by Neil Gaiman
“What is this fragment?” the little man cried. “Where is it?”
“Come with me.”
“But—” Henley turned away from Tharpe, his gloved hands again reaching for those morbid items out of the aeons.
“No, no.” Tharpe took his arm. “Later—you’ll have all the time you need. Now there is this problem of mine. But later, tonight, we’ll come back in here, and all this can be yours…”
The ex-professor voluntarily followed Tharpe out of the tent to his caravan, and there he was shown the handwritten Necronomicon with its cryptic “key.”
“Well,” Tharpe demanded, barely concealing his agitation, “can you read it as it was written? Can you pronounce it in its original form?”
“I’ll need a little time,” the balding man mused, “and privacy; but I think… I’ll take a copy of this with me, and as soon as I have the answer—”
“When? How long?”
“Tonight.”
“Good. I’ll wait for you. It should be quiet here by then. It’s Halloween and the fairground is open until late, but they’ll all be that much more tired…” Tharpe suddenly realized that he was thinking out loud and quickly glanced at his visitor. The little man peered at him strangely through his tiny specs; very strangely, Tharpe thought.
“The people here are—superstitious,” he explained. “It wouldn’t be wise to advertise our interest in these ancient matters. They’re ignorant and I’ve had trouble with them before. They don’t like some of the things I’ve got.”
“I understand,” Henley answered. “I’ll go now and work through the evening. With luck it won’t take too long. Tonight—shall we say after midnight?—I’ll be back.” He quickly made a copy of the characters in the old book, then stood up. Tharpe saw him out of the caravan with an assumed, gravely thoughtful air, thanking him before watching him walk off in the direction of the exit; but then he laughed out loud and slapped his thigh, quickly seeking out one of the odd-job boys from the stratojet thrill ride.
An hour later—to the amazement of his fellow showmen, for the crowd was thickening rapidly as the afternoon went by—Anderson Tharpe closed the Tomb of the Great Old Ones and retired to his caravan. He wanted to practice himself in the operation of the tape recorder which he had paid the odd-jobber to buy for him in Bathley.
This final phase of his plan was simple; necessarily so, for of course he in no way intended to honour his bargain with Henley. He did intend to have the little man read out his pronunciation of the “key” and to record that pronunciation in perfect fidelity—but from then on…
If the pronunciation were imperfect, then of course the “bargain” would be unfulfilled and the ex-professor would escape with his life and nothing more; but if the invocation worked…? Why, then the professor simply could not be allowed to walk away and talk about what he had seen. No, it would be necessary for him to disappear into the green light. Hamilton would have called it a “sacrifice to Cthulhu.”
And yet there had been something about the little man that disturbed Anderson; something about his peering eyes, and his eagerness to fall in with the plans of the gaunt showman. Tharpe thought of his dream of a few days past, then of those other nightmares he had known, and shuddered; and again he pondered the possibility that there had been more than met the eye in his mad brother’s assertions. But what odds? Science or sorcery, it made no difference, the end result would be the same. He rubbed his hands in anticipation.
Things were at last looking up for Anderson Tharpe…
At midnight the crowd began to thin out. Watching the people move off into the chill night, Anderson was glad it had started to rain again, for their festive Halloween mood might have kept them in the fairground longer, and the bright lights would have glared and the music played late into the night. Only an hour later all was quiet, with only the sporadic patter of rain on machines and tents and painted roofs to disturb the night. The last wetly gleaming light had blinked out and the weary folk of the fairground were in their beds. That was when Anderson heard the furtive rapping at his caravan door, and he was agreeably surprised that the ever-watchful dogs had not heralded his night-visitor’s arrival. Possibly it was too early for them yet to distinguish between comers and goers.
As soon as he was inside Henley saw the question written on Tharpe’s face. He nodded in answer: “Yes, yes, I have it. It appears to be a summons of some sort, a cry to vast and immeasurably ancient powers. Wait, I’ll read it for you—”
“No, no—not here!” Tharpe silenced him before he could commence.
“I have a tape recorder in the tent.”
Without a word the little man followed Tharpe through the dark and into the private enclosure containing those centuried relics which so plainly fascinated him. There Tharpe illumined the inner tent with a single dim light bulb; then, switching on his tape recorder, he told the ex-professor that he was now ready to hear the invocation.
And yet now Henley paused, turning to face Tharpe and gravely peering at him from where he stood by the horrible octopoid idol.
“Are you—sure?” the little man asked. “Are you sure you want me to do this?” His voice was dry, calm.
“Eh?”Anderson questioned nervously, terrible suspicions suddenly forming in his mind. “Of course I’m sure—and what do you mean, ‘do this?’ Do what?”
Henley shook his head sadly. “Your brother was foolish not to see that you would cause trouble sooner or later!”
Tharpe’s eyes opened wide and his jaw fell slack. “Police!” he finally croaked. “You’re from the police!”
“No such thing,” the little man calmly answered. “I am what I told you I was—and something more than that—and to prove it…”
The sounds Henley uttered then formed an exact and fluent duplication of those Tharpe had heard once before, and shocked as he was that this frail outsider knew far too much about his affairs, still Tharpe thrilled as the inhuman echoes died and there formed in the semicircle of grim tablets an expanding, glowing greenness that sent out writhing beams of ghostly luminescence. Quickly the tall man gathered his wits. Policeman or none, Hiram Henley had to be done away with. This had been the plan in any case, once the little man—whoever he was—had done his work and was no longer required. And he had done his work well. The invocation was recorded; Anderson could call up the destroying green light any time he so desired. Perhaps Henley had been a former colleague of Hamilton’s, and somehow he had come to learn of the younger Tharpe’s demise? Or was he only guessing! Still, it made no difference now.
Henley had turned his back on Anderson, lifting up his arms to the hideous idol greenly illumined in the light of the pulsating witchfire. But as the showman slipped his brother’s knife from his pocket, so the little man turned again to face him, smiling strangely and showing no discernible fear at the sight of the knife. Then his smile faded and again he sadly shook his head. His lips formed the words, “No, no, my friend,” but Anderson Tharpe heard nothing; once more, as it had done before, the green light had cancelled all sound within its radius.
Suddenly Tharpe was very much afraid, but still he knew what he must do. Despite the fact that the inner tent was far more chill even than the time of the year warranted, sweat glistened greenly on Anderson’s brow as he moved forward in a threatening crouch, the knife raised and reflecting emerald shafts of evilly writhing light. He lifted the knife higher still as he closed with the motionless figure of the little man—and then Hiram Henley moved!
Anderson saw what the ex-professor had done and his lips drew back in a silent, involuntary animal snarl of the utmost horror and fear. He almost dropped the knife, frozen now in midstroke, as Henley’s black gloves fell to the floor and the thick white worms twined and twisted hypnotically where his fingers ought to have been!
Then—more out of nightmare dread and loathing than any sort of rational purpose, for Anderson knew now that the ex-professor was nothing less than a Priest of Cthulhu—he carried on
with his interrupted stroke and his knife flashed down. Henley tried to deflect the blow with a monstrously altered hand, his face contorting and a shriek forming silently on his lips as one of the warmish appendages was severed and fell twitching to the sawdust. He flailed his injured hand and white ichor splashed Tharpe’s face and eyes.
Blindly the frantic showman struck again and again, gibbering mindlessly and noiselessly as he clawed at his face with his free hand, trying to wipe away the filthy white juice of Henley’s injured hybrid member. But the blows were wild and Hiram Henley had stepped to one side.
More frantically yet, insanely, Tharpe slashed at the greenly pulsating air all about him, stumbling closer to the core of the radiance. Then his knife struck something that gave like rotting flesh beneath the blow, and finally, in a short-lived revival of confidence, he opened stinging eyes to see what he had hit.
Something coiled out of the green core, something long and capering, greyly mottled and slimy! It was a tentacle—a face-tentacle, Tharpe knew—twitching spasmodically, even as the hand of a disturbed dreamer might twitch.
Tharpe struck again, a reflex action, and watched his blade bite through the tentacle unhindered, as if through mud—and then saw that trembling member solidifying again where the blade had sliced! His knife fell from palsied hands then, and Tharpe screamed a last, desperate, silent scream as the tentacle moved more purposefully!
The now completely sentient member wrapped its tip about Tharpe’s throat, constricting and jerking him forwards effortlessly into the green core. And as he went the last things he saw were the eyes in the vast face; the hellish eyes that opened briefly, saw and recognized him for what he was—a sacrifice to Cthulhu!
Quickly then, as the green light began its withdrawal and sound slowly returned to the tent, Hiram Henley put on his gloves. Ignoring as best he could the pain his injury gave him, he spoke these words:
Oh, Great Cthulhu, dreaming in R’lyeh,
Thy priest offers up this sacrifice,
That Thy coming be soon,
And that of Thy kindred dreamers.
I am Thy priest and adore Thee…
And as the core grew smaller yet, he toppled the evil idol into its green center, following this act by throwing in the tablets and all those other items of fabled antiquity until the inner tent was quite empty. He would have kept all these things if he dared, but his orders—those orders he received in dreams from R’lyeh—would not allow it. When a priest had been found to replace Hamilton Tharpe, then Great Cthulhu would find a way to return those rudimentary pillars of His temple!
Finally, Henley switched off the single dim light and watched the green core as it shrank to a tiny point of intense brightness before winking out. Only the smell of deep ocean remained, and a damp circle in the dark where the sawdust floor was queerly marked and slimy….
Some little time later the folk of the fairground were awakened by the clamour of a fire engine as it sped to the blaze on the border of the circling tents, sideshows and caravans. Both Tharpe’s caravan and The Tomb of the Great Old Ones were burning fiercely. Nothing was saved, and in their frantic toiling to help the firemen the nomads of the funfair failed to note that their dogs again crouched timid and whimpering beneath the nighted caravans. They found it strange later, though, when they heard how the police had failed to discover anything of Anderson Tharpe’s remains.
The gap that the destruction of the one-time freak-house had left was soon filled, for “Madame Zala”, as if summoned back by the grim work of the mysterious fire, returned with her horse and caravan within the week. She is still with Hodgson’s Funfair, but known to anyone with even the remotest schooling in the occult, she is sometimes seen crossing herself with an obscure and pagan sign…
∇
Cinderlands
Tim Pratt
Close to the end:
Dexter West woke to the sound of claws skittering on hardwood floors above him, thinking in a muzzy, sleep-headed way that the upstairs neighbors must have gotten a dog, even though dogs weren’t allowed, and now the horrible noise was going to keep him up all night. But as he sat up in bed he remembered there was no upstairs here. He’d moved out of the apartment building into a house of his own. After turning on the lamp, he went into the walk-in closet, where the noise—the scuttling—seemed loudest. A heating duct ran along the ceiling, and he pressed his ear to the metal and listened to the click and patter of tiny claws rushing along inside.
Was it… rats? Rats in the ducts? Rats in the walls?
He banged hard on the duct with his fist, and the scuttling stopped.
“I’ll get a cat,” he said aloud. “I need the company anyway.”
He went back to bed, and dreamed of digging holes in his back yard. Holes filled with squirming, black-furred rats the size of kittens. Holes that went down forever.
∇
Earlier:
Dexter crouched beneath the toxic fruit trees in his grassless back yard, turning over black earth with the spade he’d taken from the old man, and every shovelful revealed worse things:
clumps of cinders and the dust of ashes;
rusting nails, practically dripping tetanus;
wickedly-curved shards of brown glass;
bullets of various sizes, crusted with dirt;
and a foot or so down, fragments of black-stone statuary, showing here the partial orbit of a life-sized eye, there a broken mouth filled with crude triangular teeth, here a tiny hand with six fingers, all clawed.
Dexter looked toward the unmended fence again and said, “What do you mean, this used to be the cinderlands?”
But the old man next door was gone.
∇
Earlier still:
Dexter moved in the early spring of his thirty-fifth year. The houses on either side of his own were boarded up, and the neighborhood had the appearance of a mouth filled with missing teeth: empty lots and empty houses outnumbered the inhabited three-to-one. But he didn’t mind. After living among noisy neighbors, the silence and solitude surrounding his new life as a homeowner seemed a blessing.
The faded yellow house at 65 Mumford Street was a sprawling one-story affair with additions of varying vintages sprouting from all sides. He loved the labyrinthine interior, despite its many flaws: sagging air ducts from an abandoned remodel, a roof shedding shingles, cracked linoleum. It was still a bargain at the bank’s price. The original owner had died, and the dissolute heirs had run the place as a sort of commune—one bank official leaned close and whispered “cult,” though she wouldn’t elaborate. When the heirs vanished and stopped paying the mortgage, the bank seized the property.
Dexter paid cash, using a little of his settlement money from the case against the city. A year before he’d been attacked and beaten by police on his way to work, a case of mistaken identity—he resembled an escaped serial arsonist who’d recently burned down an officer’s home. Even after buying the house he had more than enough money to take time off to fix up the place. He was sure the neighborhood would get better, justifying the investment—the recession couldn’t last forever—but in the meantime, he’d enjoy the quiet.
The back yard was full of fruit trees, shading the earth so deeply that no grass could grow, and he spent the evenings under the branches drinking beer and watching the wind stir the leaves, body aching pleasantly from painting, and sanding, and hammering, and laying tile. After so many years teaching history to high school students who barely seemed to care about what had happened to them yesterday, it was refreshing to work with his hands and see the measurable progress of that work each day.
As the trees began to blossom, he looked forward to the fruit—lemon, plum, crab-apple, cherry. He decided to plant some tomatoes in the yard, and choosing between the two spots where sunlight actually touched the ground when a voice from beyond the broken side fence said, “I wouldn’t put roots down here if I were you.” An old man dressed in a faded white suit of archaic cut leaned on a walkingstick a
nd smiled affably from beneath a broad-brimmed straw hat.
“I didn’t realize anyone lived over there.”
“At my age I don’t come out often,” the man said. “Only when the weather is just exactly right. Saw you in that spot of sun. Thinking of gardening? Don’t. The soil’s poison.”
Dexter frowned. “The trees seem healthy.”
“Things might grow, but there’s so much… oh, lead, and mercury, and who knows what else in the dirt, I wouldn’t eat any of it. Plant in containers if you must, though even then…” He shook his head. “The air’s bad, too. This whole area used to be the cinderlands.”
“I guess I could get the soil tested for lead—”
“No need for all that trouble.” The old man reached into his suit and, improbably, drew out a spade with a gleaming blade. “Just dig down a little, you’ll see.”
“Okay.” Dexter had liked his neighbors better when they didn’t exist, but he took the spade, and dug… and found sharp, pointy, broken things, though the bits of statuary were the most disturbing. “What do you mean, this used to be the cinderlands?” The old man didn’t answer, and when Dexter went to the fence, he was gone, and the yard over there was as derelict as ever, the house just as uninhabited-looking as before.
∇
Later:
Dexter decided not to start a garden after all, and when the trees put forth fruit, he knew he’d made the right choice. The lemons were small, and while they were yellow, it was less the yellow of cartoon suns and more the yellow of jaundiced skin or nicotine-stained teeth. The plums seemed to rot rather than ripen, dripping off the branches in slimy clumps. The cherries were hard, and shriveled like shrunken heads, while the crab-apples grew so huge and fast they split their skins—and the inside of every apple was home to vast numbers of worms… possibly, he thought, of a kind unknown to science.
