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

  “Wh-what is it?” whispered McTwirp.

  “Ss-sshush!” replied Palsy, giving creditable imitation of the Death of St. Vitus. “It may hear you!”

  “Get into a side passage, quickly!” I whispered.

  “There isn’t one!” quavered the Major.

  Dragging Dr. Slump in after us, for it would have revealed our presence had we left him behind, we crept out of the chamber, extinguishing our torches. The crevice McTwirp had scratched hastily, at the cost of two fingernails, in the solid rock, was rather small for the four of us, but it was our only hope.

  Nearer and nearer came the awful sound until at last it reached the chamber. We crouched in the darkness hardly daring to breathe. There was a long silence; then, after an eternity of waiting, we heard the sound of a heavy, sluggish body being dragged across the ground and out into the corridor. For a moment we waited until the horror had passed out of hearing; then we fled.

  That we fled the wrong way was, under the circumstances, nobody’s fault. So great had the shock been that we had completely lost our sense of direction, and before we realized what had happened we suddenly found ourselves confronted by the Thing from which we had been trying to escape.

  I cannot describe it: featureless, amorphous, and utterly evil, it lay across our path, seeming to watch us balefully. For a moment we stood there in paralyzed fright, unable to move a muscle. Then, out of nothingness, echoed a mournful voice.

  “Hello, where did you come from?”

  “Lllllllll—,” quavered Palsy.

  “Talk sense. There’s no such place.”

  “He means London,” I said, taking charge of the conversation, as none of my colleagues seemed capable of dealing with it. “What are you, if it isn’t a rude question? You know you gave us quite a start.”

  “Gave you a start! I like that! Who was responsible for that excruciating cacophony that came from this direction five minutes ago? It nearly gave the Elder Ones heart failure and took at least a million years off their lives.”

  “Er—I think Dr. Slump can explain that,” I said, indicating the still semicomatose psychologist. “He was trying to sing ‘Softly Awakes My Heart’ but we put a stop to it.”

  “It sounded more like Mossolow’s ‘Sabotage in the Steel Foundry,’” said the Thing, sarcastically, “but whatever it was, we don’t like it. You had better come and explain yourselves to their Inscrutable Intelligences, and the Ancient Ones—if they’ve come round yet,” it added, sotto voce. “Step this way.”

  With a strange, flowing motion it set off through the passageway, covering what seemed miles until the tunnel opened out into an immense hall, and we were face to face with the rulers of this ancient world. I say face to face, but actually we were the only ones with faces. Even more incredible and appalling than the Thing we had first encountered were the shapes which met our horrified eyes as we entered that vast chamber. The spawn of alien galaxies, outlawed nightmares from worlds beyond space and time, entities that had filtered down from the stars when the Earth was young—all these crowded upon our vision.

  At the sight my mind reeled. Dazedly, I found myself answering questions put to me by some vast creature who must have been the leader of that congress of titans.

  “How did you get in?” I was asked.

  “Through the ruins on the mountain slope,” I answered.

  “Ruins! Where is Slog-Wallop?”

  “Here,” said a plaintive voice, and a mouselike creature with a walrus mustache drooped into view.

  “When did you last inspect the main entrance?” said the Supreme Mind sternly.

  “Not more than thirty thousand years ago last pancake Tuesday.”

  “Well, have it seen to at once. As Inspector of Outhouses and Public Conveniences it is your duty to see that the premises are kept in good repair. Now that the matter has been brought up, I distinctly recollect that during the last Ice Age but two a distinguished extragalactic visitor was severely damaged by the collapse of the ceiling directly he entered our establishment. Really, this sort of thing will not improve our reputation for hospitality, nor is it at all dignified. Don’t let it happen again.”

  “I can’t say I liked the decorations, either,” I ventured.

  “The same visitor complained about those, now you mention it. I will see that they are replaced by something more appropriate, such as a few stills from Snow White. Here the Mind gave Slog-Wallop such a glare that the poor little creature was bowled clean out of the hall.

  It turned to me again.

  “These things will happen in the best ordered communities,” it said apologetically. “Now perhaps you’ll be good enough to tell us how you got here?”

  So I described the expedition, from its departure to our arrival in the caverns, omitting such portions of the story as I considered fit.

  “Very interesting,” said the Mind when I had finished. “We so seldom get visitors these days. The last one was—let—me—think—oh, yes, that Arab fellow, Abdul Hashish.”

  “The author of the Pentechnicon?”

  “Yes. We were rather annoyed about that—these reporters always overdo things. Nobody believed a word he wrote, and when we read the review copy he sent us we weren’t surprised. It was very bad publicity and ruined our tourist trade, such as it was. I hope you will show a better sense of proportion.”

  “I can assure you that our report will be quite unbiased and entirely scientific,” I said hastily. “But may I ask how it is you seem to know our language so well?”

  “Oh, we have many ways of studying the outside world. I myself toured the Middle West of America some years ago in a circus sideshow and it is only very recently that I eradicated the accent I acquired on that occasion. Nowadays, too, radio makes it impossible to avoid you. You would be surprised to know the number of swing fans we have here—though I regret to say that the television revues from Paris have even greater popularity. But the less said about them the better.”

  “You amaze me,” I said truthfully. “What surprises me the most, however, is that you have so many outside contacts.”

  “That was simply arranged. We started writing stories about ourselves, and later we subsidized authors, particularly in America, to do the same. The result was that everyone read all about us in various magazines such as Weird Tales (of which incidentally I hold 50 percent of the preference shares) and simply didn’t believe a word of it. So we were quite safe.”

  “Incredible! The conception of a supermind!”

  “Thank you,” said my interlocutor, a smug expression spreading over where its face would have been had it possessed one. “Now, however, we have no objection to everyone knowing that we really exist. In fact, we were planning an extensive publicity campaign, in which your help would be very useful. But I’ll tell you about that later; now perhaps you would like to go and rest in our guest chambers? I’ve had them cleaned—it’s surprising how much dust can accumulate in forty thousand years.”

  We were escorted to a vast room—little smaller than the one we had just quitted—where we could recline on oddly shaped but comfortable couches.

  “How completely incredible!” gasped Dr. Slump as we settled down to discuss the position.

  “Nice chap, wasn’t it?” I said referring to our host.

  “I don’t trust it! Something tells me mischief’s brewing. It is our duty to keep this knowledge from the world!”

  “What, do you hold the rest of those Weird Tales shares?” asked Palsy sarcastically.

  “Not at all, but such a revelation would mean universal madness and I fear that the forces at their command of these Elder Ones would soon enslave mankind.”

  “Do you really think—” I began, when McTwirp interrupted me.

  “What’s that?” he asked, pointing to something on the ground. I bent down and picked it up. It was piece of paper, on which some writing was scrawled. With difficulty, I interpreted the curious characters.

  “Get Slog-Wallop to see about the drains,” I read. Then underneath, “Duke Ellington, 3:15, Washington.”

  Harmless enough—then I turned it over and saw words which sent shudders of fear down my spine.

  “Destroy human race by plague of flying jellyfish (?Sent through post in unsealed envelopes?). No good for Unknown—try Gillings.”

  “You were right, Slump!” I gasped. “What a hideous plot! I suppose this Gillings must be some poor devil these fiends experimented on. We must escape at once!”

  “But how? We don’t know the way!”

  “Leave that to me,” I said, going to the door. Outside it was a strange, flabby creature resembling a doormat in the last stage of decomposition.

  “Would you mind guiding us to the upper corridors?” I asked politely. “One of my friends has lost a valuable wallet, and if a search party comes along it may be found and sent home to his wife. Incidentally,” I added in an easy, conversational tone, “we should be awfully obliged if someone would make us some cups of tea while we’re gone. Two lumps each.”

  This last masterstroke dispelled any suspicions the being might have had.

  “Right-ho,” it said. “I hope you like China tea; it’s all we’ve got; Abdul finished off the rest.”

  It scuttled away, and shortly returned. “Now follow me.”

  Of our journey back through those awful caves I prefer to say as little as possible. In any case, it closely resembled the journey downward. At last, after an eternity, we saw the exit into the outer world far ahead. And none too soon, for our guide was getting suspicious.

  “Are you sure you had it with you?” it asked, out of breath. “You may have left it behind.”

  “Not likely,” said McTwirp. “I think it was about here.”

  So we pressed on, our goal now only a few hundred yards away. Suddenly, to our horror, we heard sounds of pursuit far behind. Pretense was useless. “Run for your lives!” I shouted.

  Luckily our guide was so taken by surprise that before it could recover itself we had a considerable start. In a matter of seconds, it seemed, we had reached the exit and were out in the clean light of day. Emboldened by the thought of safety, I glanced back.

  The guide was far behind, stupefied still by surprise. But racing toward us at an incredible speed was something so hideous that no words of mine can begin to describe it…. As I turned to flee, I heard it cry out with a gasping, high-pitched voice:

  “Do you—puff—mind condensed milk?”

  I heard no more, for at that moment the shattered bas-reliefs of the entrance collapsed about me in complete and final ruin. When I recovered, we were already in the air, flying toward safety and civilization, away from the brooding nightmare horrors which had beset us so long and from whose unthinkable clutches we had so narrowly escaped.

  THE FILLMORE SHOGGOTH

  HARRY TURTLEDOVE

  HPL COMES DOWN TO SAN FRANCISCO FROM MARIN COUNTY. They have a gig at the Fillmore tonight, playing with the Loading Zone and Crome Syrcus. Not all the guys in the band have quite come down, but hey, that’s, like, just a sign of the times, man. Pharmaceuticals are your friends. Spring 1968. Signs and portents in the air.

  Okay, sure, signs and portents are always in the air, but spring of 1968 is especially bad for them. The Tet Offensive. LBJ saying he won’t run again. Gene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey fighting for the soul of the Democratic Party (though Hubert wouldn’t know what to do with a soul if he tripped over one in the street). Martin Luther King shot down like a dog in Memphis. Ghettos exploding. The Antarctic iceberg off the Northern California coast. All kinds of weird shit going on.

  When things get weird, what do you do? George and Dave, Mike and Tony and Jeff, they go to the zoo. They park their two old station wagons and get out and stretch. Between ’em, the Plymouth and the Chevy hold all the guys in the band and all the gear they’ll need tonight. They go through gas like pigs through swill. It’s only a quarter a gallon, though, so what’s the big deal?

  “Wow,” George goes, and then, “Oh, wow.” He plays guitar and sings. If HPL has a leader—always an interesting question—he’s the man. He’s tall and dark and lean, with long hair and longer sideburns. In San Francisco, in spring of ’68, he fits right in.

  Mike, the drummer, has long hair, too, but he’s short and kind of chunky. What he says is “Brr!” He buttons up his sweater. It was sunny and warm in Marin. But the San Francisco Zoo is stuck in the southwest corner of the city, right on the ocean. The fog hasn’t even started burning off yet. No better than even money that it will.

  Somebody across the parking lot yells, “Fuckin’ hippies!” Not everyone in San Francisco is cool with long hair and funky clothes. But there are five guys in the band, all of them younger than the loudmouthed square. He flips them the bird, but he doesn’t want to meet them up close and personal.

  A jet—no, two jets—scream by overhead. The roar almost flattens you to the pavement. It dopplers off toward the west. “Whoa!” Jeff says. He’s the new bass player, blond and handsome. He’s got hotter licks than Jerry did, and a better voice, too.

  “Scouting the iceberg—what do you want to bet?” George says.

  His bandmates all nod. People have been scouting the iceberg since it broke off the Ross Ice Shelf and headed north more than a year ago. It’s on the other side of the Equator now, but it hasn’t shrunk. If anything, it’s got bigger. That should be impossible. It isn’t, not to the guys in HPL. Once you’ve dropped acid a few times, nothing is impossible.

  These days, it often seems as if the whole world has dropped acid. “The Old Ones, or maybe the shoggoths,” Dave says. He’s the keyboard man—everything from a small electric organ to a freakin’ harpsichord. He’s, like, Deep.

  Which doesn’t mean he’s wrong. Since the Miskatonic University Expedition, people and the Old Ones have warily tried to live with each other. Shoggoths, on the other hand, don’t want to live with anything else, ancient or modern. There have been some unfortunate incidents—the radioactive hole that used to be Sauk City, for instance, and the one near the South Pole—but nothing lately. Except the iceberg, that is.

  Those jets will carry bombs and rockets and guns. All the scouts do. They haven’t used them yet. LBJ has enough other things to worry about without pissing off the creatures from Antarctica. But, in case of trouble, the planes will use what they carry.

  HPL can’t do anything about the iceberg. So the guys go on into the zoo. It’s a WPA project, from about the same time as the Miskatonic University Expedition. No cages—concrete enclosures instead, with moats to keep the animals on the outside from mingling with the animals on the inside.

  Well, almost no cages. Moated enclosures don’t work real well for birds. So there’s a big old aviary you can wander through and see toucans and cocks-of-the-rock and peafowl and like that. It smells like jungle inside, jungle mixed with chicken coop.

  And there’s a sign, a sign with an arrow: THIS WAY TO THE PENGUINS. Penguins are cool. The guys drift THIS WAY. They go down some concrete stairs, to a chilly, dimly lit underground chamber. It smells of ocean and chicken coop. The penguins swimming in the water and toddling around on the concrete shore don’t wear tuxedos. They’re white all over, their eyes mere slits. They’re big birds, as tall as a man.

  “They’re funny-looking!” a little boy exclaims. George can’t possibly disagree. A sign in front of the moat says CAVE PENGUINS—Aptenodytes miskatonensis. The little boy has a flat red plastic elephant in his hand. It’s called a Trunkey. He sticks the trunk—the key part—into a Storybook below the sign and turns it. A scratchy recording blares forth: “These rare, dark-adapted penguins were discovered by the Miskatonic University Expedition deep underground in the Old Ones’ city beyond the Antarctic Mountains of Madness. Living specimens were brought back by the later Starkweather-Moore exploration team. This is the only zoo that has bred them in human captivity.”

  “Now we know what the iceberg’s all about,” Dave says. “The Old Ones are coming for the baby penguins.”

  George looks at him. He says, “I know what you’re on, man, ’cause I’m on it, too. But it doesn’t mess me up that bad.” The rest of the guys in the band laugh, nervously, not sure whether he’s kidding. Well, George isn’t quite sure himself. In the spring of 1968, nobody’s quite sure of anything, even when he isn’t wasted.

  It’s warmer once they come out into the fog again, which says a lot about how chilly it is in the penguin enclosure. The zoo has every kind of big cat there is. George admires their deadly elegance. He wonders how the tigers like San Francisco weather. They don’t seem to mind it. One of them is tearing chunks off a slab of raw meat. Except for the size of the chunks, it could be the cat back at the place gobbling Friskies kidneys-and-liver. But that makes a pretty good except.

  After a while, George and his buddies get hungry, too. Across the street from the zoo sits the Doggie Diner. It’s topped by a big old dachshund’s head. The dachshund’s wearing a chef’s toque and a bow tie. The head, even the hat, make some kind of sense to George. In California, a donut shop will be crowned by a stucco-and-chicken-wire donut. A fried-chicken place will look like a drumstick, or maybe a whole bird. So why not put a dog and something that means cooking on top of a hotdog stand? No reason at all, not here. Chicago wasn’t like this, not even a little bit.

  What’s happening with the bow tie, though? There are several Doggie Diners in San Francisco. George freaks out about the bow tie every time he drives past one. They do dish out good dogs—he has to give them that.

  After lunch, he and the rest of HPL slide into the station wagons and drive to the Fillmore. It’s a big square building at the corner of Fillmore—wow! surprise!—and Geary. It’s west of downtown, a little north and east of Haight-Ashbury. Of but not in, George thinks. He nods to himself, liking the notion. Without the freaks from the Haight, and without the people who think like the freaks there, the Fillmore would have no reason for being.