Frank Long - Mythos and Horror Stories

Little frowned. “I don’t know. Conditions on the cooling earth two billion years ago may once have been such that creations of that nature antedated the process of biological evolution with which we are familiar. And we may be sure that Chaugnar Faugn with its inscrutable endowments could have fashioned men-shapes had it so desired — could have fashioned them even from the planktonlike swarms of small organisms which must have drifted with the tides through the ancient oceans.”

Little lowered his voice and looked steadily at Algernon. “Some day,” he murmured, “Chaugnar may return. We sent it back through time, but in five thousand or a hundred thousand years it may return to ravage. Its return will be presaged in dreams, for when its brethren stirred restlessly on the Spanish hills both I and Hsieh Ho were disturbed in our sleep by harbingers from beyond. Telepathically Chaugnar spoke to sleeping minds, and if it returns it will speak again, for Man is not isolated among the sentient beings of earth but is linked to all that moves in hyperdimensional continuity.”

(contributed by Frank Belknap Long who refuses to discuss how these few lines came into his possession)

(Retranslated into slightly more modern phrase patterns here and there, but without the slightest departure from the original text otherwise.)

It must not be thought that the powers capable of the greatest wickedness appear to us in the form of repellent familiars, and other, closely related demons. They do not. Small, visible demons are merely the effluvia which those vast forms of destructiveness have left in Their wake skin scrapings and even more tenuous shreds of evil that attach themselves to the living like leeches from some great slain leviathan of the deep that has wreaked havoc on a hundred coastal cities before plunging to its death with a thousand hurled harpoons quivering in its flesh.

For the mightiest powers there can be no death, and the hurled harpoons inflict, at most, surface injuries which heal quickly. I have said before and I shall say again until my tardily earned wisdom is accepted by my brethren as fact — in confronting that which has always been and always will be a master of magic can know only self-reproach and despair if he mistakes a temporary victory for one that he can never hope permanently to win.

It was just the right place for an encounter with an enchantress. There was a long stretch of shining beach, with a sand dune towering up behind it, and in the near distance a high white steeple and the sun-gilded roofs of a small New England village from which I had just departed for a dip in the sea. It was vacation time, always a good time to be a guest at an inn that you like straight off, if only because not a single jarring note accompanies your arrival with a worn and battered suitcase and an eye for oak paneling that dates back a century or more.

The village seemed sleepy and unchanged, always a splendid thing in midsummer when you’ve had yqur fill of city noises and smoke and bustle and the intolerable encroachments of the “do this” and “do that” brigade.

I’d seen her at breakfast time, with her two small children, a boy and a girl, taking up all of her attention until I sat down at a table a short distance away and stared steadily at her for a moment. I couldn’t help it. She would have drawn all eyes in a parade of glamorous models. A widow? I wondered. A divorcee? Or — banish the thought — a happily married woman whose thoughts never strayed?

It was impossible to know, of course. But when she looked up and saw me she nodded slightly and smiled, and for a moment nothing seemed to matter but the fear that she was so very beautiful my stare would reveal my inmost thoughts.

New arrivals at small village inns are often greeted with a smile and a nod by the kindly disposed, solely to put them at their ease and make them feel that they are the opposite of outsiders. I wasn’t deceived on that score. But still—

Meeting her now, between the dune and the sea, with her children still on opposite sides of her, I was unprepared for more than another smile and nod. I had emerged from around the dune, coming into view so abruptly that she might well have looked merely startled, and it made the explicit nature of her greeting seem astonishing indeed.

She raised her arm and waved to me, and called out: “Oh, hello! I didn’t expect to see anyone from the inn here so early. You can be of great help to me.”

“In what way?” I asked, trying to keep from looking as flustered as I felt and crossing to her side in several not-too-hurried strides.

“I cut my hand rather badly just now on a razor-sharp shell,” she said. “But I’m not in the least worried. It’s just that — it was terribly stupid of me, and I haven’t a handkerchief. If you have one—”

“Of course,” I said. “We’ll get it bound up in short order. But you’d better let me look at it first.”

Her hand was velvety soft in my clasp, and so beautiful that for a moment I hardly noticed the cut on her palm. It was bleeding a little but not profusely, even though it wasn’t exactly a scratch. It took me only a moment to wrap a handkerchief twice around the middle of her hand and knot it securely just below her wrist.

“That should take care of it,” I said. “For now. If you’re not returning to the inn soon you can take the bandage off when the bleeding stops and douse it in seawater. There’s no better antiseptic. A rusty nail and a seashell are worlds apart, antiseptically speaking.”

“You’ve been most helpful,” she said, seeming not to care that I was taking my time in releasing her hand. “I’m more grateful than I can say.”

The children were fidgeting about with their toes turned in, looking reproachfully from their mother to me and back again. There is nothing children resent more than to be totally ignored when an introduction can be achieved in a matter of seconds. The gulf that yawns between a child and an adult can be spanned to an incredible extent at times with no more than & gesture, and most children are wise enough to know when they are being cheated of an enriching experience for no reason at all.

It seemed suddenly to occur to her that she had failed even to introduce herself, and she made amends quickly in a threefold way. “I’m Helen Rathbourne,” she said. “When my husband died I didn’t think I’d ever find myself at the inn again. I felt that coming here would bring back — well, too many things. But I do love this place. Everything about it is irresistibly enchanting. The children adore it too.