The Weird Company: The Secret History of H. P. Lovecraft's Twentieth Century

by Pete Rawlik

  They’ve shattered the portholes, reached in with tentacles whipping about, trying to find the latch. I cut one of them and that horrendous green fluid they use for blood sprayed out. The whole place has their stink about it now.

  They stare at me through the broken window. They can see me cowering in the corner. They have red eyes, cold dead eyes; one would think red eyes would show some life, some passion. I see nothing, not even hatred. Whatever they feel toward me it is not hatred.

  I think maybe it is hunger.

  1515

  I know now how they have survived for all these eons. It’s their blood, that bright bioluminescent green blood, something about it has a radical effect on biological tissue. As I wrote previously when they shattered the portholes I cut one of them and the green blood sprayed all over the cabin, including the dead dog.

  I do not know how it works, but some of the alien blood must have seeped in through the skin, perhaps through the eyes or mouth, perhaps even through the wound in the throat. Regardless, as I sat prepared to do battle with the things outside I suddenly heard the undeniable sound of panting coming from within the cabin itself. I turned just in time to watch the dog rise clumsily up on its legs and howl in the most horrifying and pitiful way. There was no denying that the poor beast was in agony, and a mass of pity rose up inside me, at the same time it was clear that this thing was deranged. It was no longer the domesticated dog it had been, indeed in the mere moments I watched it its behavior revealed no relation to any sort of normal animal behavior I had ever observed. The only comparison I can make is to film records of certain patients once held in the Sefton Asylum.

  It lunged at me; this mad dog flew across the cabin a mass of fur and blood, deranged and only partially in control of its movements. I dodged it easily and plunged my blade into the side of its chest. The creature now had two fatal wounds and still it stumbled back on to its feet and slowly turned to attack. I refused to give it a second chance. I leapt onto its back and with my left hand pulled its muzzle up into my chest while my right hand plunged the knife into its neck. Over and over again my knife found its mark, and still the dog-thing struggled. Blood flowed from the dog like a river and my parka became warm and slick with gore. I felt the blade bite into the spine and with a single drastic effort I forced the blade between two vertebrae and separated the dog’s head from its body. The thing twitched a bit but it has not moved much since.

  I haven’t had much time to think about what this means but there are some things that I think should terrorize me. If the blood that flows through these things can re-animate a dog and the only way that I could stop the dog was to decapitate it, then that might explain how these things survived in the ice for millions of years. It might also explain why all the other specimens, the ones that didn’t re-animate, were all beheaded. Terminating the connection of the body with the brain may be the only way of killing these things. Those things out there may be murderous but they seem organized in control, the blood likely brings them back completely normally. The dog doesn’t have the same kind of physiology; the re-animation process is probably only partially successful on mammalian life. But even that terrifies me because it shouldn’t have any reaction at all, unless in some way mammalian life, earthly life, shares some physiology, some biochemistry with these horrifying things. That these thoughts don’t terrify me suggests that I am in some sort of psychological shock.

  1530

  I want my friends and family to know that I did not despair. That Thomas Gedney did not succumb to the fear and loneliness that drives men mad out on the ice. I did not do this thing out of madness or despair but out of desperation. When I was a child my parents would take me to Sunday school and the nuns would teach us about sin, mortal sin and damnation. They said it was a sin against God to kill a man, even one’s self. I do not think there is a God. How can there be a God, as men would understand him, that would allow such things as those that stalk the ice? How could God allow such things to live? What was it the mad Arab had written? “That which is not dead, which can eternal lie, and in strange eons even death may die.” Yes that’s it. Was he writing of the Q’Hrell? Are they our god of the holy resurrection? Is their body my body? Is their blood my blood? If so I renounce them. I will pay no tribute, nor make no sacrifice. They will not have the privilege of taking my life. They will know what kinds of creatures now rule this world. They will know what stuff that men are made of, that we will not yield to their base needs and desires, that we will not allow them to butcher us like cattle.

  After I am dead, they may add my flesh to their larder, but I will not allow them the pleasure of killing me. They have numbers and strength, weapons and time. They can withstand the cold and the wind and the hunger of ages. They have all this, but I still have my knife, and the will to use it.

  CHAPTER 1

  From the Account of Robert Martin Olmstead

  “The Shadows in Innsmouth”

  It had been spring when I began my way across the country to return to the home of my ancestors. I made this journey knowing full well that government forces had for years forcibly occupied the village of Innsmouth and subjected its occupants to nothing short of martial law. Some will recall that I have already confessed to and apologized for my part in instigating the raid and subsequent occupation. There is no need for me to repeat an account of those events here, unless it is to again offer my apologies for the grave misunderstanding of events that forced me to flee that village four years ago. Still, although I knew what conditions awaited me, had I known what events my return would set in motion, I may have thought otherwise about returning to that little fishing village on the coast of Massachusetts. Then again, my particular situation, some might say condition, gave me little choice in the matter. My uncle Walter had shot himself, and his son Lawrence had spent more than four years in an asylum. He had nearly died in that place. The other patients, already unstable, had been driven over the edge by Lawrence’s degenerating condition and decided to do something about it after a careless orderly had left the door to his private room unlocked. I used the incident to remove Lawrence from the home, on the pretext of placing him into a more responsible facility. His own family, ashamed of what he had become, never questioned my actions, or even inquired on the location of the new hospital. They merely threw money at the problem, assured that I would take care of it.

  Combining their funds with mine, I planned for Lawrence and me to head east together, by private car. That the purchase of that conveyance would nearly exhaust what was left of my funds mattered little, after we reached the coast we wouldn’t need money. Lawrence never gave me the chance. One day while I was out he took most of the money and what supplies we had and left. He left me a note apologizing, the voices in his head, the dreams, the urge to head to the coast, to Innsmouth, and then into the sea, down to the deep city of Y’ha-nthlei where he would live forever, it was all too much. He couldn’t resist, couldn’t wait, couldn’t wait for me. So he went, he went and left me behind.

  My instinct was to follow him, those voices, those dreams, they were calling me as well. I longed to go into the sea and dive down to that phosphorescent metropolis where leprous corals and grotesque invertebrates clung to terraced palaces. My grandmother was there, as was the thing that was her grandmother, Pth’thya-l’yi who had lived in Y’ha-nthlei for eighty thousand years. It was she who called to us, Lawrence and I, in our dreams, beckoned us to return to Innsmouth and then beyond. Yet as much as I wanted, I was now delayed by the trappings of the mundane world. I had to replenish my funds, and map out my way east. A car was now out of the question, I had to find alternative means of travel, ones that wouldn’t place me at risk to public scrutiny.

  The trip cross country took me longer than it should have. A man can ride the train, take buses, stay in hotels, and eat food in restaurants. A thing such as I had become has no such options. I still rode the train, but not in the passenger car, but rather in with the baggage, sometimes with catt
le. I still ate food prepared by restaurants, but more often than not I stole it from unlocked back doors or out of bins. I travelled light, only what I could carry on my back and in my pockets. A few changes of clothes were the bulk of what I carried, everything else I left behind, with the life I no longer had any use for. The only thing that mattered was moving east, back to Massachusetts, back to Essex County, back to Innsmouth where I hoped I would be welcomed back and conveyed into the sea and beyond.

  It soon became obvious that the homecoming I had hoped for could never occur. I had underestimated the extent of the occupation. Miles from my destination my journey came to a sudden halt. The old bus route, which had once run through the village, the one that had been run by a man who would have been sympathetic to my condition, no longer operated. Here, so close to my goal I had to be doubly careful. In Ohio and New York I could still pass for human, deformed but still human. The stares and gasps from people who caught a glimpse of my countenance were tolerable, but they didn’t pose much of a threat. Here they knew the Innsmouth look for what it was, and here if they saw me I would be stopped, arrested, taken away, and interred, like all the others. If I were to complete my journey I was going to have to do what I had so recently become adept at doing: I was going to have to secrete myself amidst the cargo, the packages, and the livestock that was regularly moved into Innsmouth.

  Despite the attempt to make it so, Innsmouth was no fortress, indeed there were still farms and hamlets that bordered on the picket line that the Federal Government had established. It was easy to find a truck that was heading in the right direction, and easier still to conceal myself under a tarp amidst the earthy sacks of feed, flour and cans of food. I waited for the farmer to start the truck and get on the road before I let my guard down and closed my eyes. My travels had apparently exhausted me, for the ramshackle truck had barely gone a mile before the droning engine lulled me into a state bordering on sleep. I lay still in that drowsy condition, neither awake nor asleep, but rather in a kind of semiconscious torpor. It was an hour, slightly more when the truck suddenly jerked to a halt. With all the caution I could muster, I peered out from underneath the tarp and saw why my transport had ceased its motion.

  At the juncture of the main road and the turnoff to the small hamlet to the North had been built an imposing stone edifice not unlike a small fort or bunker. The driver exited the truck and headed toward the building, his heavy work boots crunching the gravel underneath. As the driver opened the door and went inside, voices offered greetings and a drink. Fearing that the truck was to be searched, I took the brief opportunity to slip out and run off into the brush. Moving through the woods, I could see that the little building served as a checkpoint on the road which was now blocked in both directions by a heavy steel pipe that functioned as a crude but effective road gate. The road may have been blocked, but there were no guards visible. Apparently there was no real concern about any foot traffic moving in to the town. I could understand their logic. Who in their right mind would try to break into what had essentially become a prison?

  Past the farms, the land around Innsmouth quickly becomes soft and wet, and transitions into swamps and marshes. The closer I stayed to the road, the firmer the ground was, and the faster I made my way. Walking carefully down the side of that dark and deserted road I kept expecting to encounter a vehicle or a patrol of some sort to come out and arrest me. I was like a child waiting for the boogeyman to come out of the dark. The irony of the situation that I was a monster, and the things that I was afraid of were men, was not lost on me. For the stars and the moon whose light leaked down through the clouds and trees and showed me the way, I was thankful. I was also thankful for the owls and other night birds that called and sang to each other, for they provided an odd comfort, a sense of normalcy that was desperately needed. That hour that I walked seemed to stretch into maddening days, each step, and each heartbeat an eternity. Yet in the end I reached the outskirts of Innsmouth where the road met the river and they both headed east.

  In the village, I furtively followed the river down to the harbor and then back through the refinery before resting at the abandoned train station. Exhausted from my clandestine excursions, I secreted myself on a hill across from the station and watched three soldiers pace back and forth on the platform. They were infantrymen, rifles slung over their shoulders, cigarettes dangling from their mouths and fingers. In traversing the village I had grown to hate these soldiers, and I hated what they had done to the village I had returned to. Homes had been gutted and burned, businesses ransacked, the refinery, once the center of industry for the town, was boarded up and strung with barbed wire. The church . . . the church had been desecrated, its finery stolen or defaced, the sacred scriptures burned or confiscated. The once proud waterfront was in ruins, laid waste by explosives and ensuing fire. The merchant fleet lay stranded in the harbor. The bay was lined with slow lazy warships and rife with noisy gunboats darting back and forth in strange almost random patterns. The empty town reeked of death.

  Suddenly, there was a commotion at the station and beams of light leapt out onto the tracks illuminating a small grey figure that I had not noticed even though it was only yards away from my own position. The man was covered in glistening wet rags and in response to being spotted attempted to run but succeeded only in obtaining a strange lopping gait that was at the time both pathetic and comical. The soldiers yelled warnings and orders but the figure paid them no heed and continued its sad attempt at escape. One final stern warning again went unheeded and then the soldiers unleashed a volley of shots that pierced the eerie stillness of the town and sent the grey figure to the ground.

  The soldiers froze on the platform, guns pointed at the strange figure which now lay unmoving on the tracks. There were frantic questions accompanied by desperate accusations and tentative orders and sheepish refusals. The soldiers seemed genuinely unprepared for the consequences of their actions. That they had fired on a man and brought him down seemed something they simply could not deal with. Slowly, lights shining back and forth across the tracks, rifles jerking wildly from place to place, the soldiers broke from the platform and fled backwards into the town for the safety of empty streets. But the streets were not empty. As the soldiers left the platform, dark shapes burst forth from basements, from closed doors and from shuttered windows and took stand against the soldiers.

  The things numbered less than a dozen, large vaguely anthropoid creatures that stood half bent in the moonlight with long claws, rows of spiny teeth, and great bulging eyes along chinless heads. Strange growths behind the jaw, between the clawed fingers and along the crest of the head, implied an ichthyic or at least amphibious origin. Yet such a conclusion was contradicted by the curious state of the hideous batrachians. Such things, such lopping, bleating things, such things should not wear the tattered and soiled clothes of men.

  As the things lunged at the soldiers, and the soldiers fought back, I left my place on the hill and crept down onto the tracks. Carefully I reached the downed figure and rolled him over. He was wrapped in a dark mariner’s sea coat which hung loose as if he had once been of much larger physique than he currently was. Atop his head was a black woolen cap that was pulled down to cover most of his head. On his hands he wore a pair of thick leather gloves that hung just as loose as the man’s coat, and were in a startling state of disrepair. Indeed, I quickly formed the impression that the garments had been long unused and badly looked after, for they carried with them a thick damp musty odor that seemed to mingle with a stench that reminded me of the beach at low tide, or perhaps of my mother’s kitchen on Friday when the fishmonger came. I pulled off his hat and opened his coat. My actions revealed a parody of a man. The head was nearly hairless, and what hair there was jutted out as course clumped fibers. The skin was rough and patterned in large thick pads which diminished into a fine pebbling around the face. His ears were perfunctory holes surrounded by weird atavistic nubs of flesh.

  He stared up at me, weird li
dless eyes, huge eyes that bulged moist and dark in the night. There was something familiar in his face, and I quickly recognized him as the driver of the now defunct bus, a man named Sargent. Strange gurgling sounds came from his mouth and throat which took me a moment to realize were words. “Yew have the look,” he gurgled, shoving something large and cold into my hands. My eyes darted toward it, something wrapped in oilskin and leather ties. “Take this,” more gurgling and heavy rasping breaths obscured his speech, “Wait . . . in Arkham.” Then the strange man-thing convulsed and was silent.

  Slowly, deliberately, I quietly backed away and began briskly moving down the rail line and out of the city. The whispering voice of Pth’thya-l’yi had suddenly gone silent. There was a new voice, one that was just as insistent as that of my own ancestor, but that urged me into a new action. The words I could not understand, but their meaning was clear, I was to take the package and head to Arkham. Arkham it insisted, go to Arkham. Arkham. The name pounded in my head like a beating drum, and though I had spent the last few months of my life being driven to return to Innsmouth I turned and did as the voice in my head insisted. I headed west toward Arkham. Whatever this new compulsion was, it was stronger than the one that had called me east.

  Glancing over my shoulder I left the dead man behind, the package he gave me still in my hands. I knew the western spur would take me through the marsh lands and then down through remote farm land. I paused for a moment and looked back. I could hear the screaming coming from the tiny hamlet and it touched a chord of memory. Skulking about the town, fleeing in the middle of the night, pursued by angry hordes, it was all too familiar. Panicked, I ran, just as I had done four years before, when the inhabitants of Innsmouth seemed so much more monstrous, and I at the time still had ears and eyelids, and still believed myself to be human.