Cthulhu Fhtagn!

by Laird Barron

  “Daddy!” Susan called to him, interrupting her father so that he might save face in front of guests.

  “Susan? What is it?” Sir Arthur turned toward us and, after a moment of shock, he descended the stairs and held out his hand to me. “Well, well, Major Stamford! We weren’t expecting you until dinner.”

  “Wonderful to see you again, Sir Arthur,” I said, shaking hands. “I understand congratulations are in order.”

  “What?” Sir Arthur asked. It took him a moment to catch my meaning. “Oh, yes, Bella. She’s outside, I expect. I suppose you’d better meet her.”

  I was taken aback by Sir Arthur’s dismissal of his own marriage, and I didn’t rightly know what to say. So instead, I simply stammered, “Oh, right,” and then motioned to Vos.

  “Uh, Sir Arthur,” I said, “may I introduce my friend, Hieronymus Vos?”

  “What?” Sir Arthur harrumphed. “Oh, yes, the detective fellow. Hazel said you were bringing a foreigner along.”

  I expected Vos to be offended, but he smiled and said, “Ja, that is I. It is very nice to meet you, Sir Arthur.” He turned to the other man. “And you also, Professor Howard.”

  Howard seemed surprised at being recognized, but he grinned as he shook hands with Vos.

  “Very nice to be noticed, sir,” Howard said.

  “Howard, you mean to say you know this man?” Sir Arthur demanded.

  “Nee, nee,” Vos interjected. “We have never met, but how could I fail to recognize Professor William Howard of Oxford, the noted archaeologist?” He smiled at Howard and said, “I read with great interest about your excavations in Arabia two years ago.”

  “Oh,” Howard said. He suddenly seemed a bit put-off, though I couldn’t imagine why.

  “It is a great honor to meet two such distinguished intellectuals,” Vos continued, bobbing his head to Sir Arthur and Professor Howard. “Though I am only an amateur….” He paused and raised a finger, an idea coming to him. “Forgive me, but did I hear mention of Sogdian?”

  Sir Arthur exchanged a look with Howard.

  “Yes,” he said hesitantly. “Why?”

  “It so happens that I have a very passing familiarity with the language,” Vos explained. “I do not wish to impose, but if I might be of some service to the friend of my friend Stamford….”

  Sir Arthur looked at Howard. “You put him up to this, didn’t you?”

  “No, I—” Howard stammered. “I’ve never met this man before in my life.”

  “Nee,” Vos said, “it is simply a felicitous coincidence, and one I thought I might use to be of service. Oh, but if it is of no interest to you, Sir Arthur, I must beg forgiveness for my presumption and withdraw the offer.”

  Sir Arthur narrowed his eyes and studied Vos silently. After a moment, his expression became rather hopeful and he said:

  “Well, if it is just coincidence, it is a fortunate one. Let’s speak more about this after dinner, Mister…Vos, was it?”

  “Ja,” Vos replied, bobbing his head.

  “Hmm,” Sir Arthur answered. Then, without another word to us, he turned and continued on his way, vanishing into the depths of the decaying house with Howard hurrying along behind him.

  Susan looked a little embarrassed at her father’s behavior.

  “Do forgive Daddy,” she said. “I fear he’s become rather reclusive in his old age.”

  “Not to worry,” I told her. I turned to Vos. “Still, dashed good luck you knowing about that Soggy-Dinny thing.”

  Vos looked pained for a moment.

  “Mijn vriend, the Sogdian language was practically the lingua franca of the Silk Road during the Tang Dynasty. How could I not have studied it?”

  “Oh, right,” I said, trying to hide my confusion.

  ***

  Susan led us to a little patio in the back, which lay at the edge of the dense Brympton forest. The lawn was in rather a bad shape, overgrown with weeds in places and not at all well tended, but I did see James and Hazel on the tennis lawn making a go of things. There were two women sitting in chairs on the patio, sipping lemonade while they watched.

  “Everyone!” Susan called. “Look who’s arrived!”

  James paused and waved to me with his racquet. “Hello, Stamford! Glad you could make it!” He was then narrowly missed by Hazel’s next serve, and the two began playing again amid shouts of “Unfair!” and “Buck up!” and “I’ll hit you in the head properly next time!”

  “Ah, life as usual,” I mused happily. Despite the poor state of the grounds, I was suddenly put in mind of idyllic summers past.

  “Ja,” Vos said dubiously.

  “Is that John Stamford I hear?”

  I recognized the voice as belonging to Gwen, James’s younger sister. She bounded out of her chair, lemonade in hand, and gave me a long look.

  “Well, well,” she said, gazing at me like a cat that has taken a sudden interest in a mouse.

  “Hello, Gwen.”

  She was as I remembered her: rather attractive and with a devious look in her eyes. She looked thoroughly American now, with her dark hair cut into a short, sharp bob. I caught myself staring and quickly introduced Vos:

  “Uh, Gwen, this is my friend Hieronymus Vos. He’s Flemish.”

  “Oh, how deliciously continental,” Gwen said.

  “He investigates murders!” Hazel called from the tennis lawn. “Grisly ones!”

  “Continental and grisly.” Gwen grinned. “How delightful.”

  “A pleasure to meet you, Miss Turnbridge,” Vos said, gently shaking her hand. He turned toward the last member of the party, who had just begun to rise from her chair. “And finally…?”

  Susan rushed to make introductions:

  “And this is our stepmother, Bella Turnbridge.”

  Now I don’t want you to think I’m a brute or anything, but I must confess that when I first laid eyes on Bella Turnbridge it gave me a shock. She wasn’t exactly ugly, but neither was she any towering beauty. Her eyes were large and milky, though she was able to hide some portion of this behind a pair of thick glasses. They were also spaced a bit too far apart for comfort, and her mouth, as she smiled, was thin-lipped and far too wide. Against my own intentions, I recoiled slightly at the sight.

  “A…pleasure, Mrs. Turnbridge,” I stammered.

  Vos seemed to have no trouble with Bella’s queer look, and he simply smiled and tapped his hat politely.

  “Ja, it is very nice to meet you, Madam Turnbridge. Forgive me, but you are a local of the village, are you not?”

  Bella smiled again and said, “Yes, I am. How did you know?”

  “A fortunate guess,” Vos replied.

  “Is it true you’re a detective?” Bella asked.

  “Ja,” Vos said, “among other things.”

  “I do so love detective stories,” Bella said. I glanced at the book she had been reading, and sure enough it was some tawdry thing about murder and whatnot.

  “Well, I….” Vos motioned to Gwen’s empty chair. “May I sit?”

  “I’m not using it,” Gwen said, still looking at me.

  “Oh, please do,” Bella told Vos. “It’s nice to have someone to talk to. I don’t understand all of these sports and things.”

  Vos chuckled. “Me also, I do not understand them. But I do understand murder. Would you like me to tell you about some of my cases?”

  “Goodness, yes!” Bella exclaimed.

  As they spoke, Gwen nudged me in the arm and motioned toward the woods with her head.

  “Care to take me for a walk, John?” she asked coyly.

  “Oh, gosh, yes,” I replied, rather more enthusiastically than intended.

  ***

  Our stroll took us through the woods on the far side of the grounds, where they ran along the cliffs above the sea. Gwen and I had gone for walks together during the War, including one particularly poignant time shortly before Passchendaele when I asked her to marry me. After the War we both saw sense and abandoned the engagemen
t, but I still carry happy memories for it.

  As we walked, Gwen told me about her new life in America, as an actress in New York. It all sounded very glamorous, and I assumed it was a rather profitable occupation at that, for the parties she told me about sounded dashed expensive. I told her about my travels with Vos, including that rather unfortunate incident in Cairo in ’21 when I was very nearly buried alive. We both had a grand laugh about things, and then suddenly Gwen stopped short and looked around. Her face grew pale. We stood at the edge of a low hill that rose to about eye level and then dropped away very suddenly toward the seashore. The trees there were especially tangled and overawing, and the shadows they cast put me in mind of some rather silly words, like “eldritch” and “Brythonic”.

  “Goodness,” Gwen said. “I hadn’t realized we were going this way.” She paused before she explained, “This is where Mother died.”

  “What, here?” I asked. I quickly checked under my feet to be sure I hadn’t trodden on a gravestone or anything.

  “Well, here’s where she caught the pneumonia,” Gwen said. “Out in the middle of a thunderstorm looking for fairies living under the hill. Damned stupid of her.” Gwen sighed. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “No, no, not at all,” I assured her.

  “And now that idiot Newbury’s running about the place doing the same thing.”

  “Is that what he’s doing here?” I asked. “You know, I nearly ran him over in my car coming down.”

  Gwen laughed. “Serves him right. Dashing here and there on that bicycle of his looking for trods and fairy rings and goodness knows what else. He’ll get himself into mischief, mark my words.”

  “And what about that Howard chap?” I asked. “Is he looking for fairies and whatnot as well?”

  “Oh, Lord, no,” Gwen replied. “No, he works for Daddy. Helps him buy and authenticate antiquities for his collection.”

  “Does he have the money for that?”

  “What?” Gwen asked in surprise.

  “Well….” I suddenly felt rather awkward. “I thought he might have fallen on hard times, state of the house and all.”

  “Oh, that,” Gwen said. “No, Daddy’s still rich as Croesus, he just spends all his money on statues and old manuscripts.”

  “But the servants?” I asked, in reference to there seeming to be none at all.

  “Let most of them go,” Gwen answered. “Didn’t trust them around his collection. He’s only got our old butler, the cook, and Susan’s maid left. Poor thing does for both her and Bella now. Father doesn’t even talk to them anymore. He just shouts orders apparently. Lets Susan and Bella manage everything else. Probably the only reason he remarried.”

  “I suppose there are worse reasons for mar—” I began.

  We were strolling along the edge of the hill, and at that moment I put my foot wrong on a loose stone and suddenly lost my balance. With a cry of alarm, I tumbled down the slope, my coat catching against every bush and bramble I passed. I grabbed for some sort of handhold to stop myself, but there was nothing I could do until I finally came to a halt at the bottom.

  “Oh Lord!” Gwen called to me. “John, are you alive?”

  I stood and brushed myself off. I’d been bruised, but everything was more or less intact.

  “Alive and well!” I called. “Just…um…. Just a moment and I’ll find a way back up.”

  “No, you stay there!” Gwen shouted. “I’ll come down and we can walk back along the shore. There’s a path around here somewhere.”

  Before I could protest, Gwen had vanished from sight and I was left in the arboreal twilight of the overhanging trees. I waited there for a little while, when I heard the sound of someone moving through the brush a little further along the hill.

  “Gwen?” I called.

  There was no answer and the noise stopped, but soon I heard it again, now moving in my direction. Being of an adventurous nature, I crept forward, peering through the brush to get sight of the stranger. I suddenly began to suspect that it wasn’t Gwen at all.

  Then I passed through a tangle of brush and into a sort of overgrown hollow at the base of the hill. It was very dark, like the rest of the wood, but I managed to see that there was something crouched in the mottled darkness beside a tumble of stones. I did not see it clearly, but I made out a curious bipedal form covered in some manner of rubbery flesh. It slowly raised its elongated head and fixed me with a pair of baleful eyes that glinted in the shadows. At the time, I saw little of it clearly, and for that small mercy I am grateful.

  Slowly, the thing raised one skeletal arm and extended a bony finger at me like Death itself. I consider myself to be a man of instinct, and as my first instinct was to flee, I fled. I scrambled through the undergrowth in the opposite direction, desperate to be away from the thing that I had scarcely seen and could not clearly remember. The vagueness of it made my fear all the more real, as is so often the case.

  And so, I ran: I ran and ran and ran, until suddenly I broke from the trees and very nearly collided with Gwen.

  “Good heavens!” Gwen exclaimed as I stumbled to a stop and she reached out to steady me. “John, what is it?”

  “I…I….”

  “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost!”

  I leaned against a tree and took a few deep breaths.

  “I think perhaps I did,” I finally replied.

  There was a pause and then Gwen began laughing. At first I was a bit angry at this—imagine, laughing at my evident distress!—but soon I was laughing with her. The memory of what I had seen was now little more than a fog and it was very easy to dismiss my moment of panic as the work of shadows and nerves.

  “You’re not serious, John,” Gwen said.

  “Not at all,” I replied, trying to look my most unruffled. “I think I saw an animal and it gave me a fright.”

  “Oh, John, you are an old silly sometimes.” Gwen shook her head and laughed again. “Come along, it’ll be time for dinner soon.”

  We went back along the shore, enjoying the cool breeze blowing off the sea. As we left the woods behind us, I convinced myself that the entire thing had been the product of a wild imagination. Ghosts and goblins weren’t real, and no cool-headed Englishman should entertain such fantasies.

  As we went along, we saw Newbury bicycling along the edge of the forest nearby. Sighting us, he gave a wave and we three converged and exchanged greetings.

  “Evening all!” Newbury exclaimed. He pointed at me and grinned. “I say! You’re the fellow who nearly ran me over, aren’t you?”

  “Well, I—”

  “Jolly good laugh,” Newbury continued.

  “Quite,” I agreed halfheartedly.

  Gwen quickly changed the subject:

  “And how have your studies been progressing, Mister Newbury? Find any interesting fairy circles today?”

  “Well, no,” Newbury replied, “but I believe I may have found your mother’s cave.”

  “Cave?” Gwen sounded bewildered.

  Newbury pulled a small notebook out of his satchel and held it up for inspection.

  “In her notebook, your mother talks about a cave beneath the big hill,” he explained, waving in the general direction of the woods. “She was searching for it the night that she—” He quickly caught himself. “Apparently she believed it was part of the old Celtic legends about the area. The Fair Folk hiding beneath the hills and all that. And I do believe I’ve found it.”

  “Who gave you Mother’s notebook?” Gwen asked, sounding a little angry.

  “Oh, Miss Susan,” Newbury said quickly. “When she found out that I was interested in carrying on your mother’s work, she insisted I take it.”

  “Very generous of her,” Gwen mused. “Is there anything interesting in it?”

  “Absolutely!” Newbury replied. “All manner of exciting things. Recounting of local legends, records of her own observations and sightings, even some stories about ‘dog-men’ and the ancient Wild H
unt. Very thrilling.”

  “If you say so,” Gwen said.

  The mention of ‘dog-men’ gave me a queer turn, but at that moment I could not remember why. Still, the unease it caused me made me fall silent, and so I remained for the rest of the walk, every so often glancing back over my shoulder at the woods and the mournful hill.

  ***

  My nervousness had all but vanished by the time Vos and I joined the others in the sitting room to await the gong for dinner. Newbury was playing the piano, to the delight of Susan and Bella. I saw Gwen seated by the windows with Hazel and John, but before I could go to join them, Vos and I were accosted by Sir Arthur, who seemed much more amiable than when we had first arrived.

  “Good evening Major, Mister Vos,” he said. “Settling in well, I trust.”

  “Oh, rather,” I replied. “Always a treat to be visit—”

  Sir Arthur rather ignored me and focused his attention on Vos.

  “And you, Mister Vos?” he asked. “Will we be enjoying your company for a few days?”

  Vos considered the question and said, “Ja, ja, that is the plan, I believe.”

  “Good, good,” Sir Arthur said. “And you say you can read Sogdian?”

  “Ja, well enough.”

  “Good,” Sir Arthur repeated. Then, without another word, he turned and walked away from us, like we were no longer there.

  After an appropriate pause, I turned to Vos and asked, “What do you make of that?”

  “I make of that a man who knows just what he wants and who has little interest in anything else, mijn vriend,” Vos answered. “And what is desired most by Sir Arthur Turnbridge at this moment is a translator.”

  “But why?” I asked.

  Vos chuckled. “I do not know, but rest assured that it shall be revealed to me soon enough.” He glanced toward the door, where the butler had just appeared. “Ah, and now I think this must be your old friend.”

  “How…?” I began.

  “Do not play the fool, Stamford,” Vos chided. “He is the only one among the guests who has yet to arrive.”

  The butler cleared his throat and announced: