New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (5 page)

The mark was on him. You'll go, too.'

'Lonnie! What have you done with — '

The boy raised his hand and chanted in a high fluting language that she could not understand

— but the sound of the words drove Doris Freeman nearly mad with fear.

'The street began to move then,' she told Vetter and Farnham. 'The cobbles began to undulate like a carpet. They rose and fell, rose and fell. The tram tracks came loose and flew into the air — I remember that, I remember the starlight shining on them — and then the cobbles themselves began to come loose, one by one at first, and then in bunches. They just flew off into the darkness. There was a tearing sound when they came loose. A grinding, tearing sound . . . the way an earthquake must sound. And — something started to come through — '

'What?' Vetter asked. He was hunched forward, his eyes boring into her. 'What did you see?

What was it?'

'Tentacles,' she said, slowly and haltingly. 'I think it was tentacles. But they were as thick as old banyan trees, as if each of them was made up of a thousand smaller ones . . . and there were pink things like suckers . . . except sometimes they looked like faces . . . one of them looked like Lonnie's face . . . and all of them were in agony. Below them, in the darkness under the street —

in the darkness beneath — there was something else. Something like eyes . . . '

At that point she had broken down, unable to go on for some time, and as it turned out, there was really no more to tell. The next thing she remembered with any clarity was cowering in the doorway of a closed newsagent's shop. She might be there yet, she had told them, except that she had seen cars passing back and forth just up ahead, and the reassuring glow of arc-sodium streetlights. Two people had passed in front of her, and Doris had cringed farther back into the shadows, afraid of the two evil children. But these were not children, she saw; they were a teenage boy and girl walking hand in hand. The boy was saying something about the new Martin Scorsese film.

She'd come out onto the sidewalk warily, ready to dart back into the convenient bolthole of the newsagent's doorway at a moment's notice, but there was no need. Fifty yards up was a moderately busy intersection, with cars and lorries standing at a stop-and-go light. Across the way was a jeweler's shop with a large lighted clock in the show window. A steel accordion grille had been drawn across, but she could still make out the time. It was five minutes of ten.

She had walked up to the intersection then, and despite the streetlights and the comforting rumble of traffic, she had kept shooting terrified glances back over her shoulder. She ached all over. She was limping on one broken heel. She had pulled muscles in her belly and both legs —

her right leg was particularly bad, as if she had strained something in it.

At the intersection she saw that somehow she had come around to Hillfield Avenue and Tottenham Road. Under a streetlamp a woman of about sixty with her graying hair escaping from the rag it was done up in was talking to a man of about the same age. They both looked at Doris as if she were some sort of dreadful apparition.

'Police,' Doris Freeman croaked. 'Where's the police station? I'm an American citizen . . . I've lost my husband . . . I need the police.'

'What's happened, then, lovey?' the woman asked, not unkindly. 'You look like you've been through the wringer, you do.'

'Car accident?' her companion asked.

'No. Not . . . not . . . Please, is there a police station near here?'

'Right up Tottenham Road,' the man said. He took a package of Players from his pocket. 'Like a cig? You look like you c'd use one.'

'Thank you,' she said, and took the cigarette although she I had quit nearly four years ago. The elderly man had to follow the jittering tip of it with his lighted match to get it going for her.

He glanced at the woman with her hair bound up in the rag. 'I'll just take a little stroll up with her, Evvie. Make sure she gets there all right.'

'I'll come along as well, then, won't I?' Evvie said, and put an arm around Doris's shoulders.

'Now what is it, lovey? Did someone try to mug you?' 'No,' Doris said. 'It . . . I . . . I . . . the street . .

. there was a cat with only one eye . . . the street

opened up . . . I saw it . . . and they said something about a Blind Piper . . . I've got to find Lonnie!'

She was aware that she was speaking incoherencies, but she seemed helpless to be any clearer.

And at any rate, she told Vetter and Farnham, she hadn't been all that incoherent, because the man and woman had drawn away from her, as if, when Evvie asked what the matter was, Doris had told her it was bubonic plague.

The man said something then — 'Happened again,' Doris thought it was.

The woman pointed. 'Station's right up there. Globes hanging in front. You'll see it.' Moving very quickly, the two of them began to walk away. The woman glanced back over her shoulder once; Doris Freeman saw her wide, gleaming eyes. Doris took two steps after them, for what reason she did not know. 'Don't ye come near!' Evvie called shrilly, and forked the sign of the evil eye at her. She simultaneously cringed against the man, who put an arm about her. 'Don't you come near, if you've been to Crouch End Towen!'

And with that, the two of them had disappeared into the night.

Now PC Farnham stood leaning in the doorway between the common room and the main filing room — although the back files Vetter had spoken of were certainly not kept here. Farnham had made himself a fresh cup of tea and was smoking the last cigarette in his pack — the woman had also helped herself to several.

She'd gone back to her hotel, in the company of the nurse Vetter had called — the nurse would be staying with her tonight, and would make a judgement in the morning as to whether the woman would need to go in hospital. The children would make that difficult, Farnham supposed, and the woman's being an American almost guaranteed a first-class cock-up. He wondered what she was going to tell the kiddies when they woke up tomorrow, assuming she was capable of telling them anything. Would she gather them round and tell them that the big bad monster of Crouch End Town

(Towen)

had eaten up Daddy like an ogre in a fairy-story?

Farnham grimaced and put down his teacup. It wasn't his problem. For good or for ill, Mrs.

Freeman had become sandwiched between the British constabulary and the American Embassy in the great waltz of governments. It was none of his affair; he was only a PC who wanted to forget the whole thing. And he intended to let Vetter write the report. Vetter could afford to put his name to such a bouquet of lunacy; he was an old man, used up. He would still be a PC on the night shift when he got his gold watch, his pension, and his council flat. Farnham, on the other hand, had ambitions of making sergeant soon, and that meant he had to watch every little posey.

And speaking of Vetter, where was he? He'd been taking the night air for quite awhile now.

Farnham crossed the common room and went out. He stood between the two lighted-globes and stared across Tottenham Road. Vetter was nowhere in sight. It was past 3:00 a.m., and silence lay thick and even, like a shroud. What was that line from Wordsworth? 'All that great heart lying still,' or something like.

He went down the steps and stood on the sidewalk, feeling a trickle of unease now. It was silly, of course, and he was angry with himself for allowing the woman's mad story to gain even this much of a foothold in his head. Perhaps he deserved to be afraid of a hard copper like Sid Raymond. Farnham walked slowly up to the corner, thinking he would meet Vetter coming back from his

night stroll. But he would go no farther; if the station was left empty even for a few moments, there would be hell to pay if it was discovered. He reached the corner and looked around. It was funny, but all the arc-sodiums seemed to have gone out up here. The entire street looked different without them. Would it have to be reported, he wondered? And where was Vetter?

He would walk just a little farther, he decided, and see what I was what. But not far. It simply wouldn't do to leave the station unattended for long.

Just a little way.

Vetter came in less than five minutes after Farnham had left. Farnham had gone in the opposite direction, and if Vetter had come along a minute earlier, he would have seen the young constable standing indecisively at the corner for a moment before turning it and disappearing forever.

'Farnham?'

No answer but the buzz of the clock on the wall.

'Farnham?' he called again, and then wiped his mouth with the palm of his hand.

Lonnie Freeman was never found. Eventually his wife (who had begun to gray around the temples) flew back to America with her children. They went on Concorde. A month later she attempted suicide. She spent ninety days in a rest home and came out much improved.

Sometimes when she cannot sleep — this occurs most frequently on nights when the sun goes down in a ball of red and orange — she creeps into her closet, knee-walks under the hanging dresses all the way to the back, and there she writes Beware the Goat with a Thousand Young over and over with a soft pencil. It seems to ease her somehow to do this.

PC Robert Farnham left a wife and two-year-old twin girls. Sheila Farnham wrote a series of angry letters to her MP, insisting that something was going on, something was being covered up, that her Bob had been enticed into taking some dangerous sort of undercover assignment. He would have done anything to make sergeant, Mrs. Farnham repeatedly told the MP. Eventually that worthy stopped answering her letters, and at about the same time Doris Freeman was coming out of the rest home, her hair almost entirely white now, Mrs. Farnham moved back to Essex, where her parents lived. Eventually she married a man in a safer line of work — Frank Hobbs is a bumper inspector on the Ford assembly line. It had been necessary to get a divorce from her Bob on grounds of desertion, but that was easily managed.

Vetter took early retirement about four months after Doris Freeman had stumbled into the station in Tottenham Lane. He did indeed move into council housing, a two-above-the-shops in Frimley. Six months later he was found dead of a heart attack, a can of Harp Lager in his hand.

And in Crouch End, which is really a quiet suburb of London, strange things still happen from time to time, and people have been known to lose their way. Some of them lose it forever.

The Star Pools by A. A. ATTANASIO

He wrapped his foot in a rag he found in the trunk of his car and sat for a while on the hood, looking out accross the swale to a clump of cedar pines where an hour before he had frantically dug up the mulchy earth. His cache was hidden in there.

Beyond the green colony of trees, the land was tortured and rose in great broken-backed steps towards a haze of iron-spined mountains. Nobody would be coming out here to look for anything but steelheads.

Reassured, already mindless of the itching throb in his foot, Henley Easton got into his car and swung out onto the highway. By dusk he was in New York City.

He had a leisurely dinner at Shakespeare's and decided o limp across Washington Square Park to find a doctor he knew. At the coruer of MacDougal and Fourth, a rush of dizziness staggered him. It happened so quickly there was no time to cast about for support. He stagsat iered on the curb, tried hard to make it back to the sidewalk. But his eyes glazed dark, and he slid to his knees. A moment later he was sprawled in the gutter, his awareness sinking into the shadows of his body.

There is a calling under the breath, a cry that goes on as a vein. It is the last senseless moment of the organism the instant of death that cries back through the narrow air from the ferrous edge.

SCHIAVONI AND MAL^MO~ Voorish R it~

Pain which even the cold stream water couldn't numb, a brittle, ruby pain. Henley Easton shuddered, down in the stream, up to his waist in water, trousers ballooning. Slowly he lifted the sharp rock he had stepped on, squeezed it hard, pressed it to his forehead, his lips. In the water, a cloud of blood swelling. The flap of skin on his foot winked open, closed. Seeing it and the blood holding back in the water, he thought he was going to be sick.

He limped to shore and spotted the familiar silt

He was still grasping the rock.With a lopsided heave, he sent it flying over the ha But tl of stone until he came back.

et was an endless dream. He wandered through dank, wight-lighted corridors that stank of rime and somewere children looking on, so he clutched at the bl,hing burnt. He was alone in the darkness, feeling his way along greasy walls and abrupt corners that mule-epped down into smoky grottoes. The air was murmurous with the sound of purling water and a rumble above the se~-

lines of his car parked at the edge of an escarprnund. Thtke distant voices or the far-off seethe of ocean rollers

was no bloed on its cutting edge, and he felt ashamed

teaming to shore.

He wandered it seemed for days, unable to wake.

of the fishing children and watched it arching along winding corridors were interminable, and after a while he forgot that he was dreaming. All that seemed to matter was that he plod on through the labyrinth, feel his way through darkness to freedo

above the reeds, falling into the shallows of the bank. ~rror that he, too, was a mammal whose loops of

But was he going the right way? Or was he coili ~ood held him like a garotte.

deeper into the maze? Later, even that anxiety wi~ Dragged under by the weight of his guts, clubbed

ered. He became, simply, movement, no longer hum~~itless by the stark remembrances of the earth devour-It didn't matter where he was going. Space flitted the earth, deafened by the terrible echoes of weeping in every direction. Movement had become his identity, he staggered through the mouth of the labyrinth continuum, so he walked and walked, letting echoes ring in his ears cluelessly.

Eventually helplessness overwhelmed him, and he realized he wasn't moving at all. Motion was an illusion. He was still. All things moved through him. And thinking that, he squatted in the black corridor and sang of the past lives twined in his brains: the memories oft wet humus, the mindless, gutless lives that led to first howl among the fronded swamp-ferns. And singing became laughing and screaming which tangled in the shadows with his hearing so that when the first memories of fur and warmth arrived, his mind was so numb with the nightmares of sharks cephalopeds that he continued speechless through mauled, bloodplastered recollections of his evolution, only occasionally letting a blind cry flap hopelessly away.