Pyrate Cthulhu: Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Volume 1 (4.0) Read online

  On the distant deck, she spied two of the masked, paper-wrapped crew, struggling to tie down several loose crates, wooden boxes large enough to hide elephants. She had failed to notice these crates before and wondered why, as if she perhaps had just made them up and placed them into this picture.

  As if sensing her awareness, the two men stopped dead in midpoint of their frantic work then pointed together back towards the ocean. Theirs was not a command, but she had the sense that if she did not look, she would miss an important aspect in the deeper symbolism of this exotic ship, where she was nothing more than one of the lost.

  Heeding their advice and returning to the rails, she gazed out into the churning waters and spotted what she thought must be a human head. Then she noticed arms attached to that head, pushing through the waves. It was a young woman without garb, swimming in the frigid waters. Next to her was a man then another figure. Soon, she became aware of dozens of humans, naked and cold, powering through the water. The heavy waves kept taking them down, pounding them with their foamy swells, but they kept rising up, kept swimming. They had hope when really, they had none. They believed in the impossible.

  As the next wave subsided, the new vision presented before her forced her to draw breath. Not a dozen, not even hundreds, but thousands upon thousands of pale, naked humans were swimming these seas. None screamed, none called for help, not even in this cold water, where they should have all died from hypothermia. Uncaring, the Vestibule ploughed right through them, crushing swimmers who were too slow to get out of the way, or too preoccupied to care. Yet none of this shocked her. She knew their fate was hopeless, and yet, they blindly continued to pretend otherwise.

  But what did tear at her soul was the fact that each and every man, woman and child was swimming in the same direction, swimming in her direction, towards Carcosa. Did they, too, believe salvation might find them in such a distant and exotic land? Was she perhaps not one of those swimmers herself?

  Unsure both of whom she was and what her eyes now witnessed, she fled to her cabin, sealing the portal behind her. Somehow, the darkness seemed inviting. She drew a breath, then another, and tried to forget.

  “Mummy, are you okay?”

  “I made you something,” spoke the child.

  It took a moment to remember where she was, that there was a shape in the far corner, wrapped in blankets The only bulb overhead swung with the ocean roll, casting sharp shadows over the shape now must be her only daughter.

  Fear returned to the mother. She looked at her daughter for moving lips, or perhaps for fidgeting, anything, something to indicate that her child was real.

  “Something for me?”

  “Yes…Mother.”

  A chill stung at her heart. That was not her daughter’s voice. It wasn’t even human a human voice. Rather, it was something artificial like the voices that all the crew shared. For the briefest of moments, she was back in the ocean, lost in the storm, recalling what had really been left behind inside their crumbling yacht.

  “That’s really nice. How sweet.”

  She sat by the dark, speaking shape. An arm extended, wrapped in papery cloth so tightly that no skin showed. At the end of the appendage was a white-gloved hand holding forth folded paper. Tentatively, with more than a hint of trepidation, she withdrew this gift from the icy-cold grip. “I’m so lucky to have you,” her words forced themselves, spoken through whispers and trembles.

  The paper unfolded easily into white cutouts of mother and daughter, hand-in-hand, foot-to-foot, unraveling in a chain. Like two mirrors that forever reflected occupants trapped between their panes, so, too, the paper continued to unfold. She almost cried at the thought of its symbolism, of being bound to her only child forever. That nothing would take her away again, that everything distant Carcosa promised her was here for her now.

  She kept unfolding.

  The paper stretched deeper, into her daughter’s arm and then on through into the sleeve. In moments, she had hundreds of the mother-daughter folds spilling out of her hands. And then, without warning, the arm vanished under the weight of paper and now, the very sheets themselves were unfolding, cut and shaped into the same pattern: mother-and-daughter, mother-and-daughter, mother-and-daughter….

  She kept unfolding.

  Paper lay everywhere. Soon, her undoing smothered the entire floor until the bunk itself was lost under a mass of folded pulp. The paper became wet and it was no longer pure white, for words were etched in the cuttings. She read some of the lines. It was a play, the characters speaking nonsense she could not read. The play’s characters’ were her daughter and herself, or that was how she interpreted the passages. Characters were discussing their loss, but they were unwilling to accept the truth. They focused their minds on discovering lost Carcosa on the shores of Lake Hali where Hastur lies. Carcosa was a mystical land - the words kept telling her

  How long she unraveled she could not recall. To her, one moment, this had been her cabin. In another, it was a mass of pulpy, wet paper filling all the space that was possible to fill in such cramped quarters. A chain of the larger-then-smaller woman repeated endlessly, cut from the pages of a waterlogged book that she had so desperately clutched in her hands for so long, reading it for hope.

  “Where are you?” she asked, pushing through the walls of paper. Its mass was too thick, so she had to tear at it, shred her way through like some Victorian explorer braving the thick jungles of Africa. “Where are you?” she cried wildly. She sobbed the same words again, sensing now her pathetic loss.

  “Where are you?” she could only whisper.

  Eventually, the weight of paper was pushed aside and the bunk re-emerged, only for her to discover that it was empty.

  Empty except for a cut-out, masquerade mask. Like all the other masks worn on this ship, it was fashioned entirely from paper.

  It was the mask that her daughter had worn.

  It was all her daughter’s face had ever been.

  ***

  Exhausted and terrified, red-eyed and wide-eyed, she ran across the decks, screaming inside, hoping for any kind of release.

  While she sprinted across the deck, a wave of salty water gushed around her. Ahead, it grew large, collected the two crew and their huge boxes, tossing them into the water like dust flicked from an emptying dustpan.

  As the ocean took the crew, they crumbled and folded, as if they, too, were made of paper and the spines of old, waterlogged books. Neither cried nor struggled to hold onto life. Both accepted their fate as readily as she accepted the sun or moon, or that her daughter and husband had once loved her. She was struck dumb as they promptly vanished then felt sick at the thought that death was so easy and so casual. She didn’t want to die like that. She’d do anything to ensure that never happened to her and her family.

  A second wave, not as crushing as the first, managed to wipe the decks, drenching her further, filling her mouth with its putrid tastes. She clung to the railing, feeling its pull grow ever stronger, threatening to take her, too, or, failing that, drown her on these very decks, themselves. She held on. She knew that she was drowning. Very soon, it would all be over.

  And then, at the last moment, the waters subsided and she was cold and wet and drenched on the decks as she had always been. Now, the Vestibule was rising out of the water, still floating, still powering ever onwards to hopeful Carcosa. She stared out. Beyond her immediate surroundings, it was impossible to see much beyond the rising waves and the grey spray of the mist. Of the horizon, nothing at all could be seen. The world was shrinking inwards, trapping the Vestibule inside what must seem to some to be an enormous glass bottle, forever shaken by an angry owner.

  Darkness was settling, readying the world for the night.

  She took to the stairs, climbing higher to where the only light shone, to the only place that might provide answers…or relief.

  At the portal, she wrenched open the latch and threw herself inside. Everything was as before. The sole captain wrapped in
his coat, scarf and flying goggles, diligent at the wheel, fighting the angry ocean. Lightning flashed outside and he lit up like a black-and-white photograph before he had time to notice his visitor.

  She ran up to him, pulled him by his arm so he had to look upon her. “My daughter, someone has taken my daughter.”

  The expressionless face, always concealed, gave nothing away concerning any emotions that it might feel. “Daughter?” he asked in that strangely familiar voice, “you have a daughter?”

  “Of course I have a daughter.”

  The Captain shrugged. “Oh? Well, that is strange, because I was well-informed that your daughter had been dismantled.”

  “What?” Her voice became hysterical. She needed answers. She needed them fast; otherwise, she knew she would really lose her mind, or find it. “I want to know what you and your crew did with my daughter.”

  Another shrug. “We did nothing.”

  “Then who did?”

  “Oh, I thought that would have been obvious too.”

  She tried to speak, but his words were just confusing her. She wanted to be angry, wanted someone else to take the blame for her hopeless predicament. She wanted the Captain to take control, to bring her back and restore everything that she had lost these last weeks. “Who dismantled her?” she finally demanded, even though a part of her already knew, a part of her that knew a lot of things that the rest of her mind pretended not to.

  When the Captain finally answered her, all he said was, “You did.”

  “I did?”

  Her mind flashed to that moment, the unraveling of the mother-and-daughter paper chain. Only now did she see what she had done. Her daughter had been made of paper, always had been. From the beginning, her only child had been nothing more than the mother-and-daughter chain. Her heart turned cold at the very thought of what she had created.

  “I pulled her apart, didn’t I?”

  “Yes, but you made her, first. Don’t ever forget that.”

  More lightning as deep shadows threw themselves onto the wall of charts behind them.

  “We just assumed that you no longer required her. But don’t concern yourself. My crew are clearing the mess away as we speak.” Again, that voice, it was almost female. And he was her height exactly, even the same build.

  “You mean, she’s gone?”

  “Yes. You no longer need her, now that we are nearly there.”

  Her angered flared, built upon an ever-foreboding thought that in reality, all was lost, and all that she had hung onto was nothing more than fantasy. She didn’t want to think that, didn’t want to remember.

  “Who are you?”

  Once more, the face was as silent as stone, the goggles reflecting her own eyes. Or were they? She looked again and saw that they were not reflections, rather, real eyes behind the mask, so similar to her own. “Who are you?” she asked again.

  “I thought you already knew.”

  Her hand flashed to her open mouth, because suddenly, she did know.

  How easy it was for the human mind to deceive, especially to deceive oneself. So, she unraveled the scarf, pulled away the World War One flying goggles and drew from his head the pirate hat. He was her height, of the same build - these should have been clue enough. The familiar voice, like the familiar human face that looked back at her now, she was looking at herself.

  Who was the only living person in this entire ocean who was willing to do anything to find fabled Carcosa?

  Only her.

  ***

  Tracy Wright came up from the ocean for what was probably the hundredth time. It could have been her thousandth for all she cared, or remembered. Down there, in those moments trapped in the murky, dark waters it was calm, it was just water. Down there, she couldn’t breathe either. Up here on the surface were the swelling waves, the eerie lightning and angry thunder. They would eventually claim her and send her back down again. That final moment now could be no more than hours away at most. Probably sooner, considering how exhausted her muscles had become treading water.

  The wreckage of the Daintree had long dispersed. Her daughter with her splattered brains was somewhere down there, many miles under the angry sea. Her husband might still be alive, but she doubted it. He was never as strong a swimmer as she.

  All she had left was his book, that dreadful King in Yellow. She’d held onto it this long, so she might as well keep reading until the very bitter end. Only that book offered any semblance of hope, no matter how futile that hope had ever been.

  She laughed at the irony. Her wish would finally come true. All she had to do now was to decide how to make it so. Down there, at the ocean’s end where the dead are never found, she could still be reunited with her husband and daughter and it would be a silent, lifeless reunion.

  Instead, if she wanted the madness, if she wanted to escape oblivion, to become lost in her own torment in a world where she would always believe her family could be made whole once again, all she had to do was keep reading.

  It was the impossible dream. Oblivion with nothing, or madness with false hope?

  The choice was so easy.

  So, she kept reading and asked again of her captain to take her to the distant shores of Lake Hali, where fabled Carcosa lay.

  The Disciple

  by David Barr Kirtley

  Professor Carlton Brose was evil, and I adored him as only a freshman can. I spent the first miserable winter at college watching him, studying the way he darkly arched his eyebrow when he made a point, or how he could flick a smoking cigarette away into a murky puddle, forgotten the instant it left his touch. I mimicked these small things privately, mercilessly. I don't know why, because it wasn't the small things that drew me in at all. It was the big things, the stories people told as far away as dear old Carolina.

  You heard the name Brose if you ran with any cults, and I ran with a couple. Society rejected us and so we rejected them. The more things you give up, the less there are to bind your will. There's power in that, we were sure of it, but it was damned elusive.

  I knew the owner of an occult bookstore in Raleigh. He claimed he had actually met Brose. "These other guys you hang with," he said, "them I'm not so sure about. But this guy Brose, he's the real deal."

  I studied the man carefully. "You believe that?"

  He'd been shelving books, but then he dropped them into a pile on the floor and turned to me with a slightly crazed look in his eyes.

  "I've seen it, man," he said, "personally seen it. Flies buzz up out of the rot and swirl in formation around him. He can make your eyes bleed just from looking at him. The guy's tapped into something huge."

  I was skeptical. "And he teaches a class?"

  "Not just a class, all right? It's this special program, only a dozen or so are admitted, and they get power. I've seen that too. Then they go away. Every spring."

  "Go where?"

  He shook his head. "Damned if I know. Places not of this world, that's what some people say."

  "I don't buy it," I said. "If he's got so much going for him, why's he working a job at all? And what kind of school would let him teach it?"

  He just shrugged. "I don't know about that. All I know is that Brose is for real. You can take my word on it."

  "Then why aren't you in his class?"

  He stared at me fixedly. "Brose wouldn't take me. He said I had no talent, no potential, said I was harmless and should go get a job. It hurt like hell, but that's another reason I know he's legit — what kind of fraud would turn people away like that?"

  I had no answer for him, and I'd known a lot of frauds.

  I traveled to Arkham, to Miskatonic University where Brose taught. I sought out his office in the deepest corner of the Anthropology building. I sat on a bench there, pretending to read, waiting for him to emerge.

  The door opened and I caught just a glimpse of his shadowed chamber, of the brooding, crowded shapes that lurked in there. Then the door was closed again and Brose was walking past me down the ha
ll. I glanced up just as he went by, as if it were an accident, as if it was the motion of his dark sleeve that had caught my eye.

  Brose stared down at me with eyes the color of a tombstone. The shadows seemed to lengthen and darken as he passed, and he smiled knowingly. I shuddered, because he had seen me and because I knew just from the look that it was all true. I had found the real thing. Brose practically radiated power. On that day my initial skepticism transformed itself into the most helpless adoration. I enrolled myself in the school.

  Winter came. The inside of his office was like some terrible jungle. Loose, shadowed papers crammed the bookshelves, drooping downwards like wild leaves. A filth-choked, and apparently unused, fish tank cast a dim green light. Through the window I saw the lonely stretch of gray-green Massachusetts woods that was called the Arboretum.

  Brose leaned back into those shadows of his own making and eyed me severely. "Why do you want to join the program?"

  "To study with you," I responded automatically.

  "Why should I accept you?"

  "I'll do anything," I said. "No hesitation. No regret."

  His lips curled into that now familiar smile. "But what have you got already? What are you bringing to the program?"

  I knew he meant power. I sighed. "Nothing. Not yet, that is. But you can —"

  He shook his head. "If nothing's what you have, then nothing's what you get from me. Go back to literature. It's really —"

  "No!" I broke in. I halted then. Breathing was a sudden strain. "I don't have much, that's true. I've lost things in my life." I paused. "So many things, but I've gained something, too. I've gained this rotting emptiness inside me and I can use it. I swear I can use it. All the loss, it can't all have been for nothing." I added softly, "I won't let it be."