Acolytes of Cthulhu

by Robert M. Price

  “Is that a threat?” asked Mitchell thinly.

  “Not a threat, but a warning. Believe me when I tell you that it is not a good thing to gain immortality—this way.”

  Ralph Mitchell glared at him in silence for a long moment, then pushed aside the straw over the entrance of the hut, clambered swiftly down the shaking ladder to the ground and stood in the cold darkness. Above him, he could hear Walton saying something to the old man in his own tongue. Waiting for him to come, Mitchell smiled grimly. Probably the other was apologizing for what had happened. If so, he could save his words. His patience was finally almost exhausted.

  From now on, he would look for these hidden things himself and take little notice of what was told him by the natives. If there was anything hidden here which they did not want him to find, then by God, he would never rest until he did find it. Until he had brought it out into the light of day and shown it proudly to the skeptics.

  But in spite of all this and the seething rage inside him, he felt oddly disturbed by what the old man had said. This veiled threat against Professor Nordhurst. What exactly had that meant? Did they intend to murder him because of his beliefs—or to be more precise, his disbeliefs? On the face of it, it seemed hardly likely that anything such as that would happen at the present day, even here. Nevertheless, he wondered whether or not he ought to warn the Professor. He would probably only laugh in his face, call him a superstitious fool and tell him that all of this work was simply beginning to get on his nerves.

  He decided against telling him anything of what had happened that night. Two minutes later, Walton came down the ladder, dropped to the ground beside him. Without saying a word, he led the way back along the path, towards the top of the lava ridge, on the other side of which lay their camp.

  The wind had risen now and shrieked at them like a mad thing, whirling their clothing about them, hammering at their faces and yelling in their ears. Spray seemed to reach up from the depths and lash at their bodies until they were soaked to the skin. There was the sharp taste of salt on Mitchell’s lips and he had to lean forward against the wind to make any headway.

  The moon still shone, close to the sea now, where it was dipping towards the horizon. Gradually, however, the wind dropped until it became quite calm. Mitchell struggled forward, feet slipping on smooth lava underfoot. Walton seemed to have little difficulty in walking, holding himself stiffly upright, not having to look down at where he placed his feet. He seemed to know every inch of this way, although Mitchell could have sworn that the other had trod this path only twice since they had been on the island. The man’s memory seemed fantastic, to be able to pick his way amid that jumble of rocks in almost pitch darkness.

  At the top of the low, saddle-backed ridge, they paused and looked about them. Mitchell was breathing heavily by this time, his breath coming in great, gasping sobs which burst from his lips in the silence. Presently, however, as he stared about him, his eyes becoming more accustomed to the blackness, he had the peculiarly illusory impression that there were dark shapes which moved in the darkness on either side of them. He screwed up his eyes in order to see them better, knowing that in the night, averted vision was far more acute than looking straight at anything which moved.

  The first movement was of tall, grotesque shadows, far taller than a man, but having human shape which seemed to glide down the side of Rano Raraku some distance to the east. Then, abruptly, they were no longer shadows, but solid things, most of them upright but some wriggling along the ground with a terrible sinuous motion. He opened his mouth to scream, but Walton, stepping forward to his side, clamped a hand over his mouth and muttered a hissed warning.

  Not until the convulsive shivering in his body had died away, did the other remove his hand and release his restraining hold on Mitchell’s arm. Then he could only stand there, dumbly, the muscles of his throat constricted so that no sound could possibly have been uttered even if he had wanted to shriek out loud with what he saw. Those vast colossi, those graven images which looked out forever across the rolling, undulating hills of Easter Island, were moving in utter silence through the darkness.

  Oh God, his mind screamed at him, colossi like this had no right to be moving around at all, and certainly not in such utter silence. The sight caused every hair, even the tiny growths on the back of his hands, to rise with a vague fright beyond all description or classification. For a moment, he lost all power to draw a single breath. His lungs seemed crushed and paralyzed. His eyes were starting from his head.

  Was this what the old man had meant when he had said that the Old Ones, the evil ones, were still on the island, that they had immortality?

  Now, he saw it all clearly and the thought itself was what brought all of the horror to a head. Of course the Old Ones were immortal. There was nothing on the island which could outlive those vast stone images.

  The terror seeped through him in a surging wave, leaving his body exhausted, his spirit spent. How long they stood there, watching that terrible sight, it was impossible to estimate. When he could finally think clearly again, when the breath came back into his body and the mad thumping of his heart had subsided, the moon had sunk out of sight below the western horizon and there was no further movement in the pitch blackness where only the bright, alien stars looked down on the scene.

  It was a long time before he could pull himself together completely. Then he turned to look at Walton. If he had expected to see an expression of fear on the other’s face, he was strangely disappointed. Instead, there was a look which he could not analyze.

  “I think we had better go now,” said Walton in a strange voice. “The others will be wondering where we’ve got to and I think you’ve seen enough.”

  “It must have been imagination,” whispered Mitchell, more to himself than to the other. “Yes, yes, that’s it. Nothing but imagination, something conjured up by that old fool’s talk.” He was babbling a little wildly now, but he did not realize it.

  The other smiled, turned and led the way down the side of the ridge, back to camp. As they approached, Mitchell saw that there were torches burning among the tents and that most of the men were still awake and moving hurriedly around, fully dressed. Possibly they were making ready to come looking for Walton and himself, he thought, and wiped the sweat from his forehead. Nobody would believe their story, even if they told it to them. He licked his lips dryly and knew that he would have to remain silent, would have to keep it to himself unless he wanted them to lock him away in some asylum.

  He could imagine what Nordhurst would say if he ever learned of it. The Skipper came rushing towards them as they came within the circle of torchlight. He seemed agitated.

  “Where’ve you been at this time of night, Doctor Mitchell?” he asked harshly. “And is the Professor with you?”

  “Professor Nordhurst—why no, he isn’t with us.” There was a sudden feeling of alarm in Mitchell’s mind. That strange threat which the old native had made against Nordhurst. Had there been anything in it?

  “He must have gone off somewhere,” said the other throatily. “His bed seems to have been slept in, but judging from the ground around the hut and inside, there seems to have been some kind of struggle. We wondered whether any of the natives had come while we were asleep and the Professor had caught them at the usual game of stealing our equipment. Nobody seems to have heard anything, although Carlton here thought he heard a faint scream, but imagined that it had been one of the sea-birds. It wasn’t until we decided to check with the lookout that we found he had gone. Then we discovered you and Doctor Walton were missing too.”

  “Doctor Walton and I have been over to the native village,” said Mitchell, just a trifle too quickly. “But we saw nothing of the Professor. If he did decide to go anywhere, it must have been in the opposite direction. In the moonlight, we ought to have seen him if he had been anywhere in that direction.”

  “We’ll make a thorough search in the morning, sir,” said the Skipper tightly. “He may
have gone over to have a word with the Governor, but I wouldn’t have thought that would be likely at this hour of the night.

  “Don’t worry, though, we’ll find him even if we have to take this whole island apart. There isn’t going to be any repetition of what happened when the Spaniards came.”

  But though they searched all of the following day, and for several days afterwards, there was no sign of Professor Nordhurst. The Governor ordered all of the natives to make a search in any of the secret places known to them, but without avail. The only possible explanation was that the Professor had vanished off the face of the island as if he had never existed.

  For six weeks, while the search continued, excavations were made at various points on the island. Some evidence to support Mitchell’s theory was turned up, but with Nordhurst’s mysterious disappearance, there was no sense of triumph in this. Now that the chief antagonist of his ideas had vanished, he lost all interest in the expedition. He was strangely glad when the time came for them to leave.

  As the anchor rattled metallically up the sides of the ship, Mitchell stood on deck, leaning against the rail, staring at the dim greenness of Easter Island. Through the powerful binoculars, he could make out the various landmarks which he had grown to know so well. Halfway up the wide slope was the isolated figure of the statue they had dug out of the ground, exposing the entire body for its tremendous length of sixty feet. Around it were others, still standing there or lying on their faces. He moved the binoculars gently from side to side, studying the faces with a detached interest.

  That there was some mystery, there was not any doubt but—

  His thoughts gelled in his head. His hands shook so violently that he could scarcely hold the glasses steady as he stared at the vast stone face, the only one looking out to sea, the face of Nordhurst as he had seen him just before he had vanished.

  THERE ARE MORE THINGS

  BY JORGE LUIS BORGES

  ON THE POINT OF TAKING MY LAST EXAMINATION AT THE University of Texas, in Austin, I learned that my uncle Edwin Arnett had died of an aneurysm at the far end of the South American continent. I felt what we all feel when someone dies—remorse, now pointless, for not having been kinder. We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men. My course of study was philosophy. I remembered that it was my uncle, at the Casa Colorada, his home near Lomas, on the edge of Buenos Aires, who, without invoking a single proper name, had first revealed to me philosophy’s beautiful perplexities. One of the after-dinner oranges was his aid in initiating me into Berkeley’s idealism; a chessboard was enough to illustrate the paradoxes of the Eleatics. Years later, he was to lend me Hinton’s treatises which attempt to demonstrate the reality of four-dimensional space and which the reader is meant to imagine by means of complicated exercises with multicoloured cubes. I shall never forget the prisms and pyramids that we erected on the floor of his study.

  My uncle was an engineer. Before retiring from his job with the railroad, he decided to build himself a house in Turdera, which offered the advantages of almost country-like solitude and of proximity to the city. Nothing was more predictable than that the architect should be his close friend Alexander Muir. This uncompromising man followed the uncompromising teachings of John Knox. My uncle, like almost all the gentlemen of his day, had been a freethinker or, rather, an agnostic, but he was interested in theology, just as he was interested in Hinton’s unreal cubes and in the well-constructed nightmares of the young H. G. Wells. He liked dogs, and he had a great sheepdog that he had named Samuel Johnson, in memory of Lichfield, his far-off birthplace.

  The Casa Colorada stood on a height of land, bordered on the west by sun-blackened fields. Inside its fence, the araucarias did nothing to soften its air of gloom. Instead of a flat roof, there was a slate-tiled saddle roof and a square tower with a clock. These seemed to oppress the walls and the meager windows. As a boy, I used to accept all this ugliness, just as one accepts those incompatible things which, only because they coexist, are called the world.

  I returned home in 1921. To avoid legal complications, the house had been auctioned off. It was bought by a foreigner, a Max Preetorius, who paid double what was offered by the highest bidder. No sooner was the deed signed than he arrived, late one afternoon, with two helpers and they carted off to a rubbish dump, not far from the old Drover’s Road, all the furniture, all the books, and all the utensils of the house. (I sadly recalled the diagrams in the Hinton volumes and the great globe.) The next day, Preetorius went to Muir and proposed certain alterations that the architect indignantly rejected. In the end, a firm from Buenos Aires took charge of the work. The local carpenters refused to furnish the house again. Finally, a certain Mariani, from Glew, accepted the conditions laid down by Preetorius. For an entire fortnight he had to labour by night behind closed doors. It was also by night that the new owner of the Casa Colorada moved in. The windows no longer opened, but chinks of light could be made out in the dark. One morning, the milkman found the sheepdog dead on the walk, headless and mutilated. That winter they felled the araucarias. Nobody saw Preetorius again.

  News of these events, as may be imagined, left me uneasy. I know that my most obvious trait is curiosity—that same curiosity that brought me together with a woman completely different from me only in order to find out who she was and what she was like, to take up (without appreciable results) the use of laudanum, to explore transfinite numbers, and to undertake the hideous adventure that I am about to tell. Ominously, I decided to look into the matter.

  My first step was to see Alexander Muir. I remembered him as tall-standing and dark, with a wiry build that suggested strength. Now the years had stooped him and his black beard had gone grey. He received me at his Temperley house, which, foreseeably, was like my uncle’s, since both houses followed the solid standards of the good poet and bad builder William Morris.

  Conversation was sparse—Scotland’s symbol, after all, is the thistle. I had the feeling, nonetheless, that the strong Ceylon tea and the equally generous plate of scones (which my host broke in two and buttered for me as if I were still a boy) were, in fact, a frugal Calvinistic feast offered to the nephew of his friend. His theological differences with my uncle had been a long game of chess, demanding of each player the collaboration of his opponent.

  Time passed and I was no nearer my business. There was an uncomfortable silence and Muir spoke. “Young man,” he said, “you have not come all this way to talk about Edwin or the United States, a country that I have little interest in. What’s troubling you is the sale of the Casa Colorada and its odd buyer. They do me, too. Frankly, the story displeases me, but I’ll tell you what I can. It will not be much.”

  After a while he went on, unhurriedly. “Before Edwin died, the mayor called me into his office. He was with the parish priest. They asked me to draw the plans for a Catholic chapel. My work would be well paid. On the spot, I answered no. I am a servant of God and I cannot commit the abomination of erecting altars to idols.” Here he stopped.

  “Is that all?” I finally dared to ask.

  “No. This whelp of a Jew Preetorius wanted me to destroy my work and in its place get up a monstrous thing. Abomination comes in many shapes.” He pronounced these words gravely and got to his feet.

  * * *

  Outside, on turning the corner, I was approached by Daniel Iberra. We knew one another the way people in small towns do. He suggested that we accompany each other back to Turdera. I have never been keen on hoodlums, and I expected a sordid litany of violent and more or less apocryphal back-room stories, but I gave in and accepted his invitation. It was very nearly nightfall. On seeing the Casa Colorada come into view from a few blocks off, Iberra made a detour. I asked him why. His reply was not what I anticipated.

  “I am don Felipe’s right arm,” he said. “Nobody has ever called me soft. That young Urgoiti who took the trouble to come looking for me all the way from Merlo—you probably remember what happened to him. Look. A few nights ago, I was retu
rning from a party. A hundred yards or so from that house I saw something. My horse reared up, and if I hadn’t had a good grip on him and made him turn down an alley, maybe I wouldn’t be telling this story now. What I saw justified the horse’s fright.” Angrily, Iberra added a swear word.

  That night I did not sleep. Around dawn, I dreamed about an engraving that I had never seen before or that I had seen and forgotten; it was in the style of Piranesi, and it had a labyrinth in it. It was a stone amphitheatre ringed by cypresses, above whose tops it reached. There were neither doors nor windows; rather, it displayed an endless row of narrow vertical slits. With a magnifying glass, I tried to see the Minotaur inside. At last, I made it out. It was a monster of a monster, more bison than bull, and, its human body stretched out on the ground, it seemed to be asleep and dreaming. Dreaming of what or of whom?

  That evening, I passed by the Casa Colorada. The iron gate was shut and some of its bars were bent. What once was garden was now overgrown with weeds. To the right, there was a shallow ditch and its outer edges were trampled.

  There was only one move left, but for days I kept putting it off—not because I felt it to be altogether a waste, but because it would drag me to the inevitable, to the last.

  Without much hope, I went to Glew. Mariani, the carpenter, was a stout, pink-faced Italian, common and cordial and now somewhat advanced in years. A glance at him was enough for me to dismiss the stratagems I had contrived the night before. I handed him my card, which he pompously spelled out aloud with a certain reverential stumbling when he reached the “Ph.D.” I told him I was interested in the furniture made by him for the house in Turdera that had been my uncle’s. The man spoke on and on. I shall not try to transcribe his torrent of words and gestures, but he told me that his motto was to satisfy his customer’s every demand, no matter how outlandish it was, and that he had carried out his work to the letter. After rummaging in various drawers he showed me some papers that I could make neither head nor tail of; they were signed by the elusive Preetorius. (Doubtless, Mariani mistook me for a lawyer.) On saying goodbye, he confided to me that even for all the world’s gold he would never again set foot in Turdera, let alone that house. He added that the customer is sacred, but that in his humble opinion Mr. Preetorius was crazy. Then he grew quiet, obviously repentant. I was unable to worm anything more out of him.