Cthulhu Lives!: An Eldritch Tribute to H. P. Lovecraft (9 page)

Late that evening, he surfaced in the kitchen for some overdue sustenance. Had he really forgotten about lunch three days in row? He supposed he must’ve done. Judging by his shelf of the fridge, he’d forgotten about shopping too. Eggs and a couple of sausages that were only just past their sell-by date. He clattered away with the frying-pan.

The noise attracted Ralph. “You OK, mate?” he asked James.

“Yeah, sorry. Been a bit distracted lately.”

“More DIY?”

“No. Well, spraying a bit of anti-fungal stuff to discourage the mould. Nothing else.”

“Better not be. I don’t want the landlord coming round and throwing a wobbly. I like it here.”

“I promise not to demolish the place.” James smiled weakly.

“If anyone’s going to demolish the place, it’ll be an architect,” Ralph said. “So what
is
on your mind. Not working too hard?”

“Well –” James was momentarily at a loss, then gave the most convenient answer. “I’ve got this project I’m working on. It’s causing me grief.” It wasn’t technically a lie. He hadn’t said that the project was related to his course.

“Is that so?” Ralph asked. “Well, hard work’s all very laudable and that, but you need an evening off from time to time. Come into the living room. Football’s on, and we’ve got some beer.”

“Not Arsenal?” asked James, rallying.

“No. Chelsea against some German buggers. Come on, bring your dinner, if that’s what that is.”

James relented, and actually enjoyed the evening. Football and beer and mates – an ancient formula, but still a winning one. Sam drank lemonade, but was as animated as the others when a disputed penalty called for earnest debate and abuse of the referee.

The football was followed by a decent if familiar film. Dave kept up a running commentary on the plot holes, until the rest pelted him with cushions, followed by empty beer cans and a lemonade bottle.

Eventually, they broke up for the night. James was happy to have been distracted for a few hours, and slightly dreaded another night with the stone. He couldn’t avoid it, though. He felt its pull as soon as he was alone. Alone... For a wild moment, he thought about calling Mel, confessing everything, begging her for company, comfort, help. He pushed the idea away. Too embarrassing. She was probably furious with him, anyway. Instead, he undressed, and got straight into bed. His eyes were still drawn by the glow – was it slightly brighter? – but at least he wasn’t going to wake up on the floor.

Sleep came eventually. Dreams followed.

The insistent voice was there again, along with the roiling shapes and unearthly colours. But there was something else, as well. He felt as though he was standing at the mouth of a long tunnel, impossibly long, leading through the aeons to, well, to the Gate. He had only to step into this tunnel to be transported to it. And the Gate led to...

To what? Inside his dream, it seemed that he ought to know the answer, but though it felt tantalisingly close, still it eluded him. “Who?” he asked the endless void. “Where? Why?”

“We are the Eternal,” came the reply. “We are the Gate. We are the journey and the destination, the cause and the effect, the within and the without, the question and the answer. We are waiting for you, James Belmont.”

The shapes and colours around him danced and flickered ever more dazzlingly. He saw, or thought he saw, snakelike tentacles writhing and questing for him, and amongst the tentacles, luminous orbs that darted this way and that. He saw an enormous void, filled with gigantic stars the size of grains of sand. He saw the past, the present and the future intermingled. He heard again the harsh syllables that represented the words carved on the stone, though their meaning still eluded him. He saw the device hanging in the air, limned in a colour somewhere between silver and infinity. He reached for it.

♦

He awoke shivering, yet drenched in sweat. His duvet and pillow were on the floor, as was his bedside light, which had been swept from its small table. He’d clearly spent a restless night.

For a long time he lay still, thoughts whirling through his mind. It was time to admit that the stone was causing him problems. Messing with his head. But who did you go to with a problem of such a nature? A doctor? The landlord? The environmental health people? He rehearsed each consultation in his imagination. He could find no way of coming across as even slightly sane. Surely he hadn’t really lost his marbles. One more day, and he’d have enough bricks out of his wall to be able to see the stone in its entirety. Maybe that would answer his problems.

What day was it? Wednesday. Never busy, Wednesdays. There was something he had to do, though. What was it? Oh yes, the Geiger counter. He checked the time. Jesus, he had to rush. He dressed quickly, and left the house. It was raining, but he ignored it. When he got to Angus, he looked very much like a drowned rat. He was also fifteen minutes late. Angus was soaked too, and highly anxious to boot, so the transaction was swift. By lunchtime he was home and, fortified by tea and toast, ready to face the wall again.

Eventually, after much cursing and a couple of skinned knuckles, he extracted the first brick. He peered intently behind it, but saw nothing but blackness. There was a tiny torch incorporated into his phone, but it was nowhere near up to the job. Then he remembered Ron’s bike, there in the hall. Ron took the tube when it rained. James borrowed the front lamp, and shone it into the hole.

There was nothing but a gap, filled partially with rubble and partially with a musty smell. Although he couldn’t have said what exactly he had expected to find, James felt oddly disappointed. Still, he continued.

Once the first brick was out, the next one was easier, and the next easier still. He freed one side of the stone, then the top. He kept an anxious eye out for signs of the false wall collapsing, but it had been built well. Brushing chips of mortar off the top of the stone, he shone the bicycle lamp on it.

The device from the front was repeated, carved into the top of the stone. It was identical, except that, slightly off-centre, some sort of gem had been set in it. There were no words inscribed, in any text.

James looked at the gem, and smiled. He wasn’t inclined to greed, but he did wonder whether it was valuable – and whether, in the eyes of the law, it belonged to him as its finder, or to his landlord. Perhaps it counted as Treasure Trove, meaning that the British Museum would have to buy it or something. It seemed large. Even a finder’s fee could be substantial. He shook his head to banish the thoughts. It was probably just one step up from glass, and worth next to nothing.

Then the gem started to glow, not with the gentle luminosity that he had seen before, but brighter and brighter, until it achieved a blazing intensity. Blue, red, green, orange, violet – every colour that James could imagine, and every colour that he couldn’t imagine, all at once. It held his unblinking gaze, and burned through his retinas. He watched his hand reach out, of its own volition, to touch the gem. Energy tore down his arm until his veins were filled with liquid fire and his hair began to smoulder. Again, he heard the voice from his dreams, filling his ears – or his mind, he didn’t care which.

“We are the Eternal, the All-in-One, the One-in-All. We are the Way, and the Gate, and the Keeper of the Gate. We are Yog-Sothoth. Yog-Sothoth is the Way and the Key and the Gate. Yog-Sothoth is the Was and the Now and the Will Be. Yog-Sothoth is the all-seeing and the all-knowing. Life eternal in the Tawil-at’Umr. Yog-Sothoth h’leth mn’gar rRhann y’law y’law. Yog-Sothoth calls. Yog-Sothoth calls – and you answer. You answer – and you shall know All.”

Colours and shapes filled the room, but he paid them no heed. He beheld the light of a thousand suns.

♦

Later, it would be known that the fire brigade had arrived first. They’d encountered confused and conflicting reports – a fire, an explosion, a gas leak. One neighbour claimed that she had seen clouds of incandescent green smoke through the window. Many mentioned screams and indescribable noises. The firemen donned breathing apparatus, and broke down the door. They found no fire, no burnt areas, in fact nothing untoward at all, save that the wall of one room seemed to have been partially demolished. There was no one in the house, alive or dead.

One reporter had followed the fire engine. He was considering leaving when an old man approached him. The man claimed to have lived on the street all his life. He had been a boy in 1944, he said, when there had been a very similar incident, which had never been explained. The reporter listened politely, then – since there was little else to report – he phoned it in. The story went round a bored newsroom. It was discussed, mentioned on the phone, pushed aside.

But news never really dies in London. A casual mention here, an overheard snippet there – some hours later, a phone rang in a small office in a nondescript building off Whitehall.

Five minutes after that, sirens descended on Harstow Road. Police stretched incident tape across the road. A small man in a severe suit arrived, showed something to the officers, and assumed command. He announced that the house was now a crime scene, and was not to be disturbed. The nature of the crime was never clearly established.

Four of the students who lived there were questioned, detained overnight, then assigned generous new accommodations – spread over London – at surprisingly reasonable rents. Their former landlord was quietly bought out. The old man who’d remembered the events of 1944 suffered a sudden debilitating stroke, and was whisked away to a nursing home somewhere. The house itself was closed and locked.

The rest of the street discussed the matter amongst themselves for a week, but never got to the bottom of it. Some speculated about a drugs factory, while others suggested terrorists. There was a brief flurry of on-line activity when a self-appointed exposer of conspiracies – a wild young man with unkempt hair and an eye-patch – declared that it was all a government cover-up. Since, however, he could not say
what
the government was covering up, the fuss died down.

All that was ever known for certain was that a fifth student – one James Belmont – had vanished. What had become of him, no one ever could say.

ON THE BANKS OF THE RIVER JORDAN
by John Reppion

To: Brian J. Showers ([email protected])
From: John Reppion ([email protected])
Sent: 21 Dec 2008 12:04
Subject: (no subject)

Dear Brian,

I hope this email finds you well.

My name is John Reppion. You may remember that we corresponded briefly last year regarding my article “Where Goes the Blackberry Man”, published in
Ghostwriter: The Amateur Ghost-Hunter’s Journal
(issue 62).

I am currently at a loose end whilst my wife, my day-to-day writing partner, is off visiting her sister prior to Christmas. In her absence, I have been working on some of my more esoteric research. Going through my notes this morning, I came across a mass of material concerning Princes Park – the Victorian park adjacent to my home – which I gathered whilst researching my book
800 Years of Haunted Liverpool
.

There are many intriguing titbits associated with Toxteth, the area of Liverpool I live in. It was once part of the Royal Hunting Ground of Robin Hood’s archenemy, King John. It’s also home to an ancient chapel, where the famous poet and astronomer Jeremiah Horrocks was educated by Puritan Minister Richard Mather (and ultimately entombed). Princes Park itself is reputed to be the modest original on which so many subsequent Victorian parks the world over were based. Even though I managed to include several pages of Toxteth lore in my book, there was much more I couldn’t mention due to space restrictions.

Most of this remaining data is still “raw”: photocopied newspaper articles, printouts, poorly written notes, and the like. My thought was to work through the data and turn it into something resembling a history of the park, but I must admit that I am already struggling. I’m so used to being able to talk these things through with my wife that without her, I’m finding it hard to get the various pieces of information into a logical order. I’m sure there is an obvious angle, a path winding through these disparate elements that would draw the whole thing together, but I’m afraid I can’t see the wood for the trees at the moment.

All of which brings me, rather belatedly, to my reason for emailing. I was greatly impressed with the way you dealt with the history of the Rathmines area of Dublin in your recent work
The Bleeding Horse and other Ghost Stories
, and wondered if I might ask you the favour of providing your opinion of the material I have amassed thus far. If you are willing, I would like to “talk” through the disjointed data via email, and hopefully make sense of it all in the act of doing so.

Thanks in advance for your time.

Very best,

John

+ + +

To: John Reppion ([email protected])
From: Brian J. Showers ([email protected])
Sent: 21 Dec 2008 13:51
Subject: RE: (no subject)

Hi John,

Good to hear from you. Of course I recall your article! I found our correspondence most helpful in my own work. Unfortunately, road works outside my home are threatening to sever my telephone and internet connections for a (supposedly) short period. My internet connection has already been intermittent today. It has also just begun to snow here – something that virtually never happens in Dublin – which might delay the workmen even more.

I would be happy to take a look at the information you have gathered, but I am unsure exactly when or for how long I might be offline. Worst case scenario: I’ll get back to you after the holidays. Apologies for my brevity. I am trying to keep my reply as short as possible so I might send this email before losing my signal again.

One thing I would add, especially given your primary matter of interest: delving into certain buried pasts must be done with a degree of delicacy. I’m sure you understand my meaning.

Compliments of the season to you,

Brian

+ + +

To: Brian J. Showers ([email protected])
From: John Reppion ([email protected])
Sent: 21 Dec 2008 15:22
Subject: The Nook
Attachment: Mole of Edge Hill.doc (17 kb)

Brian,

Thanks very much for your quick response. I hope the imminent interruption to your communications doesn’t disrupt your work too much.

No sign of snow here, but it’s been really foggy all day, which seems to have baffled our cat. He’s a very vocal and querulous creature at best, demanding to be let in and out at the window of whatever room we’re sat in. He doesn’t seem able to stand being out in the fog for more than five minutes, however. Consequently, my day has been punctuated by his mewling to go out, shortly followed by him scratching at the window frame to be let back in. As if to prove that, he is now scrabbling on the sill...

Right, the cat has been fed, which will hopefully encourage him to have a doze and stop bothering me for a while. I have just brewed myself a fresh pot of tea and will now “talk” some of my data through with your good self. I appreciate that you might not be able to reply for a few days, and apologise in advance for clogging your inbox with my ramblings. I’m just so used to having my wife here to discuss my work with that it’s hard for me to think things through without going through that process (even though I might well, in reality, be talking to myself). Right then...

Many a Scouse storyteller will inform you that Toxteth was given its name during the Viking invasion of 793 A.D., when a Scandinavian warrior by the name of Toki arrived on the banks of the River Mersey. Some historians argue that there is little evidence supporting these claims, but there is enough for me to think it at least a distinct possibility. According to sources I have found, it was the privilege of a Viking chieftain to select a suitable location for his people to settle. When the decision was made, the Norseman would drive his spear, or
staith
, into the ground, much as a flag might be planted today. The area is recorded variously as “Tockseath”, “Stochestede”, and in ancient times “Tosteth” – all of which seem close enough to me.

At the heart of present day Toxteth stands Princes Park. It was opened to the public in 1842, having been designed by Joseph Paxton, head gardener to the sixth Duke of Devonshire. At its centre is a former boating lake, now greatly reduced in size. The lake was made by damming a nearby stream, Dickenson’s Dingle, which was briefly known as the River Jordan during the seventeenth century.

Toxteth is an area which bears an ill-deserved bad reputation. It is a candidate for the dreaded “regeneration” – code for “kick everyone out and knock everything down” – which has plagued our inner-city communities for many years. This cash-hungry spectre first menaced Princes Park when an area known as Park Nook came under threat of development. The Nook started as part of the estate of celebrated philosopher and Unitarian Minister James Martineau, who lived on the park’s boundary more than 150 years ago.

Martineau was posted to Liverpool in 1832, and on his arrival, he became a tenant of the infamous Joseph Williamson – the so-called “Mole of Edge Hill”. I’ve attached an article I wrote about Williamson for
Strange Attractor Journal
a few years back. He was a fascinating character, and is usually referred to as an eccentric philanthropist, though his exact motives remain a mystery. During his lifetime, Williamson employed a vast labour force to construct a maze of tunnels beneath the Edge Hill and what is now the city centre of Liverpool. The house which Martineau rented from Williamson came equipped with its own vaulted and brick-lined tunnels, and the Minister was, it seems, quite taken with the constructions.

Relocating in 1844 to a purpose-built villa on the edge of the newly opened Princes Park, Martineau decided to construct similar tunnels of his own. These catacombs (significantly less extensive than Williamson’s, but no less remarkable) were all but forgotten after Martineau’s death. The house was demolished and the land left, at either his or his family’s request, to grow wild. The city council at the time was happy to let the privately owned area return to its natural state, and it became Park Nook.

The Nook was famed for its ancient trees, in which much of the park’s wildlife resided. Surrounded by thick, knotted brambles and nettle stalks the height of a man, it was an almost impenetrable fortress to even the most inquisitive visitors and their murderously toothed dogs. In May 1999, the area was suddenly fenced off, much to the bafflement of many park users. In an act of spontaneous community revulsion, a group of locals dismantled the barrier and began a campaign to protect the area from its would-be developers.

In 2001, I was searching the internet for information about the Nook’s current plight and history. By this time, enraged locals had been joined by
bona fide
eco-warriors who had taken up permanent residence among the ancient trees, to ensure the wilderness-like centre was kept free of development and vandalism. I found a post on the message board of the Cold Spot Society relating to an “investigation” which had taken place there.

From what I remember – the site was, as you may know, deleted in 2002, in the wake of the Blackberry Fair tragedy – a small band of ghost hunters gained access to the Nook in the dead of night, intending to visit Martineau’s tunnels. Rumour said that a young mother and her child had taken refuge in one of the tunnels during a Second World War air-raid. An explosion caused a collapse, and the pair were buried beneath the rubble. Indeed, I have heard other stories of the tunnels being used as makeshift bomb shelters during the period, although I’ve found no official record of it. The Coldspotters’ explorations amounted to little more than the usual electromagnetic field and temperature readings. There may even have been a digital photo or two showing the ubiquitous “orbs” which seem so popular with amateur parapsychologists.

Needless to say, the ghost hunters spooked themselves, causing quite a bit of noise in the process. The resident environmental activists heard them crashing about in the undergrowth and “escorted” them out of the park, presumably believing them to be agents of the developers. One interesting detail about the event sticks with me, however. The Coldspotters had initially been startled by a strange sound issuing from one of the overgrown tunnel entrances. The noises were described as sounding like the desperate cries of a half-smothered infant.

The “Battle of the Nook” raged for years before eventually drawing to a close in 2004, with developer Cyril Webb emerging as the victor. A block of luxury apartments now occupies the site. High fences erected during construction prevented myself and others from ascertaining whether the historic tunnels were demolished entirely, or merely buried. The day the barriers went up, I recall seeing a large, lean dog fox trotting through our garden, adjoining the park. I assumed that it had been displaced by the works, and wondered if it had previously made its home in the tunnels. As for the somewhat drolly-named “Glade Park Court”, it is with a tinge of regret that I must report that no stories of phantom cries from beneath tenants’ floors have come to my attention.

The cat has awakened from his rest and is once again clawing at the window frame. I believe it is time for me to facilitate his escape into the fog (for however long he can stand it this time) and put the kettle on.

Best,

John

+ + +

To: Brian J. Showers ([email protected])
From: John Reppion ([email protected])
Sent: 21 Dec 2008 20:20
Subject: Mr. Magpie

Brian,

The fog has cleared a bit, and the Yule moon seems unusually bright and yellow. I suppose I don’t usually pay much attention to it. With the cat still insisting on entering and exiting at short, regular intervals however, I seem to be looking out of the window every fifteen minutes or so tonight. A huge tiding of magpies is chattering out there, and has been for at least half an hour now. Princes Park seems to be home to hundreds of the birds, and it is not uncommon for them to flock together in the trees and
chakker-chakker
in unison. I was quite unnerved the first time I observed this behaviour and while I’d like to say that I’ve got used to it, I still find something weird and malevolent about the sound.

There was a story that received heavy coverage in the local newspapers a couple of years ago, about an old man who lived over on the other side of the park. He had been catching magpies in his garden using Larsen Traps, large cage-type contraptions baited with smaller birds to lure the magpies in. The man had died in his home, but as he had lived alone, it was a good while before the authorities were notified. The more sensational reports called him “Mr. Magpie”. They found a couple of dozen traps in his back garden, all containing dead birds, but that was nothing to the amount of carcasses and bones they found piled on an old compost heap. The old man had devoted a lot of time and effort to eradicating the birds, and the papers claimed he must have killed close to a thousand magpies over the years. On nights like this I can almost sympathise with the sentiment!

The Mr. Magpie story led me to some research into the folklore surrounding these noisy birds, which I filed away with the rest of my Princes Park information. Maybe the cacophony outside my window is fuelling my imagination tonight, but some of the data is really quite eerie.

C. A. Swainson’s
Folklore and Provincial Names of British Birds
states that a magpie “which at that time had the gayest plumage of all the feathered race” perched on an arm of the cross and “insulted the Redeemer while suffering His last agony.” Jesus evidently took the creature’s taunts to heart, cursing the bird and all its kind forevermore: “No longer shall the brilliant tuft and bright feathers, of which thou art so proud and at the same time so unworthy, adorn thee; thy colour shall be sad and sombre, thy life a hard one; ever, too, shall thy nest be open to the storm.”