I found it in his room…
• • •
I hardly slept at all that night—my dreams would not permit sleep—and early morning found me setting out over the moors. I will not describe the route I took for reasons which must be perfectly obvious. Heaven forbid it, but in the event of my final plan not working it is best that no one else knows of that place on the moors.
Eventually, in mid-morning, I found the terrible hole in the ground where all of this evil had begun. Even to my untrained eyes it was all too plain that there was something hideously wrong with the vegetation around the mouth of that pit. The plants, even those which were common and recognisable, were all strangely withered and mutated. Sehr sonderbare, mysteriöse Unkräuter!
I knew that if I was ever to be sure of what I had started to suspect, if I was ever to have definite proof, then I would have to climb down into the hole. All along I had foreseen this, but now the very thought of it was more than sufficient to cause me to shudder horribly… And my flesh was still creeping as I hammered my stake into the earth and made fast my rope, for even up there in the misty morning sunlight the air was tainted with an all too familiar smell.
Hurriedly now, for I feared my courage would soon desert me, I lowered myself into the hole. Climbing down into dimness, I was immediately aware of the poisonous quality of the atmosphere; but I was given little chance to dwell on the thought for soon my feet found the platform of stones which Matthew had built.
In the feeble light I could see that part of the platform had tumbled down, and close by there was a monstrously suggestive depression in the sandy shingle of the shelf. As I studied this hollow it suddenly, shockingly dawned on me that in his condition Matthew would never have been able to climb down here, even though his rope was still hanging where he had left it. The difficulties he must have faced even in the climbing of the knoll seemed insurmountable; yet I was certain that he had managed it and was even now somewhere nearby in the dimness. I was certain because of that depression in the shingle…
For while there were other marks in the sand—the signs of my nephew’s previous visit—this one was plainly deeper, fresher, and different. It was exactly the kind of hollow one would expect a falling body to make in wet sand!… I turned my mind hurriedly away from the thought.
Matthew had described the glowing moss on the walls of the place, and sure enough it was there, but I was unwilling to explore any further in its light alone. I took out my pocket-torch and switched it on. The torch must have received a bang in my climbing for its beam was now weak and intermittent. Nor did the mist, which was thickening up above, help any; it only served to shut out the dim light filtering down from the crack.
First I shone the beam of my torch around the pallid walls and over the surface of the soupy water; then I sought out the natural archway where the pool passed out of sight. Feeling my courage ebbing again I quickly waded into the pool. The way that slime oozed around my legs made me tremble violently and I was vastly relieved that the foul muck did not reach the tops of my waders.
I went straight to the archway, lowering my head and bending my back to pass beyond it. There, in the dingy confines of the cave, the first things that showed in the flickering light of my torch were the hanging daggers of stone depending from the vaulted ceiling. Then, as I turned to my left, the beam passed over something else—a shape slumped against the wall.
Not daring to move I stood there, shaking feverishly, a cold sweat upon my brow. The only sound other than my pounding heart was the slow drip, drip, drip of falling droplets of God only knows what evil moisture.
The hair of my neck bristled in a fearful dread but as my fear gradually subsided I began slowly to move again, swinging my torch around to the right. This time when my beam picked out the thing against the wall I gripped my torch firmly and moved closer. It was one of the plants—but not quite as Matthew had described them. This one hung soggily from the wall of the cave and there was no firmness about it. I concluded that it was either dead or dying and saw that I must be correct when I swung my beam down the length of the thing. A great portion of it had been stripped away. I guessed that this had been the specimen from which my nephew had eaten.
Then something else caught my eye, something which very dully reflected the light from my torch. Reaching out with my free hand I touched the hard object which seemed to be imbedded in the plant about halfway up its length. Whatever it was, possibly a metallic crystal of some sort, it came away in my hand and I put it in my pocket for future reference.
More daring now, I moved further into the cave, examining more of the green pods as I came upon them, still finding them frightful in some strange way but unable to account completely for my fear. And then I stopped dead. I had almost forgotten just what I was looking for—but now I remembered…
In a dark corner one of the plant-things stood all alone with its lower roots trailing in the soupy pool. It would have been just like all the other specimens except for one shocking difference… It was wearing the dressing-gown I had loaned to Matthew!
And more: as I swung my torch beam in disbelief up and down the length of the thing it blinked at me! It blinked—thin slits opened and closed where eyes should be, and in that moment of madness, in that instant of utter insanity, as my very mind buckled—I looked into the agonised eyes of Matthew Worthy!
How to describe the rest.
Oh, I was transformed in one mind-shattering moment. My torch fell from nerveless fingers and I heard myself scream a hoarse, babbling scream of horror. I threw up my hands and staggered back, away from what I had seen, away from the brainblasting abnormality against the wall. Then I turned to flee full tilt—shrieking, splashing through the vileness of the pool—through a maze of dripping stalactites, past a host of green, insinuously oozing things—bumping in my haste from wall to wall, sometimes coming into contact with slimy obscenities which had no right to exist. And all the time I screamed and babbled shamelessly, even as I clawed my way up the dangling rope and hauled myself out into the daylight, even as I plummeted headlong down the steep slope heedless of life or limb, until I tripped and flew forward into merciful oblivion…
Merciful oblivion, I say, and it is the truth, for had I not knocked myself unconscious I have no doubt that I would have remained permanently mindless. What I had seen had been terrible enough without the other. That other which I had heard had been, if anything, worse. For even as the torch fell from my fingers and I screamed, other voices had screamed with me! Voices which could not be “heard” physically—for their owners were incapable of physical speech—voices I heard with my mind alone, which were utterly horrible and alien to me and full of eternal misery…
• • •
When I came to my senses I was lying at the foot of the knoll. I refrained from an immediate mental examination of what I knew now to be the horrible truth, for therein lay a return to madness. Instead I brushed myself off and hurried back as quickly as my throbbing head would allow to Eeley. My house and practice lay at the extreme edge of the village, but nonetheless I approached it from the fields and let myself in at the back door. I burnt my waders immediately, noting especially that the slime upon them blazed fiercely with a sulphurous brightness. Later, after I had scrubbed myself from head to toe, examining each limb minutely and finding no trace of the horror, I remembered the rock crystal I had put in my pocket.
In the clear daylight it was obviously not a crystal; it appeared to be more like a bracelet of some sort, and yet this fact did not properly surprise me. The soft metal links must have long since oxidized, for as I examined the rotted thing, all of it—with the exception of a small flat circle or disc—crumbled away in my hands. Even this solid, circular portion, about an inch and one half across, was mostly slimy and green. I placed it in a flask of dilute acid to clean it; by which time, of course, I knew what it was.
• • •
As I watched the acid doing its work I began, involuntarily, to tremble.
My mind was a turmoil of terrible thoughts. I knew what my nephew had become, and presumably the partly eaten thing which had provided this metal clue had also once been human. Certainly it had been some sort of being from any one of many periods of time. I could not help but ask myself: in the latter stages of change or after the change was complete, could the pit-creatures feel anything?
Watching the seething mass in the flask I suddenly began to babble idiotically and had to battle consciously with myself to stop it. No wonder Matthew had been baffled with regard to the reproductory system of these pitiful horrors. How does a magnet cause a pin to become magnetic? Why will one rotten apple in a barrel ruin all the other fruit? Oh, yes—eating from one of the things had helped Matthew contract the change, but that was not what had started the thing. Proximity was sufficient! Nor was the horror truly a disease, as Matthew had tried to tell me in his awful note, but a devolution—a gestalt of human being and thing—both living, if such could be called life, and dependent one upon the other.
This was the sort of thing I was babbling to myself as the acid completed its work, and I shook so that I had to steady myself before I was able to draw out from the acid the flat, now shiny disc.
What was it Matthew had dreamed? “They had walked this holy ground unbidden…” Had that been sufficient in the old days—in prehistory, when the area about the pit must have been far more poisonous than it was now—to bring about the change? I think that even at the beginning Matthew must have partly guessed the truth, for had he himself not told me that he found the cell structure to be “almost human”?
Poor Matthew—that name he screamed before going mad. At last I understood it all. There it all was before me: the final, leaping horror. My own nephew, an unwilling, though perhaps not completely unknowing anthropophagite. A cannibal!
For the shiny thing I held in my shuddering hand was a German watch of fairly modern appearance, and on the back was an inscription in German. An inscription so simple that even I, unversed in that language, could translate it to read:
“WITH LOVE, FROM GERDA TO HORST”…
Since then it has taken long hours to pull myself together sufficiently to formulate my plan, that plan I have already mentioned and yet which even now I hardly dare think about. I had fervently hoped that I would never have to use it but now, with the spread of the poison through my body, it appears that I must…
When the ashes of my house have cooled the police will find this manuscript locked in a safe in the deep, damp cellar, but long before the flames have died down I shall have returned to the pit. I will take with me as much petrol as I can carry. My plan is simple really, and I shall know no pain. Nor will the inhabitants of that place know pain, not if a powerful drug may yet affect them. As the anaesthetic takes hold and while I am still able, I shall pour the petrol on the surface of that evil pool.
My statement is at an end—
—Perhaps tonight puzzled observers will wonder at the pillar of sulphurous fire rising over the moors…
Dagon’s Bell
One of Steve Jones’ first choices when he was gathering tales for his 1994 Fedogan & Bremer collection, Shadows over Innsmouth—after HPL’s ill-fated seaport and its batrachian inhabitants—“Dagon’s Bell” had been written all of eleven years earlier and had seen its initial printing in Paul Ganley’s Weirdbook in 1988. Written five years before that, in those somewhat bleak years after I had done my 22-year stint and left the financial security of my job in the British Army, this story is most definitely set against HPL’s Mythos backdrop. The location is my own, however (and nowhere near Innsmouth!), and so is the style of writing. I honestly believe that Lovecraft himself would have enjoyed this one.
I: Deep Kelp
It strikes me as funny sometimes how scraps of information—fragments of seemingly dissociated fact and half-seen or -felt fancies and intuitions, bits of local legend and immemorial myth—can suddenly connect and expand until the total is far greater than the sum of the parts, like a jigsaw puzzle. Or perhaps not necessarily funny…odd.
Flotsam left high and dry by the tide, scurf of the rolling sea; a half-obliterated figure glimpsed on an ancient, well-rubbed coin through the glass of a museum’s showcase; old-wives’ tales of hauntings and hoary nights, and the ringing of some sepulchral, sunken bell at the rising of the tide; the strange speculations of sea-coal gatherers supping their ale in old North-East pubs, where the sound of the ocean’s wash is never far distant beyond smoke-yellowed bull’s-eye windowpanes. Items like that, apparently unconnected.
But in the end there was really much more to it than that. For these things were only the pieces of the puzzle; the picture, complete, was vaster far than its component parts. Indeed cosmic…
• • •
I long ago promised myself that I would never again speak or even think of David Parker and the occurrences of that night at Kettlethorpe Farm (which formed, in any case, a tale almost too grotesque for belief); but now, these years later…well, my promise seems rather redundant. On the other hand it is possible that a valuable warning lies inherent in what I have to say, for which reason, despite the unlikely circumstance that I shall be taken at all seriously, I now put pen to paper.
My name is William Trafford, which hardly matters, but I had known David Parker at school—a Secondary Modern in a colliery village by the sea—before he passed his college examinations, and I was the one who would later share with him Kettlethorpe’s terrible secret.
In fact I had known David well: the son of a miner, he was never typical of his colliery contemporaries but gentle in his ways and lacking the coarseness of the locality and its guttural accents. That is not to belittle the North-Easterner in general (after all, I became one myself!) for in all truth they are the salt of the earth; but the nature of their work, and what that work has gradually made of their environment, has moulded them into a hard and clannish lot. David Parker, by his nature, was not of that clan, that is all; and neither was I at that time.
My parents were Yorkshire born and bred, only moving to Harden in County Durham when my father bought a newsagent’s shop there. Hence the friendship that sprang up between us, born not so much out of straightforward compatibility as of the fact that we both felt outsiders. A friendship which lasted for five years from a time when we were both eight years of age, and which was only renewed upon David’s release from his studies in London twelve years later. That was in 1951.
Meanwhile, in the years flown between…
My father was now dead and my mother more or less confined, and I had expanded the business to two more shops in Hartlepool, both of them under steady and industrious managers, and several smaller but growing concerns much removed from the sale of magazines and newspapers in the local colliery villages. Thus my time was mainly taken up with business matters, but in the highest capacity, which hardly consisted of back-breaking work. What time remained I was pleased to spend, on those occasions when he was available, in the company of my old school friend.
And he too had done well, and would do even better. His studies had been in architecture and design, but within two short years of his return he expanded these spheres to include interior decoration and landscape gardening, setting up a profitable business of his own and building himself an enviable reputation in his fields.
And so it can be seen that the war had been kind to both of us. Too young to have been involved, we had made capital while the world was fighting; now while the world licked its wounds and rediscovered its directions, we were already on course and beginning to ride the crest. Mercenary? No, for we had been mere boys when the war started and were little more than boys when it ended.
But now, eight years later…
We were, or saw ourselves as being, very nearly sophisticates in a mainly unsophisticated society—that is to say part of a very narrow spectrum—and so once more felt drawn together. Even so, we made odd companions. At least externally, superficially. Oh, I suppose our characters, drives
and ambitions were similar, but physically we were poles apart. David was dark, handsome and well-proportioned; I was sort of dumpy, sandy, pale to the point of being pallid. I was not unhealthy, but set beside David Parker I certainly looked it!
On the day in question, that is to say the day when the first unconnected fragment presented itself—a Friday in September ’53, it was, just a few days before the Feast of the Exaltation, sometimes called Roodmas in those parts, and occasionally by a far older name—we met in a bar overlooking the sea on old Hartlepool’s headland. On those occasions when we got together like this we would normally try to keep business out of the conversation, but there were times when it seemed to intrude almost of necessity. This was one such.
I had not noticed Jackie Foster standing at the bar upon entering, but certainly he had seen me. Foster was a foreman with a small fleet of sea-coal gathering trucks of which I was co-owner, and he should not have been there in the pub at that time but out and about his work. Possibly he considered it prudent to come over and explain his presence, just in case I had seen him, and he did so in a single word.
“Kelp?” David repeated, looking puzzled; so that I felt compelled to explain.
“Seaweed,” I said. “Following a bad blow, it comes up on the beach in thick drifts. But—” and I looked at Foster pointedly “—I’ve never before known it to stop the sea-coalers.”
The man shuffled uncomfortably for a moment, took off his cap and scratched his head. “Oh, once or twice ah’ve known it almost this bad, but before your time in the game. It slimes up the rocks an’ the wheels of the lorries slip in the stuff. Bloody arful! An’ stinks like death. It’s lyin’ feet thick on arl the beaches from here ta Sunderland!”