The Dark Boatman: Tales of Horror and the Cthulhu Mythos

by John Glasby

  There is no doubt now in my mind of the identity of that nameless horror I encountered in the Carter place. Since that terrible night I have spent many hours going through my uncle’s books, gathering the scattered clues together into a mad and terrifying whole. The old legends, distorted perhaps over the centuries, were still very close to the truth. The dark, malignant entities from the primaeval chaos had come to Earth long before the first men had evolved. They were old when the pyramids were young and the first Sumerian tablets still wet clay. Fortunately, they manifested themselves only to an unlucky few throughout the whole of the long millennia, but these occasional brushes with humanity were enough to bring into being the loathsome faiths that have existed since the beginnings of civilisation. There had been long, ageless aeons when they had ruled supreme on Earth and those who knew of them both dreaded and worshipped them.

  This, I knew, was one of these elder things, deathless and utterly opposed to men whom they regarded as interlopers on the planet. To their chosen few they made their plans and wishes known in apocryphal dreams and visions while they waited in the dark and hidden places for the time when, as the books all said, the signs would be right and they would take over the world for themselves once more.

  During that frantic, nightmare drive back to the village and the return journey to that house on the cliffs, I had found myself wishing with a terrible intensity that we would find nothing there. My uncle, I believed, was dead and gone into realms I could not even imagine, as had at least six poor devils within the memory of the people still living in the village, and had it remained that way, I might have somehow found it possible to force my mind to ignore, to forget, that hideous abomination I thought I had seen.

  Yet after all, the supreme horror was still to come, and the fact that it was witnessed not only by myself, but by the six stalwart and unimaginative men who accompanied me back to the house, means that never again shall I be able to sleep peacefully in my bed, or stand in the faintly shimmering starlight of a summer’s night and feel easy in my mind. Perhaps Trelawney is the lucky one, living in a blank emptiness, staring at the walls of the small room in which he is kept at the Newcastle Mental Hospital, since his mind has now retreated behind a mental barrier through which nothing can penetrate.

  I will try to set down as concisely and accurately as possible what confronted us as we entered that lower chamber, through the splintered doorway with its sagging lintel and mouldering boards, but here I must choose my words carefully. The men had all brought powerful torches with them and in their combined light the undisturbed grey dust threw back a malevolent glimmer that brought the uncontrolled shivering back into my body. The camera and tripod lay smashed on the floor where I had knocked them over in my heedless fight. My empty revolver lay half-buried in the dust at the bottom of the stairs. In the muffling silence nothing moved as I opened my mouth to call my uncle’s name, I thought that perhaps I had imagined or dreamed it all.

  But even before I could call, one of the men cried out, pointed a shaking arm and as one man we turned and stared at the unnameable horror that was slowly coming down the stairs to meet us. In the torchlight, the shape and features were barely recognisable, yet we all knew who—or rather what—it was!

  Only a bubbling, inarticulate sound came through the lips of that which had once been James Oliver, my revered uncle, and, even as it crawled, the limbs crumbled into a grey dust, the body collapsing and sagging hideously, flowing as it swayed and slithered forward. For a moment, I thought I saw the eyes turned with a look of hopeless pleading in my direction, thought it tried to lift itself upright as a man should walk, but on feet that were no longer flesh and blood, but something infinitely horrible. Then it dropped, dripping into a powder, which had neither shape nor form, joining its substance irretrievably with the rest of the dust that lay thickly over the floors and stairs.

  THE KEEPER OF DARK POINT

  There was a thick, white sea mist obscuring the edges of the hills that morning when I stepped down from the ancient coach which had brought me along the endless, twisting roads to this godforsaken spot on the South Devon coast. The muscles of my legs and body were stiff from the long, overnight journey on the train from London, and the shorter, though equally wearying ride on the bus which had brought me south from Kingsbridge. The sleep which I had missed lay heavy behind my eyes, and the impact of that first glimpse of the country that lay before me struck me with the force of a physical blow; and although there may have been a sun somewhere beyond that thick veil of darkening fog which hung heavy and impenetrable over the shoreline, the chill of the night and darkness still touched me, still hung in the air, and I shivered as I drew in my first breaths of it.

  Standing there, listening to the wheezy rattle of the bus as it began to move away from me between the dew-gleaming hedgerows, I felt oddly bewildered and out of place. I had entered this unfamiliar landscape too abruptly for me to be able to take it all in at once. Indeed, as the sound of the bus faded into the muffling distance, I felt a sudden urge to run after it, to climb back on board and leave this place. It was an overpowering impulse, and now, looking back over the events that had led up to my being there, I am certain there was some strange foreboding of evil, some presentiment that had something oddly prophetic about it. The bus had vanished around a bend in the road, the groan of its engine fading swiftly into silence, and the opportunity was gone.

  Not that I recognised it then as an opportunity. As I began to trudge along the road, I felt a sense of surprise at myself, and there was a morbid fascination that was disturbing, something I found difficult to analyse or classify. At first, I decided that it was the unworldly aspect of that stretch of rugged coastline, seen at intervals through the writhing tendrils of mist, which brought the feeling of alarm to my mind, and made me uneasy. And then I recollected the letter, which reposed in my breast pocket, the prime reason for my being there, and I knew that my uneasiness had a secondary and possibly more potent cause.

  Somewhere in this desolate part of the country, I hoped to discover what had happened to my brother. It was almost six months since I had heard anything from him. When he had first come to Devon, two years before, he had written every month, his letters filled with news of ancient folklore of the place, the old legends and myths which he had been investigating for the book he was writing. Then, abruptly, and without any warning whatsoever, all word had ceased. My letters to him had gone unanswered, and in the end, I had grown so concerned that I had put an advertisement in the local newspapers asking for any information as to his whereabouts.

  Even then, several weeks had passed before I had received a reply, in the shape of the letter that brought me hurrying to Devon by the first train, for there was something about it that had alarmed me intensely. It was not so much that my correspondent had written, as what he had implied in half-veiled tones that had aroused me to my present state of uneasiness.

  Taking it out of my pocket, I read it through again, striving to see in that rough, oddly archaic scrawl, the reason for the stirring of fear in my mind:

  Traganmawes,

  Tor Mount,

  South Devon.

  William S. Meredith, Esq.

  12 St. Mary’s Court,

  London S.E.1.

  September 23, 1934

  My Dear Sir,

  Your advertisement asking for details of the whereabouts of Philip Meredith appeared recently in the Tor Mount Gazette. I believe I am in a position to supply you with news of him which I am sure will prove of interest. I might say that since he came here two years ago, he has been engaged in a study of the most peculiar type, one that has aroused a definite antagonism towards him on the part of the more superstitious people in the neighbourhood. As you may imagine, there are many old legends whispered in this part of the world, queer tales one hears from the local farmers and fisherfolk.

  I am afraid your brother was a little too persistent in tracking down the sources of these myths, came a little too clos
e to the truth for his own good. There are things which I cannot put down on paper, and for this reason it is essential you should come here with all speed so that we may meet and discuss the matter.

  As for myself, I have both seen and heard things in the hills and in particular in the area near Dark Point, which appears to be the focal point for most of these manifestations. I suppose all of this will seem strange to a city man, but I must point out that here we see things far differently to most, as you may find if you decide to come. There is a bus that connects with the overnight train to Plymouth at Kingsbridge, getting you here early in the morning. If I cannot meet you, my house is at the far end of the street overlooking the cliffs, some distance from the others and almost halfway towards Dark Point lighthouse.

  Yours very sincerely,

  Hedley Lindennan

  My feelings concerning the contents of this letter were not such as to ease the disturbing uneasiness in my mind. I did not, for one moment, believe that there was anything real or sinister in the odd happenings which Lindennan mentioned in such obviously veiled terms, but the fact that he had somehow omitted to give any details as to what had happened to Philip was sufficient to arouse the utmost apprehension in my being. Now, as I made my way through the shrouding mist, I felt a strange sense of fright mingled with the nearness to malevolent and forbidden things, and it was easy for me to recognise how unhallowed superstitions might grow out of all proportion in a place such as this. Old beliefs would die hard here, shut away from the tempering effects of the outside world. Perhaps, after all, there were oddly inexplicable happenings taking place in this part of the country, which could have been magnified until they had assumed a dominant role in the lives of these simple-minded people.

  Occasionally, as the wind freshened in gusts from the sea, the wall of ocean fog thinned and gave me brief, tantalising glimpses of the village which lay a few hundred yards ahead of me, the solitary road winding through it before it went sharply inland and vanished over the brow of a beetling hill to my right; and there, perhaps a mile distant, the white, spectral tower of a lighthouse standing lonely and desolate on a narrow peninsula of rock thrusting out into the beating surf. This, no doubt, was Dark Point.

  The village was obviously of wide extent in spite of the small number of dwellings, since it stretched in a single line of cottages along the seafront; but here and there, I noticed a deserted and decayed building, mouldering in the mist, a sagging thatched roof, walls crumbling in amid a shamble of wood and bricks in overgrown gardens. It was not a sight calculated to ease the growing apprehension in my mind. Set a little to the rear of the street, just showing above the roofs, I observed the spire of a small church and halfway through the village, a small jetty thrust its way into the sea with a handful of fishing boats drawn up alongside it.

  I met no one on the road, and there was only the sound of my own footsteps in the muffling mist to keep me company as I passed the sightless, staring windows. This was a place in which I did not care to linger, and I was glad when I finally came in sight of the solitary house set a little back from the road, the only one which showed any sign at all of human habitation, a thin wisp of smoke curling from the single chimney.

  It was easy to understand why few outsiders ever came to Tor Mount, for unlike most other tiny fishing villages of the South Devon coast, it appeared to shut itself away from prying eyes, to shun visitors; and there was no air of welcome about the place, although at the time I put it down to the early hour of the morning and the abominable weather conditions.

  Hedley Lindennan was a man in his early sixties, evidently well-educated, who greeted me courteously and seemed curiously pleased to see me. He lived alone, but insisted on preparing a meal, waiting until I had eaten before explaining his reasons for asking me to come.

  Then, sitting in the comfortable chair in front of the fire—for the morning was still cold for this time of year, I heard the story of Tor Mount and in particular of the Keeper of Dark Point; and as the story unfolded, I knew that my fears concerning the place had not been ill-founded, and I found myself shivering incessantly in spite of the clammy heat in the room. Often, I found it almost impossible to believe certain parts of his narrative, for my mind told me that in this day and age such events could not happen, had no place in this sane, everyday world of the twentieth century.

  When Lindennan had finished, I did not wonder that people shunned Tor Mount, nor that the fisherfolk preferred to shut themselves away from the outside world, for if there should be even the tiniest grain of truth in that fantastic, horrifying tale, it would be more than enough to explain the air of utter desolation and decay over the village, the mouldering houses, and the weed-choked gardens.

  There had been many legends and whispered tales in myth-haunted Tor Mount for several centuries, Lindennan said, stemming originally from the ruined village of Torsands which had once flourished more than five hundred years before and half a mile from Lindennan’s cottage, closer to where Dark Point now loomed on its rocky promontory. In spite of its small size, it had been a wealthy place in those days, with the sea abounding in fish and crab. Then tragedy had struck at Torsands. The supply of fish dwindled, the boats returned day after day with empty nets and pots, and according to the legend, certain evil and shocking practices took place in the village after that. The stories were, as always, deliberately vague and misleading as to the exact nature of these rites, but the terrible outcome of them was sufficiently well established and authenticated. One wild, storm-filled night, so Lindennan understood from his reading of certain old books and documents, a large group of the villagers made their way up to the strange circle of stones on top of High Tor where the Devil held court, and here, in the midst of lightning and thunder, the most diabolical scenes were enacted. The tales told of wild sounds, screechings, and snarlings, bestial grunts and hideous barkings such as could have been uttered by no human throat, and a stench like that from the deeps of the most abominable pit of Hell.

  Before dawn the next day, a great wave sweeping in from somewhere far out in the Atlantic overwhelmed Torsands completely, wiping the place clean of any life which had existed there, shattering the buildings, smashing the boats drawn alongside the quay, destroying everything in a cataclysmic fury that surpassed anything ever previously known. Now, all that remained were empty shells of houses, mounds of shattered stones, and the ruined spire of the church, which had earlier been the very centre of these heathen ceremonies.

  Ever since that time, there had been reports at irregular intervals of odd things happening in the area. Curious inhuman marks found on the sand at low tide, hideous flopping sounds heard at dead of night when the evil stars shone from the clear, moonless vault of the heavens, misshapen shadows glimpsed from the road by the keepers of the light whenever they made their way along the cliffs to Dark Point from Tor Mount.

  There was, too, Lindennan had heard, a book filled with unknown ideographic symbols which had some bearing on this mad period of the region’s history; and throughout the intervening centuries, the more superstitious people of the village spoke in hushed tones of flickering lights seen on top of High Tor and mad sounds issuing from that circle of half-ruined stones.

  Philip had learned of the existence of this strange book shortly after his arrival in Tor Mount, and had spent much of his time searching for it, determined to interpret the weird symbols it contained, confident that it would tell him all he wanted to know of the curious past history of the place, especially of the ruined village of Torsands, which fascinated him unutterably.

  He had taken to wandering among the shunned spots, especially after dark, although he had been warned on countless occasions, both by Lindennan and others, to stay away from such shadow-haunted places. The villagers appeared to be sullenly banded together against the intrusion of strangers, whom they regarded with both suspicion and dislike. Some strangers, Lindennan hinted, had already vanished mysteriously long before Philip had arrived in Tor Mount; but for a t
ime, although most people outwardly shunned him, no active action had been taken against him. He had bought one of the decaying houses along the front, and there had been intense speculation about his doings, particularly the long hours after dark when he would return from his nocturnal wanderings, and a solitary light would burn in one window of the cottage until almost dawn.

  On May fifteenth—Lindennan recalled the date well, since there had been a tremendous storm later that night—my brother had been seen by several people making his way down from the summit of High Tor, where he had been spending more and more of his time striving to interpret the crudely hewn hieroglyphics carved on the oddly angled stones; but instead of taking the road down the hill to the village as he usually did, he had abruptly turned and made his way along the beetling brow of the hill towards the spectral tower of Dark Point lighthouse.

  In answer to my questions, Lindennan confirmed that the lighthouse had been abandoned for close on seventy years following the building of a new tower some three miles along the coast. Apparently, the rocky promontory on which Dark Point was situated had become riddled by subterranean clefts and shafts by the prolonged action of the sea, and the foundations were so insecure that the entire structure was in danger of collapse.

  Lindennan himself felt certain that Philip had reached the lighthouse before the storm had broken. It was less than three-quarters of a mile from the top of High Tor cut down to the crumbling ruins of the tower, but what had happened then no one could say, although several rumours were rife. For the first time in more than three months, no light was seen in the cottage on the edge of the village that night, but with the storm raging over the headland and the lightning flashing and forking across the cloud-scudded heavens, little notice had been taken of this. It was not until three days later, when nothing further had been seen of him, that anyone decided to go up to Dark Point and see for themselves whether there was any sign of him there.