The Horror Megapack

by H. P. Lovecraft

  “Shut up a minute—listen—”

  Again Bligh’s voice was lifted up.

  “This is the cov’nant that I make:

  From henceforth nevermore

  Will I again the world destroy

  With water, as before.”

  Bligh’s voice died away again in Abel Keeling’s ears.

  “Oh—my—fat—Aunt—Julia!” the voice that seemed to come from between sea and sky sounded again. Then it spoke more loudly. “I say,” it began with careful politeness, “if you are a ship, do you mind telling us where the masquerade is to be? Our wireless is out of order, and we hadn’t heard of it.… Oh, you do see it, Ward, don’t you?… Please, please tell us what the hell you are!”

  Again Abel Keeling had moved as a sleepwalker moves. He had raised himself up by the belfry timbers, and Bligh had sunk in a heap on the deck. Abel Keeling’s movement overturned the pipkin, which raced the little trickle of its contents down the deck and lodged where the still and brimming sea made, as it were, a chain with the carved balustrade of the quarter-deck—one link a still gleaming edge, then a dark baluster, and then another gleaming link. For one moment only Abel Keeling found himself noticing that that which had driven Bligh aft had been the rising of the water in the waist as the galleon settled by the head—the waist was now entirely submerged; then once more he was absorbed in his dream, its voices, and its shape in the mist, which had again taken the form of a pyramid before his eyeballs.

  “Of course,” a voice seemed to be complaining anew, and still through that confused dinning in Abel Keeling’s ears, “we can’t turn a four-inch on it.… And, of course, Ward, I don’t believe in ’em. D’you hear, Ward? I don’t believe in ’em, I say.… Shall we call down to old A. B.? This might interest His Scientific Skippership.…”

  “Oh, lower a boat and pull out to it—into it—over it—through it—”

  “Look at our chaps crowded on the barbette yonder. They’ve seen it. Better not give an order you know won’t be obeyed.…”

  Abel Keeling, cramped against the antique belfry, had begun to find his dream interesting. For, though he did not know her build, that mirage was the shape of a ship. No doubt it was projected from his brooding on ships of half an hour before; and that was odd.… But perhaps, after all, it was not very odd. He knew that she did not really exist; only the appearance of her existed; but things had to exist like that before they really existed. Before the Mary of the Tower had existed she had been a shape in some man’s imagination; before that, some dreamer had dreamed the form of a ship with oars; and before that, far away in the dawn and infancy of the world, some seer had seen in a vision the raft before man had ventured to push out over the water on his two planks. And since this shape that rode before Abel Keeling’s eyes was a shape in his, Abel Keeling’s dream, he, Abel Keeling, was the master of it. His own brooding brain had contrived her, and she was launched upon the illimitable ocean of his own mind.…

  “And I will not unmindful be

  Of this, My covenant, passed

  Twixt Me and you and every flesh

  Whiles that the world should last,”

  sang Bligh, rapt.…

  But as a dreamer, even in his dream, will scratch upon the wall by his couch some key or word to put him in mind of his vision on the morrow when it has left him, so Abel Keeling found himself seeking some sign to be a proof to those to whom no vision is vouchsafed. Even Bligh sought that—could not be silent in his bliss, but lay on the deck there, uttering great passionate Amens and praising his Maker, as he said, upon an harp and an instrument of ten strings. So with Abel Keeling. It would be the Amen of his life to have praised God, not upon a harp, but upon a ship that should carry her own power, that should store wind or its equivalent as she stored her victuals, that should be something wrested from the chaos of uninvention and ordered and disciplined and subordinated to Abel Keeling’s will.… And there she was, that ship-shaped thing of spirit-grey, with the four pipes that resembled a phantom organ now broadside and of equal length. And the ghost-crew of that ship were speaking again.…

  The interrupted silver chain by the quarterdeck balustrade had now become continuous, and the balusters made a herring-bone over their own motionless reflections. The spilt water from the pipkin had dried, and the pipkin was not to be seen. Abel Keeling stood beside the mast, erect as God made man to go. With his leathery hand he smote upon the bell. He waited for the space of a minute, and then cried:

  “Ahoy!… Ship ahoy!… What ship’s that?”

  III

  We are not conscious in a dream that we are playing a game the beginning and end of which are in ourselves. In this dream of Abel Keeling’s a voice replied:

  “Hallo, it’s found its tongue.… Ahoy there! What are you?”

  Loudly and in a clear voice Abel Keeling called: “Are you a ship?”

  With a nervous giggle the answer came:

  “We are a ship, aren’t we, Ward? I hardly feel sure.… Yes, of course, we’re a ship. No question about us. The question is what the dickens you are.”

  Not all the words these voices used were intelligible to Abel Keeling, and he knew not what it was in the tone of these last words that reminded him of the honour due to the Mary of the Tower. Blister-white and at the end of her life as she was, Abel Keeling was still jealous of her dignity; the voice had a youngish ring; and it was not fitting that young chins should be wagged about his galleon. He spoke curtly.

  “You that spoke—are you the master of that ship?”

  “Officer of the watch,” the words floated back; “the captain’s below.”

  “Then send for him. It is with masters that masters hold speech,” Abel Keeling replied.

  He could see the two shapes, flat and without relief, standing on a high narrow structure with rails. One of them gave a low whistle, and seemed to be fanning his face; but the other rumbled something into a sort of funnel. Presently the two shapes became three. There was a murmuring, as of a consultation, and then suddenly a new voice spoke. At its thrill and tone a sudden tremor ran through Abel Keeling’s frame. He wondered what response it was that that voice found in the forgotten recesses of his memory.…

  “Ahoy!” seemed to call this new yet faintly remembered voice. “What’s all this about? Listen. We’re His Majesty’s destroyer Seapink, out of Devonport last October, and nothing particular the matter with us. Now who are you?”

  “The Mary of the Tower, out of the Port of Rye on the day of Saint Anne, and only two men—”

  A gasp interrupted him.

  “Out of WHERE?” that voice that so strangely moved Abel Keeling said unsteadily, while Bligh broke into groans of renewed rapture.

  “Out of the Port of Rye, in the County of Sussex…nay, give ear, else I cannot make you hear me while this man’s spirit and flesh wrestle so together!… Ahoy! Are you gone?” For the voices had become a low murmur, and the ship-shape had faded before Abel Keeling’s eyes. Again and again he called. He wished to be informed of the disposition and economy of the wind-chamber.…

  “The wind-chamber!” he called, in an agony lest the knowledge almost within his grasp should be lost. “I would know about the wind-chamber.…”

  Like an echo, there came back the words, uncomprehendingly uttered, “The wind-chamber?…”

  “…that driveth the vessel—perchance ’tis not wind—a steel bow that is bent also conserveth force—the force you store, to move at will through calm and storm.…”

  “Can you make out what it’s driving at?”

  “Oh, we shall all wake up in a minute.…”

  “Quiet, I have it; the engines; it wants to know about our engines. It’ll be wanting to see our papers presently. Rye Port!… Well, no harm in humouring it; let’s see what it can make of this. Ahoy there!” came the voice to Abel Keeling, a little more strongly, as if a shifting wind carried it, and speaking faster and faster as it went on. “Not wind, but steam; d’you hear? Steam, steam. Steam, in
eight Yarrow water-tube boilers. S-t-e-a-m, steam. Got it? And we’ve twin-screw triple expansion engines, indicated horse-power four thousand, and we can do 430 revolutions per minute; savvy? Is there anything your phantomhood would like to know about our armament?…”

  Abel Keeling was muttering fretfully to himself. It annoyed him that words in his own vision should have no meaning for him. How did words come to him in a dream that he had no knowledge of when wide awake? The Seapink—that was the name of this ship; but a pink was long and narrow, low-carged and square-built aft.…

  “And as for our armament,” the voice with the tones that so profoundly troubled Abel Keeling’s memory continued, “we’ve two revolving Whitehead torpedo-tubes, three six-pounders on the upper deck, and that’s a twelve-pounder forward there by the conning-tower. I forgot to mention that we’re nickel steel, with a coal capacity of sixty tons in most damnably placed bunkers, and that thirty and a quarter knots is about our top. Care to come aboard?”

  But the voice was speaking still more rapidly and feverishly, as if to fill a silence with no matter what, and the shape that was uttering it was straining forward anxiously over the rail.

  “Ugh! But I’m glad this happened in the daylight,” another voice was muttering.

  “I wish I was sure it was happening at all.… Poor old spook!”

  “I suppose it would keep its feet if her deck was quite vertical. Think she’ll go down, or just melt?”

  “Kind of go down…without wash.…”

  “Listen—here’s the other one now—”

  For Bligh was singing again:

  “For, Lord, Thou know’st our nature such

  If we great things obtain,

  And in the getting of the same

  Do feel no grief or pain,

  “We little do esteem thereof;

  But, hardly brought to pass,

  A thousand times we do esteem

  More than the other was.”

  “But oh, look—look—look at the other!… Oh, I say, wasn’t he a grand old boy! Look!”

  For, transfiguring Abel Reeling’s form as a prophet’s form is transfigured in the instant of his rapture, flooding his brain with the white eureka-light of perfect knowledge, that for which he and his dream had been at a standstill had come. He knew her, this ship of the future, as if God’s Finger had bitten her lines into his brain. He knew her as those already sinking into the grave know things, miraculously, completely, accepting Life’s impossibilities with a nodded “Of course.” From the ardent mouths of her eight furnaces to the last drip from her lubricators, from her bed-plates to the breeches of her quick-firers, he knew her—read her gauges, thumbed her bearings, gave the ranges from her range-finders, and lived the life he lived who was in command of her. And he would not forget on the morrow, as he had forgotten on many morrows, for at last he had seen the water about his feet, and knew that there would be no morrow for him in this world.…

  And even in that moment, with but a sand or two to run in his glass, indomitable, insatiable, dreaming dream on dream, he could not die until he knew more. He had two questions to ask, and a master-question; and but a moment remained. Sharply his voice rang out.

  “Ho, there!… This ancient ship, the Mary of the Tower, cannot steam thirty and a quarter knots, but yet she can sail the waters. What more does your ship? Can she soar above them, as the fowls of the air soar?”

  “Lord, he thinks we’re an aeroplane!… No, she can’t.…”

  “And can you dive, even as the fishes of the deep?”

  “No.… Those are submarines…we aren’t a submarine.…”

  But Abel Keeling waited for no more. He gave an exulting chuckle.

  “Oho, oho—thirty knots, and but on the face of the waters—no more than that? Oho!… Now my ship, the ship I see as a mother sees full-grown the child she has but conceived—my ship, I say—oho!—my ship shall.… Below there—trip that gun!”

  The cry came suddenly and alertly, as a muffled sound came from below and an ominous tremor shook the galleon.

  “By Jove, her guns are breaking loose below—that’s her finish—”

  “Trip that gun, and double-breech the others!” Abel Keeling’s voice rang out, as if there had been any to obey him. He had braced himself within the belfry frame; and then in the middle of the next order his voice suddenly failed him. His ship-shape, that for the moment he had forgotten, rode once more before his eyes. This was the end, and his master-question, apprehension for the answer to which was now torturing his face and well-nigh bursting his heart, was still unasked.

  “Ho—he that spoke with me—the master,” he cried in a voice that ran high, “is he there?”

  “Yes, yes!” came the other voice across the water, sick with suspense. “Oh, be quick!”

  There was a moment in which hoarse cries from many voices, a heavy thud and rumble on wood, and a crash of timbers and a gurgle and a splash were indescribably mingled; the gun under which Abel Keeling had lain had snapped her rotten breechings and plunged down the deck, carrying Bligh’s unconscious form with it. The deck came up vertical, and for one instant longer Abel Keeling clung to the belfry.

  “I cannot see your face,” he screamed, “but meseems your voice is a voice I know. What is your name?”

  In a torn sob the answer came across the water:

  “Keeling—Abel Keeling.… Oh, my God!”

  And Abel Keeling’s cry of triumph, that mounted to a victorious “Huzza!” was lost in the downward plunge of the Mary of the Tower, that left the strait empty save for the sun’s fiery blaze and the last smoke-like evaporation of the mists.

  FEAR, by Achmed Abdullah

  The fact that the man whom he feared had died ten years earlier did not in the least lessen Stuart McGregor’s obsession of horror, of a certain grim expectancy, every time he recalled that final scene, just before Farragut Hutchison disappeared in the African jungle that stood, spectrally motionless as if forged out of some blackish-green metal, in the haggard moonlight.

  As he reconstructed it, the whole scene seemed unreal, almost oppressively, ludicrously theatrical. The pall of sodden, stygian darkness all around; the night sounds of soft-winged, obscene things flapping lazily overhead or brushing against the furry trees that held the woolly heat of the tropical day like boiler pipes in a factory; the slimy, swishy things that glided and crawled and wiggled underfoot; the vibrant growl of a hunting lioness that began in a deep basso and peaked to a shrill, high-pitched, ridiculously inadequate treble; a spotted hyena’s vicious, bluffing bark; the chirp and whistle of innumerable monkeys; a warthog breaking through the undergrowth with a clumsy, clownish crash—and somewhere, very far away, the staccato thumping of a signal drum, and more faintly yet the answer from the next in line.

  He had seen many such drums, made from fire-hollowed palm trees and covered with tightly stretched skin—often the skin of a human enemy.

  Yes. He remembered it all. He remembered the night jungle creeping in on their camp like a sentient, malign being—and then that ghastly, ironic moon squinting down, just as Farragut Hutchison walked away between the six giant, plumed, ochre-smeared Bakoto warriors, and bringing into crass relief the tattoo mark on the man’s back where the shirt had been torn to tatters by camel thorns and wait-a-bit spikes and saber-shaped palm leaves.

  He recalled the occasion when Farragut Hutchison had had himself tattooed; after a crimson, drunken spree at Madam Celeste’s place in Port Said, the other side of the Red Sea traders’ bazaar, to please a half-caste Swahili dancing girl who looked like a golden Madonna of evil, familiar with all the seven sins. Doubtless the girl had gone shares with the Levantine craftsman who had done the work—an eagle, in bold red and blue, surmounted by a lop-sided crown, and surrounded by a wavy design. The eagle was in profile, and its single eye had a disconcerting trick of winking sardonically whenever Farragut Hutchison moved his back muscles or twitched his shoulder blades.

  Always, in his memory
, Stuart McGregor saw that tattoo mark.

  Always did he see the wicked, leering squint in the eagle’s eye—and then he would scream, wherever he happened to be, in a theatre, a Broadway restaurant, or across some good friend’s mahogany and beef.

  Thinking back, he remembered that, for all their bravado, for all their showing off to each other, both he and Farragut Hutchinson had been afraid since that day, up the hinterland, when, drunk with fermented palm wine, they had insulted the fetish of the Bakotos, while the men were away hunting and none left to guard the village except the women and children and a few feeble old men whose curses and high-pitched maledictions were picturesque, but hardly effectual enough to stop him and his partner from doing a vulgar, intoxicated dance in front of the idol, from grinding burning cigar ends into its squat, repulsive features, and from generally polluting the juju hut—not to mention the thorough and profitable looting of the place.

  They had got away with the plunder, gold dust and a handful of splendid canary diamonds, before the Bakoto warriors had returned. But fear had followed them, stalked them, trailed them; a fear different from any they had ever experienced before. And be it mentioned that their path of life had been crimson and twisted and fantastic, that they had followed the little squinting swarth-headed, hunchbacked djinni of adventure wherever man’s primitive lawlessness rules above the law, from Nome to Timbuktu, from Peru to the black felt tents of Outer Mongolia, from the Australian bush to the absinth-sodden apache haunts of Paris. Be it mentioned, furthermore, that thus, often, they had stared death in the face and, not being fools, had found the staring distasteful and shivery.

  But what they had felt on that journey, back to the security of the coast and the ragged Union Jack flapping disconsolately above the British governor’s official corrugated iron mansion, had been something worse than mere physical fear; it had been a nameless, brooding, sinister apprehension which had crept through their souls, a harshly discordant note that had pealed through the hidden recesses of their beings.