The Book of Cthulhu 2

by Ross Lockhart

  Swaying on his feet, Hennessey could see that he was not alone in the square. It had become a sort of rally point for the battalion. Trucks were rolling in and out. Wounded and dead were being sorted in front of the Gilman Hotel. And there on the southernmost side, two Marines with trench guns were standing guard over twenty or so battered-looking townsfolk.

  It only took a few seconds for Hennessey to cross the square to the prisoners. As Hennessey walked along the knot of men and women, he carefully studied each of the bloated, inhuman faces. The only thing he saw in their fat, bulging eyes was hatred. From the mother clutching a wailing brat to her fat breasts, to the men, tattered, bloodied, and bruised from the beatings the Marines had given them, all Hennessey saw was red-rimmed hatred. They didn’t hate the Marines for burning their temples and smashing their idols. They hated them for what they were: normal, clean, and human.

  Hennessey didn’t want their hate. He wanted their fear.

  He returned a few minutes later with a Thompson he got off a dead Marine at the triage station and killed them all. The two Marines who had been guarding the civilians were so shocked they almost let him load a second drum into the Thompson before they tackled him and wrestled the empty weapon away. Hennessey was cuffed and placed under arrest.

  Major Walsh, the battalion’s commanding officer, was a bit disappointed that his nominee for the Congressional Medal of Honor was now a “baby-killing sonuvabitch.” But, as Hennessey heard one of the T-men explain to the Major, “How’re you going to court-martial the man when none of this ever happened and we were never here?”

  Later Hennessey was taken under guard to the Battalion HQ outside Innsmouth. He sat and watched a mortar battery dump hundreds of shells onto the north side of town where things were still flopping and twisting in the rubble. Next a convoy of motor coaches arrived. Hennessey watched as Navy doctors carefully examined the captured townsfolk and directed them onto the waiting buses. Some people got to go on the buses on the right; others were sent to the left. To Hennessey the folks going to the left seemed a good deal more squamous.

  Hennessey soon found himself joined by three other handcuffed Marines: a captain by the name of Houseman, a sergeant named Dylan, and a private who claimed his name was “Death.” The feeling of kinship was immediate and mutual. After the debriefing back at the Boston Naval Annex’s brig, Hennessey was reassigned to units of the 6th Marine Regiment based in San Diego. He never again saw the men he’d spent the night handcuffed to in that truck. Except for one, decades later, at the Chosin Reservoir. That had been even colder than Innsmouth. Maybe the coldest place this side of Hell. Hennessey saw Private “Death,” this time sporting a gold oak leaf and quartering a Chinese soldier with an entrenching tool. For a second, recognition passed between them, but nothing was ever said. By the end of that day, the Chinese, like the monsters of Innsmouth, had learned to fear them.

  And their fear was all he’d ever wanted.

  * * *

  “Sergeant Hennessey?” Levine thought the old man was dead. The way he started stuttering and then slumped over with that outrush of breath, Levine was sure he’d just had a coronary. He reached forward and grasped Hennessey’s stick-thin wrist to search for a pulse. As soon as he felt the bird-like bones, Hennessey jumped to life again and snatched his hand away as if the young Delta Green agent were made of red-hot coals. “I’m sorry!” Levine stammered. “Are you all right?”

  The question tugged an involuntary and terrible giggle out of Hennessey. “Awl’right? Shit no! I’m not all awlright at all! How many more times I gotta go through that fucking nightmare with you?”

  Nearly as soaked with perspiration as Hennessey, Levine glanced to Parker and noted the big Army Major’s nearly imperceptible nod. “I think this will be the last time, Sergeant,” Levine said. “We’ve got all we need, I think. You’ve been extremely helpful, and your government appreciates the service you’ve done us today.”

  “And did for us back then as well,” Parker added flatly. That was about as many words as Levine had heard Parker speak at one time.

  “That was it?” Hennessey looked more surprised than relieved. “You won’t be coming back?”

  “No, sir,” Levine said as he moved to turn off the video camera.

  “Are you sure, son? ’Cuz you know, I might remember more next time.” The voice went thin with desperate entreaty.

  Levine turned and looked at the old gnarled root of a man coiled in the wheelchair in front of him and instantly recognized that he wasn’t the same man he’d spent the last four days with. That man was filled with hate and jealousy for the men who were still young enough to walk to the bathroom and have a regular bowel movement. This new man was filled with fear, fear that he would die alone in this VA hospital with no one to even notice.

  “I’m…I’m afraid we have other duties waiting for us back in Washington.”

  “That’s not the only time I saw them fish men, y’know,” Hennessey blurted out.

  That stopped them cold. “I thought you said you never saw where they took the prisoners?”

  “Not the prisoners,” Hennessey chattered. “Others. And others sorta like them. During the war in the Pacific I got picked up by a section of the OSS. I went on a dozen missions in the Marshalls, the Philippines, Manchuria, and even French Indochina. I saw stuff. I could tell ya all about it.”

  “Really?” Parker’s voice sounded like the earth moving.

  Hennessey took a deep breath and let it out slow. “Maybe you can answer me one question first? Why is the Navy coming to me for answers? Why ask me when you guys have a whole filing cabinet full of debriefings on this? I ain’t telling you anything I didn’t tell Naval Intelligence right afterwards. So why ask me all over again seventy years later?”

  “Sergeant Hennessey,” Levine said evenly, “please believe me when I tell you that I truly wish I could tell you what this is all about. But it’s national security. You understand, don’t you?”

  Hennessey apparently tried to look angry, but instead he just looked tired, old and tired. His head dangled at the end of his stumpy neck and he rubbed his eyes with his swollen-jointed fingers. “Maybe you can’t tell me who sentcha, but I can sure as hell tell you who you smell like to me. You smell like those OSS guys. Answered every question with ‘Sorry, that’s Delta Green clearance only.’ I know you ain’t gonna tell me whether I’m right or not, but before I tell you one more thing, there’s something I gotta know. And dammit, you owe me.

  “I’ve done a lot of hard shit for my country. Forty-two years in the Marine Corps: Guadalcanal, Saipan, Tinian, Iwo Jima, Chosin. And those are just the ones I can talk about, if there was even anyone around to listen. After forty-two years in a business where doing anything, including doing nothing, can get you killed, somebody or something should have punched my ticket. Instead I’m propped up in this fuckin’ chair, my legs next to useless, my back and fingers twisted with arthritis. Everything’s failing except my memories. From breakfast to bedtime, all I do all day is wait for my heart to stop. So I’ve paid my dues and done my duty thirty times over and you assholes owe me this answer before I say another word.

  “You can’t make me talk. I’m too old to threaten. The only reason I’m still alive is that I’m still a good Catholic and suicide’s a one-way ticket to Hell, so killin’ me would be doing me a big fuckin’ favor. I’m too old to bribe, either. There’s nothing you can promise me that I’ve got the capacity to even enjoy anymore. So don’t even try.

  “So if you want to know more, you’ll have to answer one question first.”

  “What is it?” Levine asked.

  The old bastard looked up. He looked terribly small and frail just then.

  “Are we winning?” he asked.

  Levine knew the answer to that question. Everyone in Delta Green knew the answer. Some more than others. Some wouldn’t admit it, but they knew. What the hell could Levine tell him? The truth? That rather than face what Innsmouth meant the
government had chosen to ignore it? That when others formed a force to fight the war anew, they were disbanded, not once but twice? That all those precious files were either misplaced or destroyed? Could he really look the old man in the eye and tell him that the Delta Green Hennessey knew was now a pack of renegades having to beg, borrow, and steal to fight a war for the very survival of the human species, all because nobody wanted to believe in the things Hennessey fought seventy years ago?

  Levine knew that he sure enough owed the old bastard. He’d fought the first battle in a war that raged behind the shadows even today. A war with no end in sight. Hennessey won the first battle and made the first advances. He’d beaten the ugliness back. And then some other assholes had pissed it all away.

  Levine owed the old bastard a few restful nights, a few nights of sleep where he could lay his head down and know that he had not sacrificed in vain. That the world was safe. That Jerusalem was delivered from the infidel.

  “We’re winning, Sergeant. Of course we are.”

  •

  The Hour of the Tortoise

  Molly Tanzer

  4 April 1887, early morning. Traveling.

  I sat alone in my train-carriage watching the beech-copses and white sheep and mist-wreathed fields flashing by. I am sure this countryside could be anywhere in England, but these were the trees and fields of Devon, my home county! And I had not seen them from the time I was sent away to learn what I could at Miss Coote’s Academy for Young Women of Breeding and Promise.

  More than a decade has passed, but the native beauty of this place remains ever-first in my heart. How could it not be but so? My happiest days were spent in Devonshire, when I was but a lass running hither and yon, and always by the side of my cousin Laurent. Two years my junior, he had been my constant childhood companion—but what of now? What sort of man has he grown into?

  ’Twas a kiss that separated us, a kiss seen by his mother, Lady Fanchone. That woman, whom some would call great, mistook our embrace for the blossoming of love rather than the affection shared by near-siblings, and would brook no explanations. Laurent became but a memory, and Devon, too—until now! For I am coming home…

  * * *

  Yes, that should do nicely, I think, for the introduction. A heroine at the end of her pupal stage, all grown up and ready to break through childhood’s chrysalis.

  Christ above, save me from choking upon my own vomit.

  I must find a way to add some spice directly lest I bore myself into an early grave, to say nothing of losing us the whole of our readership. Perhaps she (need name, floral in nature: Violet? Camilla? Camilla is nice) shall lose her maidenhead on the train. But to whom: the conductor? A handsome fellow-traveler? I must think on it.

  No, I should delay the jimmying open of Love’s crimson gate slightly longer. She could be introduced to the art of prick-sucking by a gallant stranger…but then he leaves her unsatisfied?

  Better, better, and yet while it’s true my editrix has never once given me poor counsel regarding my pornographies, I find Gothic fiction so very tiresome. I really cannot account for its popularity, but I am sure that is the reason Susan is so beside herself with excitement over this project. “Dearest Chelone, you shall write me Jane Eyre—but with lots and lots of fucking! It shall be our new serial and make us ever so much money!” Not exactly the response I anticipated when I told her I must take an extended leave of absence from Milady’s Ruby Vase so I might journey into the dreariest parish in Devon to sit by the side of my former guardian while he lies gasping out his last upon his deathbed.

  To stay once again under the gabled roof of Calipash Manor, after being so unceremoniously chucked out a decade ago…I have mixed feelings about this journey, to say the least. I am certain Susan believes I am going to encounter a country house full of secret passages, drafty towers, mysterious mysteries, and handsome cousins. Well, that will happen in the pornography, of course, and to be fair, Calipash Manor does have a tower. And, I suppose, its share of silly rumors about the family. But the reality is far more boring: An old man in his tidy house, wasting away with few to comfort him, having alienated himself during his life from those who might have loved him unto death.

  I suppose there is something rather Wuthering Heights about that, but not like any of the better parts, like when So-and-So threatens to cut off the boy’s ears or whatever it is that happens.

  Later—Funny, how I had thought to include a handsome stranger-cum-deflowerer in my story; I just met a rather natty fellow that will do nicely as a model! I should liked to have had some sport with him myself, except, it was so queer. He apologized for approaching me without a proper introduction, but asked if I was by chance related to the Calipash family. I told him I wasn’t—which isn’t strictly true, of course, but we illegitimate children of the noblesse are trained to be discreet—but he would not let the matter go. He shook his head and apologized, with the excuse that he was a native of Ivybridge, so knew “the Calipash look,” and said I had a serious case of it.

  “The Calipash look!” I exclaimed, delighted. “Surely you must be referring to the Calipash Curse?”

  “I suppose I am,” said he. I was surprised by how alarmed he seemed by my amusement. “You know of the curse, miss?”

  “Of course I do, but I have not heard anybody mention it for nigh ten years!”

  “You may smile,” he said, furrowing his brow at me as if his very life depended on it, “but we Ivybridge folk know nothing connected with that family is a laughing matter. Bad blood, they have—diabolists, deviants, and necromancers all!”

  “I am acquainted with the Lord Calipash, and a better man I have rarely met.” Well, it was true enough statement. I let this cove take it as he would.

  “He’s a good sort, true enough, but they go bad easy. I’d be on the lookout, miss. You surely look like a Calipash, perhaps you were…well, I won’t curse you by suggesting you have a twin lurking somewhere—but best to stay out of the ponds, just the same!”

  I told him I had every intention of staying out of ponds, lakes, rivers, streams, sloughs, and for that matter, lagoons. He seemed relieved, but the way such a dapper young man took notice of piffling country legends, well, it gave me pause.

  Of course when I used to go into the village as a girl I heard tell of the Calipash family curse—when twins are born, the devil is their father, and something about taking to the sea, or to ponds, and something about frog people maybe, of all the outlandish claims! I may not be remembering it all correctly; as a girl once I came home enquiring about it, but Lizzie, the housekeeper, reprimanded me for repeating such twaddle and I never again mentioned it. I am glad I was taught at a young age to be skeptical of supernatural nonsense.

  Really, what family that lives in a manor-house rather than a cottage doesn’t have some sort of rumor or another hanging over them like the sword of Damocles?

  Rum analogy to use when going to see a dying man, perhaps.

  Ooh—but we are slowing, and there is the whistle! I must ready myself.

  Evening. In my old room—The dolls I left behind are still here, and the white bedstead still has its rose-sprigged coverlet and pink frilly canopy. It is only how yellowed and worn everything appears that keeps me from thinking I have stepped back into another time. I feel fourteen years old in this room.

  Ah well, why bother changing the décor? I was always made to maintain the illusion of juvenescence to please my guardian, so why not keep my chambers in a state of static girlishness, too?

  But I should not speak ill of Lord Calipash, or rather, he who was Lord Calipash until his death—his death that I fear I may have caused not an hour ago! And already there is a new lord under the manor-roof tonight…

  Things are far stranger here at Calipash Manor than I anticipated. Perhaps there is something to the idea of a family curse—no! Stop that, Chelone. You are simply tired from your journey, and overwrought.

  Here is what happened, the facts, I mean: I arrived at the Iv
ybridge station on time, but no one was waiting for me, to my distress. The skies promised rain, and it was miles to walk to Calipash Manor.

  After waiting at the station for some time, I begged the use of a little wheeled cart for my trunk and went into Ivybridge proper, thinking I would visit the post office. It was from thence I had received the letter from my guardian summoning me hither. I thought perhaps I could, rather than sending a message by courier, ride with said courier (if the horse would bear us both) and come back later for my luggage.

  The town looked the same, snug stone houses and muddy streets, the occasional chicken scurrying across the main thoroughfare. The post office was in the same dilapidated cottage, I was happy to discover, with what could have been the same geraniums as when I was a girl blooming in the window-box. I went inside and explained my situation.

  “Quite a lot of traffic to and from the manor-house of late,” remarked the woman at the window, not answering my query of how I might get myself to Calipash Manor. “Telegraph yesterday, and was barely a week ago the prodigal son come in to send a letter. Queer fellow.”

  “Mr. Vincent has come home, then?”

  “Aye, for his father is soon for the grave, they say.”

  “How is he queer?” I was madly curious about Orlando Vincent, the cousin I had never seen. I should remember later to ask him about Rotterdam, where he was educated. Might be able to write something for the Vase about Dutch schoolboys or something…

  “Didn’t say nothing when he came in.” The woman’s frown would have shamed the devil himself. “Grunted his yeses and noes as if he had no human power of speech in him. Gave me a turn, he did. At first I thought he was the Ghast o’the Hills, come to take my soul. Mr. Vincent is very like the apparition, though of course his clothing is different.”

  Her words made me laugh, which I could tell displeased her. As a child I heard tell of the ‘Ghast o’the Hills,’ some sort of spirit in a frock-coat that is said to haunt the parish of Ivybridge. Once I even thought I saw it…a childish fancy, of course. I am lucky that education—and, of course, living in London—has disabused me of such country superstitions.