The Old One stopped its fall by catching itself on its wings. It raised tentacles from where they’d rested, unnoticed, against its barrel-body. It reached for Mike, clearly intending to pull him off and throw him to his death.
Joanna jumped.
She landed so far back on the barrel, she missed Mike’s arms and legs and banged into a wing.
Their combined weights sent the Old One plummeting out of the air.
She’d thought she’d been afraid before.
She’d never been afraid, compared to this.
She struck the nearest tentacle with the stone she’d grabbed as she leaped.
The Old One slammed into the slab.
The impact sent the trio of massive stones tumbling, to strike more of the stones standing in the ancient circle.
As the stones toppled, the people below screamed and the shotguns went off.
The Old One struggled to rise on its five wings.
The two that had been beneath its body on impact hung uselessly.
Its trajectory altered by the broken wings, the Old One fell towards the hole.
As Joanna jerked her head up from the glimpse of its depths, Mike cried, “Jump!”
Leaping on the Old One had been an almost lateral jump.
She couldn’t jump down.
She’d fall down the hole—the bottomless hole—
She jumped.
* * * *
“Jeezum Crow,” Joanna murmured. “Looks like almost everyone fell in the hole except us and Brad—Bradley’s body.”
“God’s judgment,” Mike said. “The standing stones have killed Mr. Waite and Mr. Levesque, and blocked the rest of the devil-worshippers in the hole. May God keep the Old Ones and their worshippers and shoggoths trapped in Hell forevermore.”
Joanna suspected not every worshipper had been trapped. She’d glimpsed people on the other side of the hole running away as the stones fell. But the bodies of Mr. Waite and Mr. Levesque lay under a slab, and she felt no pulses in their exposed wrists. As for any survivors, they wouldn’t reveal what had happened, even if they’d recognized her or Mike. Nobody’d want to admit to human sacrifice or worship of the Old Ones.
She’d hit the ground so hard, she supposed she’d been knocked out. The sun wasn’t much lower, though, judging by the light. Her hip hurt, but not as much as her left shoulder and arm. She’d never felt anything that bad. She resumed cradling her left arm and didn’t look at the weird bend in the middle of the forearm.
“Bradley!” she whispered. “Is he okay? Is he—Bradley?”
Bradley’s body had escaped the falling stones, but whoever was inside the body was unconscious. From shock or fear, maybe. Joanna couldn’t see any damage.
Mike was conscious, but worse off. His left leg was bent in the middle of the calf. His black pants had ripped open and both legs were scraped and bleeding from ankle to knee. He’d landed some distance from Bradley’s body, but he could reach the toe of one of Bradley’s sneakers with a fingertip. He tapped on the sneaker and spoke.
“Bradley?”
Well, Joanna thought, at least nobody got shot.
She went to the brook trickling through the woods a few yards away and cupped water in her good hand. The water was so cold, you’d think she’d broken through winter ice to get it. She came back and dribbled water on Bradley’s face.
“Bradley?” she said.
“Bradley Greenwood!” Mike said. “Wake up.”
Bradley’s eyes opened, blue as ever, but confused.
A pit opened in Joanna’s stomach.
Bradley’s eyes focused on her face, then Mike’s.
“It was terrible,” whispered Bradley’s voice. “Being trapped in that old body with all its aches and pains, and anyways it felt wrong. It wasn’t mine. I knew even before I opened my eyes.
“And Mr. Waite was sitting on one side of me, in my body. And Mr. Levesque was on the other side, telling me he’d break every bone in my new body if I didn’t keep still. Then I realized Mr. Waite was going to kill me and live in my body, and everybody would think he was me, and no one would ever know, and I don’t know what he would’ve done to you guys, or my family, or—”
“It’s over,” Joanna said softly. “Mr. Waite and Mr. Levesque are dead, and a bunch of standing stones have fallen on the hole.”
“The devils are never getting out again,” Mike said.
Bradley closed his eyes with an expression of relief.
When he looked at them again, he said, “Oh my gosh, you’re hurt!”
“Don’t worry,” Mike said. “You can drive us and our bicycles out of here in Mr. Waite’s pickup.”
“That’s not enough to repay you for saving me from—”
“All right,” Mike said. “You can also make up an explanation of what happened to us that doesn’t land us in jail or the Bangor Mental Health Institute.”
“That’s not enough, either,” Bradley protestd.
“It’s all you’re going to get,” Joanna told him.
“Well,” Bradley said, with a glance at Mike, “I can tell Molly Sockbeson what hap—”
“No you won’t,” Mike said. He turned to Joanna with a grin. “He’s Bradley, all right.”
“He is,” Joanna said.
She looked away from Mike.
“Okay, okay,” Bradley said. “Nobody will ever know. Even Molly.”
“Deal,” said Mike.
All the way home in the jouncing pickup, “So Into You” went around and around in Joanna’s head, repeating its lyrics of a relationship that never ended, because it never started.
LOVECRAFTIAN LIMERICK, by Andrew J. Wilson
There once were some fungi from Yuggoth
Who battled the protean shoggoth,
And those creatures of myth
Called the Great Race of Yith,
Before falling foul of Yog-Sothoth.
THE THING IN THE POND, by John R. Fultz
They say Old Man Carter started digging the pond back in 1931. His wife and two little boys had died from tuberculosis. Folks said he’d lost his mind. He never even shed a tear at the funeral, but as soon as his family was laid to rest he went on home and started digging. Most folks thought he was digging a well at first. Others claimed he was digging the pond that his poor wife had always wanted. I remember my granddaddy’s take on it:
“Jeb Carter is plum crazy.”
Some men deal with grief in unexpected ways. Old Man Carter turned his grief into a sadness that would mar the earth itself. He dug, and he dug, and he dug. Folks brought him sandwiches from the General Store and farmers’ wives brought him chicken dinners. After a week the hole was forty feet deep, and they lowered his meals into the hole with a bucket-and-rope. Carter had rigged up a pulley system to haul up buckets of dislocated earth all day long, and a few local boys helped moved the dirt piles aside to make room for more. Everybody figured he’d give it up eventually.
Carter stayed in that damp hole, sleeping only when he’d exhausted himself, then getting right back up and digging again. All day every day—dig, dig, dig. He sent up the loose dirt in five-gallon buckets one at a time. People even came from other counties to stand at the top of the hole and watch Jeb Carter digging his way to nowhere.
“He’s bound to hit China someday if’n he don’t quit,” some said.
“Shee-it, he’ll die before he digs that far,” said others.
“I read a book says they’s fires deep in the earth,” said a boy. “Fire and magma. He keeps on digging he’ll open up Hell itself. Burn ‘im alive.”
“He’s lost his mind,” they all agreed, but nobody could blame him.
After all, he’d lost everything else.
So after a while most folks forgot all about Carter and his hole. That is until the hole filled up with water that spewed out to drown the whole pasture overnight. Nobody saw Carter come out of that hole, and the county men said he’d struck some underground reservoir or river that had proceeded to drown him. In les
s than a day there was no more sign of the crazy old man or his hole. There was just a big pond of deep green water, sparkling in the sunlight.
Nobody went near the Carter place for months. Down at the barber shop folks would mention Old Carter and imagine his bones lying at the bottom of the pond, or maybe stuck deep down in the hole that had birthed it. At night the pond was a black mirror reflecting the stars, and the smell of the deep earth hung in the air about it.
Wild things don’t fear what men fear, so it wasn’t long before the pond was lousy with fat, burping frogs. A forest of tall reeds grew about its edges. A few years later, a group of young boys snuck out to the Carter pond to hunt bullfrogs. Seven boys went down there after midnight, but only six came home. I was one of those boys, so I can tell you what happened.
Johnny Haxton, always the wildest of our bunch, decided to go for a moonlight swim. The other boys stalked the reed forest, stabbing their three-pointed gigs into every frog they could find. Johnny yelled at us to jump in. “The water’s fine, boys!” he said. I remember him doing the backstroke, and I almost took off my muddy shirt and joined him.
Then I heard a gulping sound and Johnny was gone. In the center of the pond a ring of quiet ripples marked the place where he had been. I dropped an impaled frog into the burlap sack I was carrying and watched the ripples, waiting for Johnny to come back up. After about thirty seconds I started calling his name. I saw his hand come up once, the water splashing, and something dark as a shadow emerged for a half-second. Johnny’s hand went back under, and there was only the sound of bullfrogs croaking between the reeds.
“Johnny!” We all screamed his name. We stood in the mud on the edge of the dark water, screaming his name over and over. Looking at the pond was like looking into the night sky. Constellations glowed like scattered diamonds. Even the ripples disappeared. We hollered for Johnny as tears fell down our faces, but not a single one of us dared to dive in there and help him. Not a single one.
We ran from that pond like the devil himself was at our heels. Next day the county sheriff sent a diver in there to comb the pond, looking for Johnny’s body. It made the headlines of all the local newspapers, but they never found so much as a little finger. Johnny was gone, just like Old Man Carter was gone. Carried deep into the earth by the thing in the pond.
Nobody went down there to hunt frogs again.
The old Carter house stood half-submerged at the pond’s western edge. If you walked the dirt road that wound past it, you’d hear them frogs croaking and burping from the shattered windows of the house. Only frogs and toads lived in that old house now, and every kid in Ellot County new it was haunted.
My pa whupped me good for my part in Johnny’s disappearance. He warned me I’d get worse if I ever went near that pond again. So I didn’t. But I did see Johnny again a few months later. It was April and a big storm blew in, thunder and lightning and sheets of rain thick enough to drown a man in the street. I was in my bedroom reading Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar. Johnny had loaned me his dog-eared copy the week before he died, but I hadn’t got around to reading it until now. I was so involved in the ape-man’s adventures I forgot about all the storm. Ma and Pa were huddled by the fireplace in the livin’ room with my little sister Sara. I was in another world altogether, a world of lost cities and deadly jungles, lost in the pages of my book.
Somebody knocked on my window. I looked up from the book, but the window was a grey mirror slick with raindrops. A pale shadow stood out there in the rain, something I could barely see. The knock wasn’t loud, and I thought maybe I’d imagined it. But then it came again, low and insistent. Johnny Haxton used to knock on my window like that when he wanted me to sneak outside after dark. My first thought was “Johnny! He’s still alive! He didn’t die in that pond—he ran off. And now he’s come back to tell me he’s okay.”
I went to the window and opened it to the pouring rain. Immediately I was soaked. It was cold, and the air stank of fish scales and worm flesh. A dark figure stood in the rain, about Johnny’s height. He’d moved back from the window a ways, and the rain obscured his face. But I could tell it was Johnny Haxton. Same skinny arms, same wild hair, and the same knock on my window.
“Johnny?” I stuck my head halfway outside.
“It’s me,” he said. His voice was hoarse, like he had a mouthful of mud caught in his throat.
“You’re alive?” I said. The rain splattered my face.
Johnny didn’t say anything, just stood there in the cold rain. A different smell reached my nostrils, and it reminded me of a dead dog’s carcass I had once seen rotting on the side of the road.
“I found him,” Johnny said. I still couldn’t see his face well. Thunder broke the sky above us.
“Found who?” I said, but I already knew.
“Old Man Carter,” he said. I noticed he wasn’t shivering at all.
“Come inside,” I said. “Come sit by the fire.”
Johnny raised a hand. “No,” he said. “I gotta get back soon. I…I wanted to let you know.”
“Let me know what?” I asked. “Where did you run off to?”
“Down there,” he said. One of his bony fingers pointed to the sopping ground. “He’s down there. Been down there all along.”
“Down where?” I asked. My hair was soaked, and the rain wetted down my nightshirt. I shivered the way Johnny should have been shivering. The cold air was seeping into my room, along with the rotten smell. Something had died out there in the mud, a drowned rat, a dog, maybe a cat.
“It’s wonderful, Teddy,” Johnny said. “You have to see it. It’s better than Opar. Better than Atlantis. Better than Camelot. Come with me…you’ll see.”
I shook my head. “Come inside, Johnny. I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.”
“Tsath,” Johnny said. “City of the Sleeping God. It’s been there forever…longer than the United States…longer than Egypt…ever since the Great Cataclysm. The Children of Tsathoggua built it from sapphire and quartz. It’s magnificent, Ted. And now they worship even stranger gods…”
“Tsathoggua?” I remembered the name from an issue of Weird Tales. “The frog-god? That ain’t real, Johnny. It’s just a story. Come inside and get warm now.”
Johnny laughed, and his teeth chattered.
“Now why would I lie to my best buddy?” Johnny said. “I just want you to see it with your own eyes. To see them. Come with me now, and you’ll never be cold again. This is your only chance…” Johnny reached out his hand and stepped closer to the window.
The lightning flashed and I saw his face. The skin was loose and pale about his skull, bloated and crisscrossed with blue veins. Black weeds hung tangled in his hair, and his clothing was nothing more than muddy rags. His eyeballs had fallen too far back in their sockets, and it was clear now that the rotting smell was him.
Johnny was dead after all, but somehow still walking and talking.
“Old Man Carter struck an underground river,” Johnny said. Dark foam streamed from his shriveled lips as his lower jaw clacked. “The deep water pulled him right down and the current washed him all the way to K’n-yan. That’s where they found his body—on the shore of the sunless sea.”
I told Johnny to shut up. Tears streamed from my eyes even as the rain washed them away. His dead mouth kept on moving, and his words burned into my memories.
“They raised him up,” Johnny said. “Now he serves them. There is no greater honor.”
“I don’t want to hear any more—”
“He came for me,” Johnny said. “So they could raise me up too. Oh, you should see it. The towers of blue crystal, the domes bright as gold, alive with atomic fires. They move like angels in globes of light, drifting and flying and making love…they made us their slaves and now we’ll never have to fear death again. What’s there to be afraid of when you’ve already died? They raised us up, Ted! Come with me before it’s too late! Let them raise you up!”
Johnny’s hand came closer and I sl
ammed the window shut. I must have screamed because Ma and Pa came rushing into my room. Ma told me later they found me crying and drenched on the floor by the window, but I don’t remember that. They put me to bed and I lay in a fever for the next three days. I never told them about Johnny, or the things he said to me. I guess I figured nobody would believe me.
I never finished Johnny’s book. I couldn’t touch it anymore. Every time I tried, I’d see his swollen, rotting face on the page. “They raised him up!” He say it again in my dreams, or during moments of quiet contemplation. I started sneaking whiskey from my old man’s stash to dull my dreams and still my racing thoughts. I think Ma knew I was drinking, but she didn’t say a thing about it. The booze kept me calm.
A month later I dug through the attic and found that old copy of Weird Tales. I found the story that mentioned Tsathoggua. Supposedly it was a massive, toad-like entity who dwelled in a deep cavern beneath the earth during prehistoric ages. There was no description in that story of a fantastic underground city known as Tsath, but it did mention various pre-human races who worshipped the toad-god with sacrifices of living flesh. But this was just a story in a pulp magazine—the kind of publication my parents called “ungodly trash,” and would throw into the fireplace if they got half a chance.
By winter I had convinced myself that Johnny’s visit had been only a nightmare. I walked by the pond and it was frozen over, as it always was during the cold months. It seemed harmless under all that ice. I tried again but still couldn’t finish the Tarzan book Johnny had given me. Eventually I dropped it into the fireplace, along with that copy of Weird Tales. I thought maybe burning them both would end my nightmares, and it worked for a while.
On the day I turned eighteen the local draft board let me know I was going to fight Nazis in Europe. The States had joined the war two years previous, and things weren’t going too well over there. Sixteen young men from Ellot County entered the service that month, although some had volunteered for duty. It didn’t matter—willingly or unwillingly—we shipped off to basic training, then to the battlefields of France.
The Third Cthulhu Mythos Megapack Page 5
