Return of the Deep Ones: And Other Mythos Tales Read online

  RETURN OF THE DEEP ONES AND OTHER MYTHOS TALES

  By Brian Lumley

  A Macabre Ink Production

  Macabre Ink is an imprint of Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition Copyright © 2017 Brian Lumley

  Copy-Edited By: Kurt M. Criscione

  Original publication by ROC—1994

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Meet the Author

  Born in County Durham, he joined the British Army’s Royal Military Police and wrote stories in his spare time before retiring with the rank of Warrant Officer Class 1 in 1980 and becoming a professional writer.

  In the 1970s he added to H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos cycle of stories, including several tales and a novel featuring the character Titus Crow. Several of his early books were published by Arkham House. Other stories pastiched Lovecraft’s Dream Cycle but featured Lumley’s original characters David Hero and Eldin the Wanderer. Lumley once explained the difference between his Cthulhu Mythos characters and Lovecraft’s: “My guys fight back. Also, they like to have a laugh along the way.”

  Later works included the Necroscope series of novels, which produced spin-off series such as the Vampire World Trilogy, The Lost Years parts 1 and 2, and the E-Branch trilogy. The central protagonist of the earlier Necroscope novels appears in the anthology Harry Keogh and Other Weird Heroes. The latest entry in the Necroscope saga is The Mobius Murders.

  Lumley served as president of the Horror Writers Association from 1996 to 1997. In March 2010, Lumley was awarded Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association. He also received a World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2010.

  Bibliography

  Psychomech Trilogy

  Psychomech

  Psychosphere

  Psychamok

  Necroscope Series

  Necroscope

  Necroscope II: Wamphyri!

  Necroscope III: The Source

  Necroscope IV: Deadspeak

  Necroscope V: Deadspawn

  Vampire World I: Blood Brothers

  Vampire World II: The Last Aerie

  Vampire World III: Bloodwars

  Necroscope: The Lost Years, Volume I

  Necroscope: The Lost Years, Volume II

  Necroscope: Invaders

  Necroscope: Defilers

  Necroscope: Avengers

  Harry Keogh: Necroscope & Other Weird Heroes

  Necroscope: The Touch

  Necroscope: The Möbius Murders

  H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreamland Series

  Hero of Dreams

  Ship of Dreams

  Mad Moon of Dreams

  Iced on Aran

  Other Novels and Collections

  A Coven of Vampires

  Beneath the Moors

  Beneath the Moors and Darker Places

  Brian Lumley’s Freaks

  Dagon’s Bell and Other Discords

  Demogorgon

  Fruiting Bodies and Other Fungi

  Ghoul Warning and Other Omens

  Ghoul Warning and Other Omens … and Other Omens

  Haggopian and Other Stories

  Harry and the Pirates

  In the Moons of Borea

  Khai of Ancient Khem

  Maze of Worlds

  No Sharks In The Med & Other Stories

  Screaming Science Fiction

  Sixteen Sucking Stories

  Spawn of the Winds

  Synchronicity, or Something

  The Burrowers Beneath

  The Caller of The Black

  The Clock of Dreams

  The Compleat Crow

  The Compleat Khash: Volume One: Never a Backward Glance

  The Fly-by-Nights

  The Horror at Oakdeene and Others

  The House of Cthulhu

  The House of Doors

  The House of the Temple

  The Last Rite

  The Nonesuch

  The Plague-Bearer

  The Return of the Deep Ones and Other Mythos Tales

  The Second Wish and Other Exhalations

  The Taint and Other Novellas

  The Transition of Titus Crow

  The Whisperer and Other Voices

  DISCOVER CROSSROAD PRESS

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  RETURN OF THE DEEP ONES AND OTHER MYTHOS TALES

  Table of Contents

  FOREWORD

  INCEPTION

  LORD OF THE WORMS

  BENEATH THE MOORS

  THE RETURN OF THE DEEP ONES

  FOREWORD

  About Return of the Deep Ones and Other Mythos Tales.

  When I decided to put together this second collection for ROC, I found myself with a good many stories to choose from but no general theme—except horror, of course! But the theme was not long in coming. Since I have always had something of a penchant for the Cthulhu Mythos of the late great H. P. Lovecraft, and since a good many of my longer stories or short novels are set against a Mythos backdrop, it seemed to me that this was the ideal opportunity to collect a few of these together.

  What’s more the title story, The Return of the Deep Ones, had only ever appeared as a three-part serial, and this was my chance to see it published as a complete novel. As for Beneath the Moors: that short novel was long out of print in its original black-bound Arkham House edition, and had never seen print as a paperback.

  The long Titus Crow novella, Lord of the Worms, had only ever appeared in a limited edition of Crow's collected adventures, and would be mainly new to the greater paperback audience. As for the short story Inception, in which Titus Crow makes his initial (however brief) appearance: that, too, was a rare one, having been printed only once, also in a limited edition. And it was necessary to include the latter, if only as an introduction to Lord of the Worms.

  So the book was born.

  The stories in Return of the Deep Ones and Other Mythos Tales were penned across a span of fifteen years; Beneath the Moors was completed in 1970, and Inception in 1985. Oddly enough, this first Titus Crow story, Inception, was written last! That came about when Paul Ganley, the American publisher of a good many of my tale
s, asked me how Crow first got started: what was his origin? This story was the result.

  The rest of them result from what might be described as a lifelong fascination with the macabre … and a warped imagination! I must assume that my reader is similarly afflicted, if not now, then hopefully by the time he turns the last page …

  Brian Lumley

  Torquay, Devon

  February 1992

  INCEPTION

  December 1916. One week before Christmas.

  London, in the vicinity of Wapping, an hour before dawn …

  Mist-shrouded facades of warehouses formed square, stony faces, bleakly foreboding with their blind eyes of boarded windows; Dickensian still, the cobbled riverside streets rang to the frantic clatter of madly racing footsteps. Except for the figure of a man, flying, his coat flapping like broken wings, nothing stirred. Just him … and his pursuer: a second male figure, tall, utterly silent, flowing like a fog-spawned wraith not one hundred yards behind.

  As to who these two were: their names do not matter. Suffice to say that they were of completely opposite poles, and that the one who feared and ran so noisily was a good man and entirely human, because of which he’d been foolish …

  And so he fled, that merely human being, clamorously, with pounding heart, tearing the mist like cobwebs in a tunnel and leaving a yawning hole behind; and his inexorable pursuer flowing forward through that hole, with never the sound of a footfall, made more terrible because of his soundlessness.

  London, and the fugitive had thought he would be safe here. Panting, he skidded to a halt where a shaft of light lanced smokily down from a high window and made the cobbles shiny bright. In a black doorway a broken derelict sprawled like a fallen scarecrow, moaned about the night’s chill and clutched his empty bottle. Coarse laughter came from above, the chink of glasses and a low-muttered, lewd suggestion. Again the laughter, a woman’s, thick with lust.

  No refuge here, where the air itself seemed steeped in decay and ingrown vice——but at least there was the light, and humanity too, albeit dregs.

  The fugitive hugged the wall, fused with it and became one with the shadows, gratefully gulped at the sodden, reeking river air and looked back the way he had come. And there at the other end of the street, silhouetted against a rolling bank of mist from the river, motionless now and yet full of an awesome kinetic energy, like the still waters of a dam before the gates are opened …

  The guttural laughter came again from above, causing the fleeing man to start. Shadow-figures moved ganglingly, apishly together in the beam of light falling on the street, began tearing at each other's clothing. Abruptly the light was switched off, the window slammed shut, and the night and the mist closed in. And along the street the silent pursuer once more took up the chase.

  With his strength renewed a little but knowing he was tiring rapidly now, the fugitive pushed himself free of the wall and began to run again, forcing his legs to pump and his lungs to suck and his heart to pound as desperately as before. But he was almost home, almost safe. Sanctuary lay just around the next corner.

  ‘London’ … ‘home’ … ‘sanctuary’. Words once full of meaning, but in his present situation almost meaningless. Could anywhere be safe ever again? Cairo should have been, but instead, with the European War spilling over into the Middle East, it had been fraught. Paris had been worse: a seething cauldron on the boil and about to explode shatteringly. And in Tunisia … In Tunisia the troubles had seemed endless, where the French fought a guerilla war on all sides, not least with the Sahara’s Sanusi.

  The Sanusi, yes—and it was from the secret desert temple of an ancient Sanusi sect that the fugitive had stolen the Elixir. That had been his folly—it was why he was a fugitive.

  Half-way round the world and back their Priest of the Undying Dead had chased him, drawing ever closer, and here in London it seemed that at last the chase was at an end. He could run no further. It was finished. His only chance was the sanctuary, that secret place remembered from the penniless, friendless childhood of a waif. It had been more than thirty years ago, true, but still he remembered it clearly. And if a long-forsaken God had not turned from him entirely …

  Wrapped in mist he rounded the corner, came out of the mazy streets and on to the river's shoulder. The Thames with all its stenches, its poisons, its teeming rats and endless sewage—and its sanctuary. Nothing had changed, all was exactly as he remembered it. Even the mist was his friend now, for it cloaked him and turned him an anonymous grey, and he knew that from here on he could find his way blindfold. Indeed he might as well be blind, the way the milky mist rolled up and swallowed him.

  With hope renewed he plunged on across the last deserted street lying parallel to the river, found the high stone wall he knew would be there, followed it north for fifty yards to where spiked iron palings guarded its topmost tier against unwary climbers. For immediately beyond that wall at this spot the river flowed sluggish and deep and the wall was sheer, so that a man might easily drown if he should slip and fall. But the fugitive did not intend to fall; he was still agile as the boy he’d once been, except that now he also had a grown man’s strength.

  Without pause he jumped, easily caught the top of the wall, at once transferred his grip to the ironwork. He drew himself up, in a moment straddled the treacherous spikes, swung over and slid down the palings on the other side. And now—now, dear God—only keep the pursuer at bay; only let him stay back there in the mist, out of sight, and not come surging forward with his rotten eyes aglow and his crumbling nose sniffing like that of some great dead nightmare hound!

  And now, too, let memory stay sharp and serve the fugitive well, let it not fail him for a single moment, and let everything continue to be as it had been. For if anything had changed beyond that ancient, slimy wall…

  … But it had not!

  For here, remembered of old, was his marker—the base of a lone paling, bent to one side, like a single idle soldier in a perfect rank—where if he swung his feet a little to the left, in empty space above the darkly gurgling river—

  —His left foot made contact with a stone sill, at which he couldn’t suppress the smallest cry of relief. Then, clinging to the railings with one hand, he tremblingly reached down the other to find and grip an arch of stone; and releasing his grip on the railings entirely, he drew himself down and into the hidden embrasure in the river’s wall. For this was the entrance to his sanctuary.

  But no time to pause and thank whichever lucky stars still shone on him; no, for back there in the roiling mist the pursuer was following still, unerringly tracking him, he was sure. Or tracking the Elixir?

  Today, for the first time, that idea had dawned on him. It had come as he walked the chill December streets, when patting his overcoat’s inside pocket, for a moment he had thought the vial lost. Oh, and how he’d panicked then! But in a shop doorway where his hands trembled violently, finally he’d found the tiny glass bottle where it had fallen through a hole into the lining of his coat, and then in the grey light of wintry, war-depleted London streets, he had gazed at it—and at its contents.

  The Elixir—which might as well be water! A few drops of crystal-clear water, yes, that was how it appeared. But if you held it up to the light in a certain way …

  The fugitive started, held his breath, stilled his thoughts and brought his fleeting mind back to the present, the Now. Was that a sound from the street above? The faintest echo of a footfall on the cobbles three or four feet overhead?

  He crouched there in the dark embrasure, waited, listened with terror-sensitized ears—heard only the pounding of his own heart, his own blood singing in his ears. He had paused here too long, had ignored the Doom hanging over his immortal soul to favour the entirely mortal fatigue of bone and muscle. But now, once more, he forced himself to move. Some rubble blocked the way—blocks of stone, fallen from the low ceiling, perhaps—but he crawled over it, his back brushing the damp stonework overhead. Small furry rodents squealed and fled pas
t him towards the faint light of the entrance, tumbling into the river with tiny splashes. The ceiling dripped with moisture, where nitre stained the walls in faintly luminous patches.

  And when at last the fugitive had groped his way well back along the throat of the passage, only then dared he fumble out a match and strike it to flame.

  The shadows fled at once; he crouched and peered all about, then sighed and breathed easier; all was unchanged, the years flown between then and now had altered nothing. This was ‘his’ place, his secret place, where he’d come as a boy to escape the drunken wrath of a brutish stepfather. Well, that old swine was dead now, pickled in cheap liquor and undeservingly buried in the grounds of a nearby church. Good luck to him! But the sanctuary remained.

  The match burned down, its flame touching the fugitive’s fingers. He dropped it, swiftly struck another, and pushed on along the subterranean passage.

  Under a ceiling less than five feet high and arched with ancient stone, he must keep his back bowed; at his elbows the walls gave him six inches to spare on both sides. But while he could go faster now, still he must go quietly for a while yet. The follower had tracked him half-way round the world, tracked him supernaturally. And who could say but that he might track him here, too?

  Again he paused, scratched at the stubble on his chin, wondered about the Elixir. Oh, that was what his pursuer wanted, sure enough—but it was not all he wanted. No, for his chief objective was the life of the thief! A thief, yes, which was what he had been all of his miserable life. At first a petty thief, then a burglar of some skill and daring (and eventually of some renown, which in the end had forced him abroad), finally a looter of foreign tombs and temples.

  Tombs and temples …

  Again he thought of the Elixir, that tiny vial in his pocket. If only he had known then … but he had not known. He had thought those damned black Sanusi wizards kept treasure in that dune-hidden place, the tribal treasures of their ancestors; or at least, so he’d been informed by Erik Kuphnas in Tunis. Kuphnas, the dog, himself one of the world’s foremost experts in the occult. “Ah!” (he had said), “but they also keep the Elixir there—which is all that interests me. Go there, enter, steal! Keep what you will, but only bring me the Elixir. And never work again, my friend, for that’s how well I’ll pay you …”