The Taint and Other Novellas: Best Mythos Tales Volume 1 Read online

  No, the insidious gropings of that horror within Hamilton’s brain simply did not bear thinking about, for that had obviously been the source of his insanity. Anderson in no way considered himself weak to shudder when thoughts as terrible as these came to threaten his now calm and controlled state of mind, and when the bad dreams started he at once lay the blame at the feet of the same horror.

  At first the nightmares were vague shadowy things, with misty vistas of rolling plains and yawning, empty coastlines. There were distant islands with strange pinnacles and oddly angled towers, but so far away that the unknown creatures moving about in those island cities were mere insects to Anderson’s dreaming eyes. And for this he was glad. Their shapes seemed in a constant state of flux and were not—pleasant. They were primal shapes, from which the dreamer deduced that he was in a primal land of aeons lost to mankind. He always woke from such visions uneasy in mind and deflated in spirit.

  But with the passing of the months into summer the dreams changed, becoming sharper visually, clearer in their insinuations, and actually frightening as opposed to merely disturbing. Their scenes were set (Anderson somehow knew) deep in the dimly lighted bowels of one of the island cities, in a room or vault of fantastic proportions and awe-inspiring angles. Always he kneeled before a vast octopoid idol…except that on occasion it was not an idol but a living, hideously intelligent Being!

  These dreams were ever the worst when a strange voice spoke to him in words that he was quite unable to understand. He would tremble before the towering horror on its thronelike pedestal—a thing one hundred times greater in size than the stone morbidity in the freak-house—and, aware that he only dreamed, he would know that it, too, was asleep and dreaming. But its tentacles would twine and twist and its claws would scrabble at the front of the throne, and then the voice would come…

  Waking from nightmares such as these he would know that they were engendered of hellish memory—of the night of the green glow, the deep-ocean smell, and the writhing thing in his brother’s head—for he would always recall in his first waking moments that the awful alien voice had used sounds similar to those Hamilton had mouthed before the green light came and after it had taken the florid explorer away. The dreams were particularly bad and growing worse as the year drew to a close, and on a number of occasions the dreamer had been sure that slumbering Cthulhu was about to stir and wake up!

  And then, himself waking up, all the horror would come back to Anderson, to be viewed once more in his mind’s eye in vivid clarity, and knowing as he did that his brother too had been plagued by just such dreams prior to his second long absence from the fairground, Anderson Tharpe was a troubled man indeed. Yes, they had been the same sort of nightmares, those dreams of Hamilton’s; hadn’t he admitted that “Cthulhu comes to me in dreams”? And had the dreams themselves not heralded the greater horrors?

  And yet, in less gloomy mood, Anderson found himself more and more often dwelling upon Hamilton’s weird murder weapon, the pulsating green light. He was by no means an ignorant man, and he had read something of the recent progress in laser technology. Soon he had convinced himself that his brother had used an unknown form of foreign science to offer up his mad “sacrifices to Cthulhu”. If only he could discover how Hamilton had done it…

  But surely science such as that would require complex machinery? It was while pondering this very problem that Anderson hit upon what he believed must be the answer: whatever tools or engines Hamilton had used, they must be hidden in the octopoid idol, or perhaps built into those ugly stone tablets which had formed a semicircle about the idol. And perhaps, like the electric-eye beams which operated the moving floors and blasts of cool air in the fairground’s Noah’s Ark, Hamilton’s chanted “summons” had been nothing more than a resonant trigger to set the hidden lasers or whatever to working. The smell of deep ocean and residual dampness must be the natural aftermath of such processes, in the same way that carbon monoxide and dead oil is the waste from petrol engines and the smell of ozone is attendant to electrical discharges.

  The tablets, the idol too, still stood where they had stood in the time before the horror—the only change was that now the canvas partition was down and Hamilton’s ancient artifacts were on display with the other paraphernalia of the freak-house—but just suppose Anderson were to arrange them exactly as they had been before, and suppose further that he could discover how to use that chanted formula. What then? Would he be able to summon the green light? If so, would he be able to use it as he had tried to convince Hamilton it should be used? Perhaps the answer lay in his dead brother’s books…

  Certainly that collection of ancient tomes, now slowly disintegrating in a cupboard in the caravan, were full of hints of such things. It was out of curiosity at first that Anderson began to read those books, or at least what he could read of them! Many were not in English but Latin or archaic German, and at least one other was in ciphers the like of which Anderson had only ever seen on the stone tablets in the freak-house.

  There were among the volumes such titles as Feery’s Notes on the Cthaat Aquadingen, and a well-thumbed copy of the same author’s Notes on the Necronomicon ; while yet another book, handwritten in a shaky script, purported to be the Necronomicon itself, or a translation thereof, but Anderson could not read it for its characters were formed of an unbelievably antiquated German. Then there was a large envelope full of yellowed loose-leaves, and Hamilton had written on the envelope that this was “Ibn Shoddathua’s Translation of the Mum-Nath Papyri”. Among the more complete and recognizable works were such titles as The Golden Bough and Miss Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, but by comparison these were light reading.

  During December and to the end of January, all of Anderson’s free time was taken up in the study of these works, until finally he became in a limited way something of an authority of the dread Cthulhu Cycle of Myth. He learned of the Elder Gods, benign forces or deities that existed “in peace and glory” near Betelgeuse in the constellation Orion; and of the powers of evil, the Great Old Ones! He read of Azathoth, bubbling and blaspheming at the center of infinity—of Yog-Sothoth, the “all-in-one and one-in-all”, a god-creature coexistent in all time and conterminous with all space—of Nyarlathotep, the messenger of the Great Old Ones—of Hastur the Unspeakable, hell-thing and “Lord of the Interstellar Spaces”—of fertile Shub-Niggurath, “the black goat of the woods with a thousand young”—and, finally, of Great Cthulhu himself, an inconceivable evil that seeped down from the stars like cosmic pus when Earth was young and inchoate.

  There were, too, lesser gods and beings more or less obscure or distant from the central theme of the Mythos. Among these Anderson read of Dagon and the Deep Ones; of Yibb-Tstll and the Gaunts of Night; of the Tcho-Tcho people and the Mi-Go; of Yig, Chaugnar Faugn, Nygotha, and Tsathoggua; of Atlach-Nacha, Lloigor, Zhar, and Ithaqua; of burrowing Shudde-M’ell, meteor-borne Glaaki, flaming Cthugha, and the loathsome Hounds of Tindalos.

  He learned how—for practicing abhorrent rites—the Great Old Ones were banished to prisoning environs where, ever ready to take possession of the Earth again, they live on eternally…Cthulhu, of course, having featured prominently in his brother’s madness—now supposedly lying locked in sunken R’lyeh beneath the waves, waiting for the stars to “come right” and for his minions, human and otherwise, to perform those rites which would once more return him as ruler of his former surface dominions—held the greatest interest for Anderson.

  And the more he read, the more he became aware of the fantastic depth of his subject—but even so he could hardly bring himself to admit that there was anything of more than passing interest in such “mumbo-jumbo”. Nevertheless, on the night of the second of February, 1962, he received what should have been a warning: a nightmare of such potency that it did in fact trouble him for weeks afterwards, and particularly when he saw the connection in the date of this visitation. Of course, it had been Candlemas, which would have had immediate and speci
al meaning to anyone with even the remotest schooling in the occult. Candlemas, and Anderson Tharpe had dreamed of basaltic submarine towers of titanic proportions and nightmare angles; and within those basalt walls and sepulchres, he had known that loathly Lord Cthulhu dreamed his own dreams of damnable dominion…

  This had not been all. He had drifted in his dreams through those walls to visit once more the inner chambers and kneel before the sleeping god. But it had been an unquiet sleep the Old One slept, in which his demon claws scrabbled fitfully and his folded wings twitched and jerked as if fighting to spread and lift him up through the pressured deeps to the unsuspecting world above! Then, as before, the voice had come to Anderson Tharpe—but this time it had spoken in English!

  “Do you seek,” the voice had asked in awesome tones, “to worship Cthulhu? Do you presume to His priesthood? I can see that YOU DO NOT, and yet you meddle and seek to discover His secrets! Be warned: it is a great sin against Cthulhu to destroy one of His chosen priests, and yet I see that you have done so. It is a sin, too, to scorn Him; but you have done this also. And it is a GREAT sin in His eyes to seek to use His secrets in any way other than in His service—AND THIS, TOO, YOU WOULD DO! Be warned, and live. Live and pray to your weak god that you are destroyed in the first shock of the Great Rising. It were not well for you that you live to reap Cthulhu’s wrath!”

  The voice had finally receded, but its sepulchral mind-echoes had barely faded away when it seemed to the paralyzed dreamer that the face-tentacles of slumbering Cthulhu reached out, groping malignantly in his direction where he kneeled in slime at the base of the massive throne!

  At that a distant howling sprang up, growing rapidly louder and closer; and as the face-tentacles of the sleeping god had been about to touch him, so Tharpe came screaming awake in his sweat-drenched bed to discover that the fairground was in an uproar. All the watchdogs, big and small, chained and roaming free alike, were howling in unison in the middle of that cold night. They seemed to howl at the blindly impassive stars, and their cries were faintly answered from a thousand similarly agitated canine throats in the nearby town!

  The next morning speculation was rife among the showmen as to what had caused the trouble with the dogs, and eventually, on the evidence of certain scraps of fur, they put it down to a stray cat that must have got itself trapped under one of the caravans to be pulled to pieces by a Great Dane. Nevertheless, Anderson wondered at the keen senses and interpretation of the dogs in the local town that they had so readily taken up the unnatural baying and howling…

  During the next fortnight or so Anderson’s slumbers were mercifully free of nightmares, so that he was early prompted to continue his researches into the Cthulhu Cycle of Myth. This further probing was born partly of curiosity and partly (as Anderson saw it) of necessity; he yet hoped to be able to gainfully employ his brother’s mysterious green light, and his determination was bolstered by the fact that takings of late had been dismal. So he closed off again the previously partitioned area of the tent and his spare-time studies now became equally divided between Hamilton’s books of occult lore and a patient examination of the hideous idol and carved tablets. He discovered no evidence of hidden mechanical devices in the queer relics, but nevertheless it was not long before he found his first real clue towards implementing his ambition.

  It was as simple as this: he had earlier noted upon the carved tops of the stone tablets a series of curiously intermingled cuneiform and dot-group hieroglyphs, two distinct sets to each stone. This could not be considered odd in itself, but finally Anderson had recognized the pattern of these characters and knew that they were duplicated in the handwritten Necronomicon; and more, there were translations in that work into at least two other languages, one of them being the antiquated German in which the bulk of the book was written.

  Anderson’s knowledge of German, even in its modern form, was less than rudimentary, and thus he enlisted the aid of old Hans Möller from the hoopla stall. The old German’s eyesight was no longer reliable, however, and his task was made no easier by the outmoded form in which the work was written; but at last, and not without Anderson’s insistent urging, Möller was able to translate one of the sequences first into more modern German (in which it read: Gestorben ist nicht, was für ewig ruht, und mit unbekannten Äonen mag sogar der Tod noch sterben; ), and then into the following rather poor English: “It is not dead that lies still forever; Death itself dies with the passing of strange years.”

  When he heard the old German speak these words in his heavy accent, Anderson had to stifle the gasp of recognition which welled within him. This was nothing less than a variation of that paradoxical couplet with which his brother had once terminated his fiendish “sacrifice to Cthulhu!”

  As for the other set of symbols from the tablets, frustration was soon to follow. Certainly the figures were duplicated in the centuried book, appearing in what Anderson at first took to be a code of some sort, but they had not been reproduced in German. Möller—while having not the slightest inkling of Anderson’s purpose with this smelly, evil old book—finally suggested to him that perhaps the letters were not in code at all, that they might simply be the symbols of an obscure foreign language. Anderson had to agree that Möller could well be right; in the yellowed left-hand margin of the relevant page, directly opposite the frustrating cryptogram, his brother had long ago written: “Yes, but what of the pronunciation?”

  Hamilton had done more than this: he had obligingly dated his patently self-addressed query, and the surviving Tharpe brother saw that the jotting had been made prior to the fatal second period of travel in foreign lands. Who could say what Hamilton might or might not have discovered upon that journey? Without a doubt he had been in strange places. And he had seen and done strange things to bring back with him that hellish cancer-growth sprouting in his brain.

  Finally Anderson decided that this jumbled gathering of harsh and unpronounceable letters—be it a scientific process or, more fancifully, a magical evocation—must indeed be the formula with which a clever man might call forth the green light in his dead brother’s “Temple of Cthulhu”. He thanked old Hans and sent him away, then sat in his caravan poring over the ancient book, puzzling and frowning long into the evening; until, as darkness fell, his eyes lit with dawning inspiration…

  And so over the period of the next few days the freakhouse suffered its transition into the Tomb of the Great Old Ones. During the same week Anderson visited a printer in the local town and had new admission tickets printed. These tickets, as well as bearing the new name of the show and revised price of admission, now carried upon the reverse the following cryptic instruction:

  Any adult person desiring to speak with the proprietor of the Tomb of the Great Old Ones on matters of genuine occult phenomena or similar manifestations, or on subjects relating to the Great Old Ones, R’lyeh or the Cthulhu Cycle of Myth, is welcome to request a private meeting.

  Anderson Tharpe: Prop.

  The other members of the fairground fraternity were not aware of this offer of Anderson’s—nor of his authority, real or assumed, in such subjects to be able to make such an offer—until after the funfair moved into its next location, and by that time they too had discovered his advance advertising in the local press. Of course, Bella Hodgson had always looked after advance publicity in the past, but she could hardly be offended by Anderson’s personal efforts toward this end. Any good publicity he devised and paid for himself could only go towards attracting better crowds to the benefit of the funfair in general.

  And within a very short time Anderson’s plan started to bear fruit, when at last his desire for a higher percentage of rather more erudite persons among his show’s clientele began to be realized. His sole purpose, of course, had been to attract just such persons in the hope that perhaps one of them might provide the baffling pronunciation he required, an acoustical translation of the key to call up the terrible green glow.

  Such authorities must surely exist; his own
brother had become one in a comparatively short time, and others had spent whole lifetimes in the concentrated study of these secrets of elder lore. Surely, sooner or later, he would find a man to provide the answer, and then the secrets of the perfect murder weapon would be his. When this happened, then Anderson would test his weapon on the poor unfortunate who handed him the key, and in this way he would be sure that the secret was his alone. From then on…oh, there were many possibilities…

  Through early and mid-April Anderson received a number of inquisitive callers at his caravan: some of them cranks, but at least a handful of genuinely interested and knowledgeable types. Always he pumped them for what they knew of elder mysteries in connection with the Cthulhu Cycle, especially their knowledge in ancient tongues and obscure languages, and twice over he was frustrated just when he thought himself on the right track. On one occasion, after seeing the tablets and idol, an impressed visitor presented him with a copy of Walmsley’s Notes on Deciphering Codes, Cryptograms, and Ancient Inscriptions; but to no avail, the work itself was too deep for him.

  Then, towards the end of April, in response to Anderson’s continuous probing, a visitor to his establishment grudgingly gave him the address of a so-called “occult investigator”, one Titus Crow, who just might be interested in his problem. Before he left the fairground this same gentleman, the weird artist Chandler Davies, strongly advised Tharpe that the whole thing were best forgotten, that no good could ever come of dabbling in such matters—be it serious study or merely idle curiosity—and with that warning he had taken his leave…