“What’s the point of it?” I asked.
‘Why?’ is perhaps the most futile of questions when bad things happen. We always want the murderer to have a rational and sensible motive so we can make sense of things. But people are not always like that, so why should we expect to understand beings far stranger than ourselves?
George had his appetites, which ran to gullible young women of a certain class. There was no good reason for those repeated seductions. Perhaps there’s another reason for them, a practical reason. But it may be that Cthulhu’s appetites run to human sacrifice.
“It’s not me,” Daisy said. “What happens with those boys, I’m not the one that’s doing it, you know. Those things—things with wings—they come.”
I knew she was telling the truth. Of course it was not her. Daisy was just a beacon, a channel, bait that attracted Cthulhu’s sacrifices and guided his forces towards them.
“To lose one set of friends may be regarded as a misfortune,” I said, “To lose two looks like carelessness.”
“You always make jokes about serious things,” Daisy said unhappily. She sounded worried, as though she might have done something to upset me. She thought she had been doing the right thing. “You know much more than I do. The shadows with wings, they’re yours, aren’t they? The things that take the sacrifices for Him.”
“It’s nothing to do with me,” I lied. “Not directly. It has to stop.”
“I thought…” she said, and stopped. Her eyes narrowed. “I see. But you know, we have to prepare the way, to save the world. He must come, sooner or later, and He will call the old ones—what can we do?”
I had been prepared for evil, but not for good. Daisy was being helpful, as she always was. Daisy did not judge people. If someone asked her to walk a mile for them, Daisy would be glad to oblige. If they asked for a human sacrifice, she would give them two. For a good cause.
“This has to stop,” I said again, feeling I was repeating myself because I had lost an argument.
“What do you want me to do?”
What indeed? Death followed Daisy like another admirer, one who could not easily be put off. I walked out of the kitchen, down the hall, gesturing for Daisy to follow. There was a claw-footed full tub of water in the bathroom, and we stood side by side looking into it.
“Daisy, what do you see?” I asked.
“Water,” she said. Then, “our reflections.”
“Look very closely,” I said.
Daisy bent lower.
“I can’t see anything else.”
“Closer.”
Daisy bent lower and I seized her by the throat, toppling her into the bathtub with me on top of her. There was a tremendous splash and half the tub of water splattered noisily all over the bathroom, a miniature tidal wave sweeping across the floor. But there was still enough water that her head was submerged, and my hands locked firmly around her neck.
I closed my eyes, so that I could not see her, and started chanting an incantation.
The words I spoke were exactly the same recipe that Jessica had chanted in the church at Dulwich. Perhaps her pronunciation was wrong or she lacked the skill in saying them, but perhaps Jessica was just unlucky.
Daisy struggled, but I have always weighed more than her and I bore down heavily. I was strong with a mad rage at my fate, and she was such a slight thing. Her thrashing about was not enough to move me from her. Daisy had not had a chance to take a breath, but her slow and ghastly drowning still seemed to take forever.
Something shifted under my hands. I opened my eyes involuntarily. The form beneath me was shifting, melting. A sea-change was coming over Daisy.
Then I was Odysseus, wrestling with Proteus, The old Man of the Sea, the firstborn of the waters, a spirit who can take any form. I was struggling with an ape-like thing, and then a leopard-woman, and then a dragon which slashed me with long claws, a slithering salamander with spurred feet. Shape followed shape, blurring and metamorphosing as rapidly as shadows passing over water.
I did not let go, and I bore down with all my weight, and I did not stop chanting that formula all the while.
It squirmed and flopped and there were fins and tentacles lashing out, wrapping around my arms and feeling for my face. You can’t drown a fish, I thought, but it was too late now and I clung on, strangling whatever I held with all my strength.
Then something burst like a bladder breaking. There was a vile stench, and my fingers closed on nothing but slime. I was kneeling in a bath full of a disgusting, slushy mess which bubbled like champagne. My vision was lost in a cloud of acrid green vapour that poured upwards like smoke from an inferno. I coughed and choked and shook my head and almost fainted.
Everything was seething around me. The primordial mess was starting to recombine, forming itself again. Forming into something else.
I pulled out the bath plug, and the big bubbles were going glub-glub-glub as the contents of the bath started to drain away. I turned on the tap as far as it would go, and then the other tap. The streaming water mingled with the mess, and it all turned into a whirlpool and kept on running down and down until nothing but clean water was left. Clean water, and my blood. I was bleeding from a dozen slashes on my wrists, my arms, my chest, and my face. Some of them were deep.
Of course, my poor crepe silk dress was utterly ruined.
I turned off the taps at last. Daisy was dead. Daisy was gone, sailing down the Effra with Elizabeth and Leicester, to the sea. Gone forever.
When Euripides wrote his play Helen, he had it that the Helen who went to Troy was an illusion made of a cloud by Hera. The real Helen, according to Euripides, stayed with her father Proteus. On some days I think that the Daisy I killed was just an illusion made of cloud, a mask fashioned by Cthulhu for his extension in our world. On other days I think that mask was made of Daisy’s flayed and cored body. On my bad days I think that I killed the real, pure Daisy, who had survived R’lyeh untouched, whose innocence transmuted the furnace-glare of Cthulhu’s presence into cool light. Daisy who was just being herself, and who should have lived instead of me. Would my death have served as well?
I was brought back to myself by the sound of the grandfather clock chiming midnight. It was a dark and stormy night and They were coming.
I struggled into the kitchen, dripping a trail of blood and water, and before the last chime faded I was standing at the centre of the elaborate petals of the pattern I had chalked on the floor. I did not understand the whys and the wherefores, I was working by intuition. Losing blood only sharpened my senses, helped tune me in to those vibrations that lie beneath the ordinary world.
The wind blew, and there was another sound beneath it.
The shadows all moved at once, blades of black grass growing, stretching up from the cracks in the floor, out of the corners of the room, from behind every piece of furniture. I thought there would only be a few but there were dozens, twisting and rising from the ground.
Daniel would have loved to see this. He would have applauded to see how they unfolded themselves from lines into shadows and then into three dimensions. The smallest were ugly little imps, the largest scraped the ceiling with their bat wings. Herbert’s sculptures had captured something of them, but not the worst. Herbert had seen them through more artistic eyes than mine; to me they suggested vivisection laboratories rather than Gothic paintings. They were more human than Herbert had portrayed them, and less: you could see their animal ancestry, the strains of monkey and rat and bat, and something else deeper and more chthonic, but the human strain was all too obvious. The room was thick with their odour.
To me they were all lopsided, deformed in different and horrible ways, but perhaps that is just the prism of my human eyes.
They were mine, my sins, the tenants of my house, my ancestral spirits. They had been around ever since mankind first had commerce with Cthulhu. They were hybrids, existing between worlds, and they thirsted to tear open a passage through human flesh with their claws.
The faces were worst. Herbert could never have sculpted those faces, nobody could, however insane. I could not look at them. Encountering them, simply becoming aware that they existed, was more than most people could stand. I could well understand how it would drive you to the merciful release of suicide—and what happened to those who were strong enough to stand their ground against that unholy horde.
They were ready to tear me to bloody rags. Only the chalk pattern protected me. I am the blasphemer, the apostate who killed Daisy, their guiding light and their lode star.
Never summon that which you cannot put down, Chuck told me. I did not summon these, and I knew they were beyond me.
I began a chant, an incantation made of words from before the beginning of time. Or, as Daniel would have it, words that existed outside time. I had no hope of finishing; even if I had been at my full strength I would not have prevailed against the mass of clotted darkness pressing in around me. It was like trying to empty a swimming pool with a teaspoon; century upon century of black vileness was piled up around me, and they were far too strong for my feeble efforts.
I was too angry just to give in. I kept chanting. What else could I do?
I cupped my hands to catch the blood running from my wounds. If it marred the chalk lines the shadows would break through in an instant.
Words began to fail me. I kept losing my place in the incantation. The bat-winged things remained in place, like the gargoyles they resembled, patiently biding their time. It had occurred to me that if I could hold out until dawn they would be forced to withdraw back to their hiding places before the light could burn them. These malformed things cannot exist in daylight: Daniel would be able to explain why being seen fully would destroy them in one of his collapsing waves.
But dawn was many, many hours away. I was weak and getting weaker with every drop and trickle of blood.
Hands reached for me, shadow hands, clawed and scaled or rubbery and glistening, reaching to me from the darkness.
I wished that the door would open and someone, anyone would come to save me. That you, or Estelle, or someone would burst in and rescue me, any sort of unlikely deus ex machina would do.
The rain pattered on the windows and the wind howled softly around the house and I could hear their voices in it.
Sophie, we want you…Sophie, we’re waiting…Sssssophie…
My mind drifted, my words drifted. My arms felt very cold. I lost feeling in my feet and I seemed to be surrounded with cotton wool. I felt as though I could not fall, that if I let go I would be caught in a feathery embrace.
And as that hazy, foggy nothingness began to engulf me I started to move through it like a swimmer. I had just enough strength to make my way towards the light. It was faint, and my progress was like one of those agonising dreams of walking through treacle, but I kept going. The veils slowly parted before me as the fog condensed into numbers which fell like snowflakes. As I reached to catch them the numbers became words.
The words forced themselves out of my mouth, the peculiar syllables shaping themselves, taking on clear and precise form, the original language of the creation. I heard a voice pronouncing the alien syllables; it was coming from my mouth but it was not my voice. I sensed the crowd of black-winged things drawing back.
There are many random processes in nature; the wind, the rain, and the clouds are all random, driven by the tiniest original causes. So are other natural phenomena. I did not know what was happening as my hair stood on end and blue sparkles danced between the floor and the ceiling, shedding an eerie glow on the dozens of dark, deformed figures filling the room.
The windows all lit up with the most brilliant light as lightning struck from every direction at once, zigzagging in from the four points of the compass. I had just enough time to guess what was happening before the brilliance was multiplied tenfold. The shadows dissolved instantly in that intolerable light, scattered pieces disintegrating into a shower of nothingness, no fragment escaping.
I did not hear what the thunder said: it was much too loud for human hearing. I was blasted far away, far into the light.
IV
My cleaner found me on the floor the next morning, comatose with lacerated arms. Of course I was committed to a mental asylum shortly afterwards. The damage to the house could only have been the act of a madwoman, and I certainly looked the part. Sophie’s mad againe…
Apparently there were outlines of a most disturbing variety burned into the walls around the kitchen, which were taken as further evidence of my mental disturbance.
It did not help that I was raving. It did not help that I was deaf for some weeks and could not communicate any of what had happened. Perhaps if Dr Hamilton had been alive I could have coerced him to stand up for me; but he was dead, and in any case I scarcely cared.
Besides, I really was mad for much of the time. Madness has a bad name, but in truth it is the only safe refuge at times. Hamlet played mad because it held reality at bay for him, and you of all people must know how true that is. Straitjackets and padded cells can be so soothing to the troubled mind, they give a reassurance that one is being looked after.
You probably imagine that I was treated badly—and some of the treatment is quite barbaric by any standards—but they did not damage my mind any more than it had already been damaged. They were kind to me, after a fashion. My family never visited, never sent a word, but the doctors and nurses were polite and friendly. They even took the trouble to tell me that the cleaner was looking after the house and my cat, and that he would be waiting for me ‘when I got better’. He’s probably still there ten years later.
Being strapped down in pitch darkness for days on end is not entirely pleasant. The various shock therapies I endured, as I had to. None of them came close to the shocks I had already endured, or could dislodge certain things from my mind.
I admit that being a mental patient is a dismal life and one that demands strength of spirit. They dehumanise you: you are no longer a person but a patient. You are an ugly creature, with a prison haircut, no make-up, drab clothes and a spotty, pasty skin from poor food and lack of sunlight. The important thing is to realise that the mirror lies. I know who I am and what I really look like.
Once I saw Estelle there, being shown some other patient. I heard somebody call her ‘doctor’. She glanced once in my direction.
I will not bore you with details of these last ten years of incarceration. I will only echo Wilfred Thesiger’s response when asked about life in the trenches during the Great War: “My dear—the noise! And the people!”
I learned early on to be a compliant, easy patient. There is no room for ego here. I was a good patient for the nurses and orderlies, who only want a quiet life and no trouble. If you are pleasant to them, they can easily be bribed into small favours. Cigarettes, sweets, and books can all be obtained at a low price. You can even get pens and writing paper.
After much thought, I sentenced myself to ten years for Daisy’s death, which for a variety of legal reasons I consider to be manslaughter. When that term elapses in one week’s time, I will take my leave of this place at last. I have planned it all.
I know that I will be pursued, and not just by the authorities. I will have to go a long, long way from here, and stay well hidden.
But there is one person I cannot hide from: you. We have some unfinished business between us.
You have been, I gather, a teacher, moving from school to school, leading a quiet and blameless life. A bachelor who avoids the company of others, perhaps because they can never understand him. I never thought that William Blake would lead such a humble existence.
You will have realised my secret by now. I am a Whatley, of the house of Whatley. My grandmother, the one they said was a witch, was old Whatley’s sister. He was my great-uncle; Flora Whatley was a first cousin once removed. The thing you battled in the church was my second cousin.
I inherited the house and Whatley’s gold. I inherited that filthy old book, which
was duly passed on to me after the vicar died. That was the book which Estelle stole from me for her own purposes. I suppose I inherited the mantle of a priestess of Cthulhu.
The blood of the Whatleys runs in me. Naturally I was reluctant to help George in the first place; I knew that sooner or later he would find out the relationship and I would be on his list of those who needed to be liquidated for the greater good. I raised the issue of whether blood mattered more than moral choice, and thought it did. With an aristocrat’s belief in breeding, he thought only blood mattered. George would have made a good Nazi.
Blood does count for a little, though. I have inherited the skill, as Daniel realised, an ability at what once would have been called magic. Like any skill, like music or painting, it can be learned by those willing to put in the effort, but to me it comes easily and naturally. In any other century I could have been burned as a witch.
Perhaps I will still burn. I will leave the choice to you; I submit myself to your judgement. Have I suffered enough? I still have the power and all the potential for chaos that it brings. George would have said that I am too dangerous to be allowed to live. Perhaps he was right.
But consider this. You are also dangerous, you who also Know Too Much. You keep a manuscript in a tin box under your bed, one which is every bit as powerful and crazed as the book which I inherited from the Whatleys. You are also a danger to humanity. You must also judge yourself.
But that which summons the old ones can also be used to fight them. That power—their power—is our only hope.
When I have finished writing this I will wrap it up with a red ribbon. I shall bring it to you in person and make you read it while we drink a bottle of champagne. Both of us have earned that.
I am a murderess and a madwoman, but haven’t I served my time? You judge. The sacrifices stopped after that night. I have no doubt more shadows are slowly pooling and forming again in that cursed house, but lacking Daisy they have no direction, harmless as a forgotten box of knives in an attic. The young men of South London were saved, saved for the time being anyway, saved for another sort of sacrifice which they say is coming soon.
The Dulwich Horror & Others Page 39
