Frank Long - Mythos and Horror Stories

I began to work on his fingers, trying my best to force them open. I had no success for a moment. Then, gradually, they seemed to become more flexible and some of the stiffness went out of them.

Quite suddenly his entire hand opened, as if my persistent tugging at each individual finger in turn had broken some kind of spell.

The small object which rested on his palm did not seem to have been compressed or injured in any way by the tight constriction to which it had been subjected. I thought at first it was of metal, so brightly did it gleam in the sunlight. But when I picked it up and looked at it closely I saw that it was of some rubbery substance with merely the sheen of metal.

I had never before looked at any inanimate object quite so horrible. Superficially it resembled a tiny many-tentacled octopus, but there was something about it which would have made the ugliest of sea monsters seem merely fishlike in a slightly repulsive way. It had a countenance, of a sort, a shriveled, sunken old man’s face that was no more than suggestively human. Not a human face at all, really, but the suggestion was there, a hint, at least, of anthropoid intelligence of a wholly malignant nature. But the longer I stared at it the less human it seemed, until I began to feel that I had read into it something that wasn’t there. Intelligence, yes— awareness of some kind, but so much the opposite of anthropoid that my mind reeled at trying to imagine what intelligence would be like if it was as cold as the dark night of space and could exercise a wholly merciless authority over every animate entity in the universe of stars.

I looked at Helen Rathbourne and saw that she was trembling and had turned very pale. I had lowered my hand just enough to enable her to see it clearly, and I knew that her son had seen it again too. He said nothing, just looked at me as if, young as he was, the thought that such an object had been taken from his hand made him feel in some strange way contaminated.

“You picked it up without knowing,” I wanted to shout at him. “Forget it, child — blot it from your mind. I’ll take it to the pool you almost drowned in and let it sink from sight, and we’ll forget we ever saw it.”

But before I could say a word to John or his mother, something began to happen to my hand. It began to happen even before I realized the object was attached to a rusted metal chain and had clearly been designed to be worn as an amulet around someone’s neck.

My fingers closed over it, contracting more and more until I was holding it in as tight a grip as John had done. I couldn’t seem to open them again or hurl the object from me as I suddenly wanted to do.

Something happened then to more than just my hand. Everything about me seemed subtly to change, the contours of near objects becoming less sharply silhouetted against the sky and more distant objects not only losing their sharpness, but seeming almost to dissolve. There was a roaring in my ears, and a strange, terrifying feeling of vastness, of emptiness — I can describe it in no other way — swept over me.

Nothing actually vanished, nothing was gone, but I had the feeling that I was in two places at once — suspended in some vast abyss of emptiness wider than the universe of stars, and still on the beach beneath the wreckage, with Helen Rathbourne, John, and Susan all looking at me in alarm.

They were staring in alarm because I was moving, I felt, in some strange, almost unnatural way, as men and women were not supposed to move. Like some mindless automaton perhaps, a robot shape with no way of preserving its balance because its cybernetic brain had exploded into fragments and it could only stagger about in the grip of an utter mindlessness that was about to cause it to go crashing to the sand.

Then my perceptions steadied a little, and when I looked down over myself I saw that no change had taken place in my physical body at least. But I had swung about and was walking toward the surf line.

Nearer and nearer I came to it, and suddenly I was not alone. John had gotten to his feet, and both children were pursuing me across the sand. Their mother was following them, frantic with concern, but unable to catch up with them because they, were running so fast to join me before I started wading out into the waves that were cresting into foam a few feet from shore.

The instant they reached my side, my hand went out toward Susan and her small trembling fingers crept between mine. I could not give John my other hand, but he was not in need of support. He had become his sturdy young self again and was striding along very rapidly at my side. The water was swirling about my ankles, and Susan was stumbling a little because it had risen to her knees when I spoke the words that had not even formed in my mind, in a voice that I did not recognize as my own:

“The Deep Ones await their followers, and we must not fail to be present at the Great Awakening. It is written that all shall arise and join. We who carry the emblem and those who have looked upon it. From the ends of the earth the summons, the call has come and we must not delay.

“In watery R’lyeh Great Cthulhu is stirring. Shub-Niggurath! Yog-Sothoth! Ia! The Goat with a Thousand Young!”

“He will be all right now,” the young resident physician was saying. “I am sure he will be all right. It was your son who deserves all of the credit by prying that lost amulet from his hand just as he was about to go under, after lifting your daughter above the waves.”

I could hear the voices clearly, although my head was still in a whirl. The crisp white hospital sheets had been so stiffly starched that they cut into the flesh of my throat when I tried to raise my head. So I gave up trying, and went on listening instead.

“It’s strange,” came in a voice I would have recognized if nothing had been left of me but a hollow shell, on the darkest of days, “how quickly children can become attached to a total stranger. Susan risked her life to save him, and so did my son. When he took that hideous thing from my son’s hand and I saw it, I thought I was going to faint. I can’t begin to tell you how unnerving it was.”

“He didn’t know about—”

“How it came to be there? Apparently not. He just arrived at the inn this morning. Since it happened two weeks ago everyone had stopped talking about it. It was so horrible a thing that it doesn’t surprise me in the least.”

“The man was a member of an esoteric cult, I understand. A halfcrazed, uncouth fellow with a waist-length beard. There were eight or ten of them roaming about here at one time, but now they have all disappeared. After what happened, it’s not in the least surprising, as you say.”

“I can’t bear to think about it, even now. His body was dismembered, and horribly mangled. One of his legs was missing. He was found right where my son picked up the amulet, so it must have belonged to him. Of course everyone has a ready explanation for such horrors. Sheriff Wilcox believes that where the channel widens out by that demolished breakwater there is sufficient depth of water to provide a kind of swimming pool for a shark. And if he had stumbled and fallen—”

“Do you think he did?”

“You either have to believe that, or that he went down deliberately into the water. Are you familiar with the writings of H. P. Lovecraft? He was a genius, of a sort. He resided in Providence until his death in 1937.”

“Yes, I’ve read a few of his stories.”

“Those bearded, uncouth cult members you mention must have read them all. Perhaps that’s why they’ve disappeared. Perhaps they made the mistake of taking Lovecraft’s stories a little too seriously.”

“You can’t really believe that.”

“I don’t quite know what I believe. Just suppose — Lovecraft didn’t put everything he knew or suspected into his stories. That would have left a quite wide margin for future exploration.”