The Cthulhu Mythos Megapack (40 Modern and Classic Lovecraftian Tales)

by Anthology

  As the men passed the site of Wilbur Whateley’s abode they shuddered visibly, and seemed again to mix hesitancy with their zeal. It was no joke tracking down something as big as a house that one could not see, but that had all the vicious malevolence of a daemon. Opposite the base of Sentinel Hill the tracks left the road, and there was a fresh bending and matting visible along the broad swath marking the monster’s former route to and from the summit.

  Armitage produced a pocket telescope of considerable power and scanned the steep green side of the hill. Then he handed the instrument to Morgan, whose sight was keener. After a moment of gazing Morgan cried out sharply, passing the glass to Earl Sawyer and indicating a certain spot on the slope with his finger. Sawyer, as clumsy as most non-users of optical devices are, fumbled a while; but eventually focussed the lenses with Armitage’s aid. When he did so his cry was less restrained than Morgan’s had been.

  “Gawd almighty, the grass an’ bushes is a-movin’! It’s a-goin’ up—slow-like—creepin’ up ter the top this minute, heaven only knows what fur!”

  Then the germ of panic seemed to spread among the seekers. It was one thing to chase the nameless entity, but quite another to find it. Spells might be all right—but suppose they weren’t? Voices began questioning Armitage about what he knew of the thing, and no reply seemed quite to satisfy. Everyone seemed to feel himself in close proximity to phases of Nature and of being utterly forbidden, and wholly outside the sane experience of mankind.

  X

  In the end the three men from Arkham—old, white-bearded Dr. Armitage, stocky, iron-grey Professor Rice, and lean, youngish Dr. Morgan—ascended the mountain alone. After much patient instruction regarding its focussing and use, they left the telescope with the frightened group that remained in the road; and as they climbed they were watched closely by those among whom the glass was passed around. It was hard going, and Armitage had to be helped more than once. High above the toiling group the great swath trembled as its hellish maker re-passed with snail-like deliberateness. Then it was obvious that the pursuers were gaining.

  Curtis Whateley—of the undecayed branch—was holding the telescope when the Arkham party detoured radically from the swath. He told the crowd that the men were evidently trying to get to a subordinate peak which overlooked the swath at a point considerably ahead of where the shrubbery was now bending. This, indeed, proved to be true; and the party were seen to gain the minor elevation only a short time after the invisible blasphemy had passed it.

  Then Wesley Corey, who had taken the glass, cried out that Armitage was adjusting the sprayer which Rice held, and that something must be about to happen. The crowd stirred uneasily, recalling that this sprayer was expected to give the unseen horror a moment of visibility. Two or three men shut their eyes, but Curtis Whateley snatched back the telescope and strained his vision to the utmost. He saw that Rice, from the party’s point of vantage above and behind the entity, had an excellent chance of spreading the potent powder with marvellous effect.

  Those without the telescope saw only an instant’s flash of grey cloud—a cloud about the size of a moderately large building—near the top of the mountain. Curtis, who had held the instrument, dropped it with a piercing shriek into the ankle-deep mud of the road. He reeled, and would have crumpled to the ground had not two or three others seized and steadied him. All he could do was moan half-inaudibly,

  “Oh, oh, great Gawd…that…that…”

  There was a pandemonium of questioning, and only Henry Wheeler thought to rescue the fallen telescope and wipe it clean of mud. Curtis was past all coherence, and even isolated replies were almost too much for him.

  “Bigger’n a barn…all made o’ squirmin’ ropes…hull thing sort o’ shaped like a hen’s egg bigger’n anything, with dozens o’ legs like hogsheads that haff shut up when they step…nothin’ solid abaout it—all like jelly, an’ made o’ sep’rit wrigglin’ ropes pushed clost together…great bulgin’ eyes all over it…ten or twenty maouths or trunks a-stickin’ aout all along the sides, big as stovepipes, an’ all a-tossin’ an’ openin’ an’ shuttin’…all grey, with kinder blue or purple rings…an’ Gawd in heaven—that haff face on top!…”

  This final memory, whatever it was, proved too much for poor Curtis; and he collapsed completely before he could say more. Fred Farr and Will Hutchins carried him to the roadside and laid him on the damp grass. Henry Wheeler, trembling, turned the rescued telescope on the mountain to see what he might. Through the lenses were discernible three tiny figures, apparently running toward the summit as fast as the steep incline allowed. Only these—nothing more. Then everyone noticed a strangely unseasonable noise in the deep valley behind, and even in the underbrush of Sentinel Hill itself. It was the piping of unnumbered whippoorwills, and in their shrill chorus there seemed to lurk a note of tense and evil expectancy.

  Earl Sawyer now took the telescope and reported the three figures as standing on the topmost ridge, virtually level with the altar-stone but at a considerable distance from it. One figure, he said, seemed to be raising its hands above its head at rhythmic intervals; and as Sawyer mentioned the circumstance the crowd seemed to hear a faint, half-musical sound from the distance, as if a loud chant were accompanying the gestures. The weird silhouette on that remote peak must have been a spectacle of infinite grotesqueness and impressiveness, but no observer was in a mood for aesthetic appreciation. “I guess he’s sayin’ the spell,” whispered Wheeler as he snatched back the telescope. The whippoorwills were piping wildly, and in a singularly curious irregular rhythm quite unlike that of the visible ritual.

  Suddenly the sunshine seemed to lessen without the intervention of any discernible cloud. It was a very peculiar phenomenon, and was plainly marked by all. A rumbling sound seemed brewing beneath the hills, mixed strangely with a concordant rumbling which clearly came from the sky. Lightning flashed aloft, and the wondering crowd looked in vain for the portents of storm. The chanting of the men from Arkham now became unmistakable, and Wheeler saw through the glass that they were all raising their arms in the rhythmic incantation. From some farmhouse far away came the frantic barking of dogs.

  The change in the quality of the daylight increased, and the crowd gazed about the horizon in wonder. A purplish darkness, born of nothing more than a spectral deepening of the sky’s blue, pressed down upon the rumbling hills. Then the lightning flashed again, somewhat brighter than before, and the crowd fancied that it had shewed a certain mistiness around the altar-stone on the distant height. No one, however, had been using the telescope at that instant. The whippoorwills continued their irregular pulsation, and the men of Dunwich braced themselves tensely against some imponderable menace with which the atmosphere seemed surcharged.

  Without warning came those deep, cracked, raucous vocal sounds which will never leave the memory of the stricken group who heard them. Not from any human throat were they born, for the organs of man can yield no such acoustic perversions. Rather would one have said they came from the pit itself, had not their source been so unmistakably the altar-stone on the peak. It is almost erroneous to call them sounds at all, since so much of their ghastly, infra-bass timbre spoke to dim seats of consciousness and terror far subtler than the ear; yet one must do so, since their form was indisputably though vaguely that of half-articulate words. They were loud—loud as the rumblings and the thunder above which they echoed—yet did they come from no visible being. And because imagination might suggest a conjectural source in the world of non-visible beings, the huddled crowd at the mountain’s base huddled still closer, and winced as if in expectation of a blow.

  “Ygnaiih…ygnaiih…thflthkh’ngha…Yog-Sothoth…” rang the hideous croaking out of space. “Y’bthnk…h’ehye—n’grkdl’lh.…”

  The speaking impulse seemed to falter here, as if some frightful psychic struggle were going on. Henry Wheeler strained his eye at the telescope, but saw only the three grotesquely silhouetted human figures on the peak, all moving their
arms furiously in strange gestures as their incantation drew near its culmination. From what black wells of Acherontic fear or feeling, from what unplumbed gulfs of extra-cosmic consciousness or obscure, long-latent heredity, were those half-articulate thunder-croakings drawn? Presently they began to gather renewed force and coherence as they grew in stark, utter, ultimate frenzy.

  “Eh-ya-ya-ya-yahaah—e’yayayayaaaa…ngh’aaaaa…ngh’aaaa…h’yuh…h’yuh…HELP! HELP!…ff—ff—ff—FATHER! FATHER! YOG-SOTHOTH!…”

  But that was all. The pallid group in the road, still reeling at the indisputably English syllables that had poured thickly and thunderously down from the frantic vacancy beside that shocking altar-stone, were never to hear such syllables again. Instead, they jumped violently at the terrific report which seemed to rend the hills; the deafening, cataclysmic peal whose source, be it inner earth or sky, no hearer was ever able to place. A single lightning-bolt shot from the purple zenith to the altar-stone, and a great tidal wave of viewless force and indescribable stench swept down from the hill to all the countryside. Trees, grass, and underbrush were whipped into a fury; and the frightened crowd at the mountain’s base, weakened by the lethal foetor that seemed about to asphyxiate them, were almost hurled off their feet. Dogs howled from the distance, green grass and foliage wilted to a curious, sickly yellow-grey, and over field and forest were scattered the bodies of dead whippoorwills.

  The stench left quickly, but the vegetation never came right again. To this day there is something queer and unholy about the growths on and around that fearsome hill. Curtis Whateley was only just regaining consciousness when the Arkham men came slowly down the mountain in the beams of a sunlight once more brilliant and untainted. They were grave and quiet, and seemed shaken by memories and reflections even more terrible than those which had reduced the group of natives to a state of cowed quivering. In reply to a jumble of questions they only shook their heads and reaffirmed one vital fact.

  “The thing has gone forever,” Armitage said. “It has been split up into what it was originally made of, and can never exist again. It was an impossibility in a normal world. Only the least fraction was really matter in any sense we know. It was like its father—and most of it has gone back to him in some vague realm or dimension outside our material universe; some vague abyss out of which only the most accursed rites of human blasphemy could ever have called him for a moment on the hills.”

  There was a brief silence, and in that pause the scattered senses of poor Curtis Whateley began to knit back into a sort of continuity; so that he put his hands to his head with a moan. Memory seemed to pick itself up where it had left off, and the horror of the sight that had prostrated him burst in upon him again.

  “Oh, oh, my Gawd, that haff face—that haff face on top of it…that face with the red eyes an’ crinkly albino hair, an’ no chin, like the Whateleys… It was a octopus, centipede, spider kind o’ thing, but they was a haff-shaped man’s face on top of it, an’ it looked like Wizard Whateley’s, only it was yards an’ yards acrost.…”

  He paused exhausted, as the whole group of natives stared in a bewilderment not quite crystallised into fresh terror. Only old Zebulon Whateley, who wanderingly remembered ancient things but who had been silent heretofore, spoke aloud.

  “Fifteen year’ gone,” he rambled, “I heerd Ol’ Whateley say as haow some day we’d hear a child o’ Lavinny’s a-callin’ its father’s name on the top o’ Sentinel Hill.…”

  But Joe Osborn interrupted him to question the Arkham men anew.

  “What was it anyhaow, an’ haowever did young Wizard Whateley call it aout o’ the air it come from?”

  Armitage chose his words very carefully.

  “It was—well, it was mostly a kind of force that doesn’t belong in our part of space; a kind of force that acts and grows and shapes itself by other laws than those of our sort of Nature. We have no business calling in such things from outside, and only very wicked people and very wicked cults ever try to. There was some of it in Wilbur Whateley himself—enough to make a devil and a precocious monster of him, and to make his passing out a pretty terrible sight. I’m going to burn his accursed diary, and if you men are wise you’ll dynamite that altar-stone up there, and pull down all the rings of standing stones on the other hills. Things like that brought down the beings those Whateleys were so fond of—the beings they were going to let in tangibly to wipe out the human race and drag the earth off to some nameless place for some nameless purpose.

  “But as to this thing we’ve just sent back—the Whateleys raised it for a terrible part in the doings that were to come. It grew fast and big from the same reason that Wilbur grew fast and big—but it beat him because it had a greater share of the outsideness in it. You needn’t ask how Wilbur called it out of the air. He didn’t call it out. It was his twin brother, but it looked more like the father than he did.”

  THE DARK BOATMAN, by John Glasby

  When I received a letter from my late uncle’s solicitors informing me that, as the last of the family line, I had been left the old mansion overlooking the sea on the south coast of Cornwall, my first instinctive impulse was to ask them to advertise the place for immediate sale since I had no wish to cut myself off completely in such an isolated spot. I had visited my uncle on only one occasion in my lifetime, more than fifteen years before, and my memories of that visit were far from pleasant.

  I was seventeen at the time and it had been late autumn with low cloud and an eternal mist sweeping in from the sea, making it impossible to see anything of the surrounding countryside. I had been a virtual prisoner within the ancient house for two whole weeks and my uncle, who lived the life of a recluse, shunning all contact with the few neighbours he had, was not a fit companion for a youth. He had spent all of the day and most of the night poring over musty old tomes in the library which, though well-stocked with volumes, held only queer literature concerning myths and histories of races no more recent than the ancient Greeks.

  The mansion, itself, had a history almost as long. Parts of it dated back to the time of the second William and the more modern renovations were on the Gothic style with long, gloomy corridors and narrow passages which intersected in such puzzling patterns that it was easy to lose one’s way in the labyrinthine maze, which extended from one wing to the other.

  Two things, however, conspired to force me to change my mind and move from my native Yorkshire to Cornwall. The first was my health, which had been deteriorating somewhat over the past four years and my doctor was of the considered opinion that the more salubrious nature of the Cornish weather would be more conducive to a return to better health than the windswept moors of Yorkshire. With summer approaching, the warmer climate would undoubtedly prove both beneficial and invigorating.

  The second reason was a further letter, which arrived six days after the first. Like the other, it came from my uncle’s solicitors, but inside was a second envelope with my name on it written in my uncle’s spidery script in the India ink I remembered him using.

  “My dear nephew,” he wrote. “By the time you receive this I will have departed this earth and as you are my only heir, there are certain points I must bring to your notice concerning the family mansion at Tormouth. These may appear strange to one unaccustomed to our ways but I earnestly assure you they are not the product of a senile or deranged mind and must be followed implicitly. The duty of carrying them out now falls upon you and if it is of any consolation to you, as the only living Dexter, yours will be the final act in the tradition of the Dexters that has been carried on for more centuries than you would ever believe. You will find the key you seek in the concealed compartment of my desk. The opener is the left arabesque. But use it not until the time is right unless you call over Him who comes only at the appointed hour. And how shall you know the time? That is given by the clock in the upper room. I adjure you to watch it closely for no one knows the hour when the key must be used.”

  I read this strange letter several
times, unable to make either head or tail of it. I was well aware I was the last in a long line of Dexters, that I could trace my lineage back, unbroken, for more than eighteen hundred years. But what was all this rigmarole about a key? A key to which lock? And as for keeping continuous watch on a certain clock, waiting for some particular preordained hour to strike—that made no sense to me at all. Nonetheless, the contents of the letter wetted my natural curiosity and I knew that, whatever happened, I had to move into that ancient manor if only to satisfy myself as to the real reason behind my uncle having written such a bizarre epistle.

  I did not, however, intend to go alone; at least not until I had discovered all I could about the place and its curious secrets. I decided to ask a colleague of mine, Michael Ambrose, to accompany me. I knew him for a gifted antiquarian, well versed in ancient history and many of the old myths and religions. When I approached him, he accepted with alacrity for he had read a great deal about my family history and the strange stories that surrounded the mansion on the cliffs.

  Accordingly, we both took the express to Penzance, arriving early in the evening on a glorious late spring day. My recollection of Tormouth was vague and prone to the inevitable inaccuracies associated with a brief memory of more than fifteen years before. However, we soon discovered there was no public transport which would take us there even at that early hour of the evening. There was, we learned, a bus that went out to Tormouth the next morning although it might be possible to hire a car for our purpose.