Shakespeare Vs Cthulhu

by Jonathan Green

  With thanks given and courtesies observed they took their leave; only Will once more addressed their benefactor: ‘That was you, was it not? On our way here. The hare, the hound, the hog... the prods and pinching.’

  Puck grinned. ‘A treasure I was to deliver, however necessary; I but took my taxes where I could in fair fee. Fare thee well, noble Prosperus, Faustus Rakehell, Groatsworth and upstart Crow; I would not follow if e’en now I could, but go with the good wishes of Summer and fare thee well.’

  And so, some span later, they arrived at an ancient arrangement of stones close to where land fell away ahead (to sea or sky Will could not decide), five pairs, each bearing mad grotesques.

  ‘The Iambic Pentagram,’ said Prosperus, ‘the way to our destination. Take a place between the pillars.

  Perhaps by intuition they took one each, leaving the furthest, that chiselled to relief of the most ungodly figure. A head with eyes, but tentacles where a mouth should be (as in part Will had understood from the creature he’d witness on the heath) and wings as some ascribed to dragons. If Otho had provided their way to these lands, Will feared he knew whose dream they used to traverse onward.

  Come not between the dragon and his wrath, Will thought, looking to the empty sunwards space that now, before Prosperus’ incanting, darkened and etched onward a dismal avenue of dripping stone. He wondered who’d said those words to him and, looking through that portal, found others conjured in his mind:

  And as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name: R’lyeh.

  They looked to one another, in some compact of this hasty fellowship. Then Prosperus led them through and their feet passed from grass to stone of like hue, moist with the same stuff that slicked the walls; the blue sky above had become a howling greyness.

  Before them was a vista of horror, of things beyond their prior knowing or full apprehension, that in itself the only mercy. Even the dark avenues – of dripping stone overlarge to man, mortared by agency and means unknown, and drenched in some unholy ooze – seemed to make mock of Euclid, twisting ahead at angles contrary to sense and senses. And ahead, almost inexorably, lay a stone door set at similar un-angles into the rock beneath.

  But that was the set in this appalling theatre; and now more of the cast of the unfolding tragedy prized themselves from it, from behind rocks and the misery of sky.

  There were monstrous green things with white-bellies, some blasphemy between man and toad though with heads more of fish, necks inflating and obscene gills fanning with guttural breaths. These Deep Ones were both like and unlike the Moon-Beast Will had seen, though its brethren were here also. And then there were things quite departed from human form, if not size; ghastly shades of pink with horrible pairs of limbs and wings as well, their ‘heads’ an abomination of flesh and feelers. And the sky was no more forgiving, with dark-winged shapes flitting back and forth, more this time of man but with terrible barbed tails trailing behind and a seeming absence of a face entirely beneath incurving horns.

  They had been expected after all.

  ‘Hell is empty,’ Marlowe breathed, ‘and all the devils are here.’

  ‘We are undone,’ Will echoed. ‘We are lost.’

  * * *

  Lovecraft’s Labours Won

  Tim Bayley

  The way back was gone, the way forward unimaginable, yet ‘twas the only way that lay open. The things that waited made no move closer, an appalling audience ready to fall upon them should their production of despair be not to their liking. Prosperus went on in vague direction of that terrible door, and the three Englishmen followed his script. The horrors were mostly ahead, some to their sides, when they reached a space amidst the rocks that seemed a stage of sorts.

  They were silent before the expectant viewers, ‘til Prosperus removed the wooden box from his pack, and, holding it in his hands, called, ‘I release you!’

  The lid was flung aside and something rushed out, into the sky and back and around the scene. Creatures became suddenly and forcefully intimate with nearby rocks and stone, otherwise staggering back as some gale blasted past.

  ‘We will deal with them,’ Prosperus declared. ‘Take the Gaunts!’

  Will fancied he heard in the howl of wind such words as ‘broom’ and ‘buttocks’ but was the more attendant on the old man’s directions towards them. ‘To the door, my friends!’

  They plunged on unguided into black arcades of horror that none of them had ever trod before, heading presently to the enormous gate, likewise sculpted to that obscene meeting of man, dragon and octopus.

  Marlowe... Faustus led, stabbing and slashing at those creatures already in their path or that came into it, Crow and Groatsworth loosely beside him, doing likewise. Will had some sense of the dark creatures above being dragged from their flight and out of sight.

  ‘I had hoped we might not be anticipated,’ said Prosperus.

  ‘You brought your familiar after all?’ Marlowe asked.

  ‘Concealed in a vessel of cloven pine, as once he was bound by Sycorax, and so invisible to them. It was in case the worst came to pass and best I didn’t share. He will take care of the Night Gaunts – they are powerful but ill-inclined to water, over which now he drags them. Come, the door is not far.’

  After this brief respite they dashed on again. Fish-headed devils came at them now, faster than the Moon-Beasts, and the trio cut away at them as Prosperus muttered some similar incantation to that which had brought them to this terrible place. Ahead, from the door, sounded the terrible grind of stone on stone but only momentarily. Moreover while it looked to be ahead, it then seemed more to be beneath as they approached, more a trap-door.

  ‘I have opened it but a fraction,’ said Prosperus, ‘enough to enter and then to best defend. Onward.’

  More Deep Ones leapt on their approach from flanking rocks. Will caught one at the point of his sword, plunged it deeper. Groatsworth had been surprised but wrestled his off, pressing forth his point through its gills, and Faustus had gutted one, now going to Prosperus’ aid and hacking the life from that monster that had grappled him to the ground.

  ‘Excellent work, Marlowe,’ Groatsworth approved.

  ‘Not here!’ Prosperus exclaimed. ‘None of those names in this place!’

  Helped in rising by Faustus, Prosperus led them on. Faustus patted his comrade Groatsworth on the shoulder, then joined Prosperus. Will and Groatsworth went after to the base of that terrible panel.

  They were through. And, as Prosperus had said, there was room enough for one man apiece to enter. But ahead, through that crack, spilled a stench of unholy dankness, and a blackness so absent of light it seemed to have substance, a dragon womb of Stygian darkness...

  ‘As black as the badge of hell’, quoth Will aloud, as Prosperus entered it. ‘The hue of dungeons and the school of night.’

  ‘And crows,’ said Groatsworth. Will led them in.

  ‘This is not normal darkness,’ said Prosperus ahead, ‘but neither is this normal light.’

  A glow began within the blackness, as if pressing it aside, expanding in pulsing waves ‘til the vast space became a dim lit room of grossly inhuman proportions. Prosperus set the lamp upon the floor.

  ‘Something I acquired during my time in Araby,’ he said as they gawped at the cyclopean architecture.

  They were, of course, far closer to the near side of the cavern, and could make out the mottling of further reliefs ascending those walls into unseen vaults, reliefs that must be repeated throughout this profane enclosure. But some way in, perhaps the middle, projected an oblong of stone; even could he have seen it entire, Will knew those angles would play havoc with his senses.

  And there was some thing on it.

  ‘Ariel... Ariel will keep them occupied. We have some brief respite as I pressed open the door but slightly. I must get up... You must help me get up... You must...’

  Prosperus col
lapsed and only avoided hitting the ground from Will’s intervention. He clutched a wound in his side, gashed against rock or something wielded by the Deep One that had pounced.

  ‘I am not strong enough. One... one of you must climb up to it. Take this and climb up to it and...’

  Horror formed on Groatsworth’s face, on Faustus’ besides, as Prosperus explained what must be done; Will didn’t doubt it was mirrored upon his.

  ‘I’ll go,’ Will breathed to Prosperus.

  ‘They are in!’ Faustus announced, and there was indeed one of the toad-fish things stepping into the cavern; he ran to it, sword drawn.

  ‘I’ll go, Groatsworth,’ Will said, ‘Help Faustus.’

  The horror turned to gratitude and Groatsworth turned and headed to the fray. Will took what Prosperus had given him, took it and ran as if the world depended on it, for indeed it did. He thought of Anne and of young Susanna, Hamnet and Judith, his wife, his children, his life beyond the theatre. Whatever awaited him above, the terrible thing upon the colossal stone bier, he had to do this, must do this… would do this.

  Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.

  The platform was thrice Will’s height and stepless, but his hands and feet found purchase in the unholy reliefs that blasphemed ‘gainst the stone into which they were chiselled, and much besides. A claw, a wing, a tentacle... It was the tentacle that proved most apt for Will’s purpose (at least he hoped it was a tentacle).

  His fingers met the edge above. Limbs straining he hooked elbows atop, and hefted himself onto the plateau.

  The immensity was, blessedly, simply too large to make full sense of, but, if ‘twas man-shaped as Will took it, those projecting claws at the entrance end of the bier had to mean feet.

  Anne. Susanna. Hamnet. Judith.

  Will headed the other way, grateful for the death-deep slumber of the thing to his left, that he could for now pretend it a recumbent effigy of something beneath and not the entity itself.

  That was wing, that claw, that an arm, a shoulder...

  And Will was at the head, a misshapen globe with, yes, snaking feelers, tentacles, hanging like petrified drool to the platform from where a mouth was meant to be. Will put them from his head as he sought some strategy for scaling that of the creature; he was disturbed in his musings by sounds of the fight beneath and away by the great doorway.

  They were Marlowe’s words but Anne’s voice, speaking them with her arms around their children: Do not falter; I know you, Will, and I know you will not.

  He turned from the insurmountable crown and back to the tentacles, forming – in the way they lay, some kind of curving stairway. Ascending them required that his hands grip the unearthly flesh, clammy despite eons to dry yet rubbery, and the image of his loved ones to press aside the terrible notion of what he was doing. The riser he now climbed seemed impossible and he slipped back, gripping to it for dear life. Were his limbs – were any – even capable of this task?

  ‘Once more unto the breach dear friends!’ Will heard Prosperus call and, in couplets, forced his limbs up again, again, again ‘til he’d reached where a nose should be, a point of relative flatness. And then he was looking, beneath a ridge of brow, at two... eyelids, scaled, rubbery screens, each the size of the Rose Theatre.

  The noise of the fight drew Will’s attention to the fray itself once more; but there in the pit of his vision, he spied, in horror, a twitch in one of those monstrous feelers.

  A tiger’s heart wrapped in a players hide.

  He had to act.

  Will withdrew the package he’d secured for the climb in his shirt, opened it, took its contents into his hands.

  Cthulhu, upon thy eyes I throw all the power this charm doth owe.

  He crushed the purple flower petals over each lid in turn, squeezing the juice thereon to anoint them. And then, then the lids groaned open and awareness burned down at Will like twin suns in an alien sky.

  Whatever now happens, thought Will, I have achieved my task. I love you Anne. I love you Susanna, Hamnet, Judith...

  Love...

  And in that moment, as the Thing took in the mortal form of young William Shakespeare, whatever happened happened, to the ears an indecipherable shrieking of immemorial lunacy as it rose, flinging Will back to land upon the creature’s chest, its belly, again to raised stone... from there to solid ground beneath – and blackness.

  Blackness as black as the badge of hell, the hue of dungeons and the school of night; and crows.

  ‘He lives?’ queried Groatsworth.

  ‘Indeed,’ the old man confirmed, ‘and he has proved our saviour.’

  ‘What was all that?’ Faustus asked.

  ‘Oberon, King of Shadows, once spied the falling shaft of Cupid’s Bow striking a specimen of Love-in-Idleness, leaving the flower replete with the first quality of its namesake. His servant the Goodfellow kept some aside.

  ‘But Faerie remembers distantly the terrible yolk of the Great Old One and would not gladly suffer its return, even at the cost of priceless sport. Or perhaps this was that very jest, writ heavens-large: to imbue so foreign an entity with so alien a passion, a mad doting on that living thing which first it glimpsed upon waking. It is gone now, at least for now, shattered by a madness of its own and, perhaps, taken refuge in the impossible spaces of this unholy acropolis.’

  ‘But what of W... Crow?’ asked Groatsworth.

  ‘Will remember not a thing of this, not with conscious mind; his reward as much as anything. Yet it will remain with him, inspire his art. His works will a bastion build, crafted fictions that will sleep in the minds of men of your England, and neighbours besides, ‘gainst future incursions. And perhaps all this through the dreams of Cthulhu, within which now burns the vision of one William Shakespeare.

  ‘Aye, we may speak his name, even now, even here, for he is protected, and by our very enemy.’

  ‘And us?’

  ‘All in good time, Master Faustus. First we carry our brave companion and complete our journey back to whence we came via yon portal, dream and my Arts. But, regrettably – though no blame should be laid in such circumstances – your name was spoken in this place and will be heard by those degenerate celebrants; there is no escaping them as Groatsworth found.

  ‘Before we come to us, Christopher Marlowe must die.’

  Robert Greene’s death was announced by Gabriel Harvey (who’d go on to feud with Thomas Nashe) as being on the 3rd September 1592, his burial announced by the same as being the day after in the new churchyard near Bedlam. He died of no visible disorder. No record of his burial has been found.

  The official record shows that Christopher Marlowe was killed on the 30th May 1593 by Ingram Frizer while reckoning a bill. Seeing similarities in the works of Shakespeare, some have speculated he did not in fact die, but wrote the plays attributed to his friend, whilst living in obscurity in Italy.

  The year after, Ferdinando Stanley, 5th Earl of Derby, Lord Strange, patron to Robert Greene, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare and others, died in mysterious circumstances, possibly by poison though, like Greene, with of no physical symptoms.

  Around 1594 Will Shakespeare penned Love’s Labours Lost, the story of a noble and three companions who embark on a nigh impossible venture. It enters the record in 1598 along with a play entitled Love’s Labours Wonne - possibly the working name for a known work (Henry VIII was first performed as All is True), possibly a sequel.

  William Shakespeare went on to be lauded as the greatest writer in the English language.

  Toads feature prominently amongst his many scripted insults.

  By and by, in June 1953 at the docks of the Pool of London four men gathered by a ship chartered for Rhode Island.

  ‘Well met,’ said one. ‘How seems the afterlife to you?’

  And with strange aeons e’en death may die, thought he who once went by Marlowe. ‘‘Tis still new but, so far, much as the last. Though I’m th
e happier its end was from brawling at dinner than a surfeit of herring.’

  ‘A worthy retort,’ Greene smiled, ‘I suspect we might find a new theology that works for us both in this.’

  ‘So then,’ said Titus Prosperus, ‘with this place secured against the Great Old One we sail for the New World, to pursue what similar works there we may. Ariel has brought tidings that others may join us later, and I have corresponded with one Master Angell who is more than sympathetic to our purpose and attends us there.

  ‘Though Cthulhu once more deathless sleeps the cult still lives. Who knows the end? Mayhap it will not be us whose works with pen or sword finally lay the matter to rest; perhaps those we bring into our company, or descendents of any.’

  ‘And this Company,’ said Otho, apparelled in his frayed finery, ‘what shall it be called?’

  ‘Our leader remembers being of some rank, and is certainly some dignitary of the weird: Lord Strange’s Men perhaps?’ Marlowe quipped.

  Greene shook his head. ‘The School of Night.’

  ‘As once Will labelled our way ahead; the School of Night then,’ agreed Titus Prosperus. ‘And on the same, it would be becoming and perhaps auspicious if the names we took to the New World took in something of our unknowing saviour Master Shakespeare. I have scribed some thoughts here in case any appeal.’

  It was handed between them, lastly to Otho.

  ‘Groatsworth was given me by Will,’ said Greene. ‘If that still holds, I’ll keep it.’ Prosperus nodded.

  ‘What means this name?’ Otho asked, passing him the parchment.

  ‘Son of Will,’ the old man replied.

  ‘We have been given new life by Will,’ said that dark young man of neurotic and excited aspect, ‘as much as Ariel. It will suffice: Wilcox then.’

  ‘And if there is no name here that rightly sits with you,’ said Titus Prosperus to he who’d been Marlowe, ‘I’ll simply take on Crow as my latter. Perhaps your pamphlet may yet hold some use in this regard?’

  He who was no longer Christopher Marlowe took Crow’s meaning. He’d thought, to leave behind some words of choice for printing – for Will if no other, with, quite counter to Groatsworth, encouragement in his works. Titus had noted that he might do as he wished, but it would not be necessary; on reflection Will, though he knew it not, had quite enough inspiration to be going on with. He’d decided against similar posthumous pamphleteering but had kept it and held it now. He looked to what he’d written.