The Children of Cthulhu

by John Pelan

  The gloomy interior of the study obscured the corners of the room, but didn't shield the girl's perception that there were other people present. She could see her father standing behind his desk, and seated at it, in front of her father, was the squire.

  Like everyone in the village she had heard the stories about the strange things that were said to happen at the Grange, the squire's house. She'd heard the children gossip in hushed tones about the bright lights seen hovering above it at certain times of the month; about the music and the chanting that were sometimes heard; about the misshapen creatures that were said to stalk the grounds after dark and to dwell in the vast cellars beneath the house.

  “Martha,” her father said, quietly. “A special day has arrived for you. A day on which you can fulfill your destiny.”

  The girl had received little in the way of education and had scant knowledge of what destiny was. What she did know though, was that the shadows in the comers of the room were pulsating now, and moving closer.

  The squire stood and put his hand on a red brocade cloth that was draped over a large object to one side of the desk. With a practiced flourish he pulled the drapes away to reveal a pot dresser— not a plain, ordinary one such as she had seen before, but an ornately carved one with a huge Green Man at the top and other large, blasphemous creatures crawling over the rest of it, as though trying desperately to prise themselves away.

  Martha became aware of organ music playing, and she saw her father was softly playing a tuneless dirge on the instrument he kept by the window.

  The dogs heard the van arrive outside even before we did and began barking furiously.

  “Gielgud, Richardson, that's enough!” Sally shouted as she went through to open the door. Before doing so she grabbed both of the dogs by the collar and pulled them into the study, shutting the door behind them.

  McQueen's sparkling, new Mercedes van was parked at the curb. McQueen and a young lad disembarked and opened the van's rear doors. I watched from the doorway as they removed the top section of the dresser and set it down in the road. The bottom half, which contained the drawers, was taken out next and McQueen and the lad made heavy weather of carrying it through the front garden and up the concrete steps to the house. “Don't strain yourself, Colin, will you,” McQueen muttered as he carried the piece past me. Sally had gone ahead of them, opening doors and moving objects that might be in the way. She kept glancing back at the lower half of the dresser, a delighted smile on her face.

  By the time the top half was carried through, McQueen was sweating profusely, but the boy had taken off his shirt and was proudly displaying his muscles, occasionally glancing at Sally to see if she had noticed. I went into the kitchen to supervise the positioning, and Sally put the kettle on. When we were satisfied it was exactly where we wanted it, the lad went to lock the van up, Sally took the tea and biscuits through to the lounge, and McQueen and I went into the garden for a smoke.

  A cry of pain and a loud volley of expletives shattered the tranquillity of the morning.

  In the kitchen we found McQueen's lad, Tom, sitting on the floor, doubled over, his hand pressed to his shoulder. Blood was trickling out from between his fingers.

  “What on Earth happened here?” McQueen said to the boy.

  “Bloody thing scratched me,” Tom said, jerking his thumb at the dresser. When he moved his hand we could see the extent of the damage to his shoulder. There were four parallel scratches running from the top of his arm to the shoulder blade. They were quite deep and dribbling blood.

  “It looks nasty,” Sally said. “I'll get the first-aid kit from the bathroom.”

  McQueen was looking at the dresser, rubbing his chin and running his fingers over the smooth wood. “What do you mean, it scratched you?” The skepticism in his voice was a sham, as the sticking plaster on his hand bore witness.

  Tom looked up at him, his face still creased with pain. “I was giving it a polish, cleaning it up. I was crouched under there.…” He pointed to the space between the drawers and the base. “Next thing I know, something scratches me. Felt like I'd been bitten at first, then I saw the blood.”

  Sally returned to the kitchen and, crouching down next to the boy, opened the small first-aid kit. “I'll just clean it up,” she said to him, pouring some antiseptic onto a ball of cotton wool.

  As the antiseptic was applied and the boy swore again, I joined McQueen in his examination of the dresser. “There's nothing sharp here,” he said, running his fingers along the wood beneath the drawers. “Nothing, certainly, that could make marks like that.”

  McQueen went back to the hall, picked up the boy's shirt, and tossed it to him. “Come on, get dressed. We've got a long drive back.”

  With a groan Tom pushed himself to his feet. He thanked Sally and walked back to the van. With a promise to call me the moment anything interesting came in, McQueen joined the boy in the cab and set off.

  When I went back to the kitchen Sally was standing, staring up at the dresser. She had let the dogs out and they were sniffing the piece curiously.

  “Well?” I said. “What do you think of it?”

  She was silent for a moment, her hand reaching down and stroking Gielgud's ruff. Then she turned to me. “It's perfect, Colin, absolutely perfect. Milos is going to love it.” She pulled open the center drawer, running her fingers across the bottom of it, and bringing them up thick with dust. “Young Tom was right. It needs a clean and polish.” She stared up at the face carved in the top panel. “I'm not too sure about him though.”

  “It's a Green Man,” I said. “It's meant to be lucky. And the corn dollies are a symbol of—” My display of knowledge about the myths and legends was interrupted.

  “Fertility. Yes, I know. I don't think I'll tell Milos that. It might give him ideas.”

  I heard the front door close, followed by Milos's booming voice calling hello.

  “In the kitchen,” Sally called back.

  Milos bounced into the kitchen followed by a raven-haired girl in her early teens. Milos embraced his wife, planting a kiss on her cheek, then stuck out his hand to me. “Colin, good to see you,” he said, pumping my hand enthusiastically. “You haven't met my daughter, Martina.” To the girl he said, “Martina, this is Colin Gould, the genius who has designed this wonderful kitchen.”'

  The girl was crouching down, petting the dogs, which were responding by nuzzling her and licking her hands. “Hello,” she said to me brightly. Unlike her father's, her voice was pure Home Counties with no trace of an accent, a product of the expensive boarding school she attended. I remembered Sally telling me that Milos had brought his daughter to England after the death of his first wife, the girl's mother, some ten years ago.

  “Martina's on holiday from school and is staying with us for a few days,” Sally said, and I noticed immediately that something was wrong. There was a flatness to her voice that told me she didn't approve of this change to their domestic arrangements.

  “We'll have a good time together, yes?” Milos boomed, but his enthusiasm seemed overstated, perhaps to make up for Sally's obvious lack of it.

  “Martina, don't let the dogs lick your face,” Sally said.

  Martina giggled and said something in fluent Czech to her father, who laughed and replied in the same language. The girl looked up at Sally, saying nothing, but the expression on her face was a challenge.

  I looked at my watch. I had an appointment to discuss a new commission with a prospective client in Stanmore, and I didn't want to be late. I said to Milos, “Before I go, tell me: what do you think of the dresser?”

  He came over and wrapped an arm around my shoulder. “Colin, it is a beautiful piece. Very… macho, yes? Perfect.”

  Martina was looking up at the carvings on the dresser. “It's ugly,” she said. “And he's evil.” She pointed at the Green Man. “Pure evil.”

  “Don't be so stupid,” Sally snapped at the girl. “You always have to dramatize everything.”

  The girl
smiled to herself. Satisfied at having finally provoked a reaction from her stepmother, she sipped her water and wandered into the lounge.

  Sally watched her go, shaking her head slightly, then turned to me. “I'll see you out, Colin.”

  She walked me to the door. “I'm sorry about Martina,” she said when she was out of earshot. “Fifteen years old and sometimes she can be so incredibly childish.”

  “Don't apologize,” I said. “She was trying to goad you, not me.”

  “Damnit, I know. She used to be so sweet. A year ago we were getting on so well, then suddenly she changed into this nascent superbitch.”

  “Hormones,” I said. “And I think she sees you as a rival for her father's affections. My two girls went through the same thing not long after Jackie and I divorced. Gave her hell for eighteen months, then suddenly switched their loyalties and started to give me a hard time. They're twenty-one now, and thankfully they've grown out of it.” I rarely spoke about the twins and their mother to my clients, but over the weeks I'd been working on her house, I had become very fond of Sally. We had an easygoing and fairly candid relationship.

  “Twenty-one! God, that's six years away. I'll be in the madhouse by then.” She laughed at her own dramatics and kissed my cheek. “See you Monday?”

  “Bright and early. My last week,” I said. “You'll soon be rid of me.”

  A shadow seemed to pass across her face, or perhaps it was just wishful thinking on my part.

  Then there was an indistinct noise from behind her, but fear kept her attention focused firmly upon the dresser. More noise caused her to turn her head, and as she did so, she caught sight of a mass of inhuman shapes, huddled together, tentacles breaking free from the cluster to wave sightless in the air, lolling heads barely able to stay upright on molten bodies that seemed to merge into the darkness and be carried by it.

  The squire grabbed her arms and pulled her toward the pot dresser. The wood seemed to hold her as if it were alive, and she felt tiny cuts tear into her back.

  The music stopped and she was sure she could hear her father praying, but the words contained more syllables than sense to her and were not the words she had learned so devotedly at Sunday lessons.

  The swaying mass of shadow separated into a crowd of individual creatures that had bodies such as she had never seen before. Above her head the wood was pulsating, liquid sap dripping onto her forehead in a parody of her baptism, her body held tight so that she was powerless.

  She had seen cheap engravings of Satan— it was part of her upbringing within the church—but nothing she had ever witnessed was as indescribably monstrous as the beasts she saw crawling toward her. She screamed, but her screams were ignored. She heard rather than felt the wood behind her rip and splinter, and then two bands of extraordinary strength tightened around her chest.

  She was unconscious before the creatures were upon her.

  Unlike a lot of interior designers I favor a hands-on approach to my work. It isn't enough for me to draw my ideas on paper, present them to the client, and then hire experts to transform the ideas into reality. I still hire experts in certain fields, but much of the work I do myself, and, as in the case of Sally's kitchen, I remain on site for the duration of the contract.

  The final week was to be a rounding-up operation, as I liked to call it. It would give me a chance to test all the appliances, correct any design faults, and make sure the kitchen was working the way I had designed it.

  I arrived on the Monday morning full of optimism that the week would be a breeze, and encountered the first of what would prove to be many problems.

  “I don't understand it,” I said as I examined the patch of mold just above the granite worktop. “This is an internal wall. It's the original plaster, and I don't remember there being any mold there before.”

  “There wasn't,” Sally said glumly.

  I dealt with the mold on the wall, but it puzzled me because it was unlike any mold or mildew I had encountered before. It didn't seem to be fungal; more like a moss than a mold. Still, I cleaned it off, bleached and repainted the area of wall, and when I left the house that evening there was no trace of it.

  Returning the next morning, I was horrified to see that the mold had not only come back, but had spread to the size of a dinner plate.

  Martina met me at the door. Sally, she informed me, was still in bed with a headache. To me the girl was perfectly charming, making me a cup of tea and toasting some bread, which she served with a choice of honey or marmalade. We sat at the kitchen table drinking our tea. “Have you noticed how it smells in here?” she asked between mouthfuls.

  I sniffed the air but could smell nothing but fresh paint and toasted bread. “Can't say that I have.”

  “Oh, yes, it's quite a definite smell,” she said. “Earthy. Like the forest floor after a shower of rain.”

  “It's your imagination,” Sally said from the doorway. “We went through all this nonsense last night. And why didn't you wake me when Colin arrived?” She was clearly furious.

  Martina shrugged. “I thought you could do with the rest,” she said.

  Sally grabbed at the girl's shoulder and spun her around in the chair. “Don't you dare patronize me!” she said.

  “Sally …” I said ineffectually.

  “Keep out of this, Colin. I've taken just about all I'm going to take from this little — “ Her words were cut off by Gielgud and Richardson, who had bounded into the kitchen at the sound of Sally's raised voice and were now barking furiously at her. “And you two… out of here!” she said, but the dogs did not move. Their barking quietened, but they continued to growl threateningly at Sally. She reached for Martina again and the growls became more menacing; both dogs bared their teeth at her. Sally froze, hand outstretched.

  “Martina,” I said quietly, trying to restore some order to the chaos into which the morning had erupted. “Take Gielgud and Richardson out to the garden, there's a good girl.”

  She did as she was told without argument. I watched from the kitchen window as she picked up a ball from the lawn and threw it to the end of the garden. The dogs chased after it, tails wagging. I looked around at Sally. She was crying, tears streaming down her cheeks.

  “Do you want me to phone Milos, get him home?” I said.

  She gave a short, brittle laugh. “He's why I'm upset. He always sides with Martina, never backs me up. Now he wants the dresser moved to his study.”

  I was astonished. “What on Earth for? Surely it belongs in the kitchen. Doesn't he like it?”

  “Oh, he loves it. Says it reminds him of ‘dark European nights, of moonless seas, and the bottomless abyss that surrounds us.’ You know what nonsense he can talk when he gets creative. He's researching the origins of the carvings on it.”

  I was horrified that the dresser might be moved from the kitchen. Apart from my design being meddled with, and the need to replace it, I felt an indefinite unease about the interest Milos was taking in it. When I watched Sally busying herself in the kitchen I only hoped my feelings weren't turning to jealousy.

  The mold or moss on the kitchen wall refused to go away. Despite several scrubbings and liberal doses of bleach, and even a mold killer, the mark remained. I mentioned the difficulty with it to Sally, but she just looked at the mark with tired eyes and said, “I shouldn't worry about it, Colin. It hardly matters now, does it?”

  But worry about it I did. With the mold there I couldn't finish the job, and until I finished the job I could not submit my bill, and my bank manager was breathing down my neck about an overdraft that was pushing its limits. I used my cell phone and contacted a builder friend who specialized in damp and rot problems, and he agreed to meet me at the house later that day.

  Dave, the builder, scraped some of the greenish black growth from the wall with a penknife and rubbed it between his fingers. He sniffed his stained fingertips and said, “It's not mildew, or any kind of mold I've ever encountered.”

  “Great,” I said. “Whi
ch leaves us precisely nowhere.” I shook my head in despair. “Well, whatever it is, it's spreading.” The patch had grown since the morning, not so much in diameter, but thread like filaments were reaching out from the edge of the mark, some of them more than a foot long. I rubbed at them with my finger.

  “I don't want to worry you.…” Dave said. He had walked to the other end of the kitchen and was crouching down beside the dresser. “But there's more here.”

  It was a spot the size of a penny, greenish black, exactly the same as the larger mass. Then we pulled the dresser away from the wall. The back of it was covered in the green, pungent-smelling stuff. It took an age to clean and it still looked like a temporary job to me.

  Later that day Milos came back to the house to see Martina. Sally had gone into town to the hairdresser and beautician, feeling that she needed to be pampered; she probably did. Milos came into the kitchen, looking unutterably sad. He looked around at the new oven, the dresser, and the granite worktops. “A dream kitchen,” he said. “Sally's present to me. So sad, such a shame she cannot feel the passion for this.…” His open arms indicated the dresser, looking forlorn in its current state.

  I said nothing, concentrating on painting over the latest stain. I had decided to give it one more try before calling in a structural engineer. Milos brightened when Martina entered the room. He hugged her and held her close.

  “Colin,” she said to me, completely ignoring her father, “would you come and have a look at Richardson? He's got something on his back.”

  The dog didn't seem to be in any pain, but something was irritating him. He was sitting, head twisted back over his shoulder, nibbling at something. I got down beside him. He looked at me with his lugubrious brown eyes. Gielgud pushed his snout against my hand and Martina took him by the collar and pulled him away.