The Second Cthulhu Mythos MEGAPACK®

by Lovecraft, H. P.

  [Robert E. Howard]

  From that final lap of senselessness, he emerged with a full understanding of his situation. His mind was imprisoned in the body of a frightful native of an alien planet, while, somewhere on the other side of the universe, his own body was housing the monster’s personality.

  He fought down an unreasoning horror. Judged from a cosmic standpoint, why should his metamorphosis horrify him? Life and consciousness were the only realities in the universe. Form was unimportant. His present body was hideous only according to terrestrial standards. Fear and revulsion were drowned in the excitement of titanic adventure.

  What was his former body but a cloak, eventually to be cast off at death anyway? He had no sentimental illusions about the life from which he had been exiled. What had it ever given him save toil, poverty, continual frustration and repression? If this life before him offered no more, at least it offered no less. Intuition told him it offered more—much more.

  With the honesty possible only when life is stripped to its naked fundamentals, he realized that he remembered with pleasure only the physical delights of his former life. But he had long ago exhausted all the physical possibilities contained in that earthly body. Earth held no new thrills. But in the possession of this new, alien body he felt promises of strange, exotic joys.

  A lawless exultation rose in him. He was a man without a world, free of all conventions or inhibitions of Earth, or of this strange planet, free of every artificial restraint in the universe. He was a god! With grim amusement he thought of his body moving in earth’s business and society, with all the while an alien monster staring out of the windows that were George Campbell’s eyes on people who would flee if they knew.

  Let him walk the earth slaying and destroying as he would. Earth and its races no longer had any meaning to George Campbell. There he had been one of a billion nonentities, fixed in place by a mountainous accumulation of conventions, laws and manners, doomed to live and die in his sordid niche. But in one blind bound he had soared above the commonplace. This was not death, but re-birth—the birth of a full-grown mentality, with a new-found freedom that made little of physical captivity on Yekub.

  He started. Yekub! It was the name of this planet, but how had he known? Then he knew, as he knew the name of him whose body he occupied—Tothe. Memory, deep grooved in Tothe’s brain, was stirring in him—shadows of the knowledge Tothe had. Carved deep in the physical tissues of the brain, they spoke dimly as implanted instincts to George Campbell; and his human consciousness seized them and translated them to show him the way not only to safety and freedom, but to the power his soul, stripped to its primitive impulses, craved. Not as a slave would he dwell on Yekub, but as a king! Just as of old barbarians had sat on the throne of lordly empires.

  For the first time he turned his attention to his surroundings. He still lay on the couch-like thing in the midst of that fantastic room, and the centipede man stood before him, holding the polished metal object, and clashing its neck-spikes. Thus it spoke to him, Campbell knew, and what it said he dimly understood, through the implanted thought processes of Tothe, just as he knew the creature was Yukth, supreme lord of science.

  But Campbell gave no heed, for he had made his desperate plan, a plan so alien to the ways of Yekub that it was beyond Yukth’s comprehension and caught him wholly unprepared. Yukth, like Campbell, saw the sharp-pointed metal shard on a nearby table, but to Yukth it was only a scientific implement. He did not even know it could be used as a weapon. Campbell’s earthly mind supplied the knowledge and the action that followed, driving Tothe’s body into movements no man of Yekub had ever made before.

  Campbell snatched the pointed shard and struck, ripping savagely upward. Yukth reared and toppled, his entrails spilling on the floor. In an instant Campbell was streaking for a door. His speed was amazing, exhilarating, first fulfillment of the promise of novel physical sensations.

  As he ran, guided wholly by the instinctive knowledge implanted in Tothe’s physical reflexes, it was as if he were borne by a separate consciousness in his legs. Tothe’s body was bearing him along a route it had traversed ten thousand times when animated by Tothe’s mind.

  Down a winding corridor he raced, up a twisted stair, through a carved door, and the same instincts that had brought him there told him he had found what he sought. He was in a circular room with a domed roof from which shone a livid blue light. A strange structure rose in the middle of the rainbow-hued floor, tier on tier, each of a separate, vivid color. The ultimate tier was a purple cone, from the apex of which a blue smoky mist drifted upward to a sphere that poised in mid-air—a sphere that shone like translucent ivory.

  This, the deep-grooved memories of Tothe told Campbell, was the god of Yekub, though why the people of Yekub feared and worshipped it had been forgotten a million years. A worm-priest stood between him and the altar which no hand of flesh had ever touched. That it could be touched was a blasphemy that had never occurred to a man of Yekub. The worm-priest stood in frozen horror until Campbell’s shard ripped the life out of him.

  On his centipede-legs Campbell clambered the tiered altar, heedless of its sudden quiverings, heedless of the change that was taking place in the floating sphere, heedless of the smoke that now billowed out in blue clouds. He was drunk with the feel of power. He feared the superstitions of Yekub no more than he feared those of earth. With that globe in his hands he would be king of Yekub. The worm men would dare deny him nothing, when he held their god as hostage. He reached a hand for the ball—no longer ivory-hued, but red as blood.…

  [Frank Belknap Long]

  Out of the tent into the pale August night walked the body of George Campbell. It moved with a slow, wavering gait between the bodies of enormous trees, over a forest path strewed with sweet scented pine needles. The air was crisp and cold. The sky was an inverted bowl of frosted silver flecked with stardust, and far to the north the Aurora Borealis splashed streamers of fire.

  The head of the walking man lolled hideously from side to side. From the corners of his lax mouth drooled thick threads of amber froth, which fluttered in the night breeze. He walked upright at first, as a man would walk, but gradually as the tent receded, his posture altered. His torso began almost imperceptibly to slant, and his limbs to shorten.

  In a far-off world of outer space the centipede creature that was George Campbell clasped to its bosom a god whose lineaments were red as blood, and ran with insect-like quiverings across a rainbow-hued hall and out through massive portals into the bright glow of alien suns.

  Weaving between the trees of earth in an attitude that suggested the awkward loping of a werebeast, the body of George Campbell was fulfilling a mindless destiny. Long, claw-tipped fingers dragged leaves from a carpet of odorous pine needles as it moved toward a wide expanse of gleaming water.

  In the far-off, extra-galactic world of the worm people, George Campbell moved between cyclopean blocks of black masonry down long, fern-planted avenues holding aloft the round red god.

  There was a harsh animal cry in the underbrush near the gleaming lake on earth where the mind of a worm creature dwelt in a body swayed by instinct. Human teeth sank into soft animal fur, tore at black animal flesh. A little silver fox sank its fangs in frantic retaliation into a furry human wrist, and thrashed about in terror as its blood spurted. Slowly the body of George Campbell arose, its mouth splashed with fresh blood. With upper limbs swaying oddly it moved towards the waters of the lake.

  As the variform creature that was George Campbell crawled between the black blocks of stone thousands of worm-shapes prostrated themselves in the scintillating dust before it. A godlike power seemed to emanate from its weaving body as it moved with a slow, undulant motion toward a throne of spiritual empire transcending all the sovereignties of earth.

  A trapper stumbling wearily through the dense woods of earth near the tent where
the worm-creature dwelt in the body of George Campbell came to the gleaming waters of the lake and discerned something dark floating there. He had been lost in the woods all night, and weariness enveloped him like a leaden cloak in the pale morning light.

  But the shape was a challenge that he could not ignore. Moving to the edge of the water he knelt in the soft mud and reached out toward the floating bulk. Slowly he pulled it to the shore.

  Far off in outer space the worm-creature holding the glowing red god ascended a throne that gleamed like the constellation Cassiopeia under an alien vault of hyper-suns. The great deity that he held aloft energized his worm tenement, burning away in the white fire of a supermundane spirituality all animal dross.

  On earth the trapper gazed with unutterable horror into the blackened and hairy face of the drowned man. It was a bestial face, repulsively anthropoid in contour, and from its twisted, distorted mouth black ichor poured.

  “He who sought your body in the abysses of Time will occupy an unresponsive tenement,” said the red god. “No spawn of Yekub can control the body of a human.

  “On all earth, living creatures rend one another, and feast with unutterable cruelty on their kith and kin. No worm-mind can control a bestial man-body when it yearns to raven. Only man-minds instinctively conditioned through the course of ten thousand generations can keep the human instincts in thrall. Your body will destroy itself on earth, seeking the blood of its animal kin, seeking the cool water where it can wallow at its ease. Seeking eventually destruction, for the death-instinct is more powerful in it than the instincts of life and it will destroy itself in seeking to return to the slime from which it sprang.”

  Thus spoke the round red god of Yekub in a far-off segment of the space-time continuum to George Campbell as the latter, with all human desire purged away, sat on a throne and ruled an empire of worms more wisely, kindly, and benevolently than any man of earth had ever ruled an empire of men.

  THE LAST HORROR OUT OF ARKHAM, by Darrell Schweitzer

  Originally appeared in Fantasy Crosswinds #3, February 1977.

  Professor Latham Knucklebury was a bent, grey-haired little man with a penchant for bizarre theories, and a tendency to lecture on them, as if he were in front of a class, to anyone he could corner. I shared an office with him at U. Mass, (pronounced You-Mass by its denizens) and I suppose I heard more of his ideas than anyone else in those days. His arguments were uniformly as strange, incredible, and seemingly ridiculous on the surface as they were, if you stopped to listen to all the reasoning behind them, logical, brilliant, and backed by evidence overlooked by everyone else. Knucklebury often compared himself to Copernicus, Galileo, and other persecuted scientific greats of the past, and perhaps this wasn’t entirely inappropriate, because his mind was undeniably first rate, but in the end that didn’t save him. He had no tact at all, and thumbed his nose at the Chairman of the Anthropology Department visibly, publicly and with a personal vindictiveness matched only by that directed against him by the late Professor Chambers.

  It was obvious that Latham wouldn’t last long at the University and it came as no surprise when the axe finally fell. The immediate cause was the publication of his article, Evidence of Fungoid Phallic Worship Among the Early Fire Islanders, despite statements of disapproval and outright threats from Chambers in the Spring 1978 issue of the Squammous Review. It made a laughing stock out of the department as I had feared it would, and when it appeared the Chairman consulted with the President of the Board of Directors, and it was agreed that my colleague had to go. He did. The next morning Latham found a note of dismissal in his mailbox and, true to his nature, his first impulse was to rush into the Chairman’s office, interrupt a long-distance phone call and demand an explanation. Now the Anthropology Department’s office consisted of a large centre room with the individual offices of the chairman and the various teachers opening into it, and this meant that anything said in a loud voice behind one door could be heard behind all the others. I was at my desk that morning grading some exams, so I heard the whole thing. Before long Chambers was shouting like a barrage of cannon fire, and Knucklebury had degenerated into a shrill screech. Latham sounded hurt, indignant, and furious all at the same time, as if the most cowardly and treacherous thing imaginable had been done to him. He played the martyr-to-science role well.

  “I don’t need to remind you,” he said, “that when I was teaching at Miskatonic they never treated me like this. There I was given respect!”

  “And that’s why they closed the place down!” retorted Chambers. “Nobody wanted to go to a place filled with lunatics like you!”

  “That’s not true! They lost a government grant!”

  “Hallelujah! Maybe Nixon was a good guy after all!”

  “Just because your own curiosity has dried up, because you haven’t functioned as a scientist in decades because your sterile little mind can’t appreciate anything new.”

  “You ought to be locked up, Knucklebury. You might be dangerous. Delusions of grandeur, hallucinations, I don’t know what. But in the meantime, get out of here. The matter is settled. You’re fired. Talk it out with the Board or the President, but leave me alone. I never want to see your face in here again!”

  With that Professor Chambers broke into a stream of language unbefitting a scholar speaking to another scholar. Latham realized that there was nothing he could do and left the room. He came over to my office and I dropped the test paper I had been hiding behind during the battle.

  “Jesus Christ, what brought that on?”

  “Just make sure that you don’t rock the boat around here Richard,” he said. “If you write anything more than stale rehash you won’t have your job very long.”

  “Anything I can do for you, Latham?”

  “No. Just watch and wait. I swear to you that I’ll vindicate myself. I’ll prove every one of my hypotheses to be a fact, not just conjecture. Watch and wait, and I promise you, unusual things will begin to happen.”

  He refused to explain what he meant while he packed a few papers into his briefcase. He left the office and that was the last I saw of him for months.

  * * * *

  An unusual thing did happen almost immediately, within a week in fact, but at the time there was no way I could connect it with Latham Knucklebury.

  Even though anthropology is my profession, I have always maintained an avid interest in literature. It was my undergraduate minor and my wife Peg teaches English, so between the two of us ours is a very literary household. Both of us are incurable bibliophiles. We collect rare editions, old periodicals, and publishing oddities, so we were both fully equipped to appreciate the uniqueness of the volume that came in the mail the following Saturday morning, four days after my friend’s dismissal.

  I was sitting at the table finishing my coffee while Peg tidied up the kitchen, when the doorbell rang and the mailman left off a large parcel marked “fourth class book.” When I picked it up I was surprised, the thing must have weighed a good fifteen pounds. I looked for a return address but there wasn’t any, and the stamps were obscured by a black smear of a postmark.

  “What was that?” Peg called.

  “A package.”

  “What is it?”

  “A book, but I don’t know who it’s from. You didn’t order anything, did you?”

  “No. It might be freebies from some textbook company.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said as I began to unwrap it. “No, it’s an old book, a very old book. God!”

  She dropped something and came running.

  “Well? What is it?”

  I showed her the title page:

  Mr. William

  SHAKESPEARE’S

  Comedies

  Histories & Tragedies.

  Published according to the

  True Original Copies

>   London

  Printed by Isaac Jaggard and Ed. Blount, 1623

  “It’s got to be a fake,” I said. “It must be a fake.”

  Peg picked up the book gingerly, with a half religious awe. She paged through it, checking certain points, then sniffed the binding.

  “No,” she said. “I think it’s the real thing. This is a genuine First Folio. The paper’s old enough. Smell it.”

  I did. Every book collector knows what musty old books smell like, and very old ones, prior to the invention of wood pulp paper, have an odour all their own, and you get to recognize it after a while. This one smelled right.

  “Isn’t there any way you could fake it?”

  “Have you got any idea how much trouble it would take to forge a book of this size? You’d have to make all the plates, get specially aged paper, get the watermarks right, get the typoes right, the corrupt lines, the smears, the wormholes, everything accurate enough to fool an expert. The expense wouldn’t be worth it. You could only make one or two copies without raising suspicion, and this book isn’t all that rare. A hundred and fifty copies are known to exist, and that’s pretty good for an Elizabethan book that isn’t a bible.”

  “How much do you think it’s worth?”

  “A lot. A hundred and fifty thousand dollars maybe. But wouldn’t it be easier to rob a bank than to counterfeit something like this? And then why would anyone send it to you anonymously in the mail, real or fake?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they’ll come to collect a pound of flesh later, but when they do I’ll make them explain that inscription first.”

  “What inscription?”

  I pointed out the handwriting in the upper right corner of the title page, in a nearly illegible hand and faded ink. It read: