At the back of the cave, surrounded by the small sea of arthropods, was a stone statue carved into the rock wall. The figure was like nothing Penny had ever seen before, and the crabs seemed mesmerized by it. It was a sculpture of some kind of … monster was the word that came to mind.
Its head, which was bulbous and elephantine, featured two pupil-less eyes and had no discernible mouth she could see, only numerous tentacle-like appendages, draping from its grotesque face and down its immense, muscled torso—it appeared to be like that of a man’s—all the way to the statue’s base. The creature’s arms, which were crossed over its chest, ended in hideous, webbed claws. The thing squatted on bulging legs with clawed feet, and its body was partially cocooned by two bat-like wings extending from the creature’s back.
Penny also noticed a tiny pile of neatly stacked rocks in front of the statue. When she looked closer, though, she realized they weren’t rocks but a collection of smaller, fist-sized stone carvings of the same devilish being.
Penny couldn’t fathom what the thing was supposed to be, who might have fashioned it or why. And why there, in that cave? As she stared at it, an overwhelming sense of horror started growing in her mind. It was a petrifying dread she realized had always been lurking there, in the back of her subconscious, like a crouching demon waiting for its chance to lunge from the shadows.
Despite her fear, Penny found herself drawn to the horror before her. As if of their own accord, her legs started moving, forcing her to draw closer. The unnaturally large crabs surrounding the base of the statue moved away as she approached, her eyes locked on the carved stone face of the monster.
Penny wanted to run, to hide, but her body would not respond to her mental pleas to do so. Without knowing why, she reached down and picked up one of the small idols from the pile on the floor. And as she held it, she could feel her mind drifting away. It was as if she was being pulled back, away from where she stood in the cave, into the pool and even farther down into the darkness of the briny deep. All light spun away until she was completely enveloped in black. And then she was gone.
As if waking from a drug-induced haze, Penny thought she heard someone calling her name from a long way off. She blinked several times and shook her head, trying to rid herself of the fog clouding her mind.
She was still in the eerie grotto but was sitting cross-legged at the edge of the pool, facing away from the back of the cave. Looking from side to side, she saw no sign of the black-shelled crabs from before but dared not look directly behind her. Maybe it had all been a dream; she couldn’t bring herself to test that theory.
Penny heard her name again and realized, with a shock, someone was very definitely calling to her. Then she saw them—her husband, Richard, and Mr. Brooks in the motorboat out beyond the mouth of the cave. Penny didn’t know how they’d found her but was relieved they had. It looked like she would be rescued after all.
“I’m here!” she said, jumping to her feet. She grimaced as the pain from her ankle shot up her leg and became acutely aware of the throbbing in the back of her head as well.
Richard called to her. “We can’t bring the boat inside the cave … the rocks! Can you swim to us? We’ll throw you a line.”
“I think so,” she said.
Within a few moments, Mr. Brooks had rigged a nylon rope with a lifejacket tied to one end. He gave it some slack and swung it back and forth in his hand a few times before finally flinging it through the cave’s opening. The lifejacket splashed into the water a few feet from where Penny stood, and she grabbed it. She put the lifejacket on, leaving the rope tied to it, and then dove into the pool.
She swam, while at the same time being pulled by Richard and Mr. Brooks, all the way out of the cave and to the boat. They dragged Penny aboard and laid her down on the deck.
“My God,” said Richard, gasping. “Are you okay?”
“I think I tore something in my ankle,” said Penny. “And I hit my head, too.”
“Thank goodness you’re in one piece. I was so afraid …” Richard looked as if he might start crying but clenched his jaw, tightly, and said, “Mr. Brooks, get us out of here, if you don’t mind.”
"Ayuh," said Brooks. He then raised the anchor and steered the boat toward the mainland.
As they sped away, no one noticed the slimy, undulating, spiny tentacles that broke the surface of the pool just inside the cave or the massive orb-like shape lurking beneath. When the motorboat was out of sight, the tentacles slipped back below the water, and the ominous, stone monstrosity in the back of the cave kept a silent vigil over its murky domain.
4. The Thrall
Richard was relieved to hear the report from Frank Vogel, the aging and solitary doctor in the town of Perry’s Landing, that Penny’s injuries were not serious. She’d torn some ligaments in her ankle and sustained a minor concussion but was otherwise fine.
In the doctor’s office, Richard explained to his wife that Mr. Brooks had come upon the uncovered shaft in the garden and, being intimately familiar with every feature of Askuwheteau, natural and otherwise, knew it let out in the caverns below Blackwater. Apparently, Penny wasn’t the first person in the history of the manor to fall through that hole, but Brooks had declined to offer any details about previous mishaps. Richard imagined the outcomes hadn’t been as fortunate as this one. The hole had been sealed at one time, but over the years, the cover had apparently rotted away.
The good doctor prescribed some potent painkillers for his patient and ordered Richard to keep a close eye on Penny for the next twenty-four hours. When Dr. Vogel left the room to call the prescription in to the pharmacy, Richard hugged Penny gently and breathed a huge sigh of relief.
Richard asked Penny to recount the details of her ordeal, but her memory had grown a bit hazy. She remembered working in the garden behind Blackwater, and the next thing she could recall was hearing Richard call her name. The events that transpired in between were, at least temporarily, lost.
“I thought the worst,” Richard said, his voice cracking as he fought the impulse to start bawling like a baby.
“It’s okay, honey,” said Penny, soothingly. “I’m right here. Not going anywhere. Remember, all the way—”
“And back again,” he said.
Richard left his wife to rest in Dr. Vogel’s office and briefly consulted the physician about Penny’s apparent memory gap. Vogel insisted it was nothing to worry about. He assured Richard that temporary amnesia was not uncommon in a situation like this.
Satisfied, Richard crossed the street to pick up Penny’s scrip at the pharmacy, which was located inside a 1950s retro diner. The pharmacist told Richard it would be a few minutes, so while he waited, he perused a selection of postcards in a rack by the dispensing counter. As he gazed vacantly at a dramatic four-by-six photograph of lobster boats off the New England coast, a tingling sensation slithered up the back of his neck. Richard had the distinct impression someone was watching him.
He turned and saw an elderly Native American gentleman with long, gray hair tied in braids on either side of his head, peering at him through the diner’s plate-glass window. Richard looked around nervously to see if he might be mistaken, hoping the old man was just trying to get someone’s attention at the pharmacist’s counter. But the man was obviously looking right at Richard. Then the old man gestured, motioning for Richard to come outside. And then the man was gone.
To say Richard was perplexed by the man’s odd behavior would have been an understatement. Obviously has me confused with someone else, he thought. But when Richard exited the diner, a little white bag containing one orange bottle of Vicodin in hand, he again noticed the peculiar individual, this time standing a little way down the street, next to a badly dented, sky-blue pickup truck; in the truck’s cab was a lever-action hunting rifle, hanging in a mounted gun rack.
The old man was looking right at Richard and, once again, motioned for him to approach. Glancing again at the rifle, Richard swallowed hard and walked over
to the stranger in a cautious manner.
“Excuse me,” he said. “Were you trying to get my attention? Can I help you with something?”
“You’re Mr. Cadeau, the new owner of Blackwater,” the old man said. It was more of a statement than a question.
“Uh … yes,” said Richard. “My wife, really, but—”
“You need to come see me. There’s something you need to hear.” The man’s penetrating gaze was intense and wild-eyed; it did little to put Richard’s mind at ease.
“Who … who are you?”
“Not here!” The man almost growled. He shoved a tiny piece of paper into Richard’s hand and climbed into the truck. As he pulled away from the curb, he called out the window. “Come see me, Mr. Cadeau! It’s important! Life and death! Come and see me before it’s too late!”
And with that, the Indian fellow drove off down the street, tires screeching and kicking up smoke, leaving Richard on the sidewalk with a very confused look on his face. He glanced at the piece of paper the strange man handed him. It contained an address, a rural route number Richard figured was well outside the town’s limits. Just the address, not even a name to go with it. He was about to throw the paper in the trash bin in front of the diner but thought better of it at the last second. Without knowing why, he instead put it in his pocket.
Again Richard noticed that odd tingling sensation that made him feel like he was being watched. He looked down the street to see Mr. Brooks standing about a hundred feet away, on the corner of the intersecting road that led to the dock. He was smoking a cigarette and staring at Richard with a hostile-looking scowl. Brooks was typically quite jovial, and Richard wondered what would give the caretaker cause to look so perturbed. Did it have something to do with the old Indian? The expression on Brooks’s face was beyond mere dismay. It was almost … sinister. It sent an eerie chill down Richard’s spine.
Richard’s encounter with the Indian rattled him, but over the next day or so, he was able to put the incident out of his mind. His immediate concern was for his wife.
At first, Penny had seemed little worse for wear, despite the injuries she’d suffered. But it wasn’t long before Richard’s concern deepened.
Penny had showed no signs of brain damage or anything like that according to Dr. Vogel, and for forty-eight hours, everything in the couple’s new, but still quite different, living situation continued as before.
Then the following night, Richard woke from a nightmare in which he’d been drowning in the ocean. He was drenched with sweat, and rain was pounding against the bedroom’s picture window. Still shaken by the dream, Richard flinched in surprise when the lighting flashed outside, followed by a booming crash of thunder. He then realized Penny was strangely absent from their bed.
When she didn’t soon return, he began looking for her. He searched the manor, room by room, in the dark, calling out her name when he didn’t find her in the obvious places.
Confusion gave way to worry, which turned to fear, which quickly started morphing into a frantic sense of panic. Richard rushed to the parlor, intending to phone Mr. Brooks for help. As he was about to grab the receiver, he hesitated, all of a sudden remembering the unnerving way Brooks had looked at him that day after his encounter with the nameless Indian. Another chill came over him at the thought of it, but he shook it off.
Don’t be stupid, Richard, he thought, berating himself.
As he lifted the receiver to his ear, ready to dial the number, the lightning flashed just as he happened to glance out the parlor’s window. The sudden illumination provided a clear view of the house’s front drive and lawn and the cliff’s edge beyond, and it was there he saw Penny, standing on the precipice, staring out at the churning sea. The fringe of her white nightgown was blowing in the wind, making her look very much like an eerie shade from some campfire ghost story.
Richard knew Penny was extremely lucky to survive her fall down the shaft in the garden. But nobody could survive a tumble off those cliffs, and Penny looked perilously near to teetering over and into the drink.
Richard shot out the front door, yelling his wife’s name at the top of his lungs. His cries were lost amid the wind and the sounds of thunder and rain and the sea below. It seemed like it took forever to reach her, but when he finally did, he could see she was completely catatonic. Penny was drenched but wasn’t even shivering as she stood there in her bare feet on the rocky lip of the drop-off.
“Pen,” Richard said. “You okay?”
When she didn’t answer, he waved his hand in front of her face. No response. Richard was vexed. He’d never known his wife to sleepwalk before. He thought he’d read or heard somewhere it was dangerous to interfere with someone who was sleepwalking, but Richard reasoned a fall from this height was infinitely more dangerous.
“Come on, Pen,” he said, softly, gently grasping her shoulders with both hands. He was about to guide her away from the edge and back into the house when Penny spoke.
“N’gai, ga’shotheth, mor’golathe’ye. N’gai! Dagoth’he’sthule! Dagoth’he’sthule! Ga’shothethe’ye, mor’golathe’ye!”
The words sounded like gibberish to Richard, and for all he knew, that’s all it was, some kind of jumbled dream-speak. But all the same, to hear his wife babbling so made the hairs on his neck stand up and his stomach feel nauseated.
“Okay, honey,” he said in a soothing voice. “Let’s get inside. Here we go.”
Richard was able to get Penny back into the house without any further trouble. He guided her upstairs and into the bathroom, where he stripped her out of the wet nightgown, dried her off, and put fresh, dry pajamas on her. The whole time she remained in a hypnotic, dreamlike state until Richard led her into the master suite. As soon as they reached the bedroom door, Penny went right to the bed and lay down, appearing to go back to sleep.
Richard stood in the doorway, wondering what to do. His inclination was to call Brooks—the idea again filled him with dread, though he couldn’t say why; it was clearly irrational—and transport Penny to the mainland, possibly to a real hospital. Richard was beginning to think she needed more advanced tests to see what was wrong, an MRI or something.
Then the thunder rumbled again, and Penny sat up in bed. She looked around and saw her husband lurking in the doorway, watching her intently.
“Richard?” she said, blinking and looking dazed. “What are you doing up? Is something wrong?”
“Penny,” said Richard with a gasp. “Are you okay, honey?”
“Am I okay?” Penny yawned. “What on earth are you talking about? Come back to bed.”
With that, Penny flopped back down on the bed and immediately began to snore softly. Richard sighed with relief. He started to think he’d been worried for nothing. He reassured himself it had just been a freak occurrence. Penny was just fine after all.
He lay down in the bed beside her. His worry abating for the time being, he eventually drifted off to sleep.
The next morning, Penny seemed absolutely normal, and Richard banished all thoughts of any follow-up medical evaluation.
But two nights later, he once again found Penny sleepwalking along the cliffs in front of Blackwater. And again, she spoke the same strange words as before, and Richard realized the words definitely weren’t random gibberish.
In the morning, when he confronted Penny about the incident, she laughed it off. When he persisted, suggesting they return to Dr. Vogel or go to a hospital in Bangor, Penny became angry, insisting he was just being needlessly paranoid. Penny was noticeably more irritable after that. She became somewhat distant and moody, snapping at Richard over the smallest annoyances.
Two nights later, Richard awoke for a third time to find Penny not in bed. He again located her on the cliffs, uttering the mysterious dialect in the wan moonlight. That time, everything occurred much as it had during her previous two episodes with one notable and strange exception.
As Penny was standing there above the sea, muttering in that confounding a
nd bizarre language, she was clutching something in her hand.
After Richard guided his wife back to bed, he gently pried the object from her grasp. As soon as he touched the thing, a sense of overwhelming dread filled him, crashing into him like a wave of lead.
He looked at the object in his hand. It was some kind of tiny totem, carved out of stone, a representation of a creature unlike anything he’d ever seen before—a squat little beast, sitting on its haunches. Its sinewy arms were crossed over its chest like Dracula lying in his coffin. Leathery, bat-like wings protruded from the thing’s back. And its head—a sickening spheroid with two bulbous eyes and hideous tentacles extruding from where its mouth should be, extending down and around its entire body.
As Richard gazed at the little statue, a strange, painful boring, like a needle being driven into the base of his neck, made him wince. The pain brought with it a searing intensity, gnawing at Richard’s skull like an itch on the surface of his brain he couldn’t scratch. The sensation layered itself onto the immense fear that already existed there. It was as if he could actually feel his mind slipping into madness.
When Richard could stand it no more, he threw the totem across the room. It hit the floor and slid under the dresser where it vanished from sight. And then the unhinging madness and pain were gone, just like that. But the fear … the fear lingered.
Richard knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep again that night. He spent the next several hours sitting up in his bed next to Penny, his knees clutched to his chest. He couldn’t explain anything that had happened the last several days, but he felt certain these occurrences were far from normal. He needed answers and somehow knew medical science wouldn’t be able to provide any. All of it defied the logic of science and reason.
The Lurkers & Other Strange Tales Page 3
