The Legacy of Erich Zann and Other Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

by Brian Stableford

  “I told you that there aren’t any photographs,” I reminded him. I didn’t bother shooting down the memory hypothesis—he hadn’t meant that one seriously.

  “You do carry the recessive gene, don’t you?” he said, still the rational scientist, for a little while longer.

  “Yes,” I said. “So did my wife, unlikely as it might seem. She was Australian. If I’d known...but all I knew about then was the witchcraft, you see, and you can’t really call that knowledge.”

  His jaw dropped slightly, then tightened again. He was a scientist, and he could follow the logic all the way—but he was a scientist, and he needed confirmation. Our deepest fears always need confirmation, one way or another, but once they have it, there’s never any going back...or even, in any meaningful sense, going forward. Once we have the confirmation, the jigsaw puzzle is complete, and so are we.

  “The chance was only one in four,” I said. “My other son’s body is a veritable temple to human perfection...and he can drink the water with absolute impunity.”

  Now, the horror had begun to dig in, commencing the long and leisurely work of burrowing into the utmost depths of his soul.

  “But I have a family of my own at home in Boston,” he murmured.

  “I know,” I said. “They have the internet in Ventnor public library; I looked you up. It’s not really that contagious, though—and even if you do pass it on, it won’t be the end of the world: it’ll just engender a more personal and more intimate understanding of the anatomy of the terrible, and the physiology of fear.”

  THE HOLOCAUST OF ECSTASY

  It was dark when Tremeloe first opened his eyes, and he found it impossible to make out anything in a sideways or upward direction. When he looked down, though, in the hope of seeing where he was standing—for he had no idea where he was, and was sure that he wasn’t lying down—he saw that there were holes in a floor that seemed to be a long way beneath him, and that stars were shining through the holes.

  There seemed to be a conversation going on around him, but there were no English words it in; the languages that the various voices were speaking all seemed to him to be Far Eastern in origin. The voices seemed quite calm, and in spite of the impenetrable darkness and not knowing where he was, Tremeloe felt oddly calm himself.

  “Does anyone here speak English?” he asked. The words came out easily enough, but sounded and felt wrong, in some way that he couldn’t quite understand.

  For a moment, there was a pregnant silence, as if everyone in the crowd were deciding whether to admit to speaking English. Finally, though, a voice that seemed to come from somewhere closer at hand than all the rest, said: “Yes. You’re American?” There was nothing Oriental about the accent, but that didn’t make it any easier to place.

  Tremeloe thought that the other might be near enough to touch, and tried to reach out in the direction from which the voice had come, but he couldn’t. His body felt strange, and wrong. He couldn’t feel his hands, and when he tried to touch himself to reassure himself that he was still there, he couldn’t touch any other part of him with his fingers. The idea struck him that the conviction that he wasn’t lying down, based on the fact that he couldn’t feel a surface on which he might be lying, would be unreliable if he were paralyzed from the neck down.

  “Richard Tremeloe, Arkham, Massachusetts,” he said, by way of introduction. “Have I been in some kind of accident?” He tried to remember where he had been before falling asleep—or unconscious—and couldn’t. “I think I’ve got amnesia,” he added.

  “More than you know,” said the other voice, a trifle dolefully, “but the others are a little more relevant in their concerns.”

  “Can you understand what they’re saying?” Tremeloe asked, knowing that it was the wrong question, but reluctant to ask one whose answer might provoke the panic that he had so far been spared.

  “Some of it,” the other boasted. “There’s an animated discussion about reincarnation going on. The Buddhists and the Hindus have different views on the subject, but none of them really believes in it—especially the ex-communists. On the other hand....”

  “Who are you?” Tremeloe demanded, wondering why the anxiety that he ought to be feeling wasn’t making itself felt in his flesh or his voice. “Where the hell are we?”

  “If I’m not much mistaken,” the other replied, “we’ve been reborn into the new era, beyond good and evil: the holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. I’m not at all sure about the freedom, though...or, come to that, the ecstasy. I shouldn’t be here. This shouldn’t be possible. The memory wipe should have made it impossible.”

  “Reborn?” echoed Tremeloe. “I haven’t been reborn. I’m not sure of much, but I know I’m an adult. I’m fifty-six years old—maybe more, depending on the depth of the amnesia. I’m a professor of biology at Miskatonic University, married to Barbara, with two children, Stephen and Grace....” He trailed off. He was talking in order to test his memory rather than to enlighten the mysteriously-anonymous other, but it wasn’t an awareness of pointlessness or a failure of remembrance that had caused him to stop. It was the realization that the stars really were shining through gaps in...something that wasn’t the floor. “Why has up become down?” he asked. “Why aren’t I aware of being upside-down? Why can’t I feel gravity?”

  The voice didn’t try to reassure him. Instead, the other said: “Miskatonic? Have you read the Necronomicon?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Tremeloe snapped—or tried to, since his momentary irritation was a mere flicker, which didn’t show in his voice. “It’s been locked in a vault for decades. No one’s allowed to see or touch any of the so-called forbidden manuscripts, since the unpleasantness way back in the last century. Anyway, I’m a scientist. I don’t have any truck with occult rubbish like that.”

  “Do you know Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee?”

  That question gave Tremeloe pause for thought. He blinked and squinted—and was glad to know that he could still feel his eyelids, just as he could still feel the movements of his tongue—in the hope that he might be able to make out his surroundings now that his eyes were adapting to the extremely poor light. He couldn’t. Above his head—or, strictly speaking, below it, since he seemed to be hanging upside-down—the darkness was Stygian. Around him, he had vague impression of rounded objects that might have been heads, not very densely clustered, and wispier things that were vaguely reminiscent of fern leaves, but he couldn’t actually see anything...except the fugitive stars, shining through gaps in what was presumably a dense cloud-bank. Occasionally, the stars were briefly eclipsed, as if something had moved across them: a giant bird, perhaps.

  Around him, the chorus of foreign voice was still going on. If any of the others could speak English, they were content to listen to what Tremeloe and his companion were saying, without intervening.

  What was remarkable about the other’s question, Tremeloe reminded himself, when he came back to it reluctantly, was that Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee had died more than a hundred years ago...or, at least, more than a hundred years before Richard Tremeloe had turned fifty-six. He was long dead, but not quite forgotten...just as the university’s famous copy of the Necronomicon was unforgotten, even though no one had clapped eyes on it since before Tremeloe had been born. Having no idea how to answer the other’s question, Tremeloe prevaricated by saying: “Do you?”

  “I did, briefly—but that was in another place, and another time. I infer from your hesitation that he’s long dead, and that you...died...sometime in the twenty-first or twenty-second century.”

  “I’m not dead,” Tremeloe retorted, reflexively, although he did realize that if all the other hanged men in this dark Tarot space were earnestly discussing reincarnation, he might be in the minority in holding that opinion, and might even be wrong, in spite of cogito ergo sum and all his memories of Miskatonic, Barbara, Stephen, Grace, his hands, his legs, and his heart....

  His heart would have sunk, if he’d had one, and if its sinking
had been possible. I can’t feel gravity, Tremeloe thought. Aloud, he said: “Are you telling me that I really have been reincarnated?”

  “Yes—probably not for the first time, although it’s impossible to tell how many layers of amnesia we’ve been afflicted with.”

  “How?” This time Tremeloe succeeded in snapping. “When? By whom?”

  “If you’d read the Necronomicon,” the other voice replied, with a leaden dullness that probably wasn’t redolent with panic because it had no more capacity to hold an edge that Tremeloe’s own, “you’d know.”

  “And you have?” Tremeloe riposted.

  “No,” the other came back, quick as a flash. “I wrote it—and no, I don’t mean that I’m the legendary Arab with the nonsensical name who penned the Al Azif. I mean that I too, like Peaslee, have lived in Pnakotus...except that to me, it was a home of sorts, though not Yith itself, and I’m not supposed to be out of it any more. The human brain I inhabited for ten years was supposed to have been cleansed of every last trace of me. I shouldn’t have been available for...this.”

  “Has it occurred to you,” Tremeloe asked, “that you might be barking mad?”

  “Yes,” the other replied. “How about you?”

  Good question, Tremeloe thought. This is a nightmare—a crazy nightmare. There’s no other explanation. Please can I wake up now? Somehow, he knew that wasn’t going to happen. He might well be dreaming, but he was very clearly conscious that he was living his dream, and that he was not going to be waking up to any other reality any time soon.

  Even so....

  “The cloud’s getting lighter,” he observed. “It is cloud, isn’t it? That is the sky, isn’t it? It only seems to be beneath us because we’re hanging upside-down.”

  “Yes,” the other answered. “It’s dawn. Whether we’re barking mad or not, this might be a good time to strive with all our might to lose our minds completely: to dissolve our minds into private chaos and gibbering idiocy, if we can. On balance....”

  The other shut up, somewhat to Tremeloe’s relief.

  The dawn was slow. The shades of grey through which the bulk of the sky progressed as its patches turned blue and the stars were drowned seemed infinite in their subtlety, but Tremeloe soon stopped watching them, in order to concentrate on the tree.

  The reason that he couldn’t feel his body was that he didn’t have one. He was just a head and a neck—except that the neck was really a stalk, and it connected him to the bough of a tree from which he hung down like a fruit, amid a hundred other heads that he could see and probably a thousand that he couldn’t. The things he’s intuited as leaves really were leaves, and really were divided up in a quasi-fractal pattern, a little like fern leaves but lacier. They were pale green streaked with purple.

  The tree, so far as Tremeloe could estimate, was at least a hundred feet high, and its crown had to be at least a hundred and fifty in diameter, but he was positioned on the outside of the crown, about five-sixths of the way up—or, as it seemed to him, down—and he couldn’t see the trunk at all. He could barely see the ground “above” his head, but the thin streaks he could see between his head-fruit-tree and the next were vivid green and suspiciously flat, as if they might be algae-clogged swamp-water rather than anything solid.

  The jungle stretched as far as his eyes could see. The birds in the sky really did look like giants, but that might have been an error of perspective.

  There was no disintegration into private chaos, no hectic slide into gibbering idiocy. While not exactly calm any longer, and perhaps still capable of a kind of panic, Tremeloe felt that his consciousness was clear, that his memory was sound—so far as it went—and that his intelligence was relentless. He realized that he was no longer possessed of the hormonal orchestra of old. Presumably, he still had a pituitary master gland, which was probably still sending out its chemical signals to the endocrine glands that had once been distributed through his frail human flesh, but whatever was responding to them now was a very different organism. From now on, his feelings, like his voice, would be regulated by a very different existential system. Even so, he did still have a voice, He had no lungs, but he did have vocal cords, and some kind of apparatus for pumping air into his neck-stalk. He wasn’t dumb, any more than he was deaf or blind.

  All in all, he thought, only slightly amazed at his capacity to think it, things could be worse. Then he remembered what the other English-speaker had implied about losing his mind completely, and dissolving into gibbering mindlessness, probably being the better alternative....

  The head of the other English-speaker—the only Caucasian face amid a crowd of Orientals who occasionally glanced at him sideways, with apparent curiosity but no hostility, but showed no sign of understanding what he said—seemed to be that of a man in his mid-fifties, who might have been handsome before middle-aged spread had given him jowls and thinning hair had turned his hairline into a ebbing tide. The jowls seemed oddly protuberant, but that was because they were hanging the wrong way. Gravity still existed; it was just that Tremeloe no longer had any sensation of his own weight. He felt slightly insulted by that, having always thought of his intellect-laden head as a ponderous entity.

  Tremeloe didn’t see the bats until they actually arrived at the tree, wheeling around it in a flock that must have been thirty or thirty-five strong. This time, there was no possibility of any error of perspective; they were huge. Because Tremeloe was a biologist he knew that real vampire bats were tiny, and that the common habit of referring to fruit-bat as “vampire bats” was a myth-based error, but now that he was a human fruit, the difference seemed rather trivial—especially when he saw the bats begin to settle on his fellow human fruit.

  Please, he prayed—although he was an atheist—don’t let it be me. Because he was a biologist, though, he took note of the fruit-bats’ eyes. The bats were obviously not nocturnal in their habits, so their eyes were adapted for day vision; these specimens were not “as blind as bats” even in their natural state—but that didn’t explain why the unnaturally huge creatures had eyes that looked almost human in their fox-like heads.

  After a few seconds, during which he saw one creature’s needle-sharp teeth tear into the face of an Oriental man—who did not scream—Tremeloe was on the point of withdrawing the almost...but he never quite got there, because one of the bats suddenly descended upon him, as if out of nowhere.

  He felt the monster’s breath on his cheek, caught its rancid stink in his nostrils, and looked into its not-quite-almost-human eyes, and knew that it was about to pluck out his own as it groped at it with its clawed feet...but then it was suddenly gone again, snatched away as abruptly as it had arrived.

  After the bats had come the huge birds...and they really were huge. They were eagles, or condors, or something akin to both but not quite either. At any rate, they were raptors, and they numbered human-fruit-bats among their prey of choice. There weren’t as many birds as bats, so some of the bats were enabled to start their hasty meals in peace, but the birds were even fiercer, and they could easily carry a bat in each claw, so it wasn’t long before the bats fluttered away, seeking the cover of the sprawling crowns.

  The raptors too, Tremeloe realized, as he watched his own avian savior fall into the sky, clutching for its next meal with its terrible talons, had unnaturally large eyes: not eyes like a hawk’s, but eyes like a man’s....

  Tremeloe looked his white-faced neighbor in the eyes and said: “Is this hell?” He knew that it was a stupid question. He’d done much better before, when his not-quite-immediate response to the possibility that he had been reincarnated had been: How? By whom?

  What the other said in reply, however, was: “That depends.”

  A phrase that the mysterious other had used while they were still enclosed by merciful darkness floated back into Tremeloe’s mind: the holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Except, the other had added, presumably knowing already that he was simply a head-fruit, there wasn’t much freedom in their presen
t existential state. Nor ecstasy either, so far as I can tell, Tremeloe added, privately. Although it might have been more exciting, now that he thought about it, to be reincarnated as a human eagle...better, at any rate, than being reincarnated as a human fruit-bat.

  Are we all vampires now?

  But the real questions were still how and by whom?

  “I’m not who I think I am, am I?” Tremeloe said to the other, who seemed to know a lot more than he did. “I’m just some sort of replica, created from some sort of recording. This isn’t the twenty-first century, is it? This is a much later era—maybe the end of time. Is this the Omega Point? Is this the Omega Point Intelligence’s idea of a joke?”

  “I wish it were,” the other replied. “Perhaps it is...but my suspicion is that it’s not as late as you think. The Coleopteran Era is a long way off as yet, alas. This is Cthulhu’s Reign...what the human race were designed to be and to become. But no, we’re not just replicas reproduced from some sort of recording; we’re actually who we think we are, shifted forwards in time. You are, at any rate. I shouldn’t be here. I don’t belong here. I only borrowed a human body temporarily, and then I returned to Pnakotus. I shouldn’t be here. This isn’t right.”

  Tremeloe thought that he had just as much right to protest as the other, but his mind—which was not only refusing to dissolve into incoherent idiocy but perversely insistent on retaining an emotional state more reminiscent of complacency than abject terror—was oddly intent on trying to pick up the thread of the narrative that the other fruit-head was stubbornly not spelling out.

  “Pnakotus,” he said. “That’s the mythical city in the Australian desert, where some of the so-called forbidden manuscripts were found. You really believe that’s where you’re from?” He paused momentarily before adding the key question: “When, exactly?”

  “Two hundred million years before you were born,” the other replied. “But I seem to have been removed from the twenty-first century, where I spent ten years doing research. That memory was supposed to have been erased—not just blocked off, like some fraction of a computer hard disk whose supposed deletion is merely a matter of losing its address, but actually wiped clean...reformatted. I’m not supposed to be here. I’m supposed to live in Pnakotus for another hundred million years or more, and then migrate to the Coleopteran Era, in order to avoid all this. The members of the Great Race of Yith are inhabitants of eternity. Cthulhu and the star-spawn simply aren’t relevant to us....”