The Madness of Cthulhu Anthology (Volume One): 1 Read online

  The wind scolded him, All your fault, and what’s she gonna do now? And the ice cracked, and shadows crawled from the crevasses and bled black. Foam burbled on the edges of the black sludge, which peeled off the ice and rose in sheets, fanning the snow, sucking it up, then slamming back to the ice in clouds of rabid froth. From all directions, the sludge wriggled toward the dog. His fur stood on end. He sensed the sludge was alive, and he somehow knew it came from the lake the humans were studying, a lake deep below the glacier.

  His tongue hung from his lips and grazed the ice. The smell of the sludge grew closer, blood of a beast, and now he tasted it, and it was sweet. He wanted to sleep, wanted the sun to flicker off and the ice to stop pounding him.

  This was the end of his life, and it had been good.

  Let it come quickly, and let it be brief.

  His body tensed. His muscles strained against his bones. Oh, how it hurt, and he couldn’t stop it. The muscles stretched tightly, ready to snap. He didn’t want to die this way, but he had no choice in the matter, and the wind whirled him around like a spinner in the girl’s games. The ice scraped the fur from his skin, and he smelled his own blood and it scared him.

  And that’s when his bones shattered.

  The dog was aware that his body was a limp sack filled with mush. He didn’t understand.

  He lifted his nose. His face, or what was left of it, pointed south toward the Bialystok Glacier. And then the wind lifted him and ice flew past in whorls, spinning spinning, and his broken bones ratcheted back together but in odd formations, kinked and hinged like a snake, molding his body into something new, something horrible.

  His heart thumped wildly, an aching rose in his chest, his soul keened. He’d let the girl down, and what would she do without him?

  Coated in black, he inched like scum across the ice. He was heading toward Bialystok and the South Pole. He slithered one inch, now two. His body flopped up, sucked the snow, and collapsed back down. He had no control, none at all, as his body wriggled and the sludge effervesced around him and permeated his pores.

  I didn’t mean to wander out at night. I didn’t mean to sniff by the compost shack. I didn’t mean for the wind to pick me up and carry me to the drilling post. I didn’t mean for any of this to happen.

  The girl would be lonely. He knew she would cry, and it was all his fault.

  And now shadows surged against the sky, and the sun dimmed …

  and it dimmed …

  until it was only a dot of fire on a sheath of black.

  * * *

  “He’s alive down by the Devil’s Bathtub.”

  Iris didn’t understand. Why would Dad leave Sammy outside in the storm? She tucked her chin beneath the wool blankets, which smelled like wet sheep, or at least, she figured this is what wet sheep would smell like. Dad and old man Farley were both staring at her as if she’d been very bad. Not angry looks—Iris knew what those looked like—but disappointed looks as if she were a naughty girl who had let them down. But what had she done? She tried to remember but failed. “What’s Sammy doing at the Devil’s Bathtub?” she asked.

  “The demons got him.” Farley shifted his eyes away from her. He sat on the wooden chair, his cane—the one with the skull knob—tapping the splintered floor. He wore his usual rags. Black parka with holes like bite marks scattered all over it. Matching snow pants frayed at the bottom. He chewed constantly, brown spittle frozen to his lips and halfway to his chin.

  Dad’s blue eyes seemed to be the only color in the room. Iris was named for those eyes, for she had them, too. They were the Habberstam eyes, he’d told her long ago, and they ran in the family, those eyes did. Hair the color of dust straggled from under the hood of his parka. Dad was old. “We actually found Sammy near the South Pole. There is a–” He paused and collected his thoughts. “There’s a trail from the Devil’s Bathtub to the Pole. The trail is black, thick like tar, and I’m afraid there’s fur stuck to it. Iris, you must have let Sammy out last night.”

  Ice pelted the bunkhouse. The air felt swarthy and leaden. Iris couldn’t breathe, and her throat clenched, and she tried to swallow but couldn’t. Sammy was gone. She’d known it in her heart, but to hear her father tell her out loud, it was almost too much to bear.

  “He’s with them now,” said Farley.

  “No, he’s not with anybody. He’s dead,” she sobbed, “and I didn’t let him out.”

  Dad fidgeted. She knew he was anxious to leave and return to his work. “He must have sneaked out, that’s all. He’s alive, Iris, but not in an ordinary way.”

  She wanted her father to comfort her, but as always, it was Farley who hugged her, and she cried until she had no tears left. Her toes were numb, her fingers stiff inside her gloves. She hated it here, hated it so much that she didn’t care if she died. With no friends, no Sammy, what was the point?

  It wasn’t fair. She was stuck at this stupid Vostok glacier outpost. Antarctica. It sucked. Mom had died so long ago that Iris didn’t even remember her face, and Iris had to stay here with Dad because this was where he worked. Sammy had been ten years old, just like Iris, and there were no other children here.

  She pulled back from Farley. “Dad, can’t we live somewhere else, please?”

  Dad’s mouth tightened. “I’ll have Martha bring hot tea and toast. Eat something. You’ll feel better.” As usual, he was ignoring her pleas. “We’ll go see Sammy, and next time a ship comes in, maybe they’ll bring you a new dog.”

  “Yes, a new dog,” Farley repeated, as if this would make it happen. But Iris knew her father wouldn’t remember to request another dog from Australia. Dad never remembered anything other than his work. After Mom died, he withdrew from everyone, even Iris. He’d be happier without Iris, she just knew it. He didn’t love her, not really. He just felt responsible for her, and that was something entirely different.

  That afternoon, the storm died down, and Dad and Farley took her to see Sammy. Farley rarely left the bunkhouse. He was too old and crippled. He spent all his time at the monitors, peering at strange shapes and numbers and chewing on seal jerky. But today, he insisted on coming with Dad and Iris. “I have to see Sammy for myself,” he said.

  They rode a tractor from the Vostok Station to the Devil’s Bathtub. The giant wheels crunched over the ice. The sun boiled overhead like a volcano and streamed down so brightly that Iris could see the veins in her eyes. She also saw circles everywhere: eyeballs blinked in and out of view, pustules of color burst and reformed. The ice plains convulsed.

  Her father cursed and maneuvered the tractor around big cracks in the ice. “This might be dangerous, but I was out here earlier and nothing happened, so …” He was muttering as if to himself, then said to Iris, “You notice the black tar and fur? That’s the trail I was talking about.”

  She shielded her eyes from the sun’s glare. Yes, she noticed, but she couldn’t believe this was Sammy’s fur. Her brain couldn’t process it.

  As far as she could see, white bubbles glistened across pools of black rimming the edges of all the cracks and stretching like protoplasm across the glacier. Iris knew all about protoplasm. She could operate some of Farley’s computer simulations, too. Her father didn’t talk to her about much, but he was always willing to talk about science. Dad had told her many times about the importance of his work. He and Farley drilled through the ice and took samples from Lake Vostok, which was thirteen thousand feet below the surface. “The ice is four hundred and twenty thousand years old,” he’d say, “and deep beneath it is the lake, filled with two thousand two hundred feet of liquid and life we don’t understand yet.” Dad quivered whenever he talked about his work. It was that exciting to him. He lived to discover new life forms while ignoring the ones that already existed around him. Like Iris.

  “Is this from the lake, Dad?” she asked.

  “Maybe. There’s no way to know yet. The drill at Devil’s Bathtub has extracted what appears to be magnetic bacteria.” He jerked the wheel to the l
eft, and the tractor wheels trod across a long finger of black. Beneath the heavy machine, something squished and moaned. Flaps of black peeled off the ice and slapped back down. Something rumbled deep beneath the surface. It sounded like a thousand waterfalls shot through with the shrieks of dying monkeys. Iris clapped her hands over her ears and pressed. The noise was deafening. And the smell was bad, more pungent than the compost shack.

  Dad’s face tightened more than usual. In the sun, his wrinkles looked deeper, his face more pained. Did her father cry himself to sleep at night as she did? Was he unhappy, too? If so, why did he keep refusing to leave?

  The noise subsided as they neared the South Pole. Here, black bricks wobbled like jelly on the ice. What was this? The bricks looked like Lego blocks, and they were stacked in various-sized towers around the Pole. A layer of white froth coated the tops of the stacks and dripped down the sides in frozen smears.

  Part of Iris thought it was all fascinating, and she wanted to poke the black towers and make them jiggle. But part of her was horrified. The whole plain of ice seemed alive and rose in tangled formations that looked like spiders’ webs, delicate and loosely woven, suspended in winds fierce enough to crack her bones. Black sludge rose in globules from the webs. They bulged and pressed against each other, then split into two, four, then eight globules. They were multiplying.

  “Never seen anything like this. Don’t understand. Wasn’t like this earlier.” Dad’s words tumbled out as if he was scared out of his mind. Farley sat behind them, hunched over, chewing jerky. He was trembling.

  “Best get the child back,” said Farley. “This isn’t natural, Joe. I don’t see Sammy here. I don’t know what I see here, but it isn’t natural. It’s the demons.”

  “There are no demons, Farley,” her father shot back. He was shouting to be heard above the wind.

  “Well, these aren’t magnetosomes, not of any sort I’ve studied.”

  This is what kept Iris at Vostok Station. Magnetic bacteria fifty nanometers small and organized in chains.

  “I tell you, Farley, these are a new form of the bacteria. Magnetosomes always face the Pole because of Earth’s geomagnetic field lines. They’re found in ancient rocks and fossils. So why shouldn’t they be in an ancient subterranean lake? Look at these bricks. They all face the Pole, Farley.”

  “No. We’ve never seen bacteria massed into wobbling bricks and walls. Never. This is something else.”

  “Sammy’s dead, isn’t he?” interjected Iris.

  “If he’s alive, he’s part of this magnetosome structure,” said Dad. “I believe he’s in there, in those blocks, still alive in some weird new form. That’s what I believe.” He glared at Farley.

  Why was he arguing with Farley about science? Didn’t it matter more that Sammy was dead?

  Her tears welled, then froze. She would find Sammy, even if he was part of this magnetosome thing. Sammy was her only friend, and he was lost.

  She jumped out of the tractor.

  Dad yelled, “No, it’s too dangerous!” and grabbed her sleeve, but she wrenched free and he leapt after her. Farley stayed behind, too feeble to follow.

  She’d swear the wind was hissing her name. She’d swear the wind was bellowing something that sounded like shoggoth. But it had to be her imagination, right?

  All around her, globules popped. They spewed black tendrils that suckered to the ice and puffed up like snakes gorged on meat.

  No, Iris wasn’t imagining this, definitely not.

  A hiss of her name and now a bellow—

  shoggoth—

  and fists of wind grabbed her hair and yanked her toward the bricks, and her mind filled with a searing shriek. Bullets of ice clattered against her parka and snow pants. She struggled against the storm, but the ice sheet slammed up and down, and she lost her footing and almost fell into a crevasse rimmed in sludge and foam. She gripped the sludge, her left cheek suctioned to the glue of foam, and it was like the fat on a cheap cut of beef. She recoiled, but her feet and ankles hung over the crevasse and she had to hold tight. Her cheek was inflamed as if by fire,

  and as her skin ripped off the left side of her head,

  and as the wind and the sludge stripped off her hair,

  she screamed, “Daddy! Daddy!” but the wind snatched the words and whipped her around in circles. Spinning like a top right over the crevasse, and she could see way down below, the swarm of creatures—some round with horns, some that looked like skeletal fish, some elongated with too many eyes, and all of them, translucent and flickering in colors she didn’t know.

  Could these be Farley’s demons? Were Dad’s magnetosomes and Farley’s demons the same?

  The storm twirled her until she was dizzy, and still she cried “Daddy! Daddy!” but when she looked for him, he was gone. She lay, crumpled, upon the stack of blocks. The tractor wavered in the distance, outlined in charcoal against the white sheet of sky.

  Her bones rattled and crunched, and oh yes, she should be dead, but here she was, a limp sack of skin filled with the debris of bones and organs and muscle.

  What had happened to her? What was she?

  She should still be scared, but she wasn’t. Instead, a calm settled over her. And still, the storm raged.

  Farley couldn’t survive a storm like this, not on his own. He must be gone, and this made her sad.

  The black bricks jiggled beneath her and swung her body so her face pointed toward the South Pole. She looked down. Saw bright blue eyes, the whites huge around tiny irises. Stark terror. Dad. But he wasn’t really there. Only his eyes, and they were plugged into the sides of the wall like light bulbs. She sensed him within the wall, and yes, he was alive but he was something different. Bricks, jelly, ooze, the froth of bacteria? Magnetosomes, that’s what she and Dad were now, hinged bricks, millions of magnetic bacteria all pointing south.

  Dad had been a very good scientist. He was always right.

  But Farley had been right, too. It could be said that these magnetic bacteria were demons of a sort. They infected and took over.

  Iris rested gently at the top of the wall, her body composed of a hundred or more black bricks etched with foam. She smelled like rotting meat. It was pleasant. Almost relaxing. But for how long would she be amused? Eventually, this would grow tiresome.

  At the bottom of the wall, something whimpered.

  Sammy?

  Iris struggled and finally wrenched her body from the top of the wall, and her hundred bricks ratcheted together by hinges fell to the ice surrounding the South Pole. As they hit, they instantly swung so all the bricks faced the Pole.

  Sammy’s bricks were on the other side of the Pole, also facing it. She and Sammy stared at each other.

  His eyes, brown velvet, soft and loving.

  His body, hundreds of black bricks, jiggling happily as he saw her.

  Did she see a tail wag there in the bricks? Did she?

  She looked from Sammy to Dad and back again. They were together now, all three of them, as a family, the way things were supposed to be, right? Dad would have to pay attention to her. What else could he do?

  She’d been able to split herself off the top of the wall. Perhaps the three of them could chink off and wander away together across the ice. But no, they always shifted south, didn’t they? They had no choice. They would always move toward the Pole.

  Iris was still wondering what they would all do when the glacier lurched. A wide crack yawned in the ice, and now it was an open mouth with icicle teeth. Iris felt herself tumbling, and her bricks fell straight down through the ice sheet leading to Lake Vostok. It was like the crashing of a skyscraper, except all the bricks were alive, and hers were among thousands. She felt nothing, really, other than the grazing of icicles across her bricks and the cool swish of the air.

  Iris splashed into the water. And there were creatures here she never could have imagined. It was lovely. And beside her was Sammy, and this was their new home. Her larger bricks split into millions of microsc
opic ones, hinged and swimming smoothly through the water. Sammy did the same, and together, they swam south.

  But over there, a third creature flailed in horror, thrashed against its brethren, and tried desperately to swim north against the pack. It had the Habberstam eyes. Poor Dad, he just wasn’t a family man.

  THE WITNESS IN DARKNESS

  JOHN SHIRLEY

  FROM THE DIVISION OF STEALTH ARCHAEOLOGY TO DR. KYU KIM, Your Eyes Only, Class. Top Secret:

  On October 20, 2011, a roughly cylindrical artifact of unknown metal, pentagonally five-sided in cross section, its outer surfaces imprinted with the dot-cluster writing of the Elder Culture, was found by DSA classification team 23, in the Eastern Quadrant Elder Ruins, Antarctica. Retro-analysis hypothesizes that the artifact is an electronic telepathy device, enhanced by sound recording and playback. Attached to the artifact by rubber band was a scribbled note in a handwriting thought to belong to the geologist William Dyer, who returned to the Antarctic on one additional occasion after his second visit to the so-called “Mountains of Madness.”

  The legible part of the note reads, “Final return to Antarctic ruins, encounter with Elder One—the creature applied this device from earlier phase of civilization. You’ll hear my voice but it is not, ultimately, I speaking; the Elder One has simply used my mind for telepathic translation so as to [water damage has erased the remainder].”

  The artifact, when activated by a flow of electricity, produced sound, a playback that seems to be a recording, transcribed here. The recording gives the listener the distinct impression that William Dyer is telepathically channeling a narrative provided by an Elder Thing, a.k.a. a “Great Old One”:

  * * *

  I never anticipated being wakened by a blade—by vivisection. Even after my body had been shifted, transported, and exposed to much colder temperatures, I continued my trance. Reluctant to emerge from my trance of suspension, in which I’d been immured for immemorial ages, I slept onward despite the interference of the pink primates—until the blade wielded by the intruder began to saw away at my skin. We evolved to be not only beautiful, but tough as tree bark, our people; still he persisted, and broke through, digging ever deeper into my flesh with his cold, unrelenting knife-edge, gouging and probing. The exquisite agony, the sheer unthinkable intrusion of it, burst the bubble of my dream. When I opened my eyes he made a pathetic squalling noise and backed away. My tentacles lashed about his forelimb, and I snatched the edged probe from him and gave him a taste of his own vivisection. He did not survive it.