Cthulhu Fhtagn!

by Laird Barron

  He blew air. “Don’t be daft. Our adventure will be of an urban nature—at first. And then, well, wait and see. I’ve been investigating a moment in the city’s past. You’ll enjoy what I have planned for us tonight.”

  “You’re rarely so secretive, Jacob. Why the obliqueness?”

  “Artistic effect, let’s say. I’ve been patching pieces of the past together, delving into buried records and testaments, correlating what I’ve snatched. It’s amazing, how alive the past becomes when one delves into it. There are so many secrets aching to be disinterred.”

  “Name your discovery,” I commanded.

  “Go have the host call us a cab,” he countered.

  I rose and did so, and when I returned to our booth Jacob was pulling a black ski cap over his long blond hair. He pushed out of the booth and struggled with his knapsack. “Let me take that,” I suggested, taking hold of the thing and finding that it was indeed quite weighty. “Damn, what the hell did you pack in here?”

  “Relics of ritual,” was his arcane reply. I followed him outside, and before long our cab pulled up in front of us. Once seated, Jacob bent to the driver and said, “75 North Main Street.” I leaned back, the heavy rucksack on my lap, and after a short ride we arrived in front of the First Baptist Church. I protested, as the taxi fled from us, that the building would be locked shut at this time of evening. Ignoring me, Jacob led the way to an alley that took us to a back door of the structure. There was very little light, for the moon was curtained by clouds, and I could barely make out the small silver implement that my friend had removed from his pocket. Understanding his request that we dress in black, I watched as he slipped the contrivance into the keyhole and fiddled with it. He pushed, and the door opened.

  The backpack was heavy on my shoulder as I stepped into a space that might have been a storage room, although the chamber was so dark that I couldn’t make anything out clearly. I felt Jacob work at the zipper of one of the rucksack’s compartments, and suddenly our way was illuminated by a flashlight’s powerful beam. We walked through a wide doorway and entered the enormous Meeting House, and I followed Jacob into one of the cubicles and sat upon a pew. The flashlight’s bright blue beam was switched off, and we sat in silent darkness for a little while before my friend began to speak.

  “The Wilcox bas-relief that we saw in the Dodge House Gallery was fashioned on February 28, 1925, the day that the Charlevoix-Kamouraska earthquake rocked eastern Canada and portions of the northeastern United States. The young artist was living in the Fleur-de-Lys Building across the street at the time, and his recorded statement about the sculpture is curious, to say the least. He said that he had fashioned it ‘in a dream,’ a dream of great Cyclopean cities composed of titanic blocks of stone and towering monoliths that dripped with oceanic slime. He called what he saw a ‘dream landscape,’ and it’s an odd coincidence that around the same time, in Paris, a fantastic artist named Ardois-Bonnot hung a profane painting of the same title in a salon. A correspondent in Holland now owns that painting, and he sent me a photograph of it. Here.”

  Jacob took a small photo from his jacket pocket and I heard the click of his flashlight switch. I studied the image beneath the beam. “It looks vaguely familiar,” I muttered. Then it came to me: the painting was of the fantastic Cyclopean architectural background that the artist Wilcox had etched onto his bas-relief. The alien city was too uniquely fabulous to be mistaken as any other representation.

  My companion began to speak again. “The pastor here in the 1920s had an adoring sister who was of a sensitive artistic nature. Inspired by her brother’s calling, she became interested in the art of stained glass and found employment in a friend’s small factory which specialized in manufacturing windows for religious houses. She was allowed to work on a personal project shortly following a physical and emotional collapse that she had suffered in late February of 1925, a project that inspired furtive murmurings from her fellow employees. She later presented her window, such as it was, to her brother, after which its history becomes a mystery. Come, follow me.” Jacob rose and took up his backpack, and I followed as he led the way up the carpeted steps to the high place where the podium was situated. Setting down his burden, he asked me to hold the flashlight, and as I shone it on him he reached for two of the four high shuttered doors that had been built into the wall. The doors opened at his maneuvering of them, revealing an aperture of darkness into which Jacob hurled his knapsack. “Help me up there,” he ordered as he retrieved the torch.

  “What the hell is it, Jacob?”

  He clucked his tongue. “It’s the baptismal font, my dear. Help me inside. You’ll have no problem climbing up, giant that you are.” I did as asked and lifted him to the opening, and then I climbed into the chamber. I heard Jacob rummaging through his rucksack, and then a match was struck and a tall bulky candle was lit. He reached into his bag and produced another similar candle, and when it had been ignited the room’s contours became discernible. The raised font was enormous. Behind it was a wall, at the center of which had been installed a stained glass window. My friend vanished for some few moments, and then I heard the sound of running water. When he returned, he flashed me a mischievous smile. “I’ve done my homework.”

  “What are we doing here?”

  He began to undress as he spoke. “Some people say that the Outer Ones find us alluring because of the chemistry of our blood. Well, that may contain a modicum of truth; but the real appeal is our ability to dream, because that’s the one aspect that we share with these otherwise utterly alien beings. Indeed, my little theory is that when they molded us from prehistoric mud, the Great Old Ones and their kind instilled within us the ability to dream, so that in our dreams we could pay homage to them. Don’t look so confused. You’re a student of Pickman, and he had the talent of dreaming more than most. It was in his dreams that he located many of the hidden byways that he then sought and found in wakefulness. Oh, the paths we may locate in dreaming. And I burn to find the path to that.” Here he pointed at the stained glass window, but the place was too dark for me to make out what the window depicted.

  Jacob was now entirely naked. The sound of running water ceased. “It’s programmed, you see, to turn off once the water reaches its proper depth. You should probably kneel, Nathan, because we are about to ape religion.” I did not move as he climbed the steps that led to the font’s brim, and he began to sing as he flopped into the water. “Much deeper than I imagined it would be; but, of course, I am ridiculously tiny. On your knees, mortal—we are now to become fantastic!” He vanished for some moments, and I heard his playful splashing. Then his head emerged again and he began to speak the gibberish that he had enunciated in the gallery; but he spoke it in such a way, with such conviction, that the sound of it caused my bones to tremble.

  The clouds that had curtained the moon must have dissipated, because beams of lunar light became to shimmer behind the stained glass window. I detected that the wall into which the window had been fastened was a false one, and that the real church wall and its wide window was beyond it. I peered at the decorative window and knew that it was the lunatic work of the former pastor’s sister. It was an almost majestic representation of the pseudo-city that Henry Anthony Wilcox had etched behind the figure of his monster and it depicted the fabulous evil erections that I had beheld in my dream of blood and madness. I gazed at it, and Jacob spoke his outrageous chant once more, almost shrieking the vile words. The moonlight seemed to shudder; it brightened into beams of sickly yellow and rancid green. The large candles began to smoke profusely, and my wide eyes burned as I watched the delirious pantomime before me. I had been transported into my misty dream once more, however much I was aware of the room’s solid floor beneath my heels.

  Jacob sank from view as waves of water splashed from the font, onto me. He surfaced once again and gargled “Cthulhu R’lyeh fhtagn,” and then he vanished, for such a prolonged time that I grew frantic with fear. I reached for the rim of the font
and leaned over it. For a few seconds I was aware of the thing that floundered in the water, the formless white polypous with wide luminous eyes—beseeching eyes. I saw the light of life die in those eyes as the thing grew still. I sensed that the ritual required human blood, and so I smashed my forehead against the metal rim of the font and smelled my blood as it oozed into the pool. But, blood was not the life in this instance, and I cried in fury as I hurled myself over the rim, into the depths of water. I lifted the lifeless husk of the one who had been my beloved friend, and raised him out of the water, into the smoke and lunar light of dreaming. I rose, like some monster of myth, with a stained glass city of titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths behind me. I wept, because I would no longer taste the mad dreams of the acolyte in my embrace. I groaned, because I could not flex my heavy wings and rise out of the water that was not my cosmic element. And I raged, because I could not see the stars through which I had filtered in antediluvian aeons, those stars that I would terrify so that they crawled through the chaos to the baying of Nyarlathotep, those shuddering stars that would align so as to spell my appalling name.

  The Lurker In The Shadows

  Nathan Carson

  [HPL to SEK]

  10 Barnes St.,

  Providence, R.I.,

  Decr. 02, 1973

  Dear Mr. King:---

  I greatly enjoyed receiving your letter, & find the discovery of yet another Yankee of such good taste has disturbed my traditional ennui, & indeed ignites a certain sense of wonder inspired by cosmic coincidence. As the years pass, & I delve further into my dotage, my faith in the literacy & self-education of youth culture wanes with each passing season. Well met, young scribe.

  While you flatter me beyond necessity by making such declarations of the quality of my early work, as well as its apparent profundity upon your own aspirations, I must admit that you are the first ever to mention that particularly wretched paperback as anything more than poorly edited pap from an era in which the licensing of my work had truly sprawled beyond the control of an estate as modest as my own was at that time. I ask not for pity, but please believe that it was the greatest struggle to put pen to page throughout the explosive years of the 1940s as my small fictional body until that time was in a rather constant state of bastardization, plagiarism, & puzzling critical reevaluation. I’m certain that I have not seen a copy of TLITS in the last twenty years—& sincerely hope never to again!

  Despite your assertions that my Mythos have [sic] in some small way led you down a dark path of your own, I must congratulate you for balancing your learned state with a love for the fantastic & horrifying. For too long, those worlds have been mutually exclusive, as well evidenced by the degradation from the once lofty written worlds of the strange, to the lurid fare projected beneath cheapened moonlight at every drive-in cinema in this nation so wretchedly obsessed with “progress” which has all but completely lost sight of its proud origins & originators.

  Of course you will find no reason to extend any condolence to this octogenarian so seemingly well established & received. But bear in mind the insidiousness with which those Hollywood hucksters twisted my art into little more than scantily clad models dashing headlong into closets full of Technicolor tentacles. Fame & fortune may have been made, but the many deaths my artistic soul experienced have far exceeded anything devised in the Tower of London. Surely without the annual bloodletting throughout the 1960s of films with my name smeared in raucous red below the titles, Hammer would not be the most successful studio on the European continent.

  & the recent turn toward the Grand-Guignol into which macabre cinema has spiraled seems seeped in but one colour—crimson! Why, it was but a few years prior that I encountered the severely disturbed Italian youth who directed The Squid With the Crystal Plumage. Pardon this old quibbler, but only certain cephalopods boast a beak, let alone quills! Exactly why that wretch was bestowed with honors at NecronomiCannes, I may never know.

  May I implore—if you ever find producers urging allowance of your gruesome tales to slum their way from the sanctity of paper to gross silver celluloid, resist with all thy might, & do not ever, under any circumstances, allow yourself to be coerced into a cheap cameo. The only adaptation of my own which I can still stand to admit as having its origins in the recesses of my id is Hitchcock’s Cool Air, & the scene in which the camera passes me & Hitch in the elevator headed toward the 13th floor makes me curse & wince to this very day.

  But again, I have digressed. I myself know the sensation of reverence for an author of stature beyond my ken. In my teens, I discovered the work of one Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany—a lion of a man whose life experience & generosity would affect me, firstly as a literary influence, & later as a patron & provocateur. Had I not been goaded into introducing myself to keen old Drax at a reading in October 1919, I very well might have starved to death in obscurity long ago. It is no secret that my correspondence with him began immediately following, & his good will led to my liberation from the shackles of self-imposed reclusion. Not only was my work published in professional venues & the dignity of hardcover, but paunchy Plunkett went so far as to provide the funding for my first Atlantic voyage. That visit to the old country was an eye opener, to be certain. Without Dunsany, it is quite assured that I would never have pointed a pistol at a pachyderm!

  Clearly you are on your own path & need far less encouragement than I did at an even more advanced age. However I would be quite honored if you would share your ms with these tired eyes, if only because us Yanks must stick together, regardless if the bond is of crusted blood & mouldering sinew.

  Please give my regards to your family & “Cthulhu fhtagn” to you as well, young sir.

  Most cordially & sincerely yours,

  H P Lovecraft

  April 08, 2016

  1:00 pm EST

  World Weird Con - Portland, ME

  Guest of Honor Keynote

  To the esteemed devotees of the World Weird Convention 2016, I thank you for your consideration here. I know that being a member of such an illustrious family makes my Featured Guest status suspect of nepotism or worse, but I do have a story to relate to you today that I believe you will find as fascinating and inexplicable as I have.

  My name is Ashton Nathaniel King. Yes, that King. It’s true that my father is widely known as one of the Big Three—King, Lovecraft, and Lockhart, (with Poe clinging to a distant but respectable 4th)—who have come to rule the literature of the fantastic, horrible, and strange.

  With my father’s coma so widely discussed in the last year by tabloids and social media, I believe the time for me to weigh in my opinion has come. As well, I have unearthed some documents that leave my mind reeling, and hope sincerely that by sharing them with you, I may ultimately find some peace on the matter.

  Where to begin? At the time of my father’s birth in 1947, Howard Phillips Lovecraft was by the far the most famous author in our field. Launched to stratospheric heights by his postwar collections and film adaptations, he had eclipsed even Poe in durability and his stories were discussed in parlors and salons.

  Of course we all take for granted Walt Disney’s contribution as we’ve lived with it our whole lives. But did you know that before Mickey’s famous turn as The Outsider in Fantasia, Disney had considered basing this sequence on the poem “Der Zauberlehrling” by Goethe? How different might history have run for our industry then? Dancing brooms and puddle buckets? Hardly the stuff nightmares are made of.

  But when that ragged cartoon mouse finally caught his own visage in the mirror, ten million children cried out in terror together, and we finally knew ourselves; for we are all outsiders. Decades later, Matt Dillon’s live action turn brought the subject home for a generation of teens too jaded for the hand-painted version.

  Well known is the story that my father discovered an H.P. Lovecraft collection that belonged to his father before him, stashed away in an attic space. Dowsing for black gold, he struck it, and peel
ed back the pages of the rare and now impossible to find The Lurker in the Shadows. Go no further than Wikipedia, or King’s famous essay collection, Danses in Literature of the Supernatural and Macabre if you prefer the long version. Bottom line: Lovecraft gave him purpose from a young age, only too apparent throughout his life.

  What is odd to King-ophiles, the obsessed fans that congregate on message boards and via hand-stapled magazines and at conventions such as this, is how different King’s widely suppressed first novel Carrie (Doubleday 1974) is when considered alongside all his more famous Mythos work that followed.

  Casual fans are not even aware of this earlier novel, and copies were fetching some absurd prices for a time—that is until the crudity of its language, vulgarity of subject, and overall inferiority to his later work was established by critics, eventually putting the matter to rest. Even I had not read this book until I felt compelled to quite recently by some remarkable ephemera that fell into my possession.

  It is more than simple literary legend that my father visited Providence in 1974 in order to pay his respects to the dying Howard Phillips Lovecraft. But the letters I have here prove beyond doubt that the two had been in dialog for several months prior. With your permission, I will interrupt my long-winded speech by reading another sample from these missives now.

  [HPL to SEK]

  10 Barnes St.,

  Providence, R.I.,

  Decr. 07, 1973

  Dear Mr. Prince (may I call you this?—It seems far more apt a sobriquet for an heir so apparent…)

  I received your ms for Carrie & will offer what limited editorial comments this enfeebled mind may conjure. The first few pages reveal a keen intellect & superior sense of characterization with which I have struggled since the late 19th century. Still I must say that I am a bit shocked at the crude modernity you employ in regards to the scatological & even gynecological references. Perhaps that is the gentleman in me. I am sure your adolescent readership will enjoy every drop soaked into those sanguine sanitary napkins. I fear the critics, on the other hand, may find cause to laugh at you.