The Madness of Cthulhu Anthology (Volume One): 1 Read online

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

  EDITED BY S. T. JOSHI

  The Madness of Cthulhu 2 (October 2015)

  Black Wings of Cthulhu

  Black Wings of Cthulhu 2

  EDITED BY STEPHEN JONES

  Shadows Over Innsmouth

  Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

  Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth (January 2015)

  EDITED BY ROBERT M. PRICE

  Acolytes of Cthulhu

  THE MADNESS OF

  CTHULHU

  VOLUME 1

  EDITED BY S. T. JOSHI

  FOREWORD BY JONATHAN MABERRY

  TITAN BOOKS

  The Madness of Cthulhu

  Print edition ISBN: 9781781164525

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781781164532

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: October 2014

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved by the authors. The rights of each contributor to be identified as Author of their Work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Arthur C. Clarke, “At the Mountains of Murkiness,” first published in Satellite (1940). Robert Silverberg, “Diana of the Hundred Beasts,” first published in Realms of Fantasy (February 1996), copyright © 1996 by Agberg, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Agberg, Ltd. and the author. All other stories are original to this volume, and are Copyright © 2014 to the individual authors.

  Foreword Copyright © 2014 by Jonathan Maberry

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  What did you think of this book? We love to hear from our readers. Please email us at: [email protected], or write to us at the above address.

  To receive advance information, news, competitions, and exclusive offers online, please sign up for the Titan newsletter on our website: www.titanbooks.com

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also Available from Titan Books

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Foreword by Jonathan Maberry

  Introduction by S. T. Joshi

  At the Mountains of Murkiness by Arthur C. Clarke

  The Fillmore Shoggoth by Harry Turtledove

  Devil’s Bathtub by Lois H. Gresh

  The Witness in Darkness by John Shirley

  How the Gods Bargain by William Browning Spencer

  A Mountain Walked by Caitlín R. Kiernan

  Diana of the Hundred Breasts by Robert Silverberg

  Under the Shelf by Michael Shea

  Cantata by Melanie Tem

  Cthulhu Rising by Heather Graham

  The Warm by Darrell Schweitzer

  Last Rites by K. M. Tonso

  Little Lady by J. C. Koch

  White Fire by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.

  A Quirk of the Mistral by Jonathan Thomas

  The Dog Handler’s Tale by Donald Tyson

  Notes on Contributors

  Also Available from Titan Books

  FOREWORD

  JONATHAN MABERRY

  I CAN REMEMBER THE VERY FIRST TIME I MET CTHULHU.

  Not just the day or the situation, but the actual moment.

  Cthulhu attacked me.

  Seriously.

  Okay, maybe I wasn’t wrapped in the coils of a tentacular monstrosity whose very appearance is too horrific to behold. It wasn’t that kind of attack.

  Cthulhu hit me in the head.

  I’ll explain.

  I went to a dysfunctional middle school in a very poor neighborhood in Philadelphia. I’d been reading voraciously since about age eight—when I discovered the Fantastic Four, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Shakespeare in the same week! So, by the time I got to seventh grade, my reading level was a tad higher than that of most of the other kids. Not sure I was any smarter, but I was well-read. The English class, typical of public schools, was geared toward the lowest reading level, which was roughly a point where those kids thought that the difficulty the pokey little puppy had in rescuing its ball from under the couch constituted deeply challenging literature.

  The teachers, being otherwise unsure how to deal with me, simply gave me to the school librarian. That arrangement was somewhere between “take him and teach him” and “hey, here’s a pet.”

  The librarian, bless her soul, was a geek. A true literary geek. An acolyte in the church of genre fiction. She knew and loved all aspects of the fantastic in literature, and over the next couple of years she not only encouraged me to read and write reports about the books I devoured, she dragged me along to the meetings of a couple of private clubs for which she served as secretary. Clubs of writers. Some amateur, some professional. At those clubs—in the years 1972 and 1973—I got to meet authors who would later populate the pantheon of my personal cosmology. Writers who are, by today’s standards, the Elder Gods of genre fiction. Writers like Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Robert Sheckley, Harlan Ellison, Lin Carter, and L. Sprague de Camp.

  Yeah … I know.

  These writers—many of whom I had not heard of when I first met them—were amused to find a kid among them who was both a reader and a wannabe writer. Most of them went out of their way to offer me advice, to share insights into what makes a great story, to encourage me to try authors whose works I hadn’t read, and to prop open all of the doors and windows in my mind.

  At one event, a book-release party for his work The Fallible Fiend was held at de Camp’s house in Villanova, Pennsylvania. A few of the authors were in his office, mostly talking shop with me there to fetch drinks and chips and be constantly amazed. While they spoke about the industry I wandered about the room, looking at the editions of de Camp’s books that filled the shelves and at all the strange little pieces of art that he’d collected—statues, carvings, a bat skull, awards, and more. I reached up to take down a copy of a foreign edition of one of the Conan collections (Conan the Usurper, I believe—the Lancer edition with the Frazetta cover), I accidentally knocked down a small metal statue. I dodged too slow and too late, and the figure tonked me on the head. Luckily it landed on the carpet without damage. My head, on the other hand, was growing a nice lump.

  De Camp picked up the figure and when the others saw what it was, they all laughed and told me that I must be a hero because I survived an attack by one of the Great Old Ones. I had, it seemed, been attacked by none other than Cthulhu himself.

  My response was, “Who—?”

  The whole group of them stared at me as if I’d just asked what air was. Or what the color blue looked like. It was a reaction that spoke to an inability on their part to comprehend that anyone at that gathering, no matter how young, could possibly not know who Cthulhu was.

  They gaped at me. First time I’d ever seen people genuinely gape.

  So I said, “Well, who is Cthulhu?”

  They told me.

  Now, let’s look at how they told me. Every single one of them pronounced the name differently. Ka-
tool-oo, K’thool-ooo, Ka-hul-loo, and on and on. I don’t think any of them actually pronounced it the same way. There were arguments relative to that, but we don’t need to go there.

  Then they began a tag-team explanation of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, his life and work, his stories, his general strangeness, his willingness to let other writers craft stories using his characters and themes, and so on. This was not a short conversation. This was a conversation that spilled over into a general decamping to the living room, it chased us through buffet food and dessert, and I don’t think it really reached an ending but was rather terminated by the end of the party.

  Somewhere along the way de Camp trotted out a copy of something called The Necronomicon, for which he’d written an introduction to an Owlswick Press edition.

  I didn’t know it at the time, but that conversation, as long, convoluted, and layered as it was, barely touched the tip of a very large iceberg. I saw de Camp many times after that, and he always had a bit of an addendum to that conversation. Two years later de Camp’s Lovecraft: A Biography was published in hardcover by Doubleday.

  One immediate effect of that first conversation, though, was that when I left de Camp’s house that night I was weighed down with a double-armful of books related in some way to the Cthulhu Mythos. That stack included some valuable reprints of Weird Tales, in which Lovecraft’s first stories appeared. And a great number of collections and anthologies that contained Cthulhu stories by Robert Bloch, Richard F. Searight, Hazel Heald, Clark Ashton Smith, Duane W. Rimel, Robert H. Barlow, Henry Kuttner, Henry Hasse, Manly Wade Wellman, William Lumley, Zealia B. Bishop, August W. Derleth, Will Garth, Charles R. Tanner, Wilfred Owen Morley, Carol Grey, C. Hall Thompson, Vol Molesworth, and Robert E. Howard.

  That was the first batch.

  Over the years de Camp would frequently suggest tales by other writers. For some of these I had to read them at de Camp’s house in the original magazines—Weird Tales, Stirring Science Stories, Scorpio, The Unique Magazine, Future Fantasy and Science Fiction, Polaris, Strange Stories, Fanciful Tales, Astounding Stories, The Californian, Unusual Stories, and others. Then he directed me to libraries and bookstores to find new stories and reliable collections.

  I read more stories than I can remember. I read very good Mythos stories and I read some crap. I read stories that paved new creative ground and expanded the Mythos, and I read stuff that even by today’s standards would be considered bad fan fiction. But overall I found that the Cthulhu Mythos allowed for it all. Good and bad, weird and commonplace, original and trite, terrifying and comical.

  It allowed for it in the way that a true genre does. And that’s the thing; the Cthulhu Mythos isn’t, in my estimation, a subgenre. Not of horror, not of fantasy, and not of science fiction. It has become its own genre. Okay, sure, you might argue that it is a subgenre of Lovecraftian fiction, but I don’t think I’ll get many arguments if I say that for most people—even those who are deeply familiar with Lovecraft’s oeuvre—when we think about “Lovecraftian” fiction we’re generally thinking about the Cthulhu Mythos. Right or wrong, there it is.

  And what a world it is. Ancient races of gods, beings that cruise the vast emptiness between stars, extra-dimensional monsters, misfired breeding programs, cults of insane worshipers, sights so beyond human comprehension that the slightest glimpse will blast the mind into screaming insanity.

  How insanely delicious is that!

  And also how logical, in its way, and how fully formed. It also plays into the nebulous cloud of uncertainty that hangs over us all when we contemplate religion (ours and others), infinity, time, and the potential for intergalactic and interdimensional travel. Those concepts are, in real point of fact, beyond human comprehension. They’re also like crack to writers of the fantastic, because in many of us there is an ache, a yearning to try and take that formless madness and contain it with words so that it can be understood. By inviting all writers into his world Lovecraft has made sorcerers of us all.

  So that brings me to this anthology.

  This is the first volume in The Madness of Cthulhu. It contains many classic stories by some of the greatest genre writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These are stories that show the scope of the genre and eloquently argue to its creative potential. A second volume will follow in 2015, and I am delighted to have a story in it, “A Footnote in the Black Budget.” That will be my very first Lovecraftian tale, and I am more pleased than I can express. I hope de Camp will look down from Valhalla (or from whichever strnage dimension to which his soul has departed) and approve.

  Each story in this volume is unique. Few, if any, of the writers actually knew Lovecraft. Most were part of the second or even third wave of post-Lovecraftian writers to dip their toes into the dark waters of this genre.

  So … why do they? Why do I?

  And why on earth do we have the temerity to think that we can add something to a genre that already has thousands of stories and hundreds of novels in it, not to mention movies, TV shows, comic books, toys, board and video games, and even live-action role-playing.

  Well … we were invited here by a guy named Howard.

  Lovecraft created a great big, albeit insanely warped, canvas and then let anyone and everyone paint or scribble or splash or draw on that canvas. There has always been a long line of writers just waiting to dip a brush or a palette knife or a finger in the color box and make strange shapes on the canvas.

  And here’s the freaky part. Every picture we paint is the right picture.

  There isn’t a set of rules or guidelines. The Mythos is so much bigger than that. It’s like telling stories about our world. If one writer tells a tale about a boy going rafting down the mighty Mississippi, then that is as real, as true, as valid as a writer telling about the clash of armies in the dusty Mongolian steppes or a tale told about an old woman trying to draw water from a dry well in West Africa. Infinite variety, same world.

  Lovecraft, however, gave us more than one world.

  He gave us infinite worlds.

  Here, in this volume, are a few wonderful glimpses into those worlds. A few glimpses at the infinite possibilities of a larger and darker world as seen through the eyes and perceptions of the contributors.

  I’m now in my middle fifties, and even though I read every Lovecraft-inspired story I can get my hands on, I haven’t scratched the surface. Not even a little. There are so many stories out there about shambling things and elder gods and pulsating protean masses and lost cities that I know I’ll always have something new to read.

  What delights me at the moment, though, is the knowledge that you, holding this book, have before you an entirely new batch of original Cthulhu stories. I know what it feels like to turn the page and be drawn back into the Mythos.

  And for those who, like a certain thirteen-year-old boy way back when who tottered out of Sprague de Camp’s house with a double-armful of books, are about to experience the madness and magic of Cthulhu for the very first time. Wow! You’re going to see things you never imagined and go places you did not know existed.

  Come on, turn that page … let’s go together. The darkness is waiting for us.

  INTRODUCTION

  S. T. JOSHI

  H. P. LOVECRAFT WROTE AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS IN THE first two months of 1931; but his fascination with the great white south was of much longer duration, dating to his boyhood at the turn of the twentieth century. As early as 1902, when he was twelve years old, he had written such treatises as “Voyages of Capt. Ross, R.N.” and “Wilkes’s Explorations”; in 1903 he compiled an “Antarctic Atlas.” None of these juvenile works survives, but the subject-matter of the first two is suggestive: they deal with Antarctic explorations of more than half a century before.

  The history of Antarctic exploration can be said to begin with Captain James Cook, who attempted in 1772–74 to reach the South Pole but had to turn back because of the ice fields. Edward Bransfield of England actually sighted th
e Antarctic continent on January 30, 1820, and Alexander I Island (a large island off the coast of what is now called the Antarctic Peninsula) was discovered by Fabian von Bellingshausen on January 29, 1821.

  In the late 1830s several expeditions did much to chart various portions of Antarctica. The American Charles Wilkes went to the Antarctic, bizarrely enough, to test the hollow earth theory proposed in 1818 by John Cleves Symmes (a theory Lovecraft attacked in a letter to the Providence Journal of 1906). Wilkes’s expedition of 1838–40 actually sighted land on January 19, 1840. By January 30 he had seen enough of the landmass to be certain that an actual continent was involved, not merely a series of islands or a huge frozen sea, and he made a momentous pronouncement: “Now that all were convinced of its existence, I gave the land the name of the Antarctic Continent.”

  The Englishman James Clark Ross left England on September 25, 1839, for the purpose of exploring the huge ice shelf that now bears his name. In doing so, he discovered the small island at the mouth of the ice shelf now called Ross Island and named the two enormous volcanoes there (Mt. Erebus and Mt. Terror) after his two ships, the Erebus and the Terror. Dr. Joseph Hooker, one of the ship’s doctors, gives a vivid impression of the first sight of Mt. Erebus: “This was a sight so surpassing everything that can be imagined … that it really caused a feeling of awe to steal over us at the consideration of our own comparative insignificance and helplessness, and at the same time, an indescribable feeling of the greatness of the Creator in the works of His hand.” The atheist Lovecraft would certainly have echoed the first half of that utterance, but expressed doubts about the second half.

  Lovecraft wrote his little treatises just as new explorations were being undertaken. The Norwegian Carsten Egeberg Borchgrevink launched an expedition of 1898–1900 whose great achievement was to have established the first camp on actual Antarctic soil. In a 1935 letter Lovecraft stated: “I think it was the newspaper accounts of Borchgrevingk’s [sic] second expedition of 1900 … which first captured my attention & interest.” By 1902, Lovecraft reported in another letter, “I had read virtually everything in fact or fiction concerning the Antarctic, & was breathlessly awaiting news of the first Scott expedition.” This latter remark must refer to the expedition by Robert Scott on the Discovery, which left New Zealand in August 1901, the high point of which was an attempt by Scott, Ernest Shackleton, and Edward Wilson to traverse the Ross Ice Shelf beginning on November 2, 1902; the team, ill-equipped for so arduous a journey, was forced to turn back on December 30 and almost died on the return trip.