Worlds of Cthulhu

by Robert M. Price

  These activities continued on and off for some three years. Only once did something akin to excitement trouble the placid ritual.

  It was on the night of April 28, 1894. The Shepherds of Remembrance, as they were called, were picking their way through the peeling pear birches and black locust trees, when the scoop bonnet (then hopelessly out of fashion) was again recognized.

  Word was spread. Calls were made. Entreaties thrown out into the dark dense woods. They called for Remembrance to take the southern fork of the path to the new covered bridge and forsake the one no longer spanning the treacherous Gorge of Passiquamstook.

  Whether Remembrance (were it indeed she) heard or understood was never learned. She of the scoop bonnet fled.

  The Shepherds of Remembrance saw her no more—though they were not disbanded until 1897.

  Sightings continued into the early 20th century, but less and less were they taken seriously. The turnpikes expanded. Automobiles and trains juggernauted through the Miskatonic Valley, hurling back dread and superstition. There was no place for such naive conceits under the modern sun. And at night, whatever walked the woodlands walked in solitude.

  Then came the surveyors. Officially, they descended upon the Miskatonic region in 1928. In truth, the Massachusetts legislature had been surreptitiously eyeing the area around Foxfield for nearly a generation. Boston needed water. Rivers of it. No discoverable lake or pond could hope to serve the thirsty growing metropolis.

  It was as if a slow doom had descended upon the towns of Aylesbury, Belton, Dunwich and Foxfield. With the dull clap of a gavel, they were consigned to extinction. No earthly petition could save them. No appeal to any power was heard, or if heard, answered.

  All told, it was a gradual process. Homes were razed. Others salvaged. Church bells were relocated to safer steeples, cemeteries emptied of their dead, who were dragged unresisting from eternal rest to unquiet reinterment. Finally, the underbrush was burnt black to form a charcoal lakebed. With the detonation of a single dynamite charge in 1938, the Old Stone Mill at Foxfield was reduced to rubble.

  A greater charge tore apart the Passiquamstook dam. And the sluggish river blundered home, immersing the rural valleys, transforming the high wild hills into low green islands in what was then and remains today the largest man-made body of water on Earth. The new Miskatonic Reservoir spread out like a reflective blue leaf on the green face of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

  All was completed by World War II. Dunwich and the rest were no more, although a portion of Foxfield on high ground and of historical value did happily survive. As for the “dead drowned towns,” they slumbered like modest little outposts of some half-forgotten backwoods Atlantis.

  Remembrance Tyler was seen no more and seldom spoken of after the cool, still waters drank the fields of her time. Travelers came less frequently to the area, for the Aylesbury Pike had been cut in twain. And the familiar path she had betimes been seen to negotiate halted at the impassible gorge, just short of unfamiliar waters.

  As for the uptorn people of Foxfield and environs, some scattered to adjoining hill towns, clinging to their memories, forevermore shut off from the obliterated streets of their youth. Others evacuated the state altogether. It was more than the end of an era. It was the dawning of a new way of life, both fair and foul.

  Some say that the more things change, the more they remain the same. Perhaps. But it would surprise even a lifelong resident of western Massachusetts to learn that the Miskatonic Valley is today wilder and more forested than a century ago. For one hundred years ago much of the Valley had been cleared for pastureland. But farming—particularly the lucrative tobacco plantations with their long red curing barns—ceased to pay. Great tracts of land were ceded to nature. And where man ceased to operate, green saplings sprang up anew.

  Nearly three centuries after the evanishment of Remembrance Tyler, the forests of her time again held sway over the fields where she last walked. And while it is true that the trees which rose up did not take root precisely where former, familiar trunks had once leached sustenance from the dark rocky loam, they were yet trees such as Remembrance might have known—columnar birches, sturdy oaks, gargantuan swamp maples, and brooding hemlocks.

  All but missing were the spectral elms with their serrated, oval-shaped leaves. Successive waves of beetle-borne Dutch elm disease had thinned their once-prosperous ranks to near-extinction. Only Foxfield’s mighty Arcade seemed untouched by the remorseless fungus. This fact was much remarked-upon, but never satisfactorily explained.

  For a single generation these wild woods held unchallenged dominion. Then came the Drought of 1999. A peculiar late Spring heat wave began the arduous drying-out process. June and July sweltered. By the dog days of August, New England lay parched and unslaked. The Miskatonic Reservoir shrank by slow degrees, its depths so depleted that archaeologists from Harvard and Miskatonic Universities came to examine what submarine wonders the impoundment had given up.

  Divers were dispatched into the unusually warm waters. They were astonished at what they discovered. Among the glass milk bottles, rusty buckets, leaning brick chimneys, empty graves and cellar holes of the old dead, drowned towns grew curious new things—things both unexpected and unsuspected.

  Amid the layered silt, the rotted leaves covered by the gray veil of water mold, clear water sponges and freshwater mussels dwelt. Although these were seen as perishable survivals deposited by the once free-flowing Passiquamstook, a tentacle-headed annelid never before found outside Caribbean waters fed with sovereign impunity among the native rainbow trout. None could explain how a tropical ocean worm came to inhabit a man-made New England lake.

  Of less interest was the enfeebled Passiquamstook. It too shrank and shriveled. But few were interested in the sluggish waters that writhed and rilled down the forbidding old gorge to weakly feed the Miskatonic River, which itself had withdrawn from its banks all the way to Arkham and the Atlantic.

  Nor did any notice how at one spot, the torpid waterway had dried to a virtual mire.

  Had there been any survivors from the pioneer generations, they might have recognized that on either side of that baked and cracking mud, the steep sides of Passiquamstook Gorge sloped conveniently, recreating an uncertain shallow passage that had once led down to Old Foxfield. But no one survived of that long-ago time to impart such a useful particle of information.

  The relentless heat of August brought out the crickets in greater numbers than heretofore seen. Fireflies, too, made their appearance in unprecedented multitudes. Naturalists suggested that the Miskatonic Valley had not seen such entomological activity since the days before the white man came to thin the woodland trees and carve roads through the impenetrable forests of old.

  On the evening of October 9, 1999, Massachusetts stretched supine in surrender. The autumnal equinox had failed to chill Fall nights, and a buzzing heat lay over the long length of the Miskatonic River Valley like an oppressive curse.

  On that night, the fat fireflies danced about the seemingly imperishable Arcade of Foxfield like bejeweled bees at a honeycomb. Inasmuch as fireflies do not sting or bother, they were tolerated in spite of their unsettling numbers.

  Foxfield had retired for the night, her lights going out in window panes ancient and modern, when the fireflies began to gather and bestir themselves in a manner unknown to folklore or science.

  As a cloud, the fairy bulbs floated free of the Arcade’s leafy crowns, their greenish incandescence winking in and out by turns. But the greatest portion of them suggested a flowing constant.

  This nebular mass of witch-fire leapt uncannily high into the air for lightning bugs, then swirled toward Passiquamstook Gorge.

  What drew them was never known or recorded. The few witnesses failed to investigate the phenomenon, for the unnatural heat had been observed to affect other species strangely.

  Determinedly, the cloud of fat
starlets entered the primaeval wilderness now drooping from thirst, and sought a primaeval path that still wended through the newer forest amid the ghosts of the old.

  A figure picked its way through these pine-needle-strewn wendings. It was a girl. Head cast down, dejected of posture, her features were enshadowed by a scoop bonnet of a time so far gone it was beyond living memory.

  The figure stopped, catching sight of the greenish-white constellation flecked by a few yellow bulbs. Abruptly changing course, she picked up her skirts and started in that direction.

  At length, she became bewildered and beset by fireflies. They danced playfully around her, like dogs frisking about their mistress. Betimes, they moved west, toward the parched gorge. The scoop-bonneted form followed rapidly, half-anxiously, half-joyfully.

  Here, the path diverged from the old trail of the days of Remembrance Tyler. Here, Remembrance Tyler (if indeed it was she) also diverged. She followed the winged galaxy and it led her onward, ever onward, away from the lost bridge and toward the less-traveled, eroded side of Passiquamstook Gorge.

  Where months before, the sloping path had stopped dead at the water, it now continued along a broad swath of dried mud. And lifting her plain skirts ever higher, Remembrance Tyler (for who else could it be?) stepped across this cracking stretch with all the care of one who fears to lose her footing as much as her way.

  Across the gorge, onto the other side, strode Remembrance Tyler with increasing confidence. Down the leafy hollow to the state road that led west to the edge of town. Then, impelled by a phosphorescent procession of fireflies like a sentient mass with one thought, one will and one mind, she stepped joyously onto the familiar mystical lane of her youth.

  The historic houses of Old Foxfield were much the same. The elms were perhaps stouter and more hoary. Other details were assuredly different. But to her ageless eyes it was in truth the elm-shaded Way she once knew.

  Who can say what is in the mind a child returning home after uncounted years lost? Did Remembrance Tyler remark to herself that the dwellings of her childhood were no longer painted the colors of her memory? Did she marvel at the hard smoothness of the Way, the utter absence of horses?

  Perhaps all of these things passed through her singing mind.

  Perhaps none of them did, so overwhelmed was she by the sight of that familiar two-leaf double doorway, marked by the broken scrolls and fan lights she knew so well.

  The coruscating fireflies guided her to that doorway and, their chore completed, seemed to curtsy, then moved mindfully aside, dispersing like a glowing vapor.

  Remembrance Tyler stepped up to the solid panel, reached for the latch and passed within. Did she notice that her unsubstantial hand melted through the black-painted metal? Did she feel strange as her body flowed into the wood, slipping through it like the gray phantom that she was?

  What was in her mind when she passed beyond all matter, into the darkness on the other side? And who was there to meet her?

  Alas, no one knew, or could ever know. These were affairs of another realm. The realm into which Remembrance Tyler forevermore entered, at long last redeemed.

  This much alone became known: A solitary passerby detected a muffled gasp, followed by a soft sobbing voice heard to choke on an archaic word, “Wellbeloved!”

  Then, silence.

  The fireflies began dying off the next day. So too did the Arcade. For centuries resistant to age and elements and blights, their dark-green leaves began discoloring and wilting. At first, the dull yellows and browns were mistaken for the familiar Autumnal processes of nature. But ere the leaves had begun separating from droopy limbs, it was noticed that these were not the usual seasonal colors. Further, the dead leaves lay about curled and brittle. Strong limbs withered. At the same time, the corky gray bark began sloughing off in alarming patches.

  The rapidity of their decline was noticed within a week. By Winter’s first snow, the greater portion of them had succumbed. By Spring the next, the last survivors had to be cut down.

  Most were sawn into sections before being carted away. It was only then that their true age was at long last revealed. For the annual rings that were created every season were incapable of falsehood. The last surviving Arcade in New England had been unquestionably the very first. How it had come into existence could scarcely be guessed. Withal, fewer and fewer believed the tale of the 300 year old elms of Foxfield as the generations progressed into the 21st century. Over time, the Arcade dissolved into local myth, becoming as much discredited as the fading fable of a lost pioneer girl called Remembrance Tyler.

  As for its sudden decline, this was attributed to the convenient causes of the prolonged drought and Dutch elm disease—although firm evidence of the latter was said to be conspicuously absent.

  Today, as it was in the era before the white man transformed the marshy meadows and hollows and dells of the ultimately untamable Miskatonic Valley, only the silent fireflies continue their life cycle, unbroken and eternal.

  There are those who say the universe is but one being, indivisible, and the differences between what once constituted Remembrance Tyler and the Arcade are ones of perception and personality, not utter substance. If this is so, then Remembrance Tyler has been reabsorbed into the grand matrix of all creation, and all that interlaces and interpenetrates it. And, their final duty done, the mortal elms as well gracefully surrendered to those selfsame natural, but not supernatural, processes.

  For in nature, there are balances and imbalances. Over time (which may not exist as we imagine it does) imbalances foster balances, and thus are natural tapestries and human destinies alike inexorably set aright.

  Who can say whether or not this perfect equipoise is the handiwork of a well-ordered universe, or a loving God?

  Adrian Cole is a veteran and a master of fantastic fiction in England. He has imbibed the spirit and the substance of the pulp classics every bit as fully as the great Richard L. Tierney. At my invitation, Adrian had penned for the short-lived revival of Strange Tales new adventures of Henry Kuttner’s sword-&- sorcery hero Elak of Atlantis. Here is a tale of horrid discovery amid the tombs of Egypt, a river of weird fiction possibilities that never runs dry! Or, to switch similes, Egypt is like an ancient mummy, thought to be dead and helplessly lost in the sands of history, but ever ready to emerge, rotting gauze trailing, to shamble forth in the modern day.

  THE CHAOS BLADE

  Adrian Cole

  The ending of one story is the beginning of another. As day closes, night opens. Life never ceases, it merely pauses. Individuals may perish, whether they be man or galaxy. And certain forces exist outside the cycle of time itself.

  Ludwig Kreigmann, “The Hungry Stars”

  From the oval window of the private hire plane, the old man squinted out at the crystal desert night, where an extravagance of stars winked like jewels. There was no night sky on earth as clear as that of the desert. He tapped the glass, his finger singling out a meteor’s passing, the long tail of white light, sharp as a laser’s beam.

  “So it began,” he said.

  The man wedged into the seat beside him was far younger, in his late twenties. Unlike the older man, whose age had brought with it an air of calmness, a refusal to be hurried, the youth was tense, constantly alert, as if every breath of the night pulsed with threat.

  He saw the swift flash of the meteor, cut off by the dune horizon. He assumed the old man meant life, the world, something like that, and grunted acquiescence. Did this guy ever sleep? They’d been on the plane for hours since quitting Cairo. He swore that the old man’s eyes had never closed.

  “This thing you’ve found. That your people are so anxious for me to see,” the old man said.

  “The sarcophagus?”

  The old man smiled. “Of course, it’s unique and very valuable in itself. I can imagine the authorities of a dozen countries squabbling over it, regard
less of its contents.”

  “You know whose remains are in it?” said the other, his whole manner one of unease, as if in a moment he would be on his feet, fretting to be at the invisible forces to which he seemed to be so sensitive.

  The old man pulled from his breast pocket a creased sheet of vellum. By the dim light of the plane’s interior the writing on it could barely be discerned, written in thick pen strokes. It looked like Arabic, or some variant of it.

  “According to this, yes. Your boss transcribed this from the lid.”

  “He could only understand some of it. Is that why he wanted you here? You can read it? Mannerton said one look at that and you’d come. You’d know who was in the sarcophagus.”

  “Oh, yes,” the old man nodded, a little smugly. “And Mannerton was quite right. I can read this. I believe only a handful of men could.”

  Luke Phillips, the young man, yawned, trying to make himself comfortable in the seat. If it weren’t for the payload, he’d have been long gone from this job. Mannerton, Professor of Antiquities somewhere in England, and a group of keen archaeologists, had been poking around in the western deserts for a year or more. Mannerton, a fastidious and testy eccentric, had hired a dozen or so security guards like Luke to do their fetching and carrying, mainly on site: at least that was what the media were led to believe. There was a hidden agenda, which inevitably meant a whole heap of money on the end of it. The guards were here as protection, a sort of private army. Luke had been taken on because of the time he had spent in the Marines, not because he had graduated in digging holes. He’d had a crash course from Mannerton and his team, like the other guards, just in case he had to talk to the media.

  There had been little to do out in the desert. A few wandering Bedouin, though they showed little interest in the dig. They called it accursed, but Mannerton’s people encouraged them to think it. Occasionally a stuttering chartered plane like this old tub dropped in, spilling out a handful of journalists, eager for any news of discoveries. Mannerton played everything down, his irritable nature as effective at deterring the visitors as the lack of real news. And the stone coffin’s discovery had been kept completely secret, its tomb closed to all but Mannerton and his most trusted team members. Although none of the other guards were taken into confidence, Luke had the privilege, if such it was, of being the principal bodyguard. He’d been given a free rein and a considerable sum to acquire firearms for the guards. These men, like himself, all ex-servicemen, were reliable. No questions. The pay was good. Hell, most of it had already been stashed in their accounts. Luke wondered about that. Surely no university or grant body would fund this. But Mannerton was reputed to own a personal fortune. And this tomb, this lost pharaoh, or whatever it was, must be worth big bucks.