Many years before I was born, there had been some sort of trouble between my Uncle Hiram and the rest of my Mother’s family. I have never quite known what occasioned this breach, but the breaking-off of relations was lasting and permanent. If my Mother ever knew the reason, she never confided it to me, but I can remember my aged Grandfather muttering about “forbidden practices” and “books no one should ever read,” whenever Uncle Hiram’s name came up, which was not very often. Whatever the nature of the family scandal, Uncle Hiram moved away from Arkham, went to California, and never returned. These ancient, in-bred New England families, as you may be aware, are rife with skeletons in the closet, old feuds, centuried scandals. It seems quaint, even perverse nowadays, to bear a grudge for a lifetime, but we are a proud, stubborn, stiff-necked race. Just how stiff-necked we are can be demonstrated by the fact that my Uncle, as if not content with severing all relations with the family (even with my Mother, who was his favorite sister), actually repudiated the family name, Winfield, adopting instead his mother’s maiden name, Stokely.
At any rate, all of this happened long before I was born—before my Mother married into the Phillips family, in fact—and because of this, and of the fact that no single communication had ever passed between my Uncle and myself, I had no slightest thought of even being mentioned in my Uncle’s will, and had as well utterly no interest in his Estate, although it was commonly known that he had become immensely wealthy since moving to distant California.
As for the element of pleasure involved in my journey, this lay in the opportunity to resume a cherished friendship with my cousin, Brian Winfield, the only son of my other Uncle, Richard. We had first met, Brian and I, quite by chance, in the Widener Library at Harvard in 1927. I had been sent there by my employer to copy out some passages from a certain very rare version of a curious old volume of myths and liturgies called the Book of Eibon, since Harvard was lucky enough to possess the only known text of the medieval Latin translation made from the Greek by Philippus Faber. The young man seated next to me, a cheerful, freckle-faced, snub-nosed fellow with tousled sandy hair and friendly eyes, deep in a medical book full of the most repulsive illustrations imaginable, responded to the librarian’s call of “Winfield” and ambled forward to claim another book just fetched up from the stacks for his perusal. Thinking he must certainly be a relative, I took the liberty of introducing myself; later, chatting over coffee, we laid the foundations of a lasting friendship.
Brian was about five years younger than myself and had come east to study at the medical school, hoping to become a doctor. We both took to each other from the start, both equally delighted to discover we were cousins. Although my stay was a brief one, we managed to continue our friendship on weekends and during vacations. On these occasions I had to come to the dorm to visit him, since his father had made him swear never to venture a foot closer to Arkham than the Boston city limits.
This afforded me no particular discomfort in traveling, of course, since Boston and Arkham are only some fifteen miles apart. But after some two years my visits to Boston had to end, for Brian flunked out of medical school because of some ridiculously boyish prank, and he went home to live again with his parent. He later studied veterinary medicine at Tate College in Buford, the county seat of Santiago County in which Durnham Beach is located, and became a licensed veterinarian. I suppose this was quite a come-down for one who had hoped to cure cancer and win the Nobel Prize; or perhaps his father, discovering our surreptitious correspondence, demanded that it cease. At any rate, our exchange of letters dwindled and died. An infrequent card at Christmases or birthdays, and that was about it.
Until this June, when suddenly and to my delight I found in my mailbox a brief, scribbled letter in his familiar, childish hand, informing me of our Uncle’s death and inviting—virtually begging—that I come west for the funeral. I did not need much urging, and, as Dr. Lapham was willing to dispense with my services for a week or so, I went out that very afternoon and purchased my railway tickets, informing Brian by telegraph of the time of my arrival.
Besides the pleasure of resuming my acquaintance with Brian, and the family duty of attending my Uncle’s funeral, I had also a bit of unfinished 5 business to clean up on the behalf of Dr. Lapham.
A few miles north of Durnham Beach, on the coast of Southern California, lay the town of Santiago in which the famous Sanbourne Institute of Pacific Antiquities was situated. About seven years earlier we had been visited at Miskatonic by a gentleman named Arthur Wilcox Hodgkins, the assistant curator of the manuscripts collection at the Sanbourne Institute. This earnest and scholarly young man had implored the assistance of Dr. Lapham and certain of his colleagues in unraveling an ancient mystery which I shall not go into here, save that it involved the necessary destruction of a rare primitive idol of unknown craftsmanship, found off Ponape some decades earlier. Possession of this peculiar statuette—which gained considerable notoriety in the popular press under the rather melodramatic name of the “Ponape Figurine”—was already reputed to have driven two famous scientists mad, and from Hodgkins’ agitated state, threatened to unhinge his own reason as well.
Rather to my surprise, Dr. Lapham took these ravings quite seriously indeed, as did Dr. Henry Armitage, the librarian at Miskatonic. It is a measure of their concern over the potential danger to mankind in the continued existence of this so-called Ponape Figurine that the two of them placed at young Hodgkins’ use the fabulously rare copy of a grim, blasphemous old book called the Necronomicon, of which Miskatonic owns and jealously guards in a locked vault the only copy of the “complete edition” of the book known to exist in the Western Hemisphere.
This book, and several other volumes of similar rarity and esoteric lore, form the central source of information the world possesses on an obscure, very ancient, and bafflingly wide-spread prehistoric mythology called by some the “Alhazredic demonology,” from the name of the Necronomicon’s Arabic author, and by others the “Cthulhu Mythos,” from the appellation of its most celebrated devil. Traces of the Cthulhu cult, and of other cognate cults and secret societies devoted to the worship of Cthulhu’s three sons, Ghatanothoa, Ythogtha, and Zoth-Ommog, as well as his half-brother, Hastur the Unspeakable, and other gods or demons with names like Tsathoggua, Azathoth, Nyarlathotep, Daoloth, Rhan Tegoth, Lloigor, Zhar, Ithaqua, Shub-Niggurath, and so on, have persisted for ages in the far corners of the world, and are not yet entirely extinct. Linked together into a vast secret network, a sort of “occult underworld,” the Cthulhu cult and its minions form, in the opinions of some authorities, little less than an enormous, and age-old, criminal conspiracy against the safety, the sanity, and the very existence of mankind.
Dr. Lapham and Dr. Armitage asked me, while visiting Santiago, where Brian was currently employed, to look into the mysterious end of Arthur Wilcox Hodgkins. He had cruelly bludgeoned an old watchman to death, set fire to the South Gallery of the museum wing of the Institute, hidden or destroyed the noxious Figurine, and had been hauled off raving mad to the local sanatorium.
It would seem that there was considerably more to his wild story than one might reasonably have assumed. While assisting Dr. Lapham in his investigations of the activities of the Cthulhu cultists I have undergone a few unnerving and scientifically inexplicable experiences myself. I knew, although I tried not to believe, that there was in fact a hard, grim kernel of truth behind the nightmarish legends of this fantastic mythology. I saw enough in Billington’s Wood that dark day in 1924 when Dr. Lapham and I shot and killed Ambrose Dewart and his Indian bodyservant, Quamis—or whomever it really was had taken over their minds, bodies and souls—to treat these matters with caution and trepidation.
Something had driven poor Hodgkins mad. The Ponape Figurine? Or what he saw in the instant in which he touched to the cold, slick jadeite of the Figurine the grey star-stone talisman from lost, immemorial Mnar which Dr. Armitage had entrusted to h
im? I did not know. But Lapham and Armitage wanted desperately to find out; they wanted to close their file on the weird and unearthly statuette they believed had come down from the black yawning gulfs between the stars when the Earth was young.
And so did I.
Chapter II
Brian was there to greet me at the Santiago railway station when the train pulled in. Hatless, his sandy hair tousling in the breeze, he waved and grinned and thrust his broad shoulders through the crowd to crush my hand in his clumsy, powerful grip. He had changed very little in the years since we had last seen each other: he was still loud and boyish and irrepressible, with that joyous zest in life and boundless store of physical energy I admired and envied so much.
Collecting my bags, he tossed them into the back seat of his car, a sporty red roadster, and bade me pile in. I had been just as willing to have employed the dilapidated old taxi which was pulled up before the station, but this was even more comfortable an arrangement. While we drove to Brian’s little apartment on Hidalgo Street, just off the park, we talked, renewing our acquaintance.
“Tomorrow, I’d like to motor down to Durnham Beach, so we can explore Uncle Hiram’s house,” said Brian as he helped me unpack. “The lawyers gave me the key to the front door, and directions on getting there.”
“Haven’t you ever seen it?” I asked. “Living so close to our Uncle, all these years…”
He grimaced. “Uncle Hiram didn’t get along with my Dad any better than he got along with the rest of the family, I guess! Anyway, I never got invited down. Queer old bird he must have been, but not a bad sort, after all. By the way—I didn’t get around to mentioning it before—did you know that you and I are his beneficiaries?”
I blinked, fairly thunderstruck. “Do you mean it?”
He grinned, nodding. “Everything but the money, I’m afraid! That goes to some sort of foundation. But we can split the house, the library and furnishings. Reckon you’ll be most interested in the books…I understand our Uncle had quite a library. Well; come on, let’s wash up and get something to eat.”
Chapter III
The events of the following morning I will pass over without comment. There were only a few people at the services, a couple of our Uncle’s old servants and a curiosity-seeker or two. The burial was done rather hastily, and I noticed it was a closed-casket service, for some reason.
After lunch, we motored down the Coast. It was a brisk, bright day, and Brian drove with the top down. I could tell Brian had some news for me—he was fairly bursting with it. Finally, I asked him what was up. He gave me a mischievous sidewise glance.
“Remember, when you wrote you were coming, you asked me to find out anything I could about that ‘Ponape Figurine’ affair?” he asked. I nodded. “Well, I got together some newspaper clippings for you—give them to you later. But I discovered something positively weird while looking into the matter…”
And he mentioned the name of the late Professor Harold Hadley Copeland. Time was, what with all the newspaper sensationalism connected with that name, it would instantly have been familiar to the reader of Sunday supplements. But how swiftly yesterday’s news becomes ancient history! I suppose few people would even recognize the name nowadays, although his death in a San Francisco mental institution was only some seven years ago.
It had been Professor Copeland who had discovered the notorious Ponape Figurine, which formed the nexus about which so many strange and baffling mysteries had centered. The Figurine had been part of the collection of rare Pacific antiquities and books which Copeland had left to the Sanbourne Institute in 1928. It seems that the Figurine was in some way connected to an ancient, little-known cult which worshipped “Great Old Ones from the stars,” whose myths and legends were presumably recorded in a number of old, seldom-found books. Several of these books Copeland had left to the Sanbourne Institute, as they bore upon the matter of his research. What I now learned from the lips of my cousin thoroughly astounded me:
“The old Prof had a copy of the Unaussprechlichen Kulten, did you know?” asked Brian, teasingly, playing with my curiosity.
I nodded. The book, by a German scholar named Von Junzt, was a principal text in the study of the cult.
“And some pages from the Yuggya Chants,” he added, “and a copy of something called the R’lyeh Text…”
“Yes, I know all about that,” I said impatiently. “Get on with it, won’t you?”
“Well, Win, where do you suppose Professor Copeland got these rare books from in the first place?”
I shrugged, irritably. “How the devil should I know?”
Still smiling, Brian dropped his bombshell.
“He bought them from Uncle Hiram.”
I’m sure my jaw must have dropped, making me look ludicrous, for after another sidewise glance, Brian began chuckling.
“Great Scott,” I murmured, “what a coincidence? D’you mean to say our Uncle was interested in occultism—in this Alhazredic demonology?”
He frowned, not recognizing the term. “‘Alhazredic—?”
“After the Arabic demonologist, Abdul Alhazred, author of the celebrated Necronomicon, one of the rarest books in the world. We have a copy back at Miskatonic, kept under lock and key. The only one in the Western hemisphere.”
He confessed that he had no idea about our Uncle’s interests, scholarly or otherwise. “But Uncle Hiram made a fortune, you know…and he went in for book-collecting in a big way…anything old and rare and obscure and hard-to-find was just his meat. He had purchasing agents all over the world working for him…say, bet that sounds good to you, since you’ve inherited your pick of his books!”
I didn’t say anything, feeling a bit uncomfortable. While my Uncle Hiram’s death had meant nothing at all to me personally, there is something a trifle ghoulish about profiting from another man’s demise. I changed the subject.
The long drive down to Durnham Beach took us by a scenic route which disclosed frequent glimpses of the rugged, rocky coast, with the smiling blue Pacific lazing beyond under clear sunlight. But, as we approached the town, the highway turned inland, and the scenery became by gradual stages oddly drab and even depressing. We passed acres of scrub pine and mud-flats full of stagnant, scummed water. Then followed, for dreary miles, abandoned farms and fields where the raw, unhealthy earth, eroded by the salt breeze from the ocean, exposed beneath pitifully-thin layers of topsoil nothing but dead and sterile sand. Sea birds honked and cried mournfully, as if to fit the mood of uneasy depression that had fallen over us both. Even the clear sunlight seemed vitiated and dull, although the skies were as clear as ever.
I said something about this to my cousin, and he nodded soberly.
“It’s not a very healthy place,” he remarked. “Town’s been going downhill as far back as I can remember—especially when they started to close down the canneries and people were out of jobs. I can remember when all these farms were going strong, lots of orange groves, truck gardening…some communities thrive and grow, and others just sort of crumble and go rotten at the heart…”
We passed a road sign and the name on it seemed vaguely familiar to me, like something I half-remembered reading years ago in the newspapers. I asked Brian about it. He looked grim.
“Hubble’s Field? Sure, you must have read about it—ten or fifteen years ago, something like that. They found all those bodies buried there—hundreds, I think it was.”
His remark sent a shiver of cold apprehension through me. Of course, I remembered, the Hubble’s Field atrocity—who could forget it? The county was putting in a pipeline for some reason, and when they came to excavate a certain stretch of condemned property, they began to dig up the remains of human bodies, literally hundreds, as Brian said, although from the way the bodies were dismembered and jumbled together, it was never possible to ascertain an accurate count. So
mebody on the radio at the time remarked that if you took all of the mass-murders in history and put them together, you wouldn’t have half as many corpses as those found buried in Hubble’s Field…oddly gruesome thing to remember! Or to think about.
“Yes, I remember something about it now,” I murmured. “They never did find out who did it, or why, did they?”
Brian uttered a harsh little bark of laughter. “No, they didn’t,” he said shortly. “What they did find out, was that it had been going on for one hell of a long time…the further down they dug, they began to find scraps of homespun and tanned leather and old bottles from the early settlers…deeper down, bits and pieces of old Spanish armor were found mixed in with the skeletons…and beneath that—”
He broke off, saying nothing. I nudged him.
“Beneath that—what?”
“Indians,” he said heavily “Lot’s of ’em. Infants, old people, braves, women. Way back before the Spaniards came. This was all Indian country once, of course. The Hippaway nation owned all these parts before the explorers came. Still some Hippaways around, on reservations in the mountains. But not anywhere around here, you can bet!”
“What do you mean?”
“Back in school I took a course in anthropology, Indian stuff. Hippaways had a name for Hubble’s Field in their own language…something like E-choc-tah, I think it was.”
“What does it mean?” I inquired curiously.
His face looked stony.
“‘The Place of Worms.’”
Suddenly the sunlight dulled, the sky seemed to darken, and the air around us became dank and unwholesomely chill. But when I glanced up, the sky was still clear and the sun shone brightly…but seemed weirdly unable to warm the air.
The Second Cthulhu Mythos MEGAPACK® Page 50
