The Cthulhu Mythos Megapack (40 Modern and Classic Lovecraftian Tales) (68 page)

* * * *

“You go upstairs and rest for a while, Son,” my father said. “You’ve had a long trip up from South America. I’ll fix us a little something in the kitchen. Then you come down again.”

I don’t know how he thought I’d want to rest, or linger here at all, considering what the inevitable outcome must be, but
he,
I think, wanted to delay it just a bit longer, and I granted him the courtesy of this reprieve. Maybe he just wanted to be a father again, one last time.

So, silently, I went upstairs, into my old bedroom. I flicked on the light and saw that absolutely nothing had changed since the day, when I was twenty-three, I had stormed out of the house. There was still a 1982 newspaper on the floor, under the dust. And a pair of dirty socks.

I sat down on the bed and just stared into the indeterminate distance of the room, which was not a matter of physical space at all: at the bookshelves, even the model airplanes which had dangled from the ceiling since my childhood.

And, irony of ironies: the sleeve for
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
was still on the shelf in front of me. I had never gotten around to replacing the record.

My hand found something on the bed, under the covers, something which had
not
been there before: a leather-bound photo album. I recognized some of the pictures, from family outings, graduations, and the like. I paged through it with a mixture of dull curiosity, then something almost like anger, then just exhausted sadness. The pictures had been altered, mutilated with a ballpoint pen. My own image had sometimes been made into that of a prince, with crown and flowing robes and a sword, sometimes the huntsman, with a gun or bow-and-arrows and a Robin Hood cap. Once, my eyebrows had been raised and I’d acquired long fingernails and a pigtail—a comic Chinaman. I had no idea why.

Mother’s image had been the object of anger, the eyes and sometimes the whole face gouged out. She’d been given ass’s ears more than once, and there was even an enormous posterior drawn in the sky over her wedding picture. There she was, a bride, on the church steps, her face scraped away, and it was raining shit.

The final picture in the book was one of father, exhausted, reclining on a plastic-covered sofa. I think it had actually been taken one Christmas, as he snoozed after all the preparations were done. But now there were wires going into his arms and sides, and a carefully-rendered monitor on the wall above him, the line on the screen a zig-zag, flattening out. Father in Intensive Care, dying.

The one truly frightening thing was that I didn’t know if this was Jeffrey’s work, which it should have been—but how had he known I was coming and how had he gotten out to place the book here for me to find?—or Papa’s own.

Above me, something stirred, then hit the upstairs floor hard, again and again, as if stamping its hooves.

God help me, I thought of that stupid TV sitcom theme:
A horse is a horse—

And fully, and deeply, I wept, lying there on the bed, amid the dust and papers and old laundry.

* * * *

Father and I ate in silence, badly cooked eggs and bacon. He couldn’t look me in the eye. He stared at his plate, swirling his fork around in the grease.

I was thinking in clichés. I should have felt that there was so much I had to say to him: that I, his estranged son, truly loved him after all, that I wished our family could be together again, like old times, the whole routine. But there, sitting with him, I couldn’t think of anything to say at all. I was empty. I’d cried my last tears on the bedspread upstairs, and that was the end of that.

Two floors above us, the pounding was louder, insistent.

“Come on, Son,” he said at last. “We’ve got to finish this.”

So I followed him upstairs that last time. He paused at the first landing, staring into my bedroom, where I’d left the light on and the photo album out on the bed. Then he turned into his own room. I went to follow him. He held me back.

“Wait.”

He still had to have his little secret, his final one. All right. He could have it. I waited patiently while he rustled around in the dark. I could only imagine that the bedroom, too, hadn’t been touched, that my mother’s things were exactly as she’d left them. It sounded like her closet Father was rummaging in.

He came out with something wrapped in a garbage bag. Even before I felt the heavy, iron-bound covers through the plastic, I knew what it was: the ancient
Necronomicon
.

“You’ll have to study,” was all he said.

That was almost the very last thing he said to me, ever. He flicked on a light. We went up the attic steps in silence. He indicated that I should be the one to remove the heavy, five-pointed stone sigil that leaned against the door of the attic room. By now the smell was almost overpowering, the stench of garbage and excrement and something that almost might have been burning, sulfurous, vile, but ultimately unidentifiable. Why the neighbors didn’t have the Board of Health or the police in long ago was beyond me.

There was no sound at all from behind that door, as I dragged the heavy stone away, as Father undid the padlocks and slid the bolts back.

He opened the door, and I took the first step inside, my feet stirring what must have been old steak and pork bones.

“Jeff? You there?”

Father grabbed me from behind with surprising strength, his arm in a chokehold around my neck. He hurled me back, across the tiny landing, against the opposite wall. He held me there with both hands, and for once his eyes met mine and his face was utterly, utterly inscrutable. I could make out the King with his Royal Wrath, and Papa, exhausted beyond words, despairing, wanting only for it all to end, and more. Possibly he wanted to explain it all to me, or ask my forgiveness, or merely wish that things had turned out differently. I don’t know. He was angry, sad, firm, and stoically uncaring all at once.

All he said to me was, “No. Wait here. It was supposed to be your mother. Now it
has
to be me.”

“Father, I—?”

He squeezed my hands tight over the
Necronomicon
, then turned from me and went, meekly but unhesitantly, into the dark room.

As a final offering. Because Jeffrey was grown up now, and it was time.

In the instant of silence that followed, I found myself plagued with another comic, irrelevant thought, a memory of a Gahan Wilson cartoon showing a puffy-faced young man confronting his seated, frog-faced father in what must have been the great hall of an old English manor. Portraits of frog-faced ancestors lined the walls, and the caption read, “Son, now that you’re of age, it’s about time I told you about the old family curse.”

About time.

In the room, my father was screaming. But I knew he wouldn’t want me to come in.

The screaming stopped. Something heavy and wet dropped to the floor. Then I heard a sucking sound, like an electric pump struggling with a clogged drain, and after that a series of snaps, which I knew were bones breaking.

Again, silence. The smell grew even worse.

I knew what I had to do. There was only one possibility left.

“Jeffrey,” I said. “It’s me. It’s Jerry. Come out. I want to tell you a story. Remember?”

And from within the darkness came my brother’s voice, “Play?”

“Yes,” I said. “Let’s go out and play.”

Holding the book, I backed down the steps, and he came out onto the landing, whimpering a little as he brushed against the five-pointed stone; for he had grown so huge that he could not help but touch it.

He didn’t wear clothes anymore. His whole body, even his tusks, had turned a greenish-black, the color of tarnished metal; but his muscles and numerous limbs I couldn’t quite make out seemed more like a huge tangle of ropes come alive. He stumbled and thumped down the stairs, squeezing between the walls, one surprisingly human hand grasping the railing. His head, on top, seemed almost an irrelevancy, like a basketball floating on frothing water. But I could still see his eyes, and they were my brother’s eyes.

Of course his passage made complete havoc of Mother’s immaculate living room. It was only there, in the better light, that I realized that Jeffrey had an extra mouth where his chest should be, vertical, like an insect’s mouth, lined with needle-teeth. Praying-Mantis claws held the remains of our father firmly in place. Jeffrey streaked the living room, and the kitchen, and the back stairs, with slime and blood and the debris of smashed furniture.

Outside, in the darkness, in the swirling snow, I coaxed him through the fence, into the park. We waded through the stream once again, as he had when we were boys, and it was just as cold now, and once again I didn’t care. This time I didn’t fall, though. I clutched the plastic-wrapped
Necronomicon
tightly under one arm.

“Play,” Jeffrey said, clapping his hands. “Play.”

Once more we climbed the hillside, in the darkness, Jeffrey shoving the trees aside, making a terrible racket—but no one disturbed us—until we reached the terraces.

And in our secret place, we sat together, and I told him the rest of the story of the Prince and the Beast, how the younger brother released the elder from the castle’s dungeon, how the Beast devoured the King, as was only fitting; and the King’s guards fled in terror at their approach, and the two of them retreated far, far into the forest, where no huntsman could ever follow, until they reached the secret and eternal land of the beasts, where animals spoke in their own languages, and no human being was ever admitted.

But because the Prince was the Beast’s brother, he was allowed to the very threshold of that land. He could see into it through the thick underbrush, just for an instant, as the leaves parted when the Beast and those who had come for him went back inside. The other animals did not kill the Prince, and, knowing that he would not betray them, they allowed him to leave.

“Is that the end of the story?” said Jeffrey.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.” I should have been sobbing. That would have been right. But I had run out of tears. As before, when I sat with Father in the kitchen during his last meal, I felt only empty and had nothing more to say.

Then They of the Air finished the story, whispering to Jeffrey in their own language. I saw them, clearly this time, huge, winged, impossible shapes with fiery faces, half like smoke, swirling in the night sky, weaving between the trees, their passage a great whirlwind. Branches flew. Trees creaked and swayed. Jeffrey, wild with excitement, leapt up, doing a kind of dance on the hilltop, howling and hooting, stamping his several enormous feet. I was irrelevant to all this, like a pigeon that’s wandered into a parade. I could have been crushed. I scrambled down the hillside, out of my brother’s way, and looked up just once as a particularly brilliant flash of lightning tore the sky apart. My eyes were dazzled. I couldn’t be sure. But Jeffrey seemed transformed once more, into something utterly indescribable and powerful, with wings that reached out to touch the horizons. He and the others filled the sky, rising up.

And then there was just me, sitting alone in the cold and the dark on the hillside, still clutching the plastic-wrapped book I didn’t know how to read, unable to understand how the story had turned out.

THE GRAVEYARD RATS, by Henry Kuttner

Old Masson, the caretaker of one of Salem’s oldest and most neglected cemeteries, had a feud with the rats. Generations ago they had come up from the wharves and settled in the graveyard, a colony of abnormally large rats, and when Masson had taken charge after the inexplicable disappearance of the former caretaker, he decided that they must go. At first he set traps for them and put poisoned food by their burrows, and later he tried to shoot them, but it did no good. The rats stayed, multiplying and overrunning the graveyard with their ravenous hordes.

They were large, even for the
mus decumanus
, which sometimes measures fifteen inches in length, exclusive of the naked pink and grey tail. Masson had caught glimpses of some as large as good-sized cats, and when, once or twice, the grave-diggers had uncovered their burrows, the malodorous tunnels were large enough to enable a man to crawl into them on his hands and knees. The ships that had come generations ago from distant ports to the rotting Salem wharves had brought strange cargoes.

Masson wondered sometimes at the extraordinary size of these burrows. He recalled certain vaguely disturbing legends he had heard since coming to ancient, witch-haunted Salem—tales of a moribund, inhuman life that was said to exist in forgotten burrows in the earth. The old days, when Cotton Mather had hunted down the evil cults that worshipped Hecate and the dark Magna Mater in frightful orgies, had passed; but dark gabled houses still leaned perilously towards each other over narrow cobbled streets, and blasphemous secrets and mysteries were said to be hidden in subterranean cellars and caverns, where forgotten pagan rites were still celebrated in defiance of law and sanity. Wagging their grey heads wisely, the elders declared that there were worse things than rats and maggots crawling in the unhallowed earth of the ancient Salem cemeteries.

And then, too, there was this curious dread of the rats. Masson disliked and respected the ferocious little rodents, for he knew the danger that lurked in their flashing, needle-sharp fangs; but he could not understand the inexplicable horror which the oldsters held for deserted, rat-infested houses. He had heard vague rumors of ghoulish beings that dwelt far underground, and that had the power of commanding the rats, marshalling them like horrible armies. The rats, the old men whispered, were messengers between this world and the grim and ancient caverns far below Salem. Bodies had been stolen from graves for nocturnal subterranean feasts, they said. The myth of the Pied Piper is a fable that hides a blasphemous horror, and the black pits of Avernus have brought forth hell-spawned monstrosities that never venture into the light of day.

Masson paid little attention to these tales. He did not fraternize with his neighbors, and, in fact, did all he could to hide the existence of the rats from intruders. Investigation, he realized, would undoubtedly mean the opening of many graves. And while some of the gnawed, empty coffins could be attributed to the activities of the rats, Masson might find it difficult to explain the mutilated bodies that lay in some of the coffins.

The purest gold is used in filling teeth, and this gold is not removed when a man is buried. Clothing, of course, is another matter; for usually the undertaker provides a plain broadcloth suit that is cheap and easily recognizable. But gold is another matter; and sometimes, too, there were medical students and less reputable doctors who were in need of cadavers, and not overscrupulous as to where these were obtained.

So far Masson had successfully managed to discourage investigation. He had fiercely denied the existence of the rats, even though they sometimes robbed him of his prey. Masson did not care what happened to the bodies after he had performed his gruesome thefts, but the rats inevitably dragged away the whole cadaver through the hole they gnawed in the coffin.

The size of these burrows occasionally worried Masson. Then, too, there was the curious circumstance of the coffins always being gnawed open at the end, never at the side or top. It was almost as though the rats were working under the direction of some impossibly intelligent leader.

Now he stood in an open grave and threw a last sprinkling of wet earth on the heap beside the pit. It was raining, a slow, cold drizzle that for weeks had been descending from soggy black clouds. The graveyard was a slough of yellow, sucking mud, from which the rain-washed tombstones stood up in irregular battalions. The rats had retreated to their burrows, and Masson had not seen one for days. But his gaunt, unshaved face was set in frowning lines; the coffin on which he was standing was a wooden one.

The body had been buried several days earlier, but Masson had not dared to disinter it before. A relative of the dead man had been coming to the grave at intervals, even in the drenching rain. But he would hardly come at this late hour, no matter how much grief he might be suffering, Masson thought, grinning wryly. He straightened and laid the shovel aside.

From the hill on which the ancient graveyard lay he could see the lights of Salem flickering dimly through the downpour. He drew a flashlight from his pocket. He would need light now. Taking up the spade, he bent and examined the fastenings of the coffin.

Abruptly he stiffened. Beneath his feet he sensed an unquiet stirring and scratching, as though something were moving within the coffin. For a moment a pang of superstitious fear shot through Masson, and then rage replaced it as he realized the significance of the sound. The rats had forestalled him again!

In a paroxysm of anger Masson wrenched at the fastenings of the coffin. He got the sharp edge of the shovel under the lid and pried it up until he could finish the job with his hands. Then he sent the flashlight’s cold beam darting down into the coffin.

Rain spattered against the white satin lining; the coffin was empty. Masson saw a flicker of movement at the head of the case, and darted the light in that direction.

The end of the sarcophagus had been gnawed through, and a gaping hole led into darkness. A black shoe, limp and dragging, was disappearing as Masson watched, and abruptly he realized that the rats had forestalled him by only a few minutes. He fell on his hands and knees and made a hasty clutch at the shoe, and the flashlight incontinently fell into the coffin and went out. The shoe was tugged from his grasp, he heard a sharp, excited squealing, and then he had the flashlight again and was darting its light into the burrow.

It was a large one. It had to be, or the corpse could not have been dragged along it. Masson wondered at the size of the rats that could carry away a man’s body, but the thought of the loaded revolver in his pocket fortified him. Probably if the corpse had been an ordinary one Masson would have left the rats with their spoils rather than venture into the narrow burrow, but he remembered an especially fine set of cufflinks he had observed, as well as a stickpin that was undoubtedly a genuine pearl. With scarcely a pause he clipped the flashlight to his belt and crept into the burrow.

It was a tight fit, but he managed to squeeze himself along. Ahead of him in the flashlight’s glow he could see the shoes dragging along the wet earth of the bottom of the tunnel. He crept along the burrows as rapidly as he could, occasionally barely able to squeeze his lean body through the narrow walls.

The air was overpowering with its musty stench of carrion. If he could not reach the corpse in a minute, Masson decided, he would turn back. Belated fears were beginning to crawl, maggot-like, within his mind, but greed urged him on. He crawled forward, several times passing the mouths of adjoining tunnels. The walls of the burrow were damp and slimy, and twice lumps of dirt dropped behind him. The second time he paused and screwed his head around to look back. He could see nothing, of course, until he had unhooked the flashlight from his belt and reversed it.

Several clods lay on the ground behind him, and the danger of his position suddenly became real and terrifying. With thoughts of a cave-in making his pulse race, he decided to abandon the pursuit, even though he had now almost overtaken the corpse and the invisible things that pulled it. But he had overlooked one thing: the burrow was too narrow to allow him to turn.

Panic touched him briefly, but he remembered a side tunnel he had just passed, and backed awkwardly along the tunnel until he came to it. He thrust his legs into it, backing until he found himself able to turn. Then he hurriedly began to retrace his way, although his knees were bruised and painful.

Agonising pain shot through his leg. He felt sharp teeth sink into his flesh, and kicked out frantically. There was a shrill squealing and the scurry of many feet. Flashing the light behind him, Masson caught his breath in a sob of fear as he saw a dozen great rats watching him intently, their slitted eyes glittering in the light. They were great misshapen things, as large as cats, and behind them he caught a glimpse of a dark shape that stirred and moved swiftly aside into the shadow; and he shuddered at the unbelievable size of the thing.

The light had held them for a moment, but they were edging closer, their teeth dull orange in the pale light. Masson tugged at his pistol, managed to extricate it from his pocket, and aimed carefully. It was an awkward position, and he tried to press his feet into the soggy sides of the burrow so that he should not inadvertently send a bullet into one of them.

The rolling thunder of the shot deafened him, for a time, and the clouds of smoke set him coughing. When he could hear again and the smoke had cleared, he saw that the rats were gone. He put the pistol back and began to creep swiftly along the tunnel, and then with a scurry and a rush they were upon him again.

They swarmed over his legs, biting and squealing insanely, and Masson shrieked horribly as he snatched for his gun. He fired without aiming, and only luck saved him from blowing a foot off. This time the rats did not retreat so far, but Masson was crawling as swiftly as he could along the burrow, ready to fire again at the first sound of another attack.

There was a patter of feet and he sent the light stabbing behind him. A great grey rat paused and watched him. Its long ragged whiskers twitched, and its scabrous, naked tail was moving slowly from side to side. Masson shouted and the rat retreated.

He crawled on, pausing briefly, the black gap of a side tunnel at his elbow, as he made out a shapeless huddle on the damp clay a few yards ahead. For a second he thought it was a mass of earth that had been dislodged from the roof, and then he recognized it as a human body.

It was a brown and shriveled mummy, and with a dreadful unbelieving shock Masson realized that it was moving.

It was crawling towards him, and in the pale glow of the flashlight the man saw a frightful gargoyle face thrust into his own. It was the passionless, death’s-head skull of a long-dead corpse, instinct with hellish life; and the glazed eyes swollen and bulbous betrayed the thing’s blindness. It made a faint groaning sound as it crawled towards Masson, stretching its ragged and granulated lips in a grin of dreadful hunger. And Masson was frozen with abysmal fear and loathing.

Just before the Horror touched him, Masson flung himself frantically into the burrow at his side. He heard a scrambling noise at his heels, and the thing groaned dully as it came after him. Masson, glancing over his shoulder, screamed and propelled himself desperately through the narrow burrow. He crawled along awkwardly, sharp stones cutting his hands and knees. Dirt showered into his eyes, but he dared not pause even for a moment. He scrambled on, gasping, cursing, and praying hysterically.

Squealing triumphantly, the rats came at him, horrible hunger in their eyes. Masson almost succumbed to their vicious teeth before he succeeded in beating them off. The passage was narrowing, and in a frenzy of terror he kicked and screamed and fired until the hammer clicked on an empty shell. But he had driven them off.

He found himself crawling under a great stone, embedded in the roof, that dug cruelly into his back. It moved a little as his weight struck it, and an idea flashed into Masson’s fright-crazed mind: If he could bring down the stone so that it blocked the tunnel!

The earth was wet and soggy from the rains, and he hunched himself half upright and dug away at the dirt around the stone. The rats were coming closer. He saw their eyes glowing in the reflection of the flashlight’s beam. Still he clawed frantically at the earth. The stone was giving. He tugged at it and it rocked in its foundation.

A rat was approaching—the monster he had already glimpsed. Grey and leprous and hideous it crept forward with its orange teeth bared, and in its wake came the blind dead thing, groaning as it crawled. Masson gave a last frantic tug at the stone. He felt it slide downwards, and then he went scrambling along the tunnel.

Behind him the stone crashed down, and he heard a sudden frightful shriek of agony. Clods showered upon his legs. A heavy weight fell on his feet and he dragged them free with difficulty. The entire tunnel was collapsing!

Gasping with fear, Masson threw himself forward as the soggy earth collapsed at his heels. The tunnel narrowed until he could barely use his hands and legs to propel himself; he wriggled forward like an eel and suddenly felt satin tearing beneath his clawing fingers, and then his head crashed against something that barred his path. He moved his legs, discovering that they were not pinned under the collapsed earth. He was lying flat on his stomach, and when he tried to raise himself he found that the roof was only a few inches from his back. Panic shot through him.

When the blind horror had blocked his path, he had flung himself desperately into a side tunnel, a tunnel that had no outlet. He was in a coffin, an empty coffin into which he had crept through the hole the rats had gnawed in its end!

He tried to turn on his back and found that he could not. The lid of the coffin pinned him down inexorably. Then he braced himself and strained at the coffin lid. It was immovable, and even if he could escape from the sarcophagus, how could he claw his way up through five feet of hard-packed earth?