The Weird Company (16 page)

The beast on the stairs spun toward us and unraveled as it did so. The strange piping that called through the air transformed into a now familiar voice, the booming sound of Walter Gilman screaming at us, at me. “BE QUIET YOU FOOL!” The Q’Hrell was gone, now only Gilman was rushing up at us.

But I wouldn’t be quiet. “You finished your coursework Frank. You finished your papers. You earned your degree. You lived, you graduated, and you have your degree. That means you are no longer the second-rate student; you are no longer even a student. You are a distinguished graduate of Miskatonic University. You have a Master’s degree. You’re not a student anymore. That thing down there, Gilman, The Student, that is all he will ever be, but you Frank, you’re not a student, you are a master! Gilman will never achieve that!”

The Elwood thing hissed as he leapt from my arms. He flew through the air, striking Gilman and latching onto his chest just below his throat. “You are dead!” the Elwood rat cried out, and then there was a flash of red. Blood flew through the air and Elwood disappeared beneath Gilman’s shirt.

Gilman screamed. There was a moist sucking sound as he drew in breath and let loose a horrendous, pitiful cry. The Student spasmed, his back arched over and then cracked as he fell to the floor thrashing about and whining in the most horrible of manners. There was a wet gurgling noise, and Gilman’s throat swelled and his mouth opened wide as the thrashing ceased and blood leaked steadily out of Gilman’s eyes and nose. The jaw cracked as the mouth opened wider. Two hands suddenly thrust themselves out of the broken mouth scattering yellow teeth across the stairs. The hands forced their way out and then reached back to grab the sides of Gilman’s face. They pulled and as they did so two arms wrenched out of Gilman’s head. There was a cracking noise, and I watched as Gilman’s legs collapsed upwards into his body. The arms were followed by a gore-covered head and shoulders, and I watched in rapt horror as the body inverted itself. Time is meaningless in dreams, but it seemed mere moments for the thing that was once Walter Gilman to transform itself, to rend itself inside out and cease to be what it once was. When it was finally over, the flesh was no longer that of Walter Gilman; in his place lay the hideously reborn form of Frank Elwood.

I helped the young man to his feet, and together we stumbled up the stairs. We found the landing and there where he had been imprisoned for so long I apologized to the poor creature. As I spoke, he looked at me with the most confused of looks. I almost stopped, almost took pity on the poor thing, but in the end I knew there was no going back. Elwood had his part to play, just like I did. We needed him, and there was no point in putting off the inevitable. “I’m sorry Frank, but there is going to be some pain.” I maneuvered him to the edge and then removed my arms from beneath his. “Birth is painful. Life is painful. Death is painful.” One quick shove and Elwood fell silently down the stairs and tumbled head over bloody heels into the abyss. “Why should your rebirth be any different?”

As Frank Elwood fell out of his dreams, so did I. The nightmare version of the house dissolved, and in an instant I was back in the real world lying on the table of the real Witch House. Asenath and Hartwell had Elwood wrapped in blankets and were shepherding him out the back door. All around me debris was raining down. Chandraputra swept me off the table and into his arms just as a portion of the ceiling came crashing down. Something about those arms didn’t feel right, but as he rushed me out the kitchen door I was just grateful that he had been there. Outside on the street there was a great wind blowing, as if a gale had come off of the ocean and rolled into town, but the wind wasn’t blowing from the east, it was blowing from the windows of the Witch House itself.

Glass exploded onto the street as something snapped inside the ancient edifice. Elwood’s dreaming had been powerful, so powerful that it had given life to his dead friend, and helped support the place where he had died. But now that dream was gone, and the power that had created and fortified the psychic architecture was gone as well. Without Elwood, the roof of the decrepit house collapsed, and with it the great chimney tumbled down as well. We watched as a chaos of crumbling bricks, shingles and rotting timbers crashed down into the house and blew moldy debris all over the overgrown lot.

As the five of us fled back through the streets in those wee hours, we seemed content with what had been done. Elwood smiled, but said little. The Witch House still stood, but it was no longer the ominous threat it had been. Keziah Mason was dead, and so was her rebellious student Walter Gilman, and his dream-spawned doppelganger. It was true that Brown Jenkin, Keziah’s rat-thing, was missing, but without his mistress he seemed to have retreated from the world. More importantly, Frank Elwood was no longer a prisoner of his past regrets. Only the city itself bore witness to our deeds that night, and though I like to think we accomplished something, the truth be told, Arkham is, and always shall be, Witch-Haunted: one witch more or less, real or imagined, I suppose makes little difference.

CHAPTER 9

From the Account of Robert Martin Olmstead
“The Creeping Shadows”

I slept through the next day, and the night after that. On the second morning I rose with the sun and ate breakfast with Dr. Hartwell. I asked after Elwood and was told that he was recovering very quickly, and would be joining us soon. As for Chandraputra, the swami always ate in private. Asenath on the other hand rarely slept, but ate voraciously, often devouring substantial meals five or six times daily. I joked about how perhaps she was eating for two. Hartwell didn’t find my quip funny and the way he looked at me made me very uncomfortable. Without knowing why it was necessary I apologized and for the rest of the meal we said nothing more to one another.

Chandraputra came for us and together the three of us descended once more to the hall where Asenath and Elwood were waiting. Elwood looked well. His skin color was slightly pale and his hair wild and unkempt, but dressed in a charcoal suit over a white shirt with a matching tie, one would not know that he had recently been released from his weird incarceration inside the Witch House, or that he had been rescued just a day or so before. As before, Asenath sat at the head of the table wearing the same pinstripe suit she had sported when I first met her.

“As I have said before, there is a dire threat,” announced Asenath, “one that requires immediate attention.” At Asenath’s proclamation the table rapidly came to order. “Men have travelled to places they were not meant to be, seen things they were not meant to see, and awakened horrors that the world is not yet prepared for. Innsmouth was supposed to intervene in such affairs, but as a result of the occupation our forces are diminished.”

I seized on the pause and demanded answers, “You have danced around the truth Waite, but I have had enough. What happened in Innsmouth, and why? Why after thousands of years did the Deep Ones suddenly decide to come out of hiding?”

Asenath sighed in annoyance, “I suppose telling you is of no consequence, you are owed the truth, or at least some of it. Decades ago we were made aware of a threat; a man had established a rudimentary form of contact with the something from outside. That thing drove him and his children insane, and they became deluded by visions of power. They became determined to bring this thing into our own universe. Doing so would have changed the very laws of reality, not only for men, but for all of us. We moved to intervene, but ages beneath the sea had made most Deep Ones unable to function at the surface. Many desperate attempts were made and ended disastrously. A new generation was needed, one able to move about in both the shallows of the sea and on land. In desperation a bargain was struck with the men of Innsmouth. The town was to withdraw from the world, cut itself off and become forgotten. The Deep Ones would interbreed with the townsfolk, and in exchange they would be given great wealth, and their children would be nearly immortal, and they would form the ranks of those needed to stop the intrusion from outside.”

“Why not simply attack preemptively?” interjected Elwood.

Asenath nodded. “We considered that, but our allies, those who could see the possible futures, all warned against such options. To move too soon would have revealed our presence and created a nightmare future for our species. Only by intervening at the last possible second could we have established ourselves as man’s ally instead of his enemy.”

Hartwell’s eyes grew bright. “You are talking about what happened in Dunwich!”

“Yes, not that it matters now,” commented Asenath in a derogatory manner. “The plan failed. Innsmouth was too large, too uncontrollable. Too many people left the village, and too many came to visit. The isolation was incomplete. Too many questions were asked. Men came and the town was unprepared to move against them. Now, Innsmouth is trapped, lost to the currents, unable to rise up as needed.”

I was confused, and begged for an explanation. “Why would we Deep Ones fear such a thing? Wouldn’t this herald the return of Cthulhu? Wouldn’t we once more have dominion over all the Earth?”

The room filled with a sudden palpable dread, and I watched as Asenath exchanged furtive glances with the others gathered around the table. Apparently I had sad something I shouldn’t have.

It was Swami Chandraputra who finally broke the oppressive silence with his odd monotonous voice. “Robert, there are things
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that you believe to be true, that are not. This is not your fault
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. Your education on these things is incomplete, a hodge-podge of
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legends and racial memories that can be interpreted
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in a dozen ways. Tonight we will speak of true
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things. The truths
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you think you know
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are about to change.” He seemed to settle down into his robes, and he shrank slightly, as if somehow a chair had appeared beneath him and he had eased himself into it.

Chandraputra took a deep, almost mechanical breath and in some strange manner changed his voice to become more soothing. Through some supreme effort the monotonous tone was gone and the clicking noises vanished. “Thousands of years ago, men believed the world to be flat. They believed the Earth was the center of the universe. They believed that everything in the universe was comprised of four elemental forces. Science, human science, has changed all that. A globular world orbits the sun in a universe comprised of scores of elements. Man’s view of the world, of the solar system, of the universe has changed. The old texts have been replaced.”

“Sadly, while science has moved forward, man’s understanding of the paranormal has remained stagnant. The works of Alhazred, Prinn and Von Junzt are held out as infallible sources, beyond reproach. No one bothers to check the so-called facts in these muddled hermetic diatribes. Even those who are privy to some of the secrets of this world, who have parted the veils and held onto their minds, still fail to see the truth. They see so little, understand less, and so assume too much.”

I was forced to interrupt, “What you are implying is that even we who have been touched by the outré forces of the universe are just as ignorant as the rest?”

“You Mr. Olmstead are a perfect example, you dance on the brink and think you understand, you’ve gleaned a little knowledge and suddenly you think you have the key to all the mysteries of the universe. You saw Innsmouth, and the images of Cthulhu and assumed so much, too much it seems. From this you extrapolated even further and assume that the Deep Ones would find an ally in the foulness that men know as Yog-Sothoth, not understanding the devastation his entry into our universe would cause.” He paused, but only for a moment. “Were Yog-Sothoth to claw his way into this universe chaos would ensue. The laws of the cosmos as we know them would cease to function. The laws of thermodynamics, cause and effect, gravity, would not only radically change, but be in a constant state of flux. Can you imagine such a universe? How would earthly life survive? Not just men, but all things. Our biologies may be different, but they all follow the same physical and chemical principles. Men could not survive such a change, any more than the Deep Ones or even those from Xoth. Cthulhu and his dreaded spawn may tap into the power that is Yog-Sothoth, just as the Progenitors had done once to create the Shoggothim, but to release him would cause the universe itself to shatter.”

I lowered my head, “Have we no allies?”

Chandraputra chuckled, “Not as you think of them. To be sure there are those who are like us, children of the Progenitors, the Q’Hrell. The Deep Ones were their servants, their creations, as are man, and the Valusians, and before them the Cthonians. Some would be our allies. As would be the archetypes, the Old Ones, the titans of Earth: Father Dagon and Mother Hydra for certain, Yig and Bokrug are likely as well. The others, Atlatch-Nacha and the like, who can say? The gods of Earth are as multiform as the myriad of creatures that cover this precious little world, and divining their intent and reasoning is beyond us. They are people Mr. Olmstead, individuals; to think that they would all act in unison is simply preposterous. Even amongst the Deep Ones there are divisions. Some who once stood against Cthulhu and those from Xoth now ally themselves with that they once fought against.”

“Traitors to the cause,” Asenath snorted in contempt. “Men have heard the Deep Ones pray and assumed we have raised our voices in adulation to the monstrosity, but it is a misinterpretation. ‘Cthulhu fhtagn’ is not a prayer of admonition, it is one of supplication. We do not worship Cthulhu, we fear him and have stood guard over his prison for hundreds of millions of years! Every Deep One prays that ‘Cthulhu dreams,’ and will remain that way.”

Seizing a pause in the exposition, Elwood demanded an explanation of an event I too was familiar with. “What happened in 1925? The attack from the Alert’s crew? What of that strange couplet ‘Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn’ that LeGrasse’s cultists were chanting? Does it not translate as, ‘In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming?’”