The Cthulhu Mythos Megapack (40 Modern and Classic Lovecraftian Tales) (107 page)

I saw many dead men I had known and held annoyingly banal conversations with them. Perhaps the gargoyle faces that peered and gibbered into mine were likewise hallucinations, but I’m not absolutely sure, even though I think it would have been too dark to see real faces. Screaming at them and punching them made them flee, and I doubt that phantasms would have been so timid.

I fell. My head cleared sufficiently to grasp that I was about to die, that I had fallen into the abyss, but the fall soon ended with a hard jolt on a brick floor. I rose and cracked my head on a wooden beam. Despite the blinding pain, I was elated. I doubted a tomb would have wooden beams. I was in the cellar of a common house, though it seemed less common when I tripped over a chair made of human bones, and of some neither human nor animal.

I groped my way forward and collided with a dangling bundle. Only when it swung back and nearly toppled me did I now it for a corpse, hung by the heels. There were several such, most of them in advanced stages of decay.

“Help,” a thin voice cried. “Please, help me!”

A man kept in a lightless dungeon for twenty years could have been no more thrilled by that voice than I. I had lost all certainty that the world existed, that other creatures than myself existed, that I was not a mad worm in a demon’s bowels. “Where? Where?” I demanded, blundering among the hanging corpses.

I staggered against the shockingly warm body of a woman. Forming those few words had exhausted her stock of speech, but she whimpered. I made to untie her, assuming she was held by a rope, but she was suspended by a hook through her ankles. She screamed when I lifted her to relieve the cruel pressure, but it was a very faint cry indeed. By the time I had extracted the hook and laid her body on the floor she was quite dead.

I touched her dead face. Perhaps the admission does me no credit, but I was relieved to know that my illogical fear was unfounded, that she wasn’t my niece. She was emaciated, and her hair was longer and finer than Susan’s thick curls.

There was one similarity, however: the smallest finger of her left hand had been amputated.

I crept up an ominously swaying and creaking stair to a door that opened on painful sunlight. This place, the brightest and most beautiful I had ever seen, soon faded to its true form as a derelict brothel. It had been so long abandoned that the rats scurrying on their errands spared me no more than occasional glances of annoyance.

I was starved for light, color, distraction, and I found these in the stained murals. The antique hairstyles and unfashionable voluptuousness of the doll-faced wantons were like a peephole on my grandfather’s youthful daydreams. Even the graffiti had charm; but among the specimens of wit that was old-fashioned when I was a boy, the names of lechers whose fires no longer burned and praises of fair ones long past fueling them, my eye fell on one inscription that unnerved me. It may have been a joke or scurrility or even a religious message whose meaning had died with its author, but I doubted it: “Blessed are they that eat and are consumed not.”

A vision of Mrs. Kilpatrick, ghoulishly gnawing while retaining her human form and even her beauty, assaulted me as clearly as if it were displayed among the sprawling whores. I ran from the house. I believed that the street outside was one of a multiplicious tangle jammed between Mt. Tabor and the Miskatonic, but this one’s only distinction was emptiness. I heard sounds of life, but I fancied that they issued from beneath the cobblestones. From the midst of a house-high heap of refuse in an alley, a pale, hairless face seemed to leer at me, but before I could say whether it was a most unlikely dog or something quite different, it vanished. I hurried on.

It struck me belatedly that I should retrace my steps and mark the house of corpses with its entrance to the ghoul-tunnel, but I had wandered too far and inattentively to find my way back. I memorized the names of a few streets, but I was later unable to find them on any map. I must have been in a fugue, as psychologists call it, for I have no clear idea of how I got home. I’m sure no cabby would have allowed me to ride in his car.

“Ay-ay-ay!” Ramon cried when, at long last, he opened the door to me. “The tiger, she really get loose?”

“No, the lady,” I grumbled, and I told him to go flog himself with his questions about my fine topcoat and jacket and sword, then took to my bed for three days and nights.

I was feeling much better, though guilty, when I presented myself for breakfast at my sister’s home. Susan had not succumbed to shock, as I had feared on my way to visit her so belatedly, but she was said to remain dull and listless.

“Let her sleep for now,” Sarah advised, and went on to quiz and tease me about the exhibition I had not seen.

“Mrs. Kilpatrick’s disappeared, you know,” my brother-in-law said, rescuing me from further questions about Niobe. “I went there in the hope of tracing those scoundrels—I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d followed you from her place, friends of hers, the vile bitch—and her servants seem to think she’s finally got what’s coming to her. She hasn’t seen seen since the night Susan was attacked. Doesn’t that suggest—”

He broke off as Susan swept into the room, and he looked even more surprised than I felt. She radiated health and happiness. I had never seen her so lovely. He objected to her being up, but she silenced him with a kiss. She was going out, she said, she felt wonderful. She embraced her mother and then me.

Her kiss was indecorous, to say the least. I wondered if she had gone mad as I recoiled from her snaking tongue. I turned to her father to deny any blame for her behavior, but he stared at me in horror.

“What do you have for me, dear Uncle?” she laughed, poking and tickling and thrusting her hands into my clothing. “Another whistle, perhaps, that I can blow?”

When she groped inside my trousers I seized her wrist. Staring at her hand, I couldn’t believe what I saw. She wrenched it away with nightmarish strength. I kicked my chair over and rose to my feet.

“Who are you?” I cried, gripping her by the shoulders. “What have you done with Susan?”

“No, Uncle!” She slapped me. The blow, from a girl not half my size, sent me sprawling to upset the table. “You’ll never stick your sword in my ass again!”

“No!” Sarah shrieked. “Felix, what does she mean?”

“It’s not she!” I cried, wallowing in broken crockery as I struggled to rise. “Stop the fiend!”

Hazard knew what his daughter’s words meant, or thought he did, and he knocked me down as soon as I managed to get up. I shoved him aside when I rose a second time and ran after the thing masquerading as Susan. It had already fled to the street, but that street was empty by the time I reached it.

When I turned, Hazard bore down on me, his red face working, his fists clenched. Sarah clung to his right arm, but the look she gave me was not one of unqualified support.

“Kill me if I’m wrong,” I said, “but severed fingers don’t grow back.”

“Oh, no!” Sarah screamed. “He’s right! I saw it. How can it be?”

We trudged up to Susan’s room, her father and I. Refusing to wait below with Sarah, he cursed me for a fool and told me to get on with it, damned, fat lecher that I was with my wild tales of fingers growing back. It gave me no consolation that he fell down in a faint when I opened the door on the red, reeking chamber.

I have seen victims of violence. I have dissected many corpses. I had never before seen the victim of a violent dissection. No surgeon would rip a body open in the shortest possible time, strewing limbs and organs about the room, and surely no surgeon would do it while the patient still lived and the heart could spray blood over the walls, the floor, even the ceiling. I nearly collapsed beside the poor child’s father.

As soon as I could master myself I tiptoed into the room. A huge, old oak stood beyond the window, and the window was open. That explained everything, except the boldness and cunning of a ghoul that would cross half the bustling town, from Mt. Tabor Cemetery to Zaman’s Hill, to seize a living victim.

The legends I had collected and half-playfully written down had told the truth. Susan’s heart had been torn from her chest, her brain from her crushed skull. The ghoul had devoured them and mimicked her form. One thing he had not eaten, perhaps purposefully, was her left hand. It lay neatly on the human wrack, unmarked except for the stump of her little finger.

“He liked it,” I muttered to myself, “and came back for more.”

“What?” Hazard groaned. “What?”

I left the room and closed the door on it as I helped him to his feet, but I never repeated the words I had spoken.

I later went to look for the tunnel into the hill. It had been sealed solidly by a massive collapse. My cashmere topcoat and dinner jacket were gone, perhaps to adorn either a homeless person or a ghoul.

Climbing to the top of the hill in a blustery wind that already hinted of winter, I stood and surveyed the city I had loved so much since childhood. The white spires of its old Yankee churches and the Gothic fantasies of its university were dwarfed now by the spindly skeletons of communications towers on every hill; streams of bright, tinny autos disturbed the reverie of its ancient homes on every twisted alley; neon signs and mercury-vapor streetlamps would soon blaze to life, turning the dark and quiet nights I recalled from childhood into a gaudy hell.

Raising my eyes to Zaman’s Hill on the horizon, I suddenly understood how a monster like Roger Kilpatrick could have crossed the city without drawing notice. I had to grip a gravestone for support as I was struck by a horrifying vision of the network of tunnels that must extend from this graveyard. Modern light and clutter and overpopulation would be no impediment to Roger and his colleagues, who could crawl from one end of the city to the other in tunnels whose courses had probably been laid out four centuries ago.

I searched the necropolis for a tomb with a hole in the roof, but there are many such. If I found the one where I had last seen Mrs. Kilpatrick, I didn’t recognize it. No trace of her has yet been found, and I suspect none ever will be. Nothing could induce me to visit Mt. Tabor Cemetery now, and I take roundabout routes to avoid it even in broad daylight, but I am often dragged into its black tunnels in my nightmares: where the vile witch, as hideously transformed as her son, shrieks and gibbers at orgiastic feasts.

Unlike the victim of a random wave or a whirlwind, I knew why I—or why Susan Hazard, I should say—had been struck down, but knowing the reason gave no comfort. Everyone who has ever written of ghouls has noted their delight in grisly pranks, their love of laughter, but I had been singled out for their malice because the dull vermin hadn’t been able to get a joke.

From what I had overheard Mrs. Kilpatrick say to her son, they took that “Ghoulmaster” nonsense seriously, and they resented it.

THE SPAWN OF DAGON, by Henry Kuttner

Two streams of blood trickled slowly across the rough boards of the floor. One of them emerged from a gaping wound in the throat of a prostrate, armor-clad body; the other dripped from a chink in the battered cuirass, and the swaying light of a hanging lamp cast grotesque shadows over the corpse and the two men who crouched on their hams watching it. They were both very drunk. One of them, a tall, extremely slender man whose bronzed body seemed boneless, so supple was it, murmured:

“I win, Lycon. The blood wavers strangely, but the stream I spilt will reach this crack first.” He indicated a space between two planks with the point of his rapier.

Lycon’s childlike eyes widened in astonishment. He was short, thick-set, with a remarkably simian face set atop his broad shoulders. He swayed slightly as he gasped, “By Ishtar! The blood runs uphill!”

Elak, the slender man, chuckled. “After all the mead you swilled the ocean might run uphill. Well, the wager’s won; I get the loot.” He got up and stepped over to the dead man. Swiftly he searched him, and suddenly muttered an explosive curse. “The swine’s as bare as a Bacchic vestal! He has no purse.”

Lycon smiled broadly and looked more than ever like an undersized hairless ape. “The gods watch over me,” he said in satisfaction.

“Of all the millions in Atlantis you had to pick a fight with a pauper,” Elak groaned: “Now we’ll have to flee San-Mu, as your quarrels have forced us to flee Poseidonia and Kornak. And the San-Mu mead is the best in the land. If you had to cause trouble, why not choose a fat usurer? We’d have been paid for our trouble, then, at least.”

“The gods watch over me,” Lycon reiterated, leaning forward and then rocking back, chuckling to himself. He leaned too far and fell on his nose, where he remained without moving. Something dropped from the bosom of his tunic and fell with a metallic sound to the oaken floor.

Lycon snored.

Elak, smiling unpleasantly, appropriated the purse and investigated its contents. “Your fingers are swifter than mine,” he told the recumbent Lycon, “but I can hold more mead than you. Next time don’t try to cheat one who has more brains in his big toe than you have in all your misshapen body. Scavenging little ape! Get up; the innkeeper is returning with soldiers.”

He thrust the purse into the wallet at his belt and kicked Lycon heartily, but the small thief failed to awaken. Cursing with a will, Elak hoisted the body of the other to his shoulders and staggered toward the back of the tavern. The distant sound of shouting from the street outside grew louder, and Elak thought he could hear the querulous complaints of the innkeeper.

“There will be a reckoning, Lycon!” he promised bitterly. “Ishtar, yes! You’ll learn—”

He pushed through a golden drapery and hurried along a corridor—kicked open an oaken door and came out in the alley behind the tavern. Above, cold stars glittered frostily, and an icy wind blew on Elak’s sweating face, sobering him somewhat.

Lycon stirred and writhed in his arms. “More grog!” he muttered. “Oh gods! Is there no more grog?” A maudlin tear fell hotly on Elak’s neck, and the latter for a moment entertained the not unpleasant idea of dropping Lycon and leaving him for the irate guards. The soldiers of San-Mu were not renowned for their soft-heartedness, and tales of what they sometimes did to their captives were unpleasantly explicit.

However, he ran along the alley instead, blundered into a brawny form that sprang out of the darkness abruptly, and saw a snarling, bearded face indistinct in the vague starlight. He dropped Lycon and whipped out his rapier. Already the soldier was plunging forward, his great sword rushing down.

Then it happened. Elak saw the guard’s mouth open in a square of amazement, saw horror spring into the cold eyes. The man’s face was a mask of abysmal fear. He flung himself back desperately—the sword-tip just missed Elak’s face.

The soldier raced away into the shadows.

With a snakelike movement Elak turned, rapier ready. He caught a blur of swift motion. The man facing him had lifted quick hands to his face, and dropped them as suddenly. But there was no menace in the gesture. Nevertheless Elak felt a chill of inexplicable uneasiness crawl down his back as he faced his rescuer. The soldiers of San-Mu were courageous, if lacking in human kindness. What had frightened the attacking guard?

He eyed the other. He saw a medium-sized man, clad in voluminous gray garments that were almost invisible in the gloom—saw a white face with regular, statuesque features. A black hollow sprang into existence within the white mask as a soft voice whispered, “You’d escape from the guards? No need, for your rapier—I’m a friend.”

“Who the—but there’s no time for talk. Thanks, and goodbye.” Elak stooped and hoisted Lycon to his shoulders again. The little man was blinking and murmuring soft appeals for more mead. And the hasty thunder of mailed feet grew louder, while torchlight swiftly approaching cast gleams of light about the trio.

“In here,” the gray-clad man whispered. “You’ll be safe.” Now Elak saw that in the stone wall beside him a black rectangle gaped. He sprang through the portal without hesitation. The other followed, and instantly they were in utter blackness as an unseen door swung creakingly on rusty hinges.

Elak felt a soft hand touch his own. Or was it a hand? For a second he had the incredible feeling that the thing whose flesh he had touched did not belong to any human body—it was too soft, too cold! His skin crawled at the feel of the thing. It was withdrawn, and a fold of gray cloth swung against his palm. He gripped it.

“Follow!”

Silently, gripping the guide’s garment, bearing Lycon on his shoulders, Elak moved forward. How the other could find his way through the blackness Elak did not know, unless he knew the way by heart. Yet the passage—if passage it was—turned and twisted endlessly as it went down. Presently Elak had the feeling that he was moving through a larger space, a cave, perhaps. His footsteps sounded differently, somehow. And through the darkness vague whisperings came to him.

Whispers in no language he knew. The murmurous sibilants rustled out strangely, making Elak’s brows contract and his free hand go involuntarily to the hilt of his rapier. He snarled, “Who’s here?”

The invisible guide cried out in the mysterious tongue. Instantly the whisperings stopped.

“You are among friends,” a voice said softly from the blackness. “We are almost at our destination. A few more steps—”

A few more steps, and light blazed up. They stood in a small rectangular chamber hollowed out of the rock. The nitrous walls gleamed in the glow of an oil lamp, and a little stream ran across the rock floor of the cave and lost itself, amid chuckles of goblin laughter, in a small hole at the base of the wall. Two doors were visible. The gray-clad man was closing one of them.

A crude table and a few chairs were all the furnishings of the room. Elak strained his ears. He heard something—something that should not be heard in inland San-Mu. He could not be mistaken. The sound of waves lapping softly in the distance…and occasionally a roaring crash, as of breakers smashing on a rocky shore.

He dumped Lycon unceremoniously in one of the chairs. The little man fell forward on the table, pillowing his head in his arms. Sadly he muttered, “Is there no mead in Atlantis? I die, Elak. My belly is an arid desert across which the armies of Eblis march.”

He sobbed unhappily for a moment and fell asleep.

Elak ostentatiously unsheathed his rapier and laid it on the table. His slender fingers closed on the hilt. “An explanation,” he said, “is due. Where are we?”

“I am Gesti,” said the gray-clad one. His face seemed chalk-white in the light of the oil lamp. His eyes, deeply sunken, were covered with a curious glaze. “I saved you from the guards, eh? You’ll not deny that?”

“You have my thanks,” Elak said. “Well?”

“I need the aid of a brave man. And I’ll pay well. If you’re interested, good. If not, I’ll see you leave San-Mu safely.”

Elak considered. “It’s true we’ve little money.” He thought of the purse in his wallet and grinned wryly. “Not enough to last us long, at any rate. Perhaps we’re interested. Although—” He hesitated.

“Well?”

“I could bear to know how you got rid of the soldier so quickly, back in the alley behind the tavern.”

“I do not think that matters,” Gesti whispered in his sibilant voice. “The guards are superstitious. And it’s easy to play on their weakness. Let that suffice!” The cold glazed eyes met Elak’s squarely, and a little warning note seemed to clang in his brain.

There was danger here. Yet danger had seldom given him pause. He said, “What will you pay?”

“A thousand golden pieces.”

“Fifty thousand cups of mead,” Lycon murmured sleepily. “Accept it, Elak. I’ll await you here.”

There was little affection in the glance Elak cast at his companion. “You’ll get none of it,” he promised. “Not a gold piece!”

He turned to Gesti. “What’s to be done for this reward?”

Gesti’s immobile face watched him cryptically. “Kill Zend.”

Elak said, “Kill—Zend? Zend? The Wizard of Atlantis?”

“Are you afraid?” Gesti asked tonelessly.

“I am,” Lycon said without lifting his head from his arms. “However, if Elak is not, he may slay Zend and I’ll wait here.”

Ignoring him, Elak said, “I’ve heard strange things of Zend. His powers are not human. Indeed, he’s not been seen in the streets of San-Mu for ten years. Men say he’s immortal.”

“Men—are fools.” And in Gesti’s voice there was a contempt that made Elak stare at him sharply. It was as though Gesti was commenting on some race alien to him. The gray-clad man went on hurriedly, as though sensing the trend of Elak’s thoughts. “We have driven a passage under Zend’s palace. We can break through at any time; that we shall do tonight. Two tasks I give you: kill Zend; shatter the red sphere.”

Elak said, “You’re cryptic. What red sphere?”

“It lies in the topmost minaret of his palace. His magic comes from it. There is rich loot in the palace, Elak—if that’s your name. So the little man called you.”

“Elak or dunce or robber of drunken men,” Lycon said, absently feeling the bosom of his tunic. “All alike. Call him by any of those names and you’ll be right. Where is my gold, Elak?”

But without waiting for an answer he slumped down in his chair, his eyes closing and his mouth dropping open as he snored. Presently he fell off the chair and rolled under the table, where he slumbered.

“What the devil can I do with him?” Elak asked. “I can’t take him with me. He’d—”

“Leave him here,” Gesti said.

Elak’s cold eyes probed the other. “He’ll be safe?”

“Quite safe. None in San-Mu but our band knows of this underground way.”

“What band is that?” Elak asked.

Gesti said nothing for a time. Then his soft voice whispered, “Need you know? A political group banded together to overthrow the king of San-Mu, and Zend, from whom he gets his power. Have you more—questions?”

“No.”

“Then follow.”

Gesti led Elak to one of the oaken doors; it swung open, and they moved forward up a winding passage. In the dark Elak stumbled over a step. He felt the cloth of Gesti’s garment touch his hand, and gripped it. In the blackness they ascended a staircase cut out of the rock.

Halfway up, Gesti paused. “I can go no further,” he whispered. “The way is straight. At the end of the stairway there is a trapdoor of stone. Open it. You’ll be in Zend’s place. Here is a weapon for you.” He thrust a tube of cold metal into Elak’s hand. “Simply squeeze its sides, pointing the smaller end at Zend. You understand?”

Elak nodded, and, although Gesti could scarcely have seen the movement in the darkness, he whispered, “Good. Dagon guard you!”

He turned away; Elak heard the soft rush of his descent dying in the distance. He began to mount the stairs, wonderingly. Dagon—was Gesti a worshipper of the forbidden evil god of ocean? Poseidon, a benignant sea-god, was adored in marble temples all over the land, but the dark worship of Dagon had been banned for generations. There were tales of another race whose god Dagon was—a race that had not sprung from human or even earthly loins.…

Gripping the odd weapon, Elak felt his way upward. At length his head banged painfully against stone, and, cursing softly, he felt about in the darkness. It was the trapdoor of which Gesti had spoken. Two bolts slid back in well-oiled grooves. And the door lifted easily as Elak thrust his shoulders against it.

He clambered up in semi-darkness, finding himself in a small bare room through which light filtered from a narrow window-slit high in the wall. A mouse, squeaking fearfully, fled as he scrambled to his feet. Apparently the room was little used. Elak moved stealthily to the door.

It swung, open a little under his cautious hand. A corridor stretched before him, dimly lit by cold blue radiance that came from tiny gems set in the ceiling at intervals. Elak followed the upward slant of the passage; the red sphere Gesti had mentioned was in the topmost minaret. Up, then.

In a niche in the wall Elak saw the head. The shock of it turned him cold with amazement. A bodiless head, set upright on a golden pedestal within a little alcove—its cheeks sunken, hair lank and disheveled—but eyes bright with incredible life! Those eyes watched him!

“Ishtar!” Elak breathed. “What wizardry’s this?”

He soon found out. The pallid lips of the horror writhed and twisted, and from them came a high skirling cry of warning.

“Zend! Zend! A stranger walks your—”

Elak’s rapier flew. There was scarcely any blood. He dragged the blade from the eyesocket, whispering prayers to all the gods and goddesses he could remember. The lean jaw dropped, and a blackened and swollen tongue lolled from between the teeth. A red, shrunken, eyelid dropped over the eye Elak had not pierced.

There was no sound save for Elak’s hastened breathing. He eyed the monstrous thing in the alcove, and then, confident that it was no longer a menace, lengthened his steps up the passage. Had Zend heard the warning of his sentinel? If so, danger lurked all about him.

A silver curtain slashed with a black pattern hung across the corridor. Elak parted it, and, watching, he froze in every muscle.