New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird Part 16

"I am not a poet, but I love the craft and have been enchanted by what I have heard tonight. I would like to read a short piece by a poet who is now largely forgotten. Sadly, we live in an age where, in this country, poetry is seldom bothered with. We cannot be forgotten, for we are utterly ignored. But none may deny us our voice. Here is one poetic voice; and although it's not as . . . free in form as that which we heard from Mr. Christopher, it is its equal in extravagance."

"The impudent vixen," I thought angrily, frowning at her as she opened the book and began to read.

"I kiss the cosmic wind that finds my face, This face that burns as if encased in flame, An ember glowing in an alien place, An ancient land that deigns to call my name.

I tell my name among the stones that stand As towers of black slat beneath black stars, The stars that spill toward me like dark sand, Like sand that stains the mortal flesh it mars.

New-made I rise, a pillar of dark stone, A nascent thing on Yuggoth's h.o.a.ry sod.

I hear the sound that chills me to the bone: The mirthless chortle of some raving G.o.d."

I had closed my eyes as she began to read, and that had been a mistake; for as she continued to sound the verse, I was transported to the scene described. I felt an alien tempest that burned my face, that slinked into the cavities of my countenance and pushed beneath my flesh. I clutched my face and felt the b.u.mps that began to form upon it. Polite applause shook me from the vision, but it was for some bloke, not the mysterious woman who had enchanted my brain with nightmare. Clumsily, I exited my chair and stumbled from the room, into night. She was leaning against the building, looking at stars.

"Can you smell the encroaching fog? How rank, like some unwashed lover. See how it steals the starlight. Can you smell the coming storm?"

"No," I bluntly replied, reaching for the pack of cigarettes in my shirt pocket and hoping that smoking offended her. "Will you have one?"

"Certainly," she replied. Placing a f.a.g in my mouth, I lit it, took a drag, then held it to her. She brought the thin narcotic cylinder to her face and inhaled its fumes. Her mouth never touched it. "Will you walk with me?" she asked.

"I suppose." I was not fond of intimate human contact, and women were a race I could not comprehend and with which I felt uncomfortable. And this was no ordinary woman. From the moment I first laid eyes on her I had felt unsettled. She was like one of Wilde's alluring panthers, as dangerous as she was beguiling. I fancied that I could sense her b.e.s.t.i.a.l appet.i.te as her hips moved against mine. These alarming observations overwhelmed me until I heard the sound of distant music. Ah, how I smiled. We approached a sight that would stir her curiosity, and in her distraction I would make my escape. Nonchalantly, I led her toward the sound, to the overgrown and usually abandoned courtyard that was lit by one weak lamppost. Beneath that dim light were two figures. The taller one, a bent old gentleman, played a worn and weathered accordion, a slender tube-like instrument from another century, with b.u.t.tons rather than keyboard. He moved its pleated billows in a mechanical manner, as though oblivious to the heart-wrenching music he produced.

Beneath him knelt one of the oddest and most pathetic beings I had ever encountered. One knew instinctively that the diminutive thing was not a child, even though the monkey mask of flayed rubber covered most of the creature's face. From its dome, just above the mask, was a mess of mangled hair, coils of matted filth that resembled thick dead worms. Bent over the image that it drew on pavement with a stick of chalk, it was unwitting of our presence.

I looked at my companion and saw her watch the remnant of hand that clutched the yellow chalk. The right hand was little more than fist, its flesh ending just above the knuckles. The left hand retained two middle digits, and they stopped their drawing as we got closer. The wee creature turned to look at us. How oddly the black eyes shined beneath their mask. His fingers dropped the chalk and began to move as if he were attempting some piteous form of sign language. He then stood upon truncated legs and did a little dance; and as he capered he bent his torso low as if in genuflection to the woman at my side.

The music swelled, and with rakish abandon I took the woman into my arms and danced her closer to the pair of beings who stood like harbingers of doom. The old man lifted his fantastic face and watched our frolic, and I tried not to stare at the growth of b.u.mps and folded flesh that disfigured his visage. His familiar watched us with bent head and held out what remained of a palm. Pushing from me, the woman went to him and kissed the open palm. I watched the small thing shudder at her touch.

The music stopped, and the gentleman released one hand from his instrument, holding it to her. She took the proffered hand and lifted it to her face, smoothing her features with his cracked and ancient paw. Her hands swam through the air to his pale face, then wound into his white hair. She bent to him and touched her mouth to his, and then she moved her mouth to an ugly growth on his cheek. Her kiss was a prolonged thing. When at last she pulled away, I was horrified to see the blood that oozed from the place on the old gent's face that had been eaten into. Sickened, I backed away, then turned to run as the ancient fellow reached out with shaky hands and pulled the woman's face once more to his.

II.

I wandered through moist and stinking fog, that queer mist that had stayed now for two days. From the sound of bells and horns I knew that I had reached Harborside, and when I found myself on Water Street I walked to a familiar address and pa.s.sed through gates that were supported by stone walls eight feet high. The gnarled trees that surrounded the ancient dwelling were swathed in thick mist. From the wide covered porch I could discern a lantern's glow. I heard the faint humming of intoxicated song. Winfield Scot was watching me.

"Ah, brother poet, come and share my wine. Or try this kick-a.s.s rum. It'll warm you from the coils of detested fog. You look like a fellow in need of fortification. What ails thee, son; what's her name?"

I took the proffered bottle of rum and gulped a generous portion. "She's a very devil."

"Aren't they all, G.o.d love them? Give me the h.e.l.lish details. But steady on the rum, mate; it's another week before my next check."

I babbled of my encounter, and as I told my tale Scot's eyes sobered. I think sometimes he plays at being more inebriated than he actually is, as if it were expected of him to play the part of town drunk. How carefully he listened to my yarn.

"Hmmm," he said after a long pause, and then he brought a bottle of red wine to his mouth.

"What?"

"You say she appeared out of this d.a.m.nable fog as you were reading People of the Monolith? Were you reading aloud?"

"I don't know. I sometimes read aloud, especially verse. I like to feel the words on my lips. Why?"

"Justin Geoffrey was a potent bard. I've cautioned you before about speaking certain esoteric verse aloud. Now, you know that fellow's history, of how he wrote the initial draft of his infamous poem in a state of rich madness while sitting near a monolith of cursed stone. Haunted place, haunted mind. Linked in lunacy. In such a state, believe me, humanity is p.r.o.ne to channel unusual influence. You and I, son, as poets, know too well the weird stuff that leaks into our imaginations. From where?"

"I've heard all of this before, your theory of the universal madness of poets."

"Not all. And there are degrees of lunacy. I speak mainly of those who dig the weird cosmic stuff. You've written a little of it yourself, and you read it always. This place, this old seaport, welcomes those of us who thrill to outside influence. We have felt the velvet kiss of the kind of madness that produces such poetry as People of the Monolith or Al Azif. We tap into a language that is fraught with energy, with alchemy. The result is poetry that is truly evocative. We should use caution in speaking such words aloud."

"Okay, I know where you're going with this. You're saying that I summoned this witch woman by uttering the sounds of a mad poet's song."

"You catch on quick. Come on, I want to show you something interesting." Clumsily, he held out his hand. I took it and pulled him to his feet. He stumbled to the door of the ancient house and pushed it open.

"I don't think so, Winfield."

"Hand me that lantern and don't be gutless. The trick is not to linger too long inside. Take my hand, child, if that will help. Can you feel it? This, too, is a realm of madness." I stayed close behind him, taking in the debris with which the shadowed room was cluttered. "The old matey who lived here, bless him, left his stigmata of craziness within these rotting walls. Man, the weird junk he picked up as he sailed around the world. This place is a trove of nameless booty. From the stories he told, and from the bits he cautiously left out but hinted at, he was ruthless in his pursuit of plunder. Ah, settle down and don't look so nervous. Ain't much can reach us here from Outside, not as long as those painted stones stand unmoved in the yard. Okay, found it."

"Found what?" He handed me the lantern and took up a small box of polished black wood. Undoing a latch, he opened the lid. I reached for the small obsidian dagger that nestled on red velvet. "What is this?"

"Feels creepy, don't it? You see, Justin Geoffrey wasn't the only lunatic to visit the black monolith of Stregoicavar. Over the decades foolhardy souls have taken ax and hammer to that stone, but they never did much damage. Around the base is a litter of shards, and from one good-sized piece our sea captain had this ritual weapon forged. G.o.d alone knows what he used it for."

"Let's get out of here," I said, closing the lid of the box. Winfield watched as I placed the weapon in my coat pocket. He followed me out the door and onto the porch that was his homeless residence.

"Listen, man. This old town ain't just a seaport. It's a portal. Things can be summoned from the other side. Wouldn't surprise me if that crazy old coot initially called up this woman, whatever she is. If she's linked to the Black Stone and Geoffrey's mad verse, carrying that thing with you is a bad idea."

"I want to study it. There's some symbols carved onto the handle that look familiar. I think I remember them from a book I saw in the library at Miskatonic. Maybe I can find some answers about this woman."

"This avatar, you mean. You're b.l.o.o.d.y mad."

Calmly, I smiled, and then I turned and walked into the fog.

III.

I walked past Water Street, toward the ocean, to the wharves. Dropping the facade of calm that I had faked so as to disguise my true emotional state from my inebriated friend, I walked the lonely place until I found the pathetic shanty that was my destination. Breathing deeply the unwholesome fog, I pushed the crooked door of disjointed wood. He was sitting on his crate, eating fish that had been wrapped in newspaper. Flickering light from one single candle illuminated the place. Looking at one corner, I saw the mound of blankets wherein his squat companion slept, next to a wall on which had been scrawled, in yellow chalk, curious glyphs.

"h.e.l.lo, Enoch."

He looked at me with rheumy eyes, a shred of fish hanging from one corner of his mouth. "Evening."

"Are you okay?"

His eyes blinked. "Never better." I watched his gnarled hand reach for a place on his face, which he thoughtfully scratched. From outside I could hear a boat's forlorn call, and as if in answer I heard a low moan which I took to be the wind on water. This latter sound increased and became a gale that shook the edifice of wood and metal and thick cardboard. I looked at one of the trembling cardboard walls, at what I took to be papier-mache masks that had been fastened to its surface. Stepping to the wall, I carefully touched one of the pale faces. Its thin membrane pushed inward at the force of my fingering.

"What are these, Enoch?"

"Oh, aspects of she and her kindred. They like their false faces, aye."

I reached to touch another of the ghastly things, gently poking a finger into the hollow eye socket. Hideous as they were, I was strangely seduced. So soft. Perhaps, if I was very careful, I could peel one of them from the wall and slip it over my own visage.

The old man began to hum, as outside the wind blew roughly against the shack. Enoch's tune became a low chanted song. "Across black gulfs toward us they dance, to mock our insignificance." From a corner of the room, fluted music accompanied the old man's singing. I turned to glance at the malformed gnome. Still wrapped in many blankets, he glowered at me with glistening black eyes. A cracked flute was pressed against the mouth of the shredded mask.

Something soft touched my shoulder. I turned my face to hers. Her cool mouth pressed against my forehead, and her tongue-so strangely soft, so warm and heavy-fastened to my flesh. When she backed away, I knew that it had not been her tongue that had tickled me, for I could feel it still upon my face, the soft weighty thing. Reaching to my face, I touched the fungous growth upon it. Her diamond eyes beamed as shadows shifted the contour of her inhuman visage. She bent to me a second time and touched her lips to mine. As we kissed, my hand went into my pocket and found the dagger. Joyfully, I pushed the tiny blade into her face, below one eye. How easily the flesh tore, like mushroom. Sediments of her sardonic physiognomy spilled to me, onto my eyes, into mouth and nostrils.

I pushed the creature from me and fled that haunted place. Wild tempest tore at my hair, my clothing. It had pushed away the noisome fog, and I saw a dark sky laced with silver starlight, with gems that remorselessly winked at me. I watched the roiling storm clouds that gathered at the jutting edge of Kingsport Head, and listened to the waves that crashed against ports of rotting wood. From behind came an odd scuttling sound, and turning I saw the a.s.semblage of large leaves that followed me, pushed by wind along the ground.

No, not leaves. Rather, they were soft hollow faces moving in a moaning wind. I groaned into that gale, as beneath its noise I heard that other sound. I saw them dimly in the distance, two figures that had followed from their shabby abode. One played an antique accordion. About his feet his masked companion frolicked, a flute at its mouth. Behind them, in spreading darkness, she emerged, gliding toward me. Windstorm whirled around her, lifting the faces to the she-devil in a whorl of spinning air. Reaching out, she took hold of one face. How easily it covered her split countenance.

Mindlessly, I laughed. I mumbled some s.n.a.t.c.hes of lunatic verse that fumbled in my brain. The b.u.mps of substance that stained my mouth and forehead began to expand, as drops of moisture dripped from the black cosmos. Baptized, I gazed once more at the daemon that swam toward me through the liquid air; and then I shut my eyes and awaited her final kiss.

That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death may die.

"The Call of Cthulhu" H.P. Lovecraft (1928).

"One other thing, Lestrade," he added, turning round at the door: " 'Rache'," is the German for 'revenge'; so don't lose your time looking for Miss Rachel."

"A Study in Scarlet" A. Conan Doyle (1887).

* A STUDY IN EMERALD *

Neil Gaiman.

1. The New Friend.

It is the immensity, I believe. The hugeness of things below. The darkness of dreams.

But I am woolgathering. Forgive me. I am not a literary man.

I had been in need of lodgings. That was how I met him. I wanted someone to share the cost of rooms with me. We were introduced by a mutual acquaintance, in the chemical laboratories of St. Bart's. "You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive," that was what he said to me, and my mouth fell open and my eyes opened very wide.

"Astonishing." I said.

"Not really," said the stranger in the white lab-coat, who was to become my friend. "From the way you hold your arm, I see you have been wounded, and in a particular way You have a deep tan. You also have a military bearing, and there are few enough places in the Empire that a military man can be both tanned and, given the nature of the injury to your shoulder and the traditions of the Afghan cave-folk, tortured."

Put like that, of course, it was absurdly simple. But then, it always was. I had been tanned nut-brown. And I had indeed, as he had observed, been tortured.

The G.o.ds and men of Afghanistan were savages, unwilling to be ruled from Whitehall or from Berlin or even from Moscow, and unprepared to see reason. I had been sent into those hills, attached to the ___th Regiment. As long as the fighting remained in the hills and mountains, we fought on an equal footing. When the skirmishes descended into the caves and the darkness then we found ourselves, as it were, out of our depth and in over our heads.

I shall not forget the mirrored surface of the underground lake, nor the thing that emerged from the lake, its eyes opening and closing, and the singing whispers that accompanied it as it rose, wreathing their way about it like the buzzing of flies bigger than worlds.

That I survived was a miracle, but survive I did, and I returned to England with my nerves in shreds and tatters. The place that leech-like mouth had touched me was tattooed forever, frog-white, into the skin of my now-withered shoulder. I had once been a crack-shot. Now I had nothing, save a fear of the world-beneath-the-world akin to panic which meant that I would gladly pay sixpence of my army pension for a Hansom cab, rather than a penny to travel underground.

Still, the fogs and darknesses of London comforted me, took me in. I had lost my first lodgings because I screamed in the night. I had been in Afghanistan; I was there no longer.

"I scream in the night," I told him.

"I have been told that I snore," he said. "Also I keep irregular hours, and I often use the mantelpiece for target practice. I will need the sitting room to meet clients. I am selfish, private and easily bored. Will this be a problem?"

I smiled, and I shook my head, and extended my hand. We shook on it.

The rooms he had found for us, in Baker Street, were more than adequate for two bachelors. I bore in mind all my friend had said about his desire for privacy, and I forbore from asking what it was he did for a living. Still, there was much to pique my curiosity. Visitors would arrive at all hours, and when they did I would leave the sitting room and repair to my bedroom, pondering what they could have in common with my friend: the pale woman with one eye bone-white, the small man who looked like a commercial traveler, the portly dandy in his velvet jacket, and the rest. Some were frequent visitors, many others came only once, spoke to him, and left, looking troubled or looking satisfied. He was a mystery to me.

We were partaking of one of our landlady's magnificent breakfasts one morning, when my friend rang the bell to summon that good lady. "There will be a gentleman joining us, in about four minutes," he said. "We will need another place at table."

"Very good," she said, "I'll put more sausages under the grill."

My friend returned to perusing his morning paper. I waited for an explanation with growing impatience. Finally, I could stand it no longer. "I don't understand. How could you know that in four minutes we would be receiving a visitor? There was no telegram, no message of any kind."

He smiled, thinly. "You did not hear the clatter of a brougham several minutes ago? It slowed as it pa.s.sed us-obviously as the driver identified our door, then it sped up and went past, up into the Marylebone Road. There is a crush of carriages and taxicabs letting off pa.s.sengers at the railway station and at the waxworks, and it is in that crush that anyone wishing to alight without being observed will go. The walk from there to here is but four minutes.

He glanced at his pocket-watch, and as he did so I heard a tread on the stairs outside.

"Come in, Lestrade," he called. "The door is ajar, and your sausages are just coming out from under the grill."

A man I took to be Lestrade opened the door, then closed it carefully behind him. "I should not," he said. "But truth to tell, I have had not had a chance to break my fast this morning. And I could certainly do justice to a few of those sausages." He was the small man I had observed on several occasions previously, whose demeanor was that of a traveler in rubber novelties or patent nostrums.

My friend waited until our landlady had left the room, before he said, "Obviously, I take it this is a matter of national importance."

"My stars," said Lestrade, and he paled. "Surely the word cannot be out already. Tell me it is not." He began to pile his plate high with sausages, kipper fillets, kedgeree and toast, but his hands shook, a little.

"Of course not," said my friend. "I know the squeak of your brougham wheels, though, after all this time, an oscillating G sharp above high C. And if Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard cannot publicly be seen to come into the parlor of London's only consulting detective, yet comes anyway, and without having had his breakfast, then I know that this is not a routine case. Ergo, it involves those above us and is a matter of national importance."

Lestrade dabbed egg yolk from his chin with his napkin. I stared at him. He did not look like my idea of a police inspector, but then, my friend looked little enough like my idea of a consulting detective-whatever that might be.

"Perhaps we should discuss the matter privately," Lestrade said, glancing at me.

My friend began to smile, impishly, and his head moved on his shoulders as it did when he was enjoying a private joke. "Nonsense," he said. "Two heads are better than one. And what is said to one of us is said to us both."

"If I am intruding-" I said, gruffly, but he motioned me to silence.

Lestrade shrugged. "It's all the same to me," he said, after a moment. "If you solve the case then I have my job. If you don't, then I have no job. You use your methods, that's what I say. It can't make things any worse."

"If there's one thing that a study of history has taught us, it is that things can always get worse," said my friend. "When do we go to Sh.o.r.editeh?"

Lestrade dropped his fork. "This is too bad!" he exclaimed. "Here you were, making sport of me, when you know all about the matter! You should be ashamed-"

"No one has told me anything of the matter. When a police inspector walks into my room with fresh splashes of mud of that peculiar mustard yellow hue on his boots and trouser-legs, I can surely be forgiven for presuming that he has recently walked past the diggings at Hobbs Lane, in Sh.o.r.editch, which is the only place in London that particular mustard-colored clay seems to be found."

Inspector Lestrade looked embarra.s.sed. "Now you put it like that," he said, "it seems so obvious."

My friend pushed his plate away from him. "Of course it does," he said, slightly testily.

We rode to the East End in a cab, Inspector Lestrade had walked up to the Marylebone Road to find his brougham, and left us alone.

"So you are truly a consulting detective?" I said.

"The only one in London, or perhaps, the world," said my friend. "I do not take cases. Instead, I consult. Others bring me their insoluble problems, they describe them, and, sometimes, I solve them."