The Book of Cthulhu

by Neil Gaiman

  It started forward, but it couldn’t step out of the circle. Not that way. It wheeled to find the exit the horse had made, and as it did, Reverend Mercer, now on his feet, fired twice and hit the thing in the back, causing it to stagger through the opening and fall against the line of rocks that had been there to protect the horse. Its head hit the rocks and the creature cried out, leaping to its feet with a move that seemed boneless and without use of muscle. Its forehead bore a sizzling mark the size of the rock.

  “Get back inside the circle,” the Reverend said. “Close it off.”

  Norville waited for no further instruction. He bolted and leaped into the circle and began to clutch at the displaced stones. The Reverend put his right leg forward and threw back his coat by bending his left hand behind him; he pointed the revolver and took careful aim, fired twice.

  Both shots hit. One in the head, one in the throat. They had their effect. The horror splattered to the floor with the wet laundry sound. But no sooner had it struck the ground, then it began to wriggle along the floor like a grub worm in a frying pan; it came fast and furious and grabbed the Reverend’s boot, and came to spring upright in front of the Reverend with that strange manner it had of moving.

  Reverend Mercer cracked it across the head with his pistol, and it grabbed at him. The Reverend avoided the grab and struck out with his fist, a jab that merely annoyed the thing. It spread its jaws and filled the air with stink. The Reverend drew his remaining pistol and fired straight into the hole the thing used for a nose, causing it to go toppling backward along the floor gnashing its teeth into the lumber.

  Reverend Mercer ran and leaped into the circle.

  When he turned to look, the monster was sliding up the wall like some kind of slug. It left a sticky trail along the logs as it reached the ceiling and crawled along that with the dexterity of an insect.

  The horse had finally come to a corner and stuck its head in it to hide. The thing came down on its back, and its mouth spread over the horse’s head, and the horse stood up on its hind legs and its front legs hit the wall, and it fell over backward, landing on the creature. It didn’t bother the thing in the least. It grabbed and twisted the horse over on its side as if it were nothing more than a feather pillow. There was a crunch as the monster’s teeth snapped bones in the horse’s head. The horse quit moving, and the thing began to suck, rivulets of blood spilling out from the corners of its distended mouth.

  The Reverend jammed his pistol back into its holster, bent and grabbed the axe from the floor and leaped out of the circle. The thing caught sight of the Reverend as he came, rolled off the horse and leaped up on the wall and ran along it. As the Reverend turned to follow its progress, it leaped at him.

  Reverend Mercer took a swing. The axe hit the fiend and split halfway through its neck, knocking it back against the wall, then to the floor. Its narrow eyes widened and showed red, and then it came to its feet in its unique way, though more slowly than before, and darted for the bedroom door.

  As it reached and fumbled with the latch, the Reverend hit the thing in the back of the head with the axe, and it went to its knees, clawed at the lumber of the door, causing it to squeak and squeal and come apart, making a narrow slit. It was enough. The thing eased through it like a snake. The Reverend jerked the door open to see it going through the gap in the window. He dropped the axe and jerked the pistol and fired and struck the thing twice before it went out through the breach and was gone from sight.

  Reverend Mercer rushed to the window and looked out. The thing was staggering, falling, rising to its feet, staggering toward the well. The Reverend stuck the pistol out the window, resting it on the frame, and fired again. It was a good shot in the back of the neck, and the brute went down.

  Holstering the revolver, rushing to grab the axe, the Reverend climbed through the window. The monster had made it to the well by then, crawling along on its belly, and just as it touched the curbing, the Reverend caught up with it, brought the spell-marked axe down on its already shredded head as many times as he had the strength to swing it.

  As he swung, the sun began to color the sky. He was breathing so hard he sounded like a blue norther blowing in. The sun rose higher and still he swung, then he fell to the ground, his chest heaving.

  When he looked about, he saw the thing was no longer moving. Norville was standing nearby, holding one of the marked rocks.

  “You was doin’ so good, I didn’t want to interrupt you,” Norville said.

  The Reverend nodded, breathed for a long hard time, said, “Saddle bags. If this is not medicinal. I do not know what is.”

  A few moments later, Norville returned with the flask. The Reverend drank first, long and deep, and then he gave it to Norville.

  ∇

  When his wind was back, and the sun was up, the Reverend chopped the rest of the monster up. It had already gone flat and gushed clutter from its insides that were part horse bones, gouts of blood, and unidentifiable items that made the stomach turn; its teeth were spread around the well curbing, like someone had dropped a box of daggers.

  They burned what would burn of the beast with dried limbs and dead leaves, buried the teeth and the remainder of the beast in a deep grave, the bottom and top and sides of it lined with the marked rocks.

  When they were done chopping and cremating and burying the creature, it was late afternoon. They finished off the flask, and that night they slept in the house, undisturbed, and in the morning, they set fire to the cabin using the BOOK OF DOCHES as a starter. As it burned, the Reverend looked up. The sky had begun to change, finally. The clouds no longer crawled.

  They walked out, the Reverend with the saddle bags over his shoulder, Norville with a pillow case filled with food tins from the cabin. Behind them, the smoke from the fire rose up black and sooty and by night time it had burned down to glowing cinders, and by the next day there was nothing more than clumps of ash.

  ∇

  The Fairground Horror

  Brian Lumley

  The funfair was as yet an abject failure. Drizzling rain dulled the chrome of the dodgem-cars and stratojets; the neons had not even nearly achieved the garishness they display by night; the so-called “crowd” was hardly worth mentioning as such. But it was only 2:00 p.m. and things could yet improve.

  Had the weather been better—even for October it was bad-and had Bathley been a town instead of a mere village, then perhaps the scene were that much brighter. Come evening, when the neons and other bright naked bulbs would glow in all the painful intensity of their own natural (unnatural?) life, when the drab gypsyish dollies behind the penny-catching stalls would undergo their subtle, nightly metamorphosis into avariciously enticing Loreleis—then it would be brighter, but not yet.

  This was the fourth day of the five when the funfair was “in town.”

  It was an annual—event? The nomads of Hodgson’s Funfair had known better times, better conditions and worse ones, but it was all the same to them and they were resigned to it. There was, though, amid all the noisy, muddy, smelly paraphernalia of the fairground, a tone of incongruity. It had been there since Anderson Tharpe, in the curious absence of his brother, Hamilton, had taken down the old freak-house frontage to repaint the boards and canvas with the new and forbidding legend: TOMB OF THE GREAT OLD ONES.

  Looking up at the painted gouts of “blood” that formed the garish legend arching over a yawning, scaly, dragon-jawed entranceway, Hiram Henley frowned behind his tiny spectacles in more than casual curiosity, in something perhaps approaching concern. His lips silently formed the ominous words of that legend as if he spoke them to himself in awe, and then he thrust his black-gloved hands deeper into the pockets of his fine, expensively tailored overcoat and tucked his neck down more firmly into its collar.

  Hiram Henley had recognized something in the name of the place—something which might ring subconscious warning bells in even the most mundane minds—and the recognition caused an involuntary shudder to hurry up his back
. “The Great Old Ones!” he said to himself yet again, and his whisper held a note of terrible fascination.

  Research into just such cycles of myth and aeon-lost legend, while ostensibly he had been studying Hittite antiquities in the Middle East and Turkey, had cost Henley his position as Professor of Archaeology and Ethnology at Meldham University. “Cthulhu, Yibb-Tstll, Yog-Sothoth, Summanus-the Great Old Ones!” Again an expression of awe flitted across his bespectacled face. To be confronted with a… a monument such as this, and in such a place…

  And yet the ex-professor was not too surprised; he had been alerted to the contents of Anderson Tharpe’s queer establishment, and therefore the fact that the owner had named it thus was hardly a matter of any lasting astonishment. Nevertheless Henley knew that there were people who would have considered the naming of the fairground erection, to say nothing of the presence of its afore-hinted contents, blasphemous. Fortunately such persons were few and far between—the Cult of Cthulhu was still known only to a minority of serious authorities, to a few obscure occult investigators, and a scattered handful of esoteric groups—but Hiram Henley looked back to certain days of yore when he had blatantly used the university’s money to go in search of just such items of awesome antiquity as now allegedly hid behind the demon-adorned ramparts of the edifice before him.

  The fact of the matter was that Henley had heard how this Tomb of the Great Old Ones held within its monster-daubed board-and-canvas walls relics of an age already many millions of years dead and gone when Babylon was but a sketch in the mind’s eye of Architect Thathnis III. Figures and fragments, hieroglyphed tablets and strangely scrawled papyri, weird greenstone sculptings and rotting, worm-eaten tomes: Henley had reason to believe that many of these things, if not all of them, existed behind the facade of Anderson Tharpe’s horror house.

  There would also be, of course, the usual nonconformities peculiar to such establishments—the two-headed foetus in its bottle of preservative, the five-legged puppy similarly suspended, the fake mummy in its red- and green-daubed wrappings, the great fruit (“vampire”) bats, hanging shutter-eyed and motionless in their warm wire cages beyond the reach of giggly, shuddering women and morbidly fascinated men and boys—but Hiram Henley was not interested in any of these. Nevertheless, he sent his gloved right hand awkwardly groping into the corner of his overcoat pocket for the silver coin which alone might open for him the door to Tharpe’s house of horror.

  Hiram Henley was a slight, middle-aged man. His thin figure, draped smotheringly in the heavy overcoat, his balding head and tiny specs through which his watery eyes constantly peered; his gloved hands almost lost in huge pockets, his trousers seeming to hang from beneath the hem of his overcoat and partly, not wholly, covering the black patent leather shoes upon his feet; all made of him a picture which was conspicuously odd. And yet Hiram Henley’s intelligence was patent; the stamp of a “higher mind” was written in erudite lines upon his brow. His were obviously eyes which had studied strange mysteries, and his feet had gone along strange ways; so that despite any other emotion or consideration which his appearance might ill-advisedly call to mind, still his shrunken frame commanded more than a little respect among his fellow men.

  Anderson Tharpe, on the other hand, crouching now upon his tiny seat in the ticket-booth, was a tall man, well over six feet in height but almost as thin and emaciated as the fallen professor. His hair was prematurely grey and purposely grown long in an old-fashioned scholarly style, so that he might simulate to the crowd’s satisfaction a necessary erudition; just such an erudition as was manifest in the face above the slight figure which even now pressed upon his tiny window, sixpence clutched in gloved fingers. Tharpe’s beady eyes beneath blackly hypnotic brows studied Hiram Henley briefly, speculatively, but then he smiled a very genuine welcome as he passed the small man a ticket, waving away the sixpence with an expansive hand.

  “Not you, sir, indeed no! From a gent so obviously and sincerely interested in the mysteries within—from a man of your high standing”—again the expansive gesture—“why, I couldn’t accept money from you, sir. It’s an honour to have you visit us!”

  “Thank you,” Henley dryly answered, passing myopically into the great tent beyond the ticket booth. Tharpe’s smile slowly faded, was replaced by a look of cunning. Quickly the tall man pocketed his few shillings in takings, then followed the slight figure of the ex-professor into the smelly sawdust-floored “museum” beyond the canvas flap.

  In all, a dozen people waited within the big tent’s main division. A pitifully small “crowd.” But in any case, though he kept his interest cleverly veiled, Tharpe’s plans involved only the ex-professor. The tall man’s flattery at the ticket booth had not all been flannel; he had spotted Henley immediately as the very species of highly educated fly for which his flypaper—in the form of the new and enigmatic legend across the visage of the one-time freakhouse—had been erected above Bathley Moor.

  There had been, Tharpe reflected, men of outwardly similar intelligence before at the Tomb of the Great Old Ones; and more than one of them had told him that certain of his artifacts—those items which he kept, as his brother had kept them before him, in a separately enclosed part of the tent—were of an unbelievable antiquity. Indeed, one man had been so affected by the very sight of such ancientness that he had run from Tharpe’s collection in stark terror, and he had never returned. That had been in May, and though almost six months had passed since that time, still Tharpe had come no closer to an understanding of the mysterious objects which his brother Hamilton had brought back with him from certain dark corners of the world; objects which, early in 1961, had caused him to kill Hamilton in self-defence.

  Anderson had panicked then—he realized that now—for he might easily have come out of the affair blameless had he only reported Hamilton’s death to the police. For a long time the folk of Hodgson’s Funfair had known that there was something drastically wrong with Hamilton Tharpe; his very sanity had been questioned, albeit guardedly. Certainly Anderson would have been declared innocent of his brother’s murder—the case would have gone to court only as a matter of formality—but he had panicked. And of course there had been… complications.

  With Hamilton’s body secretly buried deep beneath the freakhouse, the folk of the fairground had been perfectly happy to believe Anderson’s tale of his brother’s abrupt departure on yet another of his world-spanning expeditions, the like of which had brought about all the trouble in the first place.

  Now Anderson thought back on it all…

  He and his brother had grown up together in the fairground, but then it had been their father’s property, and “Tharpe’s Funfair” had been known throughout all England for its fair play and prices. Wherever the elder Tharpe had taken his stalls and sideshows—of which the freak-house had ever been his personal favourite—his employees had been sure of good crowds. It was only after old Tharpe died that the slump started.

  It had had much to do with young Hamilton’s joy in old books and fancifully dubious legends; his lust for travel, adventure, and outre knowledge. His first money-wasting venture had been a “treasure-hunting” trip to the islands of the Pacific, undertaken solely on the strength of a vague and obviously fake map. In his absence—he had gone off with an adventurous and plausible rogue from the shooting gallery—Anderson looked after the fair. Things went badly, and all the Tharpes got out of Hamilton’s venture were a number of repulsively carved stone tablets and one or two patently aboriginal sculptings, not the least of which was a hideous, curiously winged octopoid idol. Hamilton placed the latter obscenity in the back of their caravan home as being simply too fantastic for display to an increasingly mundane and sceptical public.

  The idol, however, had a most unsettling effect upon the younger brother. He was wont to go in to see the thing in the dead of night, when Anderson was in bed and apparently asleep. But often Anderson was awake, and during these nocturnal visits he had heard Hamilton talking to the idol. More
disturbingly, he had once or twice dimly imagined that he heard something talking back! Too, before he went off again on his wanderings in unspoken areas of the great deserts of Arabia, the sensitive, mystery-loving traveller had started to suffer from especially bad nightmares.

  Again, in Hamilton’s absence, things went badly. Soon Anderson was obliged to sell out to Bella Hodgson, retaining only the freak-house as his own and his prodigal brother’s property. A year passed, and another before Hamilton once more returned to the fairground, demanding his living as before but making little or no attempt to work for his needs. There was no arguing, however, for the formerly sensitive younger brother was a changed, indeed a saturnine, man now, so that soon Anderson came to be a little afraid of him.

  And quite apart from the less obvious alterations in Hamilton, other changes were much more apparent; changes in habit, even in appearance. The most striking was the fact that now the younger Tharpe constantly wore a shaggy black toupee, as if to disguise his partial premature baldness, which all of the funfair’s residents knew about anyway and which had never caused him the least embarrassment before. Also, he had become so reticent as to be almost reclusive; keeping to himself, only rarely and reluctantly allowing himself to be drawn into even the most trivial conversations.

  More than this: there had been a time prior to his second long absence when Hamilton had seemed somewhat enamored of the young, single, dark-eyed fortune-teller, “Madame Zala”—a Gypsy girl of genuine Romany ancestry—but since his return he had been especially cool towards her, and for her own part she had been seen to cross herself with a pagan sign when he had happened to be passing by. Once he had seen her make this sign, and then he had gone white with fury, hurrying off to the freak-house and remaining there for the rest of that day. Madame Zala had packed up her things and left one night in her horse-drawn caravan without a word of explanation to anyone. It was generally believed that Hamilton had threatened her in some way, though no one ever took him to task over the affair. For his own part, he simply averred that Zala had been “a charlatan of the worst sort, without the ability to conjure a puff of wind!”