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Goat Mother and Others:

The Complete Weird Fiction of Pierre Comtois
is published by Chaosium Inc.

This book is copyright as a whole © 2015 by Chaosium Inc.;
all rights reserved.

“Goat Mother”, Eldritch Blue, Lindisfarne Press 2004.

“The Old Ones’ Signs”, Tales Out of Innsmouth, Chaosium Inc., 2006.

“The Deep Cellars”, Lin Carter’s Anton Zarnak Supernatural Sleuth,
Marietta Publishing, 2002.

“Dreams of Yig”, Cthulhu Codex, Necronomicon Press, 1989.

“Take Care What You Seek”, The Cthulhu Cycle, Chaosium Inc., 1996.

“Country of the Wind”, The Ithaqua Cycle, Chaosium Inc., 1998.

“What the Sea Gives Up”, Cthulhu Codex, Necronomicon Press, 1987.

“Footsteps in the Sky”, The Ithaqua Cycle, Chaosium Inc., 1998.

“Zzzzzzzz!”, Cthulhu Codex, Necronomicon Press, 1985.

“The King in Yellow”, Crypt of Cthulhu, 1994.

“The Pallid Masque”, Fungi, Pierre Comtois Publications, 1996.

“Question of Meaning”, Sargasso, Ulthar Press, 2013.

“Thoughts on Lovecraft and his Mythos”, Cthulhu Codex,
Necronomicon Press, 1997-1998.

All other stories are original to this collection.

Cover Illustration © 2014 Victor Leza

Interior Illustrations are © C. George Porter (p. 91, 134, 267, 330, 436, 441)
and Gregorio Montejo (5, 7, 11, 13, 150, 175, 204)

Editor-in-Chief Charlie Krank

Similarities between characters in this book and persons living
or dead are strictly coincidental.

www.chaosium.com.

FIRST EDITION

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Chaosium Publication 6060

Published in February 2015

ISBN-10: 1568824033

ISBN-13: 9781568824031

Printed in the USA

Contents

Author’s Preface

Introduction

The Secret Name

Goat Mother

High and Dry

The Old Ones’ Signs

The Deep Cellars

The Legacy of Acheron

Aqua Salaria

Dreams of Yig

Take Care What You Seek

The Country of the Wind

What the Sea Gives Up

Footsteps in the Sky

Zzzzzzzz!

Second Death

The King in Yellow

The Pallid Masque

Final Plea

Masks of the Puppet Lord

A Question of Meaning

Thoughts on Lovecraft and his Mythos

Afterword

Author’s Preface

elieve it or not, I wasn’t always interested in the Cthulhu Mythos. No, really! Before high school, my reading endeavors were divided mainly between science fiction and non-fiction (when I wasn’t reading Marvel Comics of course). By the time I did get to high school, it was the golden age of Edgar Rice Burroughs paperback reprints and it was from the back pages of one of those volumes that I discovered the wonders of the mail order form. Soon after, I latched onto J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and became an avid reader of the Conan the Barbarian comic book which led me to the sword & sorcery worlds of Robert E. Howard whose work was also being massively reprinted at the time. Meanwhile, LOTR served as an introduction to the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series all of whose volumes I devoured, but no doubt it was likely Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath and The Spawn of Cthulhu that first clued me in to H.P. Lovecraft. The real closer though, was Lin Carter’s Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos with its appendix listing of nearly every Mythos tale written by the Lovecraft Circle and beyond. From that point on, I had to read everything there was and having exhausted what was immediately available in local stores and mail order, reached out to Arkham House for some of its super-expensive hardcover volumes including Lovecraft’s letters. For the first time, I felt compelled to read an author’s non-fiction output, his letters, essays, and articles—not just his fiction. And as a would-be writer, it wasn’t long before I had a yen to make my own contributions to the Mythos (following in the footstep of many other fans before and since). Of course, it took many years before I had any results that would be worth anyone’s time but with a self-imposed apprenticeship in my own small press mags Fungi and Cthulhu Codex, I managed to improve (if I do say so myself) to the point where other publishers began to search me out for contributions to their own projects. The results of those efforts (for good or ill; the reader will have to be the judge), spread over the last two decades, are contained in this volume.

By way of a few words about the stories in this collection (which are not necessarily presented in any published or compositional or chronological order), “The Secret Name,” “High and Dry,” “The Legacy of Acheron,” and “Masks of the Puppet Lord” are all unpublished with the first three having been written expressly for this collection and the last for an anthology that was to have been produced expressly for the Japanese market but never came to anything. “The Secret Name” features Dean’s Corners, located next door to Dunwich, which I’ve made the setting for many of my later Mythos stories. This might be insider baseball, but my conception of Dean’s Corners is based on the real life Massachusetts town of Groton (with next door Dunstable standing in very loosely for Dunwich). In fact, they fit the profile so well, I’ve often wondered if Lovecraft himself had those two towns in mind for Dean’s Corners and Dunwich?

“The Old Ones’ Signs,” “Take Care What You Seek,” (published as “Zombies From R’lyeh”), “Country of the Wind,” and “Footsteps in the Sky” first appeared in Chaosium’s Tales Out of Innsmouth, Cthulhu Cycle, and Ithaqua Cycle respectively, all edited by Robert M. Price.

“Aqua Salaria,” “The Dreams of Yig,” “What the Sea Gives Up,” and “Zzzzzzzz!,” all appeared in my own small press magazine, Fungi. “Dreams of Yig” was written with Henry J. Vester and the title “Zzzzzzzz!” was a remnant of that tale’s origin as a satire on horror stories written as a radio drama; actually my earliest attempt at writing a Lovecraftian type tale.

“The King in Yellow” and “The Pallid Masque” have an interesting history. While not directly connected to the Mythos, they are present here due to Robert W. Chambers’ most famous weird stories having been retroactively included. Though neither “story” is directly linked to the Mythos, I, at least still consider them to be a part of it. Anyway, the first has the most interesting publication history: having been concocted by myself and Gregorio Montejo for Fungi, it was later reprinted in Crypt of Cthulhu before being enshrined in the 2001 Arkham House volume Book of the Dead. “The Pallid Masque” while not a direct sequel, was the second part in what I had planned as a trilogy of tales, the third part of which I may yet visit some day. I don’t mind admitting here that a great influence for the approach I take in these tales was Karl Edward Wagner’s classic “The River of Night’s Dreaming.”

“The Deep Cellars” appeared in Anton Zarnak: Supernatural Sleuth, a collection of original tales based on a character created by Lin Carter and edited again by the ubiquitous Robert M. Price. I liked Zarnak and, with permission, used him as a supporting character in a couple other stories featured in this collection.

“A Question of Meaning,” an attempt to tie in the Mythos with William Hope Hodgson’s Night Land, appeared in the first issue of Sam Gafford’s Sargasso magazine while “Second Death,” my sequel to Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness,” will be appearing in Robert M. Price’s forthcoming Return to the Mountains of Madness.

Finally, “Goat Mother,” perhaps the most disturbing tale in the collection, has been called by some the greatest Tcho Tcho People story ever written. Well, you be the judge of that. Although written to fulfill the requirements of a collection called Eldritch Blue, it was my attempt at trying to come up with a “fate worse than death” for its female protagonist. Although women have not been absent from my Mythos tales, rarely do they take the traditional male role of inheritor of a strange house filled with secrets left by its former owner. So this tale was a bit of a departure from the formu

Which is not to say I prefer formula to originality. It’s just that in my approach to writing Mythos tales, I never had any desire to expand or push the boundaries of what Lovecraft, his immediate Circle, and the first round of disciples had established. All I ever wanted to do was to play in the same sandbox they did, while along the way, tying elements they created closer together in new stories. Beyond that group, contributions to the Mythos exploded and became impossible to keep straight let alone to keep up with. So, mainly, in my own stories, I wanted to capture what it was about the Mythos that first captured my youthful imagination. But to learn more about my thoughts on Lovecraft and Mythos fiction, check out “Thoughts on Lovecraft and His Mythos” that brings up the rear in this collection.

The stories presented here cover about 20 years in my writing career and, I hope, a full range of style and subject matter (including a diverse choice of Cthulhuoid menaces!). So if you like your Mythos fiction close to the bone, in the tradition of, and boundaries set by Lovecraft and his disciples, you should have no trouble enjoying (if that’s the right word) these choice offerings.

Pierre V. Comtois
October 2013

la for me.

Introduction

ou’ve all heard stories of the glorious days of pulp magazines and how their editors abused and exploited their writers. Well, I am proud to say I have carried on that tradition, both in my 1980s Cryptic Publications titles and in my anthologies for Chaosium. The pulp editors would hand a writer a piece of cover art and assign him to write a story to fit it. I liked that idea! So I went it one better! I used to ask my writers to write up stories to justify particular titles I made up. Hugh B. Cave was always a good sport. He wrote up, now let’s see, “Brides of the Blood Fiend from Hell” and other prescribed goodies. And who can forget Chuck Hoffman’s loonily brilliant story that fully lived up to the title I gave him, “Plaything for the Chortling Fiend.” These tales were, of course, aimed at my Weird Menace title Shudder Stories. But I think the prize must go to the extraordinarily versatile Pierre Comtois, always (apparently) happy to craft a story for any occasion, in any sub-genre, to go with any wacky title. He wrote for me “Zombies from R’lyeh,” “The Old Ones’ Signs,” “Kamikaze Nudes of the Secret Pacific Empire” — this last for the one-shot Men’s Adventure homage/parody I put together, Man’s Guts. Go rent Attack of the Sixty-Foot Centerfold, and you will catch a scene in a doctor’s office waiting room where the bandaged Invisible Man is reading a copy of Man’s Guts!

Pierre reminds me of Val Lewton, whose films were similarly made to order from lurid titles supplied him by the studio: Cat People, Curse of the Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, etc. (the last of which I have always suspected must have some sort of underground connection with the forgettable flick Bride of the Gorilla, with which it has a surprising amount in common). Lewton, you see, was saddled with the curse of a genuine artistic conscience, and he just couldn’t help making better films than they told him to make! The titles promise drive-in schlock (one of my favorite genres, rest assured), but what he turned in were real films with real cinematography, real scripts, taking place in what looked like the real world.

This is exactly what Pierre Comtois has somehow always managed to do: he has imbedded his horrors in the midst of real historical and personal circumstances. He gives you what you wanted and expected, and more. His devotion to pulp fiction is evident on every page, but, like the pulp writers themselves, he also shows the influence of classic literature. It is sometimes hard to remember that, while many beloved pulpsters wrote fanzine-level campiness and other masters like Lovecraft and Howard created whole new sub-genres, many more showed themselves to be real writers with the instincts and ability to publish in mainstream venues. Pierre falls in this last category. Such an approach lends the horrors a unique chill and power for their seeming to emerge from the “mainstream” world. This is the kind of narration that cannot work if it skimps on historical background, character development, etc., so it doesn’t. And Pierre Comtois doesn’t. Sure, he takes exotic journeys of the imagination to lands afar and unknown, but he is always documenting them in detail in the manner of an attentive anthropologist, and this book contains the compelling results. Enjoy them!

Robert M. Price
Hour of the Siesta of the Shoggoths

The Secret Name

o you have to go to Josh Turner’s pasture again today?” asked Ruth Mills as she scrambled some eggs at the stove.

“Now Ruth, we’ve talked about this before,” said her husband, Daniel. “Josh and I have been planning to clear his south pasture since the spring and now that the harvest’s in, we’ve got the time to do it.”

“But why you? Why not someone in Dunwich?”

“Because we’re family…”

“I hardly consider a fourth cousin who’s related to you only by marriage, family.”

“Just the same, blood is thicker than water.”

“Especially in Dunwich, right?”

Clearly exasperated, Daniel threw his fork in his plate with a clatter.

It was the same conversation they’d been having for the past month, ever since Daniel began going to Dunwich to help Josh clear a thirty acre parcel of second growth forest. Every Saturday, Daniel would be up early for the 15 mile drive into Dunwich in order to get there with enough time left to get a full day’s work in. He came back late in the evening, sometimes after Ruth had gone to bed, exhausted but unwilling to slow down. Daniel wasn’t as young as he used to be and it didn’t help knowing about Dunwich’s unsavory reputation even if the reality didn’t quite come up to what some folks believed.

“Ruth, this is just business as usual,” Daniel was saying. “I help Josh with his pasture and some day when I need him, Josh will come over and help me with something.”

“You’ve never asked anyone for help before and anyway, it’s much better for Josh to come to Dean’s Corners than it is for you to go to Dunwich. I mean, most of the roads there aren’t even paved and there aren’t any town services to speak of…”

“Dean’s Corners wasn’t that much different until a few years ago.”

“But the point is, Dean’s Corners has moved into the twentieth century,” said Ruth, scraping the eggs into a plate. “Dunwich is still backward in almost every measure of what a properly ordered town is supposed to be.”

“So?”

“So if something happened to you out there, if you got hurt, the town doesn’t even have an ambulance service, let alone a doctor,” said Ruth. “Does Josh even have a phone at his place?”

Daniel shrugged.

“Nothing’s going to happen and some people like Dunwich’s isolation. I hear tell that a few folks have moved there occasionally to get away from all the hustle and bustle.”

“Just the same, there’s always been something creepy about that old town what with its half dilapidated farms and abandoned homes…”

“Don’t tell me you’re going to bring up all those stories we used to hear when we were kids?”

“They’re nothing to laugh about,” insisted Ruth, sipping at a cup of tea. “Why, just the other day, Myrtle Potter was saying…”

“Myrtle Potter is the biggest gossip in town,” said Daniel with contempt. “All she does is spread stories about people she has no business telling. You don’t take that stuff seriously, do you?”

“Of course not, but didn’t you tell me how you and Josh uncovered some funny looking rocks in that pasture?”

“Sure, but you come across rocks like that around these parts all the time,” said Daniel with a dismissive wave of his hand. “They’re no different than the stone circles in the hills around town. Remember how we used to go up to them to make out when we were kids? People used to be afraid of them so we thought what better place to fool around and not get caught? Nothing ever happened, right?”

Ruth had to admit it was so and had to smile despite herself at the memory of those long ago trysts.

Suddenly, Daniel stood, gulping the dregs of his coffee and placing the empty cup in the sink. “Gotta go now. I’m burning daylight. Might be back a little later than usual tonight.” Stooping, he gave Ruth a peck on the cheek, grabbed his hat from the rack by the door and pushed the squeaky screen door open. Ruth heard his booted feet clomp hollowly on the back porch before they crunched down on the gravel driveway.

Standing, she went to the door where the early autumn breeze was still warm enough to warrant leaving the kitchen door open. Outside, the sky was just beginning to pink in the east and the tall line of pine trees along the edge of the kitchen garden were silhouetted against a few low lying clouds. Out back, she heard the rooster give out with a cockle doodledoo and she remembered in the days when they were first married how hard it was to be parted even for a few hours when Daniel used to hurry back to the house at lunch time…all the way from the north forty…just to make love with her.

Ruth’s reminiscences were interrupted at the sound of an engine turning over and with a squeak of brakes, Daniel backed the pickup out of the barn. As he always did, he stopped briefly in front of the door to blow her a desultory kiss and she sent one back to him.

“Take care, Dan,” she called as he began to back the truck the rest of the way down the driveway. “See you tonight.”

The sun was full up by the time Ruth had cleaned the breakfast dishes, fed the barnyard animals and gone through the kitchen garden. She set down the basket of fresh picked vegetables with a thump on the back porch, wiped her hands on her apron, and stepped back into the cool interior of the house. Taking a few minutes to wash up and change, she tucked her wallet in the back pocket of her jeans and left the house again. This time, it was her turn to head to the barn and back out with her old Chevy Cavalier. It was a car she and Daniel had picked out the year before in nearby Boxton Township to be used for household errands but which they both referred to as “her” car ever since. At the end of the driveway, Ruth paused to make sure the road was clear before pulling out; it almost always was, but once her brother had made the mistake of assuming it was as empty as usual and ended up being clipped by Hank Zygot’s pickup. It was only luck that Hank just managed to slow down enough to avoid a full collision. Seeing the road was clear, Ruth pulled out and headed north toward the center of town. A few miles farther on, she crossed the Aylesbury Pike and glanced in the direction where it led toward Dunwich. Seeing how the trees on the sides of the road seemed to crowd closer overhead, making it appear as if the Pike narrowed to a trail in the distance drew Ruth’s mind back to her concerns regarding Daniel’s working i

It wasn’t as if she took any stock in the stories of haunted farmhouses, unholy rites or Indian legends of monsters and were-things that moved about deep in the forest. They were fine for children gathered around a campfire eager for the pleasant thrill of a spooky story, but not for adults. Not that there weren’t plenty of people in Dean’s Corners who, if they didn’t necessarily believe in ghosts and monsters, at least gave enough credence in their spirit to avoid going to Dunwich if they could. And it didn’t help that Dunwich was almost completely depopulated, filled with abandoned farmhouses, dilapidated barns and overgrown fields. The few people who still lived there, were old timers who refused to leave, families more attached to their land than making a better life for themselves or outsiders who went there to get away from it all. And while some development was slowly creeping in the area, none at all was going on in Dunwich. So far as she knew, there hadn’t been a new home built there in thirty years; there were no stores except one or two feed stores that also offered general provisions and almost no town government to speak of. She’d heard that there was a Board of Selectmen but that they met infrequently, a broken down fire engine that hadn’t been used in decades sat behind the old town hall and emergency services and law enforcement had to be provided by neighboring towns. There were, however, a couple churches whose spires could still be seen at a distance, poking hopefully above the treetops from the summits of the Four Sisters hills that surrounded Dean’s Corners. Ruth remembered how she and her friends used to speculate on what lay beneath those trees on summer days when they were on vacation from classes at Boxton High School. They’d pack lunches as they did when they were younger and hike up to the top of one of the Four Sisters and picnic amid the rings of old stones up there. It was while on one of those excursions that Daniel noticed her for the first time, really noticed her. Dean’s Corners being such a small town, they’d known each other for years before that, but as usually happened among younger children, you took each other for granted. After that, whenever the gang went up to one of the Four Sisters, she and Daniel would pair off and find a place to neck…

The honk of a car shattered Ruth’s daydreaming and she suddenly realized that she’d driven all the way over from the Pike to the town center without ever noticing it. Quickly, she pulled into the small plaza off Route 12 and stopped in front of the A&P. Still wondering at her absentmindedness, she took a carriage from the small corral in the parking lot and headed for the main entrance. It sure had been an improvement when the supermarket, small sized though it was, first came to town. She remembered when her mother used to have to go all the way in to Boxton to do her weekly food shopping. And with the supermarket came a branch of the local 5 cent savings bank and even a laundromat!

“Hello, Mrs. Mills,” said Cindy Stewart from behind one of the store’s two cash registers.

“Good morning, Cindy,” replied Ruth. “How’s your mother? Up and around yet?”

“Oh, you know her, Mrs. Mills, a few hours after the delivery, she was up making dinner!”

Ruth laughed. “She hasn’t changed since high school!”

Some time later, Ruth was just finishing up her shopping and had stopped in the canned fruit aisle when she heard a familiar voice. Standing with a can of peaches in her hand, she listened and discovered that the voices were carrying over the shelves from the next aisle.

“…visiting with my brother in Arkham,” said one person. “You know he’s an attorney there? And he was telling me about having to settle an estate issue in Dunwich and how it was a nightmare to figure out because of either poor record keeping at the registry of deeds or there being no records at all!”

“That doesn’t surprise me one bit,” replied the second person, whose voice Ruth recognized immediately as Myrtle Potter’s. “Dunwich has disintegrated to the point where the state is considering discontinuing it as a legal township…read it in the Boston Oracle. If it happens, it’ll be the first time that’s happened in who knows how long. What with no Fire Department, no Police Department and hardly any town government to speak of and only a two room schoolhouse that’s always looking for a new teacher, it’s no wonder.”

“How did that town ever get so bad, I wonder?”

“Pshaw, Janey, you’ve heard all the same stories as I have…”

“But they don’t explain such neglect…”

“Well, I’ll tell you, things weren’t always so bad,” went on Myrtle. “It mostly happened after that business with the Whateley’s years ago. Tossed such a scare in folks that a lot of ‘em sold their farms and moved away. Those that stayed…well, it’s not polite to speak in such terms, but those that stayed was never regarded as being the sharpest needles in the old pin cushion if you know what I mean.”

Janey Sawtelle chuckled guiltily, but agreed.

“’Course, that doesn’t mean that there still ain’t a few folks there that knows what they’re about. Take Josh Turner’s wife, Adele for instance…”

At the name, Ruth straightened and listened more intently.

“What about her?” asked Janey.

“Not as slow on the uptake as a lot of those other Dunwich folk,” said Myrtle. “I heard from Emmaline Craddock that her family’s not from Dunwich at all but from somewheres else. Not sure where. Boston maybe or out of state.”

“Why’d they move to Dunwich of all places?”

“Emmaline said she heard that Adele’s grandfather came to Dunwich to research the Indian tribes that used to live around here in olden times,” Myrtle explained. “He bought the old Coburn place up near Dead Indian Road and fixed it up some.”

“And Adele married Josh Turner? Didn’t set her sights too high, did she?” said Janey, unkindly.

“Ain’t that so? And her being such an attractive thing too. I mean, there might not’ve been much stock to choose from in Dunwich, but there was no reason she couldn’t do some shopping in Dean’s Corners or Boxton for that matter. Anyway, I hear she’s come to her senses somewhat lately…”

Janey giggled. “Oh, I know what that means! Who’s she takin’ up with?”

Here, Myrtle lowered her voice somewhat so that Ruth was forced to listen very carefully to hear what she said.

“Well, I hear from very reliable sources…Lizzy Doderholz, who works for the telephone company manning the old switchboard for Dunwich…they still haven’t got a modern phone system up there you know…”

“Yes, yes, go on!”

“…that Adele and Dan Mills are foolin’ around.”

“No!”

“It’s true. Lizzy said she accidentally listened in on a phone call Adele made to her father, who still lives up at the old Coburn place, and she told him that Josh wouldn’t do for her but that Dan was quite ‘satisfactory.’ Can you believe that?”

“That’s what she said, ‘satisfactory?’”

“Lizzy swears it…makes you wonder why Ruthy was constantly smiling those first years after she and Dan were married!”

Both women laughed then and moved on but Ruth stood rooted to the spot, the can of peaches forgotten in her hand. Could it be true? Daniel had seemed more distant ever since he began working with Josh a few weeks before. And before that, his relationship with her had settled into a dull routine but no more routine than what was expected of a couple married for many years. But as Ruth continued to turn what Myrtle had said over in her mind, she began to see a pattern of impatience and short-temperedness in Daniel over the past few weeks that was out of character for him. Could he have taken up with this woman? The notion seemed so outlandish. Cheating like that only happened on television or to other people. Nevertheless, all the way home, Ruth couldn’t help but turn the possibility over in her mind.

As the afternoon wore on to evening, she prepared supper as usual but when Daniel didn’t show up at his regular time, all the fears she’d gone over earlier in the day returned. Adding to her doubts was the fact that Daniel had told her that he might stay later that night. To work in the field or…? Suddenly wracked with doubt and fear, she decided to give Josh a call and picking up the telephone receiver she dialed the Dunwich exchange…hopefully, the Turner’s did have a phone. But when she heard Lizzy Doderholz’ voice come over the line, she immediately hung up. One thing was for sure, if she was going to call Josh’s place, she didn’t want Lizzy listening in and passing the gossip along to Myrtle Potter!

Looking outside, she saw that there was still an hour or so of full daylight before sunset and determined to drive out to Josh’s farm and find out for herself if anything was amiss. If things were as Myrtle said, well…she’d cross that bridge when she came to it.

Throwing on her coat, she left the house and backed the car to the road. Her decision made, she had to consciously keep from pressing too hard on the gas pedal and watch her speed. In a few minutes, she had reached the Aylesbury Pike crossing and turned north as the road led out of Dean’s Corners. Immediately, the forest seemed to grow thicker, wilder, and more impenetrable as she proceeded. She hardly noticed the roadside placard informing motorists that they were entering the town of Dunwich, est. 1718 so overgrown it was with creepers. The going was easy so long as she stayed on the Pike which, as a state road, was well maintained, but as soon as she took the turn off for Dunwich proper, the way became more difficult. At first, the roads were paved, although cracked and crumbling fast with long neglect, but soon enough, after she’d left the main road, they turned to bare earth and forced her to slow to a crawl in order to keep her car from being damaged.

She’d forgotten to take into account the wild nature of the forest in Dunwich and how soon it would cause the region to darken as the sun began to set. In no time at all, it seemed, the world around her settled into the gloom of dusk alleviated only by the occasional firefly or kitchen light shining from some far off farmhouse. More than once, the crooked shape of an abandoned barn or silo would bulk up against the sunset sky and then vanish behind her as she continued along windy, twisty back roads that she knew led to Josh Turner’s farm. Leaning forward tensely in her seat, Ruth peered anxiously into the gathering darkness looking for the remote crossroads at the intersection of Old Swamp Road and Turner’s Landing. She knew she would need to pass it before coming to the turnoff that was actually the long drive leading up to the Turner’s farm. Suddenly, something shone off to the side of the road, like eyes, and then there was movement directly in front of the car! Ruth slammed on the brakes, her chest striking the steering wheel. Heart pounding, she caught a glimpse of three deer as they passed out of the glare of her headlights into the woods at the side of the road. Breathing a sigh of relief and allowing herself a little laugh at her own nervousness, she started forward again. Good thing she’d not been going very fast, otherwise, she might have been looking at a smashed windshield and a ruined suspension. Something Daniel would not be happy about. But thought of Daniel reminded her of where she was, in the dark, trying to find her way around unlit country roads. Finally, she passed the crossroads and slowing down even more, began to keep an eye out for the Turner’s mailbox…there it was! And right beside it, the entrance to the Turner farm.

Sighing with relief and leaning back in her seat for the first time since leaving the Pike, Ruth guided her car up the long twin ruts that led to the farmhouse passing Daniel’s truck that was parked off to the side. A light over the front door led her in the last few hundred yards and she braked to a stop alongside the Turner’s own shiny new Ford Ranger pickup truck. Also in the yard, was a good selection of farming vehicles from tractors to harvesters and seeding trailers, even a big hay bundler. And they all seemed to be new, without hardly a scratch on their paint jobs. Vaguely, Ruth wondered how Josh could afford it all and if he could, why he needed Daniel to help him clear his fields when it was obvious he could easily pay to hire some hands to do the job.

Getting out of the car, Ruth approached the house where the light shone above the back porch. There was another light on somewhere inside so she knocked at the door. While waiting for a reply, she looked around some more admiring how neat everything appeared. Standing away from the house were the various outbuildings including chicken coop, tool shed, hoppers and stalls for the farm equipment. A big, brightly painted barn stood a hundred yards off with a pair of silos sticking up from the far side. Ruth noticed the wooden sigil placed over the main doorway that most barns sported, a bit of traditional superstition that could be found across the country. But on this particular example, Ruth noticed that instead of sporting the usual gaily colored circular design pattern, the placard was quite plain and shaped in the form of a five pointed star with a single, open eye in the center.

Turning back to the door, Ruth knocked again, this time harder but with the same result. Peering in at the window, she couldn’t see any evidence that anyone was home. Could the men still be working out in the field? Maybe Mrs. Turner, Adele, had gone out to bring them some supper? Since Josh Turner was family, Ruth decided it wouldn’t be impolite to step inside and wait a few minutes until someone came back. Testing the door, she found it was unlocked, which didn’t surprise her. Stepping inside, she eased the door closed quietly and looked around. The kitchen was much like her own; neat with many feminine touches including curtains decorated with a fruit and vegetable pattern and refrigerator magnets in the shape of barnyard animals, some holding notices and household messages. The light she had seen earlier was coming from the next room and when she followed it, found herself in a small parlor. There too, everything was in order: stuffed chairs and sofa, lamps and a fireplace with kindling laid aside in anticipation of colder weather. The walls included a couple cheap prints and a few portraits of family members including one obvious patriarch with huge, mutton chop sideburns and dark eyes that looked out from beneath great, bushy eyebrows. Not the most endearing visage Ruth had ever seen. On the frame was a small metal plate engraved with the name “Ezekiah Coburn Winthrop.” Adele’s grandfather maybe? If so, it seemed that he hadn’t move into the old Coburn place by chance after all.

The light she saw now, was coming from a small oil lamp sitting on a roll top desk set in an alcove across from the front door. Moving in its direction, Ruth saw that there were a few scattered articles on the desk: a holder filled with pens and pencils, a stapler, some loose papers. Pinned to the wall over the desk however, was what looked like a hand drawn map. Looking more closely, she saw that she was wrong. It wasn’t a map but a diagram of some sort. Bringing the lamp up for a better look, she saw a series of curved lines, some dotted and some solid along which had been written numbers, some in decimals but no matter how long she concentrated, she couldn’t find a pattern to any of it. Here and there among the lines were what looked like little drawings, circles maybe, but with their edges all irregular and jagged. Inside the shapes were markings that suggested symbols like letters or numbers but of a sort Ruth could not interpret. There was something familiar about them though. Had she seen markings like those somewhere before? Giving up, she moved the light across the rest of the room and noticed a chair in a corner holding a pile of books with library tags on the spines. Curious, she picked one up and opened it. She was a little surprised to find that the stamp inside the front cover indicated that the book had been taken from the Boston Public Library. The book itself seemed to be one on higher mathematics…geometry or something. At least that’s what all the pages of diagrams reminded her of. Flipping the book shut again, she read the title Three Dimensional Numbers for a Four Dimensional World: Mapping the Landscapes of Dis. Frowning, she looked at the pile again and saw the next book was entitled Finding the Way to Carcosa and Other Places: A Mathematical Guide. The subject matter seemed far beyond anything she’d expect a farm couple in Dunwich would be interested in, let alone understand. She noticed that the rest of the books seemed to cover similar esoteric subjects…except one, much to her relief. But upon picking it up, she wasn’t sure if her initial reaction was premature: Azathoth and Other Horrors it was called, by Edward Derby. What was a book of fiction doing mixed up with the math texts? Idly, she thumbed through the book’s pages until they stopped by themselves where a bookmark rested. “…at length his vision opened to many secret vistas whose existence no common eye suspects,” read the passage. “And one night a mighty gulf was bridged, and the dream-haunted skies swelled down to the lonely watcher’s window to merge with the close air of his room and make him a part of their fabulous wonder…” A section of the text that had been highlighted in yellow marker attracted Ruth’s eye to the bottom of the page: “Azathoth: find the secret name and the demon sultan in his blindness must appear. Azathoth: ask the question and the seething chaos must give answer. Azathoth: voice the secret name and control your destiny…”

Ruth returned the book to the pile on the chair, not sure what connection it had, if any, to the other volumes. A wastebasket stood nearby with crumpled papers in it. Curious, she undid a few but stopped when she came to one so sheer, she could almost see through it. A short, handwritten note in one corner read “Call Dad about this” and beneath it, a set of straight lines had been ruled across it, all intersecting at a certain point. Again, there were the irregular shapes with familiar markings and, in a moment of inspiration, Ruth placed the paper over the diagram on the wall and found that the two sets of irregular shapes matched perfectly. The intersection of the ruled lines rested almost exactly in the center of the shapes.

Crumpling the paper and tossing it back into the wastebasket, Ruth returned to the kitchen intent on continuing her search for Daniel outdoors. But passing by the refrigerator, she recalled something she had seen earlier. Scanning the messages stuck there beneath an assortment of magnets, she found the one she wanted. A note written in the same feminine hand as the one she’d seen in the alcove. “Call Dad after 31st…first try didn’t work…asked the questions but got only garbled replies…conclusion: Josh wasn’t right…or Azathoth not the secret name.” A second word had been written that Adele seemed to have planned to try next, but the spelling was so garbled Ruth didn’t even try to read it. Fearful, for some reason she didn’t understand, she left the house and, walking down the driveway, yanked open the door to Daniel’s truck and took down a hunting rifle from the gun rack. While checking the magazine, she became aware for the first time of a dull, pulsing beat coming distantly from the rear of the house. Had it been there all the time or had it just started? Holding the gun before her, she began to walk around the house and, when she cleared it, the beating sound became a good deal more noticeable. It seemed to be drifting over from a stand of trees that bordered a paddock behind the barn. The sun had been gone now for a good hour, and night had fully fallen. There was no moon, but the starlight that shone from the cloudless autumn sky was sufficient for her to see the cart path that led from beside the paddock into the woods, no doubt to Josh’s fields on the other side. Determined to find out what was going on and where Daniel was…she hadn’t forgotten the things that Myrtle had said, and nothing she’d seen so far reassured her that the old gossip’s speculations were untrue…she started out.

As she stepped within the limits of the tree line she was plunged into impenetrable gloom, as the feeble starlight was cut off by the mix of pine trees and oaks that made up the stretch of forest along the trail. Luckily for her nerves however, the belt of trees soon petered out and opened onto fields again. Here, the path led along the fringes of a cornfield that covered the brow of a hill and, as the beating sound continued to pulsate, she found herself entering a second stretch of forest. This time it took much longer to cross, and Ruth guessed that she must have gone a good half-mile before emerging into another clearing where she found herself surrounded by the stumps of recently-cleared forest. Smaller branches littered the ground everywhere and larger limbs, cut into manageable pieces, were thrown together in huge brush piles that loomed at intervals in the semi-darkness. This, no doubt, was the field Daniel had been helping to clear. Around her, the open land rose gently and over the crest, apparently, was where the beating sounds were coming from. Carefully, Ruth began to negotiate the freshly-cleared landscape, at one point passing a big tractor with a pair of heavy chains leading from it to a huge tree stump that had been pulled from the ground. It’s spidery tangle of upended roots smelling heavily of freshly-turned earth.

For the first time, Ruth noticed that the air about her seemed to have thickened; walking through it felt like wading in chest-deep water that only grew more resistant as she went on. At last however, with the sky filled with stars and a slight wind rustling the nearby trees, she reached the crest of the hill. She hadn’t really thought about what she’d expected to see…Daniel in the arms of Adele Turner maybe, but what she saw instead puzzled her more than anything else. A few hundred feet before her, in a slight depression formed from the top of the hill, was a circle of stones not unlike those scattered about Dean’s Corners. These stones, however, were not as big, smallish and lumpy rather than chiseled and raised upright, but they sported the same kind of hieroglyphic markings that those other stones did. Over them was a soft glow, but from where it came, she couldn’t be sure.

Off to one side, beyond the perimeter of light, stood Daniel naked from the waist up. It seemed to Ruth that his posture was much too stiff to be normal, and she guessed that perhaps he might be in a sort of trance. That impression was reinforced when she laid eyes on the second figure sitting on a big, discarded tree branch just outside the circle of stones. Dressed in overalls and a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up, Adele Turner looked exactly the way Ruth had imagined her: long dark hair, tall and slim. Men, she was sure, no doubt found her attractive. Just at the moment, she was speaking aloud in an unfamiliar language whose syllables seemed to rise and fall to a beat she kept on a small drum gripped between her knees.

Azathoth…demonicus…sultanus…Azathoth…primus…intelligenci…Azathoth…” she recited monotonously before repeating the strange chain of words all over again.

Suddenly she stopped, and Adele stood bolt upright and, if it were not for the darkness, Ruth was sure her eyes would have been shooting daggers.

“Who are you?” Adele demanded. “You’re trespassing on private property!”

“I’m Ruth Mills, Dan’s wife, and I demand to know what’s going on here!”

“None of your business, girl,” retorted Adele, surprising Ruth with the bold comeback. “You have no right to come here. This is private property and I’m telling you to turn around and leave right now.”

“Not on your life,” replied Ruth, who could be as testy as the next woman. “I’ve come for my husband and don’t mean to leave without him.”

“Stop right there!” Adele positively screamed, moving to come between Ruth and Daniel.

Surprised at the note of desperation in the woman’s voice, Ruth halted despite herself.

“Dan is here because he wants to be,” Adele said. “Now leave this instant!”

Ruth wasn’t sure what the woman meant by her comment, whether it confirmed the gossip she’d heard in town or not, but she wasn’t about to surrender her marital rights on the say so of a stranger.

“He does, does he? Then let him speak for himself.”

Ruth never found out how Adele would have replied to the demand because, at just that moment, there was a sudden wavering in the air above the circle of stones. With the movement, Ruth expected some sound to accompany it but there was nothing, instead there was a certain thickening of the atmosphere all around that she felt as pressure on her eardrums. She swallowed in an attempt to unblock her ears and gave her head a little shake. Her behavior however, did not go unnoticed by Adele, who immediately whirled back in the direction of the stones and, when she saw the vague but growing movement in the air that now seemed to be steadily expanding, she screamed.

But Adele’s shout was not one of fear, but of defiance.

“No!” she cried. “Not now! Not yet!”

Quickly, she ran to Daniel and stood before him as if shielding him from something and began reciting the same strange words she’d been saying when Ruth first encountered her.

“Azathoth…phnglwnph…urgll…echinisis…” Over and over she repeated the unintelligible phrases, as if trying to ward off whatever was happening. But if that really was what she was trying to do, her efforts seemed useless. “Azathoth…phnglwnph…urgll…echinisis…” she tried again, advancing a little way toward the center of the stone circle. “Stop, O Great One!” she shouted, unconsciously switching to English. “I implore you with the utterance of your secret name…” And here she spoke aloud something that Ruth recognized vaguely as the word that had been written on the note attached to Adele’s refrigerator. She repeated it a number of times, enough for it to actually begin to make phonetic sense to Ruth.

“Now is not the time!” Adele continued. “The sight of you will be profaned by the presence of an unbeliever! I am your true acolyte! I am the one who has made all the sacrifices, slaughtered the calves, and endured the self-inflicted ritual of placing your Sign upon my body…”

At that Adele moved quickly, and suddenly had pulled aside the straps of her overalls and torn open her shirt exposing an elaborate tattoo that Ruth could plainly see involved a hideous display of wormy filaments gathered around a sigil incised over her belly. In its center her navel, painted like the rest of her, stared like the single eye of a demented Cyclops. Feeling both repelled and attracted at the sight, Ruth vaguely recalled seeing a similar design on the Turners’ barn.

Screaming now herself, Ruth suddenly staggered back and, lifting a hand to wipe the perspiration streaming from her head, she remembered the gun she was holding in her hand. Adele was still shouting imprecations toward the disturbance in the atmosphere over the circle of stones that Ruth could now see was blurring out the stars behind it. And even as she watched with growing horror, it seemed to her that the blurriness began to congeal into the likeness of the image upon Adele’s body, and that something was snaking out from it…

Suddenly, there was a soundless explosion and a long scream of utter despair as the night was lit in a brilliant burst of light.

Blinded and desperate to regain her sight, Ruth rubbed her eyes with the balls of her fists and, when at last she began to see again, she saw Daniel’s rifle lying on the ground where she’d dropped it, a thin wisp of smoke still drifting from the barrel. Quickly, she picked it up and aimed it toward the circle of stones. But the emergency of only a few seconds before seemed to have passed. The sky above was once more filled with stars, the air devoid of disturbances or the strange image she thought she had seen in those final seconds.

Trembling slightly and still half-blinded, Ruth looked for Daniel and found him standing in the darkness, outside the circle of stones, still obviously in a trance. Picking up his shirt where it had been tossed on a tree stump, she draped it around his naked shoulders and slipped his arms into the sleeves. She was relieved when he began to fasten the buttons on his own. Satisfied, Ruth turned again toward the stone circle but saw no sign of Adele. Whether she had run off or simply vanished she didn’t care, so long as she had her husband back. Slipping her hand into Daniel’s, Ruth quickly led him away from the scene and, as they recrossed the cleared field, a kind of desperation overcame her so that she began to move faster, suddenly in a great hurry to leave the Turner farm and Dunwich altogether. Now they were among the great piles of brush at the lower end of the field and Ruth noticed that one seemed to be burning. Grateful for the additional light cast by the fire, Ruth used it to find her way to the cart path that led back to the farmhouse. But as she passed the burning brush, she couldn’t help looking in its direction, wondering idly how it had come to be lit. And as she stared, she thought she saw something in it other than the blackened bones of mangled trees. Wary of the heat and the danger of flying embers, she drew closer to the pile and, seeing what it was that rested there amid the flames, she recoiled in horror. The flames licking at jeans and work boots and hair already smoldering, Ruth nevertheless had no trouble recognizing the features of Josh Turner, as the dew that had collected on his face and naked torso earlier in the evening sheened in the flickering light.

After that, Ruth neither cared about how the fire had been lit nor the whereabouts of Adele. All she wanted was to get as far away from Dunwich as she possibly could. The mad dash from the field to the farmhouse, boarding the pickup, and the crazy speed with which she fishtailed down the long driveway became only a blur to her. She barely even noticed the screech of her tires and the violence she might have done to the truck’s transmission as she tore down Old Swamp Road and headed for the Pike. In fact, the details of that senseless flight only began to come back to her after she was forced to slow down when the road became too curvy for speeding.

It was only after she’d reached the center of town that she was able to calm down and check on Daniel where he sat beside her.

“Are you all right, darling?” she asked, placing a reassuring hand on his arm while trying to keep her eyes on the darkened road ahead. There was no response and when Ruth hazarded a look in his direction, all she could see was the deep contours of her husband’s face lit in the eerie glow of the dashboard lights. Feeling the tenseness of his muscles beneath her hand, she removed it and resumed her two fisted grip on the truck’s steering wheel. Ahead of her, the cracked and pot-holed roadway leading to the Aylesbury Pike snaked into the gloom beyond the reach of the truck’s headlights. On either side was the impenetrable darkness of the forest that opened only occasionally when a pasture or cornfield was passed.

“Don’t worry, darling, we’ll be home soon,” she said, feeling the need to reassure Daniel as much as herself.

As she drove, Ruth found herself frustrated at Daniel’s lack of response but, convinced that something might be happening deep in his subconscious, she decided that conversation, even one sided conversation, could help.

“Do you know what Adele was trying to do out there, Daniel?” she asked, pausing to see if there was any response, but there was none. “We’ve always heard those stories about Dunwich but we never really believed them…at least I didn’t…well not much anyway, but…”

Had he said something? She listened a moment but didn’t hear anything more.

“What about those stones in the clearing, Daniel?” she tried again. “The stones that were set in a circle? The ones you said that you and Josh found after clearing the forest away?”

Looking closely, she thought Daniel was struggling to speak…or was it only her imagination? Her mind drifting, she thought of the stone circle again and remembered the diagrams she had seen in the farmhouse that matched the layout of the stones…crisscrossed with geometric lines and mathematical symbols…and the note written by Adele to her father! With all those calculations, was it possible she could have known ahead of time where the stone circle lay? And if so, could she even have been the one to suggest to Josh that the field ought to be cleared? Her mind racing, Ruth even wondered if the reason Adele had married Josh in the first place was simply to gain access to the stone circle. But that would have meant years of planning…and now she recalled what Myrtle had said about the Coburns, that the family had first come to Dunwich because of an interest in the history of local Indian tribes, the ones who’d always been suspected of having something to do with the area’s megalithic sites.

Ruth shivered as the realization slowly dawned on her how long the Coburns must have been planning before Adele snared Josh Turner in their schemes. It all made sense now why a beauty like Adele would settle for a lump like Josh. Ruth shivered again at the cold blooded nature of the whole thing.

“But what was it all for?” she asked aloud. “Why are there always questions and never any answers…wait a minute…wait a minute…” Ruth thought hard for a moment, there was something else she’d seen somewhere…yes! The note on the Turner’s refrigerator! It had said something about asking questions but not being able to understand the answers and that “Josh wasn’t right,” the same thing that Lizzy Doderholz had told to Myrtle Potter!

But wasn’t right for what? Ask questions of whom? And then it occurred to her that some of the words Adele had been uttering when she first came upon her could have been names. Casting her thoughts back, Ruth tried to reconstruct the events that led up to her meeting with Adele, how she followed the cart path to the cleared field, how she walked up the hill to the crest and how she first saw the stone circle. Adele was sitting on a branch, hitting a drum or something. She said some things that sounded like Latin but one word at least, Ruth had recognized, what was it?

“Azathoth!” she said suddenly. Something like that, but was it a name?

And then, after Adele had been interrupted, she seemed desperate to stop whatever it was she’d started. Then she began to shout that other name…the one she wanted to talk to her father about. She was calling not for someone but some thing…like in those stories she used to hear about Dunwich when she was a girl. Weren’t there always folks selling their souls in order to call down things from outside? Or sacrificing their first born or something…? Her thoughts stopped right there. “Josh wasn’t right…” she recalled the phrase again and in her mind’s eye she saw again Josh’s body in the fire…now she really was frightened. Glancing over at Daniel as he continued to stare empty eyed at the road ahead, she suddenly realized what a narrow escape they both had had. That is, if she was going to believe the conclusion her thoughts had brought her to. Had Adele been trying to use first Josh, then Daniel as conduits to communicate with some creature from another world? It seemed too preposterous a notion to take seriously and yet, it was obvious that Adele at least believed it…believed it enough to have murdered Josh to do it! What had happened that first time? According to the note she had read, Adele had attempted to ask Josh some questions but that his replies were meaningless. Was that why she ended up using Daniel? Hoping that somehow, he would prove a better conduit than the slower thinking Josh? And what kind of questions did she want answers to?

Azathoth…the word broke through Ruth’s jumbled thoughts and called up a memory, the memory of the book she’d seen in the Turner’s little study. She thought hard, trying to remember what it was that she’d read. Something about speaking the name and asking questions… “find the secret name and control your destiny!” She looked then at Daniel whose lips remained sealed.

“What kind of information was Adele looking for, Daniel?” she asked, more to herself now than anything as she felt the dark of the surrounding night crowding closer than it had through the whole drive. But as the minutes dragged on, she saw that the whole situation was getting more complicated all the time. She’d have to report Josh’s murder to the police in the morning…but that would mean telling them about everything else, including what happened to Adele…and she didn’t have any explanation for that!

It was with a sigh of relief that Ruth finally turned onto the Pike and passed the old sign pointing to Dean’s Corners. When they got home, she’d fix some coffee to calm her nerves. Maybe a good night’s sleep would clear the cobwebs and allow her to think more clearly in the morning.

Minutes later, she pulled the brake and the truck squeaked to a halt beside the house. Getting out, she noticed that Daniel wasn’t making any move to exit and so went around and pulled open the door on his side.

“Come on darling, home sweet home,” she purred, reaching in to encourage him to come out.

Daniel didn’t resist and once she had him standing in the driveway, she slammed the door shut and guided him around to the porch. Once inside, she turned on the kitchen light and headed for the stairs. Daniel mounted them easily and once upstairs, she led him to the bedroom and eased him onto the mattress.

“That’s it, darling,” said Ruth, “lie back and rest. I’ll be back in a little bit to help you get ready for bed.”

Daniel lay there, his eyes open, staring at the ceiling. A look that unnerved Ruth as she quietly left the room and made her way back to the kitchen. A little while later, sipping at a cooling cup of coffee, she sat staring at the telephone on the wall. Should she call the police now or wait until morning? If she did, it was for certain she wouldn’t get any sleep that night…Sheriff Hunnicut would be over asking her questions, questions she didn’t have all the answers to. She was sure to get things confused, causing more questions and then the paramedics who were sure to follow Sam over would insist that Daniel be taken to a hospital and she’d feel compelled to go with him. No, it would end up being a long night…one she hadn’t the strength to endure. She’d wait until morning to call the sheriff. Who knew? Maybe by then Daniel would have recovered his senses.

Placing her cup in the sink, she turned off the kitchen light and went upstairs. Daniel lay where she had left him, but he had rolled over onto his side. She chose to believe that it indicated progress of a sort.

“Darling,” she whispered, placing a hand lightly on his shoulder. “Are you all right?”

Still nothing.

Sighing, she began to turn him over.

“We have to get you washed up before turning in for the night,” she said. “You’re all sweaty and dirty from working in that field all day. Get up now, just for a little while until we get you cleaned up.”

As she helped him get up again, she found herself feeling better about Daniel’s condition. Although he hadn’t said a word all night, she was sure that deep down, his consciousness was struggling to emerge. That he lacked only a good night’s sleep to regain his full faculties.

It took very little effort to guide him to the bathroom across the hall. He walked mostly on his own, requiring very little prompting and when they reached the bathroom, he sat himself down on the toilet as soon as she’d snapped on the light switch. As she filled a basin with water and found a face towel, he continued to sit there, his back straight as a board, his eyes staring ahead. Setting the towel in the hot water to soak, she went to him and began to undo the buttons of his shirt. Standing so close, she found herself looking into his eyes and for a moment, wondered if there was anything of her husband left in the body that sat before her. Shaking the feeling aside, she was pulling his shirt back when she glanced down at what she was doing and recoiled in horror. She lost her footing and fell to the floor, hard. Feeling a scream building deep inside her, she scrabbled backward in desperation and only stopped when she felt her back pressed up against the frame of the bathroom door. If she hadn’t pressed a fist against her mouth her screams would surely have filled the house. In the meantime, unmoved by her actions, Daniel remained motionless where he sat, his body still partially draped by the shirt that hung from his shoulders. Repulsed, Ruth watched in horror the moving, writhing things that had been exposed where Daniel’s abdomen should have been.

Unable to take her eyes away, Ruth stared at what looked like the same tattoo that Adele Turner had sported on her body, except now it was real! In place of the appearance of ropy filaments, Daniel’s body featured what seemed to be actual appendages nestled in a tangle of other, lesser tendrils that matted his belly, some no thicker than ordinary hair. At the moment, there was a vague, restless movement among them but as grotesque as that was, by far the most horrifying aspect of Daniel’s disfigurement was the single eye that glared outward from where his navel should have been. Just then, it was open and Ruth found herself trapped in horrid fascination as she became the focus of its bloodshot glare. It looked at her, the pupil slightly off-center, as she continued to cringe from where she sat on the linoleum floor. Then, slowly, deliberately, the pupil recentered itself as the eyelid gradually descended, hiding the monstrosity from sight.

Finding herself released from whatever it was that had held her, Ruth rose using the doorjamb for support. Daniel’s body remained unmoving where it sat on the toilet, the harsh glare of the light from the medicine chest casting sinister shadows beneath the contours of his face. Edging into the hallway, she stumbled down the stairs to the kitchen and dashed outdoors. Pulling open the door of the truck, she yanked the rifle down from where she’d hung it on the rack earlier in the evening and went back into the house. Slowly remounting the stairs, not sure if she were in her right mind, she made her way back to the bathroom. In the doorway again, she saw Daniel still sitting where she had left him, his shirt still hanging uselessly around his shoulders. To her relief, the central eye was still closed. Crossing the threshold, she stepped before the thing she was sure now was no longer her husband and raised the gun. Repulsed at what had become of Daniel, whom she was convinced would rather die than remain as he was, she felt her finger begin to tighten around the trigger. And then, the eye opened again. Ruth stiffened, determined to shoot, but when she met the thing’s gaze, instead of horror, she caught only a sense of vast age and ancient wisdom. A wisdom deep and dark and infinitely cold. A wisdom that could swiftly capsize a person’s sanity and sink it out of sight forever if care were not taken. But if care and deliberation were exercised, the wisdom could be shared and knowledge gained that could make anything possible: unlimited knowledge of space and time and dimensions without number. All she had to do was to utter the secret name… Then, as Ruth felt herself being pulled back from the edge of that black abyss, she was aware for the first time of the consciousness behind the eye that seemed to reach out to her, to coax her; it promised her things that made her shudder in anticipation of she knew not what. Suddenly, she realized that she had lowered the rifle and no longer felt any inclination to use it. Leaning it against the wall, she took Daniel’s arm and once more led the way to her room where she left him lying on the bed. Pausing at the door, her hand at the light switch, she looked back, and just before turning off the light, saw that the monstrous eye had closed.

It was mid-morning, much too late for a farm couple to be having breakfast but today was a special occasion. Ruth smiled to herself as she watched the eggs sizzle in the pan. Daniel had changed it was true. As a matter of fact, she doubted that the body occupying the wheelchair in the next room was still Daniel at all. But that was all right. She’d reconciled herself to that. She’d loved Daniel of course, but she had to admit that their marriage in the last few years had deteriorated to the humdrum and the predictable. The eagerness and fire of the early days had long since been replaced with an uneasy truce. Besides, wasn’t it true that sooner or later, every woman had to put aside their dreams of romantic perfection and settle for reality anyway? So, whatever it was that Daniel had become, would make little difference to her on an emotional level.

With the eggs finished, Ruth went into the sitting room for the wheelchair. As she pushed Daniel into the kitchen, she congratulated herself on remembering that the chair had been in the barn since her mother passed away some years before. With Daniel in position at the table, Ruth retrieved his breakfast and placed the plate in front of him. After cutting the egg into pieces and breaking up the toast, she put a fork in Daniel’s hand and showed him how to feed himself. After a few tries, she was able to sit back and watch.

The abdominal eye was out of sight beneath the clean flannel shirt that she had dressed Daniel in that morning, but she still remembered the intensity of its gaze and in the remaining hours of the night and into the dawn, she had come to realize that part of what she had seen there was confusion. She concluded that Adele’s spell or formulas or whatever, had worked. The Azathoth-thing had been drawn from outside and been at once freed and trapped in Daniel’s alien body… at the mercy of others for guidance in a strange new world…and in its desperation, eager to do whatever was asked of it in return. She didn’t know what Adele had planned, but she was sure a woman with her ambitions wouldn’t have killed her husband and disfigured herself in such a horrid fashion just to live it up in a backwoods town like Dunwich when there were so many other possibilities.

Seeing that Daniel had finished his meal, Ruth picked up a napkin and dabbed at the corners of his mouth. For herself, she had more modest dreams. A prosperous farm, a long healthy life for she and Daniel, maybe children, but before all that could happen, other, less pleasant things needed to be taken care of. None of her dreams would matter for instance, if the events at the Turner’s farm weren’t taken care of first. Pushing the empty plate away, she leaned onto the table and whispered the name she had seen on the Turner’s refrigerator, the one Adele had attempted to use too late. And then, sensing she’d been heard, Ruth posed a question and for the first time since she’d interrupted Adele’s ritual the night before, Daniel began to speak…

n Dunwich.

Goat Mother

arlene, honey…”

“Bill, dear,” replied Darlene Cobb with growing exasperation, “can’t you get it through that thick male skull of yours? We’re just friends.”

“But, Darlene, I was sure after what we’ve meant to each other over the past few months…”

Darlene sighed loud enough so that Bill could hear her at the other end of the telephone line. “I won’t deny that it wasn’t fun, Bill, but that’s all it was. You’re a wonderful guy to be with and I appreciated the time we spent together, but I won’t be tied down the way you want me. Now if you can’t live with that…”

“So I don’t mean anything to you, then?”

Darlene sighed again. “You mean something to me as a good friend and that’s all. If that’s not enough for you, then there’s nothing I can do.”

“Well, then…this is goodbye.”

“If that’s the way you want it.”

“It is.”

Darlene heard a distinct click in the earphone as Bill hung up.

Finally, she thought, replacing the receiver onto its cradle. Men were so predictable. Just because a woman sleeps with them, they think they own her. Here it was the 21st century and it was as if the feminist revolution never happened. Well, wake up and smell the coffee boys, women don’t need you that way any more!

Putting Bill out of her mind, Darlene retraced her steps back into the kitchen where she had been dicing celery before being interrupted by the telephone. On the way, she passed the front door and noticed there were envelopes on the floor beneath the mail slot. Changing direction in mid-stride, she crouched and gathered them up. Straightening, she began sorting through them: more bills, another offer for a Sears credit card, Greenpeace wanted a donation…and a letter postmarked Dean’s Corners.

Tossing the rest of the mail onto the kitchen table, Darlene reached for the knife she’d been dicing the celery with, and slit the envelope open. Looking at the return address, she noticed it was from her Uncle Silas Cobb. Hmmph, she hadn’t heard from him in a while. Not that she’d made any effort to keep in touch. Generally, she preferred to forget her old home town. Dean’s Corners had just been so boring! A typical back-country, small Massachusetts town where nothing ever happened and everybody knew everybody else’s business. She’d hated living there, and as soon as she had the opportunity to leave, she took it. City life, with all its lights, and color and people, was for her. Her Uncle Silas, who actually lived a few miles away in Dunwich, understood her yearnings and promised her that if her grades in high school were good, he’d pay her way through the college of her choice. She didn’t have to think twice about the offer. She came in the top of her class and Uncle Silas came through as he promised, paying for all four years she’d spent at Brown University, earning her degree. Upon graduation, she’d thanked her uncle for his support, moved to New York City, and hadn’t seen either him or Dean’s Corners since.

Fingering the envelope in her hand, Darlene was tempted to simply throw it in the trash unread, but an ember of gratefulness for her uncle’s generosity still flickered somewhere inside her, and she relented. Moving closer to the window, she removed the letter from the envelope. The message was short, but contained what she feared most: a request by her uncle to visit him at his house in Dunwich. Again, she felt the urge to ignore the request and throw the message out, and again her conscience prevented her. She did owe him big-time for covering her college tuition and providing the means for her to get out of Dean’s Corners, after all. And how long had it been since she’d gone back? It was for her mother’s funeral, at least eight years ago. Her uncle had been there; confined to a wheelchair and looking old. Scanning the remainder of the letter, Darlene could find no explanation for why he wanted her to come up, only some vague language that Darlene interpreted as a reminder of the favor he’d done for her. Well, all right! Just this once, she told herself. She did owe it to him, but he’d better not take advantage of her grateful nature.

Despite a sophistication bred from years of living in cities like Providence and New York, Darlene couldn’t help a little shiver when she spotted the first of the stone circles.

She’d passed through Dean’s Corners a few miles back, and had just turned off the old fork for Dunwich, when she saw them. Nothing had changed much.

Darlene had left earlier that morning and driven up to Massachusetts from New York and arrived in Dean’s Corners about noon time. Not really wanting to waste much time in her old home town, she’d restricted herself to brief visits with some cousins, (the only relatives she could ever get along with), and lunch at a local café. The afternoon was wearing on when she started out again for the last stretch to her uncle’s house. She knew she’d reached Dunwich not from the old town marker past the fork, but at the sight of the stone circle atop Warlock’s Hill. There had always been talk about the stone circles around Dunwich, especially among she and her friends who often speculated, with frissons of fearful delight, that they were the sites of witches’ Sabbaths in olden days. Darlene smiled to herself remembering the time she and Jeb Taylor had gone up to one of the smaller circles near Dean’s Corners one night on a dare and made love among the old, moss-covered stones. It had been her first time. Wonder what happened to Jeb, she wondered idly, then cursed under her breath as the car dipped suddenly into a pothole.

She’d heard that the road had been even worse before it was paved, but that was hard to believe seeing the condition it was in now: all crumbling at the shoulders with rough patches of asphalt scattered about its length. Dunwich had always been lackadaisical about living up to its public responsibilities. So far as she knew, the town didn’t even have a Board of Selectmen, let alone a mayor. To be expected, she supposed, of a town that seemed to have been caught in a time warp since the 1930s. She’d been within the town limits for a few miles already and had only spotted a few lonely-looking farmhouses, all ramshackle and weather beaten, looking as if no one had lived in them for decades. But she knew that was untrue. People lived in Dunwich, it was just that there were so few of them, and all inbred hicks. Well, that was the talk in Dean’s Corners and Darlene saw no reason to disagree. The countryside was mostly empty except for abandoned farms, fields gone over to second growth, roadways threatened with being choked off by the encroaching forest, the town center a pitiful collection of storefronts and a tiny, disused Town Hall. Residents had failed to raise the necessary funds for paving the highway that came through the center of town, so the state had to do the work. That was nearly 30 years before and, with lack of maintenance, the potholes now threatened to ruin the suspension on Darlene’s three-year-old Saturn. Most public facilities in Dunwich, like police and ambulance services, were covered by nearby towns, which meant mostly Dean’

Coming into the center of town, Darlene slowed, trying to recall the way to her uncle’s house. It hadn’t been one of those big, Victorian places that one would expect a well-to-do small town resident would live in, but it was a respectfully-sized former 18th century farmhouse. In any other town in Massachusetts, it would long since have been designated for historic preservation and a sign with its construction date fixed outside the front door. But this being Dunwich, nobody ever gave such things serious thought. About a half mile past the center, she recognized a big oak tree and then saw the unpaved road almost hidden by undergrowth just alongside it. Turning, she entered a tunnel formed by arching tree branches overhead that threw the late afternoon light into gloomy shadow. She crawled along the road for a few minutes until she came across a big mailbox secured in the crook of an oak tree: 124 Old Arkham Road it read. The driveway to her uncle’s house opened just alongside it, and in seconds she was rounding the curve of the driveway that led up to the front of the house and pulled up behind a Celica that was already parked there.

The hot sunshine of a late summer day beat down on her as she stepped out of the car and looked up at the old house. Freshly painted in an off-yellow color, the old building had two floors with the back side of the roof sloping steeply toward the ground. Later additions to the 300-year-old house were obvious with outcroppings in the rear that expanded the size of the kitchen, dining, and living rooms on the first floor and added a bedroom on the second. Indoor plumbing had been a feature of the house for quite a while with a good, deep well located in the side-yard a few hundred feet away. Darlene could still see the old, disused outhouse standing in the forest, all covered in creepers and obscured with saplings and bunches of big-leafed poison ivy. The old path leading through the woods to Sabbat Hill that loomed behind the house was still there too. A garage extended from the kitchen addition with stalls for three vehicles, no doubt still holding her uncle’s pickup truck and little-used Buick. Her reverie was broken when someone from inside the house came out, holding the storm door open for her.

“Miss Cobb?” said the man, obviously not her uncle.

“That’s right,” replied Darlene, shading her eyes.

“Can I help you with your bags?” the man said, letting the storm door go and stepping outside.

“Sure.”

“I’m Oscar Whitney,”

Darlene shook his hand.

“Your uncle hired me to look after the house and things about a year ago,” Whitney explained. “That’s my car, there. I don’t stay at the property.”

“What happened to his other man?”

“The groundskeeper you mean?” Whitney shrugged. “I don’t know, but…”

Impatient with the man’s hesitation, which she regarded as a bit theatrical, Darlene pressed, “What?”

“Well, I don’t think your uncle mentioned it in his letter to you, but he has been ill. Moreso than he’s been over the last few years,” Whitney began. “Unfortunately, things took a serious turn yesterday and he died last night. I’m sorry.”

“What!” Darlene was genuinely shocked. She had called to tell her uncle that she was coming up only a few days before. “How did it happen?”

“The doctor said it was a heart attack, that your uncle died in his sleep,” said Whitney. “You can ask him more about it at the wake tomorrow.”

Oh, crap, thought Darlene. She’d forgotten about that. There would have to be a wake…and a funeral. She was rapidly beginning to regret not throwing her uncle’s letter in the trash as she’d first intended. Just the thought of going to a wake, and having to mingle with her relatives, was enough to make her want to get in the car and head right back to New York. But she was here now, and it was too late to turn back in any case.

“Oh, and there’s something else too,” said Whitney. “Your uncle was expecting an important guest to arrive any day. He was coming from really far away as I understand, maybe Asia or something.”

“Great. Is there any way to contact him? Does he have a cell phone?”

“I’m afraid not, or at least, none that I know of. Your uncle seemed quite anxious about his coming. I think he had it in mind that part of the reason for his inviting you was to add a touch of domesticity to the visit and to help him keep his guest company. Your uncle was confined to a wheelchair, as you’ll recall.”

Rolling her eyes, Darlene had to admit that it made sense.

“When is this person supposed to get here?”

“Any time now,” said Whitney. “Your uncle received a notice of his impending departure from London only a few days ago.”

Sighing deeply, Darlene began lifting her things from the trunk. She’d think what to do about the situation after she settled in.

That night, after Whitney had left for the evening, Darlene sat in the living room, sipping at a cup of coffee. She’d forgotten how cosy the old place was with its darkened rooms, old knickknacks, bookshelves and big, paned windows. A fireplace dominated the living room, now cold for the summer. Nowhere was there a “woman’s touch,” there not having been a Mrs. Cobb in years; but if Whitney’s guess was correct, it had been her uncle’s intention that she fill the role of woman of the house. She smiled to herself. Well, so what? What was an old widower to do?

Getting up, she went to the kitchen and set her cup in the sink. Deciding on a breath of air before bedtime, Darlene stepped out the back door. Outside, the heavens were filled with stars (she’d forgotten how crowded the sky was with them since moving to the city) and on the air, her nose picked up the scents of the surrounding woodland, now heavy and very noticeable as the atmosphere cooled from the day’s heat. Something fluttered across the stretch of open sky between the close-crowding trees: a bat! She hadn’t seen one of those in a long time either.

Stepping off the big, flat stone set beneath the threshold of the door, she let the storm door spring shut and wandered into the rutted driveway that came up before the garage. Wary of mosquitoes, she decided to stroll down to the road as far as the mailbox. She’d almost reached it when she noticed something peculiar in the hills behind the house. Was it her imagination, or was there a glow at the top of one them? She couldn’t be sure. It might have been light pollution cast from the more populated eastern portion of the state… Just then, a firefly caught her eye and she followed it as it made its erratic path across the yard, it’s light winking on, then off, then on again. By the time it disappeared from view, the mosquitoes were really getting to be a pain, forcing her back inside the house at a pace that was a good deal faster than the one she used upon first coming out.

The next morning, Whitney prepared breakfast and Darlene had had time during the night to decide what she was going to do next. Her better nature had triumphed, and she’d decided to stay long enough to at least greet her uncle’s expected guest. Hopefully with his host out of the picture, the visitor might be convinced to turn around and leave.

In the meantime, she had some time to kill in the morning and decided to take a closer look around the property, which had been a working farm at one time judging by the stone fences that zig-zagged through the surrounding woods. But outside, her plans melted away when her eyes fell on Sabbat Hill and she remembered the strange glow she’d seen from its summit the night before. I wonder if the old path still leads up the hill? she wondered, heading to the rear of the house.

Ducking her head, she entered the path and began walking. Surprisingly, the trail had remained clear over the years with only the occasional overhanging branch needing to be swept aside. She passed by the old swamp and through a glade of birch trees that she remembered being impressed with years before. Shortly, the ground began to rise as she reached the base of the hill, growing steeper as she continued along the path. Presently, the surrounding forest began to thin out, the trees grew shorter with rough scrub beginning to dominate. The soil became more rocky and more sun made things hotter.

As she neared the crest, the old standing stones peeked over the brow of the hill and in another moment, she was standing among them. Looking back, she could plainly see the roof of her uncle’s house amid the trees below, and the clearing a few miles away where the town center ought to have been. Nothing else was in sight. Some pasturage could be seen farther in the distance and fields of ripening corn lapped up the sides of other, nearby hills, giving evidence that the hand of man had, after all, been at work in the area.

Turning, she walked amid the old stones, once again remembering all the stories she’d heard about them when she was growing up in Dean’s Corners: that they’d been there even before the time of the Indians, that they’d been erected by castaway Vikings in honor of their cruel Norse gods, that covens of witches used them for unholy rites during the time of the Salem troubles. Darlene’s favorite was the story about the Whateleys, a family of inbreds who worshipped the devil…no, what was it?…something from “outside.” For some reason, from the way people around town said it, she’d always imagined the word having quotation marks around it. She’d always been inclined to dismiss such stories, but with evidence of a freshly-doused fire amid the stones seeming to suggest otherwise…or maybe it was just some local kids sneaking a few beers away from their elders. She kicked at the blackened spot where the fire had been and looked around for the expected shards of shattered glass or crushed cans. She didn’t find any, but did notice a peculiar smell. Then, looking at her watch, she realized she needed to be heading back. The wake was scheduled for early afternoon and she needed to freshen up.

A few hours later, Darlene found herself standing in the gloom of the funeral parlor in Dean’s Corners. At one end of the room stood her uncle’s coffin. The lid was open and when she’d looked inside, decided that her uncle didn’t look much different in death than he had in life. Folding chairs had been arranged around the periphery of the room and a thick, maroon rug helped to deaden the sound of any conversation. Not that there was much talk; there were few family members in town, and those that were around refused to have anything to do with Silas Cobb. Partly because he was Silas Cobb, but mostly because he lived in Dunwich. Most residents in Dean’s Corners didn’t have much to do with Dunwich folk, resenting the fact that they were forced to spend their taxes offering services to a town that refused to provide them for itself.

With the afternoon sun getting low on the horizon, Darlene was about to quit her vigil when someone actually walked into the room. Was there a mistake?

“Miss Cobb?” said the man whose graying hair indicated that he was nearing fiftyish, an age that Darlene still considered attractive in a man.

“Yes,” she said, turning to face him more fully.

“I’m Dr. Sayers,” said the man, extending a hand. “I treated your uncle.”

“Oh, right. How are you? It was good of you to come.”

“Well, actually, I came to see you more than to pay my respects,” Sayers said with some embarrassment.

“Don’t worry about it,” soothed Darlene. “So, Mr. Whitney said that my uncle died peacefully?”

“That’s a relative term,” Sayers hedged. “There was no pain or discomfort at the end…it was a heart attack suffered in his sleep…but your uncle was not without a share of agitation and anxiety over the years, which I think reached acute levels in the last few weeks of his convalescence. I dare say they were a major factor in weakening his heart.”

“Anxiety over what? He had no money problems, I’m sure…and he wasn’t married,” Darlene added with a short laugh.

Sayers chuckled at her little joke.

“No, you’re right, nevertheless something bothered him.”

“He was expecting a guest from overseas…in fact, he’s supposed to arrive any time now,” offered Darlene.

“That could have something to do with it,” mused Sayers. “People who lead reclusive lives often exaggerate the importance of anything that threatens to upset their quiet routine. Your uncle could very well have worried about this visit more than it deserved.”

“In any case, he doesn’t have to worry about it any more,” Darlene said, looking over at the coffin.

“You’re staying out at the house?”

“For now; I figure I should stay at least until my uncle’s guest arrives, it’s the polite thing to do.”

Sayers nodded. “Funny thing about the night your uncle died. Whippoorwills had been gathering around the house all that day and it seemed the moment your uncle passed away…whoosh!…they all took flight at the same time, all screeching like the dickens. Whitney mention anything about that?”

“No.”

“Well, I guess for Dunwich folk, those things are normal,” Sayers laughed.

After the doctor left, Darlene decided that she’d fulfilled whatever duty she had to her uncle, and said goodbye to the funeral director who reminded her that there would be no service for the deceased and that the interment would take place the next day in Dunwich.

Leaving the funeral home, Darlene drove over to Main Street for her appointment with her uncle’s attorney, a Mr. Roland Humberton.

“It seems that your uncle was quite fond of you, Miss Cobb,” Humberton said after reading her the will. “Leaving you his house and all its possessions. Unfortunately, there is very little in his bank account.”

Darlene was a little stunned about the revelation (money or no money)…she hadn’t come to see Humberton about any will, just to find out what would happen to the house. But as she considered it, who else was there that her uncle could have left it to? Which presented her with another problem: what to do with it. She had no intention of moving back to the area, let alone Dunwich! So selling was her only option. Unfortunately, however, that would have to wait until she could get rid of her uncle’s expected guest.

“Mr. Humberton,” she said. “I want to put the house up for sale as soon as possible.”

“That can be arranged.”

“The only thing is, I have to stick around long enough to welcome a guest my uncle was expecting from overseas. Can a sale be delayed until after he leaves?”

“Not a problem, it’ll take some time to transfer ownership of your uncle’s property to you and arrange paperwork for the sale,” said Humberton. “And besides, it being Dunwich, well…don’t expect a quick sale, that’s all.”

“I didn’t,” laughed Darlene. “But will it be necessary for me to stay in Dunwich until the paperwork is taken care of?”

“No, it can be done without your presence.”

That was a relief!

Humberton cleared his throat.

“Yes?” she said.

“You’ll excuse me for asking, Miss Cobb, but in all the time I’ve known your uncle, he has been a solitary and reclusive fellow. When, he offered to underwrite your college expenses years ago, many people in town were taken aback. And now, after many more years, comes his sudden invitation for you to visit. Doesn’t all that strike you as strange?”

“How so?”

“That he might have had some reason for what he did.”

“He was a good man, anxious to help a niece he could see wanted desperately to make something of her life,” explained Darlene, herself suddenly not quite convinced.

“Hmmm, maybe.”

“What other reason could there be?”

“Well, you must be aware of the talk around town about your uncle…”

“Oh sure, heard it from my own family…but he’s just eccentric, that’s no crime is it?”

“Of course not but, well, he’s from Dunwich you know, moved there deliberately before he was married. No one moves to Dunwich, only out of it.”

“So now you’re going to remind me of the strange doings up there?”

“I’m sure I don’t need to do that…but…well, he’s dead now, so I guess it doesn’t matter.”

Despite her challenge to the attorney’s hints, Darlene left Humberton’s office with new doubts about her uncle’s reasons for inviting her to visit. Helping to entertaining his guest suddenly seemed like an inadequate excuse…and what about paying for her college tuition? Even that seemed a bit implausible in hindsight. Maybe some clue could be found among her uncle’s papers at the farmhouse.

But whatever idea Darlene had of going through her uncle’s desk drawers was dismissed when she arrived back at the house and was informed by Whitney that her uncle’s guest had arrived.

“He’s waiting in the living room,” said Whitney, inclining his chin.

“Okay, I’ll go in and see him,” said Darlene. “Does he know about Uncle Silas?”

“Yes, I’m afraid I had to tell him when he inquired about him.”

“Good,” Darlene was glad she didn’t have to be the one to explain the bad news. “By the way, I’ve decided not to keep the house, but selling it might take some time and I can’t afford to remain in town as long as it might take. Are you available to stay until it can be sold?”

“I can do that.”

“Thanks.” That was another concern off her mind. Then she thought of something else.

“Whitney, do you have any idea what my uncle had been spending his money on? Attorney Humberton told me his bank account was almost empty.”

Whitney shrugged. “He liked to collect things,” he gestured around the room, indicating the various knickknacks that filled up corners and furniture surfaces. “I gathered some were expensive and he’d sometimes trade what he had for things he didn’t. At least it seemed to me that items around here were constantly disappearing and being replaced by others. Most of his transactions were conducted by mail.”

“That’s why he needed such a big mailbox outside,” concluded Darlene…she’d always wondered about that.

“Its size did come in handy for the bulkier items,” confirmed Whitney. “It was before my time of course, and it wasn’t as if he confided in me, you understand, but it was my impression that it was Dunwich’s reputation that first drew him here from Dean’s Corners. I’m told before he became infirm, he often went up into the hills to look over the stone circles and was seen sometimes over at what’s left of the old Whateley place. But all that was a long time ago, before his wife died…hmm, now that I think of it, I think I heard tell that she was distantly related to the Whateleys. Anyway, he hadn’t been out of the house much in recent years, that’s why he spent so much of his time doing business through the mail.”

“Well, I was planning on going through Uncle Silas’ papers, but I guess that’ll have to be put off for a while,” Darlene said. “Right now, I have a guest to entertain.”

Darlene crossed the foyer into the living room and as she did so, her guest rose from where he was sitting in an old wing-back before the empty fireplace. She wasn’t sure what she had expected, but she was surprised to find that the man before her barely came to her waist in height. At the moment, he was swathed in a cloak of some kind with a hood fallen behind his head. His features seemed vaguely Asian but because his skin was slightly disfigured from what Darlene guessed was burn damage, she couldn’t be sure.

“I’m Darlene Cobb, Silas’ niece,” said Darlene, extending a hand.

The little man nodded his head slightly but didn’t offer his own hand in return.

“I am pleased to meets you,” he said in heavily accented English…or was there something wrong with his voice? “My name is Shuri.”

“Welcome to my uncle’s home, Mr. Shuri,” replied Darlene, motioning for her guest to retake his chair. “You have already been informed of my uncle’s death?”

Shuri nodded. “Yes, very tragic. Very untimely. I have traveled a very long way to do business with your uncles.”

“Where do you come from, if I may ask?”

“Very far,” Shuri said again. “Far to the East, near the land you knows as Burma.”

“That is far away. But, if I may ask, what is the nature of the business you were to have with my uncle? Perhaps it’s something that can yet be completed?”

“Perhaps. You are his niece? The daughter of his brother, Joshua?”

It was an odd way of putting it, and certainly strange to hear this stranger from the other side of the world speak of her in such familiar tones. What exactly had her uncle told Shuri about her and why the need for such detail? “Yes, I am she. Does that make any difference?”

Shuri visibly relaxed and leaned back in his chair.

“Very much so,” said Shuri. “Your uncles spoke very highly of you, and was eager that I should meet you.”

“Why was that?”

Shuri didn’t answer, instead, he leaned over and took a suitcase that had stood behind his chair out of Darlene’s line of sight. Placing it on his lap, he clicked open the lid and reached inside. A moment later, the suitcase was back on the floor and in his hands he held a plain loose-leaf binder filled to its capacity with sheaves of paper.

“This binder contains the full history of my peoples, called the Tcho Tcho.”

Darlene had never heard of them.

“We are a very old peoples and growing fewer with each year that passes,” continued Shuri. “Your uncles, as you no doubt know, was a seeker of knowledge. Objects, whether books, idols, or even stones and plants that furthered that knowledge were precious to him. He was very eager to acquire them.” Shuri looked around the room. “And I can see that he had much success at it. There, for instance, is a carving of Chaugnar Faugn, very rare. And there, a porcelain figurine of Tsathoggua. Most delightful to behold however is this she-goat, a fetish hand-woven by the Tcho Tcho.”

Here, Shuri took down the goat from the mantelpiece.

“It is a figure very holy to my people, the fleshly appearance of Shub-Niggurath, she who has guarded our fields and blessed us with many offspring for countless centuries.” Suddenly, Shuri became more somber. “Unfortunately, due to transgressions we do not understands, the goat of a thousand young has abandoned us. The Black Lotus lies withered in our fields and the sounds of young ones do not ring amid the barren hills of my homelands.”

“That’s…too bad,” was all Darlene could say, not really able to identify with what was clearly some uncivilized tribe in the back country of…Burma, was it? Where exactly was that, anyway?

Shuri replaced the stuffed goat and extended the binder to Darlene.

“Take this, as your uncle’s heir, it is yours now.”

“Oh…well, okay. But what was it that my uncle was to give to you in return? One of these statues or a book….I can tell you he left very little money in his accounts.”

Shuri smiled. “All in good times.”

Now Darlene was worried. It didn’t sound as if Shuri intended to leave any time soon, and the last thing she wanted was to have to entertain him indefinitely.

“Well, as much as I understand the unexpected circumstances of your arrival and the problems they might make to your travel plans, Mr. Shuri, I feel it is my obligation to tell you that I have no plan to remain in Dunwich. As a matter of fact, I had intended to leave for New York as soon as possible.”

“And I have no desire to hinder your departure,” Shuri soothed. “As a matter of fact, it is my intention to leave soon also. Tomorrow, I hope. Will that be suitables?”

“That would be fine,” said Darlene, relieved.

“Well, then, if I may be shown to my room?” Shuri said, getting up.

Later in the evening, Darlene found herself in her uncle’s study, a small room at the back of the house that had once been what folks used to call a mud room. Windows all around allowed-in plenty of sunlight during the day and cool breezes on hot nights. She had already gone through the desk, and found little to explain where her uncle’s money had gone to, or why he’d decided to pay her way through college when it seemed he may have had so little. There were, however, lots of odds and ends: correspondence to antiquarians and scientists around the country, bills of sale for books and art objects, even a notebook that her uncle obviously used to record what he learned about Dunwich history. But nothing about her, or the family they both had shared.

Suddenly, the telephone resting on the desk buzzed and she picked it up.

“Cobb residence.”

“Darlene?”

“Bill!”

“You don’t sound happy to hear from me.”

“I’m neither happy nor unhappy. How’d you get this number?”

“That doesn’t matter, I’m calling to find out if you’ve had a change of heart.”

Darlene sighed. “I…no, I haven’t had time to even think about it.”

“Well, I’ve decided not give up on you yet. I can be a pretty persistent guy when I want to.”

“That’s fine, Bill, but if you’re going to be obnoxious about it, then forget it.”

“I’ll take that response as a positive one, then.”

“Take it any way you want to but right now I have to say good night.”

Darlene returned the receiver to its cradle…The nerve of Bill calling me here…then noticed that the message indicator light on the telephone was blinking. Pressing the replay button, she waited a few seconds before the first message came on. There were a number of them, most inconsequential, and one even featured the voice of her uncle talking to a travel agent. Listening, she learned that her uncle had made all the arrangements for Shuri’s visit as well as paying for his trip. No wonder he had no money left in his accounts!

But the real surprise followed with the final recording. It happened when her uncle apparently waited too long to answer the telephone and the following conversation was automatically recorded by the answering machine.

“…are much eager to make transaction,” said a voice whose accent was similar to Shuri’s.

“No less than I am,” replied her uncle. “Is the book complete?”

“Yes,” said the person on the other end of the line. “Many of my peoples work on different parts of book according to different knowledges. Then a translation must be made from Elder Tongue to Inglaise…English…but be warned…much knowledges secret, untold, until puts in book. Must be kept secrets lest the High Lama of Leng learn of it. Many years has my peoples kept work secrets. Must not be careless now.”

“I realize that and agree with you completely regarding the need for secrecy,” replied her uncle. “I have been preparing for this trade for almost ten years, and now that the time draws close, I have no intention of letting anything ruin it.”

“Many years, yes, many years have the Tcho Tcho endured without the blessings of our mother, Shub-Niggurath. There are no more younglings to continue our traditions, and those of us who yet live grow older. A new Goat-Mother we needs to restore the blessings of fertility that flow from the goat of a thousand young…”

“Yes, yes; you will soon have yourselves a new goat-mother. All has been prepared. As I promised, the candidate will be here when the time comes. Just make sure your man brings the essence of the Black Lotus with him…and the book as well.”

“He will have both.”

“Good, then I’ll look forward to your emissary’s arrival.”

Darlene stood transfixed, lost in thought as her mind tried to make sense of what she’d heard. It was only with the click of the answering machine as it completed its rewind cycle that she was jolted back to an awareness of her present surroundings.

What had her uncle been up to? A trade of some kind for sure, obviously involving the packed ring binder presented to her by Shuri earlier in the evening. But the trade her uncle had had in mind, it sounded as if it had to do with a person rather than a thing like one of the statuettes stored around the house. But who? By the way he had spoken, it sounded as if whoever it was that he had in mind would be here in time for Shuri’s arrival. Whitney? He hardly fit a female-oriented role evoked by such phrases as “goat-mother,” fertility, and the restoration of “younglings.” Then a cold realization swept over her, as she stood in the room where perhaps her uncle had first devised and then executed what occurred to her as a cold-blooded and calculated plot that could only have been aimed at herself.

But that was impossible, ridiculous! she thought. Her common-sense, asserting itself, refused to accept the conclusion the facts as she knew them seemed to indicate. Her uncle, sensitive to her desperation to escape the stultifying, small-town world of Dean’s Corners, and perhaps sympathetic to her desires to widen her knowledge, had generously paid for a full four years of college. He had left her his house and all his possessions upon his death. He’d invited her to visit this time because he knew he was ill and wanted to see her once more before he died. That was all there was to it.

But then, there was the telephone conversation she’d just heard. It was her uncle’s voice, clearly involved with an arrangement with someone that involved trading a “candidate” for “goat-mother” for some secret knowledge contained in a book especially compiled for him. He had assured the speaker on the other end of the line that the “candidate” would be at the house when the delivery of the book was made. Since Shuri’s arrival, that included only Whitney and herself. What did it all mean? Reluctantly, her mind began offering an alternate explanation for her uncle’s past generosity: what if he’d planned on putting her into his debt. Not asking for anything in return, but expecting to some day play on her sense of obligation to lure her to his home when the time came to make the transaction?

It was crazy, but it was the only explanation that made sense. But with her uncle dead, the deal would be off, right? There was no way Shuri and his people could collect on the deal. Yes, that was it. In the morning, she’d give Shuri’s book back to him and tell him that whatever arrangement there was with her uncle was canceled.

Determined to go through with her plan first thing in the morning, Darlene was headed to her bedroom when she remembered she’d left the binder in the living room. For safe keeping, she decided to take it with her for the night.

A noise woke her up. Raising herself onto an elbow Darlene listened, but heard only the familiar sounds an old house makes at night and outside, the lonely calls of solitary birds unable to sleep. Leaving her bed, she went to the open window and pressed her face close to the screen. Outside, all was quiet except for the soft susurration of the evening breeze among the forest trees. A few clouds, shining in the moonlight, scudded across a sky filled with stars and atop Sabbat Hill, there was once again the glow of light. Was it sounds from the kids partying on the hill that she heard? Glancing at the alarm clock she saw that was almost 3 a.m. — pretty late for teenagers to be out in the woods, guzzling beer.

Turning back to the bed, her eyes fell on the binder she had left on her bedroom dresser. Suddenly curious, she picked it up and began thumbing through the pages. She was a little surprised to find that it was all handwritten, not printed from a machine, and each “chapter” had obviously been written by different hands. Unwilling to go so far as to turn on her bedroom lamp she brought the book to the window to read by moonlight, but soon realized the subject was incomprehensible: filled with such wild tales and conflicting facts as to be expected from primitive folklore. Who was this Nyarlathotep for instance? In some places it seemed to be a place and others a living being and in one place, it was actually identified as some kind of traveling showman! Then, like the better-known Atlantis, there were places of a frankly fabulous nature such as “the Plateaus of Leng and Sung,” “Sarkomand,” “Yuggoth” and “Kadath.” Why her uncle thought such a collection of fairy tales important enough to go to the lengths he did to get them, she couldn’t understand. If, of course, her suspicions had any validity. Well, it wouldn’t do any harm to cancel her uncle’s deal with Shuri’s people just in case. Certainly, she had no use for the book. Crawling back under the covers, she was soon asleep again. The glow in the hills subsided, soon to be replaced by the glow of morning.

Darlene unlocked her bedroom door, which she had taken the precaution of latching the night before, and headed for the bathroom located on the ground floor of the house. She noticed Shuri’s room was empty, the bed neatly made, almost as if he hadn’t slept in it. A half-hour later, after returning to her room to complete her toilet, she descended the narrow stairwell at the back of the house to the kitchen. Shuri was there ahead of her, sipping tea at the table.

“Good mornings, Miss,” he said, his face seeming puffier than it did the day before.

“Good morning, Mr. Shuri,” Darlene replied, stepping off the final stair. “You’re up early.”

“Was up before suns. Have taken walks in hills. Very beautiful countryside heres,” he gestured with his cup. “The tea Mr. Whitney left on stove is very good, will you joins me?”

“Oh, Mr. Whitney is here already?” asked Darlene, taking a cup down from the cupboard.

“Oh, yes. Was here early. Fix tea for Shuri. Said he had to go to markets to buy things for lunch.”

Darlene poured the still-steaming tea into her cup and sat at the table across from her guest.

“Mr. Shuri, there’s something I want to talk to you about,” she began, sipping at her tea. It had a peculiar aroma that smelled familiar and she wondered idly what kind of blend it was?

“No needs for more talk,” said Shuri, looking all the more diminutive in slacks and shirt. His feet, unable to reach the floor from the chair he was sitting on, were shod incongruously in a pair of Addidas running shoes. “I brings book as promised, now receive what uncles traded for.”

“Well, that’s just it,” said Darlene, with a sudden flash of what she could only describe as displacement; as if for a moment, time had stopped for her as the rest of the world continued to rush by. “My uncle has died and left me with all he owned, including the responsibility for whatever debts and obligations he made while living. Although I may be legally bound to pay some of them from his estate, I’m not liable for other, less-formal agreements.”

“Ah, buts you see, Miss Cobb,” said Shuri, setting down his tea and slipping from his chair, “I am similarly bounds by the law of my owns people, the Tcho Tcho People.”

“That may be true…but…” said Darlene, setting her own cup down with a feeling of increasing lethargy. Again, it seemed to her as if everything around her was hurtling into the future even as she stood like a rock in a rushing stream, forcing water around her but never yielding. Outside, she thought she could see the sun climbing toward noontime and the clouds racing past the summit of Sabbat Hill…then it came to her as if from long ago…the familiar smell of the tea…it was on Sabbat Hill that she’d encountered it before…the fire that had been put out…the blackened remains… “The laws in Burma don’t necessarily…apply in the…United…”

“That is quite all right, Miss,” said Shuri, helping her to get up. “The law of Leng is much older. Much, much older and for those who transgress, the punishments is not a thing pleasant to contemplate. Much more frightfuls than the laws of humans. And so, you sees, to avoid punishments, the law of Leng must be observed and the agreements your uncles made with the Tcho Tcho must be fulfilled. You will come with me and you will see. You will be glorifieds and be a mother to our peoples. You will give birth to new younglings who will continue to serve our masters Nyarlathotep, may his name be praised.”

Darlene allowed herself to be led from the kitchen.

“Now, you will packs yourself a bag for travel,” continued Shuri. “We have long journeys ahead of us.”

From that point, Darlene could remember little but the occasional impression or snatch of conversation. To all outward appearances, she seemed normal and in possession of all her faculties, perfectly cognizant of what she was doing when she called Whitney to verify his commitment to oversee the property until the house could be sold, when she told Humberton to send all mail to her residence in New York and to transfer the proceeds from the sale of the house to her personal account, when she called the travel agent to arrange a flight schedule for Shuri and herself to Burma.

“…will be of great service to my peoples who have had many other Goat-Mothers who served us well in the past,” Shuri was saying as she drove the Saturn up Interstate 93 to Boston’s Logan Airport.

“…life of Tcho Tchos good and devoted to service of Nyarlathoteps in return for sharing his rule when Elder Gods return some day, but price to be paid for our faithfulness is our inability to procreates,” she heard Shuri saying while the flight attendant cleared away the remains of their meal.

“…Tcho Tcho folk not mens nor womens, not builts for reproduction, so we have our Goat-Mother, she who is consecrated to Shub-Niggurath, the goat of a thousand young, she who is Great-Goat-Mother to all…Tcho Tcho…Deep Ones…Dholes…Shantak…

“…of great service to Tcho Tcho People and whose bodies have provens to be oh so well suited to Shub-Niggurath’s purposes are those of humans women…” Shuri said as they made their way through the crowded streets of Rangoon.

“…have served Tcho Tcho People in past but more humans about Sung in these latter days and was determined by peoples to be too dangerous to continue to consecrate local candidates as Goat-Mother and so was decided to look in lands that not know of us…” Shuri said, tugging vigorously on the reins of his donkey as they picked their way up slope from the jungle that was left behind some days before.

“…when name of Silas Cobb came to us, we send cousins to see him…” said Shuri, holding a great, covered tray before him.

“…cousins in Innsmouth know of humans ways and speaks to Cobb of trade…” Darlene heard Shuri say as she lay sweating and naked upon a stone couch whose cold could still be felt even through the roughly woven blankets that covered it.

“…Cobb told cousins that he could get a Goat-Mother for Tcho Tcho in return for story of Elder Gods…” Shuri lifted the lid of the tray and when Darlene saw what was there, all shiny and squirming, her terror and horror was so acute that for an instant the power of the Black Lotus was not enough to restrain the screams that filled her throne room.

“…Cobb said plan would take much times but that was well, as it would be long before Tcho Tcho could complete book about Elder Gods…” But Darlene was long past hearing Shuri’s story as she felt the squirmings begin inside her.

“…but finally book finished and soon Shuri leave Sung to come to Cobb with book and find Cobb keep promise…” There were people, things, gathered around her, robed and grotesque, holding wooden bowls. Then one approached and held its bowl between Darlene’s legs and gathered the millions of fertilized eggs that spewed from inside her. One by one, figures came to her and did the same until, hours later, the nightmare ended.

“Now Miss is Tcho Tcho Goat-Mother, will spawn new younglings and Tcho Tcho able to continue duties and worship of Elder Gods…” Darlene lay supine on her throne, exhausted and sickened, wanting only to die.

“…only few younglings will live to adulthood but new Goat-Mother not to worry that not all her children will live…” Shuri said, replacing the handmaidens in Darlene’s distorted vision and approaching her with the covered tray again. How long had she been in this place? her mind screamed. Was this Hell? As the fog of the Black Lotus gradually lifted from her brain, she wasn’t sure of anything except that her most fervent wish was to die…

“…not all will live, but in thousand-years time, Goat-Mother will have gratification of seeing those of her children who do, grow and glorify her…”

s Corners.

High and Dry

on Schulter tossed an armful of kindling onto the ground then straightened, holding his back. He felt a distinct creak back there. Must be getting old, he thought. Throwing his arms forward, he gave them a good stretch. It had been a long day beginning with the drive west up I-90 from Boston then to the old Aylesbury Pike. The maps had made it look easy but after he took the turnoff onto the Pike, things became a bit more uncertain. It was all because of the reservoir of course. When the Winsor Dam was built in the 1930s, the rising waters of the Swift River not only drowned a number of small towns and scattered homesteads, but part of the Aylesbury Pike too. That necessitated alterations in the direction of the highway and it seemed that the state’s maps had not yet caught up with the changes. Why was he not surprised at that?

Schulter sighed, placed his hands on his hips and surveyed the scene around him.

It had been a hot autumn day and the sun was just setting behind the ridge on the far side of the Quabbin Reservoir in a brilliant, orange ball swollen to twice its normal size. The glow from the sun cast a reddish tinge on the surrounding woodland and accentuated the strange sight that lay before him.

At the moment, Massachusetts was in the midst of its second year of the longest drought anyone could remember. Streams and wetlands all across the state had run dry, and rivers and ponds were dangerously low. Restrictions were in-force in cities and towns everywhere, to the usual grumblings of homeowners, and meteorologists predicted more of the same until at least the new year. But the state’s misfortune also resulted in a boon for local archeologists and antiquarians who were able to explore streams and river bottoms for remnants of the state’s early history. In particular, the drought turned out to be quite convenient for Schulter, whose research into his family’s history had led him to the Quabbin, which at the moment held only about half its normal volume of water.

That was good, because as its waters receded, they began to reveal some of the old homes and buildings that had been covered over when the reservoir was first created in the 1930s. Even as he looked out over the shrunken body of water to the ghostly shapes that had once been homes, businesses, and even churches, he wondered what secrets lay behind those moldy walls? He wasn’t quite sure why he’d come, what he expected to find, but what had seemed fantastic in the light of day, didn’t seem so now as the shadows lengthened and darkness fell.

It all started when he began working on his master’s thesis for the University of Massachusetts. His paper was supposed to trace his family history, but what he soon realized was that what had begun as a purely academic exercise instead became something a little more personal.

And so, Schulter began following his family’s trail back through the twentieth century. There were blind alleys and false leads of course; Schulter was not too uncommon a name among people of German descent. But a title search at the registry of deeds based on his father’s purchase of a home in Salem enabled him to find the correct line of descent which led to a district courthouse in Arkham. There, he was able to confirm that his great-grandfather had once owned a farmstead in central Massachusetts.

Excited with his progress, Schulter was bitterly disappointed upon further research to learn that old Micah Schulter’s farmstead, as well as the entire Swift River Valley in which it was located, rested at the bottom of a man-made lake, the Quabbin Reservoir!

Having grown up in the more populous eastern part of the state, and the last several years in Boston, Schulter had never really given much thought about where his drinking water came from. But as he soon found out, the Quabbin Reservoir had been created in the 1930s to satisfy the state capital’s increasing demand for fresh water. With its steep sides and lightly populated bottom land, the Swift River Valley was judged ideal for the construction of a dam at nearby Belchertown, and soon the local population was bought out of their property and moved to other locations. With the dam and an accompanying tunnel to carry water all the way back to Boston finished by 1939, authorities began flooding the valley and by 1946, the reservoir was filled to its 412 billion gallon capacity. In the process, the rising waters had covered over a half dozen towns and countless homes that locals claimed they could sometimes see when the water was particular clear.

All of which hadn’t helped him learn any more about his family, but he hadn’t spent years in college without learning how to do research. What he couldn’t discover firsthand from possible relatives still living in the valley, he might be able to find in a local library.

Or historical society as things turned out.

A few telephone calls yielded the information that much of the official records and archives of the towns that had been abandoned to make way for the reservoir had been saved and moved to another town called Firthford, located on the opposite side of the north ridge of the Swift Valley. Hoping to find more information about his family history among those records, Schulter had driven out to Firthford earlier in the summer. The first thing he found out about the town was that it was named after somebody named Jonathan Huxley Firth. He knew that because the man’s name was everywhere: on the sign welcoming visitors into town, over the single bay of the town’s only fire station, the public elementary school, even the cemetery! So by the time Schulter arrived at the library, he wasn’t surprised to see “Jonathan Huxley Firth Memorial Public Library” carved over the main entrance.

“Just who is this Jonathan Huxley Firth?” he asked the librarian as he drew up to her desk. Inside, the library was tiny as most small town libraries are. Bookshelves were overloaded with books and competed for space with outdated computer terminals, CDs, videos, and DVDs. A huge painted portrait of a stern looking, middle aged man hung from the wall of a crowded reference area. Schulter could just make out the name “Jonathan Huxley Firth” on a darkened bronze plate affixed to its massive gilt frame.

The librarian looked at him, lowering her glasses, then up at the portrait.

“Firth was a very important man for our town,” she explained. “He was very rich and owned a lot of land around the county.” She leaned a little closer to Schulter and continued in almost a whisper. “They said he owned half the land in the Swift Valley before the Quabbin was built. It wasn’t a coincidence that he was the chairman of the committee charged with finding a location for a reservoir. He made a fortune when the Swift Valley was picked as the site and the state reimbursed residents living there for the land they had to give up. Anyway, he spread his wealth around at least, donating the funds to build this library, the town hall, fire station and the school. After that, people were glad to forget how he earned his money and renamed the town after him.”

“Nice guy,” said Schulter, giving the portrait one last look.

“But nature has a way of balancing things out,” continued the librarian. “His family suffered from some inherited ailment…no one’s really sure what it was…but he was in a constant sweat over it and if he didn’t bathe frequently, would kind of…you know…sme

“Hm,” grunted Schulter, having learned a little more than he really wanted to. “I’m here to try and do a little research on my family background. My great-grandfather lived in the Swift Valley.”

“Oh, then you need to go over to the historical society,” said the librarian. “All the records from the valley towns are kept over there.”

A brisk walk along the town’s main street, which was lined with spreading maple trees and beautifully restored 18th century homes, led him to the historical society offices. By that time, it didn’t surprise him to discover that the building had once been the home of Jonathan Huxley Firth, donated to the town on the death of his only daughter.

Inside, Schulter found that what had once been the living room was appointed much as it had when Firth had been alive except for the presence of a number of glass counters displaying important documents in the town’s history. Glancing idly over them, Schulter noticed many had been signed in the strong, forceful signature of Firth himself. Here was his last will and testament, there a donation of 20 acres of land for the elementary school, there a deed handing over the rights to a carriage house to be used for a fire station. It was when his eyes trailed over the fourth or fifth such document that he noticed something about Firth’s signature: he included a little design after his last name. A small circle with a little squiggle in the center. Going back to the other papers, Schulter saw that all of Firth’s signatures sported the same sigil. Did it have any meaning? And now that he thought about it, hadn’t it been on a circular plaque over the entrance to the house? And part of the town’s seal that he saw on the sign welcoming him to Firthford?

“Can I help you?”

Schulter couldn’t help starting a bit at the sudden intrusion on his thoughts. He turned and found himself facing a dowdy, middle aged woman

“Um, yes. I was told that I could find the records from the Swift River Valley towns here…the towns that were evacuated when the valley was flooded…”

“Of course. You’ve come to the right place, Mr…”

“Schulter, Lon Schulter…I’m doing some research on my family’s history and so far I’ve traced it to the valley.”

“Then you’ve come to the right place,” said the woman. “I’m Mrs. Thomas by the way, I look after the house for the historical society. The records you want are this way.”

She led him to what had once been the dining room but was now used as a reference library housing the Swift Valley records.

“This is where we keep the records,” said Mrs. Thomas as she opened one of the glass leaves of an antique sideboy. Inside, Schulter could see rows of cardboard sleeves, all neatly labeled, containing various records, births, deaths, deeds, voting records and town histories written by residents long since dead. “You can see how they’re arranged, you should find whatever you need here. If you don’t, just call out, I’ll be around here someplace.”

With that, Schulter was left alone and spent the balance of the afternoon going through the mass of information. Although he did confirm that his family did indeed live in the Swift Valley at one time…it was his grandfather who had owned the farmstead at the time residents were forced to move in the 1930s…he soon found other details of life in the valley more interesting.

In particular, was the back story of the central Massachusetts region when it was still populated by Indian tribes with only a scattering of white settlers here and there. It seemed that the original inhabitants of the Swift River Valley were a tribe of local Indians called the Micmuc which logic would indicate must have been related to the local Pocomtuc branch of the Algonquian speaking tribal groups that dominated central Massachusetts. But curiously, that didn’t seem to be the case. In fact, by what Schulter was able to piece together from stories told by old timers and gathered by enterprising ladies interested in local history, the Micmuc were completely shunned by the Algonquins. The reason for that was not entirely clear, but scanty information gleaned from interviews with the descendents of the Pocomtuc was that not only were they unrelated, but they were hated and reviled by other tribes who were repulsed by certain rituals involved with Micmuc religious practices. This repulsion was even stretched to include their appearance, which accounts described as mottled and oily, almost reptilian.

One of the local histories quoted from a letter it said had been dated 1651 and written by an early settler named Israel Hanson to his brother in Chelmsford:

“Brother Jonas, I write to you to tell of this wonderful country which is well watered with soil exceedingly suited for planting. I have paced off and noted the metes and bounds for a good sized farm which I will submit to the local magistrate in short order. As for wild beests, the country seems bereft, but yet blessed with plentiful game of all kinds. Of the local savages, there are some hereabouts but I am assured they are friendly to white men. More doubtful is a particular tribe called by the natives the Mikmuks which they have warned me of in a most friendly, and encouraging fashion. The Mikmuks, they say, are not men as red and white men reckon humanity, but are more akin to lizards and snakes. Brother Jonas, I must admit my surprise when the savages here, called the Pocomtuc, urged me and others hereabouts, to kill the Mikmuk on sight. A most strange request. But I am assured by John Leland, a resident of Chelmsford who preceded me to this place by some months, that the Indians speak truthfully about the Mikmuks, who, he says, practice weird and arcane rights akin to the devil himself. Furthermore, Leland has told me that he was shone the carcass of a Mikmuk by an older settler in the region who shot the creature when he caught him prowling about his cabin one night. I swear, I saw Leland shudder when he confirmed that the dead Indian was more thing than man with its slick, oily skin and yellow eyes. Thank the Lord of Hosts that the Mikmuks are but little seen in these parts since the days before the arrival of white men!”

Schulter didn’t know how much of the weird story to believe but at first he was inclined to dismiss it as wild tales told by superstitious Amerinds that played on the minds of isolated settlers. Reading on, he learned that the Micmuc were almost hunted to extinction by other tribes before they found shelter in the Swift River Valley which only had a single easily negotiated entrance and sides so steep they did not invite ready invasion. In fact, the Aylesbury Pike had once passed through the valley from the entrance at Belchertown before it was rerouted to make room for the new Winsor Dam.

As he continued to pore through the old histories however, he couldn’t help becoming more interested. One thing led to another until he found an account by one Zed Bishop who told the story handed down from the days when his family had first settled in the Swift River Valley:

When my people first came to the valley there were only a few other families there before them and land was available for the taking. My family settled at the far end of the of the valley a good ten miles from the nearest neighbor. Now in those days it was still a bit of a frontier and there were still Indians living about. Most had long since paced off their own farms and adopted the white man’s ways, but there were still a few who just couldn’t take to plowing and continued to hunt and fish the way their people always did but in the winters when game was scarce, they’d come around begging for food. The story my family used to tell was that some of these Indians, the Micmuc, were really sickly. They smelled terrible and were always sweating, even in the coldest weather so that their skin was slick and smooth like a seals’. Well, one day, one of the boys in the family decided to follow one of these Indians after he’d been to the house. He followed him up past the tree line in the upper pasture and into the woods. No one saw him for days after that and there were search parties out looking for him until suddenly, he came wandering out of the woods by himself. He was dazed and shaken and muttering about a stone house in the forest and big snakes. Folks were worried about him for a while, but eventually he pulled through and got over it.

Then he found a newspaper article written on the day residents of the Swift River Valley received notice from the state that they would have to abandon their homes to make way for the new reservoir:

GREENWICH – Residents of the Swift River Valley received notice this week that the long expected state takeover of their homes and towns will become a reality within a few short months.

After two years of searching for the right location followed by debate and numerous public hearings and town meetings, state officials in the form of the Reservoir Search Committee announced three weeks ago of their decision to turn the valley of the Swift River with its towns, manicured farms and thousands of residents, into the future site of water storage for the thirsty eastern seaboard.

As expected, reaction from local residents, who received official notice of the state’s intentions and offer to purchase their land at market rates, has not been wildly positive.

“I don’t like it and never did,” said Joshua Berwitz, a farmer in Greenwich. They can pay me as much as they want for my land, but it’ll never be enough. A farm anywhere else might offer the same life that I’ve had here, but it can never replace the roots my family has set down here for over 200 years.”

Joseph Menjou agreed.

“My family hasn’t been here as long as others,” admitted Menjou, a resident of Enfield. “But I agree with a lot of other folks I’ve talked to that no amount of money can make up for the life we have in this valley.”

“It’s all because of that snake religion the old Micmucs used to believe in and that some people around here have taken to following,” said David Schulter, a farmer in Greenwich.

Over the long months of discussions between state officials and residents, one objection to siting the reservoir in the Swift Valley has been its importance as sacred ground for local Indians. Although members of the old Micmuc tribe were said to visit the area in observance of their ancient beliefs, no one has been able to prove that they even exist. Members of the committee dismissed claims by some non-Indian residents that they had adopted the religion and that the valley was holy ground to them as fabrications intended to keep plans for the reservoir from becoming reality…

The first thing that had leapt out in the news account for Schulter was the quote from his grandfather and only after that the curious accusation that reasons behind locating the reservoir in the Swift Valley were rooted in some kind of Indian cult, a cult apparently, that some white people had taken to following. Well that wasn’t too surprising. There were lots of people today doing the same thing except it was called New Age this or that…an outgrowth of the conservation movement, misguided beliefs in Amerindian lifestyles and political correctness run amok.

Still, Schulter found himself just too interested in the whole thing to let it go, whether it led to more information on his family tree or not.

“You interested in the snake cult?”

For the second time that day, Schulter almost started at the unexpected voice.

“Well, I didn’t come here to find out about that, but now that I’ve read about it some, yes, I guess I’m curious now. Do you know anything about it?”

“Not personally, except talk that’s always been around town; but that’s never added up to much,” said Mrs. Thomas. “But if you’re really interested, I’d suggest you visit the library up at Miskatonic University in Arkham. A fellow was here a few years ago doing research on the subject and he told me they had all kinds of information about the state’s settler days up there.”

“Hm, I’m not sure I’m all that interested to make a special trip to Arkham, but I appreciate the information.”

But despite his protestations of disinterest, Schulter found himself thinking about what his grandfather had said in the newspaper article and wondering about this “snake cult.” So by the time he’d reached the turnoff for Arkham on the way back to Boston, he’d already decided that a visit to the Miskatonic library wouldn’t do any harm.

Known for its collection of exotic texts, scholarly writings, personal diaries and letters, and other literary ephemera from researchers and scholars the academic world generally dismissed as simple cranks, and a faculty preponderant in professors willing to at least consider the most outlandish theories that combined science, folklore and primitive religions, Miskatonic University held a dubious reputation in the world of learning. It was one of the reasons Schulter never really gave any serious thought to attending the school when he decided to go for his masters.

Driving onto the campus, he found it to look no different than any other small town private college: gothic-style older buildings with a few bland modern structures such as the new Wingate Peaslee Auditorium and World Cultures Student Union. The ranked windows of some dormitory buildings could be seen behind the main campus that was generously interspersed with expansive green lawns dotted here and there with ancient oaks and maples.

One of the ornate, older buildings proved to be the library. Schulter followed the signs around to the rear and parked in a graveled lot that was almost devoid of other cars, it being summertime and classes out for the season. Luckily, the library was open but on first entering, Schulter hadn’t seen anyone about. Shrugging, he began nosing around, admiring the polished woodwork, the recently remodeled reception and reference areas, some portraits of alumni, dour looking Puritan types, who over the years, had donated collections to the library.

A few locked glass display cases in the reference section included some really ancient looking books and odd artifacts no doubt dug up at some archeological site in the Gobi Desert or the Peruvian jungles before nationalist movements put an end to private expeditions.

Schulter had just begun scanning the reference shelves when movement in the corner of his eye caught his attention. When he looked up, a skinny young man, obviously an undergraduate working at the library to help earn his way through college, was just opening his mouth to speak.

“I’m looking for information about the early settlement of central Massachusetts,” said Schulter, cutting him off. “I was told that the library here had a good collection.”

“It does, sir,” confirmed the young man. “Any particular town you have in mind?”

“Well, I’d say Greenwich, but the whole area around the Quabbin Reservoir would probably work,” replied Schulter.

“Okay, let’s see what we can find; I’ll be right back,” said the librarian and disappeared into a room behind the main desk. A few minutes later, he returned pushing a cart loaded down with old books sporting hand written filing labels on their spines, fat folders filled with yellowing papers and ledgers of the kind births and deaths were recorded in. “This should keep you busy for a while.”

The young man was right. It was almost evening when Schulter finally noticed the clock. Around him was scattered the debris of his reading from which he hadn’t learned much more than he’d already known.

Then, like the plot of a bad movie, he picked up an unmarked folder and discovered that it contained correspondence, minutes and other records relating to the establishment of the Quabbin Reservoir. Most exciting for him however, was a brief period of correspondence between his grandfather, David Schulter, and a professor then teaching at Miskatonic. Of the handful of letters, most concentrated on the same subject, his grandfather’s conviction that the decision to locate the reservoir at the Swift Valley had more to do with a “snake cult” there than the area’s geographical features:

Dear Professor Armitage,

You understand me rightly about the snake cult here. It is not something new or something that I am making up in order to defame the committee. The cult has been present in this valley for many years, since at least the time of the early settlers who reported it practiced by a queer band of Indians they found living here when they first arrived. From stories handed down from those days, it seems that the beliefs and practices of this tribe, the Micmucs, were so repugnant that even other Indians in the area hated and avoided them, even killing them on sight. I don’t know if any of that is true, but I do know that many upstanding and otherwise normal seeming people around these parts have taken up with this old cult. You can tell who they are by what folks around here call “the sign of the snake,” a circle with a snake down the center. Members of the cult use it after their names or place it on their barns or mailboxes. Whether the cult is as old as the stories say or just trumped up recently, I can’t say. What I can say is that worship in this cult by some folks around here is real. I’ve seen the stone house they go to in the woods and it looks old enough to have been built in the days before white men came to the valley. Be that as it may, no matter what we may think of them, the cultists are serious. They really believe that there’s a snake god living in that stone house in the woods. They say he’s older than the human race and has lived there for untold ages. Personally, I think it’s all hogwash, but they believe it, which is the real reason I think this reservoir is going through. I’ve tried to tell the newspaper reporters about it, but they’ve ignored me, cutting what I say out of their articles and making me sound like a lunatic. That’s why I decided to write to you on account of you’re having been involved with that business in Dunwich. Professor Armitage, you must believe me when I tell you that it’s common knowledge around these parts that Jonathan Firth is one of these cultists and that it’s no coincidence that he’s a member of the committee. They want to flood this valley not to supply water for Boston, but to help their snake god! They want to help him escape from the valley and reach the open sea through that 100 mile tunnel they plan on building and they don’t care what happens to the rest of us living here! Whether or not anyone else believes in their snake god, their cult is real and what they have planned for our community is real and something needs to be done about it before we all lose our homes!

Respectfully,
David Schulter

Could such things as his grandfather claimed be true? Had there been a cult of snake worshippers in the Swift Valley before it was flooded? Was Jonathan Firth, easily the most important man in the area with powerful connections to the political establishment of the time, a member? And if the cult really had existed, what had become of them?

Just then there was a sound behind him and when he turned, Schulter discovered the young librarian.

“Couldn’t help noticing some of the stuff you were looking through, sir,” he said a bit apologetically. “So I wondered if you’d be interested in looking at a book we have that concentrates on, well, weird cults?”

“Sure, if you think it’ll help,” Schulter replied, intrigued.

“It’s in special collections so I can’t bring it out here,” said the young man, his body language indicating that Schulter should follow him.

He did.

The special collection was located in a separate room off the reference section that the librarian had to unlock with a key. Inside, the walls were lined by glass-enclosed bookshelves with the exception of a large, old fashioned safe-door punctuated with a combination lock mechanism. The young man spun the dial back and forth while glancing at a piece of paper that obviously held the combination. When he finally pulled the door open, a definite scent of old paper met Schulter’s nostrils. A moment later, the young man emerged with a large, hardcover volume that he placed carefully on an oaken table situated in the center of the room.

“This is a book called Nameless Cults, it’s an English edition of a German original that was printed in 1909,” the librarian explained. “The German title is unpronounceable…”

“The Unaussprechlichen Kulten,” pronounced Schulter haltingly.

“That’s it.”

“No index I see.”

“Well, these old books you know…”

Schulter turned the cover carefully. “Written by Friedrich Wilhelm von Juntz.”

The young man shrugged. “Whatever. I’ll just leave you here. The library closes in about an hour.”

“That should be enough time for me.”

Schulter began turning the pages of the book, which was illustrated here and there by garish color paintings. He wasn’t familiar with anything inside, it was all pretty outlandish stuff until he found a reference to a serpent cult. Stopping, he started reading what sounded to him like pure fantasy: once upon a time, tens of thousands of years ago, when the continents of earth were in radically different positions, a race of serpent men had once ruled the world. For thousands of years, men were their slaves until they rose up and conquered their reptilian masters. The serpent men were slaughtered and the few remaining retreated into swamps and jungles trying from to time to time to regain their lost power. But all their attempts failed and in the process, they became even fewer until even the memory of their existence faded from the mind of men.

These few serpent men, being long lived creatures, dwelled alone in their stone houses for many years and some there were who continued to be served by their former slaves, humans weak of mind as well as of will. Through the long centuries, driven by strange passions and a desperate loneliness only the members of a dying race can know, the serpent men impressed upon their human worshippers the need to yield up their daughters in order to perpetuate the source of their faith. Jealous of their secret knowledge of the reptilian race, the serpent cult sought to hide its masters from other humans and removed the serpents farther and farther from the ever-advancing kingdoms of men until a day came when there were no more serpent men in the lands that became Europe. They had all been taken to lands across the seas; first to the land Eire from whence they were driven out by a man whose God was more powerful, and thence to what would soon become known as the New World. Even there, however, the primitive inhabitants of the land, repulsed by the reptile-like eyes, slickness of the skin and the odor of the snake worshippers, slaughtered them and drove the remainder to hide in remote fastnesses far from the watery strongholds that had once given strength to the race of serpent men.

Schulter leaned back in his chair, his mind reluctantly putting together the disparate, and unbelievable, pieces to the puzzle. Was there something to his grandfather’s assertion that, under the guise of supplying water to the eastern cities, the reservoir had been located on the Swift River by strategically placed members of a cult of snake worshippers with the specific intention of building a tunnel so that their “god” could finally escape his imprisonment far from the sea? The whole notion seemed patently preposterous until Schulter remembered something: the librarian in Firthford had said that Jonathan Firth, the man accused by his grandfather of being a member of the snake cult, suffered from an ailment whose symptoms included excessive perspiration and an unpleasant odor!

And what of the “sign of the snake?” His grandfather had said that those belonging to the cult used it when signing their names…and it was an undeniable fact that Firth used such a symbol wherever his signature appeared, he’d seen that himself!

Like his grandfather had said, whether or not there had been anything to the snake god business, the cult members believed there was and that would have been all that mattered. The fact remained: in the end, the reservoir and its 100 mile-long tunnel were built and the valley flooded.

By the time Schulter had left the Miskatonic library, he had realized that nothing had ever come of his grandfather’s accusations. Armitage had apparently done nothing (or at least there hadn’t been any record of his doing anything), the residents were removed from their homes, the dam built and the valley flooded. That seemed to put an end to his researches too until a few months later, when the whole fantastic story was suddenly brought back in all its force by the news only a few days before that because of the ongoing drought, the Quabbin Reservoir was at its lowest ebb since it had been filled in the 1940s.

Driven by inexplicable sympathy for his long-dead grandfather and a conviction that the snake cult he railed against had really existed, Schulter called Quabbin officials to find out if any of the old homesteads had been exposed as a result of the water level’s going down and was delighted to learn the area of the old Schulter farmstead was one of them.

Schulter had packed up some camping gear and driven down to the Reservoir that day. He hadn’t been sure if the Reservoir Authority would permit anyone to explore on the exposed floor of the Quabbin, but he intended to do just that.

Bringing a hand up to shade his eyes against the glare of the setting sun, Schulter looked up the valley to where the dam blocked the narrows. He had no idea what he had expected to find here, but he felt he needed to come if the strange story he’d learned was ever going to have closure for him.

He remembered how shocked he’d been when he arrived at his campsite that afternoon. Where he had expected to find a spectacular view of the surrounding countryside, the steep, pine covered hills as they sloped down into blue water for instance, he instead found a body of water that had indeed receded alarmingly as a result of the drought. So much so that great swaths of mud lay revealed and drying in the sun. Here and there, he even saw the foundations of old buildings bulldozed when the land was cleared for the reservoir.

Standing at the edge of the forest where once the waters of the Quabbin had lapped, he could see the valley slope away into the distance where here and there, small ponds of water gleamed in the light of the setting sun. Around them, for great stretches, what had once been the bottom of the reservoir was now a plain of dried and hardened mud punctuated by the carcasses of fallen trees and the detritus of decades of standing water. Around the steep edges of the reservoir’s high-water mark, scattered branches and trees now covered in a layer of dun colored dirt, had over the years, fallen from the shore into the area that had been submerged, but farther inward, there was surprisingly little in the way of obstruction. In the gathering gloom, Schulter could just make out the dim forms of the buildings that made up the little town of Greenwich, still mostly submerged in standing water with the upper half of a church steeple still clearly visible. In the morning, he’d use the town’s location as a map reference to begin looking for his grandfather’s farm.

With the sun down, darkness was rapidly falling and Schulter turned away from the little town and busied himself with building a fire. The mosquitoes were already hovering around and he still had to fix something to eat before crawling into the tent for the night.

Morning dawned bright but cloudy and Schulter was up when the shadows of the surrounding trees still stretched far out onto the emptied reservoir. After boiling water on the camp stove for coffee and oatmeal, he broke out a Xerox of an old map of the Swift Valley from before it was flooded, and located Greenwich. He circled the spot where his grandfather’s farm was and highlighted the roads leading to it from Greenwich. According to his calculations, the farm ought to lay upslope, away from Greenwich and the bottom of the valley. Off in the distance, surrounded by a plain of grey mud, he could make out what could be isolated buildings, exposed to the sun from the receding waters. Shrugging into a small backpack, he started along the edge of the woods where the water of the reservoir used to lap when it was at full tide.

A few hours later, he not only had verified that the dried mud of the reservoir bottom was hard enough to walk upon safely, but that there were indeed buildings still standing even after decades of being submerged in the cold waters of the Quabbin. Around him were the suggestion of stumps from the thousands of trees cut down when the land was cleared for the coming waters and even traces of roadway that helped him find his way across the newly exposed wilderness. At last, he arrived in the vicinity where his grandfather’s farmhouse should have been located. Behind him, the slope of what once must have been rolling pastures curved downward to where the remaining portion of the reservoir glistened in the noonday light. Off in the misty distance, Schulter could just make out the outline of the dam at the Belchertown gap.

Finding the trace of an old path leading from Greenwich, he managed to follow it for a mile or two before coming upon a group of grey buildings, like big lumps of mud a few hundred yards off the road. With growing excitement, he knew he had reached the end of his search as it surely must have been his grandfather’s farmstead. He removed a copy of an old photograph of the farm he’d found at the Firthford historical society and compared it with the structures before him. They seemed to match. Approaching the small group of buildings, he saw that what had once been the barn had partially collapsed and other outbuildings were mostly splinters. But the farmhouse itself was seemingly intact and with some wariness for its structural integrity, he pushed against the kitchen door. It didn’t budge. Carefully looking out for the wall over his head, he threw his shoulder against the dusty panels and had the satisfaction not only of having the old door scrape inward enough to allow him entrance, but not having the rest of the house come crashing down on his head.

Indoors it was dark, as the waning daylight had difficulty penetrating the layers of mud that oozed in frozen cascades across the gaping openings that had once served as windows. Slowly, Schulter stepped deeper inside. Most items of furniture seemed to have been removed, with what was left merely unrecognizable lumps beneath decades of accumulated mud and dried aquatic vegetable growth. He was standing in the entranceway from the kitchen to the dining room where he could see into the parlor area towards the front of the house when he was startled by a loud creak from the walls around him. His heart in his throat, he decided further exploration was not necessary and hurried back outside. There, looking up at the old building, he wondered that it hadn’t collapsed as soon as the supporting water pressure had left it. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem as if there was anything left of the old homestead that could satisfy any of his vague desires to exonerate his grandfather’s belief that there had been some kind of conspiracy relating to the creation of the Quabbin. Again, there was the dangerous sound of creaking from the house and it being late afternoon by that point, Schulter decided that he had learned all he could from visiting the family homestead.

Turning from the old house, Schulter retraced his footprints back to the road and began the long way back to his campsite. The sky had by then been filled with banks of dark clouds that now echoed dully with the sound of thunder. Looking up, he noticed for the first time that the day had become darkly overcast and that there was the scent of rain in the air. Quickening his pace, he hoped he could outrun whatever rain was on the way, but an hour later, as a premature darkness descended over the gloomy, naked landscape, he felt the first, heavy drops begin to fall around him. Great, he thought, now the dry spell breaks! As the rainfall picked up and he realized that he wasn’t going to make the shelter of his car before the downpour began, he looked around for some kind of cover and found it in another lonely farm building that squatted atop a low rise. Running now, he passed through the dilapidated remains of a rail fence just as the first streak of lightning flashed across the sky. He reached the house and the remains of its old porch just as the rain really began to come down and, pausing there to look back, he saw another bolt of lightning illume the surrounding area in a pale, intermittent glow. It only lasted for a second or two, but in that time, Schulter was able to take in the eerie landscape around him, the empty waste of the mud-covered countryside, the distant line of pine trees where the forest stopped suddenly at the former shore, the dull, dun colored buildings that dotted the exposed valley and…what was that? Something over the gaping opening of the barn door had caught his eye. Impatiently, he waited for the next flash of lightning and when it came, he saw what it was that had attracted his attention: a plaque fixed beneath the peak of the barn roof, a plaque that sported a circle pierced by the familiar squiggle of a snake that he could still make out beneath the grime.

The sign of the snake! The one his grandfather had said could be used to identify members of the valley’s snake cult! Was this the home of one of them? Did he accidentally stumble across the evidence he needed to prove his grandfather was right? He didn’t have time to think much more about it as a gust of wind sent sheets of rain onto the porch, forcing him to shrink back against the door leading into the house. Not hesitating, he put his shoulder to it and forced it open. Not trusting the strength of the old structure, he remained within the doorframe, afraid to risk going in too far.

He had been standing there for some minutes when, during a lull in the downpour, he thought he heard a noise come from inside the house. He listened carefully, past the sounds of dripping rainwater and the more familiar creaks to another sound, one that suggested furtive movement. His first thought was that perhaps some type of aquatic life, fish maybe, had become trapped in the basement after the reservoir’s waters receded, but decided the sounds weren’t those of flopping fish. Moving into the kitchen, listening carefully, he headed to what looked like a basement door, then tripped over a pile of mud-covered rubbish that pitched him to the muddy floor. Cursing, he was pulling himself up when he suddenly froze. Directly before him, low to the floor and framed in the doorway to another darkened room, were what appeared to be a pair of eyes. As he stared, he noticed that they were composed of a deep yellow and devoid of pupils. With mounting fear, he wondered if he had managed to trap himself in the house with a mountain lion. Slowly, he straightened and began to move back toward the door, his hand reaching behind him in search of the rusty knob. His actions, however, were followed by whatever creature skulked before him. The eyes rose from near the floor to become level with his own. Whatever it was that he faced, it couldn’t be a mountain lion…was it a bear rearing onto its hind legs? Then the room was filled with a loud sibilance that struck Schulter as nothing so much as the sound of a giant snake and in that moment, lightning flashed outside and he saw what it was that he faced. He screamed and his mind must have gone blank for a moment because the next thing he knew, he was stumbling on his hands and knees in the wet mud outside. All he could think of was to get away, as far away as he could as quickly as he could but the mud hindered him. He couldn’t seem to find his footing and behind him he heard, or thought he heard, that damnable hissing…made all the more monstrous because it seemed to shape itself into words: “I ams your massster, manlings! Sssubmits and worssship me asss your ancessstors did!”

What came to his mind next was mad, insane, but it was the only thing that made sense to his addled senses: the snake god was real! But why, why, was it still here? They had flooded the valley, built a tunnel so that it could escape to the sea…what was it still doing here, now?

Something loomed up in the darkness before him and his heart went into his throat before he realized it was only a fence post. He was almost off the old property! Maybe he could outdistance the snake thing…he chanced a look over his shoulder, but the yellow eyes were still there. Feeling panic well up inside him, knowing that he was on the verge of losing any kind of logical thought, he fought down the insane notions that threatened to overwhelm him. He needed to stay calm, to think! But thinking straight was coming harder now. He fell again, and when he looked up the eyes were in front of him. How did the thing get there, he was behind me before, he thought irrelevantly. But looking over his shoulder, the eyes were there as well! Now suddenly, as the rain eased and the clouds parted, a full moon shone its light onto the nightmare scene around him, and surrounded as he was by slathering, slithering, hissing shapes that hungered for flesh more substantial than stray fish caught in dank basements, Schulter realized that the 100 mile tunnel built from the reservoir to the sea had not been intended to let the valley’s snake god out, but to let its surviving fellows in!

ll.”

The Old Ones’ Signs

rom: United States’ Department of Justice Federal Bureau of Investigation

To: Mr. Pierre Comtois

Reference: Freedom of Information Act Request #900048

Subject: Government Document #0534225 Hosea Peters, testimony of.

My name is Hosiah Peters. It was early Spring as I recall it, in 18-- and I had just come off four months of wintering on the old homestead outside Pepperell in Massachusetts. My parents and two brothers still lived there, yielding a living from the rocky New England soil, but spent the winter cutting wood and bottling preserves in the root cellar. I don’t usually mind such work when the sea grows frigid and grey and the ice cakes on a ship’s hull, but when the sun begins to stay up in the heavens and temperatures to rise, I get the old urge to feel the swell of water beneath me and to smell the brine of the ocean in my nostrils. Such was the case that season when I hefted my sea bag, kissed my mother on the cheek, shook the men-folks’ hands and took the road toward Boston.

Little was I to know of the strange and heathenish ways I would be exposed to and the even stranger temptations. Mind you, I was not ignorant of the peculiar delights of the world’s more exotic ports of call, but as I am a God-fearing man and a proper Yankee, I like to consider myself made of sterner stuff, my will reinforced by staunch faith. The sea itself and the honest wages due me at the end of a voyage were my delights, and the attractions of the French ports, the crowded cities of Araby, the gentle women-folk of China, or the savage wantonness of the south-sea isles held no interest for me. But none of those experiences would prepare me for what proved the final time I would cross a body of open water.

There was an early thaw that season and when I arrived in Boston I found that every ship had already hired its complement of seamen. Disappointed, I made my way to Salem and Marblehead where the same situation prevailed. It was in Salem however, that I was advised to try Innsmouth further north where ships were said to still need men. It was growing late in the trading season when I arrived in Innsmouth, at that time, still a bustling seaport whose warehouses and factories along the main wharves would soon be packed with goods. The sun shone hard but gentle and the gulls called enticingly from the housetops as I climbed the stone steps into the custom house. There I inquired about employment and the old pensioner behind the counter looked up surprised. “Kinda late aintcha boy?” I mumbled an excuse and waited as he slowly rose from his swivel chair and made his way to a bulletin board crowded with announcements. He tore one off and returned to his chair. “Here y’are boy,” he said, handing the paper to me. “The Sumatry Queen sets sail with the tide skippered by her owner no less, Cap’n Obed Marsh. Find his Fust Mate, Matt Eliot. He’ll square ya away if’n he hasn’t already hired the full crew.” I thanked him and left the building.

Outside, I approached the sea at last as I followed the long length of Stone’s Wharf, the stink of low tide tickling my nostrils like perfume. At last, I found the Sumatra Queen. A sleek, three masted barque that at the moment sat motionless, its sails furled. A gang plank extended down to the wharf where men worked feverishly loading her with Nantucket candles, New England butter, mountain ginseng, salted fish, and a dozen other local products for the European market. The dock master indicated a rough-looking character standing on the ship’s deck as the first mate and I heaved myself up the gang plank. I introduced myself and told him of my desire for work. He looked me over well before saying “We do need a few more men and I can tell the way you hold yourself that you are a tried seaman. So I will take you on here and now. Wages are fifty cents a week and a standard percentage of the profits. The Cap’n sails a tight ship and brooks no sloth. He is hard but fair. You will bunk in number 12 with Worthy for’ard.” He shook my hand and went back to his business.

I was in the stern when our Captain ordered the lines to be cast off and watched as men heaved at the oars of two boats tugging the Queen into open water. With the tide in, the ship was taken by a hidden current and slowly drifted away from the yards. The roofs and gables of Innsmouth gleamed in the sun as they began to shrink on the horizon and I could see a dozen handkerchiefs fluttering their farewells. Finally, it was time for the Captain to order the sails up and for a time I was too busy to appreciate the fine weather as I helped with the hoisting of the spanker. Then, under full sail, the huge sheets filled with wind and billowed outward and I felt the ship beneath me jerk forward as it eagerly sought the deeper water. My heart leaped with the knowledge of truly being at sea.

I had a chance to size up our Captain later that afternoon when he assembled the crew amidships for the customary welcome. He stood above us on the poop, not a large figure, but impressive in his self confidence. He told us a bit about himself but nothing I did not already gather from the chatter of my fellow crewmen. He said he ran a tight ship and if we all pulled together and obeyed he and his mates, then all would go well and we would return in two years with handsome wages to show for it. It was then he said something which made me uneasy. After mentioning our due wages, he added that it would be much more we would get from hard, honest labor than the same time spent in prayers that never were answered. Now I am the first to say that not all prayers are answered, but there are times in men’s lives when it is all they have. If nothing else, they bring comfort and are meant not simply to receive items we want, but as a tool of communication with the Almighty. This attitude on the Captain’s part set a false note with me that was to last throughout our voyage. And it was this seeming interest in the things of earth over those of heaven that was to drive the Captain and the crew of the Queen into the abominable situation that is the ultimate reason for this narrative.

It was with some self-consciousness that I would pull the well worn bible from my sea bag at the end of my watch and read its familiar passages. There was no jeering or mocking from the other men of course, it was one of the unwritten laws of the sea that against the vast oppression of the open ocean and its sometimes unpredictable and terrifying nature, a man had a right to his own form of spiritual comfort. It was true that many men found theirs at the bottom of a bottle, but many more shared my sentiments.

Thus did I pass the time aboard ship as the Queen made its expert way across the chilly Atlantic waters to arrive at last in the port of Liverpool in England. There we off-loaded our American goods and took on a cargo of fine linens and colored cloths. The men were given little time to spend ashore and in any case, had even less money to spend on the sort of women to be found there. Consequently, a number of us sober crewmen had to be sent around to drag our mates from the dockside grog shops preparatory to our departure.

With the Queen once more riding low in the water, we drifted down the Mersey into the Irish Sea and began one of the longest legs of our route. We sailed southward, across the old Spanish Main and the Canaries then swung outward along the Guinea Current avoiding Cape Bojador on the West African shore. We continued southward after that, at last rounding the Cape of Good Hope and entering the Indian Ocean. The strange, jungle laden coastline of Madagascar with its dusky denizens giving obeisance to the god of Islam slid past our port side too slowly for my satisfaction. Who knew what unholy activities that green hell hid? When the northern tip of the island at last sank from view I breathed a sigh

The next several weeks were an unending series of battles with fast moving squalls and deadening calms under a burning sun and it was with great relief for all when the enchanted coast of India loomed on the horizon. The Captain ordered the sails trimmed as the Queen approached the great city of Bombay. The men crowded the starboard rail shouting and pointing as the shore grew nearer and they could see the throngs of people jamming the seashore doing their laundry, bathing or performing certain esoteric rites in the shallows. As we passed beneath the brooding bulk of the Towers of Silence up on the Malabar Hill and entered Mahim Bay where the shipyards lay, the sea turned a muddy brown in color as the accumulated filth of a million people emptied into it from inland rivers and streams. Once even a shrouded body bobbed past the ship. Shuddering, I ruminated on the heathen practices of the people here and mumbled a prayer in thanks that my ancestors had the benefit of the Lord’s enlightenment. In Bombay, we traded our linens and cloth for a load of opium which would be under guard for the length of our next leg to Macao in China.

By that time, I had earned a reputation for honesty and fastidiousness aboard ship; by no means qualities disparaged or distrusted by the crew. In fact they were appreciated and their handiness was not lost on the first mate who recommended me as one of the guards below decks for the opium. Thus it was that I saw little of our voyage along the coasts of India or Annam. Finally, we reached our destination after passing between the city of Macao and Hong Kong, beneath the resentful eyes of a British man-of-war and into the Bogue. Immediately, we were hemmed in by a rag tag fleet of junks including a grand affair bearing the local customs officer. The expected bribe was paid and we berthed comfortably at Whampoa. While the Captain and his first mate bartered away our cargo, the men at last had the time to spend ashore that allowed them full vent for their bestial lusts. The women of China are as wondrous and beautiful as you may have heard and altogether too easy to bundle with. Amid the crowds, one could easily see the luckless fruit of the thousands of illicit unions the natives were made to endure since the arrival of white men to their country.

Once more, when it was time to depart, I was called upon to help round up the men. It was more difficult this time and we ended up losing two to the myriad drug dens that riddled the city. To replace them, Captain Marsh took on a couple of the huskier natives who could speak a kind of pidgin English. With hold loaded with fine porcelain and furniture and tons of rice, we slipped port and made our way back out to open sea. It was not official knowledge, but the scuttlebutt had it then that the Captain was of the mind to steer a course southward to the spice islands to trade our load of rice for some spices and peppers that would bring a great price among the dealers in Boston. He had hopes of finding an island not recently visited by traders and so, ill versed in the worth of rice vis-a-vis spices.

Well I am sure that the subsequent search went on a good deal longer than even the Captain had expected. The Queen at first made good time south of China as it crossed the Philippine Sea, passed the Carolines and threaded its way beyond the Gilberts and the Tuamotu Archipelago. After that, landfall became a rarer thing and when we transited the Tropic of Capricorn we at last entered the great, empty reaches of the South Pacific. At first, the Captain made for islands marked on his charts, but soon after he began following leads to others that were not charted given to him by the ignorant savages that populated these God forsaken specks of land. Most of the stories we heard proved false, some led to actual islands. Eventually, these specks of land seemed to run out and we drifted out onto the wide empty ocean far below New Zealand. Weeks passed with nary a hint of dry land and the men began to grumble and expected momentarily to spot stray icebergs from the not too distant polar regions to the south.

It was on one of those later evenings when I held the stern watch by the spanker that my doubts about the Captain’s intentions and his irreverent attitude toward the Christian religion began to crystallize, as the learned men sometimes say, in my mind. The surface of the sea was as still as a soft shroud while the silvery light of a full moon silhouetted the length of the ship toward the bow. Unfamiliar constellations twinkled between the ropes and spars of our empty masts as the Queen lay in wait for a strong wind. The hour was late, and so we had only a minimum crew on deck, allowing my thoughts to wander. I lit my pipe and leaned against the rail, feeling the cool night breeze against my face.

“Reckon we must be nearin’ the pole as some ‘o the crew been sayin’, Hosea?” came a voice from behind me. I looked over my shoulder without altering my position at the rail.

“It’s true that this wind is colder than normal, Worthy,” I replied, “but the pole’s still a long way off. More ‘n likely it’s just the season.” My bunk mate took a place beside me at the rail and lit his own pipe.

“Couldn’t sleep,” he said, looking out at the moon. “Ain’t familiar with these parts,” he continued. “The strangeness of it all: the stars, the currents, the not knowin’, it all spooks me.” I told him I agreed with him and wondered aloud if the Captain knew what he was doing.

“Cap’n Marsh is a crafty old seaman,” said Worthy, “but he’s got one weakness: profit. It ain’t enough for him to return to Innsmouth a rich man, he always needs to have more.”

“No good can come of a man who worships only at the altar of Mammon,” I observed. “The Captain’s god is gold and silver.”

Worthy did not dispute this observation but merely changed the subject. “What do ya hear about our provisions?”

“They are still good. We have plenty of fresh water, but we lack fruit to prevent scurvy.”

“Aye, we haven’t been able to stock up on fruit for over three weeks.” Suddenly, the moon slipped behind an approaching cloud bank and plunged the surrounding sea into what seemed pitch darkness. As the minutes passed, we could actually see the shadow of the clouds as they creeped over the water and swallowed the Queen. I immediately looked to the spanker as a few more hands came up from below decks. The second mate was shouting orders to trim sails when a terrified scream pierced the night air.

“We’re bein’ boarded!” it yelled, and immediately the ship was plunged into a chaos of shouting men and screaming savages as what seemed a hoard of dusky-skinned, painted, and file-toothed natives swarmed amidships flailing spears and truncheons at the night watch.

I saw Jim Caneford have his skull crushed beneath the weight of a war club and Isaac Kearns gutted with a spear. Their killing slowed the savages down a bit as they jumped and hooted in glee at their swift victories. Then the bulk of the crew emerged from below-decks armed with pistols, cutlasses, and belaying pins. Captain Marsh was at the forefront, shouting encouragement at the men and curses at the natives as the two sides met and mingled amidships. Almost immediately, the decks were awash with blood as limbs were hacked off and heads rolled. It was all I had time to see as I was suddenly grasped from behind in a rough embrace and felt the prick of a stone knife against the flesh of my back.

A foul reek of sweat and fish guts assailed my nostrils as my captor’s breath whistled in my ear. I twisted suddenly and reached behind me, my hand seeking to stay the plunge of the knife. I found the savage’s wrist and we stood there a moment or two, he with his arm about my throat and I with my hand at his wrist. The sounds of the melee below died away until we struggled in silence, the perspiration beading my face and streaming along my body with the strain. Finally, I felt my assailant shift his weight and in that instant, I acted. I pushed the knife hand against his belly and threw myself backward. In doing so, the arm around my neck pulled away enough for me to use my free hand to seize and twist it away. In the meantime, the force of my rearward lunge prolonged the savage’s imbalance and he toppled back. I threw my full weight against him and in another moment his back was arched against the horizontal beam of the spanker. I spun and flung my right hand to his throat, with the other, I struck the knife from his hand. Our relative positions were in my favor as I continued to force him back. Now both his hands were desperately grasping at mine as I stopped forcing him back and concentrated on crushing his larynx. Already, the breath was wheezing from his open mouth where I could see that two of his sharpened teeth had been broken long ago. At last, his struggles grew weak, his arms fell to his sides, and he began to slump. Cautiously, I removed my hands from about his throat and had the peculiar satisfaction of seeing him crumple to the floor.

Fleetingly, I felt the guilt a proper Christian must feel when he kills a fellow man, but it was only fleeting because just then I heard, as if from very far away, the voice of Worthy Hunnicut calling my name. He was asking me if I was all right and I replied that I was. I could see through the tatter of his blouse that his shoulder was smeared in blood and behind him lay the corpse of a native, the broken haft of a spear protruding from its side. I looked at my own hands and saw that they were smeared in the earthy paints that had decorated the native I had slain.

Then the silence retreated and the clamor of battle reemerged into my consciousness. The level of noise had lessened somewhat, and as Worthy and I rested warily against the rail overlooking the main deck, we could see the last act of the epic battle. A score of bodies lay strewn across the blood-drenched deck and we could see with some relief that only one more of our crew could be added to those of Jim and Isaac. The rest consisted of savages in various modes of dismemberment. Captain Marsh was still standing, still shouting and cursing and spattered in blood, he looked more than a match for the nickname the men had taken to calling him: Old Limb of Satan. The enemy were in full retreat as the last of them fell and leapt over the side. Some regained their war canoes, others simply began swimming toward the horizon, while still others merely sank beneath the surface of the sea. By then it was near dawn and just as the men began to catch their breath, another shout arose, this time with an even more fearful warning: “Fire in the hole!” it yelled.

There was a momentary scramble as the crew looked anxiously about until someone spied the smoke rising from the bow trap. “Form a bucket line!” ordered the Captain as tired men became newly galvanized and began handing buckets of water up from the sea with ropes and handing them on down a line of their mates to eventually be thrown into the hold. As the smoke dissipated, and the seaman’s worst nightmare began to recede, the first mate was lowered into the hold to view the damage. When he reemerged, it was to report that the trade goods were undamaged but that our victuals had all been spoiled. There was silence then as everyone looked to the Captain who wasted little time in nipping any discontent in the bud.

“These savages,” he said, pointing to what remained of the dead natives, “boarded our ship in war canoes, which means that they didn’t come from very far away. We’ll find their island and restore our supplies there.” This seemed to reassure the crew who for a moment had not thought of that possibility. But the natives who had survived the battle were already out of sight and no one aboard had noticed in which direction they had fled.

As I ruminated upon this new problem, the sound of a groan at my back arrested my attention. When I turned, I saw that the savage whom I had thought I had slain, was yet alive. I immediately informed the Captain of this stroke of good luck and watched as he and Matt Eliot climbed the stairs to where the savage lay on the deck. “Matt, you speak the lingo of these parts,” says the Captain, “see if the brute can understand any of ‘em.” The first mate grunted some words which the native immediately understood. I was not too surprised at this development as past experience had taught me that many of the natives populating the islands of the Pacific Ocean were related in some way and shared much of the same language.

The native grunted something back which Eliot translated as the whereabouts of his own island. The Captain smiled, then stopped. He had noticed something around the native’s neck and, stooping, ripped it from about his throat. The savage made as if to stop him, but thought better of it. The Captain looked closely at the object which seemed to be a necklace made of finely worked gold. Grinning, the Captain handed it around the knot of crewmen that had since surrounded the native, who still reclined on the deck.

After passing from hand to hand for a bit, the necklace finally came into my possession. It was very fine indeed, not heavy. And the man who had shaped the figures on it could have made his way in any civilized city in the world. Upon closer examination, I could see that the figures etched in the gold were strangely amphibian. Men who seemed to be in the form of frogs or fish, and fish with legs and arms emerging from the waves. There were other, less recognizable shapes but by then the short hairs on the back of my neck had begun to rise and I sensed that there was something not right with the native imagery. Something beyond simple pagan iconography, for I had seen much of that in my travels and none ever affected me in the manner that that necklace had. I handed it absentmindedly to Worthy, and when I brought my attention back to the small drama before me I could see that the Captain’s ploy of handing the necklace to the men had worked as he had planned. The lust of riches was plain in their eyes and none seemed to be as disturbed as I was about it.

“Ask him where he got that there necklace,” ordered the Captain. When Eliot reported that the native refused to tell, the Captain became exceeding wroth and told Eliot to threaten the native with bodily harm if the information was not forthcoming. Again the native refused to comply and the Captain ordered Barnston, the second mate, to take him below with two other men and use what physical persuasion they cared to convince him to cooperate. The broad smiles that creased those crewmen’s faces needed no explanation. They were the sort who took pleasure in the sound of other men’s bones breaking. I did not hesitate to protest the action and was surprised to find that I had an ally in Matt Eliot, but our suasions were wasted on the Limb of Satan, who confidently asked the rest of the men if they felt the way I did. They bellowed their negative reply and the issue was settled.

A short time later, the second mate returned and he and Eliot were beckoned by the Captain to follow him to his cabin. There they remained for some time until emerging around noon. The first and second mates split up, bellowing orders to the crew to trim the sails and bring the Queen about. With our experienced hands, it did not take much time to put words into action and presently we found ourselves bearing a course to the south-southeast. Every eye aboard strained ahead to be the first to spy our destination even though every one knew that honor would fall to the man in the crow’s nest. The sea was still as glassy and smooth as it had been during the night and a preternatural calm had suddenly settled in the air itself so that our sails soon went limp. Anxious to arrive at the island the native had spoken about, the Captain ordered a boat lowered with sixteen men to man its oars. A line was made fast in the bow and the men soon were bending their backs and singing a seaman’s dirge to the calls of the second mate. Slowly, they pulled the Queen along toward the horizon and presently, as the afternoon waned, a great tower of birds could be seen wheeling in the sky like a living tornado. It was a strange sight even if we had not been away from land for so long and it elicited much excited discussion until the lookout in the crow’s nest called out “Land ho!” Instantly, every member of the crew followed the direction of the man’s pointing arm and dimly, a dark smudge began to resolve itself on the horizon. The men in the boat began to pull with renewed vigor but it was clear that it would be after nightfall before we arrived within the vicinity of the island. When the time came, the Captain ordered a halt and the boat brought back. The sea anchor was thrown overboard and the ship made fast for the night. It would remain for the dawn to see us make our final approach to the island.

That night, most of the crew slept above-decks with their weapons close at hand. I found it difficult to sleep at my position aft with the regular scuff of Captain Marsh as he paced the deck throughout the night. He seemed more anxious then he usually was when near to closing a deal. Sometime in the dark nearest dawn, I gave up attempting to sleep and approached the port rail. The faintest tinge of the approaching sun glowed dimly near the horizon silhouetting the shape of the island. We were within a mile of it and already I could tell it rose steeply out of the water at that point. As the light increased, its bulk began to take on more detail. At first, I guessed the irregularity of its summit was due to a thick, overhang of jungle growth and indeed, my surmise soon proved accurate and more. Great tendrils of leafy vines festooned the face of the greyish cliffs much as we are told of the hanging gardens of cursed Babylon. Then, as the sun rose fully into view, and as more of the crew joined me at the rail, the full wonderment of those cliffs were revealed to us. Far from being a single sheet of rock, the cliffs were actually a grouping of colossal stones, tumbled as if from a great height untold ages before. It betokened some sort of volcanic activity on the island some time in the past. But as the sun slowly moved its rays over the surface of those stones, their true disposition became startlingly apparent. Many of them sported the likenesses of men. They proved to be great stone effigies whose visages stared unseeing and eternally out to sea, as if waiting for something. I had seen such handiwork before in the Ponapes, but never dreamed the practice could have reached to other islands. Also, these stone faces were of more intricate work, as if closer to the culture at the source of the phenomenon.

Others of the crew were also marveling at the discovery even as the Captain ordered another sixteen men to take their places in the row boat. “Ole Limb o’ Satan ain’t wastin’ any time is he, Hosiah?” said Worthy at my elbow.

“He has the scent of gold in his nostrils,” I replied, without taking my gaze from the stone effigies.

Worthy saw my stare. “Seen things like those oncet in Easter Island, somewheres east of these parts,” he said.

“There as well?” I observed, and told him about my own experiences.

“Reckon there’s some connection?” asked Worthy. I shrugged.

“I would not be surprised. How else could such widely separated peoples participate in identical endeavors to rival the labors of Hercules?”

“Aye, it would seem ta be a colossal waste o’ time for folks otherwise dirt poor.”

The Queen moved forward inch by inch as Eliot called out the soundings. The water there reached only fifteen or twenty feet before a hidden reef reached dangerously up for the vulnerable hull of the ship. The Captain continued to push it farther to the east, circling the island and when the soundings finally reached a safe depth, an inviting, sandy stretch of beach was clearly visible on the island. By this time, the strange carvings had sunk from view and the island’s elevation had flattened until the surf could wash far up onto the beach. An impenetrable jungle edged the sand, hazy in the morning’s growing heat, and a mist still clung to the land farther back where it sloped up to the hidden heights. With those heights cleared, the birds that we had spied the day before were again in view, but apparently were not centered upon the island before us, but at some point beyond it. Still towed by the boat, the Queen was maneuvered through an opening in the coral reef that ringed the island. Members of the crew manned long poles to either side, probing the depths for unexpected coral projections that could rip open the ship’s hull in seconds. Eliot gave the word that we had cleared the reef and the rowers were ordered back to the ship. The Queen drifted with the tide a bit before the Captain signaled for the anchor to let fly. It was done and the ship made secure.

The Captain wasted no time in having the captive brought from below decks. The poor wretch had to be supported between two crewmen. His face was bruised and I could see two fingers had obviously been broken. At the Captain’s order, Eliot put some questions to him to which he nodded and grumbled a reply. Presently, a boat was lowered and the Captain, together with Eliot and the captive whose charge had become his own, and a handful of other men including myself clambered aboard and headed for the distant beach.

Although the journey to the beach was short, it seemed longer as we pulled our oars, our backs to the land and only the comfortable familiarity of the Queen to be seen on the bosom of the sea. The captive managed to keep up a stream of commentary at the instigation of Eliot who translated for the Captain. It seemed that the people native to this island were resented in no small way by the inhabitants of the surrounding waters. There also seemed to be some undercurrent of revulsion in the words Eliot translated; whether it was the inadequacy of the translation, or something actually intended by our savage companion, I could not tell, but in any case, there appeared to be a subtle element of disgust in the words, but of what, I could not have said at the time.

Then, just as I noticed the swirl of sand in the water about my oar ends, the boat scudded into the soft beach. We all debarked and hauled it the rest of the way out of the surf until it was securely above the water line. I turned then, and received my first close-up look at the island. It resembled any number of other such islands I had visited in the past with its fringe of jungle growth and gently curving beach. Suddenly, there was movement in that jungle and a small group of dusky savages arrayed in primitive implements of war and no less bizarrely painted than those who had attacked the Queen the night before. They were in all respects like those others except in one: they were decorated in various and sundry articles of gold. Necklaces, armlets and ankle rings. Ear rings and finger rings and head bands. The crewmen around me began to mumble in eager delight until the Captain ordered them to keep silent and display as little interest in the gold as possible. Shrewd as ever, even in this first, uncertain contact, the Captain then ordered the trade goods we had brought from the Queen taken out of the boat and laid on the beach. Soon, the newcomers approached warily and after glancing interestedly at the various colored cloths and beads on display, their leader, whom we later learned was named Walakea, pointed at our captive and said something.

“He wants to know what this man is doing in our company sir,” said Eliot.

“Tell them the whole story, Matt,” instructed the Captain, “but leave out our interest in the gold.” Eliot turned and did as he was told.

Walakea said something again and Eliot said, “He says this man’s people are their traditional enemies and demands to take possession of him.”

The Captain hesitated not at all. “Then give him to him.” Eliot said something to Walakea and signaled the men holding our captive to give him over. He was taken roughly in hand and marched off into the jungle by two of the natives. Then followed the introductions and the discovery that rudimentary communications could be had with sign language. The natives, who called their island and themselves the Kanakys, were enthralled by the goods we brought, being completely ignorant of the products of civilization. And what was more, they had no compunction about trading their golden baubles for it. But the art of the trade does not involve coming directly to the point. A roundabout method is often called for in order to arrive at the desired end. Consequently, the Captain began trading for other, less desired items among which were small, stone carved effigies, like miniature versions of those giant heads on the cliff sides. An invitation to their village soon followed and when we returned to the Queen, the Captain informed the crew of the celebration Walakea planned for our reception the next day. Knowledge of the easy trading on the beach fired the men’s excitement and greed and, I must admit, my own, for the anticipated meeting.

The night passed uneventfully and the next day, leaving a minimal crew aboard ship, the Captain led the remainder of us to shore where we were met by one of Walakea’s warriors. We were led inland a few hundred feet to where the village stood beside a small, deep stream of fresh water. At least two dozen canoes lay pulled up to the narrow beach there while the village proper extended through the nearby jungle and straggled almost down to where the boats lay. The village was composed of grass huts typical of the south seas, which stood on sturdy palm logs. Pools of sunlight shone here and there where the natives had cleared parts of the forest. But the people themselves, of which there appeared to be many hundreds, were decidedly strange, even queer looking. Admittedly, there were some, including Walakea and his wives, that were quite handsome as natives in those parts are judged, but the greater majority seemed wan, and pallid with an odd, scaly texture to their skin. In addition, these people possessed bad posture, seeming to find it more comfortable to stoop rather than stand erect, and frequently slouched when walking. There were many more of the golden ornaments about the village, but not as many as we were led to believe by the group we had met on the beach the day before.

A great feast had been laid out for us in the center of the village consisting of every sort of native fruit and vegetable and a wide variety of sea food. Indeed there was so much, even Captain Marsh was moved to comment on it to Walakea, who shrugged and indicated it was due to the beneficent nature of their gods. As we took our places, music of a sort was begun on various native instruments as the women passed among us with wooden plates stacked high with steaming native viands and succulent fruits. From where I sat, I could see that the Captain lost no time in getting Eliot to sit with him beside Walakea to begin the bartering. I could tell by his demeanor that the chief was not disposed to discuss the matter, but that did not dissuade the Captain from continuing his efforts periodically throughout the meal. By the end of the fifth course, most of those present were becoming rapidly satiated and a sort of torpor began to set in. Native and white man alike lay back, some to sleep and some even to seek out the dubious pleasures the native women might offer. I continued to study the Captain as he plied Walakea for information, and I could tell that Marsh was already stitching together a rudimentary understanding of the native tongue, needing Eliot less and less.

An impenetrable jungle edged the sand, hazy in the morning’s growing heat, and a mist still clung to the land farther back where it sloped up to the hidden heights.

I also noticed the singular lack of elderly members of the tribe, in fact there were none. There also seemed to be fewer young people than would be expected in a village of that size.

It was about then that Worthy came back from somewhere I knew not, slightly drunk on the native beer and threw himself down next to me. “Look what I have,” he said, holding out a gold headband to me. “Traded it for my brass shoe buckles,” he said. I looked at it at first with envy, but then as I observed its markings more closely, with vague repulsion. Whereas the previous pieces I had seen were decorated with frog-like men, the object I held in my hand had the figures of less distinct aquatic-looking creatures in obvious postures of sexual coupling with humans.

Disgusted, I threw it back at Worthy swearing, “I will have nothing to do with such unnatural idolatry! The rest of the crew can keep what gold it acquires here, but for my part, I will remain satisfied with my honest wages.” Here, Worthy looked at the etchings and shrugged, his greed apparently getting the better of his Christian upbringing. From that moment on I grew increasingly wary of those people and their degraded interests. Soon I noticed their strange little idols everywhere and when I next looked to find the Captain, he was gone together with Eliot and Walakea.

It was only the next day when I saw them again, or rather, I saw Eliot. He was sitting alone beneath a palm tree near the beach when I came upon him. Naturally I was curious as to how he and the Captain had fared with Walakea and made bold to walk up to him to ask. In hindsight, there was no reason for a first mate to confide the way he did with a mere member of the crew, but I have since felt that he may have remembered my stand against the Captain’s torturing of the native prisoner and saw me as a kindred spirit. In any case, he had a story he needed to share with someone and perhaps I was the most convenient. It was a story so outlandish, so bizarre and yet so hideously obvious that it would shake my perception of the world to the very core and test the mettle of my Christian faith.

I approached Eliot that fateful day and casually asked him if he and the Captain had made any progress in their talks with the chief. Eliot grunted and remained silent for a moment then said, “Hosiah, I have observed you for a good portion of this voyage and I think I might have your measure. We think alike in many ways and I can see you have much book learning about you. You think straight, not like the other members of the crew. Hosiah, what if I told you our idea of the order of things is not quite what we suppose it is?” I must have made the expected facial expression, because he continued.

“Have you noticed the queer looks of the natives on this here island? The way their big eyes seldom blink? Or the slippery feel of their skin? Hosiah, the carvings on those golden ornaments and statuettes are not the figurings of ignorant savages, but the literal truth their own eyes have seen and, God help me, my own as well! When I left yesterday with the Captain, Walakea had already hinted to us about how his people acquired their gold. At first, I thought it was just more heathen superstition needed to explain what perhaps, they could not understand, but then Walakea showed us the island. No not this one, but another on the lee side of this one. We boarded one of his war canoes and, paddled by a handful of his most trusted warriors, were taken downstream to the sea. From there, we skirted the shore until we came into sight of another, smaller island. Only a few hundred yards of water separated it from this one and at that proximity, I could see that it seemed less an island than a jumble of oddly carved stones. Overhead whirled that mighty column of birds we had seen from far off. The stones were odd I say, not because of the well worn carvings of various sea creatures that dominated them but because for some reason, they were hard to see. Not with distance, but because of their shapes. It was as if a man could get an idea of their shape out of the corner of his eyes but when he tried to look at them straight, they blurred somehow. In any case, right then, I started feeling that we may have stumbled into something we had not bargained for.

“As we drew nearer, I could see that much of the rubble was buried in black silt suggesting that the island had once been beneath the sea and perhaps had been hurled up sometime in the past. When I questioned Walakea on this he confirmed my opinion saying it appeared from the sea one morning when his grandfather had been chief. At that time, he said, his people had been extremely poor and they had made an excursion to the island hoping to find something of value to trade with their neighbors. What they found were strange, fish-like creatures, like those depicted in the carvings. Of course I dismissed the chief’s remarks as ignorant exaggeration but to my surprise, Captain Marsh nodded and took the whole matter seriously. He began to question Walakea in word and in sign and grew increasingly excited as the chief continued to speak. According to Walakea, his forebears had learned to communicate with the island creatures and soon arrived at a mutually beneficial agreement. In return for their worship and the sacrifice of a certain number of the tribe’s young men and women, the sea things insured the Kanakys plentiful supplies of fish and a steady stream of golden artifacts.

“Well, we reached the island at last, and on closer examination I could see that many of the carvings, besides the half-fish, half-manlike things, consisted of many other less familiar creatures; all tentacles and ropy filaments. I thank God that those carvings were as old as they were, because if they had been any more distinct, I think I may have lost my mind. I reeled as it was as Walakea steered us toward a single gargantuan block while his men pulled thick strands of old and rotted seaweed from about its face. When they had finished, they all fell to their knees and the chief led them in some kind of prayer. I noticed then how the image on that great stone resembled those of the small idols the natives possessed back in the village. This was the image of their god, a god who answered their prayers in a most concrete way, a way easily understood and appreciated by a poor and backward people. I actually found myself feeling jealous of them! I must admit that the thought did not immediately strike me as absurd; it was all a part of the hideous nature of the situation. After a few minutes my senses returned and I was able to rethink my feelings. Of course it was all absurd! Their god could not be a real god. I thought I had the problem settled in my mind until Walakea revealed the ultimate secret about the Kanakys’ relationship with the sea-things.

“We re-entered the canoe and paddled back to the main island, but instead of taking us back to the village where we had been feted last night, Walakea took us to the opposite side of the stream where a second village site stood. It seemed deserted, but as we soon learned, all those who resided there lurked indoors. We approached a lone hut and Walakea bid us follow him inside. I followed the Captain and when I straightened from my stoop my eyes fell on a sight I hope never to see again. Even with the interior of the hut in semi-gloom, I could make out the features of the figure before me. It was no doubt human, but it was more fish than man! I saw all the same queer attributes in it that we have seen in most of the villagers here, but they were all horribly exaggerated; the eyes were great, unblinking orbs without pupils, the hands and feet were webbed and the skin where the light fell on it, glistened in thousands of iridescent scales. What must have been rudimentary gills opened and closed at the side of its misshapen head as if the creature had difficulty breathing. Entirely hairless, it crouched on the dirt floor staring at us with the emotionlessness of a fish.

“I was repulsed and even the Captain took a step backward. Then Walakea told us the final horror. After his people had been sacrificing their youths to them for some time, the sea-creatures began to tire of them and made a further suggestion: they wished the opportunity to mate with members of the tribe. At first, the idea was resisted, but soon they were persuaded to comply. Over the years, almost the entire tribe had been tainted with the aquatic streak, thus the queer looks we noticed among the villagers. But the strange looks did not come altogether, they came over time. When a villager advanced in years, the changes began to come over him with increased rapidity until, at an advanced age, he resembled the creature I saw in the hut last night. Soon after that, the urge to go to the sea would become too strong, he would be unable to endure it and he would join the sea-creatures beneath the waves, very infrequently to return.”

I began to protest the veracity of his story, to suggest alternative explanations to what he had seen, even as I knew no other explanation could make sense of the strange look of the villagers. Eliot shook his head.

“It’s all too frighteningly true, Hosiah,” he said. “But the sight of that fish-thing was not the worst of it. Do you know what the natives received in return for their miscegenation? Immortality! You do not understand do you? They have gods who not only answer their prayers in a most efficacious manner but who also grant them eternal life! What argument is there against it and in favor of our own Christian religion? We are only promised our eternal reward and perhaps an all wise God may deem fit to answer our prayers, but their gods are less discerning, being here, now, serving them! That is the most insidious fact about the whole thing, do you think that men, ruled mostly by greed and lust could long resist the lure of such a practical faith? Yes, yes, I know it is all preposterous. They are not true gods, but mortal creatures even as we, only with preternaturally long lives, but I say to you, that they could easily prey on the ignorance and selfishness of many men. They must remain here, unknown.”

I suggested an immediate return to the Queen, but he shook his head.

“The Captain, unbeliever as he is, is the first of those fools to embrace these devils. Even now, he speaks with seriousness with Walakea on the whys and wherefores of their worship. Oh, he does not believe in the creatures’ divinity any more than I do, but his greed yet leads him into a situation that will not only damn his own questionable soul but anyone else to whom he introduces the secret.

“The Captain will surely work on the men’s greed to win them over to his way of thinking. He will swear them to silence and you will see, a regular run to the Kanakys for trade gold will become an accepted fact back in New England.”

I protested that I would take no such blasphemous oath.

“I believe you, Hosiah, but are you prepared for the consequences? I have sailed for Captain Marsh for many years and feel I know him as well as any man. You saw to what lengths he was willing to go to force the native warrior to talk? Believe me, he will display little more compunction to keep you from talking. Would you like to remain behind on this here island? Perhaps to end up as another sacrifice to those creatures?”

I shuddered and shook my head.

“Then we both will take whatever oath is demanded of us and keep our mouths shut. There’s no shame in it as it will be a vow made under duress. Our real problem will be in trying to find a way to thwart the Captain should he decide to work directly with those sea-creatures himself. Aye, he would do that if it meant cutting out the middle man and increasing his profits. Already, when I left him, he was working on the chief to show him how to call up the monsters.”

I asked him how we could do such a thing; who would believe such a wild tale back in Innsmouth?

“I have an idea about that too,” he said. “Most folks here are tainted by the fish-blood except for Walakea’s immediate family. He had to preserve it in order to keep open the possibility of inter-marrying with the daughters of neighboring chiefs. But there’s one other person that is not tainted…”

“The shaman!” I said.

“Aye, there must be a reason why he has managed to hold on to his humanity while everyone else has succumbed. We’ll go and see him.” At that, he rose and began making his way back to the first village. I followed him, not knowing what else to do. In truth, I did not even know if I believed all that he had recounted to me. It was all so utterly fantastic, completely incredible! And yet, I had seen and wondered at the queer look of the villagers, the meaning of the disgusting carvings on the golden ornaments and the fetid inspiration of the tiny idols. In my mind they added up to irrefutable evidence of Eliot’s story. In addition, a strange disquiet had been building in me ever since our arrival in these distant waters and I was loath to remain blissful of any threat to myself or the Queen.

It did not take long to locate the shaman’s hut. It stood alone a good ways off in the surrounding forest and one smelled it long before seeing it. The remains of dismembered animals lay all about the site and drying and rotting fish hung from the structure’s outer walls. We called out and received a reply from within the hut. Eliot led the way inside and I followed, vainly holding my breath against the overpowering stench. The shaman himself was one of the ugliest humans I had ever seen, but even then he seemed more pleasant looking than the tainted creatures his brethren had become. His hair was a tangled, dirty mass and his skin was smeared in fish oil. He was naked but for a loin clout about his hips. As he squatted to the side of the hut, I noticed one thing immediately, there was no sign of the island’s gold nor any aquatic idols. Eliot spoke to him and must have received a positive reply because he bade me sit. I sat cross-legged as far away from the old man as I could as Eliot sat alongside me but a little ahead. He leaned forward and asked the shaman a question. The following is the translation he gave me of his conversation with the witch man, who barked a sort of laugh before he spoke.

“He says he knew we would come around to see him sooner or later. That any normal men, even sickly looking white men, would be repulsed by what had happened to his people and be compelled to seek out their own kind. He is laughing at his own joke, and I cannot say as I blame him. We white men always think ourselves the superior of other races and now we can see just how closely related we really are to them. Our differences amount to nothing compared to the gulf between us and those ‘Deep Ones’ as he calls them. Aye, he has a name for those creatures whose likenesses I saw carved on that island. He says everything Walakea told me is true and I gather he and the chief are not on friendly terms. It seems when the Deep Ones began mating with the Kanakys’, his forbears held out and kept their line pure. Seems the shaman here, is jealous of the Deep Ones. Ever since making their unholy bargain with the creatures, the villagers have had little need for his services. They get all they want from the Deep Ones. These days, he ekes out a living by working a few cures for bellyache and infection. I asked him if there is anything the Deep Ones fear and he said something about how do I figure he and his father and his grandfather were able to remain pure blooded all these years? The Deep Ones fear only two things he says: someone or something called Clooloo I think, and a certain kind of symbol of things called the Old Ones.”

By this time, I was a bit confused, no doubt the result of a mixture of Eliot’s inadequate translation and the shaman’s ignorance. Who were these Deep Ones and Clooloo? They seemed nothing less than the embodiment of the Biblical fish god, Dagon. There was a pause in the conversation as the shaman reached into his loin clout and pulled out a small stone. He showed it to us by the fading light of afternoon and I could see the simple markings of a what looked like a crooked cross on its face. Quickly, he returned it to its place and resumed speaking.

“He says he can tell that we are still having a difficult time believing his story, but that perhaps he can offer us more proof.” The shaman stood and preceded us out of the hut. The sun was well down on the horizon when we started up a path different than the one we had followed earlier. As we walked, it grew darker and soon I could hear the sound of the surf in the darkness. We came upon a rock-strewn beach. The shaman bade us be silent on pain of our lives, and showed us to a spot laden with concealing underbrush. A hundred yards or so in front of us, the beach was well lit with many torches and Walakea stood there with a great many of his people. The light of the torches flickered over the incoming waves and in the distance, I could make out the dim outline of the island of the Deep Ones. Suddenly, Eliot took my arm in an almost-painful grasp and hissed a warning. He inclined his chin toward the crowd on the beach and, for a moment, I did not see what he was attempting to point out to me. Then it was my turn to stiffen as I saw Captain Marsh step out from behind one of the warriors and take a place beside Walakea. The shaman nudged us and indicated we look out to sea.

At first, I thought he meant for us to observe the island in the distance then, as my eyes adjusted to the weak torchlight, I saw that there was something else out in the water between us and the island. It was a jagged log or something that thrust itself a good six feet from the surface of the water. There was an irregularity upon it that I suddenly saw move.

“It is that native prisoner the Captain gave to Walakea yesterday,” whispered Eliot in my ear. “They got him tied to that log. They intend the poor creature to drown in the incoming tide.”

Unfamiliar stars began to twinkle overhead and a dull glow was all that was left of the setting sun in the west. All was silent except for the lapping waves when Walakea began intoning a guttural prayer. Soon, his followers began to join in. There was a disturbance on the surface of the water a little distance from the bound native. I tried to focus my eyes upon it, but failed to see what was happening in detail. I thank God to this day that I was not successful! Slowly, the disturbance grew in violence until the captive seized his struggles in momentary confusion. Then the movement halted and all was calm once more. I had turned a moment to ask about the phenomenon of Eliot when a blood-curdling scream pierced the gathering gloom. My head shot around in a flash as I could see the captive struggling mightily against his bonds, to no effect. All the time his screams continued, melding with the droning chant of the group on shore. Then, if possible, the man’s screams became even more shrill as his body seemed to stiffen. I saw something break the surface of the water around the native’s legs. It slid slowly upward, its hide glistening wetly in the torchlight. I watched transfixed as the thing inched its way ever higher, now to the man’s thighs, now his waist. It seemed in that concealing gloom that it was a giant slug as its movement suggested an arching and contracting to help pull its bulk along.

The screams continued until they seemed to become a part of the universe, a natural noise like that of the wind or the surf. Then the gelatinous mass seemed to begin to tug, to drag its massive weight downward. The native’s bonds snapped with a sound that was clearly heard even over his screams as his body began to slide downward into the water. By then, his mind must have been completely emptied of rational thought by the horror that had hold of him. I gulped heavily and breathed, I think, for the first time since the screams began. Another snap and the native, one arm flailing, slid beneath the waves as his screams bubbled into silence. The only evidence of the horrid scene was a shiny slick left upon the upright log. Dimly, I heard the chanting die out and the crowd turn back toward the village. I do not know how long it was before I was shaken by Eliot and pulled back along that path to the shaman’s hut, but I remember watching the first mate working frantically through the rest of the night with the shaman’s inadequate tools to reproduce the Old Ones’ signs on a few smooth stones. The shaman’s ironic chuckling, tinged with not a bit of madness, shall remain with me the rest of my days.

As expected, the Captain demanded an oath of silence from the crew. His explanation, appealing to their greed, was smooth to be sure but Eliot and I refused to participate in the compact. I simply shook my head but Eliot uttered his defiance aloud, barely able to control his voice which shook slightly. Behind him, I could see the ague-like trembling his hands had acquired that night, when we witnessed the thing rise from the sea. For myself, I demonstrated no outward signs of trauma, but I knew they were there nonetheless. Shock perhaps had internalized them to emerge in due time.

Thus the long voyage progressed until, early one morning, just after two bells, the cry most dreaded by seamen echoed below decks: “All hands on deck!” Immediately, Eliot and I joined the rush to the top, spilling outdoors into harsh moonlight and a placid sea. We were far southward by then, in the currents that skirt the Pole. The captain was on deck, smothered in his cold weather gear and pointing out to port.

I moved to the rail with the rest of the men and looked in the direction the captain was pointing. At first I saw nothing in the gloom, then a sound of disturbed water broke the silence and one of the men shouted and pointed too. Instantly, every head turned. There was activity in the water about half a league out, a small whirlpool of swirling water that indicated something of immense bulk had recently submerged. We all leaned just a little bit more forward then, as whatever the thing was breached the surface once more. It slid wetly toward the southward and I could see immense ridges or rings that segmented its length as though it were a gigantic serpent or worm. I stiffened and recoiled at the sight, my hand immediately seeking the comforting shape of the stone in my pocket as I recognized the contours of the monstrous thing worshipped by the damned Kanakys. In the meantime, immediately upon catching sight of the creature, the entire crew reeled back as one, some crying out to the Lord, others cursing, but all deeply frightened.

“It’s just like in the Book o’ Jonah!” someone cried out, echoing my own racing thoughts. I looked about for the kindred soul and imagine my surprise to find that it was none other than Captain Marsh himself! Amazed, I listened as he harangued the crew, controlling their panic, with Biblical allusions and assurances of the Lord’s mercy until his true intentions revealed themselves. “The thing’s only lookin’ fer sustenance,” the captain said. “There cain’t be much food for a creature so big hereabouts. But still, something had to bring it up from the deep. Someone among you must have aroused its wrath through sin and unbelief.” With that, his eyes fell squarely upon mine and in a flash, I saw the captain’s evil plan. He himself had called up the thing using the idolatrous methods of the Kanaky islanders and then making the suggestion of offering the creature a sacrifice when he knew the crew were already resentful of Eliot and I. Perhaps the Lord was yet with me that night however; how else to explain the timeliness of my next words in that situation?

“But Cap’n Marsh,” I said, not unmindful of the irony of trading scriptural quips with old Limb of Satan himself, “don’t forget that Scripture says each seafarer called upon his God, and I will call on Jehovah, even as Jonah did! And thus let it be known who is God!”

Then, something even more amazing and terrifying than the nearby sea beast followed: lightning crackled amid a cloudless sky and the stone in my pocket became almost too hot to hold. I bit my lip and continued to grasp it firmly as the sea off the port side was churned into a gleaming froth in the throes of the maddened beast. At last, the monster seemed to disappear and the sea returned to normal and the crew, their resentment for Eliot and I temporarily forgotten in the relief of the moment, dispersed amid fearful mutterings. Eliot and I remained behind, the comforting feel of the Old Ones’ Sign still warm in my hand. The look he gave me indicated he too had resorted to the protection of the stone and I was on the verge of voicing my guilt at our reliance on such idolatrous and pagan objects over that of the true God when I noticed the form of the captain where he still stood at the rail. His eyes burned hatefully into mine and I knew for certain my life aboard the Queen was not worth a penny. Muttering, Captain Marsh turned and retired to his cabin, leaving Eliot and I to ruminate upon the strange protections obviously afforded by the star shaped stones in our possession.

How we endured the interminable agony of the long voyage around Cape Horn is more than I can explain here. Where once the sea had beckoned me with its gentle swell and even violent temper, now it struck me with ineluctable fear and loathing. It’s boundless reaches filled me with terror and, although there were no further attempts by the captain to rid himself of Eliot and I, we took to spending as much time as we could below decks. At last though, the shores of home hove into view and the Sumatra Queen arrived at Innsmouth again.

But even back among the civilized haunts of men, I could not find peace. Almost as soon as we arrived, Captain Marsh began his damnable crusade to convert the citizenry of Innsmouth in the ways of the Kanaky religion. Even I had to admire the old seaman’s canny arguments; such casuistry would have impressed even the most wily Jesuit. For some, he promised riches from gods who rewarded their worshippers with items they could use such as gold and silver and, for others, he used the insidious and tempting arguments first promulgated by Thomas Paine and Ethan Allen. Each man had his weakness and Marsh had no compunction in exploiting it. He debated the local clergy, sometimes pointing out their hypocrisy and other times demanding of the congregation why they allowed themselves to be led by these men, why could they not think for themselves? Compelled to witness against such unscrupulous tactics, Eliot and I spoke out at every opportunity. In the public rooms, in the churches, and on the street corners we spoke to whoever would listen, but it was difficult to combat a man who could pass out bits of gold. In increasing numbers and regularity, men began to meet in cellars and basements and then in homes and halls to participate in the new rites of worship. Whom Marsh could not convert, he bought with gold, thus he was able to drive from the town first the clergy and then those citizens and elected officials who refused to follow the new belief. At last, there was no more Eliot and I could do and it was decided that I would journey to Boston and seek help from State or Federal officials who might at least act upon Innsmouth’s official corruption.

It was with great trepidation that I deserted my companion, but it was felt to be necessary by the both of us that I did. In Boston, I met with resistance to my imprecations. It was out of their jurisdiction, it was none of their affair, there was no evidence they said. I spent days wandering the cobbled streets searching for anyone who might listen to my tale, but no one did. Suspecting that Marsh’s gold had arrived there before me, I considered moving on to Washington, but by then I was growing fretful of Eliot’s lack of communication. Finally, some weeks after my arrival in the state capital, I gave up and began my return journey to Innsmouth.

It was on my final night on the road, after I had arranged for a room in Arkham, that I had the dream. In it, I found myself on a vast field of ice and snow. Before me, in the misty distance, rose a range of snow covered mountains and at my back was a great empty ship held fast in the ice. Snowflakes fluttered in the cold air, and suddenly there was the strangest shape I had ever seen standing erect before me. It was cone-shaped and somewhat taller than a man, and its plastic makeup seemed undisturbed by the weather. But the strangeness of the event was not borne out of my encountering it in those frigid climes but rather, the shape of what I presumed to be its head. For that member was shaped much like the Old Ones’ Sign that I clutched in my pocket. Could this creature actually be an Old One? Then I saw it twist about at its mid-section as if it intended to indicate some point to the side. I looked, and beheld the figure of my friend, Eliot, as he lay in the snow, his cold body partially buried in the drifting stuff. Now, at last, a shiver passed along my body as the meaning of the scene bore itself upon me.

Upon awakening, I tried to convince myself of the essential meaninglessness of dreams, but however I tried, I could not shake off the feeling that it had been a kind of premonition or warning. It was not an hour later, as I had breakfast in the tavern below my room, that I learned the sad fate of my friend.

A local resident, enjoying a pint of rum at the inn, overheard me say that I was bound for Innsmouth and asked me what I might know about a lynching that occurred there not two days before. It was from him that I learned Matt Eliot was dead. It seemed that the affair began with a simple theft when Marsh had goaded the town prankster, a boy named Zadok Allen, to steal the strange stone Eliot always kept on his person. I did not say so to my informant, but the theft of the Old Ones’ Sign would have left Eliot unprotected, as Marsh surely knew. It was after that, said the man, that Marsh accused Eliot of all kinds of foul deeds, whipping the town’s residents into a self-righteous frenzy that resulted in his being lynched.

With this crushing news, all the hope and enthusiasm I may have had for combating Marsh and his followers evaporated. I paid for the man’s drink and left the inn. There was no coach scheduled to go southward until the next morning, but I could not bring myself to remain in such close proximity to the scene of such a depressing turn of events. It was a long and lonely walk back to Pepperell.

Although I have not had the opportunity since then to keep abreast of events in the larger world, or even of those closer to home, I have still heard news from time to time from the vicinity of Innsmouth, including its rise in prosperity even as it shuns outsiders. I have heard it said that Captain Marsh made many subsequent voyages to the Kanakys, always returning laden with strange worked gold and sometimes even in the company of certain of its natives.

For myself, I have resided here on my family’s farm in Pepperell since the day I returned after hearing of the fate of poor Eliot. In that time, my loathing of open water has only increased, further circumscribing my movements. From time to time, I seek to test those fears but whenever I approach a body of water I balk and begin to tremble violently, I begin to perspire and an urge to turn and run overcomes me. The nearby Nashua River is a terror to me and the smallest brook takes all my fortitude to cross. Consequently, I mostly stay on the farm. I am safe here, and land-bound. Here, far from the sea, I am well out of the reach, the long reach, of Dagon or the Deep Ones or Clooloo or whatever it was I saw emerge from the waters that damned night in the Kanakys. I also have my charms, the Old Ones’ Signs; my Bible I read less frequently now. Why should I? The Old Ones have proven their power. The sign will ward off Dagon. I have them close at hand, here in my room. But Dagon’s reach is not so long as that, is it? I cannot say, for the one thing I do know for certain is that the thing I saw that night drag the screaming native into the water, and again in the colder southern climes, was not a giant slug or enormous jellyfish nor even a serpent, but merely the tip of an appendage belonging to an infinitely larger creature that had been trapped beneath the sea for uncounted ages and now is not only free, but aware of our larger, more populated world here in America…

Addendum: Freedom of Information Act
Request #900049

Subject: Government Document #9745632
Stone, one (1) “Old Ones’ Sign”

Status: Request Denied

of relief.

The Deep Cellars

1. The Tale Begins

t sat there like a crouching gargoyle, all gothic corners and spires made of dark stone and slate. It was called simply the Towers but New Yorkers universally knew it as the Castle. It had the look of having been built in the Middle Ages but could not have been constructed before 1850; no one knew for sure since all records of its having been built had long since vanished…by fire, theft, or neglect, no one seemed to care enough to discover. So the years passed, and the Towers continued to stand serene in its small piece of real estate in the heart of the greatest city on earth. Soon other buildings began to cluster about it, but none too close, and in time Mr. Olmstead’s Central Park joined them in 1876. The Towers found itself brooding amid growing walls of glass and steel, the soothing greens of the Park that faced it across Central Park West doing little to lighten its austere aspect.

What the Towers had been expected to be was also a mystery. It stood a full twenty stories high so it could conceivably have been intended as a hotel, but it also had those ornate spires, curving turrets, and crenellated projections that defied architectural common sense. Was it simply a relic of the gilded age? A monument to some forgotten tycoon’s ego? These were questions most New Yorkers also ignored; they mattered little as the Towers was now indubitably a conglomeration of private residences. Highly exclusive and affordable only to the most well to do, but still a residential building.

Most New Yorkers, like the rest of their countrymen, had no idea of exactly who lived in the Towers and perhaps cared less. Certainly, dark colored limousines were seen infrequently outside and paparazzi even less. However, it was assumed people did live in the Towers whoever they were, and Dr. Evan Scopes was one man who was sure of it because he had sent one of its residents a note and received in reply an invitation to drop by.

At the moment, Scopes was moving slowly up Eighth Avenue in a rented cab, having only arrived in the city a few minutes before at Grand Central Station. It was the first time he had been there since attending a conference on the changed understanding of the nature of the bicameral mind two years before, and he marveled at the continuing change in the face of the city. The taxi’s slow progress through the usual heavy traffic gave Scopes ample time to think as he recalled the peculiar case that had forced him to seek the help of a fellow professional in the field of psychiatry. Dr. Anton Zarnak had a certain reputation among his peers that yielded a grudging respect tempered by disdain for his unorthodox interests and sometimes questionable methods, but Scopes felt little concern for such fears as he had long acquaintance with the Doctor ever since befriending him when both were students at Heidelberg University. Since that time, both had kept in touch by mail and of course, through each other’s papers in the scholarly journals. No physician was happy when he had to turn to another for help, but Scopes felt no compunction in seeking aid wherever he could find it in the interests of his patients’ welfare.

At last, the taxi managed to pull up to the empty curb before the imposing facade of the Towers. “Here it is mac, the Castle. That’ll be $8.50.” Scopes gave him a ten, told him to keep the change, and stepped out into the cool shadow of the Towers. He looked up, searching out Zarnak’s penthouse suite. He ought to have a good view from that perch. Grasping his briefcase, Scopes marched up the wide stone steps and pushed past the heavy glass doors into the building’s foyer. A uniformed doorman tipped his hat to him and asked for his card. Scopes produced the personal invitation card sent by the Towers’ residents to those they wished to enter the building. The doorman scanned it quickly and showed him in. He did not return the card.

Scopes found the elevator and rode it silently the twenty floors to the top. When the doors opened, he stepped out into an empty corridor devoid of ornamentation. A single door broke the bland surface of the opposite wall and a small bronze plaque on the door met a visitor at eye level. “Zarnak” was all it read. Scopes knocked. A moment later, the door opened and his friend stood before him. “Evan! Punctual as ever. Come in.”

Scopes did so and was immediately engulfed in the light scent of myrrh. Around him, from what he could see of the other rooms, he saw that the suite was lightly appointed in a tasteful modern style, plenty of light and space. Here and there, never clashing with the apartment’s open feel, antiques and objets d’arte indicated their owner’s eclectic tastes.

“Let me take your coat, Evan,” said Zarnak helping him off with it and storing it easily in a nearby closet. His friend had changed little in the years since they first met. Dressed just now in slacks and open shirt, he still sported that odd zig-zag of silver in his hair that stretched from just before his right ear to the back of his head. “Let’s go onto the veranda, I’ve set out some refreshments.”

His friend led him through a number of large rooms, all fairly nondescript until they passed through a pair of glass doors onto the veranda that allowed a spectacular view of Central Park and the city beyond.

“Magnificent isn’t it?” said Zarnak motioning to a wrought iron table and chairs where a genuine Revere silver tea service stood.

As his host poured some coffee, Scopes remarked: “Frankly I’m kind of surprised Anton. These digs are quite a change from your old ones in China Alley.”

Zarnak only smiled. “I’ll admit it is quite a change, but one has to change with the times. The reasons I once had for locating in old Chinatown have melted away. In this age of the computer and increasing crime, I find it more convenient to live a more conventional lifestyle.”

“You call this conventional?” said Scopes, sipping at his coffee.

“It serves my needs.”

“And what about that Indian you used to employ?”

“Ram Singh…died…some years ago.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Anton.”

Zarnak smiled fleetingly. “And what is it that brings you to New York, Evan? Your note said something about a problem with one of your patients at Resthaven.”_

Scopes put his cup down and said, “Yes, but first I must remind you that this must all remain absolutely confidential.”

“Of course,” said Zarnak.

“Well, as I mentioned in my note, I would not have asked you to step in on this case but for the unique nature of the patient’s phobia,” began Scopes.

“And what is that?”

“He tried to kill his six year old son!”

Zarnak was usually able to keep his feelings to himself, but this revelation was enough to elicit from him a startled grunt.

“This is serious Evan,” he said at last. “Has he had a history of such behavior in the pa

“That’s one of the problems I have had with this case, Anton. A complete lack of such a history makes it all the more difficult to assess his phobia beyond the mere fact of its existence.”

“Are there ancillary effects to the patient’s phobia?”

“Allow me to start at the beginning, Anton.” Scopes laid his briefcase on the table, opened it and removed a few thick manila folders, each bound with a red ribbon. “These are the patient’s files. You may keep them for review should you decide to involve yourself with the case.”

Zarnak merely nodded.

“The patient’s name is Geddes, Henry Geddes,” Scopes began. “And so far as I can discover and that I am informed by his wife, he had lived a completely ordinary life up until about a year ago when he came upon an inheritance. It was at that time that he was notified through the law offices of Kierny and Taylor of Tarreytown that he was the legal heir of property outside Lefferts Corners, a small town near the Taconic Mountains. It seems that Henry was the descendent of an old Dutch family named Martense that had lived in the area years ago. Anyway, the inheritance was a house that had once belonged to a family named Meir, relatives of the Martense’ and for which attorneys have been seeking heirs for as far back as the early ‘20s. A small trust fund had almost given out and the property about to revert to the community when Henry was found.

“Of course, he accepted the windfall and moved in with his wife and son about a year ago, as I have said. It was very soon after that that his strange delusions began.”

“And what are those delusions?” asked Zarnak.

“He claims his son is not what he appears to be,” said Scopes, almost shrugging. “That he had to destroy him in order to save him.”

“Is this delusion limited only to his son? I mean, does he feel the same way toward his wife?”

“No, he claims to still love her the same as always.”

“I suppose you have exercised the usual battery of approaches to such cases?” Zarnak had begun taking notes.

“Yes. I began with mild psychoanalysis and when the sessions yielded nothing of importance, I moved on to physical, visual and aural exercises. It was quite frustrating as they mostly indicated that Henry was perfectly sane. I even attempted discussions with him in logic and deductive reasoning, but to no avail. I won’t hesitate to say that he’s perfectly harmless to himself or anyone else, except to his own son, whom I’m certain he would destroy the moment I ever released him from Resthaven.”

“Have you checked for a family history of such behavior?”

“His family background is impeccable,” replied Scopes.

“And his new-found family background?”

“Why…I didn’t check…I didn’t think it had any bearing…”

“Hm.” Zarnak tapped his pencil once on the pad where he had been keeping his notes. “Yes, Evan,” he said at last. “I think I will look into this case. Please make an appointment for me to come down and visit Mr. Geddes…say next week?”

“Certainly. First thing Monday then?”

“Fine, I’ll see you then.”

A few minutes later, Scopes was whisking downward to the lobby, relieved at having Zarnak on the case, but also unaccountably uneasy over not having checked Geddes’ other family background.

2. Zarnak Investigates

Early the next day, Zarnak left his perch on top of the Towers and descended to the street. The late October sunshine was warm but there was a crisp breeze that found its way down to Central Park and blew up litter along the street. Zarnak waited as the Towers’ doorman stepped to the curb and raised his hand for a taxi. In seconds, one of New York’s ubiquitous yellow cabs rolled to a stop in front of the building and the doorman pulled open the rear door. Zarnak held his hat and ducked inside. The door slammed and the cabbie said, “Where to mister?”

“94th and Second,” said Zarnak settling back.

Some minutes later, the taxi stood double parked along busy 94th Street. Zarnak handed the driver a bill and exited to the sidewalk. A long row of old townhouses stretched along either side of the street. Small trees captured within wrought iron cages stood at the curb. Glancing at the number of the brownstone building directly in front of him, Zarnak began walking down the street. With his hat, he wore a long coat over his suit and a white scarf was tucked neatly around his collar. In his hand he carried a black briefcase. Presently, he came to the address he was looking for. Just to the left of the double oak doors that stood at the top of a short flight of stone steps was a large metal plaque: New York Genealogical Society it read.

Inside, Zarnak doffed his coat and hat and placed them in a closet in the foyer. A thin, middle-aged woman, still very handsome, met him there and asked, “Dr. Zarnak, a pleasure to see you again.”

“The pleasure is mine Mrs. Johns,” Zarnak replied.

Mrs. Johns led him to the reception desk where he entered his name into a visitor’s ledger. Flipping back through some of the pages, he noticed the name Gerald Kierney. He smiled. It had taken a while for Mr. Kierney to come to New York.

“We have a number of tables free in the reference room,” said Mrs. Johns motioning for Zarnak to precede her into the nearby library.

Zarnak was shown to a heavy wooden table well apart from the only other person working in the room. He placed his briefcase on it and turned to Mrs. Johns, “I think we can begin with the National Ledger…volumes 8 through 10.”

“I’ll have them brought in for you in a jiffy, Doctor,” said Mrs. Johns.

While waiting, Zarnak opened his briefcase and arranged his things. Presently, a young man came into the room wheeling a well oiled cart laden with the thick volumes Zarnak had asked for. In the course of the morning, he was able to trace Henry Geddes’ parentage back far enough to find where it connected with that of the Meir line. From there, it was a simple thing to find where the Meir’s intersected with the Martense’. It appeared that the two lines separated sometime early in the 1800s and though some of the Meir descendents ventured into the wider world most, like their Martense cousins, remained insular and provincial. The line eventually disappearing in a blur of Meirs, all inter-marrying and never straying far from the family home near Lefferts Corners. Those things went on in the days before modern transportation.

It was while looking through the Martense line however, that Zarnak found something interesting. Like the Meir’s, it too petered out amid incestuous pairings but, in the old volume where the last recorded entry was, Zarnak found a yellowed newspaper article pressed between the pages. Unfolding it carefully, he read a short piece about a vague disturbance outside Lefferts Corners involving the old Martense homestead. The date line at the top of the article showed that the story appeared in the New York Times of the early 1920s.

His research completed, Zarnak replaced his things, signed out, and went to find a taxi.

His next stop was the New York Public Library where he visited the microfilm department. It took a few hours before he found what he was looking for, but Zarnak judged the time spent to have been worth it. A series of news articles and features had been filed throughout the summer of 1921 of strange doings surrounding the tiny community of Lefferts Corners, New York. Much of the continuing story seemed vague to Zarnak, but he was able to gather that a series of frightful deaths had taken place in the area and a wild beast, perhaps a mountain lion or even a bear, was suspected. Incongruously, it seemed that the entire region had been honeycombed with subterranean tunnels that were prone to collapse from time to time from the effects of erosion. The whole thing apparently climaxed in a series of explosions that not only destroyed the old Martense mansion but also, if the accounts were to be believed, the entire top of a nearby mountain.

Now Zarnak was not in the habit of dismissing the strange and the odd having had experience in both for many years, but even his credulity would have been taxed to the utmost if it were not for the coincidence of the events described in the news accounts and the presence in the area of the Martense and Meir homesteads.

Some minutes later, Zarnak was in a public telephone booth in the lobby of the Library and dialing a number. In moments a voice answered.

“Resthaven hospital, may I help you?”

“Yes, could you connect me with Dr. Evan Scopes please?”

“Who may say is calling sir?”

“Dr. Anton Zarnak.”

“One moment doctor.”

“Hello, Dr. Scopes speaking.”

“Evan, this is Anton.”

“So soon?”

“I’m finished work on this end and was wondering if I was still clear for Monday?”

“Of course, the staff has been notified to expect you.”

“Good. I was also wondering if you could call Mrs. Geddes and ask her if I could come up to see her for a couple of days.”

“Is that necessary?”

“I think so, but I can’t say just how yet. Will you do that for me?”

“Of course, but I can’t promise she’ll say yes.”

“Understood. I’ll see you Monday.”

Zarnak spent the weekend consulting with his friend Jules de Grandin, who steered him to a specialist named Stephen Strange, for information regarding the more offbeat details of the Geddes case.

On Monday morning, he took his BMW roadster from the garage and left the city. It was a sunny day and, as buildings gave way to greenery, he took the time to enjoy the bucolic pleasures of the Long Island countryside. Following a brief stop for lunch, he soon arrived at the town of King’s Park where Resthaven was situated atop a low hill surrounded by great expanses of park-like lawn and copses of pine trees. He was breezed through the front gate by a security guard who had been told to expect him and drove up the long, curving approach to the old Horvath Manse that had been left to Dr. Ilya Lanewski at the turn of the century for use as one of the area’s first modern lunatic asylums.

Zarnak almost regretted going indoors on such a beautiful day, but resigned himself. Inside, a pretty, plain-clothed nurse showed him to Scopes’ office. Zarnak favored her with a smile.

“Right on time, Anton,” said Scopes rising. “We’ll waste no time; follow me.”

Zarnak was led through a series of well-appointed corridors, obviously Horvath possessions kept in place to provide as normal a setting as possible for the patients. Examination rooms to the sides were similarly furnished as comfortable dens or small studies. In a few minutes however, they left these cozy surroundings and entered a more antiseptic wing of the hospital, a new addition to the facility placed in the rear of the Horvath mansion where it could not be seen from the road. Here, patients’ rooms were small cubicles secured by heavy doors, the halls were bare except for being painted in combinations of soothing colors. At last, they halted before one of the doors and Scopes handed Zarnak a clipboard tracking Geddes’ therapy sessions, medicine intake and behavioral symptoms over the previous week.

“Has he been violent?” asked Zarnak, handing the board to a nearby orderly.

“No,” said Scopes. “As I said before, my judgment is that he’s perfectly harmless to himself and anyone else except when it comes to his own son.”

“He’s never given us any trouble, Doctor,” confirmed the orderly.

“Very well, then. Will you introduce us?”

Scopes nodded and knocked at the door. “Henry, this is Dr. Scopes, I have a visitor for you. Can we come in?”

“Of course, Doctor,” came the reply.

Scopes opened the door and stepped inside. “How are you this morning Henry? I’ve brought Dr. Zarnak to see you as I mentioned a few days ago.”

Zarnak had followed Scopes inside the small room, which was well lit by an east facing window (covered on the outside by a heavy security screen) and filled but not crowded by small items of furniture.

“How do you do Mr. Geddes?” said Zarnak, scrutinizing the man closely. He was of medium height, slightly pale (to be expected after a lengthy hospital stay), and relaxed.

For his part, Geddes fastened Zarnak in a steady stare, brown eyes scrutinizing him carefully from beneath a furrowed brow.

“How do you do, Doctor,” he said. “If you’ve come to give a second opinion about me, I’m afraid you’ll get nothing more than what the good Dr. Scopes here got. Namely, that I’m not insane.”

“You jump to conclusions, Mr. Geddes,” said Zarnak, taking a chair. “I’m here neither to pass judgment nor to offer opinion, but simply to observe and offer some advice if I can.”

“Are you telling me that you’re absolutely objective; that if you had any notions about me you’d keep them to yourself, no matter how strongly you felt about them? You’re only human after all, Doctor.”

“I suppose that’s true,” conceded Zarnak, impressed.

“Regardless of just why Dr. Scopes brought you here, I want you to know that I am not out of my mind. I’m as sane as you are, to paraphrase a hundred bad movies.”

“That may be so,” said Zarnak, “but how does your assertion square with the actions resulting in your being sent to Resthaven?”

Geddes paused a moment, took a deep breath and continued. “I suppose my words and deeds of six months ago could be construed as unreasonable by any normal person. I can see that. But they were well grounded in fact; I had my reasons for what I did.”

“And what were those reasons, Mr. Geddes?”

“I had to kill my son to save him from a fate worse than continued life. He suffers from the Meir taint, Dr. Zarnak. I suffer from the same taint. To continue living under such a curse would be worse than death, it would be a living death! Each of us condemned to a lifetime of growing and ever-worsening imbecility and degeneracy! The Meir line came to an end decades ago, as well it should have, and I have every intention of making sure that it’s curse ends with my own generation.”

“Then you would end your own…”

“I fully intend to follow my son into oblivion.”

Zarnak fell silent a moment as he absorbed this extraordinary delusion. “You say you and your son suffer from a ‘taint,’ where did you get this information? Have you always been aware of it or…”

“Yes and no. If I had known of its significance, do you think I would have waited so long to act? Do you think I would have had the irresponsibility of bringing a child into the world under such a curse? No, I only recognized the taint for what it was after I moved into the Meir house nearly a year ago now.”

“Just what is this ‘taint’ Mr. Geddes?”

“Don’t patronize me, Doctor,” Geddes said with rising anger.

Zarnak decided not pursue this obviously dangerous point.

“And what was it that brought this all to your attention?”

“My ancestor, Georg Meir, had left behind a number of personal papers and diaries, it was after reading them that I learned to recognize the family’s distinguishing feature… but why discuss it all? You’ll never believe me anyway.” Geddes turned in frustration and paced to the window.

There was silence then, and sensing that the interview was at an end, Zarnak rose. “This has been a most enlightening conversation Mr. Geddes. Thank you for your time.” The patient grunted without turning from the window.

“Were you able to make anything out of what Geddes said?” asked Scopes when he and Zarnak were out in the corridor again.

“Somewhat,” replied Zarnak. “Were you able to make those arrangements for my visit to Mrs. Geddes?”

“Yes, but is there any need for disturbing her? She’s still upset over this whole situation.”

“That may be so, but if we are to get to the bottom of this mystery, I must examine the papers Geddes mentioned.”

“Surely you don’t give credence to his assertion that secret knowledge found in his uncle’s library was enough to drive him to kill his son do you?”

“I don’t know,” replied Zarnak. “But I do know that something has challenged Geddes’s belief system and he has surrendered to it. Evan, that man you have back there is not insane!”

3. Sin of the Fathers

Late the following evening, Zarnak arrived at the Geddes home. It was large, ornate as only a house built by the affluent early in the last century could be, and huddled frog-like in a thick forest of second-growth trees. Here and there amid the growth, one could see an ancient gazebo, a tumble-down carriage house, a splintered outhouse, a nearly invisible barn; the property, it seemed, had not been tended for a good many years. Lights were burning on the ground floor and Zarnak noticed an electrical wire or two strung from the house to a nearby pole that eventually led back to the county road beyond the trees.

Zarnak had left Resthaven for Lefferts Corners immediately following his interview with Henry Geddes armed with a letter of introduction from Scopes to Geddes’ wife. The drive north had proved long but uneventful. He had called Mrs. Geddes from a restaurant in Lefferts Corners where he had eaten supper, and came on at her insistence that he spend the night at the house.

Now Zarnak was slamming down the hood to the BMW’s trunk and, travel bag in hand, mounted the wooden steps to the front door. There was a bell pull and he used it. Presently a shadow moved across the light shining through the small paned, stained glass of the door and a voice asked, “Who is it?” He gave his name and slid the letter of introduction through the mail slot. At last, the door opened and the voice said “Please do come in, Doctor.”

Zarnak did that, doffing his hat as he did so. Inside, it was warm and well lit and he could see that quite a bit of work must have been done on the house before Geddes’’ breakdown.

“Let me take your things,” said Mrs. Geddes, an attractive woman wearing plaid shirt and loose fitting jeans. Her hair was slightly disheveled. She could not have been older than thirty. “Won’t you come into the parlor?” she said turning from the hall closet. “How was your trip? Did you have a hard time finding the house?”

“Only moderately, I’m familiar with the upstate area,” Zarnak replied, following her into the parlor. A tray and coffee pot were waiting there for them. They sat down as Mrs. Geddes poured some coffee without bothering to ask him if he would care for any.

“Dr. Scopes says you’re some kind of expert?”

“Of a sort, yes. I hold a number of degrees from different universities and Dr. Scopes and I studied together in Germany.”

“I notice you didn’t answer my question, Doctor,” said Mrs. Geddes handing him a cup of coffee. “But that’s all right. All I’m really interested in is your opinion of my husband. How is he? Will he be all right?”

“Mrs. Geddes…”

“Please call me Sondra, Mrs. Geddes makes me sound so old.”

Zarnak smiled. “Sondra, it is my opinion that your husband is perfectly fine. He is not insane. But he does suffer from some inexplicable delusion that, he believes, necessitates the death of your son.”

“Well, forgive my ignorance Doctor, but that sounds insane to me.”

“Whatever a person does or thinks that is out of the ordinary has always been considered ‘insane’ by larger society, but in your husband’s case, I believe that he has been exposed to a number of facts, and has aligned them in such a manner that he was forced to come to a single conclusion. No matter how inexplicable others may find his insistence that your son must die, to him it is perfectly logical. The way to cure your husband of this delusion, I feel, is to learn the facts that have led him on this train of thought and convince him of the error in his logic. That done, he must admit he drew the wrong conclusions and cure himself so to speak.”

“You make it sound so simple.”

“Although the human mind is an extremely complex organism, and contrary to what others, and particularly those in my own profession, sometimes say, many of its problems do have simple solutions. Tell me a bit about why you decided to seek help for your husband?”

“Well, I’m sure I can’t provide any more information than Dr. Scopes probably gave you,” said Mrs. Geddes, “but I think my husband’s breakdown began slowly over the course of time and not suddenly.”

“Were there any indications of this coming breakdown before you moved to this house? Were you having any marital problems, family difficulties, pressures of any kind before then?”

“Only the ordinary stresses and strains of any normal marriage. No, I’m sure the problem began only after we moved here. At first, everything was fine. For the first four or five months we worked fixing up the place, we could see it was a gorgeous house even under all the neglect, then, in that last month, Henry began to change, at first in subtle ways, then he became more antic, more unpredictable and short tempered.”

“What was different in your lives after moving here than before? Anything at all?”

“Nothing except maybe the gloomy surroundings of the forest and such, maybe we were a bit more isolated. But I’m sure that couldn’t be it. I know that Henry began spending more time in the library. He’d found all sorts of personal papers and such belonging to his distant relative, Georg Meir…”

“How long ago did he develop the delusion that your son must be destroyed?”

“Oh, I don’t…well I remember he began to say things like he had the Meir look, that he had to look into that. Then he began watching little Luke, not watching him like a parent ought to, but studying him, staring at him as if he was waiting for him to make some expected move, waiting for him to do something that would give him away…but that’s silly, it’s just something I’ve started dwelling on these past…”

“No, no, Sondra. The mind is a very intuitive organ, it correlates data and sometimes it allows the sub-conscious to arrive at conclusions faster than the conscious mind. That sub-conscious may be trying to tell you something. Now this strange behavior culminated in…what exactly?”

“Well, I had been growing more nervous with every passing day, Henry had begun to have a strange, wild look in his eyes. And then…on that night…I woke up and found that Henry was not in bed. I got up to check on Luke and when I did, I caught Henry…he was leaning over Luke with a pillow clutched in his hands. He was going to suffocate him! I screamed, grabbed Luke from the bed and ran from house. The next thing I realized, I was at the police station in my night gown. I…well, they came for Henry the next day. He was still at home.”

“Did he say anything about the reason for his actions?”

“Something about how he had to kill Luke for his own good or something.”

Zarnak replaced his cup on the tray and leaned back in his chair. There was silence a moment.

“I’ve upset you, I know,” he said at last. “Why don’t you retire early tonight and if you don’t mind, I’d like to go through some of the things in the library.”

“You think Henry got those ‘facts’ you were talking about earlier from some of Georg Meir’s papers?” She was quick. Under other circumstances, Zarnak might have considered pursuing such a woman.

“You’ve read my mind.”

She laughed then. “That’s a funny line coming from a psychologist! Well then, I’ll leave you to your research. Everything is just as Henry left it. When you’re ready to go to bed, I’ve prepared the room just off the library for you, you can’t miss it. Oh, and take the coffee pot with you.”

“Thank you, that’s a good idea.”

After placing his things in the guest room, Zarnak poured himself another cup of coffee and moved behind the big desk that dominated the library. Around him, old books were ranged on shelves that rose to the high ceiling. Some were of newer manufacture, obviously belonging to Henry Geddes. Others, Zarnak noticed with misgiving, were volumes of questionable content, books of sorcery and black magic long banned by sensible authorities.

He lit the reading lamp over the desk and saw that its surface was littered with old papers yellowing with time and small notebooks filled with neat handwriting. Georg Meir’s private papers he presumed. He sat down and began ordering material by date; that done, he spent the next several hours reading through them. When he had finished, he found that most of the information contained in the old papers and diaries substantially matched that of the news reports he had read at the New York Public Library.

The Martense and Meir lines had degenerated into incest and mongrelization nearly a century ago, until the families eventually vanished. But people, especially whole families, just do not disappear, they go somewhere, even if it is into other family units. But in the case of the Martense and Meir lines, there was no evidence that they had ever merged with other local families. In fact, the people round about shunned and feared the two clans because of their insular and eccentric ways. So where did they go? Zarnak believed he had the answer. There were hints in some of the papers of “deep cellars” beneath the Martense and Meir properties that, in fact, the tunnels that honeycombed the area were the very reason that the families built their homes here. Through the papers, the news articles and scattered information provided by Dr. Strange, Zarnak deduced that far from vanishing, the degenerate remains of the Meir family had retreated to these “deep cellars” and never reemerged. It was his intention to explore the house basement to find the entrance to these catacombs.

There was one other thing. He had discovered what Henry Geddes had meant by the Meir “taint.”

Zarnak retreated to the bedroom and took a flashlight from his travel bag. He pocketed some extra batteries. Going back into the darkened parlor, he found the door to the basement where he expected it beneath the front stairway. He pushed it open and found a light switch on the wall. He flipped it on and immediately the gloom below became lit in the sickly yellow glow of a bare bulb just visible beyond the end of the staircase. At the bottom, Zarnak saw that the floor was bare earth with here and there, naked ledge clearly exposed. There was evidence of some storage but not of a recent variety, the dank of the basement would have damaged any items of a more modern manufacture. Parts of the basement were divided by a wooden framework stapled over with chicken wire and overhead, the ancient beams were choked with cobwebs.

In a few minutes, Zarnak had arrived at the furthest reaches of the basement where the flooring was all of rock that gently sloped toward the corner of the house. A few moldy boxes and barrels of wood were enough to hide the cavern entrance beyond as the top of its arched entrance barely rose above the level the floor. Zarnak shone the beam of his flashlight into its inky depths but saw nothing. So this was the “deep cellar.” It was incredible that human beings could actually retreat there to live, but if the accounts were to be believed, the Meir’s did exactly that. Whether any of them were still alive, Zarnak now intended to find out.

Slowly, he negotiated the uneven slope to the entrance of the cave; he played the beam of his flashlight inside, but again saw nothing. In another moment, he was swallowed up within its confines and almost immediately, he came upon evidence of human habitation. But by the appearance of scattered bones and such bits of metal as a belt buckle and buttons, it had been many years, perhaps decades, since anyone had disturbed them. He continued on. Time passed. According to his watch, he had been walking for nearly an hour in total silence except for the scuffling of his own feet on the uneven floor when the tunnel widened into a large cavern where his beam had difficulty reaching the opposite end. A thin stream of water, heavy with sediment, passed through one corner of the room and on the shelf of rock that sloped up from its bank, Zarnak was able to see the terrible fate that had finally caught up to the vanished Meir clan.

A dozen corpses, some mutilated in an obviously cannibalistic manner, lay bunched together, almost mummified in the peculiar atmospheric conditions that existed this far beneath the earth. A few more corpses lay scattered farther away, but these fifteen or so bodies were all that had remained of the Meir family when finally, after generations of in-breeding had produced human strains unable to survive in the world and when even the ability to reproduce had at last been bred out of the poor creatures, they had succumbed to the relentless law of nature.

With care, Zarnak played the beam of his flashlight over the desiccated faces and in some he could yet see, in the dried and sunken sockets, the Meir “taint.” Satisfied, Zarnak returned to the surface world.

4. Two Surprises and a Conclusion

Zarnak rose early the next morning both because he was habitually an early riser and because the rambunctious Luke, trailed by his mother, were preparing for a school day. For his morning ablutions, Zarnak was compelled to use the house’ sole bathroom on the second floor. When he was finished, he passed the open door to the boy’s room and decided to take a cursory look about the scene of the attempted murder. It proved to be no different than any other boy’s room except for one thing.

Zarnak picked up the book that rested on the night table by the boy’s bed. By its thin wooden covers and rumpled pages held together by bits of twine, he could tell immediately that it was of homemade manufacture. Curious, he flipped it open and saw that each page contained Georg Meir’s neat handwriting and what was more, his experienced eye recognized the words as an English translation of segments of the dread Necronomicon, a very rare tome of a sorcerous and blasphemous nature. It was plain that Meir had somehow made a selective translation of the original, but what was it doing in the child’s room?

Just then, Mrs. Geddes stepped into the room and before she had time to say anything, Zarnak asked, “Sondra, what is this book doing here?”

She recognized it immediately. “Oh, Henry found it in the library and thought it’s Arabian Nights’ stories would make good bedtime reading for Luke.”

To say that Zarnak was taken aback at this facile explanation would be an understatement. But then, as he reflected further, what else would an untrained eye see in the evil parables of Abdul Alhazred’s book but simply more tales of the Arabian Nights? Then, idly thumbing through the book’s pages, it fell open to a bookmark that rested on the last page of an entry that Zarnak recognized as an elaborate Spell of Reversal that was intended by the author as a method of counteracting spells, curses, and even mistaken summonings of antediluvian gods.

He took the book to the breakfast table with him and had it beside him when Luke and his mother joined him.

“Luke, this is Doctor Zarnak,” said Mrs. Geddes introducing the boy. “He’ll be staying with us for a few days.”

“How do you do, Luke?”

“Fine sir,” said the boy approaching Zarnak with his hand extended.

Zarnak smiled at this mature display and in taking the boy’s hand, looked into his eyes and was taken by surprise for the second time that morning. What a fool he had been! The answer to the whole problem had literally stared him in the face from the beginning!

“Sondra, the boy’s eyes…”

Mrs. Geddes showed a bit of irritation when she replied, a mother’s natural defensiveness toward her progeny.

“What about them?”

“They’re both the same color!”

“Well, yes.”

“But members of the Meir family have always sported dissimilar eyes; one blue and one brown.”

“That’s true, but I just assumed Luke’s eyes adjusted somehow, that the two colors turned out to be just a childhood thing that he grew out of…like his blond baby hair darkening…”

“But your husband’s eyes have normalized as well!”

“What? They…they have?”

“When did you first notice this change in your son?”

“Why, come to think of it, it was soon after we moved into this house.”

“Sondra, have Luke finish his breakfast, he won’t be going to school today,” Zarnak said.

A few hours later, Zarnak, Mrs. Geddes and Luke met with Scopes in his office. Scopes was having trouble with their explanations.

“I’m still not quite sure I understand you, Anton,” said Scopes.

“You say Geddes’ delusion has something to do with his eyes? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Evan, just let me ask you a single question: Has Geddes looked at himself in the mirror since he’s been here?”

“Why no; too dangerous. It’s against Resthaven’s rules to allow a patient anything with which he might harm himself or others. A mirror could be broken into sharp pieces…”

“Then I suggest we overlook the rules in this instance, supply Geddes with a mirror and further explanation may be moot,” said Zarnak.

Scopes shook his head in puzzlement but the imploring look on Mrs. Geddes’ face overcame whatever objections he might still have had. A few minutes later, the orderly had unlocked the door to Geddes’ room and, with his wife and son out of sight up the corridor, Scopes and Zarnak entered.

“Dr. Zarnak,” said Geddes rising from his cot. “I didn’t expect you back so soon.”

“I never expected to be able to help you so quickly,” replied Zarnak modestly. “Mr. Geddes, do me the small favor of looking into this mirror?”

“A mirror? Why, are you trying to mock me by drawing attention to my affliction?”

“Not at all.”

Geddes took the hand mirror from Zarnak and hesitantly brought it up to his face. There was a moment of silence, then a sharp intake of breath. Suddenly, Geddes dropped the mirror with a crash, buried his face in his hands and broke out in heavy, wracking sobs.

Zarnak signaled to the orderly at the door and in moments Geddes’ wife and son were in the room. Mrs. Geddes took her husband’s hands in hers and drew them from his face. “It’s all right, dear,” she soothed. “Everything will be all right.”

Then, she deliberately placed Luke in front of him. Geddes’ gaze immediately went to the boy’s eyes and when he saw the change there, grabbed the boy in a great hug and crushed him to his body saying, “Oh God, forgive me!”

“I’m still not sure I understand all you’ve told me, Anton,” Scopes was saying some time later in his office. “You say it all came down to the color of his eyes?”

Zarnak nodded. “You’ll recall that I said I did not think Geddes was insane, that his delusion was the result of facts he had gathered from reading his ancestor’s private papers. Well, the most telling of these facts involved the color of the eyes sported by members of the Meir family, one blue and one brown. Geddes took this reality, a reality he himself had lived with his whole life, as the corroborating, the final proof of the horrific Meir legacy. Logically, it did not make sense, since the fate of the Meir’s was the result of radical, extended inbreeding, not a curse. In point of fact, there was nothing wrong, nor could there ever be anything wrong with Geddes or his son beyond the inherited color of their eyes. In effect, Geddes over-reacted. It was only with the fortunate change in father and son’s eye color that provided the logical point upon which Geddes’s mind could take hold and convince itself that the ‘curse’ had been lifted.”

“Are you sure it will be safe to allow Geddes to return home with his family?”

“Absolutely. With Sondra’s permission, I took all of Georg Meir’s papers and many of the older, unwholesome books in his library out into the yard and burned them all.”

Zarnak did not think it necessary to tell his friend of the real cause of the sudden change in the Geddes’ eye color; let him think it mere coincidence, a lucky chance. But the irony was not lost on Zarnak that the father who had tried to kill his son because of a perceived “taint,” had himself unknowingly cured the boy by reading him a “fairy tale.”

It was another fine autumn day when Zarnak exited Resthaven so he put the top down on the BMW and took a leisurely route back to the city. On the seat beside him lay Georg Meir’s handwritten translation of the Necronomicon, kept by Zarnak as a reminder that he was, after all, only human.

st?”

The Legacy of Acheron

old!”

Mervyn Stalls smiled and stood.

Altogether, it had been a most satisfactory day, most satisfactory!

Pushing his way past the score or so of men crowding the cellar space, Stalls headed to the table at the front of the room. Finally shouldering a few losing bidders aside, he produced a crumpled handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the sweat from his forehead.

Man, it’s hot in here, he thought, eagerly anticipating his return to the air conditioned atmosphere of his hotel room.

“Congratulations, Mr. Stalls,” said a swarthy man whose head was covered in a burnoose that both protected him from the heat and helped to hide his features from too closely prying eyes. “I’m sure you’ll feel much pleasure in its possession.”

The man referred to the stone jar that he was just setting down on a wooden table laden with a number of similar objects.

“At the price I just bid, I better had,” said Stalls, replacing his handkerchief and pulling a roll of American bills from inside his shirt.

“You know as well as I, Mr. Stalls, that in this kind of market, it’s buyer beware,” said the man, leaning forward slightly in expectation of being paid. “But I assure you, the jar is genuine and what’s more, unopened.”

“Which is why you started the bidding so high,” Stalls said, peeling some bills from the roll. “If I hadn’t had a chance to have it appraised before, I wouldn’t give two hoots in hell for your assurances.”

The man chuckled, taking the proffered money. “And I don’t blame you. Cheats and forgers are as thick as cockroaches here in Cairo and they’re far more accomplished than those elsewhere. How anyone fell for that ossuary from Israel that was supposed to have held the bones of James, the “brother” of Jesus, a few years ago is beyond my capacity to understand.”

“If someone wants to find something bad enough, they’re willing to believe anything,” said Stalls, who knew of such fools first hand.

Having handed over the cash, he was free to take hold of the jar himself and look at it more closely.

The thing wasn’t large. Around a foot tall, it was narrow at the top and widened to a diameter of about eight inches before tapering again until it became the same size at the base as it was at the neck. The top was stoppered tight by a stone plug that showed to Stalls’ practiced eye, all the evidence of not having been tampered with…as promised.

“And you won’t tell me where it came from?” asked Stalls.

The man smiled and shrugged. “You know I cannot, Mr. Stalls. The site might still hold other objects of value. Objects my associates would like to find before their activities are discovered by the police.”

It was the price, besides the money he’d just handed over, that Stalls knew came with dealing on the black market. You could never be absolutely sure of the authenticity of what you were buying, but he’d dealt with Mehmed before and never been disappointed. The items he’d purchased had always checked out. It was one of the reasons why only the cream of the collector crop were invited to Mehmed’s auctions. Gazing at the Canopic jar he held in his hands, Stalls felt pretty damn sure that he was now in possession of an object that hadn’t been tampered with for at least 4,000 years, and that dated back to the Third Dynasty. Could the object inside still be preserved? Would there be enough of the kidney, intestines, or liver to take a viable DNA sample from? If so, he might be able to prove the existence of a highly developed Egyptian proto-culture from before recorded history, could prove the existence of the fabulous Hyborian Age from which Egypt arose on the ashes of a land called Stygia.

But he was getting ahead of himself…

Handing the jar back to Mehmed, he watched as the dealer wrapped it in cheap brown paper and string so that the completed package looked no different than the packages made up by local laundries and markets.

“Are you sure you’re not interested in anything else, Mr. Stalls?” asked Mehmed as he held out the package. “We’re holding another auction in a few days…some very nice items from the Iraqi National Museum. The police have already been bribed…”

“No thanks, I have what I want.”

Stalls, made his way to the rude wooden door at the back of the basement where a man standing lookout motioned to him that it was safe to leave. A moment later, the door had closed shut on its leather hinges and Stalls had emerged onto a dusty alley in the heart of the Cairo slums. Not too familiar with the streets in that part of the city, it took him some time to finally make his way from the crowded warren onto a paved thoroughfare where he could hail a passing taxi.

It was still short of a couple hours till dawn by the time he arrived at his hotel. He waited until the taxi had driven off before turning away from the main entrance and going around to the back and entering through the receiving area. There was no one on the street at that hour and he was sure he made it into the building without being observed. Outside his second floor room he fumbled with his keys before getting the door to his room open and, finally stepping inside, sighed in relief at the hum of the air conditioner.

Locking the door behind him, he carefully set the package down on a nearby bureau, imagining what was inside. By the Third Dynasty, the ancient Egyptians had refined their art of preserving the human body after death about as far as it could go. The secret lay in moisture, or rather the elimination of moisture from the body. To do that, the Egyptian priests would remove all of the body’s internal organs and place them into separate Canopic jars, like the one Stall had just won at auction. The process of removal was a pretty sophisticated one; they even developed an operation that could remove the brain from the head through the body’s nostrils, piece by piece with a pair of specially fashioned hooks! When they were done, all that would be left in the body was the heart, due to the Egyptian belief that it contained the soul and thought processes. The priest would next anoint the body in natron, a kind of salt that would absorb all remaining traces of moisture. After a sufficient amount of time had passed, the natron would be brushed off and the body wrapped in linen. The result was the marvelously preserved bodies found by archeologists in the nineteenth century, thousands of years since they’d first been mummified.

Looking at the package, Stalls could only wonder where it had come from. He was in no doubt about its authenticity, Mehmed was no fool; if word got around that he was dealing in forgeries and fakes, he’d be out of business in no time. All of the known tombs and pyramids were tapped out, there was nothing left to find in Cheops or the Valley of Kings. From time to time, isolated tombs were discovered beneath the shifting sands of the Sahara. Could his jar have come from one of those? He suspected that if any evidence for the existence of Stygia were to be found, it would most likely come from farther south, in what was known in ancient times as Upper Egypt. Could it have come f

Eagerly, he unwrapped the jar and set the paper aside. Holding the artifact closer to the lamp, he noted the faint markings that circled the jar. He recognized many, but one in particular stood out, the one that had caught his eye when he first examined the jar before the auction. The stylized figure of a serpent, the traditional emblem of Set, the snake god.

Setting down the jar, Stalls went to one of his suitcases, produced a key, and unlocked it. From inside he removed a vinyl case, unzipped it and withdrew a thick sheaf of Xeroxes bound in an unlabeled ring-binder. Sitting down on the edge of the bed and placing the binder on his lap, he flipped through its pages until he stopped at a title page labeled The Saracen Rituals. In order to be fully prepared for his Egyptian “shopping” trip, Stalls had brought as much of his research materials with him as possible. Most, of course, was stored on disk, and so accessible on his laptop, much of the rest was a simple matter of surfing the ‘net. Some items, though, could be had in no other way than old fashioned hard copies. For that, he’d visited a few libraries in the United States and arranged to make copies of the pertinent information directly from the printed source. For The Saracen Rituals, he had to make a special stopover in London to visit the British Museum which had one of the only known copies on hand. Only a single chapter from Ludwig Prinn’s larger De Vermis Mysteriis, most Egyptologists dismissed the work as the ridiculous ramblings of an early version of a conspiracy theorist. Which it may well have been, but Stalls suspected that as paranoid as Prinn no doubt was, he did spend time in the Middle East in the 1500s and could very well have picked up some useful information; a suspicion the American confirmed when he first laid eyes on the jar. Flipping through the scanty pages of the Rituals, he finally found what he was looking for: a drawing of the Seal of Nephren-Ka, the infamous Black Pharaoh of Egyptian history. It matched perfectly with the image of a trampled snake on the jar in Stalls’ possession and confirmed in his mind that Nephren-Ka not only existed, but that he had been mummified at some point. What he had in the jar on the bureau before him, were none other than the human remains of the most notorious man in Egyptian history, a man that many researches still were not completely convinced even existed. But now he had the evidence! And if DNA testing proved it, his reputation in the field would be made. Of course, there would be questions about where the jar came from, but he already had a plan to explain that.

In any case, it was useless to speculate on the issue any further until he could have the jar examined in detail…and there were university laboratories he knew in the States that would do the job without asking any questions. Resigning himself to the wait, he snapped the binder shut and replaced it in his bag. Retrieving the paper and string, he rewrapped the jar and, yawning, shed his sweaty clothing and stepped into the shower.

A few minutes later, he emerged feeling refreshed and was still scrubbing his hair when he thought he heard a sound from the bedroom.

“You want to leave some extra towels before you…” he started to say, expecting to find the housekeeper changing the bedsheets. Instead, he was confronted by a robed figure whose burnoose hid his features in shadow. Cradled in his arm was the package containing the jar. Behind him, one of the leaves of the sliding glass door was open and the warm morning breeze was wafting the curtains inward. Outside, the sun was brightening the eastern sky and from the streets below, traffic sounds could be heard.

“Hold it right there, mister!” Stalls shouted, trying to sound as threatening as he could. Standing in the center of the room stark naked however, didn’t make him feel very formidable right then.

Showing not the slightest bit of intimidation, the burglar crouched and began to back toward the open doorway — was that a hiss he was making? Stalls didn’t have time to wonder about it as he lunged after the retreating figure who sidled this way and that in quick, jerky movements that struck the American as definitely odd.

The burglar’s moves allowed him to easily avoid Stalls’ clumsy attempts to grab him before slipping out the door and over the railing that lined the balcony outdoors. Desperate not to lose the jar, Stalls dashed outside in time to see the man land on the sidewalk and scramble in a loping run down the street.

Cursing, Stalls ran back inside and dressed as fast as he could. He couldn’t allow the man to get out of sight if he was going to recover the jar, because there was no question about going to the police for help. Egypt had strict laws against dealing in antiquaries, and dealt even more harshly with those who bought them on the black market. No, if he was going to get the jar back, he’d have to do it himself.

Balking at the two story drop from his balcony, Stalls took the emergency stairs and burst out the service door to the sidewalk. Around him the street was still relatively deserted that early in the morning, making it easy to spot his quarry with his funny, stooped posture and jerky movements even from a distance. Thus, a fast run up the street, glancing down alleys and side roads as he went, enabled him to finally spot the thief, package still tucked under his arm, as he skittered up the far end of a narrow side street.

By the time he reached the spot where he’d last seen the thief the man was out of sight, but with only one direction he could have gone, Stalls was pretty sure he was still on the right track. A few minutes later, now deep into the increasingly crowded warrens of Cairo’s back streets, with the smells of cooking food and human waste pungent on the air, he caught sight of the thief again. So far as he could tell, the man wasn’t aware that he was being followed and Stalls decided that he could afford to slow down and wait for a chance to nab him that would be to his advantage.

He was in a wholly unfamiliar part of the city and beginning to feel somewhat nervous about the seedy looking nature of the neighborhoods he was passing through when it occurred to him that the thief might be going to meet friends, friends who could help him take care of the lone American pursuing him. Suddenly anxious to conclude the chase, Stalls put on an extra burst of speed and caught up to the unsuspecting thief just as he paused above a set of stairs leading down into a dark basement.

“Now I’ve got you…” Stalls managed to say as he collared the man by his loose robes and used the momentum of his run to swing him against the mud wall of a nearby building. Momentarily stunned, the man’s grip on the package loosened and Stalls moved swiftly to grab it from him. “I’ll take that, and you can take this…” He gave the man a good left uppercut that was meant to strike him beneath the ribs and wind him but instead, his fist caught on the fabric of the man’s jibba and seemed to glide across the surface of his body. A hiss of hot, stinking breath washed across his face as the unexpected lack of resistance threw Stalls off balance and he fell clumsily against the body of his opponent. Before he could regain his balance, something hit him on the back of the head, forcing him to his knees. Still clinging to the package, he determined to remain upright but the effort only set him up for another blow, once again to the head and this time, he fell forward, never feeling the cobblestones that rose up to hit him in the face.

The low murmur of voices was the first thing that impressed themselves on his senses when Stalls finally emerged from the darkness of unconsciousness. For a long time, or what seemed to be a long time, that was all he was aware of. The voices, or what he took to be voices, seemed to be slurred with an unusual amount of sibilants in their speech…was it English they were speaking? Or Arabic? He couldn’t tell, it was hard to concentrate.

The next thing he felt was the hard, unyielding nature of whatever it was he lay against. That’s when he realized that he was lying down. Opening his eyes didn’t do any good. He couldn’t see a thing in the darkness. He moved his arms to prop himself to a sitting position and realized that they were bound behind his back. Why…? Suddenly, it came back to him: the theft, the chase, the fight…then he was hit on the head. He must have been unconscious and whoever it was that had struck him, had tied him up and brought him here to…where was he? And it was only at that moment that he fully realized the possible danger he was in. If he’d been captured and taken by the thieves who’d robbed him, they might not feel safe in letting him go. His only hope lay in the belief by the natives that all Americans were rich and that he could be more valuable to them alive than dead.

Struggling to raise himself, he found there was a wall at his back and used it to force himself upright. He was still groggy from the blows to the head. He had a monster headache and his eyes refused to adjust themselves to the dim light of what must have been one of the subterranean basements that was a regular feature of the local architecture…offering residents the only real respite they had from the country’s relentless heat.

Shaking his head, he squinted his eyes against the dim light and tried to make out more details about the room around him. Right away, he noticed that there was an echoing quality to the voices indicating that the room was bigger than he’d first supposed, a lot bigger. Then, as his surroundings grew clearer, he made out the bulky form of what looked like a massive pillar about a dozen feet in front of him. Following its length up into the shadows overhead, he guessed right away that it must have towered at least thirty feet high before its upper reaches vanished in the gloom. Looking further, he began to see that other shapes, other pillars, dotted the floor space farther back in the room. He wasn’t in any typical Cairo basement, that was for sure! Then, guessing that his captors were most likely involved in the illicit antiquaries trade, he concluded that he must have been taken to a site known only to local tomb raiders. Of course! He’d wondered where the latest batch of articles for sale had come from, information that Mehmed had been reluctant to tell him.

But then, thoughts of Mehmed gave him a new idea.

“Hey, you men,” he croaked in the direction of the voices. “Do you know Mehmed Makmoud? He’s a dealer…he can vouch for me.” The voices stopped but there was no reply to his query. Had he spoken in Arabic or English? He couldn’t remember. Concentrating, he tried again in Arabic. Silence. Then the voices continued but not directed at himself.

Giving up for the moment, Stalls leaned back against the wall of the room and only then noticed that there were markings on its surface. With his sight improving, he looked up and realized that the wall was covered in cuneiform writing, with hundreds of the familiar Egyptian characters covering it in scores of horizontal rows. Although not an expert, he was Egyptologist enough to recognize many of the characters and was able to piece together some of what was being communicated. The message seemed to harken back to pre-historic times and…Stalls stiffened in shocked realization at what he was really looking at. The hieroglyphics told the story of the fall of Acheron, the dark, snake worshipping empire that had preceded the historic Egypt, and even Stygia that came before Egypt in the time of the Hyborians. Almost nothing had ever been recorded of ancient Acheron, only vague legends themselves buried in abstruse Egyptian records thousands of years old. Most researchers didn’t even give them much credence, supposing them to be merely the fanciful musings of a primitive people seeking some kind of explanation for their own mysterious origins. But here, Stalls guessed, was the most detailed description of the rise of Acheron in the dim centuries before recorded history, from a time when man himself was a rare species and quasi-humans and beast-men were the dominant life form on the planet. As his eyes ranged along the wall, Stalls noticed a single motif that recurred with uncomfortable regularity, that of a snake, the god Set, worshipped by the Acheronians in foul rites beneath black pyramids that rose out of the steaming swamps of an antediluvian Nile. As he continued to read, Stalls learned that when Acheron was finally overthrown and replaced by the slightly less fabled Stygia, the cult of the snake didn’t disappear but was simply adopted by its human conquerors.

Stalls’ concentration was broken by the sudden clatter of pottery or some such coming from the same direction as the voices he’d heard. When he turned his attention in their direction, he realized that his eyesight had improved to the point where he was at last able to see his captors.

They were gathered around a raised dais of some kind; he couldn’t tell how many of them there were, they kept moving in and out of the gloom beyond the dais. Robed in the familiar Egyptian jibbas, burnooses, and other kinds of loose-fitting clothes, three or four of them seemed busy fetching objects from a number of side tables while another figure hovered about what looked like a body that lay atop the dais. On the floor beside the dais lay an empty sarcophagus, its lid leaning against a wall a few feet away, which Stalls noticed was carved in the likeness of the occupant. Did these guys find a mummy? he wondered, excitedly.

Looking back at the objects resting on the tables, Stalls recognized them as Canopic jars, much like the one that had been stolen from him. Most had their stoppers removed and another was just being handed to what he considered to be the head grave robber. A scrape and the sound of an almost inaudible sigh of escaping air caught his attention and he noticed that the leader had just forced open one of the jars. What was he…?

Stalls’ frowned as the man tipped the jar until its shriveled contents fell into his open palm. The jars held the internal organs of mummified bodies, the better to keep them preserved for use when the deceased entered upon the afterlife. But what use could their contents be to these grave robbers? Did they intend on selling the jar and its contents separately to increase their profits? But no, the man who had opened the jar seemed to be reaching inside the mummy. What the hell? Was he placing whatever he got out of the jar inside the corpse?

Suddenly, there was the sound of tearing paper and he saw one of the men removing his jar from its wrapping.

“Hey, now wait a minute…” Stalls started to say until he realized he wasn’t in any position to protest. In fact, he was beginning to think he had bigger things to worry about than his stolen property.

…he couldn’t tell how many of them there were, they kept moving in and out of the gloom beyond the dais. Robed in the familiar Egyptian jibbas, burnooses, and other kinds of loose fitting clothes…

Again, the man handed the jar over to the head grave robber and again, the jar was opened with a hiss of escaping air. Despite the situation he found himself in, Stalls felt a pang of vindication as something slipped out of the jar when it was upended. Next, the first man took the jar back, as the second once again seemed to reach inside the mummy. It was the damnedest thing! Suddenly, it seemed as if they had finished whatever it was they were doing and the lead man made motions suggesting that he was closing up the mummy. When he was finished, he stepped back, joining the others at the foot of the dais. Now Stalls could see that there were four of them in all. There was a moment of silence, then the man who had worked over the mummy raised his arms and began some weird chant that was half spoken words and half sibilant whisper. The words weren’t in Arabic or any language Stalls could recognize. What were they…?

There was a soft scraping sound that drew his attention to the top of the dais. There, something was stirring and although what happened next was impossible, it took a few seconds for that realization to settle in as he simply watched with more amazement than horror.

The chanting of the four men continued at the same droning pace even as their body language indicated increasing excitement. In those few seconds of rational thought, before his brain broke down under the strain of holding his disbelief in suspension, Stalls saw the shriveled and wrinkled figure atop the dais actually begin to rise. The upper half of its body began to lift from the cold stone as if struggling to reach a sitting position. One gnarled hand slipped to the edge of the table searching for support even as the four figures moved forward, arms vaguely extended to help. But before they could reach the figure, and just as Stalls’ mind gave way in a scream of blind terror, the figure gasped, a puff of ages old dust exhaling from its open mouth, and fell roughly back to a supine position.

As Stalls, tears streaming down his cheeks, eyes wide despite an overwhelming urge to close them, kicked his feet against the stones of the floor, backing himself away from the insane sight, an audible and extended hiss of what could only be dismay escaped the hidden throats of the four men gathered at the dais. Together, they rushed the rest of the way up and looked carefully down at the recently animated corpse. A discussion followed that was filled with more hisses than spoken words until, finally coming to a halt, the four turned slowly in Stalls’ direction.

“No, no…” whimpered Stalls as he tried to scrabble farther back into the shadows. He didn’t know exactly what he was trying to say, only that he desperately wanted to be somewhere, anywhere, else.

Slowly, one of the figures, the head tomb raider he thought, detached himself from the others and moved slowly toward Stalls in that strange, left to right, jerky movement that the burglar had used earlier that day. Suddenly, Stalls felt the fear and desperation in him begin to fade, his heartbeat returned to normal, the sweat turned cold against his skin, and all he could do was watch the figure, its movements now strangely hypnotic, as it moved closer and closer to him.

At last, the man stood directly over him as he looked up into the shadowed space inside his burnoose.

“Ssssso, manling,” the man hissed in Arabic. “It seemssss we were right to sssspare your life.”

“Wha…what…?” Stalls managed, not realizing just how much of a relief it was to him to hear some familiar words, no matter how mispronounced.

“You ssssaw our ritual?” said the man. It was not a question where an answer was expected. “And you have quessstionsss? Yesss? It isss to you we owe some thanksss for giving usss the sssucesss that we have had ssso far. You sssee, my brethren and I have been sssearching for the jar you purchasssed for a long time. Many yearsss, in fact. Yesss, many yearsss…” The voice stopped then, as if the speaker had slipped back into memory until, aware once more of where he was, he stepped back a bit and lifted an arm, indicating the wall against which Stalls still leaned for support.

“You are a man of learning…we know. I observed you earlier, ssstudying the writing on thisss wall. Do you know where we are? Yesss, ssstill in Cairo, but hidden, deep and dark, where no one has come for many centuriesss. But centuriesss are as nothing to usss,” he waved to the men behind him. “We worship Great Yig, father ssserpent and progenitor of Ssset, as the sssnake men have sssince before warm blooded man learned to walk.” He laughed then, or at least Stalls thought the intermittent hiss that escaped his hidden lips was meant to express humor. “Acheron wasss our home and from there we ruled the earth with the dreams of Yig as our guide. For untold ages, we were able to control our dessstiny through the precognitive giftsss bessstowed on usss by Yig. But even the father of sssnakesss could not predict the rise of men. At firssst, there were few of them and we enssslaved the ones that we found within the borders of our kingdom of shadows, but they bred like flies and soon overran usss. The age of beast-men was over. Ssslowly, we retreated into the swamps of the Styx and after the cataclysm that dessstroyed the Hyborian Age, the few of usss that remained became the ssstuff of legend among the men of Egypt, the land that rose from the ruins of Acheron and Stygia. Yig was again worshipped, but this time as Ssset, and there came a time when we dared dream of power once again. But with the rise of Nephren-Ka, it was not to be. He worshipped at the dark altar of Nyarlathotep, the sworn enemy of Yig and when he gained power over all of Egypt, he threw down the idols of Ssset and ssslew his worshippers. Once again, we, the brethren of Acheron who ssserved as the high priesssts of Ssset were persssecuted and forced into hiding. But we have long livesss, and Nephren-Ka was only human after all. Eventually, his people grew tired of his increasssing barbarities and threw him from power. He fled into hiding, no one except a few of his most dedicated followers knew where. And although the humans gave up their sssearch for him, the brethren never did. At lassst, however, we found him, buried in his sssecret sssepulchre but it wasss too late to exact our revenge. We were disssappointed, of courssse, until we looked at the walls of his tomb which told the ssstory of mankind far into the future and of Nyarlathotep’s final gift to his mossst loyal ssservant.”

He paused a moment and Stalls could hear the sibilant hiss of his breath.

“And then we realized that although Nephren-Ka had been our nemesssisss in life, he could now be our sssalvation in death! Oh, yesss, he could. You sssee, the final gift of Nyarlathotep to his mossst devoted follower had been that of ultimate prophecy which the former pharaoh ssspent the remainder of his life carving into the walls you sssee around you.”

He paused again, straightening momentarily to look up at the wall that stretched over Stalls’ head.

“As I sssaid, in the elder days the cult of Yig had languished and sputtered when his dreams could no longer show usss the future. It was knowledge of the future that enabled the brethren to rule for as long as we did. But Yig could not foresee the future where man was concerned. Humansss were too unpredictable. If Yig was ever to regain dominance over the earth, the brethren would need to find another sssource of precognition.”

Suddenly, Stalls realized where all this talk was going. He glanced at the figure that lay atop the dais.

“Yesss, I sssee you begin to underssstand,” said the figure before him, turning slightly in the direction of the dais. “We found Nephren-Ka, learned of his power to sssee the future and realized that in death, he could ssstill be made to pay for his crimesss againssst Yig. With the ussse of arcane spells at our command, we could bring him back to a sssemblance of life, a life where he would be our ssslave forever, foretelling the future for usss and enabling usss to return to power, for the greater glory of Father Yig!”

“But…the mummy…” Stalls managed to croak. “The spell didn’t work…?”

“The ssspell did work. The fault lay elsssewhere. In order to revive a body that hasss been mummified, it mussst be made whole. The organs that had been removed mussst be replaced. For many yearsss the brethren have sssearched for the jarsss containing the remains of Nephren-Ka and one by one, we found them.”

“So that’s why you broke into my room, you needed…then I was right! The jar did contain the remains of the legendary Black Pharaoh!”

“Yesss.”

“But you’re spell still didn’t work,” Stalls said again. “You failed.”

“Not yet. There isss ssstill a chance.”

“What do you mean?” asked Stalls, suddenly aware of a pair of long, hooked instruments in the figure’s hand. Had he been holding them all the time? Why hadn’t he noticed them before?

“One of the organsss preserved in the jars was damaged but there isss ssstill a chance the ssspell will work without it, if a sssubssstitute can be found.”

His clothing damp with the sweat that now seemed to be running freely from every pore of his skin, Stalls couldn’t take his eyes from the hooks, instruments that his experience in Egyptology told him he should recognize.

“Substitute for what?” he managed to say, knowing, dreading the answer.

“The brain,” said the figure, lunging forward suddenly and grasping Stalls’ head in the huge, cold grip of its free hand.

Screaming hysterically, Stalls squirmed and writhed in an effort to avoid the descending hooks, but as the other figures moved in to take hold of him and he felt his head being tilted back to expose his upturned nose, the burnoose fell away from the figure holding the hooks.

Eyes wide in terror, his head held firmly in the grasp of cold, scaly hands, the last sight Stalls had before the painful operation began was of the monstrous, misshapen head of a snake…

rom there?

Aqua Salaria

ou may know me simply as the author of a number of popular books lining the shelves of your local bookstore, but did you know that I’ve also held positions in various institutions of higher learning in the area of history, including my last position as a professor of history at Harvard University? It is all quite true, but in turning my back on academia and concentrating instead on writing books understandable to the common reader, my fellow scholars have ostracized me, turned me out of their midst and otherwise maligned my reputation. How and why has all this come about? That is the subject of this article as I attempt to describe the events that led to my decision to leave the rarefied atmosphere of the university and instead bring the light of knowledge and understanding heretofore reserved for the elitists to the general public.

My name of course, is Laughton Keen, and in the summer of 19--, I took leave of my position at Harvard to go on sabbatical to England in order to conduct on-site research regarding a subject I had long held to be fascinating and little studied. I refer to early Mediterranean influences in pre-Roman Great Britain. In particular, the area of southwestern England where the Severn River rolls from its source in Wales to its drainage at the old port city of Severnford. In expectation of my visit, I had conducted preliminary research in America involving Greek and Roman texts and even recently translated but fragmentary Mesopotamian records indicating a very early Mediterranean presence in the region.

All that, of course, I’d expected; what did come as a surprise, was information revealed in a late edition of the scholarly Italian journal, La Vita Romano. It reported on the discovery of new pages from the great Roman historian Tacitus’ Histories, only the first book of which had been known to survive into modern times. Tacitus was known as an extremely conscientious researcher himself, frequently drawing upon still-earlier, now lost, historical records for his facts. Although the article concerned itself mainly with the discovery of the pages in the library of a northern Italian abbey, what interested me was Tacitus’ reference to a still earlier book called Brittania and its account of a Roman expedition to western England. According to the story, sometime around 116 AD, eight maniples of the VI Legion marched from Glevum to Severnium, now modern Severnford, in response to complaints from the local citizens and Roman merchants about native activities further inland. Unfortunately, that was as far as the fragment went, but it was enough for me to decide to make it the central theme around which my next paper would revolve.

Accordingly, I made my plans and duly set out for England, arriving in good time and wasting little more in renting an automobile and setting out over the country’s perilous motorways toward the city of Brichester and its university. The drive was long, but made pleasant by my passage through the bucolic countryside alive with two thousand years of history. At last, I emerged from the hedgerow-bordered secondary roads and entered the city from the east. From a rise, I could make out the tangle of its streets, testament to the city’s haphazard growth. The old cathedral sat alongside the river that bisected the town and nearby loomed the ivy covered walls of the university buildings. Somewhere, church bells sounded lauds as I maneuvered my car down a gradient that debauched into the city center. I found the Victoria Road and followed it to the university and parked in the faculty lot. Announcing myself to the rector, I asked that formal introductions be postponed until the next day to allow me the time to sleep off my jet lag.

In the morning, I was introduced to the chancellor and members of the faculty at a brunch in my honor, so it wasn’t until later in the afternoon that I was able to visit the library and begin my researches. In the following days, I had the opportunity to see how good the library really was, in particular, the university’s manuscript collection and local records. Its private collection of Severn Valley lists was quite helpful in affording me the opportunity to draw up a complete timeline of persons and events of importance from the tenth century to the present. Before the Norman invasion, records became more problematical with only scattered local histories written after 500 AD by monastic institutions in the area and preserved on microfilm. It was on the evening of the third day that I came across my most significant find. Preserved on microfilm, the Historia Severnium, an episodic chronicle of the Severnford area by Govin Dryth, confessor to the half-barbaric warlord of the south midlands, seemed to describe a much-garbled version of Tacitus’ account of the VI Legion’s expedition to Severnium. In it, Dryth describes, with proper clerical indignation, certain pagan rites being practiced up the Severn River from Severnium that seemed to incite anti-Roman feelings among the only-nominally conquered natives of the area. Dryth correctly identified the VI Legion, mentioning the fact that one of its maniples was made up of German soldiers, and tells of how they marched off out of sight of the farthest civilized settlement. They weren’t seen for over three weeks until they returned, pale and shaken, to swiftly embark their waiting ships and sail back to Londinium. Beyond that, Dryth had only third-hand information, supposedly given by the commander of the expedition, of the direction in which the Legionnaires had marched. Mention was made of Throne Hill and geological formations such as the Devil’s Staircase. I found no further mention of the incident and so contented myself with trying to correlate the landmarks given by Dryth with those found on modern maps. The key seemed to be in finding the Severnium Way, which turned out to be the present day Severnford Road that wound northward from Severnford along the Severn River to Wales. Apparently, the industrious Romans had built a paved road from Severnium to facilitate the bringing of local produce to market. It’d been marked at intervals with mile stones indicating its distance from Rome.

After I’d gotten everything I could from the library, I took some time to stop and think about just what it was I was looking for. There was still no hint of what the Roman expedition found; merely its effect upon veteran campaigners. Whatever it was, I felt it would be more than enough to use as the centerpiece of my new paper and even if it weren’t, my curiosity was aroused; what better way to spend a few weeks in England than by exploring the countryside for heretofore unknown Roman historical sites?

Armed with maps and research materials, I left Brichester and made my way southwest to Severnford. From there, I went to the north of the city and entered the Severnford Road. It proved to be a narrow, two-lane affair that did indeed follow roughly the course of the river. Moving very deliberately, I tried to locate those Roman milestones that still existed; when I did, I drew out my maps and sketches and tried to match the landmarks I had with the landscape before my eyes. On the second day, passing through the village of Little Dorking, it occurred to me that it could have been the settlement mentioned in Dryth’s account called Throne Hill. As it was lunch time anyway, I decided to stop for a bite to eat and to ask questions of the local citizenry. The food was good, but the cooperation of the waitress and patrons in replying to my questions was less than satisfying. They seemed a suspicious lot and I felt I was lucky to get the news that the Devil’s Staircase was only a few miles beyond the village. I decided to remain the night at Little Dorking, reaching the Devil’s Staircase — a geological formation I was surprised to see actually did look for all the world like a gargantuan staircase — the next morning. Bare of trees, the steps somehow struck me as strange and eerie and it did not take much imagination to see how the simple folk of pre-historic Britain could have attached all sorts of superstitious noti

It was after reaching the Devil’s Staircase however, that my search bogged down and I was forced into a longer, more methodical search pattern that involved exploring every road in the area. Although some were paved, many turned out to be little more than two ruts that wound about the forests and pastures of the countryside. More than once, I had to abandon my car and continue on foot, lifting low-hanging branches away from my face and waving the occasional honey bee from my hair. It was frustrating but hardly bothersome. A more relaxing way to spend idle hours could scarcely be imagined. It was summer, and the warm sunshine that broke through the leafy overhang of the surrounding woodland was pleasant against my skin. Stone fences angled away over hill and field as early seeds wafted on the gentle breeze and out over the pastures of longish grass that sloped down to lonely farm houses. White clouds hugged the horizon and in early evening as I turned back to my car, they gave way to the first stars that winked over the eastern sky.

After a week however, these charms began to pall as my options dwindled away. I had discovered a network of little-used roads, cart paths that gave access between pastures, on the far side of the Devil’s Staircase and intended to finish my search of the area there before moving farther north, where I had even less confidence of finding anything. I was beginning to feel disappointment, but not yet despair. After a hearty breakfast back in Little Dorking, I drove up the Severn Road, past the Devil’s Staircase and off onto a single lane road. Two miles up, having passed the last farmhouse, I veered onto a little-used dirt road. Pulling into a shady glade along side the path, I killed the engine and looked up. I started. There in front of me, half swathed in tall grass and creepers, was a weathered milestone. Excitedly, I exited the car and crashed through some underbrush and began tearing away at the vines that obscured the stele. I ran my fingers over its face and made out the dim Latin markings. Its presence there, and the lack of any reference to it on my new maps gave me reason to hope that here at last was new evidence, beyond the landmarks I had already identified, that Tacitus’ VI Legion might have indeed been in the area twenty centuries before.

I returned to the car and gathered my things, then stepped out onto the path and followed one of the ruts as they bent gently to the left. A stone fence meandered through the brush and trees on my right and on the other side I could see old pieces of wooden fencing amid the creepers and vines. Beyond them, fields and pastures rolled away allowing me a clear observation of the surrounding countryside. As the road emerged from the wood, it fell into open country and I looked eagerly in every direction for any sign of what could have been man-made structures. Many old Roman sites were overgrown with trees and underbrush creating little islands of uncleared land, so any lone clump of vegetation amid otherwise open fields was to be regarded with suspicion. Finally, after a while, I determined to leave the road and cross an open pasture to my right that rose steadily for a good four or five hundred yards. From the crest of the hill it formed, I thought I might have a good view of the landscape beyond.

Leaving the path, I plunged into the waist-high grasses that filled the pasture between me and the base of the hill. Grasshoppers leaped and buzzed as I drove them from their resting places and a light dust of pollen covered my clothing. Up ahead, a sudden gust of wind bent the grass in a long wave that rolled down the gentle slope of the field. At last, I came to another stone wall, heretofore hidden by the tall grass, and negotiated it with some difficulty as it was swathed in veils of thorn bushes. The face of the hill proved treacherous as the long grass hid an uneven face pocked with a scattering of stones. Then I was at the top and shading my eyes against the glare of the sun and scanning the land before me. It was a long, shallow valley devoid of any evidence of human habitation: no houses or barns or even roads. The inside slopes of the surrounding hills were lightly forested and the valley floor seemed to be covered with a carpet of short grass. All that is, save for an irregular patch of darkened ground that blotted its center. My interest was piqued and I decided right then to walk the short distance to investigate.

The hike to the valley floor was uneventful and I approached the edge of the darkened area with increasing curiosity. At last, I reached it and found that it was covered in a purplish, sickly-looking lichen that apparently kept all else from growing where it had established a foothold. I bent down to brush my hand over the unfamiliar plant, surmising the possible reason why the otherwise verdant valley had not been cultivated.

I stood, rolling a sample of the strange growth between my fingers and looking ahead, noticed that there was a formation farther out toward the center of the purplish growth. It was a small, rocky hillock covered in a tangle of gnarled and dwarfish trees. With no better object in sight, I decided to conclude my detour by having lunch in the cool shade of those trees. I began walking, feeling the ground begin to squish wetly beneath my feet. I looked down and saw that my footprints had begun to fill with water. Looking farther out, I noticed for the first time, a scattering of glistening puddles that had apparently gathered in depressions in the lichen. I hurried on, trying to keep the water from soaking into my shoes and stopped abruptly. A hundred yards from the hillock, the puddles had become so numerous that they had begun to join together eventually forming a large, shallow lake, no more than an inch deep, completely surrounding the rocky outcrop. I admit, I was growing increasingly puzzled. I paused to pass a hand through the water and found it warm, hot even. I was delighted at the curious discovery and determined more than ever to reach the hillock. Retracing my steps a bit, I took a running start and dashed across the band of water onto the outcrop.

My mad scramble had carried me part way up the hill, and climbing the short distance remaining to the top, I was able to survey my surroundings. The hill was indeed the center of a shallow lake whose temperature was such that it caused a mirage-like distortion of the land beyond, causing the encircling hills of the valley to shimmer in the early afternoon sunlight. Suddenly hungry, I took a sandwich from my pack and looked about for a place to sit down among the twisty trees of the hillock. It was then, I think, that the odd nature of the formation impinged itself upon my consciousness.

The surface features of the hill, far from being in any sense regular, were a jumble of angles, corners, nooks and crannies, mostly made of chunks of stone. There was soil to be sure, but only what little wind and time could squeeze between the interstices of the rock. I moved a few steps back downward, bending at the waist in order to study more closely the exact composition of the hill. Suddenly, like a revelation, the hill came into focus for me. It was not a hill at all, but a pile of rubble. Once my mind had become aware of that fact, my eyes could readily see that massive blocks of hand-carved stone was what made up the “hillock.” What I stood upon was actually a pile of ancient rubble, weathered and overgrown with the passing of centuries. Then the irony struck me: here I had been scouring the countryside in a methodical plan of gradual elimination, and when I had finally discovered what I was looking for, it was completely by accident. I felt a bit foolish, I don’t mind admitting, but my glee at the time far surpassed it.

My hunger forgotten, I began a closer inspection of my discovery. Although the blocks of stone and slabs of pillars that jutted out from the pile in every direction looked cursorily that of Roman design, it actually had a root element of Hellenic, even Phoenician architectural styles. Finding a stone that seemed to jut deep beneath a covering of humus, I kicked away the accumulated detritus and found that some figures that had been carved into the stone were still legible. Retrieving some paper and charcoal from my pack, I proceeded to make a rubbing of the face of the stone. A satisfactory image was duly created and upon examination, proved to be of Mesopotamian origin, as I was able to recognize some of the characters. Pocketing the rubbing, I began a slow circuit of the site, hopping from block to block along the circumference of the rubble. I soon noticed that the rubble did not quite lie on the surface of the earth, but in a kind of depression from which flowed here and there, the hot, faintly steaming water that bubbled up from somewhere beneath it to feed the shallow lake around the site.

And now, I reach that portion of my narrative that has since changed the course of my life; that eventually thrust me from the company of my fellow academics and into the world of popular print. I must beg the reader’s indulgence and patience over the next few paragraphs to bear with me and wait until the conclusion to form any permanent judgment on my veracity.

As I was saying, those strange waters had once again caught my eye and stooping, I scooped a handful of the liquid in my cupped hands and brought it to my nose. I could detect no odor. Tentatively, I touched the tip of my tongue to it. I remembered it tasted of salt before the wave of drowsiness overcame me. I say drowsiness for lack of a better word. As it was, I sought a tree for support and soon slid down to sit beside it. Whether I eventually slept or not, I don’t know, but what followed was more vivid than any dream and I have sworn more than once since that it was real. Sight, scent, touch, all were there. So convinced am I of its veracity, that I have spent the rest of my life dedicated to the exploration of the phenomenon to which it must be a part.

It had become night, and the sky was filled with stars. I was standing in a clearing among a group of moving figures. The woods about me were black in the moonless dark and before me stood a rude stone temple. A dome supported by eight carven pillars of indefinite design sheltered a circular base made up of a series of concentric steps that led downward below my angle of view. Open to the air, I could see more figures at work there and hear a bellowing, nervous voice calling out orders to them. Unnoticed, I moved among the figures, and I began to take note of their costume. The men nearest me were soldiers clad in the leather and metal armor of Rome, their short swords bare and glinting in the starlight, with some smeared in a dark fluid. Although there were only a dozen or so in sight, I was nevertheless aware that many more were scattered about the area.

As I drew closer to the men, I could study their faces. Fear lurked there. Their eyes were haunted and their mouths were set grimly with the determination of doing their duty despite their every instinct to run. Some lips trembled on the edge of a scream and some eyes had the darting look of outright fear. The scene became ever more clear to me and I began to see other figures sprawled about the ground. None of them were Roman, but none of them were human either. Naked, the figures seemed more gelid than solid, and with mounting revulsion, I guessed by their tentacular appendages and other, more vague locomotive limbs, that they were eventually to become more solid than they were. Their semi-transparent skin, now quickly clouding in death, revealed unidentifiable organs, whose purposes I could not even hazard a guess. A great gash in the creature’s body exuded a clear, viscous fluid that continued to pump feebly onto the ground, killing the surrounding grass with a disintegrating hiss.

Sudden movement from the direction of the temple caught my attention as a soldier stabbed downward with his sword at another of the creatures that sprawled at the apron of stone upon which rested the eight pillars. The thing seemed lifeless as its foul, steaming guts bloated outward from some inward pressure of its body, but it did not stop the soldier’s murderous thrusts. Again and again, the man hacked away at the object of his revulsion until what remained of the thing was splashed in oily ribbons upon the ground. The soldier staggered back in exhaustion, the sword loose in his hand, the other rubbing saliva from his mouth. He was breathing heavily as he leaned on a pillar for support, his greaves and leather skirt spattered in rapidly drying viscera. Then another soldier was hacking away at a second creature, and another. Looking back, I saw that the clearing was littered with the carcasses of the monsters. The sounds of the night now began to make themselves apparent to my senses mingled with the more strident noises of men, some cursing, some shouting out in the impatience of fear. Then a formation of newly arrived Legionaries marched passed me and up the stairs leading beneath the temple dome. I decided to follow them.

Hanging back beneath the pillars as the soldiers continued on, I beheld a scene of furious activity. All around the apron upon which I stood, legionaries held torches aloft, giving off light to others who were busily working at the stones of the pillars and support structure. Scraping at the joints, pulling and tugging, they seemed to be weakening the foundations of the temple. In the flickering light, my gaze followed the great, circular steps as they descended toward a recessed pool of clear, yet strangely viscous water where ten or twelve further soldiers stood knee deep, their swords held at the ready and sometimes thrusting them at something beneath the surface. My attention was soon taken by the commanding figure of a centurion standing near the center of the pool who seemed to be overseeing the weird operation. Shouting at the workers above to increase their efforts and pointing toward the water before him from time to time, apparently directing the action of the two soldiers nearest him as they periodically thrust their blades into the water, he exuded an air of haste and purpose. There was a dull splashing sound as I noticed that the group of soldiers I had followed into the temple reached the edge of the pool, hesitated slightly, then resolutely plunged ahead. They waded out, relieving the others I had been observing, and assumed the same positions of careful watching and waiting. Those replaced, hastened from the pool with obvious relief, wasting no time to vacate the temple area. As the two new men took their places alongside the centurion, the commander pointed quickly and one of them stabbed downward with his blade.

Now I began to notice that the water’s viscosity was apparently due to scores of corpses, like those I had seen on the ground outside the temple, that floated and bobbed about the pool, their gelid forms disintegrating in the water as they slowly gathered along its outer edges. I came down the steps as fragments of voices emerged from the strange state I found myself in. “…watch out…” “…Jupiter, but they stink…” “They’re not of this world…” “…saw something of them at the temple of Marduk…” “…with Trajan in Mesopotamia…” “…Where the Parthians worshipped strange gods…” “…Marduk, aye, but also the brood of Eihort…” “…the Goat of a Thousand Young…” “…a thousand? More like…” “…back to Gaul after this…” “I can’t get the stuff off! I can’t get the stuff off!” “Get that man out of here…” “…my last duty with the Sixth, thank Mars…”

There was blurred movement beneath the surface of the pool, and just as I recognized the shape of one of the creatures, one of the men stabbed down, skewering it on his sword. The carcass rolled to the surface as the other soldier nudged it away with his own blade. Somehow, with my gorge rising, I still could not help taking the last step into the water myself. Immediately, I felt the hot water upon my legs, saw the steam rising from its surface into the chill night air. My hand trailed in the water and when I brought it up and rubbed my fingers together, I felt the oily greasiness of it. Globs of gelid tissue floated about me near the edge of the pool and I fought to control a rising panic. I scrambled, clearing the mucous mass and stumbled out into the relatively open water near the center.

Slowly, trepidatiously, I made my way toward the centurion and his two men who were all still concentrating on some activity at their feet. As I drew closer, I noticed that the surface of the water there was in a constant state of disturbance. Gently, the floor of the pool tilted downward, but not radically, until, drawing abreast of the little group, the water was nearly to my waist. I looked downward, trying to peer beneath the water’s surface, which was roiled momentarily by another sword thrust. Another creature’s body floated to the surface and as one of the soldiers nudged it away, I saw at last what was in the center of the pool.

The figures seemed more gelid than solid, and with mounting revulsion, I guessed by their tentacular appendages and other, more vague locomotive limbs, that they were eventually to become more solid than they were.

I think it must have been the utter uncertainty of just what I was gazing upon that ironically, allowed me to continue to look until the final revelation was revealed to me. How else to explain the fact that if I was in my right mind at all, I would have averted my eyes before seeing too much? As it turned out, I saw a great deal more than I ever wanted to. I was to receive a quick education in the hard realities of existence; that my comfortable notions of the way things appeared to be were all completely and horribly wrong. To this day, I wonder whether what I learned was a blessing or a curse; it would be so easy to have continued to live in ignorant bliss. But alas, my innocence was shattered and everything I have done since, I was compelled to do.

When the water’s surface had calmed from the soldier’s last thrust, I could see still another of the gelid, tentacular creatures wavering near the bottom of the pool. Suddenly it seemed to grow and I realized that I was only seeing a small part of it, with its hindquarters yet invisible, I actually felt the soldiers along side of me stiffen in anticipation of the next kill. Then there was a sudden pulse in the water and the new creature was free and being killed by the soldiers. When next I was able to see the bottom clearly, I looked past the newly emerging creature, (one seemed to fully enter the pool every few minutes), to its source. Suddenly, my stomach contracted and my throat grew thick as I saw that the creatures were being thrust upward, in a grotesque parody of the birth process, from a pulsing, throbbing object that was in turn, connected to something else, hidden from direct view by a veil of some kind; as if the object giving birth resided in another inaccessible chamber or dimension of time with only its “birth canal” existing in the present of the pool. Hypnotically, I found my gaze being pulled farther and farther down, in a kind of voyeuristic trance, as my eyes sought curiously the full shape of that reproductive organ. I was saved only by the sudden thrust of a sword as one of the soldiers killed another of the pool-spawn as it swam blindly into the amniotic waters of the pool. I staggered back, shaking my head to clear it somehow, knowing full well that I would never forget that monstrous sight.

The centurion waved his arm and shouted something to his men to exit the temple and, as I was swept along with the hurrying soldiers, I noticed that my surroundings had changed. The night was the same, and the trees and the men, but still something had been altered; my perception of reality had changed. Never again would I be able to observe the world in the naive fashion I did before. The crushing reality of the thing in the pool had put an end to that forever. I watched almost disinterestedly, as a score of soldiers began to pull on a set of ropes fastened to various parts of the temple. Suddenly, a spurt of dust puffed out from the top of one of the pillars and with a loud scrape, it was pulled from its age-long position and hauled down. Then, with its equilibrium shattered, the rest of the building fell in upon itself, creating a heap of shattered masonry that choked off the watery aperture from which that common head had given hellish birth to the many bodies.

Abruptly, I was “awake” again with the bright afternoon sunlight striking me through the stunted trees. Looking about me, the weathered rubble that I had earlier studied with curiosity, took on a dimension of dread horror and sinister depression. I stood up and began slowly backing away. I turned and ran, but tripped almost immediately at the edge of the hill, falling to my knees in the shallow water surrounding the site. Dazedly, I stood, feeling the warmth of the liquid as it saturated my clothing. Then, a soft gurgling sound attracted my attention. I faced in its direction and spied the slow emergence of water, steaming and still flowing from the fissures at the base of the hill.

I admit, at the time I must have been psychologically imbalanced. I fled in panic, fear even. Of just what, I am still not quite certain. But no matter how far I ran, I could not outrun the dreams and especially the nightmares. I ran as far as I could, and when I could not run any farther, I turned inward, and ran some more. Those were desperate times for me, until I learned how to cope with my new awareness. The revelation given me had been too sudden, the human brain has not been trained to deal with such enormities. But over time, in the peace of a sanitarium (I am unafraid to admit it), I learned to deal with it by utilizing the outlet of the written word.

Thus began my second career; with the mission of seeking out the truth wherever it exists. My fingers now fly over a keyboard, my words like swords, thrusting out blindly in the hope of striking home. I wrote that book at last, but Harvard University Press did not publish it. When I returned to the university after my breakdown, I was eager to incorporate what I had learned into my lectures, but I was reprimanded by my superiors for veering into areas that were too speculative. I turned to expressing myself in my papers, but the department head took exception to my insistence on the importance of Shub-Nigurath or Ubbo Sathla or Abhoth, and I was summarily fired. But as it turns out, it was the best thing they could ever have done for me. I found a new publisher, Nighthaunt, and though they are better known for their line of cheap vampire novels, they made my first mass market paperback, Fertility Gods From Inner Space (not my title, incidentally), a best-seller. As all of America now knows, my name became a household word with appearances on the Oprah, Geraldo and Donahue shows. I have become a frequent advisor for such programs as Inside Edition and Unsolved Mysteries. I continue to compose at a fever pitch, filling the New Age shelves with such titles as UFOs in Hollywood, The Paranormal Conquest of Washington, The Lennon Conspiracy, Alpha Waves and the Hidden Anti-Gravity Folk, Saucer Agenda, Ancient Gods in Milwaukee and Was Alhazred From Mars?

Of course, I was shunned by my peers and denounced as a crank; I admit, the rejection struck me hard. I fell upon evil times, succumbing to drink, etc. I was denounced for trying to disseminate my ideas as a modern snake-oil salesman. But then, I realized, how could they know? What I was saying was so beyond their ken that they could not but react as they did. I have found that I cannot blame them. I am content to point to such giants in the field as Eric Von Danniken and J. Allen Hyneck who have stood by my side. I know now that I was chosen, the scales were cast from my eyes, I have a mission. I must educate the world, slowly, but surely in the new revelation…Oh, I admit also, to some doubts late at night when those awful scenes will once more impress themselves upon my consciousness. It is then the harsh words of my critics questioning my sanity strike closest to home and I wonder: am I mad as they say? The only answer I can come up with is that I do not know. Thus the only criteria I have is what others think. And if that is the final proof of my sanity, then I swear to redouble my efforts to convince the world at large of the truth of my revelation and when they at last believe it too, how then can I be mad?

ons to it.

The Dreams of Yig

t was not quite sunset, but the sun was melting like an orange lozenge against the horizon as a lone rider urged his mount up the steep trail that zig-zagged along the face of the mesa. The man held the reins loosely in his hand, allowing the animal to pick its own way on the unfamiliar path. A half mile below, the pale thread of the trail unwound to the foot of the formation and disappeared amid the dull browns and reds of the valley that stretched into the distance. In that distance, the bed of the valley suddenly tilted upward against steep walls that hemmed it in from every side and denoted the true level of the land in this part of Oklahoma Territory. This valley, with its intermittent formations of flat-topped mesas, was once the location of an antediluvian sea; or so learned men back east said. Marshall John Rowan shrugged his shoulders in an unconscious indication of his attitude toward easterners.

He did not deny that looking at the valley as a dry sea-bed did make it seem as though there might be something in what they said. And the fact that the recent slide he had passed the other day when negotiating his way into the valley had exposed what the professors called petrified wood bolstered their argument. But that all seemed so strange and phony to him. He was used to driving longhorn on the Chisum, scouting Indian country along the Bighorn, and tracking outlaws across prairies, what mattered was day-to-day survival in a west that was still largely without law and order, not speculating on what might have been millions of years before.

Rowan sensed more than he felt his horse’s hesitation as it neared the crest of the climb, and gave it a few encouraging jabs of his heels. It leaped forward to the end of the path leaving Rowan just time enough to take in the eerie sight of a dozen or so of beehive-shaped cones, almost as tall as the mesa he was climbing, spread out over the floor of the valley, their strange shadows creeping slowly over the bottom of the ancient sea. And they were odd; in all his wanderings across the territories, he had never seen natural formations quite like those, even though on the face of it, they were not spectacular or even out of place. Nevertheless, the sight of them in the fading yellow light, affected him strangely.

He made a leap from his horse that lifted him a good six inches from the saddle as the animal reached the summit and the edge of the Indian village that rested there. Rowan had spotted the guards and lookouts long before but had ridden on unmolested. The farther he had come, the more certain he was that he would be allowed to enter the village. He had been by no means certain of the reception he would have once he reached the valley, as the Indians that inhabited it were generally of unknown character. Even the other tribes in the area: the Pawnee, Wichita, and Caddo, had little contact with them. Something about bad medicine and the valley being off-limits for all tribes. Though he was determined to enter it, Rowan wondered at the power of the medicine commanded by these Indians hidden in this valley which protected them from the usually predatory habits of their fellows. But hadn’t he heard something about these particular Indians being of different stock from those of the American west? Something about their being descendents of even older cultures from farther south in Yucatan or Peru? But there he was, going for that eastern speculation again. He shook his head and forced himself to pay attention to the warrior that was approaching him from the village.

The man held up a hand, saying, “Greetings man from the outside. I am Ke-ho-te-ho, he of the silent footsteps.”

The lawman did not bother to hide his surprise. He’d been told by local Wichita that this tribe didn’t speak English. He raised his own hand. “Greetings, Ke-ho-te-ho. I am called Rowan, enforcer of the law of my people,” he said tapping the tin star on his vest.

“It is good. We have been expecting you to come. I welcome you to our village. Enter in peace.”

Rowan had to admit he was relieved at the friendly welcome. He hadn’t been at all sure of his reception by the tribe as they were a solitary people, feared and avoided by the other tribes in the area. Still, he wasn’t about to let his guard down on account of a smiling face and soothing words; he dismounted, but kept his hands near his Colts.

Leading his horse, Rowan followed the Indian toward the village proper, pushing his hat back on his head with a thumb.

“I have come in search of a white man. Stories have come from your valley that one such may be found here.”

“Yes, such a one has lived among us for many moons. You shall see him shortly.”

Rowan was surprised again by the open admission of the presence of a white man in the village. Indians by now knew of the rage engendered in white men at the thought of others of their kind in the hands of red men; the senseless bloodshed of villages wiped out if even a suspicion was harbored by local officials. Yet this had openly admitted to a white man being in his village. But less of a surprise was the presence of Johnson Kent in the area. After all, he had been on Kent’s trail for a good six months, ever since being handed the assignment by the Territorial Marshall’s office. It seemed that Kent had disappeared along with a companion, Israel Paulson, while on a cattle drive along the Goodnight-Loving trail almost a year before. The drive foreman tried to find them or their remains, but couldn’t stay too long and delay the drive. When he finally completed it, he reported the incident to the Territorial Marshall’s office and from there it was passed from officer to officer as leads were dried up in their respective jurisdictions. Usually such disappearances were accepted as a matter of course by local lawmen who had enough to do keeping the peace and apprehending those who disrupted it. In the Kent case however, the Territorial Governor, anxious to make the territory attractive to prospective settlers, had applied the political pressures to keep the search alive. Finally it was his turn, and after weeks of crisscrossing the territory, he at last hit on his first solid lead — that a white man was rumored to be living in an Indian village in the Devil’s Gullet, a valley deemed very bad medicine by the surrounding tribes. But here he was, and certain of having found his man. “How do you mean, Ke-ho-te-ho, that you have been expecting me?”

“Our friend, Ken-te-ni-pa, he of the silver hair, knew you would come to look for him and our spirit-talker made powerful medicine to confirm it. In his visions, he saw your image and our scouts were told to allow you to pass.”

Rowan did not reply to that beyond a noncommittal grunt, and looked out over his guide’s shoulder to the village ahead of him. It was not as poor as he might have thought a village located in the barren wilderness of the Gullet would be, but neither was it a prosperous one. The tribesmen stood about, curiosity marking their faces, as he passed among them. They were not the faces of men frustrated with their position in comparison with other tribes; instead, Rowan thought he saw the sort of pride there of those who have offered a great deal in sacrifice to a higher calling. That they would continue stubbornly in their thankless task, misunderstood though they might be by other tribes, did not matter. They took pride in their appointed task. But just what that task was, Rowan had no idea and did not really care. Why would an otherwise healthy people sequester themselves in such desolate surroundings for as long as they had for no appare

He had little time to ponder the question as his short walk among the simple domiciles of the village came to an end before a wooden frame hut whose walls were formed of the skins of animals stretched taut over the poles. He turned to Ke-ho-te-ho, who had hung back within the protective semi-circle of the gathered tribe clustered inquisitively around him and the entrance to the hut. “Is the white man inside?”

The Indian waved a hand toward the doorway. “Yes. He is waiting for you.”

Rowan looked around at the circle of people, not sure what to think of the situation. The last thing he wanted to do was to show any doubt or fear before them. Without taking his gaze from Ke-ho-te-ho, he held out the reins he had in his hand, indicating his expectation that someone should take him. He felt them snatched from his grasp, and without a backward glance, stepped into the dark opening in the hut.

Inside, he stood in the crimson glare of the dying sun that creeped across the dirt floor of the hut. A grit of fine dust hung in the air and tickled his nose. Squinting his eyes against the gloom of the deeper interior of the tiny room, he glimpsed something moving in the darkness away from the doorway and, turning toward the sound, he held his hands ready by his guns.

So, you’ve come at last have you?” said a husky voice from the darkness.

Rowan squinted again, trying to pierce the veils of gloom surrounding the speaker but not relaxing his guard. “I’m Marshall John Rowan, district of the Oklahoma Territories,” he said. “I’m looking for two white men by the names of Israel Paulson and Johnson Kent who disappeared a couple years ago.”

There was a dry cough. “Paulson is dead. I’m Kent.”

Rowan relaxed at last, happy to be the one to finally put the Kent-Paulson case to rest. He backed a little ways from the open doorway. “Have these Indians been holding you prisoner?”

Kent laughed and Rowan had the impression that there was no mirth in it at all. “Just the opposite. Marshall, they’ve been protecting me.”

“From what? This valley’s dead to life and all the other tribes in the area would never even bother with it.”

“Other tribes are the last thing these Indians or me, for that matter, are worried about.”

“Then why haven’t you left?” Rowan had thought this whole thing would be a simple problem of bluffing a captive out of the hands of the tribe. Now it seemed Kent had gone native, preferring the life of the tribe to civilization. He had seen it before in white scouts and French voyageurs who had spent too long in the wilderness for their own good. He was about to press the question when he was stopped by new sounds from outside the hut. One by one, the voices of the Indians began to rise in ululating cadences, like dogs howling at the moon; then beats of drums and tom toms were added to the cacophony creating a strange music at once sophisticated and primitive and definitely unnerving. Rowan found himself trying to shake off chills that crept unwanted along his spine. The red light of the setting sun had dissolved into a dull pink that cast the entire desert into a twilit peacefulness that now seemed to shiver with hidden menace.

“What’s going on out there?” he asked at last, still facing the outside.

“They’re appeasing Yig, father of the children who lie asleep in this damned valley,” said Kent, just visible to Rowan as his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness. “It’s the autumn you see,” he continued, “the season when he’s most angry.”

“What the hell are you talking about? Have you fallen for all that crazy injun medicine talk? Spirits in the sky and were-things on the prowl? So help me Kent, if you’ve gone over the edge, I’ll see you with a bullet in your brain before I leave a white man to rot out here with them.”

“You’re the fool, Marshall. Here you are in the middle of hell, and you act like nothing’s the matter.”

“Nothing is, except that damned howling,” he tossed his head in the direction of the villagers, now jumping and prancing wildly about a growing bonfire. Catching himself, Rowan forced himself to calm down and said, “Listen Kent, if you’re not being held here against your will, just why are you still here?”

Kent leaned back against the skin wall. “Because I’m scared that’s why.”

“Of what?”

“Of the world. The world I left behind. The real world.”

Rowan didn’t answer.

“You see, I’ve seen things…or maybe I haven’t, maybe I just imagined them…” He shook his head violently. “No, no, I did see them. But the things I saw were just plain impossible. I didn’t want to believe it, but I had the proof right in front of me.” Rowan thought he detected the beginning of an emotional outburst just then, but in the silence of the pause, he could see that Kent had cut it off as if he’d done it a thousand times before. Still, he needed a few minutes to get himself back under control.

Rowan took the time to sit down, but out of line with the entrance to the hut.

“You see, that’s why I couldn’t go back,” continued Kent. “What I saw was impossible, it just couldn’t be. But it was right there, proof positive, and I had to accept it. And once I did, I had to face the fact that everything I, and every white man who ever lived, ever knew or thought was wrong. From that time on, I couldn’t know what was real and what wasn’t. I couldn’t go back to civilization then, I couldn’t face it.”

“Why not?”

Kent leaned into what was left of the fading light and Rowan saw for the first time the shock of snow white hair that covered the man’s head and bristled his chin, despite the fact that he knew him to be no more than in his late twenties. “Because, if what I saw… down there… was true, and it was, how could I know if the world I thought I left behind isn’t just a dream? It could be, you know. I just couldn’t face that. If it was, then I’d have to be a crazy man, living in a dream world my whole life. I had to stay here, never leave the valley. That way, I’d never know if I was right or wrong. I’d still have the hope that maybe the world was the same as I’d left it, but God help me…I don’t have the courage to find out for myself. Besides, I have a real purpose here. I’m needed.”

Rowan wasn’t sure what to make of the man’s ramblings, but one thing he was sure of was that Kent believed them. He was about to offer some words to reassure him that the outside world was just as he’d left it, when Kent continued.

“I’ll tell you the story from the beginning so you’ll see what I mean, so you’ll see why you can’t take me from this valley.

“It was a couple of years ago I guess, as you’ve said. I was hired on by old Ben Ironwood of the squared R brand to scout out the trail ahead of the herd when he drove it up the Goodnight-Loving later in the month. I wasn’t, strictly speaking, a trail hand, but that didn’t stop the bastard from using me to help out. I hated the damned work, especially working the rear of the herd. The heat and dust were terrible. Anyway, one day as we were nearing the Oklahoma Territory, Ironwood called me over and asked me to scout out the land to the northeast of the trail to see if there was a chance of a shortcut on the way to Colorado Springs. I was happy for any chance to leave that herd and took along another man, Israel Paulson, to keep me company and cover my backside in case there were Indian problems.

“We didn’t follow any clear trail, I just let the lay of the land direct me where to go. In a couple of days, it led me to the head of this valley, the Devil’s Gullet. I was surprised to find out that Paulson recognized it from the formations and that he also heard stories of it being full of bad medicine. Of course, I didn’t pay him no mind and continued on up the narrow mouth into the valley itself. Well, it did have those weird formations, shaped like giant beehives, stacked all over the valley floor, real regular like, and the farther we went, the more Paulson got nervous. I didn’t need to have it said to me that the man believed the Injun talk about there being bad medicine in the valley, but I could see where ignorant savages would be intimidated by the weird country we were riding through. How a white man could let himself fall for it though, was something else. Well, eventually, we got to the end of the valley with nowhere else to go but up. It was completely hemmed-in by steep walls. No way for a herd of longhorn to move up through there. It was late in the day, so I decided to have us bed down in the shadow of a lone mesa near the outside edge of the valley. Paulson was for getting out as fast as possible, but I overruled him and said to quiet down and spread out his bedroll, we’d be out in the morning. We figured not to have to take turns standing watch, since the place had a reputation that kept people pretty much out of it.

“I don’t know what it was that woke me later that night, but the full moon hadn’t set yet and when I looked around, I couldn’t find Paulson. I got up and looked some more and found his things still laying around the dead fire and both horses asleep where they’d been hobbled. At first, I thought he just went off for a squirt, but when about half an hour went by, I knew it was more than that. I got up again and found his tracks and followed them out onto the valley floor; it was easy to follow them by the moonlight and when I looked up ahead, I saw that they led straight for one of them funny beehive formations. I headed toward it, and followed Paulson’s tracks right up to the base of the thing. That’s when I began to get nervous.”

“What do you mean?” Rowan asked. “Did you find his body?”

“No, I didn’t find his body,” Kent replied. “What I found was nothing at all. The tracks of Paulson’s boots just ended right there as if he’d just vanished into the air. I scouted around for other tracks, but there were only his and mine. Oh, and theirs, of course.”

“Whose…these Indians’?” Rowan demanded, his suspicions rising.

“Hell, no. Not a one of them would go near those mounds for a hundred horses. Those other marks were snake tracks…maybe thousands of them, either leading into or out of all the little holes around the base of that mound. I walked all the way around it, trying to pick up some other lead, but there was nothing. I got back around to the place where Paulson’s trail ended and looked up to see if maybe he could’ve climbed the thing somehow. No way he could’ve done it. About half-way up the side, though, I saw another hole, maybe a yard across. I hollered up to it, just in case, but got no answer. Just a kind of rustling noise that I figured was the sand being blown around by the wind that was kicking up. Strange things happen in the desert, Marshall. You’ve traveled some, so you know what I mean. But this was the first time I’d come up against something like this, and I’ll tell you, I was getting more nervous by the minute. Not scared, though. I wasn’t scared…not then.” Kent became still and quiet, huddling himself against the lodge-pole as if ill.

“You okay?” Rowan inquired. “I’ve got dram of whiskey in my bags if that’d help.”

“No, Marshall,” the man replied. “I’m afraid there just isn’t that much whiskey anywhere. What was I saying? Oh…well, the wind was coming up, and I figured I’d have as good a chance waiting back at the camp as I would out there, so I followed the tracks back. The moon was low by this time, but still gave plenty of light. I poked up the fire some, and then decided to saddle our horses, since this was kind of an odd situation, and I wanted to be ready to ride quick if we had to. Then I sat down at the fire and rolled myself some smokes, and waited. It must’ve been near dawn when I heard footsteps coming, and not Paulson’s either. These were quick steps, and short like a child’s. They’d come a bit, and then stop a bit…come, and stop. I took my rifle and hid behind some tall brush, off to one side of the fire so the glare of it wouldn’t blind me. About this time, the horses started acting up. They’d heard the steps even before I did, so they weren’t just startled by the noise. Something else was spooking them…a scent of some animal, I figured. One of them shied to one side, and I got a glimpse of Paulson’s yellow-checked shirt. I stood up to holler at him, and just then the horse broke his hobbles and went tearing off into the dark.” Kent took a deep breath and looked Rowan square in the eye. “I swear by holy God, Marshall…that thing wasn’t Paulson. Not any more it wasn’t, anyway.”

The lawman felt an inexplicable shock of fear rush through him, but subdued it with a silent oath.

“I’m not liking the sound of this, Kent,” he blustered. “You’d better start making sense fast.”

But rather than comply with his order, Kent began a low, wild-eyed laugh which increased in pitch and volume until it had drowned out the still-pulsing drums of the ceremony outside. Rowan’s first impulse was to run; his second, to smash his fist into the man’s gaping mouth. He did neither. He grabbed Kent by the front of his tunic and hauled him to his feet in one powerful motion. Some suggestion of sanity crept back into the smaller man’s eyes, and his mad laughter subsided to a half-whimpering giggle.

“Listen to me, you crazy bastard,” Rowan hissed between clenched teeth. “If I have to beat some sense into your skull, then that’s what I’ll do. But I want some answers, understand?” He released Kent, who returned to his crumpled position against the pole.

“Oh, I’ll give you some answers, Marshall, but I don’t think they’ll make the kind of sense you want to hear. The kind in which I can no longer believe…

“When the horse bolted, I got a clear look at what I’d thought was Paulson. It wasn’t Paulson…it wasn’t even human. It stood up on two little legs, no longer than a child’s. Its body was long and thin, and kept swaying back and forth even when it walked. And its head…God, that was the worst…its head was like a snake’s. It was broad and flat, like a rattler’s, and its eyes glowed yellow in the firelight. Paulson’s clothes hung on the thing, shredded to rags, but I didn’t realize what that meant until later. The horse that was still hobbled was going crazy, but the thing paid it no attention, and came for me on its short, little legs. It opened its mouth to hiss at me, and its fangs looked just like a huge rattler’s. I clean forgot about the rifle in my hand…all I wanted to do was to keep the fire between me and that thing. It seemed scared of the fire, even though it was burning pretty low, and those short legs couldn’t close any distance between us. Then I remembered the rifle, and brought it up for a shot right through the thing…I figured a .44-40 ought to take care of it. Hell, I killed a good-sized bear with that ol’ gun once. Anyhow, I levered a shell into the chamber and fired at near point-blank range. I must have been more scared than I thought, ‘cause I only nicked the thing on the side of its neck. That’s when it gave this choked-off sort of scream, and threw itself down onto its belly. Then it came after me in dead earnest. It moved as fast on its belly as any snake I’ve ever seen. I guess it kind of went crazy, ‘cause it came right through the fire at me…didn’t even seem to feel the flames. I was so scared, I ran backwards a few steps, tripped over a rock or something, and lost the rifle.

“Before I could even move, that thing bunched itself up in a coil and struck like lightning. I rolled off to one side, and felt a pull at my shirt sleeve where a fang must have caught it. It drew back for another strike, but I’d had time to pull my sidearm. So when it opened its mouth for another try, I emptied five chambers into the thing’s head from where I was laying…blew its brains right out the top of its head. It flipped over and started tearing up the brush something fierce, but I didn’t wait to make sure it would die. I grabbed the other horse, cut its hobbles, and rode like hell for the mouth of the valley. I didn’t make it. I didn’t know it at the time, but the fang that tore my shirt scraped a little trough in my arm, and some of the thing’s poison got into me. After maybe a quarter of a mile or so, I just blacked out. I don’t even remember falling off my horse. The tribe’s spirit-talker found me before dawn and had me brought here. I haven’t left the village since that day, and never will.”

The lawman had sat nearly motionless on the floor of the hut while Kent had related his outlandish tale, and now continued to sit. Rowan felt himself strangely divided. On one hand, he could hardly allow himself to believe Kent’s insane story. On the other, he wanted to ride out of this valley of nightmare superstition and back into the familiar world of common experiences and rational explanations. But he knew that was out of the question. Action had to be taken, and he was the only law within fifty miles. He stood up and hiked his gun belt a bit higher on his waist. As he drew a breath to place Kent under arrest for the murder of Israel Paulson, the flap of hide over the dwelling’s entrance was drawn back and two imposing tribesmen entered. One was tall and still well-muscled despite the onset of his middle years. The man’s authoritative bearing assured Rowan that he was chief of these people. The other was as impressive, though in an altogether different manner. Where the tall man was plainly dressed and unadorned by headdress, this one was small and wizened, and bedecked with a variety of ornaments, most of these of a clearly reptilian origin. Viper rattles decorated his snakeskin headband and hung from straps about his wrists, elbows, and ankles. A dark, painted coil encircled the man’s torso from waist to neck, ending in a diamond-shaped head which seemed to nuzzle against his throat. While the chief remained near the entrance with his arms crossed stoically, the spirit-talker approached and stood before Rowan. In the lawman’s mind, he seemed somehow to be looking upward into those ancient eyes, even though he knew this to be patently impossible. And when the shaman spoke, his voice reminded the white man of the snapping crack of distant lightning.

“You are Rowan. I have seen your face,” he stated cryptically. “I am Tanat-Sha. You have heard Ken-te-ni-pa’s words?”

“Yes, I’ve heard,” Rowan replied firmly. “Now hear my words. I stand as the law of my people. Johnson Kent is under arrest for the killing of Israel Paulson. A judge of my people will decide whether the killing was murder. He must return with me.”

Tanat-Sha gazed puzzledly into the bigger man’s face, and turned to Kent, still seated before the lodge pole.

“You told him of this valley? Of your place with our people?” he asked.

“I told how I came here,” Kent responded. “I did not speak of the Blessing, or of the Dreams.”

Tanat-Sha nodded, grunting, and sat himself cross-legged before the fire. As he began to speak, he raised his left hand toward the flames and sprinkled what looked to Rowan like grains of sand over the glowing embers.

“The dreams of Father Yig are given to few and, once given, are never reclaimed,” the shaman intoned. “Yig dreams of the world that once was, and of that which will be. The dreams of Yig become the souls of his priests, and those priests themselves become dreams.”

Tanat-Sha rocked back and forth slightly as he became lost in his chanted litany. The lawman rubbed a hand across his face, wondering at the sudden onset of his strange fatigue. He judged there to be no harm in just sitting a bit until he felt up to making the arrest and moving out, and so squatted down opposite the old Indian, peering curiously at him over the dying flames. The spirit-talker’s voice droned on and Rowan’s attention slowly became fixed upon the shimmering coals of the fire. He was dimly aware that the ceremony outside was continuing unabated and he heard, as from a great distance, the beating of drums, the shaking of rattles, and the muted repetitions of ancient prayers.

“The dreams of Yig do not always come to those who seek them, and sometimes come to those who seek them not,” said Tanat-Sha. “Father Yig sent his dreams to me when I was still young, and not yet known as a man of powers. I sat upon a high hill for many days…no food, little water…until Yig came to me in his own shape. He wears man-shape when he speaks to the sons of men or visits the daughters to beget upon them. But that day he came to me in his own form…the snake-shape. From the desert far below he raised his head until he looked straight into my eyes. And I knew then the dreams of Yig.

“Before Tirawa made the first men, the people of Yig possessed the earth. They walked upon two legs, like men, but their faces were the face of Yig. Their medicine was very strong, and their cities were so mighty that when they crumbled at last they became as great mountains, and still seem so today.”

The shaman paused, and Rowan realized that he had been staring into the fire as though entranced by the old man’s words. This seemed odd to him and wrong somehow, although he could not think why that should be so. He recognized again the beating of the drums outside, which seemed to merge in their droning cadences with the words of Tanat-Sha as the spirit-talker continued.

“Yig commands all the scaled brothers, and it has always been so. He showed me this valley as it was before men…as it was when the children of Yig ruled the land and the sea. All of this valley, and beyond was ocean, and the ocean was filled with the life that Yig had bestowed.”

Rowan sat cross-legged before the fire, mesmerized by the visions which the words of Tanat-Sha summoned up before him. It seemed to the white man that he could all but see the ancient ocean which the spirit-talker described, and the thousands of forms of fish and reptilian life which swarmed beneath its waves, some astonishingly beautiful and others terrifying in their ferocity. The shaman again waved a hand before the embers of the fire, and Rowan’s visions became clearer and more immediate…as if he had been bodily transported to a pre-human world. All sense of his position in time and space, of his mission, even of his personal identity were submerged beneath the dreams of Yig, and further dreams unfolded as the voice of Tanat-Sha droned on. Rowan saw cities rise and fall…cities in which no human foot ever trod. He saw all the world under the dominion of the snake-headed people, and witnessed the spread of their empires from continent to time-lost continent. Now he seemed to leap thousands of years ahead, and watched the great cataclysms which ended the rule of the serpent-men forever. He saw humankind rise and fall, rise and fall, until it seemed finally that man had achieved mastery over the world. Now was the era of the human hordes, and their civilizations spread far and wide. Rowan seemed to look through the eyes of an observant god as he watched mighty temples as well as thatch-roofed huts rise beneath the hands of their builders, both eventually crumbling beneath the mightier hand of Time. His consciousness flashed from continent to continent, from age to age, until the passage of the centuries became meaningless and insubstantial as a shadow of dissipating smoke. Some part of his mind recognized the architecture of ancient Egypt and of Athens in their glory, and of Imperial Rome. But far greater were the number of lands and empires which were utterly alien to him. He viewed colossal step-pyramids atop which human captives had the hearts torn from their breasts by blood-mad priest-executioners. He seemed to enter the palaces of saffron-skinned kings with almond eyes, and to peer into the sod huts of white-skinned slaves. At one point he saw an immense undersea city which, some sense told him, could be of no human origin. Its structure, its angles, were subtly wrong in some undefinable way, as though his mind could not translate what his eyes told him to be true. And he sensed a presence in that place which, even in his transported state of mind, awoke in him a mind-devouring panic which persisted until the scene again shifted and he found himself looking down upon some desert valley from a tremendous height. As his view descended, he seemed to approach a village of huts and conical tents which he recognized as being the very village which he had entered…when? A million years in the past? A thousand years in the future? Time and the passage of time now seemed merely part of some vast, cosmic joke. The roofs of the village rose up to meet him, and he seemed to be moving downward toward a hut in the central part of the compound. His vision passed through the roof of stiffened horse hides, and suddenly he beheld himself sitting cross-legged before the dying fire, with the aged shaman across from him rocking gently and muttering as though conversing in a dream. And now Rowan’s normal consciousness began to assert itself, and he felt an electric jolt of disorienting terror as he viewed his own body through eyes not his own. He felt himself to be falling, and was enveloped in a nausea-invoking mist of dancing, shimmering sparks.

With conscious effort, he opened his eyes to see the last flickering flames playing about the embers of the dying fire. The lawman leaped to his feet and drew his revolver, only then realizing that he was alone in the hut with the old man, who simply stood serenely with his arms folded across his chest. The marshal pointed the barrel of his .45 at a spot between the shaman’s eyes and pulled the hammer back with his thumb.

“What the flamin’ hell did you do to me?” he demanded furiously. “How did you make me see those things?”

“You have been greatly honored,” declared Tanat-Sha quietly, as though completely unconcerned with the deadly weapon being held before him. “I have never known Father Yig to share his dreams with a white man. You must be an exceptional man indeed, Marshal Rowan.”

“Don’t give me that horseshit!” shouted the lawman, his voice betraying a mix of both anger and fear. “This was all some damned trick to get Kent out of here before I could arrest him. That dust you threw on the fire was a drug of some sort that made me think I was seeing things that couldn’t be true, and while I was under, you took Kent out of here and hid him someplace. Well, I didn’t track a man all those weeks just to give him up because you want him for God-knows-what. If I don’t leave this village with my prisoner, this valley will run red with the blood of your people, and then we’ll see how much good your damned snake-god does you.”

Rowan threw open the flap door of the hut and strode out into the desert twilight. He had expected to be confronted by the chief and warriors of the tribe, and to have to bluff his way out of a potentially unpleasant situation. He was surprised to find not a single soul anywhere in sight. He holstered his gun and began to move surreptitiously toward the sound of drums and flutes which continued their monotonous rhythms somewhere toward the rear of the compound. He knew of no other course of action except to put up one hell of a bluff…face down the whole tribe if necessary…and hope to live to tell about it. He had to move quickly, before the old man had a chance to sound an alarm. He ran around to the eastern side of the hut, keeping to the shadows as much as possible and trying to get a clear fix on the exact location of the ceremony. The pitch and tempo of the raucous music somehow growing more frantic each moment. He slid from shadow to shadow, his Colt held low in his right hand, until the racket of the flutes, drums and rattles was so loud that he was sure that the entire clan must be massed just beyond the teepee he now crouched behind. Flattening himself to the ground, he cautiously peered around the base of the structure until he could scan the entire astonishing tableau.

Atop a flattened earthen mound, about man-height, four tremendous torches formed a rough square. Their uneven light played weirdly across the figure of the clan’s chief, who stood at the center of the square, his arms upraised and his eyes fixed on some point in the darkening desert sky. Every member of the tribe seemed to be present, the men and boys furthest from the mound and the females, youngest child to oldest grandmother, grouped in a crescent before the front of the mound. All had their backs to Rowan, for which he was profoundly grateful, and appeared to be raptly and reverently attentive to the ceremony being conducted before them. Rowan had just decided to begin a search of the empty dwellings in the hope of finding Kent unattended while so many of the tribe were occupied, when his eyes flashed to the rear of the platform where two figures were ascending. As they stepped within the square of torchlight, Rowan suddenly cursed beneath his breath, for the figures were those of Kent and Tanat-Sha. How the aged shaman had covered such a distance so quickly Rowan had no idea, and he mentally shook off the question in favor of more immediate problems. As determined as the he was, he recognized the futility of trying to take Kent prisoner while the tribe was engaged in some sort of religious ritual. While he might have been able to execute a successful bluff at some other time, it would be nothing short of suicide to try such a tactic now. He decided that his best bet would be to leave the compound and return the next day with a plan for getting Kent and himself out of there in one piece. He only hoped that his horse had been left where he could find it. Just as he was about to withdraw, however, his attention became fixed upon the figure of Kent, who had stepped forward into the center of the mound. Perhaps now he would learn why the man had chosen to stay with these savages and turn his back on his own people. Maybe the “real purpose” he’d mentioned had something to do with this weird religious ceremony, and maybe…just maybe…he could use that knowledge to his benefit in his plan to get Kent back to civilization.

The chief, finished with his invocations, had left the mound and joined the men standing behind the cluster of women. Only Kent and the old shaman were now visible in the shifting torchlight, and all was silence for several seconds. The spirit-talker stepped to the front of the platform and raised his arms to the night sky, much as the chief had done before him. His eyes closed, he began a low chant of prayer which rose in volume until Rowan could hear, if not understand, the words,. Only the frequent mention of the name of Yig was recognizable to him. Even so, the prayers of Tanat-Sha seemed to call back to the white man’s mind the strange visions he had seen in the hut. His very sense of self seemed to betray him, and he waged a mental battle for control of his thoughts and the reason for his being in the valley in the first place. Rowan’s strength of will had rarely failed him, and it didn’t fail him now, although the effort to retain his sanity had drenched him with sweat and left him trembling. Clutching his Colt as if it were his only link to reality, he opened his eyes once more and looked out at the continuing ceremony.

As the aged medicine man alternately chanted and sang to his god, Kent, clutching a ceremonial robe about his shoulders, seemed to be entering a trance of some sort. He swayed back and forth with his eyes closed, his silver hair seeming almost to glow beneath the dancing torchlight. A drummer and a flute player were suddenly up on the platform with Kent and the shaman, although how they had arrived there Rowan couldn’t have said. Their strangely cadenced music, added to by the shaman’s gourd rattles, seemed to have a powerful effect on Kent, who began swaying more violently with the beat of the drum, his eyes now open but rolled upwards so that only their whites showed in the firelight. Then, his arms suddenly went limp and the robe fell from his shoulders, leaving him naked. His movements became increasingly sinuous, and Rowan wondered how the man could move that way without breaking his spine. The music increased in tempo and Kent’s graceful oscillations gave way to a series of spasmodic twitches and jerks. His head flopped from one side to the other as though his neck had been broken and his arms dangled uselessly at his sides. It looked to Rowan as though Kent had been poisoned with some evil drug, and he considered a mercy-killing and a quick escape. The crowd of worshippers before the mound looked half mesmerized themselves, and it might be possible, the marshal thought, to pull off such a plan. He brought his revolver up and sighted at a spot directly over Kent’s heart. Without warning, Kent dropped as though pole-axed and continued his twitchings and writhings on the floor of the mound. Rowan cursed again and lowered his weapon, hoping for another clear shot.

Kent was now kneeling, shaking violently as though in the grip of a raging fever. He opened his mouth as though to scream but no sound came forth. While the shaman and worshippers kept up their chants and prayers, Kent began scraping his forehead back and forth upon the mound’s dirt floor and succeeded in tearing a great gash in the flesh above his left eye. The lawman stared at the wound, amazed that such an injury yielded no more than a drop or two of blood. And then that wound began to split and spread as though pushed open from the inside. Rowan’s eyes widened and his mouth hung open as he watched Kent’s physiognomy go through impossible alterations. His skull flattened and broadened itself, horribly opening the skin wound so that it continued splitting the left side of the face and on down to the oddly lengthening torso. Kent again opened his mouth as if to scream, but this time the jaw had taken on new proportions and opened so widely that the skin of his cheeks was ripped apart nearly to the back of his head. Huge viper’s fangs descended from an unmistakably ophidian mouth as the creature continued to writhe its way free of its encumbering envelope of human skin. Its shoulders seemed to collapse in upon themselves and disappeared, allowing Kent’s skin to further slough off to reveal row after row of glistening white belly scales. The worshipers, far from horror-struck, continued their chanted devotions in adoring ecstacy, urging, it seemed to Rowan, that completion of Kent’s abominable metamorphosis. The lawman felt as though he was paralyzed, not only with fear of the impossible event he was witnessing, but of its implications. If this was true, then what about the visions he had seen…what Tanat-Sha had called the “dreams of Yig?” There flashed through his mind all the fearful images he had seen in those dreams…the titanic lizards and fish, the race of serpent-men and their world-spanning civilizations, the hideous star-headed creatures, the gigantic insects which spoke to one another with their thoughts and, most repellently, the unseen Dweller in that impossible city under the sea. If that writhing, hissing atrocity upon the mound was a living reality, then what about those others? A piercing ululation from the cluster of women snapped Rowan’s attention back to the immediacy of his peril, and he saw that the creature’s transformation was nearly complete. With a final thrash of its powerful tail, it threw off the restrictive weight of Kent’s empty skin and raised fully half its colossal length above the crowd, towering over its prostrate worshippers in lordly majesty. Tanat-Sha stepped from the rear of the mound to its front and stood beside the swaying monstrosity with his arms upraised over the crowd.

“Once in every generation,” the shaman declared, “the Son of Yig is given to us for a sign and a seal of the covenant which our people have had with Father Yig from the first days of our race. Always has the Son been chosen from among our own clan. But a new day dawns for the people of Yig, and he chooses a new way. An outsider has become a Son of Yig as a sign to us that the Father’s dominion is soon to include all the outsiders of this land. One thing is yet required: that an emissary prepare his way before him and show the white-eyes of the Dreams and Blessings of Yig. As he has chosen his Son, so also has Yig chosen his emissary.”

As the words of Tanat-Sha droned on, Rowan found himself becoming less alarmed at what he had seen and heard, and more accepting that these things were as they should be. His fear of the tremendous serpent, the Son of Yig, became vague and unimportant as a dream. The creature’s eyes, once so filled with the threat of unnatural menace, now seemed to hold promise of wonderful knowledge. It seemed the most natural thing in the world for Rowan to stare deeply into those golden, unblinking orbs, and he seemed to feel in his own body the gentle swaying to and fro of that sinuous form. As from a great distance, he seemed to hear his name being called by one whom he could not refuse, and he arose from his hiding place and approached the earthen mound on legs which felt as though they were no longer under his own control or direction. The warriors and then the women parted to let him pass, forming an aisle which led to the spot just below the shaman’s position at the front of the mound. He felt himself lifted to the mound’s platform by men and women whose presence he barely noted, and found himself standing between Tanat-Sha and the great serpent. Although he still held the six-gun in his hand, he had no thought of using it. He merely listened, knowing that this was what he was now called upon to do. Again he seemed to be looking upward into the face of the old medicine man, and he gave his full attention to the words that were spoken to him.

“John Rowan, lawman of the white eyes,” the spirit-talker intoned, “Yig has honored you greatly. You are to be his emissary to your people, to tell them of the Ending of Ages and of the safety to be had in Father Yig. The Father of Serpents grants refuge from the destruction of this world to those who will own him as Master and live in peace with his children. Yig serves They Who Come, and They will not rend the souls of his servants.”

Rowan, uncomprehending, merely nodded acquiescence. The shaman continued.

“The stars are the keys to many doors. Behind those doors are They who have waited long for release, and for the devouring of a world. Their freedom is almost at hand, John Rowan. You have seen the face of Yig in that of his Son. Now turn and see the face of One Who Comes.”

Rowan, obeyed, and his eyes were caught and held by those of the huge serpent. The creature’s eyes seemed to grow, spreading outward into a golden void in which, slowly, another scene resolved itself.

Rowan stared out over a vast expanse of open ocean that glittered beneath the sun as with millions of floating diamonds. Although there was nothing in view to cause the slightest concern, a familiar sense of unease began to intrude itself into his befuddled mind. Then, the sunlight began to dim somehow, and the flashing diamonds winked out of existence. He sensed tremendous upheavals beneath the darkened waves, and saw titanic bubbles of some black, noxious gas burst upon the surface of the water, creating hundreds of swirling clouds of oily, poisonous effluvium. And then, amid a rumbling which sounded in his ears like the warning growl of an angered planet, he beheld a dark, weed-festooned tower rise up from the roiling waters. His unease now took on the character of a definite growing fear as more and more of that ebon spire appeared above the waves. He tried to move, to run, to make some sound in response to his increasing dread, but found that he could do nothing but watch in petrified revulsion as that repellent monolith was lifted clear of the water, followed by the gay-green masonry of the edifice upon which it stood. Much too large to have been reared by human hands, the structure exuded an all but palpable aura of deliberate, joyful torment to the human body, soul, and spirit. And then, in a searing flash of agonized recognition, Rowan knew why his fear had seemed familiar. This was the same abhorrent undersea city, with its weed-flagged pinnacles and absurd geometries that he had seen while under the influence of the Dreams of Yig. He tried once again to move, to speak, to scream, but could find no sense of even possessing a physical body. It was as though he was merely a sentient presence, with power to do nothing but watch…watch and fear.

Thousands of gigantic bubbles continued to burst on the ocean’s surface, forming a vast ring of black, obscuring effluvia about the widening base of the still rising mountain. Shadows crept over the unearthly structure where shadows should not have been. Sunlight, which should have been reflected, was swallowed up and absorbed by impossible surfaces that seemed to be concave and convex at the same time. Even though fettered by the will of Yig, Rowan knew that this towering abomination obeyed far different laws of space and matter than those of his own world, for angles ought not to intersect one another in empty space, and cubic shapes should never cast round shadows. As he watched in fearful fascination, he saw strange creatures crawling about the thing, some appearing to be merely balls of whipping tentacles, and others of no shape recognizable to his human brain.

The rising seemed finally to stop, and a subtle shifting of planes and angles occurred such that Rowan was now able to detect something which appeared to be a set of double doors of staggeringly colossal size. At the sight of those doors, the rapidly growing fear in his mind penetrated slightly the hypnotic fog in which he was suspended. A vague memory of the power of will and self-determination asserted itself, but the memory served only to heighten his sense of utter helplessness. Then he noticed that more of the tentacled and amorphous creatures were appearing from a variety of improbable locations about the dripping pile and moving toward the immense doors as though drawn by some unguessable attraction. More and more of the things emerged, and soon the great doors were ringed, hundreds deep, with a squirming, undulating mass of tens of thousands of them, and he received the distinct impression of a frenzied anticipation on the part of the abhorrent beasts. And then…dear God…those tremendous doors began to open.

At first, he detected only darkness within, but a darkness which seemed, somehow, to feed upon and extinguish the dull sunlight which might otherwise have illumined at least a portion of the interior of the foul structure. Never a praying man, Rowan now begged the God of his fathers to spare him the sight of whatever it was that lived in so unholy a place but the great portals continued to open…whether outward or inward he could not determine…and a roiling cloud of purulent yellow vapor slid forth from the lightless interior, spilling down over the roofs and towers of the black city thousands of feet below. And then Rowan detected, with some sense beyond sight, the movement of something staggeringly huge within. His already near-panicked state was intensified as he felt an abominable invasion of his mind by another…a soul-rending violation of his deepest sense of self by an intelligence unthinkably vast and unimaginably alien. As his mind writhed under the unbearably vile touch of that joyously malevolent intellect, he saw two points of light flash into existence within the cavern’s deep recesses, red-rimmed and yellow as Hell’s purest sulphur. This…even this inconceivable horror he might have withstood had he not then seen that green, gelatinous tentacle snake forth from the black aperture. It appeared to move slowly, lazily through the intervening space, drifting, seeking, almost reaching him…just a few feet…

Then, from somewhere deep inside him, his subconscious must have tapped into deep reserves of will power he’d never suspected was there because he suddenly felt his consciousness being pulled back from the brink of ultimate madness. Somewhere in space and time, he thought he heard an agonized scream and knew, despite its strange remoteness, that it was his own. Then, just as that tortured scream trailed off, he heard the sound of an explosion followed quickly by a second. Snapped from his imposed reverie and the oceanic horror that had nearly robbed him of his sanity, Rowan suddenly found himself back on the tribal ceremonial mound a smoking .45 in his hand. Some reflex, some twitch of the muscles in his arm maybe, must have caused him to squeeze the trigger. Dimly, he remembered the desperate prayer he had offered on the threshold of that yawning pit and had no doubt that it had been answered somehow. Before him, the giant serpent that had once been Johnson Kent but lately transformed into a so-called Son of Yig, was down amongst its worshippers, its torso smeared with blood. A bullet buried deep in its scaly body, it thrashed madly about, its tail and head wreaking crushing destruction on those unable to avoid their random, whipping blows. Adding to the chaos caused by the dying creature was Tanat-Sha as he screeched and gesticulated to the frantic mob, trying to restore order and regain control of events. Still shaken by his experience, Rowan leaped from the mound and dashed toward the Indian village, heedless of the scattering worshippers. With a sigh of relief, he found his horse still-saddled where it had been left by the hut. Grasping the reins, he mounted up and, wheeling about, found the old shaman still atop the mound, wailing at the pale snake thing whose movements had slowed almost to a halt. Taking careful aim, Rowan felt no remorse as he put a bullet in the Indian’s brain. Then, digging his spurs deep into his horse’s flanks, he dashed from the village leaving behind him the pandemonium of reality gone mad and nightmares come to life.

“The dreams of Yig do not always come to those who seek them, and sometimes come to those who seek them not,” said Tanat-Sha.

Not until he had left the accursed valley and was well beyond its surrounding hills and mesas did Rowan allow his mount to slow to a walk, and then only because he realized, as reason reasserted itself by degrees, that he’d kill the animal if he didn’t allow it to rest. Even so, he wouldn’t permit himself to stop and make camp until the sun was well up over the horizon and continued to lead the horse at a walk.

Three days later he’d finally felt enough that he’d placed enough distance between himself and that damned valley to start a fire.

With time to think about what had happened to him, Rowan had decided that the spirit-talker was to blame. He’d thrown something into the fire in the hut that gave him hallucinations and made him susceptible to suggestion. He’d seen tricks like that done in traveling carnys and sideshows. Under hypnosis, a mesmerist could make you believe anything. Yeah, that was it, he thought…and thought no further because if he did, he’d be forced to remind himself that what he’d seen happen to Johnson Kent could never be explained so easy.

nt reason?

Take Care What You Seek

he money has finally run out. It was the only thought that kept repeating itself in my tired brain. The money has finally run out. Crossing my arms on the bar planks in front of me, I brought my head down on them to rest, knocking over an empty glass as I did so. I heard it roll off as if from a million miles away, almost as far away as the Florida coast where I’d left behind all my dreams. As the harsh sounds of the crowded bar receded around me, my mind went back to those simpler days, days in which it was easier to imagine success as a treasure hunter scouring the Keys than it was to work toward a chemistry degree at MIT. I’d gotten a little money together and when I had the opportunity to buy myself a boat while on spring break in Miami, I took it. I was already a good diver, and with the boat it was easy to abandon myself to the carefree life of a scavenger among the Florida Keys looking for sunken artifacts and treasure from the hundreds of wrecks littering the bottom of those clear waters. But those seas were too crowded with other, larger outfits, and the only treasure I ever found was Carol, who became my unofficial partner and lover.

I felt a tightness in my loins and thought I heard a groan from my throat as I thought back to our first meeting. I had the boat anchored in shallow water off Bimini in the Ten Thousand Islands and was just getting set to squeeze into my wetsuit when I caught a glimpse of something dark moving through those crystal clear waters. At first I thought it was a shark, so graceful were its movements, but as it moved closer, I realized my mistake. At last, the figure reached the rope ladder that hung over the side of the boat and as the water poured from its visage, I saw just how wrong I’d been. It was a girl, and a mighty fine-looking one at that. Like a fool, instead of helping her up, I shaded my eyes and scanned the horizon reassuring myself that my position was far from any landfall.

“Permission to come aboard?” The words dragged my attention back to the girl. I must have mumbled permission, because all I could remember afterward was stepping back in surprise as she hauled herself up, saying, “Help me with this, will you?” I grabbed hold of her tanks as she shrugged out of them and continued to marvel as she divested herself of the rest of her rig.

At last, seeing that she wasn’t going to stop with her flippers, I finally managed to say, “Who are you? How’d you get here?” She smiled and said her name was Carol, that she was from California, but lately she’d been living in St. Pete. She’d spotted my boat from time to time in the last few weeks, noticed I was alone, and figured I might like a junior partner. By the time she’d finished speaking, she’d shed her black wetsuit like a second skin and stood unselfconsciously before me in one of the smallest bathing suits I’d ever seen. The next thing I knew, she had her arms around my neck and her lips were massaging mine. What could I say to an argument like that?

Like I said, as things turned out, she was the only thing of value I found the whole time we spent in those waters. At last I convinced myself that if we were going to strike it big, we had to move to less frequented waters. I sold the trinkets we’d found and outfitted the boat for a long voyage and, together, Carol and I crossed the Atlantic to the west African shore. It took us three years to dive and trawl our way around the Cape and over to India, following the route of the old Portuguese barges. I’d had the Philippines vaguely in mind as our ultimate destination when I’d first started out, but we had no better luck than we had in the Caribbean and what money we had was running out. At last, we put in at Labuan in Brunei, and couldn’t get out again. With only enough money left to buy a few drinks and some rice balls, and just shy of the Philippines, we were forced to go to ground in what must have been the armpit of the world. Labuan, the capitol of Brunei, was bad enough, but the only place we could afford to flop was the lower waterfront district, a nightmare jumble of shanty bars, buildings made of driftwood and tarpaper, and rotting wharves with a sea mist that never seemed to lift and that draped the whole area in a pall of moist, gray gloom.

Since then, I’d been supporting myself with a combination of begging and petty theft with my nights spent either in the clink or the gutter. But with Carol gone, I just couldn’t work up the energy to do anything about my condition. Carol! She wasn’t the sort of girl to be stopped by a run of bad luck. I’d also say she wasn’t the type to take things lying down, but that wouldn’t be exactly true. Soon after we arrived in Labuan, I was hauled off to jail by the local constabulary for not paying a harbor tax. I stayed there for two weeks, and when I got out, I found that Carol hadn’t been idle. She’d been shacking up at the boat with a local bruiser the size of a small house and told me in no uncertain terms that if I wanted to stay around, I could have the engine hold. Well, the idea of living in a cramped, dirty, airless, rat-infested hold on my own boat while Carol lay in the arms of any sailor with a wad of money in our cabin two decks over my head was just too much to take. Ever since then, I’d been on the streets living on garbage and straight whiskey, taking a few bucks from Carol now and then when desperation drove me back to the boat. Just then, I wasn’t quite drunk enough to forget my troubles on account of not having enough money to buy the requisite liquor. Maybe that was lucky, because I was able to notice when someone began shaking my shoulder. I looked up and when my eyes focused again, they showed me that Carol was standing over me.

“Vic, c’mon, I know you’re still sober; you haven’t the money for a good soaking.” She was right, so I forced myself out of the stupor I’d wished myself into and asked her what she wanted. “I have something to show you, Vic; I think we’re back in business.” It took a few seconds for her words to sink in and in the end, I think it was the obvious sincerity in her voice that convinced me she wasn’t kidding. She must’ve seen the same thing in my eyes, because she didn’t wait for an answer. Grabbing me by the arm, she hauled me from the bar and didn’t stop until we got to the boat. From there, she shoved me up the gangplank and into the cabin. I half expected one of her friends to be present and stiffened against it, but no one was there. For the first time since we had arrived in Labuan, Carol and I shared the cabin alone.

“Sit down, Vic,” she said as she opened the secret trap beneath the bunk. I backed myself wearily into a bench at the fold-down table beneath the starboard porthole. While she was reaching beneath the bunk, I couldn’t help noticing the dinginess of the cabin, the smell of stale food and sweat and the yellowed disarray of the bed sheets on the bunk. At last she straightened and came over to the table. Remaining on her feet, she placed a typed manuscript in front of me and from what I could see of its worn and rumpled title page, it seemed to be a diary by someone named Johansen.

“So?” I said.

“I found this in the belongings of Joe Mahmoud; you remember Joe, don’t you?”

I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t want to admit it, so I took an almost sure bet. “One of your roommates, wasn’t

She didn’t bat an eye. “Right. Anyway, Joe got himself arrested a few weeks ago. He didn’t survive the experience and I was called to the police station yesterday to identify his body. It was in the yard out back. It was him all right. But since he was dead, I figured I had the right to his things. This was in them.” She rested a finger on the dirty manuscript, but I wasn’t terribly interested.

“What about money?” I asked, more to the point.

She took her hand back and rested her fists on her hips. “There was some, and since I’m the only one who’s been able to earn some bread in this partnership, I’m deciding what to do with it, got it?” I admit it, I was just too darn tired after the years at sea and months at Labuan to argue. In effect, I capitulated control of our relationship into Carol’s hands. She became the boss then, and knew it. I must have nodded, because she continued. “Joe had some money and together with the rest I’ve been able to save, we’re going to reoutfit the boat and make one more scavenger hunt.”

“Look, Carol, I’m tired. We’re never going to find anything. Why don’t we just haul up and try to make it back home?”

The stinging pain of a sharp slap across my face caught my attention but good, and, if that wasn’t enough, Carol’s hand got hold of a fistful of my hair and jerked my head back until her angry eyes were able to stare directly into my own. “Now listen up, and listen good,” she said with repressed rage. “I don’t have any intention of going back to the States empty-handed! We came out here to strike it rich, and we’ll do it yet, even over your dead body, got it?” For the first time in our long relationship, I saw Carol’s true nature: brave, resourceful, intelligent, ruthless, and utterly lacking in genuine sentiment. I’d been blinded by my own feelings when our relationship was merely one of convenience for her. But as her anger subsided and she let go her hold on my hair, she allowed the veneer of tenderness to return to her face and voice until, eerily, she was the woman I thought I’d been in love with all this time. The woman, heaven help me, I still loved.

She stroked my cheek in a way that both aroused my old passion and chilled my blood, saying, “I can see you do understand, Vic darling. You see, I remember Joe saying that this manuscript was stolen from a man named Thurston over fifty years ago by a group Joe said his father had belonged to. It was a kind of cult and when his father left it years later, he took this manuscript with him. Joe seemed to think it might be worth something and after he kicked the bucket, I looked it over and Vic, I think it just might be our ticket home.” I looked down at the manuscript with new interest and Carol noticed. “It seems that Johansen discovered an island that had recently risen up from the ocean floor somewhere in these waters and, from what I used to hear Joe saying in his sleep, there was treasure on that island that Johansen never took off.” I started to thumb the pages. “There are coordinates listed in the manuscript that show exactly where we can find it, too.”

She leaned onto the table. “I want to start getting this boat into shape again and take it out to that island, Vic, and I want to start tomorrow. I’ll go ashore and do some shopping. Tonight, you can read the manuscript, after we’ve taken care of some old business.” I looked up at her last words just as her lips met mine; pleasure like lightning coursed along my body. They lifted me from my seat as she steered me toward the bunk. My mind told me the fire of her passion cast no heat, but instinct and longing and the desire to please her were stronger, and, in the end, I never noticed the filth of the bedding.

The next few weeks were a blur of hard work as we prepared the boat for its long journey. As I busied myself with scrubbing, painting, and mechanical repair, Carol bought equipment, food, checked the diving gear, and generally kept an eagle eye on me. Finally, when the work was nearly finished, she came to me and said, “Why don’t we take the afternoon off, and go for a walk?”

I knew by then about her single-mindedness and doubted a simple walk was all she intended, so I asked, “Where to?”

“Over to the Lanes to see someone.” My eyes must’ve narrowed at that. I knew the Lanes to be the merchant district of the lower wharves area, mostly occupied by shady characters who dealt with illegal merchandise and smuggled goods. Not a healthy part of town, but one Carol seemed at home with.

An hour later, we were making our way down a crowded alley in the Lanes when Carol suddenly said, “Here it is.” She slipped into a dark doorway I would’ve missed completely and we found ourselves in a crowded, dingy room obviously meant to be a store.

I looked around, wrinkling my nose at the smell of moldering paper, a smell I’d not encountered in years. I knew before my eyes had accustomed themselves to the gloom that we were in a bookstore. “Why’d you bring us here?”

“Because Kwan might have something that could make our voyage a little easier. You ought to know the worth of research, college boy.” The words hurt and humiliated me, and Carol knew it. “Johansen’s diary,” she continued, “mentioned good directions to that island, but there’s no harm in double checking against some old charts.”

“He also mentioned a lot of other stuff that didn’t sound too healthy…”

Carol laughed shortly. “Oh, c’mon, an educated guy like you falling for fairy tales about sea monsters, next you’ll be telling me about the tooth fairy…”

“Cut it out, Carol. You’re not funny.” She smiled that mocking smile that made my blood boil. The smile that told me she knew I’d lost my nerve, or whatever it was that made me a man, and that had enabled her to take charge. I decided to shut up rather than risk her reminding me again of our new relationship. Just then, a fat old Chinaman entered the room from behind a dirty curtain.

Carol surprised me by saying something to him in a mixture of English, Chinese, and Malay that the man actually understood. He nodded his head and began rummaging about the room until at last he’d brought over a small stack of dusty, insect-eaten tomes. Carol turned them around one by one, flipped open their covers to scan their headings, and tossed aside the ones not written in English. Some were oversize chart books that we looked through, trying to match Johansen’s descriptions with their own, and some were just literary books covering various South Seas subjects such as anthropology, ichthyology, coral reefs, geography, and tides and currents. “What about this?” Carol suddenly asked, shoving an open book in front of me. I read the title: Hydrophinnae.

“Never heard of it.” But I picked it up anyway and began thumbing through its pages, stopping here and there to scan the words. It was written in a hard-to-understand style, sort of a cross between formal English and scientific jargon. “Hey, this book is about the same stuff Johansen talks about in his diary.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the stuff about sea monsters and…yeah, this book calls it ‘Cthulhut’…” Carol didn’t give me time to continue as she clapped the book shut and, taking it from me, tossed it back onto the counter.

“Forget it,” she said, “we don’t need more fairy tales. What we’re looking for is firm directions or descriptions of that island.”

I was kind of disappointed, but I wasn’t prepared to confront Carol on the issue of keeping the book. Then she handed me another one…Unterzee Kulten read the binding. “This one’s in German,” I said.

“Oh well, then we can forget…”

“No, wait a minute; I had to learn some German for chemistry back at MIT, maybe I can dope out something here.”

“Well, what’s it about?” As I flipped through the pages, the sections with reproductions of old woodcuts caught my attention. They were usually illustrations of strange forms of sea life I’d never heard of, until I came across one that looked like a cross between a squid and an impossible jellyfish. When I looked at the legend beneath the illustration, it read “Cthulhu.” My heart skipped a beat then, and I got a flash of intuition that filled me with a vague dread. “What is it?” asked Carol, peering over the edge of the open book.

“Nothing,” I said. “It’s just that this book mentions the same creature that Johansen describes.”

“Again?” I could tell she was really beginning to lose her patience.

“Carol, I’d like to keep this book…”

“Look, Vic, we can’t go around wasting our money on useless stuff like monster books.”

She took the book from me and threw it back on the counter, raising a small puff of dust. “These two chart books ought to come in a lot handier. How much are they, Kwan?” The Chinaman made signs indicating their value, but Carol wasn’t having any of it. She made an offer and the Chinaman took it.

The night before we were to set off, my eyes wouldn’t stay shut. Although I’d long since gotten used to sharing the narrow bunk with Carol, I found the nights uncomfortable and frequently sleepless. I sat up slowly so as not to wake Carol, who slept soundlessly, her face to the wall. In the dim starlight that came in through the two cabin portholes, I could make out enough detail to appreciate Carol’s still impressive curves and featureless skin. The long months of questionable liaisons had hardly worn her down at all. Quietly, I left the bunk, took down one of the chart books we had bought, and made my way topside. Sitting beneath the bow light, I opened the book to the title page. It was written in French, but beneath it, someone had long ago written a translation: Uncharted Waters. I’d studied the book many times since we bought it and concluded that it was a collection of maps and charts drawn up by untutored hands, mostly castaways who’d attempted to describe their unintended voyages. They were difficult to follow, but some had accurate longitudinal and latitudinal markings that made it easier to guess at the designer’s route. One in particular, that I’d pointed out to Carol, seemed to show the very island we were bound for. Of course, that was no guarantee that it existed, but it was some kind of independent corroboration of Johansen’s story. The date affixed to the chart indicated that it was first drawn sometime near the beginning of the First World War, by a drug addict who’d committed suicide by throwing himself out of a window. Sitting there under stars strange to someone born on the other side of the world, that same feeling of dread I’d experienced in the book shop came over me. Was it over these fairy tales, as Carol called them, or was it something deeper? Something to do with my very psyche, whatever it was that’d robbed me of my male pride? That was all the time I had before I heard Carol call me from the cabin doorway: “Vic, c’mon back to bed, I can’t sleep.” It wasn’t a wish, it was a command, and, still trying to understand what made me do it, I got up and followed meekly after her.

I have to admit, even though I wasn’t completely comfortable with our destination, the day we left Labuan lifted my spirits higher than they’d been since the early days along the African coast. The sea mist had suddenly lifted and a light breeze came off the ocean as I steered the boat out of the harbor into the sunlit open water. The hum of the engine sounded pretty and the sea breeze against my face was bracing, and Carol…man, Carol looked delicious as she scrambled over the deck doing the odd things that needed doing in khaki shorts and a bikini top. She was all bronzed skin and dark hair as she moved in easy, fluid motions handling the ropes and diving gear. I could almost forget the artificiality of her personality and the position she, and mostly I, kept me in. The next few weeks passed quickly with days negotiating the currents that allowed us to pass from among the islands of the Philippine Archipelago, through the southern regions of Micronesia, across the Gilberts and American Samoa, to the region where our mysterious island was supposed to rest. If all went well, we could take our treasure and head straight to Hawaii when we’d finished. Our nights were spent on calm seas and deserted lagoons in one another’s arms, frolicking in the surf, or diving naked in the shallow waters looking for shells. Living that life, I could almost forget that the past few months had ever happened, but then, at the end of the day, I’d be reminded again of who called the shots as Carol would suddenly grow serious and declare fun time over, that we needed our sleep.

At last, after endless weeks at sea, and having been out of sight of land for days, we entered the area in which, according to our charts, our mysterious island ought to be located. Idling the engines, I descended from the wheel and joined Carol at the chart table on deck. She had Johansen’s notes out and the sets of new charts and the one I had found in Uncharted Waters open alongside. “It should be around here somewhere,” she said unnecessarily. “We’ll begin a circular search pattern from this point,” she added, indicating a spot on one of the charts. Since we’d refitted with all the supplies we’d need for a month at our last landfall, there was nothing much I could say and so I said nothing.

“Let me know when you get there, I’m going aft for some sun.”

“Sure,” I said, as I watched her balance herself along the edge of the boat toward the stern. By the time I was aloft at the wheel again, I could see that she’d already stripped and was lying on a towel looking up at the sun. A pair of sunglasses hid her expression as I found myself envying the apparent self assurance she still had and that I couldn’t recapture.

It was two days later when I spotted it. “Land ho!” I called out excitedly. “Carol! Carol! I think we got it!”

Carol was lying on her towel aft again. When she heard me cry out, she didn’t bother getting dressed before she leapt for the ladder and scampered up beside me. By that time, she was as dark as brown sugar, and as trim and hard as a navy cruiser. “Where?” she said breathlessly when she reached me.

“Over there,” I said, pointing to a smudge on the horizon.

She took the binoculars and had a look. “Well, it’s in the right spot. There shouldn’t be any other islands around here.” She put the glasses down, unable to hide her glee. “Vic, this is it! This is where we hit the jackpot!” She threw her arms around me and hugged me for all she was worth, which was considerable, and I hugged back, lifting her feet from the deck and spinning us around.

When I put her down, I was relieved to see that she was still smiling as she headed for the ladder. “Head straight in and find anchorage, and I’ll get the gear set,” she said over her shoulder.

“No sweat, and don’t forget the champagne,” I replied and smacked her on the rump. She didn’t mind it at all as she slid down the ladder and disappeared below.

An hour later, the island loomed large in front of us and I guided the boat carefully parallel with the shore as Carol sat forward looking out for hidden reefs. In the excitement of arrival, she’d prepared all the gear and pulled lookout duty without ever bothering to get dressed, a fact I didn’t have time to appreciate as I studied the island. It was strange for a South Seas island in that it didn’t seem to be volcanic in origin. Instead, although it was covered in tropical vegetation, its dark earth indicated that it’d been thrown up from the ocean floor once years before. It wasn’t a very large island either; we made the circumference in fairly short order and it seemed completely devoid of animal or bird life. At last, Carol shouted that we’d come to a spot to weigh anchor, and I turned the bow in that direction. As Carol used the plum rod to gauge the water’s depth, I eased up on the engine and then shut it down completely, allowing it to drift into a final position. “Cast anchor,” I said. I couldn’t help noticing the sun shine over Carol’s bronzed flesh as she lifted the anchor and tossed it overboard.

“Anchor aweigh,” she called, as the heavy object splashed into the sea. In another moment, Carol threw herself into the water and began swimming to the beach of black sand that stretched only a few dozen yards from the boat. When she stood up again, streaming seawater, she motioned for me to follow. Shrugging, I stripped and dove from the wheel loft and in another minute was standing beside her.

“This is a funny beach for an island like this. The land just falls away only yards from shore.”

“It makes a perfect natural harbor,” said Carol.

“I guess.” I was still looking into the water when Carol called me over to where she was standing looking at a jumble of boulders that seemed to be the end of a mountain ridge that ran from higher up inland down into the sea where we stood.

“See this? It almost looks like writing or hieroglyphics, doesn’t it?” I looked more closely at where she rested her hand, but couldn’t decide if it really was writing or just random cracks in the rocks.

“I don’t know, it could be anything.”

She took my arm and we walked a bit along the beach scanning the rocks for a passage inland until Carol stopped short and gasped. She freed my arm and stooped to the sand. I saw her digging for a bit, but before I could say anything, she straightened and held out an object that glittered in the setting sun. “Gold!” she cried. And it was. Strangely worked jewelry, but definitely gold.

“This is it, Vic! Johansen’s island! C’mon, let’s see what else we can find…”

“Wait a minute,” I said, with unaccustomed vigor. “We can’t just go charging inland like we are.”

For the first time since spotting the island, Carol seemed to notice that she was naked and laughed. “Am I a nut! Let’s get back to the boat…” She looked up at the sky. “No, let’s wait until first light tomorrow, it’s too late now. In the meantime, we’ll celebrate with that champagne and a little lovemaking…”

It was early the next morning when we again left the boat, this time in the dinghy, and a light sea-mist clung along the shore of the island. As Carol leaned eagerly forward in the bow, I could already see wisps of fog breaking loose farther inland, slowly revealing the rest of the island. “Careful of the drop-off,” I warned, as Carol prepared to jump ship.

“Right,” she said as she leapt overboard and waited while I beached the boat. A few minutes later, we’d hauled it farther up the beach, hoisted our day packs, and checked the pistols on our web belts. I wore a shirt, shorts, and hiking boots, while Carol was in her usual khaki shorts and bikini top with her hair tied back in a ponytail. Marching over to the spot where we’d found the jewelry the day before, Carol scanned the rubble that lined the inner shore.

“I think we can make it through up there,” she said pointing, and took the lead scrambling over the smaller boulders. I followed, content to be an Indian to her chief and vaguely wondering over the shape of the boulders we were climbing over. Not that there was anything really strange about them, it was just that they seemed so regular, like the rubble you’d see from a blasted building worn down after years of exposure to the elements. On the other side there was a short field of more rubble, as if a small mountain had shattered into pieces that lay scattered about, and then the green of the jungle on the other side. Carol didn’t hesitate as she leapt from boulder to boulder toward the inviting greenery. When I finally caught up with her, she was breathing hard and already sweating profusely in the tropical heat.

“What do you make of this?” I asked as we caught our breath there beneath the shade of the trees.

“Make of what?”

“You don’t find the layout of this island kind of funny? Unlike any other island we’ve visited?”

Suddenly her expression clouded. “You’re not going to bring up that stuff about monsters again, are you? Because if you are…”

I held up my hands in protest, fearing her anger. “No, no. I just think this island is made kind of funny, that’s all.”

She visibly relaxed, and said, “All right, then stop fretting and follow me.” She turned and began making her way up the slight incline beneath the trees. As the land began to rise gently I noticed that the terrain beneath the trees wasn’t smooth. Here and there amid the foliage, which was in no way thick or heavy, more like a lightly wooded forest glade, I spied huge boulders, one might even call them blocks, resting haphazardly all about us. Soon I realized that not only were there hundreds of them within sight, but that the very ground we walked on was composed of the same rubble we had encountered on the beach. The only difference was that because it was farther inland, silt that had settled about it while the island had presumably rested on the bottom of the ocean had not been eroded away by the action of the surf. As we continued to climb, and the way became steeper and steeper, the boulders became more plentiful and the trees gave way to mere undergrowth. The walk became a climb and soon we were obliged to help each other up over the rocks that increased in size until finally, resting atop one, we took the time to look back at the way we’d come.

The morning mist had fully lifted by that time, revealing the island in its entirety. Carol and I found ourselves on an outcropping of rocks that formed a fractured ledge overlooking the portion of the island we’d just traversed. I could see the boat resting along the shore and the black beach from which we’d started our hike. From where we stood, we could see a good portion of the island and it became more apparent to me than ever that there was something not quite right about it. Except for patches of greenery here and there in its lower reaches, its entire surface was a single, vast pile of shattered stone that seemed to tumble down to the sea. As a matter of fact, from where I stood, I could see that whole ridges of boulders simply wound down the face of the high ground and disappeared beneath the sea. At last, I turned to face the upper reaches of the island, on part of which I stood. Although it didn’t tower too much further than where we rested, it seemed much larger than it must’ve been. It had a huge escarpment of sorts, now more obviously segmented into gargantuan blocks that rested together without need of mortar and, as my eyes trailed downward from those heights to the sea, I became convinced that the formation, whatever it was, wasn’t natural. Even as I looked, I could guess that the whole island was merely the tip of some colossal structure that had been shattered in the cataclysmic force that hurled the sea floor upon which it rested to the surface.

“Look, Vic,” said Carol, breaking into my thought. “Here are those funny marks again.” I looked at where she was pointing, and again saw the strange cracks in the rocks that we’d seen the day before on the beach. They weren’t hieroglyphics or writing of any kind, I was sure of that. They seemed to be more in the nature of stress lines, as if a gigantic weight had settled over the whole island. As if, ridiculous as it sounds, part of the island had existed in an environment with different laws than that of the earth and maybe when it was forcibly thrown upward, it was torn from those forces that held it together. But I was saved from wasting more time thinking over such fantasies by Carol’s latest exclamation.

“Vic, look!” She was holding another piece of golden jewelry. “We’re on the right track!” she said, putting the piece in my hand. I was still looking at it when she exclaimed again. “Hey, what was that?”

“What was what?” I said, looking up.

“I saw something move up there,” she said, pointing up toward the truncated high ground of the island.

“Are you sure? We haven’t seen a living thing all day.” As a matter of fact, we hadn’t seen a living thing outside of plants since we had spotted the island. The thought of finding something now, instead of reassuring me, only gave me the chills.

“I’m sure of it. Let’s go check it out.” So saying, she began to negotiate the last expanse of rock to the top. With no choice but to follow, I did likewise.

“Check this out,” Carol suddenly called back over her shoulder. Looking up past her legs and rear end, I saw her holding out more of the golden jewelry. She tucked it into her back pocket, where it dangled against her buttocks as she made it the rest of the way to the top. In another minute I joined her. “The main cache must be around here somewhere,” she was saying as she scanned the cracked and fissured surface before her.

“What about that movement you said you saw?” I asked nervously.

She sensed my unease and dismissed it with, “Forget about that, it was probably just a bird. Start looking around for more treasure. Why don’t you start over there?” Not liking the idea of separating, I did as instructed anyway and began to wander over to a short outcropping of rock. Carol grew smaller and smaller in the distance as she searched in the opposite direction. Then I heard her cry out and spun around. I caught a glimpse of her just as she disappeared over the edge of the escarpment. Fearing for her safety, I dashed across the intervening space and when I arrived at the spot from which she’d vanished, I saw her, gun in hand, peeking cautiously into a darkened fissure in the side of the mountain.

“Is there anything wrong?” I asked.

“No,” she said, without looking up. “…I don’t know. I saw something down here that looked like gold, and when I jumped down, I thought I saw something move in here.”

“Well, c’mon back up.”

“No way; you come on down and back me up.” I hesitated until she looked back at me, her eyes flashing, and said, “Let’s go, Vic!”

Gulping, I crouched down and jumped the eight feet or so to the ledge. When I straightened, Carol said, “Get your gun out, just in case; stay here and watch my back. I’m gonna take a look just inside the opening and see or there’s any sign of treasure; it sure looks like the perfect hideout for it.”

I took out my pistol and nodded, not trusting my voice. For some reason I couldn’t explain, the island was straining my already weakened nerves. “Be careful, Carol,” was all I could say.

“Just don’t chicken out on me, Vic.”

Then she slipped out of sight. I moved over to where she’d been standing, glancing nervously around the ledge and holding my gun up. Carefully, I inched closer to the opening and peeked inside. I could see Carol moving about, stooping here and there as she checked for more jewelry. “See anything?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she replied testily. “C’mon over and help me look.” Swallowing, I rounded the corner and stepped into the cool interior.

“Put that thing away, and start sifting through some of this sand.” I had just holstered my gun when there was a slight rustling sound from the darkened rear of the fissure and suddenly Carol’s scream filled the tiny space like a physical thing. I instinctively stepped back in surprise and fell over a rock. With Carol’s screams still in my ears, I felt rough hands try to get hold of me, but I wriggled out of them and regained my feet. For an instant I thought of running, but there was just enough of my manly pride to think of Carol, so instead, I shoved my way the few feet to where I could see her struggling against whomever it was that had also tried to grab me. The weight of my body must have taken them by surprise, because I managed to wrench Carol free and drag her toward the entrance. Her bikini top had vanished in the struggle and her gun was gone.

“Let’s get out of here,” I yelled, but Carol, unbelievably, still hesitated.

She swung her angry face in my direction and said through gritted teeth and wisps of undone hair that hung before her eyes, “And leave the treasure? You’ve still got your gun, use it!”

I hesitated, and in that hesitation she took the gun from my holster herself and swung it in the direction of our assailants, whom I’d imagined simply to be island natives. But as the first few advanced into the light near the entrance of the fissure, their true nature was revealed. Dressed in what seemed a combination of various seaweeds, dried kelp, and sea shells, it was their faces that revealed the fact that they were no mere natives but white men. I froze as the first flashes of Carol’s pistol shots showed the chamber crowded with the forlorn figures and, though it was impossible for her to miss under such circumstances, I thought she must have, until I saw her last shot pass through the forehead of the man closest to us without effect.

After that, they were on us again, Carol kicking and shouting defiant curses and I…I reeled back outside and scrambled down the face of the mountain. Blind panic had eroded the last vestiges of my pride and sheer fright propelled me downward over that landscape made harsher in the dying light of the day. By the time I reached the treeline, I was exhausted and my clothes were in ribbons; I stumbled to a breathless halt on my hands and knees as my ears finally began to register the pitiful screams still dimly emanating from the cavern mouth. I scrambled to my feet, not returning to my right mind until long after I had climbed aboard ship, a ragged, bleeding mess.

When the clouds finally began to lift from my brain, I found myself perched on the edge of the boat’s bunk with an empty bottle of Scotch rolling on the deck. There’d only been a few fingers left to it, but it was all the liquor we’d had left. Unfortunately, it hadn’t been enough to erase the memory of the events of a few hours before. But was it the memories I’d been trying to wipe out, or the shame of my being driven to this kind of mental paralysis? Over and over again I rationalized it all in my mind: years of failed effort scavenging the seas of the world, months of degradation in Labuan, and having gotten used to Carol doing the thinking for the both of us, had made me a different man. There were too many of those…things, up there. And Carol, I knew she didn’t love me, she only tolerated me because she needed me. How many times had we made love without passion or feeling? How often had she treated me with thoughtless, even cruel, abandon? She’d been an opportunist from that first day she swam up to the boat in Florida, and like a sap I’d fallen for her like a ton of bricks. I’d been a sap all right, and still was one, because even then, I couldn’t help feeling something for her. Whether either of us like it or not, she’d become a part of my life and I couldn’t imagine it without her. I guess I loved her, despite it all. Suddenly, as if to punctuate that last difficult admission, I heard, or thought I heard, a distant scream come over the water; like a siren, it seemed to pull me from the darkened confines of the cabin out onto the open deck of the boat. I think I must’ve been irrational then; how else to explain the fact that I just dove into the water and swam to shore without even bothering to supply myself with fresh clothes or a gun? I hardly remember following our trail back up the escarpment, the way lit only by the light of the full moon. At last, I found myself back at the entrance to the fissure from which Carol had been taken. All was quiet then, so I slipped inside, stopped, and listened. I didn’t hear anything, so I found a wall and followed it to the rear of the chamber.

With my heart pounding like mad, I discovered the opening those things had boiled out from and stepped through and continued on down the passage in the same manner I’d used in the fissure.

As my hand ran along the walls, I could feel irregularities that seemed to cover every inch of them, irregularities that arranged in patterns, unlike the cracks that we’d seen on the outside. Although I couldn’t see them, I imagined the patterns in my mind and they began to impress on me certain suggestions that, as they became clearer, began to repulse me. At last the imagery they inspired reached such a point that I had to jerk my hand back from the wall as if from an electric shock. As I shrank back from the wall, the loathsome images began to fade from my mind only to be replaced by other, as yet vague, psychic intrusions. As the intrusions grew stronger, somewhere in the back of my mind, I could still muster some surprise at my newfound courage. Instead of turning back and running as I would’ve done up until only a few hours before, I kept moving forward and as I did, I felt all my fears melting away. At last, after what seemed an eternity, the floor of the passage began to slope downward. Continuing to walk along the narrow tunnel I finally came upon a dim glow of light ahead. Proceeding cautiously, I began to hear a jumble of voices all speaking at once, or maybe chanting together, which grew louder the closer I approached the light. Suddenly, I came upon a wide opening and, peeking around the edge, saw that it opened onto a vast, sunken chamber. From where I stood, the opening led out onto a narrow ledge that lined one side of the chamber. At regular intervals, blazing torches were fastened into walls oddly carved with vile imagery. Strangely, with little apprehension, I stepped out onto the ledge, joining the humanoid creatures which had taken Carol. They were still dressed in their robes of seaweed, but now they were festooned, incongruously, with the same strange, pale gold jewelry they must have placed like breadcrumbs on a trail to lead us here. There was our treasure: tiaras, bracelets, and pendants catching the firelight.

The creatures were spaced out evenly between the torches, their arms raised stiffly over their heads as they droned some kind of chant. It was then that it occurred to me that they weren’t speaking aloud at all, but that I was receiving their thoughts directly in my brain. With that revelation, all became clear. I leaned forward to look more closely into the bowels of the chamber where the light of the torches didn’t quite penetrate.

I began to notice details that had escaped me before: the constant sound of water sloshing about, coming from far below and echoing throughout the huge hall; and the almost overpowering stench of rotting sea things. As my eyes accustomed themselves to the flickering light, they began to form a picture of that space below. Moonlight filtered through a low arch of rock to one side where the ocean lapped in and out, flooding the chamber floor; water that dimly sparkled as it washed inward, lapping about the foot of a small mountain of rock and coral that slowly built itself into a thick bed of living mollusks, crustaceans, dead fish, and even frogs. I would’ve looked further, but just then my attention was drawn to a disturbance on the far side of the chamber. There was an opening there similar to the one I’d just come out of, but with no ledge. Two torches burned on either side of the opening.

Then I saw two of the creatures emerge with Carol between them. My first instinct was to go to her, but that was impossible with the yawning chasm that stretched between us. As it was, I had to watch as her naked form was led to the edge of the precipice. She no longer struggled, and I could see by her tangled hair and filthy skin, crisscrossed with fresh scratches, that the fight had gone out of her. She simply stood between her two captors, head bowed a little as they raised their arms and intoned something. I’d been so centered on Carol that I hardly paid attention to the thoughts that pushed their way into my brain. Then I heard something that jolted me back, something that filled me with the same dread I’d felt in reading some of those old books back in Labuan…the name of Cthulhut. I looked around wildly, the image of a crude woodcut rising back into my mind. I wanted to scream out, but something held me back. I fought it, and managed a weak, “Carol, Carol…” She must have heard that pitiful call, more a plea for help than a summons to action, because her head lifted and she spotted me.

Her lips parted. “Vic? Vic! Oh, Vic, help me! Please, help me!” As if her words had triggered it, there was a sound from far below. At first it was like water sloshing, then it was a moist crunching of shells beneath a sudden weight, a slithering.

“The blood of the woman will enliven the Great Cthulhut. Cthulhut. Cthulhut.” The words droned through my brain, becoming stronger and stronger. “Release us from your bondage, O Great Cthulhut. We offer you this rare morsel in appeasement. Have mercy, great Cthulhut.”

“Vic!” She was struggling now, as her two captors seized her arms and legs and began to lift her, kicking and screaming, over their heads. They approached the ledge.

“Carol!” I screamed one last time as they hurled her bodily into the abyss, trailed only by her last, raw, wrenching plea that ripped my soul to shreds: “Viiiiiiiiic!” It ended when her body hit the mountain of sea creatures and tumbled a little way to the water’s edge. I could see her broken limbs moving feebly in the uncertain light, and in an unemotional zombie-like state, I saw what had caused those earlier sounds as great Cthulhut flowed. I say flowed, because all he was was a massive, gelid, tentacular mass, mercifully hidden even from the hardened gaze of his loyal servitors. The ponderous creature slowly crested the mound of shellfish and allowed certain of his arms to reach for his offering. One greasy tentacle slipped under Carol’s body, encircling it, and as it began to drag her toward one of the several orifices that suddenly opened in its body, her head must have lolled on its broken neck to face the creature whose appetite she was fated to satisfy. Her nerveless face twitched and I realized that she was fully aware of what was happening. Unfortunately, this time, she couldn’t even scream. But even in the catatonic state in which I found myself, somewhere there must have resided a safety mechanism, a psychic fail-safe that protected me even when the rest of my body had shut down. I felt a tightness in my chest and a sudden pain that stole my consciousness.

I don’t know how long it’s been since that night. The night I died. All I know is that I’ve been somehow reborn or reanimated into a kind of living death, kept animate by the dreams of Great Cthulhut. Like my fellow treasure hunters, castaways, and explorers…Lopez, Donovan, Guerrera, Angstrom, and the rest…I exist only to please Cthulhut, hoping that someday he might tire of us and release us from his bondage. Even now I hear his hellish call, and the last vestiges of my self control vanish…I weaken…I weaken…Great Cthulhut…Cthulhut…R’lyeh is your City…Cthulhu Fhtagn…

he?”

The Country of the Wind

udson Porter stood with his shotgun cradled in the crook of his arm. It was only a few hours past dawn on a late autumn day high up in the Vermont hills. The sun had still not quite cleared the treetops, as its rays slanted down through the forest at an almost horizontal angle suffusing the woods, with its yellowing foliage, in the curious orange-yellow glow it took at that time of year. Judson cocked his head to listen, but there was nothing to hear except the soft sursurrance of the wind in the trees and the dry rustle of leaves just trembling in anticipation of their fall to the already leaf-matted ground. A tree creaked suddenly and Judson’s gaze snapped in its direction, then nothing. He’d set off for some hunting before dawn, leaving the pick-up a mile or so back along the interstate, but hadn’t fired his gun all morning; not that he really expected to. Hunting was just an excuse to come out to the forest and enjoy the silence, to breath the cool, fresh air that came down from the nearby mountains. He’d found this path leading into the forest from the side of the road and felt it as good a place to start as any, and was really beginning to enjoy his walk, when it was abruptly cut off.

Before him yawned a gash in the earth that bisected the path. He leaned over and saw the little stream rushing at the bottom in a soundless current. About three feet below the edge of the cliff face were the remains of an old, washed out bridge, its ancient timbers in a tangled heap at the bottom of the ravine. One stout beam, however, remained more or less in place as it clung to the near side of the gorge and reached over to the opposite side in moss-covered desperation. Judson eyed it, then the other side where the path he’d been following continued on into the light spattered forest beyond. Disappointed that such an interesting walk could be interrupted so soon, he determined to at least give the tenuous crossing a chance.

Keeping a careful hold on his gun, Judson slowly lowered himself the few feet to the embedded beam. At last, his foot found firm hold on its soft surface and soon, he found himself seeking a comfortable position on the end of the beam. Inching slowly forward, he was soon satisfied with the beam’s firm setting and quickly crossed to the far side. After a short look back at the way he’d come, he turned and faced the path.

Due to the great many pine trees that dotted the forest here, the floor of the wood was thickly matted with brown pine needles liberally mixed with a variety of leaves. Combined with the browned and yellowing leaves still in the surrounding trees, the sunlight seemed to make the forest glow, and gave the feeling that it should really be late afternoon rather than early in the day.

He was just about to start along the path again when something out of the ordinary caught his attention. Just off the trail, half hidden by some low-slung branches, stood a stele about three feet tall. He reached out and lifted away one of the branches, exposing the stone to fuller view. Judson grunted at the plainness of the object. On it was carved a peculiar five-pointed star. He’d half expected an announcement that the stone marked a state or county line, but there was nothing of the sort. Looking at the star, he decided it reminded him of the warding plaques he’d sometimes seen on barns in Pennsylvania, meant to protect the structures from bad luck. He let the branch fall again and stepped back onto the trail.

As he moved deeper into the forest, the trail narrowed and closed up behind him. Looking closer, he could tell that at one time, the path had been a fully developed roadway. To either side of him, he could still make out the double troughs caused by ancient wagon wheels that were now overgrown with saplings whose trunks were nearly two or three inches in diameter. Farther in, he saw where the banks of the road must have been and the larger trees that had grown up and worn them away. He remembered the stories he’d heard of old farming communities deep in the hills that had simply died off earlier in the century as the rest of civilization passed them by. Soon, he thought he could make out the old furrows of long abandoned fields among the maples, poplars and oaks that grew off the trail.

Something thumped heavily to the ground off to his right, like the sound of a dull shot in the heavy silence. Judson whirled, aware that he’d instinctively leveled his shotgun in the direction of the sound. Feeling foolish, he lifted the barrel of his gun and simply peered through the fringe of underbrush at the side of the trail and tried to see what had caused the noise. At last, he’d decided a squirrel must have dropped a chestnut when he saw something deeper in the forest. It was a building of some sort. Festooned with years of accumulated leaves and fallen branches — if it hadn’t been for its unnatural, man-made lines, he never would’ve spotted it.

Judson hesitated and looked around. There was no evidence that anyone had been about the area in many years, maybe even decades. His curiosity piqued and not a little desirous for a bit of adventure, he stepped through the shrubbery and slowly made his way among the more widely spaced trees toward the structure as it’s true nature slowly made itself apparent. As he drew closer, Judson discovered that the building was actually an old farmhouse. It had once boasted two stories but the second floor had long since collapsed into the first. The remains of an old well and several out buildings still stood off in different directions and as he drew closer, a barn revealed itself standing behind the house.

Suddenly, Judson found himself standing on what must have been the drive that led from the old road up to the farmhouse. He changed course slightly to take advantage of the easier walking and continued on. A great pine tree towered to his right and, nearly wrapped around it, testifying to the violence of the collision, were the remains of an old wagon, its frame a rotted shambles but no less recognizable with its tongue extending alongside of and past the trunk of the tree to where the bones of the team of horses lay half buried in the humus of the forest floor. Judson stopped and rubbed his chin in puzzlement. Clearly, the evidence indicated that the wagon had crashed into the tree, but did the crash kill both horses pulling it as well? It seemed unlikely, but what other explanation was there?

Turning from the strange sight, he went over to the front door of the farmhouse. The door had long since fallen away and one look inside showed nothing of interest save for the ruins of the upper floor as it lay in a moldering heap in the center of the house. A few trees had taken root amid the rubble. To the rear of the house, the barn still stood, relatively intact and Judson was able to push one of the pair of doors open and step inside. Immediately, he caught the suggestion of a foul stench that he assumed was the residue of all the animals once kept there, but immediately dismissed the idea, for the smell wasn’t quite like any manure he’d ever smelled before. Suddenly, the longer he smelled it, the worse his body began to react, in no time, his gorge began to rise and he was forced outside again in order to escape it. In the fresh air again, he had the opportunity to turn and notice that his hasty exit had been through the missing rear portion of the barn, whose planks and timbers were scattered for dozens of yards all about the rear of the building, as if something had once exploded

It was while staring at the rubble that he found the colorful ward. Stooping, he pulled the circular plaque from beneath some boards and looked at it. It was as he’d first thought: the plaque bore the same colorful and intricate pattern as the wards he’d seen before on Pennsylvania barns. Also, like the stele farther back along the road, it sported a peculiar five-pointed star, except that this star was more faded, more hastily made, and somehow incomplete. His thoughts where interrupted by the snap of a twig behind him. He dropped the plaque and turned quickly, this time catching sight of a wild-looking dog slinking back into the trees about a hundred yards away. He knew he hadn’t imagined things before. He continued to watch the spot where the dog disappeared and presently saw it again as it eyed him in turn. By its feral appearance, Judson surmised that it had once belonged to someone in the area and had long since become wild. It seemed more frightened than frightening, so he ignored it. Shrugging off the last vestiges of his nausea, he walked back toward the front of the house and up the path toward the old road, pausing again to wonder at the crashed wagon before going on.

Repressing a sense of vague unease, Judson followed the remnants of the old drive out to the road and continued his leisurely walk. Around him, nothing had changed except for the height of the sun above the horizon, but he nevertheless felt something was now different than it was only an hour before. The ancient road began to bend slightly up ahead and as he approached the corner, it widened too, almost to what must have been its original width. Then, on the side of the road, he saw yet another horse drawn wagon, dilapidated and rotting, sitting on the side of the road. This time, its bed was piled high with a family’s belongings that had long since crumbled into an almost indistinguishable lump. Once again, he saw the skeletal remains of the horses that pulled it lying side by side before the wagon.

But he hardly had the time to wonder at this new puzzle when he looked up at the road ahead, now visible around the bend, and saw an astonishing sight. The old road was crammed with every sort of wagon, cart, and buggy imaginable, all in various states of disintegration and decrepitude. Some were smashed into trees, some into each other, and others simply stopped in the open, each with its compliment of dray animals and, Judson saw as he continued to walk in stupefied wonder, the remains of every other kind of farm animal imaginable: cows, chickens, pigs, oxen. It looked to him for all the world like one of those old photos from World War II of roads choked with the remains of fleeing refugees after they’d been hit by attacking aircraft. It all appeared more eerie in the silence of the surrounding forest as he began to thread his way among the ruined vehicles that were, in any case, half buried in the leaves and pine needles of decades of accumulation. At last, he emerged from them on the other side and continued down the road, which remained at its original width until it debauched onto the outskirts of what was once a tidy little farming village.

There were perhaps a dozen or so buildings, or what was left of them: a general store here, an eatery/hotel there, a blacksmith’s — the rest were an assortment of small homes. Most of the buildings were partially collapsed and some even had full sized trees growing up from their walls. Everything was covered with a thick blanket of leaves and branches, one house had been completely crushed by a fallen oak. Judson wandered into the center of the village, looking back and forth before deciding to investigate the general store. He could tell it was a store by the large frames of windows whose glass panes had long since shattered and the broken remnants of farming implements that spilled partially from the door. A board nearly gave way beneath him as he stepped lightly onto the wooden platform before the door and peered cautiously inside, holding his shotgun out ahead of him. Inside, he could see the droppings of various animals on the floor amid the scatter of old merchandise that lay everywhere. An old fashioned pot-bellied stove sat in the center of the room with its black flume lying in pieces about it and broken shelving, some still holding a stray can or two, lined the walls. Some broken chairs lay around the stove and the cash register sat on the counter against the opposite wall with its cash drawer sticking out. Judson moved over to check its contents. Empty. Oh, well, it was worth a try. He moved down behind the counter toward the rear of the store where a small screened off section showed where the local post office was situated. The neat arrangement of brittle envelopes, stamp pads and cancellation stamps indicated to him how important the postal supplies had been to the residents who’d so hastily abandoned the town. Then it struck him how strange it was that for all the remains of farm animals he saw, he never saw a single human skeleton. He felt a rising uneasiness until he rationalized it by figuring that if anyone had died their families would have buried them of course. Still, why hadn’t he heard of such a hurried exodus from this old town from the locals who lived up the interstate where he usually stopped for breakfast and to tank up the pick up? They’d always been forthcoming with the local news before and the old timers who gathered there on Sunday mornings never missed an opportunity to regale a stranger with their knowledge of the area.

A bird cawed somewhere outside and broke his reverie. He looked around the room again and was about to leave when his eye caught something on the table behind the postal cage. A drawer was still partially open and something white peeked out at him. He leaned over and opened it more fully and found a handful of undelivered mail. Scooping the envelopes with the vague idea of taking it with him and dropping them at the first post office he came to (wouldn’t that be a kick?), he idly sifted through them. Finally, he decided it wouldn’t do any harm to open one up. He didn’t think he’d get arrested for opening such old mail, and in any case, he could just not deliver this one. He placed his gun on the counter with the rest of the mail, selecting an envelope addressed to a Miss Fletcher who lived at…Misty Meadows, so that’s where he was…and tore it open.

September 11, 1919

Dear Cousin Sophie,

Got your note the other day and as usual, enjoyed hearing from you immensely. It was good to hear of all the news of Misty Meadows, of Judy, Mandy and Mike and Aunt Eleanor and Uncle Ted and even that queer old couple, the Branfords. Funny how you should mention them again, the Branfords, I mean. About their finding an animal in the hills and keeping it locked up in their barn. It’s just like them. Remember how, on my summer visits we kids used to go over to the Branford farm to spy? We thought we’d find…I don’t know, something queer, but we never did. Do you think old Moe Jeering was just fooling with us when he used to talk about the strange goings on of the Branford clan? And what about his spooky stories of the Indian god, Ithaqua? Sure it was foolishness, but like Old Moe’s claim that he was half-Algonquin Indian, it was fun to imagine that it was all for real. But seriously, Sophie, reading between the lines, I get the feeling that not all is right with you in Misty Meadows. Is something wrong? Anything I can help you with? If so, don’t hesitate to write.

Friends forever,
Camilla

Judson grunted to himself, replacing the letter in its envelope. He should’ve realized he’d learn nothing. He placed the mail inside his coat, took up his gun, and exited the store. Outside, nothing had changed. It was still only mid-morning, so he decided to continue down the old road for another hour or so before heading back. Looking behind him, he spotted the old dog again, except this time he didn’t try to hide. He just stood in the center of the street, eyeing him. Judson shrugged. If the dog wanted to follow him it could, but if it tried anything, he’d find a barrel full of shot to cool his temper. He hadn’t gone more than a hundred yards however, before the road began to bend to the left, and soon the gradient increased as well. In no time Judson figured that he must have missed a fork, because if he continued to follow this road much further he’d end up at the crest of a tall hill that dominated the town and the valley in which it was located. But why would anyone build a road to the top of hill instead of going around it? Further thoughts along such lines were soon dissipated in the natural beauty of the Vermont forest as the golden-leaved branches of the surrounding woods formed a glittering arch over Judson’s head. He reached a switchback, turned the corner and immediately saw that the road became much rockier from the effects of run-off from the hilltop and it was with increasing difficulty that he was able to keep his breath with the steepening ascent. At last, the blue of the sky began to predominate behind the thinning trees and soon, they gave way completely to the balding hilltop. As Judson cleared the tree line, he had his second surprise of the day. At the rocky crest of the hill stood a tight circle of standing stones that bore obvious resemblance to certain megalithic structures elsewhere in New England.

Judson had been to North Salem, New Hampshire, where the oldest megalithic site in North America was situated. That one was presumed to have been built by Celt-Iberians but this one didn’t seem, on first glance to be anything like it, nor as old. As he approached closer, Judson could see that the circle comprised four huge stones standing on-end to a height of over nine feet, and an equal number of two-foot-high stones spaced between every other tall one. In the center of the circle stood a much broader stone that could have been used as an altar; but as Judson looked closer, he saw that it wasn’t an altar at all, but some sort of capstone. It had been pushed aside, revealing a black opening into the rocky crest of the hill. In the morning light, he could just make out what might have been stairs leading downward. From the look of it all, the work had been done a long time ago. But what, he wondered, had been kept down there?

Judson shook his head; this was all pretty interesting, but what in the world was all this doing on a hilltop outside Misty Meadows? He looked around and judged by the amount of scrub that the site had not been visited at least since the town below had been occupied. He shaded his eyes and scanned the surrounding countryside. There was the town; he could just make out some of the buildings peeking from the canopy of trees. Around about, there were more hills, most a good deal higher than the one he stood upon. He studied the receding forest as it lay like a multi-colored carpet over the rounded Vermont hills. Then Judson decided he could have a better view if he stood on the capstone, and clambered up. From there, he could almost see straight down the rather steep hillside. He turned slowly, inspecting the hill from every direction until he faced the far side, and his eyes were immediately arrested by the sharp contrast of white against the dulled hues of the woods. He took his hand from over his eyes and squinted for a better look, but it didn’t work; all he could see was that dog nosing around near the spot. At last, he hopped down from the capstone, frightening the dog with the sudden motion and sending it scampering away to a safer distance. He passed through the circle to the edge of the hilltop and stopped. At his feet, strewn along the face of the hillside, was a field of discarded bones, thousands of them. They were as thick as a carpet, but farther out, scrub and grasses had begun to obscure them with years of slow growth. His first thought was that someone may have once performed animal sacrifices on the hill, maybe Indians, but as his eyes roamed over the bones they began to settle on something in particular. Carefully, instinctively respectful, he negotiated his way a few feet downward until he was able to stoop and pluck up a skull from the collection at his feet. It was clearly human. No doubt about that entered his mind. And now, looking more closely, he could see half a dozen others. Suddenly, a strange feeling came over him and an atavistic fear spurred him back up the hill and back within the circle of stones, the sharp cackle of dried bones in his ears as his feet knocked them aside.

There were perhaps a dozen or so buildings, or what was left of them: a general store here, an eatery/hotel there, a blacksmith’s — the rest were an assortment of small homes. Most of the buildings were partially collapsed…

As he fell back against the capstone, a stray breeze mussed his hair, the first he’d felt all day. For a moment, it seemed to sooth him and calm his inexplicably shattered nerves, but then, a strange odor began to permeate the hilltop and as his gorge began to rise, Judson suddenly remembered the smell that he’d encountered in the barn outside the town. Immediately upon the recollection, he began to retch, violently and completely, and soon, his system drained, he was struggling with the dry heaves that, when they finally abated, left his abdominal muscles weak and sore. Propping himself against the capstone and wiping his mouth, he noticed that the breeze he’d felt earlier had grown, and the once blue sky had clouded over into a featureless gray. The trees of the forest below began to whip and toss and soon he was nearly blinded by the amount of flying grit and debris that seemed to be focusing around the circle of standing stones. Then, through squinting eyes, he saw what looked like a wind-blown path open up among the trees along the distant hillsides. It was as if the wind blew in a stronger current than the winds elsewhere in the valley and created an effect that looked for all the world as if some massive, invisible creature was shouldering its way through the encumbering woodland. A low whining caught his attention and when he looked around, he found that the dog had come within the stone circle with him and now huddled, shaking at his feet. The fear that had seized Judson a few moments before, returned with renewed strength as he saw that the current of air was pushing a path directly for him.

Fear had turned to panic as Judson backed slowly away from the unnatural phenomena and made to dash from among the stones, but just as he did so, he was buffeted by the rising wind back toward the altar. Again he tried to leave and again he was forced back. Against all reason, his mind began to accept the seemingly impossible: that some supernatural force was at play that refused to allow him escape from the hilltop. He looked over his shoulder back in the direction of the hills, hills that now seemed sinister and brooding, silent witnesses like accomplices, watching the unfolding of events as the current of air reached the base of his own hill and trees at the tree line began to shudder in expectation of its arrival. With increasing violence, their branches were whipped to and fro, shearing the foliage and sending the leaves and twigs flying skyward in a cloud that gathered overhead focusing around the megalithic circle.

Blinded and stung by the flying debris, Judson fell back against the capstone, lifting his shotgun out before him in a useless defensive gesture. His arm was over his eyes and when he noticed a definite change in the timbre of the howling wind, he lowered it a bit and gasped as he saw that he was now situated in the center of a small cyclone whose twisting leaf-filled winds completely obscured the surrounding landscape. Then, slowly, horribly, it began to change. Before Judson’s disbelieving eyes the wind began to coalesce and visibly slow even as his hair and clothes continued to be whipped about.

He began to see eyes, thousands of eyes, and he felt without knowing, that these were the eyes of the vanished townsfolk, of the Indians who had once lived in the hills, even of ancient Celts who’d been marooned on a strange, empty continent. They communicated volumes of suborned purpose, of enslaved purposes, of unwanted actions, at once, refusal and acceptance. The love/hate relationship of ecstatic union between two opposing forces, and they wanted him to join them.

A sudden yelp from his feet enabled him to drag his eyes from the fantastic sight as the dog was lifted from the ground at his feet and whipped into the cyclone. Judson took one instinctive step forward to help, but found he was frozen to the spot by invisible, windy hands. He heard the dog howl with such terror and pain as he’d never in his most fearsome nightmares imagined. He watched in horror as the fear-maddened creature, thrashing wildly, was carried into the whirling maelstrom and suspended in the air a short distance from where he stood. Instantly the wind was filled with flying fur, and then with a sticky red mist as the dog was stripped of flesh, layer by layer, until Judson cold see its still-pulsing vital organs against the white of its skeletal structure. After a few seconds only naked, scoured bones remained suspended before him, and then they were discarded to fall to the hillside below.

Unbidden came the vision of such wind descending upon a small farming community, stripping horses, oxen, men, and women of sanity, flesh, and life. Although escape had certainly been attempted, none had been possible.

The thousands of eyes whirled round him now in an ever-tightening spiral. Each unearthly stare was at once a threat and a promise of joy. They awakened in Judson an impossible, alien yearning for the wild, free sky and for the spaces beyond it. His soul ached to join itself with that of the Wind-Being, and to roar and scream and laugh and moan among the crags of Earth’s highest peaks, and to brush the stars in his eternal flight. As he stepped forward toward the circling eyes, primal instinct asserted itself. Without knowing, he raised his shotgun into the vortex of eyes where it vanished together with his arm up to the elbow into the side of the funnel. He must have pulled the trigger, at least he couldn’t think of anything else he might have done to result in the action that followed. The wind thing seemed to dissipate at bit, to evanesce, to become more transparent and so, weakened; Judson pulled his arm from the side of the funnel only to find a blackened stump where his forearm used to be.

After that, he remembered nothing and he couldn’t say with any conviction that the memories he had of stumbling wildly through the darkening forest were real, or simply what he thought should be real. In any case, they told him that he was found, ragged and dirty and unconscious for loss of blood, on the side of the interstate by a passing motorist who collected him and brought him here, the nearest hospital.

The doctors and nurses at the country hospital had been very kind to him and had hoped that he would be able to tell them how his arm had been severed and its stump cauterized, but Judson had professed complete ignorance, unable himself to decide as to the reality of the terrible images which still groped and tugged at his mind.

He raised his arm and looked at its bandaged stump. That wasn’t a dream. But how could he expect anyone to believe his fantastic story if he himself couldn’t believe it? He felt his head and realized that it too was bandaged. Maybe a board fell on it while he investigated one of those old houses and he only imagined all the rest?

At last, the doctor who’d been treating him entered the room along with a male orderly and two nurses. They chatted amiably for a few minutes as they arranged their instruments on tables about his bed and one of the nurses adjusted the elevation of his bed to a more comfortable position. Soon they were ready and the doctor asked Judson to lay his damaged arm on the table extension that jutted over the side of his bed. He did so, and the doctor reached over to a tray held by a nurse close to Judson. He plucked a pair of small scissors and began snipping carefully at the bandages around Judson’s right arm. Little by little the bandages began to fall away until at last, the limb lay exposed, its skin grafts still newly-pink and the scars still…then Judson caught sight of something at the end. He gently pulled his arm from the doctor’s grip and looked more closely at the stump. The scar tissue began to move and weave and from amid its wrinkles emerged a conglomeration of eyes, hungry eyes that seemed to be devouring his flesh even as he watched. He screamed once, frightening the nurse nearest him into dropping her tray of utensils, the others stiffened in shock. Then, faster than anyone could anticipate, he grabbed a scalpel from where it had fallen on the bedside and thrust it downward toward his throat that had turned raw with the force of his continuing screams. But to his mounting terror and panic, the orderly stopped his arm at the very moment of his self-destruction while a wind seemed to come up out of nowhere. His screams turned from simple terror then, to sheer, mind-snapping pain…

out of it.

“What the Sea Gives Up…”

he canoe moved easily along on the water’s glassy surface, pulled by invisible, unseen currents. The only evidence of movement was trailing off in a broad fan from the prow of the boat, the trailing wash becoming less violent as the river widened until, in the far distance, the level of the water rose and fell undulantly at its banks. There, a forest of great trees crowded the land down to the water’s edge, trailing to ones and twos growing out from the river. There, the trees stood engulfed, surrounded by the muddy water; some standing proudly, their upper branches raised above the surface while others lay half reclining in tilts and leanings that suggested old men drowning in thick molasses.

The native paddlers, their dark skins shining in the baking heat of the tropics, dipped their short but serviceable oars into the water only infrequently to correct the canoe’s direction of drift, allowing the energies built up in the moving water to propel them to their goal, miles downstream. Sometimes Dr. Lee felt he was the only white man around for thousands of miles. But he knew that despite appearances, thousands of Americans were gathered not forty miles away on the eastern coast of Panama. The city of Colon was to be the eastern terminus of the new Panama Railroad being built across the isthmus and due to be completed in 1870. It was just his luck to be stationed at San Francisco when the word came down from staff headquarters to proceed to Colon, located in the northernmost province of Colombia. A regular trip by sea from the Pacific would take weeks and cover over forty-five hundred sea-miles, so it was deemed by his superiors quicker for him to disembark at Panama City on the west coast of the isthmus and travel cross-country the fifty or so miles to Colon on the opposite side. But it became increasingly obvious to Lee that his superiors had not the slightest notion of what that meant.

Poisonous snakes, spiders, scorpions, ants, malarial swamps, the intolerable heat, torrential downpours that struck without warning, and the flying, buzzing, crawling insects, especially the mosquitoes, conspired to make the night a nightmare with the days scarcely better. And the stink of rotting vegetation, the noxious fumes and gasses that rose miasmically from stagnant swamps and inland salt flats did not make things any better. Barely half way, his clothing had been worn to mere strips of cloth, his leather boots eaten and perforated with jungle rot and the feedings of the voracious jungle insects. And though he had contracted malaria once before while serving in the southwest, he had still managed to catch it again almost as soon as he landed in Panama City, so that now he seemed unable to shake a constant shiver and the occasional attack of chills. It was also a good thing that his guides had proven trustworthy, because his pistol had long since rusted into a lump of oxidized iron. He chuckled to himself as he thought of what a spectacle he would be when he finally presented himself to the officer in charge at Colon, and Dr. Jonas whom he would eventually report to.

A gentle bump of the canoe as it struck something just beneath the surface of the water brought his attention back to the present. As the man in the rear of the boat stuck his oar in the water like a rudder, redirecting the craft to the correct course, Lee looked about to either side of the boat, trying to spot the object they had struck. Suddenly, a long, scaly snout poked above the surface and with a toothy yawn, the alligator submerged again only to reappear a few feet away as it glided off to the shallows along the bank of the river. Disturbed in sleep, it had little inclination or appetite to concern itself with those who had nudged it awake. As Lee’s eyes watched the reptile go, a rush of motion on the horizon caught his attention as a flock of strange birds cast off into the air in a violently-colored flurry; their long legs hanging limply beneath their slim bellies. Dimly, their strident calls reached him from across the swollen river.

For swollen the Chagres was. Normally, he was told, the river was not formidable at all, in fact it was a beautiful river that wound lazily about the cordilleras that formed the spine of Panama. But during the wet season, it grew to ten times its ordinary size and, merging here and there with the nearby sea as the Pacific reached high tide, became a raging torrent that flooded the central isthmus beneath gathered rainwater that fell savagely for days in the mountains. Such was the time of year now of course, just when Lee needed to cross the delicate land bridge. In fact the river was so high that the portion he and his companions were in the process of crossing looked more like a lake than a river in its expansive stillness. Already he knew he would never forget the sight of the trees, their tops poking above the running water like leafy hillocks, now jet black with the weight of millions of tarantulas as they sought the dry safety of the temporary islands.

It was toward a group of those trees, heavy-laden with spiders, that the lead native steered the canoe. Passing the submerged trees, Lee watched the desperately scrabbling spiders in repulsive fascination as the craft slipped easily among them to the hidden shore. Gradually, the trees grew more numerous and as the water level receded, more and more of their length was revealed until at last, the great root systems stood exposed all intertwined with each other. Then, in less time than Lee had expected, the boat nudged gently along the grassy bottom of the swollen river. In another instant, he and the guides were splashing quickly for dry land with the canoe on their shoulders, warily watching for hunting alligators.

At last, the canoe safe in a tree, the trio gathered their sparse belongings and headed inland to Colon. Watching a threatening swarm of mosquitoes, Lee decided that they could not get there fast enough to suit him.

Just as he had expected, Lee received a rather cool welcome from the commandant of the Army unit detailed to protect American citizens working on the new railroad. As an officer, even an officer of the Army Medical Corps, Lee was still expected to attire himself as an officer in the United States Army, and not to appear before his commanding officer looking like some kind of vagabond. Which, as it turned out, was the very word General Ernst had used to describe him. And though Lee had been given ample time to explain his appearance, the general still could not force himself to quite forgive him. Things just were not done that way at West Point, jungle or no damn jungle. So Lee was sent off with Corporal Jones from the chilly atmosphere of the Commandant’s office to the oppressive heat of the out-of-doors.

A few hours later, he emerged from the murky recesses of the officer’s quarters back into the blaze of the Panamanian sun. He had taken a makeshift shower and slipped into a brand new uniform, the effects of both lasted for a few seconds until the tropical heat and humidity wiped out what positive effects might have been gained from being clean. Lee soon discovered that dry clothes were an impossibility in this country; at most he could expect damp ones. The humidity being at such levels as to prevent any drying off of wet clothing.

“All set?” asked someone from behind him.

Lee looked over his shoulder and saw Corporal Jones sitting in a wicker chair, his foot braced against a railing while he tilted the chair back against the wall. Without waiting for a reply, Jones fell forward with a thump and

“The hospital’s this way, sir,” he said as he jammed his regulation Stetson on his head and descended the veranda steps. “Oh, and sir,” he said. “I’d keep the hat on if I were you; we’ve had a lot of problems here with guys who didn’t wear them and wound up flat on their backs with heat prostration.

Lee needed no prodding as he stepped into the direct sunlight and hurriedly covered his head. Already, as he and the corporal pulled away from the barracks, the structure assumed connotations of coolness with its open windows, shaded veranda and nearby trees whose branches seemed to wilt in the heat as they drooped and poured over the sloping roof of the building.

But Corporal Jones, unaware of Lee’s regret at leaving the cool protection of the barracks, had proceeded across the unit parade ground and was just entering the forbidding closeness of the surrounding jungle. Lee had to hurry along to catch up to him.

The corporal had stepped from the parade ground onto a neatly maintained trail that passed between a few other buildings before winding through a bit of jungle. Following Jones, Lee was immediately surrounded by the sights and sounds of the tropics: crying birds and exotic plant life including some species of flowers that flourished only in the dank gloom of the rain forest. The sight of hidden beauty excited his interest and he promised himself that as soon as he had the time, he would collect samples. Looking around, he was sure he could identify at least a half dozen new varieties of flora.

“…until we cleared it all out,” Jones was saying. “Altogether, it took nearly three weeks of constant hacking to open even this little trail to the top of the hill. And we still have to keep a regular squad of men on duty every day, working on different stretches of it to keep it clear.”

Lee had not been paying attention to the corporal and now that looked more closely, he could see the shreds of uprooted vegetation that had been cast to the side of the trail, the shoots of new growth already coming up from among the debris.

“The hospital’s been located on the hill?” Lee asked.

“Yes sir,” Jones replied. “Doctor Jonas told the General how malaria and yellow fever are caused by noxious gases that rise from rotted vegetation in these hot tropics and that if the hospital was located on high ground, gentle breezes would keep it cleared of gases. You can imagine the General’s feelings about having to detail hundreds of men not only to clear a trail to the top of the highest hill in the area, but then having to build a good, sturdy building there to boot.”

Lee pictured the General and said, “Yeah, I can imagine his displeasure.” Then, “It’s good to hear that Dr. Jonas has taken every precaution to control the spread of tropical diseases.”

“I won’t deny that, sir,” answered the soldier, “but if you don’t mind my saying so, it hasn’t done much good.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean sir, that I don’t know about any official reports or what you’ve been told, but around here, people have been dropping like flies despite the doctor’s precautions.”

“Oh?” Lee had expected a few more deaths than what was reported to the public; standard operating procedure. “How many would you say?”

“At least thirty or thirty-five thousand.”

“Thirty-five thousand!” Lee staggered to a halt, hardly able to believe his own ears. “Are you serious man?”

Jones turned and said, “Dead serious sir. This climate is deadly for white men, and just as murderous for coloreds too. You see, at first, the army and railroad management thought the colored races…Negroes, Indians and Chinamen…would stand up better in this climate than white men. But it’s proven to be just the opposite. As fast as the company can import laborers from abroad, they catch malaria, cholera or old Yellow Jack as quick as you can say it. Why just a week ago, a platoon of fifty recruits pulled in to help patrol the new extension on the line, and today there aren’t but two left alive. It’s said that a man’s died for every tie laid down by the railroad, and at last count, that added up to almost forty thousand.”

Lee stood there in the green tinged half light of the forest, his mind numb. Thirty-five thousand! It was simply inconceivable. And the public back home knew nothing of it! Abruptly he bestirred himself from his involuntary lethargy and determined more than ever to reach the hospital and the doctor in charge as quickly as possible.

The trail up the hill switched back gently to and fro with the contours of the rising slope. It was broad and well kept with a large team of Chinese workmen constantly toiling in shifts keeping it clear. Lee marveled at their ability to work so diligently in the stifling climate. Looking away and up ahead, he saw that he and Jones were very nearly at the hospital and in a few seconds more had reached the front entrance. Jones clambered up the steps ahead of him, his feet clumping hollowly on the wooden planking, and jerked open a screen door that squeaked in protest. Lee followed him and entered the soothing shadow of the veranda that encircled the hospital, thankful to be out of the hot tropical sun. Although Jones moved quickly toward the main doorway, Lee needed a few seconds for his eyes to become accustomed the dim light of the interior of the building. Inside, Jones was already asking for the doctor’s whereabouts.

“Dr. Jonas is in his office, sir,” reported Jones. “Want to follow me?” Without waiting for a reply, the corporal led the way along a short corridor and, stopping only long enough for a quick rap at one of the doors, held it open for Lee.

Inside, Dr. Jonas was just rising from behind his desk, a hand coming up to clasp Lee’s. “Welcome to Colon, Doctor. I heard your passage was more than merely an uneventful one.”

Lee shook the man’s hand firmly. “It sure was. I’m thankful that I’d already contracted malaria once, otherwise I surely would have perished before ever seeing your hospital.”

“That’s all too true I’m afraid,” replied Jonas. “We’ve had more than our share of cases since the railroad project began.”

Lee decided to waste little time in getting to the crux of his interests. “Doctor, I’ve heard that you’ve had a less-than-easy time here yourself. Is it true that you’ve had more than thirty thousand deaths by disease since the beginning of the project?”

Jonas straightened at the blunt question, his eyes seeking out corporal Jones. At last he sighed and said, “It’s true all right. This climate is killing men by the hundreds. But it’s not only that. I’m convinced that the railroad company is the chief culprit, by driving its workers at an inhuman pace. I’ve fought more than once with them over this issue, even to the point of traveling back to New York to see the banks that are paying for it, but all to no avail.” He strolled over to the screened window overlooking the trail as it wound down the face of the hill. “Fighting them is like knocking my head against a stone wall, so I’ve given up to concentrate on trying to save as many people as I can while I’m here. Unfortunately, all my efforts have only amounted to a drop in the bucket.”

There was silence for a moment as Lee pondered his own possible actions after he took over the hospital. Then Jonas spoke up once more, this time with a different quality in his voice.

“One of the good things about being stationed here though, is the unparalleled opportunities for pure research it affords. Why, I’ve been able to accomplish in a year what would take half a lifetime if I had remained in the States. With all the information I’ve gathered here, it’ll be at least ten years before I’m through correlating all the facts and figures.”

Happy to change the subject for the moment to a less somber one, Lee agreed. “Yes, I’ve already determined to begin gathering some of the tropical flowers I’ve seen in the forest. The country around here is a vast unexplored wilderness. A true natural laboratory.”

Excited now with the conversation moving along in a less sensitive direction, Jonas warmed to the subject. “I know what you mean. I’ve had a once in a lifetime opportunity to assemble a complete anthropological collection with specimens from all over the world.”

“What do you mean?”

“Come and see.”

With that, Jonas led him through a rear door and out into a courtyard area enclosed by the hospital building’s three wings. As his guide stepped aside and gestured vaguely to the open space beyond the screened veranda, Lee stopped short as his eyes fell upon the most fantastic sight he had ever seen. Row upon row of skeletal remains lay neatly across the courtyard. Each skeleton complete in every detail, not a bone out of place or missing. Above each head, a wooden marker had been sunk into the ground with a small sign affixed to it that listed a set of statistics on the physical remains. Lee was stunned with the sheer audacity of it, the sheer tastelessness of the thing.

“What have you got here?” Lee asked, still somewhat stunned at the sight.

Jonas didn’t seem to notice Lee’s discomfiture, replying with an air of pride in his voice. “It’s my museum. My museum of anthropology. In fact, I believe this collection of skeletal remains is the most complete in the Americas, perhaps in the world. Do you know that the company here employs men of every racial type in the world? Aborigines from Australia, Indians from the United States, Negroes from Africa, Chinese from Asia, even some peoples I’ve never heard of! With these remains, I believe I can identify every branch of the human family. An evolution from one to the other so to speak. When I return home, I’ll bring these specimens with me to continue my research.”

“But,” Lee began, gulped, and continued, “these are human beings, man. What of their families?”

Jonas waved a hand. “Think nothing of it, Dr. Lee. I made sure these unfortunates had no families. Or at least, possessed no identification that would indicate such. They were headed for a mass grave meant for such unknowns. But now, having rescued their remains from oblivion, I’ll give them the opportunity to serve science and the world in a way they never had when alive.”

Lee took a hesitant step into the yard and, apparently interpreting the move as a sign of interest, Jonas quickly moved ahead to one the skeletons. “This one here is a rare dwarf type. See the curious deformations in its limbs?”

Lee studied the remains and despite himself, found his scientific curiosity aroused. He was about to take a closer look at the headboard when something else caught his attention. Straightening, he walked over a few rows and looked down at the most peculiar skeleton he had ever seen. “This one…”

Jonas had accompanied him in silence, allowing his collection to speak for itself. “Your professionalism and medical eye impress me doctor,” he said. “This is the most interesting specimen I have in my museum.” He squatted down alongside the skeleton, Lee doing likewise, and pointed with his finger. “Do you see the strange formation of the hands?”

Lee had to nod. “Yes, it seems vaguely icthyic. In fact,” his eye quickly scanned the rest of the skeleton, “the whole body possesses peculiarities one would normally associate with sea life.”

“Exactly.”

“Who was he?”

“All I know is that he belonged to a small tribe of Indians, or at least natives of this area, who inhabit a particular region along the eastern coast of the country. I’ve questioned some of the other Indians and Mestizoes in the area, and all agree that the tribe this fellow belonged to is very peculiar, insular, and that they inspire in outsiders an unexplainable revulsion.” He rose and reached for a small sack that hung from the headboard. “These were some of his belongings. Nothing to identify him of course, but he did carry around the most odd bits and pieces I’ve ever seen.”

Lee held out his hands to receive the objects. Most of them were what he’d expect of a native fisherman: shark’s teeth, bits of bone and rock, shells, and dried vegetation. But one item held his interest. It was a scrap of cured animal hide with very faint markings on it. As he held it out to the light, Jonas noticed his attention.

“There’s some sort of Spanish writing on it, but I can’t make anything out of it.”

“You’re right,” agreed Lee. “It is in Spanish, I can only read a few words. Something about a place…thing…person…named…Clulu I think. And something else relating to it…those who serve, tend or guard the former. The ‘Deep Ones?’ But it’s all so garbled, as if whatever the subject was, it couldn’t be translated accurately into Spanish. Or at least what command of the language the writer had. Hmm, this is funny. There’s a kind of drawing at the conclusion of the message or whatever. It looks like a star or something.” Lee handed the scrap back to Jonas who replaced it with the other things in the sack.

The two men reentered the doctor’s office and somehow the conversation returned to the astonishingly high number of deaths among the workers. “Well, we’ve done everything proper for the prevention of the spread of malaria and so forth, but it just doesn’t seem to have helped. You’ve seen that our beds are all standing freely in pans of water to protect from crawling insects and all our windows and doors are kept wide open for maximum ventilation.”

Lee sighed; he was getting tired. The finish of the long trek this morning, and the visit here this afternoon, had completely winded him. “Doctor,” he said at last, “do you mind if we end our conversation here for today and go on with the hospital review tomorrow? I’m really quite tired.”

“Of course Doctor, how stupid of me. You must be weary after your grueling trip cross country. Go on to your quarters and take a good rest. We’ll continue tomorrow as you say.”

Lee left the hospital more than a little troubled. All these people dying of disease and the doctors really stymied in developing methods to combat them. He was walking half stumblingly down the grade of the road from the hospital when, unbidden, the image of the water pans that the legs of the beds stood in entered his mind; the myriad flying insects that infested them. Mosquitoes. Finally, a vague idea teased at the recesses of his memory. Hadn’t he read of a handful of European physicians, French and British mostly, who suggested the notion that insects carried the hidden germ of the plague? He stopped suddenly. Mosquitoes in particular?

Images of standing water, natural attractions to mosquitoes, played in his brain: the pans at the bed-legs, rain barrels at the corners of the hospital roof, the catch basins about the boles of the young trees in the doctor’s garden. Everywhere, breeding grounds for mosquitoes. He suddenly halted and turned back to the hospital. Without pausing to summon Dr. Jonas, he sped through the first anteroom to the laboratory. Ignoring the physician’s grisly museum, he found a large magnifying glass and a petri dish.

It was the work of seconds to entrap a number of mosquitoes between the two halves of the dish and to train the glass on the captured insects. Looking at the creature more closely, he couldn’t help noticing their unusual size. Of course he was a stranger to these tropics, and it was quite possible that he was simply unfamiliar with this genus; still, he couldn’t help a chill from crawling up his back as he peered into the glass.

Almost as soon as he had his first good look at the creatures, he recoiled in shock, his body instinctively pushing itself away from the laboratory table. Every muscle rigid, he propped himself up against a nearby counter, knuckles white as they gripped the wooden surface. His gaze held the specimen dish where it sat, impossibly placid, on the table before him. Slowly, his pounding heart quieted as he drew the sleeve of his shirt across his feverish brow. His hands trembled as he brought the glass back up for another look, but just the thought of seeing again the sight that had met him when looked the first time, kept him even from approaching the table.

At last, a full quarter of an hour later, he pulled himself together enough for a second look.

Nothing had changed. But through an effort of will, he forced himself to stay and further examine his catch.

Up from the petri dish and through the thick lens of the magnifying glass, stared one of the most disturbing sights he had ever witnessed. Although as a physician he’d seen many grisly sights before, not the least of which included the field hospitals during the late war between the states, he felt instinctively that no insect in the animal kingdom would ever claim as members of their genus, the horrors he was now studying.

A multitude of great, bulbous eyes covered what he assumed to be the head of the creature, punctuated by coarse fibers of cilia-like hairs, some of which hung low beneath the “eyes” to lengths ten times that of the others. Other, more rigid-seeming tendrils stuck straight up above like strange antennae. Whereas insects sported an abdomen and thorax, six legs and two wings, these creatures held only the latter in common. And those seemed to flicker in ghostly insubstantiality with an electric-blue light that, now that he was aware of it, crackled audibly in the silent room. But the final horror was the fact that each of the creature’s “legs” terminated in tiny, perfectly formed hands…

He quit looking then and backed away, clenching his eyes shut in a futile attempt to block the vision of the creatures from his mind’s eye. He succeeded in banishing all but a single image. The last detail he’d observed was the one he most wanted to forget, but paradoxically, was the one he knew he would always remember.

He remembered the mere glimpse he’d had of the long tube-like shape that projected obscenely from the creature’s underside to nearly three times the length of its entire body, terminating in a sharp needle that he knew was inserted into the insect’s prey. Just beneath the jointure of the appendage and the body, hung a redly-bloated sack. A sack so heavy, it almost held the creature earthbound, despite the electric power that pulsated in its wings.

Lee dropped the dish on the floor and in a reaction that surprised him with its vehemence, set his heel to it with instinctive abhorrence.

Slowly, he retreated to the long row of windows at the end of the room. Leaning against a window frame, he breathed deep of the pungent air outside the suddenly stifling confines of the clinic.

At first, he heard nothing more than the sounds of the jungle that he’d become accustomed to over the past few weeks, but then, his senses began to sort them out, with one in particular more insistent than the others. It was a sound he’d heard before since arriving in Panama, a low buzz that grew from a barely perceptible hum to a loud grinding that seemed to threaten destruction of the entire forest.

Then, he realized that he recognized the sound from somewhere else. The electric hum generated from the wings of the insects he’d examined was the same as that one he now heard emanating from the depths of the jungle! Listening now with a greater urgency, he heard the sound reach a crescendo before dying down again. Somewhere out there was a swarm of the creatures, maybe more than one, moving like a cloud over the land looking for victims off of whom to feed. Victims such as the railroad workers toiling blissfully in the scorching equatorial sun!

Suddenly, his responsibility to protect the lives of the workers rested like a great weight upon him as the realization dawned upon him of what he had to do: find out where and how the creatures bred and destroy them.

Luckily, with all the preparation he had to make, the next few days passed too quickly to spend much time pondering about the monstrous nature of the tiny beasts he’d discovered. He’d tried to interest Dr. Jonas in the venture, but as soon as he mentioned insects as the possible source of malaise and yellow fever, the physician nonchalantly dismissed the notion. He even went so far as to approach General Ernst and convince him that the new doctor had confused classroom theory with the reality found in the field. As a result, no help was to be found from official quarters.

But his sense of responsibility as a physician and the honor he felt in the oath he had taken upon graduating from medical school compelled him to take action; even if he were alone in the endeavor. Fortunately, though, he did find some help. Corporal Jones came through for him in finding the things he needed to prepare for the project.

Those preparations included the gathering of twenty yards of good sail from the hold of one of the many ships laying at anchor at the railhead, strips of mosquito netting, and the services of a good sail maker to fashion the material in the form dictated by Lee. Though that form puzzled Jones as well as the sail maker, Lee decided not to confide its purpose in them for fear of word getting around to General Ernst, who would order him to desist in his wild ideas. And order that Lee sometimes felt he’d welcome with relief.

At last, however, everything was ready. He’d created a complete suit that would cover every exposed inch of his body. Made of the tough canvas material of ship’s sail and sewn together tightly, the suit was fashioned like a beekeeper’s outfit complete with a hard sun helmet pulled down tight with folds of mosquito netting. Though the thought of the long, wicked looking “stinger” sported by the insect he intended to hunt still sent shivers down his spine, he felt sure that the suit’s toughness would withstand the creatures’ attempts to pierce the material. Still, there was the nagging fear that under a constant barrage of stings, even the tough fibers of his protective gear might not be enough to protect him, thoughts that he preferred not to dwell upon.

And so, early one morning, Lee made a strange figure covered entirely in his coarse body-suit as he stepped from his assigned bungalow into the conveniently close jungle. He really didn’t have much of an idea about how to exterminate the creatures outside of finding their breeding ground and destroying it somehow. To that end, he carried a heavy fire-ax in case it took the shape of a hive. Perhaps, with their home destroyed, the creatures would be forced to disperse and travel further inland, away from human habitation. If there was no hive and the creatures simply breed in the open such as common mosquitoes, he had a back-up plan. He’d done some experimenting on the insects and discovered that they reacted to smoke much as did ordinary bees; it put them into a sort of coma. To that end, he intended to set local brush afire hoping that would help disperse them as well. If anything went wrong with his suit or his plans to deal with the creatures, he’d prepared a number of small huts reinforced with mud and clay and dotted them about the nearby countryside.

Pushing his way into the clinging undergrowth of the forest, he lumbered heavily out of the fragile world of men and into the stronghold of the wild. Immediately he was struck with waves of intense heat as his enclosed body began to bake in the thick sail-cloth suit. He’d not reckoned with the heat his body would generate as he marched through the jungle, but he gritted his teeth and plunged on in the direction of the Chagres River, the area from which his hasty studies of the buzzing sounds indicated the major activity of the insects came from. The buzz itself was almost always present, only building and dying occasionally as he thought the swarm moved to and from its nesting area. Just now, the intensity of the sound emanated distantly from the south-east and it in that direction he aimed his footsteps.

As he continued to move in the direction of the sounds, Lee realized that he was headed directly towards the area where the mouth of the Chagres emptied into the Caribbean. There, he knew, the river dissolved into a tangle of rivulets and tidal pools comprising a swamp thick with rotting and dying vegetation, the perfect place for the breeding of mosquito-like insects. It was in that area as well that the obscure tribe of fisher-folk identified by Dr. Jonas was supposed to be located.

But any further thoughts along the lines of the whereabouts of local Indian tribes became irrelevant when he noticed that his feet began to sink into the soft soil of the jungle. It seemed to Lee that he was still too far from the swamps for such a thing to be happening, but he could plainly see his footprints filling slowly with water. The ground all around him was like a big sponge, completely saturated with water and as he continued to walk, the area between the forest began to thin until he found himself amid a vast mud flat that extended as far as he could see. Then it occurred to him; the rainy season had only recently ended. The Chagres was swollen and had flooded the entire delta and only now were the waters receding, leaving behind muddy silts of the charging river.

Laboriously, Lee heaved himself onto the exposed roots of a huge tree and peered off into the distance. Far ahead, he could just make out the glistening surface of alluvial pools of water, left behind by the retreating river; everywhere the stink of rotting vegetation permeated the atmosphere. Lee had almost gotten used to it when his senses were suddenly overwhelmed by a stink whose smell was so repulsive, his body could only react to it by gagging. Quickly removing his hat, he’d just managed to get it off when he threw up. Weakened by the sudden attack, he replaced his hat and readjusted carefully the netting about his neck. When he’d recovered somewhat, he found that the stink was still there. Never in all his years as a surgeon had he been exposed to such a fetor! Worse than the stink of any rotting corpse or burned flesh, he could tell that it emanated from only a short distance ahead. He’d just determined to head in that direction when a great buzz of insects once again filled the air. The sound was so loud, Lee half expected to see the distant line of trees cut down as by a buzz saw.

Not without some trepidation, Lee forced himself to continue, feeling that the thing he was looking for was close by.

It took him a good hour to wade through the soft mud that rose about his ankles before finally finding what he was looking for. He could tell that he’d found it by the dark cloud of insects that boiled noisomely up ahead. Rising out of the sea of mud like some great beaver’s mound, lay a black bulk that occluded the horizon, blocking out the view of the sea beyond. Blacker than the mud surrounding it, it lay wetly in the thin skin of water that sheened the mud flat, its outline punctuated by a few old tree trunks that poked out from its sides.

Spying an island of dry land that had been too high above the surface of the flood waters to become submerged, Lee moved cautiously in its direction. At last, he managed to position himself amid the tangled shrubbery that clung to the crown of the little island. From there, his view of the mound was much improved and he discovered with a little shock that far from being some kind of lodge, the thing had once actually been a living creature! At least he hoped it was no longer living, as it showed no sign of life. There was no steady rhythm to suggest breathing, no futile efforts to right itself. Looking at the thing, Lee was almost certain that it was a sea creature of some kind, thrown up from the depths by the violent storms of the past few weeks and beached on an inhospitable shore. But if it had been a living creature, he prayed mightily that the thing was the last of its species. For there was a certain indefinable something about it that set Lee’s teeth on edge, that tickled at some long suppressed superstitious fear that lurked just below his conscious mind. The sort of fear a civilized man was long since supposed to have relegated to the memories of infancy. But the fact couldn’t be denied: he was in the presence of some lost primeval beast… Wait! The scrap of skin found on the fisherman by Dr. Jonas…hadn’t it said something about “Deep Ones”?

But before he could pursue the thought any further, his attention was drawn by increased agitation in the black cloud of insects that hovered overhead. Watching, he saw how the insects began to swarm by bringing into play the electric buzzing of their wings. In seconds, the swarm had begun to glow in the dim blue light generated by the collected power of the insects’ wings. Then, reaching a crescendo of sound, the swarm lifted higher into the air, and flew off in the direction of the railroad.

It took a few minutes after the buzzing sounds had tapered off for Lee to stir himself enough to focus his attention on the bulky form that lay out on the mudflat. Cautiously, he lifted himself from his place of concealment and inched out onto the hardening mud. He was relieved to find that the solid ground beneath the island apparently extended for some ways beyond the portion visible above the mud.

Having long since emptied his stomach of its contents and become accustomed to the smell, he was able to draw himself to within a few feet of the thing. Closer examination yielded no more information. The thing still appeared to him as a formless heap of gelid viscosity. Perhaps the thing could not hold its shape without the supportive pressure of the deep? In any case, Lee was sure the carcass had some connection with the insects he was determined to destroy, and so, he began to collect scattered driftwood and to snap off the dry stumps of branches that still dotted the tree trunks protruding from the thing.

Some time later, he’d managed to cover the thing with enough wood to incinerate any portion of it that lay exposed above the surface of the mud. He was just stepping back from his handiwork when he was startled by a sudden spasm along the surface of the creature’s anatomy. Startled, he stumbled backward, dropping a last arm-load of sticks and prepared to run if he had to.

Watching the thing carefully, he realized that the movement he’d seen, was not the creature itself, but something wholly separate. The dull, waxy surface of the beast was as lifeless as ever, but it quivered in places that seemed wholly apart from any nerve related cause. Gradually, the movements spread over the whole of its surface and Lee, sensing danger, drew back in inexplicable dread. But even as the short hairs at the back of his neck prickled in warning, he couldn’t suppress his scientific curiosity. A curiosity that allowed him to witness the final horror; a curiosity that he would have reason to curse for the remainder of his life…whenever he again had occasion to smell the salty aroma of the sea.

Leaning in close, Lee observed the appearance of certain lesions across the surface of the creature that rapidly grew into knob-like pustules. In minutes, its entire exposed surface was alive with the throbbing sores. Finally, one burst, then another, and another in wetly popping unison surprising Lee into stumbling back onto the dry mud. It was from that position that he discovered the reason for the sudden activity. Half stumbling, half crawling away, Lee’s weakened frame was again wracked by futile heaves that brought only bitter trickles of bile to his lips. On his mind, the squirming, writhing maggots that hungrily ate their way up from the pulpy effluvia that was the interior of the beached Deep One and their almost instantaneous transformation into replicas of the insects that had only recently swarmed off toward the railroad.

Even as he backed away, hand over his mouth, Lee could see the newly hatched young testing their wings as they rose hesitantly from their noxious birthplace into the warm air of the surrounding swamp. Gradually, instinctively, they began to swarm and Lee, cognizant of his danger yet aware also of his duty, forced himself to gather a few of the sticks he had dropped into a small pile. Slowly removing the cumbersome gloves from his hands, he reached inside his suit and removed a tin of matches. Eying the slowly growing cloud of insects who had yet to recognize him as a source of nourishment, Lee lit one of the matches and held it to the small piled of twigs. It took a few tries, but he finally managed to get them to burn. By that time, the new-born insects had gathered into a swarm. Taking hold of one of the burning sticks, he tossed it desperately towards those that he’d used to cover the Deep One.

As soon as the faggot he’d tossed touched the thing, the whole creature burst into flame as if its surface had been covered in oil. Some unknown excreta covering or composing the thing’s body had proven to be naturally combustible, a fact Lee wasn’t going to question. Holding an arm up to protect himself from the mounting flames, he could see with relief that the flames quickly sought out the low flying young that had not yet escaped the vicinity of the carcass.

Hardly waiting to see if his handiwork was completely successful, he turned and began to run as quickly as he could along the surface of the dried mud. Within a few dozen paces however, his feet began to sink again.

He was still busily slogging his way along when his ears were filled with the sound of buzzing. Allowing a gasp of fear to escape from his lips, he looked back to the smoldering heap for the approach of the creature’s insect offspring, but there was no activity from that direction. Then, sweat streaming from his body, he turned back toward the distant forest and realized that the sound was coming from there.

Quickly, he turned direction and recrossed his island hiding place and sloshed again in the soft muck of the mud beyond. The buzz of the returning insects was growing louder by the second as his frenzied mind insisted on picturing for him the details of the creatures’ physiognomy: the electric blue wings, the ugly cilia, the long prehensile stinger with its accompanying sack bloated red with blood…and those tiny, inexplicable but all-too-humanlike hands. It was that final image, of those ghastly, incongruous hands, that drove him crazily over the last few yards of open mud onto dry ground. But any relief he might have derived from the possible safety of dry land was subsumed in the tearing, ripping, slashing sound of the swarm close on his heels. He dared not even glance back to see how close they actually were. He didn’t need to.

His surroundings were a blur of rushing images: trees, pools, bushes, leaves, vines, more trees. He noticed none of them until he burst into a clearing that held a deserted village. His passage through it was so hasty that he barely had time register any of its features. Indeed, it was with some amazement that later in life he remembered any of it at all. Only a handful of empty huts of grass and wood stood in a rough circle around the black pit of the community fire. Here and there the typical belongings of a poor native village. A stand of poles draped with grass fishing nets and crude wooden buoys characterized that the village as that of a tribe of fisher-folk. All was quiet and empty. The village was deserted and later, Lee needed to spend little time wondering about it.

Leaving the village behind, he plunged hip-deep into a narrow stream outside the ring of huts and crashed through the few dugout canoes still moored there. Thrashing about in a desperate attempt to disentangle himself from the surface clutter, he fell upon the opposite shore and scrabbled unknowingly upward toward a pile of shattered stones. He sensed more than felt the presence of the ferocious horde at his back as he scrabbled up the short ridge of rock that poked up like a finger from the midst of the surrounding forest. His protective suit, torn and shredded, felt heavy on his arms and legs but he was thankful for what protection it still afforded when he felt the first few pricks made by the lead elements of the swarm. Tiring, unable to go much further, Lee braced himself for the final attack as he crested the ridge and fell face forward onto the smooth expanse of rock at the top. Struggling to rise, he found himself too exhausted to continue and finally fell back unconscious.

When Lee awoke at last it was night and the moon had risen and drowned out the dimmer stars in its bright light. Slowly, he stripped off the last shreds of his now-useless protective suit. Standing, he wondered at last why he was still alive. Moving to the edge of the broad shelf of rock upon which he’d fallen, he looked back down the way he’d come. Littered along the steep slope were the decomposed bodies of about thirty or so people. They lay there in the positions they had fallen in the act of trying to escape the angry swarm that had at last caught up with them before they could reach safety. The inhabitants of the village he’d passed through, he realized. And all around them, inches deep like some black carpet draped over the small knoll, were the lifeless bodies of insects. Already, they were being feasted upon by birds and other insects; by morning, almost nothing would be left of their presence. On the horizon, a dull smudge on the eastern sky marked where the last fumes of the burned carcass rose thinly from the mud flat.

Lee turned slowly back to face the sailing moon, wondering why he’d been spared and the tormenting creatures slain. The bright light reflected from off the face of the smooth stone on the edge of which he stood, attracting his eyes. He looked down and saw the shape of the rock. Too regular for nature, it had certainly been carved by human hands. He looked back at those dead villagers then back at the stone. They’d sought safety upon the rock. He alone had reached it and survived. Stepping back for a better view, he again looked at the stone he was standing on and recognized it as the same as the one that had been etched on the piece of cured skin found in the possession of the native that had died at the hospital. In addition to the Deep Ones and something called Clulu, it also included the design of a strange, five pointed star.

Lee hunkered down in the center of the stone and again looked down upon the black carpet of insects below him, relieved that their menace had been ended, whatever the connection between themselves and the star figure. Along with them, the Deep One was destroyed and that was good, but what concerned him were the other swarms, the ones he’d heard in the jungle before ever arriving in Colon. What about them?

Then, as the silence of the evening deepened around him, he thought he heard a familiar, softly building drone…

stood up.

Footsteps in the Sky

he snow started to fall again, tracing intricate patterns in the still night air. Mathias Cordell marveled at the total absence of sound in the presence of so much motion. The temperature had risen a few degrees above zero during the short hours of daylight. The gray skies were a single sheet of unbroken clouds that stretched forever in all directions. Now, however, those same clouds were invisible in the night, with only the large, white flakes that suddenly appeared from nothingness to show that they were still there.

One snowflake found its awkward way to Cordell’s eye, forcing him to lower his head. “Damn!” He had to remove his sealskin glove to rub his eye…always an intricate process. Rubbing quickly and replacing the glove fast so as not to leave his bare hand exposed to the chill air longer than necessary, he leaned back against the stone wall and looked to his right.

A line of men huddled with their old Russian rifles against the crumbling boundary until it was lost in distance and snow. The men wore old Russian uniforms and greatcoats, fur caps firmly jammed down over their ears. Most were drawn up in sleep, but a few remained awake, working their frozen rifles. When they spoke, it was in a strange tongue that died in the silence of the storm.

Cordell blew droplets that hung, not yet frozen, from his upper lip and retreated farther down into the recesses of his parka.

The man next to him stirred and turned his head, revealing a dull flap of gold on his collar. “You have never been a soldier.”

A cloud of mist rolled across Cordell’s eyes as the thick accent indicated a statement, not a question. He shifted his position to face the man, forcing his holster into his side, and said, “So what else is new?” The man looked at him strangely, with a slight cock of the head. A smile came to Cordell’s face. “Forget it.” Then: “How long have we got till dawn?” He managed to shift his weight and ease the pressure in his side.

The man looked up at the vanished sky. Cordell watched him as flakes of snow came to momentary rest on his face and disappeared.

“A few more hours. I will waken the men soon,” the man said, looking back to Cordell. “How will you take notes in this storm? Surely you Americans have not invented waterproof paper?”

Cordell allowed himself a chuckle and said, “Not yet, Colonel. I’ll watch the goings-on and get it all down later.”

“There will be much to see when the fighting begins, my friend, and you will be down more often than you are up.”

“You ought to know.”

“By God, you are right, I ought to know. My men and I have been fighting here for several months. If it was not for us, Admiral Kolchak and his Whites would never have had a chance.” The Colonel was standing now, warming to his subject. Cordell followed his gloved hand as it pointed to imaginary targets. “It was we,” he pounded his big chest, “the Czechoslovak Legion, that seized the railroad and gave the Whites a chance to organize. We were the first to fight the damn Bolsheviks and drive them beyond the Ural Mountains.”

Cordell took advantage of the pause to say, “But you were originally deserters of the Austro-Hungarian Army…” For a moment it seemed to Cordell that the Colonel stiffened and would have swung at him but then managed to control himself. “…and were on your way to the coast to leave Russia by way of the Pacific.”

The Colonel drew in a chestfull of frigid air and said, “Yes, we were taken prisoners of war at first, but later the Czar allowed us to form our own units. Before we reached the coast, however, the Bolsheviks struck and…complications arose involving our departure.”

“So you stayed and allied yourself with the Whites and the Interventionist forces,” Cordell concluded.

“Ha!” the Colonel bellowed, stooped and clapped him on the back, knocking Cordell off balance. “You Americans can drag information from one like milk from a cow!” With that, he stormed off into the gray, swirling whiteness kicking his sleeping men as he went.

Cordell leaned back against the wall, breathing shallowly, relishing the calm before the intruding sounds of men girding themselves for combat. In another moment he heard the dull shifting of bodies and the clank and creak of metal and leather. A soldier walked by, looking intently down at his rifle as he tried to worry the bolt loose from the frozen shaft. Farther off, he saw another man urinate over his weapon, a thin mist rising from his feet. Cordell stood at last, accompanied by the crack of his joints. He felt for his pistol at his hip and stared into the eddying whiteness beyond the wall, where soon thousands of men would walk warily to the black taiga up the river.

As he stared into the white and gray of the Siberian plain, Cordell remembered the day he was called into the editor’s office on the fifth floor of the Maher Building in uptown Manhattan. He had been still riding on the success of his Rupert murder story when Kenneth Streeter at the International Desk called him over. “Cordell,” he had said without bothering to remove the cigarette from his mouth, “how would you like to take a little trip?” It was that easy. Three days later, he found himself on a ship bound for Vladivostok, Russia’s port on the Pacific. Before he had left, he managed to get hold of every paper he could find that carried stories on the Bolshevik Revolution and the war in Siberia and the Ukraine. By the time he arrived in the port of Vladivostok weeks later, he knew as much about the war as anyone back in the States, except maybe for the War Department.

In Vladivostok, he acquired his first taste of Russian winter with the cold wind and thin covering of snow. Before leaving port, he watched American soldiers debark from his ship, and march in perfect cadence to barracks somewhere nearby. His papers told him to wait, as a courier would be sent to take him to the local White Russian commanding officer. It was not long in coming. A young orderly who could not speak English met him and showed him some orders typed up in English, then led him through the frozen town to the commander’s headquarters.

The commander was civil enough, and even shared a glass of cognac with him. Finally, he gave Cordell a railroad pass to Omsk, one of the largest Central Russian cities and headquarters-in-turn of the counter-revolutionary government.

The Trans-Siberian Railroad was the first thing seized by the renegade Czechoslovak units, and it was along it that the Czechs began the anti-Bolshevik crusade. For three days the monotonous Siberian plains rolled by his window, occasionally broken by patches of thick coniferous forests called taiga by the natives. As the miles rolled on, the snow that covered the land grew deeper and deeper and fell longer and longer until he rea

He never did get to see Admiral Kolchak, but he did reach as far as the office of General Dovska, the regional commander. The general was very polite, as befitted Czarist nobility, and granted Cordell’s request for a position with the front-line troops. Cordell was surprised to learn, after a long four-day march with reinforcements through freezing weather, mountainous drifts, and the frozen river Tavda, that the unit he was assigned to was not Russian after all, but Czech. At least the Colonel in charge spoke English, which was more than he was beginning to expect.

Upon meeting the mountainous Colonel, Cordell learned that the reinforcements he had marched up with would be used for a major offensive operation to take place in a few days. Not expecting action so soon upon his arrival, Cordell immediately began to question the men with the help of the Colonel, jotting down quick notes.

The snow was falling harder now, creating a gray haze with distance beyond the wall. Cordell passed his hand over the top stones and watched the displaced snow fall on the far side, the small heaps almost invisible on the white on white of the ground.

There was motion all around him and he saw the Czech soldiers, so far from home, shake the snow from their shoulders and begin to negotiate the wall. Scores of other soldiers were swarming up from the rear, black against the white of the land, and followed their comrades to the distant taiga. The thick blanket of snow muffled their movements, and the storm, Cordell hoped, covered their advance. As more and more of the grim men passed him into the grayness, he began to wonder if he had misunderstood the Colonel’s earlier directions to wait for his return before starting out.

Then, from among the advancing troops, the Colonel trudged to Cordell’s side, snow whirling and eddying between the two men. The Colonel squinted in the breeze, lines forming around his eyes like ice cracking, and said through bearded lips, “I am glad you held up. I was forced to stay longer with one of my units because of a disciplinary problem.”

Cordell lowered his muffler and said, “Don’t worry about it, Colonel,” then, “Which way do we go?”

“We follow the river north, keeping west of Gorodov until we reach the taiga…” he paused a moment, rubbing his chin, “…about three miles north of the town. Then we ‘dig in’, as you say, in the forest.”

“So we’re not going through the town of Gorodov after all?”

“No, the Russian units to our right moving up the Itirsh will capture it. There will be less confusion since my men do not speak the language.”

Cordell was disappointed. He had hoped to move through the town and talk to some of the local people. Especially with scare stories of a Cheka “red terror” campaign in the Bolshevik-held areas.

“Come, we must hurry to reach the head of my column. It will not do to have my men leaderless in an encounter with the damn Bolsheviks.” With that, the Colonel dragged his bulk over the wall, taking a shower of snow and rocks with him. On the other side, he took his rifle from his shoulder and held it in front of him as if it were a pike. A glance behind him sent Cordell over the wall in a bound. The snow immediately in front of him was hard-packed with the passage of countless men, men who were still streaming over the wall. “Follow as best you can, my friend, for the damn Bolsheviks will not wait for us to begin the battle.”

He said it with such joviality that Cordell wondered whether he wanted to go back to his homeland at all. And the way he kept using the word “damn,” as if he thought it an ordinary American word, a common adjective like “dirty” or “sneaky;” well, it was, sort of. Cordell smiled. Should he tell the Colonel of his error, or let him revel in his belief in his knowledge of American slang? What difference did it make? A man had few enough delusions out here anyway…why spoil it for him?

Men were all around him now, walking forward instinctively crouched, guns at the ready, bayonets tilted down a bit. The footprints he had been following for the past few hours were now knee deep, and the cracks forming in the settling ice of the Tavda River sounded like gunshots in the silence. More than once, Cordell had thrown himself into the driving snow at the sound, only to have the Colonel pick him up by the collar of his parka. He was saved from humiliation by the sight of dozens of other men lifting themselves from various drifts. Everyone was on edge now. According to the Colonel, they had passed the town and were approaching the brooding wood of the taiga.

Then the Colonel signaled him to his side, and in a cloud of breath pointed to the horizon. “I don’t see a thing,” said Cordell, lowering his muffler.

“Keep looking; there,” insisted the Colonel, pointing.

Cordell began to speak again, then stopped. There was something there. But in the thickly driving snow all was gray; then he seemed to see a dim outline, a shade darker than the surrounding gray, dim forms that towered over his head.

“Come,” said the Colonel, a friendly hand on his back.

In a few steps, Cordell could make out what the shapes were. Monstrous pines stood huge across the land, stretching into the distance on either side; which was not so far in this storm. Cordell could not believe he had not seen them earlier, since the boughs were already over his head when the Colonel first brought the trees to his attention.

Soon the massive boles were all around, great sweeping branches weighted with snow, sweeping to the ground. The slight breeze was enough to clear the snow away from the base of the trunks, creating hollow bowls that quickly filled with tired men. It was a fairy tale landscape that made the war seem remote and unimportant.

The sounds of the men were more audible now in the closeness of the forest; soldiers lay here and there throughout the wood, it seemed, their weapons trained before them, eyes straining to see deeper into the taiga. Now and then a rifle shot reverberated among the boles, disturbing the snow higher up in the trees. The men were nervous and Cordell understood why: the forest had a life of its own. Not a sentient sort of life, but a feeling, a mood. A will of its own. Cordell shook the feeling physically and heard the Colonel’s voice bellow hollowly, giving orders to his men. Then he approached Cordell and said, “This is as far as we go. Come, we will sit beneath this pine.” It was the largest tree in sight; somehow it seemed fitting for the Colonel.

“Is this as far as we go?” reiterated Cordell as he followed the Colonel.

“For now, my friend; break off some of these rotten branches.” He gave one a yank and, though it snapped with little resistance, it proved not to be rotted.

“I thought we were supposed to see some action during this advance.” Cordell dropped the sticks he had collected near the base of the tree.

“We were, but the Bolsheviks must have discovered our plans and pulled back. It has happened before. Maybe the Russian unit on our flank ran into something in the town.” The Colonel kneeled to arrange the branches. Cordell sat against the curve of the trunk and pulled his blanket from his roll. The Colonel hunched closer to the faggots and started a fire. “Let us find out about the town, eh?”

With that he lurched to his feet, cupped his hands to his mouth and called off into the distance. Cordell recognized the guttural sounds of Russian as they poured from the Colonel’s throat, then a flurry of answering calls from deep in the forest to his right, behind the tree. At first a few voices answered in chaotic unity, but then only a single one remained. Cordell recognized it the Russian language and, with the comparison, was able to pick up the Colonel’s Czech accent. Then he realized that the disembodied voice was quite animated and repeated often a certain word. Cordell fumbled in his inner pocket for his pencil and pad and listened for the word again. There it was… Ithaqua. The word seemed to be picked up farther back by the other Russians. The Colonel stopped abruptly and lowered his hands. He settled around the fire and said, “That unit passed through the town; they said there was no resistance. But there were some strange findings.”

“Like what?” Cordell leaned forward eagerly.

“Footprints all over the place and no bodies,” said the Colonel almost matter-of-factly. “It sounds like Cheka doings to me.”

“What was that word they kept repeating?”

The Colonel turned away his face. “Nothing.”

“Nothing? Not the way they were saying it. What word was it?”

The Colonel’s eyes, blazed under his massive eyebrows, his mouth a thin line in his beard, but Cordell was not noticing.

“Ithaqua.”

The two men’s eyes met. For a moment, Cordell thought he saw something there. “Just a Cheka unit, but that is enough.”

“I’d like to see the town. Will you take me?”

“I must remain here; an attack may come any time.”

“Then I’ll go alone. Where is it?”

“Are you Americans all so stupid? You would never find it alone in this country.”

“I’ll ask directions along the way.”

The Colonel laughed then. “Ha! You are a stubborn one, my friend. Almost as stubborn as a wife I once…well, never mind, we will leave in the morning.”

The fire crackled.

The snow had gone with the clouds during the night, leaving the sky for the sun as it traced a short arc across the heavens. Cordell squinted in the light and raised his hand to shade his eyes. He could see the low buildings of the little town of Gorodov just ahead of them. It had taken a bit longer to cover the three miles from the forest to the town than the Colonel had guessed. Cordell looked at the Colonel’s bearded profile as they high-stepped in the knee-deep snow. His face seemed like a thing of stone chiseled in eternal grimness. Was there something in the town the Colonel would rather not face? Had he seen once too often the handiwork of the Cheka? Cordell thought it a likely possibility and said, “You didn’t have to come to the town with me, you know.”

“I know,” said the Colonel without turning.

Cordell shrugged and stepped onto the snow-covered road, followed by the Colonel. The road was nothing more than a hard-packed path into the town punctuated by an occasional glimpse of wagon wheel tracks. There would not be any incriminating footprints here. Hundreds of advancing troops had long since effaced every evidence of them. As the two approached the town, soldiers could be seen walking about or gathered before numerous campfires. The town itself was nothing more than a collection of a score or more of run-down, two-story buildings. Most of the community lived in tiny ramshackle huts outside in the countryside, tending their sparse herds of goats or sheep. Deep drifts of snow were everywhere, with impossible amounts of it heaped high on the rooftops. Cordell marveled that the old buildings had not yet collapsed under the weight.

He could see no sign of the townspeople either in the road or peeking through frosted windows. Surely not everyone could be gone.

Cordell saw that the Colonel had one foot on the cracked step of what looked like an old sheriff’s office. He hurried over to the Colonel as he stepped into the dark of the building. Entering the room, Cordell was blinded for a few minutes by the contrast in the intensity of light from the outside snow and the dim firelight in the room. He closed the rickety door behind him, feeling waves of warmth wash over him as he did so. He heard the crackling of the fire from somewhere in front of him, matched by the creaking of the sagging floor beneath. As his eyes adjusted to the light, he heard a strange voice say something in Russian accompanied by the Colonel’s name; then the Colonel’s reply. His eyes had fully recovered by the time the two men faced him and the Colonel said, “Mr. Cordell, this is Major Doskolva, commander of this unit; Major, this is Mr. Cordell, an American reporter,” he finished in Russian. The major extended his hand and Cordell shook it firmly.

“How do you do, Major,” said Cordell, forgetting that the major did not speak English.

The major motioned to an old table as he released Cordell’s hand and walked over to a shoulder bag that rested on its surface. In another moment, he had produced an unlabeled bottle of clear liquid.

“Vodka!” exclaimed the Colonel, as he dragged a chair to the table.

What followed was an animated two-way conversation in Russian by two men as the vodka was shared liberally among all three.

Cordell tried in vain to catch even a single familiar word of the conversation until resigning himself to the bliss in the bottle. Then, as the fire in the chimney died down, the major rose and took his coat from a peg behind the door. The Colonel had risen also, and said, “Come, my friend, Major Doskolva will show us some interesting things about the town.”

As Cordell shrugged into his parka and jammed his hands into his gloves, the Colonel had stepped through the door where, outside, the wind had picked up again.

Cordell closed the door shut behind him and waded through the snow that had piled up since they entered the building. The wind whistled inside the hood of his parka and stung his face with stray flakes of snow.

“Major Doskolva had some interesting things to say,” said the Colonel, nodding toward the major’s back.

“I figured that out by myself. What exactly did he say?”

“Well, his unit was to capture the town and sweep northward on our right flank. But upon reaching it, his men found no resistance and, after carefully searching the village, they moved on.” Cordell sensed an almost imperceptible pause in the Colonel’s story, who then continued. “Major Doskolva found that everyone in the town had disappeared, perhaps fearing reprisals on our part, leaving even their newly cooked meals on the tables and fires still burning in their grates. But, strangest of all, everywhere about the town his men discovered scattered footprints; not the disordered variety left by fleeing or herded people, but well spaced and well formed ones of calm and deliberate leave-taking.” The Colonel looked sidelong at Cordell for a few seconds then turned away.

“Anything else?”

“Later, upon questioning his men, Major Doskolva heard stories that upon entering the town, the men swore that each footprint seemed tinged with a light, red color, almost like blood, and that the farther they got from the village, the farther apart each person’s prints became.”

“Farther apart?” Visions of the success of the Rupert murder story danced in Cordell’s mind.

“Yes, as the prints of a bounding deer increase in length.” The Colonel did not turn his head at all this time.

“But with this snowfall only hours old, the villagers couldn’t have had more than minutes or even seconds to leave the town before advance elements of the major’s units entered the village.”

The Colonel offered no explanation.

“No problem,” said Cordell with some triumph. “I see it now. The townspeople themselves, in order to discourage a search, left everything as if they intended to return. Of course, that doesn’t explain the strange tinges on the prints, but the people around these parts still harbor strange beliefs, so who knows?”

“Yes,” said the Colonel, almost under his breath. “Strange beliefs. And what about the distances between the footprints?”

Cordell stopped short, his theory shattered. “That’s right. Those spacings. But can we accept the hearsay evidence of some half-educated soldiers?”

“You are taking the word of one in Major Doskolva.”

“Oh. I’m sorry, Colonel, I didn’t mean…” He let the sentence fade and the Colonel nodded, understanding,

“Then if we didn’t do it and the Cheka didn’t do it, and the villagers themselves couldn’t have done it, then who did? And why?”

The Colonel looked at Cordell and murmured, “Perhaps you supplied the answer earlier.” With that, he passed into a narrow alley between two buildings where the major had gone seconds before.

Cordell wondered at the Colonel’s last remarks. What did he mean…he had already answered his question? Cordell resolved to review in his mind their conversation as he followed the two men into the alley.

Beyond the buildings and the village proper, Cordell saw the two soldiers bending low over something in the deeply driven snow. As he came closer, he noticed that the clear field was dotted by hundreds of footprints radiating in every direction. Coming abreast of the men he squatted beside the Colonel as he indicated the print before them. It was roundish, more like a hoof than a human print. Cordell saw that even a quickly running man could not have left such an oddly deformed impression. Beyond that peculiarity, at the Colonel’s pointing finger, he saw the faint, almost undetectable reddish halo surrounding the print. For minutes, Cordell did not know what to think, but slowly, unbidden, a chill born of something other than the icy wind crept along his spine. He rose abruptly as much to dispel the odd uneasiness he felt as to stretch his tired legs.

The Colonel rose to face him a moment before pointing downwind, away from the village. “The next print is…there. A full ten yards from this one, and the next doubtless in the forest another fifteen yards farther on.”

Before Cordell could reply, a young officer ran up to them, black against the moving snow behind him. The major stood and relieved the officer of the note he had been carrying.

Cordell and the Colonel waited as Major Doskolva read the paper in his hands. In another moment he said something to the Colonel. When he had finished, the Colonel looked at his feet.

“Well?” asked Cordell, wondering at the Colonel’s hesitation.

The Colonel looked up slowly and said, “Major Doskolva has just received a report that scores of his Russian regulars have disappeared since last night without a trace. Especially those belonging to the unit that had passed through Gorodov.”

“Desertions? The pressure lately hasn’t been that great,” mused Cordell.

“Perhaps, but after searching their positions, commanders report finding strangely shaped footprints leading from the trenches off into the forest.” The Colonel looked down again, then threw back his shoulders and stepped off in the direction of the town.

Cordell ran after the Colonel, the cold like a physical thing. “Colonel, wait, what’s wrong?”

The Colonel continued on his way, the major now forgotten in the field. “Nothing, my friend; it is time to return to my units.”

“Listen, Colonel,” pleaded Cordell. “I know how you must feel about all this. But the Cheka doesn’t discriminate between ordinary people, soldiers, or even nobility. Look at what they did to the Czar and his family up at Ekaterinburg.”

Cordell was not prepared for the officer’s sudden halt and even less for his next comment. “You do not see at all, do you?”

Cordell was puzzled. “See what?”

“You think all this is simply another murder for you to write about. You are not in America any longer. You are in the Old Country; and here the old ways, the old things, still cling. Yes, the old beliefs, too, live in the forest, the mountains, and the steppes.” He stopped there, his body visibly relaxing. “Come, let us go back.”

Cordell was not sure what the Colonel had been talking about, but he was sure that it had something to do with his sullen behavior in the last few hours. All the way back to the Czech lines, Cordell reviewed their conversation, seeking a clue to the Colonel’s new disposition. Earlier he had said that Cordell had already answered his question regarding the perpetration of the disappearances. What had he said? Something about strange beliefs. Yes, that went well with the Colonel’s final comments about the Old Country and old beliefs. Certainly he was not trying to foist superstition on him? Yet the strange circumstances surrounding the whole episode lent themselves to it. Then it hit him: did it all have something to do with Ithaqua? Yes, that was when the Colonel had first begun to behave strangely. Cordell decided to keep his conclusions to himself, though. After all, he could be wrong and he did not want to be made into a laughingstock with these crazy ideas.

When the two men at last returned to the Czech positions, the wind had almost abated and the soldiers actually began to look comfortable. Countless fires burned warmly in the many hollows of drifted snow and trenches had been chopped from the frozen ground. Cordell and the Colonel settled down near their large tree after the Colonel had deftly relit the fire. Cordell reached in his coat for his pad and pencil and began catching up on his journal as the Colonel received a few reports from his officers.

Suddenly, the Colonel shot upright and asked an officer a series of sharp questions. Cordell had torn himself away from his entry as the Colonel finished his questioning.

“What’s the matter?” asked Cordell.

“This officer reports the discovery of many bodies heaped deeper in the forest.” He looked off beyond the line of men in the trenches, as if trying to pierce the thick woods and see the bodies from where he was sitting.

“They might be the bodies of the townspeople!” exclaimed Cordell jumping to his feet.

“Yes, perhaps.” A hint of animation came to the Colonel’s lips as if, Cordell thought, he anticipated the fulfillment of some hope.

“Come, we will see this atrocity.”

Cordell kept himself from looking too eager as he gathered his things and followed the Colonel and his officer and a small detachment of soldiers as they marched into the dim forest made dimmer now by the setting sun.

But now, the lengthening shadows had suddenly raised doubts in Cordell’s mind about the timing of their expedition. “Colonel, do you think it might be getting a little late for an investigation?”

“It will only take a few minutes. My officer says it is just beyond this stand of trees.” Once again Cordell thought he sensed anticipation in the Colonel’s response. As if it was something he had to do, one way or the other. Cordell thought back to the man’s earlier remarks and suddenly felt himself weighed down by some gigantic force. Something seemed to impede his forward motion, as if trying to keep him back, trying to separate him from the others?

The forest grew darker toward dusk as the small procession made its way through the needle-strewn snow; the trees marching slowly by in nightmare procession. The Czech soldiers swung their heads nervously from side to side, fingering their cold rifles. Finally the officer halted and pointed to a black and white heap in the center of a small clearing; bunches of dried grasses ringed the mound, poking through the snow that had not been blown away in the earlier wind. It seemed to Cordell that even the elements shunned the forest.

The party had stopped at the sound of the officer’s voice. Slowly, the Colonel advanced toward the strangely flat pile, his head leaning far forward of his body, his rifle dipped low to the ground. Examining the pile closely, he straightened and Cordell moved into the clearing himself. He had awaited only the unspoken desire of the commanding officer to inspect the site first.

The soldiers had spread to different points around the clearing, eyes keenly peering in the darkening wood for sign of the enemy, the hems of their greatcoats dusty with snow. A soft sigh of wind moved the trees to song, the opening in the roof of the forest showing brightening stars. The sky and the trees, blue on black. Cordell thought he had better take a quick look so they could leave fast.

For some time, he had realized that the black in the white was that of bodies heaped together and covered by a thick veil of snow. He stopped at the edge of the pile and saw that it was the shoddy clothes of the villagers lying in a grotesque mound. He tried to observe the faces of the people to cement their reality in his mind, if only to certify their existence. It was then he noted something strange. The clothes were lying in heaps placed together, trousers to shirts, shirts inside of coats, stockings in their boots, all lying about like carelessly thrown bodies, except that the clothes were empty. Cordell looked up as the queerness of it struck him. Even the Cheka would not have bothered to be so meticulous, even if they had had the time, which they had not.

“No footprints,” said the Colonel.

Cordell’s head snapped to the side, and he realized that the Colonel had been looking at him all the time. Quickly, Cordell looked around the clearing and saw that indeed, there were no footprints except those leading back to their lines…those they had formed themselves.

The Colonel stepped forward, within the circle of the disturbing heap. Cordell watched him with morbid curiosity. The Colonel was poking at the upper sets of clothes with the toes of his boot, shaking loose the snow that had lodged in the folds of the cloth. With a high swing of his leg, the Colonel threw over, almost to Cordell’s feet, a shower of the topmost items. Cordell jumped back instinctively, still watching the Colonel. The big Czech stood amid the riot of dark raiment, silhouetted against the snow at his back like some guardian spirit pointing at Cordell’s feet. Cordell dragged his gaze from the soldier and looked down at the scattered pieces of clothing and saw brass buttons peek around folds, markings of rank on some of the shoulders and a Russian rifle lying stark against the snow. Cordell looked up slowly, recognition in his eyes. “The uniforms of the deserters from the Russian units.”

The Colonel laughed then, not long; half out of amusement, half pity. “My friend, do you not yet see? Those men did not desert, just as the villagers did not run away. They were literally spirited away.” The Colonel picked his way from the heap and moved to the edge of the clearing. He stared hard into the gloom of the surrounding forest, as if searching for something, then said, “You said one time that people in this part of the world still believed in strange things. That is true. There are some things that will never change; so long as one man yet believes in them, they will survive.

“In my country, some people believe in a thing called Orzuti. Most people, of course, do not, but those that dwell in the wooded mountains do. So they build things to ward it off, things like houses of the dead where sheep are sacrificed. And some say it works.” He continued to stare.

Everything fell into place now, thought Cordell, but how could he believe any of it?

The Colonel continued.

“My village deep in the woods of my homeland built these things for thousands of years, and still did after I had gone. Whether or not the things worked to keep the Orzuti away, I do not know. But I do know that to acknowledge his existence by saying his name aloud would bring him surely to your door. For this reason, no man ever spoke the name of Orzuti aloud.

“I suspect it is the same here in Siberia. That this Ithaqua is a cousin of the forest spirit in my homeland.”

Cordell said, not believing he was treating the whole thing seriously, “Yes, I covered a story in Canada many years ago where my guide, a Monsieur Defago, spoke of an Indian deity called the Wendigo. The Indians, he said, sometimes built funeral scaffolds against it. Perhaps these beliefs were carried over from Asia to North America in prehistoric times across the Bering Sea land bridge.” A pause. “So you think that the villagers must have used the thing’s name in vain, so to speak, and it whisked them away?”

“Yes.”

“And the soldiers the other night, too?”

“Yes.”

“Hey, wait a minute, I spoke this creature’s name aloud then. Why didn’t it come after me?” Despite himself, Cordell felt some relief that he had dispelled the legend so easily.

“One must say its name aloud and in belief to summon him. You did not, and still do not, believe Ithaqua lives.”

Suddenly, it flashed through Cordell’s mind. “Wait a second, you just used his name. Twice now! And obviously, you believe…”

“Exactly. For too long I have shied away from it, but I cannot long stand by as the creature destroys my men and those of the Whites.”

Cordell circled the clearing in the opposite direction from that of the Colonel. The dark trees wheeled in the periphery of his vision as he said, “You’re going to conjure up this thing, this Ithaqua, to kill it?” He never took his eyes away from the Colonel.

“That is correct, my friend.”

“With me here?” Cordell fought a tremor in his voice.

“Certainly; you are a correspondent, are you not?”

“Yes, but that doesn’t mean I’m a fool.” At that moment, it was an assertion that Cordell desperately wanted to believe. He was a rational man; there was no such thing as an Ithaqua! The alternative was too ridiculous, too terrible even, to contemplate.

“Are we not all fools at one time or another? I, fighting a war that has nothing to do with my country, so far from anywhere? You, risking your life simply to acquire a story, as if what we do here is merely a game?”

The Colonel fell silent then, circling the clearing, staring into the woods. Then, from deep in the forest, Cordell heard the familiar sloughing sound of snow slipping from a tree branch. This time, the sound ended with an unusually heavy thump as the snow struck the ground. He glanced at the Colonel quickly, in time to see him step between the trees in the direction of the noise.

Warily, Cordell went after the Colonel, following his big footprints in the snow as they wound between the trees. At last he saw him ahead, looking down at something. Cordell stumbled up to where he stood and looked down as well. At first, he was puzzled at the sight of the naked body that lay before him. Then, he noticed its feet and his puzzlement turned to terror. He staggered back, hands reaching out for the support of a tree.

“This poor soul must have been one of the villagers,” guessed the Colonel. “When Ithaqua comes striding across the land, he takes up his victims in his windy arms and carries them off across the world to deposit them again in their own country; hours, sometimes days later. The others are…”

Cordell followed the Colonel’s gaze upward, and in the trees overhead, he saw a number of amorphous white blobs hanging in broken heaps among the branches. After seeing the condition of the corpse on the ground before him, Cordell thanked God he was not able to see the things in the trees with any detail.

Then, a distant swish and thumps coming from deeper in the woods brought his attention back to the present where the Colonel was just concluding his unfinished sentence: “…leaves them their bodies, but takes their lives.”

As if on cue, the wind sighed through the dark trees and the stars seemed to shimmer and fade. The forest protested the rising wind with a flurry of creaks and rustles. Snow fell from the upper branches and struck Cordell over the head. Startled, he lost his nerve then and ran back to the clearing. Arriving there, he suddenly realized that he was alone except for the empty pieces of clothing; the soldiers had managed to slip away. He felt a great weight heavy on his shoulders, forcing him to the ground; he fell to one knee, a hand wrist-deep in powdery, swirling whiteness. He struggled, wobbling to his feet; he took one faltering step, quick and strong; lifting his foot mere inches from the ground and slamming it down hard only inches away, just as a man would with an impossibly heavy load to carry. The wind was a howling whirlwind now. Snow and pine needles stung his face; loose clothes whipped themselves about his feet, seeking to drag him down.

Crushed to the ground, the force of the wind seemed to become even more fierce; his fur cap was dragged from his head and his muffler threatened to choke him. Weakly, he struggled to pull the scarf away until finally managing to get it off.

Shutting his eyes against the slashing wind, he tried to open them again, his eyelashes like black bars imprisoning his vision…or protecting him from the intrusion of a persistent thing that the Colonel had called Ithaqua. The black trees that towered above him seemed to shimmer and sway as if viewed from beneath the surface of the sea; the stars were gone, hidden from sight by a whirling, twisting cyclone of snow, tree limbs, pine needles and bits of clothing that were swept from the ground and up to the treetops and back again. Meanwhile, the wind, like countless tiny fingers, kept pulling and tugging at his own clothes and from the midst of the whirling pillar of debris a shape seemed to be forming.

It bulged and billowed, its outline at the mercy of the ravening wind. It grew huge and then dissipated, reassembled and grew huge again; it had shape and substance and yet was insubstantial too. The vision prompted Cordell to renew his struggle to escape but all he succeeded in doing was to pin his arms beneath his body. Slowly, the thing moved over him, enveloping him, and it was then he began to feel a different kind of tugging. Not the wind pulling at his clothes, but something felt inside him. He felt his personality slipping away, whatever it was that made him Mathias Cordell and no one else, and suddenly, his mind opened up and he thought he saw the yawning emptiness of eternity stretching out before him.

The vision inspired a new desperation in him. He found new reservoirs of strength he did not know he had and gradually, he began to lift himself from the ground, against the continued force of that mighty wind. Suddenly, his hand felt the hard leather of his holster. The snap had prevented the pistol inside from being dragged away. More with instinct than active thought, he undid the snap and took the pistol into his hand. Raising it in the direction of the nebulous form that continued to occupy the center of the whirling cyclone, he fired the gun in the direction of the ghostly form. There were a number of explosions from the gun before the clicking sounds of empty chambers were all that was left and in that instant Cordell realized that nothing remained between himself and the wind-creature that was once again moving to envelop him in its terrible embrace. Once again, he found himself being drawn outward, slipping, slipping, his mouth open in wordless, useless protest as the wind continued to whine in his ears.

Then something stepped between him and the wind thing. Whatever it was, it spoke, and from its throat emerged a string of guttural, barking noises, spat out like unclean things that had been swallowed and needed to be regurgitated:

Iä! Iä! Ithaqua, Ithaqua! Ai! Ai! Ai! Ithaqua f’ayak
vulgt-mm vugthlaghn vulgtmm. Ithaqua fhtagn! Ugh!
Iä! Iä! Ithaqua Iglucks fah’tn! Ai! Ai! Ai!

The sounds seemed to anger whatever it was in the wind. The speed of cyclonic forces increased in tempo and Cordell was forced to protect his eyes against the driven snow, pine needles, and dust that had been scoured from the exposed earth.

When at last he was able to see again, the trees around him were still whipping about and there were a number of sharp cracks indicating the splintering of mighty branches deep in the forest. The debris-filled cyclone still moved near the center of the clearing but now seemed to be winding down as the sound of snapping trees ceased and were replaced by the creaking of massive trunks that sounded more like the death rattle of some titanic beast.

And then, finally, all was still.

Cordell still crouched in the position he had assumed when he began firing his pistol into the wind: his eyes staring ahead along the length of his upraised arm, the gun still in his hand.

“Come, my friend, the battle is done.” The Colonel lifted him to his feet. “The recitation of certain sounds sent the creature back to its prison — for a time at least.”

“Then I didn’t just dream the whole thing?” Cordell asked, still recovering from his experience.

“Perhaps we both did; after all, one man’s belief is another’s superstition. Who is to say, if another man had been here, he would have seen the same as we, if anything? It is a tenuous thing, belief. Do the old gods really exist, only gone until another believer summons them forth? Like Ithaqua, one must believe in order to be threatened. Is belief, then, born of fear? To think a being such as man must be at once superior to all other creatures and yet so insecure!”

As he felt the Colonel’s strong arm beneath his shoulders, Cordell thought once more about the big Czech…was he only what he appeared to be, or was there something more to him? He had once seen a look in the colonel’s eyes and now, seeing it again, he recognized it.

It was the look of someone who was slipping…slipping…

ched Omsk.

Zzzzzzzz!

arrived home late that night after a hectic day at the office and had it in mind to hit the sack early after a quick drink. A prosaic opening to a tale whose implications hold dire tidings for the future of the human race…but despite the number of years that have passed since the events it describes, I still find myself struggling to come to terms with them.

Anyway, before I could fix myself the nightcap, I noticed there was a personal letter in among the bills and junk mail I’d received in the post that day.

I saw by the various stamped labels that it had been sent originally to my previous address in New Jersey where I had lived until almost ten years before, when job requirements forced me to leave there and relocate to Manhattan. Whoever sent me the message, then, must have been someone who hadn’t been in touch with me for quite some time. Tearing the envelope open, I pulled free the message and was surprised to find that it had been sent by my uncle, Giles Wilcox, the anthropologist and well-known explorer. Maybe you’ve heard of his greatest discovery, the jaw bone of Selenga Man that proved the existence of the fabled lost people of the Mongolian high country that vanished almost one hundred thousand years ago? No? Understandable. His field was rather specialized. Among his other accomplishments were his explorations of the upper Amazon jungle, the discovery of the hidden crypt of Prince Tunka-Re in the Valley of Kings in Egypt, and the excavations in the lower Gobi Desert of the hidden city of Chin.

As a result of his travels, my principal recollections of Uncle Giles’ old house was that it was crammed with strange artifacts he’d collected from all over the world. I’d spent a bit of time there in my childhood and remember the house being swathed in shadows with relics of dead civilizations and objects of blasphemous and questionable origins littering every room and hallway. There were vaulted ceilings supported by heavy oaken beams that gave rooms an oppressive, claustrophobic atmosphere, and a massive fireplace on the ground floor that was shaped in the form of cyclopean jaws gaping wide with a grate like bared fangs and a fire like the fires of Hades burning in its gullet.

My thoughts returning to the letter in my hand, I found that I was being urged to come to visit my uncle at his house at once, but without stating any specific reason. However, whatever the reason was, I suspected that it would have to be pretty important for my uncle to suddenly have need of me after so many years.

More out of curiosity, I think, than out of a genuine desire to help, I decided to leave immediately. I packed a suitcase and bought a ticket on the next train bound for Woodhaven, New York. That night was a largely sleepless one as I spent hours going over the possible reasons for my uncle’s summons. Perplexed, but eager to find out more, I finally fell asleep just before dawn.

It was approaching evening the next day when the train pulled into the region around Woodhaven. Its dense, silent woods threatened to encroach upon the few ramshackle farms that dotted the landscape and the low hills with their mysterious cairns built in the times of the Indians looked down upon the countryside with a sort of primeval decadence that lay heavily upon this isolated area of the state.

The sun was all but down when I finally deboarded and found myself upon a short length of platform where a faded sign declared that the stop was indeed the Woodhaven station. Looking at the sign, I realized the wind had begun to pick up and the rustling of the trees that lined the railroad tracks whispered suggestively in the growing twilight.

The station doubled as Woodhaven’s Post Office and after checking the ranks of mail boxes inside, I found one labeled with my uncle’s name and address. Apparently, his house lay about a mile or two up the road and, finding no transportation about, I decided to walk the rest of the way. I’d only been walking for a few minutes before I heard the creak of a wagon coming up behind me. Turning, I saw an old man in faded overalls and work shirt sitting atop an old buckboard coming up the road. The swaybacked horses pulling the wagon looked none too reliable but when the old codger pulled up alongside me and asked if I wanted a lift, I decided to accept his offer.

After he’d judged that I’d had enough time to get used to the wagon’s hard seat, the old man spoke up.

“Where yer headed fer young fella?” he said from amidst a scraggly beard.

“To my uncle’s house a mile or so up the road.”

“An’ who might he be?”

“Giles Wilcox.”

“Oh? He lost his wife a coupla weeks back, mebbe yer comin’ fer thet?” He sounded mildly interested, but I sensed some curiosity behind the words.

The news of a deceased spouse though, came as quite a surprise to me; I hadn’t known my uncle had married. With my own curiosity aroused but reluctant to reveal that I wasn’t up on family business, I decided to play along with the old man a bit.

“I was sent a telegram inviting me to come,” I said. “Uncle Giles didn’t go into any details. Did you know his wife?”

The old man thought for a minute then, apparently deciding that his response would do no harm, said, “Not exactly. She wasn’t a local girl. Don’t know how she died. Just that she did. We all saw the coffin bein’ shown in his den before he had her buried behind the house. Thet was a few weeks ago naow. A terrible thing, it happening on their weddin’ night an all.”

“She died on the very day of the wedding?” I asked, more shocked than ever. “And you have no idea how she died?”

“Well, thet there’s the mystery,” said the old man. “She fell down the stairs they say. She lived fer two days after th’ accident. There weren’t any marks on ‘er, though. ‘Course, some wags in town say she was poisoned, others thet she kilt ‘erself. Hell, I don’t know, ask yer uncle.”

I grunted some neutral reply, not wanting to get into what the local gossips were saying. But the news that my uncle, who’d always been what used to be called a confirmed bachelor, was married, even briefly, certainly was interesting news and made me all the more intrigued about my invitation.

The old man quieted after a while and soon deposited me at the end of a wooded road that led back into the forest. Standing at the entrance, suitcase in hand, I could see that the trees had been allowed to grow so far into the roadway that in some places they threatened to choke it off completely. Not without some trepidation, I began walking up the path, half expecting to be jumped by some denizen of the woods before arriving at a gate that led into a weed-infested courtyard. The old house loomed large across the clearing, crowded and almost hidden by saplings and overgrown shrubbery that had remained untrimmed for years. Clearly, my uncle had been negligent beyond ordinary neglect. He’d always kept his properties as clean and orderly as an archeological dig but now, trees were prying up the flagstones in the courtyard and the fence that surrounded the yard was falling apart. Ivy crawled over everything so that as I approached the door, I was hard pressed even to find the bell-push. Waiting for an answer, I noticed that the house itself hadn’t been painted in years and that shingles lying on the ground indicated that the roof was in need of repair as well. The branches of the old oak trees that dotted the encroaching forest began to squeak and protest in a rising wind that bore a hin

Just then, the door opened revealing a tall man standing just inside the shadowed foyer. I recognized him nonetheless as my uncle’s butler, Bruce.

“Hello, Bruce; don’t know if you remember me, but —”

“But of course master Simon. Please step inside,” he said gravely, moving aside to let me in.

“How’s Uncle Giles?” I asked without preamble.

“Not too well I’m afraid,” Bruce replied. “He’s been acting very peculiar recently.”

“Oh? When did this begin?”

“Shortly after his marriage, as a matter of fact. A condition that’s only accelerated since Mistress Ruth’s untimely death a few weeks ago.”

“I understand she died the night of their wedding; it must have been a great shock to Uncle Giles.”

“It’s not my place to say, Master Simon, but if I may, I suspect his feelings have less to do with the suddenness of his wife’s death than the strange circumstances surrounding it.”

“Strange circumstances?” I asked, recalling my conversation with the old man on the road. “What actually happened Bruce; Uncle Giles never even mentioned that he was married in his letter to me. There seems to be an air of mystery surrounding the whole relationship with his wife.”

“The master has never been one to talk about his personal life with anyone,” said Bruce. “But I’m sure he deeply mourns the loss of his wife and would surely not want to profane her death by having it publicized. If you want any more information than that, I’m afraid you’ll have to ask him yourself.”

“Of course. I wouldn’t want you to abuse your position as an employee.”

“Thank you, sir. And now your bag sir?”

“Oh, sure.”

Bruce led the way up the curving staircase to the shadow haunted rooms above, our feet making little noise as we walked along the carpeted stairs and hallways. Suddenly, the silence was broken by the patter of raindrops against the rank of large windows that lined the north face of the house. Distantly, the rumble of thunder echoed in the distant hills and as the rain tossed patterns against the inner walls, we passed a door from beneath which a yellow light creeped into the hall.

“Is there someone else visiting besides me, Bruce?” I asked, hooking a thumb at the door.

“A Mr. Sean Stout, actually, a former colleague of your Uncle’s. Mr. Stout is here seeking your uncle’s advice on some carvings he discovered on the L’isle Mystere. No doubt your uncle will fill you in on the subject at dinner…ah. Here’s your room Master Simon.”

Bruce pulled out a wad of keys and a moment later had pushed a door inward, the scent of freshly cleaned linen and floor wax exhaling from the interior of the room. “I trust you’ll find everything in order.”

“No problem, Bruce…this is the same room I used on my last visit if I’m not mistaken…”

“You have a good memory, Master Simon,” Bruce replied.

Inside, the room was just as I remembered it, like the set for the castle in the old Bela Lugosi Dracula film: the overstuffed upholstery, the expansive bed with its overhead canopy, the cedar chest with its accompanying washbowl, pitcher and towel and, of course, the full length mirror with its teak border and frosted edges. And how could I forget the mysterious oriental rug with its curious and vaguely obscene pattern? Suddenly, the shadows that seemed to have followed me in to the room were momentarily chased away as the sky outside was split by a great bolt of lightning. It did the same for the outdoors, revealing the crown of a small hill set in the midst of surrounding woodland. When the light had vanished, I was left with the after-image of tombstones scattered about the hill’s slopes. I shuddered to think of my uncle’s wife being buried out there with the unknowns. I called them that when I was a boy, because no one knew who the unfortunates buried out there were. When my uncle had bought the property years before, it came with its own burial ground. When I asked him once, who was buried up there, he told me he’d tried to find out but no records existed beyond the curious inscriptions carved into some of the stones and what might be learned from the old cairns covering a few of the grave sites.

With the darkness of dusk once more covering the land, I turned back to my suitcase and began to unpack my things, an impression of oppression and evil suddenly hovering in the air. When I’d finished, I laid down on the bed and stared up at the canopy without really seeing it. Instead, I began to think over what I’d discovered since arriving in Woodhaven.

Why had my uncle decided to summon me after all these years? What, if any, were the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of his wife? Why was the mansion in such a sorry state? Who was Sean Stout and was it a coincidence that he was visiting my uncle at the same time I was? All of that and more swirled in my muddled brain; all that and the vision of the hill outside with its ghastly fill. Did it, beneath its noxious soils, hold the answers to my questions?

I was in a light sleep when I was awoken by a soft rapping at the door. When I answered it, I found Bruce silhouetted in the door frame, his figure stark in the persistent flashes of lightning.

“Dinner will be served in half an hour Master Simon,” he said, a clap of thunder punctuating his announcement. “The Master wishes me to inform you that you need not dress formally for the occasion.”

“Thanks, Bruce. I’ll be right down.”

“Very well, sir,” he said and was turning to retrace his steps to the staircase, when I thought of something else.

“Oh, Bruce…?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Will Mr. Stout be coming down?”

“Why, of course sir. Did you expect him to eat in the kitchen with me?”

“No, no, what I meant was, that maybe Uncle Giles would have wanted to dine with me in private to discuss his reasons for sending for me.”

“I don’t know when he intends to talk to you about that Master Simon, but likely it won’t be tonight.”

“Yes, well, thank you.”

Bruce turned on his heel and strode into the shadows almost before I could dismiss him. I noticed that he didn’t stop at Stout’s door indicating that he’d probably already told him about dinner before coming to me. Turning back to my room, I washed my hands and threw some water onto my face. Dabbing myself with a towel, I straightened out my clothes and then combed my hair. Finished, I stepped from my room and noticed the light under Stout’s door was still on, indicating that he hadn’t gone downstairs yet. I was glad because I didn’t want to be at a psychological disadvantage when I went downstairs, meeting at the same time a stranger and a man I hadn’t seen for years. I’d much rather have met them one at a time. And so, I headed for the dining room and found it all set for dinner with its long table laden with silverware and aromatic viands. A great chandelier hung suspended from a thick rafter that spanned the ceiling, casting scintillations of light in every direction. The table stretched the length of the room with well over a dozen chairs in place and Bruce, like another item of furniture, was standing statuesque at the rear of the room beside the servants’ door. At the head of the table, where two other places had been set to his left and right, was seated my uncle, Giles Wilcox.

He’d risen upon my entrance and I noticed immediately that he’d become greatly emaciated since the last time I’d seen him. He stood on shaking legs, and his once robust form had vanished. In its place now stood a spindly scarecrow, a shadow of its former self. Even the personal magnetism I used to sense in his presence seemed to be absent.

Then this person whom I barely recognized stretched out his hand to grip mine and I found that his grasp was as weak as a kitten’s.

From outside, thunder grumbled an introduction as he said, “Good evening, my boy. I trust your journey was an uneventful one?” Though weak, his voice at least, hinted yet of hidden reserves of strength.

“There were no problems, Uncle Giles.”

“I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve asked you here?”

I nodded.

“Well, I’ll explain everything tomorrow,” he said.

I hoped I’d managed to hide my disappointment.

“Yes, tomorrow…” The sound of a throat being cleared interrupted his next sentence. “Ah, Sean my good fellow, I’d like you to meet my nephew, Simon. Simon, my colleague, Sean Stout, explorer extraordinaire.”

Despite my uncle’s attempt at normalcy, I could tell that there was a note of tension in his voice, as though he were forcing himself to sound calm and relaxed.

Stout, on the other hand, was everything my uncle had been but no longer was. Physically fit and ramrod erect, his hair was streaked with gray as was a huge handlebar mustache that he smoothed with a finger. In a deep, booming voice, he broke the uneasy silence.

“You flatter me, Giles, I’m hardly your equal,” Stout said easily. “My accomplishments don’t even approach your own.”

“Don’t belittle yourself Sean,” replied my uncle. “Your treatises, essays and studies have been, and still are, objects of heated discussion in speculative circles. Why, your latest discovery, the Island of Mystery, is the biggest news in archeology these days.”

“You seem to be pretty up to date on my activities, Giles,” Stout replied as he advanced to the table.

For no good reason, I just didn’t trust Stout, but to keep the conversation from sinking into maudlin self-congratulation, I asked him to tell me more about his work.

“Do you know about Thor Heyerdahl, Mr. Cole?” I nodded. “Then you know that the reason for Heyerdahl’s Ra expedition was to prove that the ancient Egyptians were capable of crossing the Atlantic Ocean using only their own primitive sailing vessels. Needless to say, Heyerdahl succeeded, allowing speculation to proceed about whether the Egyptians could have influenced the Aztec and Inca civilizations here in the New World. His success, placed within the bounds of possibility that ancient Mediterranean cultures may indeed have once reached Central America.”

“Yes, but was has that to do with your own work?”

“I’m coming to that,” Stout said, his hands in his pockets. “I wanted to prove a similar theory: that it was possible that the people of Easter Island had originally sailed from some other point in the south seas. To that end, I constructed and launched my own primitive craft based on vessels used by the natives of Easter Island and sailed there from the nearest set of populated islands. What happened on that voyage was that my vessel intercepted a previously unknown current and was thrown hundreds of miles off course. Luckily I had prepared for a long journey and finally ground ashore upon a small basalt island scarcely as large as Easter Island, and similarly landscaped. I had a radio and called for help, but before it arrived, I discovered that the natives of the island spoke a pidgin French! They called their island L’isle Mystere and showed me tools of French origin that dated back to the early sixteenth century. In addition, I found hundreds of stone images similar in style to those of Easter Island plus thousands of small fetishes of exquisite workmanship far beyond the capabilities of the island’s natives.”

“Could they have been of French manufacture?”

“Absolutely not,” insisted Stout. “But the most interesting thing of all was the fact that all were carved of marble, although nowhere on the island is any to be found, including the surrounding ocean floor.”

“Do you have one of the figures on hand to show me?”

“As it happens, I do,” said Stout. “I brought a few for your uncle to study. You can take a look at those if you wish.”

“I will.”

“You know, Mr. Cole,” continued Stout, “there’s an interesting story that comes with my discovery of the fetishes. When I pulled the first one from its rocky moorings, a great buzzing sound like a horde of …”

At the mention of the final words, my uncle started and dropped his coffee cup and saucer with a clatter, cutting off further discussion. Immediately, Bruce entered the room and began to clean up as Uncle Giles leaned back, pale and shaken.

“I’m sorry gentlemen,” my uncle said. “I lost my grip. Shall we eat, then?”

The meal was then served and we all ate in silence, Stout and I pretending as if we hadn’t noticed the look on my uncle’s face when he dropped the cup. But watching him, I thought I could still detect a shadow of fear upon his stony features.

After the meal, we retired to the study and Stout displayed a few of his findings to me.

“I think this item may interest you as I think it has a more than unusual resemblance to Teheclan, the Incan god of earth,” he began. “Notice the fine lines of his stern features around the jaw. A definite trait of the Incan deity. Even the headdress and robes are identical. This statuette and Teheclan are one and the same.”

“These objects also have a striking resemblance to the ancient fetishism of Easter Island,” added my uncle.

“A point we’ve discussed before,” said Stout just as Bruce came in.

“Just the man I want to see,” said my uncle. “About a drink of course. Gentlemen, what would it be?”

“Scotch would go down nicely,” said Stout.

“A whiskey and soda, thank you.”

“You heard them, Bruce. Pour.”

“Very good, sir.”

The next few seconds were occupied with the ritual of pouring, giving thanks and offers of health.

Finally after the first few tentative sips, my uncle reiterated, “So it seems we are agreed on the semblance and possible relationship between these curious fetishisms?”

“Who could deny the evidence?” asked Stout.

I was on the point of agreeing with them when the ring of the telephone interrupted me.

At the sound, I was surprised to see my uncle turn a deathly pale and for a moment was sure he was going to faint. But all that he did was to put down his drink and order Bruce away from the phone.

“Don’t answer it, Bruce,” he said before picking it up himself. “Hello? No…no. I didn’t. I refuse. No you can’t mean that. I’d sooner see you in hell!” At that he slammed the receiver and stammered, “You…you must excuse me. I have some very pressing matters to attend to.”

With that, he hurried from the room and up the darkened stairs.

“Please forgive my uncle’s seeming misbehavior, Mr. Stout,” I said, somewhat perplexed myself. “I assure you, I’ll get to the bottom of this tomorrow.”

“Quite excusable Cole,” Stout replied. “I’ve known your uncle all my life, and a man like him will surely begin to feel restless in retirement after a life of wandering the world’s byways.”

“I suppose so,” I said. “Well, I might as well call it a night myself. It was good to have met you.”

“And I, you.”

Downing the rest of my drink, I turned and left the room, thoughts of my uncle still uppermost in my mind. Why had he behaved in such a strange manner after getting that telephone call and why did he have the same reaction when Stout said something about the buzzing sound he’d heard? Could the two things have something in common? Whatever the answer, I was determined to get to the bottom of it on the following morning.

Then, another thought occurred to me: could Uncle Giles’s strange behavior be the reason he invited me to his home?

The next morning, I greeted the day by looking out over the treetops that swayed beneath my window and stretched to the foot of the hill beyond. The sky had a thick overcast that threatened more rain later in the day. The little cemetery on the hill lay dully in the grayish light and I determined to visit it later in the day.

Finishing my toilet, I left my room for my uncle’s study and, passing by Stout’s door, I saw that it was open. Evidently he was an early riser. Coming downstairs, I was making my way to the study when I met Bruce who was headed to the kitchen with a tray full of discarded breakfast dishes.

“Bruce, I was looking for my uncle, is he in the study?”

“The master is in his chambers at the tower, Master Simon.”

“Right, thanks.”

I reached the door to my uncle’s suite and knocked at the door. Receiving no answer, I entered and walked across the anteroom to the entrance to his private chambers. There, I knocked again.

“Who is it?” came my uncle’s voice, trembling and fearful.

“It’s Simon, Uncle Giles. I’d like to speak to you a moment.” The only reply was the sound of muffled footsteps as my uncle crossed the inside room and opened the door.

“Come in Simon…” he said, holding the door open for me. When I’d come in, he closed it quietly behind me. “Now, what is it that you’d like to talk about?”

The question took me by surprise. “Why, about your unusual behavior yesterday…”

“Unusual? I only felt ill, and wished to lie down a bit, that’s all. I’m all right now, I assure you.”

He was lying, I was sure of it, as sure as I was that he needed my help. “Uncle, please don’t evade the subject. I know the reason that you asked me to come visit is related in some way to your strange actions of last night. Why hide it?”

“It is true I haven’t been feeling well lately,” Uncle Giles admitted. “But it isn’t so serious as to have brought you all the way from New Jersey.”

“I live in Manhattan now, but that’s beside the point,” I said. “You’ve lost a dangerous amount of weight, you’re pale as a ghost and you shake as if palsied. It all has something to do with some damned buzzing…”

“Don’t say that!” Uncle Giles shouted suddenly, fear etched in every line of his haggard face, in the timbre of his voice. “Don’t ever say that! It’s not true, I tell you. It’s not true!” A pause. “No…no, it is…it is true…I…” he paused again and seemed to reconsider. Then, regaining a measure of self-control, he continued. “You’re right, I summoned you here for that reason. But I have the thing in hand now, nothing to worry about. I have everything under control…”

Try as he might, he’d failed to convince me that everything was, indeed, “under control.”

“Uncle Giles,” I said. “It seems to me that you’re worse than ever. Please confide in me. I want to help. I really do. But I have to know more. Tell me.” I tried to put as much sincerity into my voice as possible and was rewarded with Uncle Giles’ next words.

“What the hell,” he sighed. “I have to tell someone besides St…, I mean someone. Simon, I don’t want you to be startled by what you hear because it was not my doing. I’d been the victim of a conspiracy, a conspiracy to drive me slowly mad.”

“What sort of conspiracy?” My first reaction was much the same as anybody else’s would have been under similar circumstances, I thought my uncle was being paranoid.

“Be still!” said my uncle, his words charged with the old strength and power that I remembered as a youth. “Simon, man is not the sole intelligent species on this planet. Don’t…” He held up a hand, warding off my instinctive objection. “It’s taken me many years to convince even myself of the fact. But there’s more, there are forces bent on manipulating man and ultimately ruling him, forces I’d not suspected were so close at hand until my marriage to Ruth. Her presence gave me the final proof I needed; proof that also forced me to do away with her.”

The note of calm certainty in his voice came in stark contrast with the horror and astonishment his words inspired in me. “Are you saying that you killed her? You killed your own wife?”

“I was forced to do it,” he replied, almost as if he were talking to himself and not to me. “I had to get rid of that damned thing…”

“But, what is it, this…this…damned thing? Why did you feel the need to kill your wife?”

“I didn’t mean to at the time,” said Uncle Giles. “But afterward, I saw the necessity of it.”

He said it as if murder had been nothing more than taking out the trash or falling into bed at night.

“Here, before we go any farther, let me fix you a drink,” he continued in that maddeningly calm voice. “Whiskey and soda isn’t it?”

“Yes, thank you, I need it…” I held the glass with both hands and gulped. “So you hadn’t planned on killing her?” I asked.

“That’s right. Don’t you see?”

Actually, I didn’t see at all but I let him continue talking.

“I pushed her from the top of the stairs,” he said.

Would the horror never stop, I wondered?

“Don’t misunderstand me Simon,” he continued. “I still had deep appreciation for her, it was a very difficult thing to do. But it was either me or her and I’m only human.”

“But they say she lived for two days…”

“Yes, she broke her back, but miraculously, she survived for two days before finally succumbing,” explained Uncle Giles. “Can you imagine what she must have felt living under the same roof with the man who’d killed her? But as maddening as that might have been for her, it was worse for me. I lived those forty-eight hours as if they’d been spent in hell. I asked myself over and over again a thousand times ‘When will she die…When will she die, blast her!’ But at last the torture ended. With a last gurgle, she finally succumbed. I held a short wake for her in the front parlor…to satisfy the curiosity of the townsfolk…and then buried her on the hill.” He inclined his chin, vaguely indicating the outside of the house.

“And Bruce? Where was he through all this?”

“I’d given him a few days off after my wedding so he was gone when I pushed Ruth down the stairs. Luckily, when she injured her back and became paralyzed, her powers of speech were also impaired. Thank God for that! Bruce knows little or nothing of the affair.”

“But why, Uncle Giles? What could’ve been so threatening that you felt compelled to…?”

“It’s hard to explain…” Just then, he was interrupted by a knock at the door.

As he turned towards it, I noticed that his movements seemed stiff, as if he were reluctant to discover what was on the other side. At last he seemed to control himself and reached for the knob. When he opened the door, there was only Bruce waiting there.

“Yes, yes, what is it?” barked Uncle Giles impatiently.

“A message for you sir,” said Bruce, unperturbed.

Uncle Giles snatched the note from his hands and tore it open. I could see the crumpled paper shaking visibly in his hands. Abruptly he whirled toward me and screamed furiously. “Get out! Out! I must be alone to think, to plan!”

“But Uncle Giles, I think I really ought to stay and…”

“Leave me!” he shouted.

After my uncle’s abrupt dismissal, I needed some time to clear my thoughts and wandered outdoors for some fresh air. Slowly, I wandered beneath the arcing boughs of the great oaks and maples that edged the immediate environs of the house and in a little while I began to feel like myself again.

I’d been walking for about a half hour along a trail that meandered into the nearby forest when the ground began to slope upward and I realized that I’d reached the foot of the hill where the private cemetery was located. Ahead of me, I could see the old gravestones leaning crazily against some unseen wind. Slowly, I began to make my way among them, glancing at the faded inscriptions until I stumbled onto that of Ruth Wilcox. Shiny and erect, inscribed simply with a name and no dates, the stone communicated coldness and a love that had withered and died. What exactly had gone on between my uncle and his wife? Was she murdered over a simple paranoiac impulse or was there more to it than that? The police should be informed of course, no matter my uncle’s excuses. A woman was dead after all…

With a light rain beginning fall, I suddenly no longer felt alone on the hill.

Turning, I spotted Stout leaning under a nearby tree.

“It’s only me, Mr. Cole, sorry about the fright,” he said over the gentle hiss of the falling rain. “Why don’t you join me over here, out of the rain.”

I saw no reason why not and stepped beneath the protective canopy of the tree.

“Bruce told me you were headed this way.”

“Did you want me for something?” I really wasn’t in the mood for talking about South Pacific fetishes.

“As a matter of fact, I do. Have you come out here to see the grave?”

The question caught me by surprise. “Yes.”

“Then Giles has already told you.”

“Told me what?” I asked, not wanting to tip my hand too soon.

“Why, about his wife’s death of course.”

Stout obviously knew or at least guessed more than he let on. I was surprised, but decided to play dumb. I still didn’t trust him after all. “Only that she fell down a flight of stairs.”

“Come now, Mr. Cole, don’t mince words with me.”

Stout looked me steadily in the eyes and I knew I wasn’t fooling him. “All right. How do you know? Have you been listening in on our private conversations?”

“You can do better than that, Mr. Cole!” There was no hint of insult in his voice, only impatience.

“Has he told you?”

“Of course,” he replied. “And what did you think of it all?”

I didn’t reply right away. I was still reluctant to give too much away.

“Look,” he said, seeming to take a different tack. “I might as well level with you. At this point, it can’t hurt.”

“What can’t hurt?” Stout’s attitude was really beginning puzzle me. He seemed to know more than I did, in fact, he seemed to have known whatever it was that I didn’t all along. But what exactly was it that he knew?

“That I never found those marble fetishes, never found even the L’isle Mystere.” He laughed shortly.

“I don’t understand…”

“What say I tell you the whole story in one fell swoop?” He’d taken a deep breath, straightened and dug his hands deeper into the pockets of his coat.

“All right,” I said. The wind had picked up a bit, tearing leaves from the tree overhead.

“First of all, I’m not an explorer, but a physician…a psychiatrist. I came to visit with your uncle some months ago and noticed his odd behavior…you saw a sample of it last night. I suspected it had something to do with the recent death of his wife and being his friend, invited myself to stay on a bit to keep him under observation until you arrived. It was at my suggestion that he invite you here and he agreed. Unfortunately, he soon changed his mind, but it was too late. You’d already left home. Embarrassed with my presence, Giles asked me to pose as an explorer friend so you wouldn’t suspect his nervous condition. I agreed and used some of his latest discoveries to complete my masquerade.”

“No wonder I’d never heard of you before.”

“Quite. Anyway, after meeting you and seeing your genuine concern for Giles, I decided that it would be best for everyone if I dropped my pose and filled you in on the situation. Together, I’d hoped we could help Giles overcome this brooding fear that seems to dominate his thoughts.”

“I’m glad you’ve come clean, doctor…I’m assuming Stout is your real name?” He nodded. “But at the moment, I’m afraid I can’t add much to the situation. I don’t know anything as to the reasons why my uncle did what he did. That is, if he really did murder his wife…?”

“I’m not even sure of that myself,” admitted Stout. “We only have his word for the deed and in his current emotional condition, it could very well have been an accident after all. He could be blaming himself as part of a guilt complex for not being able to do anything to prevent the fall.”

“That makes more sense than his ramblings about other intelligences and their plans to conquer the human race,” I said, not a little relieved at the welcome intrusion of sanity on the situation.

“Maybe if we went up to see him together, we could get him to talk about what’s really bothering him?” I suggested.

“My thoughts exactly.”

The gentle rainfall had become a torrent with lightning occasionally flashing across the heavens by the time we entered the house and made our way to the study. There, we found Uncle Giles sitting dejectedly in a chair, a defeated man.

So absorbed was he in depression that he didn’t even notice that we’d entered the room. Clicking the door shut softly behind us, Stout cleared his throat.

“Giles,” Stout began as my uncle lifted his head. “I’ve had a long talk with your nephew here and in short, there’s no longer any need for subterfuge.” There was a noncommittal grunt from my uncle. “Up to now, I’d intended to take the easy approach in working through the grief process with you, but after your display last night and the behavior described by your nephew that took place this morning, I must insist that the whole matter be brought out into the open and discussed frankly.”

“So, it’s a candid discussion you want, is it?” asked Uncle Giles, in a voice that was suddenly quite firm.

We each nodded.

Leaning back in his chair, Uncle Giles took a deep breath and considered, then began.

“Gentlemen, man is not alone on the earth,” he said. “He shares it with others. Others who, quite possibly, have a prior claim to it. In effect, they were here first. No, let me finish! As you know, I’ve made a career of exploring the globe, poking my nose in the most obscure of corners, L’isle Mystere being only the last. I had long since come to the conclusion that man shares his home with malign and vast intelligences that are not at all disposed to trafficking in any way with us. And although these…things, seem to come in a confusing and senseless variety of shapes, unlike man, they seem to act in a strange concert. Personally, I had never come into actual contact with any of these beings, but a fellow researcher and correspondent of mine, a Henry W. Akeley, did. In his last letters to me dated almost ten years ago, he described evidence found in rural Vermont of a certain race of terrible creatures that mined the old mountains in the area of his home. For what mineral these ‘Outer Ones,’ as he called them, mined, he was never able to ascertain. But he was able to identify the sounds they made to communicate with one another. A sort of clicking and buzzing…”

Here he interrupted his narrative with an audible gulp. “Soon after, Akeley’s letters ceased and my work carried me overseas. I was not reminded of the matter until after I had met and married my wife, Ruth, upon my return from L’isle Mystere. I had known her for years through her job at a Post Office in a neighboring town where I used to go to mail my correspondence. Although her mannerisms were stiff and her speech halting, we nevertheless seemed to develop a rapport, an old recluse and an old maid together. The wedding itself was a simple affair and we came straight back here, we’d never planned a honeymoon you see. That night, I was here reading until late. I hadn’t realized the lateness of the hour and when I did, I immediately thought of Ruth. It was our wedding night after all, and I figured the poor thing was waiting for me upstairs but too shy to interrupt me while I was reading. Feeling a bit guilty for neglecting her, I went upstairs and entered the bedroom on tiptoe in case she’d fallen asleep. But imagine my surprise after approaching the bed to find it empty! Naturally, I wondered where Ruth had gone to and decided to go and find her. Perhaps she’d gone down to the kitchen for a cup of tea. I’d only reached the landing on the back staircase when I heard her voice as it drifted up from downstairs. Wondering who she could be talking to, I descended the stairs until I could see the moonlight from the kitchen windows as it spilled across the room. Crouching there, I heard Ruth apparently answering questions put to her by someone who’s voice I could not recognize. Although my first impulse was to descend the stairs and confront this person, something restrained me from doing so. Thus it was that I was able to hear the stranger’s voice, which was not a voice at all but a series of buzzing, clicking, droning sounds…which Ruth replied to in kind! Suddenly, I felt myself break out into a cold sweat and unwanted, the realization dawned on me that I was hearing the same voices heard by Akeley in the hollows of those Vermont mountains. In that moment, all the horror of Akeley’s account of the creatures in the Vermont hills that had escaped me ten years before, revisited me in their full force. And Ruth seemed to be in league with them! Slowly, dazedly, I half-crawled, half-crept back up the stairs, praying fervently not to see what body belonged to that hellish voice. I crouched there at the top of the stairs with only a hall lamp throwing its feeble glare across the corridor, and the faraway drone of that voice ringing dully in my ears. I was so distracted that I never noticed when the dim light from the kitchen had been extinguished. What finally caught my attention was the sound of the kitchen door being stealthily opened, and a rhythmic clicking sound that suggested the shambling gait of an ambulatory creature with feet of tough, bony construction like the appendages of some fantastic crab. All I can think of now is that I must have been slightly mad then, because my first reaction upon my wife’s appearance at the top of the stairs was to shove her back in a blind, unthinking panic. I…don’t know exactly what happened then, I think that I must have blacked out because when I came to my senses, there was Ruth, at the bottom of the stairs, grotesquely twisted, her spine shattered.

“You know of course that she lived for two days following the ‘accident’ unable to speak, and that after a brief wake, for appearances sake, I buried her myself. But although she was gone, the horror continued. Since her death, I’ve been plagued with phone calls, letters, and notes threatening me, cajoling me, flattering me to abandon my home here, presumably so that they, the Outer Ones, can begin their mining operation in the surrounding hills as they have in Vermont. With each contact I find myself losing self-control. They’ve done hellish things to people in the neighborhood; nothing I could prove however, and heaven knows what they did to Ruth to gain her cooperation. They’ll stop at nothing, and killing a person is the least that they’re capable of. And now that you’ve been warned, I’m warning you, if you value your lives, your sanity, get out!”

But Stout and I were left speechless after my uncle’s inane story. Clearly, his paranoia was completely out of control.

“Leave here and don’t come back!” he shouted, oblivious to our reactions to his tale. “It’s not worth the…” at that point the phone rang and my uncle jumped to his feet and snatched for the receiver.

From where I stood, I could plainly hear a sort of buzzing sound from the earpiece.

“No! Leave me alone! I’ll never surrender my home! Stay away!” shouted my uncle into the receiver. Then, slamming it onto its cradle, he threw the phone violently across the room.

Shocked at this total loss of temper, I had to try and calm him down.

“Uncle Giles! Please relax…”

“Shut up! If you refuse to accept the danger you’re in, you leave me with no choice.”

Then, with as little warning as that, Uncle Giles flung himself through a nearby window, glass shattering, and dashed himself to death on the broken flagstones two stories below. He’d acted so suddenly, that neither Stout nor I had time to divine his intentions let alone to stop him. For a few moments, all I could do was stare in horror at the broken window, not moving until a white faced Stout beckoned me to the phone he’d retrieved from the floor. Placing the receiver to my ear, I heard a grotesque parody of human speech mingled with what I can only describe as an unearthly buzzing or clicking sound that repeated my uncle’s name over and over again. I looked at Stout, that buzzing still emanating from the earpiece, and knew we were thinking the same thing. However the human voice can be disguised, it was impossible to even entertain the thought for a second that what I’d heard was anything but the voice of hell itself.

The rest of the day was a blur to me as Stout and I gathered up the body of my uncle and laid him upon his own bed, dismissed Bruce with a handsome retainer that would see him to his grave, and fortified ourselves liberally from the bar.

Finally, before we called in the police, Stout suggested what he’d had in mind to do since my uncle first confessed to him his murder of Ruth Wilcox; the disinterment of the body. Despite my emotional exhaustion, I agreed to accompany him to the grave holding aloft an electric lamp as he worked the spade. Though the rain had eased by dusk, taking the wind with it, I was still chilled and shaking when Stout finally cleared the moist soil from the lid of the coffin.

I stared in morbid fascination as he pried it open with the spade and motioned for me to hold the lamp closer. At first, the light revealed nothing more terrible than what I’d expected to see, the emaciated, dehydrated body of Ruth Wilcox, hands folded across her chest; but as I brought the light along her body to her feet, Stout gasped and staggered back, scrambling from the pit, falling and stumbling along the hill as he ran for the house. Clenching the lamp handle tightly, I leaned forward, riveted there at the grave despite every instinct that told me to run. Just as the light shone on the corpse’s feet I saw a sight that blasted my senses; I reeled, dropping the lantern. I think I screamed. I don’t know. All I remember is running, running… and the old house burning beyond the trees. I ran because the sight of Ruth Wilcox’s feet showed that they were not feet at all. Where the fiendishly designed skin of her human feet lay beside them in a hideously wrinkled heap, I saw not human feet but the chitinous footpads of some monstrous human crab!

Despite my emotional exhaustion, I agreed to accompany him to the grave holding aloft an electric lamp as he worked the spade. Though the rain had eased by dusk, taking the wind with it, I was still chilled and shaking when Stout finally cleared the moist soil from the lid of the coffin.

t of rain.

Second Death

nton Zarnak enjoyed autumn in New England. Though it was late in the season now with the colorful leafage long since gone, the grayish forests standing against overcast skies and empty, stubbled fields that characterized the countryside still held a somber beauty of their own.

Just now, he was motoring up Interstate 495 heading north to Arkham and the campus of Miskatonic University. His office in Manhattan had received a call from a Dr. Aaron Stillnor, director of the Pickerton Rehabilitation Hospital, requesting help on a case involving a patient who had recently emerged from a coma. It seemed the patient…Zarnak reached over and slipped a chart out from a folder on the seat beside him…a Charles Danforth, had been in a comatose state for almost forty years before suddenly coming to his senses a few weeks ago.

Danforth had been a resident of the hospital since 1962 when family members asked that he be transferred from the Danvers State Insane Asylum. Before agreeing to extend his consultative services, Zarnak decided to conduct a little research at the New York Public Library and was surprised to discover that Danforth had been a member of the tragic Dyer Expedition that Miskatonic University had sent to explore the region beyond the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica. That was in 1930, before the age of satellites and such when exploration still meant wooden ships and dog sleds. The Dyer Expedition, however, had been equipped with the most modern conveniences including a few Dornier airplanes and the latest drilling apparatus. In any case, the expedition met disaster when an advanced party was killed…presumably from harsh weather…with starving sled dogs unfortunately digging out the bodies before relief arrived in the person of the expedition’s leader and Charles Danforth.

The remnants of the advance campsite were found by the later Starkweather-Moore Expedition of 1935, an effort initially opposed by Prof. William Dyer in a monograph filled with what the kindest critic might describe as delusions inspired by Antarctic isolation and shock at the condition of the bodies found at the advanced campsite.

Although the existence of a megalithic city described by Dyer in his monograph was confirmed by Starkweather-Moore, its conclusions as to its origins were at variance with those of the professor who claimed they were millions of years old and built by some pre-human race from another planet. The stone construction and reliance on the arch as a key component of its architecture alone precluded any belief that the city was built by a culture any more advanced than the Romans. In fact, it had been the conclusion of academics as far back as the late 1930s that the stone city was likely built by ancestors of cultures represented by the builders of Machu Picchu or Teotihuacan.

Although Dyer himself returned to his professorial duties at Miskatonic University, Danforth seemed never to have fully recovered from his experience in Antarctica. Reports at the time suggested that he was high strung and prone to neuroticism. He became close-mouthed and refused to speak to anyone except Dyer with whom he insisted on talking to only behind closed doors. Eventually, his nervous condition had evolved such that he suffered a complete nervous breakdown that ended in catalepsy and coma.

Zarnak emerged from the library with his interest piqued. He made arrangements to visit the patient and consult with Dr. Stillnor. With other business taken care of, he drove out of New York that morning and took the usual route to Massachusetts along I-95. His Ford Mustang made good time and soon he was speeding up 128 and spotted the brown highway sign indicating he should take the next exit for Arkham. If he recalled correctly from previous visits, not much further up would be the off ramp for Dean’s Corners and the Dunwich country and beyond that, up around Newburyport, Innsmouth.

Checking the dashboard clock, Zarnak ascertained that he’d have some time to spare before his appointment with Dr. Stillnor so decided to check in at a bed and breakfast he knew of along Washington Street in Arkham’s historic district. Passing through a few suburban neighborhoods, he soon found himself in an area where big, Victorian-era homes still stood, preserved by the efforts of the city’s Historic District Commission. In many respects, Arkham was still a college town, and a small one at that. Miskatonic University itself had not grown much since the heyday of ivy league schools in the early part of the century. Its reputation then was much respected in the area of archeology and anthropology but in the 1960s the tide of such subjects had moved out and the school was better known today for being somewhat old fashioned and behind the times. Newer departments dedicated to xenobiology and cryptoarcheology, however, did little to enhance the institution’s standing in the academic community.

Zarnak had little trouble finding the bed and breakfast and after bringing in his things, took his briefcase back to the car and headed across town to the hospital. He found the Pickerton Rehabilitation Hospital located behind a stone wall on well-manicured acreage that in better weather, no doubt, had a calming effect on its patients. He identified himself to a speaker at the entrance and had the satisfaction of seeing the iron gates swing slowly open. A short drive beneath bare branched trees led him to the visitor parking lot where he left the Mustang. An unassuming side entrance brought him to the reception area where he asked for Dr. Stillnor. Soon, he was met by a middle aged man in white lab coat who offered his hand in greeting.

“Dr. Zarnak?” he asked.

“Yes,” replied Zarnak, taking the man’s hand. “And you are Dr. Stillnor?”

“I am. Shall we go to my office?”

Stillnor led Zarnak beyond a pair of doors that cut off the reception desk from the administration area and up a corridor to a door labeled “Dr. Aaron Stillnor.” Stepping inside, Stillnor motioned Zarnak to a chair and took the one behind the room’s desk.

“I saw from your note that you’ve familiarized yourself somewhat with Mr. Danforth’s case?” asked Stillnor without preamble.

“I did,” replied Zarnak. “I found it most interesting.”

“That’s good,” admitted Stillnor. “Because I’ve been somewhat at a loss as to how to proceed.”

“Suppose you fill me in on the details.”

“There’s not much to tell,” began Stillnor. “The patient, Charles Danforth, has been here at the hospital for eight years. His family asked that he be transferred from Danvers hoping that a private institution could provide more personalized treatment for the patient. It seems to have worked, though I hesitate to take credit for Danforth’s sudden emergence from his comatose state.”

“Did your treatment vary in any way from that provided at Danvers?”

“Very little,” said Stillnor. “An increased use of mineral baths and more frequent muscular massage to loosen the limbs. As you know, this case has been somewhat unusual in that it seemed to involve a combination of both catalepsy and coma, so treatment was necessarily bifurcated in its application. Maybe it was the combination of the two that triggered something in Danforth’s mind bringing him to full wakefulne

“Hmm. So it seems to me that the patient is on the road to recovery. A happy situation for his family, I’m sure.”

“It would seem so except for the fact that the patient has been delusional ever since coming to his senses. He thrashes about with such violence that we’ve had to have him restrained and even sedated for his own protection. Those precautions may calm him down physically, but I’ve not been able reach him where it counts, his reasoning mind.”

“But you say the drugs have calmed him down. He hasn’t been receptive to the usual methods of verbal communication?”

“Not at all.”

“Have you tried hypnotherapy?”

“As a last measure of desperation but it hasn’t succeeded. The patient lacks the ability to concentrate long enough for such methods to work.”

“And what are you looking for from me?”

“To be frank, doctor,” said Stillnor, “you’ve had some success in other cases that have seemed intractable. As with any other professional, it was difficult for me to admit that there was nothing else I could do for the patient and that I needed to consult with a specialist. I hope you can help me doctor.”

“Well, I can’t promise anything, of course, but I’m certainly willing to give you all the assistance I can.”

“Fine,” said Stillnor, rising. “Would you like to look at the patient then?”

“Certainly, doctor. Do you mind if I leave my things here?”

After Zarnak had deposited his briefcase and coat in Stillnor’s office, the two made their way from the administrative wing to the wards. Emerging from the elevator on the third floor, they encountered patients sitting quietly in wheelchairs or shuffling down corridors. Others remained in their rooms as a nurse held down a station midway along the corridor and an orderly and some nurse’s aids worked directly with patients.

“How is the patient in Room 12?” asked Stillnor of the duty nurse.

“He’s been quiet for about an hour now,” said the nurse in low tones. “But that happens occasionally. I don’t expect it to last.”

“Has there been any change in his behavior otherwise?”

“I’m afraid not, doctor,” said the nurse. “When he’s active, he still raves about the snow and such.”

“Thank you. This is Dr. Zarnak; he’ll be consulting with me on Danforth’s case.”

“How do you do, doctor?” asked the nurse who could not help noticing the slash of silver that zig-zagged like a bolt of lightning through Zarnak’s otherwise dark hair.

“Very well, nurse…Popworth?” said Zarnak, looking at the name pin on the woman’s uniform. “What’s this about snow?”

“A mania the patient has,” said Stillnor before the nurse could reply. “Ever since coming out of the coma, Danforth has expressed an extreme phobia of snow. Possibly connected to his experience in Antarctica many years ago. I’ve considered the possibility that his current state is some kind of throwback to those days…he may be imagining that he’s still there in those cold, isolated wastes.

“Such cases have been known to drive men to insanity but, from what I understand, he was somewhat well adjusted after he first returned from Antarctica,” said Zarnak. “Something else may be at work here.”

“Only one way to find out,” said Stillnor leading the way to room 12.

There, he opened the plain wooden door…it was unlocked…and motioned Zarnak inside.

According to the chart that Zarnak took from the end of the bed, Charles Danforth was 60 years old but looked older due mainly to a thin frame which had been nourished almost entirely intravenously since his hospitalization in 1935. His hair was entirely white and the padded cuffs that held his arms and legs to the bed frame seemed hardly necessary to restrain such a wisp of a figure.

At the moment, the patient was awake but resting quietly. His dark eyes were alert however as they focused on Zarnak and tracked him as he moved around the bed. Taking a penlight from his breast pocket, Zarnak examined Danforth’s reaction to light. Satisfied, he straightened and put away the instrument.

With Danforth’s eyes still looking into his, Zarnak saw the patient try to speak.

“What is it, Mr. Danforth?” asked Zarnak, bending forward.

“Snow…” whispered Danforth. “Is it…snowing?”

Encouraged by the seeming rationality in the patient’s voice, Zarnak was careful in making his reply. “Why no. It’s not snowing outside. Why does that matter, Mr. Danforth?”

“The snow was white,” said Danforth, struggling for breath. “The mist was white…those mountains…higher than the clouds…higher than anything… They were so big, even 300 miles away…so high they touched the stars…but there was something bigger still! I saw it! It moved and was standing behind the mountains! Behind the mountains!”

Suddenly, Danforth lost control of himself and began to laugh hysterically, then to thrash about, pulling at his restraints. Froth began to foam on his lips and his eyes grew big and round with the veins standing plain on the whites of his eyeballs.

“The snow! The damned snow! It covered it all over so that I couldn’t see! The thing! The thing that towered over the mountains! Oh, God! The snow! Thank God for the snow! It hides everything, even the truth!”

So violent became his struggling that Stillnor feared for the patient’s safety. Quickly, he called for a sedative and when it was finally delivered, stabbed the needle into Danforth’s arm and threw the plunger.

It was a powerful dose and soon took effect…or at least it seemed to.

Danforth had certainly calmed down but the action came too swiftly to be the result of the sedative. His eyes still open, they no longer made contact with those of his visitors. Instead, they stared unblinkingly at the ceiling.

“The shape must be altered,” he was saying, almost under his breath. “The bounds disfigured. The Elder Sign of Mnar must be broken. Must find the stones. But the snow, the snow will make it hard to find them. Must find them before it snows…”

The words trailed off at last as the full effects of the sedative took hold.

“Is there anything else you need to see, doctor?” asked Stillnor after a few moments when the room was filled only with the sound of Danforth’s steady breathing.

Zarnak shook his head from where he had moved to the foot of the bed. “No. I think I’ve seen all I need to see.”

Later, back in Stillnor’s office, the two physicians consulted.

“So what has been your own diagnosis, doctor?” asked Zarnak by way of opening the discussion.

“Well on the face of it, the patient’s ravings make little sense aside from an obvious phobia related to mountains…a fear of heights perhaps? On the other hand, he also seems unusually apprehensive about snow; you noticed how the first thing he said when he saw you was to ask whether it was snowing?”

Zarnak nodded.

“The solution to the patient’s problem then is to find some way to relieve him of these unfounded fears,” continued Stillnor. “Unfortunately, his nervous attitude seems to preclude, at least for the time being, analysis of any kind. A leading dialogue with the patient is out of the question so long as he isn’t rational.”

“Dialogue does seem out of the question….”

“Do you have any suggestions, doctor?”

Zarnak was quiet a moment before suddenly getting to his feet. Hands in his pockets, he paced briefly before pausing by the window and looking out over the spreading lawn leading down to the street.

“Tell me, doctor,” he began. “What do you know of Danforth’s personal history?”

“Well…aside from the years spent at Danvers…he seems to have been a promising student at Miskatonic University when he was a young man. I’ve been told that professors at the time had high hopes for him — one even recruited him for an expedition to the Antarctic I believe. In fact, I’d given brief consideration that his phobia regarding snow might have been connected to that trip.”

“In a way, I think it does,” conceded Zarnak turning to face Stillnor. “Does the name of the Dyer Expedition mean anything to you doctor?”

“I believe that was the name of the expedition that Danforth accompanied to the Antarctic.”

“Correct. It took place in 1930 and was quite well equipped at the time,” said Zarnak.

“I’m afraid that I’m not familiar with the details of…”

“The expedition’s major claim to fame was the discovery of a megalithic city nestled between a pair of mountain ranges off the Ross Ice Shelf,” explained Zarnak. “When communications failed between the base camp and an advance camp located at the foot of the first range of mountains, Danforth accompanied Prof. Dyer to investigate. Although the two said little about exactly what they found there upon their immediate return to civilization, a later plea written by Dyer intended to discourage further exploration beyond the mountains was more explicit describing a scene of horror in which all the bodies of their comrades had been torn apart. You can imagine how such a scene might impress a young mind…”

Stillnor nodded. “I hadn’t realized…”

“But that was not all,” continued Zarnak. “Dyer also described a series of strange burial sites in the snow where portions of biological specimens discovered by his colleagues had been interred…”

“I seem to recall something about that but thought it mere fancy…”

“Not hardly, doctor, as portions of those specimens were rescued from the camp site and returned to Miskatonic University where, I believe, they have been stored ever since.”

“Be that as it may, what does it all have to do with Danforth?”

“Suffice to say that if we are to believe Dyer’s words, the condition of the advance camp site was only a prologue of other horrors to come when he and Danforth went on to discover the stone city. There, amid the ruins, they came upon evidence that whoever killed their colleagues at the advance camp had escaped in that direction taking along the body of Felix Gedney, a close friend of Danforth’s.”

“I still fail to see…”

“From what I have read in newspaper accounts of the time, it appears that Dyer and Danforth agreed to say as little as possible about the expedition beyond their discovery of the advance camp site,” said Zarnak. “Later, Dyer described Danforth as having been the more shaken of the two, and sometimes barely able to keep his composure. I believe that Danforth struggled against having a complete nervous breakdown and even sought psychiatric help. Unfortunately, nothing helped and to protect himself from whatever it was that disturbed him, he forced a self-induced catalepsy.”

“It sounds plausible,” conceded Stillnor. “But how does it explain his coming round now? Or his phobia about snow…?”

“His ravings about something that was behind the mountains…that is, the second, more distant range of mountains beyond the stone city…I think is the key. In short, where Danforth may have prompted self-induced catalepsy, something else may have brought him out of it.”

Momentarily at a loss for words, Stillnor simply stared at Zarnak.

“Something else?”

“The thing he mentioned just now,” said Zarnak. “The thing that stood behind the mountains.”

“An imaginary…thing…of course?”

Zarnak shrugged. “Not necessarily.”

“You mean based on the ravings of a deranged mind, you’re suggesting to me that some kind of…of monster is influencing Danforth’s mind across time and space or whatever?”

“Stranger things have happened.”

“You might think so, but it sounds ridiculous to me.”

“Be that as it may, a simple phobia of snow is not Danforth’s problem.”

“I’m sorry, doctor, but I cannot accept your explanation,” said Stillnor, rising. “I appreciate your taking the time to see the patient but as a consultant on the case I can only take your opinion and keep it in mind in my considerations. I’m sorry I cannot be more specific in my conclusions than that.”

By way of reply, Zarnak took his briefcase and resting it on the desk, opened it and removed some folders.

“I understand doctor,” he said, placing the folders on the desk. “These are copies of the material relating to the Dyer Expedition and Danforth’s return to Arkham in 1931. I’ll leave them with you.”

Snapping shut the briefcase, Zarnak shrugged into his coat.

“If you change your mind and would like to talk further on this case, doctor, call my office anytime.”

In another moment, Stillnor was alone in his office.

Later that afternoon, while making his final rounds of the day, Stillnor was still thinking about the things Zarnak had said. On the third floor, he checked with nurse Popworth asking in particular about Danforth.

“He’s been quiet since you and Dr. Zarnak left,” reported Popworth. “But I’m afraid we’re going to have to put him on an IV again if he refuses to eat.”

Nodding, Stillnor went to room 12 and, not wishing to disturb the patient, merely peeked in through the small one way window set in the door. Danforth was still secured but resting quietly. His eyes stared at the ceiling and his lips moved silently.

Satisfied, Stillnor checked in again with the nurse and returned to his office. Gathering his things, he hesitated only slightly before including the folder given him by Zarnak in his briefcase. The drive home was uneventful and he went through his routine of preparing dinner and catching up with the news on television. Refilling his cup with coffee, he retired to his study where began going over the day’s reports.

He had not been at it long before the phone on his desk rang. Wondering who it could be, he picked up the receiver and identified himself.

“Doctor, this is nurse Popworth at the hospital,” said the voice at the other end. “Something has happened here that I thought you should know about right away.”

“What is it?”

“Some time ago, we don’t know exactly when, the patient in room 12 managed to escape.”

“Escape!” said Stillnor, surprised. “Mr. Danforth? He was all right when I checked on him before leaving for the day.”

“I realize that doctor. No one checked his room again until a few hours later at dinner time. When Mr. Scott, the orderly on duty, went to see if the patient would eat anything, he found that he was gone. We’re not sure how he managed to escape the restrainers, but one band seemed to have been chewed through.”

“Well then, how did he get out of the building? Someone must have seen him.”

“The door to his room was still locked when Scott checked but his window was open. As you know, there are no grills on the third floor windows…”

“You mean to tell me that he escaped out a third story window?”

“He must have. There was no other way out of the room. Anyway, the police agree that it must have been the window. They found impressions in the ground where someone who jumped might have landed.”

“So you called the police?”

“As per hospital policy, doctor.”

“Good. What did they say about getting the patient back?”

“They were optimistic that they could find him quickly…he was only wearing a jonnie when he escaped and was barefoot so he couldn’t have gone far.”

Stillnor breathed a sigh of relief. Nevertheless, it was never good for an institution’s reputation to have had patients under its care escape. The sooner Danforth could be found, the better.

“Well it seems the situation is under control,” said Stillnor. “Unless you think it would do any good for me to go in, I’ll remain here…”

“I think that would be all right for now, doctor.”

“Very well. Let me know as soon as you hear anything from the police. We’ll go through the whole thing in the morning.”

“Yes, doctor.”

Hanging up, Stillnor was nevertheless torn between the need to stay by the phone and an urge to hop in his car and search the streets himself. He was still debating the issue when the phone rang again.

“This is Dr. Stillnor.”

“Doctor, Popworth here. Just wanted you to know that the police reported that a cruiser spotted someone answering the description of Danforth at the bus station. If it was our patient, he managed to get some clothes somehow because he wasn’t in his jonnie.

“The bus station? How the devil did he manage to get that far without being spotted?”

“I’m sure I don’t know, doctor.”

“Well, were they able to take him into custody at least?”

“Unfortunately, no. When the officers approached him, the patient disappeared into a crowd.”

It was the last anyone heard or saw of Danforth for some weeks until officers cruising the area around Stuart Street one night caught sight of someone digging around Pickering Common. Investigating, they thought the man’s description fit that of the missing Danforth and called in the sighting. Unfortunately, the man managed to flee before he could be secured.

Naturally, the weeks since Danforth’s escape were not easy ones for Stillnor who, as supervising physician at the hospital had to account to the board for the patient’s escape. Luckily however, it was left to the superintendent to deal with family members who were understandably distraught at the situation.

But even with the escape of a patient, work at the hospital had go on and so it was that Stillnor found himself at home one night trying to catch up with paperwork when the doorbell rang. Rising, he went to the front door and opened it. Standing there was a tall man with dark hair peppered in gray.

He wore a trench coat.

“Doctor Stillnor?” the man asked.

“Yes.”

“Doctor, I’m Detective Shonross of the Arkham Police Department,” said the man, holding out identification.

“Oh, yes; we’ve spoken on the phone. Have you any news about our escaped patient?”

“As a matter of fact, I do,” confirmed Shonross. “The man last seen digging around in Pickering Common has been seen again and this time we’re sure it’s Danforth.”

“Seen again?” asked Stillnor anxiously, beckoning Shonross indoors. “You sound as if he hasn’t been picked up yet.”

“He hasn’t,” admitted Shonross. “He’s managed to keep one step ahead of us so far but with an all-points alarm out, I think it’s only a matter of time before we bring him in.”

“Well, I certainly appreciate being kept informed about the department’s progress…”

“Danforth has been spotted a couple times this evening in different parts of town,” revealed Shonross. “But for a man on the run, your patient has been demonstrating some strange behavior and I thought it might be useful to talk to you about it. Maybe you can figure out what the man has in mind.”

“Well, since he was moved to our facility last year, the patient has never shown any kind of rational behavior so it’s hard to imagine that there might be any thought going into his actions.”

“Don’t want to second guess you, doctor, but the patient did have the presence of mind to escape from your hospital. He knew how to do that well enough didn’t he?”

“That’s so,” admitted Stillnor.

“So, is there any possibility that the patient is looking for something?”

“Looking for something?” asked Stillnor, surprised. “Not that I’m aware of. He’s been in one hospital or another for over forty years. It’s hardly likely that the first thing he’d do with his freedom is go looking for something…”

“He’s been missing for almost three weeks, doctor,” reminded Shonross. “So he must have been doing something in that time. Anyway, now that he’s back in Arkham, it seems that he must be looking for something because each time he’s been spotted, he was caught digging. Twice tonight he’s managed to get away from us and both times when officers went over to see what he was doing, there were fresh dug holes about two feet deep in the ground.”

Puzzled, Stillnor could offer nothing in explanation.

“The second time though, was closer than the first. Officers surprised him and when he got up to run, he dropped something. It was caked in dirt so we know it was something he’d just dug up.”

“What was it?”

“Well, that’s something we were hoping you could tell us.” So saying, the detective produced an object from his pocket and handed it to Stillnor.

Taking it, Stillnor at first thought it was just a rock but on closer examination noticed its distinct coloration and shape: that of a five pointed star with the tips broken off. The star itself was of a design he’d never seen before.

“Have any idea what that is?” asked Shonross presently.

“No. I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

Just then, even through the closed doorway, the squawk of a police radio could be heard from the detective’s car parked outside.

“Have to go,” said Shonross. “I’ll leave that with you for now but let me know if you think of anything that can help us figure out what Danforth is going to do next.”

“I will,” assured Stillnor letting the detective out.

Absently, Stillnor made his way back to the study, turning the strange star stone over in his hands. By midnight there was no more news of Danforth so he thought he could snatch a few hours of sleep before heading in to work. Taking one last look at the star stone, he set it on the night table by his bed and slipped under the covers.

The first impression he had was the feeling that they were being watched. The camp site lay on a vast plain of white snow that stretched for miles back in the direction from which they had traveled. Back there, a rising wind obscured the horizon casting the whole world into a featureless white haze. The coming storm was rolling in from the direction of a towering range of mountains at the foot of which the camp had been pitched, mountains so high that their peaks were nothing but naked rocks far above the snow line. There nature, through millions of years of weathering, had so fashioned their steep flanks as to make them appear carved by human hands. Reaching downward thousands of feet into the snow at their base, the rock looked for all the world like it was a pile of giant blocks piled one atop the other. It was a formation that the camp’s leader, Prof. Joseph Lake, had intended to study at close range but for a more immediate discovery.

Standing outside the group of tents that comprised the core of the camp site, he could see in the distance the iron derrick that held the drill designed by Prof. Pabodie. With it, the expedition had managed to break through the ice into a cavern below where a remarkable discovery was made. A veritable boneyard of artifacts including a set of completely unidentifiable biological specimens that no one was certain represented either the animal or vegetable kingdoms. Excitement over the discovery was palpable and the specimens were hauled to the surface and stored outside where the cold would continue to preserve them. But Lake, being a biologist could not wait to find out more about the things and had one brought in under cover of a tent. There, he could see the fitful glow of a lantern on the rough fabric and the silhouette of figures moving inside where Lake had decided to dissect the specimen.

His feet crunching in the hoar frost, he made his way to the tent and entered. Lake was there holding a scalpel with Gedney and a few others looking on. All but Lake were clearly uncomfortable, and one look at the thing on the table before them would be enough for anyone to see why. It was almost eight feet long with some kind of membranous wings folded under it where it lay on the table. Inexplicably, there appeared to be suckers or mouths at the tips of the wing struts. Around a thick middle, spread equidistantly around the thing were five rubbery tentacles that in turn branched out twice more with sub-groups of five smaller filaments. Atop the thing was a huge rugose mass in the shape of a five pointed star with stalks projecting from each point. The flesh at the end of one stalk was pulled back to reveal what looked to be an eye. Atop the star shaped head was a grotesque looking slit. The base of the thing was likewise-appendaged with a series of extensions that could have supplied locomotion. It was altogether a disgusting sight made worse by an almost overpowering stench that filled the enclosed space. It was a situation in which he had to force himself to remain where he was. At that moment, Lake had just finished opening the thing up when there was a sudden disturbance outside.

Everyone in the tent started when the dogs, which had been kept in a corral some distance from the main camp site, erupted in a wild frenzy of howling and whining. When he emerged from the tent to see what was happening, the wind outside had progressed into a gale that set the tents to flapping and lashed unprotected faces with crystals of icy snow. Holding his hand over his eyes, he looked in the direction of the corral just in time to see the dogs break through their snowy enclosure and begin to run off. But then it seemed to him that vague figures moving in the storm positioned themselves to stop the stampede. He could make out nothing for some minutes but in that time, the sounds of the dogs died away among a few isolated yelps. Finally all was quiet again and he was on the point of investigating when one of the tents collapsed in the wind. Rushing to the scene to save what he could, he thought he heard screaming from still another tent that had been set aside for the radio. Changing his mind about the collapsed tent, he leaned into the howling storm and made for the radio hut instead. Some minutes later, he reached it and burst inside. There he found no one. Camp stools and bunks, however, had been overturned, the radio smashed, and everywhere there was a stench that threatened to make his gorge rise. Holding his hand over his mouth, he stumbled from the tent. Squinting into the driving snow, he thought he saw movement outside the tent where Lake and the others had been gathered, but they seemed strangely disfigured and over large. Was it the howling wind or did he hear the sounds of screaming? He thought he heard a crash but could not be sure. The next he knew, movement around the distant tent had ceased along with any noise save that of the wind. Struggling against the rapidly gathering snow, he lifted his feet and trudged toward where he had seen the activity. At last, he fell through the tent opening to find the interior a chaos of smashed instruments and scattered equipment. In the center of the enclosure, the table still stood but the specimen that Lake had been dissecting was gone. Again, there was that terrible smell and footprints in the snow blown into the tent by the wind outside hinted at furious and hurried activity.

Suddenly, above the howling wind outside and the furious noise of the shuddering tent, he thought he heard screams — but the kind of screams more akin to animals than human beings. Had some of the dogs returned to the campsite? Now wondering where the others had gone, he looked toward the snow shelters erected to protect the expedition’s airplanes from the weather. Surprised, he noticed that one of the planes had been removed from its shelter and the dull flicker of a lantern danced inside the hollow where it had been stored. Making his way to the plane, its details and those of the enclosure became more vivid. He came across a deep trail through the snow leading to the shelter. Strewn about were various camping implements and foodstuffs. Near the entrance to the enclosure, he saw a few of the expedition’s sleds piled high with supplies. A tarp covering one of the sleds moved with more energy than could be expected from the wind. He veered aside and reaching it, pulled the tarp back. Beneath it was Gedney, strapped tightly to the sled. His eyes stared about in maniacal panic and though he tried to say something, all he could manage were unintelligible mutterings. Saliva dribbled from the corners of his mouth and froze on his cheeks.

He would have said something to Gedney, but a noise from inside the shelter drew his attention. There, lantern light still flickered and a few moans could be heard. The snow had fallen from the interstices between the blocks of hardened snow and through them he could see figures moving about. Something about them seemed wrong however. They were uniformly tall; taller than anyone in the camp, and their heads seemed too big for their bodies. Also, there were too many of them, more than could be accounted for by the members of the expedition. Curious, but with growing trepidation, he rounded the corner of the enclosure to the large, open end where the tail section of the plane crowded close. The glare of a toppled lantern blinded him momentarily but when his eyes cleared, the first thing he noticed were the figures lined up on the snowy floor of the enclosure. At first, he thought they were among the specimens the crew had retrieved from the cave but as he stared, he realized that they were too small for that, the flesh too pale. With growing horror he recognized Lake at the head of the line; his torso had been opened up and parts of him lay scattered in the snow. Now he saw that the other figures were also members of the expedition: stripped and their bodies taken apart in various ways. Then, his vision broadened and he sensed the others occupying the enclosure. Something stepped between him and the lantern, something that loomed gigantically in silhouette, blocking any further view into the enclosure. He took a step back in surprise, then surprise was overtaken by horror as he saw what it was that he faced. The large shape where the head ought to have been was shaped like a five-pointed star with all about it waving eye stalks that studied him unblinkingly. Shifting its weight, the thing moved toward him, its five tentacular arms lashing out, already glistening with blood, its huge bulk towering over him…

Stillnor sat bolt upright in bed, a scream in his throat, one that stopped only when he’d run out of breath. Panting, he threw off the covers and immediately was chilled by the sheen of perspiration that lathered his body.

Running a nervous hand through his hair, he forced himself up and stumbled to the bathroom where he splashed warm water on his face and swallowed a gulp or two of water directly from the tap.

Calmed down greatly since waking, Stillnor decided not to return immediately to bed. Instead, he threw on his bathrobe and went to make a cup of coffee. By the time he’d finished the familiar routine of its preparation, he was able to take the cup into the study without spilling any of its contents.

Just a nightmare, he assured himself. It was all that talk by Zarnak about Antarctica and the Dyer Expedition that did it. I always did have an active imagination.

Sitting in the darkened study, Stillnor found himself facing his desk and remembered the folder Zarnak had left with him. Resisting a rising fear that reviewing at its contents would force a recurrence of the nightmare when he returned to bed, he reached over and took the folder.

Opening it, he began to examine its contents in the light that spilled into the study from the hall. Mostly, the folder contained copies of articles and reports published at the time of the Dyer Expedition and its return to the United States. Here was Dyer’s plea against further exploration of the mountain ranges his own expedition had discovered and a piece on the artifacts brought back for display at the Miskatonic’s museum. There, the dispatches to local newspapers received by radio direct from the expedition. Stillnor hesitated at one noting the discovery of a plant or animal with a head shaped like a five pointed star…its description was disturbingly similar to the thing in his nightmare. A coincidence he was sure perhaps brought on by the stone given him earlier in the evening by Detective Shonross. Continuing on, he came across some photos among which was a group shot of the Dyer Expedition. Even before he had a chance to read the dateline below the photo, he recognized one of the members: Felix Gedney. Now why was that? He’d never seen the man before or his likeness. Didn’t Zarnak mention that he’d been a student on the expedition…that he’d died and his body discovered by Danforth? Yes, that was it. But now he recalled his dream and was sure Gedney had been in it but in just what capacity, he couldn’t remember.

He had almost finished going through the contents of the folder when he came upon another photo that caught his attention, this time it was one of a star-shaped stone, identical it seemed to the one on his night stand. Looking further, there was a quote from Prof. Dyer calling it a “Mnar stone,” something that sources in certain historical texts claimed to have protective properties, but protection against what, he didn’t say. Then something began to tickle the back of Stillnor’s mind. He went to a cabinet and found a street map of Arkham. Unfolding it, he located the places where Danforth had been sighted earlier that evening. Taking a pencil, he drew lines radiating from those points and then, assuming a five pointed star pattern, completed the form. The places where Danforth had been found digging were located at the points of the assumed star. Could it be that there was method to his madness? If so, then Stillnor was certain he could now predict where Danforth would appear next!

Excited with his theory, Stillnor decided that it was too insubstantial to report to the police. He’d take his car and go to the next place he thought Danforth would go. But so as not to waste his time, he called the police to find out if his patient had been sighted anywhere else since Detective Shonross had paid him a visit. He was, but again, escaped before he could be apprehended. Hanging up the phone, Stillnor marked the location on his map. It still fit the pattern! Quickly, he grabbed his coat and ran out to the garage. Backing out the car a little too quickly, he forced himself to calm down and take his time driving to Front Street where a little park would provide the perfect place for digging.

It was almost dawn by the time Stillnor pulled up across the street from the park. There were a few benches but no playground equipment. This was simply an island of green in a neighborhood of older homes that had been renovated in recent years. Slouching down behind the wheel, Stillnor prepared for what he expected to be a short wait. And right enough, it wasn’t long before some movement caught his eye and a white-garbed figure creeped from the shadows and made its way to the park. Quietly, Stillnor slipped from his car and raced across the street keeping a row of hedges between himself and Danforth. Peering over the shrubs, he could see him on his knees already, digging with a stick he’d found, not an easy task what with the late autumn cold. Cautiously, Stillnor rose and tip-toed toward Danforth then, with a quick lunge, threw himself on top of him. As expected, Danforth struggled mightily but Stillnor had a good grip on him, or thought he did. Danforth managed to break free and, spinning about must have recognized Stillnor because he stopped suddenly. But there was nervous tension in everything about him as he crouched, ready to run at the slightest provocation.

“Mr. Danforth,” gasped Stillnor in an attempt to reassure him. “Remember me? I’m Dr. Stillnor.”

“I remember you, doctor,” said Danforth in a voice Stillnor barely recognized. “You want me to go back to the hospital. Well maybe I will after I’m done with what I have to do.”

“What do you have to do, Charles?” asked Stillnor, using Danforth’s first name to reinforce a soothing familiarity.

“Star stones,” said Danforth, looking this way and that as if fearful of being discovered. “The Old Ones’ sign and their protection. Prof. Dyer…”

“What about Prof. Dyer?”

“Dyer, Dyer, Dyer!” shouted Danforth, suddenly. “Dyer hid them and I have to find them before it snows! It’s his fault I had to go!”

At a loss for words, Stillnor could only stare, hoping Danforth would regain control of himself and let him take him back to the hospital.

“The voice in my head!” agonized Danforth as he pounded his skull with his fists in some kind of desperate attempt to drive out whatever it was that had compelled him to flee the hospital and disappear for weeks. “The voice won’t leave me alone! It tells me what to do and I don’t want to do anything! I just want to be alone! Alone!”

“Get hold of yourself, Charles,” soothed Stillnor. “I’ll help you but first we have to get back to the hospital…”

“No! I have to get the stones, break the wards, end the protection — the voice said so,” insisted Danforth, obviously struggling in some sort of mental tug of war. “Dyer hid the stones. Dyer and I. He said they’d protect us from them. I don’t want to remove them but the voice says they work against hybrids too, so I have to. I have to!”

With that, Danforth finally lost control and ran off into the night leaving Stillnor looking helplessly after him.

Not knowing what else to do, Stillnor decided to return home and inform Shonross of what he had discovered about predicting Danforth’s movements. He determined not to tell the detective of his own encounter with the patient, there was really no need. He was sure that with his information, the police could lie in wait at all of the remaining points that Danforth was sure to visit and nab him at one of them.

On the way home, however, Stillnor had the opportunity to mull over Danforth’s obvious agitation. Surely, from what he could see, the patient was still suffering from some residual effects of his catalepsy. His ravings made little sense and his agonized behavior indicated a great deal of internal confusion. Still, his condition was a great improvement over his previous comatose state and Stillnor had hopes that his patient could make a complete recovery under proper psychological care.

The key was to free him of the delusion that he was hearing voices, voices that seemed to blame Prof. Dyer for his predicament. Clearly, Danforth attached significance to digging up the so-called star stones that he claimed…wait! The star stones! They were obviously for real because Danforth had been digging them up, one was even delivered by Shonross to his home! Despite himself, Stillnor was suddenly forced to accept the fact that aspects of Danforth’s ravings were based in reality. What was it he’d said? That it was both he and Dyer who had hidden the stones. For some kind of protection against…what? Suddenly Stillnor found Danforth’s case to be more complicated than he first assumed. The more he considered it, the more questions he had.

Back in his study, Stillnor made his call to the police. It took a while to convince Shonross of his “theory,” but at last he succeeded. That done, he was free to again look through the material given him by Zarnak. There was mention of the star stone so-called in Dyer’s old monograph about what he liked to term “the mountains of madness” and their apparent connection to a pre-human race of star-headed creatures he termed “Old Ones” but nothing about any protective qualities they might have. Also, there was mention of Danforth’s mental condition upon their return to the United States and their agreement not to discuss details of what they’d found in Antarctica. Clearly, from the monograph, Stillnor could tell that something had shaken Danforth greatly but was it really some ultimate horror hinted at by Dyer? What he needed, thought Stillnor, was more information about what Dyer and Danforth did after they arrived home from the expedition. Why, for instance, did the two apparently bury star stones around Arkham? Smacking of superstition, the action made little sense for men of science such as Danforth and especially Dyer had been.

Considering, Stillnor now recalled that Zarnak had said that artifacts were brought back by the Dyer Expedition and had since been housed at Miskatonic University. The museum there, he knew, was quite famous for its collection of artifacts from around the world gathered mostly before the second World War. The institution had fallen behind somewhat in its display and cataloguing practices since those days but as he understood it, still boasted material that scholars found invaluable. Surely, among that material, he could find information on Dyer’s doings after he returned from that ill fated Antarctic expedition?

Stillnor had been too busy at the hospital the next couple of days to get away, due mostly to the return of Danforth, who had been captured by police at one of the locations he’d suggested. Trussed in a straightjacket, the patient had been able to walk into the hospital with a police officer on either arm but soon after being placed in his room, he’d lapsed into silence and refused to cooperate with the staff.

The apparent retrogression was very disappointing to Stillnor personally who had seen how energetic, if somewhat neurotic, Danforth had been only days before. Still, he’d hoped that upon his return to the hospital there would be a basis upon which to build an eventual recovery. That, however, didn’t seem likely and he was forced to fall back on a variation of the previous treatment regimen that had been in place before Danforth’s escape.

Thus, by the time the weekend rolled around, Stillnor’s professional frustration was such that he found himself willing to consider more unorthodox approaches to Danforth’s problem. Perhaps the answers did lie among Dyer’s papers housed at the Mikatonic library.

The weather was still frosty when he left home that Saturday afternoon for the short drive across town to the university campus. The sun never did make it much over the horizon as the days grew shorter, and already the shadows of coming evening stretched across the city with some areas where buildings crowded close together, in perpetual gloom.

As venerable as Miskatonic University was, it had not grown much since its founding, as most other such institutions had a habit of doing. It’s main buildings, including library and museum, were still crowded close together on some high ground overlooking Arkham’s historic downtown. Stillnor found some visitor parking below the hill and, joining a few students heading in the same direction, soon found himself in the overheated lobby of the old library building. The roomy hallways were all linoleum and polished wood frame, and through a pair of doors set in an entrance arch, Stillnor could see the reference section with its heavy tables, card catalogues, and shelves groaning under the weight of massed volumes. Entering, he spied the reference desk and approached a middle aged woman busy stamping arrival dates on the fly leafs of newly-acquired books.

“Excuse me,” said Stillnor. “I might be looking for something that could be in special collections?”

“Anything in particular?”

“The papers of Prof. William Dyer who held the archeology chair at the university in the 1930s.”

“That would be upstairs,” she said, pointing with her stamp in the direction of a staircase at the rear of the room.

“Thank you.”

Stillnor mounted the heavy staircase whose marble steps had been worn down over the years by the numberless feet of undergraduates. At the top, the landing was dominated by a large glass display case which upon closer examination, Stillnor was surprised to see contained the famous Necronomicon. He knew little about its contents beyond what he’d read in local newspapers from time to time, but he was aware that it was supposed to be an extremely rare copy. Briefly, he wondered why it seemed to be housed in such an insecure fashion. Well, he was here on other business at the moment and moved on to a doorway with a placard that read “special collections.”

It led to a medium sized room that smelled strongly of parchment and old books. Metal shelving crowded the available space leaving only narrow avenues between each. A scratched up wooden table with two chairs was pushed up beneath a pair of windows and in a corner, a tiny desk was covered in thick folders and a few ancient volumes.

“Hello?” ventured Stillnor.

“I’m here,” said a voice from among the stacks followed by the wizened features of what was no doubt one of the school’s retired teachers. “Yes? Can I help you?”

“I’m Dr. Aaron Stillnor, of the Pickerton Rehabilitation Hospital here in town,” said Stillnor. “I have a patient I’m working on whose case may turn on events that happened forty years ago and was hoping I might find records belonging to one of your former professors here.”

“What’s his name?”

“Prof. William Dyer. I think he may have taught here in the 1930s and 40s.”

“Oh, yes. Died in 1961. Served as chair of the university’s archeology department for many years.”

“Then you’ll know if any of his papers or records of any sort were preserved?”

“Naturally. Most of Miskatonic’s faculty bequeath their papers to the university…well most have anyway.”

As the clerk was speaking, he led the way into an adjoining room which was, incredibly, even more crowded than the first. Waiting in the doorway, Stillnor watched as the man made his way down one of the aisles and apparently found what he was looking for.

“We have all of Prof. Dyer’s papers here in bound volumes,” he said, looking over his glasses. “They’re labeled by year…”

“Those covering 1931 or so,” replied Stillnor.

Turning back to the shelves, the man reached up and pulled down one fat, crimson bound volume.

“Here we are Doctor,” said the man, handing the book to Stillnor. “I’m afraid it can’t be taken from the department though. You can examine it at the table here by the window.”

“Thank you,” said Stillnor.

At the table, Stillnor sat down and opened the book to the contents which indicated the bound records included Dyer’s scholarly papers and journals covering the years 1930-1935 and including material dealing with his celebrated expedition to the Antarctic.

Flipping to the relevant sections, Stillnor found the goals, itineraries, invoices, and lists of expedition members of the Antarctic venture as well as copies of the cablegrams forwarded to local newspapers from the advance camp set up by Prof. Lake. Although Stillnor had already seen much of the material in the folder Zarnak had left him, he was still somewhat surprised to find the more sensational aspects of the expedition confirmed in Dyer’s records. Here was the discovery of the hidden cavern, the strange star headed creatures or plants found there, the disaster that struck the advance camp after a sudden storm swept down from the mountains.

Here also was Dyer’s monograph written in an attempt to dissuade the sponsors of the Starkweather-Moore Expedition. It was rather long so Stillnor skimmed much of it, lingering only when Dyer mentioned the discovery of Gedney’s body deep in the bowels of the ancient city. Overall, he had to admit that the monograph did have a discomforting effect with its sense of mounting horror and hints that the builders of the city had come from another world and came to Earth millions of years before the appearance of men, indeed, were said by Dyer to have mastered telepathy and cellular manipulation and been the creators of human kind! It was rubbish of course. Dyer offered no definitive proof that any of his conclusions were even plausible, but however true or untrue they were, it was clear he believed them. So much so that only a few pages later, his journal entries indicated that after conferring with a colleague named Wilmarth, he seemed to have been convinced that use of star stones brought back by the expedition would protect him from something he feared might follow him from Antarctica. Consequently, he enlisted the aid of Danforth in burying a number of the stones around Arkham, arranging them in the pattern of a single large five-pointed star shape. In the following years, so far as Stillnor could tell, Dyer made no more trips outside of town and soon after burying the stars, Danforth went into cataleptic seizure.

So Danforth was telling the truth when he said he and Dyer had buried the stones! But if that was so, what about the other things he mentioned? Stillnor thought a moment. Danforth said that the five pointed star was the sign of the Old Ones…those whom Dyer claimed built the city in Antarctica…and that voices in his head were telling him to remove the stones, remove the protection…why? If the star stones belonged to the Old Ones, from whom did they need to be protected? In the monograph, Dyer said that Danforth had seen something even more horrifying than the star headed creatures found at the advance camp or the so-called Shoggoth that chased them out of the city. Was that what they were afraid might come after them even so far away as Arkham was from the bottom of the world?

He’d still not decided what to believe when it occurred to him that the Miskatonic’s museum was connected to the library building and that he could view for himself some of the artifacts returned from Dyer’s expedition. Suddenly convinced that the answer to his doubts could be found among the bones and petrified samples that lay so near at hand, Stillnor returned his book to the clerk.

“Tell me, is the university’s museum open at this hour?” he asked.

“Every day until 8 p.m.” The man checked his watch. “But if you want to have time to look through it…there’s plenty to see…you’d better go now, it’s almost 7.”

“Already?” Stillnor was genuinely surprised. He had no idea that he’d been reading for so long. “Then you’d better give some good directions so I can find it without any trouble.”

The man did so and a few minutes later, Stillnor had traversed a short connecting tunnel in the library’s basement to an adjoining wing where he took another few minutes to find the corner housing the artifacts from Dyer’s expedition. The lights in this section of the museum were turned down low, no doubt due to the fact that it had few visitors. Standing in the gloomy corridor outside the exhibit, he had to chuckle that such a collection was even still on display forty years after it was gathered. Maybe there was some truth to the school’s reputation for being behind the times. Even the Peabody Museum in nearby Salem was rumored to be getting rid of its fabled anthropological collection in favor of a less offensive approach to aboriginal cultures.

Stepping under an arch giving way into the exhibit, Stillnor was startled after coming face to face with the biggest penguin he’d ever seen. Bigger than he ever suspected such animals to grow! Erected on a pedestal by the door, the stuffed penguin towered over him and must have stood at least 6 feet tall. Its pointy beak partially opened in a silent call, it seemed ready to leap down and charge across the room. Recovering from his surprise, Stillnor was forced to admire the animal and recalled Dyer mentioning such beasts while exploring the stone city.

Slowly, he made a circuit of the room, looking into its many wood and glass display cases and noting the yellowed character of the cards that gave descriptions of the various items. Here was a display of the tools used by the expedition to chip away pieces of ice and rock for samples, there photos of the expedition at different points: at a banquet the night before embarking, aboard ship, views of the Antarctic ice shelf, Dyer standing with some loaded sledges with the dogs milling behind, an aerial shot of the planes sitting on the snow at the advance camp. Stillnor looked more closely when he came upon a photo of Dyer and Danforth together and another of Prof. Lake directing drilling into the ice.

Moving on, Stillnor became interested in a display of prehistoric artifacts found in the cave explored by Lake and his colleagues: bones, rock fragments including some displaying the odd “footprint” that Dyer claimed belonged to the Old Ones, and an exact replica of the star stone Detective Shonross had given him. Next came more photographs, this time of the megalithic city discovered by Dyer and Danforth on the other side of the mountains that looked down upon the advance camp. Suddenly, the reality of Dyer’s claims became substantial to him as he gazed upon actual evidence of the existence of the city. A feeling of mounting strangeness overcame him as he looked at the historical carvings Dyer had described so vividly in his monograph, the titanic stone structures that had collapsed upon themselves, the winding stairways and inclined planes that led into deeper gloom in chambers that lay far beneath ground level, the occasional rubble and the long corridors that ended in darkness ahead. Occasionally, a photo even captured the figures of either Dyer or Danforth themselves standing beside some object to help to give the observer some notion of its size. Looking at them, Stillnor was struck by either man’s youthful appearance. Danforth had only been an undergraduate of 20 or so when he accompanied the expedition while Dyer was in his prime at 54.

Sobered by the series of photographs that had altered Dyer and Danforth in his mind from an historical figure and a madman to flesh and blood human beings who had lives and hopes and dreams, Stillnor came to the final portion of the exhibit. Mounted on the wall in glass fronted cases extending from floor to ceiling, were the organic remains of the star headed creatures discovered by Lake in the cavern beneath the Antarctic ice. Whether they were plant or animal, no one was sure at the time, although in his monograph Dyer claimed they were actually members of the alien race he called the Old Ones. Rather unimpressive, most of the artifacts appeared to be bits and pieces of the things, desiccated and petrified, cut by scalpel in such ways as to best display external and in some cases internal, bodily functions.

Taking an involuntary step backward, Stillnor felt an odd repulsion at the display and as his gaze moved upward, it finally came to rest on what could only have been one of the creatures’ star-shaped head. It lay flat against the tack board behind it with pins holding the five pointed ends at full extension along with the thinner eye stalks. The slit at the center of the star shaped head was as Dyer had described it in his monograph. All of it was vaguely disgusting to Stillnor without his being able to say exactly why. Just then, the shadows created by the muted lighting seemed to press down around him and he felt suddenly alone. He hadn’t seen a single person in all the time since he entered the museum wing and wondered if it was still open to the public. If no one knew he was here, maybe he’d been locked in? He was on the point of looking for the welcome desk when he was stopped by a peculiar odor. Sniffing, he began to cough and his gorge threatened to rise. He managed to overcome his initial reaction and, controlling his breathing, couldn’t help but follow the scent to find out what could be causing such a stink.

Stepping back out into the corridor, he looked up and down and still saw no one about. Continuing on, he followed the hallway back the way he’d come until arriving at another arched doorway. This one led through a darkened room to another archway on the other side where light revealed many green plants. Heading in that direction, the stench remained strong but now included elements of earth and green growing things. Arriving at the second arch, he found himself at the entrance to a greenhouse filled with what looked to him like exotic plants. Great fern trees stretched to a glass ceiling where a cloud-veiled moon struggled for release in the early evening sky. Closer to the ground, exotic shrubs, flowering plants, lianas, and other flora more akin to a rain forest than the forests of New England dominated. Everywhere, the unpleasant smell still lingered and despite his having come no closer to discovering its source, something prompted him to continue deeper into the greenhouse where light from the entrance found it difficult to penetrate. Here, the ferns and palms hung thickly about, their details obscured as clouds continued to cover the moon. There was a tinkle of something knocked across the floor, and suddenly Stillnor was certain he wasn’t alone. Frightened, he whirled, casting quick glances around him and seeing only the looming silhouettes of plants whose fronds brushed his head and shoulders. At last, his attention rested on one particular shape that bulked largely amid trunks of palm trees and low hanging branches. Had it moved? Stillnor wasn’t sure; it could have been his own looking about that stirred the still air of the greenhouse. If only the moon would come out from behind that cloud…Then, his vision seemed to come into focus and gradually, he was able to distinguish the shapes about him. There was a palm tree and there a cactus and there…he gasped and drew back tripping over something that clattered too loudly in the silence of the greenhouse. Tumbling, he flailed his arms helplessly trying to find support and failing, fell heavily to the concrete floor. Kicking himself away from the plants in front of him, he couldn’t help looking up hoping he’d been mistaken about what he thought he saw. He wasn’t. Looming before him in the gloom was a bulky figure topped by a star-shaped head piece! Soundlessly, cord-like tendrils waved about it and half way down the solid trunk of its midsection were ropy appendages that divided and sub-divided into a myriad grasping hands. And then, appallingly, there was the sound of stiff, plastoid flesh stretching and pulling as the thing bent slowly forward. Stillnor felt the oppressive nearness of its heavy bulk pressing him down, cornering him and suddenly, the stench that had receded into the background of his consciousness flooded back in greater force than ever. At that moment, the damned moon chose to emerge from the clouds that up to now had prevented Stillnor from getting a good look at the thing before him. It lasted only a moment, but it was enough. The fright that had been building somewhere inside of him, that had been kept pent up, controlled somehow, was finally loosed and he screamed, screamed like a child faced with its worst nightmare, screamed like the poor souls he dealt with on a daily basis at the hospital. The next he knew, he was stumbling from the greenhouse, running blindly, not knowing where so long as it was away from that arboretum of horror and madness. Afterward, he could never recall just how he escaped the museum only that he never stopped running. He ran and ran until exhaustion overtook him and he fell to the cold ground panting, his heart pounding. When he was able to stand again, he ran some more and this time didn’t stop until he’d burst through his own front door and locked himself in. He spent the rest of the night on the floor, his back firmly pressed against the door, deathly afraid that something that had followed him from the museum would get in.

The next day he’d learned that the museum wing at Miskatonic had burned to the ground. The result of a gas explosion it was said. And because he’d abandoned his car in the library parking lot, he was asked to come to police headquarters for questioning. Still somewhat incoherent after his experience, the police found his explanations unsatisfying and kept after him for hours. Finally, he was allowed to go home. Disheveled and exhausted from his ordeal, Stillnor fell into a chair and congratulated himself in managing not to tell the police everything that had happened the night before. If he’d had, he was sure that not only would he have been implicated in the destruction of the museum but accused of being a madman himself and candidate for residency at his own hospital; a verdict that he was not at all sure would be far from the truth. Fearful of talking to anyone about what really happened, he finally decided that there was only one person with whom he could confide.

After making himself presentable and reclaiming his car from the garage where the police had it towed, he drove out to the hospital and, avoiding as many of the staff as he could, made his way to the third floor where he greeted the duty nurse and asked for the key to Danforth’s room.

Inside, Danforth had been released from his straightjacket but was once again secured to the bed. Unspeaking, he at least acknowledged Stillnor’s presence when he turned his head in his direction and stared at him with dull, emotionless eyes.

Taking a chair, Stillnor set it beside the bed and sat down. He was about to say something when Danforth surprised him by speaking first.

“I can tell that you’ve seen it,” he said.

Stillnor said nothing.

“Have you told anyone?” asked Danforth.

“Who’d believe me?”

After that, the two talked for a good while before Stillnor finally left.

Back at home, he chose not to turn on the lights and simply sat in the study listening to the occasional car swish by outside. His mind wandering, Stillnor recalled his conversation with Danforth, a conversation whose content he would have dismissed as lunatic only 24 hours before. All about how the Old Ones had mastered cellular manipulation and could and did create the ancestors of the creatures that went on to populate the Earth following their extinction. How they developed telepathic skills that enabled them to communicate with the Shoggoths, their greatest creation and eventual heirs. Finally, as Danforth felt more at ease with him, he confided to him that it had been Gedney’s voice he heard telling him to remove the wards around Arkham and in the weeks in which nothing was seen of him after his escape from the hospital, it was the voice again that directed him to South America where he arranged for cargo to be transported to Boston. At that point, after his own harrowing experience, it finally struck Stillnor in all its terrible implications that the Old Ones were real. As were their servitors, the monstrous Shoggoths who had evolved over millions of years into self-conscious beings filled with curiosity of a world outside the confines of their subterranean abode and eager to learn more about it. Imitative creatures, they had mastered many of the Old Ones’ skills including the manipulation of organic matter, either dead or alive, so that if given the opportunity, they could no doubt alter the structure of a human being so that it could survive the rigors of life deep beneath the Antarctic continent. Such alterations would also no doubt make telepathic communication between themselves and their mutation easier to accomplish. Stillnor knew this was so because he’d seen an example of it the night he found himself in the greenhouse at Miskatonic University, lured there under a telepathic guidance that had prodded him first to the library, then to the museum, and finally to the greenhouse. Although he hadn’t realized it at the time, it had been a call for help after Danforth had been removed from the scene and restrained at the hospital. A cry for help that went unheeded until a deep desperation no other human being could possibly understand forced the telepath to end its existence in a fiery blast of its own making. A cry for help in fact, from a tortured soul trapped in the shape of an Old One, but that still retained its human mind. It had been a sight that badly frightened Stillnor when he saw the star-headed thing looming over him but it wasn’t that which finally sent him screaming into the night. Rather, it was what had been revealed in those few seconds when moonlight broke through the clouds, for nested amid those waving, pleading tentacles were fixed the unmistakable features of Felix Gedney!

ss.”

The King in Yellow

Preface

harles Vaughn (1902-1966), was the first and perhaps foremost American example of that traditionally Gallic malady, the poete moudit. He came from a well-to-do Long Island family of solid Welsh stock. His father, James Cabot Vaughan, was a prominent New York attorney; his mother, Elizabeth Forester Vaughan, nee Woolton, was a socialite who spent her childhood in Europe. James Vaughan expected his son to follow him into the law profession, and Charles read law at Cambridge for one fruitless semester. In 1920, contrary to all his father’s explicit wishes, Charles left for France to study art. After failing to enter the prestigious Ecole des Beaux Artes, he turned his interests to the burgeoning, post-war literary movement centered in Paris. Vaughan began writing poetry, and living on a small stipend secretly sent by his mother, he tramped about Europe — a few months in Germany, an extended visit to Italy, and a return to Paris in early 1923. There, with the help of friends and admirers, he was able to self-publish his first book, Rhine Sketches; a small collection of reminiscences and vignettes extolling the beauty of the Bavarian countryside, and the pleasures of the Hamburg brothels, all in the overblown, overtly romantic language typical of his early prose and verse.

Prima Matera, a group of extended poems dealing with more philosophical concerns, followed in 1925. These poems, in the manner of Rimbaud and Appolinaire, found a willing publisher and some critical and public success. With his mother’s stipend and the small profit from Prima Matera, Vaughan moved with his mistress to Nice where he began writing a novel. This disastrous and huge book (816 pages!) appeared in 1928. Athenian Nights, set in the Paris of the 1920s, and based on Sophocles’ Oedipus plays, was hated by both the critics and the public at large. This monumental failure coincided with his father’s death. In despair, Vaughan fled Nice, leaving his dreams of writing and his mistress behind. After a failed suicide attempt and months of wandering, Vaughan settled in Berlin in 1929. Vaughan found solace in the expressionist theater he found there. Inspired by the plays of Ernst Toller, Georg Kaiser and Bertold Brecht, he began writing one-act plays which soon won him a new-found reputation as one of the best new dramaturges of the era. In 1933, anticipating the Nazi regime’s fascist policies, Vaughan fled to England where he was greeted enthusiastically by the critics. In 1934 he had his first widespread success with a full length play titled Descartes: a three hour montage of scenes from the French mathematician/philosopher’s life, interspersed with excerpts from Descartes’ Les Passions de L’ame (1649) sung by a Greek chorus. Fresh off this success, he soon completed his most ambitious play to date, The Age of Bronze (1936), a scathing modern drama which dealt with the rise of fascism in Europe. The Age of Bronze was also Vaughan’s first triumph on the Broadway stage; and in 1938, he returned to the United States after eighteen years of self-imposed exile.

From 1939 to 1945, Vaughan continued to write one-act plays, poetry, and essays ranging in subject-matter from art to mysticism (collected in The Night Watch, 1972). In 1946 his mother died, and his new full-length play, Charles I, opened to enthusiastic reviews. Olivier’s refusal to play the doomed king, along with the author’s tumultuous personal life made Vaughan one of the most scandalous and well-known writers in America. In 1949, Vaughan completed the libretto for La Rouge et le Noir, an opera based on the classic novel by Stendahl, and he married the artist Virginia Abrams. Vaughan’s next play was Hadrian’s Wall (1952), a bitter parable which compared the decline of the Roman empire with Cold War America. This made Vaughan the target of an investigation by Senator Joseph McCarthy. Vaughan became silent until 1957, when his next, eagerly-awaited play Metaphysique premiered. This stark, disturbing farce/tragedy is made up of one long monologue, often sinking into a stream-of-consciousness, recited by a number of gray, faceless characters inhabiting a dark, featureless wasteland. This confusing monologue is repeatedly interrupted by inexplicable passages of brutal, sadistic violence including a beheading, a number of acts of rape, and a crucifixion. It managed to deeply shock critics and audiences alike. Vaughan retreated into a solitude in which he remained until his untimely death a decade later. Vaughan’s death was as controversial as his life and has been the subject of much conjecture. Did he accidentally shoot himself, or was it a suicide? In the twenty years following his death, Vaughan’s collected oeuvre has been brought back into print, along with a tantalizing fragment first published in 1975. This fragment, The King in Yellow, is put forth by some as Vaughan’s final play. A full decade of scholarship has not revealed any conclusive answers.

Vaughan retreated into a solitude in which he remained until his untimely death a decade later. Vaughan’s death was as controversial as his life and has been the subject of much conjecture. Did he accidentally shoot himself, or was it suicide?

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Works by Charles Vaughan

Rhine Sketches, 1923

Prima Matera, 1925

Athenian Nights, 1928 Novel

Descartes, 1934 Play

The Age of Bronze, 1936 Play

Charles I, 1946 Play

La Rouge et le Noir, 1949 Libretto

Hadrian’s Wall, 1952 Play

Poems 1920-1950, 1955

Metaphysique, 1957 Play

Selected Poems, 1964

Complete One Act Plays, 1968

The Night Watch, 1972 Essays

The Carcosa Trilogy: three unproduced plays, 1975 (written 1957-1966?)

Collected Poems, 1920-1964, 1979

Collected Plays, 1981

The Portable Vaughan, 1984

A Vaughan Omnibus, 1995

THE KING IN YELLOW
By Charles Vaughan

CHORUS:

Along the shore the cloud waves break,

The twin suns sink behind the lake,

The shadows lengthen

In Carcosa.

Strange is the night where black stars rise,

And strange moons circle through the skies,

But stranger still is

Lost Carcosa.

Songs that the Hyades shall sing,

Where flap the tatters of the King,

Must die unheard in

Dim Carcosa.

Song of my soul, my voice is dead,

Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed

Shall dry and die in

Lost Carcosa.

— Cassilda’s Song

Act I, Scene 2:

(As evening approaches night, Cassilda and Camilla walk slowly, arm in arm, along the garden terrace of the palace. In the distance, glowing dimly on the horizon, are the almost-hidden spires of lost Carcosa. In the sky, their light suffusing the terrace, hang the strange moons of Carcosa. Dimly, below the heights upon which the palace is located, gleams the still surface of the Lake of Hali, upon whose shores the cloud waves roll and break. Bright wedges of light fall through open doorways at stage right along with the sounds of a masque: the laughter of people, the tinkling of glasses, the music of popular dances. But outside, all is subdued. Cassilda and Camilla are dressed in the style of past centuries, their hair layered in extravagant pompadours. They each hold small face masks, gilded in silver and gold, before their eyes.)

CAMILLA: (Leaving Cassilda’s side to approach the stone railing hemming-in the verandah.) Such a wonderful night. The cold stars belong to Carcosa once more. The land will again shift its mood, replacing its gay mantle of day to that of evening’s magic cloak. Do you think, Cassilda, that evil days exist in other worlds, in other universes?

CASSILDA: (Smiling.) Don’t be foolish, dear Camilla; all evidence of physical phenomena, as the wise men say, are perceived through the senses. All the world is Carcosa, and Carcosa all the world. Our senses have never revealed aught but magic. Day and night in Carcosa are alike; both are eternally suffused in the aura of magic and perfection. Indeed, if evil days exist at all, there is precious little evidence for them.

CAMILLA: And yet, could they still exist, invisible, untouchable, unknowable to our limited senses even as we speak?

CASSILDA: (Drawing closer to her companion.) Invisible?

CAMILLA: (Staring in the direction of the Lake of Hali.) Like the waters of the Lake; placid and calm, but hiding currents, strong and deep, churning invisibly beneath its surface. Waiting to drag down the unwary swimmer.

CASSILDA: Ah! Like the masks we wear tonight. Hiding our true features. But could strong currents, dangerous as they are, be evil?

CAMILLA: I am not prepared to discuss the nature of good and evil, dear Cassilda, but merely ask if there could be anything in nature to mar the perfection of Carcosa. A strong current is neither good nor evil, but in dragging an unwary swimmer to his doom, effectively destroys the paradisiacal patina of Carcosa.

CASSILDA: (At the railing now, turned to her companion and leaning close.) Truly, such a thing would be unfortunate and skew the wonder of death itself. Snatching it from the beauty of cyclic Nature and casting it down to the anarchic ugliness of Chance. (A pause.) But why do we speak of such unhappy thoughts, when there is a great masque to be reveled in?

CAMILLA: (Musing as if not having heard Cassilda’s reply.) Does Carcosa possess a paradisiacal patina? Do our masks hide more than mere features?

CASSILDA: (More seriously.) I think…you may be right. I believe Carcosa itself may be perfection, but I do not speak of the King.

CAMILLA: (Excitedly.) Oh! Do not speak of the King…

CASSILDA: No, no. Carcosa may be perfection, but its citizens are merely human. Ruled by their petty lusts and simple desires. Vanity and Pride. Intellects ruled by their emotions soon are corrupted and the empty slate of perfect humanity is soon garbled in the blind desires of the flesh.

CAMILLA: (Turning and looking through the open doorways of the palace.) Then evil…

CASSILDA: Not evil. The vagaries of emotion. Kaleidoscopic. Shifting. Anarchic. As you said earlier, neither good nor evil, merely neutral with the possibility of disorder.

CAMILLA: …exists only intangibly in the hearts of men. Invisible. Manifesting itself only in the abstract.

CASSILDA: (Turning now too.) Only in the realm of ideas. Leaving it to each one of us, outside the heart of the perpetrator, to interpret its meaning.

CAMILLA: With all of these churning forces, it is a wonder we see so little evidence of it upon the faces of others.

CASSILDA: (Nodding to the revelers inside the palace.) Just as our masks tonight hide our true faces, so do our faces mask the roiling forces in our hearts. Forces which, if ever allowed to surface, would so twist our physical features that even our closest lovers would be unrecognizable to us.

CAMILLA: (With a visible shrug.) Well, I forget how our little stroll in search of fresh air could lead us so far astray, but the talk here has become too estranged from the senses to border even remotely on reality. Carcosa is magic and perfection. The Lake of Hali is quiet as ever. The Hyades are in their accustomed places. Lord Hastur is in his House. And so our conversation evaporates on the evening breeze, as ephemeral and unreal as the intangible idea of anarchy. (Taking a deep breath.) Let us rejoin

CASSILDA: You are quite right, Camilla. My mind had wandered along avenues of unaccustomed conjecture. Tonight is a night for revelry, and my Lord Guillaume awaits me within.

CAMILLA: (Knowingly.) As a lover, Lord Guillaume possesses many fine attributes…

CASSILDA: (Casually.) Certainly he is handy with the lash and more than proficient in the art of pain.

CAMILLA: You see, I am completely free of cuts and scars and I do not walk with a visible limp.

CASSILDA: (Sincerely, as sister to sister.) And I thank you so much for directing him to me!

CAMILLA: No need for thanks! Are we not friends and lovers? (The two women embrace affectionately and rejoin the masque within the palace. The ballroom occupies the majority of stage right. Inside, laughter, music, the movement of the dancers, musicians, and servants lend an aura of vigorous activity to the scene. Everyone wears different costumes from varying periods and eras with appropriate masks of silver, gold, and elaborately painted plaster. The two women weave their way through the crowd to stage right where Cassilda is greeted by a tall figure in the uniform of an executioner. A black hood drapes his head and a flay trails from his hand.)

CAMILLA: Ah! There is no need to peer beneath this mask to learn the wearer’s identity.

CASSILDA: Lord Guillaume?

GUILLAUME: Not so loudly, Ladies, lest those without the knowledge overhear. (So saying, Guillaume reaches to Camilla, touching her in some secret place and eliciting a barely repressed groan of pain from the girl.)

CASSILDA: (Observing her friend’s softened features as they register a mix of pleasure and pain.) It is wonderful to see how the two of you retain your sense of intimacy.

(Camilla, still unable to speak, smiles and leans momentarily against her friend. A single drop of perspiration shines along her cheek.)

GUILLAUME: I hope to share the same comforting relationship with you, my Lady. (Stooping to kiss her hand.)

CAMILLA: (Suddenly fully recovered and straightening.) Look, did either of you see that man?

CASSILDA: (Looking about.) Which man?

CAMILLA: (Searching.) There, by the entrance. He wears a mask larger than any other, with features of exaggerated contours.

CASSILDA: Yes, the mask is…different.

GUILLAUME: Hideous. But for what reason, I do not know.

CAMILLA: He frightens me.

CASSILDA: (Repressing a shudder.) He is frightening. But it does not lie in the mask alone. Perhaps in what it implies?

CAMILLA: See! He comes this way!

GUILLAUME: Who is that, with the mirror?

(As the man in the strange mask becomes hidden in the movement of the partyers, the women’s attention is turned toward a foppish young man as he crosses the dance floor, his gaze fixed on his own visage in a hand held mirror.)

CASSILDA: Such a strange young man…

CAMILLA: His name is Pierrot and I am told he is seeking Truth.

GUILLAUME: In a mirror?

CAMILLA: Where else?

GUILLAUME: But he sees only himself.

CAMILLA: Then he is fortunate; for who could embrace Truth if they ever had the opportunity?

CASSILDA: (Shuddering.) Then perhaps it is we who should be envying him; faced only with his own visage, he must be forever trapped in a circularity that will spare him the unpleasantness of his desires. He need not seek any farther.

GUILLAUME: We, however, must continue to seek Truth in a more obtuse manner, albeit delightful…

(Guillaume slips two fingers deftly into Cassilda’s mouth.)

CAMILLA: (Smiling.) Take care, Guillaume; my Lady Cassilda has unusually sharp edges to her back teeth…

GUILLAUME: (Expertly manipulating his fingers.) So I see. And does my Lady Cassilda take advantage of her blessings?

(Guillaume removes his fingers and sucks them clean of saliva.)

CASSILDA: (Licking her lips.) If you would care to…

(Before Cassilda can fully reply, Constance, a friend of Cassilda’s enters excitedly from stage right. She is about thirteen years old.)

CONSTANCE: The King! The King in the Pallid Mask!

GUILLAUME: The King you say?

CASSILDA: Hush, Constance, speak not of the King in such a cavalier fashion.

(Before Constance can reply, there is a hubbub of excited whispers as suddenly, the King appears. He is tall and garbed in a tattered mantle of fantastic colors. The Yellow Sign is emblazoned on its back. Covering the King’s face is a featureless Pallid Mask. In his entourage are the two Phantoms of Truth and the Past and a few steps to the rear is the beautiful-yet-tragic figure of Genevieve. She is naked and her hands are bound loosely before her in filaments of gold. As the King advances, the guests bow or curtsy but give way before the Phantom of Truth.)

CAMILLA: Oh, it is the King!

GUILLAUME: Where is Pierrot, the Truth he seeks has arrived.

CASSILDA: It would be useless, he would never recognize it.

CONSTANCE: Is not the Lady Genevieve most fair to look upon?

CAMILLA: It is said she dwelt upon a world most strange and far from the wonders of Carcosa. That she had seen what was not meant for her to see and so, the King took her as his own.

GUILLAUME: (Admiring Genevieve’s form, her golden hair that trails below her back, her dainty feet that never seem to rest upon the floor at the same time, her eyes that glitter behind drooping lids.) Her beauty is wonderful and terrible.

CASSILDA: Careful, my Lord…

GUILLAUME: There is not a mark upon her…

CONSTANCE: Look! Truth has hesitated. It turns…

GUILLAUME: Genevieve…!

(Truth turns to face Genevieve, whose face lifts for the first time to return Truth’s gaze. Truth steps closer, placing a hand on Genevieve’s hip. The two look into one another’s eyes.)

GUILLAUME: She does not flinch!

CONSTANCE: What? What?

CASSILDA: (Terrified.) This is impossible! What kind of awful creature can this be?

DEATH: (Who has been standing nearby, his back turned and thus unidentified up to this point.) One who understands.

CONSTANCE: Death, you are a friend, tell us, what does it mean?

DEATH: To see Truth, is to understand. To understand, is to become aware of one’s identity. To know one’s identity, is to know purpose. To know purpose, is to know contentment. To know contentment, is to be at peace at all times, in all places. Genevieve is equally comfortable as a slave or as a queen.

CAMILLA: And with the King, she is both.

CONSTANCE: Who can compare with him in his white mask?

DEATH: Who can compare with me, for I am paler still.

CONSTANCE: You are very beautiful.

DEATH: So I am. (He holds out an arm and Constance takes it.)

GUILLAUME: (Watching Death and Youth leave the room arm in arm.) They make a charming couple.

CAMILLA: (Still watching the beautiful Genevieve, now sipping wine from a glass held to her lips by the Past.) I would someday like to embrace Death.

CASSILDA: (Crooking a finger into Camilla’s bodice and pulling her lips to hers.) It is too soon to consider that sort of love, my Lady.

GUILLAUME: (Parting the women and sweeping Cassilda into his arms.) Aye, let the young Constance flirt with Death; we three will yet explore Life. (He presses his mouth to Cassilda’s, but never takes his eyes from the figure of Genevieve who now passes close to them as she slowly follows the King from the hall. Guillaume’s nostrils flare as he catches the musky aroma left in her wake and, aroused, clutches more desperately to Cassilda.)

CASSILDA: My Lord!

(Suddenly there is movement from the orchestra that quiets the revelers.)

MAN IN THE HIGHWAYMAN’S GARB: Ladies and Lords, as you can see, the moons are at their apogee and the King has paid his call. It is midnight and time at last to rid ourselves of these false façades. Let every face be bared.

(So saying, the revelers begin to remove their masks amid general laughing and rustlings of clothing. Cassilda and Camilla lower their masks and Guillaume pulls the hood from his head. The trio do not notice the figure they had spied earlier with the strange mask at Camilla’s elbow. Making no motion to remove his mask, he comes to Cassilda’s attention. Overcoming her initial uneasiness at the man’s appearance with the reflexive desire of curiosity and the general relief and gaiety of the moment, she speaks.)

CASSILDA: You sir, should unmask.

STRANGER: Indeed?

CASSILDA: Indeed it’s time. We all have laid aside disguise but you.

STRANGER: I wear no mask.

CAMILLA: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!

Publisher’s Note: This presentation of the fragment, The King in Yellow, a drama for the stage by Charles Vaughan, is printed here in its entirety. No deletions, additions, corrections, or tampering of any kind have been made in the work. It is complete and unchanged as the day it was discovered in 1966.

The King in Yellow is copyright © 1987 by the New York Public Library, The Charles Vaughan Memorial Collection, and cannot be reproduced in full or in part without the explicit permission of the members of the board in unanimity. Any resemblance of characters or situations in full or in part to real persons, alive or dead, is strictly coincidental. Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that the above mentioned play, being fully protected under copyright laws, is subject to license and royalty. Particular emphasis is laid on the matter of readings and performance rights (professional, stock, amateur), permission for which must be obtained in writing.

Afterword
by Paul Bastienne

Since Mallarme, language and universe are always to be read in the same words, and one in the other: mystery of mysteries framed by letters, adventure of the madman losing himself in the incessant throw of the dice where his wandering trajectory is gradually undone; adventure of the linguist eager to deny chance; adventure of the poet who, on the contrary, seminated in it or to triumph over it, word by word, inciting fiction.

–Michel Pierssens

La Penultieme…est morte

–Stephane Mallarme

Charles Vaughan’s work, for the sake of clarification, can best be divided into two distinct groups: the political and the spiritual/metaphysical; although Vaughan, as Edmund Wilson pointed out, did not abhor mixing both when the need arose. The one thematic concern which can be traced from his earliest Sketches to his final artistic testament, Metaphysique which, indeed, can be seen as a bridge that spans the gap between the political and the mystical, is a quest for faith. Or, to be more precise, the need for a belief in the fact of its antithesis, unbelief or nothingness.

In Vaughan’s earliest works, such as the execrable Rhine Sketches, we begin to see the young poet toying with the existential fact of human mortality. Vaughan sees this fact on the one hand as being horrific, and on the other subtly seductive; the young man had shrewdly learnt that man is attracted to the unknown. With Vaughan’s more mature work his concern for the blissful sleep of quietus comes to the forefront; but always in conjunction with a sublimated quest for a belief system which will posit a philosophy in which death is not the final end, but a new beginning. I feel that Vaughan’s most effective creations dealing with the issue of faith are his unjustly ignored poems from the late thirties and early forties. Especially in his poem “Schliemann at Troy” (1939), where he uses the metaphor of the quest for the mythical city, as actualized by Schliemann’s unerring faith, as a superb parable for the need to believe in the presence of doubt and fatalistic denial:

Some may say

That Revelation is the debt

Of the faith to the faithless;

Stigmata of flesh

And blood for Thomas

And of bread and wine

For Judas. Some must partake

The waters of the Jordan.

Yet others reach

The walls of Jerusalem as

Schliemann found

The gates of Troy!

If we go beyond the obvious analogies of the poem we find that Vaughan is saying that he is determined to reach a state of grace through the creative act, to grasp salvation “as Schliemann found/The gates of Troy.” This quixotic search for a kind of linguistic redemption would, ironically, lead to Vaughan’s downfall in the coming decades. This conflict was to become a central part of Vaughan’s later work. In such memorable scenes as the brilliant soliloquy of the condemned man in The Age of Bronze, and the third act of Hadrian’s Wall when the incorporeal voices of the forest night taunt the lost soldiers, he showed this tension between denial and affirmation. This inner conflict is perhaps most poignantly presented in the dialogue from the final act of Descartes when the mocking shade of Protagoras the skeptic comes to deny truth, while the aged philosophe lies on his deathbed, racked by pain and doubt.

Vaughan’s tragic undoing came in the 1950s when his ongoing search for the true reality on the one hand, and his unrelenting need for faith on the other crashed head-on. As a result, it seems, of that very language to which Vaughan had turned for salvation. It is safe to say that Vaughan, at least initially, had an interest in finding the essential meaning of words simply to expedite the instrument of his salvation; this inexorably grew into an interest in semiotics: the ways the words themselves “meant;” and, finally, a growing realization of the ways that words failed to “mean.” For Vaughan this was the supreme irony.

Vaughan’s study of logic, semantics, and philosophy made him aware of mankind’s essential inability to understand the universe it occupies; in effect man’s very “humanity” places an insurmountable barrier to his capacity to comprehend reality. Kurt Godel’s monumental work in mathematics, which conclusively proved this limitation, had a devastating effect on Vaughan’s thinking. The playwright now found the doors to his salvation irrevocably shut. To Vaughan, Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, destroyed the possibility of ultimate “meaning” as surely as Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle had destroyed Newton’s determinate, clockwork universe. Metaphysique, Vaughan’s last play, resonates with this bitter insight. Somnambular figures walk through a blighted landscape, a “Slough of Despond” in which random acts of brutality are performed without reason or explication. It is clear that Metaphysique is an artistic interpretation of the implications inherent in Godel’s Theorem: The existence of the “object” (God, truth, reality, et al.) can never be incontrovertibly proved by empirical methods. All that remains is inexpiable doubt.

The mystery surrounding the composition of Vaughan’s The King in Yellow is, I fear, insoluble. Most scholars believe that Vaughan based this unfinished, or partially destroyed, play on a fictitious work created by R. W. Chambers, an obscure early-twentieth-century novelist. Others have embraced a theory which states that both Vaughan and Chambers based their creations on a third, presumably lost, work which has come to be known, within certain circles, as the Xanthic Folio, or Yellow Codex. Could it be Vaughan’s final, pitiful attempt at philological deliverance; or merely an earlier, forgotten piece, briefly begun and then discarded, left forever unfinished by Vaughan’s premature death? Unfortunately the surviving fragment is too brief to provide any decisive indications.

In my initial examination of the manuscript, I discovered a quote written on the reverse of the last page. It was obvious from the diminutive, almost indecipherable nature of the letters, that this was Vaughan’s handwriting. I take this quote to be Vaughan’s adieu and perhaps, his epitaph:

Thus do I lie,

Bend myself, twist myself, convulsed

With all eternal torture,

And smitten

By thee, cruelest huntsman,

Thou unfamiliar—God…

(Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche/Thus Spake Zarathustra)

the fete.

The Pallid Masque

The Players:

Chorus: A robed and hooded figure whose face is indistinct.

Angelique/Cassilda: As Angelique, a woman in her early-thirties who reigns over the Paris art world, confident in her position as a broker of what’s acceptable and what’s not. An extremely attractive woman conscious of her power over men and perfectly willing to use it. As Cassilda, a leading lady of Carcosa, the world as it is revealed in the burning light of Truth, she is equally as beautiful, but revealing of character flaws: vanity, pettiness, fear and cruelty.

Forsyth: A young man in his early twenties, handsome and an American recently arrived in Paris. As Angelique’s latest infatuation, he has been raised high by her in the literary world and invited to her soiree as he has already been invited into her bed. Although he has been sponsored by Angelique, he is not without genuine talent as a writer and poet. He is a bit naive and completely entranced by Angelique.

Melbourne: Although Forsyth’s senior, Melbourne is still under thirty years old. A few years before, he had occupied the position Forsyth now holds both in the literary world as well as in the esteem of Angelique, who has grown tired of him. Somewhat of a lush, Melbourne suffers from great melancholy and cynicism arising from a shattering event in the recent past in which Angelique has figured. He hasn’t written a word in years.

The Scene

(As the curtain rises, darkness covers the stage area until a single spotlight from directly overhead illuminates a lone figure standing at extreme stage left. It is robed and hooded with its face indistinct.)

CHORUS: What is the world but a pallid masque? If one compares it with traditional alternatives, does it not pale in contrast? Is there not a heaven after life on earth? Did not Francis Bacon propose a House of the Six Day’s Work, a new Atlantis, to stand apart from the failed civilization he inhabited? Did not the City of Man have Augustine’s City of God? Does not every disappointing reality have its imagined ideal? Is the world a pallid mask? Does it hide the true scheme of nature beneath its flawed surface? Is life a pallid masque, a play, a small drama, played for a time and then ended? If so, then where is its true face? What is its real meaning? When shall it be revealed? How shall it be shown? And if it were, could you accept it? If the Truth were revealed to you in one searing instant, a single blast of revelation, would you know it for what it was? And then what? Would life be as sweet? Could life be as sweet? Or would it be as foul ashes in your mouth? As a world without a sun? Today without tomorrow? If your only choice was madness or the black hole of despair and self destruction, which would you choose?

(The figure extends a hand toward stage right as a few spotlights come on. The lights illuminate a party scene with the actors frozen in mid-motion.) Behold the masque. Some would call it a suitable representation of life, the real world. But how suitable is it? And how real is the world it represents?

(The light over the figure goes out as others come on, fully illuminating the entire stage area. There are about twenty people, men and women, standing about in a salon adorned with period furnishings. French doors border stage left, a big fireplace dominates center stage, and well stocked bookshelves fill the corner at stage right. The party-goers stand about, some with drinks in their hands, dressed in evening wear. The typical conversation of salon parties fills the air. The exact year is uncertain, but it could be the recent past. Suddenly, the French doors open and Forsyth enters. He closes the doors behind him as he glances about, then adjusts his bow tie.)

ANGELIQUE: There is our wayward poet now! (She detaches herself from a small knot of male admirers and approaches Forsyth, a small glass of champagne in her hand.) Clifton, where have you been?

FORSYTH: (Smiling nervously, but obviously ill at ease.) Sorry Angelique, but there was…

ANGELIQUE: Do not tell me, the muse hit you and you could not get away until you put those imperishable thoughts on paper? (She smiles and extends her drink.) Well, never mind that. Here have a drink. (Forsyth takes it as Angelique leans forward to give him a chaste peck on the cheek, but instead, bites at his ear.) Tonight? (She whispers.)

FORSYTH: You mean tomorrow morning don’t you? We’re hardly going to get out of here before two.

ANGELIQUE: (Shrugging.) Whatever. Just do not get so drunk that you cannot find your way to my room.

FORSYTH: I could find it in my sleep.

ANGELIQUE: Hardly an original line coming from a writer.

FORSYTH: We can’t be brilliant all the time, my dear.

ANGELIQUE: (As a chorus of male voices entreat her to return to them.) Speak for yourself, Clifton. (She turns and rejoins her admirers.)

MELBOURNE: She’s a fine looking woman; be careful.

FORSYTH: (Turning suddenly at the voice behind him. Melbourne holds a glass of champagne with the slightly disheveled look of someone who is just beginning to have too much to drink. He is very pale.) I don’t believe I have had the pleasure…?

MELBOURNE: (Smiling.) With me or her? (He indicates Angelique with a gesture of his glass.)

FORSYTH: (Scowling now.) Now see here…

MELBOURNE: (Still smiling but now bringing his hands up in mock self defense.) Hold on old chap, no offense meant. Just teasing you a little. It’s just that Angelique and I used to be friends too.

FORSYTH: (Putting his hands in his pockets.) Angelique has had many friends as I understand.

MELBOURNE: True. And you know what’s the nice thing about her? She treats every one as if he was her first and only. There are very few ladies of her experience willing to put that sort of effort into a relationship. Sometimes too much effort.

FORSYTH: She is a remarkable woman. She’s been invaluable in helping me in my career.

MELBOURNE: (Nodding knowingly.) She’s the best agent any writer could have in this town. Paris tends to eat us alive.

FORSYTH: You’re a writer too?

MELBOURNE: Used to be. Not any more.

FORSYTH: Not any more? How can that be? One just doesn’t shut one’s self down.

MELBOURNE: (Smiling and downing the rest of his champagne.) Damned stuff doesn’t have any kick at all. It can be, and it is. I don’t write any more. Just don’t. Haven’t set a word on paper for two years now. (Looking around for more liquor.)

FORSYTH: (Intrigued.) But why? What happened? (Begins to follow Melbourne as he heads for the liquor service.)

MELBOURNE: Nothing happened. Absolutely nothing. I mean. It just hit me one day of the absolute uselessness of writing as an art. I mean, w

FORSYTH: (Perplexed.) I’m not sure what you mean. A man writes because he has to. It’s in him to do it. He must express himself and the written word is a writer’s particular outlet. A writer must write as he must breathe…

MELBOURNE: (Reaching the liquor service, he takes up a bottle and pours himself a liberal portion.) Tell me, what is the object of the written word?

FORSYTH: Why to communicate ideas to others…

MELBOURNE: And would you say that some writers are better at communicating than others?

FORSYTH: Of course.

MELBOURNE: And in being better, how is that measured?

FORSYTH: (Rubbing his chin.) In the ease and clarity in which they’re able to communicate an idea to others.

MELBOURNE: Will a particular way to express an idea, through words or any other manner, ever be communicated perfectly? I mean, will the written word, for instance, ever reach a point at which a reader is able to grasp perfect understanding of an idea from it?

FORSYTH: (Pausing to think.) No, I guess it wouldn’t. Every writer is an individual, each with his own unique perspective. And because each reader is also a unique individual, each with his own life experiences, his ability to interpret a writer’s work must necessarily differ from every other reader.

MELBOURNE: So, can perfection, can the ideal, ever be attained?

FORSYTH: (Watching as Angelique approaches them from across the room.) No.

MELBOURNE: Then why bother trying? Lay bricks instead, at least building a house protects you from the rain.

ANGELIQUE: (Arriving at the liquor service and slipping her arm around Forsyth’s waist.) What is Brian filling your head with now?

FORSYTH: We were just discussing the uselessness of writing as a matter of fact.

MELBOURNE: Among other things.

ANGELIQUE: (Smiling, but with a definite air of menace in her voice.) You’re drinking too much Brian.

MELBOURNE: Am I? Well what did you expect?

ANGELIQUE: Poor boy. You used to be so much more fun. Perhaps I ought to give you more attention…

MELBOURNE: Though your charms are considerable, my dear, even they aren’t enough.

ANGELIQUE: (Laughing.) Why, Brian, what is Clifton here going to make of that?

FORSYTH: I’ve sampled your charms, Angelique, and don’t find them lacking.

ANGELIQUE: There, you see?

MELBOURNE: You’ve done enough for me already, Angelique.

ANGELIQUE: But only at your insistence, darling.

MELBOURNE: (Suddenly earnest.) How do you do it, Angelique? You’ve looked in the book as well, and yet…

ANGELIQUE: (Craning her neck suddenly.) Oh look, there is Count Orloff; I simply must run off and greet him. (She leaves the two men and moves off stage right.)

FORSYTH: It seems there was something more than passing between you and Angelique.

MELBOURNE: (Looking after Angelique and replying almost absentmindedly.) Oh yes, something more.

FORSYTH: You said something about a book…

MELBOURNE: (Starting, he downs the rest of his drink and turns back to the liquor service, speaking over his shoulder.) Did I?

FORSYTH: Yes, was it a book you shared with Angelique?

MELBOURNE: (Turning slowly.) A book…yes. I say, Clifton is it? Have you ever heard of the Xanthic Folio?

FORSYTH: (Frowning and shaking his head.) No.

MELBOURNE: Didn’t think so. (Sighing, he drains his glass.) Damned stuff couldn’t get an old lady tipsy… The Xanthic Folio is named after a Greek philosopher named Xanthes who was forced to drink poison by the Athenian authorities sometime before the fifth century BC. Or at least that’s what I’ve been able to piece together; there’s not much written about him. From what I’ve been able to find out, Xanthes had developed his own school of philosophy, much like Plato and Socrates, but there was something about his teachings that were felt to be subversive by the powers that ruled Athens at the time. All I’ve been able to discover is that it involved a variant theory of mimetics: the Greek idea of the impossibility of attaining perfection because the ideal of everything existed only in the mind, that any three dimensional construct of any idea would necessarily be inferior to its ideal. Anyway, Xanthes was put to death and his school wiped out. Except for the Xanthic Folio, the only source for Xanthes’ theories. Unfortunately, that work has been lost for centuries.

FORSYTH: How dangerous could a work on mimetics be; it’s studied today in every university.

MELBOURNE: (Smiling and shaking his head.) If only it were that simple. Xanthes’ theory of mimetics was revolutionary. As an example of its power, I can tell you that the Oracle of Delphi consulted a copy of the Xanthic Folio; how else could it make its predictions?

FORSYTH: If there was an oracle.

MELBOURNE: (Shrugging and putting his empty glass on the liquor service. He does not take another.) Believe what you will. But to finish, I’ll say that although the Xanthic Folio vanished sometime in the Roman era, it reemerged in the thirteenth century as the White Codex, a work cited by Thomas Aquinas from written materials only then emerging from Byzantium. That too, if it ever existed, was lost and, I’m not sure about anything from this point, another book came to light. I knew nothing about it, although I turned Paris, London and Berlin, even Rome, up side down trying to. When it was written, by whom and for what purpose, I still haven’t the faintest idea. (His eyes flicker toward Angelique across the room.)

FORSYTH: What is this book?

MELBOURNE: (Turning his attention back to Forsyth.) The King In Yellow.

FORSYTH: I never heard of it.

MELBOURNE: Thank God, if there is one, that you never have. Whoever wrote it must have been a madman, or a genius, or maybe not even mortal. It’s like a window or…like an x-ray, one reads its exquisite language, its impossible scheme of words and sees the Truth. (Melbourne begins to look past Forsyth, speaking almost to himself.) The world is stripped away and what’s left is the ideal, the blazing, staggering revelation of reality. There’s no room for self-deception or prevarication only blind acceptance or…

FORSYTH: You’re rambling, man.

MELBOURNE: (As if awakened from a trance.) Am I? Tell me, Clifton, have you ever read Mallarme?

FORSYTH: One doesn’t write in Paris and not read Stephen Mallarme.

MELBOURNE: Then you’re familiar with his ideas on the literal meaning of words? That if it could be attained, the Truth could be revealed? He once said that “having arrived at the horrible vision of the pure work, I have about lost my mind and all contact with the meaning of the most common ways of speaking.”

FORSYTH: “I am in Truth on a voyage, but in unknown lands, and if I like to evoke cold images in order to escape from torrid reality I should tell you that for a month now I have been in the purest of glaciers of Aesthetics…that after having found nothingness, I have found the beautiful…and that you cannot imagine the lucid altitudes in which I venture.”

MELBOURNE: (Nodding.) Exactly. You have it. It’s my theory that The King In Yellow must have been circulating in Parisian poetic circles sometime in the last century. How else to explain Mallarme and his fellow decadents? How else to explain their fates? Suicide, murder, and self-exile. Mallarme came closest to telling us what it must have been like to read those damnably illuminating words. It was literally the last word in the art of writing. In human self-expression itself. After reading it, no writer could possibly ever lift a pen again. Why bother when perfection had already been reached?

FORSYTH: (Uneasy now.) Are you saying you’ve read this book?

MELBOURNE: Yes, damn my soul, yes! (His fists clench tightly at his sides as if restraining a great internal struggle.) If you’re a real writer, you know the feeling. Nothing you’ve written is ever exactly the way you want it. No matter how many times you rewrite or polish, you’re never satisfied. Well, that’s the way I felt, and when…Angelique offered to help me, I accepted. She led me in here, this room, one night, took down the book from those shelves, (indicates bookshelves at corner of stage right), and gave it into my hands. She put me in a chair and bade me read. She may have left the room then, I don’t know, the only thing I do know is that I read the book through in a single sitting and when I was finished, dawn was breaking through the windows and Angelique was standing before me, just as she had the night before. But things were not the same. Yes, it all looked the same, but I perceived the world differently. Angelique herself…

FORSYTH: Go on, what of Angelique?

MELBOURNE: You think Angelique beautiful, desirable? She is that, oh yes, she is that. But she’s also more…so much more…Clifton, if you could see her the way I do, the way she really is, not the indistinct shadow she appears to you…

FORSYTH: (Gripping Melbourne tightly with his left hand.) Show me, Brian. Point out the book to me.

MELBOURNE: (Shrugging himself loose from Forsyth’s grip.) You don’t know what you’re asking. It’s not worth it. It’s said that ignorance is bliss, but I never knew how wonderful blind delusion could be! The Truth, Clifton, the Truth! Think about it! Do you want to know the Truth? The Truth about God? The Truth about the human Soul? The Truth about you, the human race, the Earth, or the universe? The real Truth? The Truth about…Angelique? Stop and think!

FORSYTH: (Stops a moment and appears to think hard.) I’ve thought and imagined about the worst disillusionments on those things that I could and none of it would matter to me. I don’t believe in a God or a soul, humans are mere mammals and the Earth and universe accidents of nature. But Angelique…I must know all there is about her.

MELBOURNE: (Slowly shaking his head.) You poor, blind bastard. You think your cynicism protects you from disillusionment, shields you from disappointment. You think your attitude makes you superior to the rest of humanity whom you consider no better than a rabble. You remind me of myself before… (Shrugs and looks around.) Angelique’s not here. (Turns back to Forsyth.) So you’d like to read The King In Yellow.

FORSYTH: Show it to me.

MELBOURNE: (Leads Forsyth across the room to the corner shelves. When they arrive there, all the lights on the stage fade except for two on each of the two men; all sounds of the party gradually cease.) Let’s see now, it was kept on the top shelf…Ah, here it is. (He reaches up and takes down a heavy volume covered in faded yellow cloth.) It’s not much to look at, but it’s still the most dangerous object in the world. Humanity must have its delusions, just as it must have its sleep, its dreams, they help man cope with life. Strip men of the outlet of dreams, and they become mad. Can you live without your dreams, Clifton?

FORSYTH: (Reaches out and takes the book.) If dreams are keeping me from seeing Angelique, then I can live without them.

MELBOURNE: (Smiling.) Then join me and be damned. (Melbourne motions Forsyth to a chair. Forsyth sits, opens the book after a slight hesitation and begins to read. His head moves slightly from side to side as he reads and his hands begin to tremble. Then, with a great effort, he slams the book shut and looks about dazedly.) Something wrong?

FORSYTH: I…don’t know. Everything seems different…it all looks the same, but now…

MELBOURNE: Now you perceive the world as it really is. Ordinary objects are burningly clear in their utter reality.

FORSYTH: The world is beautiful and terrible. There are strange moons in the sky…

MELBOURNE: It’s Carcosa you perceive. Reality as it is, not as our dulled human senses interpret it for us. (Very slowly, the lights come back on again. The party is still in progress in the same room, but there are subtle changes in the room’s look and the party-goers are clad in strange, beautiful attire. A woman approaches them.)

CASSILDA: Clifton, reading while a party is in progress?

MELBOURNE: It’s a rather riveting book, my dear.

FORSYTH: (Still appearing a bit dazed.) Angelique?

CASSILDA: Is that what the dullards call me?

MELBOURNE: The blind cannot help their blindness, Cassilda. And besides, does not the King hide his own visage behind a Pallid Mask lest we see his Face?

CASSILDA: (Visibly shaken.) Speak not of the King!

MELBOURNE: So, Truth still holds some of its terrors even in Carcosa!

CASSILDA: I must return to my guests. (She moves off.)

MELBOURNE: You see, Cassilda is not what you expected.

FORSYTH: She’s so beautiful and…

MELBOURNE: …vain, petty, fearful… (Forsyth looks down slowly and after some hesitation, reopens the book that rests on his lap and begins to read again.)

MELBOURNE: The Truth is never pretty, always disappointing. But go on, keep reading. Perhaps with more knowledge, there will come better perception…but don’t count on it!

(The spotlight on Melbourne now fades to black, leaving only Forsyth as the sole illuminated figure on the darkened stage. Forsyth sits stock still, reading for a full five minutes until the spotlight on him begins to fade, very, very slowly, to black.)

(At stage left, a lone spotlight comes on, illuminating the figure of the Chorus.)

CHORUS: There was once an Inhabitant of Carcosa who met an acquaintance he did not recognize and asked of him to “direct me, I beseech you, to Carcosa.” The familiar stranger broke into a barbarous chant in an unknown tongue and walked away. The Inhabitant could only stare after him in wonder, unaware of the depths of his own ignorance and the happy fortune that prevented him from breaching it.

“The Pallid Masque,” is copyright © 1968, Perseus Press Inc., 196 West Huston St., New York, NY, 10014. Caution: No part of this play may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the publisher. This play is fully protected in whole, in part, or in any form under the Copyright Laws of the United States of America, the British Empire including the Dominion of Canada, and all other countries of the Copyright Union, and is subject to royalty. All rights, including professional, amateur, motion picture, radio, television, recitation, public reading and any method of photographic reproduction, are strictly reserved. For amateur rights, apply to Dramatists Professional Play Service, Inc., 440 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10016. For stock rights, apply to Samuel Floren, Inc., 28 West 45th Street, New York, NY, 10036. For all other rights, apply to Perseus Press, Inc., 196 West Huston St., New York, NY., 10014.

Afterword
by Gregorio Montejo

Charles Vaughan was a haunted man, his works possessed by the pale eidolons of remembrance and desire, the ineradicable dualities of mind and body. Behind and between the words, you catch brief glimpses of the white specter of Cartesian doubt, the unquiet ghost of disbelief, deracinating the tangible, the finite, the contingent, the material, until it leaves the lone cogitator forsaken in the barren plane of his own consciousness. Cogito ergo sum: the spirit voice of skepticism is the mind’s I, the thinker thinking himself, trapped in the dark cage of the Self, calling forth into the indeterminate space he calls Other, only to hear the faint echo of his own voice.

In an empty room

Two mirrors reflect

Each other’s blank stares,

Their desire for light

Bound in eternal stasis,

An invisible rope held taut

Above an infinite void.

“narcissi” (1926)

Here we are listening to the voice of the phantom of solitariness, the anchorite soul, consumed by the desire to connect with-that-which-is-not-itself, immured in the isolation chamber of the Self.

After Descarte, a dark spirit of solipsism lodged in some of the brightest minds of the Age of Light. George Berkeley, the venerable Bishop of Cloyne, avowed the nonexistence of matter. Esse est percipi: to be is to be perceived. If it were not for the Mind of God, which perceives all things at all times, the world would be a ceaselessly metamorphosing universe of objects continuously coming into and out of creation depending upon the consciousness of individual perceivers. Hume exorcised the fantastic ideational teleology — the infinitely perceptive God — of Bishop Berkeley, then deconsecrated causality, casting doubt upon the possibility of knowledge itself.

All probable reasoning is nothing but a species of sensation. ‘Tis not solely in poetry and music, we must follow our taste and sentiment, but likewise in philosophy. When I am convinced of any principle, ‘tis only an idea, which strikes more strongly upon me. When I give the preference to one set of arguments above another, I do nothing but decide from my feeling concerning the superiority of their influence. Objects have no discoverable connexion together; nor is it from any other principle but custom operating upon the imagination, that we can draw any inference from the appearance of one to the existence of another.

A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40)

There is an anecdote, perhaps apocryphal, about Dr. Johnson: once, while engaged in a debate with an adherent of Hume’s skepticism, he kicked a stone vehemently and declared, “thus I refute Hume!” By kicking the stone, Johnson thought (or at least hoped), to touch the metaphysical ground of reality — despite Hume, Johnson’s foot could not be fooled about the solidity and stability of Being. Kant, Hume’s most profound critic, if he had been present, would undoubtedly have told Dr. Johnson that we can never ultimately know the stone in itself, only our own limited knowledge about the stone. Kant’s Critiques saved the integrity of cognition, restored causality and codified the categories of the understanding, but at the terrible cost of significantly reducing the scope of all possible knowledge. From the high, desolate peak upon which man hoped to contemplate the plenary universe of created things, Kant leads him to the narrower vistas of the shallow epistemological plane/plain called Mind. Vaughan’s corpus is one of the authentic poetic voices of the Age of Epistemology — capturing the claustrophobia of consciousness, the ontological indeterminacy of the quotidian (the object is always, in some way, the creation of the subject), the incessant, mysterious influx of sense-impressions from the spatio-temporal manifold (after originating in the imperceptible, unknowable realm of things-in-themselves) into the synthesizing sphere of the a priori pure concepts of the understanding.

The Labyrinth’s wynd

Wound back upon itself,

This stone cochlea I entail

Domiciled at the locus

Of convergent spirals,

Manumitted coils

Of sprung contingents

Woven delicately in spar;

I inhabit my concretions.

“daidalos” (1931)

The subjective experience of cognition is captured in the very act of creating a poetic representation of itself. The metaphor of the Cretan labyrinth of thought — of the poet as both the architect of the maze and the monstrous Minotaur trapped at its center — is seamlessly melded to the figurative trope of the chambered nautilus of experiential awareness — that fatal burden of memory and finitude, the accidental exigencies of corporeity and transience, that the self perpetually constructs upon itself.

“Daidalos” inaugurates the period of Vaughan’s most profound exploration of the dichotomy between the Self and the Other, the seemingly unbridgeable gulf which now partitioned epistemology from ontology, and the problematic point at which they potentially met: language. More specifically, Vaughan’s poetry queried the uncertain metaphysical status of poetic discourse itself. Is literary language referential or figurative? Can the linguistic sign reconcile the schism between mind and body, between the spirit and the world? Vaughan’s work throughout the decade of the 1930s, can be seen as a series of poetic interpolations of the basic matter and position of words. Vaughan’s conceptual starting point for these investigations — indeed for all of his work — was the Post-Symbolist poetics of Mallarme and his great pupil Valery, whose Cimetier Marin (1920), had a profound effect on Vaughan’s own emerging poetics. In a letter to Valery, dated February 4, 1930, Vaughan presciently mapped the future course of his explorations:

As you have brilliantly shown in your own work, the poet, since Mallarme, has been confronted with the precariousness of words, he has been made aware of the fault lines along which poems (perhaps along with language itself) shift and buckle. Mallarme located the epicenter of the quake in the ineffable ptyx, the delitescent conflux where the meaningful and the meaningless, where order and chaos contend. But I will confess to you that where Mallarme perceived a deliverance from the merely denotative, the pregnant silence in the wake of signification, the infinite white spaces behind words waiting to be filled with worlds of latent sound, I see only a fathomless void.

Letters: Vol II 1929-1941 (1933)

The “infinite white spaces” of Mallarme, frigid and lifeless, symbolic of silence and death, began to dominate Vaughan’s poetry at this time:

The muted rime-bound weirs,

The black alders white with the castings of Ophion,

The dormant lids of blank hillocks

Blindly shadowing the silent flight of snow owls

The frozen cataracts asleep in calcite caverns,

Flowing tongues crypted in the catacombs of Morpheus

Lips fastened by the white locks of sempiternal winters…

“hibernia” (1931)

Vaughan had begun his trek into the boundless polar landscape of Arthur Gordon Pym, his inquiry into the whiteness of the White Whale, where he would be called upon to paint a monochromatic portrait of the pale skull beneath the pallid Masque/Mask, and compose tone poems on the white noise of poetic aphonia:

The memory of whiteness

Is traced in the subtile interstices

Between the dark markings of your passing,

The cicatricose web of arrivals and departures

A gauze veil hung between two broken black branches,

The snow field punctuated by crows’ feet,

The dark rictus amid white poppies.

“albus” (1933)

The black branches, the prints in the snow are the calligraphic marks of the pen, the configuration of words the poet places before the vertiginous white abyss of the paper. But the words seem tainted by the fatal transiency of the objects they name, the branches are broken, the traces of the crows’ passage will disappear under new snows, and the “dark rictus amid white poppies” is the grinning skull beneath the skin. The word, the logos, is the instrument the poet uses to name the world, and the Logos is the rational order of that world, of the universe, which Plato called nous — the first principle (arche) of everything — the source of paradigmatic forms which emanate from the inelligible realm (neotos topos) before descending into the visible realm (boratos topos). The visible objects which compose the world are merely shadows projected upon the wall of Platos’ Cave, and poets, the metaphorizers of objects, are dispensers of illusion (eikasia). Only by escaping from the Cave in order to contemplate the bright light of the Logos, the pure forms of the nous, Plato tells us, can we hope to liberate ourselves from eikasia. Descarte retreated into his Mind to find the Logos, Nietzsche, coming after Hume and Kant, postulated that the Cartesian Mind is a cave upon which the Mind’s Eye/I projects its own shades:

“There is thinking: therefore there is something that thinks: this is the upshot of all Descarte’s argumentation. But that means positing as “rue a priori” our belief in the concept of substance — that “when there is thought there has to be something that thinks” is simply a formulation of our grammatical custom that adds a doer to every deed. In short, this is not merely the substantiation of a fact, but a logical-metaphysical postulate. Along the lines followed by Descarte one does not come upon something absolutely certain but only upon the fact of a very strong belief. If one reduces the proposition to “There is thinking therefore there are thoughts,” one has produced a mere tautology: and precisely that which is in question, the reality of thought, is not touched upon — that is, in this form the “apparent reality,” but a reality in itself.

The Will To Power (1901)

For Nietzsche, the world is a text. “I am” is literally a figure of speech. In the triadic equation of object/poet/text, the crucial middle term, the Cartesian Mind or Kantian Pure Concept, becomes an impenetrable barrier between the Platonic topoi. The word (logos) refers only to itself. As does the Logos when it descends into the boratos topos and becomes incarnate: “And the Logos was made flesh, and dwelt among us…” (John 1:14). In embodying the indeterminacy of the text/world, the Logos itself subverts the possibility of a hermeneutics — the anagogic decipherment of the sign/object:

MELBOURNE: The blind cannot help their blindness, Cassilda. And besides, does not the King hide his own visage behind a Pallid Mask lest we see his Face?
CASSILDA: (Visibly shaken). Speak not of the King!

I have read encheridions of inquietude

In the epigraphy of continuance,

And in the unspoken evasions of grammars and breviaries

Oblique flights by which we aspire

To arrive, without inordinate abasement or loss,

At the concealed heart of our displacements:

In the lacunae of sufferance,

And in the forgotten dogmas of abrogated syllabaries;

In the effaced palimpsests of claustral scriveners,

And in the mortal remains of the Word

I have sought clemency

Or a cure for remembrance.

We are pallid exegetes

Lighting our dusty, cragged paths

By the cold, noumenal beams

Of metaphysical fireflies

A paltry handful that long ago

Escaped unnoticed from the Garden.

Can we read the illegible catechisms of absolution

In the chance vaticinations of blood and water

Can we decipher the obliterated texts of redemption

In the transubstantiation of bread and wine?

“philology” (1935)

The Pallid Masque, a one-act play written in 1930-31, is of vital importance for anyone who wishes to understand Vaughan’s obsession with the metaphysical uncertainty of the logos/Logos, and his dread of the immeasurable emptiness at the core of the Mallarmean ptyx. The protagonist, Melbourne, is a symbolic archetype of Vaughan’s radical interrogation of the word. His very name is an exemplar of the etymological (Etymology: a search for the “true ((etumon)) word ((logos))” methodolgy). Melbourne — mel-: Of a darkish color. Greek melas, black: MELANO-, MELANCHOLY, PSILOMELANE. Melancholy: Middle English malencolie, melancholye, from Old French melancholie, from Late Latin melancholia, from Greek melankholia, sadness, “(an excess of) black bile”: melas, (stem melan), black+khole, bile, and bourne: Middle English burne, variant of burn, BURN (brook). In other words, (in a universe of plurivalent textuality, words are inextricably compromised by other words) Melbourne is the dark stream, the carrier of the disease of consciousness, the Self’s anxious confrontation with negating Otherness, what Kierkegaard called the “Sickness Unto Death,” or despair; the black river (of bile, of ink) the poet draws from to make his words, the dark marks he uses to fix (stabilize, establish, repair, settle, decide, place) signs/objects upon the ontologically ambiguous whiteness of the paper; and the Styx, the dark (stygian) river of death, the inviolable waters by which the gods swore, or “gave their word,” as well as the bourn (French bourne, from Old French bonne, bodne, BOUND (limit): the terminal point of life’s dark stream and the boundary of the topoi. Melbourne is also a metonymy for Mallarme, the first poetic explorer of the Styx/ptyx: “…nul ptyx/Aboli Bibelot d’inanite sonne,/(Car le Maitre est alle puiser des pleurs au Styx/Avec se seul object dont le Neant s’honore)”—…no ptyx/Abolished bauble of empty sound, (For the Master is gone to draw tears from the Styx/With the sole object which Nothingness honors). Mallarme, who, upon nearing that stream, confessed, “And now, having reached the horrible vision of a pure work, I have almost lost my reason and the meaning of the most familiar words.”

As the play begins, Melbourne has already crossed to the far shore. He has drunk the water and become silent. He has donned the mask of the inspired or enthused poet/prophet, and he preaches a negative poetics of silence — an aphonic evangel; the White Codex is his bible, or gospel of the Word’s dissolution. The author of the Codex is the divine breath or spirit, the paraclete, the third hypostasis of the Logos, who animates or inspires the body with the pneuma (breath, spirit) of the logos/Logos. It is the Spiritus Sanctus, and is represented as a burning tongue of fire, for it is the Spirit who gives the gift of tongues. Angelique is an Angelus Domini, a dark annunciator of the Incarnation, or the Logos’ birth into materiality.

The Codex comprises the Tetragrammaton, the transliteration of the ineffable, incomprehensible name of the fallen Logos, and therefore contains all the inherent enigmas, of the logos or textuality; it embodies the shifting ground of linguistic slippage itself as it becomes subject to the corps of pathologies (figural errancies, duplicitous tropes, grammatical displacements) which subvert the logos from within. The word betrays itself. The Codex unceasingly composes and decomposes itself beneath the reader’s gaze. It is Mallarme’s “pure work,” a work incorporating everything and nothing, incessantly raising and inhuming all meaning, and thus becoming meaningless or empty; in a metaphysical sense, the pages are blank, the vacant leaves comprehend or include nothing, or, to be more precise, are included by it. Reading such a text invariably produces a fracture in the logocentric unity of the subject. The spectacle of language simultaneously constituting itself shatters the Self’s monistic notion of identity. In the Chorus’ final speech, Vaughan represents that moment as a synesthetic transport or rapture.

The Chorus makes us witnesses to an anti-apocalypse, a negative revelation of Vaughan’s theosophy of whiteness. It begins in the darkling plane of illusions or dreams (eikasia). The somnambulist asleep in the cave of Self (both poet and reader, actor and audience) is engaged in a revelatio, a dream of prophetic vision. As in the Somnium Scipionis, the dreamer rises to a vantage point from which he will see the true working of the universe. As in the Paradiso, the visionary traveler journeys through various levels or topoi in order to return to the godhead. Yet the line in which a “lone voice” destroys the cosmic order with a whispered word (logos), signals a profound difference, an intrinsic transfiguration of the epistemology/ontology dichotomy. Cicero’s sleeper awakens to a vision of cataclysmic purification, the Ptolemaic cosmogony of Dante is obliterated, the cosmic orbs splinter, the stars are extinguished, the moon plunges into its own image, its mimetic representation — a conflagrant mirror, in a moment of annihilating self-perception (1 Corinthians 13:12 — “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”)

The ascending levels of the universe, the Platonic topoi, are called emanations by Plotinus. In his Enneads, the nous, or cosmic Mind (Berkeley’s God) of the Logos (or simply, the One), is an overflowing fountain of light. (In Vaughan, the reverse mirror image of the symbol becomes a paradoxical fountain of black fire of absent light). The overflow consist of descending levels of existence, which are called emanations of the One; the further down the overflow goes, the less light it contains. The final level is the phenomenal or terrestrial plane. After a time in the boratos topos the emanations ascend once again--in a process of apostrophe to the nous, where they are reunited or re-assimilated into the Mind of the One. The mind is an emanation of the Mind.

The Neo-Platonists developed two contending, yet complementary epistemological theories, both of which are echoed in Vaughan’s work. In one, the mind is an empty, polished tablet upon which the nous, inscribes itself, a mirror which passively reflects the illuminated emanations of the One. In the other, the mind is a lambent receptacle fueled by the lucid glow of the One, a lamp which shines its borrowed light upon the variegated emanations of the Logos. Vaughan was possessed by these images: mirrors resounding the logos, refracting the obscure light-source of consciousness; lamps casting their feeble beams into the tenebrous solitude of being, creating the objects they clarified.

The Kantian Understanding discerning existence through the sieve of the Logos’ script, the Cartesian mind elucidating its own topography with the dim rays of its I/Eye. The process of emanation and apostrophe is not a singular event; according to Proclus, it is cyclical and constant, an endless module of procession and return — an enclosed circle similar to the Nietzschean Eternal Return. The Logos recapitulates itself eternally. We are both mirrors and lamps, reflecting each other endlessly, imaging, echoing, reproducing, meditating ourselves to ourselves. The Archimadean spiral of “Daidalos” closes to become a perpetually self-actuating system. The Self is trapped in an immutable ring of recurrence. This absent One-whom Pascal defined as a “fearful sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” It is transfinite and omnipresent, a perfect circle, an incalculable cipher, a limitless nought, a cryptogram of the Logos” infinite nullity. The color of ultimate negation is white. It is the color of the ptyx, of the abyss and of the Masque.

It is the blinding white light of the cosmic unveiling, an apocalyptic dawning. It is the white robe of the hierophant of nothingness, and the white shroud, the winding sheet of the dead Word. The white mask is the searing visage of a vacuous chaos. The poet confronts the Word and beholds Kafka’s terminal observation: “Our art is a dazzled blindness before the truth: The light on the grotesque recoiling mask is true, but nothing else.”

Selected Bibliography

I have included only those works which I consider relevant to my own discussion of Vaughan’s philosophical and poetic theories. The observant reader will note the paucity of studies in English. Although Vaughan has always elicited considerable scholarly interest abroad, he remains a relatively obscure figure in his homeland. Two forthcoming monographs, Alfred Sciarri’s Aletheia: The Poetics of Charles Vaughan and Kathleen Day Hughes’ monumental two-volume biography, will hopefully begin to redress the egregious neglect of Vaughan within American academia.

1) Baumgart, Rudolf. Charles Vaughan: Sein Leben und sein Werk. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968.

2) Calderon, Francisco de la Torre. “Mimesis conflictiva: la violencia de los simbolos en las obras de C. Vaughan.” Anales (de la Facultad de Filosofia Y Ciencias de la Educacion de la Universidad Catolica de Chile), 58 (1970): 85-102.

3) Delisle, Gustave. Symboles du neoplatonisme dans lÕoeuvre de Vaughan. Paris: Gallimard, 1994.

4) Diaz Millan, Eugenio. El teatro metafisico ce Pirandello y Vaughan. Barcelona: Seix Barral, Biblioteca de Bolsillo, 1983.

5) Festugierre, Georges. “La dialectique du “moi” et de “l’autre” dans la pensee de Charles Vaughan.” L’Homme et Son Prochain: Actes du VIIIe Congres des Societes de Philosophie de Langue Francaise. Toulouse: Presses Universitaires de France, 1956. 273-291.

6) Gardiner, Patricia. The Isolation Chamber of the Self: An Essay on the Concept of Person in the Aesthetics of Charles Vaughan. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1966.

7) Grenier, Barthelemy. Charles Vaughan et la Methodologie de I’Inverifiable. Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1980.

8) Lemoisne, Pierre Andre. “Daidalos: une essai concernant l’entendement humain.” Gazette des Belles-Lettres, XXXVI (1948): 9-33.

9) Muller, Bernhard. Vaughans Erkenntnistheorie und Metaphysik, Wiesbaden: Insel-Verlag, 1985.

10) Pringsheim, Joachim. “Vaughans Dichtungstheorie.” Deutsche Verteljahszeitschrift fur Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, III (1952): 353-76.

11) Rodriguez Poncela, Guillermo. “La palabra y el origen de la onciencia reflexiva en la poesia de Charles Vaughan.” Revista Hispanica Moderna 36 (1970-1971): 145-57.

12) Sarmiento, Teodosio. “La inseguridad ontologica, clave del mundo de Charles Vaughan.” Sur, 184 (1950): 39-65.

13) Suddermann, Karl Justus. Motiv und Gestaltung bei Charles Vaughan. Berlin Wagenback, 1973.

14) Taylor, G. H. The Staging Area of Revelation: An Introduction of the Dramaturgy of Vaughan. London: Faber & Faber, 1979.

15) Witt, Robert Kilburne. “Vaughan, Epistemology, and the Other.” In Hypatia: Essays in Classics, Comparative Literature and Philosophy. Edited by William Calder III, Ulrich I. Goldsmith and Phyllis B. Kenevan. Boulder: Colorado Associated University Press, 1985,. 171-206.

16) Zimolo, Alessandro. L’anima e l’uomo: Ill pensiero filosofico di Charles Vaughan. Rome: Ateneo & Bizzarri, 1991.

17) Vaughan, Charles. “The Pallid Masque.” Complete One Act Plays. Perseus Press, New York, NY. 1968.

18) Vaughan, Charles. “Narcissi,” “Daidalos,” “Hibernia,” “Albus,” “Philology.” Collected Poems 1920-1964, Penguin.

hy bother?

Final Plea

irst of all, I want you to understand that all this has been a mistake. I’m not the kind of man who usually takes to the field. I leave that to others who like to get their hands dirty. Who like to go digging around in old ruins. I’m happiest in a classroom setting where I can address issues in an academic rather than an experiential level. So you see, everything that’s happened since that day Gerald Walker asked me to visit the hospital has been unintentional. A misunderstanding. There’s no need for you to concern yourselves with issues of confidentiality because I have no reason to bring any of this up with anyone.

Look, maybe if I explain how it all happened from the beginning you’ll see that I really can be trusted. As I told you before, the whole thing began that day when Walker, he was the head of the Archeology Department at Miskatonic University, walked into my office while I was at lunch.

By coincidence, I’d been reading the Arkham Advertiser. More specifically, I was reading a story about a man who claimed to be the last surviving member of the Hughbanks Expedition that had been exploring a site in the El Cacao region of Belize when its work was interrupted by a local drug cartel. That was during the 1994 season when the University of Pennsylvania had been a major sponsor of the dig and that later released Dr. Paul Hughbanks from its faculty when it became known that four students who had been members of his expedition were killed in an exchange of gunfire with the drug dealers. It was quite a messy affair at the time including the full range of expected lawsuits and settlements. When the dust settled, Hughbanks was disgraced and everyone else connected with the affair either died or fell into obscurity. All except for one Kyle Woodson who pursued his interest in the Belize ruins until his own untimely death some years ago. Such was the case until one last survivor of the expedition recently surfaced.

According the article in the Advertiser, Armand Sanders was committed to the Pickerton Rehabilitation Hospital in Arkham in 2010 by members of his family after his rantings about the Hughbanks Expedition became too much to bear. It seems that after the scandal, Sanders had retired to his home in Dean’s Corners and although at first reluctant to talk about his experiences in Belize, he suddenly began to open up about them a few years ago. However, the subject became a full-blown obsession as his claims grew more wild and so frightened the female members of the family, that they were compelled to seek-out professional help. Finally, it was decided to send him to the Pickerton Hospital for observation and rehabilitation if only for his own protection as several times he had threatened to end his own life.

As I said, it was only coincidence that Walker came into my office just as I was reading that article because what he wanted of me was to ask if I’d make a trip up to the Pickerton Hospital to interview Sanders!

“Me?” I asked. “What for?”

“Because you’re the department’s expert in Mayan history and culture and might be able to make some sense out of the things Sanders has been saying,” Walker replied. “Besides, it’s been a while since you’ve taken some time off. When was the last time you had a vacation?”

“Two years ago I…”

“There you go. Consider this assignment as a little R and R. Now. The request was made through our colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania who’ve only recently been informed of Sander’s case. Due to the negative ramifications surrounding the Hughbanks Expedition, officials at the university are understandably reluctant to send someone on their own faculty for fear of word getting out and local newspapers making a fuss and dredging up the whole sordid affair all over again.”

“Makes sense,” I admitted and somewhat reluctantly agreed to interview Sanders even though, as I’ve said, my main interests lay in a classroom setting rather than in the field. And in a way, this field trip off-campus qualified, in my mind at least, as being outside the usual academic requirements of my position as a full professor.

“Good,” said Walker. “Meanwhile, the arrangements have been made. Your visit has already been approved and you’re expected later this evening.”

“So soon?”

“Do you have any other appointments?”

“No.”

“Well then. Following the interview, you’ll write up a report for our colleagues in Pennsylvania?”

“Of course.”

So you see? The situation really was out of my hands. It was not as if I wanted to become involved. It was an order from my superior. What could I do? Anyway, I completed my course work for the day and after a leisurely supper, took myself across town to the hospital which I found was located behind a stone wall encircling well-manicured grounds.

I identified myself to a guard at the gate and was somewhat surprised to find others patrolling among the bare trees and withered hydrangeas. Walker didn’t tell me that Pickerton housed any really dangerous patients nor that it was a high security institution.

Following the guard’s directions, I drove through the gate and along a short drive to a visitor parking area that gave access to the main building by way of a side entrance. Inside, I found myself in a quiet reception area generously decorated with a number of potted plants.

“I’m Prof. Luke Withins,” I said, identifying myself to a girl sitting behind a counter. “I believe I have an appointment to speak to a patient tonight? His name is Armand Sanders.”

“Oh, yes,” said the girl. “I have you down right here. If you’ll just wait a moment, I’ll call Dr. Bross to escort you up to the ward.”

“Thank you. By the way,” I said after the girl had hung up the telephone. “I noticed quite a few guards around the building. Is that normal? I wasn’t aware that the hospital was a secure facility…?”

“Oh, we’re not, at least not until lately,” the girl replied. “But recently, there’s been a prowler about. Before the ground began to freeze, one of the nurses noticed a number of footprints in the flower beds as if someone was looking in at the windows. It was a little unnerving, let me tell you. So the hospital hired a security firm to keep watch outdoors and escort female staff members to the parking area after dark.”

“So the person hasn’t been caught I take it?”

“No. New footprints keep showing up I hear. Well, some of them are a man’s footprints but others look like those of a deer or something.”

“Deer? This close to the center of town?”

“I know! Funny isn’t it? But there definitely are other prints, animals of some kind, I’ve seen them myse

My conversation with the receptionist ended there as it was interrupted by the arrival of Dr. Bross, supervisor of Ward 9 where Sanders was located.

“Prof. Withins?” he asked, extending a hand.

“Yes.”

“Nice to meet you. Do you have any questions about our patient before we go upstairs?”

“Not really except that I wondered if it was safe…?”

“Oh, certainly. Sanders is not dangerous, except perhaps to himself. Although the primary reason for his commitment were concerns over suicidal tendencies, there’s been no evidence of that since his arrival here some months ago. It’s only for reasons of safety that he remains on suicide watch.”

“And the ravings that his family said he was having?”

“He still expresses unusual fear about, well…alien invaders and such,” laughed Bross, “but aside from that, he’s managed to convey his concerns in a much less excited manner than before his arrival here.”

“So my interview with him ought to work out all right?”

“He’s quite lucid if that’s what you mean. But don’t expect what he has to say to make any sense!”

At that point, we had entered an elevator and traveled up three flights to Ward 9. It was still early in the evening so the corridor there still bustled a bit with patients sitting quietly in wheelchairs or shuffling down corridors. Others remained in their rooms as a nurse occupied a station at the intersection of two corridors and an orderly and some nurse’s aids worked directly with patients.

“Adele,” said Bross, approaching the nurse’s station. “How is Sanders doing tonight?”

“Same as usual, doctor,” the nurse replied. “He received his meds after supper and asked to be excused from day-room activities. I think he’s eager to speak with the visitor he’s expecting.”

“Very good.”

Taking Sanders’ chart, Bross led the way down to Sanders’ room. The door was open.

“Armand?” said Bross, knocking lightly by way of warning Sanders that his visitor had arrived.

“I’m here, doctor,” came the reply as Sanders swung about in a swivel chair placed before a small metal desk.

“There’s a Prof. Sanders here to see you. I believe he’s expected?”

“He is,” said Sanders, rising from his chair and extending a hand. “Please sit down professor.”

As the only place to sit was on Sanders’ neatly made cot, I took a seat there. Looking the patient over, I was surprised to find him looking quite healthy in his clean hospital whites. And although his face was creased with what some call worry lines, they were by no means predominant. He had a receding hairline and I noticed that his hands shook slightly. The result of the medicines he was taking or something else? Still, overall, I was impressed with his demeanor and inclined to believe that our conversation would be a pleasant one.

“Doctor,” said Sanders.” You’ve heard my story many times before. Do you mind if I fill in Prof. Withins privately?”

“Of course not,” said Bross without hesitation. “I’ll wait down at the station. Let me know if you need me.”

Sanders watched Bross leave but made no attempt to close the door. Then, speaking in a low voice, he addressed me.

“So you’ve come at the request of the university?” he asked.

“Pennsylvania University, yes.”

“Did they give you any reason why they wanted this interview?”

“I think they want to know more about the confusing reports that have been made over the years about the Hughbanks Expedition,” I said truthfully. “It was thought that all of the surviving members had died or dropped from sight, so it came as a surprise when they read that you had appeared as a patient here.”

“The hypocrites!” spat Sanders. “To the public, they act like they’re all scandalized at the reported debacle in Belize, but what they really want to know are more details on what really happened to us. The expedition brought back a number of artifacts that have never seen the light of day because they were buried in storage cabinets in the deepest recesses of the campus. For years, members of the expedition were unable to give them any information about the artifacts because none of us could remember anything about them…”

“How was that?”

“Because we were brainwashed, professor! Oh, don’t look so surprised. Did you really believe that story about our getting involved with local drug dealers? Do you think any professional like Hughbanks would allow something like that? Mixing in local politics is strictly verboten on such digs as you well know otherwise not only would expensive expeditions be jeopardized, but the lives of members put at risk in countries that are often unstable and even lawless.”

“Then there were no drug dealers?”

“Isn’t that what I just said? It was aliens, professor, or at least their human henchmen, that disrupted the dig,” insisted Sanders, moving his chair closer to me. “We were getting too close to their secrets. The aliens…some kind of fungoid-based life-forms who call themselves the Mi-Go…became alarmed when Hughbanks led the expedition into the El Cacao region. There’d never been extensive exploration of the area before, and as we moved deeper into the jungle and began uncovering a whole city of ancient ruins such as had never been seen before in Mayan, Incan, Aztec, or even Tolmec cultures, there were increasing indications that someone didn’t want us to go any farther.”

“You didn’t come across any fields of cannabis plants or…?”

“You still think it was all about drugs, do you professor? No. There was no sign of any drug producing organization or local growers. This was something else. At first, we began to find our way blocked by recently felled trees and later, items began to disappear from our camp: food, tools, medicine, water, until it was no longer possible to fool ourselves that we’d been the ones mislaying the items.

“It was at that point that we ran into the El Cacao natives which we were surprised to find were of European stock, albeit by way of Mexico. Of course, that wasn’t immediately apparent as they’d abandoned western dress for what materials they could find in the jungle so at first, they appeared to us as wild natives what with their skins and feathers and body paint and such. Dr. Hughbanks tried to talk to them, at one point coaxing their leaders into camp for a peace conference. They spoke a corrupted Spanish so that some of our party could communicate with them after a fashion, and it was quickly discovered that though they once had been members of some branch of American Amish, they’d long since abandoned the Christian faith for something far more primitive and to them, virile.”

Sanders lowered his voice and his eyes became more intent. I could tell that whatever kind of mania that had landed him in Pickerton, it had arisen from somewhere inside him and at that point, lay just beneath his calm exterior. I knew then that a wrong word spoken by myself could set him off, so I determined to humor him the best I could.

“Go on,” I said.

“They told us that their ancestors had come to the region many years before and found…creatures already living there, creatures that possessed vast knowledge and, practicing strange surgical techniques, could transport them across abysses of time and space that left their brains bursting with wonder and black delights. After their leaders had returned from such mind-expanding journeys, enthusiasm for the creatures grew to such an extent that it descended into a regard that was indistinguishable from worship.

“Naturally, Hughbanks humored them, the same as you are doing to me I’m sure,” continued Sanders knowingly. “But the same way I can tell that you remain credulous, so too did those natives. They led us on a bit, showing us the ruins and as they took us deeper and deeper into the surrounding jungle, the buildings became more fantastic in design, more inexplicable in purpose. Then one day, we were attacked in camp. We were seized and restrained and it was then that we first set eyes upon the object of the natives’ worship: as a kind of buzzing speech filled the camp, a number of the things emerged fully from the surrounding vegetation. We stared in horror at sight of the crab-like bodies, and it was then that some of us were killed resisting the things. We were taken back into the jungle and shown to an entrance below one of the ruined buildings. It was dark at first, but as we were led downward light appeared, and we emerged into a cavernous space filled with weird humming machinery of a sort never seen in any earthbound laboratory. With mounting horror and disquiet, we were shown bodies of natives where they seemed preserved under glass, the tops of their heads open and their brains removed. I barely recall how the others reacted but for myself, I was somewhat stupefied as we were shown how the brains were stored in cylinders and prepared for fantastic journeys to other times and other galaxies. Some, we were told, were bound for Pluto, one of the alien creatures’ way stations, known to the natives as Yuggoth.

“At that point, as you can well imagine, most of us had had enough. Refusing to see more, we began looking for the way out but by then it was too late. We were prevented from going, and I for one could not help focusing my attention on cruel-looking instruments some of the things held in their claw-like hands…but I can see I’ve gone too far. You don’t believe me, do you?”

“Of course I…”

“They say I’m mad professor, but I’m not,” insisted Sanders. “They brainwashed us is what they did. Not by any psychological means but by a simple surgical technique. That’s why those of us who finally made it back to civilization told some stupid tale of a battle with drug dealers. It was the cover story they wanted us to convey. To discourage any more expeditions to El Cacao — and it worked too. For years our conditioning held as we died one by one. But something must have gone wrong with me. Maybe my body managed to rewire itself, I don’t know but suddenly, a couple years ago, my memory began to return. At first it felt like a dream I was remembering but after a while I became certain that my memories were of no dream. I did some research that corroborated my suspicions. Eventually my memory returned completely and I had no doubts. My mistake was trying to convince my family that I wasn’t mad; that my recollections were of events that really happened. I should have kept it all to myself. As it is, I wound up here and worse, news of my commitment filtered out into the newspapers, because I can’t think of any other way they could have found out about me.”

“Who?”

“The creatures, the Mi-Go…that’s what they call themselves you know. They must have begun to look for me and found me here. Prowlers have been reported lingering on the hospital grounds. You’ve heard about that? There were both human footprints and other less identifiable prints as well, right?”

“I was told they were deer…”

Sanders snorted and leaned back in his chair, shoving it back toward the desk as he did so.

“They weren’t deer!” he almost shouted. “I don’t know how they do it without being spotted but their human servitors, those natives, they help them. They never go anywhere without them. They’re always somewhere nearby.” He laughed then, suddenly. “You don’t believe any of this of course?”

“Well, I…”

“Of course you don’t. Neither would I in your place. But go on, write your report of this interview to the fools at the university…if you want to submit something that’s incomplete. You do want the full story don’t you?”

“Of course, if there’s more…”

“Oh, there is, professor; there is!” He turned and began writing something down on a scrap of paper then handed it to me. “That’s the address of my home in Dean’s Corners. It’s still in my name although my family have been trying to get it transferred into theirs. For now though, all the material I’ve managed to gather since my memory began to return is still there. You’ll find the key to the house hidden in the gutter over the back door. My family is in Florida for the season so you should be able to stay as long as you need without fear of being disturbed. My notes and other things are in the study. With the door key, you’ll find a second, smaller key. That’s for the locked cabinet in my desk. Use it. And professor, you shouldn’t waste any time in getting to Dean’s Corners. It won’t take long for those who’ve been following me to figure out that they need to search my home for anything they need to destroy.”

“Thank you…”

“No need to thank me if you’ll do one small favor.”

“If it’s nothing…”

“When you open the cabinet, you’ll find a star shaped stone object inside; can you bring it back to me here?”

“Yes, if it’s not against the hospital’s rules.”

“I assure you it isn’t. Just remember to bring it to me. You will, won’t you?”

I assured him I would and taking the note with the address on it, I bid him goodbye. He watched me leave by the open door.

Although when Walker had given me the assignment I’d been somewhat annoyed at the whole thing, I admit that by the time I left the hospital, my curiosity had been piqued. I found myself eager for a little expedition of my own out to Dean’s Corners, a small town in the central part of the state known mostly for its number of elite private academies.

Although I gave no credence to Sanders’ story, his invitation to visit his home in Dean’s Corners, which is next door to often mysterious and backward Dunwich, struck me as possibly being of some interest. So, with Walker’s permission, I set out the following Saturday traveling north on Route 128.

Near noon, I left the highway at the old Aylesbury Pike interchange and gradually, the urban landscape of the eastern part of Massachusetts gave way to more open country. By the time I’d driven another hour or so, farmland predominated with the occasional roadside produce stand deserted and waiting for warmer months. At last, a roadside marker welcomed me to Dean’s Corners, established 1742.

Private homes began to make their appearance again as the strange, steep hills that gave the town much of its character came into view. Historic signs named them off: Gibbet Hill, Throne Hill, Castle Hill. From what I could tell, Dean’s Corners was a typical New England town with a main street lined with local businesses including the usual attorney and real estate offices, a café or two, a local branch bank, and a dozen or so consignment and antique shops. Consulting my GPS device, I turned off at Hollis by the Congregational Church and, driving past the public cemetery, found the road I wanted. Sanders’ home was only a few hundred feet farther on. I’m not sure what I’d expected but it wasn’t the pleasant little Cape that I found. It was set a ways back from the road behind some overgrown hedges that Sanders’ family obviously hadn’t been keeping up with.

I drove a little ways up the paved drive and stopped in front of the garage which was attached to the house. Paint was peeling on the door and pretty much everywhere else. The front lawn was shaggy to say the least, and branches downed by some recent storm littered the roof.

At least it looked as if I wouldn’t have to worry about any family members wondering what a stranger was doing entering the house.

Leaving the car, I took my briefcase and made my way around the back. There, the yard was also unkempt but screened from the view of any neighbors by overgrown pine trees and other brush. There was evidence that local deer had been nosing about.

I discovered the back door and after climbing onto a wooden garden chair and feeling about the gutter, found the keys secured against the weather in a plastic sandwich bag. The larger key fit the lock. Pushing in the swollen door, I stepped into the garage where a vehicle was stored covered in a sheet. Ignoring it, I entered the kitchen through an inside door and wasted little time locating the study.

Luckily, it was at the back of the house where any activity wouldn’t be noticed by the neighbors. I set down my briefcase and shrugged out of my overcoat. The furnace was operational but was obviously set at a low temperature. At a glance, the desk top was clear with the usual accoutrements in their proper places. So I picked out the smaller key from the plastic bag and sitting in the padded swivel chair, tried it in the cabinet door.

It worked, and the door sprung open revealing a few folders stuffed with papers and to my surprise, a number of other items as well.

Taking them out, I immediately recognized the star shaped stone that Sanders had asked me to bring to him. It was a Mnar stone, an object believed by some to help in warding off danger. I struggled to recall what I’d heard about them from other members of the Miskatonic faculty, but all I could remember was that it had something to do with the Cthulhu myth cycle.

Pocketing the stone, I inspected a cast made of some kind of print that I soon associated with those of the deer outside the house. It struck me as strange why Sanders would bother producing such a thing, or storing it in the cabinet with papers dealing with his delusions. But seeing the print at closer range, it did strike me as somewhat strange and not like a deer’s at all.

In one of the folders I found a group of photographs, among them those showing the same kind of prints as they appeared in the ground behind the house. Turning the photo over, I saw that someone, most likely Sanders, had scribbled a note reading “Tracks found in the backyard: Mi-Go?”

Recalling what he had told me about alien creatures by the same name, I wondered if Sanders believed that the same beings had been congregating on his property? I smiled at the imagined scenario until I remembered that the same kinds of tracks were reported around the Pickerton hospital, and a vague feeling of discomfort suddenly came over me. Shaking it off, I continued to look through the photos coming across a group shot obviously of the Hughbanks Expedition with a young Sanders smiling in the back row. A few other photographs showed a number of ruins virtually hidden among thick jungle growth.

Immediately, the shape of the stone structures, whose size was only hinted at in the photos due to there being little in the jungle setting to compare them with, caught my attention. The culture of the ancient Mayan people was my field of special study, so my eye was trained to recognize the architectural styles they used over the centuries of their development and, though the structures in the photos had some familiar aspects, they were overall completely new to me, representing a heretofore undiscovered era of Mayan history.

Suddenly fascinated, I set the photos down and began going through the other material in the folders. I soon found some old receipts indicating that the jungle photos were copies made by the University of Pennsylvania and forwarded to Sanders’ home address. An invoice showed that Sanders had purchased the Mnar stone from a dealer in Boston a few months before his commitment to Pickerton.

A letter signed by the head of the antiquities department at the University noted that photos of the ruins arrived there by separate post while the Hughbanks Expedition was still in Belize, in fact, before the expedition had even left on its ill fated trip into the El Cacao region. As per Sanders’ request, copies were made of the photos and sent along to his home address.

Finally, I picked up pages filled with what I was sure was Sanders’ neat penmanship (looking about I noticed for the first time the lack of a computer anywhere about the room) and began to read.

They turned out to be an informal diary of sorts in which Sanders detailed the return of his memory…or his increasing paranoia, depending on whether or not I was to believe his hospital rantings. Nevertheless, I began to read and discovered that the photos had duly arrived at his home and placed in the desk cabinet by family members when they arrived. There they remained undisturbed for many years due to Sanders’ memory loss.

If I was to believe the story of his loss of memory, it apparently began to return to him a few years before. Not all at once, but gradually, as details of his participation in the Hughbanks Expedition grew more clear and the horror of it started to prey on his mind.

March 12: I woke up from a short nap this afternoon with recollections of Belize. I must have had a particularly vivid dream because I remembered walking with the rest of the expedition members along a narrow jungle trail that was overhung by low hanging branches and lianas. This was not the coastal region where we’d spent much of our time excavating ancient Mayan farmlands but inland, where the temperatures were a good deal higher.

March 20: Thoughts of the jungle trek keep nagging at me and I can’t help feeling that they weren’t the figment of a dream but recollections of a real excursion into the interior of Belize…

April 9: I came across an envelope in my desk today and was surprised it contained some photos I’d never seen before…or at least at first I thought I hadn’t. But almost immediately, I changed my mind. I had seen them before. They were given to Hughbanks by local Indians as proof that there were undiscovered ruins deeper inland. I remembered then how we gathered around them by the lamp light in Hughbanks’ tent, and how none of us were able to identify which era of Mayan history the structures belonged. The next day, we questioned the Indians more closely and were convinced that we had an opportunity to make history ourselves. It took little after that for Hughbanks to decide to form a secondary expedition to explore the El Cacao region to confirm the new findings and we began to make preparations.

April 10: Like a fog breaking up, my memory continues to clear, amazing me with events that I’d completely forgotten about. I remember it all now: how the expedition marched into the El Cacao country, how we met local tribesmen whom we were shocked to learn were descendants of white men who had migrated there a century before, how they guided us to the ruins, and how stunned I was to discover that the ruins represented a totally different architectural style than any ever seen in that country, with angles that didn’t seem quite right, that appeared to bend in different directions depending on your angle of view. I remembered how our guides seemed to grow more nervous until one day, they suddenly disappeared. After that, items began to disappear from camp until we figured out it must have been the natives. We were definitely beginning to feel unwanted in the valley. I struggled to remember more, but for some reason, my memory again began to fail me so I gave it up for the day.

May 1: After a series of inexplicable nightmares, I’ve finally been able to piece together what happened to us after the natives disappeared but even as I write these lines, I can hardly bring myself to believe it. After a day spent scrambling among the ruins taking measurements, making drawings, and doing some preliminary digging, we were all exhausted and fell into camp looking forward to a good night’s sleep. But before we even reached our tents, we found ourselves attacked. My memory is still hazy on the details, but what we at first took to be an attack by the natives who had guided us was nothing of the sort. Instead, we found ourselves being overwhelmed by hideous, crab-like things that at first we took for some kind of new species of jungle life, but that we soon learned to our dismay were intelligent, alien life forms whom the natives merely served. Thankfully, details of the creatures themselves and the attack have been clouded in my mind I think by the sound they made, a kind of buzzing that had the effect of numbing the human brain and interfering with basic motor functions. In any case, we were all quickly captured…except for a few whom the buzzing sound had less effect upon and who were able to give a better account of themselves. Would that the same had happened to me so that I might have been simply killed with them. But that was not to be. Instead, I joined Hughbanks and the others as we were herded away and into one of the larger ruins. I’m still not sure what happened after that but it must have been some kind of conditioning that erased our minds because up until a few months ago, I had completely different recollections of the expedition, ones that included an attack by drug dealers rather than the Mi-Go…the insect like creatures who captured us.

June 20: The story of what happened to myself and the Hughbanks Expedition is now clear to me but it’s so fantastic I’m afraid no one will believe it. When I tried to explain it all to administrators at the university, I was mocked. They thought I was just trying to make excuses for the shambles Hughbanks had made of his expedition. I was warned never to step foot on the campus again or I would be prosecuted for trespass and libel and anything else the administration could come up with. The rage I encountered was truly vehement convincing me that the wounds resulting from the legal battles fought over the expedition were still open with the school’s archeology department deathly afraid of having what little reputation still remaining to it destroyed.

July 1: Failing with the university but still hoping to convince anyone of the veracity of my story, I tried to broach the subject with my family members but, there too, I was rebuffed. I’m afraid I may have put my case too strongly, because some of them clearly think I’ve gone crazy. And maybe I have, I don’t know.

Sept. 2: I had a real scare yesterday. When I went out back today I noticed the ground had been disturbed somewhat. Thinking it was only squirrels digging for nuts, I looked a little closer and discovered that the ground was covered in strange prints similar to those of deer. But they weren’t. I’m afraid I panicked and ran into the house and locked myself in. For the rest of the day, I couldn’t make myself leave. That night was endless. Finally, this morning, I ventured back outside and confirmed my worst fears. The tracks I found yesterday were the same as those left by the Mi-Go. My only conclusion is that somehow, they’ve discovered that my memory has returned…they have humans who serve them like the natives of El Cacao…maybe word came to them after I visited the university…it’s perfectly logical that they’d have spies there as it would be the first place that any news of expedition members’ returning memories would likely be reported.

Sept. 14: I’ve made a plaster cast of one of the prints outside, but it’s failed to convince my family that I’m telling them the truth about the Mi-Go. I’ve tried to stop talking about them but I can’t help it. My fear gets the better of me. I’m afraid that my family thinks me mad.

Sept. 15: Sent off for a Mnar stone today. Hope it gets here in time to be of use.

Sept. 16: Today I overheard my youngest daughter talking with a cousin about placing me in a “home.” They didn’t know that the window was open and that I could hear everything they said. The irony was that even as they spoke about my madness and placing me somewhere for my own good, they were standing amid a crowd of footprints belonging to the Mi-Go.

Finishing, I put the papers down, not sure what to think. Except for the photos of the jungle ruins, which were real enough, there was little direct evidence to corroborate Sanders’ outlandish story of alien beings in the jungles of Belize! Still, there was a shuddery logic to the events described although I had no idea how I’d put it into words for my report to Walker.

Gathering up Sanders’ papers and stuffing them back into the folders, I inadvertently jostled the desk phone, striking the replay button for messages left on its answering machine. Suddenly, the quiet of the room was filled with the whisper of the rewind mechanism that stopped and automatically began replaying the last messages left on the tape.

There were a couple unremarkable reminders from the electric and gas companies about unpaid bills before a low, susurrant buzzing sound came from the recorder. Immediately, my attention was riveted and as those weird notes rose and fell, so did the shivers up my spine. My blood froze and as I continued to listen, it seemed to me that words were being formed through the rhythm of the buzzing. But if there were, they were just below the threshold of understanding…or at least so they seemed to my muddled senses. I must have been more affected than I realized at the time because when I finally was able to stir myself, I noticed that the late season night had fallen outside shrouding the rest of the house in impenetrable gloom.

Still shaken by recollection of that infernal buzzing sound, I went to the kitchen and turned on the lights. The familiar surroundings of chrome appliances, formica counter tops, and humming refrigerator calmed my nerves until I realized how hungry I’d become. Recalling Sanders’ invitation to make myself at home, I checked the refrigerator and cabinets for something to eat and fixed myself a sandwich.

Feeling too sleepy to make the long drive back to Arkham, I decided to throw myself on the living room couch for a few hours and leave in the morning, confident that none of the family would arrive to surprise me.

That night, I had the most vivid dream, triggered I think, by the events described in Sanders’ notes.

I dreamed I was in Belmopan, the bustling capitol city of Belize. Next, in the strange way dreams have, I found myself working on a dig outside the city. I was left with the impression that I did some exploring around the ruins there before a pair of Indians were shown to my tent. They handed me photographs showing jungle covered ruins they said were located in the interior, beyond the mountains in the El Cacao valley. They would lead me there in return for payment. After that, I was walking along a dim trail over the coastal Maya Mountains that debouched into the El Cacao valley. The heat was oppressive and the insects voracious and aside from myself, there were only my Indian guides and a handful of bearers. Descending from the mountains, we entered a maze of jungle and had to hack our way along until we reached a small clearing indicated by our guides. We pitched camp but by the next morning, the two Indians were gone. I’m not sure, but somewhere along the way, the bearers vanished as well. It might have been hours or days after that when some natives of the valley appeared and I was as amazed as those in the Hughbanks Expedition had been to discover their origins in Mexico and the US before that. They recalled with fondness the Hughbanks’ Expedition that had preceded my own visit and happily volunteered to guide me through the valley. I don’t know how much time had passed after that when I found myself standing at the foot of a cyclopean pyramidal structure whose dimensions appeared to shift with every step I took. In walking toward it I wasn’t sure if it was receding or getting closer until the native guides showed me to a doorway canted into the base of the structure. It was already open and I found myself drawn inside by a cool draft that drifted out from the darkened interior. I don’t recall if the natives used torches or not, but the deeper recesses of the pyramid turned out to be well lit from sources I couldn’t identify. As we emerged into a large room whose dimensions I couldn’t ascertain due to a complete lack of angles and corners, the natives around me retreated and were replaced by strange beings whom I later identified as Mi-Go, the fungoid-based life forms that Sanders spoke about, who were visitors from Pluto, a planet identified in their own language as Yuggoth. But even Yuggoth wasn’t their home, any more than Earth was. It was simply a way station, a stepping stone used on their measureless journeys from the depths of time and space where their true home lay. Those visiting Earth were merely workers seeking a mineral not found on other worlds and worthless to men in our primitive age. Somehow, all that information was imparted to me by way of the creatures’ speech which sounded in my ignorance as hardly more than the buzzings of insects. Other knowledge imparted to me by the creatures was the strange method by which they rewarded their loyal terran servitors. I was led to a series of tables upon which lay a number of elderly natives of the valley, each displaying different stages of an arcane medical procedure that resulted in the removal of the brain for storage in metal cylinders which were vacuum-sealed against the intrusion of any kind of atmosphere. Inside the canisters the brains floated in a murky fluid with nerve endings and spinal column connected to sensitive electronic nodes within the base of the cylinders. I should have registered revulsion at the procedure, but in my dream it all had a sense of normalcy about it. I continued to watch the procedure as one of the fungoid creatures took a freshly sealed cylinder to a work table and connected a series of jacks into its base. Instantly, other nearby devices that I soon recognized as remote audio/visual equipment came to life and a trebly voice emerged from a speaker using the local dialect belonging to the natives. Unsure at first, as if the entity doing the speaking was orienting itself, the voice steadied and began to respond to questions put to it by the fungoid creatures. Apparently satisfied with the connections, the creatures detached the cylinder from the jacks, labeled it, and placed it in a storage area filled with scores of similar containers. The bodies, with their vacant skulls, were dismembered with key parts such as hands and the skin of the head including face and scalp, preserved for some future use. The rest was disposed of and the empty tables prepared for new subjects. I was then guided to one of the empty tables and it was indicated that I should lie down. With dawning comprehension that the hellish procedure undergone by the native elders was intended for me as well, I drew back. At first, the creatures tried to explain to me the wonders of space and time that would become available to me once I submitted to the procedure. I would be immortal and would be carried between the stars by the Mi-Go themselves and become privy to age old secrets not given for ordinary humans to know. I would visit the Mi-Go’s own black-litten planet and experience life within its sprawling fungoid cities and finally, I would roam where the hideous Shantaks flew, and witness the cosmic maelstrom where great Cthulhu and his brethren were born. And with my sanity thus strengthened by these experiences, I might even have the honor of being taken to the ultimate center of time and creation where the mindless Azathoth whorled and tittered for all eternity. All that would be mine if only I agreed simply to having my brain parted from mortal body. But by then, I was struggling to free myself from the hold the crab-shaped Mi-Go had upon me. Dream or no, I sensed the horror and madness that lay behind the creatures’ empty promises and screamed my protests. Perhaps realizing the futility of working on such an unwilling subject, the creatures yielded and instead, placed me beneath a device that they said would simply rob me of short term memory…but even then, as the plastic thing, punctuated with numerous needles and other unidentifiable instruments, was descending toward my unprotected head, I renewed my struggling and shouted my protests, promising that I would never tell, would never reveal what I’d found in the valley…

I was still screaming when I fell off the couch and bumped onto the floor.

It was a dream! Only a dream, I suddenly realized with vast relief. Nevertheless, my body was soaked in sweat and I shook all over in fear and desperation. Getting to my feet, I found that my legs were still wobbly and bracing myself against walls and furniture, I made my way to the bathroom to dash my face in cold water.

Anxious to leave the scene that had inspired my nightmare, I chose not to wait until full light but locked up the house and drove back to Arkham, arriving at my own apartment by mid-morning. Reluctantly, I turned my attention back to what I’d learned from Sanders and, after organizing my thoughts, began to write up a draft of the report I wanted to submit to Walker later that afternoon. My conclusion of course, was that Sanders was mad as a hatter and that the University of Pennsylvania would have nothing to worry about in the way of further scandal from him, if that was what really concerned them.

Ironically, that evening, I turned on the TV to a local news station while preparing supper and heard the news of Sanders’ disappearance. Hurrying from the kitchen into the living room, I stood and watched a reporter standing in front of the familiar red brick hospital building as he filled viewers in on Sanders’ background and suspicions aroused by a still unidentified prowler who’d been nosing about the grounds. A brief interview with Dr. Bross revealed that upon making bed check the night before, Sanders was found not to be in his room. When he failed to turn up after a search of the building, the Police Department was called in to take over. Since then, there had been no sign of the patient’s whereabouts, but the audience was informed that although Sanders was considered of little risk to others, citizens were cautioned to contact the police immediately if he was sighted and not to approach him themselves.

Coming as it did only a few hours after I’d seen Sanders myself, the news of his disappearance upset me and began to draw my mind along avenues that ended only in blind alleys. I felt a mounting anxiety that I really couldn’t account for until finally, I had to take a couple of pills to calm my nerves. They did little good however, as that night my dreams were again filled with visions of the jungle, of massive, unnatural ruins, of alien creatures, and buzzing, buzzing, buzzing…

I awoke exhausted, and it took me more time than usual to gather my things and get out the door and on my way to the university. With Sanders disappearance, at least I was relieved of the duty of bringing him the Mnar stone. It was then, while I was crossing the quad on the way to Walker’s office, that I met the stranger. He appeared to be a rustic of some sort, somewhat stooped and of medium build, and wearing a hunting jacket and plaid cap with the ear flaps pulled down around his head. He’d apparently been waiting for me because after I spotted him standing in the center of the walkway, he called me by name.

“Prof. Withins?” he asked as he came up to me. “Prof. Luke Withins?”

“Yes, that’s me,” I replied slowing to a halt and not at all in the mood for pleasantries. I was prepared to tell the man just that when I nearly coughed in response to an unpleasant odor that he seemed to bring with him. Was it the stench of some dead animal that clung to his hunting jacket?

“I understand you’re doing some research for the University of Pennsylvania?” the man was saying.

“How did you know that?” I responded, resisting the urge to cover my nose with a handkerchief. “Who are you?”

“A friend of Armand Sanders.”

“A friend in what way?”

There was something odd about his face as well. Close up, there was a kind of slackness to it as if the bone structure beneath had been rearranged.

“I’m the brother of one of his colleagues on the Hughbanks Expedition,” the man said.

“Oh?” I was interested, I have to admit. But I really didn’t want the net for this story to be cast any wider. If there was the possibility of new information being made available, I’d feel obligated in bringing it to Walker’s attention and was fearful that he would ask me to follow up on it. At that point, I really wasn’t sure why I felt that way, but after the nightmare I had at Sanders’ house, I was quite ready to drop the whole thing.

“That’s right,” the man was saying. “Like Sanders, my brother also had things sent to his home both from Belize and from the university. Items that I’m sure would be of interest to you.”

“See here, how did you even find out about my assignment? Did Dr. Walker bring you in on it?”

“No, it was…Sanders,” the man said. “It was Sanders, after I visited him in the hospital.”

In a flash, I remembered the prowler that had been reported creeping about the grounds of the hospital and I wondered if there could be any connection.

“Sanders has disappeared,” I said, my suspicions aroused. “Did you know that?”

“No,” he replied, in a manner that was less than convincing. “Anyway, I have more information about the Hughbanks Expedition at my home in Vermont that will help substantiate Sanders’ claims.”

“And those being..?”

“That he was brainwashed in order to protect the secret that alien beings have established a colony on Earth,” came the bland reply. “It sounds preposterous when spoken aloud, but the evidence in my brother’s possession is pretty convincing.”

“Well, it’s not for me to decide on pursuing it,” I hedged. “It’s up to my superior. But I’ll run it by him and if he approves, I’ll drive over and take a look at it.”

“I just want to clear my brother’s reputation,” said the man. “He died a few years ago but, like Sanders, his career was destroyed by the scandal and even his sanity had begun to be questioned.”

“I can understand that,” I soothed.

“In any case, here’s the address,” he said, handing me a card. The address listed on it was outside Townshend, Vermont. Not a long drive from Arkham but not a short one either.

“Thank you, Mr…?”

“Porter. Chris Porter. If you decide to come, call me at that number and leave a message. I’ll get it and wait for you at my house.”

With that, he walked off.

Pocketing the card, I continued on my way to the Archeology Department. When I arrived at Walker’s office, his secretary was out but the man himself was sitting behind his desk. Presenting him with the draft of my report, I dutifully filled him in on what Porter had told me. As I guessed, Walker said he preferred that the report be as thorough as possible and instructed me to take a drive to Vermont to find out what more information Porter had. He would see to it that a graduate student covered my classes for me while I was gone.

With no good argument against going, I left instructions for the grad student and made my way back home for the balance of the day. That evening, I called the number given me by Porter but instead of an answering machine as I’d expected, someone picked up at the other end. I was startled for a moment at the soft, whispery sound of the voice, definitely not that of Porter, but when I identified myself, was told that I was speaking to his housekeeper and that my message would be brought to his attention. I was assured that Porter would be home the next day to receive me.

Nagged by the familiar sound of the housekeeper’s voice, I took a double dose of pills before going to bed, and managed to get through the night with only a feeling that I’d dreamed but recalling nothing.

Relieved, I backed the car out of the garage and soon was headed west along Route 2. Just past Greenfield, I veered north on I-91 before taking the turnoff at Vermont Route 30 toward Newfane and Townshend just beyond. It was a cold but brilliantly sunny day which nevertheless had little effect among the steep, rounded hills of south-central Vermont. Gloom covered the two lane blacktop roadway leading into Townshend, as the sun found it difficult to penetrate between the forested peaks that crowded close to one another. Here and there, some early snow dusted the conifers that grew so thick right up to the edge of the road that it was impossible to see more than a few yards among them.

In Townshend, I stopped briefly to make sure I had my directions right before pushing on to Porter’s house, which I learned lay about 10 miles north of town. There, local homes seemed to thin out rapidly until the ones I saw were few and far between. Here and there, the thick forest was broken by open fields waiting for spring to be seeded again. The occasional farmhouse, with its sloping roof covered in the area’s distinctive metal sheathing, nestled against the edge of the woods as if about to be overwhelmed. My odometer indicated that I’d gone a good deal more than 10 miles before I spotted the sign I was told to look-out for indicating a covered bridge over a rushing stream. Turning, I was plunged into the near darkness of the tunnel before emerging on the other side where the paved road ended. Following this for another few hundred yards I came to the top of a rise and into sight of an old two-story farmhouse that was almost completely overcome by second growth forest. Behind it, I knew, rose the thickly wooded flanks of what the locals called Dark Mountain, a local landmark.

With its sagging roof and peeling paint, the farmhouse itself had all the appearance of having been abandoned for years. A path leading up to the front door had long since been overgrown and part of the house was completely hidden in ivy and other creepers.

Could this be the proper address, I wondered? Certainly, it didn’t have the look of having been lived in for years. I still had my doubts when I left the car and began looking around for a way to the front door. I found the head of the old walk after spotting a rusty mail box almost hidden among shaggy brown grass at the edge of the road. Bending down for a better look, I saw block letters spelling the name “Porter” painted on its surface, letters that seemed scrawled over another name beneath. Looking more carefully, it seemed the older name may have been “Ashley” or “Akeley.” In any case, with the house confirmed as that belonging to Porter, I forced my way between overgrown shrubs to the main entrance. Along the way however, I couldn’t help noticing imprints all around, imprints that looked exactly like those of the deer that had poked around Sanders’ home at Dean’s Corner and the Pickerton Hospital. But then, what else would I expect in such bucolic surroundings?

Still somewhat doubtful, I made my way to the front door and knocked. At first, I thought my initial impressions had been correct: no one lived there. But after trying again, there were sounds from within and I heard a muffled voice bid me come in. Pushing the door in on creaky hinges, I found myself in a darkened vestibule. Before me, a short staircase led to the gloomy second floor and to my left, an opening in a pair of curtains indicated a parlor. On the musty atmosphere itself was the same odor I detected on Porter himself the day before.

“Is anyone here?” I ventured, leaning toward the parlor.

“In here, Prof. Withins,” beckoned a voice, the same whispery voice I’d heard on the phone the night before. Only this time, it seemed rougher, more like a rumbling buzz. It was something I allowed myself little time to consider as I stepped impulsively through the curtains into the dusty parlor.

By that time the short, late-autumn day was winding down and the sun already fallen behind Dark Mountain. The room was darker than it likely was only a few minutes before, so that I could hardly make out Porter from where he was standing away from the windows.

I had the immediate sensation that he was not alone in the room, and I was right.

No sooner had I stepped through the curtains than I sensed movement behind me. Turning, I was confronted by a thing that up to that moment, I’d only seen in nightmares. It stood on the hindmost of its many segmented legs, and the suggestion of membranous wings lay folded on its back forming a hardened carapace. Where its head should’ve been was just a collection of fleshy protuberances from which extended a nest of ropy feelers that moved and swayed in constant motion. I was left with the overall impression that it was some kind of giant, impossible crab.

What it was, was a member of the Mi-Go, the alien race that had been appearing in my dreams of Belize and for that reason, I supposed, I didn’t feel as frightened as I ought to have been.

The ends of its legs made slight clicking sounds on the wooden floor as it moved further into the room, its fleshy feelers waving in the air.

But despite my puzzling lack of fear, I felt nevertheless compelled to take a few steps backward until I felt the edge of an end table against my legs. Regaining my balance, I glanced around the rest of the room and noticed the suggestion of movement elsewhere in the deepening shadows. Porter himself hadn’t moved from where he stood near one of the windows. He spoke then, at first with the voice I recognized from the university campus and then, as it grew more indistinct, like the whispery words spoken over the phone the day before.

“It was good of you to come, Withins,” he was saying as he fumbled around the collar of his hunting coat.

Then, with an action that did alarm me, he removed his face.

Horrified, I watched as he tossed the thing on the end table. It was stiff enough to remain somewhat propped up, enough-so that Porter’s features were still recognizable. Before I could drag my eyes from the horrid mask, it was joined by a pair of severed hands affixed with complicated clip mechanisms. It was then that the familiar odor became overpowering. Holding a handkerchief over my nose, I recognized it as the scent of rotting flesh.

Fearfully, I raised my eyes and saw that the Porter figure had removed its clothes and what was revealed was another Mi-Go that was in the process of unfolding its limbs and shedding the general shape of a bent and stooped human being.

“We are happy to see you, Withins,” the thing whispered. “We have been waiting for quite some time for you to join us.”

“Wha…what do you mean?” I stammered, but dreaded the answer, having an inkling of what it would be.

“Why don’t you remember, Withins? We have been friends for quite some time,” said the thing. “We met in Belize two years ago.”

“Belize? But I’ve never been there before…”

“Ah?”

“I mean aside from my dreams…”

“All a dream was it?” questioned the thing as it shifted its legs. “What would you say, Withins, if I told you it actually happened? That you went to Belize, journeyed to our valley, visited us in our stronghold?”

“No. That’s impossible…”

“Not at all,” insisted the thing, whose waving feelers I could imagine simulating the movement of muscles beneath the Porter mask. “Here is the truth: you traveled to Belize two years ago and like the Hughbanks Expedition, was lured into the El Cacao region by unscrupulous Indians. You were met there by our servitors and taken to our stronghold where you were made to forget your trip to Belize…”

“It wasn’t a dream…?”

“None of it. Unfortunately for us and you, however, your treatment was imperfect. Your memory of those events began to return to you after you overheard our message on Sanders’ machine — a post-hypnotic signal intended for Sanders, instructing him to return here to us. That intercepted signal triggered your own buried memories and forced us to take a hand. We were forced to physically recapture Sanders when he failed to receive the post-hypnotic signal, but with you, it was easier to lure you here with the promise of information desired by your superior.”

“And now,” said the thing’s companion in a voice much closer to a buzzing sound than a whisper, “We shall correct our error with a more permanent solution to the problem of your memory.”

But there is no problem. Can’t you see that? I can falsify the information I was to get from Porter, and Walker need not be the wiser. In fact, I could fix it so that when Walker submits the report to the University of Pennsylvania, it would eliminate any remaining suspicions the administrators might have that anything more than a confrontation with drug dealers happened with the Hughbanks Expedition. Other than that, it’s only me you have to worry about and if I promise never to tell anything to anyone about my trip to Belize…well, where’s the harm?

So, you see, there’s no need to make a fuss. No need to use up one of those valuable cylinders on me, someone who’s not even interested in making the journey to Yuggoth. You can save it for a more deserving person, maybe Sanders or one of your servitors in Belize?

I can see I’m no longer in the farmhouse. Are we under Dark Mountain? We must be since I can see the same kind of tables that I saw in my dream…or in Belize if, as you say, it wasn’t a dream at all but reality. Is that somebody’s body you’re taking apart? Not that I object! You do what you think is best. Believe me, I have no problem with that. On the other hand, I still have much to do at home. I have classes to teach and I can’t really trust those grad students to cover the material properly. So, as much as I’m honored to be considered for an operation, I really think you should let me go back…

“Stop prattling, you fool! We’ve already taken your brain!”

lf.”

Masks of the Puppet Lord

ow did I arrive at this point, asked Samuel Bowditch of himself.

At first, it had appeared to be a simple assignment, if somewhat unusual: he was to look into the disappearance of a colleague and if possible, find out where he had absconded with valuable museum property. He’d check the man’s office, his home, his computer records for possible clues that the police might have missed but that a fellow anthropologist might pick up and hopefully get some answers for Prof. Paxton, who had given him the assignment.

All very straightforward, yes, until his fax machine spat out that final damning photograph from Japan!

Now, he sat in an overstuffed chair outside of Paxton’s office waiting to enter the office of Miskatonic University’s Director of Asian Antiquities to give him the final report on his findings. But how do you summarize in a few words facts that by themselves seem to mean nothing, while strung together suggest a conclusion so fantastic as to call his sanity into question?

Rubbing his damp palms against his trousers, Bowditch looked at Paxton’s secretary where she busied herself transcribing some steno notes or something. Had she been doing the same thing that day when he’d come to this same office and received the assignment to find out what happened to George Pondwaithe? Maybe it would help his presentation if he cast his thoughts back and reviewed the events of the past few months as they happened…

The new academic year had begun only a few weeks before; any visitor to the campus of Miskatonic University could tell that by the number of students who crowded the walkways between classes and from the colors of the trees as their leaves turned from summer green to the autumn yellows, oranges, and reds that New England was noted for.

As usual, no matter how much work he’d put in during the summer months in preparation for the new semester, much of it never survived contact with his students. And frankly, it was the problem of how to rearrange his class on the Indonesian diaspora, so that its main points would not be lost on a particularly dense group of freshmen, that occupied his thoughts the morning he received word that the department head wanted to see him.

There was nothing urgent about the summons; just a note from the pool secretary saying that Prof. Paxton would like to see him as soon as his schedule permitted. He had time that morning before his first class on prehistoric rituals among South Sea islanders, so he had decided not waste any time in getting the meeting over with.

A summons from the department head was nothing unusual and as he had no reason to believe that his job performance had been lacking, he never even considered the possibility that the meeting could involve anything of a disciplinary nature.

Although still early when he entered the administration building, he expected to find Paxton in his office. Reaching the door labeled “Prof. J. Johnstone Paxton,” he stepped through and was recognized by the man’s secretary.

“Oh, good morning Dr. Bowditch,” she said, looking up from a steno pad. “The professor will be happy to see that you’ve come so soon.”

Getting up, she opened a door leading to an inner office and informed Paxton of his arrival.

“Go on in,” she said brightly, holding the door open for him.

“Sam!” said Paxton familiarly. “Glad you could make it before classes started. Take a seat. Want some coffee?”

“No, thanks John. Had some earlier and one cup’s enough for me.”

Shrugging, Paxton reseated himself and leaned back a bit in his big leather chair. Behind him, the early morning sunlight streamed in from a triptych of tall windows that gave onto a view of the quad. In the distance, the school’s nineteenth-century chapel cast a shadow across the old campus and beyond the church, receding rooftops suggested the city of Arkham that spread out below the hill upon which the grounds of the university were located.

“Well then,” said Paxton. “I’ll get right to the point. You know about the situation with Prof. Pondwaithe?”

“Only from what I’ve read in the papers and office gossip,” Bowditch replied.

“And that is…?”

“That George…I mean Prof. Pondwaithe…disappeared a few weeks ago apparently stealing an artifact apparently made of human tissue belonging to the Peabody Museum’s Asian collection.”

“Exactly. Pretty horrible as historic artifacts go. But the situation, as you may have guessed, is quite embarrassing for the university as Pondwaithe was a tenured faculty member doing research at the Peabody. His disappearance along with property belonging the museum has reflected badly on Miskatonic’s reputation, and I can assure you that the Board of Regents is very interested in retrieving the artifact and restoring the university’s professional reputation.

“Unfortunately, the police have made little progress in finding Pondwaithe or the artifact, and have informed me that they have placed their investigation aside pending any new development. I suppose I can’t blame them if they have nothing to work with, but I decided that was no reason the university could not pursue the case on its own. Thus, I’ve received permission from the board of regents to hire a specialist in this area, a fellow by the name of Anton Zarnak; ever heard of him?”

Bowditch shook his head.

“I’m not surprised as his name most often comes up in those trashy tabloids one finds around the checkouts at the supermarket,” chuckled Paxton. “But I assure you, that is simply sensationalism intended to sell papers. The real man is quite accomplished in the field of psychology, and holds a number of degrees in anthropology. In fact, he has lectured here at the university in the past but that may have been before your time.”

“It must have been.”

“Well, in any case, I contacted Zarnak and he agreed to look into the case,” continued Paxton. “It was on his advice that I also assign one of the faculty’s anthropologists familiar with Pondwaithe’s area of study to work with him. It was Zarnak’s feeling that someone who knew Pondwaithe and his work might find something that the police had overlooked.”

“It’s true that I’ve followed Pondwaithe’s recent work with interest, especially his discovery of that pre-Nihongi mask,” said Bowditch. “But I’m not sure how his research could shed light on what happened to him.”

“Nevertheless, you’ll work with Zarnak on the case and present me with a final report of your findings no matter how the issue turns out,” said Paxton with an air of

“All right. So, when is this Mr. Zarnak supposed to arrive in Arkham?”

“He’s driving up from New York tomorrow so I expect him to be here sometime in the afternoon,” guessed Paxton. “I’ve arranged for Lossner and Phillips to take over your classes for the time being so after Zarnak arrives, you’ll have all the time you need to conduct your investigation.”

“Well, seeing as things have all been arranged, I guess there’s nothing more to say than that I’ll do the best I can,” said Bowditch.

“I knew I could count on you, Sam,” said Paxton familiarly. “Good luck.”

Bowditch rose and took Paxton’s hand. Outside the administration building again, he wondered what his first move should be. Should he wait until Zarnak arrived from New York the next day, or begin the investigation on his own? In the end, he decided to spend the day refreshing his memory about the work Pondwaithe had been doing just prior to his disappearance.

It felt strange to be home in the middle of a school day, but after delivering his lesson plans to Lossner and Phillips and making sure they had everything they needed to properly cover his classes, Bowditch returned to the old campus and the new Albert Wilmarth Wing of the university library. There, he settled himself in the periodicals section pulling out scholarly magazines that Pondwaithe had used to publish his findings regarding the pre-Nihongi mask he had found.

The story of its discovery was summarized in an early article written by Pondwaithe for the Archeological Review of March, 20--:

I was in the midst of a larger project to identify the uncategorized pieces in the Peabody Museum’s Far Eastern collection when I first laid eyes on the mask. Now, anyone uninitiated in Japanese pre-history would be justified in their surprise as the mask and its use in religious ritual is not a well known fact. The earliest reference to it is in an obscure passage from the Nihongi, admittedly a late period history of Japan written about the 8th century but which purportedly describes events as early as 660 BC, a time of turmoil when city-states struggled with one another for control of the countryside. That said, I have reason to believe that the mask was used chiefly in rights practiced among coastal peoples along the northern shores of Kyushu. I say that due to circumstantial evidence indicating that use of such masks seems to have crossed the Korean Strait during the Chou Dynasty. The cult to which the mask belonged, however, is much older than that with stray mention of it in the writings of Confucius who speaks of it being present in China even before 2,000 BC. Thus, the reader can imagination my excitement when I pulled an unidentified item from its padded crate there in the basement of the Peabody Museum…

Putting down the Review, Bowditch took up a copy of Far Eastern Studies dated May, 20--; sort of a chatty space where scholars “let their hair down” in rambling exchanges among themselves. Relatively free of jargon, the magazine had a very small, one might say even elite, circulation. It was in an email received by the magazine that Pondwaithe seemed to pick up his tale where the Review piece let off:

Oh, yes, I immediately recognized the mask for what it was: a very rare item. Besides never having been itemized by the museum (a fact I verified over several days searching through the institution’s records), it appeared to fit no known cultural practice. However, its preservation was superb, having suffered little of the ravages of time. And yet, holding it my hands, I couldn’t help but shudder at its origin and wonder to what horrid rites it had been attached. Certainly, aspects of its features suggested a victim who had been of Chinese origin and I was sure that DNA analysis would place it at the time of the T’ang Dynasty.

It was getting late by the time Bowditch reached the final publication in the pile he had retrieved from the periodical files. Picking up the July issue of Cahier de Nippon, he was relieved to find that Pondwaithe’s definitive paper on the subject of the mask had been printed in both French and English.

Given that Shinto soon became the national religion of Japan, the movement had its beginnings in pre-recorded times when the natives lived a primarily sea-faring existence sustaining themselves on raw fish, vegetables, and rice. With their lives depending so heavily on the vagaries of the weather, it was only natural that some early peoples would develop a notion of fate; a belief system positing that events were out of the hands of humans who were powerless to influence them. However, if a force could be found powerful enough to control at least key aspects of their daily lives, protection from inland tribes for instance, such a deity could be quite useful. Such was the case, I believe, with the “puppet lord,” whose two limbs are commonly shown as being covered by hand puppets of the sort that children sometimes play with today. In them, the deity symbolically controls the lives of human beings and, as it was hoped by its worshippers, in doing so protect them from their enemies. The worship of the puppet lord was not altogether in contravention with Shinto that would evolve out of an amorphous polytheism in which the various kami or spirits such as Amaterasu the sun goddess or even Mount Fuji itself, were amalgamated into a single belief system.

Bowditch threw the magazine atop the others and sighed heavily. Outside, night had fallen and the lights along the paths that crisscrossed the campus were blazing brightly. In the farther corners of the parking lots, the distinctive blue glare of emergency phones glowed like eerie ghosts risen from the graves of nearby Alumni’s Rest.

Although he had learned much more about Pondwaithe’s last project, Bowditch was disappointed that there appeared to be no clue as to why his colleague would steal the artifact and disappear with it. There was no mention anywhere of its possible value and even if it was worth something, how would a scholar like Pondwaithe know the connections needed to sell such an item on the black market?

Shrugging, Bowditch hoped that something would turn up at police headquarters on the next day. Outside, he turned his collar up against the cold wind and followed drifting leaves to where he had parked his car. Pulling away from the curb, he wondered vaguely about Anton Zarnak and decided to run a brief google on him before turning in for the night.

Zarnak did not turn out to be what Bowditch had expected.

He was just finishing up breakfast when the telephone rang. On the other end was an unfamiliar voice whose owner identified himself as Dr. Anton Zarnak.

“Dr. Zarnak!” said Bowditch. “I didn’t expect to hear from you so soon.”

“I arrived early this morning and have just settled in to my rooms in alumni housing,” replied Zarnak. “When will be a convenient time to get together?”

“I’m ready now,” replied Bowditch, impressed with Zarnak’s willingness to get right to work. “Shall I meet you on campus?”

“By all means. Say in about an hour?”

“Fine.”

Bowditch hung up and washed the breakfast dishes before throwing on a light coat against the brisk fall temperatures and heading down to the garage stall. A minute later, he had backed out of his unit and was tooling across central Arkham toward the campus of Miskatonic University.

Delayed by a number of traffic signals, Bowditch entertained himself by recalling what he had read about Zarnak on the computer the night before. Except for a stray article or two about his standing in the field of psychology and his popularity on the lecture circuit, most of the information available on the man was of a tabloid nature concerned with flying saucers, exorcisms, voodoo cults, and ghost hunting. Items that only verified Bowditch’s first impression of the man when Paxton first brought up his name.

Truthfully, the sound of Zarnak’s voice over the phone, calm and measured, went far to disabuse him of the questionable profile he had of the man from his brief readings. There was something about it, a quality of reassurance that put the listener at his ease. As he pulled onto the campus of Miskatonic University, Bowditch was certain that if circumstances warranted it, Zarnak would have no trouble with hypnosis, if psychologists were still using the technique these days.

He had no more time to ruminate on the matter as he found an empty spot in the parking area reserved for alumni. He was just getting out of his car when a tall gentleman in slacks and tweed jacket approached him from the sidewalk. Over one arm was folded what appeared to be an overcoat and as he drew nearer, Bowditch noticed a distinctive slash of silver that zig-zagged like a bolt of lightning through his otherwise dark hair.

“Prof. Bowditch, I presume,” said the man. He smiled as he extended his hand in greeting.

“No need to be so formal, doctor,” replied Bowditch shaking hands. “Call me Sam.”

“You may call me Anton,” said Zarnak. “So we are to work together.”

“So I was told,” said Bowditch. “Are you familiar with the case?”

“Quite. I’ve been keeping track of it since Pondwaithe’s disappearance and have since read up on his articles relating to the missing artifact.”

“Then may I make a suggestion?”

“Please.”

“I thought we might drive over to the Peabody Museum before looking over Pondwaithe’s place in Dean’s Corners,” suggested Bowditch. “As Paxton told me, maybe people more familiar with Pondwaithe’s field of study might pick up information that the police have missed.”

“I agree; especially since it was me who gave him the idea,” said Zarnak. “But might I also suggest that we stop by the police station in Dean’s Corners too? It cannot hurt to review the more mundane results of crime scene investigation.”

“Good idea. Well, then. Shall we take my car?”

“Just let me get my briefcase,” said Zarnak, going over to a sporty BMW parked a few spaces away.

A moment later, the two men sat side by side in Bowditch’s less flashy Cavalier as he headed north to Route 128. While they made their way through Arkham traffic, there was little talk about Pondwaithe as Bowditch pointed out various places he thought might be of interest to a newcomer in town. Zarnak seemed to appreciate the preponderance of historic structures that had been preserved in the town’s historic district, remarking that he had visited Arkham in the past but that it had been many years since the last time. At last, the car made its way up a ramp onto 128 but only a few miles down the highway, turned off again on Route 114 toward Salem. Almost immediately, they entered traffic again and crawled slowly toward the center where they found parking in a multi-level garage off Essex Street.

“The Peabody Museum is just a few steps over here,” said Bowditch leading the way from the garage to the museum with its modernistic new wing dedicated to contemporary art. Across the street was the older-style building that held the administration offices, library, and storage for older items in the institution’s collection.

“I think the man we want to see is Oliver Smithson, director of Asian collections,” said Bowditch as he started up the steps to the administration’s main entrance. “It was he with whom Pondwaithe was in contact when he made his discovery of the mask.”

At the front door, Bowditch pushed through one of its leaves and then through a second set of interior doors to the tiled hallway beyond. Looking around, Zarnak pointed to a young woman sitting at a small table.

“We would like to see Oliver Smithson,” said Bowditch as they approached the girl. “I called yesterday for an appointment.”

The girl smiled sweetly and consulted an appointment book on the table.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Mr. Smithson is in his office downstairs. Just take those stairs and then left at the bottom. You can’t miss it, his name is printed on the door.”

Thanking the girl, the two men took the stairs and found themselves in a corridor a good deal more gloomy than that above. On either side stood ranks of old file cabinets and tables piled high with cardboard boxes and other packaging material. Among them was a door of pebbled glass with Smithson’s name on it. Bowditch tapped it a few times before pushing it open.

Inside the office, a middle-aged man looked up from a battered metal desk. Around him were more file cabinets and more boxes but this time actual artifacts and other objects lay revealed here and there.

“Are you Samuel Bowditch?” asked Smithson.

“Yes, and this is Dr. Anton Zarnak,” replied Bowditch gesturing to his companion. “We’re looking into the disappearance of Prof. Pondwaithe for the university and were told you might be able to answer some questions for us.”

“Not about his disappearance maybe, but if you want to know what he was doing while he was here, I can tell you that,” said Smithson.

“What can you tell us about the mask Prof. Pondwaithe identified while he was working here?” asked Zarnak before Bowditch could say another word.

“Not much,” admitted Smithson rising from his chair. “I know from the scant notes that were included in the packaging along with the artifact that it had been stored here at the museum for quite a while, about 175 years to be exact.”

“How exactly did it come into possession of the museum,” Zarnak wanted to know.

“Near as we could figure from the notes, it was donated to the museum in 1915 by Zelia Carney, the widow of Captain Able Carney. The donation was one of about a dozen items given by Zelia from a collection that had belonged to her husband. Seems the captain had a yen for offbeat kinds of Asian art and managed to bring back quite a few pieces from voyages he made there before the Civil War. Unfortunately, the captain didn’t have a trained eye for such things and when his collection was presented to the museum, experts at the time classified them as nothing special and stored them away. When they opened the new wing a couple years ago, the museum’s directors decided to go through all of the uncataloged items in storage and invited Prof. Pondwaithe to help identify them.”

“And was the professor excited when he found the mask?” asked Zarnak.

“Not at first,” said Smithson, tucking his hands in his pockets. “He just seemed puzzled. But he did put it aside and later went upstairs to the library where I supposed he did some research to help identify it. I don’t know if he found anything useful, but a couple hours later he came back down and returned to work. It was only after he left for the evening that I noticed the mask was missing. I thought maybe I just couldn’t find it amid all the packing material and other items lying around, but after the professor was reported missing, I had second thoughts and told the directors about my suspicions. They instructed me to repeat them to the police. I guess you know the rest.”

“Since the professor’s identification of the mask, has there been anyone else here asking about it?” Zarnak wanted to know.

“Besides the police and the directors? No; and frankly, I can’t imagine who’d be interested. The thing is pretty disgusting.”

Dismissing Smithson’s final comment, Bowditch wondered at Zarnak’s last line of questioning but immediately realized that the psychologist only wanted to make sure there was nobody else who could possibly have taken the mask. It was good thinking, but something he was sure the police had already verified. But then, Zarnak’s next question took him by surprise.

“There have been no foreigners asking about the mask? No evidence of break-ins into the building since Prof. Pondwaithe’s disappearance? Any other items from the same period or collection missing?”

“Why, no…of course not; I mean, not that I’m aware of,” said Smithson slowly. “In connection with the mask? Why should there be?”

Instead of answering Smithson’s questions, Zarnak turned to Bowditch. “Do you have any questions, Sam?”

Caught wondering about the psychologist’s line of questioning, Bowditch was unprepared for an immediate answer. Finally, he managed a “No, none.”

“Then might I suggest we take our leave? Thank you, Mr. Smithson.”

“Sure. Any time.”

Bowditch followed Zarnak from the room and moments later the two men were moving down Essex Street to the garage.

“I have to admit, that was an unexpected line of questioning, Anton,” ventured Bowditch.

“In what way?”

“Well, why foreigners especially might be interested in the missing mask,” said Bowditch. “What kind of foreigners were you thinking of?”

“I’m not sure myself,” replied Zarnak. “Do you mind if I keep my conjectures to myself for the time being?”

“Not if that’s what you want. But I have to say, you’ve got me wondering about your train of thought.”

Back in the car again, Bowditch had soon returned to Route 128 and after a short journey north exited the highway at the old Aylesbury Pike interchange. Sooner than one would expect, the landscape gave way to more open country and the occasional farmstead as they passed a roadside marker welcoming them to Dean’s Corners, established 1742.

“If my memory serves,” observed Zarnak as he studied the countryside, “the town of Dunwich is not far from here.”

“Never been there myself, but I think the turnoff is on the other side of Dean’s Corners,” replied Bowditch as a passing mileage marker indicated that Dean’s Corners was only 7 miles further on.

Soon, farmland shifted to a more wooded landscape with trees and unpruned underbrush crowding the sides of the roadway. The scent of browning leaves and fresh-cut grass was in the air and here and there, single family homes started to appear.

The day was becoming cloudier as they rolled into Dean’s Corners proper; not that there was much to look at. A typical small town, the main street was lined with local businesses: attorney’s and real estate offices, a café or two, a local branch bank, and a dozen or so consignment and antique shops. Bowditch aimed for the tall, white steeple of the Congregational Church and sure enough, right across a small common with the inevitable stone dedicated to Civil War veterans, stood the Town Hall and next to it, the tiny police station. There, the parking lot was empty but for a single cruiser and the building itself looked hardly big enough to handle more than a single prisoner.

Quickly, and perhaps unfairly, Bowditch judged that it was no wonder little progress had been made on Pondwaithe’s disappearance. The Dean’s Corners sleepy-looking Police Department did not inspire confidence in him that anything near a thorough investigation could have been possible.

Inside, a ceiling fan rotated slowly and the front desk was unoccupied. A card on the counter read “ring bell for service.” Bowditch looked questioningly at Zarnak who shrugged. He slammed his hand down on the bell and a voice called from an inner office.

“Can I help you?”

Bowditch leaned over until he could see around the door jamb to the other room. A man in a blue uniform sat behind a desk covered with a scattering of manila folders. At the front of the desk was a name plate that read “Chief Paul DiFriggio.”

Straightening, Bowditch walked to the open door and introduced himself and Zarnak.

“Don’t know if there’s anything more you can learn at the professor’s place,” said DiFriggio leaning back in his swivel chair. “We went over it pretty thoroughly. FBI even took an interest as it might have been a case of kidnapping. They went through the prof’s computers and cell phone but so far as I know, found nothing much.”

“Has the equipment been returned?” asked Zarnak.

“It never got taken,” replied the chief. “Seems these days they have gear that just sucks out the guts of computers on the spot. No need anymore to haul all of that stuff around.”

“So if we go over to Prof. Pondwaithe’s home, we’ll be able to check his computer files?” Bowditch wanted to make sure. “It’s important as my superiors at the university feel that people familiar with the professor’s work would be able to find something out of the ordinary that non-experts might not have recognized.”

“Don’t know if you’ll be able to find anything new, but yes, you’ll have access to the professor’s computers,” said DiFriggio.

“Aside from the computers, did you find anything else of value at his home?” Zarnak inquired.

“Only what you’ve read in the papers,” replied DiFriggio, rising. “We went over the premises for fingerprints and found quite a few aside from those of the professor but so far, we haven’t been able to identify them.”

The chief pulled open a file drawer and withdrew a folder. “Here they are if you want to look at them.”

Bowditch looked over Zarnak’s shoulder but as he figured, wasn’t able to make heads or tails of the prints.

“The only other thing we found was a picture of the item the professor is supposed to have taken with him,” continued DiFriggio, holding out a glossy photograph for their inspection.

This one Bowditch took and made a face when he saw what it was.

“Ugly thing, isn’t it?” asked the chief rhetorically. “Supposed to be a mask made from skin taken from a human head. Gruesome stuff. Supposed to have been made by Japanese cavemen or something.”

“They weren’t simple cavemen,” commented Zarnak absently.

Bowditch wondered what was on Zarnak’s mind but his thoughts were interrupted when the psychologist called his attention to the mask.

“Notice the detail, Sam,” Zarnak said, holding out the photograph so that Bowditch could have a better look. The photograph showed the mask mounted on what appeared to be one of the museum’s display stands.

“Whatever process the makers used to create it must have been quite elaborate.”

“Exactly. This mask is what has traditionally been displayed covering the hands of the ‘puppet lord’ worshipped by the ancient Japanese. Quite a literal symbol of the god’s purported control over man’s destiny wouldn’t you say?”

“I suppose so,” mused Bowditch, disturbed more than he cared to admit at the imagery inspired by the empty mask whose features were made all the more disturbing in a photograph whose quality was so much better than the reproductions he had seen in the various periodicals at the library.

“Chief DiFriggio,” said Zarnak, “can you tell us what you know of Prof. Pondwaithe’s movements in town just prior to his disappearance?”

“Well, that’s difficult to say,” said the chief, rubbing his chin. “A week before his reported disappearance, which came to us from the university when he failed to show up for classes, he was seen doing errands around town.” DiFriggio consulted a notebook. “Grocery shopping at Harrellson’s, a fill-up at the quick mart, a visit to the historical society, he talked to some neighbors, nothing out of the ordinary.”

“One doesn’t usually associate such prosaic activity with Dunwich country,” commented Bowditch.

“Don’t compare Dean’s Corners with Dunwich, mister,” suddenly stormed the chief. “We’re nothing like that town. Dean’s Corners is a progressive community!”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…”

“Just the same, people here are tired of having Dunwich’s reputation rubbing off on them,” said the chief, calming down immediately.

Clearing his throat, Zarnak returned the conversation to the disappearance of Prof. Pondwaithe.

“Tell me, Chief DiFriggio, have there been any foreigners reported in town lately; foreigners who tended to move around in a group?”

“Not that I’ve heard,” said DiFriggio. “Not many foreigners come to Dean’s Corners.”

“Would they have reason to visit Dunwich?”

“Now that’s an odd question. There’s always been talk of strangers in Dunwich but none that I ever noticed who didn’t look like me or you.”

“Well, thank you, chief, we appreciate you’re taking the time to talk to us,” said Bowditch, sensing that whatever the chief could offer them had been exhausted.

“You’ll find the key to Pondwaithe’s place under the front mat,” said DiFriggio in parting. “Be sure to put it back when you leave.”

Outside, Zarnak wondered if they could make one more visit before heading out to Pondwaithe’s home.

“Where to?” asked Bowditch sliding into the driver’s seat of the car.

“The historical society,” said Zarnak. “I’m curious about what reason Pondwaithe might have had for going there barely a week before he vanished.”

“Might as well hit all the bases while we’re here,” agreed Bowditch, pulling out of the parking lot onto the town’s main street. He had barely put on speed when he had to apply the brakes in order not to overshoot the historical society building which was headquartered not two doors down from the police station. With no off street parking, he had to station the car along the sidewalk and when he finally took the time to notice, saw that the society was located in a nineteenth-century building that he later learned had been the home of Judge Ezekiel Dean, who had once served in the cabinet of the second Cleveland administration and later made an unsuccessful run for governor.

Inside, most of the building’s original furnishings were gone and instead had been replaced with various glass counters displaying various artifacts from the town’s history. Bowditch was just looking at a set of rust-eaten horseshoes when his curiosity was interrupted by a woman’s voice.

“Can I help you gentlemen?” it asked.

When Bowditch looked up, he found himself staring at a not-unhandsome middle-aged woman dressed in the style of the late nineteenth century.

“As a matter of fact, you can,” said Bowditch, surprised to find himself bowing slightly at the waist. “We were told by police chief DiFriggio that before his disappearance, Prof. George Pondwaithe had paid a visit to the historical society and…”

“Forgive my colleague, madam, but we have been assigned by Miskatonic University to look into the disappearance of Prof. Pondwaithe,” interrupted Zarnak. “My name is Dr. Anton Zarnak and this is Prof. Samuel Bowditch.”

“Dr. Zarnak, the famous psychologist?” asked the woman, suddenly very interested.

“The same,” replied Zarnak to Bowditch’s consternation. “And you are?”

“Millie Thomases,” said the woman, obviously a bit overwhelmed to be in the presence of celebrity. “I’m president of the Dean’s Corners Historical Society.”

“Very pleased to make your acquaintance, madam,” said Zarnak. “As my colleague was saying, we hoped that someone here might be able to tell us what reason Prof. Pondwaithe might have had for stopping by only a week before he disappeared.”

“Of course, we’ve all heard of the professor’s disappearance,” said Thomases. “A very disappointing affair I’m sure.”

“Something Dr. Zarnak and I have been asked to clear up,” said Bowditch. “We were hoping that whatever Prof. Pondwaithe had been doing here might help us in finding out what happened to him.”

“Hmm, well I’m not sure it will help,” said Thomases. “All he was asking about were the old stories of the Indian medicine man Misquamacus.”

“He was said to be a very powerful shaman in the early days of settlement wasn’t he?” asked Zarnak.

“Oh, yes,” said Thomases, obviously pleased that her visitor knew something about local history. “He stood very high in the estimations of the Wampanoags, the Indian peoples who lived in the Dunwich area at the time when European settlement was first moving into the region. Did you know that the Aylesbury Pike actually follows the road taken into the area by the first settlers? In fact, that path was said to have originally been an Indian hunting trail…”

“I see you include Dean’s Corners in with Dunwich?” said Bowditch. “Chief DiFriggio seemed to take exception to the town being lumped in with Dunwich.”

“Some older residents of town have that attitude,” said Thomases. “But it cannot be denied that all the towns around this area had once been part of Dunwich before becoming independent townships.”

“Did Prof. Pondwaithe say why he was interested in Misquamacus?” asked Zarnak, getting the conversation back on track.

“No. He just asked a few questions; the kind most people ask.”

“Did he ask to look at any documents; books of any kind?”

“Yes, he did,” said Thomases walking over to a cabinet and opening one of its glass-paneled leaves. Inside, were a number of old books, one of which she removed and held out to Zarnak. “This is the one I gave him. It has a few sentences about Misquamacus.”

Zarnak opened the book carefully and it fell open to a page marked by colored ribbon. One page showed an engraving of a group of Indians sitting around a campfire with the shapes of tree branches vaguely visible in the gloom overhead. Before them stood another Indian wrapped in a blanket and with one hand raised as if in speech. Beneath the illustration was printed the words: “Misquamacus speaks to the chiefs.”

Looking over Zarnak’s shoulder, Bowditch read from the text on the facing page which described Misquamacus and how he proselytized the gospel of something called Ossadagowah.

“What in the world…?” Bowditch found himself asking. “Are you sure this was the book Pondwaithe wanted to see?”

“I’m sure,” said Thomases. “It’s one of the oldest in our small collection. Not an original edition, I’m sorry to say.”

Keeping his finger between the pages to mark his place, Zarnak flipped the book shut displaying its title in faded letters on the cover: Of Evill Sorceries Done in New-England of Daemons in No Humane Shape. The pages about Misquamacus seemed to be only an excerpt from a longer account about how the medicine man came to Massachusetts governor William Bradford and told him of the fate of one Richard Billington, who seemed to have given up Christianity for the worship of a native spirit called Ossadagowah which was described as a “great toad” that yet had “no shape” but a face with “serpents grown from it.”

“Seen enough?” asked Zarnak.

“Plenty!” I said as he snapped the book shut and handed it back to Thomases. “What in the world was Pondwaithe doing reading this claptrap? Come, Anton, we might as well go.”

They thanked Thomases for her help and returned to the car.

By the time they cleared Main Street the afternoon was getting on and the late autumn sunlight was slanting steeply through the trees, casting long shadows along the ground. As they moved farther away from the center of town, they noticed that tall, conical hills began to dominate the landscape ahead of them and, as they rounded the flank of the first, the sun disappeared behind it and they were thrown into deep gloom. Bowditch was surprised to find how relieved he felt when the car emerged again into sunlight as the road began to twist and turn and the number of homes became less dense. At last, Zarnak pointed out a street sign indicating that they needed to take a turn off the main road if they were to continue on to Pondwaithe’s home.

“Never realized how far Pondwaithe was willing to commute,” observed Bowditch as he slowed down to more safely navigate the narrow road.

“He does seem to have enjoyed his privacy,” agreed Zarnak.

“You didn’t seem to find his interest in that old Indian legend too surprising,” ventured Bowditch.

“No, I didn’t,” said Zarnak. “I think there may be a connection.”

“A connection? In what way?”

“I’m not sure yet but hopefully we’ll find more substantial evidence in his home.”

“So you’re not prepared to elaborate?”

“Here’s your next turn,” said Zarnak.

Bowditch slowed almost to a halt as he eyed the unpaved road that opened among a thick growth of wild grape vines covering trees that grew along the road. An old wooden sign hung from the trunk of a massive oak; on it, faded lettering reading “Wampanoag Pond” was underscored by an arrow pointing down the narrow path.

Carefully, Bowditch left the paved roadway and turned into a dirt road that was indicated only by a pair of ruts hung over by tree branches. Over the next few minutes, they creeped past a number of openings in the underbrush marked by crooked mailboxes but as the light really began to fade, the mailboxes ended and they were left with a cavernous path lit only by the car’s headlights.

At last, openings among the trees indicated a body of water off to the right, and soon after they passed a mailbox marked by the number “37” and entered a grassy area that sloped up to a tidy little cottage overlooking what should have been “Wampanoag Pond” but looked more like a glorified swamp to Bowditch.

“Thirty-seven,” Bowditch said as he brought the car to a halt and snapped off the lights. “This is it.”

“More isolated than I expected,” said Zarnak getting out of the car and looking around.

Bowditch followed and, in the last light of the day, saw that the cottage sat on a narrow peninsula of land that stuck out into what must at one time have been a beautiful body of water, but now barely qualified as such with most of its surface choked in aquatic plant life. The ugly bulk of what could only have been an ancient weed harvester sat half submerged a few hundred feet away, mute evidence that at one time, at least, there had been an effort by Dean’s Corners to keep the intrusive species at bay. Here and there along the former shoreline, there were a few lights indicating that other cottages were occupied, but directly across the pond to the north, there was nothing by darkness.

“Dunwich,” said Zarnak, inclining his chin in the direction of the opposite shore. “We must be right on the town line here.”

“I can’t imagine a more desolate spot,” observed Bowditch, not without a chill.

“Shall we move inside?” suggested Zarnak.

“Let’s,” agreed Bowditch, slapping away a mosquito.

Removing their things from the back seat, Bowditch found the key beneath the mat on the porch, just as Chief DiFriggio said, and unlocked the front door. Inside, it was pitch dark with the musty smell of a building that had been left empty for a while. Zarnak found a light switch near the door that instantly revealed a cozy-looking front parlor that included a large stone fireplace, a big throw rug covering the floor, some rocking chairs facing the grate, and a desk and bookcases occupying the far corner of the room. On the other side of the door, facing the pond, were a pair of bedrooms and from what Bowditch could see through a distant doorway, a kitchen in the back with, no doubt, a second door leading onto a back porch. He was relieved to learn that on further inspection, there was a rude bathroom in the space between the two halves of the house.

“Clearly, this was once intended to be a summer cottage, not a year-round home,” said Zarnak, putting his briefcase on one of the rocking chairs.

“I’m still coming to terms with the fact that Pondwaithe called this home,” said Bowditch, looking into the first bedroom. “It’s a long way from Arkham!”

“Why don’t you take that room,” said Zarnak. “I’ll take the other. I think it’ll be too late to head back tonight anyway.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” said Bowditch laying his own bag on a cot in the first room. “I see Pondwaithe’s computer is still here and it’ll take us hours at least to go through that and whatever else he has around here.”

“Maybe we should see if the professor has left us anything to eat in the kitchen?”

“Good idea. Don’t think he’d mind if we helped ourselves.”

A little while later, after they had finished a supper of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and canned beans, the two men brought their coffee into the living room, set a fire, and began looking through the missing man’s records. Outside, the lights of nearby cottages had winked out and the atmosphere filled with sounds of crickets and croaking frogs. Once in a while, Bowditch even heard the lonesome call of a coyote…not a sound that he associated with modern day Massachusetts!

Getting to work, it was decided that Bowditch would concentrate his attention on going through Pondwaithe’s written notes and books while Zarnak checked his computer records. The psychologist surprised Bowditch with his apparent skill at finding his way around a keyboard. It was something he had not expected, belying Zarnak’s sometimes old-world demeanor.

As the hours passed, both men experienced growing frustration in their appointed tasks. For his part, Bowditch found little dealing with the missing mask but quite a bit on local history and, in particular, the Indian medicine man Misquamacus. It was after midnight when Bowditch, not for the first time, tossed aside some note about the Indian shaman and how his preachings had inspired Billington to actually worship the toad thing or whatever it was. Maybe it was the lateness of the hour or maybe he was just tired, but despite his disdain for the authenticity of the material, Bowditch found himself reading from a quote that Pondwaithe found somewhere and obviously felt important enough to copy down:

“This much ye antient wizard Misquamacus told to Mr. Bradford, and even after, a great mound in ye Woods near ye Pond southwest of New Dunwich hath been straitly lett alone. Ye Tall Stone is these twenty yrs gone, but ye Mound is mark’d by ye Circumstance, that nothing, neither grass nor brush, will grow upon it. Grave men doubt that ye evill Billington was eat up as ye savages believe, by what he call’d out of Heaven, notwithstanding certain Reports of ye idle, of his being seen in diverse places. Ye Wonder-Worker Misquamacus told that he mistrusted not but that Billington had been taken; he wou’d not say that he had been eat up by It, as others among ye savages believ’d, but he affirmed that Billington was no longer on this Earth, whereat, God be praised.”

Bowditch shook his head as if to clear it and was about to toss the paper aside as he had others when he realized that something in the text had struck a familiar chord with him. Scanning it again quickly, he picked out references to a pond in the southern part of Dunwich…which a hundred years later would become Dean’s Corners township. Was it coincidence? He looked out the window across the now dark pond. Was the pond mentioned in the excerpt Wampanoag Pond?

“Anton, call me crazy, but what do you think of this?” Bowditch said, not without some embarrassment.

“What have you found?” asked Zarnak, leaning back in his chair and stretching his arms over his head.

Bowditch handed him the paper he found and after Zarnak had finished reading it, called his attention to the pond reference.

“Is there anything to it, do you think?”

“Apparently Pondwaithe thought there was,” said Zarnak. “The question is, where he got the notion in the first place.”

“So far as I can tell, there’s very little documentation supporting a connection between the deity worshipped by American Indians and Japanese fishermen on the other side of the planet,” said Bowditch. “In fact, there’s none that I know of.”

“Tell me, Sam,” said Zarnak exploring. “Have you ever heard of the Cthulhu cult?”

Bowditch blinked, momentarily at a loss for words. “The word is familiar to me. Some pre-historic religion wasn’t it? Supposed to have been the basis of numerous sects around the world. But evidence for it has always been patchy at best. Researchers have found it almost impossible to find evidence that the same belief system could be shared by such widely scattered cultures as the Indo-American and Austro-Aborigine to say nothing of Central Asian peoples and Africans.”

“What do you think about it?”

“Scientifically speaking, it doesn’t make sense,” replied Bowditch, warming to the subject. “There are neither facts to support the notion that a common belief system could have been shared in such primitive times nor even its very existence. To qualify as a common belief system, religions in different parts of the world must have a certain number of points in common and the so-called Cthulhu cult has very few.”

“But doesn’t the very institution of which you are an instructor, Miskatonic University, include a department devoted solely to such an antediluvian belief system?” prodded Zarnak. “What about the endowment left by Henry Armitage to fund continued research in occult subject matter that he himself had devoted his career to? The last I heard, a scholarship from the fund has been awarded each year since the professor’s death in 1939.”

“That’s true, but neither I nor anyone else on the faculty pays much heed to that sort of thing,” said Bowditch. “The delusional belief in occultism by some early nineteenth-century scholars is well known and just as soundly dismissed.”

“Hmmm. But certainly, acceptance of their credulity in such matters can be held while acknowledging that the false premises in which they believed can still be worthy of study if only for anthropological reasons?”

“I suppose that’s so,” mused Bowditch. “We do study other belief systems of early cultures in order to gain more insight into people’s daily lives.”

“Exactly,” agreed Zarnak. “And there is evidence that belief in the Cthulhu cult was widespread in many of the earliest cultures and in fact, survives even today.”

“Given that, how does it connect with Pondwaithe?”

“The points you bring up regarding the tale of Misquamacus confirm my suspicions that there is a connection between the mask identified by Pondwaithe and Ossadagowah the deity that was known to the Wampanoags. In truth, I think Ossadagowah and the ‘puppet lord’ are one and the same, the twin names of a fallen god more commonly known as Tsathoggua.”

“A fallen god? As in Lucifer?”

“No,” said Zarnak flatly. “The Cthulhu belief cycle has nothing to do with any subconscious earthly paradigms. Actually, from what I have been able to piece together, the ‘gods’ of the Cthulhu cult were actually alien beings from the stars who may or may not have been imprisoned on Earth by others of their kind in retaliation for some revolt or unimaginable war waged eons ago. Each of the defeated creatures, it seems, claim influence over different kinds of natural forces with that of Tsathoggua never having been made clear. His influences, as with his appearance, seem to be amorphous and ambiguous although they could be interpreted to control men’s destinies. Look here.”

Zarnak had been fiddling with the computer’s keyboard and in a moment he had downloaded a photo of a sculpture in the shape of a toad for lack of any other comparison.

“Does it look familiar?”

“It fills the description of the toad god mentioned by Misquamacus,” said a wondering Bowditch.

“Notice the notation beneath the image.”

“’Tsathoggua!’” exclaimed Bowditch.

“This is a piece fashioned by the California poet Clark Ashton Smith…he died in the 1960s…that he claimed to be the god not only of the Wampanoags but also of some antediluvian race that existed before the last ice age,” said Zarnak.

“Be that as it may,” said Bowditch. “This work is very similar to the description given by Misquamacus…so much so that there can be no other conclusion than that the two are one and the same.”

“I’m glad we agree, Sam,” said Zarnak. “For, you see, this sculpture also matches a description of the ‘puppet lord’ worshipped by the same Japanese who are believed to have fashioned the mask identified by Pondwaithe.”

“Have you been able to find anything in Pondwaithe’s files that relate more directly to this whole subject?” asked Bowditch.

“Not on his desktop,” replied Zarnak. “But I have one last thing to try.”

Zarnak hit some keys and suddenly the monitor’s screen was filled with rows of meaningless numbers and letters and other symbols that meant nothing to Bowditch.

“What’s all this?”

“I’ve accessed the computer’s hypertext background feed,” explained Zarnak as he scrolled through the file. “In an effort to remain up to date, I’ve tried to keep up with various computer software programs and this one seems to be familiar to me.”

“You can make sense of all that gobbledygook?”

“Some of it. What I hope to be able to do is at least recognize symbols that don’t belong…hello!”

“What?”

“This is interesting,” said Zarnak pointing to one of the symbols that crowded the screen. “I’ve never seen this kind of symbol before. Wonder what I’ll find if I click on them…”

Immediately, the screen was filled by an open folder showing a number of files. Picking the most recent, Zarnak opened it and was faced with an email exchange.

“Is that Japanese?” asked Bowditch.

“Yes. It’s an exchange between Pondwaithe and what appears to be some fellow in Japan. From what I can tell, it seems that the fellow read the professor’s articles about the mask in some magazines and decided to write him about the subject.”

“You can read that?” asked Bowditch, surprised.

“Some.” Zarnak closed the file and opened another, further back. “Yes. Pondwaithe was contacted by a Japanese correspondent who appears to have been very familiar with the mask as well as the ancient cult that used it in its worship rituals. Pondwaithe actually knew little about the origins of the mask and was eager to learn what he could from his correspondent. Although giving the professor plenty of information, little of it was documented or properly researched.”

“Folk history?”

“It seems so, and yet there’s a quality to the correspondent’s words…and it’s hard for me to tell judging only from typed messages…that suggests familiarity with the subject, even some first hand knowledge…”

“First hand knowledge? Are you suggesting that worship of this…Tsathoggua…still goes on?”

“That’s the feeling I get,” said Zarnak leaning back in his chair. “I’ll save this for the police.”

After doing so, Zarnak turned off the computer.

“There was nothing in the correspondence indicating what might have happened to Pondwaithe?” asked Bowditch. “Was there anything that you could possibly interpret as…”

“No, nothing,” said Zarnak. “The correspondent raised the argument used today for the return of Amerindian remains belonging to museums; he claimed it was a desecration of his ancestors for the museum to keep the mask. But beyond that, I can’t help sensing a desperation more acute than that borne of the simple return of remains thousands of years old.”

“Well, there’s not much else we can do tonight, I think,” said Bowditch between yawns. “Why don’t we turn in for the night?”

“Good idea. The down time will give me opportunity to think things over.”

A few minutes later, the lights in the rest of the cottage had been extinguished and Bowditch had closed the door to his room. Inside, he moved to the window and pulled open the curtains allowing for a good view of the pond and the stars overhead. The screen looked to be in good repair so he risked leaving the window open. The room itself was small with only a cot and night stand in one corner and a dresser in the other. Pegs on the wall held a flannel shirt and light jacket…presumably Pondwaithe’s…and on the dresser was a framed photo of the professor standing in front of the pond at some time when plants had not yet choked it almost out of existence. Snapping off the ceiling light, Bowditch took off his shoes and belt and threw himself onto the cot without taking down the coverlet. Later, he realized that he must have fallen asleep; how else to explain the nightmare that followed?

In it, he dreamed of a group of darkened figures clad only in loin cloths as they made their way through a moonlit forest. One of them held a rope, the opposite end of which was tied around the neck of another figure, slightly taller than the others, and dressed in shirt and slacks now torn almost to ribbons from the slashing branches and brambles through which it was pulled, obviously against its will. Tripping and falling from time to time, the hooded figure also had its hands tied in the front and, throughout the ordeal, pitiful mewling sounds came from beneath the rough cloth that covered its head. At last, the group broke free of the entangling wood and entered a clearing dominated by a low mound that clearly had once been made by human hands. Strangely, despite the thick woods that gathered close about its base, the mound itself was completely clear of any kind of vegetation making it a relatively simple affair for the group to make its way to the crest dragging their unwilling victim along. At the top, two members of the group held the hooded figure on the ground and stripped it of the remnants of clothing that still clung to its upper body. Lastly, they yanked off the hood revealing beneath the terrified face of Prof. Pondwaithe, who stared about wildly asking questions of his captors and receiving no reply. Meanwhile, a fire was started and suddenly, in the dream, the men around it had produced some kind of device that they placed over Pondwaithe’s head. A tube-like affair trailed from the contraption and was attached to a pot of water that began to boil over the fire. Soon, Pondwaithe began to moan and then to struggle. Becoming more desperate as the minutes passed, he tried to remove the thing on his head but his bound hands and the restraining grip of his captors prevented him from doing so. At last, as wisps of steam began to leak out from the imperfectly constructed container over his head, Pondwaithe’s strugglings grew more desperate and the air was filled with his muffled cries. Obviously screaming in pain as the thing on his head filled with boiling steam, Pondwaithe needed to be held in place by at least four members of the mysterious group. At last, as the professor’s mouthings subsided into low moans, the device was disconnected from over the fire and lifted from his head. The thing that was revealed could hardly be described as Pondwaithe as the professor had clearly lost much of his mind after the terrible ordeal. But his sufferings were not over. While two of his captors lifted the professor to his knees, another produced a strangely shaped knife and, making an incision at the base of Pondwaithe’s neck and extending it up the back of his skull, proceeded with the careful process of removing the skin and scalp from the professor’s head. In minutes, the exhausted Pondwaithe was freed from the grasp of his captors and the bloody and steaming result of the operation held up for him to see. And as his lidless eyeballs stared whitely from the gory mess that had once been his face, enough of his sanity returned for Pondwaithe to realize what had been done to him and he screamed, and screamed, and screamed…

Bowditch realized that he had been screaming only after Zarnak had slapped his face, jolting him to full wakefulness. Abruptly, insanely, he seemed to find himself back in Pondwaithe’s cottage. Outside the window dawn had begun to break and, from somewhere in the distance, there was the lonesome call of a mourning dove.

“Calm down, Sam,” Zarnak was saying. “It was only a dream…a nightmare.”

“A…dream?” Had it all been a dream? Dearly, Bowditch hoped it was and gradually, as he became more grounded in the normalcy of his surroundings, a great relief came over him and sighing, he flopped back down on the cot. “Anton, I’ve never had nightmares before…”

“Just relax a moment,” soothed Zarnak. “Get a proper hold on yourself before trying to remember what it was that you dreamed.”

“I don’t know if I want to remember it.”

“Tell me about it, but only if you want to,” said Zarnak sitting on the edge of the cot.

“It involved Pondwaithe,” began Bowditch slowly. “He was…in the woods someplace…”

Gradually, in fits and starts, Bowditch managed to describe the dream to Zarnak, including most painfully, the final denouement that had sent him spinning into wakefulness.

“I can’t remember ever having a dream like that,” said Bowditch, still exhausted from his ordeal.

“No doubt it was your sub-conscious trying to work through the facts of Pondwaithe’s disappearance,” said Zarnak with comforting certainty.

“But what triggered it? I’ve never had a nightmare before…not even very memorable dreams…”

Zarnak looked about the small room and noted the picture of Pondwaithe on the dresser.

“Often impressions we receive just before retiring are the last our subconscious retains before the brain settles into sleep,” explained Zarnak. “In this room, the last images your mind would have retained would no doubt have been this picture of Pondwaithe or the items of his clothing hanging on the pegs there…clothing can be a very powerful talisman of the person who has worn them. And, of course, you had just spent all of yesterday dealing with many aspects of the professor’s life and work.”

“Yes, I guess I can see how things like that would predispose my subconscious to dwell on Pondwaithe in some way,” agreed Bowditch. “But…never would I have guessed in such a powerful and realistic manner!”

“That said, I find it interesting that the setting of your dream seems to have been the mound mentioned by the Wampanoag shaman Misquamacus,” mused Zarnak.

“That hadn’t occurred to me,” said Bowditch. “But if there is such a place, I hope nothing of what I dreamed ever took place there!”

“Hmmm,” said Zarnak noncommittally. “Well, for now, why don’t you pull yourself together and come out to the kitchen. I’ve found some instant pancake mix and coffee in the cupboards and was about to call you for breakfast when you…woke up.”

“Lord knows, I can use a cup of coffee!” said Bowditch swinging his legs to the floor.

Some minutes later, he was just finishing up his pancakes when he took up his mug of coffee and stepped outside to the rear of the cottage. There, he joined Zarnak who stood looking out across the pond. A morning fog had lifted and the sun was just shredding through its last wisps as Zarnak inclined his chin to something across the water.

“We couldn’t see it last night but there appears to be some buildings across the way,” Zarnak said.

Looking, Bowditch did see some structures.

“They look like cabins.”

“Yes. Of the sort that are rented to vacationers. I think they might bear some investigation.”

“You think so? They look deserted to me.”

“You’ll recall what Chief DiFriggio said; that the police had found a number of unidentifiable fingerprints in the cottage. Fingerprints that definitely did not belong to Pondwaithe.”

“Yes, and that was when you asked him about foreigners.”

“Exactly. He said that there had been no reports of any in the Dean’s Corners neighborhood. But I wonder, was Dunwich included?”

“He didn’t seem to have much love for the town,” said Bowditch. “But tell me, why are you so interested in foreigners?”

“At first it was merely a line of questioning that I thought needed to be pursued if only in the course of a thorough investigation,” Zarnak said. “But after reading the professor’s email last night, I can’t help feeling that the interest shown in the mask by his Japanese correspondent was too keen. It’s just possible that Pondwaithe may have unknowingly contributed to the theft of the mask and in the process, his own kidnap.”

“You suspect some Japanese fanatic to be involved?” It was a turn of thought that had never occurred to Bowditch. He had simply bought into the simplest explanation, that his colleague had absconded with his discovery.

“Such a situation is not unheard of,” said Zarnak matter-of-factly. “And if such a thing had happened, staying at someplace like those cabins, within sight of this cottage, would be a very convenient location for a group of plotters.”

“Anton,” said Bowditch very slowly. “You don’t suppose that the fingerprints found in the cottage could belong to a group that may have kidnapped the professor do you?”

“It’s a possibility.”

“And what about my dream,” continued Bowditch. “Do you think there was more to it than symbology being worked out by my subconscious?”

“Do you?”

“I don’t know…God! I hope not!”

“Sam, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my career, it’s not to turn my back on possible leads no matter how uncomfortable the facts to which they point may be,” said Zarnak. “If it appears that the events in your dream might be more substantial than one would expect in normal circumstances, then we should follow them up to the best of our ability.”

Bowditch nodded in agreement, still hoping that his dreams would turn out to be only the insubstantial musings of a restless mind. Suddenly feeling the need to steel himself, he looked over to the buildings across the pond.

“Want to drive over then?” asked Bowditch of his companion.

“Yes,” replied Zarnak heading for the car.

A few minutes later, after driving back along the private driveway leading out to the main road, Bowditch was relieved to feel pavement again under the car’s tires. Unfortunately, it didn’t last long. No sooner had they passed a sign marking the town line dividing Dean’s Corners and Dunwich than the pavement ended and they were once more making their way along a dirt road.

“I knew there were differences between Dunwich and adjoining communities, but didn’t think they’d be so abrupt,” said Bowditch between gritted teeth.

“I’m sure there are paved roads in town,” said Zarnak. “We are in a pretty remote area after all.”

With the cabins located directly across the pond from the cottage, the two men had expected another road to open on the right in fairly short order and as predicted, one did appear. In a cloud of dust, Bowditch made the turn and the car was immediately plunged into the shadowy maze of drooping vines and tangled undergrowth.

“Sure doesn’t look like the place would be open for business,” he said.

Zarnak said nothing.

Presently, the path through the woods opened up into a clearing and, breathing a sigh of relief, Bowditch drew the car up a graveled drive to a modest tract home that sat on some high ground overlooking the pond. Out front a weathered sign read: Wampanoag Vista, Private Cabins for Rent. Beyond the house and chain of cabins that meandered down-slope toward what used to be the shore, the dirt road continued on into the forest. Where it ultimately led, Bowditch had no idea and for the moment, could care less.

Slamming the car door, Bowditch came around to join Zarnak beneath the shade of a spreading willow.

“Not much to look at, is it?” observed Bowditch, noting the dozen or so cabins in desperate need of whitewashing, the weed-choked boat launches, and the rusty Coke machine at the side of the house. Surprisingly, a car was parked outside one of the cabins indicating that some business was still being conducted at the otherwise deserted looking place.

“At least they’re open for business,” noted Zarnak looking at a “vacancy” sign leaning against the inside of a window pane.

Shrugging, Bowditch followed Zarnak up the crumbling cinder block steps to the front door, where the psychologist rapped sharply against the frame of an aluminum storm door. For several seconds there was silence, then the dull sounds of footsteps approaching from somewhere deep in the house.

Bowditch was not sure what he expected, but the man who finally opened the door did not seem too out of the ordinary to him. Clad in a pair chinos and matching shirt, the man seemed to be freshly shaven and even smelled of deodorant.

“Hello,” he said through the screen of the storm door. “What can I do for you folks?”

“Good morning, sir,” began Zarnak. “I am Dr. Anton Zarnak and this is Prof. Samuel Bowditch. We’re investigating the disappearance of Prof. George Pondwaithe, late of Miskatonic University and the owner of the cottage directly across the pond from you.”

The man nodded as though familiar with the cottage.

“Read something about the case in the newspapers,” he said.

“Then you probably know that he was thought to have had some visitors shortly before he was last seen,” continued Zarnak. “If so, we figured that there was a good chance that they stayed somewhere nearby and your cabins are the most convenient.”

“Makes sense,” said the man, still from behind the screen.

“It would certainly make things easier for us, Mr…?”

“Oh! My name’s ‘Lijah, ‘Lijah Cummin’s.”

“Well, Mr. Cummings, it struck us that if you kept a register of your guests, we might be able to recognize from their names or any other identification if any of them had a relationship with Prof. Pondwaithe.”

“Sounds like a long shot to me but you’re welcome to have a look,” said Cummings pushing open the storm door in way of invitation.

Together, the two men stepped into what had once been intended by the builder of the house to have been the living room, but which long ago was converted into an office. Looking around, Bowditch saw a door behind the counter that led into a small sitting room. An old fashioned TV set sat in one corner complete with “rabbit ears”, and a floor lamp sent a cone of light onto a well-worn recliner. Another doorway opened onto a kitchen.

“Here’s the register,” said Cummings, stepping around the counter that divided the office roughly in half.

Zarnak reached for the big ledger which, by the appearance of its well-worn cloth covering, had been in service for many years. Careful not to disturb displays holding out-of-date brochures of attractions to be found in the area, he turned the book around and thumbed the pages until he came to the final entries.

Following Zarnak’s finger as it traced its way upward on the page past a few later entries, Bowditch saw it stop at a name that was clearly Japanese in origin. In the column reserved for the signer’s address, a city or town in Japan was written in. Glancing at the columns reserved for arrival and departure, Bowditch confirmed that the dates the person had registered with Cummings matched the time that Pondwaithe was supposed to have vanished.

“I think we’ve found something,” muttered Bowditch.

“Indeed we have,” agreed Zarnak looking up at Cummings. “Can you tell anything about this guest…Mr. Iki Taneka?”

Cummings frowned in thought. “No. There was nothing unusual about him. He said he was touring the country on vacation, him and a bunch of other fellers from Japan. But that’s not unusual, we used to get a lot of groups from Japan a few years ago.”

“So he wasn’t traveling alone?”

“No. These Japanese tourists, they like to travel in groups ya know…and this feller had a few friends with him. Come to think of it, there was something about them that I thought weird at the time: even though there were half-a-dozen of ‘em, they insisted on sharing only one cabin. It must’ve been pretty crowded for ‘em, but who knows about these foreigners?”

“It says here that they stayed only a few days?”

“Right. Didn’t see much of ‘em while they was here. They were real quiet. No trouble at all. Didn’t even bother me about rentin’ boats or what to see around here.”

“Did they express any interest at all about Prof. Pondwaithe?”

“None. Otherwise, I would’ve told the police about it.”

“I see by the register that you had a couple other guests staying here at the same time as the Japanese,” noted Zarnak. “Did they have anything to say about them?”

Looking at the register, Cummings said “Oh, yeah. That was Eb Newcomb and Bobby Darden. They rent on weekends sometimes during huntin’ season. Now that I think of it, Eb did say that some singin’ or chantin’ comin’ from the cabin with the Japanese was gonna spook the game, but the Japanese warn’t here long enough for it to become a nuisance.”

“Do you mind if we take a look inside the cabin that they rented?” asked Zarnak. “That is, if isn’t currently taken?”

“No problem,” said Cummings taking a key ring from a peg board by the counter. “C’mon.”

Moments later, they were out in the warm autumn sunshine again, as Cummings led the way down a path toward the pond. All around, trees were at the height of their seasonal colors and leaves were already gathering quickly on the ground. Over in the pond, stands of cat-tails were bursting into seed and marsh grasses browned in the sun. A cool breeze made Bowditch glad that he had decided to put on his jacket before leaving the cottage.

After passing a number of cabins, they finally arrived at what appeared to be the last one in the group, where it stood close by the water’s edge, or at least where the water had once lapped. Only a trail of wooden planks leading into the tangle of swamp grasses indicated that some open water still remained somewhere out of sight.

A couple wooden steps led up to the cabin’s front door, where Cummings used the key to get inside. There, the interior was only dimly lit by a single window and as his eyes adjusted to the gloom, Bowditch noticed that he stood before a stone fireplace that still held the charred remains of a fire in its grate. Some old kitchen furniture filled the rest of the little room and in the back, a second room held some bunk beds. A second door led from the bunkroom to the rear of the cabin.

“How many did you say were in this group?” asked Bowditch.

“Five, six — I’m not exactly sure,” admitted Cummings. “I don’t think I ever saw them all together at the same time. But I got the feeling there were at least a half-dozen of ‘em.”

“Must have been pretty crowded in here.”

“Tell me about it!” chuckled Cummings.

They looked around a bit before Zarnak focused his attentions on the fireplace. There, he began poking in the ashes with a metal rod until some charred pieces of paper that had escaped the flames came to light. Reaching in, he took the papers out for a closer look.

“Find anything?” asked Bowditch coming to his side.

“I’m not sure,” said Zarnak holding the unburned papers up to the light.

“What are they from?”

“It looks like part of a brochure…” guessed Zarnak. “Mr. Cummings, let’s go back to your office a moment. I’d like to check something out.”

Together, the group exited the cabin and Cummings locked the door. Moments later, they were once again in the office as Zarnak scanned the various brochures on display there. Finally, he plucked one from a rack and began comparing its pages with the scrap of scorched paper he had found in the cabin.

At last, he beckoned Bowditch for a closer look and showed him where the two items matched. Glancing at the brochure’s heading, Bowditch saw that it was one that dealt in local tourist sights, in particular, Dunwich’s “Indian Mound” upon which nothing would grow.

Suddenly, a feeling like a cold hand closing about his heart came over Bowditch, as he recalled his dream of the night before. It was to just such a mound that the strange group had taken Prof. Pondwaithe.

“Are the directions in this brochure accurate?” Zarnak was asking Cummings.

“Nothing’s changed much in town, leastways not how the roads are set up,” said Cummings. “But I’ll give you a shortcut: just keep following the road out here ‘till it empties on old Route 12, take a left and follow the highway for about 2 miles until you see signs directing the way to the mound. From there, you should be able to find it easy.”

“Thank you for all your help, Mr. Cummings,” said Zarnak as he led the way out the door.

Back in the car again, Bowditch turned on the ignition and pulled slowly away from the house until regaining the dirt road out front. Cautiously, he picked up speed and followed the road into a dark tunnel of old-growth forest.

“The description of that so-called Indian mound sounds like the one I dreamed about last night,” ventured Bowditch.

“The subconscious has been known to make connections that the conscious mind may have failed to realize,” observed Zarnak. “In your case, it’s obvious that the story of Misquamacus and the mound he mentions made a strong impression on you.”

“But there was no suggestion that such a place ever existed or, at least, that it still existed after so many years,” protested Bowditch. “If the mound in the brochure is the same as that mentioned by Misquamacus, the place where old Billington got himself eaten by some creature he was supposed to have called out of the void…”

“What are you suggesting?”

“Recall the conversation we had yesterday, about studying ancient beliefs for what they can tell us about a culture regardless whether they’re true or not?” asked Bowditch.

Zarnak nodded.

“Then whether it’s true or not, could the group of Japanese who had stayed at Wampanoag Vista themselves have given credence to the worship of this Tsathoggua creature, and did something to Pondwaithe the way I had seen them do in my dream?”

“I cannot lie to you, Sam,” said Zarnak. “I have grave concerns that that is exactly what happened.”

Zarnak’s bold confirmation of his suspicions brought Bowditch up short, and an unaccountable fear of what they might find on the mound quickly took hold of him. He was still wrestling with his thoughts when they reached the highway and took a left as Cummings had advised. A few miles along the cracked and crumbling roadway, they came upon the first marker indicating that the Indian mound was only 1.3 miles ahead.

As they proceeded the surrounding forest began to thin, and down dusty side roads lonely farmsteads stood isolated amid cultivated fields. Although many seemed well maintained, others looked less so. For those, homes and barns were composed of weather-beaten wood and, in places, only a pile of debris marked the spot where a silo may once have stood.

At last, another marker included an arrow pointing in the direction of the Indian mound, and Bowditch slowed to take the next side road when it appeared. Spotting it, he left the highway and proceeded up a narrow two-lane access road that debouched into a parking area that was fenced off from the surrounding forest by stout beams of pressurized wood. A break in the fencing showed where a little-used path meandered into the brush.

“Guess that’s the way we go,” said Bowditch, pointing.

A little ways down the trail, the path seemed almost to disappear from not being tended often enough, and Bowditch was uncomfortably reminded of the scene in his dream where Pondwaith had been hauled by his captors through the brush. As he and Zarnak continued to make their way forward, more open sky began to appear up ahead, and presently they broke through into the clear where a great earthen mound rose up nearly to the tops of the surrounding trees. On it nothing grew, not even the stray weed. Only years of accumulated leaves matted its slopes.

Hesitating for a moment at the bottom, Bowditch took the time to notice only that the day had grown suddenly overcast as featureless gray clouds covered the landscape. Then, following Zarnak’s lead, he hauled himself up the side of the mound to discover that the crest was blown free of leaves and other forest detritus, and the earth lay bare and open. A small, flat space occupied the crest and in the center, there was a ring of stones containing the charred remnants of what had been a substantial fire.

“I don’t like the looks of this,” Bowditch said, looking at the pile of ashes. “It all looks like what I dreamed about: the trackless forest, the steep slope, the mound where nothing grows, the fire…”

“Let’s not jump to conclusions,” soothed Zarnak. “Remember, what you read last night could have easily supplied your subconscious with all the information it needed to create a really vivid dream.”

“Just the same, if we find anything resembling that device placed over poor Pondwaithe’s head, I think I’ll scream.”

“Then it looks as if you’re doomed to retain your sanity,” quipped Zarnak looking about. “There’s nothing here.”

“Maybe, but someone had a fire going here and, by the looks of it, not a small one either.”

“Whether or not what took place here involved Pondwaithe, the presence of the brochure dealing with this mound in their cabin does seem to make it likely that Cummings’ Japanese visitors took in some of the local sights…including this one.”

“But why? What interest could they have had in them?”

“Isn’t it obvious? They initially contacted Pondwaithe because of the mask he discovered; about the same time Pondwaithe displays an unusual interest in the Misquamacus legend dealing with Ossadagowah or Tsathoggua; and right across the pond from his cottage, this group of mysterious Japanese tourists with an interest in sites dealing with a creature that devours its acolytes just happen to move in. All of it adds up to a pre-historic cult involving a god worshipped by peoples as widely scattered as Japanese fishermen and American Indians that still exists, and whose followers do not like meddlesome unbelievers.”

“My God, Zarnak! Are you suggesting that Pondwaithe was murdered by these followers, as you call them, because he stumbled across something they wanted to keep secret?”

“It’s not like it hasn’t happened before.”

“Yes, but in bad movies, man, not in real life!”

“Do you have any better ideas?”

That brought Bowditch up short. He didn’t want to believe Zarnak’s theory, but he was a man of science and he had to draw conclusions solely from the facts and not refuse to consider those conclusions just because they went against what he wanted to believe.

All the way back to the cottage, Bowditch hardly noticed as the car jounced along the uneven Dunwich roads as he and Zarnak again reviewed all that they had learned. By the time they had finished going over the facts in a coldly analytical way, it seemed inescapable that Pondwaithe had been kidnapped by a group of Japanese that, unbelievably, continued to practice a prehistoric religion dedicated to some toad-god called Tsathoggua or Ossadagowah (apparently the god was identified by a number of different names by different groups of worshippers suiting its mutable nature). Somehow, by identifying the mask he found at the museum and by exposing it to a wider public through his writings, Pondwaithe had perhaps revealed hidden knowledge or insulted the thing’s worshipers such that they felt compelled to remove him from the scene. But did such things happen in the 21st century? Zarnak apparently believed that they did, and determined to follow the trail left by the group of Japanese visitors to the Wampanoag Vista cabins all the way back to its origins.

“To Japan?” Bowditch asked in surprise.

“Yes,” replied a grim Zarnak. “You need not come. Remain here and wait for word from me, then include it in your final report to Paxton. I’m afraid that I’ll be leaving you somewhat in the lurch in regards to filling-in the police on what we’ve learned however.”

“I don’t look forward to another interview with Chief DiFriggio,” Bowditch admitted. “Especially on such a fantastic subject!”

“I know the town from which the Japanese group came from, and I’m sure some contacts I have in the country will be enough to track them down,” continued Zarnak as they drove along Route 128 back toward Arkham.

“Then what? Do you think you’ll be able to rescue Pondwaithe before he can come to harm?”

Despite their conclusions, Bowditch still could not relinquish the hope that Pondwaithe still lived; that the disturbing events depicted in his dream had been merely nightmare after all.

Zarnak, however, was silent a moment before answering.

“I hope that will be the case,” was all he said.

Later, upon thinking back to that moment, Bowditch was surprised at his capacity for self-deception. Why hadn’t he heeded the warnings in his nightmare? Why couldn’t he have left well-enough alone? He could have gone back to his classes, his condominium, his familiar, comfortable life and gone on as if the world was still a sane and ordered place. But no, he had to wait for that report from Zarnak; he had to have stood-by as that damned fax machine gave off its warning buzz of an incoming message. And warning it was, but he had still been too naïve to recognize it for what it was!

Abruptly, his thoughts returned to the present as he was being told by Paxton’s secretary that it was all right to go into the office. At that moment it became clear to him: he would not…could not…tell Paxton the whole story. It was just too unbelievable. He was not sure he believed it himself. After all, how could he tell the head of his department that when he looked at that fax from Japan, the toad-like figure shown in the grainy photograph was real, and that the objects covering the ends of its arms for all the world like children’s hand puppets, were a pair of masks: the missing mask from the Peabody Museum and the other, one that possessed the empty, gaping likeness of George Pondwaithe?

finality.

A Question of Meaning

Part I: Fitch

t happened in 1999, what the locals later called the year of the three nines.

That year began as every other New England winter did, with stiff winds out of the north and an early snowfall that left the frozen ground covered in white for the balance of the season. Grey, overcast skies predominated and the normal activity of daily life seemed to slow to a crawl. Most folks stayed indoors if they could help it, with the need to drive into the city being the only thing that compelled commuters in Dean’s Corners to leave home at all. Over in next-door Dunwich, where employment was still largely in agriculture, farmers left the warm confines of their kitchens only to milk the cows and feed the livestock.

But as winter progressed and the snow stopped flying so frequently, the first of the odd occurrences took place. At the time, no one recognized it as being anything out of the ordinary; after all, things like that did happen from time to time. But as old Lydia Walker said, it was coincidental that when Mrs. Sarah Norris had her triplets, she had them on the third day of March. The next thing that happened was equally unexceptional, at least for a farming community; Jonas James’ jersey cow calved turning out an offspring with two heads. Those things also happened now and then, with the unlucky farmer at least making a little profit selling the unfortunate creature to any traveling carnival that passed through town later in the spring. After that, something happened to Mrs. Anna Arnold that really set tongues to wagging. Like Sarah Norris, Anna Arnold also birthed a set of triplets, this time in May, also on the third day of the month. Immediately, the gossips in town began to talk, wasting little time bringing up the stories of curses and warlocks, and old wives’ tales about the Whateley family. And truth to tell, there was enough in the coincidental births to give pause even to those who dismissed such talk. After all, Dunwich had its share of strange history, much of it never having been satisfactorily explained either by local officials or scholars in attendance at nearby Miskatonic University.

Speculation about the possible meaning behind the births of the triplets had hardly died down when an unseasonable blast of cold air dropped 10 inches of snow on the ground in mid-May. In a farming town like Dunwich, such an event was more than curious, it was pretty much near-disastrous when farmers depended on good weather to plow their fields and prepare crops for the summer’s growing season. Next, the snow had barely melted away when a big wind blasted through the area, felling trees everywhere and even taking the roof off Silas Gentry’s house. After that, people in town began to get nervous and were in no way hesitant to let others know how they felt. Then it happened, the last straw, the thing that settled in everyone’s mind that 1999 was not going to be like other years, the thing that caused folks to remember it forever after as the year of the three nines. It happened on July 3, when ‘Becca Smith had her triplets, the third set of triplets born on the third day of the month. Quickly after that it seemed, there was a plague of frogs that filled the summer nights with an unholy racket, mosquitoes carrying the threat of West Nile Disease swarmed thicker than anyone could remember, and finally, the woods around about became infested with ticks, a problem the Miskatonic Valley had never had before. It was all enough to lend credence to beliefs about curses and evil tidings, with some even saying they had seen witch fires burning for the first time in years atop Sentinel Hill, a story dismissed by Sheriff Hilger after he took the better part of a day to hike up there to find out. Overall, though, after the late start, the summer progressed as it always had with farmers planting their crops and turning the livestock out to graze. By the end of the season, the year of the three nines promised to be one of the more successful for local farmers, with even the apple growers expressing satisfaction with the way things had turned out. So it was hardly even remarked upon when the weed harvester being used out on Novard’s Pond ran into some thick growth and began dredging up weird plants no one had ever seen before: long, discolored strands that tended to clog outboard props, and that sported ugly-looking bladders filled with some kind of gooey substance the Novard’s Pond Advisory Committee had to send to Boston to identify. Still, some people had not forgotten the strange things that had taken place earlier in the year and as the summer months trailed into autumn, they held their collective breaths as if waiting for another shoe to drop.

That happened on Oct. 29 when Ebnezer Fitch came into the Grange Hall one day with a funny looking stone he said he had plowed up in his south pasture. At least that was what most folks called it, a stone. Others insisted it was not just a stone but a carven figure. Different people saw different things depending on what angle the thing was viewed from or under what kind of light. Anyway, the way Ebnezer told it, he had taken his tractor up the cart path past Petawag Brook and down Lawton’s Slope to his south pasture, where he grows his turnips and carrots, and began turning over the soil there and teasing out the old plants when his grader hit something hard, chipping one of the blades. That took Ebnezer by surprise, certain as he was that there could be no rocks left in the field, one that had been plowed for over 70 years, at least as far back as when he had worked it with his father when just a boy. Curious, he looked around in the moist soil, kicking over clods of dirt until the toe of his work boot struck something. Stooping, he dug his fingers into the ground and pulled up the stone. He was on the point of chucking it away when something stopped him. The morning sunlight caught it in such a way that he thought he recognized an unnatural pattern in the stone. Like it had been carved at some point. Brushing off dirt, he grew more positive that he was right. He knew that some people were interested in Indian artifacts or trinkets left over from the region’s pioneering past, so he decided to hold onto the stone until he had a chance to take it into town. Maybe someone there might be interested in it.

Ebnezer returned to his home late that night. There had been a full moon that allowed him to stretch out the work day, and he was done in. As he put his key into the back door his dog, Corky, came around the corner of the house from wherever it was he spent his days, tongue lagging and eager for a bowl of dog chow. After feeding the dog, Ebnezer, too tired to cook, nibbled at something cold from the refrigerator and decided to hit the sack early. Before he did though, he took some time to wash the stone he had found under some running water and verified that its shape was definitely not natural. It had been carved at some point and, to his eye, appeared to suggest nothing so much as a house with eyes…not just two eyes set side by side, but a whole bunch of them all around with no sense or order. Without understanding why, the thing disturbed him somewhere deep down. Putting the stone aside, he retired to his bedroom for the night.

Ebnezer never noticed when it was that he had fallen asleep but it must have been pretty quick as when he woke later on, the moon was still high in the night sky and its glare placed everything in the room in sharp relief. It was only after he heard the sound of Corky scratching at the back door that he realized what it was that had wok

Stepping into some clothes, he entered the kitchen where the dog was still worrying at the door.

“What is it, boy? Something out there?”

Corky had always been a reliable dog, rarely getting excited over nothing, so Ebnezer never even considered not heeding the animal’s obvious interest in going outdoors.

Passing through the mud room, Ebnezer shrugged into his coat and stepped outside. There, he paused and breathed in a deep draft of night air, held it, and released it all at once bringing him to full wakefulness. Meanwhile, Corky had dashed up the cart path leading to Lawton’s Slope. Deciding to follow the dog, Ebnezer retrieved his rifle from the mud room and entered the tunnel-like opening into the surrounding woodland. Hearing Corky’s scrambling from up ahead, Ebnezer confirmed to himself that the dog was heading toward the south pasture. Beneath the overhanging branches of century-old maples and beeches that were almost denuded of their leaves, Ebnezer passed among the shadows cast by the still-bright moon. Around him, the forest was quiet in the mid-autumn cold, a silence broken only by Corky as the dog suddenly came dashing down the path, passing Ebnezer without so much as a yip of acknowledgment. Surprised, Ebnezer watched the dog disappear back in the direction of the house and as the silence returned, he noticed that things were not so quiet as he supposed.

At first, he thought the sounds were made by the scurrying of chipmunks among the dry leaves that had piled up beneath the trees, but soon dismissed the notion when it became apparent that their origin lay farther up the trail. Slowly, with gun raised, Ebnezer made his way upwards to the crest of Lawton’s Slope. At the top, he stopped to listen more carefully and sure enough, the sounds were still there, now more like the flapping of bats’ wings in an attic than the rustle of dry leaves. Crouching, he moved slowly to the tree line that edged the south field. Keeping to the shadows, he looked out upon the field he had worked earlier in the day. In the moonlight, the newly turned furrows showed sharply in the silver glare and against the dark silhouette of trees on the opposite side of the pasture, Ebnezer could make out the kind of erratic movements that did indeed suggest bats.

Getting down on his belly, Ebnezer crawled past the trees to a stone fence that bordered the field, a good 20 to 30 feet closer to the activity. There, peeking over the top of the wall, he was startled to find that the creatures were no bats, but men of a sort. Unbelievingly, he stared, frozen, while the things fluttered up and down, scrabbling here and there at the clods of fresh soil that Ebnezer had turned over that day. They seemed to be searching for something, but what it might be was lost on the farmer as he studied the unearthly shape of the things which, though with appendages like those of men, were nevertheless radically different in detail. Arms and legs there were, but the limbs seemed to bend in unnatural directions while the skin covering their naked bodies was black as the shadows beneath the trees. From their backs sprouted leathery-looking bats’ wings that fluttered and snapped in the cold night air. There were three of the things so far as Ebnezer could tell and in trying to get a better look, one of them, perhaps caught in a sudden updraft, was thrown sidewise in the direction of the stone fence. For an instant, its figure was fully illuminated in the moonlight, and it was then that the full horror of the scene descended upon Ebnezer’s mind. The next thing he knew he was running for all he was worth. Crashing through the underbrush, his gun forgotten at the base of the wall, he plunged into the woods even as he sensed the things rushing after him. Smashing his nose against a tree he did not see, he bounced away from it and plunged on down the cart path, the things screeching and howling in a mad cacophony as they rose above the intertwining branches. As he ran, Ebnezer cast fearful glances over his shoulder and saw dark shapes fluttering overhead. They were following, crazy to get at him, but the thick forest that bordered the cart path prevented them from swooping down after their prey. Suddenly, Ebnezer’s foot caught on a tree root and he tumbled to the ground. Rolling onto his back, his arms up before his face to ward off the expected attack, he could barely see the things against the twinkle of stars between the trees. Now that they could see he was down they approached more deliberately, weaving their way among the branches, getting closer, closer…and then old Woodchip crowed his first call of the morning and suddenly, the things halted in their progress. Again the rooster crowed, warning off potential rivals but also it seemed, the things overhead. Then, with vast relief, Ebnezer saw the things fly up above the trees again and move off in the direction of the south pasture. Soon, their screechings died away with distance and he knew they were gone. Dawn was not far off but no light of day could erase the memory of the thing Ebnezer had seen that had ended his self control and sent him dashing into the woods and toward the sanity of his own hearth: that the black, leathery things, had no faces!

Part II: Leander

Shaken, exhausted both physically and mentally after an evening of unrelenting horror and nightmare, Ebnezer barred his doors and sat stiffly in his darkened parlor, afraid to move until the reassuring rays of the sun were comfortably over the eastern horizon. Aware that he was defenseless with his gun lying in the underbrush back at the south field…and not at all sure if it would do him any good against the forces that he had encountered during the night…Ebnezer had time to think. Eventually, he concluded that the only object the bat things could have been seeking in the south field was the stone he himself had uncovered the day before. Angry at the things that had invaded his property, but more disgusted with himself for the way he had acted, he decided that instead of doing the obvious…returning the stone to the field where the things could take it back…he would take it to town and hand it over to the Grange. The fellows there would know what to do with it. In any case, it was likely that the bat things would leave his property as a result and search for the object elsewhere.

At the Grange, Ebnezer encountered the usual suspects, Josiah Green, Jeb Casey, and Eric Leander who always found the time to hang around the hall. Leander’s presence made some sense as he acted as chairman of Dunwich’s Historical Society but the other two were a question mark being farmers just as he was. How Josiah and Jeb found the time to linger at the hall at all times of the day he could never figure out. Be that as it may, all three were interested in the stone Ebnezer brought in.

“Sure looks like one of them arteefacts,” admitted Josiah after turning the stone over in his hands.

“I’ve never seen anything quite like it,” said Leander, puffing on a pipe. “Doesn’t seem to match any of the other pieces we’ve got at the town museum.”

“So you think it’s genuine?” asked Ebnezer, eager that someone else take the object off his hands.

Leander shrugged and removed the pipe from his mouth. “Hard to tell. I’m no expert…you know, one of them professors who can tell how old something is by how deep the grooves are in the carving.”

“These here don’t look so deep to me,” observed Jeb.

“Just the same, that’s no indicator,” said Leander. “Plenty of cases where something looks like it was made yesterday and turns out to be hundreds of years old. This thing here, might have been in Ebnezer’s field for who knows how long, protected from the wind and rain by being buried under the ground. On the other hand, the style doesn’t look native to the Miskatonic Valley either…could be a hoax, someone’s idea of a joke.”

Ebnezer, knowing for sure that it was not a joke but reluctant to expose himself to the ridicule of his neighbors…everyone still remembered how the town treated the Whateley’s…persisted in defense of the stone.

“This here is no joke,” he insisted. “They way I found it…well, it’s no joke.”

“I don’t like it,” said Jeb. “Never did cotton to things like this. It’s not Christian, it is. I’d take it out and smash it with a sledge hammer and be done with it.”

“I got an idee,” said Josiah, ignoring Jeb’s fears. “Why don’t we take it over to old man Corwin. I bet he can tell if it’s genuine or not.”

“I don’t know, Josiah,” said Leander. “Corwin is a bit of a crank. Just because he dabbles in the weird history of the town…”

“The Historical Society might not take much stock in his opinions but you have to admit he’s been right a few times,” reminded Josiah. “Why even some of those perfessor types from Miskatonic come down sometimes and ask for his advice.”

“A bunch of New Age nuts,” snorted Leander. “Illustrative of the low state of public education these days…”

“You have any better ideas?”

Leander shrugged. “I’ll call Corwin and see if he’s at home.”

As most residents of Dunwich would admit, Mose Corwin was a strange duck. Living in a run down Victorian-era home off the town center’s main street, Corwin supported himself as a junk collector, emptying people’s garages, basements, and attics and selling what he found or could repair to antique shops that were as plentiful up Dean’s Corners and Townsend way as mushrooms after a good rain. But a taste for the strange and the out-of-the-way compelled him to hold on to pieces he considered valuable, though no one else did. Thus, while his yard was filled with the castoff junk usually found in back country flea markets, the inside of his home was crammed with books, glassware, and bits of wood and stone he claimed were remnants from Indian tribes that had formerly lived in the Miskatonic Valley, and of Dunwich’s own early settlers who were obsessed by the devil and other even less-wholesome demons. In fact, Corwin himself was descended from one of the town’s oldest families, one that had gained an evil reputation when raiding Indians during King Philips’ War had burned out practically every home in Dunwich Village but left the Corwins’ untouched. But that was a long time ago and no cause to be held against Corwin 350 years later, although it did not keep people from talking.

“Hmmm,” was all Corwin had to say upon first laying eyes on the stone.

Ebnezer had accompanied Leander on the short walk from the Grange to Corwin’s home and, after managing to navigate the piles of bedsteads, automobile parts, and cast off lawn furniture in the yard, they found the front door and yanked the bell pull. The device worked, as they could hear its tones echoing inside the house and presently, Corwin came shambling into the front hall. A curtain covering the big glass oval in the door moved slightly before the door itself opened to reveal a tall, thin figure in flannel shirt and faded chinos. A shock of neatly combed white hair was Corwin’s most distinctive feature, other than the largish family nose. Leander guessed that the man must have been well into his 80s but was not sure.

“Well, if it isn’t Eric Leander, Dunwich’s resident historian,” chuckled Corwin, using the term historian as though the word were surrounded in quotes. “What brings you out here? Thought you already knew it all.”

Leander cleared his throat. “Now, Mose, you know that isn’t so. I’ve always been open minded…”

“Sure you have,” said Corwin, winking at Ebnezer.

“Listen, Mose, can we bury the hatchet?” pleaded Leander. “It’s been over ten years since that town meeting…”

“Not a long time at all when you get to be my age,” replied Corwin. “I warned you all about the Devil’s Hopyard, but you wouldn’t listen. You went ahead and voted to demolish the thing.”

“It was the right thing to do after that incident with Wilbur Whateley,” said Leander. “When word of that got out, Sheriff Hilger ended up spending all his time up there shooing-off Miskatonic students, self-described witches, and who knows what else off that property. It was giving the town a bad name and turning it into another commercial disaster like Salem, only Halloween seemed to be happening all the time instead of just one month a year. The folks here didn’t want any part of it, and I don’t blame them.”

“And we had a run of bad luck as a result…”

“You can call it what you want, I call it coincidence.”

“Just the same, for an historian, you’ve shown an astonishing ability to ignore unpleasant facts.” Then, before Leander could reply, Corwin changed the subject. “So what brings you out this way today?”

In tacit agreement to drop their ongoing disagreements, Leander turned to Ebnezer, introducing the farmer, and indicating the stone he held in his hands.

“Ebnezer found this stone in his pasture yesterday and came to the Grange to find out if anyone knew anything about it. I couldn’t identify it. It doesn’t seem to be the work of the Wampanoags or of any stone carvers among the early settlers…”

“Let me see it,” interrupted Corwin.

Ebnezer handed the stone over to the old man, who hefted it to gauge its weight and then moved the stone about to examine it from different angles.

“Interesting,” was all Corwin said. “C’mon in. Close the door will you? And mind the knick-knacks.

The two men followed Corwin inside and down a stuffy corridor to the back of the house, maneuvering their way among book cases, old furniture, and boxes piled high with who knew what. In a back room, Corwin set the stone down on a heavy desk and rummaged around in the drawers until producing a magnifying glass. Ebnezer and Leander remained standing, as chairs in the room were piled high with debris.

With the glass close to his eye, Corwin took up the stone again and looked at it intently, following the faded grooves carved in its surface and turning it over in his hands. At last, he put it down and declared “It’s not new but it’s not that old either.”

“What do you mean?” asked Leander.

“I mean that it was likely carved some time over the last 100 years or so, no earlier.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because the carving is of a style that I’ve only seen on objects produced from the late nineteenth century,” said Corwin. “There was a new cult popular at the time, worshipers of an entity known as Nodens.”

Leander could barely keep the disappointment from showing on his face. It was what he was afraid of when Josiah had suggested they visit Corwin. The old man was well known for his interest in esoteric cults and paleo-religious beliefs that he believed had once centered in Dunwich. It was a local reputation that residents had been trying to live down for years. Sure, Dunwich had had its kooks and eccentrics, as had other towns in Massachusetts, but no one put down Harvard for its Quakers or Pepperell for its Millerites. In fact, those towns embraced such defunct movements, preserved their sites, and otherwise hosted historians from all over the country who came to learn about them.

At length, Leander sighed and asked “Nodens?”

“No need to hide the skepticism I know you feel, Eric,” smiled Corwin. “Do you want to know what I think, or not?”

“Let’s have it.”

“Well, whether you accept it or not, I know you’ve heard about the Great Old Ones and how their worship goes back into pre-history,” began Corwin. “You also know that the Wampanoag Indians in the Miskatonic Valley worshiped them along with their own home grown spirits…”

“At least so goes the story among popular writers of the New Age variety,” interjected Leander. “Dunwich still has its share of those coming through town from time to time.”

“Be that as it may, as the belief system goes, the Old Gods were imprisoned for some infraction in different places across the universe, and in our own solar system in particular,” recounted Corwin. “I won’t go into which being is which or where they’re all supposed to be imprisoned, only that some of them are said to be here on Earth and that their jailer is an Elder God named Nodens.”

“Nodens…”

“Right. Now, Nodens is said to reside coterminously in alternate eras of Earth’s dim future, which doesn’t seem to hinder his ability to keep an eye on the imprisoned Old Gods, maybe because his servitors called Nightgaunts actually do the legwork…”

“Nightgaunts?” asked Ebnezer, trying to keep up.

“Why yes…” Corwin stopped, considered a moment, and took down a book from one the shelves in the room. “Ah, here it is. ‘Nightgaunts are bat-like creatures, denizens of the Night Land, or Dreamland as it was called by the Wampanoags and other Indian tribes of the northeast. Their master, Nodens, also makes his home there where he resides in darkness and always night.’ There’s a rather crude drawing of one here.” Corwin held out the book for Ebnezer to see.

No sooner had the farmer laid eyes on the illustration than he jumped back as if struck by an electric cattle prod.

“What’s wrong? Not afraid of a picture are you?” But the arch of Corwin’s eyebrow indicated that he suspected there was more to Ebnezer’s reaction than the fellow was willing to say at the moment.

Setting his suspicion aside, Corwin flipped a few pages further on, and stopped at another illustration.

“Here’s something I was looking for,” he said, turning the book around so that Leander could see it better. “These designs here. Do they seem familiar to you?”

Leander looked more closely. “They look a little like the ones on the stone.”

“Not a little, exactly!”

“So what if they are alike? What does that mean?”

“It means that whoever carved this stone knew something of the worship of Nodens. According to this book, such stones were a central ingredient to rites invoking the god. Likely where one was found, there are going to be others as the ritual of calling up demanded a circle be warded with five such stones, each representing eras of time in which the creature is supposed to reside. The purpose of the ritual itself is unclear, but it may have something to do with pleas to be swept up into one of the future eras in company with Nodens.”

“It’s all very fanciful, but the bottom line is that the stone is not terribly old…”

“Not a candidate for pride of place in your museum, Eric,” chuckled Corwin, snapping the book shut. “Still, I’d advise you to seek out a competent archeologist at Miskatonic to come out and do a survey of this gentleman’s field before the cold weather hits. There’s a good chance that the other stones might be buried out there.

“That does seem to be the obvious course, that is if it’s all right with Mr. Fitch…”

Worried that more stones would continue to attract the awful things he saw the night before, Ebnezer quickly agreed to the suggestion.

“Well then, I’ll contact someone I know at the university,” said Leander. “Thanks, Mose. You’ve been of some help.”

“You see? That wasn’t so hard was it, Eric?”

Leander said nothing as he left the house, concerned only that Dunwich might once-again be the destination of choice for loons who saw the town as a center for so-called demonic activity. Town officials had tried for years to play down that stuff, and had largely succeeded since the Whateley family had died out, and no one wanted to see it all started up again.

Part III: Lilly

“Prof. Lilly?” inquired the pretty young graduate student. “This came for you while you were out.”

The girl stepped into Prof. Walter Lilly’s office and set down a shoebox on his desk.

“Is this all?” he asked. “Just this box?”

“A Mr. Eric Leander dropped it off. He said he was curator of the Historical Society Museum in Dunwich, and that a local farmer dug up something while plowing his pasture a few days ago. I told him you were lecturing today and wouldn’t be available until late in the day. He asked if he could leave this box with you, there’s a typed explanation inside he said, along with contact information. I gave him a receipt for the package.”

“Dunwich, hmm?” Lilly was familiar with the town and its region of course, specializing in colonial era New England history as he did. Dunwich, he knew, had been rife with all kinds of wild claims in years past, claims more suitable to books like Weird Massachusetts than serious history. However, he had not achieved the reputation he had among his peers by ignoring opportunity when it presented itself. Interesting things had the habit of coming over the transom, so to speak, and this new arrival could be one of those.

“Thank you, Miss Farnum,” said Lilly as the girl retreated from the office.

He pulled the string that secured the shoebox and removed its cover. Inside, wrapped in the pages of a weekly Dunwich newspaper, was a stone, one that revealed, upon closer examination, to be covered in carvings of lines that undulated around the thing suggesting a face here and a building or a house there, Lilly could not be certain. There was nothing else remarkable about the rock, it being a common fieldstone.

Lilly replaced the rock in the box and pulled out a folded sheaf of papers held together with a paperclip. Deciding to postpone some papers needing to be corrected, he settled back in his chair and began to read.

Some minutes later, he was sufficiently intrigued to call Eric Leander right away. It turned out that the contact number given was for his cell phone, and he soon found himself talking to the museum curator. Lilly thanked him for sending him the stone, and expressed a definite interest in visiting Fitch’s pasture with a few students to conduct a formal dig. No, he did not anticipate the operation to take more than the good part of a Saturday morning and afternoon and, after being assured that the farmer in question would not mind the arrangement, Lilly scheduled the following weekend for the visit.

“Miss Farnum,” Lilly called after he had hung up the phone.

“Yes, professor?”

“Can you pick out a few of the grad students to accompany us on a limited dig this weekend? The usual gear.”

“Of course, professor.”

“And Miss Farnum, don’t forget to tell everyone to dress warmly.”

“Yes, professor,” said the girl happily, and departed on her errand.

Four days later, Lilly was in a good mood.

It was a sunny autumn day, one spent in the field and away from the stuffy confines of the classroom, even a rather prosaic dig practically right next door to the campus of Miskatonic, but still much to be preferred than being cooped up indoors. That, and Lilly always felt invigorated among the company of young people eager to learn, company made all the more pleasant by the presence of Miss Farnum, of whom he had long since dismissed any feelings of foolishness in finding her attractive. There was nothing wrong in admiring a fine specimen of female pulchritude, even among his students.

The little entourage had left the school’s campus early that morning in a pair of Range Rovers packed with graduate students and the equipment they would need to conduct a proper excavation. Progress along Route 128 was swift under the hands of two male students, and soon they found themselves on the old Aylesbury Pike interchange and looking for the turnoff to Dunwich. As it turned out, no sign was needed to tell them that they had arrived, as the neat pavement running through Dean’s Corners ended at the town line and Dunwich’s less-well-maintained roads began. Winding in and out of wooded hollows still dark before 10 o’clock in the morning, the two vehicles finally emerged in the town’s center, and before long pulled up in front of the Historical Society Museum which was located in a former mansion erected in 1718 that at one time had been the home of a governor of Massachusetts.

There, Eric Leander was waiting for them on the sidewalk. As the two Miskatonic vehicles arrived, he stepped forward and leaned toward the open window that Lilly had lowered.

“Prof. Lilly, I presume?” asked Leander.

“I am. And you are Eric Leander, curator of the Historical Society Museum?”

“That’s right. I’m happy to see you, professor. Shall we waste no time and head out to the site?”

“Lead on!”

Leander turned and dashed over to a waiting pickup and slipped inside. A moment later, the two Range Rovers were following the truck as it led them a short way down Main Street before taking a right just out of the downtown area. Immediately, they were plunged into farm country dotted now and then with century-old homes, barns in varying states of repair, and odd silos and chicken coops. Between swaths of woodland, hilly pastures still shown green with grass dotted here and there with grazing cows.

Some miles from town, the pickup slowed and turned again, this time with a mail box labeled “Fitch” marking the entrance of a narrow lane. With tires crunching gravel, the three vehicles progressed along a narrow but rushing brook until arriving at last in the yard before a well-maintained farm house. Directly next to it stood a barn with chicken coop behind. Just then, a big rooster stood on a fence post regarding the new arrivals warily.

Leander leapt from his truck, slamming the door behind him just as Ebnezer Fitch stepped out onto the farm house porch, a screen door slamming behind him.

“Good morning, Ebnezer,,” said Leander. “This is Prof. Lilly, from Miskatonic University.”

“‘Mornin’, perfessor,” said Ebnezer, unsure of how he should act.

“Good morning, Mr. Fitch,” replied Lilly, extending a hand. “I understand you found something interesting in your field a few days ago?”

“I did and you suspect there might be more of them rocks out there?”

“Could be. From what I know of the people who used such stones, they were needed in religious rituals that usually demanded more than one to work properly…at least such was the belief of the cultists.”

“Cultists, huh? I don’t like the sound of that. If there are any more of those things out there, or anything else of theirs, I’d shore like to have you dig ‘em up and get ‘em out of here. I’m a proper Christian man and don’t want nothin’ to do with devil worshipers or whatever they be.”

“Well, we’ll see if we can oblige you, Mr. Fitch. Now if you’ll just point us in the direction of the field…”

“Leander, here, can take you there. I..I have work to do around the farm.”

“No problem, Ebnezer. Shall we go professor?”

“By all means.”

The little party reentered their various vehicles and, once again led by the pickup truck, trundled along a bumpy cart path that took them through forest where the rays of the morning sun had just begun to penetrate, their golden beams slashing through trees almost entirely stripped of their leaves and stretching shadows along the ground. At last, the convoy broke into the open and full sunlight as Leander stopped at the edge of a wide pasture whose soil had obviously been turned over recently.

Hopping from his Range Rover, Lilly wasted no time barking orders to his students to unload equipment even as Leander led him to where Fitch had uncovered the stone.

“You can see where the furrows have been disturbed over there,” said Leander, pointing. “That’s where Ebnezer found the object.”

“Good, we’ll use that as our center point and perform some test bores in concentric circles out from there.”

“Will that take long?”

“About an hour or so. Based on the markings on the stone, I’ve studied a bit about the cult associated with them, and have a pretty good idea of how the stone we have fits into the ritual pattern. So I don’t anticipate the need for spending too much time rooting around at random….Tony!” called Lilly, interrupting himself. “Set the first series for about ten yards!”

“Right, prof!” came the reply as Tony began to direct the other grad students in the work.

“Must be nice to have students who know what they’re doing to help you out on projects like this,” noted Leander.

“Oh, yes. And it’s also good being in their company, I always find their youthful exuberance invigorating.”

As it turned out, Lilly was quite right in his assumptions and very quickly, the perimeter of the dig was established and testing soon located three more stones similar to the first.

“Keep at it,” encouraged Lilly to his students. “There should be at least one more out there.”

“Frankly, I’m amazed that you were able to get such results so fast,” Leander was saying as he watched Lilly and Miss Farnum carefully clean the stones with soft bristled brushes.

They were standing at a folding table beneath a light canopy held up by four thin poles. On the table were ranged four carefully-marked trays, a couple of them holding two of the stones found so far.

“That’s enough for now, Miss Farnum,” Lilly said as the girl finished cleaning the third stone. “You can start to get the packing ready.”

“I know it’s early, professor, but is there anything you can deduce from your findings so far?” asked Leander.

“Not much. But because the stones were located almost exactly where they were supposed to be, then I think it’s safe to assume that much of the rest of the material I consulted back at the university is also accurate. This is definitely a worship site for Nodens, a being in the cosmology popularly known as the Cthulhu Myth Cycle.”

“I’m not sure I follow you, professor,” admitted Leander. “What is this cycle?”

“Briefly, it seems to be an association of prehistoric religious trends that at some time were drawn together in a loose cosmogeny dominated by the Elder Gods,” explained Lilly. “The hierarchy of entities associated with the cycle are supposed to be imprisoned around the solar system, with not a few here on Earth including the most notorious, Cthulhu, who is believed by followers to be trapped beneath the sea…

“You speak of this cycle as if it were still an active religion…”

“Well it is, to some extent. Not as widespread as our current world religions, of course, but it does command the loyalty of more than a few disillusioned souls…”

“A local…historian, told us much the same thing before I contacted you, professor,” said Leander. “We didn’t believe him…”

“Local crackpot, I presume?”

“Well, I wouldn’t put it so crudely…”

“I didn’t intend to be insulting to the fellow,” said Lilly. “I was just guessing at what residents likely think of him. In my business, I’ve learned not to dismiss out-of-hand the oral histories held by locals.”

“Well, the funny thing is that this fellow, Mose Corwin, also connected this Nodens with the stones.”

“And you didn’t believe him?”

Leander shrugged. “This town has had more than its share of strange lore and local legends, professor. The people hereabouts are eager to play them down. They don’t want Dunwich to end up overrun by the type of commercialism that has ruined Salem.”

“I understand, but at the same time, the town shouldn’t be too quick to deny its own history. What has happened, has happened, and no amount of self-delusion will change that fact. More to the point, if residents are determined to turn their backs on the town’s history, others are not. These stones, though old, are not that old. They don’t even date back as far as the settlement era. In fact, I daresay they were created less than 100 years ago by Europeans and not native Americans.”

“But why?” asked Leander.

“For worship of course. You see, due to the lack of a written language or permanent art, much of the history of American Indians has vanished, so that what we do know about their ways of life prior to the arrival of the first explorers has been that preserved by Europeans. That includes some of their religious practices, practices that Europeans have not been immune to. The earliest references to such were made by John Winthrop himself. At that time, it was not uncommon for settlers to ‘go native’ as they say and since then, the phenomenon has persisted.”

“Are you suggesting that some benighted souls placed these stones here as part of some current religious observance?”

“Exactly. The soil strata indicates nothing else. These stones, which may have been in the possession of the cult for decades, were placed here recently for the express purpose of worship. Likely, the cultists had not completed their ritual before Fitch dug one of them up.”

“So not being as old as all that, can they still be of interest to you?”

“Oh, certainly! I can say right now that the workings on these stones are greatly similar to work found in artifacts taken from Indian mounds in Ohio…and those have been definitely dated to 900 BC. If nothing else, they furnish a good link between the recent past and older practices that go back hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years. I’m sure the university’s native studies department will be eager to study them.”

“I’m finished, professor,” interrupted Miss Farnum, who had been packing the stones in individual containers and labeling each with identifying information on the outside. “We’re only waiting to see if the others can find…”

“Professor,” Tony was saying as he approached the canopy. “We found the last one.”

“Wonderful!” declared the professor as he took the muddy stone in hand. “I’ll clean it off while you boys gather up the equipment. I think we’re finished here.”

Within another half hour, everything was packed up back in the Range Rovers and the field more or less restored to its original condition.

“All that remains now is to have Mr. Fitch sign a release form for the artifacts so we can take them back to the university for study,” said a satisfied Lilly.

To Lilly’s surprise, getting the farmer’s permission was easier than he anticipated. He had hardly begun to explain the need for signing the release form than Fitch fairly snatched the clipboard from his hands and signed it.

It seemed to Lilly that the man was overly eager to fulfill the legal detail, even waving-off talk of returning them in a timely fashion. In fact, Leander seemed more fretful about getting them back for his museum than the owner was.

Part IV: Montrose

He had awoken with a start, a cry even, and discovered that his pajamas were soaked in perspiration. Curled up in a ball near the bed’s headboard, it took some time before he calmed down enough to unwind and gather his thoughts. But when he did, he realized that he had had the dream again, nightmare this time. In the past, the dreams had been vague and difficult to recall by morning’s light. But this time it was still night, and he had the distinct impression that if he tried, it would all come back to him. Not ready to make the effort, he was still shaken by the experience and decided that a cup of coffee heavily laced with some of Bobby Winthrop’s moonshine would be just the thing to calm his nerves.

At first, recollection was difficult. It was as if something inside of him refused to cooperate, actively resisting any effort to revisit the nightmare. But he reminded himself that he was a priest of Nodens, high priest as a matter of fact, destined to serve the great one upon the day of Release, when the Old Gods would be imprisoned no more and allowed to ravage a helpless and supine Earth. On that day, he planned to be under the protection of Nodens and thus be spared the terrible fate of his fellow men. He took strength from that knowledge and turned his attention to recalling the dream.

Gradually, as he focused his concentration, bits and pieces of it began to surface, and with them, fear as well. He was finding that his subconscious resisted the idea of recollection and it took some little effort to overcome that resistance. It was as if an echo of the haunted place he had visited in his dream remained with him, warning him to stay away. But by then it was too late; the pieces were falling into place too swiftly to ignore and suddenly, he remembered it all: he remembered blackness, utter and unrelenting darkness, and an overwhelming sense of being watched by entities vast and cool and that regarded him as he would a spider found in the kitchen sink. Then, though his eyes could not penetrate the darkness, his other senses told him that he was in the wide outdoors: he could smell ashes and the dust of soil that had long since lost its life-giving qualities and, in nauseating waves, the air smelled of sulfur and burning things. His ears registered a dull, heavy throb that filled the air with its pulsations that threatened to crush him under its invisible weight. Also, his skin could feel oppressive warmth borne not of a healthy sun, but of subterranean fires or of a black, dead star. It was that last feeling that prompted him to concentrate the harder and gradually, he detected a dull glow or a place of lesser darkness somewhere in the distance. The glow permitted the outlining of other things that occupied the black, burnt over plain upon which he found himself; vague things, big things, whose misshapen masses bulked over the landscape in familiar yet disquieting shapes. But above them all, far away though he sensed it was, there stood an impossible structure, a miles-high pyramid whose sloped sides gleamed dully as of burnished metal. So colossal was the thing that its apex vanished in the heavy, upper atmosphere and to his relief, tiny lights blinked here and there against its black bulk. It being the only object at all recognizable on that vast, empty plain, he instinctively associated it with those of his own kind. But it was a refuge, a great Redoubt, more than a home. Perhaps the last stronghold of a mankind put to rout by the spawn of the Elder Gods. But he had no more time to contemplate the riddle of the pyramid as the baneful shapes he had detected earlier assumed a whole new dimension of terror: they seemed to move, a characteristic all the more horrible as it was not something immediately associated with a house say, or a fence. Returning in full measure, the feeling of malevolence he had connected earlier with those incongruous shapes became a rolling tide of physicality that threatened to overwhelm him. Panicking, he began to scrabble among the radioactive ashes that composed the ground beneath him. Stumbling, falling, rising, and falling again in a desperate effort to escape the living mountain that bore down upon him, he felt the rise of deadly madness welling up inside him. He cried out for Nodens, and realized suddenly that his master was displeased with him; that the loss of the warding-stones had removed his protecting arm and left him open to the same fate that the rest of mankind would soon face.

“Don’t abandon us, master!” he heard himself cry out, images of the horrid dream-scape still vivid in his mind. “I promise to heal the injury to your dignity! Only do not forsake the most loyal of your servants!”

Nervously, he looked about the kitchen to reassure himself that he was still in the rooms he rented over Jim’s Feed Store and, for just a moment, even such common items as the electric toaster and oven seemed alien and threatening. But somehow, the refrigerator was worst of all; something about its shape or dimensions stirred an unreasoning fear in his brain, one that ultimately forced him to dress and leave the apartment.

Outside it was still dark, but he found his car and began driving east out of Dean’s Corners as fast as he could, heading to the highway and ultimately to Miskatonic University. It was there that he had learned the day before that the warding-stones had been taken by school archeologists. It had been only the latest setback in a string of bad luck that had earned him the enmity of Nodens, something he had devoutly hoped to avoid. When he and the others had arrived at Fitch’s field to perform the final rite of Passage, he knew immediately that something was wrong. Chosen as the nexus in a complicated pattern of key points throughout the Miskatonic Valley, the site on the Fitch Farm was vibrant with extra-sensory impulses made all the more apparent by the warding-stones that the group had buried there weeks before. But as they soon discovered, the impulses were not being received, no matter how many times or how carefully the ritual of Passage was repeated. He recalled the desperation he felt as he ordered his followers to find the warding-stones to make sure they had been placed correctly and buried at the required depth. It was then that the full enormity of the situation had impressed itself upon him: one of the stones was missing! With no clue as to what happened to it, he was forced to plead for understanding from Nodens, and to beg his aid in finding the missing ward. Even now, as he took the on-ramp to Interstate 128, he breathed a sigh of relief when he recalled how Nodens had granted him his request. That same night, a group of his servitors appeared but, because the evening had grown so late, failed to retrieve the stone. By then he had truly begun to despair. Nodens would not be forgiving of his failures, and his chance to live under his protection would be lost forever. Guessing that the stone had likely been found by Fitch, plans were laid to search the farmhouse and take back the object. The operation should have been simplicity itself, until it was learned that the farmer had already taken the stone to the Historical Society. Then, before any further plans could be made, the stone was sent off to Miskatonic University. He cursed the efficiency of the school’s archeology department, which moved so quickly that all the other warding-stones were found before anything could be done about it. Now, he was forced to confront this Prof. Walter Lilly himself, and somehow convince him to release the stones or put them back where he found them. If only Nodens’ servitors were still available to him, they would surely frighten Lilly into cooperating…but as it was, he was doubtful that mere threats could influence the unbelieving scientist.

Winding his way through the empty streets of Arkham, he slowed as he approached the campus of Miskatonic University. There was plenty of parking available at a time well before the first classes were due to begin, so he picked a quiet spot away from the faculty offices. Now, it was only a matter of waiting until Lilly came to work.

He must have dozed off because the next thing he knew, the sun was well risen in the sky and the campus around him was alive with students. Leaving the car, he entered the faculty building, pausing only long enough to consult a directory in the lobby before heading straight up to Lilly’s office in the Archeology Department.

In Lilly’s anteroom, a young woman intercepted him before he could enter the professor’s office. He told her his name was Eli-a-Pintoch and that he had important business with the professor. Asking him to wait, the girl popped her head into the inner room and he heard her telling Lilly that there was someone who wanted to see him.

“My name is Eli-a-Pintoch,” he said upon entering the office.

“Very impressive,” said Lilly. “That means Seeker of Dreams in the Wampanoag language, I believe.”

“Never mind that, I’m not here to impress you or anyone else,” said Eli-a-Pintoch.

“Then why bother changing your name from Montrose…Normand Montrose, isn’t it? You were in one of my basic anthropology classes weren’t you?”

“A few years ago, yes,” admitted Eli-a-Pintoch, nee Montrose. “That was before I became a high priest in the worship of great Nodens.”

“Is that so? And for what reason am I honored to have the high priest himself pay me a personal visit?”

“Don’t patronize me, Lilly. I’ve come to demand that you return the warding-stones you took from Ebnezer Fitch’s field.”

“And what right do you have in making such a demand?”

“By right of ownership. Those stones have been in the possession of worshipers of Nodens for 142 years…”

“Can you prove that?”

“Trust me, you don’t want to see the kind of proof I can bring to bear.”

“You’ll have to do better than that to convince me to just hand over the stones. You say you’re a high priest in the worship of Nodens?”

“Don’t change the subject, professor. I’m not unaware of your position at the university. You specialize in Amerindian lore and beliefs, so you know full well who Nodens is. He is the Prison Keeper, appointed by the Elder Gods to guard the places where the Old Gods have been imprisoned since before mankind was a group of cells swimming in Earth’s primordial oceans.”

“And on what basis do you believe that?”

“On the word of Nodens himself. I’m honored to be the instrument by which he communicates with his followers in this world.”

“See here, Montrose,” said Lilly, leaning forward on his desk. “How in the world can an ordinary human being such as yourself understand anything of the thoughts and desires of a being like Nodens, if he even exists?” He held up his hand forestalling the high priest’s protest. “But assuming that he does, the literature, including original sources such as the Necronomicon, the Pnakotic Manuscripts, and the Kraulshavn Fragments all indicate that the beings in the Cthulhu Myth Cycle are nothing more than alien creatures from distant planets who have, by one way or another, become trapped on Earth. How can such totally alien creatures, who have evolved in completely different ways than human beings, who have had totally different experiences in galaxies and even dimensions completely strange and inexplicable to us, even have the first basis upon which to establish coherent communication with beings who have nothing in common whatsoever with them? Their thought processes, beliefs, even feelings, if they had any, would be such that human beings such as yourself could never hope to understand them. In fact, there is no direct evidence anywhere in the literature to suggest that the creatures of the Myth Cycle have ever communicated directly with humans. Everything is written second hand…”

“Enough! You dare mock great Nodens? Don’t you know that he could snuff out your puny life like a candle flame?”

“If anything happens to me, it will not be due to Nodens but by the hands of humans,” said Lilly, leaning back in his chair. “Now about that proof of ownership I asked you about…”

“Those stones belong to the followers of Nodens!” insisted Montrose. “They are ours!”

“You can say that until you’re blue in the face, but that doesn’t comprise proof,” said Lilly. “And the reason you can’t prove ownership is that you haven’t any. On the other hand, need I point out that the stones were found on private property owned by Ebnezer Fitch? They rightfully belong to him, and he has given the university permission to hold them for a time to study. If you trespassed and buried them on his land, you were in violation of the law.”

“Great Nodens is not bound by any Earthly rules and regulations, least of all the bylaws of Dunwich,” insisted Montrose. “And the stones actually belong to the Great Nodens, Keeper of Prisons and Lord of the Dreamlands. However, his followers are duly appointed custodians of…”

“So your cult is the legal representative of Nodens, then?”

“We’re not a cult!” insisted Montrose, his face growing red. “The Elder Gods are real! They rule the known universe. All reality is theirs to command, and they have given unto Nodens a terrible responsibility…”

“Yes, to make sure the Old Gods, including Cthulhu, remain in their prisons,” completed Lilly.

“Then I don’t need to tell you about the forces you’re trifling with if you refuse to hand over the stones…”

“What makes them so important?” interrupted Lilly. “Why are you so anxious for their return?”

“I don’t have to explain anything to an unbeliever,” said Montrose, “but I will tell you this: they’re needed in order for us to complete the ritual of Selection. When completed, the ritual will open a passage to the Dreamlands allowing those loyal to Nodens to cross over, thus sparing them against the inevitable moment when the Old Gods’ sentence will be completed, and the world once more becomes their domain.”

“Balderdash!” exclaimed Lilly, finally losing patience with the whole conversation. “Montrose, you are either a fool or a lunatic. One of those people who are unable to cope with modern society, and so must lose themselves in some imagined superstition be it witchcraft, vampirism, or belief in Old Gods. Miss Farnum!”

“Yes, professor?” said the girl, appearing at the door.

“Please show Mr. Montrose here to the door,” said Lilly, pinching the bridge of his nose. “He’s wasting my time.”

“Then you refuse to give me the stones?” asked a somewhat incredulous Montrose.

“Haven’t you been listening to anything I’ve said? Of course I do! Now please leave.”

“You’ll regret this, Lilly,” said Montrose as the girl plucked at his sleeve by way of urging him out of the office. “Great Nodens will have his way. You’ll see!”

Part V: Nodens

“He thought I didn’t notice them there on a table in his office, but I did,” said Montrose to a small group that had assembled in his rooms over the Feed Store. “I purposely overacted, trying to intimidate him but it didn’t work. Now we have to take matters into our own hands.”

“But what about great Nodens, Normand, can’t the great one help us again the way he did at Fitch’s…”

“No. Calling the Nightgaunts was a one-time proposition. If we ask Nodens for any more help, he’ll know we failed the first time and don’t have the stones. But if we can get them back ourselves, he need never find out…and don’t call me Normand.”

Montrose had called the other members of the group together to give them the bad news, and to solicit their help in getting the stones back. He knew as soon as Lilly refused to cooperate that more drastic action would be necessary.

“We need those stones by Wednesday night, because if the ritual of Selection is not completed then, not only will we lose our chance for protection when the Old Gods wake, but we’ll incur the displeasure of great Nodens as well,” said Montrose. “For that reason, we’ll have to break into Lilly’s office and take them back ourselves.”

There was some mumbling among the group then, until Montrose signaled for them to quiet down.

“I know it’s risky, but what other options do we have?” Seeing no objection, he proceeded. “Now here’s my plan. I see no reason for delay, so we conduct the break-in Wednesday after midnight. I think we’ll have a good chance of getting away with it, as I don’t think Lilly will expect us to strike so soon…that, and he just might be stupid enough to think we really believe Nodens himself would take a hand in so minor an adventure. So, I’ll only need a couple of you to come with me, the others will go to the field and prepare it for the ritual so we can start as soon as possible after we get the stones back. I don’t want to take a chance that Lilly or anyone else will guess what we’re up to, and interfere before we’re through. So, Jessica and Kent, you’ll come with me. Farley, you take charge of the field.”

“Right,” nodded Farley.

“You’re dismissed.”

As the others filed out, Montrose motioned for the two remaining to sit down around the little kitchen table.

“Jessica, we’ll use your car for the job,” opened Montrose. “Mine might be recognized by a guard or something. It won’t matter if anyone sees your car either because after it’s all over, we’ll have long-since crossed over to the Dreamlands. When we get to the university, you’ll wait in the car while Kent and I conduct the actual break-in.”

Jessica nodded but said nothing.

“Kent, you and I will go down to the school by bus during the day and hide in the faculty building until after midnight. When everyone’s gone, it ought to be easy to find Lilly’s office and, if it hasn’t been left unlocked, we can get in with the old credit card trick. When I was in his office I checked and made sure the lock on the office door was an old one that has been changed.”

Kent grinned. “Know where we’re going to hide?”

“There’s an old furnace in the basement that’s not used any more. All we have to do is remove a service panel and there’s plenty of room inside to hide for a few hours. I did some exploring before I went up to see Lilly.”

“Sounds like a plan all right.”

“Where do you want me to wait?” asked Jessica.

“Out on French Street, just on the other side of the south campus wall. If all goes smoothly, me and Kent should come over that wall about 3:30 a.m. Any questions? Okay. Kent, I’ll meet you at the bus stop on Main Street at 4 p.m. Tuesday afternoon.”

Things ended up going better than expected, with Montrose and Kent coming over the wall closer to 3 a.m. than 3:30. With them were the stones, which they kept in a heavy mail bag taken from the Dean’s Corners Post Office. Remaining at the wheel, Jessica drove calmly through the darkened streets of Arkham until reaching the highway, where she picked up speed but taking care not to exceed the limit. About an hour later, they were moving along the Aylesbury Pike into Dunwich, where scattered streetlights finally vanished altogether. Avoiding the downtown so as not to attract the attention of the town’s lone patrol car, Jessica followed a circuitous route along the narrow, winding roads that crisscrossed the farming community’s back country. Finally, with lights dimmed, Jessica pulled the car off the road and into a disused turnoff on a reverse slope from the Fitch farm.

The thick woods around them were pitch dark, lying as they did in the shadow of a hill that rose steeply across the road. Overhead, stars twinkled in a clear sky but there was no moon. Using a small flashlight with a pencil-thin beam, Montrose led the way past a pair of other vehicles parked deeper into the woods, cars left by Farley and the others who had preceded them to the ritual site. A faint trail led past thick, ancient oaks as the ground rose toward the crest of the slope then downward again and over Petawag Brook. At last, after hopping a stone fence, they emerged into the field where the others waited.

“You got the stones?” said Farley, stepping out from under a patch of birch trees whose boles glowed whitely in the starlight.

“Yes,” replied Montrose motioning to the mail bag that Kent held over his shoulder. “Is everything ready here?”

“Absolutely,” confirmed Farley as the others began to emerge from the shadows. “The holes have been prepared to the prescribed depth and the preliminary words of warding have been recited at the proper times.”

“Good. Let’s bury the stones and get our robes on.”

The final preparations were completed quickly and the group separated to remove their clothing and slip into their robes; the few women moving off by themselves for the purpose displaying a modesty that would later be discarded, along with the robes, when the time came to make the passage into the Dreamlands. For it was written that Earthly possessions of any kind would be a hindrance to a successful transition into the protective arms of Nodens.

Their change of clothing completed, the group reassembled in a loose circle outside the five points formed by the warding-stones. Ordering his thoughts, Montrose began reciting words from the ritual of Selection: “Oh, great Nodens! Holder of the Keys, Confidant of the Elder Gods, Wise Protector! Heed the pleas of your faithful servants! For years, we have proffered our faith and loyalty, preserved your name, and performed all that had been instructed of us in those records where you have deigned to express your will. Now, at the expressed time, upon the eve of the Release when the Old Gods are to be released and loosed upon the Earth again to rule as they did in the olden times, we beseech you to grant us the reward that is our due and protect us against the coming storm! Ia Nodens! Sfaug ntruit phingli phan! Sui gilphon chhic nar. Ia Nodens!”

Quiet descended upon the scene as Montrose ended his imprecation. In the dark woods that bordered the empty field, a soft wind had arisen and, as the trees round about whispered in the night, a strange thing began to happen within the space bounded by the five stones.

Some among the worshipers gasped, taking involuntary steps backward but not far enough to break the circle. Their surprise perhaps betraying the fact that their faith had not been as complete as it might have appeared. But wonder now held them in thrall, preventing any further retreat as they joined the others in gazing at the thing that was happening within the confines of the five warding-stones.

There, a vision began to form, a pillar of three dimensional space that stretched from a few inches above the furrowed ground of the field upwards into the sky. Within the pillar there was a sense of movement, although nothing could be seen to stir. Beyond a vague glow on what seemed to be a distant horizon, darkness dominated a blackened landscape that beckoned anyone who dared to look upon it.

“The Night Land,” murmured Montrose, leaning in. “That future era of the Dreamlands wherein the Old Gods are free and great Nodens presides, his role as gaoler ended forever!” Turning, he faced the others who had gathered together in instinctual security. “We can escape the fate that awaits the rest of mankind! We have followed the dictates of great Nodens to shape the present such that a future timeline could be created that will likely lead to the proper era; the era in which the Old Ones will once again rule the Earth as they did in days of old. We have slain the proper actors, sacrificed from among ourselves, as the ancient writings have indicated. Now, we perform the ritual of Selection and our moment has come! We are the fortunate few! We are the chosen ones! We will dwell in the House of Silence forever! All we need do is to step across this threshold that Nodens has provided.”

Turning back to the pillar that still stood silently before him, Montrose shed his robe to stand naked before the looming dark. “I am ready, great Nodens! Ready for the reward you have prepared for your faithful servant!”

With that, Montrose passed from the world into the Night Land beyond, followed quickly by the others as each in turn left the last of their Earthly accoutrements behind.

The first thing that Montrose noticed upon arriving on the other side was the familiarity of the landscape around him. Quickly, he realized it was the same as the one in his dreams, dreams he now realized had been visions sent to him by Nodens. But the elation he had felt only moments, or perhaps it was eternities before, quickly dissipated as the malignancy that permeated the atmosphere immediately pressed down upon him like a physical thing. So divorced were his senses from the environment around him that it was only pain inflicted by the stoney ground that told him he had been forced to his knees. The discomfort brought him to his senses somewhat and suddenly, far from delivering a sense of freedom, his nakedness only made him feel vulnerable. Tears lining his cheeks, he struggled to his feet and at last he noticed the others around him. They too were disoriented, unsure on their feet, their white, naked bodies already streaked with dirt and ash.

In the far distance stood the great pyramid of his dreams, and emanating from it, like waves of mental energy, were the hopes and desires of trapped millions. They seemed to be urging him on, to come to them where they resided in the only remaining safe-haven in Night Land…a hostile environment dominated by enormous things they called Watchers, and other lesser creatures that wandered the devastated landscape in blind search of hapless prey.

“We have to get to that building over there,” gasped Montrose, using all of his strength to take a single step. “Oh great Nodens! Have your faithful servants been forsaken? Where are your protecting arms?”

Even as he made his desperate plea, Montrose suspected that there would be no reply, but there was. Somewhere in the darkness around them there was movement, or at least something big was closer to them than it had been before. Suddenly, the sense of its presence was closer than ever; it towered over their heads like a mountain and, like a looming avalanche, they felt its weight pressing upon their tiny, insignificant selves.

“Run!” Montrose heard himself say as he turned from the pyramid and stumbled in the darkness. He cut himself on some sharp rocks but never noticed as his fingers dug in the loose, ashen soil and he scrabbled like some insect, desperate to avoid the descending hammer. Around him he heard the wailing cries of his fellow worshipers, some former classmates from his days at Miskatonic University where they had first fallen under the sway of the Cthulhu Myth Cycle. Now, as he looked, they scattered in all directions, blinded by the dark, falling into hidden pits, becoming mired in sinks of tar. Sobbing, he muttered a last plea to the god he had worshiped all his adult life. There was no response, and his disordered mind wondered if he had been betrayed. Like rats down their holes, his thoughts skittered along corridors of memory; bits and pieces of increasingly scattered experiences flashed across his mind until settling on a single incident recalling something someone had said to him once, in a different lifetime: something about the utter impossibility of alien minds making themselves understood by human beings. As panic began to well up inside him, Montrose wondered: had he been wrong about Nodens? Could he have misinterpreted the god’s intentions? And then a far worse thing occurred to him: what if the god had understood his human servant? What if the only thing in question was the meaning of the word “reward?” Then, as he scrambled desperately toward a dim glow in the surrounding darkness, the fate of his friends long since driven from his mind, he found himself falling into a pit at the bottom of which writhed an oily mass of giant slug-things. He screamed in mad terror, trying uselessly to halt his slow slide toward those hungry, searching mouths and it was then, in the last glitter of sanity in a shattered brain, that the final horrifying revelation occurred to him: Nodens had not betrayed them. Nodens had kept his word. There was no miscommunication. He was to be rewarded. The only thing was, to the alien Nodens, nothing could be finer than for a human to be consumed by the spawn of the Old Ones!

en him up.

Some Thoughts on H.P. Lovecraft, the Cthulhu Mythos, and the State of Weird Fiction

Notes from The Cthulhu Codex

1997

Bob Price has done a great service for Mythos readers in recent years by his vigorous defense of pastiche in general and the Derlethian take on it in particular. Well, that’s how I feel about it anyway. In his first editorial in issue #7, Bob described a personal revelation that, in effect, brought his appreciation of the Mythos full circle; from his early days of wide eyed wonder in the first flush of discovery through a period of pretension and elitism to, more recently, a more simple acceptance of the elements in the Mythos that lend themselves to clearer, more forthright stories unencumbered by an author’s need to avoid the appearance of being too slavishly attached to Lovecraft’s original stories If I’m assuming too much of an interpretation of Bob’s words, then I’m sorry, but I don’t think I am. Because you see, much the same thing has happened to me.

My first exposure to Lovecraft (besides such films as The Dunwich Horror and Die, Monster, Die which I saw before I ever heard of Lovecraft), was when I picked up the Ballantine Books paperbacks in the early 70s (you know, the ones with the weird heads with either shards of glass or coiled worms sticking out of them?) which duly knocked me out. Slowly, I discovered the wider Lovecraft circle and enjoyed them, I was reading anything associated with Lovecraft, them as well. By that time, I was reading anything associated with Lovecraft, mostly pastiche. But slowly, as the available sources dried up, I had to content myself with newer product. Here, in the beginning, Crypt of Cthulhu helped with its frequent all-fiction issues that featured mostly rare stuff by established authors; but soon, that material started to dry up and I finally found myself in a literary desert of “new style” Lovecraftian fiction in which authors, swallowing the elitist line of the times, decided to write Mythos yarns that bore as little relation to the HPL originals as possible. This wild experimentation was a total flop to me. Maybe I didn’t take my Lovecraft seriously enough, it was always good, entertaining, escapist fun for me, thus perhaps, my attraction to pastiche. My interest in Mythos fiction became mostly a nostalgic one. When I was in the mood to recapture a bit of my youth, I liked to read a good Mythos “yarn” (as Robert Howard used to say). How could the tortured, punkish, new style Cthulhu story be construed as fun?

Ultimately, my take on the Mythos is that it’s nothing to take very seriously, so why not have fun with it? It’s various components: Cthulhu, the Necronomicon, Dunwich and Innsmouth might be considered archetypes within its self-contained universe. Touchstones of inspiration that never seem to exhaust themselves, so why not explore them? Almost twelve years ago, I proceeded to do just that. Inspired by the stories first of Derleth, then of Lin Carter (his paperback edition of Weird Tales from 1980 was a big influence on my own publishing aspirations; by the way, does anyone out there have copy of #2 I can buy?) I determined to start my own magazine dedicated to the perpetuation of Mythos pastiche which I grandly called Chronicles of the Cthulhu Codex. And although that first issue had some great “yarns” in it, I was always a sucker for a good story, no matter how it was written, and included the inventive “Arc Tangent” by Gregorio Montejo. Although I dropped out of the small press and fiction writing in general for almost ten years, I’ve recently jumped back in with both feet with the revival of my old mag Fungi which I hope will offer an alternative to all the Mythos and splatter, s/exploitation mags flooding the postal routes these days. (One of the most disheartening things about getting back into the game has been all the submissions I get involving violence to children, exploitation of women, and simple bad taste, but I’ll leave that as possible fodder for a future editorial).

In the meantime, enjoy this latest crop of Cthulhu Mythos fiction, but before anyone writes to accuse me of possible hypocrisy, I have to warn you that Bob bears ultimate responsibility for the fiction department!

1997

When first conceived some months ago, this editorial was supposed to address a trend in Mythos/HPL writing that I had thought to be something new and unique to HPL fandom. Well, since taking a little time to ask questions and look around, I’ve since discovered that in general, the use of an author within the fictionalized setting of a story or novel is not new (indeed, Dante used Virgil in The Inferno). However the purposes to which deceased authors have been used in fiction have changed over the years, a change that has resulted in a truly recent trend that seeks to explore their sexual lives as well as their perceived perversions and scandals.

Recent literary attempts of this nature have been done with Henry Adams and Henry James and in a related context, a slew of biographical films have been released as well.

But what prompted me to address the subject for this editorial was a casual thumbing through of a recent collection of new Mythos fiction called The Starry Wisdom (1996 expanded edition).

Now, at this point, I must admit and warn the reader that I am not nor have I been for many years, an avid Mythos reader. For reasons touched upon in my last column, I have given up on much of what the newer contributors and editors of Mythos fiction purvey as such. Consequently, much of my experience with modern Mythos fiction has been limited to casual perusals of collections found in my local Barnes and Noble or Borders. Also, my retention of much of any of it is low, resulting in my admission here that I can’t remember any of the titles or authors (except in a most generic way: the book with the photo cover or the one written by a couple of comic book writers, etc.) of most of the volumes I’ve looked at. Except when something so outrageous crosses my eye that it sticks with me. Such was it with the Starry Wisdom volume.

This is how it happened:

I was scanning the horror section at a Borders bookstore in West Palm Beach last Spring when I came across the Starry Wisdom book. As I always do, I took it down to thumb through it. I recognized the name of Grant Morrison (a comic book writer who’s achieved some modicum of attention outside the comics field), and decided to read some random paragraphs from his contribution called “Lovecraft in Heaven.” Well, imagine this old hand’s surprise when I came across passages describing in clinical detail the sexual activities of HPL and his wife Sonia Greene:

…Lovecraft enters her convulsively, clenching back the nausea that bubbles in his throat. She loops her legs around him and lets out a long breath. She bites his ear, whispers some Slavic endearment …The clock stops ticking and he empties his terror into her arctic gulfs, her cold wastes, her cellar spaces, going inside and out simultaneously. His prick goes soft inside her, with a great oceanic seizure and he finds himself walking along the train tracks̷

You get the idea. But in this story, even Lovecraft’s parents are not safe from such undignified treatment:

…The tattered, flayed corpse of his father is clambering through the wet earth into his mother’s coffin, prising the lid away with broken-stick fingers, eager for her fresher flesh…Father, corrupt, in-sane, tears, through her bridal veil, puncturing her rotten flesh and mindlessly fucking the punctures. The two bodies squirm and knot in a tangle of greasy, ruined limbs. Father’s swollen cock bursts and spills maggots, spits obscene crawling words…

What can I say about my shock, horror and dismay at this truly undignified, even insulting fictional account?

Call me naive (and in light of the biographical fiction noted above, perhaps I was), but for me it was the last straw. After years of coming across the use of HPL in fan fiction (as I recall, usually as a protagonist in solving mysteries or fighting Cthulhoid monsters), perhaps I should not have been completely surprised, but his use had never achieved such heights, or should I say lows, as this example. It started me thinking: just what is it with HPL that seems to attract such undignified treatment? Of course, one could point out that Lovecraft himself may have initiated the trend by first including his friends in his stories and later allowing himself to be killed as the protagonist in the Robert Bloch story “Shambler from the Stars,” but did he deserve to be so treated by Morrison?

Is such treatment of Lovecraft a subconscious thing or have fans always been secretly contemptuous of HPL? Not for his antiquarianism, not for his anti-semitism, not even for his racism, but simply for his lack of an interesting sex life? Maybe it was his professed Victorian values? Or is it all more a reflection of modern society’s fin de siecle attitude that imbues all things sexual as very nearly the only thing worth living for that it cannot understand someone like Howard who was not into its full swing? If so, then he must be treated as hopelessly contemptible and the full panoply of discredited Freudian psychology be brought to bear upon him.

It makes me wonder: is it time to begin a “respect Howard” movement? Is there anyone out there who feels that things have gone far enough and it is now time to simply treat Howard Phillips Lovecraft as a man and nothing else? Isn’t it enough that we pillory anyone who tries to rise above the crowd in our own society without feeling the need to grave rob even the dead of their last shred of dignity?

1998

The notion that time changes all perspectives was never more true than with my recent rereading of a clutch of Lovecraftian chestnuts that I hadn’t looked at in nearly twenty-five years.

It’s a strange thing, inexplicable to me, that of all writers connected with the so-called Lovecraft Circle (and other contemporaries that have not been connected with HPL in a personal way), the one I have least revisited is the one that I first encountered and that made the greatest impression upon me as a teenager: H.P. Lovecraft. Why that has been, I don’t really know. I don’t necessarily find his prose inaccessible, nor do I find his stories unentertaining. The only thing I can think of is that over the years, I’ve read so many alternate versions, variations, articles and pastiches, that it sometimes seemed tedious to go back and reread the original stories themselves.

Consequently, what time I’ve ever spent rereading favorite stories has usually been spent with Robert E. Howard or Algernon Blackwood.

Recently however, I had the perfect excuse to revisit some of those Lovecraft stories that I had been telling myself for years that I really ought to reread. I’m speaking of S.T. Joshi’s recent volume of The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft. (At least I think it’s recent; since I bought it in paperback, it’s entirely possible that the volume had appeared earlier in hardcover). Besides my suppressed desire to reread some of HPL’s stories, what attracted me to the volume was the fact that the stories it contained were the cleaned up versions Joshi had recently assembled for Arkham House, Joshi’s copious footnotes informing the reader of the stories’ arcane subtexts and its affordability.

Fine, but what has all this to do with changing perspectives? As I’ve said, I hadn’t read these stories since I was in high school when my reading habits were just emerging from the pure pastures of science fiction and taking their first dip into the world of fantasy. The Lord of the Rings was a recent discovery along with Ballantine’s Adult Fantasy Series and I was just finishing up the last volumes I could find of Edgar Rice Burroughs when I stumbled upon the Ballantine Lovecraft series.

My first exposure to Lovecraft (besides such films as The Dunwich Horror and Die, Monster, Die which I saw before I ever heard of Lovecraft), was when I picked up the Ballantine Books paperbacks of the early 70s (you know, the ones with the weird heads with either shards of glass or coiled worms sticking out of them?) which duly knocked me out.

Lovecraft, especially the Cthulhu Mythos, became a passion. But now, years later, after rereading such stories as “The Dunwich Horror” and At the Mountains of Madness, I find myself scratching my head and wondering just what it was about these yarns that so grabbed me? Of course after so many years HPL could hold no surprises for me, but still, I expected something a bit more dazzling. Instead, I found myself trying to figure out just what was it that was supposed to be so horrible that the narrator of At the Mountains of Madness needed to tell his story to warn off future expeditions to the Antarctic. When the shoggoths finally appeared they were an anticlimax. As a matter of fact, the moment passed with my hardly noticing it. When I finished reading, I couldn’t help thinking “That’s it?” Certainly HPL’s description of those cyclopean ruins amidst the frozen waste were as evocative as ever, but the menace implied in the story just wasn’t there. The next expedition should just come in force and bring plenty of hand grenades.

“The Dunwich Horror” and “The Colour Out of Space” held up much better as elaborate mood pieces still inspiring in me wild visions of the tangled New England back country where as a youth with an imagination freshly fired by these selfsame images, I wandered, hoping to stumble across empty farmhouses or abandoned orchards.

The menace in these stories was much more clear cut and easily understandable leading itself to an anticipatory frisson. Where HPL seems to falter in all these stories is in his unconvincing assertion that the human mind would surely be blasted upon sight of the menace. The difference between my teenage self and the present is that perhaps my first impulse at 17 would have been to believe HPL and run as he’d insisted whereas today, it would be to pick up a gun and start shooting.

Will I go back and read more HPL? I’m not convinced it would be a terribly rewarding task, but if Mr. Joshi decides to continue with his annotated volumes, I’ll consider it as a convenient excuse to disregard my doubts and indulge myself in a continuing program of reassessment.

1998

You know, if I were fifteen years old again, these would be flush times to be a Cthulhu Mythos fan. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much Mythos material so easily available in the whole 25 years since I first picked up the Ballantine editions of The Survivor and Others and Fungi From Yuggoth and Other Poems in 1971.

Oh, I’d stumbled across the stray Lovecraft yarn in other collections of weird stories, but the impact was diluted. It was those two books along with Lin Carter’s Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos that set my imagination boiling with that first glimpse of a larger Mythos universe.

Then came the Ballantine line of Lovecraft fiction (those books with the funny heads; boy, I had a hard time explaining those to my teachers and fellow students at St. Joseph’s High School!) Also, because of Marvel Comics’ Conan strip, I was reading Robert E. Howard. I found Carter and L. Sprague DeCamp’s Conan the Buccaneer first and from there, ordered all the remaining books in the Lancer Conan series. Next it was Lancer’s Wolfshead and (along a completely separate reading path wherein I discovered volume two of The Lord of the Rings and got hopelessly hooked on straight fantasy), stumbled across Clark Ashton Smith in Ballantine’s Adult Fantasy Series.

Almost before I knew what was happening, I had simultaneously discovered the three musketeers of Weird Tales: H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith and the hunt for anything and everything by them was on! In rapid and dizzying succession, I spent the next decade amassing scores of new paperback editions collecting everything it seemed, by these authors and other Weird Tales alumni. And stranger than anything in all those stories was, it was all good stuff!

Which brings me in my long-winded way to my opening statement that these are flush times for a Mythos fan. In the fifteen years or so since the end of those boom years around 1979, a drought settled in that had allowed only desperate searches in used book stores to satisfy my need for more weird material. Today, however, that’s all changed. The horror shelves in Barnes and Noble and Borders are crowded with Mythos material from reissues of Lovecraft and Howard volumes to new tomes about tales from Miskatonic University and Chaosium Inc.’s excellent anthologies. In addition, through the mails, one can find lots more stuff from Necronomicon Press (including sometimes even Fungi) the internet and a number of mail order outlets. In fact, there’s so much material out there that it would have been impossible for my 15-year-old limited income self to have kept up with it!

But there are two problems with it all.

And I’ll admit right here that both may be problems only I have with the situation, but that won’t stop me from laying my difficulties with them on you anyway!

The first is that in all this new material, very little of it seems to include the larger Lovecraft Circle (or even the inner circle, with virtually nothing being released from Clark Ashton Smith in popularly priced editions). Where are paperback collections of Frank Belknap Long, Vernon Shea, Henry Kuttner, Lin Carter, Brian Lumley and especially August Derleth? Where are the collections of other Weird Tales contributors such as Henry S. Whitehead, E. Hoffmann Price, William Hope Hodgson, Arthur Machen, Hugh B. Cave, Wilfred Branch Talman, Edmund Hamilton, Eric Frank Russell, Carl Jacobi and yes, Seabury Quinn? Where are such eclectic paperback collections as The Books of Robert E. Howard? Lin Carter’s Weird Tales volumes 1-4? The Last Celt? The Howard collector? Great Short Novels of Fantasy volumes 1 and 2? Beyond the Fields We Know? The Doom That Came to Sarnath?

The second problem is that with the concentration of new material by new and/or unfamiliar names rather than classic authors and knowing the anything goes attitude of much of today’s media (I touched upon this theme in an earlier column related to disrespect for HPL), it is difficult for the discerning reader to navigate the potentially offensive waters of modern Mythos fiction.

So what’s the answer? Heck if I know! All I can be sure of is that if paperback publishers issued more eclectic collections by the classic Weird Tales contributors, it would be a whole lot easier to choose among the proliferation of titles with a more than reasonable chance of being satisfied with a purchase and not morally repulsed by it. After all, how wrong could you go with say, The Second Book of E Hoffman Price or Henry S. Whitehead: The Unpublished Stories or The Portable August Derleth or even A Seabury Quinn Omnibus?

1998

I’ve been thinking about style. What set me off was a notice for contributions to a proposed anthology called New Tales of Zothique. In the notice, the editor asked for submissions that capture Clark Ashton Smith’s themes and ideas rather than a slavish adherence to his writing style.

That started me wondering: Can the themes explored by Smith (and H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard) be separated from his powerful writing style? And if they could, would the results be recognizable as being unique to Smith?

I don’t think so.

Smith had a unique voice and although many of his plots could not be classified as terribly original, it was dressing them up in the uniqueness of his prose style that turned them into the purest of reading pleasures.

Robert E. Howard didn’t invent sword and sorcery out of whole cloth (heck, it went at least as far back as T.H. White’s Le Morte d’Arthur), but the way he could spin a yarn made it all seem brand new. H.P. Lovecraft took bits and pieces and influences from such disparate places as the Bible and the Arabian Nights to fashion his heavy handed horror stories into seemingly complicated psychological mystery plays (after all, could August Derleth have drawn his notorious conclusions about the Elder Gods and Great Old Ones if there wasn’t a hint of a Biblical parallel somewhere?). And Clark Ashton Smith turned out simplistic vignettes about monsters and sorcerers and transformed them into jewel boxes of verbal ironies (Grimm’s fairy tales, anyone?). Eliminate their writing styles and what’s left? Pretty standard stuff I’d say.

But all gussied up, the traditional material each story is based upon turns into something wholly new, viscerally exciting and a joy to just plain read. (All this is not to say that these authors and others like them have never had an original idea, but not only couldn’t they be geniuses twenty-four hours a day, they could no more avoid cultural influences then we can.) So, stripped of their writing styles, how interesting could stories based on these authors’ ideas be? The process must inevitably produce results with little apparent connection to their source material. Thus, their status as “homages” then becomes wholly questionable. Without the use of the original author’s writing style, a mention of Cthulhu here or Maal Dweb there will not be enough to satisfy the reader who thirsts for more stories from his favorite writer’s pen.

It makes me wonder: is it time to begin a “respect Howard” movement? Is there anyone out there who feels that things have gone far enough and it is now time to simply treat Howard Phillips Lovecraft as a man and nothing else?

1999

Remember my editorial in issue #14? That’s where I lamented the fact that despite these being flush times for Mythos fans with all kinds of Lovecraftian material in print and even readily available at such mass distribution outlets as Barnes and Noble and Borders, there was still a dearth of classic weird material written in the mid-part of this century (1920-1960 say).

Well, although I’m sad to report that nothing’s changed since then, a recent find moved me to go back to my bookshelves to take a closer look at just what has been coming out in the last ten years or so. (One qualification about what comes next: I haven’t been keeping that close an eye on the small press market lately, so I don’t know what they’ve been coming out with; on the other hand, just about everything from the more prestigious small presses such as Arkham House, Donald M. Grant and even Necronomicon Press can be found at the aforementioned big bookstore chains).

Anyway, I was at Barnes and Noble the other day and while scanning their bargain books section came across yet another collection of Weird Tales stories (Weird Tales: Seven Decades of Terror, Barnes and Noble Books, 1997). This one was edited by John Betancourt and Robert Weinberg and as I can never resist at least scanning the contents pages of such collections (I’ve never given up hope of finding anthologies that feature the mid-century authors that most appeal to me) I picked it up. Divided into seven decades with representative stories from each, there were enough stories from the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s that I had never read before and by authors not usually anthologized, that I immediately purchased it (and the fact that this hardcover was only going for seven bucks didn’t hurt either!) The good thing about this collection for us fans of the old stuff, is that of its 400+ pages, only 100 are devoted to the lackluster 70s and 80s and 90s. What particularly attracted me about the collection was its mix of stories by the masters (Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Kuttner, Leiber and Bradbury) as well as by lesser known authors such as Whitehead, Wellman, Eric Frank and Ray Russell and G.G. Pendarves. Rarely anthologized stories by Bradbury such as “The Crowd,” Kuttner’ “Graveyard Rats” and Derleth’s “Pacific 421” were new to me at least.

This was just the kind of thing I liked to find and in placing it on my bookshelf at home, remembered similar books released over the last few years including Weird Tales: The Magazine that Never Dies (edited by Marvin Kaye, Doubleday 1988) which out of its 44 entries very few stories were from the likes of REH, HPL, CAS and their followers. Interesting tales here included “Off the Map” by Rex Dolphin, “Funeral in the Fog” by Edward D. Hoch, “The Damp Man” by Allison V. Harding, “More than Shadow” by Dorothy Quick and “The Dead Smile” by F. Marion Crawford.

Weird Vampire Tales (edited by Robert Weinberg, Stefan Dziemianowicz and Martin Greenberg for Gramercy Books, 1992) included a similar percentage of unknowns from mid-century as Never Dies with contributions such as “Placide’s Wife” by Kirk Washburn, “Vampire Village” by Edmund Hamilton, “Doom of the House of Duryea” by Earl Peirce Jr., “The Silver Coffin” by Robert Barbour Johnson, “Share Alike” by Jerome Bixby and Joe E. Dean and even “Asylum” by A.E. Van Vogt.

Other recent collections of note have been The Howling Man (edited by Roger Anker for Tor Books, paperback ed. 1992) a 600 page collection of every weird yarn written by Charles Beaumont complete with individual introductions for each story by other famous writers. Tor also released a trilogy of paperbacks anthologizing three classic weird novels by Richard Matheson in 1995 including I Am Legend and The Incredible Shrinking Man; each novel is accompanied by choice short stories including rarely anthologized treats such as “Duel” and “Prey.” And not usually considered a horror writer, Philip K. Dick was given the royal treatment by the Carol Publishing Group in 1990 when they began to reprint everything the author ever wrote; of particular interest to fans of the weird are the first two volumes of the series (The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick) in which are included some of the strangest yarns ever written such as “The Father Thing,” “Roog,” “Paycheck,” “Colony,” “Autofac,” and “The Days of Perky Pat.” More recently, the General Publishing Group has just released the first volume of the Ackermananthology (1997) which, although the first volume concentrates on rarely collected science fiction stories from the decades in question, later volumes promise to concentrate on such topics as fantasy and horror.

So what’s there to learn here? That maybe things aren’t as thoroughly bleak as I first let on and that a little diligence and a lot of patience on the part of the connoisseur can be rewarded in the end.

2000

Flush times indeed!

In issue #14 I mentioned that if I was fifteen years old again, these would surely be exciting times to be a Lovecraft fan. Never before have there been so many books relating to HPL available to the general public and in formats suitable for every budget. (In the old days, most HPL related material was to be had only from a small group of independent publishers and that through mail order)! In addition, mythos fanatics can even purchase every film produced over the past forty years that have been based on HPL’s work (however tenuous and whatever the quality) instead of catching them on the late, late show whenever a local television station decided to put them on. And now there’s cyberspace, where for as little as $10/month (sometimes even free!) anyone can access what amounts to thousands of pages of material related to anything Lovecraft.

Despite these seeming riches however, there still exists the danger of sensory overload, of being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of material. And sometimes, this cornucopia of plenty vs the increasing demands today’s world place on our leisure time, can have an enervating effect on us, a sort of information-panic that no matter how much time we give to scanning all these offerings, we’ll never be able to absorb them all. There might even come the temptation to give up trying to sort it all out and just letting the tides of all that material simply wash over us at random (and getting our metaphors mixed!).

That’s when a bibliophile needs to stop and decide what’s really important: which items are worth his precious time and which mere Lovecraftian dissembling. And a good way to do that is to go back to the basics.

Such, I think, is S.T. Joshi and Peter Cannon’s recent volume More Annotated H.P.Lovecraft. This book, (which follows in the path of a previous volume called The Annotated H. P. Lovecraft), presents many of HPL’s classic tales in a format as close to the author’s original intent as it is possible to get. (These versions have been reprinted from the latest Arkham House hardcover editions upon which Mr. Joshi had labored for years). The presentation here of such familiar stories as “Pickman’s Model,” “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Thing on the Doorstep” will be familiar to even the newest of HPL’s readers, but what makes this volume of more than passing interest are the scores of detailed footnotes and photographs that rest on almost every page. The information they convey, both trivial and arcane, allow readers to learn something of the daily life of the author as well as placing each story within the context of the real world from which Lovecraft drew so much of his inspiration.

With the appearance of this second volume of the Annotated HPL, it can only be hoped that the editors will follow through with the balance of Lovecraft’s stories. (And after that, who knows? Maybe Joshi and Cannon can be prevailed upon to provide the same service for other authors: The Annotated Clark Ashton Smith or The Annotated Robert E. Howard or even The Annotated Joseph Payne Brennan maybe)?

Despite a tendency for some of the footnotes to verge on the self-parodic (like notes explaining such vocabulary words as aurora, gibbering, eldritch, cyclopean, mesmerism; has the English language in current use strayed so far from its roots that the general reader needs to have specialized definitions of such words highlighted in editions of popular literature or are they so identified with HPL’s purplish prose as to become of a like with his own invented lexicon?), I can think of no more refreshing way for the avid reader of the mythos, harassed (and perhaps jaded) by too much product, to reestablish his roots than to revisit the stories and the mild mannered gentleman who wrote them presented in this well-rounded package.

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Author’s Final Word

ere, I must give belated acknowledgement to Gregorio Montejo for his collaborative efforts in the writing of “The King in Yellow” and “The Pallid Masque” as well as to Henry Vester who partnered with me on “The Dreams of Yig.” Together, they present instances of cooperation that were very satisfying to myself at least and my only regret has been that we could not have done it more often.