The Taint and Other Novellas (15 page)

“Not
you,
sir, indeed no! From a gent so obviously and sincerely interested in the mysteries within—from a man of your high standing”—again the expansive gesture—“why, I couldn’t accept money from you, sir. It’s an honour to have you visit us!”

“Thank you,” Henley dryly answered, passing myopically into the great tent beyond the ticket booth. Tharpe’s smile slowly faded, was replaced by a look of cunning. Quickly the tall man pocketed his few shillings in takings, then followed the slight figure of the ex-professor into the smelly sawdust-floored “museum”, beyond the canvas flap.

In all, a dozen people waited within the big tent’s main division. A pitifully small “crowd”. But in any case, though he kept his interest cleverly veiled, Tharpe’s plans involved only the ex-professor. The tall man’s flattery at the ticket booth had not all been flannel; he had spotted Henley immediately as the very species of highly educated fly for which his flypaper—in the form of the new and enigmatic legend across the visage of the one-time freak-house—had been erected above Bathley Moor.

There had been, Tharpe reflected, men of outwardly similar intelligence before at the Tomb of the Great Old Ones; and more than one of them had told him that certain of his
artifacts
—those items which he kept, as his brother had kept them before him, in a separately enclosed part of the tent—were of an unbelievable antiquity. Indeed, one man had been so affected by the very sight of such ancientness that he had run from Tharpe’s collection in stark terror, and he had never returned. That had been in May, and though almost six months had passed since that time, still Tharpe had come no closer to an understanding of the mysterious objects which his brother Hamilton had brought back with him from certain dark corners of the world; objects which, early in 1961, had caused him to kill Hamilton in self-defence.

Anderson had panicked then—he realized that now—for he might easily have come out of the affair blameless had he only reported Hamilton’s death to the police. For a long time the folk of Hodgson’s Funfair had known that there was something drastically wrong with Hamilton Tharpe; his very sanity had been questioned, albeit guardedly. Certainly Anderson would have been declared innocent of his brother’s murder—the case would have gone to court only as a matter of formality—but he had panicked. And of course there had been…complications.

With Hamilton’s body secretly buried deep beneath the freak-house, the folk of the fairground had been perfectly happy to believe Anderson’s tale of his brother’s abrupt departure on yet another of his world-spanning expeditions, the like of which had brought about all the trouble in the first place.

Now Anderson thought back on it all…

He and his brother had grown up together in the fairground, but then it had been their father’s property, and “Tharpe’s Funfair”had been known throughout all England for its fair play and prices. Wherever the elder Tharpe had taken his stalls and sideshows—of which the freak-house had ever been his personal favourite—his employees had been sure of good crowds. It was only after old Tharpe died that the slump started.

It had had much to do with young Hamilton’s joy in old books and fancifully dubious legends; his lust for travel, adventure, and
outré
knowledge. His first money-wasting venture had been a “treasure-hunting” trip to the islands of the Pacific, undertaken solely on the strength of a vague and obviously fake map. In his absence—he had gone off with an adventurous and plausible rogue from the shooting gallery—Anderson looked after the fair. Things went badly and all the Tharpes got out of Hamilton’s venture was a number of repulsively carved stone tablets and one or two patently aboriginal sculptings, not the least of which was a hideous, curiously winged octopoid idol. Hamilton placed the latter obscenity in the back of their caravan home as being simply too fantastic for display to an increasingly mundane and sceptical public.

The idol, however, had a most unsettling effect upon the younger brother. He was wont to go in to see the thing in the dead of night, when Anderson was in bed and apparently asleep. But often Anderson was awake, and during these nocturnal visits he had heard Hamilton
talking
to the idol. More disturbingly, he had once or twice dimly imagined that he heard something talking back! Too, before he went off again on his wanderings in unspoken areas of the great deserts of Arabia, the sensitive, mystery-loving traveller had started to suffer from especially bad nightmares.

Again, in Hamilton’s absence, things went badly. Soon Anderson was obliged to sell out to Bella Hodgson, retaining only the freak-house as his own and his prodigal brother’s property. A year passed, and another before Hamilton once more returned to the fairground, demanding his living as before but making little or no attempt to work for his needs. There was no arguing, however, for the formerly sensitive younger brother was a changed, indeed a saturnine man now, so that soon Anderson came to be a little afraid of him.

And quite apart from the less obvious alterations in Hamilton, other changes were much more apparent; changes in habit, even in appearance. The most striking was the fact that now the younger Tharpe constantly wore a shaggy black toupee, as if to disguise his partial premature baldness, which all of the funfair’s residents knew about anyway and which had never caused him the least embarrassment before. Also, he had become so reticent as to be almost reclusive; keeping to himself, only rarely and reluctantly allowing himself to be drawn into even the most trivial conversations.

More than this: there had been a time prior to his second long absence when Hamilton had seemed somewhat enamoured of the young, single, dark-eyed Romany fortune-teller, “Madame Zala”—a Gypsy girl of genuine Romany ancestry—but since his return he had been especially cool towards her, and for her own part she had been seen to cross herself with a pagan sign when he had happened to be passing by. Once he had seen her make this sign, and then he had gone white with fury, hurrying off to the freak-house and remaining there for the rest of that day. Madame Zala had packed up her things and left one night in her horse-drawn caravan without a word of explanation to anyone. It was generally believed that Hamilton had threatened her in some way, though no one ever taxed him over the affair. For his own part, he simply averred that Zala had been “a charlatan of the worst sort, without the ability to conjure a puff of wind!”

All in all the members of the funfair fraternity had been quick to find Hamilton a very changed man, and towards the end there had been the aforementioned hints of a brewing madness…

On top of all this, Hamilton had again taken up his nocturnal visits to the octopoid idol, but now such visits seemed less frequent than of old. Less frequent, perhaps, but they nevertheless heralded much darker events; for soon Hamilton had installed the idol within a curtained and spacious corner of the tent, in the freak-house itself, and he no longer paid his visits alone…

Anderson Tharpe had seen, from his darkened caravan window, a veritable procession of strangers—all of them previous visitors to the freak-house, and always the more intelligent types—accompanying his brother to the tent’s nighted interior. But he had never seen a one come out! Eventually, as his younger brother became yet more saturnine, reticent, and secretive, Anderson took to spying on him in earnest—and later almost wished that he had not.

In the months between, however, Hamilton had made certain alterations to the interior of the freak-house, partitioning fully a third of its area to enclose the collection of rare and obscure curiosities garnered upon his travels. At that time Anderson had been puzzled to distraction by his brother’s firm refusal to let his treasures be viewed by any but a chosen few of the freak-house’s patrons: those doubtfully privileged persons who later accompanied him into the private museum never again to leave.

Of course, Anderson finally reasoned, the answer was as simple as it was fantastic: somewhere upon his travels Hamilton had learned the arts of murder and thievery, arts he was now practicing in the freak-house. The bodies? These he obviously buried, to leave behind safely lodged in the dark earth when the fair moved on. But the money…what of the money? For money—or rather its lack—patently formed the younger brother’s motive. Could he be storing his booty away, against the day when he would go off on yet another of his foolish trips to foreign places? Beside himself that he had not been “cut in”on the profits of Hamilton’s dark machinations, Anderson determined to have it out with him; to catch him, as it were, red-handed.

And yet it was not until early-in-the spring of 1961 that Anderson finally managed to “overhear” a conversation between his brother and an obviously well-to-do visitor to the freak-house. Hamilton had singled out this patently intelligent gentleman for attention, inviting him back to the caravan during a break in business. Anderson, knowing most of the modus operandi by now and, aware of the turn events must take, positioned himself outside the caravan where he could eavesdrop.

He did not catch the complete conversation, and yet sufficient to make him aware at last of Hamilton’s expert and apparently unique knowledge in esoteric mysteries. For the first time he heard uttered the mad words Cthulhu and Yibb-Tstll, Tsathoggua and Yog-Sothoth, Shudde-M’ell and Nyarlathotep, discovering that these were names of monstrous “gods” from the dawn of time. He heard mention of Leng and Lh’yib; Mnar, Ib and Sarnath; R’lyeh and “red-litten” Yoth, and knew now that these were cities and lands ancient even in antiquity. He heard descriptions and names given to manuscripts, books and tablets—and here he started in recognition, for he knew that some of these aeon-old writings existed amid Hamilton’s treasures in the freak-house—and among others he heard the strangely chilling titles of such works as the
Necronomicon,
the
Cthaat Aquadingen
, the
Pnakotic Manuscripts
and the
R’lyehan Texts.
This then formed the substance of Hamilton’s magnetism: his amazing erudition in matters of myth and time-lost lore.

When he perceived that the two were about to make an exit from the caravan, Anderson quickly hid himself away behind a nearby stall to continue his observations. He saw the flushed face of Hamilton’s new confidant, his excited gestures; and, at a whispered suggestion from the pale-faced brother, he finally saw that gentleman nodding eagerly, wide-eyed in awed agreement. And after the visitor had gone, Anderson saw the look that flitted briefly across his brother’s features: a look that hinted of awful triumph, nameless emotion—and, yes, purest evil!

But it was something about the face of the departed visitor—that rounded gentleman of obvious substance but doubtful future—which caused Anderson the greatest concern. He had finally recognized that face from elsewhere, and at his first opportunity he sneaked a glance through some of the archaeological and anthropological journals which his brother now spent so much time reading. It was as he had thought: Hamilton’s prey was none other than an eminent explorer and archaeologist; one whose name, Stainton Gamber, might be even higher in the lists of famous adventurers and discoverers but for a passion for wild-goose expeditions and safaris. Then he grew even more worried, for plainly his brother could not go on forever depleting the countryside of eminent persons without being discovered.

That afternoon passed slowly for Anderson Tharpe, and when night came he went early to his bed in the caravan. He was up again, however, as soon as he heard his brother stirring and the hushed whispers that led off in the direction of the freak-house. It was as he had known it would be, when for a moment pale moonlight showed him a glimpse of Hamilton with Stainton Gamber.

Quickly he followed the two to the looming canvas tent, and in through the dragon jawed entranceway, but he paused at the door-flap to the partitioned area to listen and observe. There came the scratch of a match and its bright, sudden flare, and then a candle flickered into life. At this point the whispering recommenced, and Anderson drew back a pace as the candle began to move about the interior of Hamilton’s museum. He could hear the hushed conversation quite clearly, could feel the tremulous excitement in the voice of the florid explorer:

“But these are—
fantastic!
I’ve believed for years now that such relics must exist. Indeed, I’ve often brought my reputation close to ruin for such beliefs, and now…Young man, you’ll be world famous. Do you realize what you have here? Proof positive that the Cult of Cthulhu did exist! What monstrous worship—what hideous rites! Where,
where
did you find these things? I must know! And this idol—which you say is believed to invoke the spirit of the living Cthulhu himself! Who holds such beliefs? I know of course that Wendy-Smith—”

“Hah!”
Hamilton’s rasping voice cut in. “You can keep all your Wendy-Smiths and Gordon Walmsleys. They only scraped the surface. I’ve gone inside—
and outside!
Explorers, dreamers, mystics—mere dabblers. Why, they’d
die,
all of them, if they saw what I’ve seen, if they went where I’ve been. And none of them have ever dreamed what I
know!”

“But why keep it hidden? Why don’t you open this place up, show the world what you’ve got here, what you’ve achieved? Publish, man, publish! Why, together—”

“Together?”Hamilton’s voice was darker, trembling as he suddenly snuffed the candle. “Together? Proof that the Cult of Cthulhu did exist? Show it to the world? Publish?” His chuckle was obscene in the dark, and Anderson heard the visitor’s sharp intake of breath. “The world’s not ready, Gamber, and the stars are not right! What you would like to do, like many before you, is alert the world to
Their
one-time presence, the days of
Their
sovereignty—which might in turn lead to the discovery that
They are here even now!
Indeed Wendy-Smith was right, too right, and where is Wendy-Smith now? No, no—
They
aren’t interested in mere dabblers, except that such are dangerous to
Them
and must be removed!
Iä, R’lyeh!
You are no true dreamer, Gamber, no believer. You’re not worthy of membership in the Great Priesthood. You’re…dangerous! Proof? I’ll give you proof. Listen, and watch—”