PYRATE CTHULHU - Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (vol.2) Read online

  It was human and marked with striations and certain colorations and telltale teethmarks that could only have resulted from one cause. The bone was undeniably Leffler's.

  To this day I don't know how Jerome had located one of the hidden gravesites I had so carefully arranged, but he had. This particular bone was carved with a few words in a certain language not common among humans, and the phrase necessarily carried a definite allusion to Leffler.

  Even to Jerome there was no question whose it was.

  Jerome, Jerome, Jerome. A stupid, incautious man. His purpose was blackmail, naturally. But he had the evidence to back it up. It was nothing that would stand up in conventional courts but there were some who would understand it, including a few of Leffler's friends I was reasonable enough to fear more than any legal tribunal. Jerome produced some other information about me, too, and that was just as dangerous and a lot more embarrassing. It was obvious that his source was a girl named Nathalie. She meant nothing to me, but Catherine was such a jealous woman, and if she saw the letter which Jerome claimed to hold...

  But Jerome was in an expansive mood. His terms were simple. For money he would forget it all. I agreed, of course, but insisted it would take time to raise the amount. The idiot believed me.

  His other mistake was in assuming that I was content with the way things were. Aside from the situation with Catherine, it was evident that Europe was on the verge of war and I was anxious to take certain steps that would assure both my safety and my fortune when war came. I might have even walked out on Catherine if she had not been such a powerful sorceress, but no one lightly incurs the enmity of any follower of Ptar-Axtlan. Fortunately, Catherine was in spite of her wisdom in arcane matters, dull in most ways. I gave the matter sufficient thought to work out the details of my own safety and sprung my trap.

  I regret that I didn't have the time to give her the same lingering death I had once given to Marie Ostroff, but Catherine's power was too great to permit that sort of risk; in only a few hours she would have broken through my spells. So it was not an artist's job, but it expressed my boredom with her adequately enough, and it strengthened my own powers.

  Poor Jerome was taken completely by surprise;

  I said he was stupid. His death was also rather quick but by now time was of the essence. I left Catherine and Jerome together in the middle of the bookstore.

  I located what Jerome had of Leffler's bones in a cheap tin box in a dark corner of his apartment. They were bones from the left leg, including that distinctive left kneecap of his. The damned things had been buried near Brussels.

  Jerome's apartments were in the back of his shop. In his kitchen I found a meat cleaver and some crude oil. The instrument was just crude enough to be totally satisfying in the chore I needed it for. When the bits and pieces of the two were intermingled and strewn around the floor I doused the place with oil. Then I stepped outside into the brisk Parisian spring night and lit myself a cigar. I savored it until I had smoked it down to a third its length.

  I watched the glow of it trail an arc as I tossed it back into the shop before locking Jerome's door and going on my way. Jerome, I fear, had paid too little heed to the municipal fire regulations. That entire block burned. Three days later when I left Paris the officials had still not discovered the mutilated corpses.

  I should have loved to remain in Europe through the coming war and, indeed, I tried. I sailed to England as the next best thing, but the climate there wasn't to my liking. America held little lure for me, but the truth is I had no choice. I sailed to Boston; I hated Boston. But I discovered that the state held certain other towns where there were people who knew as much about the Ancient Ones as I did. In fact I spent several years in New England, learning much. In the port of Innsmouth I found men with wide and varied contacts in both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. I used a dream-draught described in Von Juntz's Unaussprechlichen Culten and swam among the spires and monoliths of Y'ha-nthlei where in those days the Deep Ones gathered by the thousands. Three months later the American government had Devil's Reef bombarded. There were arrests throughout Innsmouth and most of the buildings near the waterfront were burned. I might have been caught or killed like so many others except that I had suspected Innsmouth was growing too conspicuous and had arranged a certain route of escape. It was a grave blow, the destruction of Innsmouth. It has weakened the intentions of the Deep Ones and their human and other allies to this day.

  Under another name I made my way to Baltimore, remaining there only long enough to establish a useful reputation. Then on to New Orleans. There I learned of other followers of the Ancient Ones who lived on or near Caillou Bay but I had learned my Innsmouth lesson well and avoided them. A few years later I went to Dallas and from there, after a time, to San Francisco. My caution was paying dividends. No one suspected me but my power was growing.

  My knowledge also -and my suspicions.

  Consider. I have told you something of the Ancient Ones. You might know a bit more: where they come from, their war with the Elder Gods, and so on. But suppose... suppose there is something beyond even the Elder Gods and the Ancient Ones. Suppose there is another plane of existence which draws from ours, from us, even from the actions of the Elder Gods and the Great Old Ones and the Ancient Ones...

  More and more I've come to think that this or something like this must be so. That the use of power here on our plane creates an energy or prana or force needed or desired elsewhere. We feed that place... We feed it by practicing certain skills and arts. The arcane arts, of course, but probably murder as well. If it does nothing else, this theory accounts for the rise of violence and interest in the occult in such a technological period as the one we now live in.

  After San Francisco I travelled throughout the Orient. I operated one of that sort of sophisticated slavery rings that arose in the early part of this century and still flourishes today. In addition to the conventional uses for young women and boys we provided slaves for other purposes to people I had met through my special contacts. It was more profitable than selling those same customers copies of forbidden and rare occult books. Very businesslike, lucrative, dull.

  I stayed away from Europe until the Second World War. It was a whim, going back, but the war was an experience just made to order for the person I'd become. It provided ideal cover under which to indulge my taste for gruesome and prolonged murder. Who could possibly pay any attention to Jack the Ripper in the shadow of that war?

  But we are running short of time, aren't we, so I must leave most of my wartime experiences to your imagination. It's almost light after all, and I have places to go. These days I keep moving.

  For a time after the war I found Europe a fine place to be. I had developed, curiously, a taste for human blood, a penchant for vampirism.

  I apologize to you for being unable to provide here the traditions made so famous by Mr. Stoker's novel, of course, but this was only a love for the stuff which I could control utterly. An indulgence. No furtive returns to the casket before dawn... There was no casket involved at all -of mine.

  My powers and knowledge were growing in these years, but strangely I found myself spending less and less time with the arcane, with my rituals and offerings to the Ancient Ones. My greatest interest now became simple murder. I look unprepossessing, perhaps, but I assure you that no ordinary man could prevent me from breaking his neck if I attempted it. I tested that assumption many times.

  It became necessary again to leave Europe but there was still the rest of the world. South America. I worked as a high official of a certain government for a while, helping them devise municipal tortures and certain private amusements which they would otherwise never have discovered. My wealth of invention in those things is a source of pride to me. But I was too skillful for my own good. My associates turned on me, forcing a return to Asia. There are always opportunities in the Orient.

  But the years pass and here I am back again in South America, though I fear it was a mistake coming bac
k so soon. Oh, I don't make many mistakes, but this one might be sufficient. Letting my picture get in a newspaper like that, which never happened before, not even in those days when Catherine and I were the most celebrated couple in Paris. I surmise that photograph led you to me, just as you surmise I would be willing to tell you my story, that I need the money you offer. The irony is that I am not broke; I have enormous sums. But that fiasco, you understand, off Madagascar, of all the unlikely places, makes it impossible for me to touch most of my funds just now. It's almost unimaginable that the slave trade would change so drastically in just a few short years that I'd almost blunder into a police trap. And now that photograph here. It may be decades before I can reach that money.

  So it is to your good fortune. You have guessed the truth, though I don't know how, and asked for my story and I told it to you. No one is going to believe the silly thing; I doubt that you can even get it published though that is your problem, not mine. It is easy enough a way for me to make some pocket change until I can establish myself again.

  Look at the sky... Out over the bay. Soon the sun will be up. I'll have to leave then, I have people to meet if I'm to get out of this country. But I have one more thing you might want to hear before I go. A point of irony, for you.

  The dreams.

  You don't understand. Dreams. Like old Leffler's, like those stupid alcoholic dreams of his. I see pallid ghouls crawl from their fresh turned graves, moist clumps of dirt still clinging to rotted naked flesh. There's four of them... and parts of them are burned... charred.

  Did I tell you how I spent those three days after the fire before leaving Paris? I visited Nathalie. I even made a joke of it. Before I left, while the police still investigated the fire, I hid her bones in the ruins of Jerome's shop.

  Now I wonder if it could have been a mistake -that common crematorium, I mean. Nathalie was no sorceress, and Jerome mediocre at best.

  But Catherine was a queen of sorceresses. And Leffler, for all his cowardice, had no peer in those days, not even I. He would no longer be afraid, now. Death would have ended his fear.

  And now these dreams... their faces. Twisted, distorted, but recognizably theirs...

  But, do you see? It is all in my mind. I look young, but I contract an old man's disease.

  I permit my imagination to run wild, without call, without any call whatever.

  And yet-

  Yet it grows light and now I see your face.

  For the first time it causes my mind, my imagination to stir. In the line of your forehead... Nathalie. And your eyes are as hazel as Catherine's. That chin of yours might pass for Jerome's and that mouth... forgive me for Jerome was no man whose mouth suggested any desirable attribute but you possess that sort of mouth. And your hands-

  So slender, well formed, yet so strong-looking. Like Catherine's...

  Please, I don't mean my words to sound insulting. It is my mind, it is only the way my mind works which I am showing you, the combined quirks of old age and the morning light. I know I don't look out of my twenties yet, but I am still old and my mind is very old. And too tired to be fully reliable. Some times...

  Your walk... Have you limped long?

  It — how foolish of me. It is your left leg.

  How stupid of me. I make a mistake and don't even credit it. The face -the hands- I could tell myself those things were merely my overactive imagination at work. Even the eyes. But that leg, that left leg. The deformity of the knee is obvious even through the cloth of your trousers...

  So now I know whether the dreams are true or not, don't I? Look...

  A bit of dirt has fallen from your clothing...

  Jendick’s Swamp

  by Joseph Payne Brennan (1987)

  At the time, Chris Kellington was only a constable in Greystone Bay; he didn’t have much to do. Occasionally he was called out by a farmer whose fences had been damaged by a neighbor’s cows. Now and then there were minor thefts—pumpkins lifted from somebody’s back lot, a few tools taken from the town truck.

  Sometimes he stopped at my place for a chat. If I was hunched at my typewriter, hammering away, he’d merely remark on the weather and stroll off. If I was puttering around, he’d stay and talk.

  One afternoon, after I’d finished my writing chores, he came in and sat down. No matter what the weather was, he’d head for a worn and somewhat rickety kitchen chair near my old wood-burning stove. He’d prop his feet on the edge of the wood-box and lean back.

  It was late August, warm and sultry. I broke out some chilled apple cider. Chris sipped appreciatively. “Best cider I’ve had all summer!" After some routine remarks, he looked up with a quizzical expression. “Kirk, any chance you remember the Jendicks?”

  I had to ponder a minute. “I remember some rumors. A sort of inbred, run-down family. Squatters, kind of. Built a big house on a knoll in the middle of a quicksand bog. Lived by hunting mostly. A wild bunch best avoided. Died out many years ago.”

  Kellington nodded. “You’ve summed it up fairly well. Wasn’t a bog, though; it was the marshes on the other side of North Hill. A treacherous enough place, no matter what you call it. I was in there only once and I was glad when I’d sloshed my way out. I didn’t sink in any quicksand but probably I was close to it. It’s pretty certain that a number of hunters went in there and never returned.”

  “What brought the Jendicks and their quicksand swamp to mind?” I asked.

  He set down his cider glass. “Funny thing. About a week ago some New York character named Lawton was visiting the Clarksons in the Bay—cousins, I think. He considered himself a hunter. Brought along a brand-new sporting rifle. Well, he wandered around the back end of North Hill without any luck and was about to give up when he spotted a deer. Spooked it but caught sight again and kept following. Tracked it into the marshes. The deer got clean away; before long Lawton was lost. Trudged around for hours getting soaked up to his belt line and finally glimpsed a house standing on a knoll—he called it a hill. Said the house was a wreck, rotted and moldy-looking, and he naturally assumed it was uninhabited. Well, he climbed up the knoll to rest and dry off a bit, if that was possible. While he was sitting there, he had a strange feeling that he was being watched. The Clarksons quoted him as saying: ‘I had the worst sense of impending danger I’ve ever experienced.’ Stood up and turned around and there were two eyes glaring at him from one of the dark window apertures. Eyes like those of a wild animal. But he swears he saw the shadowy form of a man.”

  Kellington shrugged. “That’s about it. He rushed away, back into the swamp, and never turned around. Found his way out by sheer luck. Doesn’t know whether he was followed or not. By the time I got the story secondhand from the Clarksons, Lawton had left for New York.”

  I refilled the cider glasses. “Makes a spooky little anecdote. I imagine a tramp had settled down in the old Jendick house and didn’t welcome visitors.”

  Chris frowned. “Well—maybe. But I’ve got a nagging urge to check it out.”

  “What’s to check, Chris? A squatter in an abandoned house surrounded by a swamp where scarcely anybody ventures? Sure, you can get yourself half-drowned going in there but what’s accomplished? You evict some halfwitted derelict and like as not he takes up quarters in somebody’s barn and causes real trouble."

  “I’d make sure he cleared right out of town. Aside from that, I guess maybe I have a hankering to get a look at that old Jendick house—or what’s left of it.”

  He rearranged his feet on the wood-box and leaned back. “They were a weird bunch, Kirk. You’ve heard some rumors, but maybe not all. Seems old Jendick was part Indian—Pequot, I guess, though I’m not sure. Anyway, there’s a legend that some of the early tribes worshiped a so-called Spirit of the Swamp. I think he—it—was named Iththaqua. In exchange for sacrifices, Iththaqua was supposed to guide his worshipers safely through the labyrinths of the swamp and eventually grant them other favors as well. I’ve heard it said that during a hunt in the swamp, the Jendick
s always tried to catch one creature alive—even though wounded—in order to sacrifice it to Iththaqua.”

  “And in exchange, Iththaqua kept them from getting lost or drowned?” I interposed.

  “Something like that. Anyway, there might be some clue left in the house.”

  I shook my head. "The Jendicks don’t sound like the kind who kept written records. And even if they did, any journal would be long gone by now—weather, rats, roaches.”

  “You’re probably right," he agreed. “But I'd still like a look in the house before it rots away completely.”

  I grinned at him. “You always were a stubborn cuss! Well, let me know when you plan to drown yourself and I’ll tag along. My current yarn’s hit a dry plateau and I need to get away from it for a day or two.”

  “How about tomorrow, then? Midmorning. Say, ten. I’ll bring a Thermos and sandwiches.”

  “Fine. I’ll be ready.”

  He turned at the door. “Better wear hip boots!”

  The next day was overcast and humid. The hip boots were hot and highly uncomfortable, but once we started into the swamp, I was grateful for Chris’ suggestion that I wear them.

  The swamp was a world to itself. On the north end of the marshland, it was shadowy, nearly silent, filled with the smell of still water and dissolving vegetation. Dense stands of hemlock, spruce, and black ash crowded along narrow aisles slippery with sphagnum moss. Tall cinnamon ferns and tangled patches of nettles clustered around the trunks. In some places the remains of fallen and decaying trees had created little hummocks which rose above the level of the surrounding pools. I recognized a few bird sounds but the only bird I glimpsed was a small green heron which glided away over the glistening water.

  Although many of the pools were relatively shallow, the old-time quicksand rumors held us to a slow and hesitant advance.