The Blasphemy In The Canopic Jar & More Tales Of The Cthulhu Mythos

by McLaughlin, Mark

  The Blasphemy In The Canopic Jar

  & More Tales Of The Cthulhu Mythos

  by Mark McLaughlin & Michael Sheehan, Jr.

  Table Of Contents

  The Blasphemy In The Canopic Jar

  Glove: A Tale Of The King In Yellow

  Mrs. Dakhamunzu

  The Pharaoh Of Pendleton Court

  The Final Door

  The Spawn Of Ghattambah

  Casino Carcosa

  About The Authors

  The Blasphemy In The Canopic Jar

  by Mark McLaughlin & Michael Sheehan, Jr.

  Professor Boris Kingsley studied the canopic jar with rapt interest. “I will admit…” he said. “It intrigues me. I’ve never seen a jar quite like it, and I’ve seen hundreds.”

  The jar was made from smooth teal stone, streaked with veins of dark green and pale blue. The thick lid was carved in the form of a grim, brutish skull. Hieroglyphics had been etched around the jar, and some of these were symbols Kingsley had never seen before. His slender fingers softly stroked the ancient etchings. One symbol looked like a vulture with two heads of different sizes, while another depicted a misshapen man with an oversized head.

  Vanessa Templeton, the professor’s visitor that afternoon, stood by his desk, smiling hugely. She was stocky and muscular, with almond-shaped eyes, pulled-back auburn hair, full plum-red lips, and long, crimson fingernails. Her toothy grin reminded Kingsley of a ravenous Cheshire Cat. “I knew you’d like it, Boris darling,” she said. “It’s the only one of its kind in the world.”

  “I would ask if it’s stolen, but that goes without saying. Where did it originally come from?”

  “It was found in the burial chamber of the pharaoh Tutankhamun, along with all the other relics.” Templeton’s grin widened to an almost alarming degree. “But, it’s presence in the chamber has never been documented. It previously belonged to a descendent of George Herbert, fifth Earl of Carnarvon – the financial backer of the Tutankhamun excavation in the Valley of the Kings.”

  Kingsley nodded wearily. “I know who George Herbert is.”

  “Ah, yes. Of course you would. Well, if you’re so smart, let’s see if you can tell me who has a body part in that canopic part … and what part that might be.”

  “Hmmm. Let me think…” Kingsley stared at the jar. “Tutankhamun’s testicles, maybe?”

  “No, but a good guess. I was recently a houseguest of that Herbert descendent I mentioned.” She pointed to the canopic jar. “It somehow found its way into one of my suitcases when I left. A few days earlier, my host had told me all about the jar and its ghastly history.”

  “Ghastly? Tell me more.” He had to admit, he dearly enjoyed Vanessa’s visits. She always brought such interesting relics for sale, and she was so deliciously corrupt. He often thought about starting a lively relationship with her. The problem was, she had such sticky fingers. He knew that if she spent any amount of time in his home, key items in his highly valuable collection would soon go missing.

  “It’s generally known that Tut sired two stillborn daughters with his half-sister, Ankhesenamun,” Vanessa said. “But, only a few people know that they also had a son named Mupp, who reached a ripe old age of fifty-seven, despite his severe … health problems.”

  “What? Really?” Kingsley stared at Vanessa for a moment before his gaze returned to the jar. “If this Mupp fellow outlived Tut by so many years, why wasn’t he named as pharaoh?”

  “Tut’s parents were siblings, so he suffered from pronounced genetic flaws,” she said. “A club foot, feminine hips, a severe overbite … not what you’d call a looker. But, he was a Hollywood sex symbol compared with his son. Mupp was even more mutated than his dad: a hydrocephalic skull, cleft lip, minimal chin, a stunted arm, malformed hips, a vestigial tail, a flipper foot, wrong numbers of fingers and toes … and of course, the pièce de résistance!” She tapped the lid of the jar with the rounded tip of a crimson fingernail.

  “So this pièce de résistance you mentioned … is it in the jar?”

  Vanessa nodded. “You know it! Mupp worshipped a shape-shifting god of death known as Nyarlathotep, and ancient legends say that this particular deformity is, in fact, a gift from his god. In my opinion, it’s not much of a gift. Mupp was so utterly hideous, he was kept hidden during his lifetime. No royal robes for the freak, I’m afraid. When he finally died, the few existing mentions of him, on papyrus or stone, were either burned or chiseled out of history.”

  “I must admit, you have me thoroughly intrigued. I can hardly wait to see what’s inside.”

  “I thought so. And you can see it when you buy it.”

  “Well, don’t leave me in suspense. Do you mind telling me what this exotic deformity is … and how much it will cost? I take it the odious contents come with the jar, yes? A package deal?”

  She pointed to the large-skulled figure on the side of the jar. “Mupp was born with only one eye, and a huge one at that,” she said. “As the hieroglyphics indicate, you’ll find it inside the jar – and yes, it’s a package deal, like you said. For fifty-thousand dollars, it’s all yours. A ridiculously low price … but for my favorite customer, I’m inclined to be generous. Of course, the jar has never been opened, so I can’t guarantee how much of it remains after all this time. Eyes are composed mostly of fluids, you know. I have no idea how well embalming fluids would preserve anything as fragile as an eyeball.” So saying, she plucked the jar out of Kingsley’s hands and headed toward the door.

  “Wha–? What are you doing?” Kingsley cried, shocked. “I thought you were trying to make a sale. Where are you going?”

  “I’m going home,” Vanessa said, matter-of-factly. “We’ve been down this road before. I show you a relic. You hem and haw over the price. You tell me you’ll need a few days to think it over. To sleep on it. I finally sell you the relic after loads of tiresome haggling. The end.” She smiled and shrugged. “This time, we’re not going through all that. I’m going home to contact other potential buyers. If you want to buy the jar … at my extremely reasonable price … let me know at your earliest convenience. Hopefully, it will still be available, but I can’t make any promises.”

  Vanessa walked to the door. There she stopped and looked back. “Remember those legends I mentioned, Boris darling? They claim that if you gaze into an eye like the one in the jar – the Eye of Nyarlathotep – you will behold the lands beyond life, where the gods themselves dwell. The gods themselves!”

  So saying, she graced him with a happy wink and departed.

  Kingsley had to smile. Such a bold gambit! Vanessa never failed to surprise, amuse, and yes, even arouse him. He would have to buy an especially nice bottle of wine before stopping by her house later that evening.

  - - -

  Kingsley parked his Cadillac in the driveway of Vanessa’s pale-blue bungalow house on the outskirts of town. Looking at her humble dwelling, one would never have guessed that it had been built around the basement’s walk-in vault. In her hidden domestic bunker, she stored the treasures that were both her passion and business.

  Lights were on in many of the windows. He looked in the window of her garage and saw her red Ford Ranger parked inside. Good, she was home. He was looking forward to a productive evening.

  Wine bottle in hand, he walked up to the front door. He rang the doorbell, waited for a moment, and rang it again. After waiting a full minute, he knocked.

  He then noticed that blood was seeping out from under the door. “Vanessa!” he shouted. “Vanessa,
are you hurt? Open this door!”

  No answer.

  His first thought was to call the police, but he decided not to bring them into it just yet, considering the dubious nature of her career. He tried the knob and to his surprise, found that the door wasn’t locked. He pushed it part of the way open and looked in – a large dead Rottweiler was blocking the entrance. Vanessa’s dog Pooch was so vicious, she had to lock her pet in her study when Kingsley visited. Now the beast was just a bloody mess.

  He set down the bottle and squeezed through the half-open door, carefully stepping on only clean sections of the dog’s fur. He’d just bought the shoes the day before and didn’t want to mess them.

  He stared with growing confusion at the dog’s head. Someone, it appeared, had hacked at the creature’s skull without mercy. Both eyes were chopped out, along with most of the bone structure between the eyes.

  “Ouch...” he whispered. “What the hell happened to you, Pooch?”

  He began to wander through the house, looking for some clue to Vanessa’s whereabouts. The place was a shambles. Furniture was overturned and paintings had been knocked off the walls. Blood was splattered throughout the rooms. Had the dog gone mad and chased Vanessa around the place…? But if that was the case, Vanessa never would have disfigured her beloved Rottweiler, even in self-defense.

  He decided to check out the vault in the basement. If there was trouble in the house, Vanessa would rush to protect her valuable artifacts. He cut through the kitchen to the door of the basement, which was already open. He began to descend the steps, calling out, “Vanessa! Are you down there?”

  At the base of the stairs, he stood staring at the walk-in vault. It was a daunting stainless-steel structure, rather like an armored truck without wheels. The highly polished doors of the vault were as reflective as any mirror. To the side of the vault stood a work counter covered with the tools Vanessa used to clean and repair her treasures. The massive double doors of the vault were wide open, with Vanessa’s blood-drenched form sprawled in the entrance.

  Kingsley kneeled by the side of her body. He reached out to feel for a pulse in her neck, but as soon as he caught a glimpse of her face, he knew she had to be dead. Like the Rottweiler, her face was now a chopped mess of lacerated flesh and broken bone. Her eyes had been gouged out and her nose had been hacked away, leaving a deep, gore-clotted crater.

  Her eyes…. He suddenly realized, he would never look into them again. He would never watch them flash with excitement as she presented him with yet another ancient treasure. “Why … why would anyone do this...?” he whispered, wiping the tears from his eyes with the back of his hand.

  He saw that she was holding the canopic jar – and that the lid was off. This fact completely baffled him. Why would Vanessa have removed the lid? To open the jar was a rare privilege she would have reserved for whoever had purchased it.

  He looked around for the lid and found it, cracked in two a few feet away. Perhaps she’d been preparing to return the jar to its shelf when it had slipped from her grasp.

  Suddenly he heard a slight rustling sound from within the vault. He looked inside at the various swords, urns, goblets, ancient books and other relics, but saw nothing moving. He continued to stare, thinking it might be some small creeping creature, like a mouse, that would reveal itself in time if he watched long enough.

  Suddenly the source of the rustling made itself visible, popping out of a wooden chest filled with scrolls. Kingsley gasped in shock as the thing dropped to the floor of the vault and began to move toward him.

  The thing, quite simply, was an eye – a huge, oversized eyeball, about four inches wide, rearing up on a long, snakelike tail of nerve tissue. This tail was so long and thick, it no doubt served a double purpose as both an optic nerve and the spinal cord of its owner. Smaller nerves, branching off from the main stalk, nimbly pushed the eye-creature along the floor. The iris of the eye had three reddish-gold lobes centered around the black dot of the pupil.

  The creature stared at him with great intensity. Kingsley instantly realized that this was not the stare of a dumb beast. He leaned toward the eye-creature. “Can you understand me?”

  The creature raise the tip of its tail in the air. The last several inches were wrapped around the handle of a stainless steel blade that Kingsley recognized as one of Vanessa’s tools. Was the creature telling him that it wanted to perform surgery on him … the same surgery it had performed on Vanessa and the dog? Clearly it wanted to install itself in a living thing – a procedure that could only end with ghastly results.

  He pointed to Vanessa’s body. “The woman told me that great knowledge can be learned by looking into the Eye of Nyarlathotep,” he said. “Please, let me look. Maybe I can help you somehow.”

  The creature lowered the blade to the floor and let it go. It then crept closer to Kingsley – so close that he wanted to scream, being so near such a repulsive blasphemy of a being. But while the eye-creature was a thing of horror, it was also strangely compelling. The eye and its whiplike body glittered with a crystalline, silvery sheen, as though the passage of time had partially mineralized the surface. There was no possible way that this impossible ancient horror could be alive … and yet it was.

  Kingsley moved closer, until there was only an inch between his left eye and the faintly pulsing pupil of the creature. With each pulse, the pupil seemed to dilate a bit more, a bit more, more, more, more–

  He found himself afloat in a void of swirling green mists, lit by streaks of yellow lightning. Far below, he saw a thriving jungle of crimson and jade trees. Huge, swirling vines reached up from out of the lush foliage. Vulture-like flying creatures with prehensile, barbed tails shrieked as they fought with the vines, which ended in toothy mouths, similar to the hungry leaves of Venus flytraps.

  Just above the trees, massive pyramids floated through the air, moving with serene grace. Stately Egyptian barges drifted to and from the pyramids, bearing pharaohs and their queens as passengers. One of the barges he saw carried humanoid beings with bestial heads. These beings wore exquisite robes, gold jewelry and elaborate, gem-studded headdresses.

  “Is this the land where the gods dwell?” Kingsley asked, hoping that the spirit of the eye could hear him.

  The reply came to him as words of soft thunder, echoing in his mind. Yes, this is that realm … a marvelous realm beyond the world you know. How long I have been waiting to return here, and to be able to stay as a physical being! Thanks to you, soon I shall be able to join my own kind and dwell with them forever. And I shall do so in the form of the One I worship: Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos. It was good of you to allow our minds … our very selves … to meld. Now that the flesh has been restored, the transformation can begin.

  “I … I’m afraid I don’t understand,” the collector said.

  You have reason to rejoice, stated the voice. For your whole life, you have lusted for all that is strange and exotic. You think you are an adult, but really, you have always been a child. A child trapped in an aging body. So many boring, wasted years! But now, you shall have all that you desire, and so much more. For the kindness you have shown me, you shall have your reward.

  “What? How...?”

  Kingsley sat up on the floor of the basement, trembling and confused. The vision was over, but had anything really happened? He looked around the basement. Vanessa’s body was still where he had found it – but the eye-creature was gone.

  He then caught his reflection in the polished surface of the vault door.

  His arms, legs, even his human face – all gone. But the Eye of Nyarlathotep was still there, blazing with triumph. It was a part of him. The rest was a mad, fleshy conglomeration of lashing tentacles, gnashing mandibles, membranous wings, and multi-segmented, chitinous limbs. At one time, such a development surely would have shattered his sanity. Now, it just seemed…

  Wonderful.

  He shambled up the stairs and out of the house. It was night now. Beautiful, endless night
.

  He noticed the bottle of wine by the door. He grabbed it with one tentacle and snapped off the neck with another. He poured the delicious crimson liquid down his throat.

  One for the road.

  He flapped his wings and soared up into eternity, screaming with unbridled happiness.

  Glove: A Tale Of The King In Yellow

  by Mark McLaughlin

  I loved Miranda and love her still. But she moved out of my house after seventeen years together because she needed to be her own person. In doing so, she left me with no one. No one meaningful, anyway. I avoided my sullen, cruel family. I had a few casual friends, coworkers, various other people with whom I did business... Not a rich life. Not a full one.

  A week after leaving me, Miranda returned crying, but only to drop off something she had acquired but could not keep.

  It was a small, dark-gray kitten. She had adopted him out of pity, because his right front paw was deformed. The toes were too long – almost like fingers. A friend of hers who worked at an animal shelter had told her about the poor thing.

  The deformed paw didn’t have much hair on it. The skin was pink with small grayish splotches. The claws were flat and shiny, like human fingernails. It was a beautifully creepy thing to see.

  The kitten was a noisy little devil, and his constant mewing kept her awake at night. And so one day she came knocking on my door, holding a cardboard box with the kitten inside. She didn’t want to take it back to the shelter, because she was afraid no one else would adopt it and so it would be put to sleep. She knew I loved cats, and like her, wouldn’t want a poor kitten to be killed. Especially one with such an interesting paw. Plus, my house was bigger than her apartment, so she thought his noise would be less of a bother to me.

  I love cats, but I’m also mildly allergic to them, so I emptied the spare room of my house, scattered some pillows, blankets, and a few large boxes and branches, and made that the cat’s room. That way, his dander and hair would be kept mostly to one room. The boxes and branches were for his play – things for him to crawl into and upon. It was a large room with a closet in one corner. The closet included a large laundry chute leading down to the basement. The opening was large enough to accommodate quilts. I kept the door closed, since I didn’t want the kitten to fall down the chute.