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

  “We’ll never know what happened.” I think I raised my voice; I was exasperated, but that’s no excuse. Marissa seemed to think that the world was a tidy place. She’d missed quantum physics or something. Hell, she’d missed television and the Internet. “Even your boy genius Harley was stumped.”

  “He would never have stopped seeking the truth!” Marissa said. “Oh!” I was getting really worked up—I supposed guilt had something to do with that—and knew I would say something hurtful. “What good is the truth if you’re dead? If you fling yourself into the abyss you won’t come back whole. Would you seek the truth if you knew your mind couldn’t contain it; if you knew it would shatter all the convenient objects of your reality as though they were china; if you knew knowing would bring madness?”

  I realized in that instant that Harley understood this—that I was one of his disciples. It was another one of his symbiosis-inspired rants. Like all his rants, it came out of nowhere, a long non sequitur (because Harley’s conversation was almost entirely internal—and divisive). He’d been speaking of ants he called amazon ants (I can’t remember the genus, but they weren’t uncommon; there were species in Europe, in America).

  Harley said, “So these ants enslave other ants, in this case ants of the genus Formica. The amazon ants go into the nests of the Formica, kill any ant that opposes them, and steal the cocoon-encased pupae. The amazon ants are great warriors with large mandibles. But these warrior ants have no other castes. The amazon ant is essentially helpless without its slaves; it can hardly feed itself, much less attend to the complex needs of the colony. All it can do is enslave other ants, but what does that anthropomorphic verb ‘enslave’ mean to the ants it captures? Nothing. Business as usual. You now have a Formica colony that nurtures some ants with long, killing mandibles. That’s it. And the Formica will seek out other colonies of Formica and lead the amazon ants to that nest. So are these Formica evil collaborators? Of course not. This is all just ant-life in the ant-world. Where did these amazon ants come from in the first place, these helpless warrior ants? You’ve got me.”

  Harley hesitated. It was a rare thing to see him confused, but there it was. “It’s as though nature, whatever you want to call it, cannot avoid going down these paths; it doesn’t, in fact, resolve into simplicity. Nature perseverates. It’s neurotic, insane really …”

  He didn’t finish the sentence. It was the first time I can remember Harley being at a loss for words, and (I confess) I was pleased.

  * * *

  I had no idea how or what I felt as we drove up Barker. I was worn out and resigned to whatever bad thing happened. An apathy born of defeat: the closest I’ve ever come to a Zen state. Small talk was in order: “Does this property still belong to the Turnips?”

  “It never belonged to the Turnips,” Marissa said. “That was kidspeak. It belonged to the Turners, and as far as I know it still belongs to them. They are probably sitting on it until the rich real-estate developers come along, which is a ways off.”

  “Way beyond the horizon,” I agreed.

  We chatted as we had always chatted, and I enjoyed this strange displacement in time. The mood changed when Marissa parked the car—not, it seemed to me, where we used to park it. We got our gear and crossed over the dying meadow and into a forest guarded by evergreens that opened into the first scatterings of fall color: yellows and browns and reds, curled leaves that crackled under our feet.

  By the time we got to the store, it was dark, and I sensed it before I saw it, and I was afraid and assaulted by images from twenty years ago and time hadn’t improved the vibe.

  “We’ll go in,” Marissa whispered in my ear, and the words hummed as though read in a ritual.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Although it looked like wood, it was cold and hard as stone, silver-blue and luminous. The door was halfway open (as always: it could not be opened or closed, it couldn’t be budged), and we slipped inside to where the blue light was brighter and the weirdness weirder. I could hear Harley’s whispered voice: “Everything has been replaced: some exotic substances, although common quartz seems to predominate.”

  I stood in the center and turned slowly in a circle, as I had the first time I came here, as anyone would. Everything had leapt up and pressed itself into the walls: an old oil stove, counter-tops, signs advertising soap and elixirs for health, cans of beans and carrots, a bag of potatoes that had burst open and set its contents free so they now resembled the backs of great bloated beetles burrowing into the plaster, a tall, ornate cash register from which coins tumbled, each stuck to another. Whatever had pasted everything to the walls had also robbed everything of color—the jelly beans were either white, black, or gray—and it was this absence of color that had made the man stuck to the wall seem—surely—a manikin. But where the flesh flared raggedly on the left side of his jaw, the teeth and dusty-black tongue were difficult to explain, as was the single skeletal foot (the other encased in an elaborately decorated boot). “He was,” Harley had whispered, “no doubt the proprietor until … well, perhaps he still is. Maybe he’s old man ELDERS like it says on the sign outside. Retired. Under new management.”

  “Same as ever,” I said, wishing to sound at ease but discovering a voice that was thin and lacking in conviction.

  Marissa must have heard it. “Let’s get on with it,” she said.

  I hastened to follow her as she crossed the room and slipped through another half-opened door. We walked down a flight of wooden steps (real wooden steps) and entered what was an underground storeroom that had succumbed to the usual laws of entropy. This room existed in a sort of eternal twilight, and I could never ascertain where this light came from, but, surrounded by bigger mysteries, I was content to let that one lie. This is where I first encountered what Harley called recon rats. “I think their masters send these out to look around. But these masters don’t have much love for their servants. They are ill-used. When they come under any light, you’ll notice they are red. Their little metabolisms have been pushed to the max, and they are sweating blood.”

  Across the room, Marissa opened another door. I raced after her, descended stone steps, and encountered, as though for the first time, the hall of the warlords.

  That is what Harley called the place; he found it, he gets to name it.

  But naming it doesn’t describe it. I don’t know how these giant, grisly murals and carvings were created, although I think they might have been created in some malleable material and later subjected to the process that turned the store to stone.

  * * *

  I have never traveled the miles of this underground labyrinth, and I don’t intend to, and not because the undertaking would be too physically arduous. No, what I fear is eventually understanding this catalogue of what must be eons of war. There isn’t any single artist, or any single species. It’s nondiscriminatory interspecies carnage.

  As a teenager, seeing all the images, feeling the outrage that younger generations bestow upon the previous generation, I despised the very impulse that generated life. What I saw—and what I was still seeing twenty years later—was one generation of monsters recounting its triumphs only to be overwritten—no, defiantly written beside— the next race of extraterrestrial barbarians. This was the universe’s graffiti wall where the boasts and venom of cosmic gangs could share a moment of art.

  Every kind of monster, every atrocity, every dark, festering need is depicted on these walls. To see it is to despair.

  * * *

  Marissa called my name, and I saw her further down the hall. I started walking toward her and hesitated when I thought I saw a shadow behind her.

  “Jerry,” she said. “He came back.”

  It was, in fact, Harley, or the image of him. He seemed immediately at her side.

  “My old friend, Jerry,” he said.

  “What are you?” I asked.

  “And why would you ask that? Don’t you believe your own eyes?”

  “You aren’t Harley.”


  Harley turned toward Marissa, lifted a hand to her cheek, and said, “Jerry thinks I’m dead. He thinks that because he remembers killing me. But he didn’t kill me; he only wanted to.” Harley looked at me. “How did you kill me, Jerry?”

  I couldn’t speak.

  “With a rock hammer, my Estwing Supreme rock hammer, in fact. Couldn’t even bring your own murder weapon. And why? Because Marissa loved me, not you.”

  “No.”

  “The Elder Gods still live here, although this here isn’t in a forest on Old Man Turnip’s land. They are not gods, of course, but they might as well be. They are, however, more complicated than earth-made gods. They are in alliance with us because—and this is true symbiosis as I never understood it—they want our defiance, our hatred, and then they make us love them!”

  Harley threw his arms around Marissa, who returned the embrace silently and looked past him to me with an expression beyond my dark-hearted understanding. And there was a noise, like the unfurling of a huge sail in violent weather, and something like vast black wings rose up behind them, and they disappeared in a rush of darkness that rolled out and toward me too fast for me to flee.

  And it was gone. I was in a clearing in the forest, and I pushed myself to my knees and rose up and thought, It’s gone for good.

  And I have thought about it and thought about it and haven’t grown any wiser. I still go to my job, and it is no better or worse than it ever was.

  And at night when I am trying to sleep, it is not a cosmic question that troubles me. It is what I saw in Marissa’s eyes. Sometimes I think it was simple fear. More often I think it was pride. But most of the time I think it was pity.

  A MOUNTAIN WALKED

  CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN

  EXCERPTS FROM THE FIELD JOURNAL OF ARTHUR LAKES DURING His Explorations for Saurians and Fossil Remains in the Wyoming Territory (June 1879):

  May 25th: I spent the morning in sketching bones in [Quarry] No. 3 and the locality of the Ichthyosaurus quarry. Being alone in the tent I had the usual company of the spermophiles. In the evening I walked along RR track to meet men returning in the handcar. Stationmaster Carlin [William Edward] had shot an elk and they were bringing back the hams. Following supper, the tale of the hunt was recounted which set [William Hallow] Reed to the cheerful spinning of many yarns of their hunting misadventures.

  May 27th: Reed discovered portion of saurian jaw poßeßed of herbivorous teeth in it at Quarry No. 3. So we went up on the handcar to see it. Was about six inches of jaw, but rather weathered and portions of skull in exceedingly friable condition attached. Saw couple of deer and fawn near the quarry. Most of the day spent shovelling out dirt.

  Had elk meat for our supper which was tender and nice. We fashioned a cabinet for geological specimens from dry goods box. Caught axolotl [tiger salamander, Ambystoma mexicanum] in water tank. Reed related story of how he once found a broken fiddle in the old deserted camp of some party in North Park. Broken, the fiddle, but of expert craftsmanship. Also found blankets. Campers supposed, then, to have been wealthy people, likely of a sudden run down by Indians and forced either to beat a hasty retreat, else were maßacred and never heard of thereafter. He also told of finding skeleton of a man and also his gun in a fißure. He believed the man must have frozen to death.

  May 28th: Paßed morning sketching bluffs fr. north shore of the lake [Como]. Great clouds of cliff swallows whirling darting about on ledges or rock forming the bank of the lake or resting basking on sand near to the water. Strata to north belong to same geological horizons and groups as those forming bluffs at the station, viz. Juraßic & Cretaceous.

  Reed returned from Quarry No. 3 with report of find of a very large humerus bone. Men discovered enormous claw of carnivorous Dinosaur much curved, sharp and long. Walked out by shore of lake near to sunset and saw muskrat cavorting in the rushes. Couple of ducks flew close in under the bank unconscious of my presence, the female quacking lustily. Could have dropped a stone on them! A wild scene with flaming glare of the sunset so distant and solitary on the desolate Wyoming prairie. As we turned to head back to camp, a most peculiar booming was heard sounding acroß the lake followed by complete silence. Gave us a right start. Reed speculates may be meteorological phenomenon as yet unknown though it sounded to me nothing like thunder. We did not speak of it to the others.

  May 29th: Went to Quarry No. 3 in company of Reed. Uncovered respectable portions of two fused vertebrae [Allosaurus sacral] lying beneath humerus. While digging, Reed had misfortune to tap into a small spring which at once flooded part of the diggings. Water foul and oily, owing poßibly to mineral composition of enclosing strata. A most noisome odor as if from decaying vegetation and it is hoped we shall not be forced to abandon quarry on its account. Reed also found three small and somewhat constricted vertebrae roughly one yard from humerus. In the evening arranged Reed’s cabinet of foßils.

  May 30th: Spent in shovelling earth at No. 3. All signs of flood have drained away, leaving only hole from which it sprung and which I filled in post haste lest we have a repeat of that deluge. Odd sunset.

  May 31st: Spotted antelope herd as we made our way back to camp. Reed the hunter started in pursuit whilst I continued on to the quarry. Soon I heard the report of his rifle, and looking up saw him lying on the prairie firing shot after shot. But not at the herd which had vanished. Puff after puff of white smoke came from his rifle’s barrel, and I could see nothing of his target. I saw dust rise where the bullets struck ground. After twenty shots he remained for a bit lying there in the graß.

  On the way home on the handcar asked Reed what had become of the antelope and what he might have been shooting at in their stead. But he was uncharacteristically taciturn and refused to speak on the subject. Minutes later though he did point out to me a distinct trail several feet wide and a half mile long which he said was made by jackrabbits. I saw no sign of their feet but the graß grew up in a defined line as distinct from the prairie turf.

  June 1st: In tent read to Reed from Vestiges of Creation. He has spoken little since yesterday and starts at smallest of sounds. Have not asked again about the antelopes.

  June 2nd: Hired another man. Watched coyote creeping along through sage until Reed shot it. Later found small saurian bones 500 yds. west of No. 3. They were small vertebrae hollow but filled with carbonate of lime. Also curved sabre tooth about one inch in length from a carnivorous Dinosaur. In the afternoon I sketched our camp. The last discovery Reed calls Quarry No. 6. He is not so anxious as on yesterday—to my relief.

  June 4th: Profeßor [Othniel Charles] Marsh whom we had been expecting arrived and breakfasted with hands at sectionhouse. Quickly made himself to home with all the men. After breakfast we set forth on the handcar, a large party of us, the “rubbed car” being attached to it for Marsh and my benefit. A lovely morning & Profeßor Marsh much amused by innumerable spermophiles, hares, and rabbits leaping from RR track as we did speed along. Stopped first at Quarry No. 3 only to find worse flooding from Reed’s spring, as if I had not filled in the source! A great disappoint all round, and the odour was many times worse it seemed than previously. Profeßor Marsh dismayed and visibly angered that ilium and caudals of carnivorous dinosaur lost, even after I explained all were too rotten for excavation. In addition to iridescent oily sheen on water’s surface witneßed a yellow form about the periphery of the submerged quarry.

  Thence we proceeded to our latest discovery No. 6, in hopes of lifting Profeßor Marsh’s spirits somewhat. After close and careful examination of bones Profeßor M. devolved many of them to destruction as much too imperfect or rotten for preservation and lest Cope’s men come upon them and conclude otherwise. But bones we had taken to be those of a crocodile with scutes of armour deeply pitted proved just so. Profeßor M. thinks one bone to be that of a pterodactyl, a small half-inch jaw to belong to early mammal. The loose teeth were also those of a crocodile of a species long vanished from the globe.

  From there again by ha
ndcar to Quarry No. 4, which is situated on the slope of a deep ravine washed out by Rock Creek, some four or five miles east of Como. Quarry has been well worked by Reed previous to my arrival at Como. Many large bones plainly were visible. Near this quarry Profeßor Marsh found exceedingly unusual Indian stone fetish or lithic artefact which could be, at a casual glance, taken for the effigy of some winged demon as from the illustrations of Gustave Doré. Reed straightaway grew troubled again and advised the Profeßor to leave it be, as its removal could anger Sioux or Cheyenne with whom we have had no trouble heretofore. But Profeßor Marsh insisted the piece would be a valuable addition to the Peabody collection back in New Haven and all Reed’s effort could not dißuade him. Profeßor M. carried the artefact away in his coat pocket. Also found a foßil snail or helix in concretion between quarry and overlying Dakota sandstone (Cretaceous).

  From a nearby ravine a doe elk suddenly sprang from the bushes and dashed up to the top of the ravine. Reed who happened to be on ahead did not see it at first till the Profeßor shouted at him. Hearing us he wheeled round and fired directly. Beast struck him near the hip but wound insufficient to stop him, and Reed got off another shot but without succeß. The elk was lost to sight over the ridge. Reed followed and tracked him [sic] for an hour by drips of blood which later he insisted were “not right,” being of a darker hue than proper for any elk and stinking of sulphur. Profeßor Marsh suggests doe may have drunk from befouled pool at No. 6 [sic], resulting in contamination of its fluids, but this rational explanation did little if anything to soothe Reed’s nerves. Again, he implored Profeßor M. to leave behind the artefact and again without result, except to set him in an ill humour. He wondered aloud at having employed a superstitious collector given to fear of Indian relics, and this did nothing to settle Reed.

  Turning his attention back to the quarry, Profeßor Marsh determined the bones there—a sacrum—to belong to a great sauropod. We returned to the handcar for lunch. Railroad hands and our party made quite a fine picnic arranged around the viands which were spread out upon the rubber car. Afterwards, went to Quarry No. 1 and prospecting on our stomachs or on hands and knees all hunted for small bones in a microscopic manner and were well rewarded finding what Marsh thought might be toe bone of either pterodactyl or bird. Still this did not improve Reed’s disposition I am sad to say.