The Taint and Other Novellas: Best Mythos Tales Volume 1

by Brian Lumley

  Quickly he followed the two to the looming canvas tent, and in through the dragon jawed entranceway, but he paused at the door-flap to the partitioned area to listen and observe. There came the scratch of a match and its bright, sudden flare, and then a candle flickered into life. At this point the whispering recommenced, and Anderson drew back a pace as the candle began to move about the interior of Hamilton’s museum. He could hear the hushed conversation quite clearly, could feel the tremulous excitement in the voice of the florid explorer:

  “But these are—fantastic! I’ve believed for years now that such relics must exist. Indeed, I’ve often brought my reputation close to ruin for such beliefs, and now…Young man, you’ll be world famous. Do you realize what you have here? Proof positive that the Cult of Cthulhu did exist! What monstrous worship—what hideous rites! Where, where did you find these things? I must know! And this idol—which you say is believed to invoke the spirit of the living Cthulhu himself! Who holds such beliefs? I know of course that Wendy-Smith—”

  “Hah!” Hamilton’s rasping voice cut in. “You can keep all your Wendy-Smiths and Gordon Walmsleys. They only scraped the surface. I’ve gone inside—and outside! Explorers, dreamers, mystics—mere dabblers. Why, they’d die, all of them, if they saw what I’ve seen, if they went where I’ve been. And none of them have ever dreamed what I know!”

  “But why keep it hidden? Why don’t you open this place up, show the world what you’ve got here, what you’ve achieved? Publish, man, publish! Why, together—”

  “Together?”Hamilton’s voice was darker, trembling as he suddenly snuffed the candle. “Together? Proof that the Cult of Cthulhu did exist? Show it to the world? Publish?” His chuckle was obscene in the dark, and Anderson heard the visitor’s sharp intake of breath. “The world’s not ready, Gamber, and the stars are not right! What you would like to do, like many before you, is alert the world to Their one-time presence, the days of Their sovereignty—which might in turn lead to the discovery that They are here even now! Indeed Wendy-Smith was right, too right, and where is Wendy-Smith now? No, no—They aren’t interested in mere dabblers, except that such are dangerous to Them and must be removed! Iä, R’lyeh! You are no true dreamer, Gamber, no believer. You’re not worthy of membership in the Great Priesthood. You’re…dangerous! Proof? I’ll give you proof. Listen, and watch—”

  Hearing his brother’s injunction, the secret listener would have paid dearly to see what next occurred. A short while earlier, just before Hamilton had snuffed out the candle, Anderson had managed to find a hole in the canvas large enough to facilitate a fair view of the partitioned area. He had seen a semicircle of carved stone tablets, with the octopoid idol presiding atop or seated upon a thronelike pedestal. Now, in the dark, his view-hole was useless.

  He could still listen, however, and now Hamilton’s voice came—strange and vibrant, though still controlled in volume—in a chant or invocation of terrible cadence and rhythmic disorder. These were not words the younger Tharpe uttered but unintelligible sounds, a morbidly insane agglutination of verbal improbabilities which ought never to have issued from a human throat at all! And as the invocation ceased, to an incredulous gasping from the doomed explorer, Anderson had to draw back from his hole lest he become visible in the glow of a green radiance springing up abruptly in the centre of Hamilton’s encircling relics.

  The green glow grew brighter, filling the hidden museum and spilling emerald beams from several small holes in the canvas. This was no normal light, for the beams were quite alien to anything Anderson had ever seen before; the very light seemed to writhe and contort in a slow and loathsomely languid dance. Now Anderson found himself again a witness, for the shadows of Hamilton and his intended victim were thrown blackly against the wall of canvas. There was no requirement now to “spy” properly upon the pair; his view of the eerie drama could not have been clearer. The centre of the radiance seemed to expand and shrink alternatively, pulsing like an alien heart of light. Hamilton stood to one side, his arms flung wide in terrible triumph; Stainton Gamber cowered, his hands up before his face as if to shield it from some unbearable heat—or as if to ward off the unknown and inexplicable!

  Anderson’s shadow-view of the terrified explorer was profile, and he was suddenly astonished to note that while the man appeared to be screaming horribly he could hear nothing of his screams! It was as if Anderson had been stricken deaf. Hamilton, too, was now plainly vociferous; his throat moved in crazed cachinnations and his thrown-back head and heaving shoulders plainly announced unholy glee—but all in stark silence! Anderson knew now that the mad green light had somehow worked against normal order, annulling all sound utterly and thereby hiding in its emerald pulsings the final act in this monstrous shadow-play. As the core pulsated even faster and brighter, Hamilton moved quickly after the silently shrieking explorer, catching him by the collar of his jacket and swinging him sprawling into the core itself!

  Instantly the core shrank, sucking in upon itself and dwindling in a moment to a ball of intense brightness. But where was the explorer? Horrified, Anderson saw that now only one shadow remained faintly outlined upon the canvas—that of his brother!

  Quickly, weirdly, paling as they went, the beams of green light withdrew. Sound instantly returned, and Anderson heard his own harsh breathing. He stilled the sound, moving back to his spy-hole to see what was happening. A faint green glow with a single bright speck of a core remained within the semicircle; and now Hamilton bowed to this dimming light and his voice came again, low and tremulous with emotion:

  “Iä, naflhgn Cthulhu R’lyeh mglw’nafh,

  Eha’ungl wglw hflghglui ngah’glw,

  Engl Eha gh’eehf gnhugl,

  Nhflgng uh’eha wgah’nagl hfglufh—

  U’ng Eha’ghglui Aeeh ehn’hflgh…

  That is not dead which can eternal lie,

  And with strange aeons even death may die.”

  No sooner had Hamilton ceased these utterly alien mouthings and the paradoxical couplet that completed them, and while yet the green glow continued to dim and fade, than he spoke again, this time all in recognizable English. Such was his murmured modulation and deliberate spacing of the spoken sequences that his hidden brother immediately recognized the following as a translation of what had gone before:

  “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…”

  It was only then that the full horror of what he had seen—the cold-blooded, premeditated murder of a man by either some monstrous occult device or a foreign science beyond his knowledge—finally went home to Anderson Tharpe, and barely managing to stifle the hysterical babble he felt welling in his throat, he took an involuntary step backwards…to collide loudly with a cage of great bats.

  Three things happened then in rapid succession before Anderson could gather his wits to flee. All trace of the green glow vanished in an instant, throwing the tent once more into complete darkness; then in contrast, confusing the elder brother, the bright interior lights blinked on; finally, as he sought to recover from his confusion, Hamilton appeared through the partition’s canvas door, his eyes blazing in a face contorted in fury!

  “You!” Hamilton spat, striding to Anderson’s side and catching him fiercely by the collar of his dressing-gown. “How much have you seen?”

  Anderson twisted free and backed away. “I…I saw it all, but I had guessed as much some time ago. Murder—and you my brother!”

  “Save your sanctimony,” Hamilton sneered. “If you’ve known so much for so long, then you’re as much a murderer as I am! And anyway”—his eyes seemed visibly to glaze and take on a faraway look—“it wasn’t murder, not as you understand it.”

  “Of course not.” Now it was Anderson’s turn to sneer. “It was a—a ‘sacrifice’—to this so-called ‘god’ of yours, Great Cthulhu!
And were the others all sacrifices, too?”

  “All of them,” Hamilton answered with a nod, automatically, as in a trance.

  “Oh? And where’s the money?”

  “Money?” The faraway look went out of the younger Tharpe’s eyes immediately. “What money?”

  Anderson saw that this was no bluff; his brother’s motive had not been personal gain, at least not in a monetary sense. Which in turn meant—

  Had those rumours and unfriendly whispers heard about the stalls and sideshows—those hints of a looming madness in his brother—had they been more than mere guesswork, then? Surely he would have known. As if in answer to his unspoken question, Hamilton spoke again—and listening to him Anderson believed he had his answer:

  “You’re the same as all the others, Anderson—you can’t see beyond the length of your greedy nose. Money? Pah! You think that They are interested in wealth? They are not; neither am I. They have a wealth of aeons behind Them; the future is Theirs…” Again his eyes seemed to glaze over.

  “Them? Who do you mean?” Anderson asked, frowning and backing farther away.

  “Cthulhu and the others. Cthulhu and the Deep Ones, and Their brothers and kin forever dreaming in the vast vaults beneath. “Iä, R’lyeh, Cthulhu fhtagn!”

  “You’re quite—mad!”

  “You think so?”Hamilton quickly followed after him, pushing his face uncomfortably close. “I’m mad, am I? Well, perhaps, but I’ll tell you something: when you and the others like you are reduced to mere cattle, before the Earth is cleared off of life as you know it, a trusted handful of priests will guard the herds for Them—and I shall be a priest among priests, appointed to the service of Great Cthulhu Himself!”His eyes burned feverishly.

  Now Anderson was certain of his brother’s madness, but even so he could see a way to profit from it. “Hamilton,” he said, after a moment’s thought, “worship whichever gods you like and aspire to whichever priesthood—but don’t you see we have to live? There could be good money in this for both of us. If only—”

  “No!” Hamilton hissed. “To worship Cthulhu is enough. Indeed, it is all! That, in there”—he jerked his head, indicating the enclosed area behind him—“is His temple. To offer up sacrifices while yet thinking of oneself would be blasphemous, and when He comes I shall not be found wanting!” His eyes went wide and he trembled.

  “You don’t know Him, Anderson. He is awful, awesome, a monster, a god! He is sunken now, drowned and dead in deep R’lyeh, but His death is a sleeping death and He will awaken. When the stars are right we chosen ones will answer the Call of Cthulhu, and R’lyeh will rise up again to astound a reeling universe. Why, even the Gorgons were His priestesses in the old world! And you talk to me of money.”Again he sneered, but now his madness had a firm grip on him and the sneer soon turned to a crafty smile.

  “And you’re helpless to do anything, Anderson, for if you breathe a word I’ll swear you were in on it—that you helped me from the start! And as for bodies, why, there are none. They are gone to dreaming Cthulhu, through the light He sends me when I cry out to Him in my darkness. So you see, nothing could ever be proved…”

  “Perhaps not, but I don’t think it would take much to have you, well, put away!” Anderson quietly answered.

  The barb went straight home. A look of terror crossed Hamilton’s face and, plainly aware of his own mental infirmity, he visibly paled.

  “Put me away? But you wouldn’t. If you did, I wouldn’t be able to worship, to sacrifice, and—”

  “But there’s no need to worry about it,”Anderson cut him off. “ I won’t have you put away. Just see things my way, show me how you dissolve them in that green light of yours—I mean, in, er, dreaming Cthulhu’s light—and then we’ll carry on as before, except that there’ll be money…”

  “No, Anderson,” the other refused almost gently, “it can’t work like that. You could never believe—not even if I showed you proof of my priesthood, which hides beneath this false head of hair that I’m obliged to wear, the very Mark of Cthulhu—and I can’t worship as you suggest. I’m sorry.” There was an insane sadness in his face as he drew out a long knife from its sheath inside his jacket. “I use this when they’re stronger than me,” he explained, “and when they’re liable to fight. Cthulhu doesn’t care for it much because he likes them alive initially and whole, but—” His knife hand flashed up and down.

  Only Anderson’s speed saved him, for he turned quickly to one side as the blade flashed down toward his breast. Then their wrists were locked and they staggered to and fro, Hamilton frothing at the mouth and trying to bite, while Anderson grimly struggled for dear life. The madman seemed to have the strength of three normal men, and soon they fell to the ground, a thrashing heap that rolled blindly in through the flap of the canvas door to Hamilton’s “temple”.

  There it was that finally the younger brother’s toupee came away from his head in the silent struggle—and in a burst of strength engendered of sheer loathing Anderson managed to turn the knife inward and drive it to the madman’s heart. He was quick then to be on his feet and away from the thing that now lay twitching out its life upon the sawdust floor—the thing that had been his brother—which now, where the top of Hamilton’s head had been, wore a cap of writhing white worms of finger thickness, like some monstrous sea-anemone sucking vampirishly at the still-living brain!

  Later, when morning came, even had there been someone in whom he might safely confide, Anderson Tharpe could never have related a detailed or coherent account of the preceding hours of darkness. He recalled only the general thread of what had passed; frantic snatches of the fearful activity that followed upon the hideous death of his brother. But first there had been that half hour or so of waiting—of knowing that at any moment, attracted perhaps by strange lights or sounds, someone just might enter the tent and find him with Hamilton’s body—but he had been obliged to wait for he could not bring himself to touch the corpse. Not while the stubby white tentacles of its head continued to writhe! Hamilton died almost immediately, but his monstrous crown had taken much longer…

  Then, when the loathsome—parasite?—had shuddered into lifeless rigidity, he had gathered together his shattered nerves to dig a deep grave in the soft earth beneath the sawdust. That had been a gruesome task with the lights turned down and Cthulhu’s stone effigy casting a tentacled shadow over the fearful digger. Anderson later remembered how soft the ground had been—and wet when it ought to have been dry in the weatherproof tent—and he recalled a powerful smell of deep sea, of aeon-old ocean slime and rotting seaweeds; an odour he had known on occasion before, and always after one of Hamilton’s “sacrifices.” The connection had not impressed itself upon his mind as anything more than mere coincidence before, but now he knew that the smell came with the green light, as did that strange state of soundlessness.

  In order to clear what remained of the fetor quickly—having tamped down the earth, generally “tidied up”and removed all traces of his digging—he opened and tied back the canvas doors of the tent to allow the night air a healthy circulation. But even then, having done everything possible to hide the night’s horror, he was unable to relax properly as daylight crept up and the folk of the funfair began to wake and move about.

  When finally Hodgson’s Funfair had opened at noon, Anderson had something of a shaky grip on himself, but even so he had found himself drenched in cold sweat at the end of each oratorial session with the crowds at the freak-house. His only moments of relaxation came between shows. The worst time had been when a leather jacketed teenager peered through the canvas inner door to the partitioned section of the tent; and Anderson had nearly knocked the youth down in his anxiety to steer him away from the place, though no trace remained of what had transpired there.

  On reflection, it amazed Anderson that his fight with his brother had not attracted someone’s attention, and yet it had not. Even the fairground’s usually vociferous watchdogs had remained silent. And yet those sa
me dogs, since Hamilton’s return from his travels abroad, had seemed even more nervous, more given to snapping and snarling than ever before. Anderson could only tell himself that the weird “silent state” which had accompanied the green light must have spread out over the entire fairground to dissipate slowly, thus disarming the dogs. Or perhaps they had sensed something else, remaining silent out of fear…? Indeed, it appeared his second guess was correct, for he discovered later that many of the dogs had whimpered the whole night away huddled beneath the caravans of their masters…

  Two days later the funfair packed up and moved on, leaving Hamilton Tharpe’s body safely buried in an otherwise empty field. At last the worst of Anderson’s apprehensions left him and his nerves began to settle down. To be sure his jumpiness had been marked by the folk of the funfair, who had all correctly (though for the wrong reasons) diagnosed it as a symptom of anxiety about his crazy, bad-lot brother. So it was that as soon as Hamilton’s absence was remarked upon, Anderson was able simply to shrug his shoulders and answer: “Who knows? Tibet, Egypt, Australia—he’s just gone off again—said nothing to me about it—could be anywhere!”And while such inquiries were always politely compassionate, he knew that in fact the inquirers were greatly relieved that his brother had “just gone off again.”

  Another six weeks went by, with regular halts at various villages and small towns, and during that time Anderson managed to will himself to forget all about his brother’s death and his own involvement—all, that is, except the nature of that parasitic horror which had made itself manifest upon Hamilton’s head. That was something he would never forget, the way that awful anemone had wriggled and writhed long after its host was dead. Hamilton had called the thing a symbol of his priesthood—in his own words: “The Mark of Cthulhu”—but in truth it could only have been some loathsomely malignant and rare form of cancer, or perhaps a kind of worm or fluke like the tapeworm. Anderson always shuddered when he recalled it, for it had looked horribly sentient there atop Hamilton’s head; and when one thought about the depth at which it might have been rooted…