The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction

by Paula Guran

  “And it was then that she gathered an army from the people of Serannian to march against the despotic Qqi d’Tashiva and end his tyranny. Also women and men from Cydathria did she rally to her cause, and from Thran Kled, and the tribes of the Stony Desert and Oonai and even the fearsome shi’earya of the faraway hills of Implan. She took up the weapon her mother and father had used to crush the Old Kingdom of the Ghūl, and on a midsummer’s night she led her army down into Zin and across the Vale of Pnath. There she was joined by another army, rebel ghoul soldiers who followed Richard Pickman, the earthborn ghoul and once-man. Pickman had become an outspoken foe of the King of Bones and Rags and had long since fled Thok to avoid the gallows. The night gaunts and what remained of the race of gugs also followed her when she rode out to meet her father’s army in the abyss below the mountains. The battle was brief, for Elspeth Snow chose to unleash the fires roiling inside the Madonna. When she was done, her field of victory was a scorched plain where stone had been melted to slag, and of the bones of her enemies not even ash remained.”

  The tow-headed girl stopped chewing her lower lip long enough to ask, “And what of the King? Did she slay her father?”

  “Ah, what of the King. This is where our tale begins to fray, for none seem certain precisely what became of him. Sure, some do say that Elspeth slew her father outright. Others claim that he survived and was taken prisoner and locked in the catacombs deep below the throne room where he’d once ruled. Some would have us believe that he was banished simply and unceremoniously to the World Above to live always among human men and women, stripped of all his power. There is, however, another account of his fate and, I believe, one that more likely is nearer the truth of the matter.”

  “And what is that?” asked the boy who’d yawned, but who was now wide awake and who, the peddler suspected, might not sleep at all that night.

  “There is a story I heard the one time I ventured as far as Sinara – I dislike traveling through the Garden Lands, but that one time I did, and, by the way, it is said that soldiers of Sinara were also among those who joined with Elspeth – there is a story I heard there from a very old woman who once had been a priestess in a temple of the Elder Ones. Before that, she’d been a pirate and a smuggler, and before that – well, as I said, she was very old. She’d lived a long and strange life and knew many peculiar tales.

  “We sat together in the back of a tavern on the banks of the River Xari, a tavern that served the wharves and all the shady, disreputable sorts one finds dockside, and she told me another version of the fate of Isaac Glyndwr Snow. She said, between fits of coughing and long drinks of whisky – for she was ill and did, I learned, soon after we spoke succumb to her tubercular sickness – that Elspeth took pity on him, for, at the last she saw before her a father. Sure now, children, I grant this is the oddest of all the twists and turns of my story, but often the course of history is many times odder than any fable or fairy tale.”

  The peddler closed her eyes, taking care here to say only that part fit for the ears of youngsters and, too, only that part she would not in days to come find herself ruing having said. When she opened her eyes, the hearth fire seemed much brighter than it had before, and it ringed the three children like a halo.

  “C’mon then,” said the boy on the tow-headed girl’s right side. “Aunty, what was it the woman in the tavern told you?”

  The girl glared at him. “Don’t be rude, or she might decide not to say.”

  “I ought not,” said the peddler. Her voice was rubbed thin by the telling of so long a tale, and it sounded to her ears weak and worn thin. “Sure, I should keep it between me, myself, and I. And the cats, of course, for cats know all, or so proclaim the wizened priests and priestesses of Ulthar.”

  “Please,” said the girl. “We’ll tell no one else. I swear. It will be our secret.”

  “It has been my experience,” replied the peddler, “that children are not especially good at keeping secrets.” She laughed quietly and chewed at the stem of her pipe. “But I will tell you all I know, which is, I have no doubt, not as much by half as you three would wish to hear.” The peddler shifted in the chair, and her back popped loudly.

  “The sickly woman in Sinara claimed that her own father had stood with Elspeth Snow in the Battle of the Vale of Pnath, and that he had ridden with her after the defeat of the King of Bones and Rags, down winding, perilous canyon roads to witness the sundering of the onyx gates of the royal city of Amaakin’šarr. There he watched as the Twilight’s Wrath – this is the sobriquet Isobel had been given by her troops – confronted her father on the torch-lined steps of the palace. His guards bowed before her, praying she would spare their lives. But the Qqi d’Tashiva drew his sword against her and stood his ground. In the decades since his sister’s escape he’d known only loneliness and regret, not one single hour of joy, and what was the loss of his life when he’d already lost the kingdom he’d hoarded at the cost of his only love?

  “‘Father,’ said Isobel Snow to him, ‘will you not now cast aside your folly and old misdeeds? Will you not put down your blade that I will not have to cause you further harm than already I have?’

  “The King of Bones and Rags, he sneered hatefully and advanced towards her, blue eyes blazing, his sword glinting in the light of the flickering torches. There was naught remaining in him but bitterness and rage. ‘Do not call me Father, whore, for you are your mother’s bitch and none of mine. Now, come down off your horse and face me.’

  “Elspeth Snow, Twilight’s Wrath, the Maiden of Serannian – for she was called that, as well – did not dismount, as she desperately did not wish to slay the man who’d sired her, no matter his crimes against her mother and against the ghouls and all of the denizens of the Underworld. In her heart, she knew mercy, which Isobel had taught her, having learned it herself from the actions of Pickman and Sorrow. Did they not have fair cause to slay her, rather than aid in her escape? Sure. She had been half the author of their pain and the subjugation of their race. But even the black hearts of ghouls may feel pity.

  “‘No, Father,’ said Elspeth. ‘I have brought too much death this day, and your blood will not also stain my hands. I shall not be the despoiler you have become. That will not be your legacy to me.’

  “‘Thief,’ he growled. ‘Coward and thief, usurper and witch. You come to take my lands from me, but have not the courage to test your mettle against the rightful Qqi d’Tashiva. No whelp of mine would flinch from her final duty, cur.’

  “At that, one of Elspeth’s lieutenants drew an arrow from his quiver and nocked it, taking aim at Isaac Snow. But she was quick, and she stayed the man’s hand. Again, her father cursed her as a coward.”

  “She should have killed him,” said the boy who’d yawned.

  “Of a certain,” agreed the tow-headed girl.

  “That may be. In the years to come, said the woman in the tavern in Sinara, Elspeth would sometimes doubt her choice that day, and sometimes she would wish him dead. But the fact, as this woman would have it, is that she did not kill him, nor did she permit any other to bring him harm. She declared that any who dared touch him would suffer a judgment far worse than death.”

  “Then what did she do?” asked the boy on the tow-headed girl’s right.

  “What she did do, child, was bestow upon him a gift.”

  All three children stared back at her now in stark disbelief.

  “No,” said the girl.

  “Yes,” replied the peddler, “if the woman who had been a priestess in a temple of the Elder Ones, and before that a pirate and a smuggler, if she is to be trusted. Though, of course, it may be she was a liar or mistaken or mad, and sure, you may choose to believe or not.”

  “Then . . . what did she do?” asked the boy who’d yawned. “I mean, what manner of gift did she give such a wicked man?”

  At that the peddler smiled and slowly shook her head. “The woman in the tavern did not say, because she did not know. Her father had never told he
r, not specifically, but said only that it was a gift that lifted from the shoulders of Isaac Snow all his bitterness and insanity, all of his fury and grief. Elspeth’s gift, said the woman in the tavern, restored to him that which he’d held so dear, though how this was accomplished we do not know. But he was changed – and changed utterly. Afterwards, Elspeth ordered him escorted to the seven hundred steps and up, up, up . . . and up . . . to the Gates of Deeper Slumber, where he was sent back to the Waking World to live out the remainder of his days and where he may yet dwell, for none in the Dream Lands have knowledge of what became of him. We can say only, by this version of the truth, that he passed beyond the ken of the world.”

  “That isn’t a very good ending,” frowned the tow-headed girl.

  “It most assuredly isn’t,” said the boy who’d yawned.

  “Not at all,” added the boy on the girl’s right side.

  The peddler tilted her head, and she said sternly, “Do you imagine this is the way of tales, the way of the world, that it is somehow beholden to come with satisfying conclusions? If, indeed, it comes with any conclusions at all?”

  The children didn’t answer the question. The boy who’d yawned peered over his shoulder at the fire, which was beginning to burn down. The tow-headed girl stared down at her bare feet. And the boy on her right picked at a loose thread in his trousers. Only the girl spoke. She asked the old woman, “Aunty, did Elspeth Snow become the new Queen of Bones and Rags?”

  “No, child, she did not. She had no taste for power, though the temptation must have weighed heavily on her soul. Elspeth entrusted Richard Pickman and his compatriots with the future of Thok and with the task of rebuilding Amaakin’šarr. She forsook what remained of the prophecy, vowing never again to be a soldier, and she rode away from Thok and back to the Upper Dream Lands. She took with her the Basalt Madonna, which, I have heard, she carried far across the Middle Ocean and even beyond the Eastern Desert and Irem, City of Pillars. It could not be destroyed, and she dared not entrust it to the hands of any being so mighty they could have undone the Qqi d’Evai Mubadieb. But she did hide it, and she hid it well. Some say she cast it over the edge of the world, though, personally, I think that is likely an exaggeration.”

  “And what became of her after that?” asked the girl, not looking up from her feet.

  “Some say that she returned at last to Serannian, where she died many years ago. And others say she went to Celephaïs, and still others that, by wielding the Madonna she’d become undying and was permitted a place among the Old Ones in the shining city of Kadath. But these are all rumors, and no more to be trusted than ever rumors should be,” and with that, the peddler drew a deep breath and said that she’d told all she could tell in a night.

  There were questions from the children, but she did not answer them. She sent the three away to their beds, and then went to the garret room she’d been provided for the night – in exchange for a story. Several of the cats followed her, including the tabby tom, and they stood sentry at the top of the stairs. However, despite her great exhaustion, the peddler did not immediately seek sleep. Rather, she opened the shutters of the garret’s single small window, and there in Ulthar, she undressed before the brilliant eye of the moon and before all the icy, innumerable stars that speckle an early autumn evening sky. The night regarded her with perfect indifference, and she regarded it with awe. And the peddler, the seller of notions and oddments, the nameless old woman who wandered the cities on the plains below Mount Lerion, she recalled her mother, and a kindly ghoul named Sorrow, and the last face her father had worn. And she told herself a truer tale than she’d told the children.

  “As early as my boyhood and teenage years,” writes Brian Hodge, “before I’d even discovered H. P. Lovecraft, wide open spaces and rural ruins and desolate roads struck me as eerie locales, haunted by their pasts and potentially harboring newer menaces. Terrible things can unfold, slowly, where few human eyes are around to witness them, and landscapes have long memories.

  “I come from farmers who plowed the earth, from miners who crawled inside it. I grew up a town kid, but when visiting grandparents, my playgrounds were fields and woodlands. My relationship to remote places has always been that of a heathen, allowing for the possibility of heathen gods.

  “So, when I first read works such as ‘The Dunwich Horror’ and ‘The Colour Out of Space’ they had, despite their alien monstrosities, the kind of immediate familiarity that comes with seeing your worst suspicions confirmed.

  “To me, ‘Lovecraftian’ is more than a stew of ingredients – start with these trappings, sprinkle in these settings, season with references to this deity or that grimoire – although you’ll find a few familiar flavors in ‘It’s All the Same Road In the End.’

  “I also regard ‘Lovecraftian’ as a way of looking at the earth and the night skies that engulf it. It’s a sense of memory and process; a recognition of the vast antiquity of the soil underfoot and the waters that carve it. It’s a realization that the molecules in your body may have traveled billions of years to get here, and more may be on the way, in a myriad of forms, and that the ground they land on will, in time, yield to whatever proves best equipped to colonize or conquer it.

  “And who’s to say the earliest emissaries aren’t already living at the end of a very long road.”

  Brian Hodge is one of those people who always has to be making something. So far, he’s made ten novels, and is working on three more, as well as 120 shorter works and five full-length collections. Recent and forthcoming works include In the Negative Spaces and The Weight of the Dead, both standalone novellas; Worlds of Hurt, an omnibus edition of the first four works in his Misbegotten mythos; an updated edition of Dark Advent, his early post-apocalyptic epic; and his next collection, The Immaculate Void. Hodge lives in Colorado, where he also likes to make music and photographs; loves everything about organic gardening except the thieving squirrels; and trains in Krav Maga and kickboxing, which are useless against the squirrels.

  It’s All the Same Road in the End

  Brian Hodge

  ——

  The roads all looked the same again, along with the dried-up little towns they led to. They’d all looked the same again for the last couple of years, the way they had at the beginning.

  Funny thing – there was a stretch in the middle when they hadn’t. Two or three years when Clarence and Young Will’s eyes had grown keen enough to pick up on the subtle differences that, say, set Slokum apart from Brownsville. Here, the peculiarities of a water tower, with the look of an alien tripod; there, the way a string of six low hills undulated across the horizon like the humps of a primordial serpent.

  But now they’d let the distinctions slip away. From place to place, it wasn’t that different after all. They’d seen it all before and forgotten where. Everything was the same again.

  This was how things hid in open daylight, beneath the vast skies, out here in the plains of western Kansas. There was no need for mountain hollows or fern-thick forests or secret caves tucked into seaside coves. The things that wanted to stay hidden would camouflage themselves as one more piece of the monotony and endless repetition.

  The worst thing Clarence could think of was that he and his brother were now a part of it too. That the land was digesting them so slowly they didn’t even realize it.

  Five days into this trip, the latest of many, all the Brothers Pine had to show for it was another gallon of gas traded for another dusty roadside hamlet that, until this moment, was just a name along a blue line on the most detailed map they’d been able to buy. Gilead, this time. Sometimes there wasn’t even enough town to land on the map.

  Another stop, another chance for the truth. More or less, it always went this way:

  They started with a feed-and-seed store a block away from a grain elevator. From the moment they stepped in, they drew looks from the old man on one side of the counter and the farmer on the other. No hostility, just curiosity, and why not – both men
probably knew every face within ten or twenty miles. But the pair of brothers was a disruption, their arrival like the stroke of a bell that made the farmer aware of time again, and all he had left to do in the day. He made his goodbye and his exit, out to an old workhorse of a pickup truck with a bed full of fifty-pound bags.

  “Help you?” Already the old seed man sounded puzzled. They often sounded puzzled.

  Small talk first. Sure is hot today. Sure is. Looks like you could use some rain. Sure could. Could always use more rain.

  It was better when they were old. The elders were the ones with the longest memories, and a need to hang onto the stories of the things that had happened around them, especially the things that shouldn’t have. They remembered events that younger people – Clarence and Young Will’s peers, especially – never knew, or never had time for.

  Even Will Senior had known that, way back when.

  “This may seem like a funny question,” Young Will said. He was the one feeling talkative today. Just as well. He had the friendlier face, oval and open and guileless, and the taller stature that commanded attention. He looked as if he should still be in college, shooting hoops and resolute about never breaking the rules. “But have you ever heard anything about a man named Willard Chambers? This would go back quite a few years.”