Beneath the Moors and Darker Places [SSC]

by Brian Lumley

  No one could have looked at him and felt anything except disgust, or perhaps pity if they’d known him like I had. And if they hadn’t, dread and loathing and... yes, horror. Friendship didn’t come into it; I knew that I wasn’t smiling; I knew that my face must reflect everything I felt.

  He nodded the merest twitch of a nod and husked: “Sit down, Peter, before you fall down! Hey, and you think I look bad, right?” Humour! Unbelievable! But his voice was a desiccated whisper, and his grey hands on the desk shook like spindly skating insects resting up after a morning’s hard skimming over a stagnant pond.

  I sat down on a dusty chair opposite him, perching myself there, feeling all tight inside from not wanting to breathe the atmosphere and hypersensitive outside from trying not to touch anything. He noticed and said: “You don’t want to contaminate yourself, right? But isn’t it a bit late for that, Peter?”

  From which I could tell that he knew—he did know—and a tingle started in my feet that quickly surged through my entire being. Could he see it in me? Sense it in me? Feel some sort of weird kinship with what was under my skin, burgeoning in me? Or was it worse than that? And right there and then I began to have this feeling that things weren’t going according to plan.

  “Smiler,” I managed to get started at the second attempt, “it’s ... good to see you again, pal. And I...” And I stopped and just sat there gasping.

  “Yes?” he prompted me in a moment. “And you—?”

  “Nerves!” I gasped, forcing a sickly smile, and forced in my turn to take my first deep breath. “Lots of nerves. It was always the same. It’s why I had to stay behind when you and the others went into space.” And I took out my cigarettes, and also took out the lighter from my pocket. I opened the pack and shook out several cigarettes, which fell on the floor, then managed to trap one between my knees and transfer it shakily to my mouth. And I flipped back the top on my lighter.

  Smiler’s eyes—the only genuinely mobile parts he had left— went straight to the lighter and he said: “You brought it in, right?” But should he be saying things like that? Out loud, I mean? Couldn’t Big ‘C’ hear him or sense his mood? And it dawned on me just how little we knew about them, about Big ‘C’ and Smiler—as he was now...

  Then ... Smiler smiled. Except it wasn’t his smile!

  Good-bye, everything, I said to myself, pressing the button and holding my thumb down on it. Then releasing it and pressing it again, and again. And finally letting the fucking thing fall from my nerveless fingers when, after two or three more tries, still nothing had happened. Or rather, “nothing” hadn’t happened.

  “Peter, old buddy, let me tell you how it is.” Smiler got through to me at last, as the cigarette fell from my trembling lips. “I mean, I suspect you now know how it is, but I’ll tell you anyway. See, Big ‘C’ changes things. Just about anything he wants to change. He was nothing at first, or not very much—just a natural law of change, mutation, entropy if you like. An ‘emanation.’ Or on the other hand I suppose you could say he was everything—like Nature itself. Whichever, when I went up there to Luna II he got into me and changed my cancer into himself, since when he’s become one hell of a lot. We can talk about that in a minute, but first I want to explain about your bomb. Big ‘C’ changed it. He changed the chemical elements of the explosive charges, and to be doubly sure sucked all the fizz out of the fissionable stuff. It was a firework and he dumped it in a bucket of water. So now you can relax. It didn’t go off and it isn’t going to.”

  “You ... are him!” I knew it instinctively. Now, when it was too late. “But when? And why?”

  “When did I stop being Smiler? Not long after that time you met him at the beach. And why the subterfuge? Because you human beings are a jumpy lot. With Smiler to keep you calm, let you think you had an intermediary, it was less likely you’d do something silly. And why should I care that you’d do something silly? Because there’s a lot of life, knowledge, sustenance in this Earth and I didn’t want you killing it off trying to kill me! But now you can’t kill me, because the bigger I’ve got the easier it has become to change things. Missiles? Go ahead and try it. They’ll be dead before they hit me. Why, if I got the idea you were going to try firing a couple, I could even kill them on the ground!

  “You see, Peter, I’ve grown too big, too clever, too devious to be afraid any more—of anything. Which is why I have no more secrets, and why there’ll be no more subterfuge. Subterfuge? Not a bit of it. Why, I’m even broadcasting all of this—just so the whole world will know what’s going on! I mean, I want them to know, so no one will make any more silly mistakes. Now, I believe you came in here to talk about boundaries—some limits you want to see on my expansion?”

  Somehow, I shook my head. “That’s not why I’m here, Smiler,” I told him, not yet ready to accept that there was nothing of Smiler left in there. “Why I’m here is finished now.”

  “Not quite,” he said, but very quietly. “We can get to the boundaries later, but there is something else. Think about it. I mean, why should I want to see you, if there’s nothing else and if I can make any further decisions without outside help?”

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  “See, Smiler has lasted a long time. Him and the frogmen that came to kill me, and a couple of farmers who didn’t get out fast enough when they saw me coming, oh, and a few others. And I’ve been instructed by them. Like I said: I’ve learned how to be devious. And I’ve learned anger, too, though there’s no longer any need for that. No need for any human emotions. But the last time you came to see Smiler—and when you would have plotted with him to kill me—that angered me.”

  “And so you gave me my cancer.”

  “Yes I did. So that when I needed you, you’d want to be my volunteer. But don’t worry... you’re not going to die, Peter. Well, not physically anyway, and not just yet a while. For just like Smiler here, you’re going to carry on.”

  “But no anger, eh? No human emotions? No ... revenge? OK, so let me go free to live out what days I’ve got left.”

  “No anger, no revenge, no emotions—just need. I can’t let you go! But let me explain myself. Do you know what happens when you find a potato sprouting in your vegetable rack and you plant it in the garden? That’s right, you get lots of new potatoes! Well, I’m something like that. I’m putting out lots of new potatoes, lots of new me. All of the time. And the thing is this: when you dig up those potatoes and your fork goes through the old one, what do you find? Just a wrinkled, pulpy old sack of a thing all ready to collapse in upon itself, with nothing of goodness left in it—pretty much like what’s left of Smiler here. So ... if I want to keep growing potatoes, why, I just have to keep planting them! Do you see?”

  “Jesus! Jesus!”

  “It’s nothing personal, Peter. It’s need, that’s all... No, don’t stand up, just sit there and I’ll do the rest. And you can stop biting down on that clever tooth of yours, because it isn’t poison any more, just salt. And if you don’t like what’s happening to Smiler right now, that’s OK—just turn your face away....

  “... There, that was pretty easy, now wasn’t it?

  ~ * ~

  “All you people out there, that’s how it is. So get used to it. As for the new boundaries: there aren’t any.

  “This is Big ‘C,’ signing off.”

  <>

  ~ * ~

  THE FAIRGROUND

  HORROR

  The funfair was as yet an abject failure. Drizzling rain dulled the chrome of the dodgem cars and stratojets; the neons had not even nearly achieved the garishness they display by night; the so-called “crowd” was hardly worth mentioning as such. But it was only 2:00 p.m. and things could yet improve.

  Had the weather been better—even for October it was bad— and had Bathley been a town instead of a mere village, then perhaps the scene were that much brighter. Come evening, when the neons and other bright naked bulbs would glow in all the painful intensity of their own natural
(unnatural?) life, when the drab gypsyish dollies behind the penny-catching stalls would undergo their subtle, nightly metamorphosis into avariciously enticing Loreleis—then it would be brighter, but not yet.

  This was the fourth day of the five when the funfair was “in town.” It was an annual—event? The nomads of Hodgson’s Funfair had known better times, better conditions, and worse ones, but it was all the same to them and they were resigned to it. There was, though, amid all the noisy, muddy, smelly paraphernalia of the fairground, a tone of incongruity. It had been there since Anderson Tharpe, in the curious absence of his brother, Hamilton, had taken down the old freak-house frontage to repaint the boards and canvas with the new and forbidding legend: tomb of the great old ones.

  Looking up at the painted gouts of “blood” that formed the garish legend arching over a yawning, scaly, dragon-jawed entranceway, Hiram Henley frowned behind his tiny spectacles in more than casual curiosity, in something perhaps approaching concern. His lips silently formed the ominous words of that legend as if he spoke them to himself in awe and then he thrust his black-gloved hands deeper into the pockets of his fine, expensively tailored overcoat and tucked his neck down more firmly into its collar.

  Hiram Henley had recognized something in the name of the place—something which might ring subconscious warning bells in even the most mundane minds—and the recognition caused an involuntary shudder to hurry up his back. “The Great Old Ones!” he said to himself yet again, and his whisper held a note of terrible fascination.

  Research into just such cycles of myth and aeon-lost legend, while ostensibly he had been studying Hittite antiquities in the Middle East and Turkey, had cost Henley his position as Professor of Archaeology and Ethnology at Meldham University. “Cthulhu, Yibb-Tstll, Yog-Sothoth, Summanus—the Great Old Ones!” Again an expression of awe flitted across his bespectacled face. To be confronted with a ... a monument such as this, and in such a place ...

  And yet the ex-professor was not too surprised; he had been alerted to the contents of Anderson Tharpe’s queer establishment, and therefore the fact that the owner had named it thus was hardly a matter of any lasting astonishment. Nevertheless Henley knew that there were people who would have considered the naming of the fairground erection, to say nothing of the presence of its afore-hinted contents, blasphemous. Fortunately such persons were few and far between—the Cult of Cthulhu was still known only to a minority of serious authorities, to a few obscure occult investigators, and a scattered handful of esoteric groups—but Hiram Henley looked back to certain days of yore when he had blatantly used the university’s money to go in search of just such items of awesome antiquity as now allegedly hid behind the demon-adorned ramparts of the edifice before him.

  The fact of the matter was that Henley had heard how this Tomb of the Great Old Ones held within its monster-daubed board-and-canvas walls relics of an age already many millions of years dead and gone when Babylon was but a sketch in the mind’s eye of Architect Thathnis III. Figures and fragments, hieroglyphed tablets and strangely scrawled papyri, weird greenstone sculptings, and rotting, worm-eaten tomes: Henley had reason to believe that many of these things, if not all of them, existed behind the facade of Anderson Tharpe’s horror house.

  There would also be, of course, the usual nonconformities peculiar to such establishments—the two-headed foetus in its bottle of preservative, the five-legged puppy similarly suspended, the fake mummy in its red- and green-daubed wrappings, the great fruit (“vampire”) bats, hanging shutter-eyed and motionless in their warm wire cages beyond the reach of giggly, shuddering women and morbidly fascinated men and boys—but Hiram Henley was not interested in any of these. Nevertheless, he sent his gloved right hand awkwardly groping into the corner of his overcoat pocket for the silver coin which alone might open for him the door to Tharpe’s house of horror.

  Hiram Henley was a slight, middle-aged man. His thin figure, draped smotheringly in the heavy overcoat, his balding head and tiny specs through which his watery eyes constantly peered, his gloved hands almost lost in huge pockets, his trousers seeming to hang from beneath the hem of his overcoat and partly, not wholly covering the black patent leather shoes upon his feet—all made of him a picture which was conspicuously odd. And yet Hiram Henley’s intelligence was patent; the stamp of a “higher mind” was written in erudite lines upon his brow. His were obviously eyes which had studied strange mysteries, and his feet had gone along strange ways, so that despite any other emotion or consideration which his appearance might ill-advisedly call to mind, still his shrunken frame commanded more than a little respect among his fellow men.

  Anderson Tharpe, on the other hand, crouching now upon his tiny seat in the ticket booth, was a tall man, well over six feet in height but almost as thin and emaciated as the fallen professor. His hair was prematurely grey and purposely grown long in an old-fashioned scholarly style, so that he might simulate to the crowd’s satisfaction a necessary erudition, just such an erudition as was manifest in the face above the slight figure which even now pressed upon his tiny window, sixpence clutched in gloved fingers. Tharpe’s beady eyes beneath blackly hypnotic brows studied Hiram Henley briefly, speculatively, but then he smiled a very genuine welcome as he passed the small man a ticket, waving away the sixpence with an expansive hand.

  “Not you, sir, indeed no! From a gent so obviously and sincerely interested in the mysteries within—from a man of your high standing”—again the expansive gesture—”why, I couldn’t accept money from you, sir. It’s an honour to have you visit us!”

  “Thank you.” Henley dryly answered, passing myopically into the great tent beyond the ticket booth. Tharpe’s smile slowly faded, was replaced by a look of cunning. Quickly the tall man pocketed his few shillings in takings, then followed the slight figure of the ex-professor into the smelly sawdust-floored “museum,” beyond the canvas flap.

  In all, a dozen people waited within the big tent’s main division. A pitifully small “crowd.” But in any case, though he kept his interest cleverly veiled, Tharpe’s plans involved only the ex-professor. The tall man’s flattery at the ticket booth had not all been flannel; he had spotted Henley immediately as the very species of highly educated fly for which his flypaper—in the form of the new and enigmatic legend across the visage of the one-time freak house— had been erected above Bathley Moor.

  There had been, Tharpe reflected, men of outwardly similar intelligence before at the Tomb of the Great Old Ones, and more than one of them had told him that certain of his artifacts—those items which he kept, as his brother had kept them before him, in a separately enclosed part of the tent—were of an unbelievable antiquity. Indeed, one man had been so affected by the very sight of such ancientness that he had run from Tharpe’s collection in stark terror, and he had never returned. That had been in May, and though almost six months had passed since that time, still Tharpe had come no closer to an understanding of the mysterious objects which his brother Hamilton had brought back with him from certain dark corners of the world; objects which, early in 1961, had caused him to kill Hamilton in self-defence.

  Anderson had panicked then—he realized that now—for he might easily have come out of the affair blameless had he only reported Hamilton’s death to the police. For a long time the folk of Hodgson’s Funfair had known that there was something drastically wrong with Hamilton Tharpe; his very sanity had been questioned, albeit guardedly. Certainly Anderson would have been declared innocent of his brother’s murder—the case would have gone to court only as a matter of formality—but he had panicked. And of course there had been ... complications.

  With Hamilton’s body secretly buried deep beneath the freak house, the folk of the fairground had been perfectly happy to believe Anderson’s tale of his brother’s abrupt departure on yet another of his world-spanning expeditions, the like of which had brought about all the trouble in the first place.

  Now Anderson thought back on it all...

  He and his
brother had grown up together in the fairground, but then it had been their father’s property, and “Tharpe’s Funfair” had been known throughout all England for its fair play and prices. Wherever the elder Tharpe had taken his stalls and sideshows—of which the freak house had ever been his personal favourite—his employees had been sure of good crowds. It was only after old Tharpe died that the slump started.

  It had had much to do with young Hamilton’s joy in old books and fancifully dubious legends; his lust for travel, adventure, and outré knowledge. His first money-wasting venture had been a “treasure-hunting” trip to the islands of the Pacific, undertaken solely on the strength of a vague and obviously fake map. In his absence—he had gone off with an adventurous and plausible rogue from the shooting gallery—Anderson looked after the fair. Things went badly, and all the Tharpes got out of Hamilton’s venture was a number of repulsively carved stone tablets and one or two patently aboriginal sculptings, not the least of which was a hideous, curiously winged octopoid idol. Hamilton placed the latter obscenity in the back of their caravan home as being simply too fantastic for display to an increasingly mundane and sceptical public.