Cthulhu Lives!: An Eldritch Tribute to H. P. Lovecraft (25 page)

I was barely half way along the Close when I was overcome by the most acute sense of disquiet. I reeled, and leant against the wall a moment to steady myself. Across from me was a narrow door, and above it a small, shuttered window. On the shutters, painted in a sickly, choleric yellow was the same symbol I had seen scratched into the cover of Dougal’s journal.

That same revulsion I had felt upon first seeing it, though immeasurably stronger, rose from my gut. I leant over and vomited. It was some time before I could gather myself, but eventually I approached the door beneath that dread sign. I did not know who, or what, I expected within, but I found in myself a strange resolve and, without so much as a knock, I forced the door open and went inside.

It was a narrow staircase, squeezed between the Star Hotel and the public house behind, and at the top a small, dim room, full of thick and foetid air, and the tiniest crack of light showing between the closed shutters. As much as I was loath to touch the bearers of that horrendous sign, I could see nothing without light. I stepped over and swung them back, taking a gulp of the only slightly fresher air from Fleshmarket Close.

The sign on the shutters was as nothing compared to the terror that greeted me in that little room. Laid out naked upon the floor was the very man I was looking for. Like the body in Sydney, his mouth was stuck in a horrid scream. It was stuffed with a scrap of cloth, perhaps tweed, and the eyes were wide and vacant. Despite his great frame he looked small, shrivelled, as though every last bit of life and soul had been sucked from him.

In danger of emptying my stomach again, I staggered down the stairs and into the close. I found a police box on the high street, and by the time they had examined and removed the body, some hours later, a great crowd had gathered. I was standing to one side, talking to Constable Birmingham who had arrived late on the scene.

“There is no doubt, Constable,” I said. “This is the same man I saw aboard the
Samuel Plimsoll
with my son upon Sydney Harbour.”

I said nothing, yet, of having seen him exiting my own home, thinking it best for Dougal, should he be found, not to be too closely associated with this desecrated corpse. The Constable turned a questioning gaze on me, and for a moment I wondered if he suspected I was keeping some information from him.

“You must have a canny memory, Mr Crowther,” he said. “Having seen him only the once, and all that time ago. I didnae recognise him myself, and he spent a night in one of my cells no more than a month ago. I suppose it’s the state of him, but he made quite the impression last time, so I should’ve remembered.”

“Quite the impression?”

“Oh, aye. Caused a great stramash in the Grass Market, staggering about like he couldnae control himself and screaming bloody murder. Injured near a dozen folk before we got him under control. Or semblance of control. He ceased his violence, but his raving went on most of the night. Drove the night watchman half mad, muttering and arguing with himself. Ah, he was meek as a mouse come the morning however...”

Constable Birmingham went on, but I stopped listening, taken with a sudden feeling of being watched. I looked past the Constable at the massed crowd in the high street, and saw my brother.

He looked older than I would have thought, his hair greyer than mine despite being my junior, but it was unmistakably Cormack. He was watching me avidly, and I felt unclothed and exposed beneath that stare. His eyes locked on mine for the briefest moment, and I felt a great anger rise in me, an eruption of all the fear and frustration of the last several months. I shoved past the Constable and ran at him. But he was gone. He simply disappeared into the crowd.

I searched in vain, forcing my way madly through the press, this way and that. Eventually, as the people thinned and wandered away, and still I could find no sign of him, I gave up and returned to the police. I spoke again with Constable Birmingham, answering his questions and providing what details I could. As before, I said nothing of my fears about Dougal, and in fact now that I had laid eyes on my brother, I began to wonder if I had perhaps been entirely wrong.

The constable assured me that the very best officers of Edinburgh’s police force would be investigating the case, and if my son was to be found, they would do so. I was unconvinced, however, of either the efficacy of the police, or indeed of the likelihood that Dougal was there to be found at all. Until now, I had considered the possibility that Dougal had never made landfall, having been robbed and done away with at sea. But how, and why, would Cormack have had any involvement in such a crime? And here he was, the very afternoon I arrived in Scotland.

I was deeply suspicious, and the following morning I made all haste north to Pitlochry. The day was getting on by the time I arrived, a sullen afternoon, heavy with the promise of rain. I left my case in the cloakroom at the railway station and, ignoring the hour and the threatening weather, I made my way up the path through Black Spout Wood to my family’s ancestral farm, overlooking the Distillery.

As I emerged from the ancient line of trees I saw, across the field, a stout, grey-haired figure disappear into the door of the farmhouse. Cormack. I quickened my pace, and reached the house almost at a run.

The door was ajar, and from the dim interior spewed such a wave of dismay that I was stopped in my tracks and brought to my knees upon the threshold. I fell onto my side and lay unmoving, struck down with such a bleakness I felt I might die of hopelessness right there. I lost track of how long I lay there before I was able to push myself upright, but the afternoon had waned to evening, and inky blue twilight gathered close about the house. An echo of that dire hopelessness remained, but I forced myself to my feet and opened the door.

As I stepped inside panic gripped me. My heart thundered in my ears, getting louder the further I went. I knew with certainty that I would find that abysmal symbol somewhere within.

I was not wrong. There was, of course, no sign of Cormack, or of Dougal, and there was a thick layer of dust on everything. In the kitchen I found yet another defiled and desiccated corpse. Steeling myself against the urge to retreat, I pushed into the room.

The body, bearing the same agonised scream and staring eyes, was lain upon a much larger rendition of the abhorrent sign. Unlike the scene in the Fleshmarket, it was clothed from the waist down, the upper body and face painted in thick, flyblown blood. The limbs of the corpse were stretched out unevenly to match the symbol’s tentacular arms. It had clearly lain in place for some time, and had been chewed here and there, I can only assume by rats.

It was too much. I disgorged the contents of my stomach right there, disturbing the flies in a black cloud that buzzed sickeningly around my head. Fighting my way out of the house, flies in my nose and mouth and an altogether ungodly panic in my heart, I ran blindly back down the hill toward town. It began to rain. The woods clawed at me as I went, and I stumbled and fell many times on paths I’d once known like the lines of my palm. I emerged into the road soaked, muddy and half out of my senses.

The flies were gone, the nausea and blackness of spirit behind me, and yet it was not until I had stumbled into the taproom of the Old Mill Inn, and swallowed several measures of whisky, that I could slow the frantic beating of my heart.

I wanted nothing more than to get away, and had there been an available horse I might well have forgone waiting for the morning train. As it was, I had no choice. I informed the local constable, who would go nowhere before morning, and waited out the night in the taproom of the Old Mill.

I brooded on the ghastly error I had made in coming here, and began to think that, for my own sanity, even my life, I might best soon make my escape.

Though the constable informed me in the morning that officers would be coming up from Edinburgh, I knew whatever evil was in this place was beyond the power of these earthly men. I returned to Edinburgh, and whilst I lodged in the New Town, and kept well away from Fleshmarket Close, even after several weeks I could not shake a lingering fear, an uneasiness that went everywhere with me. The police found no trace of my brother, and I despaired of ever knowing the fate of my son.

♦

MR ROBERT WALKER

GLENVIEW STREET

PADDINGTON, NEW SOUTH WALES

RETURNING TO SYDNEY STOP NO HOPE HERE STOP EXPECT TO ARRIVE END APRIL STOP

AONGHAS CROWTHER

I wandered into the train station by the Waverley Bridge, a great weight pressing on me. I could not grieve again for my son, but I had been so certain I would find resolution here. The combination of loss and failure is a bitter draught for any man, and I had drunk more than my share.

I paused atop the stairs, looking down into the station below. The platforms were crowded, its bustle a contrast to the emptiness I felt, a yawning hopelessness in the face of the unnatural malice to which I had been witness.

I made my plodding way down the stairs. As I stepped into the main station, I felt again a sensation of being watched. I felt a sharp pang in my chest, and I looked around nervously. I felt as though the world had slowed around me as I looked this way and that, searching faces in the crowd. Nothing. No one I recognised. And then I looked back up the stairs I had just stepped from.

There, in the very place I had paused and looked down but a few moments before, stood Cormack, watching with a dark, crooked smile.

The slumbering fear that I carried awoke with a start into terror, and I shook uncontrollably. I was stuck in place. The hammer of my pulse in my ears drowned out all other sound, and I was lost in my own little purgatory.

Until Cormack took a slow, almost nonchalant step down. The spell seemed broken, and in a desperate hysteria I fled through the crowd. I ducked and darted, knocking people aside, jumping behind doors and waiting for a moment, before dashing off in a new direction. I must have looked like a madman, and I cannot, thinking back on it, understand how I did not make myself that much more conspicuous in my panic.

Eventually I found a narrow space, a little recess into which I squeezed myself, beside the door to the guard’s room on my platform. I watched, as best I could, the other passengers boarding the train for London, and waited until the last moment, when the guard blew the whistle, before I leapt out of my hiding place and onto the train, as it pulled away.

I stood inside the door, peering surreptitiously out of the window at the station. I did not see Cormack, and neither had I seen him board the train. But I could not be sure, and when I found my seat, I was still in a state of great anxiety. I slumped low in my seat, trying to make myself as invisible to the rest of the train as possible.

I did not notice how far south I had gone by the time my heartbeat relaxed, but the fear stayed with me the entire journey, and I was beset by a frequent palsy, shaking so that I could barely put a cup to my lips. I was in such a state when I arrived in London that I left the train without my belongings.

My fear it seemed, was entirely justified, for in the crowds at Waterloo Station, I saw Cormack again. I reeled away, terrified, shoving people from my path as I fled. And then he was there again, and again, seemingly in every crowd, always ahead of me. Eventually I stumbled into quieter streets, and he did not find me again.

I found a cab, and instructed the cabbie merely to drive. I was in London early, and had thought to hide in my berth aboard ship until departure two days later. But now, I had no desire to bring attention to my plans, were I to be seen at the port. Instead I took the cab across the river to the Westminster Palace Hotel, where I paid a fortune by most measures to hide myself away. It was no small luxury, and despite myself, I was much recovered by the time I made my way to the port on the morning of departure.

To my alarm, however, I discovered that my ship, the
Rosebud
,
had sailed. Consulting the Port Authority, I was informed that the
Rosebud
had departing according to schedule – at dawn that morning, and with its full complement of passengers, on which list
I
was included.

Though I produced the telegram confirming my date of passage and the noon time of the
Rosebud’s
departure, there was, as the clerk informed, little point in argument. The ship was simply not there for me to take. When I questioned the fact that, despite the ledger, I had quite clearly not sailed upon the
Rosebud
that morning, the clerk became very much less than affable.

“Are you suggesting, sir, that I am telling an untruth? Or that the Port Authority does not keep factual records?” He shot up from his chair, face twisting savagely.

I was quite taken aback by his violent reaction, and somewhat in shock, simply left. In the end I sailed upon the
Samuel Plimsoll
itself, from Plymouth. I did not relish a voyage upon that ship, but neither would I remain in Britain any longer than necessary. Thankfully, for the sake of my sanity I believe, the old sailor who had sent me to Fleshmarket Close was not aboard, and no one else seemed to know me.

Upon the open ocean, with fresh air and time to reflect, I became convinced that I had been suffering some sort of delusion. Even had I seen my brother as I left Edinburgh, though in the end I doubted even this, there was simply no reasonable explanation for him to be following me about and terrorising me. If he had been so intent on causing me distress, why had he not done so upon the train? And if he was not on the train, as I came to believe, it simply wasn’t possible that he could have made it to London for me to see him there.

This realisation, that I was not in my right mind, was, I believed, the turning point, and I wondered what else had been the product of my clearly fevered mind. I sought the counsel of the ship’s surgeon, and even the chaplain. So it was that I arrived in Sydney, hale and whole, on a bright, cold winter’s morning toward the end of July.

Without my baggage, I had spent the voyage with a little spare clothing given to me by the chaplain. Not having anything now to encumber me, I eschewed a cab, and walked the miles home from the harbour.

When I turned the key in my front door, I was assaulted by the dust and musty air of a home closed up and uninhabited for the best part of a year. The shutters and curtains were all closed, and the house dim and gloomy. I went about the house, opening windows and letting in the fresh air. The door to the parlour was shut, which was unusual, and as I reached out to open it, I was struck by a sudden echo of that old fear. Shrugging it off, I opened the door and stepped into the darkened room.