The Madness of Cthulhu Anthology (Volume One): 1 (27 page)

But I
was
remembering. And changing. Even I could see that my skin was no longer the mottled gray it had once been, covered with spiky tufts of hair. My snout was receding, becoming less a malformation. My claws and teeth had receded too. I began to express the desire to wear clothing. He laughed at that at first, then finally tossed me an old coat.

I think he was almost disappointed. He painted no more pictures of me, at least not from life. He referred instead to photographs taken earlier. Still, he listened to the tales I told him and accompanied me a few more times on our excursions, but not very far, because it was I, I think, who was starting to forget the way.

Nevertheless, it was to be a fair exchange. He had promised that. He longed for the darkness and I had given him the darkness, yielding up as many of its secrets as I could.

I longed for the light. In that, he betrayed me vilely.

* * *

The betrayal happened like this:

I said, “I want to go out,” meaning I wanted to walk with him on the streets of the city, among the houses and streetcars, in the light.

He merely said, “Don’t be ridiculous.”

But I had brooded over it for a long time. I
knew
what I wanted and where I wanted to go. I had made preparations. Increasing what otherwise might have been prankish activities, I had haunted more iron-barred crypts on cloudy days and reached out to
snatch
what I could from passing funerals, a top hat, a handkerchief, a wristwatch, even a walking stick. Yes, there were shrieks when I did that, and yes, I should have found them delicious, but I was preoccupied with my future intent. Yes, you can read in the newspapers about how vandals and pranksters and thugs had created disturbances in the cemeteries, though you may not necessarily learn how certain tombs were smashed open, examined with growing disgust and horror on the part of the investigators, then sealed off entirely with newly-poured cement.

So there I was, clad in a black suit I had pilfered from a fresh corpse, handkerchief stuffed into the pocket. I wore the wristwatch, and the smashed top hat I had hauled in through the bars. It is true that the trousers had shredded as I pulled them on, and I wasn’t wearing shoes because no shoes were ever made for feet such as mine, but still I stood upright, and I even squinted through a stolen
monocle
.

I stepped toward him, walking stick in hand, and said, “What do you think?”

And he said again, nervously, yes, on the edge of fear, but still
not
afraid. “Don’t be
ridiculous
.”

But I insisted, most urgently. I told him that I was a
man
and that I had a
name
and I actually
spoke that name aloud
.

This time he was so astonished he actually
did
drop his camera. He sat down in a chair, limply.

“That’s incredible. You remember who you once were. That not possible, but it has happened. So many things are impossible, but they have happened. I don’t know where to begin.”

“I want to go out.”

“No.”

I picked up a bouquet of flowers I had stolen from a grave. I said my name again. I said
another name
too, that of someone with whom the first name had once been
in love
.

This almost put him into a kind of rage. “You think you remember who you were! But I
knew
that man.”

“I know I was in love,” I said. “I
am
in love.”

For a moment this seemed so preposterous that he simply could not grasp it. He gaped at me in silence, his mind struggling to formulate a reply. He almost seemed to laugh, but didn’t. Then he spoke, in a rapid-fire, low-voiced staccato.

“A random memory, like a page fallen from a book, out of order. What you don’t seem to know, my friend, is that the man in question,
you
, when he was very young, was
indeed in love
, but that ended badly. Perhaps
she
saw in him, already, a certain contagion. After that contagion had corrupted his soul sufficiently, he was
transformed
. I think you recall the rest—no, no, you clearly
don’t
. What you don’t seem quite able to bring to mind is that
after
your transformation had progressed a considerable ways, you came a-calling on the gentle lady. You burst in on her, stinking of the grave, and she died shrieking in a madhouse within weeks. It was a great scandal at the time. Now it is the stuff of fantastic legend. Sorry, old chap. I have done you a disservice. I have reminded you of too much. I have awakened too much. But don’t delude yourself. There is no going back. Sometimes oblivion is a mercy. Try to embrace it if you can.”

Demonstrating a mastery of newly regained vocabulary and concepts I said,
“You
are
lying.”

“Would I make a story like that up? Would I
have to
?” He snatched up a mirror that he sometimes used to gain different perspectives in his painting, and held it up to my face. “Just look at yourself. Don’t be ridiculous.”

I grabbed the mirror out of his hand and held it up to
his
face.

“Just look,” I said. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

There was a split second of fear then. I tasted it on the air. The mirror crashed to the floor. I slashed at him with my claws, unimpressive though they might be. That was when he jerked back, then drew his pistol and shot me in the chest.

Of course a bullet cannot kill one such as I, but the blow staggered me back.

Yes, he
was
afraid.

He was afraid of what he had seen, in that mirror, that
his
features were subtly beginning to change, as if he and I had quested in opposite directions, met midway, and had become quite startlingly alike.

I don’t think he was ready for that yet. Even he could delude himself.

I heard a noise in the room beyond us. There was someone else in the building. He had brought in another Warm, no doubt to show off his paintings and relish that other person’s fear.

I could taste it on the air. A swirling mass of fear.
Ravishing
.
Exquisite
.

I lunged forward, and he shot me again and again and again.

He was able to make his way out the door and bolt it behind him.

For the moment I so overwhelmed by the betrayal, by the realization that our friendship was at an end, that it had never existed, that everything had been a lie and all hopes were false hopes. In my very last truly human gesture, I stood there in stunned silence, weeping softly.

That gave him time to usher his visitor away.

It was only later that I howled and clawed at the door and at the floor, that I went to the mouth of the tunnel-shaft in the floor and screamed down into the darkness, until the dark world beneath reverberated with my cries and several of my larger and more capable fellows emerged to join me and to sniff the air.

Together we forced our way into the adjoining chamber, where a large canvas was on the easel. We smashed everything. We tasted fear in the air, thick as smoke, though the house was, for the moment, empty.

When he came back, we were lurking in every corner, and we fell on him in a mass, but
I
was the one who was afraid now, because my fellows
did not rend him
, even as they carried him down the shaft and through many tunnels. I scurried after them on all fours. I slashed the remnants of my clothing away with my claws. I howled with the rest and followed until we came to that vast, black, inner space where the elders of our race swim like leviathans before the throne of Azathoth. There we brought him, to be judged.

But they did not rend him.

And I was afraid, because I knew that one day he would be our king.

D
R
. P
AUL
D
YER WAS ALWAYS SOMETHING OF AN OUTSIDER AMONG
the Miskatonic faculty. A Geppetto-like figure with a slight build, shoulders seemingly stooped since childhood, and a prematurely graying toothbrush of a mustache, Paul was innately “old school,” a pipe-smoking dinosaur of tweed suits and bow ties; and even when the university began supplying teacher and student alike with tablet computers and digital textbooks, and the dully reflecting slate of classroom blackboards and the squeak of humdrum chalk were giving way to spacious white panels, erasable markers, and LCD displays, Paul Dyer was much more likely to be seen with real books, pen, and paper before him, polishing—slowly and thoughtfully—his bifocal glasses with a pocket handkerchief while he considered, variously, his lectures, his students, and his own research … this last so apparently unremarkable in its nature yet diligent in execution as to have secured for him his tenure and, eventually, chairmanship of the geology department.

I first met him when I was an undergraduate frantically juggling three jobs, studies, and homework with one of the primitive spreadsheet programs available in those halcyon days when a Pentium III with a hundred-megabyte hard drive was considered fine style indeed and professors would still entertain term papers banged out on an IBM Selectric. I think what first endeared the old man (though at that time he had in truth barely passed his half century) to me was the time my typewriter broke down and he graciously accepted my final report for my science requirement in the form of a fifty-page handwritten manuscript.

“Just so it is legible, Mr. Marsh,” he told me in his soft Swiss accent as he took the proffered sheaf of papers. “I cannot bear chicken scratches.” A wink. “Old eyes, you know.”

Fortunately, I had by then deliberately cultivated a fine, round hand, and the paper was not only legible but, as it turned out, worthy of high marks, for it was handed back with an A and a superscripted “Not bad, young man. Not bad at all.”

I assumed the superscript was mere politeness, but I realized later that he shared an interest in my paper’s subject: the anomalous hydrothermal vents that occasionally crop up on the abyssal plains of the oceans, far away from subduction zones or magma plumes.

At that time, I had not given much thought to my life’s longterm course. Too much of the aforesaid juggling, not to mention the additional (but rather pleasant) complication of a young lady. But the simple graciousness of Paul Dyer had demonstrated to me that there was more to college than preparation for a lucrative corporate position, and I turned my efforts toward geology, emulating the man who eventually became both mentor and colleague.

“Perilous work, Mr. Marsh,” he said when I informed him of my decision. “You might recall what it did to my father.”

In truth, that was the first time I had ever heard of his father, the late William Dyer, and perhaps the son’s words were indeed meant as a warning. But I possessed the enthusiasm of youth (not to mention a profound ignorance that nameless secrets exist … and that they lurk in dark and uncharted corners of the same world that harbors such terrors as reality TV and video games) and was therefore prompted to paw my way through the resources of the university library in order to find out why something as absurdly mundane as the study of rocks might be considered perilous (leaving aside the question of particularly large specimens falling upon one’s head) and what, in fact, it had done to William Dyer himself.

The usual references told me nothing beyond the bare fact of William’s professorship at Miskatonic University, with a vague mention of his leadership of the school’s Antarctic expedition of 1930–31. And when, finally, one of the older librarians, with an air of distaste, muttered something about “
theuse
people down in Special Collections” perhaps knowing about it, I at last found myself down in the basement of the library near what was usually termed “the Vault”—a section of library holdings deemed either too valuable or too controversial for normal academic perusal, and normally quite off-limits to undergraduates. I, however, appeared to have acquired permission … from Paul Dyer himself.

It was there that I read through a yellowing typescript report and learned of the university’s ill-fated venture to the polar continent over sixty years before, when that ice-shrouded landmass was yet unprobed by satellite images or radar scans, but was instead explored and mapped, at great risk, by prop-driven airplanes, dogsleds, and the dependable simplicity of rock drills, dynamite, and geological hammers.

Great risk indeed, for after a promising beginning, which included the discovery of some peculiarly well-developed Comanchean Era radiata and a previously unmapped but extremely high mountain range, Dyer’s expedition met with disaster. Ice storms and terrible austral winds resulted in the complete obliteration of a group of the Miskatonic explorers that had, at the urging of a biologist named Lake, unwisely separated from the main body. The devastation was total. Every one of Lake’s party, including the sled dogs, died, and so complete was the loss of life and equipment—the latter including custom ice-melting devices and a newly designed drilling rig created by Frank Pabodie of the MU engineering department (whose grandson was now a faculty member in the same field)—that there was nothing to do but terminate the operation and bring the survivors home.

Seated in the dim reading room just outside the steel door leading to the vault, I could not but blink in bafflement when I finished the slim report held loose-leaf in a crumbling manila folder. It made no sense. If Lake and his party had perished in an ice storm, that was an explanation sufficient unto itself. Why secrete this document in Special Collections when any newspaper of the period would have told much the same story?

A shadow at the door of the reading room proved to be the somewhat furtive figure of the Special Collections librarian, who apologized to me in hushed tones for having been required—library policy, of course—to place a telephone call to Dr. Dyer for confirmation of his permission, and while I pondered his words, he punched in the combination to the vault, swung the door wide, and in a minute returned from its depths with a thick, three-ring notebook, explaining that since what he was now putting before me was but one of two extant copies of this particular manuscript, I would be required to provide a signature.