The Cthulhu Mythos Megapack (40 Modern and Classic Lovecraftian Tales) (30 page)

Her mother and I wept for her and at the same time were afraid of her and almost wished her dead, just so it would be
over.

But it wasn’t over, was it, Justin? Just one more turn of the fucking screw, like, you know, when business failed, even in these prosperous times, and we had to sell the house, and daughter Carol flipped us the bird one last time and vanished on the back of a motorcycle. And then there was the small matter of Melanie coming down with lymph cancer at a statistically unlikely, early age; which metastasized; and on the night when she died, when I sat for hours by her bedside in the hospital and held her hand and whispered little stupid nothings that she couldn’t hear anyway; on
that
night of all nights I fell asleep, finally, out of sheer exhaustion, and dreamed for the first time in a very long time of deep spaces and dark planets.

I dreamed that I was hanging naked, like a trapped insect amid the frozen spiderwebworks of the Gardens of Ynath, beneath the brilliant stars in a black sky. And I heard the whispers of many voices, of those hanging there with me, frozen forever, suspended against time until the ultimate ending of the universe, and I conversed long and profoundly with a pharaoh of ancient Egypt, who had found his way hence four thousand years ago, and with an artisan and scientist of medieval Italy who had delved into forbidden mysteries and contrived to be carried off one step ahead of the Inquisition; and I spoke too, with a member of the beetle race which will succeed mankind on the Earth two million years hence, and with minds which had never known or imagined our species at all.

For in the Gardens of Ynath there is no time, and the future is as negligible as the past.

I dreamed of all those minds and voices, and it seemed, in my dream, that all of them were glorious and transfigured and greatly expectant; and also, I think, in part, afraid, of the one who is to come at the end of time, who was described to me in a manner I couldn’t quite understand as the Darkness (or Chaos) that walks like a man, before whose feet we shall all, in the end, fall down in abject worship.

Such was my dream, and when I awoke alarms were going off and all the TV monitors around Melanie’s bed had flatlined and the nurse hauled me aside to make room for frantic doctors and their useless ministrations.

I almost felt that you were with me in the room, Justin, and I cannot believe it was a coincidence that I reached into my pocket and took out your postcard, and read the address: a rural route, familiar zip code, the old Akeley place. I think you were there. I think you guided me as I walked out of the hospital unchallenged, as if I were invisible, and looked up into the bright New York sky and saw, hovering above the parking lot, one of the Outer Ones, like a crab or a jellyfish with mebranous wings, waiting, visible for just a short time before it faded into the glare of the city lights.

* * * *

We sat by candlelight at the table inside the old farmhouse, and you said to me, “It’s all lies, Opie. Crap.”

You wept then, and I looked at you with terror and amazement.

“No,” I said. “You can’t mean that.”

“I mean all this messianic garbage, the idea that They were watching over us and guiding us and would take the faithful few off to the Gardens of Ynath to dwell in glory and wisdom forever—”

“I know,” I said. “I read your book.”

“All crap.”

“Well what is the truth then?”

“This.”

And you showed it to me. You reached under the table and lifted up something heavy, then thumped it down in front of me, the black stone, square, about the size and weight of a bowling ball, covered on all its surfaces with very worn, hieroglyphic writing. When I saw it, when I ran my hands over it, I knew that it had not been manufactured on this planet, and I knew, too, what it was; for I had seen such things in my dreams.

In the Gardens of Ynath there is a great altar of pale, powdery stone, with many niches in it, where such objects are placed, and some of those niches are empty.

“It’s all too absurd,” you said. There were tears on your face, gleaming in the candlelight. You looked very old then, exhausted, defeated. “The purpose of this entire exercise, the reason for the manipulation and ruin of generations of human lives, was not to uplift the human race with any goddamn cosmic message or to reward any faithful believers, but simply
to recover this stone
. It is one of five brought to Earth millions of years ago. One was recovered in Wales in the late 19th Century. All of the others have storied histories. This one was found, and lost again, in the 1920’s. I can’t give you all the details. I don’t know them. There was a lot of intrigue, subterfuge, something about a fake being sent away by rail freight, intercepted as it was supposed to be, a decoy… I don’t even know why they want it. For reasons they’ve never bothered to tell us. Shit.… They went through such trouble for decades at a time, when all this while, the fucking thing was buried under the floorboards of this farmhouse. Old Man Akeley fooled them, recovered it, or never lost it, and stashed it.… Somehow they never figured it out. That was his last victory over them, before…whatever happened to him. Well, the only thing that makes any sense, when you think about it, is that the Outer Ones are just as stupid as we are.”

“No,” I said quietly. “For once I must tell you that you’ve got it all wrong. For once, at last, I am the master and you are the acolyte.”

You merely turned to me in a daze and said, “What?” or maybe it was “Huh?” before I hefted the black stone and brained you with it.

I did so because I understood what you could not, that it isn’t a matter of messiahs or movements or even of serving them in some semi-intelligent way. It’s about joining the flea circus. They carried you off, because you promised them the black stone. But you did not have it, so they brought you back, to complete your trick. Now you have. That stone is a ticket to the Beyond. Not out of gratitude will they take the bearer of the stone off with them, but for reasons of their own. It is not the faithful who shall be transported, but whoever holds the ticket, that’s all.

Me. You brought me to this point. It is only logical that I should go.

After I struck you, I stood over you, and though you lay in a puddle of your own blood, I was not convinced that I had killed you.

I say that you will rise again, awaken out of your long dream and find me gone. But, being as I am such a normal fellow, a paragon of business-like efficiency, I conveniently have in my pocket a palmtop computer, into which I type this account, this imagining, for your benefit. I leave it here on the tabletop, for you to read when you’ve sufficiently recovered.

Because we were friends once. Because I want you to understand.

* * * *

Now an absurd image comes: the stars are swirling like the water down a bathtub drain; no, like a vast cyclone stretching over lightyears of space and aeons of time, and the great numbers of the winged ones are like gnats, like mayflies, swarming into that brilliant abyss, into the mouth of eternity, which shall swallow up the bearer and the stone together; and I shall dwell without pain in the Gardens of Ynath amid my companions, until the ending of time, when the Crawling Chaos takes shape and walks like a man. Then shall I fall down at his feet and worship, and, like an animal, reach up to lick his outstretched hands.

That’s what you wanted in the end, isn’t it?

DRAWN FROM LIFE, by John Glasby

Never had I thought I should have to write of the hideous affair of Antonio Valliecchi and the terrible happenings in the house in Mewson Street, for there are shocking events which occur on the very rim of human consciousness which are best kept hidden and unmentioned. The horrendous truth behind his death is something no one will believe. I am only writing this record now because I have heard vague rumours the authorities are considering pulling down those old houses and I dread what they might find in the one at the very end, standing alone on the hill.

This is the one where Valliecchi lived when he came to London in the autumn of 1975. It is an early-Georgian building standing in its own grounds. Very few outsiders know this area of London, right on the outskirts, well off the beaten track. I must confess I had no idea it existed until that night. Yet it was there I discovered that there are shadows in this world of which few are aware; and yet of which all should be afraid.

I lived in a little Mews off Chelsea at the time and was busy with my book dealing with the lesser-known contemporary artists and had taken to frequenting the older and lesser-known bookshops and art studios searching for material during the mornings, writing up whatever I had gathered in the afternoons and evenings.

I had only vaguely heard of Valliecchi apart from the fact that he gave a violin concert at the Albert Hall and there were billboards all over the place and rave notices in the papers the following day.

One morning, I came across a little shop in one of the narrow streets that form a maze in the middle of Chelsea. I do not even recall seeing the name of the street. There was a decaying church at the corner of a tiny square and innumerable alleys leading off the place in all directions. It was a backwater that not even the summer tourists ever visit.

The shop was so small I almost passed it by without noticing it. In the window was the usual layout of painting on small wooden easels. There was certainly nothing inspiring and no items of any interest to me. In retrospect it seems certain that the sequence of fearful events that were to follow, culminating in that final cataclysm of horror, would never have occurred had not some imp of perversity prompted me to go inside and browse around.

It was dark and dingy inside and I had never been able to get the proper feel of a painting unless I could examine it under the correct lighting conditions. There were a few more paintings hanging around the walls but these I dismissed at once. I was on the point of leaving when I noticed a stack of canvasses in one corner, standing on edge, one against the other. It was as if the owner had discarded them, considering them to be of little value.

I suppose it must have been perverse curiosity more than anything that made me go through them for I wasn’t expecting to find anything exciting. There were a few abstracts, a couple of mediocre still-life pictures; not much to stir any kind of emotion in me.

Then I came across it, tucked away at the back as if it had been there, forgotten, for a very long time.

Merciful God in Heaven, would that I had tossed it back into the pile and walked out without unrolling it and looking at that hellish painting! My first thought was that I had stumbled across an unknown Goya. But when I took it across to the window for a better look I knew that not even Goya could have painted anything like that. It was sheer, undiluted horror!

It takes more than mere imagination and inspired brushwork to turn out paintings like Valliecchi, for that was the name at the bottom of the canvas. Any dauber can churn out covers for horror magazines, which are intended to convey fear and scare the reader into buying the book. Pictures like that just make me want to smile at the naivety of those who buy such magazines. But it takes a rare kind of genius to depict real horror; the kind that makes one shiver just to look at it. The kind that makes you believe that not only can such things exist;
but that they do exist
!

In general terms, the picture was a landscape; but it was like none I had ever seen, even in my wildest nightmares. It is difficult even to begin to describe it. There was a rocky plateau piled high with drifts of
green
sand. Normally that would have put me off completely. Yet in that painting, it looked right. I got the impression that, taking the landscape as a whole, any other color would have been utterly out of place.

There was a sheer cliff on one side dotted with cave openings in which there were glimpses of eldritch things. Mere words cannot describe them in any other way for they did not even remotely resemble anything in real life as I know it. Valliecchi had given only vague suggestions of outline; but that was more than enough. They looked positively frightening.

It was a little while before the peculiarity about the name on the painting struck me. Antonio Valliecchi. It seemed highly unlikely that he and the concert violinist were the same man. And yet, I thought, why not? It was unlikely that two men of the same name were undoubted geniuses in similar creative fields of art.

I knew I had to have the painting. Curiously, I did not have to haggle with the owner over the price. He let me have it for a ridiculously low sum. Possibly it had lain there for so long, gathering dust, he was glad to rid of it. It was, he said, the only one by Valliecchi he had and as to whether the painter and violinist were one and the same man, he did not know. To my inquiry as to whether he had come across any other work by Valliecchi, he replied that he had never seen any himself but had heard that there were one or two others in circulation. He affirmed that there was not much call for such bizarre work.

I was convinced that Valliecchi must have possessed a terrific imagination to have painted anything like that landscape. At least, I was certain at that time. Now, however, I know differently.

Everything was so real, so lifelike. This was far removed from the usual run of still-life pictures and landscapes that passed for art. There was a quality about it, which made it stand out from anything I had ever seen. Every little detail seemed to leap out of the canvas as if the viewer were standing on the edge of that hellish plateau and looking at it in real life.

And those creatures, whatever they were, seemed on the point of creeping out of the black cavern mouths right out of the picture.

Somehow, Valliecchi had captured all the color, all of the depths, of that scene. He had given it a three-dimensional quality that was positively uncanny. Every tiny detail was so sharp and clear it took my breath away. Once I got it home, I kept gazing at it in utter fascination, scarcely able to tear my gaze away.

I spent the following five months hunting all over London trying to pick up further examples of his work. I went first to the National Art Gallery, reckoning that if Valliecchi was such an acclaimed genius as a violinist, he was sufficiently well known for at least one of his paintings to be there. But there was nothing. The curator had heard of him. They had even seen an example of his work but had declined it. They did not hang that sort of work there, he told me, even with a name like Antonio Valliecchi on it. That particular form of art was too bizarre and out-of-this-world for the taste of the general public.

He suggested I try some of the collectors on the fringe of the art world. At first, my inquiries were met with blank stares and polite shakes of the head. I began to despair of ever obtaining another Valliecchi canvas.

Then, one evening, shortly after sunset, I entered an area of London I had never visited before. I had been wandering aimlessly through a tangle of narrow streets and alleys, taking little notice of my surroundings, so that when I eventually regained my concentration, and took stock of my whereabouts, I realized I was lost.

I was at the top of a low hill. Below me, the small houses and shops were dark and deserted. The sky was darkening rapidly and I scanned the distant horizon, searching for some landmark that would guide me back towards familiar surroundings. Fortunately, I made out the dome of St. Paul’s over to my left and set off hurriedly down the hill into the deepening dusk.

It was as I turned the corner at the bottom of the hill that I glimpsed the yellow light still burning in a small square window on the opposite side of the street. I might have passed it by without a second glance but something made me cross over and look inside.

And there, hanging against a black backcloth were two more paintings I knew instinctively were by Valliecchi. Trying the door, I was surprised to find it open. To the owner, I explained that I found the two canvasses in the window extremely interesting and asked if they were, by any chance, the work of Antonio Valliecchi. For a moment, he looked extremely surprised and I was subjected to a close scrutiny before he eventually replied.

“Indeed they are,” he said. “But I must confess surprise at finding anyone who would recognize them.”

“Are they for sale?” I inquired.

He intimated they were and after settling on the price he took them from the window and rolled them carefully before handing them across the counter.

Before I left, I asked him how he had obtained them. He stood in contemplative silence for several moments, seemingly reluctant to answer, then he admitted he had bought them off Valliecchi himself.

Apparently it had been three years before. He had met Valliecchi in Italy and considered him to be more than just eccentric. In his own words, Valliecchi was haunted. It was a funny sort of expression to use at the time and I wasn’t sure what he meant. It was not until some time later I was to find out just how close to the truth he was. Valliecchi, he maintained, was a very frightened man in spite of his outward show of nonchalance and his polished performances on the concert platform.

An hour later, after almost losing my way again, I reached home and took the paintings into the small parlor, switching on all of the lights in order that I might examine them in minute detail. I soon discovered they were even more disconcerting than the first. One was of a huge subterranean cavern and the way Valliíecchi had painted it, it seemed to stretched back into infinity. It was absolute genius but not the sort of thing anyone would wish to hang in their drawing room. There was some kind of ceremony going on in the center of the picture and all of the figures were hooded and robed. But I needed only one glance to realize those figures were not even remotely human—and the monstrous idol they were worshipping was hideous beyond all belief. Yet all was so realistic. I had the unshakable conviction that such a scene had been enacted somewhere, at some time, and it was not simply a product of the artist’s imagination.

Somehow, he had mastered the technique of painting in three dimensions. And when I unrolled the other canvas I found it to be the most horrific of the three. It was also the only one Valliecchi had titled.

At the bottom, he had painted the words ‘
Void Before Creation
’. Much of it was little more than a blank, black emptiness with what appeared to be suns and planets beginning to form around the edges and on one side, men were evolving from beasts.

It was only when I looked at it really closely I realized there was something in the middle of it all; something just a shade darker than the rest, amorphous and tentacled, sprawled across the center of the painting, touching everything which was being created out of midnight nothingness.

I had the feeling his intention was to show that everything had been originally formed out of utter evil and chaos and would remain tainted with it until the end of time. Like the one I had come across in Chelsea, I burned those two monstrous canvasses after the hideous affair of Valliecchi’s death.

A week later, I learned that Valliecchi had been invited to play at an exclusive club of which I was a member. By now, I was so intrigued by his work I knew I had to go along to hear him and, if possible, seek him out and ask about this other side of his creative genius with which few people seemed to be acquainted.

On the evening in question, I was in my seat half an hour before Valliecchi was due to arrive. Every seat was taken. When the lights went down, everything was quiet as the curtains opened and I saw the lone figure on the stage. I must confess I had not known quite what to expect.

What I saw was a frail little man in his early sixties with a neat goatee beard and pure white hair ruffled about his temples. He seemed quite ordinary at first glance. It was only when I looked at his eyes that I knew what the old shopkeeper had meant about him being haunted. There was no doubt about it. He was a man who went through life continually looking over his shoulder at something fearful that walked close behind him, dogging his footsteps. Something unseen and yet terrifying.

Then he started to play. And he made his violin do everything but speak. And the music! It rose and fell in wild, tormented shrieks and cadences as if the instrument had a soul of its own which was in mortal danger of being lost for ever in the fires of Hell.

He played nonstop for three quarters of an hour. But it was not just his playing that scared me more than I cared to admit. There was something else. Sitting there in the dimness with just the spotlight shining onto the stage, I had the uncomfortable feeling there were curious antiphonal echoes coming from somewhere out of the distance in answer to that strange music.

Not until later did I get an opportunity to speak to Valliecchi. His host had been called away to the telephone and the violinist was left seated at the main table. He was surprised when I took him by the arm and lowered myself into the chair beside him. And his expression of astonishment turned to something more akin to fear when I told him I had three of his paintings and wished to talk to him about them. He attempted to struggle from my grasp and muttered something under his breath about dabbling in things I did not understand.

Even when he saw I did not intend taking no for an answer, he denied he had ever painted any pictures claiming it must be someone else I was talking about. Then he saw his denials had no effect on me and he finally admitted he painted but only as a sideline, not to make any profit. It had obviously been a big mistake to allow any of his pictures to get onto the market.