Cthulhu Lives!: An Eldritch Tribute to H. P. Lovecraft (13 page)

Lying next to him was the partially burnt body of one of the two nurses who had worked at the compound. She was quickly identified as Margaret Huddleston, aged twenty. The poor girl had been shot several times in the head and chest. The other nurse, Linda Colman, was found several hours later, wandering down one of the lesser-known county roads in a trance-like state. Unfortunately, I was present when she was brought before the Sheriff for questioning.

Miss Colman was in a terrible state, her crisp nurse’s uniform soaked in blood. When the Sheriff tried to ask her what had happened, she answered in a slow and chillingly deliberate manner, “We didn’t do this, we just prepared them, prepared them for the others.”

“What others?” the Sheriff demanded.

“The others, the others that came. They did this. We just prepared them.” She would say nothing else, except for a series of nonsense syllables that she repeated endlessly before being taken away.

It was obvious to everyone present that the poor girl had gone completely insane. Whether a direct participant or only a witness, the incomprehensible things that had occurred at that place had shattered her mind beyond recovery. The prosecuting attorney had her quickly committed, on the advice of Dr. G.G. Helmsworth of Eastgrove State Hospital.

In the burnt out remains of each of the four cabins, deputies found six barely recognizable bodies that had been Lamarche’s patients. Over the course of their “cure,” the two dozen unfortunates had been systematically starved to death. In an adjacent field, the deputies dug up the disassociated bones of at least thirty more individuals. They doubted that enough remained of them to ever make a single positive identification.

I spent the next four days in that hellish place, photographing everything that the Sheriff deemed worth recording. Eastgrove Hospital even sent out a young pathologist, a Dr. R.L. Warren, to assist in determining the manner of each death. With every click of the shutter, my terror mounted as I imagined what might eventually reveal itself upon the glass negatives.

It was late in the fourth day when one of the Sheriff’s deputies discovered that terrible thing in the still smoking remnants of the main house. He called Dr. Warren and myself to take a look. At first glance, it seemed nothing more ominous than a curiously-formed black statuette. It wasn’t until we took a second look that an overwhelming, soul-chilling dread swept over us.

The statue was the distorted image of some blubbery bipedal creature with bat-like wings and extended digits. The figure was sitting on a throne, one that was covered in arcane symbols. Its head resembled that of a squid or octopus, being bulbous and altogether misshapen, and ending with a thick mass of disgusting tentacles. Somewhere deep inside, I recognized it as an abomination against nature itself. My mind recoiled frantically, and I closed my eyes, but the damage was done.

When the newspapers got wind of the statue, it was natural that they came to all sorts of conclusions surrounding devil worship and other forms of demonology. But those of us who actually saw the thing instinctively knew that its origins were much darker.

In that moment of revulsion, I understood that there was no God, not in any sense that the poor, deluded clergy had any notion about. Where was their God when these poor souls were being methodically murdered to feed impossible horrors? I had seen the photographs of the after-effects. Whatever hideous name this blasphemy might have possessed, it and its followers had far more command over this world than any mythological deity ignorantly invoked from the pulpit.

It took more than a fortnight for me to force myself to process and print the almost one hundred negatives that I had exposed. As they developed, looking at each one swiftly proved more agonizing than the last. As the images formed, I waited in abject terror to see what monstrous thing might expose itself next. I found myself consuming more and more laudanum in order to get through a single session in my darkroom.

Out of the ninety-four photographs that I had made over the course of those four days, seventeen contained the most monstrous images. The charred, emaciated corpses from the burnt out cabins produced many terrible visions of the victims’ ethereal, agonized screams. Such images even appeared on more than one photograph of the disarticulated skulls recovered from that hellish field. Each one of those prints and glass negatives I immediately destroyed. It was during this process that my hands developed the significant tremor that I have become so resigned to.

Franklin Butterfield was quickly implicated for assisting Dr. Lamarche, and covering up the deaths by starvation of at least four of her patients. Before the younger Mr. Butterfield could be arrested, the family spirited him over the border into Canada. They had him committed to a private sanitarium believed to be somewhere in the northern reaches of Saskatchewan. Over the months which followed, a series of unsubstantiated stories filtered south about Franklin Butterfield and his almost demonic behavior. The young man had obviously been driven completely insane by whatever he had participated in with the Lamarches.

Not a single trace of Dr. Rachel Lamarche was ever found, neither on the grounds of her so-called “clinic,” nor anywhere else in the area. For years afterward, people have claimed to have seen her in various places throughout the region. Not one reported sighting was ever substantiated or confirmed. I was not surprised.

The final image that I processed offered some clue to her fate. It was one of my larger photographs, of the still-smoldering main house. In it, a woman was standing just off to the right of the frame. One final time, I let my curiosity get the best of me, as I was unable to remember ever seeing a woman at that hellish place. After I foolishly made the print, I took out a magnifying glass. There was the semi-translucent figure of Dr. Rachel Lamarche. The trees were partially visible through her bright yellow dress. She was unmistakably looking right at me, waving politely at me with that exact same chillingly evil smile.

After all the images were finally done, I turned in all of my materials to the Sheriff’s Office, for the preservation of the historic record. I never took another photograph again.

SCALES FROM BALOR’S EYE
by Helmer Gorman

Genealogy, that’s the thing. People like to know where they came from and who they’re related to, what their heritage is. What it means to be them. It’s nonsense, of course. The backgrounds we came from don’t make our destiny, don’t dictate what we do. Still, my mother’s always been kind of insistent about this sort of thing and about our roots, nostalgic for ‘merrie old England,’ and she always hit a brick wall when we got back as far as that. I wasn’t going to pass up a free trip to England and so, here I was.

I wasted as much time as possible in London. Coming from a small New England town, life in the big city was fascinating to me. I’d never even been as far as New York before, let alone somewhere as exciting and foreign as London. They spoke English, at least, and that meant I wasn’t as completely out of my depth as I would have been in Paris or Berlin. It also meant I had a really good time out drinking and seeing the sights. Eventually though, I had to get off my ‘arse’ and set about what Mom wanted. Renting a car, I headed out, following the ancient map my mom had given me. It didn’t even show all the roads that were signposted. As I drove deeper and deeper into the countryside, and nearer and nearer the coast, I began to wonder if the village of Maundbury even existed.

Out of season it was cheaper, that was one thing, but outside the city, England was not the land of rolling green hills I’d been led to expect. Britain has this peculiar quality sometimes where everything goes grey. The sky is a cool slate grey, the mist swirling around you is the same and, when you see the sea, it’s the same damn color. Top to bottom grey, to the point where it seems to stretch away into infinity, and you can’t tell where you are or even how blind you’ve become.

I found the turn off, finally, that was supposed to lead to the village. Mom was on a mission to have me find old church records, so we could trace the family further back. Maundbury, my home town, took its name from this village. Early settlers just weren’t creative with the names when they first came to America. Ours were particularly lazy, not even bothering to put a ‘New’ in front when they founded the place.

The road, such as it was, was more of a track. It didn’t bode well. The car bounced and shuddered along, wreathed in mist, and I was shaken nearly out of my seat. When the road dropped in front of me, vanishing into nothingness, it was all I could do to bring the bone-shaking car to a halt. The front wheels came to a stop mere inches from falling away into whatever the unknown darkness hid.

With my heart in my mouth, I opened the door and stepped out into the swirling grey. The wind was blowing from behind me, weakly, out to sea. I could hear waves some distance below, washing against the shore. Everything sounded flat and muted in the fog. If I crouched, I could feel the very edge of the cliff, tufted with sickly grass, but there was no way to see the sea or know how high I was above the beach. It could have been twenty feet or two hundred. The only reference points were the misty glow of the car’s headlights, and further away, a distant, glowing porch light.

Perhaps I’d taken a turn off too soon, and the one I’d wanted had been the next one. I didn’t dare try to move the car in this mist, though. I reached in and turned off the engine, cutting the lights, and left the car behind. I had no choice but to wait for it to clear. Hopefully, I’d be able to get some help to move it then.

The ground was soft and crumbly like cheese under my feet as I trudged. Swirling mist clung to my hair and clothes and dampened them. The distant glowing light slowly resolved itself into a run-down Victorian house. It was weathered by the rain and the salt, with rotting window frames and mold-speckled glass. Simultaneously hopeful and worrying was a sun-faded sign in the window of the door, which said ‘rooms available.’

A glance at my watch told me it was only eight in the evening. It felt much later. I’d hoped for a pub or an inn to stay at. There were no other lights around though, and this seemed to be the only place to go. I hammered my hand against the door and stepped back to wait, trying to put on my best all-American smile for whoever came.

The door opened, and the rush of heat that issued forth felt almost stifling compared to the cold outside. I blinked and smiled, and smiled and blinked again, and gave my best and most cheerful “Hi!”

The person who stood there in the light was a wizened little dwarf of a man. He was all hunch and hair, with occasional sparse clusters of red in the snow-white of his beard. Sea-green eyes peered up at me from the dark depths of his wrinkles. “Can I ’elp you?” He leaned against the door, seemingly pretty confident for an old man confronting a stranger on his doorstep.

“My car’s stuck.” I shrugged apologetically. “I was hoping that maybe I might be able to get a room tonight until I can get it sorted out tomorrow?”

“Course you can. Come on in, before you catch your death.” The old man’s face creaked into a smile, and he stepped aside.

The air outside was a soaking blanket of cold, but inside it was steamy and hot. The moment I crossed the threshold, sweat began to pour down my back. The place was so cramped, it even looked like the walls were sweating. Ancient central heating rattled away as I stood there taking in the Bible verses on the walls and the peeling wallpaper.

The old man led the way to the stairs, and the threadbare carpet that covered them. It took him an interminable amount of time to climb the steps. I followed behind, trying not to feel impatient.

“Got nothin’ with you, eh?”

“It’s back in the car. I won’t be able to find it until the morning. Not to worry, so long as I can have a shower it’ll be okay.” Moving shadows caught my eye as I replied – a pair of female shapes watching me from the hallway below.

“Bath.”

“What?”

“No shower, just a bath.”

“Oh, that’ll be okay.”

The women’s faces appeared in the dim, shifting light, framed by red hair, one old, one young. They stared unsettlingly until they slid out of sight when we finally reached the landing. Floorboards bent under my weight as the old man shuffled up to one of the doors.

“And ’ere we are, Mister...?”

“Bremer, John Bremer.” I smiled at him again, and assured him I’d be okay, and that I’d take breakfast in the morning. In fact, I all but slammed the strange old gnome’s own door in his face in my haste to escape into the room.

The bedroom stank of damp and rot, and even with the main light on, it was surprisingly dingy. The window frame was crumbling and stained black, and the single-pane windows rattled as draughts wended their way through the frame. The bed had the firmness of chronic disuse, and the wet smell to match. It groaned as I sat on it. Sympathizing, I flipped on the bedside lamp, which barely made any difference.

Mark 1:17 peered down at me from one wall in a gilt frame, and an old, local map glared down from the other. It appeared to show the peninsula we were on, ‘the Tongue.’ The village looked to be a the part of the peninsula that didn’t seem to be there any longer. Was Maundbury even still there? Was this all that was left? This whole trip might be a bust. Mom was going to be pissed, but if the village wasn’t even there, there was nothing to be done.

Looking out the window told me nothing more than it had before. Outside the glass, the whole world was a sea of grey. It felt as if the house was the only thing that existed. The only sounds were the distant wash of the tide and the constant, unpredictable rattle of the heating. I couldn’t hear anything else – no television, no radio. It seemed odd. I wondered if they were gathered below me, silent, listening for noises from the ceiling.

Whatever the case, I wasn’t going anywhere until morning. So I slept, swathed in mist, surrounded by Bible passages and the ghost of a missing village – the very past I had no real interest in.

♦

Come morning, the mist had cleared. Wiping the condensation and black muck from the window, I felt my stomach drop through my body to see just how close I had come to death the night before. From my vantage on the upper floor, I could see my car, inches away from the edge of the cliff. The track I’d been following plunged straight over the precipice, to the surf and rocks below.

I swallowed and gathered my wits, pulled on my still-damp clothes from the night before, and stumbled out onto the landing. In the cold daylight, the dank old house didn’t feel half so threatening or strange. It just seemed somehow sad, a bygone reminder of decades before. The 1950s seemed like a good candidate. The place had that impoverished feel of rationing and hard graft to it somehow. Make do and mend, threadbare but prideful, and don’t let anyone say otherwise.

When I found it, the bathroom was – by comparison – strikingly modern. At least it had been in the 1970s, when avocado was all the rage. There’s not really such a thing as a quick bath. It’s a ritualistic affair – running the taps, testing the temperature, laying out the towel, and so on. The bath wasn’t very clean though, so I made it as fast as possible. I dipped myself into the tepid water, and washed my hair with soap – I had nothing with me.

The stairs protested my modest weight as I clambered down in search of breakfast. It’s one of those meals that the British never do particularly well. Their much-vaunted ‘fry-up’ is strictly for people who hate their arteries. About the best you can hope for is a couple of slices of toast, or a bowl of soggy cereal in milk that tastes like water because the full-fat is ‘bad’ for you.

This humble little shit-hole was no different. While I could have torn through a trough of bacon, I had to make do with a bowl of limpid bran flakes, with a few blackberries sprinkled on top for color. They didn’t even have orange juice, just water.

There was no sign of the old couple while I ate my breakfast. The girl of the house, presumably their daughter, was the one who served me. She was dressed plainly, but looking at her it was hard to believe she came from the same stock. Her hair was a tumbling mess of bright red curls, barely held in check with a hair band. Her figure was a delight, and almost made the breakfast palatable. It certainly stopped me from doing the whole indignant and demanding American guest act. Instead I smiled and nodded in that special British way, and assured her that everything was just fine.

Somehow I managed to drag myself away from the table to look outside. Everything was damp with dew. Wisps of the mist still lingered, around the house and the few lonely looking trees that clung to the cliff. I retraced my steps back to the car, and gingerly climbed in, triple checking I was in reverse and ready to go. Finally I risked starting the engine, and backed away from the precipice.

I didn’t want to spend any more time in the guest house just yet. Once I’d gotten the car back next to it, I left my suitcase in the trunk after hauling my coat out. When I pulled it on, I realized it was the first warm, dry thing I’d felt since I arrived.

As the sun rose higher, I strolled along the edge of the cliff, looking for a way down. There was a path, though it looked a bit treacherous. Old plastic ‘danger’ signs were dotted along it, but someone had rigged up a rope you could hold onto as you went up or down. So, palms burning from clinging to the rope, I stumbled my way down to the beach.

I jumped down the last couple of steps onto the sand, and wrinkled my nose. There was a lot of weed washed up. The tide mark was sticky with decomposing sea life, oil, tar and plastic, too. The mess was hopping with sand fleas. I trudged past it down towards the waterline.

The sand was rough, and unpredictable underfoot, making me stumble and sway. In some ways it was more like mud than sand, and it wasn’t any color I’d been expecting. Where do you even
get
grey sand? Here and there, dotted along the beach, were pebbles. Some of them looked a little odd, bright red shining up from the muck. I bent down low and picked a piece up. It was rough like pumice and light in my hand. I tossed it up and down, catching it out of the air as I finally realised what it was – red brick, washed down to a smooth surface like the rest of the pebbles. Perhaps part of the lost village that was just out there, beneath the waves.

The whole beach was dotted with these little red reminders, artifacts of the town that had sunk. Now I’d seen one, I spotted more and more, chunks of bright red standing out against the dull, grey sand. I wandered slowly down the beach, following the bands of the tide line, stopping every now and then to crouch and pick up one of the rounded pebbles. Brick wasn’t the only thing to have been worn smooth. Pieces of glass, worn opaque, were dotted across the grey. Green glass, blue glass, clear glass. Had they been bottles? Windows? Something else?

It was just scraps, bits and pieces. Nothing earth-shaking here, nothing important, nothing to give me any sense of connection or of history. Nothing to link me to the people who were the ancestors and cousins of my own town, so far away. This place, these people, they were meaningless. I tossed a smooth lump of brick into the sluggish waves and sat down, immediately regretting it as the damp soaked into my ass.

That’s when I saw it.

Something glittering, shimmering in the lazy, foamy waves. It wasn’t the sun on the water. There wasn’t enough sunlight for that. It was something else. I hefted myself up, struggling back to my feet, soaking my shoes and socks as I stepped into the wetness. Something about the water seemed foul. I didn’t want to linger there. It wasn’t just the rotting weeds but something else, something more that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Still, I steeled myself and thrust my hand into the froth, plucking out a single golden coin from the grey sand.

I held it up in the wan light, and brushed the sand off it as I stepped back out of the water, shaking my feet. The coin was gold, for certain. It wasn’t round, though. It was more like a child’s drawing of ‘round’. Rough and ready, a crude image of something. Maybe a horse? Maybe a stag? The letters ‘C’, ‘V’, ‘N’ stamped into it. It didn’t make much sense to me. It looked like nothing I’d ever seen before, but I thought perhaps the strange family at the house could tell me more.

I pocketed it with a frown, and looked back out over the sea. A larger wave washed the foul water up high enough to re-soak my shoes. For a moment, just a moment, the pointed tip of a church steeple broke the dull surface of the sea, like a broken tooth peeking from behind blackened lips. The only sign of our past, the history I’d come to find and, somehow, it made me shudder.