The Gods of HP Lovecraft

by Martha Wells

  Crowley stared at him.

  “What did you mean?”

  “Do you really want to go there?” Crowley asked.

  Ellison was intrigued. There seemed to be an implicit warning in the question, an acknowledgment that such a line of pursuit would lead to unwanted answers. He looked at the other man. “Why?”

  Crowley was a little drunk, so Ellison expected something unexpected, but he was still surprised by the archeologist’s response. “There’s a workroom in the museum that I haven’t shown you yet, that I’m not supposed to show you, that I don’t even think I’m supposed to know about. The artifacts in there…” He trailed off, shaking his head.

  It took only another pint and some gentle cajoling to convince him to go back to the museum and, on the pretext of catching up on some unfinished assignment, get them both into the workroom in the basement—and the other room beyond.

  Crowley used his access card to open the door, then stepped aside to let Ellison in. Low-ceilinged, the windowless room looked more like a bunker than a storage area and contained two rows of long metal tables filled with various archeological finds. An old-fashioned file cabinet sat against the wall at the far end, next to a metal desk and a glass-fronted cabinet filled with tools. There was no computer in sight. Unpainted oak cupboards lined the side walls.

  “Who works here?” Ellison asked.

  Crowley shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m not sure anyone works here. I have never seen another person down here, and there have been no changes in this room since I discovered it two years ago, no indication that another person has been here.”

  “But someone knows about it?”

  “Oh, I’m sure. In fact, when I first asked about it, I was told to stop. Then I was told not to bring it up with anyone. Then I was told to stay away, although, oddly, my access card was never revoked. Whether that was because no one knew I had access or because the people who knew didn’t want to bring up the room with their superiors, I’ve never been sure. Before you arrived, I was specifically warned by Spencer himself not to let you know about this room.”

  “Why?”

  Crowley walked around the edge of the nearest table and down the center aisle, crooking a finger for Ellison to follow. On either side of them, ancient stone tools and tablets lay atop the metal as though arranged for display. Further on, as Crowley explained, was forbidden pottery, shielded not only from the public but from staff and visiting scholars.

  Ellison understood why. The very shapes of the objects were wrong, offensive to the eye on the most fundamental of levels and only tangentially related to their apparent function, the designs depicted on the too-smooth surfaces so abhorrent that he was instinctively repulsed. On one unidentified piece that resembled a water jug as much as anything else, there was represented a small town, a crooked community with buildings containing angles so impossible that he felt dizzy just looking at it, and, walking down the twisted center street, bodies in his wake, a black square-headed figure.

  “Where are these from?” he asked.

  Since entering the room, Crowley had somehow become sober. “I don’t know, and I’m afraid to find out.”

  Ellison felt the same. And yet there was a beauty in the horror, a sort of sublime splendor to the terrible designs and shapes.

  He glanced to the right. The next table over contained piles of small bones and the reconstructed skeletons of rats. In several of the accounts he’d read, rats had been associated with the appearance of Petohtalrayn, their swarming presaging his arrival. “Are those rats from—” he started to ask.

  “Oh, those are not rats,” Crowley said.

  Ellison frowned. “What are they, then?”

  “Look more closely.”

  He did, and saw that in place of animal claws, the bones of each limb ended in minuscule carpals and metacarpals: tiny human hands. He looked up, shocked. “That’s impossible!”

  “It’s why this room is off-limits, I believe. I can’t say that I know where those creatures originated, but I’ve examined them myself and I am certain they are real.”

  The two of them stared at the skeletons of the rat things.

  “Some knowledge should not be shared,” Crowley said. “Some things were meant to stay hidden.”

  They left the room and the museum, and went back to the pub, where they drank silently until it closed.

  Lying in bed in his flat that night, Ellison found it impossible to fall asleep. Part of it was the alcohol; he was not used to drinking that much. But part of it was what he had seen. Those horrible shapes and designs, not to mention those abominable rat things, haunted his thoughts and made the dark corners of the room seem that much darker—and not entirely empty.

  If Crowley was right, if the existence of Petohtalrayn was more than a myth appropriated by one society from another but was true, if he was an actual being that had appeared throughout history over a wide geographical area—and what he had seen in that secret room suggested exactly that—then where was he last spotted? In which society had the mysterious figure made his final appearance? Tomorrow, Ellison decided, he would input everything he knew on his laptop, and attempt to construct a timeline that he could add to as he learned more.

  When he finally fell asleep, it was close to dawn, and in the single hour left to him before his alarm rang, he dreamed of a tall, square-headed man made of polished obsidian, striding down the street below his window, followed by a horde of dirty gray rats running stealthily on pale human hands.

  ***

  By the time he returned to the States, Ellison had found yet another instance in which a vanished society had apparently been visited by the Dark Man.

  Petohtalrayn

  The Catalhoyuk of Turkey, a civilization that disappeared approximately six thousand years ago, was supposedly felled by the usual confluence of natural causes, but a preserved scroll depicted a society beset by very unnatural calamities—all predicted by a prophet described as the “Dark Stranger.”

  Back at Miskatonic, Ellison continued his unsanctioned research while still performing his regular duties, fitting in extra hours at the library and even short trips to promising sites between his assigned tasks. Over the next several months, he discovered references to similar black figures in literature revolving around the collapse of several North and South American indigenous cultures with which he was previously unfamiliar.

  But all of this information was second-hand and from fixed sources. Were there more detailed stories out there? Not in reference materials, it seemed, but perhaps they existed as part of an oral tradition, passed down from one generation to the next. If he could find someone from an indigenous tribe who was well-versed in the lore of his or her people, he might be able to piece together a more full and accurate picture. To this end, he had sent out feelers to historians all over the Old, New and Third Worlds, hoping for some help.

  Then, of course, there were the sightings.

  He was unsure of where to put these accounts, but they unsettled him far more than he was willing to admit. It was in his efforts to move his investigatory parameters outside academia and use more general search engines that he found mentions of individuals who claimed to have either seen or, more commonly, dreamed of entities that bore a striking resemblance to the descriptions of Petohtalrayn: considerably taller than a normal human, pitch-black skin, blank face, squarish head, an ill-defined air of otherness. Tellingly, such sightings were often associated with rodent infestations.

  There was no single search category that listed these in bulk, no aggregate inventory of incidents. They were scattered throughout the online universe, and it was only his own singular focus that enabled him to note the links between them.

  But the sightings were disturbing. There was the rat connection, first of all. A woman in Queens claimed that each time she awoke from a dream of the “Dark One,” as she called him, she could hear rats scurrying between the walls of her house. A man in rural Georgia who claimed to have seen a �
�Black Frankenstein” in the woods while hunting said that a stream of field mice had passed right by him, heading straight for the dark form.

  But there was also the fact that an overwhelming sense of doom seemed to accompany the figure’s appearance. Those who said they saw him—either in their dreams or in real life—seemed to regard him as the harbinger of something bad to come.

  Still, this was a tenuous connection to Ellison’s course of study, an interesting but perhaps coincidental parallel that might very well have no connection to his search, and for the moment, he put the sightings aside, preferring not to think about them, telling himself that he would look into them later.

  It was on one of his trips—a weekend jaunt to New York to consult with Dr. John Dautrive, a professor at NYU and specialist in pre-Columbian art—that he met Jenny. She was not a visiting fellow from some prestigious institution nor a graduate student studying archeology or anthropology, but a waitress in the coffee shop where he ate his lunch on Saturday. Ellison was not socially adept, and afterward could not recall exactly how the two of them had started talking, but before he paid his bill, a date had been set up for the evening. It had been nearly two years since his last date, an unmitigated disaster with the friend of a colleague’s fiancée, that had ended in an argument on the sidewalk in front of her apartment building.

  He hoped that, for once, history would not repeat itself.

  The dinner date with Jenny went fine, as did a lunch date the next day. Things went so well, in fact, that he contrived to see her the following weekend, inventing a completely unbelievable excuse as to why he had to return to New York.

  Jenny was smart and interesting and very attractive: definitely not his usual type. It was on this third date that he mentioned his good luck, telling her how fortunate he was to have found her, knowing that such an intimate and vulnerable admission would either take this fledgling relationship to the next level or dash it upon the rocks.

  “Well… it wasn’t exactly luck,” she said.

  He looked at her across the restaurant table, eyebrow raised Spock-like.

  “The Dark Man told me of you,” she admitted. “I’ve seen you before in my dreams.”

  He felt as though he’d been punched in the stomach, and he stared at her in shocked silence.

  “Say something!” she prodded.

  “The… Dark Man?”

  She nodded.

  He wasn’t sure he believed that, definitely didn’t want to believe that, but it explained why she had made a specific effort to talk to him originally and why they had ended up going out. “So you were stalking me?”

  “No.” She smiled. “Waiting for you.”

  Accompanying Jenny back to her apartment after quickly calling for the check, Ellison subjected her to the third degree. She said that for the past four months, she had been dreaming of the Dark Man nearly every night. At first, he appeared in the distance, an indistinct shape at the far edge of the crowd as she walked down Manhattan’s bustling sidewalks. She was aware of him and afraid of him, but she could not see him. Gradually, in her dreams, he came closer, his coal-black head towering over the other pedestrians as he tried to get her attention. He became less threatening as he approached, and when they finally met face to face, she noticed that the crowd had thinned out, that not as many people were walking on the sidewalk or driving down the street, and somehow she knew that they were dead.

  But the Dark Man protected her. And though they did not speak to each other in the usual way, she could hear his voice in her mind, and he told her to be on the lookout for Ellison, who would soon be arriving to eat in the coffee shop where she worked. Within the dream came another dream as the meeting played out in her mind as the Dark Man showed her what Ellison looked like.

  “But why did he want you to meet me?” Ellison asked.

  Jenny shrugged, then took his arm and held tight.

  “And you’ve been having these dreams every night.”

  “For the past four months.”

  For the past four months, Ellison thought.

  Four months ago was when he had returned from England.

  She led him into her small studio apartment. On the kitchen table were pictures she had drawn of the Dark Man that she wanted him to see. Something had compelled her to record what she’d seen, though she had no idea why.

  “I’m not a very good artist,” she admitted.

  She wasn’t being modest—she wasn’t a very good artist—but her primitive attempts at depiction nevertheless allowed him to see, in a way that he had not been able to imagine, the specifics of the Dark Man’s appearance, the inhumanity of his makeup, the alien proportions of his form.

  He looked over at Jenny. Did he believe her?

  He did, Ellison decided.

  And it terrified him.

  ***

  Their involvement grew from there. It was a strange relationship. They weren’t colleagues, weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend, but were in some sort of indefinable partnership that partook of both. He told her about his research, and on his now frequent trips to New York often brought translations and copies of records that he’d discovered, running them by her to see if she had any additional insight. Her dreams had stopped, but he still tried to get as much information out of her as he could, and one night in bed, after going over in his head how Petohtalrayn had mysteriously appeared before the end of each civilization and how Jenny’s dreams had placed him on the sidewalks of Manhattan, he had to ask her, “Is he coming back?”

  She frowned, shaking her head. “I… don’t think It can.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Nothing specific. Just a feeling I have. Even when I saw It, I got the impression that It was trapped someplace and that was why It could only appear in dreams.”

  “And why do you always say ‘It?’” he asked. “I mean, it’s pretty clear the Dark Man is, well, a man.”

  She looked at him, stone-faced. “No. It.”

  There was a grim certainty in her voice, and, in a way, that scared him as much as anything else.

  Ellison’s superiors had found out about his obsession, and after having him show them a PowerPoint presentation and perusing his research, it was decided that he could work on this project full-time, with the university’s complete backing, a vote of confidence that not only gave him additional time to work but provided him with access to far more resources.

  Oddly enough, since meeting Jenny, he had developed a sort of… not sympathy, exactly… not affinity… maybe a sense of understanding when it came to the Dark Man. The PowerPoint presentation had brought this home to him. Because throughout all the stories, a pattern had started to emerge, and in each instance, the destruction of a people had led to its replacement by a far more harmonious society. The black figure—

  Petohtalrayn

  —was, as far as he could tell, a harvester for the gods, culling the unwanted from the earth and tilling the human soil so new civilizations could grow. He was to be feared, perhaps, but also, in a way, admired.

  With the prestigious support of Miskatonic behind him, he was able to finagle a trip to the Southwest and meet with experts at assorted digs throughout the Four Corners states, one of whom led him to Rick Howell, a disgraced former curator of the Heard Museum in Arizona. The university would only pay for himself, but Jenny was due some time off, and she used her own money to buy a plane ticket and pay for her meals, although she did ride in Ellison’s rental car and stay in his room at night.

  The most recent extinction event was still the Nahapi people in what was now southwestern Colorado, and according to Howell, the site of their largest village supposedly offered concrete clues to the existence of the Dark Man. So after meeting with an Anasazi expert in Chaco Canyon, Ellison and Jenny took a trip north to visit Howell at his home in Farmington, New Mexico. It had been made clear that no one in academic or scholarly circles took the man seriously. He had ruined his career cataloguing eldritch gods that he
insisted were the true inspiration for not only today’s religions but for all human theology. The names were laughably long and almost purposefully unpronounceable—

  like Petohtalrayn?

  —but Howell maintained that they were real, they existed, and human religions were but a pale shadow of this cosmic truth, a more understandable and easily digestible version of a far more terrifying and incomprehensible reality.

  Rick Howell’s place was not the isolated adobe ranch house Ellison had been expecting but a nondescript tract home in a middle-class neighborhood near downtown Farmington. Inside was another story. In place of traditional furnishings were shelves and display cases filled with pottery and relics that looked as though they’d been stolen from a top museum. On the walls were maps, charts and thumbtacked photographs.

  There was no small talk. The two of them had conversed over the phone, communicated by email, and they both knew why Ellison was here, what he was looking for. Howell had gathered together a stack of photos and artifacts related to Ellison’s search, and the first thing he showed Ellison and Jenny was a carved obsidian figurine. Jenny’s face paled at the sight of it.

  “Do you recognize—?” Ellison began.

  She nodded, cutting him off.

  He examined the figurine. If it provoked such a strong reaction within her, it must be pretty close to accurate, and a chill passed through him as he studied the terrible blank face and the strangely proportioned body. Despite its diminutive size, the figure exuded a sense of tremendous power, and while Jenny’s drawings and most of the references he’d seen made Ellison think the Dark Man was between seven and twelve feet tall, the sense he got from the figurine was that Petohtalrayn was actually much larger. He looked into the two small eyeholes that had been dug into the obsidian, and the eyes seemed to stare purposefully back at him.

  “That’s what you’re looking for, isn’t it?”

  Ellison took a deep breath. “Yeah.”