The Madness of Cthulhu Anthology (Volume One): 1 (26 page)

Ten-foot-long tentacles seemed to emerge from a ten-foot face that had massive eyes and a mouth with a hooklike beak.

The helicopter tried to bank …

One tentacle shot out. It wrapped around the helicopter.

Finn could hear the men aboard it screaming …

He could look no more. He fell back in the boat and closed his eyes. He opened them when he heard the explosion. It was the chopper. The gas … something … somehow, it had exploded and it lit up the sky.

Next to him, Devon sobbed softly. He tried to smooth back her damp hair with numb fingers. There was nowhere else to go; nothing to do. He watched as bits and pieces of the helicopter rained down around them.

And he waited.

And Devon waited, sobbing and curled in his arms.

And then …

Nothing.

They probably lay so for hours. Or perhaps it was minutes. Eventually, he felt the fact that he was freezing and stirred to gather blankets and the tarp again. And finally, he looked out at the sea.

There was no sign of the creature that had risen from the sea.
Cthulhu.

Impossible, of course.

They drifted for he didn’t know how long. He couldn’t see the
Guinevere
anywhere on the horizon.

They stirred enough to find emergency rations. They drank water and ate dried food and energy bars. He didn’t taste the food, didn’t know what it was—or care.

How much time they spent on that boat Finn would never know. He’d lost all sense of it. But as they sat together, huddled together, Devon stirred.

“A ship,” she said.

And it was. It was a huge United States Navy vessel, and it was headed their way.

“They’ll never believe us,” Devon murmured.

And they never would. As the vessel approached, Finn wondered what he would say. What truth could he possibly give them?

They would try—and they would probably be locked away. Maybe they’d even be suspected of having gone mad and killed their fellow passengers and the crew.

“What do we say?” she whispered.

He didn’t know. Maybe he’d figure it out by the time the ship reached them. Maybe he’d think of a plausible lie.

And maybe, one day, he’d sit in a bar, and he’d start talking to the fellow next to him. He’d find out the guy was a writer and he’d tell him, “Well, huh. Have I got a story for you.”

And maybe the guy would listen …

N
AME
. P
ERHAPS
I
WAS THE ONLY ONE OF MY KIND WHO STILL
HAD
a name. I could not say it, not at first. I could not say much of anything, for my mouth no longer formed the old speech I once spoke—in the
before time
, before I was transformed, such as I had been transformed, however inadequately, however minimally. As for that new speech of gibbering and of howls, which we speak
directly into the earth
, pressing our faces into the mud, so that the very stones and the fires beneath it all tremble with our rages, our curses, and our jests—well, I was not very good at that either.

But I could
think
my name. I
knew
it. I
remembered
it, for all it stuck in my throat, like something I could neither swallow nor vomit up. If the others called me anything at all beyond mere insults, it was
“Little,”
because I had not grown great as they, because I remained one of the immature or deviant few who still
looked back
at the world from which we all had come. I was still one of those who
made sport
, for instance, by glaring out of ancient, iron-barred crypts on cloudy days, and if by chance my sickly, greenish gaze met the wide-eyed blue or brown or hazel of
one of them
and I was rewarded with an
indescribable
shriek, then—
joy
, a paroxysm of merriment, followed by bitterness beyond words, as I howled and pounded my head in sorrow against the walls and door of the tomb, smashing coffins in my rage, as I longed to recall something that, like my name, I could not articulate.

Sometimes I just stood there and reached out through the bars, trying to grasp the moon.

Being as I was, then, a rather pathetic excuse for my kind, I continued to burrow beneath the great city, lurking in cellars, and even—ecstasy upon ecstasy—emerging into the
open air
on certain moonless nights, to caper among the half-tumbled stones.

That was how I met the Warm. I felt a lightening of the air, down there in the dark, as the heavy wooden cover of a shaft was lifted off. I climbed toward the distant opening. I heard a sound, which might have been a summons, a kind of chanting, maybe even an incantation, and I followed it, until I emerged into an ancient and decayed cellar, deep underground still, but for me a place of almost unbearable brightness.

A lantern hung from a rafter. There, in that room, he was waiting for me.

The Warm. That is what we call them.
Warm blood
still circulating through
fresh meat
. Too fresh for taste, really, but if he had shown the slightest trace of fear, I would have tasted
that
and gone into a frenzy, and my own underdeveloped claws, however otherwise unimpressive, would have sufficed to tear him to shreds.

But he was
not
afraid. I tasted wonder, amazement, even a kind of dark
joy
—in the air, on his odor and his breath perhaps—but, no, he was
not
afraid.

He spoke some words gently in his own speech, almost as if, absurdly, he were trying to put me at ease. I could almost make them out, almost remember what those words meant, because they were words I had
once known
.

He motioned me away from the aperture from which I had emerged. I shuffled across the stone floor,
almost upright
, a mocking caricature of what I once was; for it came to me then, by the slow turnings of my thought, that I, too, had been a Warm, before the
contagion
within my own blood began to manifest itself.

I might have raged. I might have sorrowed. But I perceived that he had supplied
that
on which my kind feasts, and the frenzy overwhelmed me, and I forgot all else.

While I was thus occupied, there was a sudden,
blinding
flash of light. I yelped and leapt back, letting go of the morsel. I slammed against the cellar wall. Dust and bits of stone rained down on me. I turned on him, snarling, shaking my head, claws manifest, black fangs, however puny, bared,
but he was not afraid
. There was
no
fear in him.

The thing he held in his hand. I knew the word. I remembered it, from my former existence. I
spoke
it.

“Camera.”

He started at that. He almost dropped the object I had named. I shuffled toward him. He stepped back, but
not afraid
. I could taste his heart racing, his mind turning, as he said, in the language of the Warm, “My God! It’s true then! This is incredible! More than I had hoped for, more than I dreamed!”

Not afraid.

He was chattering excitedly, more to himself than to me. “We shall be friends. Yes. You will tell you all your secrets, and I will tell you mine. A fair exchange, no? Yes! Yes!”

I knew that word, too,
friends
, and it hurt me. But I said nothing.

I watched in fascination as he arranged certain items. He lit another lamp. I cringed, but he soothingly repeated that word
friend
over and over. After a while I sat down and turned my attention once more to
that
which he had provided.

He set up his easel. He got out his pencils and brushes. Much later, when he had taught me to understand these things, when I knew much about his life and his world and how the other Warms turned away with shrieks and loathing from the results of this evening’s project, I understood that he had gloatingly entitled the painting he began that night
Ghoul Feeding
. It’s famous.

* * *

But I am ahead of myself. How could I, who am a monstrosity in the night, a thing that wriggles with the worms in the earth, a devourer of the dead, have a
friend
?

Yet I had a name.

He drew me to him, night after night, unafraid. He lifted up the heavy lid from the aperture and summoned me with something like a whistle, like a cough,
almost as if he knew the speech of my own kind
. He drew me up, out of the dreaming beneath the world, into that cellar, and our
fair exchange
continued.

There was always a
gift
for me, obtained I cared not how, to keep me occupied while he painted, or sketched, or drew. Several times, without warning, he used the infernal
camera
, in order, I think, to catch me in expressions of surprise or menace, which he particularly prized.

When the painting
Ghoul Feeding
was finished, he showed it to me, and spoke laughingly.

“Whaddya think? Ya like it? It’s
you
.”

I sniffed the canvas. I sniffed him. There was no fear.

I said nothing then, but he required of me speech. He demanded
words
. In exchange, he gave me
words
. He spoke to me more and more, as if I understood his words, and in time I did begin to understand them, as he stirred memories within me.

In time I was able to tell him something of my world. I tasted his excitement, the thrill he felt, but
no fear
. I told him how the whole city was honeycombed with tunnels such as the one from which he had called me, some of them made by Warms in ancient days for whatever purpose, but most of them dug by
us
with our sharp claws. I gave him the perspective from which he produced the picture called
Subway Accident
, for I had known many who were there and heard them tell the story over and over again, with much hilarity.

For there are indeed others like myself, who linger near to the surface, on the borderlands of the Great Darkness, and who engage in such pranks.

There are those among us who laugh, whose laughter can drive one such as him mad.

But I did not laugh.

Instead I begged him to tell me about the world of
houses
and
streetcars
and of
reading the newspaper before a comfortable fire
.

And he described such things to me, at first fascinated that one such as I would care about them, but finally, quite obviously, impatient. I don’t think he understood that each precious word was reconstructing a world I had once known, like a shattered mosaic being reassembled piece by piece.

I wanted more. I was greedy for more.

But
he
was greedy for the darkness. I told him how the great ones of my kind are
utterly transformed
and swim like whales far down, deep into the Dream, having turned away from the living world entirely. They no longer defile graves. They no longer devour rotting flesh. They sink deep into the uttermost depths, where the world of men and even the world of ghouls is but a thin scum floating on the surface of some tenuous black bubble that may burst at any moment. They who pass mystically
through
the membrane of this bubble, into the chaotic center of all things, behold and worship Azathoth, who
is
Chaos, whose mad, dancing, mindless flute players shriek out the music of death into all the universe.

He was
not
afraid. He was filled with amazed, hideous joy. “It is like in the books,” he said, exalting, and he spoke of the
Necronomicon
and others. He told of dark secrets he laughingly said would shock even me.

I told him a story about a common guidebook to the city, and three ghouls who found it very funny indeed. From that he painted his famous
Holmes, Lowell, and Longfellow Lie Buried in Mt. Auburn
.

But he was not afraid.

* * *

He
was the one who wanted to
go with me
, and he did go, clambering down the shaft he had opened. First I covered him with my scent, so that when we met with others of my kind, as we soon did, they would take him for one of our number, because he was not afraid.

So he accompanied me on nocturnal adventures, participated in our delvings, our rites, even our obscene feastings
as if he were one of us
; and he learned much, so very much, which made him so famous in his day, which let him relish the terror he aroused in the other Warms when he showed them the images he had made of the unimaginable, blasphemous world that lay just beneath their feet, which was itself
only the beginning
of the further horrors that lay beyond the reach of merely human senses.

Once, in the impossible depths of some cavern at the Earth’s center, when the mud and stone beneath our feet seemed no more substantial than a mist and we looked down through the stars in the direction of the ultimate chaos, he threw back his head and
howled
.

* * *

But it was supposed to be an exchange. I wanted my part in return.

I don’t know how much time had passed, weeks, months, years, for we of the dark dreamlands do not reckon time as does the waking world.

But I dreamed another kind of dream, of streetcars and houses and reading the newspaper by a cozy fire. Once I even seemed to find myself there, by the fire, in my dressing gown, with the newspaper spread over my lap. I felt the gentle warmth of the flames. The paper rustled in my hands. For a very long time I could not determine which was real and which was nightmare, whether I was a man, awakening from the awful delusion that he was a ghoul, or a ghoul dreaming that he was a man.

Meanwhile my friend painted his pictures and gorged himself on such secrets as I might reveal to him. He found my own “progress” to be intriguing at first. He remarked that I was
changing
in a manner he had formerly thought impossible. I walked upright now. I spoke his language with increasing fluency. I could even
read
, not the
Necronomicon
or anything like that, but simple books for children which he brought me, and then newspapers, all of which told me about the world I so distantly and imperfectly remembered.