New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (11 page)

Pantucci bellowed and clutched the attache. With a whipped run, he scampered along the rim of the pool towards the forest. A beaked, squid-headed mauler slobbered to shore and with gangling limbs pursued him. He was crying as he ran and, desperately, he heaved the attach~ away. But it was no good.

The creature was on him, all the seams and pleats of its throat fibrillating insanely as it hoisted him up with one pincered, blotched arm. Even after the greenscaled beak crushed him, he was kicking spastically, swivelling his arms.

Ralf almost choked on his fear. A gun in each hand, he backed off into the forest, blasting several rounds into a gaping eyeless sucker-mouth. He burst through the hedge and broke into a frantic clipped run. Howling and sobbing, he hopped among root-tangles, lashed through hanging vines, and slammed into a thick thorn bush, shredding his jellaba, tearing his flesh to be free, and kicking off into the gravedark forest. He could hear nothing. He was still deaf and too terrified to glance back. But there were vibrations. Dull, thudding, deadfall sensations that reached him through the ground.

Ralf lunged over the rotted shell of a tree, felt his leg catch on something, and saw the green-tangled ground jerk towards him. His guns flew out of his hands and vanished in the ferm growths. Rude hands banged him on to his back, and he stared up into the gnawed and lacerated face of Duke Parmelee. Hi-Hit Chuckie Watz was standing behind him, his face puffed up, scabby, the lower lip merely a crust. They were both holding heavy butcher's knives.

Wildly, Ralf tried to communicate with them in the forced medality of the deaf, but all that he could voice was whimpers. The Duke stooped to start in with his knife, but something beyond the trees distracted him. It was Hi-Hat who screamed first. Ralf saw his face stretch with horror as he shuffled backward. His foot tangled, and he fell to his back. Before he could rise, there was a blurred flurry, and a huge segmented bulk with frantic legs and membraneous wings descended on him. The Duke gawked bug-eyed and was still gawking when a lamprey with stalk-eyes lolled on to his back. He fled crazily this way and that, shrieking, trying to stab the slug-ball off his body, but it clung to him, melled into his flesh.

Finally, the slick mass swelled over his head, and he collapsed, still clutching at it.

While the Duke was convulsing, Ralf rolled off, bucked to his feet, and ran headlong into the clumsy hooked arms of something loathsome. The claspedforebrains of its head swung from side to side, and its mandibles swivelled with maniacal joy. But before it could crush him, Ralf unsprung his butterfly blade and slammed it into the shimmering bulk. He spun backward, wheeled crazily to get his balance, and then kicked off into a cloud of leaves.

On the other side was a steep bank, and Ralf plunged down it, head over heels, in a clatter of stones and dust. He splashed through rocky shallows and crashed to a stop against a thrust of boulder, his head and shoulders underwater. The cool current revived him, and he shuddered to his feet, teetered like an old man, and plopped back into the water.

Above him, among the high bank's shrubbery, he could see humps of things lumbering in and out of view. Quickly, he rolled to his belly and dragged himself out to the deeper water. The stream buoyed him and carried him off.

Hours later, he came out of a faint and found himself washed upon a gritty shore. Pale ferns fronded nearby, and beyond them he could see the tin roofs and cardboard doorways of a trenchtown. He pulled himself to his feet, slowly, painfully, and limped towards higher ground. His ears were still whining, and his head felt heavy, but he could make out the shadow of sounds: the stream rushing over pebbles with a murmur that was almost song, the curse of gravel under his feet.

He staggered towards the town mindlessly, in a daze, his eyes small and shiny as a reptile's. His mind was shut, and he moved mechanically. The people who saw him coming shied away, except for the children who pelted him with stones and ran close enough to snag him with wire-strung tin cans and garbage. Ralf shuffled on, unaware, his face empty, his eyes drifting. He had sunk into his mind.

A day later, the local police picked him up outside North End. He was being baited by a pariah dog and kids with slings and crude blow darts. Though he had been lurching frantically from street to street, occasionally lashing out with a pitiful cry, he gave the police no trouble when they cuffed him to take him away.

Days afterward, his mind shuttered into place. It took a long minute for him to take in the stained and pitted walls. Then the cretinous look drained entirely from his features, and he hunched over, weeping.

When he had got hold of himself, he stood up by the bars of his cell. He could see in the faces of the police and his cellmates that he had been raving. They wanted to know what had happened to him, if it had been mushrooms or village anis that had gone bad.

Ralf waved all speculation aside, and in a halting, fragmented way, told them what he had seen in the hills. The police laughed, but his cellmates were quiet, eyes averted.

The next day they freed him. By then he regretted telling them anything. An officer from Port-au-Prince had been called to hear his story, and Ralf was afraid they'd somehow find out about the heroin and detain him. But the officer was only concerned about the exact location of the star pools, and Ralf told him.

The man was different from the local police. He was stocky, with quiet eyes and long intelligent fingers. And he believed Ralf. Enough, at any rate, to send four men up along the trail Ralf had followed days earlier. Actually, they wanted Ralf to go along and direct them, but when he refused, melting before them to a quaking old man, they left him behind.

That night, Ralf stayed in the prison cell. The suggestion that he go back up into the hills had so shattered him that he had needed a shot to quiet him down. In his sleep, he dreamed of a sun, black but shining, with strange stars tapping in the dark blue of the sky around it. He was alone in a damp alley, greasy brick walls rising on either side of him towards the alien sky. There was a stain on the air of something burnt, and his stomach closed at the smell of it.

Then, from the far end of the alley where an icy light was wavering, a figure approached. It was a man, thin and long as a stick, and he was carrying something. As he drew closer, Ralf could see that his face was cushiony, his chin slippery with drool, and his eyes remote, bright as needles. An idiot's face. His swollen lips were moving in a whisper: Shut your ears big, Ralf.

Ralf's whole body clenched at the sound of that withered, barely audible voice. But he couldn't turn away. He was transfixed by what the idiot was carrying: a black cistern with a wide mouth. His eyes were locked on it, watching it approach, tilt forward, and reveal a blackness gem-lit by a splatter of tiny lights, pin-bright, like stars.

The lights were wheeling, and watching them curve through the dark, Ralf succumbed to a lurch of vertigo, keeled over, and fell, howling, into the depthless black.

He shrugged awake and sat still a long time before accepting coffee and bread. The four men who had gone up into the hills had not returned. The officer had wired for a helicopter to cover their trail and see if it could turn up any sign of them. When Ralf was strong enough to leave the police shack, he emerged in time to see the helicopter return. The pilot and his partner were excited. They had seen something, but Ralf didn't lag around to find out what.

The walk into Port-au-Prince was long and tedious, and in the condition he was in, it would take him most of the day. But when he got there, the American consul would wire his sister in Stony Brook for money. Then he could leave, get out before Gusto sent down more of his boys or the hills sent down what they were festering.

He walked to the edge of the trenchtown and stopped at the side of the road that led to the capital.

One last time, he looked back. The helicopter had gone up again. Its insectlike body glinted in the distance as it dropped towards the horizon, sunlight splintering off its domed glass, a wandering star burning alone above the hills.

The Second Wish by BRIAN LUMLEY

The scene was awesomely bleak: mountains gauntly grey and black-towered away to the east, forming an uneven backdrop for a valley of hardy grasses, sparse bushes, and leaning trees. In one corner of the valley, beneath foothills, a scattering of shingle-roofed houses, with the very occasional tiled roof showing through, was enclosed and protected in the Old European fashion by a heavy stone wall.

A mile or so from the village - if the huddle of timeworn houses could properly be termed a village leaning on a low rotting fence that guarded the rutted road from a steep and rocky decline, the tourists gazed at the oppressive bleakness all about and felt oddly uncomfortable inside their heavy coats. Behind them their hired car - a black Russian model as gloomy as the surrounding countryside, exuding all the friendliness of an expectant hearse - stood patiently waiting for them.

He was comparatively young, of medium build, darkhaired, unremarkably good-looking, reasonably intelligent, and decidedly idle. His early adult years had been spent avoiding any sort of real industry, a prospect which a timely and quite substantial inheritance had fortunately made redundant before it could force itself upon him. Even so, a decade of living at a rate far in excess of even his ample inheritance had rapidly reduced him to an almost penniless, unevenly cultured, high-ranking rake. He had never quite lowered himself to the level of a gigolo, however, and his womanizing had been quite deliberate, serving an end other than mere fleshly lust.

They had been ten very good years by his reckoning and not at all wasted, during which his expensive lifestyle had placed him in intimate contact with the cream of society; but while yet surrounded by affluence and glitter he had not been unaware of his own steadily dwindling resources. Thus, towards the end, he had set himself to the task of ensuring that his tenuous standing in society would not suffer with the disappearance of his so carelessly distributed funds; hence his philandering. In this he was not as subtle as he might have been, with the result that the field had narrowed down commensurately with his assets, until at last he had been left with Julia.

She was a widow on her middle forties but still fairly trim, rather prominently featured, too heavily madeup, not a little calculating, and very well-to-do. She did not love her consort - indeed she had never been in love - but he was often amusing and always thoughtful. Possibly his chief interest lay in her money, but that thought did not really bother her. Many of the younger, unattached men she had known had been after her money. At least Harry was not foppish, and she believed that in his way he did truly care for her.

Not once had he given her reason to believe otherwise. She had only twenty good years left and she knew it; money could only buy so much youth ... Harry would look after her in her final years and she would turn a blind eye on those little indiscretions which must surely come - provided he did not become too indiscreet. He had asked her to marry him and she would comply as soon as they returned to London.

Whatever else he lacked he made up for in bed. He was an extremely virile man and she had rarely been so well satisfied-...

Now here they were together, touring Hungary, getting 'faraway from it all.'

'Well, is this remote enough for you?' he asked, his arm around her waist.

'Umm,' she answered. 'Deliciously barren, isn't it?' 'Oh, it's all of that. Peace and quiet for a few days it was a good idea of yours, Julia, to drive out here. We'll feel all the more like living it up when we reach Budapest.'

'Are you so eager, then, to get back to the bright lights?' she asked. He detected a measure of peevishness in her voice.

'Not at all, darling. The setting might as well be Siberia for all I'm concerned about locale. As long as we're together. But a girl of your breeding and style can hardly -'

'Oh, come off it, Harry! You can't wait to get to Budapest, can you?'

He shrugged, smiled resignedly, thought: You niggly old bitch! and said, 'You read me like a book, darlingbut Budapest is just a wee bit closer to London, and London is that much closer to us getting married, and-'

'But you have me anyway,' she again petulantly cut him off. 'What's so important about being married?'

'It's your friends, Julia,' he answered with a sigh. 'Surely you know that?' He took her arm and steered her towards the car. q~ney see me as some sort of cuckoo in the nest, kicking them all out of your affections. Yes, and it's the money, too.'

'The money?' she looked at him sharply as he opened the car door for her. 'What money?'

'The money I haven't got!' he grinned ruefully, relaxing now that he could legitimately speak his mind, if not the truth. 'I mean, they're all certain it's your money I'm after, as if I was some damned gigolo. It's hardly flattering to either one of us. And I'd hate to think they might convince you that's all it is with me.

But once we're married I won't give a damn what they say or think. They'll just have to accept me, that's all.'

Reassured by what she took to be pure na~vet~, she smiled at him and pulled up the collar of her coat.

Then the smile fell from her face, and though it was not really cold she shuddered violently as he started the engine.

'A chill, darling?' he forced concern into his voice. 'Umm, a bit of one,' she answered, snuggling up to him. 'And a headache, too. I've had it ever since we stopped over at - oh, what's the name of the place?

Where we went up over the scree to look at that strange monolith?'

'Stregoicavar,' he answered her. 'The "Witch-Town." And that pillar-thing was the Black Stone. A curious piece of rock that, eh? Sticking up out of the ground like a great black fang! But Hungary is full of such things: myths and legends and odd relics of forgotten times. Perhaps we shouldn't have gone to l'ook at it. The villagers shun it...'

'Mumbo jumbo,' she answered. 'No, I think I shall simply put the blame on this place. It's bloody depressing, really, isn't it?'