The Book of Cthulhu 2 Read online

  I open my mouth to the black skies and drink the oily rain. It flows down my throat like nectar, quenching my terrible thirst in the most satisfying way. It sits cool and comforting in my belly, and I drink down more of it.

  I’ll never again be thirsty, I realize.

  This isn’t the end of the world.

  It’s the beginning.

  My body trembles with hidden promise. I know I’ve got a place in this new world.

  Towering things with shadow-bright wings descend to squat about me, staring with clusters of glazed eyes as I crumple…shiver…evolve.

  I raise my blossoming face to the storm and screech my joy across the face of the world.

  His world.

  Cthuuuuulhuuuuu…

  Spreading black wings, I take to the sky.

  •

  The Drowning At Lake Henpin

  Paul Tobin

  I have never before filed a shooting report and I appreciate your patience in this matter. It has taken me some time to steady myself, to steel my nerves and commit this queer incident to paper. Writing has been difficult, and not only from a standpoint of my mental state. For these past several days my fingers have been… wet. They made the paper slippery. Smeared the ink. I have been sweating. It’s only sweat. Nothing else. I’m sure of it. There’s no reason to be alarmed. To be honest I’m still somewhat shaken, and while it’s customary for police officers to deny any need for psychiatric help, I think it’s best that I do speak with someone in some official capacity. Someone who will understand me. If such a thing is anymore possible.

  Perhaps I shouldn’t have so clearly stated my above thoughts here in this file. I do not personally believe that asking for help is a sign of weakness, but there are those that do and it may come back to haunt me. I hope that I will not be denied advancement in the force. To be candid, I hope to be transferred to another district, to act as a constable somewhere away from the village of Leighton, certainly away from Lake Henpin and any members of the Cabershaw family. It’s only that these visions won’t leave my head. I can see Marken in that damnable pool of blood. Or what should have been blood. I cannot be mistaken on this. It most definitely should have been blood. Correct? It should have been blood. Of course.

  Despite my earlier statements, such as those when I was being removed from the scene, I now realize it’s not possible that I saw my bullet leaving the barrel of my Webley. A bullet moves too quickly to be seen. That’s rather the point of a bullet. But I saw it. I witnessed it coming from the barrel. There was an explosion of light. Not the bright kind of light. It was the dull variety. Until that singular moment I hadn’t known of this blacker light, that there is a light that steals brightness as it travels along its path. It was a light that did not share. It… it was a greedy light. That’s all I can say about it. And the bullet came from my barrel and it paused and then something spoke. Not the bullet. I don’t mean that. I’ve been misquoted. What I meant to say it that there was something else at the scene. I mean someone else, of course. Not something else. Someone said something that I could not understand, that I dared not understand, and I was only screaming in the hopes of driving out the damnable noise but nothing was working because the words were dripping inside my head and I could see the air moving aside from the bullet as if it were plunging through water. The air was rippling. My bullets were curving in arcs.

  I am told that Christopher Marken, there with Cecil Cabershaw at the lake house shooting, was long dead. Dead for two days, I’ve heard. Drowned and dead before I fired the shots that killed him. I’m told that my shots (there were three bullets missing from my Webley, but I stand by my earlier testimony that I fired four rounds) were not the cause of Christopher Marken’s death. The reports say he drowned. I cannot account for whatever results Marken’s autopsy have brought forth. I can only say that they are a mistake. Some vials must have been mistakenly tagged. Perhaps tampered with. The samples must have been compromised. I tell you that Marken screamed when I shot him, and I can tell you that he lunged for me, that he had me by my collar, that he whispered words to me as he died, that his hands began dripping a foul wetness down the front of my uniform and that his eyes were screaming. He was screaming. I tell you he was screaming.

  You must believe me.

  * * *

  I feel better now.

  My visits with Mr. Ulton have helped. He agrees with me that there is no reason to feel weak merely because I’m seeing a psychiatrist like him. We have decided, after some discussion, that my shooting report should involve the whole of the incident. That it should not be a simple statement of, “Marken had an axe and I shot him.” It is best that I begin with the first disappearance, that I speak of the first bodies, of the shooting itself and, of course, of the lake where I was found. Lake Henpin.

  Cecil Cabershaw was the first to go missing and I, of course, was assigned to the case. Cecil has lived for some time, alone, more or less, in the abbey. It is not much of an abbey, I’d say. Arrogant to call it as such, but it has been known by the name for some three or four centuries, now. The villagers wouldn’t know what else to call it. They’re simple, as a rule. I do not mean to fault them for that.

  Cecil lives in the main house. That sprawling ancient mess. Not as old as the tower building, of course, but it still reaches back some few hundreds of years. It’s been anyone’s guess why the tower and the house, being part of the same estate, were built so far apart. Half a mile at the least. The tower is near the lake. My father always wondered why a defense tower would be so far removed from the main house and the main road. He wondered why it was so close to the lake. I could tell him, now. I’ve solved the mystery. I am pleased that my father is no longer with us. He would not want this knowledge.

  Cecil spent the greater part of his life caring for his elder sister, Maple, doing so since the days of her near-drowning at Lake Henpin. This was some fifteen years ago. She’d been a bright child, but she’d slipped beneath the waves one afternoon, foundered by a cramp is the general belief, though she hasn’t spoken a word since that day. By chance my father and mother were on the lake as part of a boating party, like the ones you see in Impressionist paintings, my father said. He was fond of art. He was fond of calling the Cabershaw house an abbey. The cancer took him on my twenty-sixth birthday, but that’s nothing to this story. Nothing at all.

  My father saved her. He was the very one who pulled Maple from the waters. She was limp. Like a rag, he was fond of saying. She’d been down for some time before my father found her. He hauled her up into his boat and he tried to get air back in her lungs, blowing at her mouth and massaging her lungs, pushing at her ribs, literally rocking the boat, as it were, so that the other boats (there were three in the party) came close in order to steady my father’s boat, so that it would not be spilled.

  Maple gasped back to life. Heaving air. Father said she wasn’t the only one who gasped. It was like watching the dead come back to life. They’d all given up hope. They’d all thought the water had taken her life and spat back her body. It wasn’t far from the truth, I suppose, because she’s been silent ever since and holds a strange fascination with water. When her parents committed suicide (Albert and Dorline drank cyanide some few months after the lake incident, and then slid into the warm waters of their bathtub, to be found by their maid) Cecil was all that Maple had left. She is beautiful, in a wasted way. Haunting, I’d say. Almost as if her beauty was frozen away in time, caught in some trap with her words. She needs constant care. Cecil gave his life to her. For nearly fifteen years. Then, he went missing. There were signs of a struggle. The bathroom, the same room where Cecil had lost his parents, was smashed up a bit, as if men had been wrestling, tossing each other about. Maple was found sitting quietly in her own room. There was a bowl of oats on her lap. Half eaten. She would not give it up. She still kept the bowl, even when she was moved to the psychiatric ward of the hospital in Wath-upon-Dearne. She said nothing, of course, about any attacks or her missing brot
her.

  The villagers widely regarded Cecil’s disappearance as a simple case of a young man (he was thirty, but that’s young enough) deciding that his life must be lived, and his sister must therefore be abandoned. There were few who blamed him. Few who wondered at the signs of the scuffle in the bathroom. Perhaps he had been in a rage, mad at himself over his upcoming flight? It was a plausible theory, but it is not the work of a policeman to devise interesting theories and move on. We must have our proof.

  There were several tracks outside the bathroom. A toothbrush. A razor and a strop. These footprints, though, were largely upon a bed of Copper Beech tree leaves, making it impossible to determine their outlines or origins. My theory was that there was more than one set. I still hold this to be true.

  The footprints led to the woods. I lost them several times. I had the dog with me. The one Captain Levetts had trained. Steggs was his name. An Irish Setter. Named after an army friend of the captain’s, I believe. The dog was eager for the run, at the first, but as the woods closed in the hound was less in love with the game. He was shivering, and there was a wetness to him, as if he’d been romping through the morning dew. The woods were humid. The dog was unnerved. Oh, he was still barking and such, but he was looking to me in question. I urged him on. Several times. He kept on past the clearing where the festivals are held. He circled. He whined. We carried on past the tower and its recent renovations, but Steggs did not find it to be of any interest. We moved through the woods. There were more tracks, now. I wish someone else would have seen them. I am sure of them. The late September heat had been about, but the footprints were wet. I can remember thinking that perhaps young Cecil had been in his bath. That his kidnappers had taken him straight from his daily preparations.

  The dog and I emerged from the woods at the edge of Lake Henpin on the opposite side from the old docks, across from the boarded up lake house that had been built when the lake was considered a tourist attraction, in the days before the stuffy bastards from Basil College ran their experiments but could not tell us why all the fish in the lake have perished.

  Steggs was no longer barking. He was, in fact, hiding behind me, and he was glad of it when I eventually determined that there was nothing to be seen. Had Cecil’s kidnappers taken a boat across the waters? If so, I could find no hint of a mooring or any place where a boat had been slid into the waters. I could find nothing at all, and the dog’s unease was wearing on my mood. When Steggs ran off, I followed after him willingly enough. I wanted nothing of the lake.

  The Miller girl went missing only three days after.

  * * *

  Christopher Marken had been raised in these parts, if you’ll remember. I was actually with him in school. Up to Third Year, I mean. We learned our numbers together, but little else, for we did not mingle. He was standoffish, and to be honest I was a bit of a bully in those days. Marken (we called him Markie) was picked up after school by his father, having been deposited by his governess in the morning. He was good at his books, which none of the rest of us cared for. He left almost before we were out of our short pants. He was little remembered, his absence less mourned.

  When he returned last year he purchased Cabershaw Tower. You’ll remember the outcry, at first, when the villagers did not believe an outsider should be in charge of any part of the abbey. The tower has been vacant for some hundred years, and we were content for it to remain as such. Cecil Cabershaw had argued for the sale, argued that he needed the money for Maple’s medicines, and that he didn’t give a tick about heritage or the past, not when his sister needed help in the present. Still…still… it didn’t seem right. It wasn’t settled until the town meeting where Marken reminded us of the boy he had been. That he was indeed a child of Leighton. That he was little Markie. Returned.

  Extensive renovations began on the abbey’s tower. Marken had the audacity to hire outside workers. A scandal, there, owing to how there are good men in Leighton who need a hammer to swing and fresh bread on their plates.

  As like any village policeman, it is my duty to make sure each and everything is proper, not just the laws but the morals. I surprised Marken and his men one day by touring the restorations. They were superficial in the upper tower, where Marken was making his rooms, but the renovations were more extensive in the lower basements. And the wet of the lake was coming through the walls, so much so that I wished I’d brought my rubber boots. I was past my ankles at some points, sploshing about. The waters were chilly. The abbey tower is well above the lake and I would not have thought the basements could be so damp, but I suppose earth draws water like a napkin on a table. Water goes where it wishes, if you give it a path.

  Marken was not on the premises. Not for the first hour.

  The workers were an ill sort. Dark men. Not dark skinned, I mean, but dark eyed. And they kept their gaze away from me and did not speak. You’ll remember they never came into the village. Not for the dances or the taverns. Not to flirt with our women or play darts with our champions. Marken bought all the supplies himself. There were meats and cheeses, but no liquors, which we all thought a bit odd. A man needs his drink, of course. When I began my surprise inspection, one of Marken’s men tried his best to bar me from the door but I had my badge and I’ve never been a man too easily put off my course. I took my tour.

  The interior walls, down below, were strange. Perhaps it was just the water playing havoc with all the angles. I thought as much, any way, at the time, though it did not explain how the walls and the ceiling met at such sharp angles that I could not poke my fingers along the edges. It was ancient architecture, of course. Likely settled poorly over the centuries. The abbey is one of those places that is built upon one thing that is built upon an earlier dwelling that is built upon an earlier structure and so on. It likely goes all the way back to some distant bonfire, my father was fond of saying.

  I was well beneath the old abbey and there were carvings on the wall. Intricate scratchings. Marken later told me the abbey had often held prisoners (political prisoners, I assumed) and they’d scratched their words on the walls, using spoons and such. Much of it was vulgar. And there were also crude drawings clearly spat out from diseased minds. Drawings of men with no heads. Men with no legs, pulling themselves along the ground in the manner of a caterpillar. Women being bothered by fantastical creatures. The water was so blasted cold, around me. I had to throw away my shoes, in the end. Damn good shoes, too.

  I’d never been in the tower, before. Not below, I mean. As children, I suppose it was a Leighton tradition to shiver ourselves through the gaps in the blocked outer doors, explore the upper tower, imagine ourselves as adventurers with princesses to be won and dragons to be gutted, but none of us ever thought to tear away the boards that kept the basement sealed. I can remember, myself, being dared to do it, to venture below. I remember willing my hands to tear away the first of the boards, but the wood was cold and quite moist and I lost my nerve. We all did. This too, was a Leighton tradition. We all knew the tower, but none of us knew the basements. It was strange to be down in them. Like sealing away part of my childhood… gaining a man’s knowledge of somewhere else that had been only lurking, waiting below.

  I discovered a small room with what appeared to be a stone altar. I suppose it could have been a bed. I’ve seen enough books to know ancient people made their beds of stone. They’d have been piled high with cushions, of course. The stone altar (I still couldn’t help but think of it as such, and of course now I know so much of the truth) was carved of all one piece. Rough on its surface, like pumice. Small bits of it broke off when I touched the damn thing. I watched the bits settle in the water. The ripples disappearing. Then I turned, hearing a sloshing behind me, and it seemed every one of the damned workers was in the doorway, staring at me. I asked them about the room but they said nothing. The room’s ceiling had a vault design, but curved and twisted, as if had at one point been a proper dome but some divine hand had reached down and twisted it into the shape of carnival ice
cream on a cone. It was unsettling. Water was dripping down from above. I could hear it up above, trickling and rippling along the odd curves before it fell to the waters around me.

  There were many more carvings on the walls of this room. Better ones, I might add. Whatever prisoner had been kept in this room, he or she was a more talented artist. Likely as insane, I might add. The carved figures were just as fantastical. Men with multiple arms. Fish with legs. There were several images of what I assume was the sun, with radiant energy spread out all around it. Words were carved into the walls of this room as well. Not a word of it in English, though, this time. Latin, I presumed. Or a barbaric tongue. I speak and read nothing but the King’s own, if you take my meaning. Captain Levetts fancies himself a scholar, though, and I took a rubbing of some of the words so that he could make of it what he would. I used the back of a summons and a stub of pencil and put it on the wall right above the strange stone altar. I still have the rubbing. “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn ~ Lw’nafh ch’Henpin.” Seems to be utter nonsense, though it ends with Henpin, an obvious reference to our lake, so I thought the captain might like it for local lore.

  Right as I was taking the rubbing, Marken returned. I’d known he’d gone off to the Leighton general store, seeing about pickaxes and wheelbarrows, and I’d timed my visit while he was out. It’s always best to poke around a bit oneself.

  “Why are you here?” he demanded. He was holding a pickaxe. I didn’t like it. My feet were wet and the workmen’s constant presence had given me a tension in my neck.

  “Poking around,” I told him. “Seeing about the tower.” Marken’s hands were twisting on the handle of his pickaxe. He was a good seven or eight feet distant, and of course the water meant he wouldn’t be dashing closer any too quickly, but I’ve seen a man hit with a pickaxe before, in the days before the mines flooded, and the thought of it put my hand on the handle of my Webley. Only in a casual manner, mind you. Still… a message.