Shakespeare Vs Cthulhu

by Jonathan Green

  “Richard could ask me to do what others could not. I worked in the shadows, as befits a creature of the night.”

  15th August, 1483 – The White Tower, London

  I left the shadows of the garden and felt those within the tower envelop me. I greeted Constable Brackenbury with a feeling of déjà vu. Five years previously I arrived here with murderous intent and royal sanction. Then, the snow and frost of that January night bit hard and deep but I did not need the heat of the cressets and torches within the bloody tower to warm me. I had engaged upon murder with alacrity and energy, joyful in my purpose. To secure the crown by despatching the dissembling Duke of Clarence, a man who had proven his unworthiness at Bosworth – even then, King Edward had kept him in his battle because he could not trust his eldest son. To drown him in the Malmsey butt was a novel experience for me; my despatch of the realm’s foes had been in combat, with steel and wood, sword and armour. This was assassination, a cowardly way of ending a man’s life, but the ends justified the means.

  I had no such certainty this night. The golden twilight, the dimming of a glorious summer sun, gave way to a darkness blacker than that winter night. My heart was heavy, my conscience bare.

  Children. A threat to the crown? Their bastardy was obvious now the dead King Edward IV’s illegitimacy had been proven, but that was not enough for my master.

  I would have abandoned my mission, defied the Lord Protector. No ends could justify the murder of children. The entreaty that these two were enemies of the kingdom was a feeble lie and only a monster would follow it through.

  And yet, were these not monsters? Margaret’s reckless invocation to Azathoth had gone far beyond eclipsing the three suns of York. Perhaps it would make no difference. Perhaps it would be a mere stay of execution for the realm, which was surely cursed when that sunburst fell upon earthly ground at Tewkesbury.

  Brackenbury had aged greatly since I had seen him; the custodianship of the heirs to the throne had placed great worry upon him. He knew the threat to them would come from within the bloodline, not via a foreign enemy.

  “Sir James,” he said gruffly. He cast a cursory eye over the commission I handed him and grimaced. “Once more I am commanded to give you the keys for a night. This time, no names are mentioned. And this time, Dighton does not accompany you; you enter alone.”

  I did not reply. I would damn no other soul than my own, which was already commended to the Dark Ones that hid behind the shining veil. Brackenbury shook his greying head and handed me the keys.

  “I trust your reward will be bountiful for what you are about to do.”

  I did not reply. I weighed the black iron keys in my good hand while he departed. They felt so heavy, like shackles to the direst torture chamber in Hell which surely awaited me.

  I ascended the winding stairs slowly to the royal apartments, noting the fine tapestries and ornamentation that failed to disguise the true purpose of these chambers: a prison. A waiting room for death. Yet they were truly innocent, of their purpose in the tower and what awaited them; I heard their boyish laughter and wondered what games they played to occupy themselves.

  The laughter ceased when they heard the key turn in the lock. I swung the door and attempted my most accommodating smile, but I had smiled little since entering Richard’s service, and it must have showed. The golden-haired boys, sitting cross-legged on the hearth rug, took fright at my appearance and jumped to their feet, darting back to the four poster bed. Taking fright like tiny wrens when a mighty eagle sweeps upon them…

  The Soaring Eagle of Tewkesbury. A murderer of wrens. I am certain my attempt at a smile turned even deeper into a rictus.

  “Be at ease, Royal Highnesses.” I walked into the chamber, my hands raised in supplication. “I come with gifts from your uncle.”

  They didn’t reply. The younger prince, Richard, buried his head in his brother’s chest. Edward V regarded me haughtily, confidence renewed by his role as protector of his brother.

  “Uncle Richard has not visited us since we came. Are his duties so onerous that he cannot visit his nephews?”

  I shook my head. “The Lord Protector is securing your inheritance from the enemies who wish you dead, Your Highness. His absence from you grieves him most painfully, but his duty to your throne must needs take preference.”

  Self-hatred at my lies speared me, and I averted my eyes. The fire burned deeply and welcome, its flames casting illumination on the richly-coloured illustrations of the book they had been studying. I recognised the book, and the inscriptions in the margins. Richard’s handwriting, his own copy of The History of Troy. I knelt down and turned the book, smiling at the page’s contents.

  The passage described the advantages of fighting in the company of friends who share a common purpose despite overwhelming odds, and Richard’s words “note well the fair words” underscored the picture of a mother wren defending its nestlings from a sweeping eagle.

  I stared at the picture, then turned the page. The fate of the wrens was unwritten, but inevitable.

  Unwritten. It must be so for these wrens of York also. Not just their despatch from this world, of which I knew history would judge me, but the means of doing so also.

  May 5th, 1502 – The Garden Tower, London

  More cannot hide his excitement. His eyes glint in the darkening, and sweat beads his forehead. His quill feather flutters; the scratching is clamorous. He is overjoyed to hear the confession at last, to resolve the mystery – and doubtless advance his ascendant star in Tudor’s court.

  He halts when Tyrell describes the means of despatch. He pales, his jaw drops, and his writing hand flies to his gaping mouth in terror.

  I too am filled with horror at Tyrell’s description, and his vivid recall of the horrifying details of the event. So much conjecture and supposition surrounds the fate of the princes, and now Tyrell has confirmed not only that they did indeed meet their end by suffocation but that mankind can resort to such blasphemous treatment of deceased bodies.

  What is worse is that he relates the story with no guilt. A duty to be fulfilled, a job to be done.

  “I was content when I opened their bodies, and saw what lay within. I knew then I was wrong to feel apprehension and pity. These were indeed monsters.”

  More throws his quill to the floor in disgust. “Monsters? You smothered, then butchered, the most replenished sweet work of nature – Man!”

  Tyrell stares at him, with those emotionless, gaping black voids. He indicates the quill on the flagged floor. “Doubtless you will rewrite this, Master More, make it to be a tyrannous and bloody deed. You will emphasise their innocence, perhaps even exchange the book of war for a book of prayers? ‘Twas no piteous massacre – ‘twas extermination.”

  More eyes him balefully, not fearful of Tyrell’s black eyes. “Did you say such when you brought these tidings to your bloody king? Was he as… indifferent to human suffering as you?”

  “I was Knight of the Body. I slept on a pallet outside his bedchamber to guarantee his night’s rest, but he slept little.”

  “Fearful is night to the guilty,” More says, a little smug.

  Tyrell shrugs. “Guilt did not trouble him. His mind had turned in on itself, became consumed with naked ambition. It is ironic that the human qualities he retained were evil ones; he rejoiced in slaughter. Yet it was all planned, all machinery in the engine of the curse.”

  “Sir James, you mentioned the ‘eclipse of the sons of York. The Mother of Ruin.’ Please elaborate.”

  “The eclipse… Think back to the battle at Mortimer’s Cross, when our forces saw three suns rise on the morning of what would be our victory. Edward took it as a sign of God’s favour – three suns rising, like the Holy Trinity, like the three brothers of York. Small wonder we thought God was with the House of York. And Margaret of Anjou was there; she witnessed this also. How long did she study, and what black tomes did she recite, for the right invocation to imitate this celestial phenomenon? To turn our sign
of Holy Favour against us, to curse us with the dying of the sun – by each son of York?

  “At Tewkesbury she realised, too late, that her invocation had worked against her. Two suns of York would fall to darkness, ‘tis true. But the third one became darkness. When I spoke to her, I learned of the folly of those who would summon the power of the Old Ones. I learned that Azathoth is the ultimate source of power in the universe; He cares nothing for human affairs. But His servants do. They hunger for man’s folly to open portals, to enter and feast royally on what we offer…”

  December 21st, 1483 – The River Avon, one mile southwest of Tewkesbury Abbey

  Like me, Margaret was a creature of the shadows, and those of the court believed it was grief and despair that made her turn away from the sun. She looked older, more frail, with each day that had passed since her husband’s and son’s killings. Grief had consumed her and turned her in on herself, changed her from a noble and imperious queen to a twisted and harrowed crone who wandered the stone corridors of the royal palace, muttering curses and strange incantations.

  There was no reason to keep her at court, but the Lord Protector – now King Richard III – would not allow her to return to Burgundy. It was deliberate cruelty to keep the royal widow at the Palace of Westminster, a trophy of war, to remind her of what her House had lost; to make her breathe, smell, taste, experience royal power without holding any. It would drive anyone insane, let alone one who had lost her husband and son to the man who gloried in kingly power.

  That was before Richard’s true madness. Before his body began to decay and the monstrous hump on his back grew to obscene proportions. Before the withering of his sword arm.

  See how I am bewitched. Behold, mine arm is like a blasted sapling withered up. This is that Edward’s wife, that monstrous witch, that by witchcraft thus has marked me.

  “Well met, Sir James. How goes the court since my banishment?”

  My steed hesitated, unwilling to go further, as if he too shared my memory of the sunburst enveloping me on this exact spot, twelve years ago. “Richard has appointed me Captain of Guisnes Castle; I am to leave for Calais this night. I am pleased to leave court – despite your departure, it remains full of womanly cursing. The Duchess of York, and now Lady Anne – mother, and reluctant wife – they all sound just like you. But now there are less ears to hear them. Rivers, Grey, Vaughan. Now Hastings – all despatched.”

  “By your hand, Sir James.” There was no judgement in her voice, nor even question. A statement of fact.

  I nodded. “Grey’s last words were ‘Now Margaret’s curse is fallen upon our heads, for standing by when Richard stabbed her son’.”

  She laughed at that. “My curse? Ah, if only it was mine…”

  I dismounted and unhitched the leather sack from the saddle’s pommel, grimacing at the feel of the things sloshing within. I walked through the frozen leaf litter, my boots crunching. Margaret stood in the very spot where her son Edward had been dispatched. The dying winter sun turned the snowbound tree branches to bloodstained limbs, and as it sank further it illumined her dress and furs. The threadbare, faded red brocade and silk now turned shades of bright scarlet and bloody crimson. No scarf or headdress shielded her head from the winter cold. Her breath did not mist in the evening air.

  I noticed soil on her fingers, which were curled inwards like claws. I wondered what she had been digging. Or burying…

  Margaret cocked her head at my arm, still hidden within my riding cloak. “And how does your arm fare, Sir James?”

  The ride from London had been hard, every frozen byway and snowbound track an obstacle. My left arm was now unable to grip anything, and I shuddered at how much it resembled the king’s.

  Bound in chains of loyalty, forged by the light from the grove, my dear Tyrell. My servant and brother in darkness.

  Queen Margaret smiled at precisely the same moment the thought crossed my mind. Here we stood, in the same grove where the light had shone in awful splendour to herald the end of the Lancaster line and the ascension of York. Where my hand had touched Richard’s. A joint withering, an unmistakable sign that Richard and I were bound in bloody destiny. Damned.

  “It has worsened since the princes’ departure, my lady. Each day that passes, it withers more.”

  She nodded thoughtfully, no satisfaction or regret on her pursed features. “And none in the court suspect?”

  “No, my lady. Only Richard and you know.”

  “Richard… And his crookback grows ever worse?”

  “Aye, my lady. He is near bent to the ground when he rises; I do swear the hump has doubled in size since I saw him last. And…”

  “It does move of its own volition, does it not?”

  I shuddered, and knew it was not from the cold.

  “Many times have I watched night turn to dawn with him in my arms, weeping with terror. I cannot comfort him… and I feel the life within his crookback. It does terrify me.”

  “Well it may, Sir James. Well it may.” She turned and stared through the skeletal trees, where the sun touched the spires of Tewkesbury Abbey and turned them bronze and honeyed gold. There was a wistful look on her face. “I have not dared set foot on that holy ground since the death of my husband. I have… profaned it. Two suns of York have been eclipsed, yet the third remains. And through him the whole world will face eternal darkness, scorned forever by the real sun.”

  There was a similarity in this meeting to our first. In the royal chapel, following her crazed wanderings – not on the Lord Protector’s orders, but out of my own curiosity – when she believed she was alone, and I heard her new incantation.

  No mere curse this one. The words were of an unintelligible and hateful language – one that sounded as though inscribed by daemons in a corner of Hell even Satan dared not tread. Only the recollection of having heard them before made me pause.

  Before they had been uttered by an eighteen-year-old duke. Watching her mouth twist and sweat pour down her cheeks, her spindle arms shaking as though fighting the invisible bars of some unearthly prison, the tone of beseeching and the wail of despair that whatever entity she prayed to would not listen, did not even care for her pain, made me realise what had happened in the grove and then at the abbey of Tewkesbury.

  Richard, Duke of Gloucester, had not made this prayer willingly, or indeed knowingly. The unholy hymn had been spoken through him, by a female enemy who had called upon a darker, more ancient adversary to destroy the House of York.

  I had never seen such despair on a woman’s face before. This was the expression of one who, with the murder of her husband and son, surely had nothing to lose. And yet the grief on her face proved otherwise. Grief for what was to befall mankind, for the curse she had uttered with supernatural agency, defiling the House of God with invocations to an ancient evil to eclipse the three suns of York.

  I had gone to her, allowed her to weep on my shoulder. Allowed her to tell me what she had done, what she had damned humanity to in her impetuous quest to destroy York by methods otherworldly and profane.

  I prayed for the Sun of York to dim, for night to reign over its royal blood, Sir James. I embedded the Shining Splendour of Azathoth upon Our Lord’s Passion and thus created that Sunburst at Tewkesbury. I broke the Seal, rendered the Veil, and opened the world to darkness. Earth gapes, Hell burns, fiends roar, and saints can no longer pray.

  I would not have believed her, had she not shown me the light once more, birthed in that terrible dark jewel within the processional cross she had prayed upon at Tewkesbury, And then, when my arm began to wither, listened to what had to be done to prevent the curse spreading to all humanity.

  Now I followed her gaze toward the shining abbey, resplendent in the dying winter sun, and the nagging, ever-present pain in my withered arm reminded me that I too am shunned by Grace. The glass windows in the nave turned scarlet; the river became a burnished lake of bronze. I remembered the slaughter of the Lancastrian men when they sought sanctuary th
ere, and it seemed their blood had returned to ooze through the stones to remind me. Sacrilegious slaughter, and no holy sanctuary for me now.

  The sun dipped below the horizon; the remnants of sunlight died, and the ancient wood consumed us with darkness. My horse whinnied in fear, and I heard scrabbling and scratching noises from behind. I turned, my heart pounding.

  There was nothing to see in the dark, but I was aware of the presence. Something that stalked on hooves…

  “You have the offering? Open it; place it by my feet.”

  I did as I was bid. I saw the freshly-churned soil, not more than a hand-span in length, and knew where she had placed the Sunburst. I imagined traces of that infernal light glowed through the soil.

  And now, to reseal the portal…

  The lungs and hearts were shrivelled, lifeless lumps of tissue that were even smaller since the night I had taken them from the young princes. The bowels were like dried bladderwrack, brown and leathery and bulbous. I had accidentally punctured one of the polyps during the drying ritual, and the sight of the embryonic monster within caused me to jump from the fire in terror.

  The blood had been carefully drained from the bodies while on board ship to Flanders; not a single knife entry was made until the ground of England gave way to sea. Only then were the bodies opened, the blood drained into a Malmsey butt; the flesh parted from bone and placed within a second butt with the removed skins. The first butt consigned to the Black Deeps at the mouth of the Thames, under the gibbous moon and the recitation of the verse Margaret had ordered me to memorise.

  The life-fluid was for the Lord Father of Deep Ones, that He may be content with the children’s blood sanctified by Azathoth’s Shining Splendour and forebear from raising the levels of his watery realm to engulf England.

  Everything else was to be taken to the site which birthed the Shining Splendour of Azathoth. The bodily remains of the two children lay like rags, and broken tree branches, and desiccated seaweed under the moonlight. I stood, retreated on trembling legs while Margaret advanced with her powder. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes and visibly willed herself to recite the words that so haunted me.