The Dulwich Horror & Others

by David Hambling

  “She’s gone?”

  “It took her. Cthulhu. Took her to R’lyeh.” He swallowed. “I…he was there, behind her.”

  “My God,” I said, shaken. “George dead, Tom dead, Jessica dead, Daisy gone …”

  “And you nearly dead,” he said. “I don’t understand how you could have survived. I saw you when they brought you out. You were squashed.”

  “Well, thank you, my friend,” I said, nettled. “Perhaps being in the eye of the storm helped.”

  “No, I did the geometry,” he said, shaking his head. “Your survival is an anomaly.”

  I knew he was right, but I did not say anything. During my recovery I felt filled with an unnatural vitality, a strengthening which was more than physical health. I had absorbed something from the thing I destroyed; in conquering my enemy I had gained its strength. If I had been more of a Nietzschean I would have rejoiced; instead I felt soiled.

  “At least you and Sophie were spared,” I said.

  “I don’t know about Sophie,” he said. “Or me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He did not reply for a long time. I would hear people passing in the corridor, a blackbird singing its late summer song outside.

  “This is over for you, Will,” he said in a stronger tone. He stood up. “You did your bit. You just need to get better now. I’m sure you’ll be fine in a few months. I don’t understand how you survived, but I’m glad you did. It’s been good seeing you again, old man.”

  We shook hands. That was the last time I saw him.

  The only communication I had from Sophie was a short note that arrived with no return address. The wild handwriting, barely recognisable, was as disturbing as the content:

  Weds

  Darlingest Will,

  I’m so sorry about everything. It’s all turned to dust and ashes, but still we have to jolly well keep on going, don’t we? So many funerals. I will be wearing black forever.

  If Daniel didn’t tell you, we decided to stick to your story about marsh gas being the cause of it all. I added a few recherché embellishments, but it’s still yours. It’s a super story and everyone loves it—the newspapers and the police and everyone. I’m sure you’ll understand why it has to be that way.

  It might be for the best if you didn’t remember anything about anything when the police ask. Assuming you do remember anything about anything, otherwise this note will seem even madder than it already is. Just forget everything.

  Madly,

  Sophie.

  XXX

  P.S. Please do NOT trust Daniel, he is dangerous. Hahaha!

  A week later I learned of Daniel’s death. There had been a serious fire in his room late one night, from an unknown cause. He was never a smoker. Everyone else escaped from the building, but he must have been overcome by the smoke. His body was found, burned almost to ashes, in the middle of the room.

  The news reports hinted at something more, about how the deaths of several of his friends had affected him, left him in a fragile mental state. There was no outright suggestion of suicide, and the coroner firmly recorded a verdict of accidental death. However, I know beyond all doubt that he died from the same cause as the others. Perhaps it was suicide, his death left as a riddle for us, his one way of communicating his despair.

  I did not know how, but I knew those equations had linked him to malevolent forces and burned him away.

  That left Sophie and me as the only survivors.

  I tried to get in touch with her, but she was leading an erratic, bohemian life with a new group of friends. After some months I heard she was in a private asylum after a violent outburst—it was a choice between that or prison. Her condition evidently deteriorated and she went from one institution to another. Sophie’s family were wealthy, and they put her through a number of treatments of increasing severity. Psychology in those days was a barbaric affair, and various types of shock therapy were much in fashion.

  I looked up the details of those “treatments,” which resembled mediaeval torture, with increasing despair. Such crude tools could not excise madness in one neat piece like taking out a thorn. They would destroy everything there was of her and leave a Sophie-shaped shell. If her family were lucky, that shell might be occupied by something that could walk and talk without assistance. I desperately wanted to help, but even supposing I could somehow spring her from those modern dungeons, I would be faced with a worse problem. Sophie would still be imprisoned in a violent insanity, a deeper dungeon where I could not reach her.

  The whole world had fallen in.

  They died, and I alone have escaped to tell you.

  Perhaps I am not quite alone. The others continue to haunt me, with a weird, post-mortem existence which overshadows their lives.

  Tom became a celebrated photographer soon after his death. He had submitted bundles of photographs to various magazines in his last few weeks, far more than his usual output. Instead of being rejected as usual, they were hailed as masterworks. I used to think that it was his death that did it, but it seems that his talent was being proclaimed even before they knew about his ghastly fate.

  And of course some of his most famous pictures are those nudes of Daisy. I have seen her a million times on coffee tables and walls. Those eyes are unfathomable however long you look at them. Posters and prints of her never seem to go out of fashion, and there is not a photography student alive who hasn’t tried to copy some of those shots. Arguments continue over whether the images’ power lies in his photographic genius or her beauty and talent in posing and conveying an emotion.

  George’s final, frantic output of letters and essays trying to rally people to his cause won him a certain celebrity too, and in his case death certainly enhanced them. The dead can’t contradict you, and dead prophetic youth warning about the fate of the country from malign alien influences will always find an audience. His works are regularly quoted in speeches of the British fascist movement. I can’t deny that his words have a certain power and that he found an unusual fluency in his final weeks. Without the context, they seem to be a straightforward appeal to traditional British values, with a shuddering dread of every alien influence that threatens them.

  Jessica has found a place in the pantheon of secular saints. Being dead has been a great blessing, as it means her ideas can so easily be appropriated by others. Her soaring, dramatic designs for new cities and urban centres are breathtaking. The ideas behind them, with nurseries, schools, and hospitals fused into dwellings and offices, may one day be realised—and there may also be honeymoon resorts based on her plans. In any case, she is already a footnote in the history of architecture.

  Daniel had a couple of papers published posthumously. These were a surprising departure from his previous work on set theory, and dealt with the mathematics of spaces with different numbers of dimensions. They drew little attention at the time, fortunately. I dreaded what might happen if someone realised their implications and sought to explore other worlds using this new science, what horrors they might let into our green and pleasant existence.

  As for myself…needless to say, I never went back to oxford for my doctorate. I never thought of going back to university. Instead, I have taught quietly in a succession of schools, moving every few years, always staying ahead of my past. I emphasise to my students the importance of rote learning, of a methodical approach and not making wild leaps.

  I too did a lot of writing in those last weeks before the disaster, fired and inspired by unimaginable forces. I wrote enough for two theses, hundreds of pages, much of it in that bizarre symbology with its terrible and inevitable logic. After I recovered, one of my first acts was to shut away the mass of paperwork in a tin box without reading it. I admit I am afraid of what I have written.

  My dream, a rational culture based on Principia Mathematica, crumbled into destruction long before it could be realised. Kurt Gödel, that brilliant German mathematician, showed that there could be no solid basis to mathematical logic: the thi
ng was riddled through with a rot, infected by the madness of recursive paradoxes. Our universe does not and cannot make logical sense; no wonder R’lyeh and the chaos of Cthulhu’s world are never more than an atom away. They say Gödel went mad in the end. I think he rejected a world which was itself mad.

  The same disease which Gödel diagnosed in the universe will inevitably infest my work. That does not mean it is useless; I fear my manuscript is one of those ancient grimoires which seem like nonsense but which touches some awful and intolerable truth.

  I was afraid someone might accidentally open the box and read it unknowing, so I sealed it with paper and wax. Afterwards I got a chain and padlock for it. Then I feared that a burglar might assume a locked box held something valuable, so I screwed a hasp to the floorboard and the thing is chained there under the bed: my creation, my masterpiece, my monster. Sometimes I think I hear it murmuring in the night, the words turning themselves over. It speaks to me in my dreams. Does the box move of its own accord? Is there pressure building up in it sometimes, threatening to burst it, or is that all in my mind?

  Sometimes I talk to the box under the bed. It has a calming effect and reduces the pressure.

  One day it might be safe for someone to read it. It might shed some light on the enemy we face, which someone someday will have to drive back again. I lie to myself that one day I will be strong enough to tackle it again. But the risk is that my papers, like the others’ works, will lead people into dangerous paths.

  Daniel’s papers are the most obvious threat; luckily, nobody seems to have taken any interest in his work and it has never been followed up. But there were many hints of the hidden forces of the occult in George’s speeches too. Perhaps this was what sparked the story that we were all holding a séance in the church when the vicar interrupted at the crucial moment, causing the disaster. It has been suggested that George was involved with that enduring fascist obsession with the occult. Perhaps George did add fuel to the fire. And in Tom’s photographs, especially that sequence of the chambers, there is too much evidence of warped reality, too much to tempt the unwary into exploring dangerous alleys.

  But perhaps there is a force on our side too. Daniel’s papers have been deleted and are no longer obtainable. The versions of George’s speeches you see collected these days have been subtly edited. Some at least of Jessica’s plans have been altered, and some of Tom’s photographs no longer appear in print.

  Speaking of Tom’s photographs, I received an unexpected packet of them a few months after my recovery. My address was written in block letters that gave no clue as to the sender.

  I recognised the first two pictures as Tom’s studio: one a blank wall, the other of Daisy posing with a camera. Then there was a picture of a group of us, taken with a flash. I recognised the scene at once: this was the picture taken outside the church just before the disaster. Someone had gone to the trouble of finding Tom’s camera in the rubble, extracting the film, and developing it.

  The next shot is a blurred and indistinct abstract. I have pored over it without being able to make out whether it was even pointed in the right direction.

  But the final photograph—Tom’s final photograph, in fact—leaves no doubt. This is the evidence he wanted, crystal clear and in perfect focus, the flash illuminating it as well as a battery of studio lights. This is the one piece of proof I have that shows it was all real, all terribly real.

  The spawn of Cthulhu is there on the altar. Without the constant confusing movement, and without the brain’s refusal to form an image, it can be seen clearly enough like any other being.

  However, it looked nothing like the way I saw it. It was grotesque, certainly, and perhaps even otherworldly, but it was horribly recognisable. It was not simply a monster from some other world. You might have said it resembled a reptile or even a cephalopod. But the face itself told a different story: the lower half was formless, with tentacles or feelers around the soft mouth, but the upper half was startlingly human.

  The Whatleys had not summoned the creature, as George had always assumed. They had bred it. The child found dead with Flora Whatley was only half of the story. Flora had given birth to twins, and the one that survived looked more like his father.

  TWO FINGERS

  Upper Norwood, South London, 2013

  The River Effra had its source in the Great Stake Pit Coppice….Today

  there is no visible sign of the Effra in Norwood, but there is a circular

  grating in the middle of Hermitage Road from which one can hear

  the sound of rushing water of the stream, now piped underground.

  —Alan Warwick, “The Phoenix Suburb”

  Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

  —John Donne, “Death Be Not Proud”

  I

  It was her scream that made him do it. The scream caused all the subsequent events ending with the loosening of the ties binding that unearthly thing.

  The scream affected Michael at a primal level, triggering an irresistible need to help. It was the response that threw the caveman in front of a bear to save his mate and children, and Michael could not ignore it any more than he could ignore the touch of a red-hot needle. That scream meant he had to help, whatever the cost.

  He never knew Anne could scream like that. After five years of marriage Michael thought he knew all her sounds, every shriek and giggle and sob and moan. But the scream was something else, coming from a deeper place inside her. He would do anything to stop that scream. That scream was the open sesame that let him into the abyss.

  It was an idiotic accident. At the end of a party, they had climbed into the car, escorted by their hosts. It had been a long enough evening for Michael, and he was looking forward to getting home and having a large whisky after an evening drinking orange juice. But Anne discovered a new topic and sat in the passenger seat talking to her friend with the car door open, while Michael and the husband ran out of conversation. It was embarrassing, then irritating, listening to the two women rattling on about some television programme. Finally, Michael said goodnight to the husband and strolled around to the passenger side where the women were still talking unconcernedly. Calling out “See you later,” he swung the door shut. It was rude, but it was late and Michael had had enough.

  But Anne had been too intent on the conversation, and he had not noticed her hand resting on the door frame. When the heavy Mercedes door shut with a soft, well-engineered thunk, two of her fingers had been crushed. A second later her scream ripped through him; when his friend opened the door he could not understand the flaps of flesh hanging from Anne’s hand.

  What followed passed in a blur: the rush to A&E, the long hours in the hospital, the endless comings and goings in blank corridors and consulting rooms. He kept telling Anne that he was sorry, that he would make it all right, and he meant it.

  It was obvious from the start that things were not going to be all right. Before the night was over, Anne’s little finger and ring finger had been amputated. The heavy mechanism had mashed them as effectively as an industrial vice. Anne stayed in the hospital for observation, under heavy sedation. Michael went home, already intent on his next moves.

  Everything was just as he had left it in the house. The quiet elegance of their home, the fusion of his money and her taste, was still the same. It was the physical proof of the affluence he had worked so hard to achieve. The tall windows in the living room gave on to a spectacular view of the City below. The Gherkin, the Heron Tower, and the others fused into a single mass of light, with the Shard standing separate. Off to the right were the shining monoliths of Canary Wharf. A whole empire of Money, illuminated by its own light.

  Michael padded barefoot on thick pile carpet into his study and fired up the computer. The cabinet held sixteen different single malts. He took a bottle at random and poured a shot over three cubes of ice from the dispenser. The doctor had explained that Anne’s fingers were too badly damaged to be stitched back on, and he
had given Michael a leaflet. There were several options they could explore, the doctor said in his serious-but-caring medical voice, and many people adapted well after this sort of accident. It would have been much harder if it had been a thumb and forefinger. In this case the problem was mainly an aesthetic one.

  Michael had read the leaflet three times, then started surfing the Internet on his iPhone in the waiting room. The options they offered were all useless. He knew how Anne would react to being permanently maimed, and what it would do to her having to hide her mutilated hand. Appearance was so important to her. He might as well have cut off her nose.

  Michael sat in his ergonomic Swedish office chair and set about finding more advanced alternatives. Finger transplants were possible, but not the sort he wanted. The only work being carried out was transplanting a toe to replace a missing finger to give some slight functionality rather than none. Replacement finger transplants from donors were unheard-of.

  Michael kept going: stem cells, therapeutic cloning. Regeneration technology. Popular science articles breezily explained how lizards could re-grow tails and axolotls could regenerate entire limbs, and how this might one day be possible for humans. Emphasis on ‘one day’: at the moment it was all laboratory test tubes and tissue cultures. Actual treatment was years or decades away, if it ever happened.

  Michael was not going to give up. He was not going to sleep until he had cracked it. It would never occur to him to question his first judgement, or to talk to Anne about it. He was going to make everything all right. He gulped whisky without tasting it and logged on to the system at work.

  Michael sold boats. The top end of luxury boats: super-yachts. Each one was individually commissioned, designed, built, fitted, decorated, and finished to the highest possible standards for the most demanding customers. They were boats for billionaires, oligarchs, Arabian princes, and oriental tycoons. Or people who thought they deserved the same status and had the money.