Goat Mother and Others: The Collected Mythos Fiction of Pierre Comtois

by Pierre V. Comtois

  “Dunwich,” said Zarnak, inclining his chin in the direction of the opposite shore. “We must be right on the town line here.”

  “I can’t imagine a more desolate spot,” observed Bowditch, not without a chill.

  “Shall we move inside?” suggested Zarnak.

  “Let’s,” agreed Bowditch, slapping away a mosquito.

  Removing their things from the back seat, Bowditch found the key beneath the mat on the porch, just as Chief DiFriggio said, and unlocked the front door. Inside, it was pitch dark with the musty smell of a building that had been left empty for a while. Zarnak found a light switch near the door that instantly revealed a cozy-looking front parlor that included a large stone fireplace, a big throw rug covering the floor, some rocking chairs facing the grate, and a desk and bookcases occupying the far corner of the room. On the other side of the door, facing the pond, were a pair of bedrooms and from what Bowditch could see through a distant doorway, a kitchen in the back with, no doubt, a second door leading onto a back porch. He was relieved to learn that on further inspection, there was a rude bathroom in the space between the two halves of the house.

  “Clearly, this was once intended to be a summer cottage, not a year-round home,” said Zarnak, putting his briefcase on one of the rocking chairs.

  “I’m still coming to terms with the fact that Pondwaithe called this home,” said Bowditch, looking into the first bedroom. “It’s a long way from Arkham!”

  “Why don’t you take that room,” said Zarnak. “I’ll take the other. I think it’ll be too late to head back tonight anyway.”

  “I was thinking the same thing,” said Bowditch laying his own bag on a cot in the first room. “I see Pondwaithe’s computer is still here and it’ll take us hours at least to go through that and whatever else he has around here.”

  “Maybe we should see if the professor has left us anything to eat in the kitchen?”

  “Good idea. Don’t think he’d mind if we helped ourselves.”

  A little while later, after they had finished a supper of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and canned beans, the two men brought their coffee into the living room, set a fire, and began looking through the missing man’s records. Outside, the lights of nearby cottages had winked out and the atmosphere filled with sounds of crickets and croaking frogs. Once in a while, Bowditch even heard the lonesome call of a coyote…not a sound that he associated with modern day Massachusetts!

  Getting to work, it was decided that Bowditch would concentrate his attention on going through Pondwaithe’s written notes and books while Zarnak checked his computer records. The psychologist surprised Bowditch with his apparent skill at finding his way around a keyboard. It was something he had not expected, belying Zarnak’s sometimes old-world demeanor.

  As the hours passed, both men experienced growing frustration in their appointed tasks. For his part, Bowditch found little dealing with the missing mask but quite a bit on local history and, in particular, the Indian medicine man Misquamacus. It was after midnight when Bowditch, not for the first time, tossed aside some note about the Indian shaman and how his preachings had inspired Billington to actually worship the toad thing or whatever it was. Maybe it was the lateness of the hour or maybe he was just tired, but despite his disdain for the authenticity of the material, Bowditch found himself reading from a quote that Pondwaithe found somewhere and obviously felt important enough to copy down:

  “This much ye antient wizard Misquamacus told to Mr. Bradford, and even after, a great mound in ye Woods near ye Pond southwest of New Dunwich hath been straitly lett alone. Ye Tall Stone is these twenty yrs gone, but ye Mound is mark’d by ye Circumstance, that nothing, neither grass nor brush, will grow upon it. Grave men doubt that ye evill Billington was eat up as ye savages believe, by what he call’d out of Heaven, notwithstanding certain Reports of ye idle, of his being seen in diverse places. Ye Wonder-Worker Misquamacus told that he mistrusted not but that Billington had been taken; he wou’d not say that he had been eat up by It, as others among ye savages believ’d, but he affirmed that Billington was no longer on this Earth, whereat, God be praised.”

  Bowditch shook his head as if to clear it and was about to toss the paper aside as he had others when he realized that something in the text had struck a familiar chord with him. Scanning it again quickly, he picked out references to a pond in the southern part of Dunwich…which a hundred years later would become Dean’s Corners township. Was it coincidence? He looked out the window across the now dark pond. Was the pond mentioned in the excerpt Wampanoag Pond?

  “Anton, call me crazy, but what do you think of this?” Bowditch said, not without some embarrassment.

  “What have you found?” asked Zarnak, leaning back in his chair and stretching his arms over his head.

  Bowditch handed him the paper he found and after Zarnak had finished reading it, called his attention to the pond reference.

  “Is there anything to it, do you think?”

  “Apparently Pondwaithe thought there was,” said Zarnak. “The question is, where he got the notion in the first place.”

  “So far as I can tell, there’s very little documentation supporting a connection between the deity worshipped by American Indians and Japanese fishermen on the other side of the planet,” said Bowditch. “In fact, there’s none that I know of.”

  “Tell me, Sam,” said Zarnak exploring. “Have you ever heard of the Cthulhu cult?”

  Bowditch blinked, momentarily at a loss for words. “The word is familiar to me. Some pre-historic religion wasn’t it? Supposed to have been the basis of numerous sects around the world. But evidence for it has always been patchy at best. Researchers have found it almost impossible to find evidence that the same belief system could be shared by such widely scattered cultures as the Indo-American and Austro-Aborigine to say nothing of Central Asian peoples and Africans.”

  “What do you think about it?”

  “Scientifically speaking, it doesn’t make sense,” replied Bowditch, warming to the subject. “There are neither facts to support the notion that a common belief system could have been shared in such primitive times nor even its very existence. To qualify as a common belief system, religions in different parts of the world must have a certain number of points in common and the so-called Cthulhu cult has very few.”

  “But doesn’t the very institution of which you are an instructor, Miskatonic University, include a department devoted solely to such an antediluvian belief system?” prodded Zarnak. “What about the endowment left by Henry Armitage to fund continued research in occult subject matter that he himself had devoted his career to? The last I heard, a scholarship from the fund has been awarded each year since the professor’s death in 1939.”

  “That’s true, but neither I nor anyone else on the faculty pays much heed to that sort of thing,” said Bowditch. “The delusional belief in occultism by some early nineteenth-century scholars is well known and just as soundly dismissed.”

  “Hmmm. But certainly, acceptance of their credulity in such matters can be held while acknowledging that the false premises in which they believed can still be worthy of study if only for anthropological reasons?”

  “I suppose that’s so,” mused Bowditch. “We do study other belief systems of early cultures in order to gain more insight into people’s daily lives.”

  “Exactly,” agreed Zarnak. “And there is evidence that belief in the Cthulhu cult was widespread in many of the earliest cultures and in fact, survives even today.”

  “Given that, how does it connect with Pondwaithe?”

  “The points you bring up regarding the tale of Misquamacus confirm my suspicions that there is a connection between the mask identified by Pondwaithe and Ossadagowah the deity that was known to the Wampanoags. In truth, I think Ossadagowah and the ‘puppet lord’ are one and the same, the twin names of a fallen god more commonly known as Tsathoggua.”

  “A fallen god? As in Lucifer?”

  “No,
” said Zarnak flatly. “The Cthulhu belief cycle has nothing to do with any subconscious earthly paradigms. Actually, from what I have been able to piece together, the ‘gods’ of the Cthulhu cult were actually alien beings from the stars who may or may not have been imprisoned on Earth by others of their kind in retaliation for some revolt or unimaginable war waged eons ago. Each of the defeated creatures, it seems, claim influence over different kinds of natural forces with that of Tsathoggua never having been made clear. His influences, as with his appearance, seem to be amorphous and ambiguous although they could be interpreted to control men’s destinies. Look here.”

  Zarnak had been fiddling with the computer’s keyboard and in a moment he had downloaded a photo of a sculpture in the shape of a toad for lack of any other comparison.

  “Does it look familiar?”

  “It fills the description of the toad god mentioned by Misquamacus,” said a wondering Bowditch.

  “Notice the notation beneath the image.”

  “’Tsathoggua!’” exclaimed Bowditch.

  “This is a piece fashioned by the California poet Clark Ashton Smith…he died in the 1960s…that he claimed to be the god not only of the Wampanoags but also of some antediluvian race that existed before the last ice age,” said Zarnak.

  “Be that as it may,” said Bowditch. “This work is very similar to the description given by Misquamacus…so much so that there can be no other conclusion than that the two are one and the same.”

  “I’m glad we agree, Sam,” said Zarnak. “For, you see, this sculpture also matches a description of the ‘puppet lord’ worshipped by the same Japanese who are believed to have fashioned the mask identified by Pondwaithe.”

  “Have you been able to find anything in Pondwaithe’s files that relate more directly to this whole subject?” asked Bowditch.

  “Not on his desktop,” replied Zarnak. “But I have one last thing to try.”

  Zarnak hit some keys and suddenly the monitor’s screen was filled with rows of meaningless numbers and letters and other symbols that meant nothing to Bowditch.

  “What’s all this?”

  “I’ve accessed the computer’s hypertext background feed,” explained Zarnak as he scrolled through the file. “In an effort to remain up to date, I’ve tried to keep up with various computer software programs and this one seems to be familiar to me.”

  “You can make sense of all that gobbledygook?”

  “Some of it. What I hope to be able to do is at least recognize symbols that don’t belong…hello!”

  “What?”

  “This is interesting,” said Zarnak pointing to one of the symbols that crowded the screen. “I’ve never seen this kind of symbol before. Wonder what I’ll find if I click on them…”

  Immediately, the screen was filled by an open folder showing a number of files. Picking the most recent, Zarnak opened it and was faced with an email exchange.

  “Is that Japanese?” asked Bowditch.

  “Yes. It’s an exchange between Pondwaithe and what appears to be some fellow in Japan. From what I can tell, it seems that the fellow read the professor’s articles about the mask in some magazines and decided to write him about the subject.”

  “You can read that?” asked Bowditch, surprised.

  “Some.” Zarnak closed the file and opened another, further back. “Yes. Pondwaithe was contacted by a Japanese correspondent who appears to have been very familiar with the mask as well as the ancient cult that used it in its worship rituals. Pondwaithe actually knew little about the origins of the mask and was eager to learn what he could from his correspondent. Although giving the professor plenty of information, little of it was documented or properly researched.”

  “Folk history?”

  “It seems so, and yet there’s a quality to the correspondent’s words…and it’s hard for me to tell judging only from typed messages…that suggests familiarity with the subject, even some first hand knowledge…”

  “First hand knowledge? Are you suggesting that worship of this…Tsathoggua…still goes on?”

  “That’s the feeling I get,” said Zarnak leaning back in his chair. “I’ll save this for the police.”

  After doing so, Zarnak turned off the computer.

  “There was nothing in the correspondence indicating what might have happened to Pondwaithe?” asked Bowditch. “Was there anything that you could possibly interpret as…”

  “No, nothing,” said Zarnak. “The correspondent raised the argument used today for the return of Amerindian remains belonging to museums; he claimed it was a desecration of his ancestors for the museum to keep the mask. But beyond that, I can’t help sensing a desperation more acute than that borne of the simple return of remains thousands of years old.”

  “Well, there’s not much else we can do tonight, I think,” said Bowditch between yawns. “Why don’t we turn in for the night?”

  “Good idea. The down time will give me opportunity to think things over.”

  A few minutes later, the lights in the rest of the cottage had been extinguished and Bowditch had closed the door to his room. Inside, he moved to the window and pulled open the curtains allowing for a good view of the pond and the stars overhead. The screen looked to be in good repair so he risked leaving the window open. The room itself was small with only a cot and night stand in one corner and a dresser in the other. Pegs on the wall held a flannel shirt and light jacket…presumably Pondwaithe’s…and on the dresser was a framed photo of the professor standing in front of the pond at some time when plants had not yet choked it almost out of existence. Snapping off the ceiling light, Bowditch took off his shoes and belt and threw himself onto the cot without taking down the coverlet. Later, he realized that he must have fallen asleep; how else to explain the nightmare that followed?

  In it, he dreamed of a group of darkened figures clad only in loin cloths as they made their way through a moonlit forest. One of them held a rope, the opposite end of which was tied around the neck of another figure, slightly taller than the others, and dressed in shirt and slacks now torn almost to ribbons from the slashing branches and brambles through which it was pulled, obviously against its will. Tripping and falling from time to time, the hooded figure also had its hands tied in the front and, throughout the ordeal, pitiful mewling sounds came from beneath the rough cloth that covered its head. At last, the group broke free of the entangling wood and entered a clearing dominated by a low mound that clearly had once been made by human hands. Strangely, despite the thick woods that gathered close about its base, the mound itself was completely clear of any kind of vegetation making it a relatively simple affair for the group to make its way to the crest dragging their unwilling victim along. At the top, two members of the group held the hooded figure on the ground and stripped it of the remnants of clothing that still clung to its upper body. Lastly, they yanked off the hood revealing beneath the terrified face of Prof. Pondwaithe, who stared about wildly asking questions of his captors and receiving no reply. Meanwhile, a fire was started and suddenly, in the dream, the men around it had produced some kind of device that they placed over Pondwaithe’s head. A tube-like affair trailed from the contraption and was attached to a pot of water that began to boil over the fire. Soon, Pondwaithe began to moan and then to struggle. Becoming more desperate as the minutes passed, he tried to remove the thing on his head but his bound hands and the restraining grip of his captors prevented him from doing so. At last, as wisps of steam began to leak out from the imperfectly constructed container over his head, Pondwaithe’s strugglings grew more desperate and the air was filled with his muffled cries. Obviously screaming in pain as the thing on his head filled with boiling steam, Pondwaithe needed to be held in place by at least four members of the mysterious group. At last, as the professor’s mouthings subsided into low moans, the device was disconnected from over the fire and lifted from his head. The thing that was revealed could hardly be described as Pondwaithe as the professor had clearly lost much of
his mind after the terrible ordeal. But his sufferings were not over. While two of his captors lifted the professor to his knees, another produced a strangely shaped knife and, making an incision at the base of Pondwaithe’s neck and extending it up the back of his skull, proceeded with the careful process of removing the skin and scalp from the professor’s head. In minutes, the exhausted Pondwaithe was freed from the grasp of his captors and the bloody and steaming result of the operation held up for him to see. And as his lidless eyeballs stared whitely from the gory mess that had once been his face, enough of his sanity returned for Pondwaithe to realize what had been done to him and he screamed, and screamed, and screamed…

  Bowditch realized that he had been screaming only after Zarnak had slapped his face, jolting him to full wakefulness. Abruptly, insanely, he seemed to find himself back in Pondwaithe’s cottage. Outside the window dawn had begun to break and, from somewhere in the distance, there was the lonesome call of a mourning dove.

  “Calm down, Sam,” Zarnak was saying. “It was only a dream…a nightmare.”

  “A…dream?” Had it all been a dream? Dearly, Bowditch hoped it was and gradually, as he became more grounded in the normalcy of his surroundings, a great relief came over him and sighing, he flopped back down on the cot. “Anton, I’ve never had nightmares before…”

  “Just relax a moment,” soothed Zarnak. “Get a proper hold on yourself before trying to remember what it was that you dreamed.”

  “I don’t know if I want to remember it.”

  “Tell me about it, but only if you want to,” said Zarnak sitting on the edge of the cot.

  “It involved Pondwaithe,” began Bowditch slowly. “He was…in the woods someplace…”

  Gradually, in fits and starts, Bowditch managed to describe the dream to Zarnak, including most painfully, the final denouement that had sent him spinning into wakefulness.