Historical Lovecraft: Tales of Horror Through Time

by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  He went over to the mangled debris of the seaplane, calling. Only silence answered. Silence and ... creaking? Sharper. Something more metallic like ... overheated motors. Cracking. Cracking ice cubes. He spun as fast as he could, to find himself facing a crystal-like pyramid. One of its sides had been breached by the crashing aircraft and it gaped open, slowly breaking down under the weight of the cabin. Had the iceberg been rock-solid, it should not have been affected, but the impact showed the structure to be hollow, as indeed, it had been in Amundsen’s dreams, minus the humming or fantastic-looking creatures. Peeking inside a crack, he could make out an inner wall, about a meter deep inside the pyramid. In the uncertain gloom of the never-quite-night of June, Amundsen could only guess at its volume, which – like the outer shell itself – looked man-made. Was it some kind of inner chamber?

  He crawled closer to the plane, trying to see if he could salvage some food, some covers or others means to keep warm. Holding onto the shafts that supported the wings, he was finally able to stand and get his hands on two broken pieces of rod. He wrapped these with a piece of cloth to hold his leg stiff. Another piece would serve well as a cane, but as he was searching the wreck, a thick layer of clouds obscured the horizon, makeshift night for the Arctic Circle, and his lighter proved a feeble and insufficient alternative light source. He moved closer to the breached ice wall, which would serve as windbreaker for the night. If he survived the cold, he would be in a better position to start looking for valuables in the morning. A broken wing floater might serve as a makeshift boat to carry him away – possibly ….

  Dropping a handful of papers on the ground, Amundsen sat as close as he could to the wall. It did not feel any colder than the walls of his rooms as a boy back in Borge and far less rough than the wood panelling he had nestled against then. He should not sleep. Without anyone to wake him, slumber in icy conditions might mean he would not ever wake up. Unfortunately, his broken limbs ensured he could not walk, or dance and stamp, or just keep himself busy, as he would normally have done in such circumstances, as he had done in the tremendous ordeal that had been the rescue of 1925. But then they had been a whole team, working night and day to clear a path on the ice so a plane could take off. They had kept moving in sub-freezing conditions and had taken turns to sleep. Yet, lack of food and rest had created this ludicrous hallucination that had brought him back here today. That had preyed on his mind for three years, nearly driving him mad, in the process. Humming, vibrating through his brain, though his bones, a plaintive chant with dark edges, where sacrifice was expected and exacted. He reflected that, in the present case, sacrifice had indeed been performed. Five men had died in the impact and he, himself, wasn’t in too brilliant a shape. His head felt warm, much too warm to be healthy, melting the ice next to him. His body shook slightly, pulsating softly with pain. And a rhythm. Startled, he straightened up, trying to decipher the new vibrations in his body. Yes, something was sending waves through the ice, a dull throbbing like bells calling servants to church. A summons, gathering speed in the gloom. Amundsen’s eyes had become used to the darkness and he could now see some light oozing from the pyramid, dark against dark, and fine pin-points of light dancing in time with the thrumming. Was he hallucinating, again? Maybe the light was an effect of concussion, from the shock?

  Straining to get up, he turned his eyes again to the breach in the wall. The inner volume was luminous! He could clearly see it now, an obviously man-made structure carved with designs he could not quite discern. The pin-points were more active there and their chanting – could it be that they were the source of the chanting? – more vehement, more insidious. He wanted to go inside the pyramid and join them. He could tell they were angry at his delay, but at the same time, his body had frozen, the hair at the back of his neck risen in clear warning. His head felt like a spinning top, tossed between emotions, his teeth chattering and his eyes too-widely opened. He called out, a muffled cry smothered by biting his own tongue.

  The humming had stopped, the lights frozen in their ballet. A second, two, three. And then they rushed to the breach, pushing him aside on their way out. They twirled angrily into the absent night, furious wasps looking for a target, and went straight to the seaplane. Amundsen saw them disappear into the cockpit and immediately heard the metal complain. He felt warmth on his face. His hands touching his cheek felt sticky. Blood? The lights had come so close; could they have cut him? It certainly sounded like they were wreaking havoc in the shattered aircraft, which was whining and moaning against their assault. He dared not get any closer to see what was happening. Not that he needed to. After a few minutes of furious activity, the broken plane lit up in a brief flash and disappeared, shimmering dust falling slowly to the ice where the huge, metal carcass had been moments before. The lights were still there, forming some sort of spiral that shot up straight towards the sky before coming back down just as quickly, zooming past Amundsen into the pyramid. Inside, their dance took on a savage rhythm, a frenzy illuminating the whole structure. The explorer could nearly make out the patterns on the inner building, twirling designs like flowers or tentacles. Or the diaphragm shutter on a camera. Meanwhile the lights seemed ready to swarm again, gathering in a spearhead formation, their buzz strong and urgent, attacking the whole structure in waves. An aperture slowly unfolded on the inner structure, letting darkness seep into the chamber, absorbing the noise and light in slow, oily ripples as Amundsen looked on, frozen into place. Something darker than night moved into the room, advancing in tentacle-like movements from the opening, smothering the lights, one-by-one, slowly coming closer to the breach. Viscous gloom reached out from the crack, feeling its way upward.

  Amundsen felt it brush against its face and flung himself backwards. He fell heavily onto his back, his leg sending agonizing pain through his body. His mind was solely focused on escaping, as fast and as far as he could. Crawling backwards, his eyes fixed on the fissure, he searched for the broken wing-float he had found earlier and pulled aside, finding the structure just as darkness began oozing from the pyramid towards him. Pushing the fragile vessel into the water canal, he pulled himself on board just in time. But he had nothing to paddle with and his hands were of little help in pushing him farther out to sea. Gloom reached the water’s edge and pooled on the surface, rising into a large, murky wave that lapped at the floating shell, seized it and flung it back hard against the wall of the pyramid.

  With his back broken, but still alive, Amundsen looked on as darkness retreated to the inner temple, passing over his supine body. For a moment, he entertained the illusion that he was safe. Crippled and cold, yet saved somehow. Then the pyramid started pulsing into the night, humming once more in a stern rhythm, lighting up once again. Suddenly, it dissolved in a chanting blizzard of light and ice shards, tearing at the feeble night, tearing at him, tearing at the universe, until there was nothing left and everything once again fell silent.

  Nathalie Boisard-Beudin is a middle-aged French woman living in Rome, Italy. She has more hobbies than spare time, alas – reading, cooking, writing, painting, and photography – so hopes that her technical colleagues at the European Space Agency will soon come up with a solution to that problem by stretching the fabric of time. Either that or send her up to write about the travels and trials of the International Space Station, the way this was done for the exploratory missions of old. Clearly, the woman is a dreamer.

  The author speaks: Icebergs are mountains created from water that might be as old as the Earth or beyond; who knows what secret of our ancestry they might contain in their folds? Is this what makes the white-and-blue giants creak and moan about like heavy ghosts? On the other hand, on the 18 of June 1928, Antarctic explorer Roald Amundsen disappeared without a trace as he was out on a rescue mission. His body has never been recovered. In such absence blooms a story.

  RED STAR, YELLOW SIGN

  Leigh Kimmel

  The halls of the Smolny Institute, Leningrad’s Communist Party headquarters, were qui
et at such a late hour. A couple of NKVD guards maintained a bored watch at the security checkpoint. Little challenge to a man determined to avenge his honour upon that cuckold, the City’s mayor.

  The sound of footsteps brought Leonid Nikolaev to full alertness. Yes, here was the man who’d made free with his wife, walking down the corridor like he had a right to everything he set his sloe eyes upon. Damnation, but the memory still stung, the humiliation of being mocked by colleagues as the rumours spread about how eagerly Milda had spread her thighs –

  Nikolaev’s breath became rapid and his vision blurred. His skin crawled with filth and, although he tried to tell himself it was just because he hadn’t been able to afford to visit the bathhouse in weeks, he knew he was just whistling in the dark.

  No time for distractions. Nikolaev tightened his grip on the pistol concealed in his briefcase. The cold metal focused his thoughts. He shut out memories of strange symbols and stranger creatures, of the darkness that had begun calling to him during the impossible brightness of the White Nights six months earlier.

  Mayor Kirov turned the corner, still walking as if he hadn’t a care in the world. Watching the back of his rival’s neck, Nikolaev studied the pink flesh of a well-fed senior Party official. The pistol snapped up, as if of its own volition. Nikolaev hardly felt his own hand squeeze the trigger.

  His clarity shattered, pistol in hand, Nikolaev stared down at the floor. Sergei Kirov, First Secretary of the Leningrad Communist Party, lay sprawled there, a thin line of blood leaking from his mouth.

  “What have I done?” Nikolaev’s voice sounded weak and thin in his ears, and not just from being stunned by the pistol’s report. “Oh, what have I done?”

  One thing he knew for certain: his life wouldn’t be worth a plugged kopek when the NKVD found him and nobody was going to believe he’d done it solely out of sexual jealousy. He wasn’t even sure he believed it himself.

  What to do now? If he was going to end up dead anyway, wouldn’t it be better to take his own life than wait for the non-existent mercies of the NKVD? Within his mind echoed memories of voices chanting in languages he’d never learned, yet understood perfectly, telling of the joys of offering oneself and one’s victim up to Their Supremacies the Great Old Ones in an act of murder-suicide.

  Nikolaev put his pistol to his own head, but before he could complete the deed, an object struck his hand and the shot went awry. Drained, physically and emotionally, Nikolaev sank bonelessly to the floor beside Kirov.

  To: Leningrad Operational Center

  From: R’lyeh

  Date: December 1, 1934

  Their Supremacies wish to remind their operatives of the absolute necessity of maintaining plausible deniability at all times. Although the growing popularity and evident ability of the Kirov human posed a long-term threat to the utility of Communism as a self-limiting tyranny to socially neuter the humans and render them harmless to the purposes of the Great Old Ones, in the short term, the careless manner in which its elimination was achieved poses a far greater risk that our activities will be exposed.

  The hastily-organized trip from Moscow to Leningrad had been particularly unpleasant. As a responsible Party and government officer, Nikolai Yezhov was familiar with dropping everything to respond to a crisis.

  Never had he made such a trip while grieving, furious and helpless over the murder of an admired colleague. It would’ve been an exaggeration to call Sergei Kirov a friend – the gap in their respective ages and backgrounds was simply too great to bridge at that level. But in the time that they’d worked together in the Central Committee, Yezhov had come to deeply respect Kirov. Cheerful and unassuming, the older man had never looked down upon Yezhov for his short stature or meager education, but had treated him as a comrade in every way.

  And now Kirov lay dead, gunned down from behind. When the news reached Moscow, Stalin had wasted no time in calling his key staffers together for an emergency meeting. And when Stalin called, you came, even if you were just sitting down for supper with your family.

  Now here Yezhov and his colleagues were in Leningrad, packed into Kirov’s office, which Stalin had made his emergency headquarters. The fury fairly rolled off Stalin in waves as he cursed the city’s NKVD chief for failing to protect Kirov, the first and finest of the Leader’s friends. Never mind that Russian was not Stalin’s native language; he showed a fine and subtle mastery of the exquisite art of Russian malediction.

  And now, with a wave of Stalin’s hand, the disgraced city chief was dismissed. His colleagues didn’t even watch as he slunk away. They’d already brought the assassin forward.

  The man they brought in hardly looked like a dangerous killer. Scarcely taller than Yezhov himself, Nikolaev more closely resembled a homeless person swept up from the gutter by the militsia for parasitism. Sunken eyes stared from an ashen, haggard face. When the city chiefs released his arms, he collapsed on his knees. Blinking like a sunstruck owl, the man stared up at Stalin.

  “Wh-who are you?”

  Stalin scowled. Around the room, Party officials tensed, expecting an explosion of outrage. Yezhov recalled his own first meeting with the Leader. Then he realized that Nikolaev, as a lowly functionary, would never have seen the pockmarked Georgian behind Stalin’s official image.

  Yezhov grabbed Stalin’s portrait from the wall and held it before Nikolaev. “This is Comrade Stalin. He has come to investigate what has happened to Comrade Kirov.”

  Nikolaev’s wailed tearfully, “What have I done? What have I done?”

  Stalin leaned forward, his fierce hazel eyes fixing Nikolaev like those of a hunting tiger. “I am told that you fired the shot which killed Kirov.”

  Nikolaev gulped audibly and nodded, his lips trembling too much to form words.

  However, his visible distress didn’t keep Stalin from pressing the issue. “So, why did you do it?”

  Nikolaev murmured, “They needed it removed.” Then he suddenly shook his head as if clearing it and spoke again, louder. “What is a man supposed to do when another man puts the horns on him?”

  The second was a line fairly guaranteed to prick Stalin’s Georgian sense of familial honour. It might have actually worked, except that Stalin’s hearing was sharp enough to pick up that first, half-mumbled reply.

  “Who needed what ‘removed’?” Stalin grasped Nikolaev by the front of his threadbare shirt, pulled him up to better examine him. “Was this someone in the Party, perhaps a Trotskyite or a Zinovievite mole, working on orders to do the Party harm?”

  Yezhov braced for an outburst of Stalin’s notorious anti-Semitism. Having a Jewish wife had made Yezhov acutely aware of that particular hot button of Stalin’s.

  But no, Stalin didn’t get a chance, for Nikolaev pointed directly at Leningrad’s deputy NKVD chief. “Why are you asking me? Ask him.”

  Stalin’s swarthy features darkened as the blood went to his face. “Don’t get smart with me, you worthless little pipsqueak. Now, tell me who put you up to this crime.”

  Nikolaev nodded slowly, as if unable to keep his head upright. “You yourself said –”

  Stalin slapped Nikolaev across the mouth, so hard the little wretch went sprawling across the floor. “Get him out of here, now.”

  The Chekists were particularly rough in dragging Nikolaev away. One of them even landed him a few blows on particularly painful places. Yet, he remained oddly insensate, as if something were not connecting properly within his mind.

  Yezhov looked around at the other senior Party officials who filled the room. Had any of them noticed the peculiarity of the assassin’s behavior, the sense that he was not only not in his right mind, but that his mind might well have been tampered with in some way?

  But Stalin was already calling for Nikolaev’s wife to be brought in. Interrupting the Leader was not exactly conducive to good health and long life.

  To: R’lyeh

  From: Leningrad Operational Center

  Date: December 2, 1934

&nbs
p; May we remind Their Supremacies that we took the normal precautions of implanting our tool with a compulsion that would ensure its self-destruction when it completed its assignment? We could not have foreseen that this compulsion would have been interrupted in its execution.

  However, it appears that we will be able to divert attention to local divisions within the humans. The Stalin human is particularly obsessed with personal enmities and will pursue them beyond all rational limits. With proper direction, we will be able to use it to prune out certain problematic elements in the organization.

  Even through a crackly telephone line, there was something wonderful about hearing, “I love you, Papa,” in the soft lisp of a child’s still-growing mouth. Yezhov smiled, imagining he could smell his daughter’s milk-scented hair. “I love you too, Natashenka.”

  His attention interrupted, Yezhov looked up to see Agranov just outside the office door. Better get off the phone.

  Agranov wasn’t quite frowning, but it was hard to miss the tightness at the corners of his lips as he said, “A little personal conversation, Comrade Yezhov?”

  Yezhov smiled, although he doubted it really covered his embarrassment at having been found out. “I suppose it could be considered an abuse of government resources, but our daughter’s just settling in –”

  “I hadn’t heard Yevgenia Solomonovna was expecting –”

  Yezhov’s cheeks burned. “She wasn’t. She didn’t want her literary salon interrupted, so I took her to one of the orphanages around Moscow and we adopted a little girl.” He clamped down on the rush of words, annoyed that he’d let himself get caught by surprise. It wouldn’t do at all to blurt out how he’d picked that particular orphanage because a girlfriend of his had left a baby there a few years earlier and his wife’s desire for a child provided perfect cover to retrieve his own. Though he pointedly ignored how often Yevgenia’s literary lion-hunting ended in her bed, Yezhov avoided drawing attention to his own affairs.