The Cry of Cthulhu: Formerly: The Alchemist's Notebook

by Byron Craft

  The sergeant said to Clausen, “Why do we play games with this one, Lieutenant? We waste time.”

  “This boy is not like the others. He has lived in seclusion here all his life he is unaware of the events going on about the land. I merely attempt to ease his transition, and you are hindering me.”

  I could see that the lieutenant clearly did not like his companion. He turned to me again.

  “This is a great day for you, young master, for today begins your initiation into manhood.”

  “I want my uncle,” is all I could think to say.

  “You must learn that you cannot be a burden to your uncle forever. Look about you! Can you not see that this place is falling apart, that your uncle is an old man who cannot afford to properly raise a kinder. It is time for you to assume your duties to Deutschland, to your Fuhrer.”

  His voice became less stern, almost gentle. “You will learn to be a man where we are taking you, to be a soldier of Deutschland but you will also have the companionship of other young men like yourself. You would like that, wouldn’t you? You cannot really like living here alone with an old man too busy to concern himself with an energetic lad like yourself, without friends and companions your own age. With all these dusty books,” he added after a pause, surveying the study.

  “I like my home,” I stuttered.

  “And in time, you may return here...after you have completed your duties to your country. There is a great rebirth in the land and we need red blooded men like you to help usher in our new age. The whole world is watching us, waiting for us to rescue it from its own disease. This is a sacred duty, which only we of Aryan blood, that blood which flowed through Vikings, can accomplish and it requires unstinting dedication from all of us, even our sons.”

  The study door opened again, and my uncle entered, carrying a satchel. The one called Kessler took up the bag as Lieutenant Clausen took hold of my shoulder, guiding me out of the Schloss. Blinded by tears, I looked over my shoulder to see my uncle weeping silently. It was the last time that I saw him. Thus I entered the youth camps of the National Socialist Party.

  The physical world can be cruel but the indifferent cruelty of nature cannot begin to compare to the viciousness of those I encountered during my indoctrination at the youth camp. This was among the many lessons I learned while becoming an officer of Deutschland. And learned very quickly; quickly ascending the military ranks at a pace far beyond my peers. Because of this, and because of my naiveté of social mores and standards, I became the object of constant harassment by my fellow students. I learned to endure it. Those who tormented me too often, however, soon learned that I was not one who could safely be toyed with. Of those occasions I prefer to say nothing.

  On the other hand, I came to love the system the National Socialist Party had to offer. It was a well oiled machine made efficient by the supreme race that maintained it. It was a system that would make all the other countries of the world march to the step of the New Order or be crushed under its boot.

  Upon reaching adulthood, my enthusiasm for the party had awarded me the title of lieutenant and I graduated from the youth corps with honors, for I was the youngest lieutenant in my camp. From there it was a simple matter to rise even higher in the Wehrmacht, eventually being promoted to colonel.

  The elevation of my status was very important to me in this stage of my life, for rank gave me the power I was taught to desire above all else. Rank also brought to me something that I discovered I did not want...responsibility. I still sought solitude from others but it became impossible to attain as I shouldered the burden of more and greater duties. My first major command came at age 19, when the first Blitzkrieg was executed against Poland; the Third Reich had begun its glorious march that unfortunately lasted only some fifteen hundred days from the first sound of gunfire.

  Fighting in the Polish Territory was my first battle towards expanding Deutschland’s borders but the last battle for me was fought almost seven years later on that tract of land in the Schwarzwald which was once my home. I say once, for shortly after I left Schloss Todesfall, my uncle had died and the estate had been expropriated to pay for back taxes.

  It was black April. It was 1945. In every major town, air-raid sirens wailed incessantly. The armies of the Third Reich were collapsing on all fronts by then. Berlin would soon fall, a city of raging fires and death everywhere and I had been assigned to establish a field command in our old family Schloss, which, despite the fact that it was owned now by the state, remained empty, a neglected skeleton of its former self. The library, to my disappointment was in ruin, the shelves were almost bare of books and the roof had acquired a small hole which allowed the rain to pour in, ruining the fine thick carpeting and the hardwood floor. Reluctantly we made the schloss our base of operations with small hopes of preparing a counter defense against the approaching Allied Forces. A recrimination born in Hell, for we were under manned, under fed and ill equipped.

  Blood lust is a phrase that has become shop soiled. It wasn’t visible on the tired, hungry faces of my men to begin with but sitting, waiting in the long hours for something to happen changes a man. Your closest friend is a gun barrel, warm in the sun of the afternoon and icy cold by night. The thoughts of self preservation, kill or be killed, became dominant. Even human compassion flies away with the wind, as I learned the first evening of my return to the schloss.

  My officers and I were examining a map of the hollow by candlelight inside the moldy study. So impoverished were we at this final stage of the war that we had not even the luxury of a portable generator to provide electric lights to prepare our battle plans, when we heard a scream from outside. I drew my sidearm, and ran out to find a half a dozen of my men arrayed in a circle. In their midst with clothing disheveled and torn, was a middle aged woman being pushed about and fondled roughly. I fired my Luger into the air.

  The men’s laughing and jeering stopped.

  “How dare you,” I roared, feeling the muscles of my face contorting in knots of rage, “are you soldiers or beasts?”

  “She’s just a Jew, Colonel,” said one of the woman’s tormentors. “And, probably a thief as well. We found her on the estate grounds.”

  “There’s nothing here to steal,” I snapped, “and I seriously doubt if there are any free Jews walking Deutschland now. And even if she is, she is still a woman, to be treated with respect.”

  There was some barely audible grumbling, the beasts were being thwarted from enjoying their prey, literally having it snatched from their jaws, and I wondered for a moment if they were actually considering turning on their commanding officer. One of my officers whispered in my ear. “It’s been a long war, Colonel, the men are demoralized, tired and hungry, and we cannot afford even a single desertion.”

  I looked at the terrorized woman, who gazed at me for mercy. “We are already as good as beaten,” I said in a low voice. “Take her then, but away from here, we have plans to make and I don’t wish to be interrupted.”

  I re-entered the schloss, hating myself as the woman’s cries receded into the woods.

  “Be sure they are ready by 0600 hours,” I said tersely to a lieutenant as we returned to study the map.

  That night was the eve of days of battle to come, days of attack and counter attack that began with a sweeping to and fro across my beloved hollow that now had become an insane chessboard littered with the battered bodies and machinery of both German and Allied forces. By the end of the week, the Allies overran us. What was left of my regiment had fled or surrendered.

  I and a few of my officers avoided capture, hiding in the sub-cellar beneath the schloss while the Allies moved on.

  A day later, we stole from our hiding place and left the estate. The pines and earth of the hollow were scarred by artillery fire and stained with blood of both armies, their bodies scattered across the grounds like so much refuse. We slowly made our way through the forest to a field hospital outside of Stuttgart that had once been a schoolhouse. Later, I le
arned that I had been in a state of shock and the march had actually taken us over two weeks to complete, hiding at times in the woods from Allied troop movements. The trek had seemed like no more than a few days, and I remember little. It was May 2nd, 1945. Tired of the years of fighting by then, I was no less surprised and pleased to learn that the war had ended.

  In the bed next to mine was an infantryman who had lost both arms at the shoulders from a mortar bombardment. Incredibly, this man was ecstatically happy. When queried, he replied, “I just received the news. Hitler has killed himself and the Devil has departed with him! Germany is free of the evil at last!”

  I didn’t have the heart to disillusion the poor deceived soul. Many of us who labored in the rarified circles of the military knew the truth. We had been betrayed through the treachery of morally bankrupt leaders. The Jews would now succeed. Everything that our beloved Deutschland stood for would be changed...forever. That truly was the evil!

  Ever since my stay in the hospital outside Stuttgart I have been possessed with a drive to explore that truth. As I lay there, recovering, the words of the infantryman kept ringing in my mind. I saw the horrors around me in the tiny hospital, men dying and mutilated from the war, and I kept wondering if this had to be. Why didn’t we have control over our fate? I couldn’t bring myself to believe that men were created to serve unseen gods and grovel like slaves their entire lives on our world? We were the master race. We should have been the masters of our destiny, not the despoilers of it.

  In my depressed state, I reflected upon my childhood years. The Todesfall family had its own belief, a sort of religion. My uncle had alluded to it several times as the truth of truths. He called it the Tanistry and I was to learn of its ways when reaching manhood. That catechism never came to pass, because I was taken from him at an early age. I have always been resentful toward those two Nazi officers that took me to the youth camp for that loss.

  And there was something else, a passage I had read in my youth that kept flowing in and out of my thoughts. It was something I had read, a long time ago, in my uncle’s library. The words tempered my spirit and gave me a strength and realization of a new purpose to my life. The words began to become clearer, and they seemed to almost spell out in my mind:

  IN HIS HOUSE IN R’LYETH DEAD CTHULHU WAITS DREAMING.

  It was virtually meaningless at the time but the words had a comforting affect on me. I believed it to be a fragment of a much longer work out of something I had once read, possibly from a poem wherein the next line stood on the clouded edge of obscurity from my memory.

  “If only I could remember the other words,” I kept thinking, “there would be an answer.”

  Although my purpose, perhaps I should say, my fate remained obscure, my soul was reborn in the knowledge that I had to examine the old books and the scrolls that once graced my uncle’s library, or at least ones like them. That driving curiosity eventually became a quest which took me to countless libraries across Europe.

  Fearing the tribunal in Nuremburg, I assumed a new identity and Heinrich Todesfall slipped into obscurity for a while. It was not until much later that I realized that I was not on their wanted list. I knew Goering; I knew Canaris, Heydrich, even Eichmann. I knew them all. All of them either committed suicide or were tracked down one by one and executed but not me. I had not spent my time in service eliminating the Jews so that after the war I would be tracked down like a criminal. No one wanted me. I was not, as the Americans say, “newsworthy.”

  Only a few months after leaving the army I left Deutschland under secrecy and journeyed to London where I secured quarters on Great Russell Street. There I stayed, shunning all human contact, while I examined the arcane documents housed in the British Museum. Later, I made several trips to Paris seeking further material in the Bibliotheque Nationale.

  I spent a short time in Prague under the disguise of a Russian geology student then carried the investigation to Klausenburg in Romania where, after three months, I returned to the fatherland, residing in Neustadt for six months until moving on to Austria. My studies awarded me a professorship at a university in Austria which served to supplement my dwindling monetary reserves and allowed me to amass enough money to buy back my ancestral home. The longing for the return to my childhood years of solitude and security had little bearing on the reasons for the purchase of the property. Rather, I was both elated and overcome by the paradox of the situation I found myself in at the time. It took several years to acquire the money to buy back the schloss and within that time I made one of the three important discoveries I was destined to make in my life. While in Austria I came upon a rare find, a handwritten, Latin translation of the Necronomicon. The ancient book had been sent to me by a fellow researcher from America who had recently taken a teaching position at the University of Heidelberg. I do not know how he came upon this book, but it was sent to me with only a hand scrawled note proclaiming that I should be very interested in its contents.

  I remembered such a book as a child in my uncle’s possession. I spent all my free time pouring over the text and it was one evening in my small study at the university that I stumbled upon the location of the gateway. My translation was unmistakable and the more involved I became in my investigations, the more it verified my conclusions.

  It was this place and the mysterious forces of its long, continuous history which had brought me into being and which has now drawn me back to it. This must have been the secret, the “great truth” my uncle would have revealed to me if time had permitted. It was the place of our god, the true god of our fathers. In a way it was the holy ground and I was the heir to its secrets like all the Todesfall’s before me. I was the Tanist.

  Many so called antiquarians had theorized about the gateway’s location, some believing it to be in Malaysia, while one resident professor at the Miskatonic University in America had gone so far as to place it exactly in a group of nineteen islands off the Malabar Coast. A laughable Japanese investigator said it was in Burma, on the Plateau of Leng, guarded for ages by the tcho-tcho people. Another Asian scholar speculated that it was near Africa, just fourteen miles off the Skeleton Coast. But they are all wrong. I alone know the true location of the great dimensional prison where the Old One has been forced to dwell and I have located that dimensional gateway known to some as the realm of N’Kai. It is outside of Stuttgart in my beloved mountainous Schwarzwald.

  ***

  Upon acquiring the finances necessary and not wanting much for physical comforts, I retired from the teaching profession and took up residence in the once august estate. The old house was a painful sight to my eyes. The ancient tower of the library had been torn and open to the winds and the central framing of the house was crumbling under the slow yet might pressures of time.

  I boarded up all the openings but one which I left for an entrance and exit. I had need of little money, for the house was paid for and the forests yielded an endless supply of firewood and game. The surrounding vegetations provided many roots and herbs to help sustain me.

  It has been twenty-five years since I regained Schloss Todesfall and in that time I have left my estate only on three occasions. The first was only a week after I settled in at the manor when I made a brief journey to Austria to make arrangements for the transportation of my many books and research notes, as well as the other articles needed to sustain me on my lifelong pursuit.

  My second excursion from my house didn’t come until after five years when I made a long journey by train to the coastal town of Bremerhaven. The trip almost exhausted my savings but the outcome was so important that it outweighed the cost.

  In Bremerhaven I was to meet with a sailor who hailed from the New England port town of Innsmouth in America. I met the man outside his dingy hotel on the waterfront. He was a strange person and from the way that he stood and carried himself I thought he must have been deformed. He couldn’t have been too much over five feet in height when standing erect, but of this I cannot be certain because he
always stood slightly bent over and stooped shouldered. He spoke to me with a jerking, blubbering voice. Although I found him to be revolting, I pressed on in my objective.

  I had, by that time, corresponded heavily with the Esoteric Order of Dagon, an organization in America that conducted research similar to my own. I had been assured through one of these correspondences that this man possessed one of the five missing Dead Sea Scrolls and this particularly rare find could possibly be the key to unlocking the gateway.

  We went inside a bar next to the hotel to negotiate over some schnapps. The establishment was dark and full of assorted groups of sinister looking figures. Many of their features were lost to me in the dim light and smoke. The noise of laughing and shouting was grating on my nerves. After five years of solitude in the Schwarzwald, a crowded barroom was like visiting hell to me and if my quest had been of any minor significance I surely would have stood up and left the premises.

  Two prostitutes found their way to our table and began to solicit our favors but I shook them off. They sneered at me and turned their attention to my companion. One of the girls looked down at him and he turned his head so she could make out his features.

  “Do you not want my patronage?” he said with a devilish grin, “I am sure you would find me unlike any other you have known.”

  She gave a little shudder and then told her friend to quickly find other customers.

  The whore had been correct in finding my associate’s features to be disturbing. His bulging eyes would almost glow in the dim light of the bar and at one particularly heated point in our conversation I thought that they would fly from their sockets. His lips were thin and his face was a very pale grey color and his skin was loose and flabby.