Ben shrugged. “I’ve never heard of him,” he admitted. “I really mostly only read Westerns. And technical manuals.”
The little man nudged his neighbour. “Here. Wilf. You hear that? He’s never heard of him.”
“Well. There’s no harm in that. I used to read that Zane Grey,” said the taller.
“Yes. Well. That’s nothing to be proud of. This bloke—what did you say your name was?”
“Ben. Ben Lassiter. And you are…?”
The little man smiled; he looked awfully like a frog, thought Ben. “I’m Seth,” he said. “And my friend here is called Wilf.”
“Charmed,” said Wilf.
“Hi,” said Ben.
“Frankly,” said the little man, “I agree with you.”
“You do?” said Ben, perplexed.
The little man nodded. “Yer. H. P. Lovecraft. I don’t know what the fuss is about. He couldn’t bloody write.” He slurped his stout, then licked the foam from his lips with a long and flexible tongue. “I mean, for starters, you look at them words he used. Eldritch. You know what eldritch means?”
Ben shook his head. He seemed to be discussing literature with two strangers in an English pub while drinking beer. He wondered for a moment if he had become someone else, while he wasn’t looking. The beer tasted less bad, the farther down the glass he went, and was beginning to erase the lingering aftertaste of the cherryade.
“Eldritch. Means weird. Peculiar. Bloody odd. That’s what it means. I looked it up. In a dictionary. And gibbous?”
Ben shook his head again.
“Gibbous means the moon was nearly full. And what about that one he was always calling us, eh? Thing. Wossname. Starts with a b. Tip of me tongue…”
“Bastards?” suggested Wilf.
“Nah. Thing. You know. Batrachian. That’s it. Means looked like frogs.”
“Hang on,” said Wilf. “I thought they was, like, a kind of camel.”
Seth shook his head vigorously. “S’definitely frogs. Not camels. Frogs.”
Wilf slurped his Shoggoth’s. Ben sipped his, carefully, without pleasure.
“So?” said Ben.
“They’ve got two humps,” interjected Wilf, the tall one.
“Frogs?” asked Ben.
“Nah. Batrachians. Whereas your average dromederary camel, he’s only got one. It’s for the long journey through the desert. That’s what they eat.”
“Frogs?” asked Ben.
“Camel humps.” Wilf fixed Ben with one bulging yellow eye. “You listen to me, matey-me-lad. After you’ve been out in some trackless desert for three or four weeks, a plate of roasted camel hump starts looking particularly tasty.”
Seth looked scornful. “You’ve never eaten a camel hump.”
“I might have done,” said Wilf.
“Yes, but you haven’t. You’ve never even been in a desert.”
“Well, let’s say, just supposing I’d been on a pilgrimage to the Tomb of Nyarlathotep…”
“The black king of the ancients who shall come in the night from the east and you shall not know him, you mean?”
“Of course that’s who I mean.”
“Just checking.”
“Stupid question, if you ask me.”
“You could of meant someone else with the same name.”
“Well, it’s not exactly a common name, is it? Nyarlathotep. There’s not exactly going to be two of them, are there? ‘Hello, my name’s Nyarlathotep, what a coincidence meeting you here, funny them bein’ two of us,’ I don’t exactly think so. Anyway, so I’m trudging through them trackless wastes, thinking to myself, I could murder a camel hump…”
“But you haven’t, have you? You’ve never been out of Innsmouth harbour.”
“Well…No.”
“There.” Seth looked at Ben triumphantly. Then he leaned over and whispered into Ben’s ear, “He gets like this when he gets a few drinks into him, I’m afraid.”
“I heard that,” said Wilf.
“Good,” said Seth. “Anyway. H. P. Lovecraft. He’d write one of his bloody sentences. Ahem. ‘The gibbous moon hung low over the eldritch and batrachian inhabitants of squamous Dulwich.’ What does he mean, eh? What does he mean? I’ll tell you what he bloody means. What he bloody means is that the moon was nearly full, and everybody what lived in Dulwich was bloody peculiar frogs. That’s what he means.”
“What about the other thing you said?” asked Wilf.
“What?”
“Squamous. Wossat mean, then?”
Seth shrugged. “Haven’t a clue,” he admitted. “But he used it an awful lot.”
There was another pause.
“I’m a student,” said Ben. “Gonna be a metallurgist.” Somehow he had managed to finish the whole of his first pint of Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar, which was, he realised, pleasantly shocked, his first alcoholic beverage. “What do you guys do?”
“We,” said Wilf, “are acolytes.”
“Of Great Cthulhu,” said Seth proudly.
“Yeah?” said Ben. “And what exactly does that involve?”
“My shout,” said Wilf. “Hang on.” Wilf went over to the barmaid and came back with three more pints. “Well,” he said, “what it involves is, technically speaking, not a lot right now. The acolytin’ is not really what you might call laborious employment in the middle of its busy season. That is, of course, because of his bein’ asleep. Well, not exactly asleep. More like, if you want to put a finer point on it, dead.”
“ ‘In his house at Sunken R’lyeh dead Cthulhu lies dreaming,’ ” interjected Seth. “Or, as the poet has it, ‘That is not dead what can eternal lie—’ ”
“ ‘But in Strange Aeons—’ ” chanted Wilf.
“—and by Strange he means bloody peculiar—”
“Exactly. We are not talking your normal Aeons here at all.”
“ ‘But in Strange Aeons even Death can die.’ ”
Ben was mildly surprised to find that he seemed to be drinking another full-bodied pint of Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar. Somehow the taste of rank goat was less offensive on the second pint. He was also delighted to notice that he was no longer hungry, that his blistered feet had stopped hurting, and that his companions were charming, intelligent men whose names he was having difficulty in keeping apart. He did not have enough experience with alcohol to know that this was one of the symptoms of being on your second pint of Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar.
“So right now,” said Seth, or possibly Wilf, “the business is a bit light. Mostly consisting of waiting.”
“And praying,” said Wilf, if he wasn’t Seth.
“And praying. But pretty soon now, that’s all going to change.”
“Yeah?” asked Ben. “How’s that?”
“Well,” confided the taller one. “Any day now, Great Cthulhu (currently impermanently deceased), who is our boss, will wake up in his undersea living-sort-of quarters.”
“And then,” said the shorter one, “he will stretch and yawn and get dressed—”
“Probably go to the toilet, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.”
“Maybe read the papers.”
“—And having done all that, he will come out of the ocean depths and consume the world utterly.”
Ben found this unspeakably funny. “Like a ploughman’s,” he said.
“Exactly. Exactly. Well put, the young American gentleman. Great Cthulhu will gobble the world up like a ploughman’s lunch, leaving but only the lump of Branston pickle on the side of the plate.”
“That’s the brown stuff?” asked Ben. They assured him that it was, and he went up to the bar and brought them back another three pints of Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar.
He could not remember much of the conversation that followed. He remembered finishing his pint, and his new friends inviting him on a walking tour of the village, pointing out the various sights to him “that’s where we rent our videos, and that big building next door is the Nameless Temple of Unspeakable Gods and on Saturday mornings ther
e’s jumble sale in the crypt…”
He explained to them his theory of the walking tour book and told them, emotionally, that Innsmouth was both scenic and charming. He told them that they were the best friends he had ever had and that Innsmouth was delightful.
The moon was nearly full, and in the pale moonlight both of his new friends did look remarkably like huge frogs. Or possibly camels.
The three of them walked to the end of the rusted pier, and Seth and/or Wilf pointed out to Ben the ruins of Sunken R’lyeh in the bay, visible in the moonlight, beneath the sea, and Ben was overcome by what he kept explaining was a sudden and unforeseen attack of seasickness and was violently and unendingly sick over the metal railings into the black sea below…After that it all got a bit odd.
Ben Lassiter awoke on the cold hillside with his head pounding and a bad taste in his mouth. His head was resting on his backpack. There was rocky moorland on each side of him, and no sign of a road, and no sign of any village, scenic, charming, delightful, or even picturesque.
He stumbled and limped almost a mile to the nearest road and walked along it until he reached a petrol station.
They told him that there was no village anywhere locally named Innsmouth. No village with a pub called The Book of Dead Names. He told them about two men, named Wilf and Seth, and a friend of theirs, called Strange Ian, who was fast asleep somewhere, if he wasn’t dead, under the sea. They told him that they didn’t think much of American hippies who wandered about the countryside taking drugs, and that he’d probably feel better after a nice cup of tea and a tuna and cucumber sandwich, but that if he was dead set on wandering the country taking drugs, young Ernie who worked the afternoon shift would be all too happy to sell him a nice little bag of homegrown cannabis, if he could come back after lunch.
Ben pulled out his A Walking Tour of the British Coastline book and tried to find Innsmouth in it to prove to them that he had not dreamed it, but he was unable to locate the page it had been on—if ever it had been there at all. Most of one page, however, had been ripped out, roughly, about halfway through the book.
And then Ben telephoned a taxi, which took him to Bootle railway station, where he caught a train, which took him to Manchester, where he got on an aeroplane, which took him to Chicago, where he changed planes and flew to Dallas, where he got another plane going north, and he rented a car and went home.
He found the knowledge that he was over 600 miles away from the ocean very comforting; although, later in life, he moved to Nebraska to increase the distance from the sea: there were things he had seen, or thought he had seen, beneath the old pier that night that he would never be able to get out of his head. There were things that lurked beneath grey raincoats that man was not meant to know. Squamous. He did not need to look it up. He knew. They were squamous.
A couple of weeks after his return home Ben posted his annotated copy of A Walking Tour of the British Coastline to the author, care of her publisher, with an extensive letter containing a number of helpful suggestions for future editions. He also asked the author if she would send him a copy of the page that had been ripped from his guidebook, to set his mind at rest; but he was secretly relieved, as the days turned into months, and the months turned into years and then into decades, that she never replied.
Nor the Demons Down Under the Sea (1957)
Caitlín R Kiernan
The late summer morning like a shattering blue-white gem, crashing liquid seams of fluorite and topaz thrown against the jagged shale and sandstone shingle, roiling calcite foam beneath the cloudless sky specked with gulls and ravens. And Julia behind the wheel of the big green Bel Air, chasing the coast road north, the top down so the Pacific wind roars wild through her hair. Salt smell to fill her head, intoxicating and delicious scent to drown her city-dulled senses and Anna’s alone in the backseat, ignoring her again, silent, reading one of her textbooks or monographs on malacology. Hardly a word from her since they left the motel in Anchor Bay more than an hour ago, hardly a word at breakfast, for that matter, and her silence is starting to annoy Julia.
“It was a bad dream, that’s all,” Anna said, the two of them alone in the diner next door to the motel, sitting across from one another in a Naugahyde booth with a view of the bay, Haven’s Anchorage dotted with the bobbing hulls of fishing boats. “You know that I don’t like to talk about my dreams,” and then she pushed her uneaten grapefruit aside and lit a cigarette. “God knows I’ve told you enough times.”
“We don’t have to go on to the house,” Julia said hopefully. “We could always see it another time, and we could go back to the city today, instead.”
Anna only shrugged her shoulders and stared through the glass at the water, took another drag off her cigarette and exhaled smoke the color of the horizon.
“If you’re afraid to go to the house, you should just say so.”
Julia steals a glance at her in the rearview mirror, wind-rumpled girl with shiny sunburned cheeks, cheeks like ripening plums and her short, blonde hair twisted into a bun and tied up in a scarf. And Julia’s own reflection stares back at her from the glass, reproachful, desperate, almost fifteen years older than Anna, so close to thirty-five now that it frightens her; her drab hazel eyes hidden safely behind dark sunglasses that also conceal nascent crow’s feet, and the wind whips unhindered through her own hair, hair that would be mouse brown if she didn’t use peroxide. The first tentative wrinkles beginning to show at the corners of her mouth, and then she notices that her lipstick is smudged and licks the tip of one index finger and wipes at the candy-pink stain.
“You really should come up for air,” Julia shouts, shouting just to be heard above the wind, and Anna looks slowly up from her book. She squints and blinks at the back of Julia’s head, an irritated, uncomprehending sort of expression and a frown that draws creases across her forehead.
“You’re missing all the scenery, dear.”
Anna sits up, sighs loudly and stares out at a narrow, deserted stretch of beach rushing past, the ocean beyond. “Scenery’s for the tourists,” she says. “I’m not a tourist.” And she slumps down into the seat again, turns a page and goes back to reading.
“You could at least tell me what I’ve done,” Julia says, trying hard not to sound angry or impatient, sounding only a little bit confused, instead, but this time Anna doesn’t reply, pretending not to hear or maybe just choosing to ignore her altogether.
“Well, then, whenever you’re ready to talk about it,” Julia says, but that isn’t what she wants to say; she wants to tell Anna she’s getting sick of her pouting about like a high-school girl, sick of these long, brooding silences, and more than sick of always feeling guilty because she doesn’t ever know what to say that will make things better. Always feeling like it’s her fault, somehow, and if she weren’t a coward she would never have become involved with a girl like Anna Foley in the first place.
But you are a coward, Julia reminds herself. Don’t ever forget that, not even for a second, and she almost misses her exit, the turnoff that would carry them east to Boonville if she stayed on the main road. Julia takes the exit, following the crude map Anna drew for her on a paper napkin; the road dips and curves sharply away from the shoreline, and the ocean is suddenly lost behind a dense wall of redwoods and blooming rhododendrons, the morning sun traded for the rapid flicker of forest shadows. Only a few hundred yards from the highway there’s another, unpaved road, unnamed road leading deeper into the trees, and she slows down, and the Chevrolet bounces off the blacktop onto the rutted, pockmarked logging trail.
The drive up the coast from San Francisco to Anchor Bay was Anna’s idea, even though they both knew it was a poor choice for summertime shelling. But still a chance to get out of the laboratory, she said, to get away from the city, from the heat and all the people, and Julia knew what she really meant. A chance to be alone, away from suspicious, disapproving eyes, and besides, there had been an interesting limpet collected very near there a decade or so ago, a si
ngle, unusually large shell cataloged and tucked away in the vast Berkeley collections and then all but forgotten. The new species, Diodora thespesius, was described by one of Julia Winter’s male predecessors in the department, and a second specimen would surely be a small feather in her cap.
So, the last two days spent picking their way meticulously over the boulders, kelp- and algae-slick rocks and shallow tide pools consistently buried and unburied by the shifting sand flats; hardly an ideal place for limpets, or much of anything else, to take hold. Thick-soled rubber boots and aluminum pails, sun hats and gloves, knives to pry mollusks from the rocks, and little reward for their troubles but scallops and mussels. A few nice sea urchins and sand dollars, Strongylocentrotus purpuratus and Dendraster excentricus, and the second afternoon Anna had spotted a baby octopus, but it had gotten away from them.
“If we only had more time,” Anna said. “I’m sure we would have found it if we had more time.” She was sitting on a boulder, smoking, her dungarees soaked through to the thighs, staring north and west towards the headland and the dark silhouette of Fish Rocks jutting up from the sea like the scabby backs of twin leviathans.
“Well, it hasn’t been a total loss, has it?” Julia asked and smiled, remembering the long night before, Anna in her arms, Anna whispering things that had kept Julia awake almost until dawn. “It wasn’t a complete waste.”
And Anna Foley turned and watched her from her seat on the boulder, sloe-eyed girl, slate-gray irises to hide more than they would ever give away; She’s taunting me, Julia thought, feeling ashamed of herself for thinking such a thing, but thinking it anyway. It’s all some kind of a game to her, playing naughty games with Dr. Winter. She’s sitting there watching me squirm.
“You want to see a haunted house?” Anna asked, finally, and whatever Julia had expected her to say, it certainly wasn’t that.
“Excuse me?”
“A haunted house. A real haunted house,” and Anna raised an arm and pointed northeast, inland, past the shoreline. “It isn’t very far from here. We could drive up tomorrow morning.”
The Book of Cthulhu 2 Page 2
