The Book of Cthulhu 2 Read online

  Marken saw where my hand had gone and, I think, for the first time truly noted the pickaxe in his hands. He immediately handed it over to one of the workmen, but the fellow’s hands were wet and he dropped it into the water, then fished around for a bit, trying to find it, not having much luck. It was comical enough to break the mood, and Marken and I were soon up on dry land having tea on the lawn in front of the abbey, as my shoes and pants were no longer fit for any indoor conversations.

  I found Markie to be pleasant enough. A great wit, truth be told. He remembered me a good deal more than I remembered him, though when he talked of my earlier bullying I felt a few flashes of the old memories returning. I’d been an awful bastard, but Markie thought it was funny, now. Days gone by and all that. I caught him up to speed on the village (he seemed to know everything already, as if it were only another of the tests he always studied for) and I caught him up on the story of my life, which wasn’t much. A few women. My wife, now. The futility of fishing the lake. The best places to sit in each of Leighton’s three pubs.

  Marken’s life had gone in more interesting directions. He’d taken in with an antiquarian up in Bradford. Playing the part of an apprentice. Learning to tell if a scarab was four thousand years old, or only four weeks. He’d also gone crazy for languages, learning them by the basket. I asked about the writing in the rooms below the abbey and the rubbing I had taken, but he said he couldn’t read a word of it. Looking back, he was lying, of course. Looking back, I know I missed his reluctance to return the paper to my grasp.

  I asked why he wanted to restore the old tower. Nobody had lived within its premises for some hundred years, and there were further centuries of accumulated dust even so, and a man of his means (trading in antiquities seemed to be remarkably profitable, though I might add that Marken comes from money, and a rich man slides along the path to money, while a poor man stumbles) might well have had any house in Leighton, or perhaps even renovated the lake house, a far more modern and hospitable structure. He’d shuddered when I mentioned the lake house. I need no hindsight, here. I noticed it even then.

  We talked of women, of course… of our own wives and other women, and also of women we wished had been our wives. Much laughter, of course. Women may weep over spoiled romance, but men such as Marken and I see the comic side. We also spoke of the local football clubs and how strikers seem to be born and goalkeepers seem to be idiots. Women see the comic side in such things as that, but men such as Marken and I are nearly driven to tears.

  What I mean to say is that the mood had been good until I spoke of the renovations, the strange quality of the basements. Marken did not speak for some moments and I had the feeling that I should remain quiet as well. He looked off in the distance, mostly, but his eyes kept returning to mine. I could see that he was calculating. Gauging. Weighing facts and emotions. That sort of thing. All nonsense. We know in an instant whether we trust a man. All the rest is mere twaddle.

  Marken did a very extraordinary thing.

  Before finally speaking, he nabbed up the teapot, still half filled with water. Cooled by then, of course, as we’d been talking for nearly an hour.

  He poured it on the lawn. Not in any casual manner, but in that precise and sadly focused way a man will line up a good shot on a dog that’s gone bad.

  I took a long look at Marken, then. The cut of his suit was beyond adequate. Much better than mine, and I do take some care with my general grooming. He had the sideburns of a learned Bradford man. His hair was perhaps longer than we prefer in Leighton, but there’s no law against a man’s hair catching the wind. His hands were strong, and his general form was that of a fellow who could ride a horse or swing a golf club without huffing or heaving. His eyes were dark and there was a certain moistness to his skin that I assumed was sweat, as the day was balmy and we’d taken chairs in the sun to hasten the drying process of our shoes and trouser legs, soaked as they were by the excursion into the renovations.

  His skin was somewhat leathery, and dark and spotted by the sun, but that’s as a man should be.

  Marken placed the teapot upended on the table and emptied both our cups into the grass. I did not protest. Too curious to form words, I admit.

  Then, he said, “Have you heard of the Book of Eibon? Or the Cthäat Aquadingen?”

  It is that moment that I consider my first step into madness.

  * * *

  Joslie Miller was a peach of a girl. A peach. She had been visiting her friend, thirteen-year-old Constance Grane, a visit during which the two of them had crafted several paper dolls, clever cutouts from newspapers Joslie’s father had brought back from a recent excursion to Stoke-on-Trent for medical reasons. Joslie’s mother had taken ill. Some sort of wasting sickness. A cancer, I hear, but I hear other things and give them more credit, now.

  The paper dolls had been connected to each other, cut away from the papers so that each of the duplicate figures was holding hands. I heard people talking, later, of how the search parties were similar, with all of us holding hands, moving across the meadows and through the woods as best we could, staying within reach of each other because Joslie was such a small girl and could be missed so easily.

  She’d never come home from the Granes’ house. Joslie’s mother had waited a fretful time and then come to me, and I take things seriously at all times and the disappearance of Cecil Cabershaw was still biting at my mind. I rounded up as many of the villagers as I could, and we took such lanterns and torches as were available, and we set out.

  As it happens, I was the one to find her. Joslie’s little body was crumpled no more than a hundred feet from her mother’s house. Caught in the weeds, she was, at the edge of the fallow field, half hidden by the tall grass and the wheat. She was cracked and she was broken as if some monster had crumpled her there, or she’d fallen from a cloud. She was soaking wet and… just before I found her, I could have sworn I heard a running stream, but the nearest river was a half mile distant. These phantom sounds were drowned away by the swish of running men as they came plunging through the wheat when I cried out, and of course soon there was nothing but her mother’s wails.

  * * *

  By the time the dogs began to disappear, over the course of the next several days, Marken and I had become friends. We were something, anyway. I take to friends slow, I admit, but Marken was on his way. It would have gone quicker without the disappearances, and without his madness, and certainly without the way his madness began to make sense. I think that was what disturbed me most of all.

  He had theories about Leighton. About the town and the lake. He explained these theories to me when we were drinking, and once I had his words in my head I didn’t want to stop drinking. Not ever. I didn’t want to be sober in my bed, my wife going about her duties in the kitchen, me listening to my thoughts and to the raindrops coming off my roof, or the hissing complaints of a teapot set to boil.

  “The tower is old,” Marken told me. He had several papers spread out on his table. Drawings of the tower within which we were sitting. I say they were papers but they were not. They were on parchment. Papyrus. Or leather. And there was one drawing of the tower in a book that Marken called the Cthäat Aquadingen, as old a book as I’ve ever seen. I’ve never been a book man, and now I never will be, because that book is in my head. It got in my head. Dripped inside. It has me.

  Marken said, “Versions of this book first appeared in the 5th century. Nobody knows who wrote it. God give him a good grave, though. God grant him that. This one is in English, and there was a Latin version mentioned in damnation by the first of the Knights Templar, and they called it a new book, then, which I suppose would date it to the 11th or 12th century.”

  “I suppose,” I said. I was looking at the book. It was stained. Stained with what I hoped were coffees or wines or waters. And the book seemed to be creaking. A thick and ugly thing, it was. Several hundred pages long. A folio. Bound in a leather of which I wanted no knowledge. Bulging. That book was bulging. Solid
and resting motionless on Marken’s table, but it felt like it was creaking open nonetheless. I was sweating. The circulation in the abbey tower is not good. Marken had opened the book to an image of the very tower we were in. The image was hundreds of year old, but the base structure of the tower was unmistakable, as was its proximity to the lake. Unsettling, then, to see how the tower was only the beginning of the image, with the earth cut away beneath, basements and cellars and caverns reaching down an unimaginable depth. Strange creatures roamed below, and channels were connected to the lake. And then, far beneath, a being of inconceivable size. A protoplasmic blob that could have stretched itself from Leighton to London.

  “This is Ubbo-Sathla, the Unbegotten Source,” Marken told me. He was hesitant to even touch the image. I could hear a rustling from below, in the basements beneath us, and while I knew it would only be Marken’s workmen going about their tasks, I still shuddered. We were drinking wine. I drank more. More than I should have. Or less.

  “It looks like some viscous fluid,” I told Marken. “An oil stain. A jam spilt upon the floor.” I was making light of it. I could see outside the window and down to the lake, where it was black. A dog was howling, somewhere. The days had been playing hell with their kind. The villagers were pressing hard at me on the disappearances. The hounds. Cecil Cabershaw. Especially little Joslie’s murder. But I had nothing. No gypsies to roust or travelers to condemn. No donkey where I could pin the murderous tail. Now, ten dogs dead or missing in the last week. The dog that Marken and I could hear howling was undoubtedly being kept at home, mournful that it was not allowed to roam free at night.

  “Ubbo-Sathla is the creator of all life on Earth,” Marken told me, and he began to spin a fantastical tale of the vastness of space, of visitors marooned on our planet, stranded long before life here began. It was a story of Ubbo-Sathla huddled beneath ice, spitting forth creatures into a glacier melt… drop after drop of life, small organisms that soon sprang into the strange and foul creatures Ubbo-Sathla created at whim, life as no more than a toy, these beings stumbling away to cover the Earth, passing the centuries, the millennia, hundreds of millions of years, becoming grotesque fish, or dogs that howl in the night, or the villagers in every English town.

  “But not every creature changed,” Marken told me. We were on our third bottle of wine. I excused myself to the bathroom, standing over the toilet and listening to Marken’s words as he called out, as I relieved myself, as I watched the faucet of Marken’s sink dripping out, drop after drop. I was thinking of my wife, alone, at home. She would be mending. Reading. Having tea. I thought of her running the faucets. I thought of her hair. Her smile. I thought of going home but in my madness I needed to hear what Marken had to say.

  He called out, “Some of the foulest creatures kept their form, kept their hatred for their new home and for all their brothers. Unchanged, they watched as eternity cantered by, with endless steps. Or perhaps they do have an end.”

  I returned to my chair. To my cups of wine. I asked, “What do you mean?”

  “The Cabershaw family,” he spoke. There was great import in his words, but I had no idea of his meaning. There was little left to the Cabershaw family. They were dying out. Was this what he meant?

  “Cecil has gone missing,” I said. “Maple is in Wath-upon-Dearne. A hospital. For her mind.”

  “You don’t understand. Time has no meaning. None at all. To the ones who came before, to Cthulhu, to Kassogtha, to the Black Goat of the Woods with his thousand young, time is only a tool. We are neither here nor there. Not in the past or the future. Every Cabershaw who has ever lived, they are still here. Still among us. Still going about their tasks.”

  “Their… tasks?” I asked. I felt as a man who cannot help himself from entering a cavern’s depths. The dogs of Leighton were all howling, now, calling from off in the distance, for the most part, though some were coming closer. The night had gone so dark that I could no longer see the lake from my seat next to the window. The curtains were rustling. A wind was visiting.

  “They are caretakers since time immemorial,” Marken said. “Since before they were human. Since before there were humans.” He was turning pages of the Cthäat Aquadingen. The book was hundreds of years old, but the pages were not brittle. I wondered of their origin. Inside, there were texts in several languages. Most of them alien to my eyes. There were chunks of pages filled with nothing but dots in intricate patterns. And pictograms with figures that made my eyes itch and burn. I wondered of the illustrations I was seeing as Marken heaved page after page of the giant tome aside, all the images of fantastical creatures that I would never have believed existed, except Marken believed, and he did not seem as if any madness had taken him, or the wine had misguided him. My father had often told me that sometimes it is only a madman that see or speaks the truth.

  “Here,” Marken said. “The Cabershaw family.” He made as if to speak more, but then stopped, said nothing. I wondered, with all that he had been speaking, what madness he had decided was best left unsaid. He tapped on the pages and at first I did not look. I only reached for more wine. We’d opened another bottle. Outside, there were the sounds of dogs moving closer, racing through the woods and towards, I somehow felt, the lake.

  There was an image of the Cabershaw family in the book. Of Cecil Cabershaw. An exact likeness. Even, God help me, the clothes that he had been wearing the last time he’d been seen, when he was at the general store retrieving an order of two hundred canning jars suitable for vegetables or meats. The clerk remembered him well, wondering of such an order from a man not known to garden or to prepare much for the future.

  But there he was, just as the clerk had described, just in the clothes that Cecil normally wore… the same vest and the pocket watch and the hat and everything in place, even the cut of his hair, and all of it in a book whose pages had been created while the Vandals were still sacking Rome. My forehead was moist. My hand was on my Webley, for reassurance. The metal felt cold and real. It began raining outside. Soft rain. Dribbles and drops. One after the other. I could hear a pack of hounds racing past. An awful racket. I could hear the blood in my ears. A small thump in my temple. I’d have a headache, soon, I believed. I wanted to be home in bed with a cloth on my head, with my wife’s loving hands holding it in place.

  Instead of this, I said, “What role do you have? Why are you here, Marken? Why have you come back to Leighton?”

  He pondered my question. No immediate answer. I could see another of those rounds of calculation in his eyes. This time, I sensed, he was deciding not if he would answer, but only how he would answer.

  Finally, he said, “You’ve heard the dogs?”

  I nodded. The dogs were gathering by Lake Henpin. I could hear their baying, their growls, their whimpers and such. The wine and Marken and the strange leather book had put me in a mood where the dogs seemed unreal, foreign, as far away as the stars. At any other time I would have sprang to my feet and raced outside in wonder at their actions. Dogs are wise, you know. My father said to trust a dog more than a man, because a dog has never learned to lie.

  “Dogs are not the only ones that hunt,” Marken told me.

  * * *

  The dogs had been disappearing at night. For a week. One a night. Sometimes two. At first it was assumed they’d simply run off. Dogs need freedom. They’d soon come home. There were one or two jokes gamboled about… talk of how something was in the air. Cecil had started a trend by running away on his sister. The dogs were following suit. I didn’t laugh at these jokes. It is not my job to do so. And Joslie had been put to rest in her grave. A policeman can’t be seen to be smiling when a girl’s grave is still so fresh.

  As the disappearances continued, there were no more jokes. Leashes were found chewed apart. Or broken. And then the dogs began to wash up on the lake. Drowned, they were. And some animal had been at them. Dogs are not talented swimmers, and nobody could hazard a guess why they’d been going into the waters. Nobody but me, that i
s, standing at the shore, watching the small waves lapping for a foothold on land, and remembering the tales I’d been hearing from Marken.

  * * *

  We followed the dogs to the lake, did Marken and I. There wasn’t any part of me that wanted to be near Lake Henpin at night, not since seeing the drawings in that damned book, not since hearing tales of the Sathlattae, rituals and chants and spells related to Ubbo-Sathla. Incantations with which water spirits could be raised. Summoned. Created. And, thankfully destroyed. It was the last knowledge that Marken had been seeking. Not just since he’d come back to Leighton. From earlier. Much earlier.

  “My family is charged with destroying the Old Ones,” he said as we moved through the woods. I had my Webley and he an old axe that looked brittle, carved with pictograms and strange words. More a work of art than a weapon, though he clenched it as tight as his teeth.

  Marken said, “The tower wasn’t erected to stop any Saxons. Not for any Vikings or Normans, either. It’s a defense against invaders from the lake. It wasn’t part of the original abbey. Has nothing to do with it, unless you count fighting for the other side.” The dogs were still howling at the lake, but it was too dark, too many trees in the way. I could see nothing. My heart was a hammer, beating against my chest in waves.

  “I’ve travelled the globe. Fighting. Well… not much fighting. Acquiring artefacts, mostly. Stopping others from fighting. And I’ve been learning about the Cabershaw family. Learning about the lake house. Learning about… God help me and keep my soul in His hands… Lake Henpin.”

  It was then that I saw the glow from the lake. And as sure as a man knows light from dark, I knew that light was wrong. It was unsettled. Not shimmering, but… moving. Creeping out from the lake. Like a mist. The dogs were growling. Whining. I think they would have fled if they weren’t all together in a pack, with a thousand teeth and a mob’s nerves.