Strange Eons (4 page)

Lovecraft had invented imaginary locales for his stories. Most disturbing was the witch-haunted city of Arkham, home of Miskatonic University. In its library reposed a rare copy of the
Necronomicon,
a blasphemous book of black magic containing revelations about the evil powers that spawned and still secretly controlled our universe.

In the deep woods beyond the city, a strange recluse born during the eighteenth century prolonged his unnatural life through cannibalism; in the lonely hills near the village of Dunwich, an eccentric farmer practised wizardry, offering a feeble-minded girl to an alien entity and producing hideous offspring, half-human and half-monster.

Other hybrids lurked in the abandoned port of Innsmouth, whose seafaring inhabitants had met and mated with creatures dwelling in the ocean depths of Polynesia where they were worshipped by the natives. Gradually the inbred offspring of these unnatural unions lost their human characteristics and became ichthyoid or batrachian; in the end they developed gills and took to the sea. But meanwhile they hid in the crumbling houses of the forgotten town, serving the strange gods they’d found in the South Seas and disposing of intruders who stumbled across their existence.

In Lovecraft’s domain, winged visitors from other planets haunted the deserted Vermont hills and mountain peaks. Aided by human allies, they plotted against mankind. Other humans formed a worldwide cult to serve Cthulhu—one of the Great Old Ones who ruled earth in ancient times and now slept beneath the sea in the sunken city of R’lyeh. When volcanic activity raised Cthulhu from the deep, he slithered forth from his stone tomb, ready to reign and raven. Almost by chance he was seemingly destroyed and sank again into the stone city beneath the sea, but still he lives and waits the day when his followers will find the spell to call him up from the depths.

All of Lovecraft’s later work fell into this pattern of legend; of a race of monsters who once ruled the earth and were expelled, yet live on outside or beneath it and shall return with the aid of human allies worshipping them with rites of secret magic. The Cthulhu Mythos reveals a world in which civilization and its technology is meaningless and ephemeral. Modern man, engrossed in pointless progress, cannot escape the power of the Great Old Ones who once ruled and will soon return to rule again.

For three days Keith lived in this world—the shadowy dream-world of Lovecraft’s life and the nightmare-world of his stories.

Then Waverly’s call brought him back to his own home, and to reality.

“Well, what do you think of Lovecraft now?”

Waverly settled back in his chair, brandy snifter in hand, as the two men stared out at the sunset through the window of Keith’s den.

Keith shrugged. “He had a terrific imagination, no doubt about that.”

“None?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Suppose he wasn’t just writing fiction.” Waverly leaned forward. “Suppose he was trying to warn us.”

“About what? Don’t tell me you believe in ghouls.”

“Someone does.” Waverly’s eyes narrowed behind the dark glasses as he gestured towards the empty tabletop. “Someone stole your painting. Someone killed the dealer who sold it to you.”

“Is that what the police say?”

“The police say nothing.” Waverly tugged at his beard. “There hasn’t been a follow-up story on the murder—not a line in three days—and I don’t think there will be. The killer left no clues. If we hadn’t found that scrap of paper—”

“It proves nothing. Neither does the painting.” Keith took a sip of brandy. “Many artists paint monsters, but this doesn’t mean such things actually exist. Many people indulge in weird forms of worship; there might even be some sort of mysterious underground cult like the one in Lovecraft’s stories. But what they worship is a superstition, pure and simple.”

“I don’t think it’s pure, and I don’t think it’s simple.” Waverly reached for the brandy decanter and refilled his glass. “Neither did Lovecraft—and all his biographers agree he was a strict materialist. I’m convinced he wrote fantasy to cloak fact.”

“What sort of fact?”

“The fact of miscegenation.” Waverly nodded. “Lovecraft had a puritan attitude toward sex, and yet this theme threads through his stories. Even in the early tales, his morbid dislike of ‘foreigners’ hints at something evil in the mingling of bloodlines, something that would debase civilized attitudes and drag mankind down to prehuman level.

“Remember the degenerate underground race he describes in
The Lurking Fear
and
The Rats in the Walls?
In
Arthur Jermyn
he told of the offspring of ape and human, but I think he was really getting at something far worse. Then, in
Pickman’s Model,
he openly spoke of ghouls—creatures who feast on the dead and presumably are born from a necrophilic union.

“But all this was only a prelude to the real horror—not the mating of superior with inferior, of man with animal, of the living with the dead, but something even more disturbing—the mating of man and monster.

“Consider Wilbur Whateley and his twin brother in
The Dunwich Horror
—children of Yog-Sothoth and a human mother. Think about the villagers in
The Shadow over Innsmouth,
worshipping the Kanaka gods of Polynesia with sexual rites which spawned a race of beings that lived on land until they developed the ‘Innsmouth look’—fish-eyed, frog-faced mutations who finally wriggled back into the sea to join Great Cthulhu in the deep.” Waverly gulped his brandy. “That’s what Lovecraft was trying to tell us in his stories—there are monsters in our midst.”

Keith set his glass down upon the table. “If Lovecraft really believed in such superstitious nonsense, then why did he write fiction?”

Waverly pursed his lips beneath the beard. “Your choice of wording supplies its own answer. From the beginning of time there have been accounts of such beings. Greek and Babylonian mythology gave us the Hydra, the Medusa, the Minotaur, dragon-men with wings. In the lore of Africa we find leopard-men and lion-men; the Eskimos speak of bear-creatures, the Japanese have their fox-woman, the Tibetans tell of the Yeti, the so-called Abominable Snowman. Europe knew the werewolf, the
lycanthrope;
our own Indians feared Big Foot and the snake-people who whispered in the woods. Always a few have warned and some have worshipped as well—but the majority continued to speak in your voice. The voice of reason, which damns all this as superstition, and damns those who believe it as ignorant or insane. Lovecraft knew their fate and had no wish to share it. But he couldn’t keep utterly silent; consequently he chose to hide behind the mask of fantasy.”

Keith’s hands formed the steeple to a temple of disbelief. “You keep saying Lovecraft
knew,”
he murmured. “The implication is that he had access to some sort of forbidden lore, and spent years investigating the subject.”

“Right,” said Waverly.

“But that’s absurd! The facts of Lovecraft’s life are fully documented.”

“Not all of them.”

“What about the biographies I read, and the memoirs by Derleth and others?”

“De Camp didn’t know Lovecraft personally. Long met him in New York and on other occasions—but he only saw what Lovecraft chose to reveal of himself. Conover saw him just twice, and Derleth never set eyes on him at all. Neither did most of HPL’s correspondents or today’s scholars. They rely on hearsay and the letters he wrote. Well, hearsay is inaccurate. As for the letters, what better way for a man to hide his real
persona
than behind a wall of words?” Waverly spoke softly. “I tell you the man was up to something—and into something.”

Keith frowned. “But how did it all start?”

“We know HPL was fascinated by old New England and its historical landmarks. He spent time with antiquarians and local historians in the cities. Maybe they put him onto something. He began visiting the backwoods, the almost-forgotten little hamlets with their deserted, boarded-up houses he wrote about so frequently in his stories. But suppose he wasn’t just sightseeing. Perhaps he was looking for something. Something he found in an ancient attic or crumbling basement—an old diary, a manuscript, or even a book.”

“You think the
Necronomicon
really existed?”

“I wouldn’t go that far.” Waverly shook his head. “But there were actual witch-cults in New England, and they did use volumes of so-called black magic. If Lovecraft discovered one of these it may have started him thinking seriously about the old legends and tracking down the truth behind them.”

Keith poured himself another brandy. “When do you think all this happened?”

“It must have started about 1926, after his marriage broke up and he left New York to live in Providence again with his two old aunts. There was a lot they didn’t know and were in no position to guess.” Waverly cleared his throat, his voice hoarsening. “All this stuff about HPL being a noctambulist, prowling the streets at night. Do you really believe he just wandered around aimlessly, or did he have a destination? I think he must have. And it was then, of course, that he met Upton—the Richard Upton Pickman of his story.”

Keith gestured in interruption. “We still don’t know there even was such a person. Just because you picked up a scrap of paper—”

Waverly chuckled, but his features remained immobile. “On the basis of that scrap of paper I’ve had a very busy three days, calling people back East. Let me tell you what I found out. First of all, there
was
an artist named Richard Upton. Born in Boston, in 1884. Died there in 1926.”

“I suppose you’re going to tell me he disappeared from the basement of a weird old mansion in the dead of night?”

“Nothing of the sort. According to newspaper accounts, on December tenth he returned from a trip—to Providence, mind you—to discover his studio had been broken into and his entire collection of paintings stolen. That evening, after reporting the theft to the police, he shot himself.”

“Motive?”

“He left no note. The paintings were never recovered, and if the police ever learned anything it wasn’t made public.” Waverly leaned forward. “But I found out something they didn’t know. A week earlier, before Upton made the Providence trip, he crated up one painting, boxed his books and correspondence, and sent them off to the North End Warehouse and Storage Company. The stuff laid there unclaimed—probably forgotten—all these years. Until Santiago bought the lot.”

“How’d you trace this down?”

“I told you I have contacts. Beckman suggested getting hold of a Boston phone directory and calling storage firms to inquire about any recent sale to Santiago; that’s how I got the information.”

“Beckman?”

“A book dealer I know here in town. Specializes in first editions and rare items. Naturally he was interested in anything to do with HPL. He thinks it’s quite possible that Santiago might not have gotten all of Upton’s material—there could be more still in the warehouse, including correspondence from Lovecraft. Such letters fetch high prices nowadays. Anyway, he was willing to make a deal with me.”

“What sort of deal?”

Waverly rose. “I’m going to Boston at Beckman’s expense. Whatever I find to buy, Beckman sells—and we split fifty-fifty.”

“When do you leave?”

“There’s a flight in the morning.” Waverly moved to the door of the den. “If you plan on being home, I’ll give you a call tomorrow night around eight and tell you what I’ve learned.”

“I’ll be waiting,” Keith said.

They came out of the darkness and the depths, capering, crawling, creeping in response to the faint, eerie piping of an unseen flute.

Those that capered were human, or humanoid; they danced in the flickering flare of fires set about the ancient stones high on the lonely hilltop, and Keith heard their shrill and cadenced chanting:
Iaa! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!

And then came the response—the buzzing drone that was not a human voice or a human sound or even an imitation of human speech. But there were words he recognized—
Yog-Sothoth, Cthulhu, Azazoth
—and their utterance rose from the shadow-shapes that crept and crawled in the lonely night beyond the circle of firelight.

None could be seen clearly, and for this Keith was grateful, but the flames glinted to give glimpses of massive, monstrous mountains. Heaving, quivering mountains alive with the movement of myriad ropy tentacles; mountains covered with bulging eyes, opening and closing spasmodically, and hundreds of gaping mouths from which issued the hissing and croaking horror of words not shaped by mortal tongue.

It seemed to Keith as though the very hills shuddered to the fearsome echo of that guttural response, and then the scene faded and he was back in his own room once more. He realized he had dreamed and was still dreaming as his bed shook as though an earthquake assailed it.

Now, as his dream continued, the shaking ceased, but the memory of the creatures persisted, and with them the memory of all that Waverly had hinted at.

Fear came, and then resolution.

In his dream, Keith fancied he reached for the phone book on the nightstand and fumbled through its pages until he found the listing for
Beckman, Frederick T., rare books.
He imagined that he dialed the number, listening to the far-off sound of the ringing phone, the lifting of the receiver on the other end of the line, and his own voice whispering, “Mr. Beckman?”

Then came the reply: deep, hollow, unearthly, but distinct. The voice that said,
“You fool—Beckman is dead!”

It was then that Keith opened his eyes to find himself sitting on the side of the bed, phone in hand, listening to the click that cut off the connection—the click that told him he had not dreamed.

At 7:30 that morning Keith picked up his newspaper from the front driveway. A boxed-insert story above the fold on the front page caught his eye:

3.5 QUAKE JOLTS L.A.
LITTLE DAMAGE REPORTED

That much, at least, had been real. Keith scanned the story—a story familiar to every Los Angeles resident—noting the usual references to the San Andreas fault and the establishment of the quake’s epicenter in the Lancaster area. Seismologists were repeating their warning that the temblor might signal a major upheaval to come, but that too was a standard ingredient of any such account.