by Gary Fry
Jeg har berettet om denne hendelsen to ganger før; en gang på engelsk for å beskytte min kone for uant kjennskap. Jeg er klar over at folk som vet så mye som meg ikke pleier å leve lenge. Av den grunn skriver jeg dette brev på mitt morsmål i håp om at min historie en dag skal bli forstått. Jeg skal la skjebnen bestemme hvem som ender opp med å lese dette. Jeg håper at de kommende hendelser i verden ender bedre enn hva jeg uheldigvis tror. Dette dokumentet er avslørende, for jeg har sett det. Jeg vet hvilke grusomheter som venter oss alle. Gud vet at jeg er redd. Din tjener – Gustav Johansen.
After typing this text into an online translation site, George was rewarded with an English passage that lacked nuance but whose meaning appeared to be:
…written account twice, once in English…protect wife from forbidden knowledge…people who know as much as I do not live long…make this copy in native language…hope story heard one day…cast it adrift…let fate decide who falls upon it…hope events kinder to it than what may trouble the world…I’ve seen It…horrors await us all…very frightened…Your wary servant – Gustaf Johansen
In light of everything George had learned lately, this was intriguing – the line about the author having “seen It” was particularly suggestive – but to understand more, he needed access to the whole manuscript. Translation via a similarly crude method would do it a disservice and might even lead to misunderstandings. But there was a way of ensuring accuracy, and one to which George, with his academic contacts, had access. The document was eight pages in length and shouldn’t take long to render into English. He knew a guy at his former university who might help.
After emailing this man and asking if he had time free to work on the material, George switched his attention back to enquiries about that foghorn building, whose history his informant in Malton – Henry Gamble – had only partially alluded to. The man’s account, a near-hysterical sequence of events ending with no firm conclusions, had conveyed enough hints for a researcher to sink metaphorical teeth into.
It was eight o’clock in the evening, and George’s wife was watching TV in the next room. Since returning from the northeast several days earlier, George had experienced no further complications from his condition, and his dreams, still strained at times, had involved no more of those weird landscapes boasting impossible geometries. In hindsight, he’d assigned those imaginings to the stress involved in adjusting to a new period of life, free from occupational responsibilities and with few opportunities to focus on involving tasks. But that was no longer true. Even Christine had encouraged him to take an interest in this mystery, in a suspiciously silenced event in Whitby’s recent past.
He typed key words into his search engine and then clicked Find. After spending time reading about the town’s history, he chanced upon relevant information about the storm of 1975, when the port had flooded during an evening of fierce rainfall and choppy winds. The most interesting fact about this episode was that only Whitby on the northeast coast had been affected badly. Neither Redcar to the north nor Scarborough to the south had suffered the kind of damage that had closed shops for days and reduced residential properties to sodden ruins.
On the same night, which had occurred towards the end of March, residents of the town had reported hearing the famous foghorn, that rampant Bull, roaring along the coastline. But some suggested that it had sounded different, as if the regular rhythm was altered and it had gone off at random across a range of pitches. George could only suppose that, as visibility would have been poor that evening and the man operating the foghorn was distracted, the engines had been neglected, resulting in such a bestial cacophony. George could almost hear the thing now, resembling masses of cattle under protest, the throaty rumble of a huge body with incredibly deep lungs. Weather-affected acoustics over the sea had rendered its sound more resonant, and that strange delaying effect, as if time had been destabilised, made a mockery of all listeners’ expectations.
So plenty of other things had occurred elsewhere on the night Jens Amundsen had disappeared. Had the local authority and other bodies – the police or fire service, perhaps – been involved in an elaborate cover-up? That was the only conclusion which made sense. After all, the notion that the building had sustained damage caused by subsidence was ludicrous, just as Henry Gamble believed. How had local officials got away with it? More pertinently, why had they lied? Did someone know more than had been publically admitted? Or had surveyors or insurers grown afraid of implications presented by those high buckled walls and all that broken plaster, keeping the case secret and hoping any associated furore would quickly die away?
George recalled Henry claiming that although he’d been estranged from his family, his colleague Jens had relatives living in the UK. Surely at least one of them had wanted to learn more about the man’s disappearance. But George – despite using the Norwegian’s name to search specific websites, including that of Whitby’s only newspaper, the Gazette – was unable to locate further information about the missing man.
Perhaps he’d have better luck with some of the more speculative elements of the story he’d heard in Malton. Hadn’t his informant mentioned some sort of spell his ex-colleague had performed, or even the thing he’d tried conjuring with weird magic? As George reflected on this matter, a peculiar word returned to him, one almost unpronounceable and constructed from seemingly mismatching syllables: “cuff-who-loo”.
Expecting the effort to lead nowhere, George typed this non-word into the search engine and hit Return.
He was right: it led nowhere, producing just a haphazard list of links bearing little or no relation to one another. All the same, amid a number of knitting patterns (presumably generated by “cuff”) and plumbing guides (prompted by the crudely informal “loo”), there was a single entry that intrigued George.
Great Old Ones and their advocates
…the correct pronunciation of the mythical creature “Cthulhu” is thought to closely resemble “cuff who loo”…
He clicked at once on this link and was transported to a website dedicated to what appeared to be ancient entities – so old that they predated humankind – which supposedly slumbered in hidden parts of the world. They were dormant but not dead, awaiting revival by two essential triggers: the stars in the heavens “being right” and certain spells being enacted by people with whom these “Great Old Ones” had communicated via dreams. Their leader was allegedly called Cthulhu.
It was all hokum, of course, but even so George found it compelling. He spent half an hour reading about an expert on this controversial mythology, a Professor Lovecraft who’d worked between 1910 and 1935 at Miskatonic University in Massachusetts, North America.
With a respectable academic involved, George felt that he could take this material seriously and soon learnt more about Professor Lovecraft’s discoveries. These included a period of inclement weather conditions back in the winter of 1925 during which a great many artists and poets (as well as the clinically insane) had experienced convergent dreams about a bizarre semiaquatic creature and its current location, a sunken island called R’lyeh situated somewhere in the South Pacific.
George hesitated, recalling his own dream of a few nights ago, the one in which all the geometry had been at fault and some hideous thing had been about to erupt from a volcanic structure composed of improbable symmetrical blocks.
Was there a connection here? Had the dark arts practiced by Jens Amundsen left residual traces that might be picked up by sensitive brains or perhaps ones suffering ailments? Had George been violated by a lingering spell that had once summoned a Great Old One to England’s coastline, when this thing had smashed against that property before taking its supplicant away?
But this was all ridiculous, the stuff of tawdry science fiction, just as Henry Gamble had claimed. All the same, as George read more about Professor Lovecraft’s research, he couldn’t help feeling increasingly uncomfortable.
There was further material about black magic rites conducted in the deep
south of North America, among the voodoo regions of Louisiana. There were allusions to stone carvings representing Cthulhu, each sculpted by craftsmen who’d suffered those same dark dreams in the 1920s. There was talk of Eskimo tribes in which priest-wizards – angekoks – invoked devils – tornasuks – whose descriptions, passed down by word of mouth across generations, shared uncanny similarities to the Great Old Ones depicted in other cultures. There were chants and rituals codified in indecipherable prose. There was information about how these ancient creatures, all composed of non-organic tissue that allowed them to travel without conventional restrictions, had arrived on earth many millennia before humans, how they’d since been buried and were now held in slumber by powerful spells. But one day, it was claimed, when the heavens decreed that the time was right, their great leader would rise again, bringing many more with It, and the whole world would be turned to fire, freeing all people to commit violent acts in an unfettered orgy.
Intersecting the text were photographs, at least two showing sculpted carvings and another an artist’s sketch in pencil. Each supposedly depicted great Cthulhu, a vast creature boasting immense claws, multiple face tentacles, and vast wings affixed to its back. There was little context by which to judge the size of this entity, but whatever its dimensions were, it looked unspeakably unpleasant. Its flesh was greenish and its body immense, but it was the head that bothered George most, with so many rubberlike tubes shooting away from its circumference: appendages that surely might push through a building’s windows and break plaster from the room’s far wall.
He refused to think about this for long; he had more reading to do. The academic’s account ended with an observation that linked back to the manuscript George still had on the table beside his laptop. It was apparently true that anyone in possession of too much knowledge about the Great Old Ones suffered a premature demise.
George looked away from his screen and thought of Gustaf Johansen, who’d written words suggesting that “people who know as much as [him] do not live long”. The man had gone as far as composing two accounts of the same experience, one in English to save his wife from such “forbidden knowledge” and the other in Norwegian in the hope of someone chancing upon it and being warned about “what horrors await us all”, something that had certainly “frightened” him.
Someone had eventually chanced upon the latter document: Jens Amunden, a fellow Norwegian, who’d read the chronicle and then acted upon its content, drawing on an existing interest in the dark arts in a foolhardy attempt to summon unspeakable entities from some age-old void.
Pulling away from his screen, George found it difficult not to take a last glance at the webpage. At the foot of the account of Professor Lovecraft’s research findings, he read a single troubling phrase:
In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.
CHAPTER SEVEN
That night George suffered the dream again, the one in which he occupied a strange terrain where nothing behaved as it should in a Newtonian world with familiar laws of cause and effect. He awoke thrashing in the sheets, and on this occasion Christine was laid beside him and had to calm him down. Eventually she asked if he’d experienced another of his episodes.
George, feeling paranoid from the unsettling power of his nightmare, briefly wondered why his wife hadn’t used her iPhone to record his behaviour, but then felt grateful for her intervention. He couldn’t imagine facing this horror alone, being at the mercy of a universe that greeted his inevitable death with only an indifferent stare from its countless star-like eyes.
Once they’d eaten breakfast together, exchanging strained small-talk the way they often did in troubling times, George was back at his computer and first checking the news headlines. World affairs remained as tenuous as they’d been during his lifetime. China’s rise to global economic domination continued to be compromised by its Communist infrastructure, leading to mass demonstrations and riots. There was further conflict between Israel and Palestine, while Kuwait had again become a hotbed of political activity, decades after the two Gulf Wars. The Eurozone had suffered more problems arising from uneven performances between its industrious north – successful Germany – and decadent south, especially the perpetually unstable Spain and Italy. In the Far East, North Korea had been “sabre-rattling” with nuclear weapons, to such a degree that indefatigable USA had flexed more of its ageing muscles.
This was the usual hodgepodge of international friction, and although it cast a shadow over George and Christine’s imminent world tour, none of it told him what he wanted to know. For that, he needed to check for emails and make a phone call.
He started with the messages, opening his inbox and hoping for a reply from his former colleague, the one fluent in Norwegian. Indeed, here it was, instructing George to send over the material in need of transcription, which the guy, who soon had a holiday booked, could tackle reasonably quickly. George spent time scanning the manuscript written long ago by Gustaf Johansen and mailed off the file as an attachment, expressing gratitude to the academic. George hoped the man hadn’t merely taken pity on him, that he’d have done the same favour in other circumstances. But he didn’t let this trouble him for long.
He waited until his wife had gone upstairs before dialling the number he’d found online. Robin Hood’s Bay had plenty of pubs, but despite his mental unrest lately, George recalled the name of the one in which he and Christine had dined prior to leaving for home. More crucially, he remembered the name of the man who’d offered his wife a crucial lead, which had taken George to Malton to hear Henry Gamble’s curious story. The coast-dwelling guy was called Malcolm Harp and was obviously a devotee of all things alcoholic. George hoped he’d be drinking in the pub now.
He spoke to a barmaid first, maybe even the same one who’d served him that evening. After he’d asked for the man by name, the woman told him to hold the line, presumably while she roused her client from his usual corner. Seconds later a gravelly voice came on the line.
“Hello. Malcolm speaking. Who’s this?”
George identified himself and then mentioned Henry in Malton, realising that if his latest informant knew his old friend had communicated with George, there was little harm in doing similar. After wary, even apprehensive grumbles, the man agreed to speak to George, but only later, in private, from his own home.
George wondered what could be so troubling that Malcolm Harp needed to be away from public view to discuss it. But then he heard his wife descend from upstairs and enter the lounge, smiling in the sympathetic way that was beginning to irritate him.
“Are you feeling okay?” she asked. In any other situation, this would be an innocent, even polite, question. But in the current one, it only heightened George’s mounting frustration.
“I’m fine,” he said, trying to keep emphasis off the second word and yet failing. A moment later, feeling bad about his reaction, he added, “I’m just about to call somebody else about that foghorn building.”
“That place has really got a grip on you, hasn’t it?”
“What do you mean, grip?” he asked, some of his impatience returning.
Christine stared at him, as if unsure what to say. George knew she’d meant her comment conversationally and hadn’t been passing judgement on his developing obsession. All the same, he believed that she’d identified something he struggled to admit to himself. This case was taking hold of him, in pitiable contrast to its possibly unsensational nature. He’d begun to wonder whether he was seeking ghosts or maybe evidence of some other realm in the cosmos, where he was about to travel before long. In this sense, his preoccupation made absolute sense, even though he somehow knew that his investigations were ultimately likely to be a damp-squib.
Such insights had once been a regular part of his daily working life and it was characteristic of him to identify these underlying motivations. The tumour in his skull might also be driving his intense activity, a wish to know more than could be known, to grapple with the impossible. A
fter all, he’d been a social scientist for many years and now had no more than a few left.
After long seconds of silence, George exhaled sharply. “Oh look, I’m sorry, my love. I don’t mean to be rude. It’s just that…well, I’m in the middle of something important, and as you know, I always get a bit insular during my projects.”
Christine stepped across to offer a hug, which he immediately accepted, enjoying the warmth she’d always imparted.
“I’m just pleased that you’re able to focus on something positive,” she said, and after she’d set him free, he wondered whether the word “positive” could be used accurately in these circumstances.
He’d find out for certain by calling Malcolm Harp. He took his medication and watched Christine head upstairs again, then waited and waited. He strolled around the house, making tea, drinking it, nibbling at biscuits, trawling online again to see if he could discover more about that foghorn building (he found nothing), and then, at three o’clock, the time the man in Robin Hood’s Bay had said he’d be available to speak, he dialled the number he’d been given.
The line connected in seconds, as if the guy was eager to talk to George, or rather wanted to get the conversation over with as quickly as possible.
“Okay, go on,” the weary voice said from what felt like a greater distance than the seventy-five miles to the coast, “ask what you need to know and then let me get back to the pub.”
The man’s acerbic nature was in keeping with that of a lifelong village resident, with such people’s limited experience of diversity. In his academic work, George had come across many like him and knew that their lives tended to be driven by routine and a tripartite separation of daily activities: work, recreation, sleep. But George wasn’t here to talk psychology. He had a more concrete problem to solve.
“You’ll realise, of course, that I’m interested in the foghorn building just a few miles down the coast from your home.”
