The Taint and Other Novellas

by Brian Lumley

  “Using those Others in Africa, those who took Sir Amery Wendy-Smith, Shudde-M’ell and his hordes, to relay their messages and dream-pictures, they have finally defeated the magic spell of deep water and can now control dreams as of old—despite the oceans which cover them! Once more they have mastery of dreams, but to perform the Transfer they need not even break the surface of the water—a lessening of the pressure will suffice.

  “Ce’haie, ce’haie!!!

  “They rise even now; and He knows me, searching me out…And my mind, which they have prepared in dreams, will be here to meet Him, for I am ready and they need wait no longer. My ignorance is nothing—I do not need to know or understand! They will show me; as, in dreams, they have showed me the Deep Places. But they are unable to draw from my weak mind, or from any mortal brain, knowledge of the surface…The mental images of men are not strongly enough transmitted…And the deep water—even though, through the work of Shudde-M’ell, they have mostly conquered its ill effects—still interferes with those blurred images which they have managed to obtain…

  “I am the chosen one…Through His eyes in my body will they again acquaint themselves entirely with the surface; that in time, when the stars are right, they may perform the Great Rising…Ah! The Great Rising! The damnation of Hastur! The dream of Cthulhu for countless ages…When all the deep dwellers, the dark denizens, the sleepers in silted cities, will again confound the world with their powers…

  “For that is not dead which can lie forever, and when mysterious times have passed, it shall be again as it once was…Soon, when the Transfer is done, He shall walk the Earth in my guise, and I the great deeps in His! So that where they ruled before they may one day rule again—aye—even the brethren of Yibb-Tstll and the sons of dreaming Cthulhu and their servants—for the Glory of R’lyeh…”

  That is as much of it as I can remember, and even then not at all clearly, and as I have said, it was nothing to me at that time but gibberish. It is only since then that I have acquainted myself with certain old legends and writings; and in particular, in connection with the latter part of my brother’s fevered mouthings, the inexplicable couplet of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred:

  “That is not dead which can eternal lie,

  And with strange aeons even death may die.”

  But I digress.

  It took me some time, after the drone of Julian’s outré monologue had died away, to realize that he was no longer in the room with me and that there was a chill morning breeze blowing through the house. In his own room his clothes still hung neatly where he had left them the night before—but Julian had gone, leaving the door to the house swinging open.

  I dressed quickly and went out to search the immediate neighbourhood—with negative results. Then, as dawn was breaking, I went into a police-station to discover—to my horror—that my brother was in “protective custody.” He had been found wandering aimlessly through the northern streets of the city mumbling about “giant Gods” waiting for something in the ocean deeps. He did not seem to realize that his sole attire was his dressing-gown, nor did he appear to recognize me when I was called to identify him. Indeed, he seemed to be suffering from the aftereffects of some terrible shock which had left him in a trauma-like state, totally incapable of rational thought. He would only mumble unguessable things and stare blankly towards the northern wall of his cell; an awful, mad light glowing in the back of his eyes…

  • • •

  My tasks were sufficient that morning to keep me amply occupied, and horribly so; for Julian’s condition was such that on the orders of a police psychiatrist he was transferred from his police-station cell to Oakdeene Sanatorium for “observation.” Nor was it easy to get him attended to at the sanatorium. Apparently the supervisors of that institute had had their own share of trouble the previous night. When I did eventually get home, around noon, my first thought was to check the daily newspapers for any reference to my brother’s behaviour. I was glad, or as glad as I could be in the circumstances, to find that Julian’s activities had been swamped from a more prominent place of curious interest—which they might well have otherwise claimed—by a host of far more serious events.

  Strangely, those other events were similar to my brother’s trouble in that they all seemed concerned with mental aberrations in previously normal people or, as at Oakdeene, increases in the activities of the more dangerous inmates of lunatic asylums all over the country. In London a businessman of some standing had hurled himself bodily from a high roof declaring that he must “fly to Yuggoth on the rim.” Chandler Davies, who later died raving mad at Woodholme, painted “in a trance of sheer inspiration” an evil black and grey G’harne Landscape which his outraged and frightened mistress set on fire upon its completion. Stranger still, a Cotswold rector had knifed to death two members of his congregation who, he later protested to the police, “had no right to exist,” and from the coast, near Harden in Durham, strange midnight swimmers had been seen to make off with a fisherman who screamed of “giant frogs” before disappearing beneath the still sea…It was as if, on that queer night, some madness had descended—or, as I now believe, had risen—to blanket the more susceptible minds of certain people with utter horror.

  But all these things, awful as they were, were not that which I found most disturbing. Looking back on what Julian had murmured in my bedroom while I lay in half-slumber, I felt a weird and inexplicable chill sweep over me as I read, in those same newspapers, of an amateur seismologist who believed he had traced a submarine disturbance in the ocean between Greenland and the northern tip of Scotland…

  What was it Julian had whispered about a rising which would not go recorded? Certainly something had been recorded happening in the depths of the sea!…But, of course, that was ridiculous, and I shook off the feeling of dread which had gripped me on reading the item. Whatever that deep oceanic disturbance had been, its cause could only be coincidental to my brother’s behaviour.

  So it was that rather than ponder the reason for so many outré happenings that ill-omened night I thanked our lucky stars that Julian had got away with so light a mention in the press; for what had occurred could have been damaging to both of us had it been given greater publicity.

  Not that any of this bothered Julian! Nothing bothered him, for he stayed in that semi-conscious state in which the police had found him for well over a year. During that year his weird delusions were of such a fantastic nature that he became, as it were, the psychological pet and project of a well-known Harley Street alienist. Indeed, after the first month or so, so strong did the good doctor’s interest in my brother’s case become, he would accept no fee for Julian’s keep or treatment; and, though I visited Julian frequently, whenever I was in London, Dr. Stewart would never listen to my protests or hear of me paying for his services. Such was his patient’s weird case that the doctor declared himself extremely fortunate to be in a position where he had the opportunity to study such a fantastic mind. It amazes me now that the same man who proved so understanding in his dealings with my brother should be so totally devoid of understanding with me; yet that is the pass to which the turn of events has brought me. Still, it was plain my brother was in good hands, and in any case I could hardly afford to press the matter of payment; Dr. Stewart’s fees were usually astronomical.

  It was shortly after Dr. Stewart “took Julian in” that I began to study my brother’s star-charts, both astronomical and astrological, and delved deep into his books on the supernatural arts and sciences. I read many peculiar volumes during that period and became reasonably familiar with the works of Fermold, Lévi, Prinn, and Gezrael, and—in certain darker reaches of the British Museum—I shuddered to the literacy lunacy of Magnus, Glynnd, and Alhazred. I read the R’lyeh Text and the Johansen Narrative and studied the fables of lost Atlantis and Mu. I crouched over flaking tomes in private collections and tracked down all sources of oceanic legend and myth with which I came into contact. I read the manuscript of Andrew Phelan, the deposit
ion of Abel Keane, the testament of Claiborne Boyd, the statement of Nayland Colum, and the narrative of Horvath Blayne. The papers of Jefferson Bates fell to my unbelieving scrutiny, and I lay awake at nights thinking of the hinted fate of Enoch Conger.

  And I need never have bothered.

  All the above delvings took the better part of a year to complete, by which time I was no nearer a solution to my brother’s madness than when I began. No, perhaps that is not quite true. On reflection I think it quite possible that a man might go mad after exploring such dark avenues as these I have mentioned—and especially a man such as Julian, who was more than normally sensitive to begin with. But I was by no means satisfied that this was the whole answer. After all, his interest in such things had been lifelong; I could still see no reason why such an interest should suddenly accumulate so terribly. No, I was sure that the start of it all had been that Candlemas dream.

  But at any rate, the year had not been totally lost. I still did not believe in such things—dark survivals of elder times; great ancient gods waiting in the ocean depths; impending doom for the human race in the form of nightmare ocean-dwellers from the beginning of time—how could I and retain my own sanity? But I had become fairly erudite as regards these darker mysteries of elder Earth. And certain facets of my strange research had been of particular interest to me. I refer to what I had read of the oddly similar cases of Joe Slater, the Catskill Mountains vagabond in 1900-01, Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee of Miskatonic University in 1908-13, and Randolph Carter of Boston, whose disappearance in 1928 was so closely linked with the inexplicable case of the Swami Chandraputra in 1930. True, I had looked into other cases of alleged demonic possession—all equally well authenticated—but those I have mentioned seemed to have a special significance, as they paralleled more than roughly that case which I was researching and which involved so terribly my brother.

  But time had passed quickly and it was a totally unexpected shock to me, though one of immeasurable relief and pleasure, to find in my letter-box one July morning in 1963 a letter from Dr. Stewart which told of Julian’s rapid improvement. My joy and amazement can be well imagined when, on journeying down to London the very next day, to the practice of Dr. Stewart, I found my brother returned—so far as could be ascertained in such a short time—to literally complete mental recovery. Indeed, it was the doctor himself who, on my arrival, informed me that Julian’s recovery was now complete, that my brother had fully recovered almost overnight: but I was not so sure—there appeared to be one or two anomalies.

  These apart, though, the degree of recovery which had been accomplished was tremendous. When I had last seen my brother, only a month earlier, I had felt physically sickened by the unplumbed depths of his delusions. I had, on that occasion, gone to stand beside him at the barred window from which I was told he always stared blindly northwards, and in answer to my careful greeting he had said: “Cthulhu, Othuum, Dagon: the Deep Ones in Darkness; all deeply dreaming, awaiting awakening…” Nor had I been able to extract anything from him at all except such senseless mythological jargon.

  What a transformation! Now he greeted me warmly—though I imagined his recognition of me to be a trifle slow—and after I had delightedly talked with him for a while I came to the conclusion that so far as I could discern, and apart from one new idiosyncrasy, he seemed to be the same man I had known before the onset of the trouble. This oddity I have mentioned was simply that he seemed to have developed a weird photophobia and now wore large, shielded, dark-lensed spectacles which denied one the slightest glimpse of his eyes even from the sides. But, as I later found out, there was an explanation even for these enigmatic-looking spectacles.

  While Julian prepared himself for the journey back to Glasgow, Dr. Stewart took me to his study where I could sign the necessary release documents and where he could tell me of my brother’s fantastic recovery. It appeared that one morning only a week earlier, on going to his exceptional patient’s room, the doctor had found Julian huddled beneath his blankets. Nor would my brother come out or allow himself to be brought out until the doctor had agreed to bring him that pair of very dark-lensed spectacles. Peculiar though this muffled request had been, it had delighted the astonished alienist, constituting as it did the first conscious recognition of existence that Julian had shown since the commencement of his treatment.

  And the spectacles had proved to be worth their weight in gold, for since their advent Julian had rapidly progressed to his present state of normalcy. The only point over which the doctor seemed unhappy was that to date my brother had point-blank refused to relinquish the things; he declared simply that the light hurt his eyes! To some degree, however, the good doctor informed me, this was only to be expected. During his long illness Julian had departed so far from the normal world as it were, that his senses, unused, had partly atrophied—literally ceasing to function. His recovery had left him in the position of a man who, trapped in a dark cave for a long period of time, is suddenly released to face the bright outside world: which also explained in part the clumsiness which had attended Julian’s every physical action during the first days of his recovery. One of the doctor’s assistants has found occasion to remark upon the most odd way in which my brother had tended to wrap his arms around things which he wanted to lift or examine—even small things—as though he had forgotten what his fingers were for! Also, at first, the patient had tended to waddle rather than walk, almost in the manner of a penguin, and his recently reacquired powers of intelligent expression had lapsed at times in the queerest manner—when his speech had degenerated to nothing more than a guttural, hissing parody of the English language. But all these abnormalities had vanished in the first few days, leaving Julian’s recovery as totally unexplained as had been his decline.

  • • •

  In the first-class compartment on the London-Glasgow train, on our way north, having exhausted the more obvious questions I had wanted to put to my restored brother—questions to which, incidentally, his answers had seemed guardedly noncommittal—I had taken out a pocketbook and started to read. After a few minutes, startled by a passing train, I had happened to glance up…and was immediately glad that Julian and I were alone in the compartment. For my brother had obviously found something of interest in an old newspaper, and I do not know what others might have thought of the look upon his face…As he read his face bore an unpleasant and, yes, almost evil expression. It was made to look worse by those strange spectacles; a mixture of cruel sarcasm, black triumph, and tremendous contempt. I was taken aback, but said nothing, and later—when Julian went into the corridor for a breath of fresh air—I picked up the newspaper and turned to the section he had been reading, which perhaps had caused the weird distortion of his features. I saw at once what had affected him, and a shadow of the old fear flickered briefly across my mind as I read the article. It was not strange that what I read was new to me—I had hardly seen a newspaper since the horror began a year previously—but it was as though this was the same report I had read at that time. It was all there, almost a duplicate of the occurrences of that night of evil omen: the increased activities of lunatics all over the country, the sudden mad and monstrous actions of previously normal people, the cult activity and devil-worship in the Midlands, the sea-things sighted off Harden on the coast, and more inexplicable occurrences in the Cotswolds.

  A chill as of strange ocean-floors touched my heart, and I quickly thumbed through the remaining pages of the paper—and almost dropped the thing when I came across that which I had more than half expected. For submarine disturbances had been recorded in the ocean between Greenland and the northern tip of Scotland. And more—I instinctively glanced at the date at the top-centre of the page, and saw that the newspaper was exactly one week old…It had first appeared on the stands on the very morning when Dr. Stewart had found my brother huddled beneath the blankets in the room with the barred windows.

  • • •

  Yet apparently my fears were groundless. On our ret
urn to the house in Glasgow the first thing my brother did, to my great delight and satisfaction, was destroy all his old books of ancient lore and sorcery; but he made no attempt to return to his writing. Rather he mooned about the house like some lost soul, in what I imagined to be a mood of frustration over those mazed months of which he said he could remember nothing. And not once, until the night of his death, did I see him without those spectacles. I believe he even wore the things to bed—but the significance of this, and something he had mumbled that night in my room, did not dawn on me until much later.

  But of those spectacles: I had been assured that this photophobia would wear off, yet as the days went by it became increasingly apparent that Dr. Stewart’s assurances had gone for nothing. And what was I to make of that other change I had noticed? Whereas before Julian had been almost shy and retiring, with a weak chin and a personality to match, he now seemed to be totally out of character, in that he asserted himself over the most trivial things whenever the opportunity arose, and his face—his lips and chin in particular—had taken on a firmness completely alien to his previous physiognomy.

  It was all most puzzling, and as the weeks passed I became ever more aware that far from all being well with that altered brother of mine something was seriously wrong. Apart from his brooding, a darker horror festered within him. Why would he not admit the monstrous dreams which constantly invaded his sleep? Heaven knows he slept little enough as it was; and when he did he often roused me from my own slumbers by mumbling in the night of those same horrors which had featured so strongly in his long illness.

  But then, in the middle of October, Julian underwent what I took to be a real change for the better. He became a little more cheerful and even dabbled with some old manuscripts long since left abandoned—though I do not think he did any actual work on them—and towards the end of the month he sprang a surprise. For quite some time, he told me, he had had a wonderful story in mind, but for the life of him he could not settle to it. It was a tale he would have to work on himself; and it would be necessary for him to do much research, as his material would have to be very carefully prepared. He asked that I bear with him during the period of his task and allow him as much privacy as our modest house could afford. I agreed to everything he suggested, though I could not see why he found it so necessary to have a lock put on his door; or, for that matter, why he cleared out the spacious cellar beneath the house “for future use.” Not that I questioned his actions. He had asked for privacy, and as far as I could assist him he would have it. But I admit to having been more than somewhat curious.