Worlds of Cthulhu Page 3

  The temple itself was filled with a congregation of thousands. I could scarcely believe my eyes. They were humans of a sort, some of them, but not proper humans. They were misshapen things, some with blank spaces where eyes should have been, some with broad, thin-lipped mouths that showed rows of glittering, triangular teeth when they opened them to hiss. There were some with scaly skins, or skins of a color no proper human had ever sported, or with horrid, flattened heads that would leave little room for a brain, or with eyes in the palms of their hands that they held up and pointed at us as we followed the thing that had been a statue toward the front of their temple.

  The thing pulled itself up onto a dais and turned to face the room. The throng assembled sent up a chant, horrid, discordant words in a language that deserved to be blasted from all human recollection, and then the beast before them seemed to swell, its belly like the obscene womb of a monstrous Madonna preparing to give birth to, I swear it, naught less than the anti-Christ itself.

  As the thousands chanted, the monstrosity reared back on its clawed legs and spread its scaly wings with a terrible snap! that sent a fetid wind that was a stench in my nostrils and that stung my eyes like acid. It began to sing and the sound of its voice, unbearably lovely, yes, lovely, was more than I could tolerate.

  I launched myself at it then, prepared to tear that horrid thing to bits with my bare hands, to rip out its throat with my very teeth as some ancestor of mine prowling the woods of ancient Ireland might have torn out the throat of some half-human monstrosity.

  And then, suddenly, all was well. I might have seen the thing reach out to me with its slimy feelers but in the instant that it touched my flesh I was all right. It was as if I were a babe once more, and the thing holding me was nestling me like a loving mother. It touched my face. I looked up at it and it looked down at me, and I saw love in its eyes, and peace. I saw that tiny village with its little wooden horses pulling little painted wagons, its mirror lake and cotton snow, and children playing.

  There were children playing. They were running and sliding on the ice, throwing snow at one another, and someone had built a snowman beside the lake and stuck a carrot for its nose and an old hat atop its head. A few flakes were falling and we were shouting and joking, Rogan and Seamus and Malachy, Shane Galloway and Glenna Lynch and Maeve, and I ran across the ice to Maeve and took her in my arms and kissed her and she laughed and pushed me away and scolded me for behaving like a masher and a voice was sounding far away only to come closer.

  A voice.

  It was reciting, and it had a religious tone to it. I wondered if it was Father Phinean come to warn us all that the day was growing late and it was time to head to our homes so our fathers and mothers wouldn’t worry too much about us.

  But it wasn’t Father Phinean’s voice, it was another voice, and each word struck me like a hammer blow.

  Aa!

  Aah!

  Aalu!

  Ab!

  Abaddon!

  Abaris!

  I knew now what the voice was speaking.

  Abdiel!

  Abelios!

  Abellio!

  Abeona!

  I knew, and each word was like the blow of a hammer upon my skull. It was a pain inside my mind and inside my soul, a searing fiery pain and yet I knew that someone was struggling to save me.

  I heard the chanting that had welcomed our little procession into the temple, and the song of the monster, its voice as dear as a mother’s, its song as sweet as a lullaby, and I was drawn to it once more, drawn into peace and contentment and darkness.

  But the other voice persisted.

  Abog!

  Abracadabra!

  Abraxas!

  Abundantia!

  Someone was reciting the names of the gods.

  Acheloüs!

  Acheron!

  Achilles!

  Achor!

  They were gods of good and gods of evil, gods of the Greeks and of the Romans, the Cretans and the Persians. They were pulling me away from the darkness and the foul joy that the monster offered me. I felt the monster’s squidlike tentacles draw my face into it, and I was lifted up the tunnel of water and into the black sky a million miles from Earth.

  I saw stars and comets. I saw creatures that could travel between the worlds and between the suns. Creatures that looked like insects or like worms, like great whales that swam in the very emptiness of space, like flying cones with starshaped heads and a million tentacles trailing behind them for millions of miles. I could be one of them, something whispered to me, I could live with them forever. I could give them the Earth and they could come there and feast on Men, not on their flesh but on their minds.

  Kalki!

  Kalma!

  Kama!

  Kami!

  Kamui!

  Kari!

  Karttikeya!

  Gods of Japan. Gods of India. Gods of Africa. Gods of the people.

  Xilonen!

  Xipetotec!

  Xochiquetzal!

  Yahweh!

  The monster–mother–mother–monster–monster–mother shuddered.

  Yahweh! the voice repeated. Yahweh! Yahweh!

  There was a horrid bubbling and burbling. My face and then my entire body felt as if I were being bathed in boiling, burning mud. I opened my eyes and saw the face of the monster as it flung me from it, flung me at Abraham ben Zaccheus.

  Around us the temple was shrinking, the worshippers fleeing for their lives. The monster that had held me in its claws was shriveling, shriveling, diminishing until it was only seven or eight inches tall, and slumped back onto a little square pedestal where it crouched, its wings folded behind its back, its elbows resting wearily on its knees.

  There are kings everywhere, God the King of Universe and for all my money this thing, this monstrous lovely terrible little statue was the King of Hell.

  The sucking, spongy stuff beneath our feet began to churn and suck the dreadful things down into the blackness and the muck that lay below the lake, but Abraham ben Zaccheus and John O’Leary did not go below with those things.

  With a rending sound Abraham and I burst through the roof of the temple. The city lay in ruins around our booted feet, a city no larger than the Christmas scene on display on Post Street for the pleasure of the city’s children.

  Propelled by some invisible force, Abraham ben Zaccheus and I rushed upward through the swirling whirlpool. Luminous fish stared at us with their great eyes, turtles swam by, the shape of their mouths making them seem to laugh at our plight.

  We flew into the air, then fell back, shattering the smooth surface of the lake. Behind us, the whirlpool slowed and filled in and disappeared. Above us the night had passed, the breeze brought a few stray snowflakes into our faces. The sun was high overhead, and bright and clean.

  A flat-bottomed boat stood nearby. Washoe Indians paddled it toward us, helped us carefully over the gunwales so as not to swamp the little boat, then headed back toward shore.

  The Tahoe Tavern was bustling with fine visitors from Reno to the East, Sacramento and even distant San Francisco to the West. I hoped the management had saved our room. I hoped that my new friend was still staying at the Tavern. I wondered whether I ought to tell her my story, and whether she would believe it if I did.

  Is a sequel ever more than a mere curiosity? Can it ever actually carry the story further? Or, better yet, return to the original story’s well of inspiration and drink deeply again? If it does, if a genuinely new and original tale is the result, I suppose it cannot even be called a sequel. That is the pleasant dilemma presented us by this story of Darrell Schweitzer. All right, I will admit, it bears a bit more explicit connection to Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in Darkness” than that story does to its own predecessor, Machen’s The Novel of the Black Seal, but it does start over with
its own dose of autonomous awe. It reminds me of Akeley’s cosmology, learned from his crustacean informants: the story is a kind of bubble universe adjacent to Lovecraft’s and Machen’s, and reflecting them, but self-contained, with a luxuriant garden of wonders all its own.

  Envy, the Gardens of Ynath, and the Sin of Cain

  Darrell Schweitzer

  Justin Noyes, this is for you. Some of it is the work of the imagination, the paradox being that only the imagined parts are purely true, for the rest is clouded by passion, by memory, by human consciousness. I do not think you will ever understand. But bear with me. Remember that we used to be friends once.

  * * * * *

  When they first take me, there is that moment of unbearable pain, as the limbs, or tendrils, or whatever they are penetrate the skull. I more sense than actually see the great bodies hovering above me in the air. They seem to condense out of nothingness. Then the hard, sharp claws take hold, and I am pierced; but numbness soon follows as if some intensely cold fluid were pouring down into my body. I barely feel the alien limbs sliding down through my neck, into my spinal cord. They have control of my nervous system now. I feel something seize hold firmly under the arms from inside my own body and then I am well into the air. The great wings spread above, not so much flapping as vibrating in some way human senses cannot quite follow, some way that defies gravity.

  Inevitably, I look down. The ground falls away swiftly now, like in a rocket launch, only I don’t feel any acceleration, only the cold, and then not even that. Somewhere along the way I have stopped breathing, but I don’t feel that either.

  The ground falls away, then the Earth. The curved edge is clearly visible, and the terminator between night and day. The roaring in my ears becomes utter silence, and there are stars everywhere, brilliant, unflickering.

  There’s a glimpse of a crescent Moon. My captors pull away from the Sun, into the eternal darkness. The stars. The darkness. Silence. All is abstraction, my body a speck, a mote, something I can barely remember. If I look down, I might see my legs and feet trailing against the starfields.

  Or nothing. It is like a long dream.

  It has only begun.

  * * * * *

  Justin, you couldn’t possibly have known, when I finally walked up the dirt path to that Vermont farmhouse, “the old Akeley place” as I had heard it called in my childhood; as I clambered up over the stones because the road was long since washed out and impassible; you couldn’t possibly have known how far I had come, not merely in miles, which was no more than the distance between New York and Brattleboro, but the distance in my life itself, midway in the course of which, as Dante so aptly put it, I wandered into a darkened wood and became lost.

  I knocked on the door. There were no lights. The night was very, very dark, as only a Vermont night can be when there is no moon.

  I knocked again. The door opened. There you were holding a barely flickering kerosene lantern. You stared up at the brilliant stars. I turned to look, too. They were very beautiful, yes, but you and I both knew how to look at them and see them as something more. I was afraid, I admit. I think you were, too.

  You just stood there. I leaned against the doorway and shook a rock out of my shoe.

  “Hello again at last,” I said.

  You stood there.

  “Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

  You seemed to come back to yourself, from somewhere else.

  “Oh, it’s you, Opie.”

  “You still call me that.”

  “You still are that.”

  * * * * *

  Justin, when we first met, in college, I was a naive 18-year-old freshman from rural Ass-End-Of-Nowhere (Vermont) and you were the epitome of all that was urban and sophisticated and dangerously decadent, not to mention two years older than me. Oh, I knew you slightly when you used to sit around the offices of Villanova University’s literary magazine, The Lynx, and expostulate on art or the meaning of life or the mysteries of the universe, or whatever you were into that week. I was just one of the audience, perhaps its most uncritical member. I didn’t know much about you. You were rumored to be rich. They said your father had started a cult back in the ‘50s, then died, mysteriously, which only made you all the more mysterious. They said you were a writer, maybe a philosopher. I remember that I admired your poetry, too, which somebody called Baudelairean. I remember how I laughed, then puzzled over your line, “Evil is just a passing fad.” It was then that you noticed me for the first time and pointed right at me and said, “So, get it printed on a t-shirt.”

  I probably would have if I’d known how.

  But I didn’t know very much then. I was the sort of boy who was beaten up by underclassmen in high school, laughed at because I read odd books and entertained odd ideas (however furtively), largely ignored by my family; and at that age I was looking hard for someone to follow, a mentor of any sort, who would take me under his wing and recognize my special talents (assuming that I had any) and tell me the secret of how everything worked, so I could avoid pain.

  And there you were.

  Then you literally grabbed me by the scruff of the neck as if I were a kitten and dragged me up the stairs into your oh-so exclusive private dorm room on the third floor, which you shared with, I think, nobody. It fit. I mean, you were special, with connections, or something. You dragged me up and all sorts of crazy thoughts went through my head, up to and including thoughts of the loss of my precious virginity, not that I could necessarily even formulate the phrase “homosexual encounter,” and of course later I understood how fantastic (and stupid) it was to imagine that you would ever descend to the earthly plane of carnality at all. But, yeah, the dread was there and also a kind of expectation, as if yes, you finally were singling me out for something special.

  So up we went, and I fluttered and babbled nonsense and struggled to avoid tripping or dropping my textbooks.

  You let go of me, and with a melodramatic flourish got out a key.

  “Opie, I want to show you something.”

  “But my name’s Brian.”

  “I think of you as Opie, from Mayberry, The Andy Griffith Show, the nice, simple Southern country kid—”

  “But I’m from Vermont.”

  “Aw jeepers —” You laughed and turned the key, then looked down at me. It helped, for dramatic effect, that you were more than a head taller than me and maybe seventy pounds heavier. “Opie, I want you to take a look at this—”

  You swung the door open, and I let out a gasp and unconsciously or masochistically or whatever, I really did exclaim, “Jeepers!” (because I knew you wanted me to) when you flicked on the light and I saw that the room was filled with some of the most amazing artwork I had ever seen or ever hoped to see. Did you know, even then—yes, I suppose you did, because you seemed to know everything about me, about everyone—did you know that I was trying to be a painter myself, and taking all sorts of art classes and getting nowhere? The kindest thing one of my teachers said, after looking at my attempts at landscapes, was, “Mr. Simmons, you might become a decent cartoonist. Think of Charles Schulz or whoever draws Miss Peach.”

  But here—

  “Jeepers…”

  Here in brilliantly subtle, bold colors were landscapes or cityscapes, but depicting no scenes anyone had ever beheld on this Earth, strange jungles of pale, glowing tree-like growths and vines like living ice that hung from the sides of black towers that reached up into an equally black sky, where no sun shone, and the stars did not seem quite right, somehow. Words cannot begin to capture the power of the image. I felt the cold, the distance, the strangeness, and I somehow had the sense that all of this was alive — the jungle growths, the vines, even the towers. As I looked more closely I saw that there seemed to be things, animals of some sort, creatures, and human beings caught in those frigid vines, dangling there like the prey a spider wraps in silk and
leaves dangling in the web for later. I was afraid even looking at what must have been a fantasy image, because it was so real, as real and alive as the black, winged monstrosities that seemed to flicker through some of the scenes and shift slightly whenever my eye turned away from them.

  It was both beautiful and terrible beyond belief.

  “Behold the Gardens of Ynath,” you whispered.

  “Huh? What?”

  I noticed a half-finished painting on an easel, and brushes and paints on a stand beside it.

  “Your work?”

  “Yes, when the spirit is upon me. But I am not entirely sure it is my work.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I know you don’t.”

  * * * * *

  And the dreamer wakes, from out of his dream, into his dream. In the dream of the man who was dreaming, the dreamt man awoke. Pace Borges. Like that. All is real, and nothing is real. Chuang Tzu dreaming he is the butterfly and the butterfly dreaming he is Chuang Tzu.

  The dreamer awakes, and for an instant the cold is pain. He looks down at his useless legs dangling amid the starfields. He looks down again, and hours, days, years have passed, and the great planet Jupiter stretches out below, farther than the eye can see or the mind comprehend. He has the sensation of falling, of accelerating, and he knows, somehow, that his winged bearers are swooping into the planet’s gravity well, for a slingshot boost, the kind space-probes use to gain momentum when coming out the other side, from the forward motion of the planet.

  Dreaming still, I look down and notice that my shoes, loafers, which are no more appropriate for interplanetary travel than for climbing a hillside in Vermont, have fallen off, and are tumbling, down, down into the multi-colored cloud bands, and my stocking feet drag slowly across the turning planet. One sock slides off, and I see that the skin of my foot has turned a dark blue.

  But there is no more pain.

  Only darkness, as Jupiter fades away and I am carried deep, deep into the endless, nighted abyss.