Terrors

by Richard A. Lupoff

  “Why did you attack me, Antoinette?”

  “To avenge the death of my brother. I have followed you for a long time, M’sieu. You always seem to weigh anchor and depart just before I reach a port. But this time I have caught up with you at last.”

  Only the soft sound of the Sea Lynx searching for blade or gun, and the sound of two mortals breathing, could be heard in the cave. At last Shanahan said, “You can stop searching, Antoinette. I have your weapons. I don’t intend to harm you but I will not permit you to harm me, either. Ten years ago I would gladly had died. Now I intend to live.”

  “If I had caught up with you ten years ago, you would indeed have died. But, M’sieu Shanahan, better late than never!”

  “You’re foolish, Antoinette. You could have ambushed me outside the cave.”

  He heard her bitter laughter. “You are right. It was my mistake. I followed you here and I could have waited for you to emerge, M’sieu. But I wanted to see what you were searching for. I was overly eager. And now—here we are, eh? Like two children whose game has gone too far.”

  In the darkness Shanahan frowned. The Sea Lynx had declared herself his enemy but he had no grudge against her. If anything, his guilt might justify the sacrifice of his own life if by giving it up he could save Antoinette’s. “I think I can get us both out of here,” he said. “It won’t be easy but if we work together we might succeed.”

  A pause, then the soft, woman’s voice came. “A truce, then. Give me back my blade and my gun.”

  Shanahan said, “No. In time I will, but not now. We must get out of here.”

  “You were seeking the treasure of the Red Robe Men, were you not?” the Sea Lynx asked. “Did you know it was in this cave?”

  “I knew it was in a cave somewhere,” Shanahan told her.

  “Everyone knows that.”

  “Of course. But there are hundreds of islands that the Chinese caravels might have visited. There are thousands of caves where the treasure could be hidden. I’ve looked in scores of places, and finally found the right one.”

  “And found your grave, as well.”

  “No. We won’t get out of here with any treasure, but maybe we can get out with our lives.”

  “We’ll just go back the way we came, then.”

  Shanahan gave a half-laugh. “Will you lead the way?”

  “I don’t know the way. I merely followed you.”

  “I have matches,” Shanahan said. “We’ll need to use them sparingly. I’ll light each one, then we’ll advance as far as we can, then I’ll light another.”

  “A poor plan, I think.” The Sea Lynx’s voice came from the darkness.

  “Unless you have a better one, that’s what we’ll do. Or, if you wish, you can remain here.”

  He heard a sob, a roiling mixture of rage and defeat. Then, “All right. Let us begin.”

  Shanahan opened his box of matches and lit the first one. They moved back through the darkness, feeling the floor slope away beneath their feet. Each time Shanahan struck a match the tiny flare of flame seemed far brighter than it truly was, thanks to their eyes adapting to the pitch blackness of the cave. They could not advance by feel alone. There were side openings. To enter one would be to enter a maze. Even Shanahan’s unusual sense of location would not lead them out of that natural trap. No, to leave the main tunnel would almost certainly prove fatal.

  Shanahan heard his own breath and that of the Sea Lynx growing labored. “We’re starting to run out of air,” he warned. “We have to get out of here before the oxygen is used up or we’ll suffocate.”

  “Just like my brother,” the Sea Lynx hissed.

  Shanahan was down to the last match in his packet when he felt cold water lapping at his feet. “It’s straight on from here,” he told the Sea Lynx, “but I don’t think anyone could swim as far as the cave-mouth without breathing, and there’s no air above the water to breathe.”

  “We cannot wait here for the tide to recede?”

  “We’d be out of air. It wouldn’t work.”

  “Then we are doomed. Doomed to die by suffocation, as I said, just as my brother died.”

  “No.” Shanahan reached behind him and pulled the breathing tube from the air tank strapped to his back. “You’ll have to trust me, Antoinette. We’ll have to swim out together. There’s enough oxygen in this tank to get us both out, but it won’t be easy. You’ll have to stay in my arms as we swim. I’ll give you a breath of air from the tank, then I’ll take one, then it will be your turn again. We can do it if you’ll trust me.”

  He felt her hand groping for his arm. They stood together, arms around each other, and waded into the icy brine.

  As the water closed over them Shanahan flashed back to that day aboard Cichlid, back to the last conversation he had held with his best friend. Back to the last words Frenchy le Fleur had spoken as they stood in Cichlid’s torpedo room, knowing that one of them was about to die that the other might live. Or had he spoken them? Had the information passed between them in an instant of eye-to-eye, man-to-man communion? Or again, had it come to Shanahan in a dream?

  He didn’t know, he only knew that he could hear his best friend’s voice whispering inside his skull.

  I fooled you, Frenchy whispered, you never did figure it out and I fooled you one last time. You have a tell, Splash. Any good gambler knows how to look for a tell. Is a poker player bluffing or does he really have a strong hand? Is that crap-shooter just lucky or is he rolling loaded dice? A good gambler can see through it.

  You used to blink, Splash. Whenever we threw fingers, I knew what you were going to do before you did. One blink for one finger, two blinks for two fingers. I knew every time. I had to lose once in a while or you’d quit betting with me. But I always knew, Splash. Always.

  The last time, when the Regensburg caught us I saw your tell. I knew you were going to throw two fingers. That’s why I yelled, “Odds,” and threw one. You never had a chance, Splash. Man, but didn’t we have fun while it lasted! Didn’t we have fun!

  And now he was making his way through a flooded cave a decade later and 12,000 miles away from the last resting place of Cichlid.

  Half an hour later—or what would have been half an hour later had they any way of measuring time—they waded out of Valeva Cave. It was midnight on the beach, and a huge moon pounded its rays onto the tropical sand as powerfully as a northern sun would have shone at midday. The oxygen in Shanahan’s iron tank was exhausted. He could have the tank refilled in Port Vila. Ni Vanuatu cooking fires, banked and covered for the night, glowed softly on the beach.

  Shanahan stood looking at the Sea Lynx. Water-soaked and barely alive after their escape from the cave, she was still, clearly, the sister whose portrait he had seen years before in Frenchy le Fleur’s wallet. This woman, whose face had haunted him across half the world, now stood less than an arm’s length away, staring at him with hatred in her eyes. He managed to ask the Sea Lynx how she had followed him.

  She pointed to a sloop not unlike his own, beached a hundred yards from them. Suddenly she lunged for Shanahan’s flensing blade and very nearly came away with it. Snarling, she warned him, “Our truce is over.”

  Shanahan smiled sadly. “Do you really hate me that much?”

  She spit at his feet.

  “I don’t blame you, you know. I truly don’t. You loved your brother. So did I, Antoinette. We were as close as brothers, as close as you and Frenchy—Albert—were as sister and brother. When he died, you know, either of us was willing to die for the other. We gambled for who would live and would die, and Frenchie cheated. He cheated so his friend could live. And in the years since then, if only you knew, Antoinette, how I have carried your image in my mind’s eye. If only you knew the hours and years that I’ve thought about your face.”

  If Shanahan thought that his plea would do anything to change the Sea Lynx’s attitude he was mistaken. “I don’t know what you’re talking about and I’m not the least bit interested. I’m going
back into that cave as soon as I can, and I’m going to come away with the treasure of the Red Robe Men.”

  “You can try,” Shanahan told her. “But I doubt that you’ll find it. After all of the twists and turns of the cavern, all of the branches, it was just dumb luck that we found it this time. I doubt that anyone will ever find the treasure, and if they do, they’ll probably die before they find their way back out.”

  “We’ll see about that, M’sieu,” the Sea Lynx mouthed defiantly.

  “So we shall,” Shanahan replied.

  The Devil’s Hop Yard

  It was in the autumn of 1928 that those terrible events which came to be known as the Dunwich Horror transpired. The residents of the upper Miskatonic Valley in Massachusetts, at all times a taciturn breed of country folk never known for their hospitality or communicativeness toward outsiders, became thereafter positively hostile to such few travelers as happened to trespass upon their hilly and infertile region.

  The people of the Dunwich region in particular, a sparse and inbred race with few intellectual or material attainments to show for their generations of toil, gradually became fewer than ever in number. It was the custom of the region to marry late and to have few children. Those infants delivered by the few physicians and midwives who practiced thereabouts were often deformed in some subtle and undefinable way; it would be impossible for an observer to place his finger upon the exact nature of the defect, yet it was plain that something was frighteningly wrong with many of the boys and girls born in the Miskatonic Valley.

  Yet, as the years turned slowly, the pale, faded folk of Dunwich continued to raise their thin crops, to tend their dull-eyed and stringy cattle, and to wring their hard existence from the poor, farmed-out earth of their homesteads.

  Events of interest were few and petty; the columns of the Aylesbury Transcript, the Arkham Advertiser, and even the imposing Boston Globe were scanned for items of diversion. Dunwich itself supported no regular newspaper, not even the slim weekly sheet that subsists in many such semi-rural communities.

  It was therefore a source of much local gossip and a delight to the scandal-mongers when Earl Sawyer abandoned Mamie Bishop, his common-law wife of twenty years standing, and took up instead with Zenia Whateley. Sawyer was an uncouth dirt farmer, some fifty years of age. His cheeks covered perpetually with a stubble that gave him the appearance of not having shaved for a week, his nose and eyes marked with the red lines of broken minor blood vessels, and his stoop-shouldered, shuffling gait marked him as a typical denizen of Dunwich’s hilly environs.

  Zenia Whateley was a thin, pallid creature, the daughter of old Zebulon Whateley and a wife so retiring in her lifetime and so thoroughly forgotten since her death that none could recall the details of her countenance or even her given name. The latter had been painted carelessly on the oblong wooden marker that indicated the place of her burial, but the cold rains and watery sunlight of the round of Dunwich’s seasons had obliterated even this trace of the dead woman’s individuality.

  Zenia must have taken after her mother, for her own appearance was unprepossessing, her manner cringing, and her speech so infrequent and so diffident that few could recall ever having heard her voice. The loafers and gossips at Osborn’s General Store in Dunwich were hard put to understand Earl Sawyer’s motives in abandoning Mamie Bishop for Zenia Whateley. Not that Mamie was noted for her great beauty or scintillating personality; on the contrary: she was known as a meddler and a snoop, and her sharp tongue had stung many a denizen hoping to see some misdemeanor pass unnoted. Still, Mamie had within her that spark of vitality so seldom found in the folk of the upper Miskatonic, that trait of personality known in the rural argot as gumption, so that it was puzzling to see her perched beside Earl on the front seat of his rattling Model T Ford, her few belongings tied in slovenly bundles behind her, as Sawyer drove her over the dust-blowing turnpike to Aylesbury where she took quarters in the town’s sole, dilapidated rooming house.

  The year was 1938 when Earl Sawyer and Mamie Bishop parted ways. It had been a decade since the death of the poor, malformed giant Wilbur Whateley and the dissolution—for this word, rather than death, best characterizes the end of that monster—of his even more gigantic and even more shockingly made twin brother. But now it was the end of May, and the spring thaw had come late and grudgingly to the hard-pressed farmlands of the Miskatonic Valley this year.

  When Earl Sawyer returned, alone, to Dunwich, he stopped in the center of the town, such as it was, parking his Model T opposite Osborn’s. He crossed the dirty thoroughfare and climbed onto the porch of old Zebulon Whateley’s house, pounding once upon the gray, peeling door while the loafers at Osborn’s stared and commented behind his back.

  The door opened and Earl Sawyer disappeared inside for a minute. The loafers puzzled over what business Earl might have with Zebulon Whateley, and their curiosity was rewarded shortly when Sawyer reappeared leading Zenia Whateley by one flaccid hand. Zenia wore a thin cotton dress, and through its threadbare covering it was obvious even from the distance of Osborn’s that she was with child.

  Earl Sawyer drove home to his dusty farm, bringing Zenia with him, and proceeded to install her in place of Mamie Bishop. There was little noticeable change in the routine at Sawyer’s farm with the change in its female occupant. Each morning Earl and Zenia would rise, Zenia would prepare and serve a meagre repast for them, and they would breakfast in grim silence. Earl would thereafter leave the house, carefully locking the door behind him with Zenia left inside to tend to the chores of housekeeping, and Earl would spend the entire day working out-of-doors.

  The Sawyer farm contained just enough arable land to raise a meager crop of foodstuffs and to support a thin herd of the poor cattle common to the Miskatonic region. The bleak hillside known as the Devil’s Hop Yard was also located on Sawyer’s holdings. Here had grown no tree, shrub nor blade of grass for as far back as the oldest archives of Dunwich recorded, and despite Earl Sawyer’s repeated attempts to raise a crop on its unpleasant slopes, the Hop Yard resisted and remained barren. Even so there persisted reports of vague, unpleasant rumblings and cracklings from beneath the Hop Yard, and occasionally shocking odors were carried from it to adjoining farms when the wind was right.

  On the first Sunday of June, 1938, Earl Sawyer and Zenia Whateley were seen to leave the farmhouse and climb into Sawyer’s Model T. They drove together into Dunwich village, and, leaving the Model T in front of old Zebulon Whateley’s drab house, walked across the churchyard, pausing to read such grave markers as remained there standing and legible, then entered the Dunwich Congregational Church that had been founded by the Reverend Abijah Hoadley in 1747. The pulpit of the Dunwich Congregational Church had been vacant since the unexplained disappearance of the Reverend Isaiah Ashton in the summer of 1912, but a circuit-riding Congregational minister from the city of Arkham conducted services in Dunwich from time to time.

  This was the first occasion of Earl Sawyer’s attendance at services within memory, and there was a nodding of heads and a hissing of whispers up and down the pews as Earl and Zenia entered the frame building. Earl and Zenia took a pew to themselves at the rear of the congregation and when the order of service had reached its conclusion they remained behind to speak with the minister. No witness was present, of course, to overhear the conversation that took place, but later the minister volunteered his recollection of Sawyer’s request and his own responses.

  Sawyer, the minister reported, had asked him to perform a marriage. The couple to be united were himself (Sawyer) and Zenia Whateley. The minister had at first agreed, especially in view of Zenia’s obvious condition, and the desirability of providing for a legitimate birth for her expected child. But Sawyer had refused to permit the minister to perform the usual marriage ceremony of the Congregational Church, insisting instead upon a ceremony involving certain foreign terms to be provided from some ancient documents handed down through the family of the bride.

  Nor would Sawyer per
mit the minister to read the original documents, providing in their place crudely rendered transcripts written by a clumsy hand on tattered, filthy scraps of paper. Unfortunately the minister no longer had even these scraps. They had been retained by Sawyer, and the minister could recall only vaguely a few words of the strange and almost unpronounceable incantations he had been requested to utter: N’gai, n’gha’ghaa, bugg-shoggog, he remembered. And a reference to a lost city “Between the Yr and the Nhhngr.”

  The minister had refused to perform the blasphemous ceremony requested by Sawyer, holding that it would be ecclesiastically improper and possibly even heretical of him to do so, but he renewed his offer to perform an orthodox Congregational marriage, and possibly to include certain additional materials provided by the couple if he were shown a translation also, so as to convince himself of the propriety of the ceremony.

  Earl Sawyer refused vehemently, warning the minister that he stood in far greater peril should he ever learn the meaning of the words than if he remained in ignorance of them. At length Sawyer stalked angrily from the church, pulling the passive Zenia Whateley behind him, and returned with her to his farm.

  A few nights later the couple were visited by Zenia’s father, old Zebulon Whateley, and also by Squire Sawyer Whateley, of the semi-undecayed Whateleys, a man who held the unusual distinction of claiming cousinship to both Earl Sawyer and Zenia Whateley. At midnight the four figures, Earl, Zenia, old Zebulon, and Squire Whateley, climbed slowly to the top of the Devil’s Hop Yard. What acts they performed at the crest of the hill are not known with certainty, but Luther Brown, now a fully-grown man and engaged to be married to George Corey’s daughter Olivia, stated later that he had been searching for a lost heifer near the boundary between Corey’s farm and Sawyer’s, and saw the four figures silhouetted against the night constellations as they stood atop the hill.

  As Luther Brown watched, all four disrobed; he was fairly certain of the identification of the three men, and completely sure of that of Zenia because of her obvious pregnancy. Completely naked they set fire to an altar of wood apparently set up in advance on the peak of the Hop Yard. What rites they performed before Luther fled in terror and disgust he refused to divulge, but later that night loud cracking sounds were heard coming from the vicinity of the Sawyer farm, and an earthquake was reported to have shaken the entire Miskatonic Valley, registering on the seismographic instruments of Harvard College and causing swells in the harbor at Innsmouth.