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

  Enraged, the bloated, ancient shoggoth ranged back and forth near the entrance to the hibernation cavern, depositing a great trail of slime—the gleaming muck reeking horribly of its rage. Like a mad sentry it paced, afraid to enter the chamber, kept at bay by the stinging energies we’d impregnated into the rocky walls, restrained by the ancient hypnotic suggestion that made such energies an effective shoggoth repellent.

  It continued its stalking, shrugging its heaving body this way and that, slobbering furiously about the entrance—as I busied myself back at the pit it had climbed from.

  It was about this time I became aware that two pink primates had found the city, that they were exploring it—I observed them ogling the history displays in the gallery of remembrance—and watched them from the shadows as they probed more deeply.

  Meanwhile, the shoggoth was becoming hungry … and at last it put off its vigil and grudgingly returned to the pit for food, seeking after a quick dinner of blind penguins—reaching its den soon before the primates found it. It was not far down in its lair when their muttering and flickering lights caught its attention. It swarmed from the depths and pursued them, doubtless driven to mad rapacity at the thought of pink primates to feast on, a delicious novelty after countless centuries of fish and penguin.

  The primates escaped—with a little help from me, of which they were unaware. I had an intuition that I would one day communicate with one of these primates. I had seen their respectful fascination as they viewed the history panels in the gallery of remembrance. I thought that perhaps one of these “men” might be worth speaking to … if a means could be found.

  And so it was I who distracted the shoggoth—I called out to it as it pursued them, confusing it, making it turn toward me long enough for the men to find a branching tunnel for escape.

  I myself then slipped away, withdrawing up a winding ramp too small for the shoggoth, barely large enough for my own bulk. I had taken the same ramp earlier, preparing certain devices in the maintenance passages over the vast chamber that contained the entrance to the pit.

  The frustrated shoggoth returned to its cold, lonely, and dull meal of live eyeless penguins—just as I’d hoped. It descended into its den….

  I had no doubt it would be back, if I allowed it. It would eventually work itself up into a fury that might well carry it past the prickling energies of protection in the walls of the hibernation cavern. And it would tear my companions to pieces in its madness.

  No. I had vowed it would not happen again.

  Thus I activated the simple devices I’d placed around the roof of the chamber. The two primates had long since left the city when I triggered the vibratory cannon I’d brought from our ancient storeroom under the city. The reverberation blasts went off in a carefully placed ring of detonation—to my great relief, for I was afraid the ancient devices would fail to trigger. But as if expressing long-pent-up fury, they roared out on schedule, and stone that had hunched over the pit for more than a million years crackled and buckled, then tumbled, in great slabs, into the pit, with a titanic roar that shook the city, and spurred many a landslide.

  The great galleries, the tunnels and passageways rocked and trembled, so that I was afraid the ruins would collapse in their entirety; the very air groaned, choking with dust as boulders fell from above.

  But at last the ruins subsided into silence, with the occasional whisper of trickling debris.

  I had to pick my way through the wreckage, but proceeded to the entrance to the pit—and confirmed that it was quite choked with stone, as planned. The way was sealed, and the shoggoth was trapped, far below.

  Or so I pray! I call out to the Five-Sided Eye to make it so. Will it in time find its way through some unknown subterranean pathway to invade the upper world and wreak vengeance on us? It’s possible.

  For it lives down there, still. I can occasionally feel its mind thrumming from the depths….

  Those few of us who survive plan to return to the deepest trenches of the sea, to the dark, unfathomable places where warm sulfurous vents create a swarm of primal life for us to feed upon….

  There we will root, and ponder, and strengthen, until the time has come at last to spore. Do not seek us there. We have learned to value our privacy—and we will fight for it.

  One of the pink primates who viewed our history panels did indeed return to the ruined city—he returned a final time, long after he penned the account I perceive in his mind: his apologia for the invasion of our hibernation cavern, for the murder of my people. I confronted him—and we chose communication over violence.

  I had long carried the telepathic translation device with me, in anticipation of this moment. The primate allowed me to apply it to his mind, to delve into his brain, use his language and manner of speaking for this communiqué, this account of myself—this warning:

  Do not disturb our city again. The shoggoth lives. It may have learned how to reproduce—despite the inhibition we once placed in it against the process, when it was a prisoner. There may be more of them now.

  Disturb them, probe where you are not wanted, and they will arise, and spawn, and spread. And you will suffer as we did.

  I have seen that your primate race, descendents of those we created, are perhaps advanced enough now to have stored up a little wisdom. Thus I leave you this device, and its message to your higher selves. May the Five-Sided Eye guide you; may the Law of Five unfold for you.

  May you understand when to leave well enough alone.

  * * *

  There, Dyer’s voice comes to a stop, the recording ends, and we end our transcription of it. As to Dyer, he died in obscurity, in a remote New England village. No other account by him of his final journey to the “Mountains of Madness” has been discovered….

  This department can only recommend that the long-maintained suppression of public knowledge of the Antarctic ruins be continued indefinitely; that we take the Elder One’s advice.

  And we remember these words by the philosopher Schopenhauer: “The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable.”

  Perhaps the final learning is this: leave some dark corners of the inexplicable … unexplained.

  HOW THE GODS BARGAIN

  WILLIAM BROWNING SPENCER

  WHEN MARISSA AND I WERE FOURTEEN AND IN THE FRESHMAN class at Filmore High School, we fell under the spell of Harley James. The proximity of a genius can make one feel smarter, more alive, more aware of forces that abound beyond the shadows that most minds cast.

  Harley was a junior at Filmore, and it seemed our extremely good fortune that he chose to mentor us, despite our youth and ignorance. At the end … well, it wasn’t the end, was it? That’s why I’m writing this.

  Until recently, I hadn’t spent all that much time thinking about Harley. When he did come to mind it was his voice that I heard, disembodied and querulous, usually in the form of a rebuttal. An example: last winter I was watching a famous television evangelist expound on intelligent design, defending it with the usual arguments, including evolution’s inability to account for radical changes or the elaborate nature of such changes, and I could hear Harley’s nasal voice in all its lofty disdain: “Two or three hundred million years is way smarter than you! Time is bigger than your pitiful little bully of a god.”

  After the show, I started remembering Harley-anecdotes, all of which were second-or third-hand reports, hall rumors. And the more outrageous these tales, the more apt they were to be true. Like the rumor that Harley had jumped up in class during a discussion of capitalism and shouted, “That’s not a symbiotic relationship, that’s a fucking parasite!” which got him suspended for three days, during which time everyone in school learned what “symbiotic” meant and someone slipped into the gym and painted THAT’S NOT A SYMBIOTIC RELATIONSHIP, THAT’S MY GIRLFRIEND! on the wall.

  Harley was Marissa’s friend before he was mine. Her parents lived right next to him, and for whatever reason—perhaps he spotted her beauty, her
enthusiasm, her guileless nature—they hit it off. Harley lived in the only big house on Welch Street, and he lived there alone, virtually alone. There was a father, although I had never seen him, and Marissa had only seen him a couple of times. Marissa said the father was a handsome guy—“really good-looking, like he could have been a movie star”—with a thin mustache, and he wore baggy pants with lots of pockets and sleeveless white T-shirts. Harley said his name was Felix, and he worked for the CIA, which might have been true, because Harley never seemed to lie about anything.

  He taught Marissa how to play chess. They would sit at the kitchen table in his house and play on a fading black-and-white chessboard with wood-carved pieces whose ravaged condition, Harley explained, was the work of a beagle named Monkey who, as a puppy, teethed on the chessmen.

  So Harley taught Marissa chess, and Marissa taught me chess. Later Harley said that chess was for kids, and he taught Marissa the game of Go. Marissa never taught me Go, and if I hadn’t been clueless I might have given that more thought.

  * * *

  I’m getting away from where I need to begin. I need to begin with my thirty-sixth birthday, which came round last month.

  On the day of my birthday, Dan and Ethel Miller and Swan showed up as I was closing the lab, and they insisted on taking me out on the town. I found the prospect daunting; I’d had a long day that ended with my firing two student interns for hopelessly fouling several promising trials, and I’d put myself in a bad mood in which it seemed to me that the entire world had turned its back on integrity and humility, required virtues if one wanted to do good work.

  I told my colleagues that I was too weary for anything celebratory, birthday or no birthday, but they were persistent and rowdy, Dan Miller shouting, “Carpe beer!” as though he were already drunk.

  Swan was his usual sketchy self, unshaven, wild-eyed, mumbling inaudibly (perhaps a mantra like kill-them-all kill-them-all kill-them-all). Swan was undoubtedly brilliant, and he always arrived for work in a suit and tie, but if you were asked to write his name under one of two columns derived from a Robert Louis Stevenson story, you’d write it under Mr. Hyde, not Dr. Jekyll.

  Dan and Ethel, on the other hand, glow with rationality and a heartiness that you occasionally see in long-married progeny-free couples—they have already been married twenty years and neither of them can be much over forty—and they are well-liked by everyone. They are liked, I think, because they don’t inspire envy. No one would wish to be them. They have smooth, smiling faces and, in the asexual lab coats we all don in the morning, they are intelligent androgynous twins with the sex appeal of Silly Putty. They work and publish as a team and are often referred to as “the Millers.” I have also heard them referred to as “the Coneheads,” those happy aliens featured in old Saturday Night Live skits.

  I see I have presented portraits of my colleagues that are not entirely flattering. I have a hard time describing anything in a thoroughly positive manner (salient details are, so often, unpleasant), so I should note that I am fond of all three of these people and fortunate to have them for friends.

  And their insistence won me over. Even Swan, a man of few outwardly directed words, entreated me to come out. “The Millers said we were celebrating your birthday. If you don’t come, it will be just me and the Millers, who are always an embarrassment when they drink.”

  “It’s true,” said Ethel. And she and her spouse laughed like happy Pekingese.

  * * *

  So I went—on the condition that we didn’t go to Woozy’s, which is a college bar catering to the young women of Legrasse University (Miskatonic University’s sister college). Legrasse was born out of: 1) the recognition that women made excellent scholars and research scientists, and 2) the fear of losing some of Miskatonic’s finest scholars if women were introduced into its monastic walls.

  Woozy’s was also a big favorite with the male researchers at Enderson. The lab has a reputation for recruiting the brightest and paying them well, and aspiring young scientists from Legrasse are a little in awe of us. I have seen Lumpy Caldwell, slovenly and troll-like, surrounded by a rapt group of lovely young women, regaling them, no doubt, with exaggerated tales of his bioscience prowess while guzzling beer like Falstaff—a scene that speaks to the power of Enderson’s reputation and not to any charm, physical or intellectual, exuded by poor Lumpy, whose employment is a textbook example of nepotism, his father being The Dr. Elmer Caldwell.

  It occurred to me that it would be easy enough to steal Enderson’s most coveted secrets. Drunkenness and the promise of sex would loosen the tongue of any male employee at Enderson. You’d have to be a dedicated spy, though, since you’d have to piece together a lot of disparate bits (i.e., you’d have to kiss a lot of toads).

  But I’m digressing….

  I wanted something less youthful, less desperately ambitious, than Woozy’s, so we settled on a bar just off Main. I wasn’t familiar with the place, but the Millers said it was “fun for all ages.” It turned out to be big and gaudy, featuring neon cowboy hats and boots and blinking stars. It did have a sizeable middle-aged crowd, which I found reassuring.

  I intended to drink no more than three beers and then, having fulfilled my conviviality obligation, slip away, calling a taxi if need be. But I got a second wind after that third beer. There was a warm golden light suffusing the room we were in, and boisterous laughter mingled with jukebox-generated country music. I was thinking that life was good, and it seemed reasonable to try to sustain that ridiculous notion as long as possible.

  Later in the evening, I was drunk. I haven’t been drunk many times in my life. I do not, generally, enjoy the absence of control that comes with inebriation, but this time I felt omnipotent. I solved several vexing problems in my head and realized that all the botched trials I’d been lamenting could simply be re-purposed around data that had not been corrupted.

  My bladder began to ache. “I need to urinate,” I told my comrades. The Millers were clearly drunk, oddly entangled, their arms linked at the elbows, and drinking from each other’s mugs while bellowing something that was not the song on the jukebox, singing against the tide, as it were. Swan was talking to a woman who had sat down next to him. She wore a cowboy hat and a red-and-white shirt with white fringe. Her makeup was heavy enough to suggest a disguise.

  I got up to pursue my quest, and I got lost. This place was bigger than I thought. There were lots of rooms and plenty of people to fill them up. I was trapped in one room where a couple of fat guys with ponytails were good-naturedly wrestling while a crowd stood around them. My bladder chose this moment to become hysterical, and I ran behind a silver counter and into what proved to be the kitchen. Several people with hairnets and white aprons screamed at me, but I raced on, banging through gray swinging doors and into a brick-lined corridor where I instantly spied a door labeled Gentlemen.

  My bladder vented violently as I leaned over the urinal, which was an older model, not like the ones at Enderson’s which flushed discreetly when you backed away from them. When my bladder was satisfied, I flushed and zipped up. My peace of mind restored, I looked around me. This restroom was, I realized, for the employees. It wasn’t bright and shiny; there were old crates shoved up against one cinderblock wall, two urinals, a floor of cracked linoleum, two stalls—

  Something was making lots of scratching sounds behind the door to one of the stalls. Claws whisked on a hard surface: scritch skitter, skitter scritch. There was another noise, something dragged, swishing along. My heart caught the panicky rhythm. I thought I recognized it. Jeez!

  The linoleum was a mottled gray and darker gray embellished with dried brown mud and black tar from the last time the parking lot had seen a new coat of asphalt. I bent down for a closer look and saw the bright red marks: blood in the shape of small, clawed feet. The tracks swirled about before disappearing under the stall door. I guessed four, maybe five of the creatures.

  I’ve seen a few rats. I work with them every day. I lift them
up and hold them in my cupped hands, and I look them in their vacant little eyes, so why would I let the sight of this rat-spoor rob my legs of strength and knock me back against the urinal where, blindly fumbling for support, I released a new downpour of water and the harsh effluvia of disinfectant? I was scared sick. Recon rats! I thought.

  I tore my gaze away from the stall door and fled. In the corridor I stumbled toward an exit and found myself outside in a small enclosed area. Through the chain-link fence, I could see the parking lot. Since I’d last been outside, a wind had arisen, aggressive and chill, winter on its way.

  I sat down on the top concrete step and thrust my hands in my pockets. I needed to talk myself out of this … what … misapprehension? But in my mind I could see the flourish of all those tiny paw prints, documentation of some frenzied dance—and I could see the thicker, sinuous lines that suggested fat-bodied snakes, washed in more bright blood, writhing in ecstasy.

  I stood up and leaned back to look at the sky, seeking some comfortable alignment of stars, but the lamps that blazed in this gated enclosure rendered the heavens in glaring gray and white, a mist that something malign might hide within.

  The thought of returning to the corridor behind me didn’t appeal to me. I’d have to move past the restroom, and I didn’t know … I didn’t know if it knew me, if it was, perhaps, seeking me. Was I being paranoid? I didn’t think I could overestimate the danger, knowing what I knew.

  It occurred to me that I could depart via the gate on my left, run to the front of the nightclub, and beseech a bouncer to go get my friends. But then I saw the padlock and chain. Of course: this fence guarded the dumpster from the depredations of the homeless—

  The dumpster! More rats were on the dumpster, not overly large rats but deathly aware creatures, and they were connected by what Harley called umbilical cords, although, always precise, Harley admitted that the term was for convenience only and awaited some understanding of their function before a more accurate nomenclature could be applied.