The Madness of Cthulhu Anthology (Volume One): 1 (14 page)

Reed was the next to speak, and he told Profeßor M. that we all knew what she had come for, and that we would all be damned were it not returned without hesitation. Marsh replied, almost whispering, by admonishing Reed with the harshest words ever I have heard him speak, but Reed would not waver from his conviction. He had raised his voice and it had taken on a tone of genuine hysteria. He once more lifted his rifle and this time it was aimed squarely at Profeßor M.

The woman stretched out her left hand as if to confirm the rightneß of Reed’s demands. She blinked several times, and I was reminded of the flashing of a lighthouse beacon.

Reed cocked his Winchester, and this is when I raised my revolver and took aim at the woman. I had no hope of killing her, understanding on some level that such a singular entity as this visitor was beyond destruction by a mere bullet, just as the shadow behind her, that vast and mountainous thing, existed untold leagues beyond the ken of man. I cannot say now
why
I aimed my Colt at her except it is ever the way of humanity to run from or endeavour to drive back that which means us harm. And it was clear any attempt to flee would be futile.

Carlin did not move. Ashley emerged from his tent, and several of the men had also joined us. None of them uttered a sound. Wrapped about us was a silence so profound it might dwarf that which must have existed in the ages before Creation. The woman lowered her head, keeping her startling blue eyes on us, and I realised on Profeßor M. in particular. Reed said that he would not ask again but that it would be his gun that spoke next. He ordered Marsh to produce the artefact and return it forthwith to her.

Marsh cursed Reed and he cursed the impoßibly pale woman. I think he had not noticed the shadow looming above her, which surely was for the best. He cursed them both to Perdition and swore he would see Reed in prison, but he also reached into his coat pocket and produced the figurine. In the firelight it struck me as much more hideous than it had previously. I lowered my pistol and realised I must not have drawn a breath for almost a full minute.

Marsh cursed her again, spitting words with spiteful vehemence, the earlier tremble gone now from his voice. He held out the artefact and the woman smiled. I will not here make any effort to describe that smile. Better it be forgotten though I know it will haunt my dreams for the rest of my life.

Profeßor Marsh told the woman to go on ahead and take it, and if ever I meant to speak to another soul of that night I would swear before a court of law, hand on Holy Bible, to the veracity of what next occurred. That carved image that had so reminded me of one of Doré’s fallen angels vanished from Marsh’s hand and reappeared in hers. Not the smallest fraction of a second could have paßed in between. Marsh cried out and gripped the hand that had held the heathen idol (for now this is how I thought of it, as something the woman who could not
be
a woman surely worshipped). In the morning, I learned that a circular portion of Marsh’s palm no larger than a gold Indian-head dollar was badly frostbitten.

The woman folded her fingers about the object of her desire, and she almost seemed to
flow
back into the darkneß at her back. I looked up at the southern sky again, and that damnable silhouette remained. It lingered for I cannot say how long, long enough that all would bear witneß to it (save Marsh, who was too busy with his frostbit hand). And then it withdrew, making no sound at all. How its footfalls failed to shake the earth, as the Profeßor has proposed the stride of the mighty sauropod Dinosaurs must surely have, I do not know. The unnatural eclipse almost seemed to blow away, leaving no vestige behind. The stars and the waning moon were restored, and soon the night was once more alive with all the usual nighttime noises—a coyote, the hooting of owls, wind blowing through the prairie graß, the chirruping of crickets. I understood then that it truly had
only
been a shadow, as of the shadow cast by a mountain when the sun sets behind it, and I dared not contemplate what being could cast so prodigious a shadow.

Reed sat down on the ground, the Winchester slipping from his fingers, and he cried. Carlin went off to check on the horses, which had remained oddly quiet throughout the duration of the woman’s appearance. It was long after midnight before any of us went to our bedrolls, and I did not sleep. I cannot speak for the others. Never have I been so grateful for a dawn.

June 15th:
Following Profeßor M.’s departure, Reed went away to North Park to seek what fortune or misfortune there as might await him. He says his days as a “bone sharp” are over. But all the rest have decided, to my surprise, to stay on, and we resumed work at Three Trees, exposing more of the
Laosaurus.
Not a one of us has spoken of the events of the evening of the 12th. I imagine none of us ever shall. Yet I catch myself every night now fighting back an undeniable dread and glancing repeatedly toward the stars, ever expecting to find they have been obscured, by what I will not ever be able to say.

T
HE TWO FAMOUS MARBLE STATUES STAND FACING EACH OTHER IN
a front room of the little museum in the scruffy Turkish town of Seljuk, which lies just north of the ruins of the once-great Greek and Roman city of Ephesus. There was a photograph of the bigger one in my guidebook, of course. But it hadn’t prepared me—photos never really do—for the full bizarre impact of the actuality. The larger of the statues is about nine feet tall, the other one about six. Archaeologists found both of them in the courtyard of a building of this ancient city where the goddess Diana was revered. They show—you must have seen a picture of one, some time or other—a serene, slender woman wearing an ornamental headdress that is all that remains of a huge, intricate crown. Her arms are outstretched and the lower half of her body is swathed in a tight cylindrical gown. From waist to ankles, that gown is decorated with rows of vividly carved images of bees and of cattle. But that’s not where your eyes travel first, because the entire midsection of Diana of Ephesus is festooned with a grotesque triple ring of bulging pendulous breasts. Dozens of them, or several dozens. A great many.

“Perhaps they’re actually eggs,” said my brother Charlie the professor, standing just behind me. For the past eighteen months Charlie had been one of the leaders of the team of University of Pennsylvania archaeologists that has been digging lately at Ephesus. “Or fruits of some kind, apples, pears. Nobody’s really sure. Globular fertility symbols, that’s all we can say. But I think they’re tits, myself. The tits of the Great Mother, with an abundance of milk for all. Enough tits to satisfy anybody’s oral cravings, and then some.”

“An abomination before the Lord,” murmured our new companion Mr. Gladstone, the diligent Christian tourist, just about when I was expecting him to say something like that.

“Tits?” Charlie asked.

“These statues. They should be smashed in a thousand pieces and buried in the earth whence they came.” He said it mildly, but he meant it.

“What a great loss to art that would be,” said Charlie in his most pious way. “Anyway, the original statue from which these were copied fell from heaven. That’s what the Bible says, right? Book of Acts. The image that Jupiter tossed down from the sky. It could be argued that Jupiter is simply one manifestation of Jehovah. Therefore this is a holy image. Wouldn’t you say so, Mr. Gladstone?”

There was a cruel edge on Charlie’s voice; but, then, Charlie is cruel. Charming, of course, and ferociously bright, but above all else a smart-ass. He’s three years older than I am, and three times as intelligent. You can imagine what my childhood was like. If I had ever taken his cruelties seriously, I suspect I would hate him; but the best defense against Charlie is never to take him seriously. I never have, nor anything much else, either. In that way Charlie and I are similar, I suppose. But only in that way.

Mr. Gladstone refused to be drawn into Charlie’s bantering defense of idolatry. Maybe he too had figured out how to handle Charlie, a lot quicker than I ever did.

“You are a cynic and a sophist, Dr. Walker,” is all that he said. “There is no profit in disputing these matters with cynics. Or with sophists. Especially with sophists.” And to me, five minutes later, as we rambled through a room full of mosaics and frescoes and little bronze statuettes: “Your brother is a sly and very clever man. But there’s a hollowness about him that saddens me. I wish I could help him. I feel a great deal of pity for him, you know.”

* * *

That anyone would want to feel pity for Charlie was a new concept to me. Envy, yes. Resentment, disapproval, animosity, even fear, perhaps. But
pity
? For the six-foot-three genius with the blond hair and blue eyes, the movie-star face, the seven-figure trust fund, the four-digit I.Q.? I am tall too, and when I reached twenty-one I came into money also, and I am neither stupid nor ugly; but it was always Charlie who got the archery trophy, the prom queen, the honor-roll scroll, the Phi Beta Kappa key. It was Charlie who always got anything and everything he wanted, effortlessly, sometimes bestowing his leftovers on me, but always in a patronizing way that thoroughly tainted them. I have sensed people pitying me, sometimes, because they look upon me as Charlie-minus, an inadequate simulacrum of the genuine article, a pallid secondary version of the extraordinary Charlie. In truth I think their compassion for me, if that’s what it is, is misplaced: I don’t see myself as all that goddamned pitiful. But Charlie? Pitying
Charlie
?

I was touring Greece and Turkey that spring, mostly the usual Aegean resorts, Mykonos and Corfu and Crete, Rhodes and Bodrum and Marmaris. I wander up and down the Mediterranean about half the year, generally, and, though I’m scarcely a scholar, I do of course look in on the various famous classical sites along my way. By now, I suppose, I’ve seen every ruined Roman and Greek temple and triumphal arch and ancient theater there is, from Volubilis and Thuburbo Majus in North Africa up through Sicily and Pompeii, and out to Spain and France on one side and Syria and Lebanon on the other. They all blur and run together in my mind, becoming a single generic site—fallen marble columns, weatherbeaten foundations, sand, little skittering lizards, blazing sun, swarthy men selling picture-postcards—but I keep on prowling them anyway. I don’t quite know why.

There are no hotels remotely worthy of the name in or around the Ephesus ruins. But Charlie had tipped me off that I would find, about six miles down the road, a lavish new deluxe place high up on a lonely point overlooking the serene Aegean that catered mostly to groups of sun-worshipping Germans. It had an immense lobby with marble floors and panoramic windows, an enormous swimming pool, and an assortment of dining rooms that resounded day and night with the whoops and hollers of the beefy Deutschers, who never seemed to leave the hotel. Charlie drove out there to have dinner with me the night I arrived, and that was when we met Mr. Gladstone.

“Excuse me,” he said, hovering beside our table, “but I couldn’t help hearing you speaking in English. I don’t speak German at all and, well, frankly, among all these foreigners I’ve been getting a little homesick for the mother tongue. Do you mind if I join you?”

“Well—” I said, not really eager for his company, because tonight was the first time I had seen my brother in a couple of years. But Charlie grandly waved him to a seat. He was a grayish, cheerful man of about sixty, a small-town pastor from Ohio or Indiana or maybe Iowa, and he had been saving for something like twenty years to take an extensive tour of the Christian holy places of the Middle East. For the past three months he had been traveling with a little group of—pilgrims, I guess one could call them, six weeks bussing through Israel from Jerusalem to Beersheba, down to Mount Sinai, back up through the Galilee to Lebanon to see Sidon and Tyre, then out to Damascus, and so on and so on, the full Two-Testament Special. His traveling companions all had flown home by now, but Mr. Gladstone had bravely arranged a special side trip just for himself to Turkey—to poky little Seljuk in particular—because his late wife had had a special interest in an important Christian site here. He had never traveled anywhere by himself before, not even in the States, and going it alone in Turkey was a bit of a stretch for him. But he felt he owed it to his wife’s memory to make the trip, and so he was resolutely plugging along on his own here, having flown from Beirut to Izmir and then hired a car and driver to bring him down to Seljuk. He had arrived earlier this day.

“I didn’t realize there was anything of special Christian interest around here,” I said.

“The Cave of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus,” Mr. Gladstone explained. “My wife once wrote a little book for children about the Seven Sleepers. It was always her great hope to see their actual cave.”

“The Seven Sleepers?”

He sketched the story for me quickly: the seven devout Christian boys who took refuge in a cave rather than offer sacrifices in the temple of the Roman gods, and who fell into a deep sleep and came forth two hundred years later to discover that Christianity had miraculously become the official religion of Rome while they were doing their Rip Van Winkle act. What was supposedly their cave may still be seen just beyond the Roman stadium of Ephesus.

“There’s also the Meryemana,” Charlie said.

Mr. Gladstone gave him a polite blank smile. “Beg your pardon?”

“The house where the Virgin Mary lived in the last years of her life. Jesus told St. John the Apostle to look after her, and he brought her to Ephesus, so it’s said. About a hundred years ago some Eastern Orthodox priests went looking for her house and found it, sure enough, about three miles outside town.”

“Indeed.”

“More likely it’s sixth-century Byzantine,” said Charlie. “But the foundations are much older. The Orthodox Christians go there on pilgrimage every summer. You really ought to see it.” He smiled his warmest, most savage smile. “Ephesus has always been a center of mother-goddess worship, you know, and apparently it has continued to be one even in post-pagan times.”