Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

“‘No, Father,’ said Elspeth. ‘I have brought too much death this day, and your blood will not also stain my hands. I shall not be the despoiler you have become. That will not be your legacy to me.’

“‘Thief,’ he growled. ‘Coward and thief, usurper and witch. You come to take my lands from me, but have not the courage to test your mettle against the rightful Qqi d’Tashiva. No whelp of mine would flinch from her final duty, cur.’

“At that, one of Elspeth’s lieutenants drew an arrow from his quiver and nocked it, taking aim at Isaac Snow. But she was quick, and she stayed the man’s hand. Again, her father cursed her as a coward.”

“She should have killed him,” said the boy who’d yawned.

“Of a certain,” agreed the tow-headed girl.

“That may be. In the years to come, said the woman in the tavern in Sinara, Elspeth would sometimes doubt her choice that day, and sometimes she would wish him dead. But the fact, as this woman would have it, is that she did not kill him, nor did she permit any other to bring him harm. She declared that any who dared touch him would suffer a judgment far worse than death.”

“Then what did she do?” asked the boy on the tow-headed girl’s right.

“What she did do, child, was bestow upon him a gift.”

All three children stared back at her now in stark disbelief.

“No,” said the girl.

“Yes,” replied the peddler, “if the woman who had been a priestess in a temple of the Elder Ones, and before that a pirate and a smuggler, if she is to be trusted. Though, of course, it may be she was a liar or mistaken or mad, and sure, you may choose to believe or not.”

“Then . . . what did she do?” asked the boy who’d yawned. “I mean, what manner of gift did she give such a wicked man?”

At that the peddler smiled and slowly shook her head. “The woman in the tavern did not say, because she did not know. Her father had never told her, not specifically, but said only that it was a gift that lifted from the shoulders of Isaac Snow all his bitterness and insanity, all of his fury and grief. Elspeth’s gift, said the woman in the tavern, restored to him that which he’d held so dear, though how this was accomplished we do not know. But he was changed — and changed utterly. Afterwards, Elspeth ordered him escorted to the seven hundred steps and up, up, up . . . and up . . . to the Gates of Deeper Slumber, where he was sent back to the Waking World to live out the remainder of his days and where he may yet dwell, for none in the Dream Lands have knowledge of what became of him. We can say only, by this version of the truth, that he passed beyond the ken of the world.”

“That isn’t a very good ending,” frowned the tow-headed girl.

“It most assuredly isn’t,” said the boy who’d yawned.

“Not at all,” added the boy on the girl’s right side.

The peddler tilted her head, and she said sternly, “Do you imagine this is the way of tales, the way of the world, that it is somehow beholden to come with satisfying conclusions? If, indeed, it comes with any conclusions at all?”

The children didn’t answer the question. The boy who’d yawned peered over his shoulder at the fire, which was beginning to burn down. The tow-headed girl stared down at her bare feet. And the boy on her right picked at a loose thread in his trousers. Only the girl spoke. She asked the old woman, “Aunty, did Elspeth Snow become the new Queen of Bones and Rags?”

“No, child, she did not. She had no taste for power, though the temptation must have weighed heavily on her soul. Elspeth entrusted Richard Pickman and his compatriots with the future of Thok and with the task of rebuilding Amaakin’šarr. She forsook what remained of the prophecy, vowing never again to be a soldier, and she rode away from Thok and back to the Upper Dream Lands. She took with her the Basalt Madonna, which, I have heard, she carried far across the Middle Ocean and even beyond the Eastern Desert and Irem, City of Pillars. It could not be destroyed, and she dared not entrust it to the hands of any being so mighty they could have undone the Qqi d’Evai Mubadieb. But she did hide it, and she hid it well. Some say she cast it over the edge of the world, though, personally, I think that is likely an exaggeration.”

“And what became of her after that?” asked the girl, not looking up from her feet.

“Some say that she returned at last to Serannian, where she died many years ago. And others say she went to Celephaïs, and still others that, by wielding the Madonna she’d become undying and was permitted a place among the Old Ones in the shining city of Kadath. But these are all rumors, and no more to be trusted than ever rumors should be,” and with that, the peddler drew a deep breath and said that she’d told all she could tell in a night.

There were questions from the children, but she did not answer them. She sent the three away to their beds, and then went to the garret room she’d been provided for the night — in exchange for a story. Several of the cats followed her, including the tabby tom, and they stood sentry at the top of the stairs. However, despite her great exhaustion, the peddler did not immediately seek sleep. Rather, she opened the shutters of the garret’s single small window, and there in Ulthar, she undressed before the brilliant eye of the moon and before all the icy, innumerable stars that speckle an early autumn evening sky. The night regarded her with perfect indifference, and she regarded it with awe. And the peddler, the seller of notions and oddments, the nameless old woman who wandered the cities on the plains below Mount Lerion, she recalled her mother, and a kindly ghoul named Sorrow, and the last face her father had worn. And she told herself a truer tale than she’d told the children.

“As early as my boyhood and teenage years,” writes Brian Hodge,“before I’d even discovered H. P. Lovecraft, wide open spaces and rural ruins and desolate roads struck me as eerie locales, haunted by their pasts and potentially harboring newer menaces. Terrible things can unfold, slowly, where few human eyes are around to witness them, and landscapes have long memories.

“I come from farmers who plowed the earth, from miners who crawled inside it. I grew up a town kid, but when visiting grandparents, my playgrounds were fields and woodlands. My relationship to remote places has always been that of a heathen, allowing for the possibility of heathen gods.

“So, when I first read works such as ‘The Dunwich Horror’ and ‘The Colour Out of Space’ they had, despite their alien monstrosities, the kind of immediate familiarity that comes with seeing your worst suspicions confirmed.

“To me, ‘Lovecraftian’ is more than a stew of ingredients — start with these trappings, sprinkle in these settings, season with references to this deity or that grimoire — although you’ll find a few familiar flavors in ‘It’s All the Same Road In the End.’

“I also regard ‘Lovecraftian’ as a way of looking at the earth and the night skies that engulf it. It’s a sense of memory and process; a recognition of the vast antiquity of the soil underfoot and the waters that carve it. It’s a realization that the molecules in your body may have traveled billions of years to get here, and more may be on the way, in a myriad of forms, and that the ground they land on will, in time, yield to whatever proves best equipped to colonize or conquer it.

“And who’s to say the earliest emissaries aren’t already living at the end of a very long road.”

Brian Hodge is one of those people who always has to be making something. So far, he’s made ten novels, and is working on three more, as well as 120 shorter works and five full-length collections. Recent and forthcoming works include In the Negative Spaces and The Weight of the Dead , both standalone novellas; Worlds of Hurt , an omnibus edition of the first four works in his Misbegotten mythos; an updated edition of Dark Advent , his early post-apocalyptic epic; and his next collection, The Immaculate Void . Hodge lives in Colorado, where he also likes to make music and photographs; loves everything about organic gardening except the thieving squirrels; and trains in Krav Maga and kickboxing, which are useless against the squirrels.