Read Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy Online
Authors: Dennis Detwiller
Tags: #H.P. Lovecraft, #Cthulhu Mythos, #Detwiller, #Cthulhu, #Dennis Detwiller, #Delta Green, #Lovecraft
Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy (41 page)
To Hinder a Gentleman from Hell, Part 2
December 25, 1961: Blackpool, U.K.
The clock hands fixed on midnight and the bell began to strike. From below him, through the floor, Lieutenant General David Leslie Cornwall could hear his family begin their revelry anew, shouting and laughing and singing as it officially became Christmas Day.
Cornwall’s mind was fixed in the past, on the strange books of Lawrence Hutchins that they had recovered so many years ago in Australia. The books which told the future. Thousands of facts had been gleaned from their strange, cellulose pages, facts about the future stretching into the unknown decades which still lay ahead of him. It was this most of all which nearly kept him from the task at hand—the want of seeing some of the miraculous things they predicted. But his sense of duty persisted. The facts were sporadic, random, and almost always general.
Almost.
One of the assortment of alien books contained the bland recollection of some dreary man who had served in the Ministry of Defense during the early 1960s. The cheerless functionary was questioned by some sort of interrogator who had more than a passing interest in the particulars about British intelligence personnel. In those strange metal pages the clerk recalled hearing some gossip, which commonly circulates around such bureaucracies, about the retired Lieutenant General Cornwall. Many believed he had died quietly in his family home on Christmas 1961, but almost all at the Ministry knew he had actually committed suicide and the incident had been covered up by the government.
For two decades there had raged a debate within the ranks of British intelligence as to whether these books Cornwall had put so much faith in, these books he had betrayed their wartime allies for, were worth anything at all. One of the arguments against the books’ validity, one that had been thrown in Cornwall’s face again and again, was Cornwall’s predicted suicide. “Do you really believe you would ever kill yourself?” he was asked, over and over again.
When he had first read those words, the notion of taking his own life had seemed almost nonsensical. Nevertheless, over and over again, other events in the books came to pass, reinforcing the certainty of his impending doom. At times Cornwall had tried to imagine why he might kill himself nearly two decades in the future. A painful and terminal illness seemed the most likely reason, but as the years counted down no organs failed, no tumors devoured his body, no ailment of the blood eclipsed his future.
It wasn’t until the last few years that he could feel the necessary emotions gathering, one by one, like volatile chemicals being mixed to form an explosive. They had been there, stirring, for some time. All of his control, after all, all of his power was nothing but an illusion.
As his escapes narrowed and his future darkened, he began to see that he had one last duty to perform.
If Cornwall’s betrayals were to have any value, then the promise of the library had to be more than some foolish pipe dream. The books, and all their prosaic talk of the future, would have to be true. Everything in them would have to be true. Otherwise, all of it would have been senseless, futile, hollow. Cornwall may have failed to deliver the library, but he’d be damned in hell before he would allow his quest, his Holy Grail, to be nothing more than folly.
This moment had been preordained by the very power he had hoped to harness, but which he now knew he could never hope to understand. Cornwall knew he would never understand anything...
...anything except his last duty. He would protect the future by doing his part to make it the past.
Cornwall looked down the barrel of his Webley and tried desperately to see any future at all, but the black eye only looked back at him blankly.
Then, as the clock tolled twelve, just when he had given up hope, a light.
First and foremost, I must tip my hat to the master, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, one more time, and the two marvelous tales of his I used as a basis to construct this novel, “Arthur Jermyn” and “The Shadow Out of Time.” Both tales haunted me as a teenager and continue to hold that certain fear of the unknowable today, in an age of million-dollar special effects and endless dull horror movies. Their detail and richness outshines anything I have seen, and they inspired me in different ways to answer some questions that they raised in me. If you have not read them prior to this novel, read them now.
As for the questions that bothered me within those stories, the few ideas which were not clearly addressed were, for the most part, behind-the-scenes questions which could not have been presented in the stories themselves without significantly altering their narratives. Still, the gaps were very intriguing.
Why had the Great Race left their library in the desert of Australia to be found if it could be so disruptive to human history? Why did they not move it before Peaslee and company discovered it, if indeed they have traveled all of history? And most importantly, what became of the powerful “flying polyps” once they broke free of the Great Races’ wards? Wouldn’t the unstoppable beasts once more return to supremacy of the globe, erecting their black towers? Even more puzzling, if the Great Race’s weapons were no match for the extra-dimensional polyps, how did they force them beneath the ground in the first place? These questions haunted my mind. In this novel I attempt to answer them, as well as other questions I had considered in H.P.L.’s wonderful tale “Arthur Jermyn.”
Why had the ape race degenerated after constructing such a megalithic city—or did they? Why were there not other cities of the apes elsewhere on the continent? Or had the apes led to mankind as the story implies, with some inherent similarity in genetics between the white apes and humans?
It is hoped the reader understands I am not attempting to alter or change the stories in question, but to add a new layer of depth upon the almost limitless layers H.P.L. himself wrought decades ago.
Thank you for reading this book.
And, once more, thanks for everything, H.P.L.
Thanks to John Scott Tynes for working out specific cosmology issues, ideas about the Great Race, the flying polyps and the traitor’s plan, and, as usual, for his tireless (if a bit sporadic) editing efforts. Another tip of the hat to Adam Scott Glancy who created Joseph Camp, Major Cornwall, and many of the most basic concepts of the Delta Green universe, including the evil Karotechia and their plans on the coast of France. It is hoped I have not stepped on any of his creative toes with this effort. If so, too bad. (Just kidding, Scott!)
Thank you to John H. Crowe III for answering my boring and often endless questions about World War Two minutiae. “When did the Sten Mark II come into common use?” “Would a pistol explode if electricity of a high enough voltage was run through it?” “Field dress or battle dress for Waffen-SS in Belgium in 1942?” The man is a walking encyclopedia. Additional gratitude to Brian Appleton, who no doubt had to pore through this manuscript three times with a red marker until his eyes began to bleed. Sorry it wasn’t any shorter, Brian. I tried. I tried.
And a special thanks to all those who have made Delta Green such a success through their ongoing devotion to the idea!