New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

by Ramsey Campbell

  Where had the old girl picked up such expressions? And was she trying to pick me up as well?

  Her hand clamped wetly round my wrist. 'I do hope you'll let me pay for the dry cleaning.'

  'Madam,' I said, 'think nothing of it. The suit was already stained.'

  'Such a nice man!' She cocked her head coyly at me, still gripping my wrist. Though their whites had long since turned the colour of old piano keys, her eyes were not unattractive. But her breath repelled me. Slipping my paperback into a pocket, I rang for the stewardess.

  The earlier mishap had occurred several hours before. In clambering aboard the plane at Heathrow, surrounded by what appeared to be an aboriginal rugby club (all dressed alike, navy blazers with bone buttons), I'd been shoved from behind and had stumbled against a black cardboard hatbox in which some Chinaman was storing his dinner; it was jutting into the aisle near the first-class seats. Something inside sloshed over my ankles - duck sauce, soup perhaps and left a sticky yellow puddle on the floor. I turned in time to see a tall, beefy Caucasian with an Air Malay bag and a beard so thick and black he looked like some heavy from the silent era. His manner was equally suited to the role, for after shouldering me aside (with shoulders broad as my valises), he pushed his way down the crowded passage, head bobbing near the ceiling like a gas balloon, and suddenly disappeared from sight at the rear of the plane. In his wake I caught the smell of treacle, and was instantly reminded of my childhood: birthday hats, Callard and Bowser gift packs, and after-dinner bellyaches.

  'So very sorry.' A bloated little Charlie Chan looked fearfully at this departing apparition, then doubled over to scoop his dinner beneath the seat, fiddling with the ribbon.

  'Think nothing of it,' I said.

  I was feeling kindly towards everyone that day. Flying was still a novelty. My friend Howard, of course (as I'd reminded audiences earlier in the week), used to say he'd 'hate to see a~roplanes come into common commercial use, since they merely add to the goddam useless speeding up of an already overspeeded life.' He had dismissed them as 'devices for the amusement of a gentleman'-

  but then, he'd only been up once, in the twenties, and for only as long as $3.50 would bring. What could he have known of whistling engines, the wicked joys of dining at thirty thousand feet, the chance to look out a window and find that the earth is, after all, quite round? All this he had missed; he was dead and therefore to be pitied.

  Yet even in de. ath he had triumphed over me...

  It gave me something to think about as the stewardess helped me to my feet, clucking in professional concern at the mess on my lap - though more likely she was thinking of the wiping up that awaited her once I'd vacated the seat. 'Why do they make those bags so slippery?' my elderly neighbour asked plaintively. 'And all over this nice man's suit. You really should do something about it.' The plane dropped and settled; she rolled her yellowing eyes. 'It could happen again.'

  The stewardess steered me down the aisle towards a restroom at the middle of the plane. To my left a cadaverous young woman wrinkled her nose and smiled at the man next to her. I attempted to disguise my defeat by looking bitter - 'Someone else has done this deed!' - but doubt I succeeded.

  The stewardess's arm supporting mine was superfluous but comfortable; I leaned on her more heavily with each step. There are, as I'd long suspected, precious few advantages in being seventy-six and looking it - yet among them is this: though one is excused from the frustration of flirting with a stewardess, one gets to lean on her arm. I turned toward her to say something funny, but paused; her face was blank as a clock's.

  'I'll wait out here for you,' she said, and pulled open the smooth white door.

  q~hat will hardly be necessary.' I straightened up. 'But could you - do you think you might find me another seat? I have nothing against that lady, you understand, but I don't want to see any more of her lunch.'

  Inside the restroom the whine of the engines seemed louder, as if the pink plastic walls were all that separated me from the jet stream and its arctic winds. Occasionally the air we passed through must have grown choppy, for the plane rattled and heaved like a sled over rough ice. If I opened the john I half expected to see the earth miles below us, a frozen grey Atlantic fanged with icebergs.

  England was already a thousand miles away.

  With one hand on the door handle for support, I wiped off my trousers with a perfumed paper towel from a foil envelope, and stuffed several more into my pocket. My cuffs still bore a residue of Chinese goo. This, it seemed, was the source of the treacle smell; I dabbed ineffectually at it.

  Surveying myself in the mirror - a bald, harmless-looking old baggage with stooped shoulders and a damp suit (so different from the self-confident young fellow in the photo captioned 'HPL and disciple') - I slid open the bolt and emerged, a medley of scents. The stewardess had found an empty seat for me at the back of the plane.

  It was only as I made to sit down that I noticed who occupied the adjoining seat: he was leaning away from me, asleep with his head resting against the window, but I recognized the beard.

  'Uh, stewardess - ?' I turned, but saw only her uniformed back retreating up the aisle. After a moment's uncertainty I inched myself into the seat, making as little noise as possible. I had, I reminded myself, every right to be here.

  Adjusting the recliner position (to the annoyance of the black behind me), I settled back and reached for the paperback in my pocket. They'd finally got round to reprinting one of my earlier tales, and already I'd found four typos. But then, what could one expect? The front cover, with its crude cartoon skull, said it all: 'Goosepimples: Thirteen Cosmic Chillers in the Lovecraft Tradition.'

  So this is what I was reduced to - a lifetime's work shrugged off by some blurb-writer as 'worthy of the Master himself,' the creations of my brain dismissed as mere pastiche. And the tales themselves, once singled out for such elaborate praise, were now simply - as if this were commendation enough - 'Lovecraftian.' Ah, Howard, your triumph was complete the moment your name became an adjective.

  I'd suspected it for years, of course, but only with the past week's conference had I been forced to acknowledge the fact: that what mattered to the present generation was not my own body of work, but rather my association with Lovecraft. And even this was demeaned: after years of friendship and support, to be labelled - simply because I'd been younger - a mere 'disciple.' It seemed too cruel a joke.

  Every joke must have a punchline. This one's was still in my pocket, printed in italics on the folded yellow conference schedule. I didn't need to look at it again: there I was, characterized for all time as 'a member of the Lovecraft circle, New York educator, and author of the celebrated collection Beyond the Garve.'

  That was it, the crowning indignity: to be immortalized by a misprint! You'd have appreciated this, Howard. I can almost hear you chuckling from - where else? - beyond the garve...

  Meanwhile, from the seat next to me came the rasping sounds of a constricted throat; my neighbour must have been caught in a dream. I put down my book and studied him. He looked older than he had at first - perhaps sixty or more. His hands were roughened, powerful looking; on one of them was a ring with a curious silver cross. The glistening black beard that covered the lower half of his face was so thick as to be nearly opaque; its very darkness seemed unnatural, for above it the hair was streaked with grey.

  I looked more closely, to where beard joined face. Was that a bit of gauze I saw, below the hair?

  My heart gave a little jump. Leaning forward for a closer look, I peered at the skin to the side of his nose; though burned from long exposure to the sun, it had an odd pallor. My gaze continued upward, along the weathered cheeks towards the dark hollow of his eyes. They opened.

  For a moment they stared into mine without apparent comprehension, glassy and bloodshot. In the next instant they were bulging from his head and quivering like hooked fish. His lips opened, and a tiny voice croaked, 'Not here.'

  We sat in silence, neither of
us moving. I was too surprised, too embarrassed, to answer. In the window beyond his head the sky looked bright and clear, but I could feel the plane buffeted by unseen blasts, its wingtips bouncing furiously.

  'Don't do it to me here,' he whispered at last, shrinking back into his seat.

  Was the man a lunatic? Dangerous, perhaps? Somewhat in my future I saw spinning headlines:

  'Jetliner Terrorized ... Retired NYC Teacher Victim ...' My uncertainty must have shown, for I saw him lick his lips and glance past my head. Hope, and a trace of cunning, swept his face. He grinned up at me. 'Sorry, nothing to worry about. Whew! Must have been having a nightmare.' Like an athlete after a particularly tough race he shook his massive head, already regaining command of the situation. His voice had a hint of Tennessee drawl. 'Boy' - he gave what should have been a hearty laugh - 'I'd better lay off the Kickapoo juice!'

  I smiled to put him at his ease, though there was nothing about him to suggest that he'd been drinking. 'That's an expression I haven't heard in years.'

  'Oh, yeah?' he said, with little interest. 'Well, I've been away.' His fingers drummed nervously impatiently? - on the arm of his chair.

  'Malaya?'

  He sat up, and the colour left his face. 'How did you know?'

  I nodded towards the green flight-bag at his feet. 'I saw you carrying that when you came aboard.

  You, uh - you seemed to be in a little bit of a hurry, to say the least. In fact, I'm afraid you almost knocked me down.'

  'Hey.' His voice was controlled now, his gaze level and assured. 'Hey, I'm really sorry about that, old fella. The fact is, I thought someone might be following me.'

  Oddly enough, I believed him; he looked sincere - or as sincere as anyone can be behind a phony black beard. 'You're in disguise, aren't you?' I asked.

  'You mean the whiskers? They're just something I picked up in Singapore. Shucks, I knew they wouldn't fool anyone for long, at least not a friend. But an enemy, well ... maybe.' He made no move to take them off.

  'You're - let me guess - you're in the service, right?' The foreign service, I meant; frankly, I took him for an ageing spy.

  'In the service?' He looked significantly to the left and right, then dropped his voice. 'Well, yeah, you might say that. In H/s service.' He pointed towards the roof of the plane.'You mean - ?'

  He nodded. 'I'm a missionary. Or was until yesterday.'

  Missionaries are infernal nuisances who ought to be kept at home. – H.P LOVECRAFT, 9/12/1925

  Have you ever seen a man in fear of his life? I had, though not since my early twenties. After a summer of idleness I'd at last found temporary employment in the office of what turned out to be a rather shady businessman - I suppose today you'd call him a small-time racketeer - who, having somehow offended 'the mob,' was convinced he'd be dead by Christmas. He had been wrong, though; he'd been able to enjoy that and many other Christmases with his family, and it wasn't till years later that he was found in his bathtub, face down in six inches of water. I don't remember much about him, except how hard it had been to engage him in conversation; he never seemed to be listening.

  Yet talking with the man who sat next to me on the plane was all too easy; he had nothing of the other's distracted air, the vague replies and preoccupied gaze. On the contrary, he was alert and highly interested in all that was said to him. Except for his initial panic, in fact, there was little to suggest he was a hunted man.

  Yet so he claimed to be. Later events would, of course, settle all such questions, but at the time I had no way to judge if he was telling the truth, or if his story was phony as his beard.

  If I believed him, it was almost entirely due to his manner, not the substance of what he said. No, he didn't claim to have made off with the Eye of Klesh; he was more original than that. Nor had he violated some witch doctor's only daughter. But some of the things he told me about the region in which he'd worked - a state called Negri Sembilan, south of Kuala Lumpur seemed frankly incredible: houses invaded by trees, government-built roads that simply disappeared, a nearby colleague returning from a ten-day vacation to find his lawn overgrown with ropy things they'd had to burn twice to destroy. He claimed there were tiny red spiders that jumped as high as a man's shoulder 'there was a girl in the village gone half-deaf because one of the nasty little things crawled in her ear and swelled so big it plugged up the hole' - and places where mosquitoes were so thick they suffocated cattle. He described a land of steaming mangrove swamps and rubber plantations as large as feudal kingdoms, a land so humid that wallpaper bubbled on the hot nights and bibles sprouted mildew.

  As we sat together on the plane, sealed within an air-cooled world of plastic and pastel, none of these things seemed possible; with the frozen blue of the sky just beyond my reach, the stewardesses walking briskly past me in their blue-and-gold uniforms, the passengers to my left sipping Cokes or sleeping or leating through In-Flite, I found myself believing less than half of what he said, attributing the rest to sheer exaggeration and a Southern regard for tall tales. Only when I'd been home a week and paid a visit to my niece in Brooklyn did I revise my estimate upward, for glancing through her son's geography test I came upon this passage: 'Along the

  [Malayan] peninsula, insects swarm in abundance; probably more varieties exist here than anywhere else on earth. There is some good hardwood timber, and camphor and ebony trees are found in profusion. Many orchid varieties thrive, some of extraordinary size.' The book alluded to the area's 'rich mixture of races and languages,' its 'extreme humidity' and 'colourful native fauna,'

  and added: 'Its jungles are so impenetrable that even the wild beasts must keep to well-worn paths.'

  But perhaps the strangest aspect of this region was that, despite its dangers and discomforts, my companion claimed to have loved it. 'They've got a mountain in the centre of the peninsula - ' He mentioned an unpronounceable name and shook his head. 'Most beautiful thing you ever saw. And there's some really pretty country down along the coast, you'd swear it was some kind of South Sea island. Comfortable, too. Oh, it's damp all right, especially in the interior where the new mission was supposed to be - but the temperature never even hits a hundred. Try saying that for New York City.'

  I nodded. 'Remarkable.'

  'And the people,' he went on, 'why, I believe they're just the friendliest people on earth. You know, I'd heard a lot of bad things about the Moslems - that's what most of them are, part of the Sunni sect - but I'm telling you, they treated us with real neighbourliness ú.. just so long as we made the teachings available, so to speak, and didn't interfere with their affairs. And we didn't. We didn't have to. What we provided, you see, was a hospital - well, a clinic, at least, two RNs and a doctor who came twice a month - and a small library with books and films. And not just theology, either.

  All subjects. We were right outside the village, they'd have to pass us on their way to the river, and when they thought none of the lontoks were looking

  they'd just come in and look around.''None of the what?'

  'Priests, sort of. There were a lot of them. But they didn't interfere with us, we didn't interfere with them. ! don't know that we made all that many converts, actually, but I've got nothing bad to say about those people.'

  He paused, rubbing his eyes; he suddenly looked his age. 'Things were going fine,' he said. 'And then they told me to establish a second mission, further in the interior.'

  He stopped once more, as if weighing whether to continue. A squat little Chinese woman was plodding slowly up the aisle, holding on to the chairs on each side for balance. I felt her hand brush past my ear as she went by. My companion watched her with a certain unease, waiting till she'd passed. When he spoke again his voice had thickened noticeably.

  'I've been all over the world - a lot of places Americans can't even go to these days - and I've always felt that, wherever I was, God was surely watching. But once I started getting up into those hills, well...' He shook his head. 'I was pretty much on my own, you see. They we
re going to send most of the staff out later, after I'd got set up. All I had with me was one of our grounds keepers, two bearers, and a guide who doubled as interpreter. Locals, all of them.' He frowned. 'The grounds keeper, at least, was a Christian.''You needed an interpreter?'

  The question seemed to distract him. 'For the new mission, yes. My Malay stood me well enough in the lowlands, but in the interior they used dozens of local dialects. I would have been lost up there. Where I was going they spoke something which our people back in the village called agon di-gatuan - "the Old Language." I never really got to understand much of it.' He stared down at his hands. 'I wasn't there long enough.'

  Trouble with the natives, I suppose.'

  He didn't answer right away. Finally he nodded. 'I truly believe they must be the nastiest people who ever lived,' he said with great deliberation. 'I sometimes wonder how God could have created them.' He stared out the window, at the hills of cloud below us. ~hey called themselves the Chauchas, near as I could make out. Some French colonial influence, maybe, but they looked Asiatic to me, with just a touch of black. Little people. Harmless looking.' He gave a small shudder.

  'But they were nothing like what they seemed. You couldn't get to the bottom of them. They'd been living way up in those hills I don't know how many centuries, and whatever it is they were doing, they weren't going to let a stranger in on it. They called themselves Moslems, just like the lowlanders, but I'm sure there must have been a few bush-gods mixed in. I thought they were primitive, at first, I mean, some of their rituals - you wouldn't believe it. But now ! think they weren't primitive at all. They just kept those rituals because they enjoyed them!' He tried to smile; it just accentuated the lines of his face.

  'Oh, they seemed friendly enough in the beginning,' he said. 'You could approach them, do a bit of trading, watch them breed their animals. You could even talk to them about Salvation. And they'd just keep smiling, smiling all the time. As if they really liked you.'