories and defeats never recorded in the official history.”

The launch shifted with the waves, and I hugged myself, hoping for some warmth to creep over me. Finlay had promised to break out a bottle later but that made me resolve to stick to tea as a point of honour. I hated to fulfill his expectations.

“And America is a young country,” Winthrop explained. “In Europe, we’ve known things a lot longer.”

On shore, I’d have to tell Janey Wilde about Brunette and hand over Franklin. Some flack at Metro would be thinking of an excuse for the Panther Princess’s disappearance. Everything else — the depth charges, the sea battle, the sinking ship - would be swallowed up by the War.

All that would be left would be tales. Weird tales.

The Vicar of R'lyeh

by Marc Laidlaw (2007)

“Let anything be held as blessed, so that that be well cursed.”

                                     – Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers

Glorious afternoon, warm and breezy among green hills dotted with sheep. Looking down from his sylvan lounging spot upon the village with its twin spires, Geoffrey heard a mournful bell coming from the towers of Barchester Cathedral, and almost immediately thereafter noted a small dark shape making its way across the dewy grass from the open doors of the church. A faint distortion followed the pedestrian, as if air and earth were curdling in its wake. He blinked away the illusion, but the feeling of oppression grew until he clearly saw that yes, ‘twas the vicar coming toward him with some message he suddenly felt he did not wish to hear. Meanwhile, the tolling of the bell had grown appalling. As the little man struggled up the hillside, he seemed to expand until his shadow encompassed the town itself. Abruptly the vicar stood before him, the pale features of the meek country parson tearing into soft and writhing strands like the points of a wormy beard. The vicar scowled, revealing five segmented ridges of bone, teeth akin to the beak of a sea urchin. Geoffrey did not wish to hear the vicar speak, but there was no stopping his ears.

“You up, Geoff?” The voice, its accent inappropriate, was first wheedling, then insistent. “R’lyeh’s rising!”

He forced his eyes open. Somehow the phone had lodged itself between his cheek and pillow. The voice of his boss went on.

“Geoff, are you there? Did I wake you? I know you were here late, but we’ve got an emergency.”

“Mm. Hi, Warren. No. I was…I was getting up.”

(7:43 by the clock.)

“Calculations were off. Fucking astrologers, right? Anyway, we’ve got to throw ourselves into it. Marketing’s in a tizzy, but let them be the bottleneck. I think if we dig in---”

“Give me …” Shower, skip breakfast, grab coffee at a drive-through, traffic. This was bad. “…forty-five minutes?” Very bad.

“You’re a pro, Geoff.”

Very bad. Cancel all plans. Forget about rest until this thing was done. Already resigning himself to it. Exactly how off were the calculations? He’d soon find out.

Forty-eight minutes later, panicking over his growing lateness, Geoff spiraled down through increasingly lower levels of the parking lot. He was late, but he was worrying more about the dream. What did it mean? That he was becoming polluted? That his pure visions had become contaminated by the foul effluents in which he labored daily? It seemed more urgent that he get away. Finish this job and get back to what he loved. Put all this crap behind him. If he could just get through it.

As he descended, the fluorescent lights grew dingier and more infrequent; fresh white paint gave way to bare, sooty concrete; the level markers were eroded runes. Even at this hour, he found not a single free parking space until he reached the lowest level. At the end of the farthest row, he found a retractable metal gate raised just over halfway. Beyond it, a promising emptiness, dark.

His car scraped under the gate with half an inch of clearance. He found himself in a cavernous lot he had never seen before, darkness stretching beyond the reach of his headlights. This lot was anything but crowded. A mere dozen or so cars parked companionably in the nearest row of spaces. He pulled in beside them and shut off his engine though not yet his lights. Stairs? Elevators? He saw no sign of either. The safest course would be to walk back under the gate to the main level.

Slamming the door killed the light from his car, but enough flowed from the gateway to show a layer of dust on the adjacent Volkswagen. Geoff peered through the passenger window, shuddering when he saw a row of tiny plastic figures perched on the dashboard, winged and faceless except for tentacles and the keyhole eyes of superintelligent cuttlefish. The toys were self-illuminated, in the manner of their kind, and pulsed with faint colors that signaled their intentions to those who could read them. Scattered over the seats were piles of sticks and matted weeds. Also a fallen stack of books, and a spiral notebook open to a page covered with scribbles he took for treasure maps. What kind of treasure seeker plundered the recesses of a not very ancient parking garage?

Fearing he might be mistaken for a prowler, he straightened up, tugging his backpack over his shoulders. On his way toward the gate, he glanced back and saw that the car bore an all too popular bumper sticker: HE IS RISEN.

The sudden grinding of the metal gate called up terrors of confinement, though in fact the gate was opening the rest of the way. Blue-tinged headlights came down the ramp, blinding him. He threw up a hand to shade his eyes, and saw a long black limo cruising through the entryway. It came to a stop, fixing him in its headlights, the engine thrumming so deeply that he felt the throbbing through his shoes.

“Come forward!” piped a voice, thin and irresistable.

Geoff walked around the side of the limo. One of the doors was open. Inside, a luxurious compartment of oxblood leather and recessed lights comfortably contained Warren and another man unknown to him.

“Geoff? What are you doing down here?”

“Who is this?” came the reedy voice that had bid him approach.

“Uh…this is Geoffrey Abbott, our lead designer.”

“Really? Come in, young man.”

Warren gave an uncomfortable smile, then waved him in. Geoff sat, balancing his backpack on his knees. As the car purred forward, Warren nodded toward the other man, a small fine-boned figure in a grey suit, dark of complexion, with curly black hair cropped close.

“Geoff, I’d like you to meet Emil Calamaro.”

Geoff held back his hand a moment. He had never heard Warren say the name in anything but scorn; yet he was obviously awed by the actual presence of the owner of Aeon Entertainment.

“So,” piped the small man, “you are tasked with R’lyeh’s rising, is that not so?”

“Only in the Commemorative Simulator,” Warren said.

There was a chitter of laughter. “As if it could be otherwise!” said Calamaro.

It was several seconds before Geoff realized what Calamaro was talking about. Everyone on the team had a slightly different pronunciation of “R’lyeh”--from Warren’s “It’s really, really, Real-yeah,” to the broad “Ruh-lay” to the completely lazy and obnoxious “Riley.” But Calamaro’s take on the name was especially odd: It seemed to come bubbling up from his gullet through a column of thick liquid, less a word than a digestive sound.

“Geoff’s got the job for now,” Warren said quickly, covering Geoff’s confusion.

“And you think him more suitable than the previous designer?”

“We’ve got a lot of faith in Geoff,” Warren said. “He created the Jane Austen Mysteries.”

Calamaro sank back in his seat, making a faint hissing sound and baring his teeth at Austen’s name. Out of Egypt, Geoff thought, and now owner of an extensive media empire. Not always a hands-on sort of owner, Calamaro took an active role in producing only a select few of the titles in the endless run of Cthulhuvian flicks and tie-in games that Aeon cranked out on a seasonal basis. Calamaro’s dark, slender fingers clenched the head of a walking stick that was somehow both leopard and crocodile. On the seat beside him sat a cylindrical box, tall and golden, fastened with a clasp.

“I know it’s a bit of a stretch, but the authenticity of those levels, and Geoff’s ability to make them lively and action-packed without sacrificing the integrity of the source material…well, we think it’s a great fit. No one originally thought you could set Jane Austen to work solving crimes in the world of her own books, but Geoff’s team did a fantastic job.”

“I designed the Bloody Trail of Lord Darcy,” Geoff said, compelled to rise to his own defense, knowing that Warren had not actually played any of the Austen thrillers. “I was looking forward to starting in on Pride and Extreme Prejudice when this came along. Eventually I think Thomas Hardy will be a fertile source of ---”

“I would like to see the work so far.”

“Absolutely!” Warren said.

“Sure.” Geoff hoped none of his terror showed in his face.

The limo stopped. The driver opened the passenger door. Calamaro indicated that Geoff should go first.

***

He could no longer see the gated entrance. Ahead of the car, held in its headlights, was a doorway. Calamaro stepped into the beams, his shadow staggering out across the hard-packed floor and then the wall. He supported himself on his walking stick, hugging the golden cylinder close to his chest with the other arm. Warren hurried to open the door. Beyond was an elevator and a flight of stairs. The elevator waited, but when Geoff tried to enter, Warren held him back. “Why don’t you take the stairs, Geoff? We’ve got some business to discuss. We’ll catch up with you upstairs. Give you time to get the demo ready.”

“Uh…sure.” Geoff held back and watched the doors shut. Calamaro’s eyes glittered like obsidian lenses in the mask of a sarcophagus, refracting the overhead lights into a vision of endless night full of fractured stars.

He wasn’t sure how long he’d stood there before he remembered to look for stairs.

***

By the time Geoff reached the office, everyone was buzzing determinedly through the halls as if they had some other purpose than to catch a glimpse of the man who had set them all in motion. Lars Magnusson, one of the programmers, intercepted Geoff en route to his cubby: “Guess who’s making the rounds this morning?”

“I know,” Geoff said. “Calamaro. I rode in his limo with Warren.”

“Calamaro?” said Lars. “Really? No, I’m talking about Petey Sandersen!”

If this news was meant to lift his spirits, it barely raised an eyebrow. More evidence (as if any were needed) that he did not fit in on the Simulator project; that in fact his loyalty to the whole Aeon Entertainment enterprise was suspect.

Petey Sandersen was a legendary figure – an idol to those who had grown up suckling on the thousand media paps of the Black Goat of the Woods. He had formulated (or packaged) the original rules and invocations, the diagrams and tokens that everyone had once taken for the arcane paraphernalia of an elaborate role playing game. But while Petey had become revered as the Opener of the Way, the Wedge by Which They Widened the Weft, Geoff had spent his adolescence trying to put as much distance as he possibly could between himself and the massively overhyped eldritch invaders.

With Sandersen and Calamaro on the premises, this was shaping up to be a day for high-powered executive reviews. Careers were made or casually ended on days like this. Nice of them to warn the peons in advance.

Geoff slung his backpack under his desk and fired up ABDUL, their proprietary level editor. It was hard not to panic, considering that Warren had volunteered him to show off work that was by no means ready for a demo. About all he had time to do now was check for obvious errors and send the map for a full compile. That, and pray that during the night no one had checked in changes that would break the work he’d done the previous day. Reviewing the morning’s round of check-in notices, he didn’t spot any midnight code changes that would affect his map, but that didn’t mean he was in the clear. Artists were notorious for quietly making an ill-advised change to one inconspicuous model, thereby wreaking havoc on the entire world. Most of them were contractors, prone to exceedingly short lifespans at Aeon, rarely in place long enough to be trained in the brutal realities of their resource management software, dubbed ALHAZMAT. Anyway, there was no way around it. He started his compile and prayed for deliverance.

There was certainly no shortage of divinities in attendance on his prayers. His cubicle was lined with figurines: a mottled green plastic Cthulhu hunched upon a pedestal with leathery wings peaked above its tentacled face; a translucent vinyl Faceless Idiot God containing a congeries of odd shapes that sparked and swarmed like luminous sealife when you squeezed it; a pewter Shub-Niggurath, a goodly number of whose thousand young had fallen behind the desk to be sucked up by the night janitor’s vacuum. The eldritch figures seemed to leap, leer and caper at the corner of his eyes while Geoff bent close to the monitor. On the long late nights when his tired eyes were burning, he thought they did worse things than that. These were not his Cthulhu-Kaiju figures, not his maddeningly cute Li’l Old Ones. They were a constant reminder of the indignity of his situation. They belonged to the previous occupant of the cubicle—a designer who could return at any moment, depending on the whims of upper management. Aeon shuffled and recombined its design teams as if they were packs of Pokemon cards—and not particularly rare ones at that.

Geoff bore no love of Elder Gods, but as much as he would have liked to, he couldn’t get rid of the vinyl monstrosities. He didn’t dare dump them in a drawer and set out his own beloved, hand-painted, resin-cast garage-kit models of Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey. As long as he sat here and accepted the paycheck that came with the keyboard, he must pretend a devotion to the Cthulhuvian pantheon in all its manifestations. Including Warren, who sprang up on the far side of his partition, waggling fingers for him to follow.

Entering the conference room on Warren’s heels, Geoff found the other managers enthralled by the spectacle of a portly cherubic man holding forth at the end of the monolithic onyx slab that was their conference table. He was in the midst of an anecdote that ended, “--so I said, I don’t think of Petey as a Ted Klein reference. I think of Ted Klein as a Petey reference!”

Warren waited for a hitch in the laughter and beckoned Geoff forward. “Petey, this is Geoffrey Abbot, our lead designer.”

Petey leaned forward and put out a hand. He was loud, aggressively jovial, with a gleam in his eyes that was pure evangelist: “Have you heard the good news?” The hand was chubby, somewhat clammy, but the grip was firm enough to take his measure. “He is risen!”

“Well…rising,” Warren said defensively. “We still have a little time, I hope.”

“Not little enough, if you ask me! What do you think, Geoff? I’ve heard splendid things about you. Are you ready for the rapture?”

“I…build maps,” Geoff replied.

“I’ve done a bit of that. A little bit of everything as needed. You look like a dreamer, Geoff, and that’s what we need right now. Good strong dreamers. How’re your dreams of R’lyeh lately? Have the Deep Ones been welcoming?”

“Well, I---”

“It’s kind of vague, isn’t it?” Petey said. “You could use a bit more focus, to be honest. We’ve been looking at your map, and frankly…well…”

“What? My map?”

He hadn’t noticed at first because the huge wall-mounted monitor at the far end of the room was trained on darkness. Suddenly the image lurched and they were looking out over a blue-grey sea, far from land, an ocean cold and desolate and surging with the promise of nightmares. It was his ocean, beneath his bleak sky. They were running R’lyeh Rising – A Commemorative Simulator.

Warren put a hand on his shoulder and with a forced smile said, “We pulled them off your share, Geoff. We were just running through them and---”

“Those are yesterday’s, they’re not even---”

“But they’re fabulous, Geoff!” Petey was in his face again. “The only problem we’ve seen, really, is something we can easily take care of. We don’t bring this out for everyone, you understand, but you’ve already shown you’re worth the extra investment. Emil, will you do the honors?”

Emil Calamaro rose from the end of the conference table with the cylindrical golden box in his hands. He set it in front of Geoff and threw the clasp. Petey Sandersen reached inside and lifted a glittering nightmare over Geoff’s head. Geoff ducked clear to get a better look.

It was something like a cross between a crown and a diving helmet, a rigid cap that rounded off like the narrow end of a squid. Pale, beaten gold, chased with obscene motifs, set with green stones that rippled like dark aquatic eyes.

“Am I supposed to wear that thing?”

“The Miter of Y’ha-nthlei is an honor and a privilege,” said Petey eagerly.

“And a grave responsibility,” said Emil Calamaro.

“Geoff will take good care of it, we’ll see to that,” Warren assured them, pushing Geoff forward to receive the miter.

It fastened to his head with a distinct sensation of suction. Petey stepped back, beaming. “Voila!”

He felt ridiculous.

And something else…

A cold, drawn-out tingling like needles probing his scalp. An intense pressure building within, as if he were developing a sinus infection. His head filled with phlegm.

“Let us study the map again,” said Emil Calamaro.

As the Egyptian spoke, Geoff found himself drifting forward to take control of the scene. He sat down and pulled a keyboard toward him. He began to type commands. He knew what they needed to see.

Out on the sea of pale beaten gold, the waves began to roil for no apparent reason.

Petey said, “I’ve been out there, Geoff, and it’s remarkable how well you’ve captured it.”

“I don’t know,” said Calamaro. “I’m not convinced.”

“Have you been to the spot?”

“You know I don’t care for open water.”

“Well, how can you criticize?”

“It’s not what I pictured.”

“Don’t listen to him,” said Petey, leaning closer. “So far it’s perfect, it’s fine. There’s no problem at all until…well, you have to bring it closer to the surface. I mean, a melding of minds. You need to let yourself be dreamed. Let it come through you. That’s why we’re lending you the miter.”

Geoff brought them in over the area of greatest activity. He accelerated the Simulator, putting it through its paces well ahead of schedule.

The ocean appeared to be boiling. Even through the turbulence you could sense a massive darkness about to break through.

He typed “entity_trigger rlyeh_rise_01.”

R’lyeh breached the waters.

The dripping rocks were encrusted with monstrous tubeworms, their guts bursting out after the pressure shock of the tremendous ascent. Slick scaly bodies writhed in raw sunlight, suffocating in air, caught by the rising of the monolithic city and perishing now before their eyes. Up it rose, a place of eldritch angles, tilted towers, evil…wrong…

So utterly, terribly wrong.

Geoff took his hands from the keyboard and covered his eyes, trying to contain his despair. It was wrong and he knew it. Everything was fine until the full hideous glory of R’lyeh rose into view, and then the illusion collapsed. There was nothing majestic about it, nothing that conjured up the horror of its arrival. It was only tilted rocks and a few cheap, generic effects. His heart wasn’t in it, and it showed.

“It still needs work,” he said, aware that he had better show a pretense of caring for something more than his paycheck.

Without speaking or moving, Calamaro radiated near-lethal levels of distaste and disappointment. Warren had gone pale, afraid to speak either in defense or reproach of Geoff’s work. Only Petey Sandersen appeared untroubled. He slapped a hand on Geoff’s shoulder.

“It’s only to be expected,” he said. “It’s partly our fault. We’ve been remiss. In our defense, we wanted to make sure we had the right guy. I think, this time, we’ve got him.”

Petey gave a nod and a wink to Warren, who visibly relaxed. Color flooded his cheeks. Geoff suddenly remembered the unnamed designer he’d replaced. “…this time…”

“We’re going to leave you with the miter, Geoff. I think you’ll find you can remedy all deficiencies. You’ll get R’lyeh right this time. You’ll get on the Dreamer’s dark side, and all will be well.”

“We haven’t much time,” said Calamaro.

“With a dedicated designer like Geoff here, I’m not worried in the least. Are you worried, Warren?”

“Wha…no! Not at all. Geoff’ll burn both ends till we’re done with this guy. That’s why he makes the big bucks.”

The miter had begun to feel heavier. He must get back to his desk and plunge into his work. He hardly heard what the others were saying. Ideas were coming, strong and vivid. They must be captured. He must surrender to them, bring them to life.

The others must have sensed that he was no longer following the conversation. Warren stood up, signaling that it was Geoff’s turn to do the same. Petey squeezed his hand. Emil Calamaro merely bent slightly at the waist, gripping his cane.

Geoff found himself in the lobby.

Lulu, the receptionist, regarded the glittering headpiece in awe. “Wow…”

She must have seen something in his eyes that silenced her.

Geoff strode toward his cubby, the prickling sensation still strong, but turning to something cold and liquescent, an icy tendril that held his will and gave him marching orders.

What am I doing?

He dragged to a stop in the elevator lobby, determined not to surrender. This was a job, only a job. He shouldn’t have to compromise his inmost thoughts, his imagination, his dreams. He would finish the damn map because it was the only way to get back to his own project, but that was all. Beyond that, he would resist.

Elevator doors rumbled open and a small group of programmers, returning with coffee, stumbled off and stared at Geoff with a mixture of amazement and respect. He pushed past them, into the small car, just as the doors closed, and stabbed the button for the ground floor. At that moment, the watery tendrils turned to knives of ice. He put his hands on either side of the wretched miter and tried to twist it off, but it clung tight. The car plummeted past his chosen floor. The car slowed but did not stop. It had entered realms for which there were no markers. The miter had some power over the elevator, even as it fought for power over him. He half expected to step off into a cavern of watery light where Byakhee waited to wing him away to dismal festivities.

Instead, the doors opened on a concrete cell, familiar from that morning. There was the stairwell where Warren had dismissed him, and a door into the vast dark garage.

The miter tightened like a fist, as if sending a final warning, and then it relaxed its grip. He was free.

It took five minutes, at a limping run, to reach the huddled cars, his own seeming vulnerable at the edge of the row. He dug into his pocket for keys. Once he was clear of the building, he would find a way to shed the miter, using a crowbar if necessary. After that, his greatest fear was that Petey and Calamaro would find a way to blackball his career. All he wanted was to get free of this cursed project and back to something he cared about.

As he turned his key in the lock, he heard a sound that stopped him. He waited for it to repeat. It must have been an engine coughing to life on some floor far above. Nothing on this level stirred. The other cars were empty, as he proved to himself by peering through the window of the adjacent Volkswagen. The same clutter of papers on the seat; the same collection of tiny dashboard idols; the same pile of sod and sticks thrown about like yard waste interrupted on its way to the dump.

The sound, as if aware of his attention, played again.

He bent closer. Crumpled sketches littered the seat. Waves of tingling swept across his scalp. His pupils felt impossibly huge. Among the sketches he could make out a fragment of coastline, an ocean expanse, an X in the midst of the sea.

R’lyeh.

The other drawings suddenly made more sense. The tilting oblongs…a poor draftsman’s attempt at non-Euclidean geometry…a massive door…a model ship…

The miter caressed him warningly, as if an octopus could purr.

They were maps. Levels. Attempts to sketch out the very same areas he was building for the Simulator. Very poor designs, he had to admit, by a less than skilled designer.

Whose car was this?

Reluctantly, he recognized the kinship between the collection of dashboard dolls and the vinyl creatures that lined his desk.

And an even less welcome connection: The broken brown twigs were tangled with black rags that bore the Aeon Entertainment logo.

The sound came again. This time, unmistakably, it came from inside some car in this row. It sounded less like an engine noise and more like something clearing its throat.

He eased his door shut, slipped the keys into his pocket, and began to back slowly toward the distant elevator.

The miter, satisfied that he understood, regained its grip.

You haven’t won, he told it. I’ll get through this and move on.

It’s only a job.

***

He fought from the first, in his own way.

He fought from his desk, in front of his monitor, keyboarding until his eyelids trembled and the urge to sleep became all but impossible to resist. But all his other sleepless nights on the Austen project had given him the resources he needed to stay upright and conscious through the deathmarches of crunchmode. The Dreamer worked through him, but he fought back. Subverting the Dark Advent would not have been possible had he not already finely honed the ability to resist sleep; for a game designer it was second nature, a matter of instinct, ingrained.

The first line of defense was a visible act of defiance. Out came every last one of his vinyl Jane Austen figures. He set them to run lines of interference between the figures of eldritch power. The population of Casterbridge mingled incongruously among Whateleys and Peaslees and the entire Arkham establishment.

These small personal touches, injecting something of himself, were minor sorties in the main battle. But they brought a very real satisfaction and sense of resistance.

To resist outright was a doomed proposition. His sanity was at stake, after all. There were limits to how much he was willing to sacrifice just to make a point. Direct opposition would only lead to failure, madness, and the unemployment office. If he could just get through this, there would be other opportunities in store for him. With all the glory attendant on the Second Rising, he would be free again to pick his assignments. He could push his Trollope project. Or finally develop The Bronte Sisters Massacre.

Such thoughts did not sit well with the miter, which struck back by clenching down so hard that his brain felt like a raisin. Even through stifling pain, he clung hopelessly to his passion.

Warren dragged a cot into an empty office, dedicating it to Geoff for the duration. Yet to lie there, to sleep, would have been to surrender himself completely.

Beneath the waves, in the lightless depths of his map, the city took shape. Geoff modeled shapes in ABDUL, shapes unlike any he had created before. They were direct projections from the Dreamer; they prefigured the Dark Advent. Even as he built them, he knew they were true. Before this, he had merely imagined R’lyeh; he had improvised, glibly making shit up. This was utterly different. These creations were not of him; he was simply a conduit for the Dreamer’s own excretions. What that made of him, he felt all too keenly.

Yet, while his hands hewed R’lyeh from deformed terrain, his heart took shelter in a green imagined England. It was not mountains of madness that filled his mind, but hillocks of happiness. While fluorescent light throbbed down upon his mitered head, he imagined it was the sunlight of a hot August afternoon; he sought respite from the fields of baled hay, finding Tess the dairymaid (loosely of the D’Urbervilles) waiting for him in the sultry shade, her breasts white as the cream she churned to butter. This was a vision of loveliness no Elder God could threaten. It was not unknown Kadath that shimmered in the distance like a phantasmagoric tapestry, but a stolid grey manor house holding dominion above a manicured lawn. It was not distant witless piping in a cosmic void that filled his ears, but the silver peal of church bells ever ringing through a lilac-scented evening. The pastor walked out among his flock. Roses grew on old white lattices and nodded their heavy heads at the coming night, willing him to sleep…sleep…all would be well if only he would…sleep. Not surrender, merely…merely…

“Geoff? Geoff! Wake up, man, it’s coming! It’s time!”

Groggily aware that something was wrong, Geoff lurched into consciousness. When had he lapsed? What had he lost?

In sleep he had laid himself wide open to the Dreamer. He’d given up everything he valued. He had been party to atrocities. He must delete his work! It was the only way to keep the monster from leaking into the world.

Warren stopped his hand. “You’re done. Come on, we’re in the conference room.”

“Done? But---”

“Don’t worry. The map’s compiled, it’s built, it’s beautiful. Petey and Calamaro couldn’t be happier. Timing’s perfect. We’re not the bottleneck, Geoffrey. Retail can sweat the rest of it. We did our part and we’re done. Now come watch the Rising.”

Stepping into the conference room, he experienced double vision and disorientation. Twin monitors showed the same scene. It took him a moment to realize that one was the simulator and the other was a live broadcast from ships and news helicopters far out at sea. The similarity between the two scenes was uncanny.

Heads swiveled toward him; he tried to smile. Emil Calamaro and Petey Sandersen were plainly delighted to see him. Petey took his hands off the keyboard, where he had been tinkering with the R’lyeh simulation, and, supporting himself on the edge of the table, leaned toward Geoff with his hand out, shouting “He is Risen!” with evangelical fury.

Geoff mumbled his reply.

“We want to thank you and honor you. What you’ve done is beyond amazing!”

Calamaro was rising, his dark sneer full of satisfaction. He too pressed in close to Geoff. “Indeed, it is completely astonishing. You have greatly eased the Rising. We have watched the ascent again and again, and it is most pleasing. Those who did not witness this day firsthand will be able to witness it over and over again for ages to come. It will be as it was.”

On the live screen, the tossing sea had only just begun to tremble; but in the simulator that commemorated the occasion, the ocean had become a frothing stew of green slime belched from the depths. Dark angular towers began to thrust from the waters, black windows gaping, doors opening like the mouths of the abyss. To gaze upon the exhumed city was madness—even he, its author, could hardly bear to look. Then again, he felt he was no more its author than author of what the networks were transmitting.

Petey pulled over a keyboard and paused the simulation. It began to tick backward, then ran forward again at greater speed. R’lyeh was swallowed by the waves, vomited out, swallowed up again. Warren shook his shoulder. “Good work, Geoff. I mean it. Outstanding. You’ve really outdone yourself.”

Meanwhile, the actual rising would not be rushed; it could not be paused or reversed. If only!

The news cameras drifted over the open sea. Its gentleness filled him with dread.

“All right,” Petey said. “Plenty of time for this later.”

As he spoke, the simulated R’lyeh had just crested the false waters. The great stage door to the false dreamer’s lair, the tilted slab, had begun to gape. The shape within, waking, was caught by the stroke of a key. Paralyzed. Not dead. Not even sleeping. On hold.

Petey pushed the keyboard aside and picked up a remote. He pointed it at the live monitor and turned up the volume.

***

First you heard the thrum of helicopter blades. After a moment, seeping through, a deeper sound like the tolling of drowned bells vibrated out of the television and filled the listeners in the conference room with the solemnity of the moment. Geoff sank into a chair. He had seen all this before. He had dreamed it, lived it, fought it. Failed. His sense of defeat was complete.

Water slithered and eddied from the dark complexities beneath. Huge mounded shapes. Cruise ships and luxury liners had come close for the occasion, while keeping a respectful distance from the turbulence. The cameras showed their decks and rails thronged with wealthy golden worshipers. Several aircraft carriers waited on the horizon in case of international incidents. But only one incident mattered now, and it transcended all merely “international” concerns.

The bells tolled louder, and at a slowly rising pitch. Something in Geoff thrilled at the sound in spite of himself. He had dreamed this. He had been down there in the depths. He had met the Dreamer mind to mind and been utterly defeated, and yet…and yet…

The waters surged. The chopper pulled closer. From far down in the foul foam came something shining and angular, all points and slopes and corners, upthrusting towers and turrets, and still those bells, so wrong, so infinitely wrong.

Petey and Emil turned to one another, worried looks flitting.

Something gleaming, something of brilliant shining ivory whiteness, suddenly breached the surface. A gasp went through the room.

The helicopter lurched as if the pilot had lost control, caught by a vicious gust from below.

As the chopper recovered, the view stabilized. The distant television crew was shouting about the near disaster, distracted from the inevitable one. They were closer to the water now, closer to the immensity that continued rising into light and air. Gargantuan bluffs of black dripping stone, chiseled shapes covered with slime and ancient marine encrustations. And atop all this, the greatest monstrosity, the holiest of holies…

A church.

Exactly that. A small old-fashioned English country church with a single perfect spire. Sparkling white and dripping wet, it perched atop the squalid rocks as if it had been lifted whole from Geoff’s reveries and transplanted in this unlikeliest of spots.

Geoff himself could only stare as seawater flowed from the bell tower, as the pealing bells grew louder, clearer, cheerier.

They filled the room until Petey and Calamaro had to clamp their hands over their ears. The two men whirled on Geoff with their eyes bulging, mouths flapping but unable to speak.

Geoff backed away with both hands on the miter, trying desperately to pry it off, to throw it down and run, even though he knew they could not harm him now. He had given birth to this thing. He and it were one and the same. Minds had mingled in the depths, and now…

Onscreen, the TV screen, the doors of the church swung wide. The timbre of the bells deepened abruptly, sounding a sour and dismal note. Petey and Calamaro, pierced by sudden rapture, whirled to take in the sight.

The church was not empty—hardly that. The white outer shell, the churchlike carapace, had transfigured the softer thing inside, and decidedly not for the better.

It lashed out, and the helicopter went down in an instant. Green water closed over the lens. For a moment that monitor showed the bubbling surface of the sea from underneath. Sunlight flared across the screen, but shadows were spreading. Somewhere, the cruise ships were being pulled under one by one. You could hardly hear the screams above the bells, which tolled and tolled. They would stop for nothing and nothing could block out the sound.

Not even Warren: “You’ve done it, Geoff!”

Not even Emil Calamaro: “Big, big congrats!”

Not even Petey Sandersen, conveying the last words he heard or wanted to hear: “Don’t take the miter off! The job is yours! Forever!”

Dark Blue

by Alan Dean Foster (2007)

The Sea below the keel of the ocean-going ketch Repera was the bluest blue Chase Rontgern had ever seen. It was bluer than blue. Bluer than the clearest sky, bluer than all the lapis-lazuli in Afghanistan, bluer than sapphire or azurite or a studio track by Coltrane. Rontgern had spent considerable time on a number of boats on two oceans but he had never seen blue like this. He asked Captain Santos about it.

“There are no fish here, in this deep, deep water. No fish because no zooplankton. No zooplankton because no phytoplankton.” Standing on the flying bridge with his long hair tucked under his cap and dark wrap-around shades shielding his eyes from the sun and wind, Santos nodded to port. “With no microscopic life in the water, no life of any kind, there nothing to scatter the sunshine. Everything get absorbed except the blue. The sun pours down unobstructed and just keep going, going, until it fade away to indigo-black.”

Rontgern nodded his understanding as he raised the expensive binoculars that were hanging from the padded strap around his neck. They hadn’t seen a thing since leaving Pitcairn behind. Only a few patrolling seabirds searching diligently for the fish Santos insisted were not there.

They had tried but had been unable to land at Pitcairn. The island’s famous swells were too high for their single rigid inflatable to chance a dash for the concrete and rock breakwater that protected the tiny artificial harbor at Bounty Bay, and given the rough conditions the islanders were not inclined to risk one of their vital Moss aluminum longboats just to venture out and say hello to those on board a tramp ketch like the Repera.

As it had sailed on eastward out of sight of Pitcairn’s towering green-clad peaks, Rontgern had reflected in passing that the original Bounty mutineers had indeed succeeded in isolating themselves on one of the least accessible islands in the entire South Pacific. Now the Repera was headed for a speck of land that was even more inaccessible than Pitcairn, and devoid even of the resilient descendents of rowdy mutineers and their dedicated vahines.

A more or less oval chunk of solid coralline limestone rising straight up out of the ocean from a depth of three and a half kilometers, Henderson Island lay another two hundred kilometers northeast of Pitcairn, which in turn was more than ^wice that distance from where he had met up with the Repera in the Gambier islands of southern French Polynesia. The nearest airstrip to Henderson was on Mangareva, more than six hundred kilometers away in the Gambiers. No aircraft could land on Pitcairn and it was too far to reach by chopper. The closest outpost of civilization to Henderson in the other direction was Easter Island, which lay so far over the dead-flat horizon that the inhabitants of Mangareva were next-door neighbors by comparison.

“Why on Earth would you want to go to a god-forsaken place like this Henderson?” his wealthy friends had asked him once he’d explained what and where it was. “Why not go to Maui, or the Bahamas? You say there’s nothing on Henderson but birds, and you’re not a birder.”

That much was true. Chase Rontgern did not collect bird sightings. Nor was he an especially avid scuba diver. What he did collect was money, and at that he was very good.

For more than two years he had been researching the history of ships that had gone missing in Henderson’s vicinity. Ships that had been blown off course, or had become lost due to navigational error, or had simply foundered in storms. Vessels that disappeared in this part of the Pacific well and truly vanished. No ship that encountered trouble in the azure wasteland could expect help.

Since leaving Mangareva they had seen exactly one other vessel; a big container ship heading for Cape Horn. Most commercial traffic bound from the South Pacific for the Atlantic took the easier, much faster route north to the Panama Canal. As for fishing boats, there were no long-liners here, no purse seiners, because as Captain Santos had pointed out, there were no fish. There were no fish because there was nothing for them to eat. Concerning bottom trawlers—the bottom was three or four kilometers down and unknown. Too deep to trawl safely for too little potential reward for a big dragliner to take the risk.

When Henderson itself finally hove into view days later its appearance was something of an anticlimax. Rontgern was not disillusioned. The reality matched the few pictures he had been able to find of the place. Unlike Bora Bora or Rarotonga, Pacific islands that boasted dramatic central peaks and gleaming turquoise lagoons, Henderson was a makatea island. Several others were scattered around the Pacific; huge blocks of limestone and coral that had been uplifted and exposed to the air when the sea levels had fallen during the last ice age. Not only were they usually devoid of beaches, a visitor could not even walk very easily on a makatea. Rain eroded the limestone into razor-sharp, boot-slicing, flesh-shearing blades and pinnacles of solid rock.

As opposed to animals and humans, certain well-adapted birds and vegetation thrived in the otherwise hostile makatea environment. Shearwaters and noddys, petrels and four species of endemics made their home on Henderson. Its only regular human visitors were Pitcairners who came once or twice a year to collect valuable hardwood like miro for the carvings that constituted a substantial part of their income. Other than that, Henderson had been left to the birds, the crabs, a few lizards, and the ubiquitous Polynesian rat. Except for one rumored spring visible only on the single narrow beach at low tide there was not even any fresh water to be had. Not a good place, Rontgern reflected, on which to be marooned.

But then, he was not interested in spending time on Henderson, however wildly attractive the place might be to the rare visiting scientist.

It was a photograph that had finally brought him to this, one of the most isolated tropical islands on Earth. It was the same photograph that had led him to charter the Repera and its somewhat taciturn but efficient crew. His cultivated friends in New York had been right about one thing: no one anywhere much wanted to go to Henderson. It had taken him months, a lot of searching on the net, and an extensive exchange of querulous emails before he found a captain with a ship willing to travel so far from the bounds of civilization, to waters where no help could be expected in the event of trouble, no passing ship could be hailed for assistance, and there was nothing to see and no one to visit. Happily, in the course of their exchange of emails Salvatore Santos had not pressed his prospective employer for a trip rationale. All that had been necessary was to agree on a price.

Henderson slid past astern, its stark white thirty-meter high cliffs gleaming like chalk in the sun, its population of seabirds forming a flat, hazy gray cloud above the trees as they cherished the one bit of dry land for hundreds of kilometers in every direction. The island was still in view astern when Rontgern checked his GPS one more time, turned to the Captain, and declared with confidence, "This is the place.”

Looking up from the wheel and his bridge instruments, the unshaven Portuguese-Tahitian squinted at his employer. “Here?” He waved a sun-cured hand at the surrounding sea, which obligingly had subsided almost to a flat calm. “You want to drop anchor here?"

Rontgern smirked. He knew something the Captain didn’t know. If his two years of painstaking research was right, he knew something nobody else knew. With the possible exception of the bored astronaut on board the space shuttle who had taken the photograph that the energetic Rontgern had scanned in more detail than anyone at NOAA or NASA.

“Check your depth finder.”

Santos had not bothered to look at that particular readout since leaving Pitcairn. The ocean out here was benthonic, and even this close to Henderson it dropped off sharply into the abyss. Under the circumstances, the Captain showed remarkable aplomb as he checked the relevant monitor and reported.

“What do you know? There is an uneven but largely flat surface thirty meters directly below us. I am assuming it is a seamount. It is very small and at a depth that renders it harmless to passing ships, of which there are not any around here anyway. So it not surprising it is absent from the charts.”

“It’s not all that small.” Having looked forward for so long to springing this knowledge on someone else, Rontgern found that he was enjoying himself immensely. “Not just a seamount.”

Santos eyed him uncertainly. Out of the corner of an eye Rontgern could see several members of the half-dozen strong crew watching the two men from the deck. The Captain finally smiled.

“Ah, I understand now. You are a crazy man. I knew that when you hired me and my boat to bring you all this way. But that didn’t bother me. A man can be as crazy as he like, so long as his money is sane.”

Kneeling, Rontgern opened the small watertight Pelican case that occupied a compartment on the bridge near his feet. It contained none of the expensive camera gear it was designed to coddle and protect. Instead, it was full of envelopes, flash drives, and a laptop computer. Selecting and unsealing one of the envelopes, he removed several glossy 8x10 prints and handed the top one to Santos.

“Have a look at this.”

The Captain examined the photo with fresh interest. “Henderson,” he observed immediately. “Taken from space. View slightly from the south. Even with the clouds, you can’t mistake the shape.”

“Very good.” Rontgern handed him the next picture.

Studying it, Santos frowned. “Henderson again, much closer view.” He tapped the picture with a forefinger. “Here; the water is so clear, you can see a suggestion of the seamount we are over right now.”

Rontgern repressed a knowing smirk as he passed over the third and last picture. “That last one was a blowup, multiple magnification. Here’s a much better one, with the resolution computer and radar-enhanced and corrected for depth, shadow, atmospheric distortion, and other obscuring factors I needn’t go into in detail.”

Santos studied the picture. Looked at it for a long time. Then he handed it back to its owner. “I still think it is nothing but a seamount.”

“Seamounts have broken crowns. Or they’re conical in shape. Or capped with solidified lava, or they sport a sunken lagoon.” He gestured with the photo. “This one is as flat on top as a Los Angeles parking lot. Except for the bumps. Bumps with very distinctive shapes.”

A corner of the Captain’s mouth twitched slightly upward. “You think it is a parking lot?”

Rontgern had to laugh. “I’m not crazy, Salvatore, despite what you might think. Those ‘bumps’ are ships that have gone down here. At least four, maybe as many as ten. Maybe more than that, once we get down there. Two of the four are definitely pre-nineteenth century. You know what that means? Maybe treasure galleons that were sailing back to Spain from the Philippines. Trying to sneak around the Horn instead of sailing to Peru or Panama along routes that were haunted by English privateers like Drake. Before they could reach the Horn they got lost, or slammed into Henderson’s rocks. Most went down to the depths. But a few,” and again he tapped the photo, “a few fetched up here. At a depth reachable with nothing more elaborate than conventional sport diving equipment.” He stared hard as he slipped the pictures back into the envelope. “Put down the anchor.”

Santos hesitated a moment longer. Then he shrugged. “Its your money, Mr Rontgern. You may be right. There may be a ship or two down there. But I no think there any treasure. And even if there is, anything we might find belongs to the British government. Henderson is part of the Pitcairn British Overseas Territory.”

“That’s absolutely correct.” With slow deliberation, Rontgern returned the envelope to the watertight case. “And you can see for yourself how well this part of that territory is policed. Should we find anything we’ll declare it immediately when we return to Mangareva. I’m sure you will be the first to go out of your way to inform the British consul in Papeete about any discoveries we may make.” The Captain pursed his lips. To Rontgern they almost seemed to be moving slowly in and out, in and out, in concert with the Captain’s thoughts. Finally Santos smiled; a broad, wide smile.

Rontgern nodded curtly. He had gambled on just such a reaction. As soon as he had met Santos, he knew it was not much of a gamble. “We understand each other, I think.”

“Perfectly, Mr Rontgern. I will tell Bartolomeo to start readying the scuba gear.”

The water was not just clear: in the absence of microscopic pelagic life and located thousands of kilometers from the nearest source of pollutants, it was virtually transparent. As soon as he hit the water and started down, Rontgern felt as if he were diving in air. The only sound following his entry was the regularity of his respiration and the sporadic mutter of bubbles from the regulator.

As for the questions that had brought him to this isolated corner of the planet, they were answered as soon as he entered the water.

Just by looking down and without the aid of any special equipment he could see the outlines of sunken ships resting atop the seamount thirty meters below. Not only could he see the ships, the water was so clear that he could identify each vessel’s type, condition, approximate age, and a host of other informative factors. Twisting as he slowly descended fins first, he located Santos and gave him the thumbs-up sign. His hair drifting lazily behind him like black seaweed, the Captain nodded and responded in kind.

Inclining his head and body downward, an excited Rontgern accelerated his descent.

Inner exploration of the various shipwrecks and the actual search for treasure and other valuables would take place on future dives, with additional equipment. A thirty-meter descent would require a proper surface interval before the next dive. No matter. Now that his research had been confirmed, he found that he was not impatient. After all, it was not as if they were likely to be interrupted by other divers in the course of their salvage work during the next couple of weeks.

They would remove the most valuable items first, hide them in the Repera’s ballast lockers and elsewhere on the ketch, unload the prizes at night onto the private plane he would charter at Mangareva, and then return here for more. He was not worried about parceling out shares. There should be sufficient booty for all, and he would see to it that enough went to the crew of the ketch so that any notion of, say, tossing him overboard and keeping it all for themselves did not have any reason to get a grip on their thoughts. Besides, he knew more about this place than did any of them. He might know more than they could see. Unless they were utterly stupid, they would want to keep him alive in order to make use of that knowledge.

He was elated to see that there were not two but three galleons— and one ship that despite its state of advanced decrepitude looked decidedly Chinese. A load of Ming porcelain—now that would be a treasure indeed! As for the other, more recent shipwrecks, they could hold all manner of lucrative cargo. But it was the prospect of finding older vessels that had drawn him here, and it was those antique craft that understandably now captured the greater part of his interest.

One galleon in particular seemed to be in much better shape than the others. Unfortunately, it teetered on the steep-sided edge of the seamount. Even at this depth there was the danger that a particularly strong storm surge might send it toppling over into unreachable depths. He reassured himself that since it had laid thus for hundreds of years he was probably worrying unnecessarily. Signaling to Santos and to the other diver who was accompanying them, he finned off in the direction of the precariously balanced vessel.

It would be all right, he saw as he began to circle it. Its position was more stable than he had first surmised. Though lying at a sharp angle on its port side, the keel was jammed firmly against a long, narrow ridge of rock that protruded from the top of the seamount. Swimming parallel to the bottom, he swam from the bow toward the stern. Off to his right the ocean dropped away to cold, dark depths unknown.

Strange rock formation, he decided. It almost looked as if it could have been carved. That was impossible, of course. It was simply a natural limestone or lava ridge that had eroded away to form an unusually straight bulwark atop the rest of the underlying rock. He remained convinced of that until he reached the stern of the galleon. Hovering there, he was able to read the name below the great cabin: Santa Isabella de Castillo. Researching that name once he was back on dry land would likely tell him the ship’s history and the cargo she had been carrying on her last, ill-fated voyage.

Something else at the stern caught his eye. More rock, mounded up to form a V-shaped fissure. The stern of the galleon had been wedged directly into this crevice.

How could that have happened, he wondered? It seemed too perfect, too unnaturally precise a fit to be a consequence of the unruly action of wind and wave and current. Still, it was not an impossible coincidence. Storm-driven sub-surface currents could certainly have slammed the ship hard into such a pocket of waiting rock.

It was when he saw the second galleon, and soon afterward the first steamship, jammed stern-first into exactly identical crevices that his thoughts began wandering to places that had nothing to do with treasure salvage, archeology, or the conventional history of South Pacific exploration.

Spinning around in the water, he saw that Santos had come up very close behind him. Gesturing at the third wedged ship, Rontgern formed a vee-shape with his hands, gestured at the vessel, and pushed his chin toward the vee. Santos nodded to show that he immediately grasped what the other man was striving to convey. By way of further response he gestured downward, over the side of the seamount, and indicated that Rontgern should follow. Thoughts churning, the bemused entrepreneur started to comply, but a check of his air dissuaded him. They had been exploring at depth for a substantial period of time. He had just enough air left in his tank to manage a proper slow, safe ascent coupled with a conservative safety stop at five meters.

Hovering over the side of the seamount, however, Santos kept gesturing for Rontgern to follow him downward. Rontgern shook his head. No doubt a better, more experienced diver than the Manhattan-bound entrepreneur, the Captain would naturally have used less air and would have more remaining, as would the deckhand who accompanied them. A cautious Rontgern saw that the other man was excited. Reluctantly, he kicked away from the stern of the sunken steamship and followed the Portuguese to the edge, wondering what was so important that the Captain felt the need to emphasize it so close to the end of the first of what would be many dives.

Instead of pausing to wait for him, Captain and crewman promptly lowered their heads—and started to swim straight down.

Rontgern immediately held back. What was wrong with them? Were they suffering from a combination of exhilaration and nitrogen narcosis? Had they lost their bearings, control of their senses? He hovered in open water at the edge of the seamount as the two divers continued their rapid and inexplicable descent. If they went much deeper they would find themselves in real danger no matter how much air they had left.

That was when Rontgern saw that something was coming up out of the abyss.

At first he thought his eyes were playing tricks on him. It was no stretch of the imagination to envision something like that occurring at this depth, even in absolutely clear water. Weaving and working its way downward, unobstructed sunlight wove lazily intertwining patterns in the open water column. As Rontgern stared, wide-eyed, some of the patterns began to darken. Each rising shape slowly became something solid. Each was individually as big as the sunken steamship. Independent of the light that illuminated them, they writhed and twisted and coiled expectantly in the transparent, pellucid liquid. Splotches and dark streaks grew visible on the side of each...

Tentacle.

Expelling bubbles in a violent, explosive stream, Rontgern started kicking for the surface. Santos and his companion were forgotten. If luck held, their presence might be enough to divert the ascending monster away from Rontgern. Architeuthis, he thought wildly as he swam for the surface. Giant squid. Or perhaps the fabled Colossal squid, slithered up from the Antarctic to graze on passing whales. Rontgern kicked as he had never kicked in his life.

He had no choice but to pause at five meters and decompress. If he did not outgas the nitrogen bubbles that had accumulated in his bloodstream, the bends would kill him as surely and as painfully as any sea monster. He forced himself not to look down, not to seek for what even now might be reaching up for him. If it came for him, better that his last conscious view was not one of hooked, flesh-ripping suckers and sharp slicing beak. Taken by the kraken, he thought wildly. What an end for a wily double-dealer from New York.

He did, however, have to periodically check his dive computer. Three minutes left on the safety stop—then two. Was it possible for a man to sweat underwater? He fought back the urge to cut short the decompress time and shoot for the surface early.

Only seconds left to go now...

He did not so much pop out of the water as breach. Flailing and kicking, he made it to the side of the ketch in minutes. Hands were waiting to take his weighted buoyancy compensator and tank and haul him out after them. Gasping for air, he collapsed on the warm, worn teak deck. Then it occurred to him: what if the monster came up after the boat itself? Though he had not seen its body, judging from the length of those monstrous tentacles alone it was more than big enough to drag the ketch down to its doom, like some lost, forlorn ship in an ancient Spanish woodcut.

Rushing to the side, he peered hesitantly over the gunwale just in time to see emerging from the water right where he had come up—the Captain, and his deckhand. Of the monster there was no sign.

He was there when the crew helped Santos onto the deck. Sucking in fresh, uncompressed air, the Captain looked perfectly unfazed. A bewildered Rontgern found himself wondering if they really had encountered anything more substantial down there other than a trick of light and water.

“Did you see it?” he stammered. “Did either of you see it?”

“Of course we saw it.” With the help of a crewman Santos started to peel himself out of his wetsuit. “What do you think I was pointing out to you?”

So perfunctory was this response that Rontgern found himself momentarily at a loss for words. “You mean, you saw that monster and you deliberately swam toward it? And beckoned for me to join you?”

Santos was stepping out of the suit now and left standing in his Speedos. When a crewmember offered a towel, the Captain waved it off. The sun would dry him.

“Beautiful, wasn’t He?”

“Beautiful?” A stunned Rontgern could only gape. “I don’t know, I didn’t see more than the arms, and I didn’t hang around long enough to...” He paused in mid-sentence. His brow creased. “What do you mean, ‘he’?”

“The Great Old One. He who waits dreaming. Only when rarely disturbed does He rise, and then usually only for a few precious moments.” The Captain’s eyes glittered. “You should have followed. You would have been privy to a sight accorded so very few. I have to thank you, Mr. Rontgern. It is expensive to bring my people here to pay homage. We would have come another time anyway, but you have paid for that and more, and for that I thank you.”

“Visit? Your ‘people’? What the hell are you blithering on about?”

“We come here sometimes,” Santos told him. “To pray. Others have come before us, and others will come after us.” He gestured over the side. “They are down there, believers and unbelievers together. Sacrifices to Him who is Lord of the sunken city. No one else comes here. Few ships pass over this part of the southern ocean. There is no oil. There is no tuna. He is safe there in His House, dreaming the dead, until the time comes when He shall rise again.”

The Captain ceased the drivel. But though no more words emerged from his mouth, his lips continued to move in and out, in and out, as they had on one or two previous occasions. The curious

habit reminded a suddenly startled Rontgern of a breathing fish. He started to back away. But there was nowhere to back away to, there on the deck of the sunstruck ketch in the middle of the great empty southern ocean.

“If you were coming anyway,” he stammered, “then why did you want to risk bringing me along? I’m not part of your stupid cult, whatever it is. Not that I care. I’m only interested in the ships that are down there and their contents. You can worship your big squid god or whatever it is all you want. I’ll even contribute an appropriate offering, if that will make you feel better about working on this site.”

“A further offering on your part is not necessary,” Santos burbled softly. “That is for His disciples to provide, at a later and appropriate time. But we are glad you are with us nonetheless.”

The rest of the crew was closing in now, Rontgern saw. So quietly that he hadn’t noticed. Like a shoal of sharks. Their lips began to pulse in and out, in and out, in a whispered, concerted, croaking chant, forming words in a language he did not recognize. For the first time in his adult life he was suddenly very, very scared. If only he had not been so confident in his own abilities to dominate others, if only he had taken more time to check out the credentials of the ship and its crew.

If only someone had bothered to tell him that repera means “leper” in the Tahitian language.

“If you don’t want me to make an offering and you’re not going to make one yourselves, then why do you care that I’m here with you?” he mumbled.

One of the crew, streaked and sweaty, was very close to him now. It struck Rontgern forcefully that the man smelled strongly of fish. No, that wasn’t quite right. He corrected himself. The man smelled fishy.

Santos was smiling at him again. A wide smile. Too wide, in fact, for a face that Rontgern could now see was not entirely human.

“As you know, it a long way here from Mangareva, and a long way back, and we all of us get so very, very tired of whole trip eat nothing but seafood.”

Copping Squid

by Michael Sea (2009)

Ricky Deuce, twenty-eight and three years sober, was the night clerk at Mahmoud’s Mom and Pop Market. He was a small, leanly muscled guy, and as he sat there, the darkness outside deepening toward midnight, his tight little Irish face looked pleased with where he was. Behind Ricky on his stool, the whole wall was bottles of every kind of Hard known to man.

This job was easy money—a sit-down after his day forklifting at the ware-house. He already owned an awesomely restored sixty-four Mustang, and had near ten K saved, and by rights he ought to be casting around for where he might take off to next. But the fact was, he got a kick out of clerking here till two am each night.

A kick that was not powder nor pill nor smoke nor booze, that was not needing any of them, especially not booze, which could shine and glint in its bottles and surround him all night long, and he not give a shit. He never got tired of sitting here immune, savoring the unadorned adventure of being alive.

Not that the job lacked irritants. There were obnoxious clientele, and these preponderated toward the deep of night.

Ricky thought he heard one even now.

Single cars shushed past outside, long silences falling between, and a scuffy tread advanced along the sidewalk. A purposeful tread that nonetheless staggered now and then. It reminded Ricky that he was It, the only island of comfort and light for a half a mile in all directions, in a big city, in the dead of night.

Then, there in Mahmoud’s Mom and Pop Market’s entryway, stood a big gaunt black guy. Youngish, but with a strange, outdated look, his hair growing weedily out towards a ’fro. His torso and half his legs were engulfed in an oversize nylon athletic jacket that looked like it might have slept in an alley or two, and which revealed the chest of a dark T-shirt that said something indecipherable RULES. The man had a drugged look, but he also had wide-arched, inquiring brows. His glossy black eyes checked you out, as if maybe the real him was somewhere back in there, smarter than he looked.

But then, as he lurched inside the store, and into the light, he just looked drunk.

“Evening,” Ricky said smiling. He always opened by giving all his clientele the benefit of the doubt.

The man came and planted his hands of the counter, not aggressively, it seemed, but in the manner of someone tipsily presenting a formal proposition.

“Hi. I’m Andre. I need your money, man.”

Ricky couldn’t help laughing. “What a coincidence! So do I!”

“Okay, Bro,” Andre said calmly, agreeably. As if he was shaping a counter-proposal, he straightened and stepped back from the counter. “Then I’ma cut your fuckin ass to ribbons till you give me your fuckin money!”

The odd picture this plan of action presented almost made Ricky laugh again, but then the guy whipped out and flipped open—with great expertise—a very large gravity knife, which he then swept around by way of threat, though still out of striking range. Ricky was so startled that he half fell off his stool.

Getting his legs under him, furious at having been galvanized like that, Ricky shrieked, “A knife? You’re gonna to rob me with a fucking knife? I’ve got a fucking knife!”

And he unpocketed his lock-back Buck knife, and snapped it open. All this while he found himself once again trying to decipher the big, uncouthly lettered word on the guy’s T-shirt above the word RULES.

Andre didn’t seem drunk at all now. He swept a slash over the counter at Ricky’s head, which Ricky had to recoil from right smartly.

“You shit! You do that again and I’m gonna slice your—”

Here came the gravity knife again, as quick as a shark, and, snapping his head back out of the way, Ricky counter-slashed at the sweeping arm, and felt the rubbery tug of flesh unzipped by the tip of his Buck’s steel.

Andre abruptly stepped back and relaxed. He put his knife away, and held up his arm. It had a nice bloody slash across the inner forearm. He stood there letting it bleed for Ricky. Ricky had seen himself and others bleed, but not a black man. On black skin, he found, blood looked more opulent, a richer red, and so did the meat underneath the skin. That cut would take at least a dozen stitches. They both watched the blood soak the elastic cuff of Andre’s jacket.

“So here’s what it is,” said Andre, and dipped his free hand in the jacket and pulled out a teensy, elegant little silver cellphone. “Ima call the oinkers, and say I need an ambulance because this mad whacked white shrimp—that’s you—slashed me when I just axed him for some spare change, and then Ima ditch the shit outta this knife before they show up, and it won’t matter if they believe me or not, when they see me bleedin like this they gonna take us both down for questioning and statements. How’s your rap sheet, Chief, hey? So look. Just give me a little money and I’m totally outta your face. It don’t have to be much. Ten dollars would do it!”

This took Ricky aback. “Ten dollars? You make me cut you for ten dollars?”

“You wanna give me a hundred, give me a hundred! Ten’s all you gotta give me—and a ride. A short ride, over to the Hood.”

“You want money and a ride! You think I’m outta my mind? You wanna ride to your connection to score, and when we get there, you’re gonna try an get more money out of me. And that’s the best case scenario.” Ricky was dismayed to hear a hint of negotiation in his own words. It was true, he’d had a number of contacts with the San Francisco Police Department, as the result of alcohol-enhanced conflicts here and there. But also, he felt intrigued by the guy. Something fascinating burned in this Andre whack. Intensity came off him in waves, along with his faint scent of street-funk. The man was consumed by a passion. In the deformed letters on his T-shirt, Ricky thought he could make out a T-H-U.

“What could I be coppin for ten bucks?” crowed Andre. “I’m not out to harm you! This just has to do with me. See, it’s required. I have to get these two things from someone else, the money and the ride.”

“Explain that. Explain why you have to get these two things from someone else.”

Andre didn’t answer for a moment. He stared and stared, not exactly at Ricky, but at something he seemed to see in Ricky. He seemed to be weighing this thing he detected. He had eyes like black opals, and strange slow thoughts seemed to move within their shiny hemispheres . . .

“The reason is,” he said at last, “that’s the procedure. There are these particular rules for seeing the one I want to see.”

“And who is that?”

“I can’t tell you. I’m not allowed.”

It was almost time to close up anyway. Ricky became aware of a powerful tug of curiosity, and aware of the fact that Andre saw it in his eyes. This put Ricky’s back up.

“No. You gotta give me something. You gotta tell me at least—“

“Thassit! Fuck you!” And Andre flipped open the cellphone. His big spatulate fingertips made quick dainty movements on the minute keys. Ricky heard the bleep, minuscule but crystal clear, of the digits, and then a micro-voice saying, “Nine-one-one emergency.”

“I been stabbed by a punk in a liquor store! I been stabbed!”

Ricky violently shook his head, and held up his hands in surrender. With a bleep, Andre clicked off. “Believe me! You’re not makin a mistake. It’s something I can’t talk about, but you can see it. You can see it yourself. But the thing is, it’s got to be now. We can’t hem an haw. And Ima tell you now, now that you’re in, that there’s something in it for you, something good as gold. Trust me, you’ll see. Help me with this knot,” he said, pulling a surprisingly clean looking handkerchief from his jacket pocket. He folded it—rather expertly, Ricky thought—into a bandage. Ricky wrapped it round the wound, and tied the ends in a neat, tight squareknot, feeling as his fingers pressed against flesh that he was forming a bond with this whack by stanching his blood. He was accepting a dangerous complicity with his whack aims, whatever they might be . . .

Bandaged, Andre held out his hand. Ricky put a ten in it.

“Thanks,” said Andre. “So. Where’s your ride?”

The blue Mustang boomed down Sixteenth through the Mission. All the signals were on blink. Here and there under the streetlights, there was a wino or two, or someone walking fast, shoulders hunched against the emptiness, but mostly the Mustang rolled through pure naked City, a vacant concrete stage.

Ricky liked driving around at this hour, and often did it on his own for fun. When he was a kid, he’d always felt sorcery in the midnight streets, in the mosaic of their lights, and he’d never lost the sense of unearthly shapes stirring beneath their web, stirring till they almost cohered, as the stars did for the ancients into constellations. Tonight, with mad, bleeding Andre riding shotgun, the lights glittered wilder possibilities, and a sinister grandeur seemed to lurk in them.

They passed under the freeway, and down to the Bayside, hanging south on Third. After long blocks of big blank buildings, Third took a snaky turn, and they were rolling through the Hood.

Pawn shops and thrift stores and liquor stores. A whiff of Mad Dog hung over it, Mad Dog with every other drug laced through it. The Hood was lit, was like a long jewel. The signals were working here.

The signals stretched out of sight ahead, like a python with scales of red and green, their radiance haloed in a light fog that was drifting in off the Bay. And people were out, little knots of them near the corners. They formed isolated clots of gaudy life, like tide pools, all of them dressed in baggy clothes of bright-colored nylon, paneled and logo-ed with surreal pastels under the emerald-and-ruby signal glare. And as they stood and talked together, they moved in a way both fitful and languid, like sealife bannering in a restless sea.

The signals changed in pattern to a slow tidal rhythm. It seemed a rhythm meant to accommodate rush-hour traffic. You got a green for two blocks max, and then you got a red. A long, long red. Ricky’s blue Mustang was almost the only car on the road in this phantom rush-hour, creeping down the long bright python two blocks at a time, and then idling, idling interminably, while the sealife on the corners seemed astir with interest and attention.

Ricky had no qualms about running red lights on deserted streets, but here it seemed dangerous, a declaration of unease.

“Fuck this!” he said at their fourth red light, and slipped the brake, and rolled forward. At a stroll though, under twenty. The Mustang lounged along, taking green and red alike, as if upon a scenic country road. The bright languid people on the corners threw laughter at them now, a shout or two, and it seemed as if the whole great submarine python stirred to quicker currents. Ricky felt a ripple of hallucination, and saw here, for just a moment, a vast inked mural, the ink not dry, themselves and all around them still half-liquid entities billowing in an aqueous universe . . .

Out of nowhere, for the first time in three years, Ricky had the thought that he would like a drink. He was amazed at this thought. He was frightened. Then he was angry.

“I’m not drivin much farther, Andre. Spit out where we’re going, and it better be nearby, or you can call nine-one-one and I’ll take my chances. I’ll bet you got a longer past with the SFPD than I do.”

“Damn you! Whip in here, then.”

This cross street was mostly houses—some abandoned—with a liquor store on the next corner, and a lot of sealife lounging out in front of it. “Pull up into some light where you can see this.”

They idled at the curb. The people on the main drag were two-thirds of a block behind them, the liquor store tide pool much closer ahead of them. Andre leaned his fanatic’s face close to Ricky. The intensity of the man was an almost tactile experience; Ricky seemed to feel the muffled crackling of his will through the inches of air that separated them. “Here,” hissed Andre. “I’m gonna give you this, just to drive me another coupla miles up into these hills. Look at it. Count it. Take it.” He shoved a thick roll of bills into Ricky’s ribs.

It was in twenties and fifties and hundreds . . . It was over five thousand dollars.

“You’re . . . you’re batshit, Andre! You make me cut you to get ten bucks, and now you—“

“Just listen.” Some people from the liquor store tide pool were drifting their way, and Ricky saw similar movement from Third Street in his rearview mirror. “What I needed,” said Andre, “was money that blood was spilt for—it didn’t matter how much blood, it didn’t matter how much money. Your ten-spot? It’s worth that much to me there in your hand. Your ten-spot and another couple miles in your car.”

The locals were flowing closer to the Mustang at both ends. Ricky fingered the money. The gist of it was, he decided, that if he didn’t follow this waking dream to its end, he would never forgive himself. “Okay,” he said.

“Another couple miles in your car,” said Andre, “an one more thing. You gotta come in.”

“You fuck! You shit! Where does it end with you? You just keep—“

“You come in, you watch me connect, and you go out again, scott-free, no harm, no strings attached! I gotta bring blood money, and I gotta bring a witness. I lied to you. It wasn’t the ride I needed. It was a witness.”

A huge shape in lavender running-sweats, and a gaunt one wearing a lime-green jumpsuit, stood beside the Mustang, smiling and making roll-down-the-window gestures. Behind the car, shapes from the main drag were moving laterally out into the street to come up to the driver’s side . . .

But in that poised moment what Ricky saw most vividly was Andre’s face, his taut narrow face within its weedy ‘fro. This man was in the visionary’s trance. His eyes, his soul were locked upon something that filled him with awe. What he pursued had nothing to do with Ricky, nor with anything Ricky could imagine, and Ricky wanted to know what that thing was.

Andre said, “Ima show you—what’s your name again?”

“Ricky.”

“Ima show you, Richie, the power and the glory. They are right here among you, man, an you don’t even see it! Hell, even these fools out here can see it!”

The Mustang was surrounded now. From behind it sprouted shapes in crimson hoods, with fists bulging inside gold velvet jacket pockets. Up to Ricky’s door (its window already open, his elbow thrust out, and five K in cash on his lap) stepped two men with thundercloud hair, wearing shades, their cheeks and brows all whorled with Maori tattooing like ink-black flames. A trio of gaudy nylon scarecrows leaned on his hood, conferring, the side-thrust bills of their caps switching like blades. But Ricky also noted that all this audience, every one of them, had eyes strictly for Andre sitting there at his side. Ricky was free to scan all those exotic, piratical faces as though he were invisible . . .

All their eyes were grave. They showed awe, and they showed loathing too, as if they abhorred something Andre had done, but just as piercingly, longed for his nerve to do it. Ricky realized he had embarked on a longer journey than he’d thought.

Andre scanned all these buccaneer faces, his fellow mariners of the Hood. A remote little grin was hanging slantwise across his jaw. “Check this out Rocky,” he growled, “an learn from these fools. Learn their awe, man, cause what I’ma show you, up in those hills, is awe.”

He shouldered his door open, and thrust himself up onto the sidewalk. He towered just as tall as the giant in lavender sweats, but he was narrow as a reed. Yet his voice fairly boomed:

“Yo! Alla you! Listen up! Looka here! Looka me! You all wanna see something? Wanna see something about something besides shit!? See something real, just for a change? See the ice-cold, spine-crawlin, hair-stirrin truth? Looka here! Looka here, at the power! Looka here! Looka here, at the glory!”

Ricky scanned all the dark faces that ringed them round, and every eye was locked upon that wild gaunt man in his rapture, who now, with a powerful shrug, shouldered off his nylon jacket. It flopped down on the sidewalk with a slither and a sigh, and lay there on the concrete like a sloughed cocoon. He stretched the fabric of his T-shirt, displaying it to every locked-on eye.

Rickey’s angle was still too acute to let him decipher exactly who it was who “ruled.” But all these encircling faces, they seemed to know. They shared a vision of awe and terror and . . . something like hope. A frosty hope, endlessly remote . . . but hope. Ricky realized that there prevailed on these mean streets a consensus of vision. He clearly saw that all these eyes had seen, and understood, a catastrophic spectacle beyond his own imagining.

Andre barked, hoarse and brutish as a sea-lion, “Jus look at me here! I have gone up to see Him, and I have looked through His eyes, and I have been where He is, time without end! An I’m here to tell you, all you dearly beloved mongrel dogs of mine, I’m here to tell you that it’s consumed me! My flesh, and my time, have been blown off my bones, by the searing winds of His breath! I’m not far off now from eternity! Not far off from infinity now!”

The raving seer then hiked up his T-shirt to his chest. What Ricky, from behind, saw there, was like a blow to his own chest, an impact of terror and dizziness, for Andre’s thorax on its left side was normal, gauntly fleshed and sinewed, but along its right side, his spine was denuded bone, and midriff was there none, and just below his hoisted shirt-hem, a lathed bracket looped down: a fleshless rib, as clean and bare as sculpture . . .

His rapt audience recoiled like a single person, some lifting their arms convulsively, as in a reflex of self-protection, or acclaim . . .

Ricky dropped the Mustang into gear, and launched it from the curb, but in that selfsame instant Andre dropped into his seat again, and slammed his door, and so he was snatched deftly away, as if he were a prize that Ricky treasured, and not a horror that Ricky had been trying to flee.

Moonsilvered, lightless blocks floated past, yet Ricky never took his eyes from the gaunt shape whose T-shirt he could now, uncomprehending, read: CHTHULU RULES.

Somehow he drove, and, shortly, pulled again to a more deserted curb, and killed the engine. On this block, a sole dim streetlight shone. Half the houses were doorless, windowless . . .

He sat with only silence between himself and a man who had, at the least, submitted to a grave surgical mutilation in the service of his deity. Ricky looked into Andre’s eyes.

That was the first challenge, to establish that he dared to look into Andre’s eyes—and he found that he did dare.

“For all you’ve lost, “Ricky said, queasily referencing the gruesome marvel, “ . . . you seem very . . . alive.”

“I’m more alive than you will ever be, and when I’m all consumed, I’ll be far more alive, and I will live forever!”

Ricky fingered the little bale of cash in his hand. “If you want me to go on, you have to tell me this. Why do you have to have a witness?”

“Because the One I’m gonna see wants someone new to see Him. He doesn’t wanna know you. He wants you to know Him.” In the darkness, Andre’s polished eyes seemed to burn with this thing that he knew, and Ricky did not.

“He wants me to know him. And then?”

“And then it’s up to you. To walk away, or to see him like I do.”

“And how is that? How do you see him?”

“All the way.”

Ricky’s hand absently stroked the gearshift knob. “The choice is absolutely mine?”

“Your will is your own! Only your knowledge will be changed!”

Ricky slipped the Mustang into gear, and once more the blue beast growled onward. “Take a right here,” purred Andre. “We going up to the top of the hills.”

It was the longest “couple miles” that Ricky had ever driven. The road poured down past the Mustang like time itself, a slow stream of old, and older houses, on steepening blocks gapped by vacant lots, or by derelict cottages whose windows and doors were coffined in grafittied plywood.

They began to wind, and a rising sense of peril woke in Ricky. He was charging up into the sinister unknown! There was just too much missing from this man’s body! You couldn’t lose all that and still walk around, still fight with knives . . . could you?

But you could. Just look at him.

The houses thinned out even more, big old trees half-shrouding them. Dead cars slept under drifts of leaves, and dim bedroom lights showed life just barely hanging on, here in the hungry heights.

As they mounted this shoulder of the hills, Ricky saw glimpses of other ridges to the right and left, rooftop-and-tree-encrusted like this one. All these crestlines converged toward the same summit, and when Ricky looked behind, it seemed that these ridges poured down like a spill of titanic tentacles. They plunged far below into a thick, surprisingly deep fog that drowned and dimmed the jeweled python of the Hood.

Near the summit, their road entered a deepening gully. At the apex stood a municipal watertank, the dull gloss of its squat cylinder half-sunk in trees and houses.

“We goin to that house there right upside the tank. See that big gray roof pokin from the trees? The driveway goes down through the trees, it’s steep an dark. Just roll down slow and easy, kill the engine, an let me get out first an talk to her.”

“Her?”

Andre didn’t answer. The road briefly crested before plunging, and Ricky had a last glimpse below of the tentacular hills rooted in the fogbank—and rooted beyond that, he imagined, more deeply still into the black floor of the Bay, as if the tentacles rummaged there for their deep-sunk food . . .

“Right there,” said Andre, pointing ahead. “See the gap in the bushes?”

The Mustang crept muttering down the dark leafy tunnel, just as a wind rose, rattling dry oak foliage all around them.

A dim grotto of grassy ground opened below. There was a squat house on it, so dark it was almost a shadow-house. It showed one dim yellow light on the floor of its porch. A lantern, it looked like. A large dark shape loomed on one side of this lantern, and a smaller dark shape lay on the other.

Ricky cut his engine. Andre drew a long, slow breath, and got out. Leaves whispered in the silence. Andre’s feet crackled across the yard. Ricky could hear the creak of his weight on the porch-steps as he climbed them, halfway up to the two dark shapes and their dim shared light. And Ricky could also hear . . . a growly breathing, wasn’t it? Yes . . . A slow, phlegmy purr of big lungs.

Andre’s voice was a new one to Ricky: low and implacable. “I’m back again, Mamma Hagg. I got the toll. I got the witness.” Then he looked back and said, “Stand on out here . . . what’s your name again?”

Ricky got out. How dangerous it suddenly seemed to declare himself in this silence, this place! Well, shit. He was here. He might as well say who he was. Loudly: “Ricky Deuce.”

When he’d said it, he found his eyes could suddenly decipher the smaller dark shape by the lantern: it was a seated black dog, a big one, with the hint of aging frost on his lower jaw, and with his red tongue hanging and gently pulsing by that frosted jaw. The dog was looking steadily back at him, its tongue a bright spoon of greedy tissue scooping up the taste of the night . . .

It was not the brute’s breathing Ricky had heard. It was Momma Hagg’s, her voice deep now from the vault of her cave-like lungs:

“Then show the toll, fool.”

Andre bent slightly to hold something towards the hound. And above his bent back, the woman in her turn became visible to Ricky. Within a briarpatch of dreads as pale as mushrooms, her monolithic black face melted in its age, her eyes two tarpools in this terrain of gnarled ebony. The shadowy bulk of her body eclipsed the mighty chair she sat in, though its armrests jutted into view, dark wood intricately carven into the coils and claws and thews of two heraldic monsters. Ricky couldn’t make out what they were, but they seemed to snarl beneath the fingers of Momma Hagg’s immense hands.

The dog’s tongue was licking what Andre held up to it—Ricky’s tenspot. The mastiff sniffed and sniffed, then snorted, and licked the bill again, and licked his chops.

“Come on up,” said Momma. “The two of you.” The big woman’s voice had a strange kind of pull to it. Like surf at your legs, its growl dragged you towards her. Ricky approached. Andre mounted to the porch, and Ricky climbed after him. He had the sensation with each step up that he entered a bigger and emptier kind of space. When he stood on the porch, Momma Hagg seemed farther off than he had expected. From her distance wafted the smell of her—an ashen scent like the drenched coals of a bonfire that had included flesh and bones in its fuel. The dog rose.

The porch took too long to cross as they followed the hound. His bright tongue lolling like a casually held torch, with just one back-glance of one crimson eye, the brute led them through a wide, doorless doorframe, and into a high dark interior that gusted out dank salty breath in their faces.

A cold gray light leaked in here, as if the fog that had swallowed the Hood had now climbed the hills, and its glow was seeping into this gaunt house. They trod a rambling, unpartitioned space, the interior all wall-less, while the outer walls were irregularly recessed in alcoves, nooks and grottos. In some of these stood furniture, oddly forlorn, bulky antique pieces—an armchair, a settee, an escritoire crusted with ancient papers. These stranded little settings—like fossils of foregone transactions whose participants had blown to dust long since—seemed to mark the passage of generations through this rambling gloom.

Ricky had the disorienting sense they had been trekking for a long, long time. He realized that the stranded furniture had a delicately furred and crusted profile in the gray light, like tide pool rocks, and a cold tidal scent touched his nostrils. Realized too, that here and there in those recesses, there were windows. Beyond their panes lay a different shade of darkness, where weedy and barnacled shadows stirred, and glinted wetly . . .

And throughout this shadowy passage, Ricky noted, on every stretch of wall he could discern, wooden wainscottings densely carved. The misty glow put a sheen on the sinuous saliences of this dark chiselwork, which seemed to depict bulbous, serpentine knots of tail and claw and thew—or perhaps woven Cephalopodia, braided greedy tentacles, and writhing prey in ragged beaks . . .

But now the walls had narrowed in, and here were stairs, and up these steep, worn stairs the hound, not pausing, led them. The air of this stairwell was slightly dizzying. The labor of the black beast climbing before them seemed to pull the two men after, as if the beast drew them in an executioner’s tumbrel. They were lifted, Ricky suddenly felt, by a might far greater than theirs, and Andre, ahead of him, seemed to shiver and quake in the flux of that dire energy. It gave Ricky the sensation of walking in Andre’s lee, and being sheltered by his body from a terror that streamed around him like a solar wind.

From the head of the stairs, a great moldy vacancy breathed down on them. They emerged into what seemed a simpler and far older structure. High-beamed ceiling, carven walls . . . it was no more than a grand passage ending at a high dark archway. The floorplanks faintly drummed, as if this was a bridgeway, unfoundationed. That great black arch ahead . . . it was inset in a wall that bowed. A metallic wall.

“The tank!” said Ricky. It jumped out of him. “That’s that big water tank!”

The Hound halted and turned. Andre too turned, gave him eyes of wild reproof, but the Hound, raising to Ricky his crimson eyes, gave him a red-tongued leer, gave him the glinty-pupiled mockery of a knowing demon. This look set the carved walls to seething, set the sculpted thews rippling, limbs lacing, beaks butchering, all brutally busy beneath their fur of dust . . .

The Hound turned again, and led them on. Now they could smell the water in the great tank—an odor both metallic and marine—and the hound’s breathing began to echo, to grow as cavernous as Mamma Hagg’s had been. Within that archway was a blackness absolute, a darkness far more perfect than the gloom that housed them. As they closed with it, the hound’s nails echoed as on a great oaken drum above a jungle wilderness. The beast dropped to its belly, lay panting, whining softly. The two men stood behind.

Within the portal, a huge glossy black surface confronted them, a great shield of glass, a mirror as big as a house. There they were in it: Ricky, Andre, the hound. The brightest feature of their tiny, distorted reflection was the bright red dot of the hound’s tongue.

Andre paused for a few heartbeats only. Then he stepped through the arch, with an odd ceremonial straightness to his posture. He gestured and Ricky followed him, seeing, as he did so, that the aperture was cut through a double metal wall that showed a cross-section of struts between.

They stood on a narrow balcony just within the tank, and felt a huge damp breath of the steel-clad lake below them, and gazed into the immense glass that was to afford them their Revelation of the Power and the Glory . . .

Andre stared some moments at his reflection, then turned to Ricky. “Now I tell you what it is . . . you say your name was Rocky?”

“Ricky.”

“Ricky, now Ima tell you what it is. I came to see, and be seen by Him. When He really sees you, you can see through His eyes, and you can live His mind.”

“But what if I don’t want to live his mind?”

“You can’t! You didn’t pay the toll! You’ll see some shit though! You’ll see enough, you’ll know that if you got any adventure in your soul, you got to pay that toll! But that’s up to you! Now look, an learn!”

He faced the mirror again, and in a cracked voice he cried, “Ia! Ia! Ia fthagn!”

And the mirror, ever so slightly, contracted, and the faintest circumference of white showed round its great rim, and encompassing that ring of pallor, something black and scaly like a sea-beast’s hide crinkled into view . . . and Ricky realized that they stood before the pupil of an immense eye.

And Ricky found his feet were rooted, and he could not turn to flee.

And he beheld a dizzying mosaic of lights flashing to life within the mighty pupil. A grand midnight vision crystallized: the whole San Francisco Bay lay within the black orb, bordered by the whole bright oroboros of coastal lights . . .

He and Andre gazed on the vista, on the Bridges’ glittering spines transecting it, all their lengths corpuscled with fleeing lights red and white. The two men gazed on the panorama and it drank their minds. Rooted, they inhabited its grandeur, even as it began a subtle distortion. The vista seemed tugged awry, torqued towards the very center of the giant’s pupil. And within that grand, slow distortion, Ricky saw strange movements. Across the Bay Bridge, near its eastern end, the cargo cranes of West Oakland—tracked monsters, each on four mighty legs—raised and bowed their cabled booms in a dinosaurian salute—obeisance, or acclaim . . . While to their left, the giant tanks on Benecia’s tarry hills, and the Richmond tanks too in the West, began a ponderous rotation on their bases, a slow spin like planets obeying the pupil’s gathering vortex.

Andre cried out, to Ricky, or just to the world he was about to leave, “I see it all coming apart! In detail! Behold!”

This last word reverberated in a brazen basso far larger than the lean man’s lungs could shape. And the knell of that voice awoke winds in the night, and the winds buffeted Ricky as though he hung in the night sky within the eye, and Ricky knew. He knew this being into whose view he’d come! Knew this monster was the King of a vast migration of titans across the eons of the countless Space-Times! Over the gale-swept universe they moved, these Great Old Ones. Across the cracked continents they trawled, they plundered! Worlds were the pastures that they grazed, and the broken bodies of whole races were the pavement that they trod!

It astonished him, the threshold to which this Andre, night-walking zealot, had brought him. He looked at Andre now, saw the man utterly alone at the brink of his apotheosis. How high he seemed to hang in the night winds! Look at the frailty of that skinny frame! The mad greed of his adventure!

Andre seemed to shudder, to gather himself. He looked back at Ricky. He looked like he was seeing in Ricky some foreigner in a far, quaint land, some backward Innocent, unknowing of the very world he stood in.

“On squid, man,” he said, “ . . . on squid, Ricky, you get big! All hell breaks loose in the back of your brain, and you can hold it, you can contain it! And then you get to watch Him feed. And now you’ll see. Just a little! Not too much! But you going to know.”

Andre turned, and faced the eye. He gathered himself, gathered his voice for a great shout:

“Here’s my witness! Here I come!”

And he vaulted from the balcony, out into the pupil—impacted it for an instant, seemed to freeze in mid-leap as if he had struck glass—but in the instant after, was within the vast inverted cone of light-starred night, and hung high, tiny but distinct, above the slowly twisting panorama of the great black Bay all shoaled and shored and spanned with light. That galactic metropolis, round its core of abyss, was—less slowly now—still contorting, twisting toward the center of the pupil . . .

And Ricky found that he too hung within it, he stood on the wide cold air in the night sky, he felt against his face the winds’ slow torque towards the the center of the Old One’s sight.

And now all Hell, with relentless slow acceleration, broke loose. The City’s blazing architected crown began to discohere, brick fleeing brick in perfect pattern, in widening pattern, till they all became pointillist buildings snatched away in the whirlwind, and from the buildings, all the people too like flung seed swirled up into the night, their evaporating arms raised as in horror, or salute, crying out their being from clouding faces that the black winds sucked to tatters . . .

He saw the great bridges braided with—and crumpling within—barnacle-crusted tentacles as thick as freeway tunnels, saw the freeways themselves—pillared rivers of light—unravelling, their traffic like red and white stars fleeing into the air, into the cyclone of the Great Old One’s attention.

And an inward vision was given to Ricky, simultaneous with this meteoric overview. For he also knew the Why of it. He knew the hunger of the nomad titans, their unappeasable will to consume each bright busy outpost they could find in the universal Black and Cold. Knew that many another world had fled, as this one fled, draining into the maw of the grim cold giants, each world’s collapsing roofs and walls bleeding a smoke of souls, all sucked like spume into the mossy curvature of His colossal jaws . . .

It was perfectly dark. It was almost silent, except for a rattle of leaves. The cold against his face had the wet bite of fog . . .

Ricky shook his head, and the dark grew imperfect. He put out his hand and touched rough wooden siding. He was alone on the porch, no lantern now, no armchair, no one else. Just dead leaves in crackly little drifts on the floorboards as—slowly and unsteadily—he started across them.

He had seen some shit. Stone cold sober, he had seen. And now the question was, who was he?

He crossed the leaf-starred grass, on legs that felt increasingly familiar. Yes . . . here was this Ricky-body that he knew, light and quick. And here was his Mustang, blown oak leaves chittering across its polished hood. And still the question was, who was he?

He was this car, for one thing, had worked long to buy it and then to perfect it. He got behind the wheel and fired it up, felt his perfect fit in this machine. Flawlessly it answered to his touch, and the blue beast purred up through the leaf-tunnel as the house—a doorless, glassless derelict—fell away behind him. But this Ricky Deuce . . . who was he now?

He emerged from the foliage, and dove down the winding highway. There was the fog-banked Bay below, the jewelled snake of the Hood glinting within its gray wet shroud, and Ricky took the curves just like his old self, riding one of the hills’ great tentacles down, down towards the sea they rooted in . . .

There was something Ricky had to do. Because in spite of his body, his nerves being his, he didn’t know who he was now, had just had a big chunk torn out of him. And there was something terrible he had to do, to locate, by desperate means, the man he had lost, to find at least a piece of him he was sure of.

His hands and arms knew the way, it seemed. Diving down into the thicker fog, he smoothly threw the turns required . . . and slid up to the curb before the liquor store they’d parked near . . . when? A universe ago. Parked and jumped out.

Ricky was terrified of what he was going to do, and so he moved swiftly to have it done with, just nodding to his recent companions as he hastened into the store—nodding to the Maoris in shades, to the guys with the switchblade cap-bills, to the guys with the crimson hoods and the golden pockets. But rushed though he was, it struck him that they were all looking at him with a kind of fascination . . .

At the counter he said, “Fifth of Jack.” He didn’t even look to see what he peeled off his wad to pay for it, but there were a lot of twenties in his change. The Arab bagged him his bottle, his eyes fixed almost raptly on Ricky’s, so Ricky was moved to ask in simple curiosity, “Do I look strange?”

“No,” the man said, and then said something else, but Ricky had already turned, in haste to get outside where he could take a hit. Had the man said no, not yet?

Ricky got outside, cracked the cap, and hammered back a stiff, two-gurgle jolt.

He scarcely could wait to let it roll down and impact him. He felt the hot collision in his body’s center, the roil of potential energy glowing there, then poked down a long, three-gurgle chaser. Stood reeling inwardly, and outwardly showing some impact as well . . .

And there it was: a heat, a turmoil, a slight numbing. No more. No magic. No rising trumpets. No wheels of light . . . The half-pint of Jack he’d just downed had no marvel to show like the one he’d just seen.

And so Ricky knew that he was someone else now, someone he had not yet fully met.

“ ’Sup?” It was the immense guy in the lavender sweats. He had a solemn Toltec-statue face, but an incongruously merry little smile.

“ ’S happnin,” said Ricky. “Hey. You want this?”

“That Jack?”

“Take the rest. Keep it. Here’s the cap.”

“No thanks.” This to the cap. The man drank. As he chugged, he slanted Ricky an eye with something knowing, something I thought so in it. Ricky just stood watching him. He had no idea at all of what would come next in his life, and for the moment, this bibulous giant was as interesting a thing as any to stand watching . . .

The man smacked his lips. “It ain’t the same, is it?” he grinned at Ricky, gesturing the bottle. “It just don’t matter any more. I mean, so I understand. I like the glow jus fine myself. But you . . . see, you widdat Andre. You’ve been a witness.”

“Yeah. I have. So . . . tell me what that means.”

“You the one could tell me. AIs I know is I’d never do it, and a whole lotta folks around here they’d never do it—but you didn’t know that, did you?”

“So tell me what it means.”

“It means what you make of it! And speakin of which, man, of what you might make of it, I wanna show you something right now. May I?”

“Sure. Show me.”

“Let’s step round here to the side of the building . . . just round here . . . ” Now they stood in the shadowy weed-tufted parking lot, where others lounged, but moved away when they appeared.

“I’m gonna show you somethin,” said the man, drawing out his wallet, and opening it.

But opening it for himself at first, for he brought it close to his face as he looked in, and a pleased, proprietary glow seemed to beam from his Olmec features. For a moment, he gloated over the contents of his billfold.

Then he extended and spread the wallet open before Ricky. There was a fat sheaf of bills in it, hand-worn bills with a skinlike crinkle. It seemed the money, here and there, was stained.

Reverently, Olmec said, “I bought this from the guy that capped the guy it came from. This is as pure as it gets. Blood money with the blood right on it! An you can have a bill of it for five hundred dollars! I know that Andre put way more than that in your hand. I know you know what a great deal this is!”

Ricky . . . had to smile. He saw an opportunity at least to gauge how dangerously he’d erred. “Look here,” he told Olmec. “Suppose I did buy blood money. I’d still need a witness. So what about that man? Will you be my witness for . . . almost five grand?”

Olmec did let the sum hang in the air for a moment or two, but then said, quite decisive, “Not for twice that.”

“So Andre got me cheap?”

“Just by my book. You could buy witnesses round here for half that!”

“I guess I need to think it over.”

“You know where I hang. Thanks for the drink.”

And Ricky stood there for the longest time, thinking it over . . .

Crawlin’ Chaos Blues

by Edward M. Erdelac (2010)

***

‘It’s like a spirit from some dark valley, something that sprung up from the ocean–like Lucifer is on the Earth…’ – Howlin’ Wolf, 1968.

Don’t nobody remember King Yeller. The Delta folks don’t like to talk ‘bout him like they do Muddy or BB or Robert Johnson, though I ‘spect he was as good as them if not better. I don’t know no white folks ever heard of him. They ain’t a page on him in all the blues books ever written.

I ‘spect I’m the only one alive knows why.

I met him in sixty-four in Chicago. In them days, the draft was in full swing, and I didn’t see no way out of it, so I figured I’d do some drivin’ around before Uncle Sam come callin’.

I’d always wanted to hear that ‘lectric blues played, so I filled up the tank of my daddy’s ’52 Catalina, bought me a sack of tamales and a jar of moon off my cousin, and drove up there from Quito, Mississippi. I got to Maxwell Street on a Saturday when the Jew Town market was open. The sidewalk buskers and the gutbucket players paid the shop owners out they tips to run extension chords from the shops to they amps, and you could hear that ragged, powered sound goin’ all up and down the market like a rattletrap Ford with a cryin’ drunk at the wheel, crashin’ into the songs of the Gospel singers, street hustlers, and the yellin’ of the rummage sellers. A lady drummer let me blow my harp with her and her husband for pocket money. She told me ‘bout a place called Silvio’s on Lake and Kedzie where Howlin’ Wolf played on the weekends. I went over there to see him.

I seent King Yeller when I pulled up. He was a little younger than me, skinny, high yeller, and red headed; a sharp dresser. A more troublesome lookin’ nigger you never did see. Had shifty, light-colored eyes and a way of talkin’ out the side of his mouth. When I first seent him, he was leanin’ on a beer sign watchin’ that Lake Street L clackin’ overhead, one bent Kool stuck in his lips, beatin’ out I Ain’t Superstitious as best he could on a rusty ol’ National with a pocket knife for a slide.

“What we got here?” he said, when I come up on the curb.

I figured he meant to hustle me and I wasn’t ‘bout to have it.

“You got Harpoon Elkins here,” I said.

“Harpoon,” he grinned, trying my name out. It wasn’t my Christian name sure, but I didn’t wanna go throwin’ that ‘round Chicago anyhow. “See you got Mississippi tags,” he said, noddin’ to my car.

“Tha’s right,” I said.

“You up from the Delta?”

“Quito,” I said.

“Man, I ain’t never heard of no Quinto.”

“Quito. What that got to do with me?”

“Ease up now, blood,” he said. I seent he had that pocket knife still between his bowin’ fingers.

“Sound better you used a bottleneck,” I said.

“My uncle taught me with a knife. You play the slide?” he asked, slappin’ his guitar.

“Naw. I blow a little harp.”

“Who don’t?” he held out his hand. “Name’s King. No relation to Martin Luther. Yeller’s what they call me. King Yeller.”

I shook. I figured he was awright, long as he didn’t ask for nothin’. I ast him was he playin’ here tonight.

“Mm hm,” he said. “Want in? It ain’t but a buck, but you look like you could use all the bread you got.”

It wasn’t no lie.

He got me past the doorman like he said he would. Pretty soon we was settin’ in one of them smoky corners at a booth with a little candle in red glass and a couple cold Blue Ribbons in front of us, watchin’ some sweet browns wrapped up tight as candy, slow draggin’ with they mens across the floor. Crammed into the corner with a jumpin’ band was the man hisself, Howlin’ Wolf, all three hundred pounds of him, black as pig iron and sweatin’ like a steam engine, crawlin’ on all fours, rollin’ his eyes, and flickin’ his tongue like a snake. He was singin’ Evil, and he sure looked like a man possessed by a devil. He was too big for the place, so goddamned big when he put his harp between his hands and blew he looked ‘bout to swallow it whole.

“How you like it, country?” Yeller hollered at me.

I just nodded my head, grinnin’. Seein’ the Wolf in action was a sight to take a man’s words.

When the set was up and the folks stopped grindin’ up on each other long enough to clap the band down, Wolf come to stand over our table, moppin’ at his forehead with a cocktail napkin and starin’ at us through some black-rimmed glasses he took out his shirt pocket.

“You up, Yeller,” he said. He had a different way ‘bout him once he was off the stage. You hardly thought he was the same man. Up there, he’d been like a wild dog. Now, it was like lookin’ up at your daddy.

“This my boy Harpoon, just come up from Quinto, Mississippi,” Yeller said, getting up with his guitar.

“Quito,” me and Wolf both said at the same time.

I looked at him.

“You heard of it?”

“Yeah, I heard of it,” Wolf said, takin’ a beer bottle off a girl’s tray and settin’ down in Yeller’s spot. “It’s offa the Seven, ain’t it? South of Mosquito Lake.”

“That’s it,” I said.

“Been fishin’ down there,” he said.

Wolf sipped his beer and looked at me.

Over his shoulder, Yeller set up, smilin’ out at the crowd before twiddling into a song I’d never heard, what I guess was his own:

I’m in love with a damn fool woman,

She got a heart as cold as ice,

Said I’m in love with a damn fool woman,

She got a heart so cold like ice,

Why can’t I find a woman, who will love and treat me nice?

It was awright. He sorta fumbled with that National, but nobody was sober enough to notice, ‘cept maybe Wolf, who squeezed his eyes thinner every time Yeller hit a bad chord. Them big-legged women kept on dancin’ with they men, clawin’ hungry-like at they behinds like they was ripe fruit in them bright, tight dresses. Yeller did have a good voice though, raw, and mean, like Elmore James.

“I like you, Harpoon,” Wolf told me, after he’d sucked his beer down and raised his hand for another. “You listen here. Stay away from that high yeller boy,” he told me, thumbin’ at Yeller over his shoulder. “His uncle, Destruction, used to play piano for me. He wasn’t nothin’ but a fat mouth rounder, and Yeller ain’t no different. His mouth get you killed you ain’t careful.”

Yeller had picked out one of them biscuits in the crowd and was singin’ straight at her. She was that devil-eyed type woman lay her business on you, make you forget your own name, how much money you got in your pocket. She seent what Yeller was ‘bout right off and she smiled at him over her man’s shoulder. That gap in her two front teeth let you know she liked to get her jelly rolled. He played Come On In My Kitchen at her, and then One Way Out, and by the time he finished up, her man had took notice.

Wolf seent it, too. He looked at me and shook his head, then got up with his beer, said, ‘’member what I told you,’ and went off to the bathroom.

It was hot and close in that place when Yeller come back to his seat and ran his beer bottle ‘cross his shiny forehead.

“How you like that, country boy?”

“S’awright,” I said, watching that woman he’d been singin’ to start into arguin’ with her man. He kept on lookin’ in Yeller’s direction.

“Awright, sheeit,” said Yeller. “You see that fox out in front? Got my Johnny Conqueroo goin’.”

“Still say you’d sound better you got yourself a bottleneck,” I said.

Right then that nigger pushed his woman down and come stompin’ over.

“Say, boy,” he said, proddin’ Yeller in the shoulder and leanin’ on our table. His coat fell open and I seent he had a pistol butt stickin’ out his drawers.

I picked up my beer and didn’t say nothin’.

Yeller turned in his seat and pushed the man’s hand offa his shoulder.

“Whyn’t you try that again, shine?” he said to the man.

“You been eyeballin’ my rider, boy,” the man said.

“Nigger, what you want?” Yeller said. “An apology? When she wasn’t shakin’ her ass at me she was drankin’ me up over your shoulder.”

“You got a mouth, nigger,” the man said. “Look t’me like some peckerwood been at yo momma, too.”

Yeller knocked over his chair gettin’ up. The man reached in his pants and pulled out a .44. Whether he meant to shoot Yeller or slap it in his face I didn’t know, but I reached across and smashed my bottle ‘cross his hand. He dropped the gun on the table and I laid the broke bottle next to it, done with it.

But Yeller picked both of ‘em up.

He stuck the busted bottle in that man’s eye and broke it off. When the man commenced to howlin’, Yeller laid the pistol upside his head.

The gal started screamin’ when she seent her man hit the floor, and that got the rest of the womens doin’ the same. The mens took to runnin’ out the door and the bartender snatched the phone off the wall.

Yeller just turned to me, tucked the pistol in his pants, and slipped the bloody bottleneck over his finger. He held it up to me and said, “Look like I got my bottleneck now, Harp.”

I didn’t know what to do. When the big doorman come over, Yeller slapped the handle of the gun and the man stepped aside.

Then he took me by the arm and pulled me out.

Pretty soon, we was in my car, the gun in Yeller’s lap, passin’ my moon back and forth. We didn’t stop till we hit Maxwell Street. He bought us a couple of Polishes and a Jack with his tip money. Then he started in talkin’ ‘bout Robert Johnson.

“That’s how Son House woulda done it, Harp,” he told me. “Didn’t take no lip. Robert Johnson, too. You know that crossroads story?”

“Sure,” I said, slow. “Everybody do.” Truth tell, I knew it better than most.

“’Bout how he went down to them crossroads and made hisself a deal with the Devil,” Yeller said, like he hadn’t heard me. “You know where them crossroads is at? I heard they was where the Sixty-one and the Forty-nine cross.”

That was some bullshit somebody in Clarksdale come up with to sell t-shirts. I wished he hadn’t asked, and I wish more I hadn’t answered. Maybe things would’ve been different in the end.

“Naw,” I said. “It ain’t there. It’s over by Dockery Plantation outside of Ruleville.”

“Ruleville?” Yeller said.

“Yup.”

“Hey, we ought to go down there you and me, huh?”

“Whatchoo talkin’ ‘bout, nigger?” I laughed.

But he was dead serious. I seent it in them honey eyes.

“I mean it, man. The police goin’ be lookin’ for this car. You got to get outta town anyhow. You ain’t got no money for gas back down to Quinto—”

“Quito.”

He took out a fat wad of cash from his pants pocket.

“I gots me some saved up. Was goin’ to buy me a bus ticket and head down to them crossroads myself.”

“Nigger, you crazy.”

“Harp,” he said, and took the whiskey from me, serious. “You tell me now. Whatchoo think of my playin’?”

“You sang pretty good,” I said.

“Didn’t ask ‘bout my singin’, asked ‘bout my guitar playin’.”

“I told you, you be better with that bottleneck.”

“Nigger, my own momma wouldn’t sugar coat it, you just tell it.”

I shrugged. “It ain’t so good.”

I seent right off he was hurt, but shit, he had asked.

“I know it,” he said. “I ought to be better. I cut my fingers practicin’, but it don’t help. Wolf keeps me around on account of my uncle, but he only let me on when everybody’s good and drunk. How I’m s’posed to get better that way? You tell me.”

“You just got to keep practicin,’ man. You’s a good singer.”

“Sheeit,” he said, and passed the whiskey back. “Singer need a band, Harp. I gots to be able to play this here guitar. Even if I get good, it ain’t goin’ be enough. I gots to be great, man. I gots to be the best, like Robert Johnson.”

He took a long pull of whiskey and passed it back, but he didn’t let go when I tried to take it. He looked me in the eye.

“You show me them crossroads, Harp.”

He wasn’t askin’ so much as tellin’.

“That shit is just stories, Yeller,” I said, though I knew they wasn’t.

“Stories…I’m nineteen years old, man. I’m black. I’m poor. I’m just a step outta Joliet. They goin’ send me to Vietnam. I ain’t got the money for no school. I’m goin’ die over there if I go, I know it. I gots to get to them crossroads. Got to make that deal. Ain’t gonna get rich no other way. Even if a story’s my only chance, shit, man! I’ll take it.”

They was somethin’ ‘bout what he said, ‘bout Vietnam and bein’ cold in hand. I guess that’s why I told him I’d take him.

***

We talked the whole way down south. He told me he’d grown up in Gary, Indiana, where his daddy had worked for U.S. Steel till he got pulled under a roller at the mill, got his feet crushed so bad they cut ‘em off. His daddy got to be a mean drunk in a chair after that, and one night when they shut the ‘lectricity off, he kilt hisself with a shotgun. The kick sent his chair ‘cross the kitchen and rollin’ down the basement steps. That was where Yeller had found him, callin’ and feelin’ for him in the dark till he put his hand in the mess where his daddy’s face used to be.

“Tell me ‘bout them crossroads,” he said. “What’s so special ‘bout ‘em? How come you can’t make the deal in any ol’ crossroads?”

I didn’t know that, but I told him what I did know. My uncle, Luke, used to play guitar in my daddy’s congregation (Daddy was a preacher) till he switched to The Celestial Providence Church in Boyer, then he dropped religion altogether to play the blues. He went down to them crossroads and made hisself a deal. He told me ‘bout it, drunk one night. He said he’d gone at midnight and twisted the head off a black rooster and let the blood pour out, and that a shadow man come up out the ground and tapped him on the shoulder.

“The devil,” Yeller said.

“He never said it was the devil.”

“Who else would it be?”

I shrugged. Uncle Luke told me the shadow man made him promise somethin’ (I ‘spect it was his soul) and then took his guitar and taught him some songs.

“Was he better after that?” Yeller asked.

“I’s just a boy,” I said. “I ‘member him bein’ pretty good in church, but that’s all.”

“What happened to him?”

“Got his throat cut at his breakfast table. Never found out who done it.”

Yeller turned towards the window and didn’t say nothin’.

My daddy told me he’d been kilt over a woman. I’d told him ‘bout Uncle Luke’s deal and he looked real sad. He drove me to see them crossroads (though not at midnight) and he told me my soul wasn’t nothin’ I should try’n lay my hands on and give over to nobody, and that nobody that come askin’ for it had my good in mind. He told me not to think ‘bout Uncle Luke no more.

I never went to them ‘ol dirt crossroads again, though they stayed in my mind over the years. My daddy always told me you got to render unto Caesar what’s his, and render unto God what’s His, but sometime you get to a place where you can’t afford to render unto Caesar when he come knockin’. Then renderin’ unto God seems like a bill that’s goin’ be a long time comin’ due. I guess that’s where Yeller was. Maybe I wanted to go down there as much as he did, but I don’t know just why. I sure didn’t want to be no bluesman. His talk of buyin’ his way outta Vietnam sounded pretty good to me, though.

It was open season on black folks in Mississippi in them days, and the rednecks didn’t let us forget. We wasn’t ten minutes in town when we seent this beat-up blue Chevy pickup with a couple sun burnt elbows stickin’ out the windows cruisin’ real slow up and down South Oak in Ruleville where we stopped to eat a couple pig’s ear sandwiches and wait out the day.

Yeller wanted to see Greasy Street, where Wolf had told him he used to play for tips, so we went over. We spotted a boy playin’ slide with a nearly bald ol’ blind woman beatin’ on a tamborine. They was wailin’ Oh Death to a crowd of folks. Yeller set up with his National outside a corner grocery ‘cross the street and tried cutting heads with the kid, but it was four-thirty on a Thursday and wasn’t no drunks around to forgive him his playin’. I seent a couple folks wave they hands at him, and a little boy in overalls even laughed. I felt bad and joined in on my harp. Couple folks come over then, but most stayed by the boy and the ol’ woman.

Then I seent that blue pickup again, and an ugly white face with oily hair come out the shade of the cab and squinted at our car, then faded back inside. The pickup went down the street.

After we got us some cash, we headed in from the sun and got a couple beers.

“You see that truck fulla crackers?” I asked Yeller.

He hadn’t.

We was full of beer and big dreams when we headed outta Ruleville. I kept on lookin’ for that pickup in the rearview, but I didn’t see it. I knew sometime the real bad whites cruised the black parts of town lookin’ for outta state tags. That meant what they called agitators, what they figured was uppity niggers come on down to stir up ‘good’ black folks.

I parked by Dockery in the shade and we napped till round ‘bout eleven, then I took Yeller out to the crossroads.

***

They was a row of power lines stretched out against the sky, and one of the old trees was gone, but them same cotton fields stretched way out across the dark land, and them dirt roads cuttin’ through ‘em was just the same. Them fuzzy white bolls was nearly ready and they was a warm night wind rustlin’ through ‘em, makin’ ‘em sway like church folks. The fields looked crowded with ghosts, which I guess they was, if you think ‘bout how many years all the black folks poured they blood and sweat into that crop. Probably they poor, dumb ghosts just go on draggin’ them long sacks through the rows, not knowin’ the season in that gray shadow land.

We walked out into the middle of the crossroads, and that’s when I slapped my leg.

“Goddammit.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Aww, we forgot to get us a pullet,” I said. The beer and pigmeat and that hot afternoon nap had drove it straight out my mind. “We ain’t got no blood to spill.”

Yeller looked at me and I could see the moon in his eyes.

“That ain’t so, Harp.” He moved closer to me.

That’s when the bright lights come on like we’d surprised the ol’ sun in his bed and he’d thrown back the sheet. Not one, but two shadow men stepped out.

“What say, boys?” said a voice, in that slow backwoods drawl that make a black man freeze.

I didn’t need to see the color of that truck behind them whose headlights was shinin’ on us to know it was a blue Chevy.

The .44 was in the glove box back in the Catalina. Maybe Yeller had his old pocketknife he’d been usin’ as a slide on the National, but I didn’t have nothin’ but my fists in my pockets. I got to feelin’ a cold sweat under my scalp and it run down my neck when I seent the long somethin’ each of ‘em had in they hands. Axe handles, maybe shotguns.

“What you boys doin’ out here so late?” the man asked.

“Nothin’, sir,” I said. “Just out walkin’.”

“You two sweethearts?”

“We ain’t the ones parked out by the side of the road in the dark,” said Yeller.

I hissed him quiet.

“Where you from, boy?” the man said to Yeller, the meanness fairly bubblin’ up in his throat.

“Chicago.”

“I told you he wasn’t one of our niggers, Boyd.”

“I had him pegged for a Kansas City pimp with them clown clothes he’s got on,” said Boyd.

“That a guitar, boy?” said the first man.

Yeller didn’t say nothing. It was plain what it was.

“Pick us out a song,” said the first man. Then he turned to me. The moon was shinin’ on his hair grease and the shotgun I seent in his hand. “And you, you gonna dance for us. No fancy nigger dance. Just let’s see an old time shuffle.”

Yeller put hands to his strings and began to strum out Dixie. I had been in this kinda situation before. They wasn’t nothin’ to do but pick up my knees like he said.

“You are murderin’ that song, ain’t you, boy?”

Boyd walked up next to his buddy and passed him a glass bottle of something that smelled like it ought to be in the Catalina’s tank.

“I told you a nigger can’t play Dixie,” said Boyd.

“Well, he’s a bluesman. Ain’t that right? Ain’t that why you’re out here? Come to the crossroads to make your deal?” said the first man. “I guess niggers in the north is just as spooky as they are down here. Listen here, boy. Only devil you’re gonna find tonight’s right here in front of you.”

He was steppin’ closer to Yeller while he said this, and he poked Yeller’s National with the end of a shotgun.

Yeller nearly dropped the guitar, and when he stooped to catch it up, he all of a sudden let out a crazy yell and brought it up fast by the neck. The steel body caught that white boy full on the jaw and put him on his back. Yeller didn’t waste no time, but put his foot on the shotgun and fell to beatin’ that cracker’s head in. Every hit made that National twang and echo. It was the sweetest music I ever heard.

Boyd went to help out his buddy, but I threw my fist into his gut, heard the wind come outta him in one big hush. He dropped what he had in his hand, just a baseball bat. I kicked him in the balls and started stompin’ on his back.

He cried and called to Jesus and said he couldn’t breathe. I felt his ribs cave in. I knew we was goin’ wind up lynched for it, but it felt good.

Yeller come up next to me and in the light of them headlights I seent his National was dented up bad and covered in blood. The chords was sprung and curled all over like a madwoman’s hair. He had blood on his shirt and his hands.

His eyes was dead serious and he kicked Boyd over on his back. I could see his chest swellin’ and fallin’. He was the one I seent look out of the truck cab earlier that day.

“Whatchoo waitin’ on, Harp? Finish this bitch off.”

I backed away, my limbs all shakin’.

“You ain’t never kill nobody?”

“Naw.”

“S’awright, brother,” he said, patting my shoulder. “I got this.”

Boyd was moanin’ and whinin’ like a kid.

I backed away. Yeller lifted up the guitar over his head in both hands like a caveman and he brang it down on Boyd’s face.

That same second, the headlights went out. I guess the battery had died on the Chevy. I heard what happened to Boyd though, felt it, wet on my shoes.

It was dark out in that road. The moon had got behind a black cloud, and lookin’ up at the sky, I couldn’t see the stars. Now that is peculiar on a Delta night.

We heard this pipin’ in the night, like a flute playin’, or maybe it was just the wind blowin’ through some reeds in the ditch.

They was somethin’ else standin’ in the road. I seent it, or the shape of it, behind Yeller, and I give out a yell, ‘cause what I seen didn’t make no sense. It was like a bush had sprung up in the road, but it moved, and not random, like a blowin’ bush will do. Every part of it breathed and twisted on its own, like droopin’ willow branches if they was to come alive, or a nest of black snakes. They was a shine among all that mess, too, like teeth, or eyes, or both.

In that minute Yeller spun, all them movin’ shadows sort of snapped into place like a shape out the corner of your eye, and a thin, dark man stood there. You couldn’t see his face, or his clothes, just his outline.

“Hit ‘im, Yeller!” I shrieked.

Yeller pulled back to swing, but then he lowered his busted guitar and shook his head.

“You him, ain’t you?” Yeller whispered.

The shadow man dipped his chin.

Yeller giggled like a kid at Christmas and looked back at me, eyes bugging.

“Goddamn! You wasn’t lyin’, Harp!” he said. “This the man hisself!”

He turned back to the shadow man, and I looked around for that shotgun. But it was no use. It was too powerful dark in the road.

“Well, Mr. Nick, I’s here. King Yeller’s what they call me,” he said, slappin’ his chest, “and I done paid your price double. I ‘spect that ought to cover my friend here.” He looked back at me, and even though I couldn’t see ‘em, I could feel that shadow man’s eyes on me over Yeller’s shoulder.

I nearly fell over Boyd’s body backin’ away.

“Nossir, I didn’t take no hand in this. It wouldn’t be right.”

Yeller looked disappointed, maybe a little scared. “Well, your loss, cuz.”

He turned back to the shadow man.

“Awright, Scratch. Whatchoo say? You give me credit? Double the ante, double the pot.”

The shadow man didn’t say a word.

“I’m gonna need a new guitar,” Yeller said, holdin’ up his bloody National.

The shadow man reached out and took the guitar from Yeller. He run his black fingers up and down the neck, and pretty soon a sound come out of it, a crazy, distorted rift, like a hunnerd guitars playin’ at once–not the kinda sound you could tickle out no busted guitar.

“Tha’s a swell trick,” said Yeller. His voice was crackin’. He took out a shaky Kool and lit one, and in that minute I seent the shadow man’s face in fire. He wasn’t white, but he wasn’t no black man neither. All I got a good look at was his bald head and them big black eyes, sort of foreign lookin’. My daddy thought the picture show was godless, but one time when I was eleven, he took me to the Walthall in Greenwood to see The Ten Commandments. The shadow man’s eyes was just like the pharaoh’s in that movie.

The shadow man turned and walked off the road with Yeller’s guitar, crankin’ out them weird, lonesome sounds.

Yeller looked back at me.

“Don’t go with him, Yeller,” I just ‘bout begged.

“Be right back,” he promised, tiltin’ his hat over his eyes, grinnin’.

He went off with the shadow man. They went down the ditch and off into the cotton. That music echoed all up and down that black road and put a harrow in my heart. It made me feel like the dark sky was a mouth comin’ to close on the earth, like we was all ‘bout to be chewed up and swallowed into some cold, deep place worse than hell, some place even the angels wouldn’t go.

It got so bad I fell down on my knees and pressed my hands hard to my ears. I cried there, real, gushin’ tears. I felt so lonely, like that patch of dirt road beneath me was the only piece of land there was left, and I was fallin’ down a deep hole with no walls or bottom to be seent. I couldn’t summon no prayers.

I don’t know how long I knelt there, but all of a sudden the pickup’s headlights come back on, bright. I brushed my eyes and stood up, blind, still afraid.

Yeller was standin’ at the edge of the light. The stars was out again and the moon was bright over his head, as if they’d all been hidin’ from the shadow man. The moonlight was gleamin’ kinda green on the face of Yeller’s National.

Yeller’s eyes was half closed and he was shinin’ all over with sweat. He looked like a horse addict. That rascal light was gone from him.

“Let’s get outta here, Harp,” he said, and he went to where the Catalina was.

“What ‘bout these…,” I started to say ‘peckerwoods,’ but when I looked, they wasn’t no bodies in the road, just a couple butter yellow and black burn marks. They was a smell in the air like to make me sick, like a open sewer stuffed with dead dogs. I followed him to the car.

***

Yeller’s fingers wouldn’t leave his National alone the whole ride back. The sounds comin’ out of it was like slippery chain lightnin’. I never heard nobody play a guitar like he did the ride back to Ruleville. The shadow man had made him natural born. He didn’t say a word, just stared at the white line of the road as the car sucked it outta the dark ahead.

I noticed they was somethin’ different ‘bout his guitar, too. The tunin’ knobs had been chewed by mice, he told me, but they looked brand new now. They wasn’t a mark of rust or tarnish now either, and the steel felt strange. It was warm to the touch, and they was trace marks all over the backside, so faint you could only see ‘em close. They was shapes, or pictures, but of what I couldn’t say. Animals, or fish maybe, but none I could place. I didn’t like ‘em.

***

We stayed at a flophouse, and the next mornin’, and every mornin’ for the next week, Yeller went out to Greasy Street and cut heads. This time wasn’t nobody in sight that didn’t come over to hear him play, and some even come down outta the shops and the houses to listen. It got to be so’s nobody else played when Yeller was on the scene.

At night, we went from juke to juke. Yeller brought ‘em in like the Pied Piper. He played the Flowerin’ Fountain, Po Monkey’s, Red’s, JJ’s…we drove all over the Delta, and folks lined up outside to see him. He really lit them up, too. The belly rubbin’, the howlin’, it was on whenever Yeller played. Some said Robert Johnson had beat the devil and come back. They was a fight without fail anytime he played. Sometimes it would get real bad. I seent a man cut up his woman’s face with a razor at one show. Once, two men shot each other dead, right in the street out front.

Yeller never said nothin’ ‘bout this. They wasn’t no joy in him no more. He hardly ever smiled, an’ never sang out to no girls, though they did they best to get him to notice. He drank a lot, and when his set was up, all he wanted to do was hit the road.

His songs got strange too. Space Dog Blues, House Underwater, Black Goat Blues, they was all ‘bout darkness and dyin’ alone. Sometimes I didn’t even know what they was ‘bout, he jumbled up his words so bad. Nobody cared. It was that sound they loved.

I ‘member he did one called Cut Through You Sleepin’. I think it was ‘bout a man killin’ his woman in bed. The only words I could make out was:

What ain’t dead can keep a’layin’ – yas,

And come the judgment day even death might pass.

He’d always finish it with this sound, halfway between a sneeze and one of them Cuban big band shouts. F’uagh, or f’tagh.

Yeller hardly talked. After shows, he’d just set on the edge of his bed with a whiskey and drink, starin’ out the window till he passed out. He slept all day and I had to tell him to eat.

Then white men started showin’ up to his shows. They’d ask him if he never thought ‘bout recordin’. I know that’s what he wanted, but weeks went by of that and he always said no.

He might’ve been the biggest they ever was. Might’ve even saved the blues from them damn Beatles, ‘cept for The Crawlin’ Chaos Blues.

***

One Friday night outside of Clarkesdale, I asked him when he planned on layin’ tracks, and did he want to go back to Chicago, maybe see if he could get a deal with Chess Records.

He looked at me with them spacey, scarecrow eyes, and he said, “How come you never asked me ‘bout the shadow man, Harp?”

I told him I didn’t want to talk ‘bout that. I didn’t like to remember it.

“You can see what he done for me, can’t you?” said Yeller. “You ain’t never asked me what I paid him.”

“I know what you paid,” I said, meanin’ the two white boys.

“No, you don’t,” he said.

“He ask for your soul?”

“My soul…I wish I had one. He ain’t the devil, Harp. Maybe they ain’t no devil. He showed me things. Things ain’t nobody got no business knowin’. You know, I wanted this so bad, I was goin’ to kill you that night. I thought I wanted more than chicken blood woulda got me, you know?”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

He was quiet, and he drank, then he said, “He took somethin’ from me I can’t never get back. He gimme what I need to be great, but I can’t.”

“Whatchoo mean?”

“Say a man build you a house, but he leave the roof off, and he tell you if you put one up yourself, the whole thing goin’ fall down on your head while you sleepin’. Whatchoo got, then? When the rain come, whatchoo got?”

I still didn’t know what he was talkin’ ‘bout, and he could see.

“Look. The shadow man put all these songs in my head, but then he gimme one song,” and he closed his eyes and smiled just a little, like he was thinkin’ of somethin’ sweet, “the best song anybody ever heard.” Then he opened his eyes, and that dead look come back, like happiness had excused hisself and got off at the last stop and misery just sat back down. “He tell me I ever play it, I’m goin’ lose everythin’. That song’s curled up in the back of my head like a snake, all the time. Even when I’m up there playin’ and singin’, that song’s what I’m thinkin’ of. Everythin’ else just sounds like shit.”

Tears come out his eyes then and he started tremblin’ all over.

“I can’t never be happy, Harp!” he wailed. “I can’t find no peace! I just wants to die! Don’t nothin’ mean nothin’ for me no more!”

I took the .44 out the glove box that night and kept it with me from then on.

***

Next day, I took him to play at Sink City on Route 49 between Drew and Jaquith. We stopped at a drug store in Dwiggins and I bought me a pair of clay earplugs. Don’t know what made me do it.

Sink City was one of them deep country jukes, not much more than a shack, tin roof, spray painted sign, and grass for parkin’. It was situated in a field so’s the farmers could walk to it and ventilate after a long week. They wasn’t nothin’ around. In them last days, seemed like Yeller would pick the most backwoods place he could find, like he didn’t want nobody to hear him. Word traveled fast, and they didn’t meet him there, they beat him there. The field was full of cars, and seemed like the sides of the juke was swellin’ from all the folks packed inside.

The place had blue walls, I ‘member, painted with big tittied black mermaids, squids, and starfish. The ceilin’ was hung with Christmas lights, and it sagged real bad.

They was a smell of fryin’ catfish from the kitchen, and an old rawboned woman dished out greasy sandwiches till Yeller got to the stage. Ever’body slapped his back and whistled him up. He was a million miles from Silvio’s.

He sat down on the little stool and commenced to playin’ without a word, let the piano man and the drummer catch up. He played the old songs till people got to yellin’ for some of his own. Then he did that song I’d heard him do at Silvio’s, Damn Fool Woman, but some drunk fool yelled for Cut Through You Sleepin’ through most of it, and Yeller finally went into it. That got the place really sweatin’ and beatin’ on the tables.

They was somethin’ ‘bout them songs that got under your skin. They made the mens holler and the womens shake, got the couples slow draggin’ till they was fit to do the deed right there on the floor. I dunno what it was. I done said already how a fight always broke out.

When he’d played ‘em all, they hollered for more.

Yeller sat there listenin’ to them, his face just as dead as could be. I dunno what he was thinkin’. Then his eyes found mine in the crowd and he nodded at me and said into the mic, “Y’all wanna hear somethin’ you ain’t never heard before?”

The crowd hooted and shouted that they did.

I got a cold sweat and I shoved them clay plugs in my ears just as far as they would go.

The last thing I heard him say was, “This hear’s The Crawlin’ Chaos Blues.”

It was the tune he told me ‘bout, I knew. Maybe it was the one I heard the shadow man playin’ when he led Yeller out into the cotton field. Whatever it was, the people stopped still as Catholics when he started. I know they was words, ‘cause I seent his mouth movin’. He didn’t look out at ‘em whilst he sang, just stared at the floor. His fingers was a blur on the National and I could feel them deep chords in my chest, see his foot stompin’.

Then all hell broke loose.

The people on the floor commenced to dancin’, but wasn’t nothin’ held back. The mens tore they womens’ dresses to the skin, and the womens did the same to the mens’. Folks at the tables fell on each other in the same way. I had to push a big old girl offa me and shove my way to the front door. Time I got there, my shirt was rags. People was rollin’ on the floor and on the bar top like honeymooners. It was crazy.

I seent women clawin’ at the shoulders and backs of they mens, ploughin’ red lines all in they flesh with they fingernails. I heard a couple of loud pops then, made me jump near out my skin, and then I seent what they was. A woman took a pistol out her man’s waistband, even as he was givin’ her the business. She put the barrel in between his teeth and blew the back of his head wide open. I seent the blood splash all over her chest. He was dead, but his body kept movin’ between her legs like a prayin’ mantis. She put the gun up under her own chin then and drove her brains up on the ceilin’. Nobody took no notice.

They was busy doin’ they own things. Things I can’t hardly think on. If hell ever been on earth, if anybody ever laid eyes on pure, unnatural sin, it was there and it was me. I seent a man stranglin’ his woman whilst she tore his eyebrow off with her teeth. They was both of ‘em grinnin’ and laughin’. The owner held the old woman’s head down in the bubblin’ fryer grease whilst he hiked up her skirt, his eyes buggin’ out of his head and mad dog foam runnin’ all down his chin. His throat was cut and they was a bloody razor in the old woman’s hand. Another man charged at the bar like a bull, rammed his head into it, got back up, did it again. Blood was drippin’ down his nose. A gal near me tore her own hair out in clumps.

They was blood ever’where. The whole crowd was rippin’ and tearin’ into each other, limbs twistin’, heads flung back, wailin’ and grinnin’, teeth bloody. I seent a beatin’ heart go floppin’ across the stage, leavin’ spots of blood behind where it bounced.

Yeller just kept on lookin’ into nothin’ and singin’ that song from hell. The drummer had the piano player against the ivories; he was pushin’ his drumsticks in his eyes. The National was gleamin’ green and gold, and for a minute I swear I seent the shadow man’s snaky octopus arms curlin’ ‘round Yeller’s body, ‘round his neck and his ankles, drankin’ him in, drankin’ all of it in, like the sawdust on the floor was drankin’ up the blood. I seent the grinnin’ shadow man hisself risin’ up behind him, them Pharaoh eyes lookin’ across all that tearin’ flesh right into my soul.

I threw open the door to run, but they wasn’t nowhere to go. Instead of the field of cars and old Route 49, I swear they was nothin’ out there – nothin’ but a swirlin’ tornado blackness. If I’d a stepped outside, I felt I would’ve fallen forever.

I had the .44 and I pulled it. I don’t know for sure if I aimed for him or not, but I didn’t stop squeezin’ that trigger. I seent men and women go down from my bullets. They blowed a path to the stage, and when I had shot six, Yeller was lyin’ on his back with the National across his chest and the shadow man was gone. The liquor caught fire behind the bar, I don’t know how. But the way that little juke was built I knew it was goin’ up. When I looked back outside, the field and the cars was there again, so I run.

I found the Catalina and I got inside and got it movin’. I smashed into parked cars left and right tearin’ outta there. I didn’t care. Some people come runnin’ out, some of ‘em on fire. I seent ‘em in my mirrors, but I was like Lot. I didn’t stop till I left that dirt road behind and hit 49.

I drove till that burnin’ juke wasn’t nothin’ but a speck of starlight in the Mississippi black behind me. Then I couldn’t see it no more.

The highway patrol caught me doin’ ninety-five through Clarksdale, and finally knocked me offa DeSoto Ave, sent the Catalina rollin’ into a ditch. It was the only way they could’ve got me to stop. I couldn’t even hear the sirens with the earplugs. I was laughin’ when they pulled me out.

When I got out the hospital, I stood trial, but didn’t nobody bring up Sink City. On account of I had hauled ass through a white part of town and wrecked a couple of old money cars, I got the choice of goin’ to the pen or Vietnam. Three years later, I lost my leg to a different kinda Mister Charlie at Dak To.

I get to thinkin’ how things played out, and I think on Yeller and Uncle Luke, and even Robert Johnson, how they all made the deal and how they all was murdered short of gettin’ big. I wonder ‘bout how folks is moved and played like checkers by powers maybe we ain’t s’posed to see, and I wonder if Daddy and I maybe played the same part. Maybe Uncle Luke didn’t get his throat cut over no woman and maybe it wasn’t no accident I brang the .44 and them earplugs into the Sink City that night.

Even now, when I got the choice between dwellin’ on the jungle and that little Delta juke joint in the night, I chooses the ‘Nam every time.

Every time.

The Nyarlathotep Event

by Jonathan Wood (2011)

Case File #1:Performance

The Oxford Playhouse. Now.

For the record, it is very difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when you went wrong if a woman with a Laura Ashley dress and blood-stained teeth is rhythmically beating your head against the floor. Just so you know.

Ten minutes before

Here’s a treat: a night out at the theater courtesy of work. All expenses paid. The only catch—I might have to gun down the performer halfway through.

See this is the problem with working for shadowy government agencies. There’s always rough to go with the smooth. Yes, you get to enjoy an evening of ancient Egyptian magics, but it is being performed by an interdimensional avatar called Nyarlathotep who hales from a dimension representing humanity’s collective fears. Silver lining meet cloud.

Still, just another night out for Agent Arthur Wallace of MI37.

The niggling familiarity of the the name Nyarlathotep clears up as soon as he steps out on stage. Lovecraft. Whoever summoned him, named him after a gibbering literary horror.

Which, I feel, should inform my plan. Except the only plan I seem to remember old Lovecraft providing was running howling into the night, so I’m not sure how helpful that’s going to be.

Nyarlathotep stands seven feet tall, wrapped in blood red rags. They hang from his shoulders like a cloak. They wreathe his face. Red mist billows about his feet, spills into the theater, spreads out over feet and ankles. People in the front row let out odd barking sounds—the terrifying inbred cousin of laughter. And I’m pretty sure Nyarlathotep’s not told any jokes yet.

And screw evaluating the situation. I reach for my gun.

Nyarlathotep opens his mouth.

There are no words. His mouth moves. Sounds emerge. But it is something beyond speech. Something more profound. Some kinesthetic reflex of bile and horror.

The buzzing of flies. The stench of rotting meat filling my nose my mouth. Burning my throat. I gag. Heave up bile. A liquid scream. Pins in my arms. Needles, and nails, and shards of glass. The grind of cigarette against skin. My brain is burning, melting, is fecal matter sloshing in my skull.

And still his mouth stretches behind reams of cloth. And on and on pours out the filth. Into me.

My gun. I need-

I grab for the thing with numb fingers. Atrocities flicker at the edges of my vision. A noise like a kettle boiling rising, rising, up, and up like an itch I need to reach into my brain to scratch.

Somehow I get the gun loose. I half see it out of one eye, through filters of horror and peeling flesh. I try to sight Nyarlathotep, but I might as well be trying to shoot the moon.

Screw it. I pull the trigger.

The muzzle’s thunderclap hits me like water to the face. Abruptly I’m just a man on his back in a theater, waving a gun about, while around me everyone goes insane.

Men and women are on all fours. They roll in fights. Some screw. Some scream.

On stage, Nyarlathotep stands, arms wide, welcoming it all. The conductor of this pageant of madness. And, Lovecraft old buddy, running and screaming does seem like a good idea right about now.

On the other hand, that’s not what I get paid to do. So I stand. I steady my gun. I draw a bead on the bastard. I think about how I should probably change careers.

Which is exactly the moment the woman in the Laura Ashley number clotheslines me around my throat and brings me down.

My gun scatters. I scrabble at her, coughing and choking, trying to pry her off me. She seizes my head. Slams it onto the floor. Crash. Crash. The room spins. Crash.

Which brings me to the point where I’m left wondering if I’m going to have the time to enumerate all the mistakes I’ve made before my head gives way.

Just another night out for Agent Arthur Wallace of MI37.

Case File #2:Rescue

8:15 pm, The Oxford Playhouse, Oxford, England

There is romance to the idea of the Man Alone. Abandoned, desperate, he reaches deep inside and finds the will to go on, to do what must be done, to save the day.

But when the Man Alone is being beaten to death by a pack of insane theater-enthusiasts, the idea of back-up has a little more charm.

In those moments there is little better than a co-worker blowing a homicidal Laura Ashley fan off your chest with a blast of electric blue light.

Clyde — co-worker extraordinaire, and MI37′s resident magician — stands over me, lightning playing between his fingertips.

It’s hard to express my gratitude. I go with, “Guh-th-fuh.”

“You’re welcome, Arthur.” As he helps me up, a man in a three-piece suit leaps up on a chair in front of us, growls.

Clyde raises his free hand. ”Al morath cal arnum.” Blue light explodes and the man pinwheels away over seats, head snapped back.

“You know,” Clyde says, picking at his tweed jacket, “I really should invest in some sort of robe. With stars and moons on it. Proper old school stuff.”

I have other concerns. Like putting a bullet in the interdimensional avatar of fear and chaos on the stage whose fault this all is—Nyarlathotep.

Except the stage is empty.

“Target’s moving,” I say. ”Out back. Now.”

A mass of drooling, enraged Oxonians stands between me and the stage. As one, they bay their madness.

“Lobby?” Clyde suggests.

I move. A raving student comes at me. I use both fists to club him to the floor.

The lobby is stark in its emptiness. And we’re moving now. The chase is properly on. You’re mine, you interdimensional bastard.

From nowhere, a yellow clay jar arcs through the air. I duck. It explodes against the wall behind me. Gas rushes out, a red mist. I duck, but an arm of vapor circles my head. I breathe-

A wall of flesh rises, engulfing. Jackals chase me across a desert. Water closes over my head, tentacles wrapped about my ankles, pulling, pulling.

-and crash to the lobby floor. I gasp, claw at my eyes. Three figures in ragged yellow robes are streaming through the street door, curved knives held high.

I reach for my gun.

My gun beaten out of my hand by the Laura Ashley-wearer back in the auditorium.

The first of our attackers is yards away. He stinks of decay. I catch a flash of teeth. Jaundiced skin. Black pits of eyes.

“Clyde!” My voice slides up to an octave I try to avoid hitting in public.

He slams out an arm. ”Al morath cal arnum.” Electricity crackles. A strobe flare of light. The leading attacker flies backwards, spiraling through the air, colliding with his fellows.

I pull myself up, still blinking away the after-effects of the attacker’s gas. ”We need to get out of here.”

“The Children of Nyarlathotep will stop you!” One of the yellow-robed men is pulling free of the tangled pile of his fellows. ”We will come for you in your dreams. We will unseam your sanity.”

Clyde mutters something under his breath. The man’s head slams to the ground, tongue lolling.

“Shall we go?” Clyde smiles at me, holds open the street door. I step out. Time to get finally get the bas-

I stop. I stare. The streets. The city.

Where has Oxford gone?

The road, once paved and straight, is a twisting roller coaster of asphalt and cobbles. Limestone storefronts have curled into blackened husks, glass bulging like blisters. Dreaming spires have stretched to the sky, points drawn out like knife blades. The citizenry scream, and caper, and cower.

The madness is spreading. It’s not just in the citizens, it’s in the city’s walls, its streets, its soul.

And seriously, even an interdimensional avatar of madness is a Tim Burton fan?

“You know,” I say to Clyde, “I cannot wait to find this bastard and shoot him.”

Case File #3:Countdown

“Derrière. To Christ Church College. Five minutes or less. Otherwise you’re responsible for the end of the world.” Tabitha, my handler and MI37′s resident cheerleader, sets the ticking clock just in case my day wasn’t going badly enough.

It had been a simple plan. Go to the theater. Make sure the performer really is an interdimensional avatar of fear and chaos. Shoot him.

All in a day’s work for Agent Arthur Wallace.

Except now I’m chasing the bastard through Oxford transformed. Nyarlathotep — the aforementioned avatar — has vomited up the citizenry’s collective fears and given the place a good basting. Architecture spirals out of control. Streets twist back in recursive loops. Buildings teeter and leer.

Oh, and everybody’s gone mad. The insane cherry on the lunacy cake.

Ten minutes ago

Clyde — MI37′s geek and spell-slinger — passes me a plastic earbud. “Tabitha,” he says. I plug it in. Because who doesn’t want a running job evaluation from a committed misanthrope?

“Screwed that up. Big time.”

I close my eyes. “Where’s Nyarlathotep?”

“Christ Church. Potential reality rip.”

I move. Clyde follows.

Seven minutes ago

Get to Christ Church — simple enough. Run in a straight line from the playhouse.

Except every exit from this bloody traffic circle leads back to where it starts.

“What the hell?”

“Reality leakage,” Clyde answers. “Nyarlathotep’s home dimension leaking into ours, distorting space. The sensible thing, when you tear through realities and summon avatars of fear and chaos is to close the door behind you. But if you’re summoning avatars of fear and chaos then there’s a chance common sense isn’t your primary attribute.”

Which is all lovely to know, but, “How the hell do I get down this street?”

“Time window shrinking.” Tabitha’s voice comes through tinnily in my ear.

“Tabby,” Clyde says, “could you be a love and look up the Entropic Negator? The Phillip’s version”

Which must mean something, I suppose, because ten seconds later, Clyde is repeating the nonsense syllables Tabitha is intoning, and then the world ripples like water, and I get to go down the street I actually want to go down for once.

When did running in a straight line get this hard?

Four minutes ago

If it’s not one thing, it’s bloody cultists.

The yellow-robed man comes out of nowhere. I spin just in time to catch his fist on my chin. I fall down–not very Kurt Russell of me but typical of my brand of heroism. Fortunately Clyde knows magic. Unfortunately, a second cultist sucker-punches him too, which means I have to do something… well, not exactly heroic…

I kick my attacker in the crotch.

That buys me enough time to get up off the floor, and be taken down by a flying tackle from the second cultist.

We roll back and forth while, in my ear, Tabitha intones, “Tick tock. Tick tock.”

It’s more sheer frustration than anything else that lends me the strength to slam my opponents face into the brick. Finally he stops worrying about me and just lies there, insensible.

Just enough time to put the boot in on cultist number one, heft Clyde to his feet, and listen to Tabitha sing a line from The Final Countdown.

Now

Seriously. This is starting to get ridiculous.

The crowd is six rows deep, blocking the College gateway. Students mostly. And not enough sane thoughts among them to rub together and start a fire.

“Five minutes,” Tabitha says.

I look around desperately. Time is not on our side.

And then I smile. Because time might be the answer after all.

“Any chance you can knock that down?” I ask Clyde. I point to the grand clock tower sitting above Christ Church College’s grand entrance. It won’t slow time but it’ll disperse a crowd.

“Tabitha?” Clyde puts his finger to his ear. “The Tesselian blade please.”

A student at the edge of the crowd stops poking at his midriff with a stick and looks at us. He lets out a scream.

The attention of the crowd shifts.

Above our heads the clocks second hand ticks, once, twice.

“Looking. Looking.” Tabitha says.

The crowd lurches towards us.

“Look faster.”

Tabitha starts talking. The crowd starts running. Clyde repeats words. The second hand ticks. Stone work creaks.

The crowd hesitates as one. Looks back. Looks up.

Limestone explodes, ripping out and away. The second hand spins away from the clock. The whole tower leans wildly.

Clyde breaks from his incantation just long enough to yell. “Timber!”

Case File #4:Portal

Oxford, England. Not a good day.

Some days, I think, I really need to ask for a transfer. You get told you’re going into a department called MI37, and you think, oh that sounds cloak-and-dagger exciting. They charge you with defending the realm from all things supernatural and tentacle-y, and you think, well that could be exciting.

Then you find you find yourself in the middle of Christ Church College facing a pack of yellow-robed cultists standing around a bubbling rip in reality.

“Not good,” I say to Clyde, my equally up-shit-creek partner.

The cultists are chanting, of course. Limited options on the daily duties for a cultist I imagine. Chant or sacrifice. And for all my bitching about my employer, at least working for MI37 isn’t tedious.

Take the portal for instance. If I don’t close it in the next three minutes, all of Oxford is going to be permanently infected by another reality constructed of humanity’s collective fears.

Likely a suicidal task, but not a boring one.

Unfortunately Clyde and I lack the appropriate color coordination, so cultists catch on to us pretty fast. Three break from the circle, pulling large knives.

I really wish I hadn’t dropped my gun earlier. But things tend to get distracting when an entire city goes insane. Still, this is where Clyde comes in. No need for a gun when the chap next to you can access interdimensional energies and sling them at bad guys like exploding basketballs.

“All yours,” I say.

“Actually,” Clyde looks apologetic as the cultists circle, “I’m sort of going to be busy with closing the portal. Rather need you to handle this.”

“What?” I turn to him, the cultists momentarily a secondary distraction. “Don’t we just take out the cultists and then…” My hands describe the portal collapsing

“Well, yes,” Clyde says. “They all have to stop chanting, but I still need to have the spell to collapse the portal going when that happens.”

“Whatever happened to teamwork,” I say. And step forward in order to have my arse handed to me.

The first cultists swings at me. I duck, grab a piece of shattered clocktower, use it to shatter most of his jaw.

That gives the other two a good time to sneak round behind me. One slices at me. I roll with it. My jacket takes the hit. The second cultist gets a good kick in. There’s a better range of movement allowed by ragged yellow robes that you’d think. I double over, wheezing.

They come at me from opposite directions, knives held high. I do the best I can and collapse.

Knives whistle over my head. I use the rubble to crush one cultist’s foot. He drops away howling. Meanwhile the other knife comes down and opens up my shoulder so I have some howling of my own to do.

I go at the guy angry then. Fighting is not exactly my forte. I resemble an off-balance ballerina pinwheeling across the Christ Church quad. Fortunately the cultist’s hectic chanting schedule hasn’t left him much time for self-defense classes. He swings the knife low. I stagger-step out of the way. My tie becomes noticeably shorter, the end fluttering away. The cultist becomes noticeably less conscious, my chunk of rubble colliding with his left ear.

And all that would be great if there were only three cultists. But three more separate from around the circle, which draws tighter.

I close fast. My shoulder connects with one before he gets his dagger free. I step into him, whirling wide with the rubble. A second cultist comes in low and hard, head slamming into my stomach, knife nicking my thigh. I bring my knee up into his nose. He drops away. The other grabs me from behind. The knife comes up. I slam my head backwards. His nose crunches. He drops me. I spin, the rubble held tight in my fist. More of his face crunches.

The guy on the floor is thinking about getting up. Me and my rubble encourage him not to.

Three more cultists, but the circle is tight now and I’m close.

I break into a run, slam past one, spinning round but still moving. One goes to trip me, I hurdle desperately, misstep, sprawl, roll.

I connect with the legs of a cultist in the circle. He trips, crashes forwards. Forward into the portal.

An ugly ripping sound. Then the cultists are down one member. The chanting falters. The cultists stare in a tiny moment of shocked silence.

Except… Not quite silence. Clyde chanting his spell.

With a sound like a wet fart, the portal collapses in on itself.

Strike one for the good guys.

Now if only I hadn’t just given twenty angry cultists nothing to do but use me like a piñata…

Case File #5:Nyarlathotep

Christ Church College, Oxford England

One thing I’ve always liked about Kurt Russell movies is that they end.

That sounds wrong…

I like that they conclude. Evil is defeated. The good guy wins. A sunset is ridden into.

In real life you face down a horde of angry cultists, close an interdimensional portal, high-five your spell-slinging partner, and then you find out there’s a seven-foot tall avatar of fear and chaos who’s all pissed about it and manifested behind you when you weren’t looking.

In real life this shit never ends.

Having never faced an interdimensional avatar of fear and chaos before, I go with the nearest weapon to hand and throw a rock at him.

Apparently this avatar–Nyarlathotep is his name–is made of sterner stuff than that.

So: plan B.

It may not be overly heroic to run and hide while getting your friend to do the fighting, but my friend knows magic and I don’t, so this may not be as bad as it initially looks.

Clyde mutters something under his breath, flings out his hand. Electricity crackles.

And then Clyde flies eight feet through the air and lands in a crumpled heap. Sort of the opposite result to the one we were going for there.

God, I wish I’d thought of a plan C.

In its absence, I stick to cowering. Nyarlathotep steps toward Clyde. He stretches out a robed arm. The impression of a hand and its end–a claw, black leather skin, yellow nails–and then gone, or denied. On the floor, Clyde screams.

What would Kurt Russell do? Possibly not the smartest question, but it’s stood me better than you’d imagine in times of need.

Except Kurt Russell would probably charge the guy yelling. The man alone. Guns blazing.

A stupid, stupid plan.

Except I don’t have any better ideas.

There’s a broken chunk of wood on the floor, one end a jagged ruin of splinters. It looks sharp.

I grab it, brace myself, burst from cover. I level my weapon. I charge.

As it turns out, the key to a good battle cry is timing. Too early and, well…

Nyarlathotep turns, swings his arm from Clyde to me. Clyde finally lies still. And then-

Fear breaking over my skin like water, drenching me, drowning me. I can see it all. The inevitability. The end. He’s here. Our harbinger. Our prophet. Our Nyarlathotep. He comes bearing this truth: this world collapsing under its own ragged weight, burying us in flesh and concrete; we will chew on our friends, our families–a desperate, animal need to consume, to feed, to survive. An utterly ridiculous, utterly futile urge.

I’m standing inches from him. Just standing. Weeping. Knowing how foolish this all is, how much madness it is. I stare at the wood in my hands. Better I just end my own life with it. Better I chew off the hands holding the wood. Better I claw out my eyes. Better I gut myself and feast on my own-

“Ooph!”

Breath bursts out of me. Something heavy and hard colliding with my back, sending my stumbling, staggering towards, towards…

The wood strikes Nyarlathotep’s gut. It slashes through the robes. Reams of cloth without end. Still the weight drives me forward, drives the wood in. And it feels I’m crossing some terrible boundary, as if I’m wounding myself. Then: a glimpse of skin–black, yellow, green with pus. I gag, and then the wood carries on, and on, and in, and the figure, the god before me, Nyarlathotep, convulses, heaves, collapses. And the wood goes on, and in, and before my eyes, he dies.

A feeling like a whip crack inside my skull. And Jesus, did I… was I…

There’s a pile of red rags on the floor next to me. I’ve fallen down. Clyde is on top of me. I’m holding a charred stump of blackened wood.

“Sorry about that,” Clyde says, picking himself up. “Think I was trying to stop you from killing him. Did a bit of a number on me, old Nyarlathotep there. Good thing I tripped and knocked you, really. Clumsy bugger that I am.” He nods several times, as much to himself as to me.

I shake my head, try to clear the shrieking madness Nyarlathotep put in there. And I see the rags on the floor. Empty. Dead. Nyarlathotep… concluded.

I smile. Because that’s an ending I can really enjoy.

Case File #6:Sweet Dreams

Christ Church College, Oxford England

Some days I really get the vastness of the universe. I’m tiny. It’s big. I don’t matter. I get it.

Then, some days, you save the world—you know, for example you close an interdimentsional portal infecting the world with madness, kill an avatar of fear called Nyarlathotep when armed only with a bit of two-by-four—and you think the world should really pay more attention.

But no. Instead, Oxford remains a twisted fun house version of itself and the populace remains howling at the moon.

Clyde—my spell-slinging partner in government-sponsored world saving—and I exchange a look. Clyde puts a finger to his ear.

“Tabby,” he says to our handler back at MI37, “any chance you know what’s going on?”

“Dimensional portal’s definitely closed,” Tabby says. “QED Nyarlathotep’s not as dead as he looks.

Twenty or so of Nyarlathotep’s cultists are scattered around us waiting for the concussion to kick in. Except one of them starts to laugh.

“You really thought just stabbing him would work?” He laughs harder.

And to be honest I rather had. But I don’t want to give the bastard the satisfaction of hearing me admit it.

“Oh pants,” says Clyde. “Great big bloomers. We can’t kill him outside of his home reality, can we?”

Wait… Now we realize this?

The cultist laughs harder still. “And you closed the portal.”

So we can’t even get him. Oh bugger and balls.

And then Clyde mutters a few words under his breath. And next to him time and space bend. Like a bubble rising through viscous liquid.

“Ta-dah.” He indicates the reborn portal.

The cultist stops laughing.

It should be a satisfying moment, except-

“Wait,” I say. “We seriously have to go into a dimension representing humanity’s collective fears and madness?”

“Well,” Clyde says, “the travel brochure mentioned something about beaches.”

I give him the finger because I’m not at my most eloquent in the face of certain death.

“Also,” Tabitha adds, “top him, get back, and close the thing in thirty minutes or less. Otherwise permanent world buggering. OK?”

Perfect. Just bloody perfect.

“Tick tock.”

I brace myself and step through.

Another time. Another place.

As it turns out, humanity is afraid of pretty weird stuff. At least that’s the only reason I can think of that a giant version of Snuggles the teddy bear is trying to kill me with a meat cleaver.

We’re in something that looks like an airport terminal. Stepping through the portal put me six feet above the floor. With a feeling like slipping out of jello, I fell to the floor. And there was Snuggles. Six feet tall, eye buttons dangling on threadbare strings, a cleaver the size of my chest balanced in one hand.

“Passport!” he giggles and takes another swing at my head. I duck. He buries the blade into a cement pillar. He tugs it free with an adorable chuckle. A stitch bursts in his arm at the effort. Stuffing spills loose.

This is typically the point at which I cower and wait for Clyde to sling a spell that makes him seem more like a walking missile launcher than most people you meet. Except, when I look over, Clyde is sitting with his hands over his eyes, screaming.

Seriously? This is Clyde’s personal hell? Really?

Snuggles takes another swipe at my head. I duck, roll, come up behind him. Snuggles wrestles the cleaver out the floor. Another stitch pops while he giggles madly.

And I am not particularly good at this whole fighting thing, but at times like this you do what you have to do.

I kick at his loose arm. More stuffing spills. I kick again.

Snuggles looks back at me, his cotton line drawn up in a smile. “Playtime is over,” he says as sweetly as can be. He heaves on the cleaver. I kick one last time.

Another stitch pops. Snuggles heaves. The whole joint gives way. He staggers back uttering things no beloved children’s character should ever say, still laughing between the curses.

At this point, opportunity and the cleaver are the same thing so I grab them both. I stagger under the massive weight. Snuggles’ detached arm still clings to the cleaver. I swing madly, spin round and round.

And then the blade buries itself in Snuggles’ gut, and he chuckles one last time and lies still.

I stand up sweating hard. And now would be a great time for me to snap Clyde out of it. Because I can see the Care Bears coming and they have machine guns.

Case File #7:The I in Team

Every time I fight unspeakable horrors from alternate realities, I am reminded of the value of teamwork. Say, for example, that I am forced into a dimension of fear and madness to act as the government-sponsored assassin of its avatar, Nyarlathotep, then back-up is about my favorite thing in the world.

So now, forced into a dimension of fear and madness and acting as the government-sponsored assassin of its avatar, Nyarlathotep, it’s really not an awesome time for my partner to lose his shit.

But Clyde Marcus Bradley, MI37 field agent, geek, cat-lover, and bloody wizard is lying on the ground whimpering, while I’m stuck with defending us from a reality gone awry.

Untethered nightmares come at me. Balls of blades, steely and sharp; beings of arms and bone, scratching, clawing; creeping insectile horrors; nuns with switchblades; rats the size of terriers; tentacular masses, sticky, viscous, and clutching. I scavenge weapons, improvise barriers. I duck blades, catch punches, wrestle limbs. I am beaten, blackened, bruised. I come up with something in my teeth. I am an animal. I am pissing terrified.

Space ripples and changes about us. Maybe we are traveling, some dream logic carrying us along like a current through rooms of living flesh, of bone, of chitin, rooms threatening to drown us, rooms I cannot bring myself to describe.

I can feel it slipping in behind my eyes. After-images of travesties that clamber into my brain and breed. I lose track of what is real in a place where everything is unreal. And I need to pull back. I need to get him good and grounded. But there is no ground. There is just Clyde, just me. Circling. Falling. Falling again.

I land. A plain. Some tundra. A dust cloud on the horizon. I pick myself up. And Clyde is still there, right next to me. And I know something big is coming. I just need to get to him, to get us both away. I start to run, but dream rules apply. My limbs do not obey me. Each step is a tottering nightmare of minimal increments.

And the cloud. The cloud is fast, is impossible in its speed. Closing. Closing. And in the dust I get an impression of hooves, of horns, of teeth.

“Clyde,” I yell. “Clyde!” I’m begging him. He has to help. I was never built to be the man alone.

Finally I am at his side, I slap him, shake him. His head lolls. His eyes roll. “Come back to me,” I whisper. The cloud comes closer.

He is not going to snap out of it. He is gone. I am alone.

I gather him up in my arms. I stagger. Another step of glacial slowness. The cloud’s thunder shakes this world.

And it would be so easy to slip away, to give in, to let the madness take me, to be consumed by this reality.

But there is a home, a place to get back to, friends and family. And Kurt Russell movie marathons. And bacon.

And screw this. Clyde and I are getting out of here with Nyarlathotep’s head on a bloody platter.

I turn. I face the cloud. It’s almost on me now. Massive. Thundering.

Just a cloud, I tell myself. Just dust and wind. I don’t know the rules of this place, but I know the rules of dreams. Of nightmares. And I pray that they apply.

The cloud breaks over me. Just dust. Just wind. It scours my cheeks. Hoofbeats crash around me. Just echoes. Just the boom of the wind.

And then peace. Then a breeze. I open my ways. The cloud has blown away. I still hold Clyde.

Reality slips. I stand in a corridor full of doors. I can hear scampering about and above me. And I know I can hear the rats in the walls.

I am still afraid. I would still favor flight over fight. But fight I will. Because I can face my fear. Because now, Nyarlathotep, you get bloody yours.

Case File #8:Interrogation

I never thought I’d say it, but once you get used to a dimension of fear and chaos, it’s not as bad as it sounds. Yes, it’s driven my partner, Clyde, insane, and yes, it does keep trying to kill me with more and more depraved horrors, but, well it could be worse.

Take the field of flying knives I have to traverse. Blades whirl, shearing life from plants, small rodents, the odd offensive-looking rock. But a little concentration on my part, and I manifest a titanium steel umbrella and, with Clyde balanced on my shoulder, I cross the place in relatively safety.

Nightmare logic.

And when I reach a river of blood leeches—each creature a foot long, each with a spine-filled maw reaching for me—I just think hard and then I have wings. Clyde and I sail over them easy as blinking.

Seriously, I’m like the Green bloody Lantern in this reality. It’s awesome.

Really the only serious fly in the ointment is that if I don’t find its ruler, Nyarlathotep in the next fifteen minutes or so, all of regular reality is going to be permanently buggered. And I have no idea where I’m going.

Fortunately I’ve always been more of a beta male, so stopping to ask for directions isn’t a serious dilemma. If only I could stop people trying to kill me long enough to ask.

I finally strike gold in a castle that drips gore and is chock-full of tiny gremlin-like creatures armed with stilettos. An old-school suit of armor makes maneuvering difficult but renders their attempted stabbings utterly ineffective. After a few attempts I finally seize one around the midriff and heft it to eye height. It kicks and spits with its full eight inch frame. Really, if it wasn’t so full of bile it’d be quite adorable.

“I’m looking for Nyarlathotep,” I inform it.

It lunges for my eyes, hurling its blades at the grills in my armored mask. I flinch back and fling it away. Possibly a little too hard. It hits a wall and becomes an ugly stain.

I keep the next one further from my face.

“Which way to Nyarlathotep?”

It suggests some awful things I should do to my mother.

“I’m not a violent man,” I tell it, “but I can apparently crush you like an insect.”

More profanities follow. Small he may be. Easily intimidated he is not.

“Please?” I venture.

Further obscenities. And then my jaw starts to tremble, because all of this abuse is delivered by a voice so high it’s barely in human hearing range. And then I laugh. It doesn’t feel at all appropriate as chunks of viscera rain down the castle walls, but I’m starting to become immune to the shock horror aspects of this place.

As soon as the sound is out of me, the gremlin shrieks and does its best to claw its way out of my hand. I’m so shocked I stop laughing and stare at it. It recovers slowly. I chuckle. It slams its body backwards, wrestling an arm free to cover its ears.

“Nyarlathotep now, or I bust a gut all over you,” I tell it. Not the most threatening thing I’ve ever said, but it has the desired effect. The thing grimaces and screeches, and jabbers, and around me the walls of reality flex and then-

I stand (and Clyde whimpers) on a cliff overlooking a barren, dusty plain. Rising from the center, like red wax dripping toward the sky, is a many-spired citadel.

“Nyarlathotep,” the gremlin gibbers at me. “Nyarlathotep!” Looks like the sort of place an extradimensional avatar of fear and chaos would call home. I nod my thanks to the gremlin and then throw it over the edge of the cliff.

Seriously, the murderous bastard could have brought us a little closer.

Case File #9:Citadel

As citadels that are the embodiment of sheer terror go, Nyarlathotep’s is pretty imposing.

I mean, to be fair, he benefits from having built it in a nightmare reality based on humanity’s collective fears where things like gravity and physics are apparently spongier than I’m used to, but still, he deserves points for effort. Blood colored spires, statues that actually scream, non-Euclidean angles — he went the whole nine yards.

Still going to kill the bastard, of course.

I lower Clyde, co-worker, friend, and currently dribblingly insane person off my shoulders. I check my watch. If time obeys the same rules here as back home I’ve got about twelve minutes to get this done. Time to take some shortcuts.

Fortunately, the best thing about a nightmare reality is that nightmare rules apply. I concentrate, sprout wings, and take to the air.

Hell yeah, I do.

I sweep down over spires, twist between towers, work my way deeper and deeper into the heart of the complex. A vast central tower looms before me. I aim for a window near its peak, tuck in my wings, clutch Clyde tight to my chest—

—and tentacles explode out of one wall and smash me into the tower.

And, yes, that would probably be the worst thing about a nightmare reality: nightmare rules apply.

I fall, scrabbling against the tower’s sheer surface. I try to clear my mind, to focus. My fingers elongate, develop suckers. I latch on. One arm spirals away, elastic and strong, wrapping around Clyde.

I climb the wall. It ripples beneath me.

I jump as the first spike erupts from the wall’s surface. I fall, but re-summon my wings. I seize Clyde. I climb. The spikes eject from the wall at speed. Jagged rain.

My body is steel before they strike me. I shelter Clyde and they clatter away.

And screw wings. I’m from the twenty-first century dammit.

A moment is all it takes to get a jet engine strapped to my back. Going up.

The tentacles lash out as I jet upwards, but I angle away, roasting them with afterburners. They blacken, curling and falling away. Take that you bastards.

A window looms. I blast towards it, faster, faster. And I’m outstripping the citadel’s imagination. I’m outstripping its speed to respond. I’m bloody winning.

Except the window’s frame twists even as I slam towards the glass, the edges stretching, stretching, until it resembles something worryingly close to a smile.

Glass shatters. A wall looms. I collide. Blackness descends.

Later

How long was I out? How long do I have left? Is it too late for reality? I look for my watch, but everything is black.

“Clyde?” I say. No reply.

“Always late,” a voice says.

I recognize that voice.

“I’m very disappointed, Arthur.”

It’s my mother’s voice.

A spotlight flicks on, a white circle of light on the floor before me. I hear footsteps. My mother comes into the circle. She’s bleeding. A great gash across her neck. She collapses, reaches for me.

“Jesus!” I dash forward, grab her hand. She’s trying to say something I can’t hear. I read her lips. “Arthur…” There’s something she’s desperate to convey, but she can’t…

And then it hits me. Nightmare rules apply.

And this is a cheap bloody ploy.

Lights. I summon them. Banish the darkness. My mother’s body wilts in their brightness. Becomes mannequin parts falling apart beneath cheap clothes. An illusion dismissed.

The brightness illuminates a throne room, rich wall hangings, a velvet carpet, a magnificent golden chair. No Clyde. I can’t see him. But there, standing before the chair, waiting for me–my target, my goal. Nyarlathotep is home.

And seeing him there, all traces of confidence drain away. No, they are violently expunged from my body. Seeing him there, finally, I am truly afraid.

Case File #10:Rematch

Fear. It’s easy enough to be ruled by it. There are a lot of things to be afraid of these days. Terrorists. Bioweapons. New Lady Gaga songs.

My personal issue with fear is a little more immediate, though. It is seven foot tall, wears red robes, and goes by the name of Nyarlathotep.

And I’m in his citadel, in his dimension, and in this moment, I realize I probably should have brought my gun. My best friend, Clyde, is a government-paid magician, but he appears to have disappeared into madness.

Crap.

Up until now it hasn’t been too much of a problem. Until now, I’ve been able to take advantage of this being a reality other than ours, and just summoned things by concentrating hard. Apparently now I’m in Nyarlathotep’s actual house, that’s not an option. Not that I don’t try it. I imagine swords, guns, knives, bombs, even Donkey Kong on the off chance I can catch him off guard.

No go.

Nyarlathotep steps towards me. He’s got no gun either, but that’s not really an issue for him.

Visions overwhelm me. Rush up at me from the floor, swallow me.

—drowning here, swallowed by surfaces suddenly turned liquid. I can feel them pressing in. Insects scuttering forward, enveloping me. In my mouth, my ears, my eyes. Peeling back my flesh. And beneath I am something other than expected. There is no flesh here, no blood and bone. Hollow glass veins. Crystalline tendons. A hammer descending, to shatter me, obliterate me. Fear building, building. My heart beating faster in my chest until I fear even that. Until it is enough to shatter my fragile body. Overwhelming me. Drowning me—

It could go on and on. Forever. There is so much to fear. To run from. Through the vision I can see Nyarlathotep, hand outstretched, pacing slowly towards me. And I know then that all thoughts of killing him are madness. Because fear can never be killed. It will live forever, beat in my heart forever.

But there, then, I know too, that all of that doesn’t mean fear can’t be overcome too.

I squeeze shut my eyes as the visions press in, but I push back. I gather my breath. I open my eyes.

Nyarlathotep is a step away. His fingers an inch from my throat. I have one hope. One trick this place has taught me. I brace myself. And I laugh.

In his face, I laugh. As loud and hearty as I can make. Trying to avoid the hysteria overcoming me. I laugh, and I laugh, and I laugh.

His hand strikes me and shatters like glass. Nyarlathotep stares at it, disbelieving. He comes on, his arm grinding against me, splintering, fracturing, spilling to the floor in glistening red shards. And then his whole being smashes against me. And he is only so much dust at my feet.

And then his whole citadel trembles. Cracks run through it. The whole of this reality shatters and shakes. And then I am falling, tumbling through a tear in the world, into blackness.

Christ Church College, Oxford

I land with a crack on my back in the center of Christ Church quad.

I lie there panting. I look about me. And I realize, this is it. This is Oxford as I remember it. Regular, normal, boring Oxford. Normal, boring students staring at me, wondering where I’m from. The madness from Nyarlathotep’s reality has been banished.

Clyde, my partner, lost to madness in that other reality, sits up next to me, paws at his eyes.

“I just had the worst dream…”

In my ear, static as my earbud reconnects with the MI37 home office. I hear Tabitha’s voice. “Five, four, three… oh wait. You’re back.” She pauses. “Cut that bloody close. Idiots.”

Yeah. Everything back to normal.

And I smile. Because, really, there’s no place like home.