PYRATE CTHULHU - Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (vol.2)

by Various

  "I've no more idea than you," he replied. "Something horrible beyond description, or else it would never have driven Geoff mad. But if the thing's here, it will feel the power emanating from the stone."

  We waited in motionless silence. The night's voices had diminished to the sound of the resurgent waves of the nearby sea and the faraway cries of a skycoasting nightjar. For a long few minutes the scene held. Then there rose a new sound, fraught with terror, a lumbering, scraping sound, accompanied by a terrible slavering. The sounds came from below the level at which we sat, from that level where, presumably, the legendary stone casket had been hidden.

  "Thank God we have the stone!" murmured Vernon.

  Abruptly an indescribable shape rose up among the ruins, giving forth a low ululation that seemed to roll up from deep within its misshapen hulk. It hesitated for but a moment, then rolled clumsily out into the lowland surrounding the ruins. There it gathered speed as it moved forward.

  "Give me the stone," asked Vernon.

  I surrendered it without hesitation.

  Vernon shouted and ran toward the thing, Hemery and myself close behind him. But the entity from the ruins had apparently not seen us; it moved steadily toward the cathedral at a speed which forced us to exert ourselves to the utmost to keep up with it. Even so, it vanished into the ruined church before we could catch up to it. Once at the cathedral's roofless walls, Vernon called a halt. It would not do for us to separate, he warned, lest the thing caught Hemery and myself alone, and increased its own power by killing one of us separated from the strength of the stone, which might then be powerless against it.

  Accordingly the three of us entered the shadowed corridors of the cathedral together in search of our quarry. We crept silently through the ruins and back again, and then, becoming bolder, went forward with less care. But the thing was not in evidence. It had altered its course somewhere. Could it have doubled back to Wayne's house, I wondered apprehensively. After half an hour, my companions were despondent and spoke of returning either to the ruins of the priory or to Lynwold.

  It was then that a shocking, greenish hulk rose from the floor of the corridor before us and came directly toward us. At once Vernon faced it with the stone. The thing paused --- but only for a moment; then a tentacle lashed forth and struck at Hemery. But Vernon sprang forward, bearing the stone as a sheath, and the thing in the corridor fell back, whistling weirdly. Out of the darkness before us shone a trio of cruel, malignant eyes, and the opening which served as its mouth gaped yawningly below. At the same moment, its body began to glow with an eerie sea-green light. Then once more the thing came at us.

  What happened after that remains like a nightmare of mad and fantastic images in my memory. The battle with the monster from outside seemed endless, but eventually it lumbered awkwardly away from Hydestall Cathedral and made for the priory. There it fought anew, fought a long time before it vanished into the depths of an underground passage.

  I suppose that at the end we were no longer human in our battle with the inhuman monster, fighting it back inch by inch, forcing its retreat until at last it crouched in hiding in the very casket from which it had been liberated when Geoffrey Malvern --- as we learned later --- had so ill-advisedly pried the star-stone off the lid. How long the battle lasted I could not say, but it was dawn when the three of us returned from the seacoast, exhausted. The casket, sealed once more by the stone, lay in the ocean's depths, and already the events of the night seemed like a tenuous and incredible nightmare, as unreal as the amorphous being which had so briefly returned to its ancient life in the priory ruins.

  ***

  But as to whence it came, in truth, no one could tell. Nor could anyone say by what laws it had existed for so many centuries, to fatten and grow again in a time far beyond its own, to bring its horror into a distant future. And what if sometime in years to come another searcher takes up the stone once more and looses the thing from outside anew? Who knows? In other corners of this earth there may be others biding their time.

  Confession in Darkness

  by Gerald W. Page (1979)

  Forget whatever you may have read, those facts of record, those reported actualities, all of them the product of constables and journalists more devoted to their own advancement than to the truth. If you insist on my story you will have to hear it told my way. The Times, for example, described my first victim as unattractive -I think the term they used was "drab". Of course the Mirror was more generous, but as far as they were concerned, no woman who was ever murdered in a colorful enough manner was less than striking. I choose to make her lovelier, though. In my protean mind she is beautiful, unbelieveably beautiful, that first woman I ever murdered.

  Those were the days when I called myself a scientist. Where, I have often wondered, can there be found a greater irony than the idea that there's a dividing line between science and sorcery? Oh, the so-called informed in either field will deprecate the other's advocates as blind or superstitious, and neither faces the utter reality that they polish backing sides of the same coin.

  I was very interested in certain things pertaining to the nature of the universe in those days, and though I knew a bit about chemistry and astronomy and so on, I suppose I was even then the crude beginning of a sorcerer or worse. With growing frequency the books I delved into were less and less scientific. I suppose by the standards of some I was quite mad. But the more I learned the more my enjoyable, corrupt madness was revealed to me as bright reality. Marie Ostroff was blonde and young, her body all that your imagination could demand of it. Pay no attention to the press reports. They saw her afterwards. I saw her alive.

  No woman so young and beautiful should have been out alone that late and passing so temptingly close to dark doorways. I won't impugn her virtue by saying she might have had some purpose in such actions; that might tend to justify my act in certain minds and I don't want that. What I did I did wantonly and for no reason stronger than idle experimentation, to put to the test those things I had learned from my books, to discover if there was some modicum of truth behind the extraordinary madness I had found. Intellectual exercise, no more.

  Yet through it my life became an exercise in passion...

  She wasn't murdered in the street. I took her elsewhere. My hiding place was within four blocks of where I found her. Was it laboratory or altar or simple crypt? Satisfy yourself, I leave such details to your taste in cinema. I took her to that place and performed certain rites at certain hours -is this mysterious enough for you? The actual killing of her took days.

  It was a complex experiment, this one involving the murder of Marie Ostroff, involving a number of ideas. One of them was that there were circumstances where excruciating pain blended with excruciating delight, an overwrought delight. But I'm ashamed to confess that whatever pleasure she got from the rites, little of it was due to my efforts. I was most inept in those days. The disgrace of Victorian England.

  In other areas the experiment was less a failure. When it was done I could already feel the change in myself. Not those changes which might ordinarily arise from the simple act of murder but changes that came about from actions beyond my own, the actions of the One to Whom my murderous act was dedicated.

  I was so pleased that I went to see my old friend Leffler to tell him what I had done and discovered.

  It was Leffler who had shown me the books from which I had learned the ritual. More than that. He had taught me things not in the books, things that had never been in the books. He knew so much. His problem was that he knew them only as theory because he lacked the courage to pursue the things he taught. As I told him my experiences he nodded somberly and drank steadily.

  He once told me he had summoned something up —he wouldn't tell me what- and at the sight of it had wet his pants. It was a confession in a moment of rare lucidity among the alcoholic stupors that were, by the time I had met him, the only moments in which he'd talk about himself at all. He said he hadn't started drinking until after he'd
conjured that thing. The story impressed me because Leffler had as strong a stomach and as little conscience as anyone I'd ever met. It was a valuable object lesson to me, that story. I've always been extremely careful about anything I ever summoned up.

  So there was old Leffler who had given up his dabblings, though he remained something of a demon in his gourmet's fondness for dead flesh, but he was willing enough to teach what he feared to do.

  So I learned from him about the Great Old Ones and how to transcend space. He taught me the chants and cries of the worshippers of Great Cthulhu and described to me the appearance and habits of the Mi-Go and the Deep Ones, informed me about the things that occur on the Plateau of Leng in certain seasons, and of the appearance and nature of R'lyeh where Great Cthulhu dreams. From him I also learned what Hastur has need of, what Cthugha's flames must feed on. I learned the ways in which Shub-Niggurath may be compelled and the dangers of such action. I was an excellent student. I learned well, very well indeed.

  Poor Leffler. In spite of all he knew he was too afraid of it to use it even to save himself.

  And that despite his other fear.

  Oh yes, his other fear, for he had a second one. Not of dying, but of what might happen to his corpse after he died.

  He'd been indulging his ghoulish inclinations for so long that he had begun to fancy that he had certain enemies. He told me about the nightmares he had where he could see them coming from their graves. He had vivid impressions of the way clumps of dirt and bits of broken root clung to doughy, rotting flesh. His fear of what might become of him after death was as ungovernable as his fear of what might happen if he made a mistake while using his sorcerous powers. He described his terror to me that he might 'be allowed to bloat and -his word— ripen; and then become a feast from certain enemies he had. It seemed to me a pointless fear.

  Leffler had taught me what he had on one condition. I had promised to stay with him until his death, to protect him from ghouls, attend to his burial arrangements, see that his grave was too well hidden to ever be discovered by his enemies.

  He was very grateful for my assurances. I wonder what he would have done if he had ever guessed how thoroughly and ironically I intended to betray him? Not that it matters now. The dead are notorious for their inattention.

  Anyway, it was his own fault. It was a portion of certain ceremonies he had led me to; and what better repast than my own teacher for a ritual to increase my own powers?

  Not that it was total betrayal. I kept my word to him. No pasty-fleshed ghoul reeking of the ground and marking its passage with unwholesome leavings came anywhere near Leffler. And his bones, at least, found that hidden and unmarked grave he wanted. Several, in fact. And I arranged funeral for him, however it might have differed from what he wanted. The only shame is that Sheffler was so lacking in any real sense of irony. He wouldn't have appreciated it, had he known.

  But I am an ironist and I assume you must be also, to ask me to relate these brief memoirs like this; although I suppose sensationalism could be your motive, in which case you must have loved it when I began all this with my description of my first murder. Your readers will love it too, no doubt, not that it much matters. After a century murder fails to mean much to anyone except sensation seekers and no court in this sane and balanced world of ours will try a man for sorcery, so I am safe and even have another irony to enjoy. And your readers? They'll call this fantasy, a lie.

  I love them, your readers.

  But there's not much time, certainly not for such digressions. I was telling you about Leffler's death.

  After that I was on my own and, to be quite honest, somewhat uncertain about my future. But I had ambitions and a good many theories I wanted to test. I also had time, more than most people. So I decided the first thing to do was relax.

  By then my ideas of relaxation were very well refined by long years of selected perversions, atrocities, to say nothing of alignments and assignations with certain non-human entities. Weep not that I omit a few details here. Better things are coming. A memoir this brief must be selective.

  The murder of Marie Ostroff was performed in accordance with a ritual I first discovered in oblique reference in The Book of Eibon. I found a fuller outline of it in the notorious fifth canto of Mallius' Gates of Transformation. Because of it I was now in position of being able to satisfy certain desires. I spent a year and a half roaming Scandinavia, sometimes in the shape of a wolf.

  There is a simple -pardon my choice of words here- animalistic pleasure in the very act of physical transformation from human to wolf shape. There is a real pleasure in the hunt, also. Tracking your victim -animals for the most part, but not always by any means. Real wolves can be forced to serve a werewolf, though they can't be made to like one. You can't imagine their fear, or what excellent prey they make.

  But humans make better. To pit the wolf's instinctive cunning in mixture with human intelligence against some hunter, to leap snarling from cover, fangs bared, straight for the throat...

  The fear smell rises in an olfactory crescendo; you learn to time the leaps so that the fear stink reaches its height just as the teeth sink into the neck. I was so expert I could render my victim unable to really fight back without killing him too quickly. I could then tear, eat, drink.

  In winter especially fresh blood is a warming drink.

  But the fools caught on. If a silver bullet comes close to you there is no question as to what it is. Only if it hits you can you not know.

  I preferred to know.

  And since my lycanthropy was by choice, not curse, I retired and went south in human form, seeking other ways to spend my energy.

  And that, I think, brings us to Catherine.

  If you really know about me, as you must if you have tracked me here of all places to ask questions, then you must have done a certain amount of research. Did you ever learn anything about Catherine? If you did then you know it isn't necessary to refurbish history regarding her beauty. Catherine was like a goddess.

  Oh, and so mysterious. I never did really learn anything about her past. Parts were apparent. She was almost as gifted in necromancy and the crafts of the Great Old Ones as I was, implying she was much older than she seemed to be. Her unblemished youth and immeasurable beauty were things she could have received as gifts from one of the Ancient Ones, perhaps even from Cthulhu, though she at least was fortunate enough to possess none of those regrettable physical characteristics that seem to touch all of Cthulhu's more avid followers sooner or later. No. There was more of the cat than the fish about Catherine.

  I suspect it more likely her gifts came from Ptar-Axtlan, the Leopard That Stalks the Night.

  But even I hesitate to think of what in return that particular creature would ask for such gifts...

  I saw her for the first time at the opera in Paris. She was across the gallery from me, standing in the private box of some prince or grand duke or other. Nothing marked her outwardly as an adept, but I knew instantly that she was.

  Her face and figure were that of an eighteen year old girl but there was about her an aura of assurance that could not belong to any woman under forty. Our eyes met, possibly by accident, a momentary encounter, two people gazing at one another across a distance, nothing more than that.

  I received a note from her, very discreetly, not long after, inviting me to her chambers. Not too many days after that we moved in together.

  A woman who had made the proper offerings and obeisances to the Ancient Ones has an advantage over all other women, for women are expected to age. It is the great tragedy of every woman's life, magnified either through her own fears or the fears of those around her. However beautiful a courtesan of fifty may be, she is still a former courtesan while her male counterpart is still expected to regularly make a fool of himself. Her fascination no longer lies in herself but in those secrets it is believed she could tell if she would of the men she has known. But this is not the case with a woman like Catherine. Her youth is assured fo
r a good many years and no one may look at her and suspect she is anything but what she appears. Men find such beauty more hypnotic than birds find a snake's gaze. The only drawback is that a woman who does not age attracts attention.

  It becomes a problem only gradually, however.

  A woman in her thirties who looks younger gains an air of mystery. But after much longer the whispers begin and suggestions are made that aren't altogether wholesome. Periodically it was necessary for her to vanish and assume a new life and name, a new place to live. The problem was that Catherine was extravagant. Came the time when she should have been seeking herself a new identity and there she was without money and not a little desperate.

  And me? I was tired of her by this time.

  There was a man named Jerome in Paris who ran a bookstore. There among the dusty worn reprints of Hugo and Dumas, the translations of the English and Italian poets, the cheap editions of Balzac, and fading volumes of forgotten novelists and essayists, there a properly identified person might locate books more rare than those displayed upon the shelves. Jerome had on several occasions shown me books which were close to my own interests though none of them were rare enough or complete enough to justify my paying his price. I did not realize how much Jerome knew about me.

  Whether he was a student or friend of Leffler's or merely a lucky opportunist I can't be sure.

  But one day he summoned me to his shop. I arrived in my new automobile and busied myself perusing the three-franc novelists until Jerome could rid himself of a customer who was seeking a book suitable to give to her niece on the occasion of the niece's sixteenth birthday. It seemed forever to locate anything that uplifting but at last it was done and Jerome and I were alone in the shop.

  I anticipated some deteriorating tome or manuscript of spells or chants or incantations and it was without much conviction that I told myself they might be superior to those he had offered me in the past. Jerome surprised me, however. It was no book he produced. It was a bone.