New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

Edited, with an Introduction by RAMSEY CAMPBELL

The late H. P. Lovecraft was a mythmaker, a visionary, a conjurer of dreams. As a self-professed outsider in his own century, Lovecraft invested his inner visions with such intensity that he was able to will an entire world into being: Great Cthulhu, the blind idiot god Azathoth, the sea-sunken realm of R'lyeh, the infamous Necronomicon. Mythic deities and alien landscapes emanated in eldritch array, like a litany of maledictions, from the pulp magazines of the era that published his fiction.

New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos is a celebration of Lovecraft's achievement, a tribute to this most influential of twentieth-century American fantasists, by such present-day masters of the genre as Stephen King, Basil Copper, Ramsey Campbell, and T. E. D. Klein. The stories in this anthology are thus intended as satisfying contemporary entertainments and as a collective testimony to the darkly enduring power of this strange Rhode Island recluse, the man with the cosmic mind.

Also published by Grafton Books;

Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (edited by August Derleth)

GRAFTON BOOKS

A Division of the Collins Publishing Group

LONDON CLASGOW

TORONTO SYDNEY AUCKLAND

Grafton Books

A Division of the Collins Publishing Group

8 Grafton Street, London WlX 3LA

A Grafton UK Paperback Original 1988

Copyright c Arkham House Publishers, Inc 1980

ISBN 0-586-20093-2

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Collins, Glasgow

Set in Century Schoolbook

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

To the memory of August Derleth whose idea this book was.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Crouch End by STEPHEN KING

The Star Pools by A. A. ATTANASIO

The Second Wish by BRIAN LUMLEY

Dark Awakening by FRANK BELKNAP LONG

Shaft Number 247 by BASIL COPPER

Black Man With a Horn by T. E. D. KLEIN

The Black Tome of Alsophocus by H.P LOVECRAFT AND MARTIN S WARNES

Than Curse the Darkness by DAVID DRAKE

The Faces at Pine Dunes by RAMSEY CAMPBELL

Notes on Contributors

Introduction

What was the Cthulhu Mythos, to begin with?

The question needs to be asked for clarity's sake, for the Mythos has been so elaborated and overpopulated, reworked in attempts to give it unity, explained and contradictorily reexplained, that it is now impossible to distinguish a total structure - by no means wholly a bad situation, as I hope to show. So what was the Mythos in the first place?

August Derleth has pointed out that it was not a planned development on Lovecraft's part; indeed, Lovecraft never even gave it a name. Rather it was a step in Lovecraft's search for the perfect form for the weird tale. By 1923, in 'The Rats in the Walls,' Lovecraft had refined his method: the story's movement has far less to do with plot than with a gradual accumulation of telling detail, presented with relentless logic; the story moves single-mindedly toward terror. Yet in 'The Shunned House'

the search continues; the detective-story structure which Lin Carter has analyzed, and which has its roots in Machen's 'Great God Pan,' is yet more skilfully used, but Lovecraft is still seeking a background which will make his horrors both plausible and suggestive. He found it not in occultism, which he thought banal, but in a subtle, often vague, blend of science fiction and the supernatural. In 'The Shunned House' it is the weakest element in a powerful story: the explanation of the haunting, with its 'certain kinetic patterns' continuing-to function in 'some multiple-dimensioned space along the original lines of force,' seems a muddle. But only three years later the same method, perfected, could produce a masterpiece in 'The Colour Out of Space': the not; subtle Mythos story - one that never mentions a Mythos name, which has led some commentators to exclude it from the listing - and, in my opinion, the finest. It is certainly the classic solution to Lovecraft's problem of combining the tale of terror with science fiction.

Lovecraft required a background against which to present his elements of terror, an accumulation of detail which needed only to sound convincing, and he found it in science. His Mythos was never coherent nor did it need to be. Its function was to suggest, something larger and more terrible than was eye: stated. In recent years the Mythos at times has seemed in danger of becoming conventionalized. This is ironic since Lovecraft's intention and achievement was pre. cisely to avoid the predictability and resultant lack of terror which beset the conventional macabre fiction of his day. I must own up to my share of the responsibility for this state of things; like many a beginner in this field, I found it easy to imitate Lovecraft's more obvious stylistic mannerisms and some of his ideas. But alas, few of Lovecraft's imitators - particularly in the fanzines - are influenced by his best qualities, his skill in organizing his material and in atmospheric preparation, or his originality. And it is all too easy to convince oneself that a tale that reads vaguely like Lovecraft is an achievement.

In today's overcrowded Mythos it is nothing of the sort.

For this and other reasons, in this anthology I have tended to favour less familiar treatments or uses of the Mythos. There are a couple of traditional stories, one a completion of a Lovecraft fragment, but in the main these tales are contemporary. They contain few erudite occultists, decaying towns, or stylistic pastiches. They are themselves: new tales.

One - perhaps the only - merit of the overcrowding of the Mythos is that is it now impossible to devise a coherent pattern linking all its aspects, even if anyone were foolish enough to try. This leaves writers free once more to return to the first principles of the Mythos - to give glimpses of something larger than they show, just as Lovecraft did. Indeed, one of our tales hints at the ultimate event of the Mythos without even referring to the traditional names. I hope that readers will find in this book some of the sense of terror and awe that Lovecraft communicated so well.

- RAMSEY CAMPBELL

Crouch End by STEPHEN KING

By the time the woman had finally gone, it was nearly two-thirty in the morning. Outside the Crouch End police station, Tottenham Lane was a small dead river. London was asleep . . . but London never sleeps deeply, and its dreams are uneasy.

PC Vetter closed his notebook, which he'd almost filled as the American woman's strange, frenzied story poured out. He looked at the typewriter and the stack of blank forms on the shelf beside it. 'This one'll look odd come morning light,' he said.

PC Farnham was drinking a Coke. He didn't speak for a long time. 'She was American, wasn't she?' he said finally, as if that might explain most or all of the story she had told.

'It'll go in the back file,' Vetter agreed, and looked round for a cigarette. 'But I wonder . . . '

Farnham laughed. 'You don't mean you believe any part of it? Go on, sir! Pull the other one!'

'Didn't say that, did I? No. But you're new here.'

Farnham sat a little straighter. He was twenty-seven, and it was hardly his fault that he had been posted here from Muswell Hill to the north, or that Vetter, who was nearly twice his age, had spent his entire uneventful career in the quiet London backwater of Crouch End.

'Perhaps so, sir,' lie said, 'but — with respect, mind — I still think I know a swatch of the old whole cloth when I see one . . . or hear one.'

'Give us a fag, mate,' Vetter said, looking amused. 'There!

What a good boy you are.' He lit it with a wooden match from a bright red railway box, shook it out, and tossed the match stub into Farnham's ashtray. He peered at the lad through a haze of drifting smoke. His own days of laddie good looks were long gone; Vetter's face was deeply lined and his nose was a map of broken veins. He liked his six of Harp a night, did PC Vetter.

'You think Crouch End's a very quiet place, then, do you?'

Farnham shrugged. In truth he thought Crouch End was a big suburban yawn — what his younger brother would have been pleased to call 'a fucking Bore-a-Torium.'

'Yes,' Vetter said, 'I see you do. And you're right. Goes to sleep by eleven most nights, it does.

But I've seen a lot of strange things in Crouch End. If you're here half as long as I've been, you'll see your share, too. There are more strange things happen right here in this quiet six or eight blocks than anywhere else in London — that's saying a lot, I know, but I believe it. It scares me.

So I have my lager, and then I'm not so scared. You look at Sergeant Gordon sometime, Farnham, and ask yourself why his hair is dead white at forty. Or I'd say take a look at Petty, but you can't very well, can you? Petty committed suicide in the summer of 1976. Our hot summer.

It was . . . ' Vetter seemed to consider his words. 'It was quite bad that summer. Quite bad. There were a lot of us who were afraid they might break through.'

'Who might break through what?' Farnham asked. He felt a contemptuous smile turning up the corners of his mouth, knew it was far from politic, but was unable to stop it. In his way, Vetter was raving as badly as the American woman had. He had always been a bit queer. The booze, probably. Then he saw Vetter was smiling right back at him.

'You think I'm a dotty old prat, I suppose,' he said. 'Not at all, not at all,' Farnham protested, groaning inwardly.

'You're a good boy,' Vetter said. 'Won't be riding a desk here in the station when you're my age. Not if you stick on the force. Will you stick, d'you think? D'you fancy it?'

'Yes,' Farnham said. It was true; he did fancy it. He meant to stick even though Sheila wanted him off the police force and somewhere she could count on him. The Ford assembly line, perhaps. The thought of joining the wankers at Ford curdled his stomach.

'I thought so,' Vetter said, crushing his smoke. 'Gets in your blood, doesn't it? You could go far, too, and it wouldn't be boring old Crouch End you'd finish up in, either. Still, you don't know everything. Crouch End is strange. You ought to have a peek in the back file sometime, Farnham. Oh, a lot of it's the usual . . . girls and boys run away from home to be hippies or punks or whatever it is they call themselves now . . . husbands gone missing (and when you clap an eye to their wives you can most times understand why) . . . unsolved arsons . . . purse-snatchings . . .

all of that. But in between, there's enough stories to curdle your blood. And some to make you sick to your stomach.'

'True word?'

Vetter nodded. 'Some of em very like the one that poor American girl just told us. She'll not see her husband again — take my word for it.' He looked at Farnham and shrugged. 'Believe me, believe me not. It's all one, isn't it? The file's there. We call it the open file because it's more polite than the back file or the kiss-my-arse file. Study it up, Farnham. Study it up.'

Farnham said nothing, but he actually did intend to 'study it up.' The idea that there might be a whole series of stories such as the one the American woman had told . . . that was disturbing.

'Sometimes,' Vetter said, stealing another of Farnham's Silk Cuts, 'I wonder about Dimensions.'

'Dimensions?'

'Yes, my good old son — dimensions. Science fiction writers are always on about Dimensions, aren't they? Ever read science fiction, Farnham?'

'No,' Farnham said. He had decided this was some sort of elaborate leg-pull.

'What about Lovecraft? Ever read anything by him?'

'Never heard of him,'' Farnham said. The last fiction he'd read for pleasure, in fact, had been a small Victorian Era pastiche called Two Gentlemen in Silk Knickers.

'Well, this fellow Lovecraft was always writing about Dimensions,' Vetter said, producing his box of railway matches. 'Dimensions close to ours. Full of these immortal monsters that would drive a man mad at one look. Frightful rubbish, of course. Except, whenever one of these people straggles in, I wonder if all of it was rubbish. I think to myself then — when it's quiet and late at night, like now — that our whole world, everything we think of as nice and normal and sane, might be like a big leather ball filled with air. Only in some places, the leather's scuffed almost down to nothing. Places where the barriers are thinner. Do you get me?'

'Yes,' Farnham said, and thought: Maybe you ought to give me a kiss, Vetter — I always fancy a kiss when I'm getting my doodle pulled.

'And then I think, 'Crouch End's one of those thin places. Silly, but I do have those thoughts.

Too imaginative, I expect; my mother always said so, anyway.'

'Did she indeed?'

'Yes. Do you know what else I think?'

'No, sir — not a clue.'

'Highgate's mostly all right, that's what I think — it's just as thick as you'd want between us and the Dimensions in Muswell Hill and Highgate. But now you take Archway and Finsbury Park.

They border on Crouch End, too. I've got friends in both places, and they know of my interest in certain things that don't seem to be any way rational. Certain crazy stories which have been told, we'll say, by people with nothing to gain by making up crazy stories.

'Did it occur to you to wonder, Farnham, why the woman would have told us the things she did if they weren't true?'

'Well . . . '

Vetter struck a match and looked at Farnham over it. 'Pretty young woman, twenty-six, two kiddies back at her hotel, husband's a young lawyer doing well in Milwaukee or someplace.

What's she to gain by coming in and spouting about the sort of things you only used to see in Hammer films?'

'I don't know,' Farnham said stiffly. 'But there may be an ex — '

'So I say to myself' — Vetter overrode him — 'that if there are such things as 'thin spots,' this one would begin at Archway and Finsbury Park . . . but the very thinnest part is here at Crouch End. And I say to myself, wouldn't it be a day if the last of the leather between us and what's on the inside that ball just . . . rubbed away? Wouldn't it be a day if even half of what that woman told us was true?'

Farnham was silent. He had decided that PC Vetter probably also believed in palmistry and phrenology and the Rosicrucians.

'Read the back file,' Vetter said, getting up. There was a crackling sound as he put his hands in the small of his back and stretched. 'I'm going out to get some fresh air.'

He strolled out. Farnham looked after him with a mixture of amusement and resentment.

Vetter was dotty, all right. He was also a bloody fag-mooch. Fags didn't come cheap in this brave new world of the welfare state. He picked up Vetter's notebook and began leafing through the girl's story again.

And, yes, he would go through the back file.

He would do it for laughs.

The girl — or young woman, if you wanted to be politically correct (and all Americans did these days, it seemed) — had burst into the station at quarter past ten the previous evening, her hair in damp strings around her face, her eyes bulging. She was dragging her purse by the strap.

'Lonnie,' she said. 'Please, you've got to find Lonnie.'

'Well, we'll do our best, won't we?' Vetter said. 'But you've got to tell us who Lonnie is.'

'He's dead,' the young woman said. 'I know he is.' She began to cry. Then she began to laugh

— to cackle, really. She dropped her purse in front of her. She was hysterical.

The station was fairly deserted at that hour on a weeknight. Sergeant Raymond was listening to a Pakistani woman tell, with almost unearthly calm, how her purse had been nicked on Hillfield Avenue by a yob with a lot of football tattoos and a great coxcomb of blue hair. Vetter saw Farnham come in from the anteroom, where he had been taking down old posters (HAVE YOU

ROOM IN YOUR HEART FOR AN UNWANTED CHILD?) and putting up new ones (SIX

RULES FOR SAFE

NIGHT-CYCLING).

Vetter waved Farnham forward and Sergeant Raymond, who had looked round at once when he heard the American woman's semi-hysterical voice, back. Raymond, who liked breaking pickpockets' fingers like breadsticks ('Aw, c'mon, mate,' he'd say if asked to justify this extralegal proceeding, 'fifty million wogs can't be wrong'), was not the man for a hysterical woman.

'Lonnie!' she shrieked. 'Oh, please, they've got Lonnie!' The Pakistani woman turned toward the young American woman, studied her calmly for a

moment, then turned back to Sergeant Raymond and continued to tell him how her purse had been snatched.

'Miss — ' PC Farnham began.

'What's going on out there?' she whispered. Her breath was coming in quick pants. Farnham noticed there was a slight scratch on her left cheek. She was a pretty little hen with nice bubs —

small but pert — and a great cloud of auburn hair. Her clothes were moderately expensive. The heel had come off one of her shoes.

'What's going on out there?' she repeated. 'Monsters — '

The Pakistani woman looked over again . . . and smiled. Her teeth were rotten. The smile was gone like a conjurer's trick, and she took the Lost and Stolen Property form Raymond was holding out to her.

'Get the lady a cup of coffee and bring it down to Room Three,' Vetter said. 'Could you do with a cup of coffee, love?'

'Lonnie,' she whispered. 'I know he's dead.'

'Now, you just come along with old Ted Vetter and we'll sort this out in a jiff,' he said, and helped her to her feet. She was still talking in a low moaning voice when he led her away with one arm snugged around her waist. She was rocking unsteadily because of the broken shoe.

Farnham got the coffee and brought it into Room Three, a plain white cubicle furnished with a scarred table, four chairs, and a water cooler in the corner. He put the coffee in front of her.

'Here, love,' he said, 'this'll do you good. I've got some sugar if — '

'I can't drink it,' she said. 'I couldn't — ' And then she clutched the porcelain cup, someone's long-forgotten souvenir of Blackpool, in her hands as if for warmth. Her hands were shaking quite badly, and Farnham wanted to tell her to put it down before she slopped the coffee and scalded herself.

'I couldn't,' she said again. Then she drank, still holding the cup two-handed, the way a child will hold his cup of broth. And when she looked at them, it was a child's look — simple, exhausted, appealing . . . and at bay, somehow. It was as if whatever had happened had somehow shocked her young; as if some invisible hand had swooped down from the sky and slapped the last twenty years out of her, leaving a child in grownup American clothes in this small white interrogation room in Crouch End.

'Lonnie,' she said. 'The monsters,' she said. 'Will you help me? Will you please help me?

Maybe he isn't dead. Maybe —

'I'm an American citizen.!' she cried suddenly, and then, as if she had said something deeply shameful, she began to sob.

Vetter patted her shoulder. 'There, love. I think we can help find your Lonnie. Your husband, is he?''

Still sobbing, she nodded. 'Danny and Norma are back at the hotel . . . with the sitter . . . they'll be sleeping . . . expecting him to kiss them when we come in . . . '

'Now if you could just relax and tell us what happened — '

'And where it happened,' Farnham added. Vetter looked up at him swiftly, frowning.

'But that's just it!' she cried. 'I don't know where it happened! I'm not even sure what happened, except that it was h-huh-horrible.'

Vetter had taken out his notebook. 'What's your name, love?''

'Doris Freeman. My husband is Leonard Freeman. We're staying at the Hotel Inter-Continental. We're American citizens.' This time the statement of nationality actually seemed to steady her a little. She sipped her coffee and put the mug down. Farnham saw that the palms of her hands were quite red. You'll feel that later, dearie, he thought.

Vetter was drudging it all down in his notebook. Now he looked momentarily at PC Farnham, just an unobtrusive flick of the eyes.

'Are you on holiday?' he asked.

'Yes . . . two weeks here and one in Spain. We were supposed to have a week in Barcelona . . .

but this isn't helping find Lonnie! Why are you asking me these stupid questions?'

'Just trying to get the background, Mrs. Freeman,' Farnham said. Without really thinking about it, both of them had adopted low, soothing voices. 'Now you go ahead and tell us what happened.

Tell it in your own words.'

'Why is it so hard to get a taxi in London?' she asked abruptly.

Farnham hardly knew what to say, but Vetter responded as if the question were utterly germane to the discussion.

'Hard to say. Tourists, partly. Why? Did you have trouble getting someone who'd take you out here to Crouch End?'

'Yes,' she said. 'We left the hotel at three and came down to Hatchard's Bookshop. Is that Haymarket?'

'Near to,' Vetter agreed. 'Lovely big bookshop, love, isn't it?'

'We had no trouble getting a cab from the Inter-Continental . . . they were lined up outside.

But when we came out of Hatchard's, there was nothing. Finally, when one did stop, the driver just laughed and shook his head when Lonnie said we wanted to go to Crouch End.'

'Aye, they can be right barstards about the suburbs, beggin your pardon, love,' Farnham said.

'He even refused a pound tip,' Doris Freeman said, and a very American perplexity had crept into her tone. 'We waited for almost half an hour before we got a driver who said he'd take us. It was five-thirty by then, maybe quarter of six. And that was when Lonnie discovered he'd lost the address . . . '

She clutched the mug again.

'Who were you going to see?' Vetter asked.

'A colleague of my husband's. A lawyer named John Squales. My husband hadn't met him, but their two firms were — ' She gestured vaguely.

'Affiliated?'

'Yes, I suppose. When Mr. Squales found out we were going to be in London on vacation, he invited us to his home for dinner. Lonnie had always written him at his office, of course, but he had Mr. Squales's home address on a slip of paper. After we got in the cab, he discovered he'd lost it. And all he could remember was that it was in Crouch End.'

She looked at them solemnly.

'Crouch End — I think that's an ugly name.'

Vetter said, 'So what did you do then?'

She began to talk. By the time she'd finished, her first cup of coffee and most of another were gone, and PC Vetter had filled up several pages of his notebook with his blocky, sprawling script.

Lonnie Freeman was a big man, and hunched forward in the roomy back seat of the black cab so he could talk to the driver, he looked to her amazingly as he had when she'd first seen him at a college basketball game in their senior year — sitting on the bench, his knees somewhere up around his ears, his hands on their big wrists dangling between his legs. Only then he had been wearing basketball shorts and a towel slung around his neck, and now he was in a suit and tie. He had never gotten in many games, she remembered fondly, because he just wasn't that good. And he lost addresses.

The cabby listened indulgently to the tale of the lost address. He was an elderly man impeccably turned out in a gray summer-weight suit, the antithesis of the slouching New York cabdriver. Only the checked wool cap on the driver's head clashed, but it was an agreeable clash; it lent him a touch of rakish charm. Outside, the traffic flowed endlessly past on Haymarket; the theater nearby announced that The Phantom of the Opera was continuing its apparently endless run.

'Well, I tell you what, guv,' the cabby said. 'I'll take yer there to Crouch End, and we'll stop at a call box, and you check your governor's address, and off we go, right to the door.'

'That's wonderful,' Doris said, really meaning it. They had been in London six days now, and she could not recall ever having been in a place where the people were kinder or more civilized.

'Thanks,' Lonnie said, and sat back. He put his arm around Doris and smiled. 'See? No problem.'

'No thanks to you,' she mock-growled, and threw a light punch at his midsection.

'Right,' the cabby said. 'Heigh-ho for Crouch End.'

It was late August, and a steady hot wind rattled the trash across the roads and whipped at the jackets and skirts of the men and women going home from work. The sun was settling, but when it shone between the buildings, Doris saw that it was beginning to take on the reddish cast of evening. The cabby hummed. She relaxed with Lonnie's arm around her — she had seen more of him in the last six days than she had all year, it seemed, and she was very pleased to discover that she liked it. She had never been out of America before, either, and she had to keep reminding herself that she was in England, she was going to Barcelona, thousands should be so lucky.

Then the sun disappeared behind a wall of buildings, and she lost her sense of direction almost immediately. Cab rides in London did that to you, she had discovered. The city was a great sprawling warren of Roads and Mews and Hills and Closes (even Inns), and she couldn't understand how anyone could get around. When she had mentioned it to Lonnie the day before, he had replied that they got around very carefully . . . hadn't she noticed that all the cabbies kept the London Streetfinder tucked cozily away beneath the dash?

This was the longest cab ride they had taken. The fashionable section of town dropped behind them (in spite of that perverse going-around-in-circles feeling). They passed through an area of monolithic housing developments that could have been utterly deserted for all the signs of life they showed (no, she corrected herself to Vetter and Farnham in the small white room; she had seen one small boy sitting on the curb, striking matches), then an area of small, rather tattylooking shops and fruit stalls, and then — no wonder driving in London was so disorienting to out-of-towners — they seemed to have driven smack into the fashionable section again.

'There was even a McDonald's,' she told Vetter and Farnham in a tone of voice usually reserved for references to the Sphinx and the Hanging Gardens.

'Was there?' Vetter replied, properly amazed and respectful — she had achieved a kind of total recall, and he wanted nothing to break the mood, at least until she had told them everything she could.

The fashionable section with the McDonald's as its centerpiece dropped away. They came briefly into the clear and now the sun was a solid orange ball sitting above the horizon, washing the streets with a strange light that made all the pedestrians look as if they were about to burst into flame. 'It was then that things began to change,' she said. Her voice had dropped a little. Her hands

were trembling again.

Vetter leaned forward, intent. 'Change? How? How did things change, Mrs. Freeman?'

They had passed a newsagent's window, she said, and the signboard outside had read SIXTY

LOST IN UNDERGROUND HORROR.

'Lonnie, look at that!'

'What?' He craned around, but the newsagent's was already behind them.

'It said, "Sixty Lost in Underground Horror." Isn't that what they call the subway? The Underground?'

'Yes — that or the tube. Was it a crash?'

'I don't know.' She leaned forward. 'Driver, do you know what that was about? Was there a subway crash?'

'A collision, madam? Not that I know of.'

'Do you have a radio?'

'Not in the cab, madam.'

'Lonnie?'

'Hmmm?'

But she could see that Lonnie had lost interest. He was going through his pockets again (and because he was wearing his three-piece suit, there were a lot of them to go through), having another hunt for the scrap of paper with John Squales's address written on it.

The message chalked on the board played over and over in her mind, SIXTY KILLED IN TUBE

CRASH, it should have read. But . . . SIXTY LOST IN UNDERGROUND HORROR. It made her uneasy. It

didn't say 'killed,' it said 'lost,' the way news reports in the old days had always referred to sailors who had been drowned at sea.

UNDERGROUND HORROR.

She didn't like it. It made her think of graveyards, sewers, and flabby-pale, noisome things swarming suddenly out of the tubes themselves, wrapping their arms (tentacles, maybe) around the hapless commuters on the platforms, dragging them away to darkness . . .

They turned right. Standing on the corner beside their parked motorcycles were three boys in leathers. They looked up at the cab and for a moment — the setting sun was almost full in her face from this angle — it seemed that the bikers did not have human heads at all. For that one moment she was nastily sure that the sleek heads of rats sat atop those black leather jackets, rats with black eyes staring at the cab. Then the light shifted just a tiny bit and she saw of course she had been mistaken; there were only three young men smoking cigarettes in front of the British version of the American candy store.

'Here we go,' Lonnie said, giving up the search and pointing out the window. They were passing a sign, which read 'Crouch Hill Road.' Elderly brick houses like sleepy dowagers had closed in, seeming to look down at the cab from their blank windows. A few kids passed back and forth, riding bikes or trikes. Two others were trying to ride a skateboard with no notable success. Fathers home from work sat together, smoking and talking and watching the children. It all looked reassuringly normal.

The cab drew up in front of a dismal-looking restaurant with a small spotted sign in the window reading FULLY LICENSED and a much larger one in the center, which informed that within one, could purchase curries to take away. On the inner ledge there slept a gigantic gray cat. Beside the restaurant was a call box. 'Here you are, guv,' the cabdriver said. 'You find your friend's address and I'll track him down.'

'Fair enough,' Lonnie said, and got out.

Doris sat in the cab for a moment and then also emerged, deciding she felt like stretching her legs. The hot wind was still blowing. It whipped her skirt around her knees and then plastered an old ice-cream wrapper to her shin. She removed it with a grimace of disgust. When she looked up, she was staring directly through the plate-glass window at the big gray torn. It stared back at her, one-eyed and inscrutable. Half of its face had been all but clawed away in some long-ago battle. What remained was a twisted pinkish mass of scar tissue, one milky cataract, and a few tufts of fur.

It miaowed at her silently through the glass.

Feeling a surge of disgust, she went to the call box and peered in through one of the dirty panes. Lonnie made a circle at her with his thumb and forefinger and winked. Then he pushed ten-pence into the slot and talked with someone. He laughed — soundlessly through the glass.

Like the cat. She looked over for it, but now the window was empty. In the dimness beyond she could see chairs up on tables and an old man pushing a broom. When she looked back, she saw that Lonnie was jotting something down. He put his pen away, held the paper in his hand — she could see an address was jotted on it — said one or two other things, then hung up and came out.

He waggled the address at her in triumph. 'Okay, that's th — ' His eyes went past her shoulder and he frowned. 'Where's the stupid cab gone?'

She turned around. The taxi had vanished. Where it had stood there was only curbing and a few papers blowing lazily up the gutter. Across the street, two kids were clutching at each other and giggling. Doris noticed that one of them had a deformed hand — it looked more like a claw.

She'd thought the National Health was supposed to take care of things like that. The children looked across the street, saw her observing them, and fell into each other's arms, giggling again.

'I don't know,' Doris said. She felt disoriented and a little stupid. The heat, the constant wind that seemed to blow with no gusts or drops, the almost painted quality of the light . . .

'What time was it then?' Farnham asked suddenly.

'I don't know,' Doris Freeman said, startled out of her recital. 'Six, I suppose. Maybe twenty past.'

'I see, go on,' Farnham said, knowing perfectly well that in August sunset would not have begun — even by the loosest standards — until well past seven.

'Well, what did he do?' Lonnie asked, still looking around. It was almost as if he expected his irritation to cause the cab to pop back into view. 'Just pick up and leave?'

'Maybe when you put your hand up,' Doris said, raising her own hand and making the thumband-forefinger circle Lonnie had made in the call box, 'maybe when you did that he thought you were waving him on.'

'I'd have to wave a long time to send him on with two-fifty on the meter,' Lonnie grunted, and walked over to the curb. On the other side of Crouch Hill Road, the two small children were still giggling. 'Hey!' Lonnie called. 'You kids!'

'You an American, sir?' the boy with the claw-hand called back.

'Yes,' Lonnie said, smiling. 'Did you see the cab over here? Did you see where it went?''

The two children seemed to consider the question. The boy's companion was a girl of about five with untidy brown braids sticking off in opposite directions. She stepped forward to the opposite curb, formed her hands into a megaphone, and still smiling — she screamed it through her megaphoned hands and her smile — she cried at them: 'Bugger off, Joe!'

Lonnie's mouth dropped open.

'Sir! Sir! Sir!' the boy screeched, saluting wildly with his deformed hand. Then the two of them took to their heels and fled around the corner and out of sight, leaving only their laughter to echo back.

Lonnie looked at Doris, dumbstruck.

'I guess some of the kids in Crouch End aren't too crazy about Americans,' he said lamely.

She looked around nervously. The street now appeared deserted.

He slipped an arm around her. 'Well, honey, looks like we hike.'

'I'm not sure I want to. Those two kids might've gone to get their big brothers.' She laughed to show it was a joke, but there was a shrill quality to the sound. The evening had taken on a surreal quality she didn't much like. She wished they had stayed at the hotel.

'Not much else we can do,' he said. 'The street's not exactly overflowing with taxis, is it?'

'Lonnie, why would the cabdriver leave us here like that? He seemed so nice.'

'Don't have the slightest idea. But John gave me good directions. He lives in a street called Brass End, which is a very minor dead-end street, and he said it wasn't in the Streetfinder.' As he talked he was moving her away from the call box, from the restaurant that sold curries to take away, from the now-empty curb. They were walking up Crouch Hill Road again. 'We take a right onto Hillfield Avenue, left halfway down, then our first right . . . or was it left? Anyway, onto Petrie Street. Second left is Brass End.'

'And you remember all that?'

'I'm a star witness,' he said bravely, and she just had to laugh. Lonnie had a way of making things seem better.

There was a map of the Crouch End area on the wall of the police station lobby, one considerably more detailed than the one in the London Streetfinder. Farnham approached it and studied it with his hands stuffed into his pockets. The station seemed very quiet now. Vetter was still outside — clearing some of the witchmoss from his brains, one hoped — and Raymond had long since finished with the woman who'd had her purse nicked.

Farnham put his finger on the spot where the cabby had most likely let them off (if anything about the woman's story was to be believed, that was). The route to their friend's house looked pretty straightforward. Crouch Hill Road to Hillfield Avenue, and then a left onto Vickers Lane followed by a left onto Petrie Street. Brass End, which stuck off from Petrie Street like somebody's afterthought, was no more than six or eight houses long. About a mile, all told. Even Americans should have been able to walk that far without getting lost.

'Raymond!' he called. 'You still here?'

Sergeant Raymond came in. He had changed into streets and was putting on a light poplin windcheater. 'Only just, my beardless darling.'

'Cut it,' Farnham said, smiling all the same. Raymond frightened him a little. One look at the spooky sod was enough to tell you he was standing a little too close to the fence that ran between the yard of the good guys and that of the villains. There was a twisted white line of scar running like a fat string from the left corner of his mouth almost all the way to his Adam's apple. He claimed a pickpocket had once nearly cut his throat with a jagged bit of bottle. Claimed that's why he broke their fingers. Farnham thought that was the shit. He thought Raymond broke their fingers because he liked the sound they made, especially when they popped at the knuckles. 'Got a fag?' Raymond asked.

Farnham sighed and gave him one. As he lit it he asked, 'Is there a curry shop on Crouch Hill Road?'

'Not to my knowledge, my dearest darling,' Raymond said.

'That's what I thought.'

'Got a problem, dear?'

'No,' Farnham said, a little too sharply, remembering Doris Freeman's clotted hair and staring eyes.

Near the top of Crouch Hill Road, Doris and Lonnie Freeman turned onto Hillfield Avenue, which was lined with imposing and gracious-looking homes — nothing but shells, she thought, probably cut up with surgical precision into apartments and bed-sitters inside.

'So far so good,' Lonnie said.

'Yes, it's — ' she began, and that was when the low moaning arose.

They both stopped. The moaning was coming almost directly from their right, where a high hedge ran around a small yard. Lonnie started toward the sound, and she grasped his arm.

'Lonnie, no!'

'What do you mean, no?' he asked. 'Someone's hurt.'

She stepped after him nervously. The hedge was high but thin. He was able to brush it aside and reveal a small square of lawn outlined with flowers. The lawn was very green. In the center of it was a black, smoking patch — or at least that was her first impression. When she peered around Lonnie's shoulder again — his shoulder was too high for her to peer over it — she saw it was a hole, vaguely man-shaped. The tendrils of smoke were emanating from it.

SIXTY LOST IN UNDERGROUND HORROR, she thought abruptly.

The moaning was coming from the hole, and Lonnie began to force himself through the hedge toward it.

'Lonnie,' she said, 'please, don't.'

'Someone's hurt,' he repeated, and pushed himself the rest of the way through with a bristly tearing sound. She saw him going toward the hole, and then the hedge snapped back, leaving her nothing but a vague impression of his shape as he moved forward. She tried to push through after him and was scratched by the short, stiff branches of the hedge for her trouble. She was wearing a sleeveless blouse.

'Lonnie!' she called, suddenly very afraid. 'Lonnie, come back!'

'Just a minute, hon!'

The house looked at her impassively over the top of the hedge.

The moaning sounds continued, but now they sounded lower — guttural, somehow gleeful.

Couldn't Lonnie hear that?

'Hey, is somebody down there?' she heard Lonnie ask. 'Is there — oh! Hey! Jesus!' And suddenly Lonnie screamed. She had never heard him scream before, and her legs seemed to turn to waterbags at the sound. She looked wildly for a break in the hedge, a path, and couldn't see one anywhere. Images swirled before her eyes — the bikers who had looked like rats for a moment, the cat with the pink chewed face, the boy with the claw-hand.

Lonnie! she tried to scream, but no words came out.

Now there were sounds of a struggle. The moaning had stopped. But there were wet, sloshing sounds from the other side of the hedge. Then, suddenly, Lonnie came flying back through the stiff dusty-green bristles as if he had been given a tremendous push. The left arm of his suit-coat was torn, and it was splattered with runnels of black stuff that seemed to be smoking, as the pit in the lawn had been smoking.

'Doris, run!'

'Lonnie, what — '

'Run!' His face pale as cheese.

Doris looked around wildly for a cop. For anyone. But Hillfield Avenue might have been a part of some great deserted city for all the life or movement she saw. Then she glanced back at the hedge and saw something else was moving behind there, something that was more than black; it seemed ebony, the antithesis of light.

And it was sloshing.

A moment later, the short, stiff branches of the hedge began to rustle. She stared, hypnotized.

She might have stood there forever (so she told Vetter and Farnham) if Lonnie hadn't grabbed her arm roughly and shrieked at her — yes, Lonnie, who never even raised his voice at the kids, had shrieked — she might- have been standing there yet. Standing there, or . . .

But they ran.

Where? Farnham had asked, but she didn't know. Lonnie was totally undone, in a hysteria of panic and revulsion — that was all she really knew. He clamped his fingers over her wrist like a handcuff and they ran from the house looming over the hedge, and from the smoking hole in the lawn. She knew those things for sure; all the rest was only a chain of vague impressions.

At first it had been hard to run, and then it got easier because they were going downhill. They turned, and then turned again. Gray houses with high stoops and drawn green shades seemed to stare at them like blind pensioners. She remembered Lonnie pulling off his jacket, which had been splattered with that black goo, and throwing it away. At last they came to a wider street.

'Stop,' she panted. 'Stop, I can't keep up!' Her free hand was pressed to her side, where a redhot spike seemed to have been planted.

And he did stop. They had come out of the residential area and were standing at the corner of Crouch Lane and Morris Road. A sign on the far side of Morris Road proclaimed that they were but one mile from Slaughter Towen.

Town? Vetter suggested.

No, Doris Freeman said. Slaughter Towen, with an 'e.'

Raymond crushed out the cigarette he had cadged from Farnham. 'I'm off,' he announced, and then looked more closely at Farnham. 'My poppet should take better care of himself. He's got big dark circles under his eyes. Any hair on your palms to go with it, my pet?' He laughed uproariously.

'Ever hear of a Crouch Lane?' Farnham asked.

'Crouch Hill Road, you mean.'

'No, I mean Crouch Lane.'

'Never heard of it.'

'What about Norris Road?'

'There's the one cuts off from the high street in Basing-stoke — '

'No, here.'

'No — not here, poppet.'

For some reason he couldn't understand — the woman was obviously buzzed — Farnham persisted. 'What about Slaughter Towen?'

'Towen, you said? Not Town?' 'Yes, that's right.'

'Never heard of it, but if I do, I believe I'll steer clear.'

'Why's that?'

'Because in the old Druid lingo, a touen or towen was a place of ritual sacrifice — where they abstracted your liver and lights, in other words.' And zipping up his windcheater, Raymond glided out.

Farnham looked after him uneasily. He made that last up, he told himself. What a hard copper like Sid Raymond knows about the Druids you could carve on the head of a pin and still have room for the Lord's Prayer.

Right. And even if he had picked up a piece of information like that, it didn't change the fact that the woman was . . .

'Must be going crazy,' Lonnie said, and laughed shakily.

Doris had looked at her watch earlier and saw that somehow it had gotten to be quarter of eight. The light had changed; from a clear orange it had gone to a thick, murky red that glared off the windows of the shops in Norris Road and seemed to face a church steeple across the way in clotted blood. The sun was an oblate sphere on the horizon.

'What happened back there?' Doris asked. 'What was it, Lonnie?'

'Lost my jacket, too. Hell of a note.'

'You didn't lose it, you took it off. It was covered with — '

'Don't be a fool!' he snapped at her. But his eyes were not snappish; they were soft, shocked, wandering. 'I lost it, that's all.'

'Lonnie, what happened when you went through the hedge?'

'Nothing. Let's not talk about it. Where are we?'

'Lonnie — '

'I can't remember,' he said more softly. 'It's all a blank. We were there . . . we heard a sound . .

. then I was running. That's all I can remember.' And then he added in a frighteningly childish voice: 'Why would I throw my jacket away? I liked that one. It matched the pants.' He threw back his head, gave voice to a frightening loonlike laugh, and Doris suddenly realized that whatever he had seen beyond the hedge had at least partially unhinged him. She was not sure the same wouldn't have happened to her . . . if she had seen. It didn't matter. They had to get out of here. Get back to the hotel where the kids were.

'Let's get a cab. I want to go home.'

'But John — ' he began.

'Never mind John!' she cried. 'It's wrong, everything here is wrong, and I want to get a cab and go home!'

'Yes, all right. Okay.' Lonnie passed a shaking hand across his forehead. 'I'm with you. The only problem is, there aren't any.'

There was, in fact, no traffic at all on Norris Road, which was wide and cobbled. Directly down the center of it ran a set of old tram tracks. On the other side, in front of a flower shop, an ancient three-wheeled D-car was parked. Farther down on their own side, a Yamaha motorbike stood aslant on its kickstand. That was all. They could hear cars, but the sound was faraway, diffuse.

'Maybe the street's closed for repairs,' Lonnie muttered, and then had done a strange thing . . .

strange, at least, for him, who was ordinarily so easy and self-assured. He looked back over his shoulder as if afraid they had been followed. 'We'll walk,' she said.

'Where?'

'Anywhere. Away from Crouch End. We can get a taxi if we get away from here.' She was suddenly positive of that, if of nothing else.

'All right.' Now he seemed perfectly willing to entrust the leadership of the whole matter to her.

They began walking along Norris Road toward the setting sun. The faraway hum of the traffic remained constant, not seeming to diminish, not seeming to grow any, either. It was like the constant push of the wind. The desertion was beginning to nibble at her nerves. She felt they were being watched, tried to dismiss the feeling, and found that she couldn't. The sound of their footfalls

(SIXTY LOST IN UNDERGROUND HORROR)

echoed back to them. The business at the hedge played on her mind more and more, and finally she had to ask again.

'Lonnie, what was it?'

He answered simply: 'I don't remember. And I don't want to.'

They passed a market that was closed — a pile of coconuts like shrunken heads seen back-to were piled against the window. They passed a launderette where white machines had been pulled from the washed-out pink plasterboard walls like square teeth from dying gums. They passed a soap-streaked show window with an old SHOP TO LEASE sign in the front. Something moved behind the soap streaks, and Doris saw, peering out at her, the pink and tufted battle-scarred face of a cat. The same gray torn.

She consulted her interior workings and tickings and discovered that she was in a state of slowly building terror. She felt as if her intestines had begun to crawl sluggishly around and around within her belly. Her mouth had a sharp unpleasant taste, almost as if she had dosed with a strong mouthwash. The cobbles of Norris Road bled fresh blood in the sunset.

They were approaching an underpass. And it was dark under there. I can't, her mind informed her matter-of-factly. I can't go under there, anything might be under there, don't ask me because I can't.

Another part of her mind asked if she could bear for them to retrace their steps, past the empty shop with the travelling cat in it (how had it gotten from the restaurant to here? best not to ask, or even wonder about it too deeply), past the weirdly oral shambles of the launderette, past The Market of the Shrunken Heads. She didn't think she could.

They had drawn closer to the underpass now. A strangely painted six-car train — it was bonewhite

— lunged over it with startling suddenness, a crazy steel bride rushing to meet her groom.

The wheels kicked up bright spinners of sparks. They both leaped back involuntarily, but it was Lonnie who cried out. She looked at him and saw that in the last hour he had turned into someone she had never seen before, had never even suspected. His hair appeared somehow grayer, and while she told herself firmly — as firmly as she could — that it was just a trick of the light, it was the look of his hair that decided her. Lonnie was in no shape to go back. Therefore, the underpass.

'Come on,' she said, and took his hand. She took it brusquely so he would not feel her own trembling. 'Soonest begun, soonest done.' She walked forward and he followed docilely.

They were almost out — it was a very short underpass, she thought with ridiculous relief —

when the hand grasped her upper arm. She didn't scream. Her lungs seemed to have collapsed like small crumpled paper sacks. Her

mind wanted to leave her body behind and just . . . fly. Lonnie's hand parted from her own. He seemed unaware. He walked out on the other side — she saw him for just one moment silhouetted, tall and lanky, against the bloody, furious colors of the sunset, and then he was gone.

The hand grasping her upper arm was hairy, like an ape's hand.

It turned her remorselessly toward a heavy slumped shape leaning against the sooty concrete wall. It hung there in the double shadow of two concrete supporting pillars, and the shape was she could make out . . . the shape, and two luminous green eyes

'Give us a fag, love,' a husky cockney voice said, and she smelled raw meat and deep-fat-fried chips and something swee and awful, like the residue at the bottom of garbage cans.

Those green eyes were cat's eyes. And suddenly she became horribly sure that if the slumped shape stepped out of the shadows, she would see the milky cataract of eye, the pink ridges off scar tissue, the tufts of gray hair.

She tore free, backed up, and felt something skid through the air near her. A hand? Claws? A spitting, hissing sound —

Another train charged overhead. The roar was huge, brain rattling. Soot sifted down like black snow. She fled in a blind panic, for the second time that evening not knowing where.. or for how long.

What brought her back to herself was the realization that Lonnie was gone. She had half collapsed against a dirty brick wall, breathing in great tearing gasps. She was still in Morris Road (atleast she believed herself to be, she told the two constables; the wide way was still cobbled, and the tram tracks still ran directly down the center), but the deserted, decaying shops had given way to deserted, decaying warehouses. DAWGLISH & SONS, read the soot-begrimed signboard on one. A second had the name ALHAZRED emblazoned in ancient green across the faded brickwork.

Below the name was a series of Arabic pothooks and dashes.

'Lonnie!' she called. There was no echo, no carrying in spite of the silence (no, not complete silence, she told them; there was still the sound of traffic, and it might have been closer, but not much). The word that stood for her husband seemed to drop from her mouth and fall like a stone at her feet. The blood of sunset had been replaced by the cool gray ashes of twilight. For the first time it occurred to her that night might fall upon her here in Crouch End — if she was still indeed in Crouch End — and that thought brought fresh terror.

She told Vetter and Farnham that there had been no reflection, no logical train of thought, on her part during the unknown length of time between their arrival at the call box and the final horror. She had simply reacted, like a frightened animal. And now she was alone. She wanted Lonnie, she was aware of that much but little else. Certainly it did not occur to her to wonder why this area, which must surely lie within five miles of Cambridge Circus, should be utterly deserted.

Doris Freeman set off walking, calling for her husband. Her voice did not echo, but her footfalls seemed to. The shadows began to fill Norris Road. Overhead, the sky was now purple.

It might have been some distorting effect of the twilight, or her own exhaustion, but the warehouses seemed to lean hungrily over the toad. The windows, caked with the dirt of decades

— of centuries, perhaps — seemed to be staring at her. And the names on the signboards became progressively stranger, even lunatic, at the very least, unpronounceable. The vowels were in the wrong places, and consonants had been strung together in a way that would make it impossible for any human tongue to get around them. CTHULHU KRYON read one, with more of those Arabic pothooks beneath it. YOGSOGGOTH read another. R'YELEH said yet another. There was one that

she remembered particularly: NRTESN NYARLAHOTEP.

'How could you remember such gibberish?' Farnham asked her. Doris Freeman shook her head, slowly and tiredly. 'I don't know. I really don't. It's like a nightmare you want to forget as soon as you wake up, but it won't fade away like most dreams do; it just stays and stays and stays.'

Norris Road seemed to stretch on into infinity, cobbled, split by tram tracks. And although she continued to walk — she wouldn't have believed she could run, although later, she said, she did

— she no longer called for Lonnie. She was in the grip of a terrible, bone-rattling fear, a fear so great she would not have believed a human being could endure it without going mad or dropping dead. It was impossible for her to articulate her fear except in one way, and even this, she said, only began to bridge the gulf which had opened within her mind and heart. She said it was as if she were no longer on earth but on a different planet, a place so alien that the human mind could not even begin to comprehend it. The angles seemed different, she said. The colors seemed different. The . . . but it was hopeless.

She could only walk under a gnarled-plum sky between the eldritch bulking buildings, and hope that it would end.

As it did.

She became aware of two figures standing on the sidewall ahead of her — the children she and Lonnie had seen earlier. The boy was using his claw-hand to stroke the little girl's ratty braids.

'It's the American woman,' the boy said.

'She's lost,' said the girl.

'Lost her husband.'

'Lost her way.'

'Found the darker way.'

'The road that leads into the funnel.'

'Lost her hope.'

'Found the Whistler from the Stars — '

' — Eater of Dimensions — '

' — the Blind Piper — '

Faster and faster their words came, a breathless litany, a flashing loom. Her head spun with them. The buildings leaned. The stars were out, but they were not her stars, the ones she had wished on as a girl or courted under as a young woman, these were crazed stars in lunatic constellations, and her hands went to her ears and her hands did not shut out the sounds and finally she screamed at them:

'Where's my husband? Where's Lonnie? What have you done to him?'

There was silence. And then the girl said: 'He's gone beneath.'

The boy: 'Gone to the Goat with a Thousand Young.'

The girl smiled — a malicious smile full of evil innocence. 'He couldn't well not go, could he?

The mark was on him. You'll go, too.'

'Lonnie! What have you done with — '

The boy raised his hand and chanted in a high fluting language that she could not understand

— but the sound of the words drove Doris Freeman nearly mad with fear.

'The street began to move then,' she told Vetter and Farnham. 'The cobbles began to undulate like a carpet. They rose and fell, rose and fell. The tram tracks came loose and flew into the air — I remember that, I remember the starlight shining on them — and then the cobbles themselves began to come loose, one by one at first, and then in bunches. They just flew off into the darkness. There was a tearing sound when they came loose. A grinding, tearing sound . . . the way an earthquake must sound. And — something started to come through — '

'What?' Vetter asked. He was hunched forward, his eyes boring into her. 'What did you see?

What was it?'

'Tentacles,' she said, slowly and haltingly. 'I think it was tentacles. But they were as thick as old banyan trees, as if each of them was made up of a thousand smaller ones . . . and there were pink things like suckers . . . except sometimes they looked like faces . . . one of them looked like Lonnie's face . . . and all of them were in agony. Below them, in the darkness under the street —

in the darkness beneath — there was something else. Something like eyes . . . '

At that point she had broken down, unable to go on for some time, and as it turned out, there was really no more to tell. The next thing she remembered with any clarity was cowering in the doorway of a closed newsagent's shop. She might be there yet, she had told them, except that she had seen cars passing back and forth just up ahead, and the reassuring glow of arc-sodium streetlights. Two people had passed in front of her, and Doris had cringed farther back into the shadows, afraid of the two evil children. But these were not children, she saw; they were a teenage boy and girl walking hand in hand. The boy was saying something about the new Martin Scorsese film.

She'd come out onto the sidewalk warily, ready to dart back into the convenient bolthole of the newsagent's doorway at a moment's notice, but there was no need. Fifty yards up was a moderately busy intersection, with cars and lorries standing at a stop-and-go light. Across the way was a jeweler's shop with a large lighted clock in the show window. A steel accordion grille had been drawn across, but she could still make out the time. It was five minutes of ten.

She had walked up to the intersection then, and despite the streetlights and the comforting rumble of traffic, she had kept shooting terrified glances back over her shoulder. She ached all over. She was limping on one broken heel. She had pulled muscles in her belly and both legs —

her right leg was particularly bad, as if she had strained something in it.

At the intersection she saw that somehow she had come around to Hillfield Avenue and Tottenham Road. Under a streetlamp a woman of about sixty with her graying hair escaping from the rag it was done up in was talking to a man of about the same age. They both looked at Doris as if she were some sort of dreadful apparition.

'Police,' Doris Freeman croaked. 'Where's the police station? I'm an American citizen . . . I've lost my husband . . . I need the police.'

'What's happened, then, lovey?' the woman asked, not unkindly. 'You look like you've been through the wringer, you do.'

'Car accident?' her companion asked.

'No. Not . . . not . . . Please, is there a police station near here?'

'Right up Tottenham Road,' the man said. He took a package of Players from his pocket. 'Like a cig? You look like you c'd use one.'

'Thank you,' she said, and took the cigarette although she I had quit nearly four years ago. The elderly man had to follow the jittering tip of it with his lighted match to get it going for her.

He glanced at the woman with her hair bound up in the rag. 'I'll just take a little stroll up with her, Evvie. Make sure she gets there all right.'

'I'll come along as well, then, won't I?' Evvie said, and put an arm around Doris's shoulders.

'Now what is it, lovey? Did someone try to mug you?' 'No,' Doris said. 'It . . . I . . . I . . . the street . .

. there was a cat with only one eye . . . the street

opened up . . . I saw it . . . and they said something about a Blind Piper . . . I've got to find Lonnie!'

She was aware that she was speaking incoherencies, but she seemed helpless to be any clearer.

And at any rate, she told Vetter and Farnham, she hadn't been all that incoherent, because the man and woman had drawn away from her, as if, when Evvie asked what the matter was, Doris had told her it was bubonic plague.

The man said something then — 'Happened again,' Doris thought it was.

The woman pointed. 'Station's right up there. Globes hanging in front. You'll see it.' Moving very quickly, the two of them began to walk away. The woman glanced back over her shoulder once; Doris Freeman saw her wide, gleaming eyes. Doris took two steps after them, for what reason she did not know. 'Don't ye come near!' Evvie called shrilly, and forked the sign of the evil eye at her. She simultaneously cringed against the man, who put an arm about her. 'Don't you come near, if you've been to Crouch End Towen!'

And with that, the two of them had disappeared into the night.

Now PC Farnham stood leaning in the doorway between the common room and the main filing room — although the back files Vetter had spoken of were certainly not kept here. Farnham had made himself a fresh cup of tea and was smoking the last cigarette in his pack — the woman had also helped herself to several.

She'd gone back to her hotel, in the company of the nurse Vetter had called — the nurse would be staying with her tonight, and would make a judgement in the morning as to whether the woman would need to go in hospital. The children would make that difficult, Farnham supposed, and the woman's being an American almost guaranteed a first-class cock-up. He wondered what she was going to tell the kiddies when they woke up tomorrow, assuming she was capable of telling them anything. Would she gather them round and tell them that the big bad monster of Crouch End Town

(Towen)

had eaten up Daddy like an ogre in a fairy-story?

Farnham grimaced and put down his teacup. It wasn't his problem. For good or for ill, Mrs.

Freeman had become sandwiched between the British constabulary and the American Embassy in the great waltz of governments. It was none of his affair; he was only a PC who wanted to forget the whole thing. And he intended to let Vetter write the report. Vetter could afford to put his name to such a bouquet of lunacy; he was an old man, used up. He would still be a PC on the night shift when he got his gold watch, his pension, and his council flat. Farnham, on the other hand, had ambitions of making sergeant soon, and that meant he had to watch every little posey.

And speaking of Vetter, where was he? He'd been taking the night air for quite awhile now.

Farnham crossed the common room and went out. He stood between the two lighted-globes and stared across Tottenham Road. Vetter was nowhere in sight. It was past 3:00 a.m., and silence lay thick and even, like a shroud. What was that line from Wordsworth? 'All that great heart lying still,' or something like.

He went down the steps and stood on the sidewalk, feeling a trickle of unease now. It was silly, of course, and he was angry with himself for allowing the woman's mad story to gain even this much of a foothold in his head. Perhaps he deserved to be afraid of a hard copper like Sid Raymond. Farnham walked slowly up to the corner, thinking he would meet Vetter coming back from his

night stroll. But he would go no farther; if the station was left empty even for a few moments, there would be hell to pay if it was discovered. He reached the corner and looked around. It was funny, but all the arc-sodiums seemed to have gone out up here. The entire street looked different without them. Would it have to be reported, he wondered? And where was Vetter?

He would walk just a little farther, he decided, and see what I was what. But not far. It simply wouldn't do to leave the station unattended for long.

Just a little way.

Vetter came in less than five minutes after Farnham had left. Farnham had gone in the opposite direction, and if Vetter had come along a minute earlier, he would have seen the young constable standing indecisively at the corner for a moment before turning it and disappearing forever.

'Farnham?'

No answer but the buzz of the clock on the wall.

'Farnham?' he called again, and then wiped his mouth with the palm of his hand.

Lonnie Freeman was never found. Eventually his wife (who had begun to gray around the temples) flew back to America with her children. They went on Concorde. A month later she attempted suicide. She spent ninety days in a rest home and came out much improved.

Sometimes when she cannot sleep — this occurs most frequently on nights when the sun goes down in a ball of red and orange — she creeps into her closet, knee-walks under the hanging dresses all the way to the back, and there she writes Beware the Goat with a Thousand Young over and over with a soft pencil. It seems to ease her somehow to do this.

PC Robert Farnham left a wife and two-year-old twin girls. Sheila Farnham wrote a series of angry letters to her MP, insisting that something was going on, something was being covered up, that her Bob had been enticed into taking some dangerous sort of undercover assignment. He would have done anything to make sergeant, Mrs. Farnham repeatedly told the MP. Eventually that worthy stopped answering her letters, and at about the same time Doris Freeman was coming out of the rest home, her hair almost entirely white now, Mrs. Farnham moved back to Essex, where her parents lived. Eventually she married a man in a safer line of work — Frank Hobbs is a bumper inspector on the Ford assembly line. It had been necessary to get a divorce from her Bob on grounds of desertion, but that was easily managed.

Vetter took early retirement about four months after Doris Freeman had stumbled into the station in Tottenham Lane. He did indeed move into council housing, a two-above-the-shops in Frimley. Six months later he was found dead of a heart attack, a can of Harp Lager in his hand.

And in Crouch End, which is really a quiet suburb of London, strange things still happen from time to time, and people have been known to lose their way. Some of them lose it forever.

The Star Pools by A. A. ATTANASIO

He wrapped his foot in a rag he found in the trunk of his car and sat for a while on the hood, looking out accross the swale to a clump of cedar pines where an hour before he had frantically dug up the mulchy earth. His cache was hidden in there.

Beyond the green colony of trees, the land was tortured and rose in great broken-backed steps towards a haze of iron-spined mountains. Nobody would be coming out here to look for anything but steelheads.

Reassured, already mindless of the itching throb in his foot, Henley Easton got into his car and swung out onto the highway. By dusk he was in New York City.

He had a leisurely dinner at Shakespeare's and decided o limp across Washington Square Park to find a doctor he knew. At the coruer of MacDougal and Fourth, a rush of dizziness staggered him. It happened so quickly there was no time to cast about for support. He stagsat iered on the curb, tried hard to make it back to the sidewalk. But his eyes glazed dark, and he slid to his knees. A moment later he was sprawled in the gutter, his awareness sinking into the shadows of his body.

There is a calling under the breath, a cry that goes on as a vein. It is the last senseless moment of the organism the instant of death that cries back through the narrow air from the ferrous edge.

SCHIAVONI AND MAL^MO~ Voorish R it~

Pain which even the cold stream water couldn't numb, a brittle, ruby pain. Henley Easton shuddered, down in the stream, up to his waist in water, trousers ballooning. Slowly he lifted the sharp rock he had stepped on, squeezed it hard, pressed it to his forehead, his lips. In the water, a cloud of blood swelling. The flap of skin on his foot winked open, closed. Seeing it and the blood holding back in the water, he thought he was going to be sick.

He limped to shore and spotted the familiar silt

He was still grasping the rock.With a lopsided heave, he sent it flying over the ha But tl of stone until he came back.

et was an endless dream. He wandered through dank, wight-lighted corridors that stank of rime and somewere children looking on, so he clutched at the bl,hing burnt. He was alone in the darkness, feeling his way along greasy walls and abrupt corners that mule-epped down into smoky grottoes. The air was murmurous with the sound of purling water and a rumble above the se~-

lines of his car parked at the edge of an escarprnund. Thtke distant voices or the far-off seethe of ocean rollers

was no bloed on its cutting edge, and he felt ashamed

teaming to shore.

He wandered it seemed for days, unable to wake.

of the fishing children and watched it arching along winding corridors were interminable, and after a while he forgot that he was dreaming. All that seemed to matter was that he plod on through the labyrinth, feel his way through darkness to freedo

above the reeds, falling into the shallows of the bank. ~rror that he, too, was a mammal whose loops of

But was he going the right way? Or was he coili ~ood held him like a garotte.

deeper into the maze? Later, even that anxiety wi~ Dragged under by the weight of his guts, clubbed

ered. He became, simply, movement, no longer hum~~itless by the stark remembrances of the earth devour-It didn't matter where he was going. Space flitted the earth, deafened by the terrible echoes of weeping in every direction. Movement had become his identity, he staggered through the mouth of the labyrinth continuum, so he walked and walked, letting echoes ring in his ears cluelessly.

Eventually helplessness overwhelmed him, and he realized he wasn't moving at all. Motion was an illusion. He was still. All things moved through him. And thinking that, he squatted in the black corridor and sang of the past lives twined in his brains: the memories oft wet humus, the mindless, gutless lives that led to first howl among the fronded swamp-ferns. And singing became laughing and screaming which tangled in the shadows with his hearing so that when the first memories of fur and warmth arrived, his mind was so numb with the nightmares of sharks cephalopeds that he continued speechless through mauled, bloodplastered recollections of his evolution, only occasionally letting a blind cry flap hopelessly away.

For an interminable time, he limped through the dark passages, once coming within a few meters of an exit, but because he had long ago forgotten just who he was and what he was looking for, he ran back into t

md howled a bowel-emptying cry into the sear of the

In.

Then he was awed to silence, for the landscape he’d entered was familiar enough to remind him that he was dreaming. There was a white horse nearby standing still as rock, its eyes an evil pink. Sea grapes and palmetto hung limp from long trelises above shocks of colourless grass. To the left was the sea, silver as mercury around a small boat with a black stick of a man standing in it, waiting.

White huts squatted on the right, each with a scant window. Everything was perfectly still and white. Even the sky was white - except for the sun. It was black. Seeing it, Henley felt his muscles melt, and he dropped to his knees. It was a fibrous black, an imense spore, too painful to stare at. He rubbed his yes and blinked.

He blinked. Nothing changed. The Javer sea was steaming beneath the virus star, a black haze meshed to the sky.

A thin breeze picked up, and Henley watched several shy leaves littering away towards the ironwood posts the corral. The white horse remained motionless, its pink eyes were staring. Closer now, the boats aw

confusion of the maze to escape the shadows that ~ut

fuming away into an unbearable brlghtness.~a s features were visible. They were bristly and was a long

time later, after he had distilled all ~ick, dull gaping. The puffed lips moved, but Henley memories from

the blood-wallow of mammals, that~ard nothing. The face was moronic, the forehead

~: ........ ~ ~ ~ ' ing light his fi&und and bulging, filling up the sockets so that the aga,,, apF~ua~, ........ Xlt of smok o o , _ _ _

~;~; .... ;,~ .~. nd

remembered with a shudder, he had to stare up from under the skull. An idiot's face. The lips continued to move in a whisper. As then the breeze shifted and was full of patterns as pressed by.

The silky curves or air carried a voice, scrawny and wicked: Shut your ears big, let the darkness come unrolling from your eyes and your fingz blow longer all in the stillness. Shut your ears Henley.

Henley straightened as if struck. The voice was horrible. He tried to heave himself to his feet, but the effort collapsed him, and he squelched into the mud. The heat of the black sun thudded against the back his neck.

He squeezed his eyes tight and tried to will himself awake, but the dream was unbreakable.

So there he lay, feeling as if he were wrinkling smaller in the alien light, drying out to a dusty ch that

whispered away in the breeze, scattering through an incommensurable darkness.Black.

A darkness that was palpable. A thick oozing mass of black. Immense galleries of space, choirs of distance and at their centre, a mountain of black convulsing, engulfing all sound, all light.

With a terrible shriek, Henley wrenched awake. He was in a bed in a darkened room.

He was sitting perfectly still in his hospital bed, Henley t utterly transformed. The room was empty, but that s

only an appearance that confuted reality. The darkness of the room was cellular and shifting, its ative silence humming - a mockery of the void, the flute emptiness that he had just risen from. That dream deadhess was still there, but it was disguised, king as an emptiness at the centre of all things, rapacious black holes invisible behind reflecting surges: walls, a night table, a window...

tt first light, a doctor came in with his medical trt. Henley could see through him, sensed the doc"s surprise at finding him awake, saw his body disolve into a cloud of atoms, a confusion of energies temporarily united, and, at their centre, blackness.

The doctor unwrapped Henley's foot, and for the first time since waking, Henley stared at his own body. He could see through it as well, but at the foot there was something different - it was leaking darkness. Threads of blackness radiated from it, shafted up along his leg, his knee. Seeing it, he remembered the sharp rock, remembered hiding the cache beneath trees, remembered...

all he could sense at first. His eyelids tugged open! 'Henley their mineral stare facing a wall.

Gradually sou~

sifted through, and he heard footsteps, sensed a fa~ medicinal stain on the air. He was in a hospital, al that

realization calmed him. Yet there was no chance to wonder what had happened because it was s~

happening. The very air around him seemed to pulse with the massed blackness of his nightmare -

Easton snapped awake.

Christ! Where am I?'

The doctor looked up with a benign but puzzled expression. 'Relax, Mr Easton. You're in good hands.'

Ralf prowled the carpet of a consultation room St Vincent's Hospital. He was exhausted, having been able to sleep only in snatches for the last week.

No - not a nightmare. Reality! here were fever sores at the corners of his mouth, and He had been gangplanked into a perpetual nig! walked with a slight limp. Nervous as a rat, he shuffled from corner to corner, hands deep in vate room, and when Ralf entered, he essayed a pockets. He was of average height with flat downwa~nile. Ralf went over to him directly, without smiling,

slanting snake eyes and a pachuco haircut. Bene~d leaned close to his face. 'Where is it, coconut?'

his madras shirt he carried a butterfly switchblur Henley kept smiling. He made a small feathering and strapped to his leg under his trousers was~esture with one hand and stared remorselessly into specially modified bayonet. His face was smoot~h ~l~e flat dark good-looking, with flameporcelain,

sun-dark and scribbled with many fine b10~bright hair, eyes. He was jawline clean as a knife, and grey glasswrinkles.

,[~plinter eyes that looked a little crazy from the medi-

When he heard the scream, he stopped in his traC~ation. 'Since when did they start letting baboons in

and his charred eyes narrowed. It was Henley. Hh:c~ere~'

sure. Though he had known him only briefly, 'Don't loose-lip me, Easton.'

certain that he recognized something about that 'How'd you find me, Ralf?'

the . . .'

a whimpering quality that he associated with 'When you didn't show last week It wasn't a scream of pain. It was fear. 'Last week? How long I been?'

An hour later, a doctor came in - young, thin-bon~~ 'Don't you know? You been out nine days. The only

with long intelligent hands. 'He's come around.' good thing that happened to you is that I tentwentied

'What's wrong with him?' before Gusto or his bad boys did. They'd have left The doctor shrugged. 'No idea. It's the zaniest Ca,nothing for the hospital but a cleanup bill.'

tonia I've ever seen. He sent off theta waves the wh~ Henley closed his eyes and shook his head. A weight time he was out - the EKG of an alert person. Yet!heavy as heat lay on the back of his neck.

And

there refused to respond to any form of stimulation, his e~ere memories, ugly nightmare memories, of

darkwere dilated, his blood sugar way down. In some Winess, a maze, a black sun, a horrible whispering...

it's all related to the wound on his left foot. That th~ 'I laid out a lot of coin to et ou this rivate box'

g Y P ,

~m 1 refused to start heahn until about forty

s' p y ' g ' -~Ralf went on. He reached into his pocket and pulled minutes ago. Fibrinogen was actually dissolving at t~ut a jangle of dog tags. 'Your brother's plates. I figured

wound site.' they'd do more good here than they would where he's

'But he's going to pull through, isn't he?' itrashed. I used them to convince the meds that you

'I think so. His vital organs, nervous and lyr~nd I are kin. It was the only way of taking charge.'

systems, are all unaffected.' 'What about Gusto?'

Ralf released an audible sigh, ran a hand over i Ralf shook his head, contentious. 'He wants your face.

'When can I see him?' ears, clown. He figures you ripped him. What else is

'Now, if you like. He's remarkably alert for all ~. the stooge to think after more than a week? The best

been through.' thing for you to do is tell me where that skeejag is so I Henley Easton was sitting up in the bed ~i :can Tighten him up.'

60 New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos The Star Pools 61

Henley rubbed the back of his neck. A retinal af~ ~trian landscape - a parking lot. Henley recognized

image of the black sun seemed to be hovering befo ~Ralf's car and watched dumb-faced as a black man

in

him. Everything looked dark, outlined by a soft my iduck trousers unholstered a pistol and knelt down in

cal shine. ' No way, huckster. You'd just run it.' the back seat of an adjacent white Chevy. Then, just

'What?' Ralf's face darkened with indignation. 'r!as swiftiy, the image splintered.

your cover man.'

Henley looked cool and arrogant. 'You were my br~neeR~pf laidkiad.c'allused hand on Henley's shoulder. 'You rest,

cover man, and he was minced at Ngoc Linh.' Henley blinked, rubbed his temples. With cold objec-Ralf's emotional valence swung from indignation,~tivity, every rift and flaw in the opposite wall, every

fury and then to remorse with unnatural swiftneipore on Ralf's face, stood out sharp as glass. For a

'Yeah. Well, budroe, you'll be on your way to a famemoment he had felt as if he was leaning outside

reunion if you don't gratify Gusto. He wants those t~imself, teetering on the brink of a nightmare cliff

kilos.' ~that mawed beyond the particled world. Now he was

'And he can have them. I'm in this for the payoff I'~imself again, and it was difficult to imagine that not going to run it.' ~hat he had seen was real. But he couldn't take the

'Fine. Then tell me where I can cop.' chance -

'Forget it. Only I know where it's hidden. We ~ 'Hold on, Mike. There's a roofer waiting for you in a together or not at all.' !white Chevy wheelside of your car.'

'Sure, and just how long before you're mobile? I co~~ 'Huh?'

be so much fish chow by then.' 'Call it a case of the dread. Fever jitters. But stay 'We go tomorrow.' isharp.'

'You think you'll be all right? These meds don't ev~ 'Yeah. Sure.'

know what's wrong with you.' When Ralf left, Henley leaned back and closed his Henley nodded, but his eyes were glazed over, h~yes. A cold magnetic brilliance was running along the face distracted. The afterimage of the black sun h~urface of his skin, and he seemed to sense that eerie

expanded so that it covered everything like a ~hispering he had heard in his nightmare, sensed it film.

Ralf's face was a reflection in a dark rn~r~e way the deaf hear sounds through the small bones wormed

with far-off, unaccountable lights. The ro0~f their heads. Somewhere deep within himself the suddenly

seemed foreshortened, and Henley was st~ightmare was continuing, an evil pushing out into ing through

mistings of shadow. A blue light wh0~he world. He had a feeling that if he let himself he source seemed

to be somewhere behind the bed s~uld fall towards it, that it was pulling him fused his vision, and movements other than wt~a~ ! He stared at the wall directly opposite, tried to root knew were there attracted his attention. Anot~rnself in its cracks, but it was beginning to shimmer. scene was superimposed on the room. It was a ped~e was certain that it was starting all over again.

62 New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos The Star Pools 63

Then, just as he was reaching for the call switch The man rubbed the side of his head and looked up solidified. He was suddenly warm, and the sunli ~th a scowl. 'Gusto wants his scag, plain-brain.

What

slanting through the blinds was reassuring, yello~ ou expect - CIA?'

wine ~: 'Yeah, well you tell Gusto it's his soon as I cop it. My After a moment's thought, he reached out, and t~uch ~as laid up or he d have had ~t by now.

time he pressed the buzzer. When the nurse arriv~'He wants it right away, marshmallow.'

he was sitting at the edge of the bed, wearing, ~'Sure, sure. Everybody's double-time. You think I'd hoped, his most alert and gracio,u,s smile. 'Would still be in the country .if I was runnin.g it? Come on!'

mind getting my clothes, please? I m signing out. He pulled the man to his feet, pushed him back a pace, and retrieved the Walther. 'Tell him he can have it Ralf left the hospital through the service garage emerged at Twelth Street and Seventh Avenue. car was

parked in the Wavefly Building's lot, ant approached it the long way. When he got to the con

~omorrow,' he said, backing up to his car. 'Same drop.' Ralf threw the gun under the seat, slid behind the wheel, and drove off.

For nine days, since Henley turned up at St Vinof

the lot, he froze. There was a white Chevy park :ent's in a coma, he'd kept on the move, not daring to

near his car. ~~turn to his fiat. He knew Gusto would kill him. The Without hesitation he circled the lot ~[~nan had a notorious temper. But handling the hit man gave him some confidence, and he decided to get back

approached the Chevy from behind. When he ~ig~ . .

his apartment He c~rcled the block slowly once and

within four cars of it, he lay down and bellycraw~tø ú .

oped the lobby cautiously Nonetheless, as soon as he

until he was alongside its left rear door. From wh~c . . ú .

rv ~ut h~s key m the latch, he reahzed that he had

he lay, he could see the latch was up. He su eyed~~

surrounding cars as best he could. No one was in si~~)lundered. _

The door of the opposite apartment burst open, and

In one fluid movement, he unsprung his butterfly bl~ '

and jerked open the door. ~o men pounced on him, shoved him into his rooms.

There was a black man inside who was peer through a drillhole on the opposite door. Ralf burst in and the man swung around with a Walther automatic in his right hand.

Ralf was quicker. He chopped the gun out of his hand with a slash of his arm, then pulled him into a sitting position and boxed him on the side of the head.

h nrn cocked low He was carrying a shopping bag In

With a fierce tug, he dragged him out of the car, wa~~

One of them handcuffed him immediately. The other bolted his door and led him by the nose to the bathroom. They were big, wild, mongrel blacks with natty lenims, their hair twisted into spikes.

One had a beard and was missing half of his left ear. The other wore wraparound glasses and a pink hat.

In the bathroom, they knelt him down before the toilet the butterfly under his nose. 'All right, rughead, any more surprises. Who put you on me? Hey cool out, Ralf pleaded. I m clean with Gusto.

The bearded one laughed, said, 'My name's Duk Parmelee. And that's Hi-Hat Chuckie Watz. We the boys goin' to take your face apart.'

Hi-Hat Chuckie Watz took four cans of drain cleaner and a bottle of Clorox out of the shopping bag and emptied them into the bowl. The Duke continued 'Gusto wants you to know, he's hurt you ignored him.'

Hi-Hat grabbed Ralf behind the neck and shoved his face towards the fuming water in the bowl.

The acid vapours seared up into his sinuses and scalded hi eyes.

'Yaww? Ralf bawled. 'Don't! Please! Don't! I got the stuff!'

Hi-Hat eased up, and Ralf pulled back with a gaq

His face was slick with tears, and he was quaking. 'Where is it?' the Duke asked.

'My touch has it stashed. Tomorrow, I'll lift tomorrow.'

Hi-Hat steered Ralf's face towards the blue burnit water. Ralf screamed, but the fumes gagged him, and he went into a glide.

The Duke pulled him back and slashed him across the face with a sharp-ringed hand. 'Cry for me, man - cry and I won't make you drink that soup.'

Ralf was crying, his whole body was shuddering.

Henley Easton took a cab from St Vincent's to Pennsylvania Station. From there he rode the train to Garden City where he rented a car. After eating at a McDonald's, he had fifty dollars left. The nightmare hadn't recurred, and he was beginning to feel confident. It was his plan to get to his cache and head west.

He didn't want to burn Ralf, but he felt that he had no choice. The coma he had been in changed everything. No doubt Gusto and his black mafia felt ripped after a nine-day delay. They would be too suspicious to make him a good deal. It would be best now, Henley figured, to find another market and leave Ralf behind to answer questions.

Henley spent the night in a motor inn where he nspected his foot for the first time since leaving the Hospital. There was no swelling, but the lips of the wound were a scaly black. Just looking at it made him feel drowsy. He put his sock on, lay back, and slid off into a dark sleep.

The next morning he went down to the stream early. After he uncovered his cache and secured it inside the cat's spare tyre, he got behind the wheel to go, but something stopped him. He stared through the windshield at the larkspur, the myrtle, and the great bellowing fireweed that dotted the slopes like embroidery. He felt woozy suddenly, as if he were swaying with deep sea rapture out over whispering distances -

with

sobs. , ~

'Just you remember,' Duke Parmelee said, you ~

juke and everybody knows you a juke. If you don't hav~ becvming no one, everything, e.ndless space.

that H tomorrow, you goin' to suffer. Mister, you goi~ ('orne alive! he snapped at himself and jerked to suffer.' upright behind the wheel. But it was no good. He felt They uncuffed him and were gone before he couli that he had to get out of the car, and when he did it

get to his feet. All things considered, they had bee~ was like moving in a dream. He felt light as a cloud

practically cordial. beginning to vanish. A shadow was spreading its ú ú ú an~nyrnous dark over everything, and the air was

66 New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

becoming soft as rock seen underwater. His limbs were remote and rubbery and seemed to be moving by

their own will. He let them guide him down the slope and through a swatch of burned reeds. When he stopped moving, he looked down, and there, huddled among the crusts of dirt like a stunned animal, was the stone that had cut him.

It came away from the ground easily, and the dry dirt crumbled revealing a palm-sized green rock.

When he had first seen it, wet, he thought that colour was moss. But the green and the oily shine were its own strange attributes, and when he saw them again, the dizziness and the nausea returned.

Henley moved to heave it away, but something about the patterning on the rock stopped him.

Looking closely, he saw that it was engraved with sharp cuneiformlike designs. He ran his fingers over them, studied again the fine cutting edge, and turned to take it back with him.

The return walk to the car was uneventful. His body no longer felt light. It was hungry, and he decided to find a restaurant and eat. On the highway, he turned towards the city impulsively. He wanted to wheel around and go west, but it was impossible to do more than speculate about that. He felt stoned and uneasy, and he stopped several times to question his motives, but each time he stopped an overriding urgency, razorapt, urged him back into his car. When he arrived in New York, his clothes were soaked through with a cold sweat.

He returned the rented car and took a room at the Elton on East Twenty-sixth. There he unbagged the heroin and repeatedly touched it with his fingertips. It had become the primary purpose in his life, yet he was doing everything with it wrong.

He took a pinch of it, divided it into two thin slivers, and used his thumbnail to snort them. A few moments later, he was drifting slowly and powerfully through the cool red light of day's end. He mastered a small spasm of nausea and floated to the corner of his cot where he sat down, all of the day's problems already on the point of an energetic solution.

An hour later the room was darkening. Stern shadows, deep as oil, gloomed on all sides. Everything seemed immense, and the apprehensions of the nightmare began to feel real. The cutting stone, propped up on the windowsill, pulsed a dull incandescent green. It's drug-action, he reassured himself, but he wasn't confident. Fear hazed around him like a thunder charge. He realized that at any moment the horror could begin again. Something dark and cold as an ocean current was tugging at him, pulling him away.

He touched the bedspread to reassure himself. It was death-cold flesh! He hopped off the bed in terror before he saw that he had touched the metal backpost.

He breathed deeply to calm himself. It came to him that the nightmare was still there, somewhere deeper, much deeper than awareness. It was continuing. It had never stopped. Like the thunder beginning too late to remember the light, his mind was shivering in the afterfall of an intractable doom. Clearly, he saw that it was only a matter of time before the darkness welling within. surged up. He sat shivering in the twilight and resolved to contact Ralf. He had to unload the heroin. If he went into a coma and was found with it, it would be better if he never woke up.

There was a pay phone in the lobby. Henley called Ralf's apartment, and the phone rang a long time before it was answered by a basso-rumble voice he didn't recognize. Henley hung up immediately.

His hands were trembling so violently that it took him five minutes to dial correctly an alternate number Ralf had given him. A woman answered and said she hadn't seen Ralf in days and had no idea where he was. Henley told her his name and where he was staying and then hung up.

He went back to his room and closed, bolted, and chained the door before he noticed the green luminance glowing in the darkness. It pulsed brighter as he turned, and he saw that the cutting stone was emitting a haze of light. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust and to recognize that it wasn't light at all but a gas or a vapourous plasma that was deliquescing as it sublimed from the rock.

Henley stood for a long time, mesmerized. It was a tricky gas. Against the dark windowpanes, it was feathered and iridescent. Along the ceiling, it was billowing in small dark streams. But Henley was watching the stone. There the vapour was folding over on itself slowly, like a flower blossoming. It entranced him, and he kept his gaze fixed on it until something of another texture altogether appeared in its depths. There against the surface of the jade-coloured rock, a shiny wet substance was oozing. Slowly a knob of clear jelly striated with smoky colours bulbed out. It extended a pseudopod and slimed along the edge of the sill.

The light switch was to his left, and Henley snapped it on. Nothing happened. The tungsten coils glowed red in the light bulbs, but the room stayed semidark, crepuscular in the thin vapour light of the stone.

A cold finger touched Henley between his shoulder blades, and he shuddered and spun about to leave. As his hands fumbled with the dead bolt, a horrible thing happened. The idiot's voice, scrawny and demonic as in his nightmare, called out from behind: Fear arrives like a runner.

Shut your ears big, Henley, and look shadows go by long after the bodies have passed. Your eyes blow backward.

Henley whimpered and turned from the door. The ichor squeezing from the stone had stretched into a membrane and was quivering in the air like a sea plant. It was still pulling from the rock, and in the halflight Henley thought he could see a net of fine blue capillaries webbed over it. He was overwhelmed by a frantic urge to flee, but the voice, booming in his head, held him fast: Dark carries you, broods like wells in the deep ground. You can't run, nowhere to run, for you and I are the same.

A soft moan forced itself out of Henley's lungs, and he pivoted to run. The dead bolt clanked open, and the chain lock jangled free before there was a loud popping noise behind him followed by a frying sizzle.

Henley glanced over his shoulder as he fidgeted with the door latch. The viscous protoplast had snapped free, and it was swimming through the air towards him, a small shimmering mass the size of his fist.

Curly-edged feathers of flesh trailed below it, as from a jellyfish, and the whole bulk, dimpled with blood spots, arrowed for his head.

Henley swung the door open and bolted into the corridor just as the tendrilous thing caught up with him from behind. Icy snug fingers wrapped around the back of his head and over his ears.

Something hard and needle-sharp was pressing against the nape of his neck, forcing the base of his skull. He scrambled for the stairway, stumbled, and fell. The corridor went suddenly white, as if blasted by lightning. There was a hot piercing pain between his eyes, and Henley understood, with a spasm of terror, that the thing had punctured his skull!

He lurched to his feet, jerked forward a pace, and plunged over the stairwell with a stammering cry.

He bounced off the top steps and went careening over the banister into space. There was an awful moment when it felt as if his head were rupturing at the seams, and then the blur of steps braked.

Henley could see the yellowed flower wallpaper spin off gracefully to one side as the stairs swung up from below. He was floating. The hug of gravity was strong around his waist, and he sensed something within him pushing out, buckling space around him so that his descent was very slow.

Only the piercing ivory pain that pitched him through the back of his neck to a point between his eyes, kept him from marvelling.

Abruptly, the pain cracked, shot down his spine, and cramped his bowels. There was a terrifying explosion, and the stoop of the stairs that he was settling towards banged apart and splintered across the vacant lobby like a broken vase. Henley slapped to the ground amid a patter of dislodged plaster and lay there stunned, trying not to faint.

His stomach muscles knotted again, and he was hoisted to his feet by a powerful surge of strength.

There was some movement down at the opposite end of the lobby, but he couldn't make sense out of it in the whistling deafness. Mechanically, his body turned, swung over the blasted stoop, and lumbered up the stairs. In his room, Henley collapsed.

On the floor, some sense of self-control returned. His head was throbbing, and there were trickles of dark, almost black blood dripping over his cheeks from the back of his head. With one finger, he felt the nape of his neck. There was a deep hole in it, too painful to probe. He swayed to his feet and leaned against the wall. People were scurrying up and down the hall.

Gradually, one thought cleared itself from the terror trilling through him. It was his cache. Despite the horror, he had to think about his stash. Quietly and quickly as possible, he shuffled over to the night table and sealed the cotton ditty bag with the heroin in it. He debated for a moment about flushing it down the toilet and getting himself to a hospital, but that idea was too closed. He felt trapped and terrified. There was the smell of something broken in the air, and he knew that he had to get away and think all of this through.

There was a fire escape outside his window, and he clambered down it to the street. Two cop cars had pulled up in front of the Elton, so he skipped down the alley and jumped a fence to Twenty-seventh Street. He was glistening with sweat and shaking ferociously. Whatever it was that had leaked out of the rock and attacked him, it had burrowed into his skull. He could feel part of it quavering at the mouth of the puncture wound it had made. It sickened him with despair, and he wanted to get help immediately, heroin or no, but he couldn't stop walking. His body marched on mechanically, sleepwalking. His eyes were glazed like small brown fruits, and those that saw him approaching gave way, widely.

The moon sang down around him, grim and cool, and he walked on and on, sticking to the darker cross streets. Finally, hours later, he stopped. He was on a tiny side street, virtually an alley, whose name he hadn't seen. A shopfront door with iron bratticing opened and an old, old man, skin grey and hackled as bark, urged him in. The old man leaned forward like a dead tree and studied him with eyes as bright as pins. Visions had made his face unearthly, scorched-looking, between the silver wires of hair. He wore a mantle sewn with seashells and porcupinequill scrollwork, and he stood still, hooded like a cobra, silent, beckoning Henley with a sway of his head to enter.

Henley stepped a pace into the shop, faltered a moment as he surveyed the place. One wall was covered with the wing-feather fan of an eagle. A stuffed monkey hung by its genitals from the ceiling, which was crusted with black mussel shells. The odour of the room was sticky. In a polished clawfoot burner with talons spread, an orange lump of olibanum squatted, and as Henley slowly pivoted to view the coils of a white python on one of the rafters, the hognose head watching him with dusty eyes, the old man lit the incense coals. The yellow vapours wafted over the rickety shelf, seethed over husks of seahorses, the moult of a tarantula, red-speckled seabird eggs, and amber and green bottles stoppered with the thumbs of apes.

The room was glimmering with the trills of canaries. The lizards that would eventually devour them drowsed below in cages crafted from twigs. A yellow and papery light, filtered through tall lanterns stained with images of serpents and squids, gave everything an umber cast. In that light the old man, who had closed the door and was now motioning Henley to sit, looked ageless.

Henley sat in the corner and watched anxiously as the old man approached, his trouser legs hissing.

He held a thin bone whistle to his lips and blew a brittle note. 'I been waitin' a long time for you.'

With a wombsoft tread, he stepped closer. 'Cthulhu fhtagn!' he spit, and Henley felt a surge of strength. The old man was wrapped in a cloak of shadow. 'You knaw nuthin' 'bout what has you.

Well, I got to say, dat is best.' He leaned far forward out of the shadows, and Henley saw that he had only one eye. The other had been replaced by a shard of mirror, and seeing his reflection in it, he grew faint. Henley's eyes were so widely dilated, there were no whites showing, and around the corners of his mouth a scaly blackness was crusted. 'You knaw nuthin'

'bout de way dat has you. And dat be good. Dat be best good.' He pulled the bone whistle to his parched mouth and sucked a sea chant, a modal hymn, through it that seemed to come from all around, like a sound heard underwater.

Listening to it, Henley felt both as if his life were a small animal dying in a bottle and as if he would live for ever in the open spaces of lone birds.

Ralf's head was going bad. There had been too many lousy breaks, and he was getting to feel threatened.

When he learned that Henley had signed out of St Vincent's, he went to a gunshop and got several extra clips for the Walther automatic. It was too heavy to stay in the city, so he drove out to his sister's place in Stony Brook. By the time he got there, Henley's message had come through, and Ralf wheeled back into New York. At the Elton the cops had left, but there were several people in the lobby, grouped together, mumbling, Nobody had any idea what had happened.

Henley's door was unlocked, and Ralf entered without knocking. Except for a squelchy odour in the air and several drops of dark blood on the floor, the place was vacant as a sucked egg. The lights were on, and the window was open. When he went over to check the fire escape, he spotted a small dull rock with curious etchings on it. Ralf at first thought it was a paperweight, but when he examined it more closely, he recognized that it was like nothing he had ever seen before. He pocketed it, searched the bathroom scrupulously, and left.

He rarely got drunk, but when he did he became so tight that only violence could unspool him. He went down to the Red Witch and got skunked enough to call his old field captain. The last time he had seen Vince Pantucci was in Can Tho when they were spreading a little lead around some of the villages, hoping to enrage the Cong. Shortly afterward, Ralf was caught smuggling M16’s out of the country.

Pantucci was the ring's honcho, but Ralf did two years in the clam without fingering him. Since then, Pantucci had completed his tour and walked. Ralf knew he was in the city. He had been hearing tales about him for over a year. The man was mean. He was the only person that Ralf knew who could really move weight - other than Gusto. And he wasn't talking to Gusto.

Getting in touch with Pantucci was difficult. He was big time now, and he stayed low. Eventually Ralf had to drop a few lines about gun running to make contact. An hour later, Pantucci stalked into the Red Witch. He was big, wide as an oven, with arms like dock ropes and tight brass-red curls that boiled up around his neck from under his silk shirt. His dark cave-sitter eyes spotted Ralf instantly, and he muscled into the booth where he was sitting, said, 'What's the take, clothead?'

'I need a favour.'

Pantucci rolled his eyes. He had the face of an Etruscan - ethereal cheekbones, high fat forehead, and skin the colour of baked earth pulled tight over his skull. 'What's it gonna be, monk?

Cash?''Look, captain...'

'The captain is looking, Ralf, and he don't like what he sees. You're strung out, ain't you?'

'Nah, cap. I'm clean, but I got caught sidewise in a sour deal.' 'Dope?' 'Yeah.'

'What? Ganja?'

'Another class. Schmeck.'

'How much?'

'More than two kilos.'

Pantucci made a face like he smelled something disgusting. He slapped Ralf on the cheek and twisted his ear till it hurt. 'You jooch.' He pulled Ralf by his ear halfway across the table until their noses were practically touching. 'You move dub with strangers until you get boxed. Then you cry for me. Right?

Why didn't you come to me in the first place?'

Ralf pulled himself away and slumped in the corner, looking vaguely disgruntled. 'Didn't know you moved it.'

'You bullshit so much your molars are brown. Thought you'd get more play elsewhere, eh? Or was it that two years in the can made me look ugly? Who's the muscle?''Gusto.'

Pantucci coughed up a thick salty wafer of phlegm, let it lay hot on his tongue for a moment, then hawked it into the sawdust. 'What a weasel you are. What'd you expect from woolheads? You think you're a brother?' He stared for a moment into the thin cold eyes opposite him, engaging the emptiness he saw there. They were the most remote eyes he had ever known.

They reminded him of Ia Drang Valley and long swamp roads. He shook his head and looked away.

'Give me the plot.'

'Eastoh's brother Henley copped in Seattle and crossed to the city while ! lined up Gusto. Along the way something happened. He went into a coma. None of the meds could pin it. By the time I found him in St V's, Gusto was working on me. Now I know Henley's got the stuff, but he lit out. I guess he still thinks I was responsible for his brother getting blown away at Ngoc Linh. We patrolled together. I don't know. I was thinking you might find him.'

'So you can cop and deliver to Gusto? I don't work for nates, mongoose.'

'Yeah, well I do.' The wings of Ralf's nostrils whitened. His hands were under the table. 'My ass is on the line. You going off on me, captain?'

'How do you even know Henley has it?'

'I don't. But I got to ride something.'

Pantucci looked down at his hands, which were barked with callus. He liked Ralf. He looked intense, but he knew he could trust him. 'Give me the man's profile.'

'You think you can find him?'

'It's on the rails.'

Pantucci had a villa in the mountains where he set up Ralf. There was an indoor swimming pool there and a live-in maid and cook. There was also a metalworking shop for retooling stolen goods.

Ralf spent a few hours in the shop trying to bore a hole in the strange rock he had found in Henley's room. It was no good.

The rock was harder than any known substance. An automatic drill press with a diamond bit didn't even scratch it. Ralf was amazed but too preoccupied with evening the score with Henley to think much about it. He liked the rock. He liked its heft and its silky texture. It was the size of his palm with a few natural holes on its edge. Eventually he was able to thread some wire through one of the holes, and he wore the rock around his neck like a talisman.

A few days later, Pantucci found Ralf catnapping on the veranda beneath a vine-tangled trellis.

Trembling smells of cedar bark and pine riffled in the air. Sunlight buzzed off dusty rocks. 'I found him,' Pantucci whispered.

Ralf leapt out of the sunchair. 'Where?'

'He left an hour ago for Haiti.' He waved a packet of paper slips. 'Here's your ticket and passport.

There will be money at the airport - and a gun permit. Go in peace, jooch. And remember. We're even.'

Ralf arrived in Port-au-Prince wearing dark glasses, a USMC muscle shirt, and black flight pants tucked into steel-tipped boots. He carried an attache with a few changes of underwear, twenty-five hundred dollars in traveller's checks, five hundred dollars cash, and his Walther automatic. On the flight, he'd taken his butterfly out of the attache and slipped it into one of the many pockets on his trouser leg.

As he was deplaning, Ralf scanned the crowd, but there were so many black faces, it was impossible to eye any of Gusto's goofers. It wasn't until he was shouldering through the mob in the pavilion that he was sure they were laying for him. He felt hard metal pressing against his spine.

'Awright, pogue, you're comin' with me.'

He recognized the voice. It was the hit man he had tumbled in the parking lot. He was nudging Ralf out of the crowd with the barrel of his gun. Ralf groaned loudly and dropped to the ground. As he fell, he palmed the butterfly, sprung it open under his chest, and swivelled his attache to block the gun. The goofer turned and bent down to free his gun for a shot. As he did so, Ralf rolled and stood up quick, forcing the barbed end of the blade between the man's ribs. With a neat twist, he severed the aorta and yanked his knife free by pushing the man away.

The crowd was dispersing fast, and Ralf lost himself in the knots of scurrying people. A few minutes later, he was in a cab heading into town. He booked into a cheap hotel in the East End and began asking around for Henley. No one in the city had seen him, and on his second day he went out to the dirt-farmer markets near the shantytowns. He had bought a white jellaba, and, despite the heat, he wore it so that he could carry his Walther inconspicuously. It was only a matter of time before Gusto's men would hunt him down.

In the native-dominated marketplaces, the talisman drew a lot of attention. No one would touch it, but everyone wanted to see it. Three boys with the fetal air of bay pirates - brash gold teeth, oil-soaked T-shirts, reversed crucifixes - tried to tug it off his neck. They questioned Ralf about it first, mumbled something in a language he didn't recognize, and then, just when he realized that he had missed some sort of cue, one of them snatched at the rock. The wire cord it was on bit into Ralf's neck and held. His eyes tightened to a squint, and he elbowed the boy in the mouth. The other two drew long cruel knives from their thigh sheaths.

Ralf spun on his heels and spartied in and out between the stalls heading towards the alleys of the shantytown. The boys ran after him, whooping and throwing fruit and rocks. In the alley, Ralf stopped short and curled around, both hands holding his Walther automatic way out in front. The boys fell over each other trying to pull up. They backpedalled slowly, and at the mouth of the alley one of them made a gesture Ralf didn't understand and cried, 'Cthulhu fhtagn? The sound of his voice had a shrill, frightening quality that unsettled Ralf more than the sight of their knives had. He decided to call it a day.

Henley Easton had lost complete control of his body. It moved by another will, and he merely observed.

The last days that he spent in his body were riddled with madness. The body itself began to alter rapidly after he found his way to the old man in New York. The old one's name was Autway, and he was a sorcerer, that is, he was a Voudoun gangan. He carried a calabash filled with snake vertebrae, and whenever he rattled it, the men in his presence responded. He never had to speak directly to them. The sound of the calabash was sufficient instruction.

When Henley's body began to change, Autway provided loose-fitting white trousers and a wide-sleeved anorak with a hood that allowed him to move freely and didn't chafe his sensitive skin. A black squamous growth that had begun around his foot wound and his mouth spread quickly over his limbs and torso, itching terribly and emitting a thick putrefying odour.

Autway salved his flesh with the pulp of crushed roots, and that somewhat eased the discomfort.

For over a week, they kept him in a spacious cellar hung with draperies of dark nubbling. Autway came down frequently with younger men, all of them dark with wide faces that had the cast of full-blood Indians. For hours at a stretch, they rattled gourds and chanted, 'Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.' The sounds they intoned had a peculiar effect on Henley. Hearing them, he felt starcalm, crazy-alive, glittering with energy. The rhythms were a vortex around him. It was a mutable, luculent sound, sometimes dark as the sea, sometimes stream-ingfire. Often, it would charge him so full of power that his body would rise and move about in lithe, sleek movements. The others would imitate him best as they could, but none could match the demonic fury with which his body wheeled and careened.

By the time they left for Haiti, Henley's face was darkened with scales. The ears, cheeks, forehead, and scalp were still clear, but he had the mouth of an iguana, and his eyes were ringed with black circles.

There were some febrile explanations at the airport about how sickly he was, but no one made a big fuss.

On the island, Autway brought him far out to North End to a trench hut on the mountainous outskirts of the slums. There the chants continued, only now there were many more people, kettle drums, torch parades, and the ceremony of zilet en bas de l'eau, the worship of an undersea island.

At the peak of the ceremony, elderly devotees gouged themselves to death with sharp stones.

Henley watched on in horror as his body danced its insane, impossible movements. His fingers were gradually becoming webbed, and his joints rearranged so that he could move his body as could no other human.

During the days, he walked about restlessly. With the anorak pulled up over his head, his body swayed through the shantytowns. He seemed to hover over the ground, shifting his weight like so much smoke.

The breeze wherever he went was full of patterns, and there were always shadows flitting around him without any apparent source. Seeing him coming, workers stopped in the fields and blew high lonely notes on whistles made from the wing bones of seabirds.

Once, as he drifted down the back road of a slum, a very tall woman with yellow eyes and wild crowfeather hair came out of a shack carrying a child. She laid the infant in the white dust, stood before Henley, and lifted her skirts. Her eyes were charged with sorrow like a dying horse, and Henley understood that the baby was dead. With long fingers, she touched her breast, then slowly, slowly, her sullen eyes staring, she glided the tips of her fingers down over her belly to the cloud of hair below. That moment, a swirl of shadows like a shifting pattern of clouds played around the small corpse, and it stirred.

There was a muffled outcry from the onlookers who had stayed hidden in their huts. The woman fell to the side of her child, her face slippery with tears of joy. But Henley could see there would be a horrible price to pay. The baby was looking up at him not with the wonder-bright gaze of an infant but with a fully alert, seductive stare that promised violent knowledge deeper than innocence or guilt.

Another time, on a side street in North End, two blacks wearing cutoff denims and bulky pyjamastriped jackets over clean white T-shirts confronted him.

They looked malicious. One was missing half of an ear. The other had on a large hat and dark glasses.

The one with the glasses had grabbed his arm, but when he felt the spongy consistency of it, he let it go like a hot wire and jumped back. The abruptness of his action spun Henley around to face them and dropped back the hood of his anorak. The two men gaped stackfaced, unable to move for a long moment.

Then the one with half an ear drew a gun out of his jacket. Henley's stomach muscles tightened in a spasm, and the gunman was blown backward, tumbling to the ground. Henley drew his hood up, walked down the street, and turned a corner. In the secluded alley, his stomach knuckled again, and he was hoisted into the air, lightstepping over tin roofs until he settled into a garden patch several houses away.

Henley was no longer awed by such feats. The terror of being dislocated from his will had numbed him to all surprise. The memories of his previous life were remote, and he watched the events shaping themselves around him as if in a dream. Even when Autway led him up into the mountains to see the star pools, he was unmoved.

Beyond the spectral shapes of moss and fern and tall cypresses that spired above enchanted swamps, far up in the smoky hills, they came to a series of large ponds devoid of all vegetation. The sides were banked with hewn logs and packed gravel, the work of many generations. On their shores at irregular intervals were monoliths of black rock, the inscriptions carved into them exhausted by time.

Standing there, beneath a quail's-breast sky, with the wind blowing in off the pools and swirling around their heels like a discarded garment, Autway let out a low moan and began chanting. The red light of dusk was moving as if it were a breeze on the water.

They stood facing east until darkness had settled around them. Henley's body was becoming very excited.

He felt a ringing in his collar bones at the sound of the old man's droning voice, and the thick muscles massed in his legs were stirring. Barely able to remain still, his shuffling feet sounding like breath, his breath like a forgotten language, he watched the stone star, the moon, rise over the black water.

By moonlight, he could see something stirring under the water. There were many shapes, massed as one shadow. They were moving closer beneath the surface, and the expectation of their arrival nailed his breath. A splash sounded far to the left followed by a loud scuttling noise on the rocks.

Something was approaching.

Henley's body unsealed its breath and breathed deeply. Slow as a planet, it turned to face the darkness.

Laboured wingbeats sounded from a distance. A hulk loomed on the dark edge of the pool. Outlined in moonlight, Henley couldn't make sense of it. It was writhing gouts of flesh, a tangle of limbs, and then, abruptly, it narrowed and slipped back beneath the glass-grained water.

A torpid langour overcame Henley's body. It felt heavy, tired. Autway took him by the elbow, which was gelatinous and limp, and steered him away from the shining water. He felt wrong. His body had never felt so weary before. By the time they got back to trenchtown, he was stiff, almost rigid with exhaustion. The next day, Autway led him out to a remote channel where the shore was thickly covered with limestone dust that fluffed in from the quarries. Three white huts squatted on the shore, and, beyond them, an albino horse was corralled. Henley's curiosity about the previous night dissolved in a fright of recognition. To his left, drifting in the lazy current, was a white catboat with one man standing up in it.

Autway rattled his calabash, and the boatman steered towards the shore. With great trepidation, Henley watched him moor his boat and remove a black jug.

'De lurkers will naw come until we purge you,' Autway said.

Purge me! Henley thought with terror, watching the white horse's pink eyes staring at him while it champed. He wanted to face Autway, but his body wouldn't move.

'Yas. We must make room for de Host. We gone take you out. Too bad we can't kill you, but dat dere is bad for de Host. You naw get with your bruthers, les morts. Nyarlathotep cotch you and now let go. De l'eau noir, de black waters cotch you. You gone dere. You gone to go.'

The boatman was approaching with the jug in his hands. His face was cretinous, blank and washed as the sky.

Autway stepped closer, whispered in his ear. 'If even de earth itself knew. But dere is naw way to know. Speak to de dead and what do dey say? "I can be anyone you need." Give up de terrible arrogance of de past, give up de root of de present, and all dat de future can tell you is where it is you was never goin'.'

Henley's bones filled with a cold mist as the idiot offered Autway the jug. The gangan took it reverently and turned to face Henley. His face was a crust of harsh planes, and the shard of mirror was clouded. He spoke, and there was steel in his voice. 'Silence be your shepherd. What is beneath you be triumphant.'

Autway tilted the jug so that its mouth gaped before Henley's eyes. Its darkness mawed and he felt himself leaning out of his body toward it. He looked down, and there were lights, tiny and dim, moving there. They swung closer, and he saw that they were swirls of stars, galaxies, misty ballerinas flying apart through a dread night. He was falling, baffled, booming with fear. The midnight black gulfed him, and there would have been a scream, a yowl, but for the soundlessness of those blind depths.

Ralf rounded the corner of the scabrid hotel where he had left his attache. He peered through a chink in the wall that he had made with his knife when he first moved in. There was movement within, and he cursed under his breath when he saw that it was Duke Parmelee and Hi-Hat Chuckie Watz. They had scattered his underwear on the floor and were cutting open the mattress of his bed.

Ralf entered the hotel and edged up to his door. He unholstered his Walther, touched the body-warmed metal to his lips, and banged into the room.

Crouched in the doorway with his gun swinging from man to man, he hissed, 'You move, screwfaces, and I'll kill you!'

Ralf entered and closed the door behind him. Quick as wit, he had the two men sprawled against the wall while he removed their weapons. The Duke was carrying a forty-five Magnum, a switchblade, and a pair of handcuffs. Hi-Hat had handcuffs, a thirty-eight, a serrated blade in a sleeve-harness, and a hand-grip fitted with razor blades. 'Feisty,' Ralf said, waving the knuckle-grip. He threw it down on the bed with the other weapons and made the men crouch down with their heads between their knees. With his foot, he pulled off their shoes and kicked them across the room.

'Okay, eggplants, strip down,' he said, and when they hesitated, he kicked each of them in the butt so hard their heads clunked against the wall.

When they were naked, he had them handcuff their right wrists to their left ankles, then he lowered his gun, and picked up Hi-Hat's serried blade. 'You know, my better judgement says I oughta kill the two of you.' He yanked the mattress off its springboard. 'But I believe in justice.' Using the thick blade as a lever, he pried loose two hard-coiled springs and all the wire they were attached to. 'Now, you fellas were real cordial to me the last time we met. And I feel obliged to reciprocate.' He pried loose more wire and began intertwining it. When he had a long length of tightly reeved wire, he measured it against the length of their bodies and made a few adjustments. 'It's a good thing I got an even temper or I'd mutilate you skanks. But, as my more used to say, I don't get mad. I get even.'

'Gusto wants you wasted, wimp,' the Duke growled. 'So you better kill us while you got the chance.'

'You should be so lucky.' Ralf laughed, took more measurements with the wire and fashioned it into two crude harnesses. '! got a little Cong trick I wanna pull on you monkeys. Besides, I don't want you dead. I want Henley.'

'Forget Henley,' Chuckie whispered. 'why so, pretty boy?' 'Henley's freaked.'

'Yeah? Well, reserve your opinions till after I jump him.'

'Man, Henley's out,' the Duke said. 'I mean he's not even human anymore.'

Ralf smiled. He had finished. He used the Duke's switchblade to cut their clothes into long cords out of which he made binding. As he was tying Hi-Hat's ankles together, the Duke swung around with his free hand and sunk his fingers into the back of his neck. Ralf's knife hand whipped back and skewered the Duke's palm.

'Mother!' Ralf bawled. He rubbed the back of his neck and pointed the bloodied tip of his knife at the Duke who sat silent and brooding. 'For that you jokers are gonna get an added attraction.' He finished binding their legs and arms and undid the handcuffs. Gently and with some pride, he slipped the nooses of wire around their necks. The nooses were adjustable and attached to another wire that he hooked by an ingenious rider-knot to the springs. He did the same with their feet before handcuffing them and cutting off the rags.

"The beauty of your situation, fellow deviants, is that the more you struggle, the tighter the wire gets. If you squirm enough, you die. But if you're good and sit rock-steady, somebody, someday, may find you here.'

Ralf stuffed their underwear into their mouths and gagged them with a rag-cord. Before leaving, he pulled the shade and put the weapons and his clothes and money in his attache. In the lobby, he found the proprietor. His eyes were meat-coloured and his mouth a black hole, sucked in. With strained courtesy, Ralf paid the money to rent his room for another month.

There were rats in the back alley, and after some hassle, Ralf managed to box two big ones. He hauled the oil-soaked box to his room and let them loose. Hi-Hat jerked violently when he saw them, and the wire drew blood from his throat. 'Don't get excited, boys. This is just my way of saying good-bye.' He closed the door and fidgeted with the lock until he was able to jam it closed.

Ralf headed north. For several days he went in and out of small hill villages asking about Henley.

No one had seen him, and even if they had, Ralf had the distinct feeling he'd be the last one they would tell. Wherever he went he was sure he was being followed. Once, he glanced over his shoulder to see one of the young bay pirates working a nail into a footprint he'd left in the dust. The people he met were awed by his talisman, but no one would speak with him. Finally one morning, after finding a rusted jackknife near his campfire, the blade closed on a shred of paper with his crude likeness scrawled on it, he decided to call it quits. He still had most of the money Pantucci had given him, and he considered going someplace exotic to hide out from Gusto. The next day he spotted Henley. Or what looked like Henley. Ralf saw the coral-red hair from a long way off. It was in a decrepit trenchtown several kilometres out of North End. Here and there among the glinting litter of tin and broken glass a seabird poked, some perched on stumps and tall bamboo poles.

Above, a high wind was thinning clouds into long fish shapes. A lone bird was riding a ring of wind. Ralf kept his eye on the red hair as he jogged into town, his attach~ wagging beside him, his white jellaba swelling behind. The closer he got, the less like The Star Pools 89 Henley it looked.

For one, the character was too tall, way over six feet. And there was something about the way he was standing, legs akimbo, head tilted to the side like a puppet, that wasn't Henley and, very nearly, wasn't human. But his back was to him, and Ralf wasn't sure. His attention was so rigidly fixed on the figure ahead standing alongside a rusted-out jeep with large eyes painted on its fender, that Ralf didn't see the old man. He stepped from behind a tarpaper shack and grabbed Ralf by the arm. His hold was peculiarly strong. When Ralf turned to face him, he had to squint., Sunlight flashed from his face in a glare. "Scuse me, fella. My name is Autway. I want words with you.' Autway turned his face, and Ralf saw himself in the mirror shard of his eyes. What do you want, old man?' 'Dat mon over dere is not de mon you lookin' for.' 'How do you know I'm looking for anybody?' Autway shook his calabash. He had a dog-crucifix around his neck, and he touched it. 'I'm a gangan. I know why you are here.''Yeah? Why's that?' To find Henley Easton.' Ralf's eyes narrowed. For one delirious moment he thought he had been found by one of Gusto's men. But then the old man rolled his eye and leered, showing black teeth. He wasn't one of Gusto's.'How do you know that?' 'I told you. I'm a gangan.' He rattled the calabash, touched the dog-crucifix. 'You are Michael Ralf, eh?'

Ralf screwed up his face, reached out to grab the old man's stained mantle, thought better of it. '

eah, and who fingered me? Henley?'

'Naw. I'm a gangan.'

Ralf shook his fist at Autway. 'You will be gonegone if you don't start giving me some straight answers.'

Autway nodded. His hair was like tangled hawthorn, and he brushed it back. 'You have to leave -

quick. Dat is not Henley. Henley is afar us all.'

Ralf put his attache down. 'He's dead?'

'Worse. Naw dead - afar us all.'

Ralf stared through the curtains of heat at the tall man alongside the jeep. Some young men were around him, and looking closely, he saw that they were the toughs that had pulled knives on him.

'Mister, I haven't understood a thing you've told me.'

'Den I will be forward. Dis voudoun salango. Dere is nuthin' like dis in de States. All power and weircling. Dat mon over dere was Henley Easton. But naw more. He is utterly changed.'

Autway moved his calabash gently, and the tall man, as if hearing it, turned. When Ralf saw the man's face, he knew at once that it was Henley. They were his eyes. That was the line of his jaw.

That was his hair. But that was all that was his. The skin was an oily black. Not negroid, but ink black. And the body was all wrong. Bizarrely elongated, loose as a marionette. Seeing it standing there cool and lean, its eyes bright as nails, Ralf felt his mind peel away. He thought of spring clouds breaking up over a long line of cold lakes, and he felt as if an ocean current, dark, awesome, were sweeping him out beyond himself. It passed quickly, blurred off like the shadow of a fish. But it lasted long enough to instill in him a dread foreboding.

'What happened to him?'

'Dot you wouldn't understan'.'

Ralf had to look away from Henley. He stared up at oyster-shell clouds, saw the full moon, a pale vapour in the day sky. 'Tell me.'

'De Old Ones - dey have corried Henley away. And dere, das dere messenger. Das Nyarlathotep. H-s-s-t? 'Huh?'

'He de One dream Henley afar.'

'How?'

Autway shook his head. 'Best you ask why. How brings madness.'

Henley had turned and walked off with the toughs, drifting away as if he were vapour. From someplace there was a thin mournful whistle.

'Dere are star pools in de hills. Up dere de minions take shape. B-r-r-r-p! De Kingdom been comin'

for a long, long time.'

'You see - dot you wouldn't understan'. It is de Kingdom. Nyarlathotep was de Key. De world de lock. Entering, de Key is de blindness in the lock's eye, de dream dat always returns.'

Ralf ran a hand over his face. His fingers were trembling. He bent to pick up his attache, but the old man laid a hand on his shoulder, rain-soft, urging him to wait.

'You want de drug?'

Ralf looked up at him with quiet eyes and straightened slowly. 'You got the heroin?'

'You can have it. In exchange. For dat.' He extended a knobbed coffee-coloured finger and touched the talisman.

'You're kidding?'

Autway reached into his mantle and pulled out a large cotton ditty bag.

'Let me see that.' Ralf snatched the bag and tugged it open. He fingered the powder inside and touched it to his tongue. His head snapped back, and he grinned. 'You got a deal.' He pulled tight the bag, bent down, and put it in his attache. With one hand he secured the case lock, and with the other he removed the stone from around his neck and handed it to Autway.

As soon as the gangan got his hands on it, he let out a giddy laugh that twisted under his tongue like a cry and curved off into a howl. 'You stupid mon. Reap de wind. Thresh stone. All is lost. You have thrown away your only hope.' He whooped.

Ralf scowled and stood up, but Autway was already moving off. Ralf watched him disappear down the back wynds and alleys of a cluster of huts. Despite the fact that he at last had what he was looking for, he felt burned, and that was a dangerous way to feel.

He decided that he wanted the stone back. It was a dumb animal illumination, Ralf realized, but that hunk of rock was suddenly important and getting to mean more each second.

Attache under his arm, Ralf loped down a cramped alley, leaping over stacks of rubbish and debris.

When he rounded the first corner, he pulled up short, swivelled on his heels, and threw himself back out of the alley. He had his Walther out, and he sat hunched behind his attache as a man with a bison chest and a tight, sad smile came around the corner. It was Pantucci.

'Slow down, stooge,' he said, swinging his hands free of his body. 'If I was gunnin' for ya you'd be dead awready.'

'Turn around, cap'm.'

Pantucci spun about. 'I'm light as a feather.'

'Sure, sure, I'm Doctor Strange. Lift those pant legs.' The captain lifted his trousers to his knees. 'I've been in your shadow for days, dupe. I was waitin' for you to connect.'

'Yeah? Well, what's it to you?'

'Somebody's going to have to move that stuff. And all seriousness aside, Gusto wants you to cry more than he wants that dub.'

'You're always best stating the obvious with a sense of awe.'

'You don't think you can move that kind of weight yourself?'

'Captain, I know you haven't been dog-breathing me all these days to keep me out of trouble. You're here to make your good out of my bad. Now I know that. There's a small fortune of sin in this case.

If you want a part of it, you're gonna have to do what I say.' 'Okay. Shoot - not literally, chump.'

Ralf didn't smile. 'First, we'll leave your bag of lethal anecdotes in the alley where you dropped it. I saw that carry-bag. How many sappers have you got in it?'

'A Magnum.'

'Great. The neighbourhood kids'll love it.' Ralf stood up and put his pistol away. 'Next we're gonna find that old man I was talking with. He's got something of mine. After that, we'll talk percentages.

Jake?' Pantucci nodded, eyed the attache.

'Oh, yeah,' Ralf added, running his thumbnail along the length of his jaw. 'Don't underestimate me, cap. You're a lot bigger, but I'm very, very fast.'

They prowled the trenchtown for an hour, but there was no trace of Autway. Ralf decided to head up into the hills along the one path that was available. Four hours later, after much foraging through cypress groves and fern-matted glens, they heard the rattle of Autway's calabash.

Pantucci was restless and wanted to move towards the sound, but Ralf quieted him down, and he went off behind some bushes. Ralf moved up the trail a short ways and slipped into the chute of a granite outcropping that was hung with Spanish moss. Presently, Autway came padding along the trail. When Ralf burst out behind him, he bolted. His speed was incredible. If Pantucci hadn't been up ahead, he would have lost him.

Pantucci grabbed him by his mantle and threw him to the ground. Ralf came up quickly and pressed the barrel of his gun against the old man's ear. 'Where's my stone, gone-gone?''Dots not yours.'

Ralf swiped him across the face with the butt of his gun. 'Your life's not mine, either, but I'm gonna take that, too, if you don't turn over that stone.'

Autway's face was bleeding, and his one eye was open wide, red-webbed. 'I dawn have it.'

Ralf raised his gun to strike him again, but Pantucci moved to grab his wrist. Ralf rolled off in a blur, came up in a crouch with the Walther aimed at Pantucci's head. 'Belay that, cap!'

'Ralf, it's just a friggin' rock!'

'Mister, he laughed at me. He laughed at me hard. It's not a friggin' rock to him.'

'He was Huck Finnin' ya - making you think he got the better end.'

Ralf shook his head. 'Maybe. But I want that stone or I ain't leavin'.'

Pantucci lifted Autway to his feet by his ears. 'Awright, crabface, where is it? Talk fast and clear or I'll pop that eye like a grape.'

'I dawn have it. It's back dere.' He nodded over his shoulder.

'How far?'

'Far back. Deep in de forest.'

Ralf grabbed a shock of Autway's hair and jerked him around. 'Let's go get it.'

'Hold it, Ralf. He's gonna lead us into trouble. His boys are probably in lurch back there.'

Ralf opened his attache and took out the forty-five and the thirty-eight. He checked to see if they were loaded, then he took the knives and hand-grip out and threw them into the bushes. He shoved the attache to Pantucci. 'You carry Satan.' He put the Walther in its holster and the thiry-eight under his belt. The fortyfive he pressed against the back of Autway's head. 'Drop your rattle here and march.'

Autway undid his calabash and started up the trail. As they climbed higher, a stillness settled around them like a fog. Even the grass and the leaves were still as if lost in thought. The trees became larger, thick-boled old trees. After a while they became so dense that only a few threads of light came through. In that calm undersea light, dolmens and giant wheels hewn out of rock and carved with curious oghams began to appear among the trees, most of them half-buried or peering through luxuriant growths.

Soon Pantucci started getting restless again. He looked back over his shoulder. 'Ralf, we're being watched.'

'Is that right? Well, try to look your best.'

A kilometre later, the trail narrowed to a trace so tight they had to lean forward to pass. But there was a plangent breeze sifting through the forest.'How much farther?'

Autway waved his hand, a gesture like wind in a sapling. 'You go through dat brake up ahead and you dere. But go slow, man. Go slow.'

Pantucci pushed through a tangle of hedge growth, and Ralf shoved Autway after him. On the other side, they stopped and looked out across an expanse of pools with water green as fire. There were half a dozen of them, ellipsoid, mirror flat, separated by huge mamo mocked trees and grasslands swaying in a fumy and spiritous mist. Beyond them, the horizon jazed into jungle. A green glow hung in the sky, waving over the rim of the world.

Pantucci was gazing into the water, ensorcelled by pale sketches of coral shaped like ladders. There was a nutant look on his face. This is a dream,' he said.

It is eerie, Ralf thought, focusing on a drowsy sound - the whittled-down thunder of waves shogging to shore faraway. He looked hard at the glades of blue trees, some growing out of the water, bent like witches. He had to shake his head to snap out of it.

With the barrel of his gun, he turned Autway around. The gangan's face was calm and dark as amber.

'Where is it, pop?'

'With dat which came from it.' The seamed face grinned cretinously.

On the opposite side of the nearest pool, from behind a massive shaggy tree trunk, the long man with black skin emerged. He was naked, elongated, unreal, and there was a sheen on his shoulders that made them look like glass. It was a peculiar body light that addled the air around him. He glided through the grass like an apparition, his arms writhing, unjointed, undulant. Even as far off as he was, rounding the turn of the pool, it was obvious that he was not human. The flesh was crumbling off his bones like soaked bread, and the bones themselves were long and rubbery.

Ralf fired without thinking. The bullet stopped him. Or seemed to. But the wrinkled air around him kept coming. It was like a sheet of rain - static, warped air, transparent but vibrantly distorted. As it approached, a whistle, very high, far, faraway, twined in their ears. Before anyone could move, it became a shrill-pitched wail, a projectile nose-diving through the atmosphere. Then the trembling sheet of air swept over them, and the intensity jumped to a spinning siren. The whine became a needle skewed between their eyes, crashing them to the ground, fluttering rags. The ringing agony drilled into the bones of their teeth, shook vision to splinters, exploded louder with each heartbeat.

The shriek was white hot, and they knew it would kill them. Nyarlathotep was screaming.

Then, like a slamming door, the wailing stepped. But their ears kept roaring. They were deaf as sod and would have sat there in the rusted grass swaying like old women except for what they became aware was happening around them. All three of them saw it at once. Ralf quivered like a gong and Pantucci let out a pitiful moan. Autway began to laugh, then to howl.

Henley's black and distorted body was writhing on the ground in the most inhuman way, the head bending backward to the feet, the waist twisting full around. There was a vast greasy hole in its torso where the bullet had struck, and that gap was widening and ripping. The body was peeling away, cracking open like a pod, droozing a quivering cheesy bladder - the delirious, gelatinous body of Nyarlathotep.

It was massive. By some abominable infusion, it swelled to twice the size of the body it hatched from.

Its surface was covered with something sticky, a black sap, bubbling, running off at the sides, carrying with it a bed of pearls, shiny curdled clods of milk, thick clusters of eggs. Something like pinworms needled over the gummy black silk, glimmering with a rabid bacterial fire. The body it pulled from was reduced to a cake of filaments that crumbled and lapsed with blue volts to dusty embers cooking in a soft camarine light. Then the thick singed-grease odours wafted across the field to them, and Pantucci began to retch.

Ralf couldn't take his eyes off the thing. It was hovering a few meters off the ground, its jelly sac bloated with webs of blue-pulsing veins. Tendrils, lionred, fiayed open around mouthlike gaping seams that writhed below the bulbed body. The tentacles were pushing it off, into the air, and it was lifting, its hideous rippled hulk was rising up over the puddling mess of its cocoon.

Ralf heaved himself to his feet. He wanted to flee, to bolt like wind, but another horror had fixed him.

The pond was churning. Dense forms were rising to their shadows and breaking the surface.

Webbed appendages lashed among the foaming waters - fiat faces, lizard-eyed shark maws splashed towards the shore. Autway was standing before them, his arms outspread, his wild hair whipped by his ecstatic movements.

The forms that were bobbling towards the bank were soaked black with the leakage and seepings of a putrid hell. Autway was savagely dancing, and Ralf heard him - he knew it was impossible, his ears were gluey with blood - but nonetheless he heard his cracked voice vomiting its laughter in his skull: 'Nightroarer! Domn mine enemies. And corry me. Corry me afar de dream. Vever dos miroir!

O Nyarla! Sonde miroir! Nyarlathotep!' And then he was gone. A humped, bubbling gob lurched out of the pool and sprawled over him. For an instant, Ralf thought he could see his shocked, screaming face in the milky translucence, then there was only a red cloud in the midst of a throbbing amoebic thing.

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?'

He tut-tutted good-humouredly and said: 'My God! the whims of a woman, indeed!'

She snuggled closer and laughed in his ear. 'Oh, well, that's what makes us so mysterious, Harry.

Our changeability. But seriously, I think maybe you're right. It is a bit late in the year for wandering about the Hungarian countryside. We'll stay the night at the inn as planned, then cut short and go on tomorrow into Budapest. It's a drive of two hours at the most. A week at Zjhack's place, where we'll be looked after like royalty, and then on to London. How does that sound?'

'Wonderful!' He took one hand from the wheel to hug her. 'And we'll be married by the end of October.'

The inn at Szolyhaza had been recommended for its comforts and original Hungarian cuisine by an innkeeper in Kecskem~t. Harry had suspected that both proprietors were related, particularly when he first laid eyes on Szolyhaza. That had been on the previous evening as they drove in over the hills.

Business in the tiny village could hardly be said to be booming. Even in the middle of the season, gone now along with the summer, Szolyhaza would be well off the map and out of reach of the ordinary tourist.

It had been too late in the day to change their minds, however, and so they had booked into the solitary inn, the largest building in the village, an ancient stone edifice of at least five and a half centuries.

And then the surprise. For the proprietor, Herr Debrec, spoke near-perfect English; their room was light and airy with large windows and a balcony (Julia was delighted at the absence of a television set and the inevitable 'Kultur' programs); and later, when they came down for a late evening meal, the food was indeed wonderful!

There was something Harry had wanted to ask Herr Debec that first evening, but sheer enjoyment of the atmosphere in the little dining room - the candlelight, the friendly clinking of glasses coming through to them from the bar, the warm fire burning bright in an old brick hearth, not to mention the food itself and the warm red local wine - had driven it from his mind. Now, as he parked the car in the tiny courtyard, it came back to him. Julia had returned it to mind with her headache and the talk ofillrnmoured Stregiocavar and the Black Stone on the hillside.

It had to do with a church - at least Harry suspected it was or had been a church, though it might just as easily have been a castle or ancient watchtower sighted on the other side of the hills beyond gaunt autumn woods. He had seen it limned almost as a silhouette against the hills as they had covered the last few miles to Szolyhaza from Kecskem~t. There had been little enough time to study the distant building before the road veered and the car climbed up through a shallow pass, but nevertheless Harry had been left with a feeling of- well, almost of dejavu - or perhaps presentiment.

The picture ofsombre ruins had brooded obscurely in his mind's eye until Herr Debec's excellent meal and luxurious bed, welcome after many hours of driving on the poor country roads, had shut the vision out.

Over the midday meal, when Herr Debec entered the dining room to replenish their glasses, Harry mentioned the old ruined church, saying he intended to drive out after lunch and have a closer look at it.

'That place, mein Herr? No, I should not advise it.'

'Oh?' Julia looked up from her meal. 'It's dangerous, is it?'

'Dangerous?'

'In poor repair - on the point of collapsing on someone?'

'No, no. Not that I am aware of, but -' he shrugged half-apologetically.

'Yes, go on,' Harry prompted him.

Debec shrugged again, his short fat body seeming to wobble uncertainly. He slicked back his prematurely greying hair and tried to smile. 'It is... very old, that place. Much older than my inn. It has seen many bad times, and perhaps something of those times still how do you say it? - yes,

"adheres" to it.'

'It's haunted!' Julia suddenly clapped her hands, causing Harry to start.

'No, not that - but then again - ' the Hungarian shook his head, fumbling with the lapels of his jacket.

He was obviously finding the conversation very uncomfortable.

'But you must explain yourself, Herr Debec,' Harry demanded. 'You've got us completely fascinated.'

'There is ... a dweller,' the man finally answered. 'An old man - a holy man, some say, but I don't believe it - who looks after... things.'

'A caretaker, you mean?' Julia asked.

'A keeper, madam, yes. He terms himself a "monk", I think, the last of his sect. I have my doubts.'

'Doubts?' Harry repeated, becoming exasperated. 'But what about?'

'Herr, I cannot explain,' Debec fluttered his hands.

'But still I advise you, do not go there. It is not a good place.'

'Now wait a min-' Harry began, but Debec cut him off.

'If you insist on going, then at least be warned: do not touch ... anything. Now I have many duties.

Please to excuse me.' He hurried from the room.

Left alone they gazed silently at each other for a moment. Then Harry cocked an eyebrow and said:

'Well?'

'Well, we have nothing else to do this afternoon, have we?' she asked.

'No, but - oh, I don't know,' he faltered, frowning. 'I'm half inclined to heed his warning.' 'But why?

Don't tell me you're superstitious, Harry?' 'No, not at all. It's just that - oh, I have this feeling, that's all.'

She looked astounded. 'Why, Harry, ! really don't know which one of you is trying hardest to have me on: you or Debrec? She tightened her mouth and nodded determinedly. 'That settles it then. We will go and have a look at the ruins, and damnation to all these old wives' tales!'

Suddenly he laughed. 'You know, Julia, there might just be some truth in what you say - about someone having us on, I mean. It's just struck me: you know this old monk Debrec was going on about? Well, I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be his uncle or something! All these hints of spooky goings-on could be just some sort of put-on, a con game, a tourist trap. And here we've fallen right into it! I'll give you odds it costs us five pounds a head just to get inside the place!' And at that they both burst out laughing.

The sky was overcast and it had started to rain when they drove away from the inn. By the time they reached the track that led off from the road and through the grey woods in the direction of the ruined church, a ground mist was curling up from the earth in white drifting tendrils.

'How's this for sinister?' Harry asked, and Julia shivered again and snuggled closer to him. 'Oh?' he said, glancing at her and smiling. 'Are you sorry we came after all, then?'

'No, but it is eerie driving through this mist. It's like floating on milk! ... Look, there's our ruined church directly ahead.'

The woods had thinned out and now high walls rose up before them, walls broken in places and tumbled into heaps of rough moss-grown masonry. Within these walls, in grounds of perhaps half an acre, the gaunt shell of a great Gothic structure reared up like the tombstone of some primordial giant. Harry drove the car through open iron gates long since rusted solid with their massive hinges.

He pulled up before a huge wooden door in that part of the building which still supported its lead-covered roof.

They left the car to rest on huge slick centuried cobbles, where the mist cast languorous tentacles about their ankles. Low over distant peaks the sun struggled bravely, trying to break through drifting layers of cloud.

Harry climbed the high stone steps to the great door and stood uncertainly before it. Julia followed him and said, with a shiver in her voice: 'Still think it's a tourist trap?'

'Uh? Oh! No, I suppose not. But I'm interested anyway. There's something about this place. A feeling almost of-'

'As if you'd been here before?'

'Yes, exactly! You feel it too?'

'No,' she answered, in fine contrary fashion. 'I just find it very drab. And I think my headache is coming back.'

For a moment or two they were silent, staring at the huge door.

'Well,' Harry finally offered, 'nothing ventured, nothing gained.' He lifted the massive iron knocker, shaped like the top half of a dog's muzzle, and let it fall heavily against the grinning metal teeth of the lower jaw. The clang of the knocker was loud in the misty stillness.

'Door creaks open,' Julia intoned, 'revealing Bela Lugosi in a black high-collared cloak. In a sepulchral voice he says: "Good evening..."' For all her apparent levity, half of the words trembled from her mouth.

Wondering how, at her age, she could act so stupidly girlish, Harry came close then to telling her to shut up. Instead he forced a grin, reflecting that it had always been one of her failings to wax witty at the wrong time. Perhaps she sensed his momentary annoyance, however, for she frowned and drew back from him fractionally. He opened his mouth to explain himself but started violently instead as, quite silently, the great door swung smoothly inward.

The opening of the door seemed almost to pull them in, as if a vacuum had been created ... the sucking rush of an express train through a station. And as they stumbled forward they saw in the gloom, the shrunken, flame-eyed ancient framed against a dim, mustysmelling background of shadows and lofty ceilings.

The first thing they really noticed of him when their eyes grew accustomed to the dimness was his filthy appearance. Dirt seemed ingrained in him! His coat, a black full-length affair with threadbare sleeves, was buttoned up to his neck where the ends of a grey tattered scarf protruded. Thin grimy wrists stood out from the coat's sleeves, blue veins showing through the dirt. A few sparse wisps of yellowish hair, thick with dandruff and probably worse, lay limp on the pale bulbous dome of his head. He could have been no more than sixty-two inches in height, but the fire that burned behind yellow eyes, and the vicious hook of a nose that followed their movements like the beak of some bird of prey, seemed to give the old man more than his share of strength, easily compensating for his lack of stature.

'I... that is, we...' Harry began.

'Ah! - English! You are English, yes? Or perhaps American?' His heavily accented voice, clotted and guttural, sounded like the gurgling sound of a black subterranean stream. Julia thought that his throat must be full of phlegm, as she clutched at Harry's arm.

'Tourists, eh?' the ancient continued. 'Come to see old M/~hrsen's books? Or perhaps you don't know why you've come?' He clasped his hands tightly together, threw back his head, and gave a short coughing laugh.

'Why, we ... that is ...' Harry stumbled again, feeling foolish, wondering just why they had come.

'Please enter,' said the old man, standing aside and ushering them deeper, irresistibly in. 'It is the books, of course it is. They all come to see M/~hrsen's books sooner or later. And of course there is the view from the tower. And the catacombs...'

'It was the ruins,' Harry finally found his voice. 'We saw the old building from the road, and -'

'Picturesque, eh. The ruins in the trees... Ah! - but there are other things here. You will see.'

'Actually,' Julia choked it out, fighting with a sudden attack of nausea engendered by the noisome aspect of their host, 'we don't have much time...'

The old man caught at their elbows, yellow eyes flashing in the gloomy interior. 'Time? No time?'

his hideous voice grew intense in a moment. 'True, how true. Time is running out for all of us!'

It seemed then that a draft, coming from nowhere, caught at the great door and eased it shut. As the gloom deepened Julia held all the more tightly to Harry's arm, but the shrunken custodian of the place had turned his back to guide them on with an almost peremptory: 'Follow me.'

And follow him they did.

Drawn silently along in his wake, like seabirds following an ocean liner through the night, they climbed stone steps, entered a wide corridor with an arched ceiling, finally arrived at a room with a padlocked door. M~hrsen unlocked the door, turned, bowed, and ushered them through.

'My library,' he told them, 'my beautiful books.' With the opening of the door light had flooded the corridor, a beam broad as the opening in which musty motes were caught, drifting, eddying about in the disturbed air. The large room - bare except for a solitary chair, a table, and tier upon tier of volumeweighted shelves arrayed against the walls - had a massive window composed of many tiny panes.

Outside the sun had finally won its battle with the clouds; it shone wanly afar, above the distant mountains, its autumn beam somehow penetrating the layers of grime on the small panes.

'Dust!' cried the ancient. øl~he dust of decades - of decay! I cannot keep it down.' He turned to them.

'But see, you must sign.'

'Sign?' Harry questioned. 'Oh, I see. A visitors' book.' 'Indeed, for how else might I remember those who visit me here? See, look at all the names...'

The old man had taken a leather-bound volume from the table. It was not a thick book, and as M~hrsen turned the parchment leaves they could see that each page bore a number of signatures, each signature being dated. Not one entry was less than ten years old. Harry turned back the pages to the first entry and stared at it. The ink had faded with the centuries so that he could not easily make out the ornately flourished signature. The date, on the other hand, was still quite clear:

'Frfihling, 1611.'

'An old book indeed,' he commented, q~ut recently, it seems, visitors have been scarce...' Though he made no mention of it, frankly he could see little point in his signing such a book.

'Sign nevertheless,' the old man gurgled, almost as if he could read Harry's mind. 'Yes, you must, and the madam too.' Harry reluctantly took out a pen, and M~hrsen watched intently as they scribbled their signatures.

'Ah, good, good!' he chortled, rubbing his hands together. Here we have it - two more visitors, two more names. It makes an old man happy, sometimes, to remember his visitors... And sometimes it makes him sad.'

'Oh?' Julia said, interested despite herself. ~fay sad?'

'Because I know that many of them who visited me here are no more, of course!' He blinked great yellow eyes at them.

'But look, look here,' he continued, pointing a grimy sharp-nailed finger at a signature. ~his one:

"Justin Geoffrey, 12 June, 1926." A young American peet, he was. A man of great promise. Alas, he gazed too long upon the Black Stone!'

The Black Stone?' Harry frowned. 'But-'

'And here, two years earlier: "Charles Dexter Ward" - another American, come to see my books.

And here, an Englishman this time, one of your own countrymen, "John Kingsley Brown."' He let the pages flip through filthy fingers. 'And here another, but much more recently. See: "Hamilton Tharpe, November, 1959." Ah, I remember Mr Tharpe well! We shared many a rare discussion here in this very room. He aspired to the priesthood, but - ' He sighed. 'Yes, seekers after knowledge all, but many of them ill-fated, I fear...'

'You mentioned the Black Stone,' Julia said. 'I wondered - ?'

'Hmm? Oh, nothing. An old legend, nothing more. It is believed to be very bad luck to gaze upon the stone.'

'Yes,' Harry nodded. 'We were told much the same thing in Stregoicavar.'

'Ah!' M~hrsen immediately cried, snapping shut the book of names, causing his visitors to jump. 'So you, too, have seen the Black Stone?' He returned the volume to the table, then regarded them again, nodding curiously. Teeth yellow as his eyes showed as he betrayed a sly, suggestive smile.

'Now see here -' Harry began, irrational alarm and irritation building in him, welling inside.

M~hrsen's attitude, however, changed on the instant. 'A myth, a superstition, a fairy story!' he cried, holding out his hands in the manner of a conjurer

who has nothing up his sleeve. 'After all, what is a stone but a stone?'

'We'll have to be going,' Julia said in a faint voice. Harry noticed how she leaned on him, how her hand trembled as she clutched his arm.

'Yes,' he told their wretched host, 'I'm afraid we really must go.'

'But you have not seen the beautiful books!' M~hrsen protested. 'Look, look -' Down from a shelf he pulled a pair of massive antique tomes and opened them on the table. They were full of incredible, dazzling illuminated texts; and despite themselves, their feelings of strange revulsion, Harry and Julia handled the ancient works and admired their great beauty.

'And this book, and this.' M5hrsen piled literary treasures before them. 'See, are they not beautiful.

And now you are glad you came, yes?'

'Why, yes, I suppese we are,' Harry grudgingly replied.

'Good, good! I will be one moment - some refreshment - please look at the books. Enjoy them...'

And M~hrsen was gone, shuffling quickly out of the door and away into gloom.

These books,' Julia said as soon as they were alone. 'They must be worth a small fortune!'

'And there are thousands of them,' Harry answered, his voice awed and not a little envious. 'But what do you think of the old boy?'

'He - frightens me,' she shuddered. 'And the way he smells!'

'Ssh? he held a finger up to his lips. 'He'll hear you. Where's he gone, anyway?'

'He said something about refreshment. I certainly hope he doesn't think I'll eat anything he's prepared!'

'Look here!' Harry called. He had moved over to a bookshelf near the window and was fingering the spines of a particularly musty-looking row of books. 'Do you know, I believe I recognize some of these titles? My father was always interested in the occult, and I can remember - '

'The occult?' Julia echoed, cutting him off, her voice nervous again. He had not noticed it before, but she was starting to look her age. It always happened when her nerves became frazzled, and then all the makeup in the world could not remove the stress lines.

'The occult, yes,' he replied. 'You know, the "Mystic Arts", the "Supernatural", and what have you.

But what a collection! There are books here in Old German, in Latin, Dutch - and listen to some of the titles:

'De Lapide Philosophico . . . De Vermis Mysteriis . . . Othuum Omnicia ... Liber Ivonis ...

Necronomicon.' He gave a low whistle, then: 'I wonder what the British Museum would offer for this lot?

They must be near priceless!'

'They are priceless!' came a guttural gloating cry from the open door. M~hrsen entered, bearing a tray with a crystal decanter and three large crystal glasses. 'But please, I ask you not to touch them.

They are the pride of my whole library.'

The old man put the tray upon an uncluttered corner of the table, unstoppered the decanter, and poured liberal amounts of wine. Harry came to the table, lifted his glass, and touched it to his lips.

The wine was deep, red, sweet. For a second he frowned, then his eyes opened in genuine appreciation. 'Excellent!' he declared.

'The best,' MShrsen agreed, 'and almost one hundred years old. I have only six more bottles of this vintage. I keep them in the catacombs. When you are ready you shall see the catacombs, if you so desire.

Ah, but there is something down there that you will find most interesting, compared to which my books are dull, uninteresting things.'

'I don't really think that I care to see your - ' Julia began, but MShrsen quickly interrupted.

'A few seconds only,' he pleaded, 'which you will remember for the rest of your lives. Let me fill your glasses.'

The wine had warmed her, calming her treacherous nerves. She could see that Harry, despite his initial reservations, was now eager to accompany M~hrsen to the catacombs.

'We have a little time,' Harry urged. 'Perhaps - ?' 'Of course,' the old man gurgled, 'time is not so short, eh?' He threw back his own drink and noisily smacked his lips, then shepherded his guests out of the room, mumbling as he did so: 'Come, come - this way - only a moment - no more than that.'

And yet again they followed him, this time because there seemed little else to do; deeper into the gloom of the high-ceilinged corridor, to a place where MShrsen took candles from a recess in the wall and lit them; then on down two, three flights of stone steps into a nitrous vault deep beneath the ruins; and from there a dozen or so paces to the subterranean room in which, reclining upon a couch of faded silk cushions, MShrsen's revelation awaited them.

The room itself was dry as dust, but the air passing gently through held the merest promise of moisture, and perhaps this rare combination had helped preserve the object on the couch. There she lay - central in her curtain-veiled cave, behind a circle of worn, vaguely patterned stone tablets reminiscent of a miniature Stonehenge - a centuried mummy-parchment figure, arms crossed over her abdomen, remote in repose. And yet somehow... unquiet.

At her feet lay a leaden casket, a box with a hinged lid, closed, curiously like a small coffin. A design on the lid, obscure in the poor light, seemed to depict some mythic creature, half-toad, half-dog. Short tentacles or feelers fringed the thing's mouth. Harry traced the dusty raised outline of this chimera with a forefinger.

'It is said she had a pet- a companion creaturewhich slept beside her bed in that casket,' said M/~hrsen, again anticipating Harry's question.

Curiosity overcame Julia's natural aversion. 'Who is ... who was she?'

The last true Priestess of the Cult,' M/ihrsen answered. 'She died over four hundred years ago.' Re Turks?' Harry asked.

The Turks, yes. But if it had not been them... who can say? The cult has always had its opponents.'

The cult? Don't you mean the order?' Harry looked puzzled. 'I've heard that you're - ah - a man of God.

And if this place was once a church -'

'A man of God?' M(ihrsen laughed low in his throat. 'No, not of your God, my friend. And this was not a church but a temple. And not an order, a cult. I am its priest, one of the last, but one day there may be more. It is a cult which can never die.' His voice, quiet now, nevertheless echoed like a warning, intensified by the acoustics of the cave.

'I think,' said Julia, her own voice weak once more, 'that we should leave now, Harry.'

'Yes, yes,' said M/ihrsen, 'the air down here, it does not agree with you. By all means leave - but first there is the legend.'

'Legend?' Harry repeated him. 'Surely not another legend?'

'It is said,' Miihrsen quickly continued, 'that if one holds her hand and makes a wish...'

'No!' Julia cried, shrinking away from the mummy. '! couldn't touch that!'

'Please, please,' said M/ihrsen, holding out his arms to her, 'do not be afraid. It is only a myth, nothing more.'

Julia stumbled away from him into Harry's arms. He held her for a moment until she had regained control of herself, then turned to the old man. 'All right, how do I go about it? Let me hold her hand and make a wish - but then we must be on our way. I mean, you've been very hospitable, but -'

'I understand,' M/~hrsen answered. 'This is not the place for a gentle, sensitive lady. But did you say that you wished to take the hand of the priestess?'

'Yes,' Harry answered, thinking to himself: 'if that's the only way to get to hell out of here!'

Julia stepped uncertainly, shudderingly back against the curtained wall as Harry approached the couch.

M/~hrsen directed him to kneel; he did so, taking a leathery claw in his hand. The elbow joint of the mummy moved with suprising ease as he lifted the hand from her withered abdomen. It felt not at all dry but quite cool and firm. In his mind's eye Harry tried to look back through the centuries. He wondered who the girl had really been, what she had been like. 'I wish,' he said to himself, 'that I could know you as you were...'

Simultaneous with the unspoken thought, as if engendered of it, Julia's bubbling shriek of terror shattered the silence of the vault, setting Harry's hair on end and causing him to leap back away from the mummy. Furthermore, it had seemed that at the instant of Julia's scream, a tingle as of an electrical charge had travelled along his arm into his body.

Now Harry could see what had happened. As he had taken the mummy's withered claw in his hand, so Julia had been driven to clutch at the curtains for support. Those curtains had not been properly hung but merely draped over the stone surface of the cave's walls; Julia had brought them rustling down. Her scream had originated in being suddenly confronted by the hideous bas-reliefs which completely covered the walls, figures and shapes that seemed to leap and cavort in the flickering light of M~hrsen's candles.

Now Julia sobbed and threw herself once more into Harry's arms, clinging to him as he gazed in astonishment and revulsion at the monstrous carvings. The central theme of these was an octopod creature of vast proportions - winged, tentacled, and dragonlike, and yet with a vaguely anthropomorphic outline - and around it danced all the demons of hell. Worse than this main horror itself, however, was what its attendant minions were doing to the tiny but undeniably human figures which also littered the walls. And there, too, as if directing the nightmare activities of a group of these small, horned horrors, was a girl - with a leering dog-toad abortion that cavorted gleefully about her feet!

Hieronymus Bosch himself could scarcely have conceived such a scene of utterly depraved torture and degradation, and horror finally burst into livid rage in Harry as he turned on the exultant keeper of this nighted crypt. 'A temple, you said, you old devil! A temple to what? - to that obscenity?'

'To Him, yes!' M~hrsen exulted, thrusting his hooknose closer to the rock-cut carvings and holding up the candles the better to illuminate them. 'To Cthulhu of the tentacled face, and to all his lesser brethren.'

Without another word, more angry than he could ever remember being, Harry reached out and bunched up the front of the old man's coat in his clenched fist. He shook M~hrsen like a bundle of moth-eaten rags, cursing and threatening him in a manner which later he could scarcely recall.

'God!' he finally shouted. 'It's a damn shame the Turks didn't raze this whole nest of evil right down to the ground! You... you can lead the way out of here right now, at once, or I swear I'll break your neck where you stand!'

'If I drop the candles,' M~hrsen answered, his voice like black gas bubbles breaking the surface of a swamp, 'we will be in complete darkness!'

'No, please!' Julia cried. 'Just take us out of here...' 'If you value your dirty skin,' Harry added, 'you'll keep a good grip on those candles!'

M~hrsen's eyes blazed sulphurous yellow in the candlelight and he leered hideously. Harry turned him about, gripped the back of his grimy neck, and thrust him ahead, out of the blasphemous temple. With Julia stumbling in the rear, they made their way to a flight of steps that led up into daylight, emerging some twenty-five yards from the main entrance.

They came out through tangled cobwebs into low decaying vines and shrubbery that almost hid their exit. Julia gave one long shudder, as if shaking off a nightmare, and then hastened to the car.

Not once did she look back.

Harry released MShrsen who stood glaring at him, shielding his yellow eyes against the weak light.

They confronted each other in this fashion for a few moments, until Harry turned his back on the little man to follow Julia to the car. It was then that MShrsen whispered:

'Do not forget: I did not force you to do anything. I did not make you touch anything. You came here of your own free will.'

When Harry turned to throw a few final harsh words at him, the old man was already disappearing down into the bowels of the ruins.

In the car as they drove along the track through the sparsely clad trees to the road, Julia was very quiet. At last she said: 'That was quite horrible. I didn't know such people existed.'

'Nor did I,' Harry answered.

'I feel filthy,' she continued. 'I need a bath. What on earth did that creature want with us?'

'I haven't the faintest idea. I think he must be insane.'

'Harry, let's not go straight back to the inn. Just drive around for a while.' She rolled down her window, breathing deeply of the fresh air that flooded in before lying back in the seat and closing her eyes. He looked at her, thinking: 'God! - but you're certainly showing your age now, my sweet'

... but he couldn't really blame her.

There were two or three tiny villages within a few miles of Szolyhaza, centres of peasant life compared to which Szolyhaza was a veritable capital. These were mainly farming communities, some of which were quite picturesque. Nightfall was still several hours away and the rain had moved on, leaving a freshness in the air and a beautiful warm glow over the hills, so that they felt inclined to park the car by the roadside and enjoy a drink at a tiny Gasthaus.

Sitting there by a wide window that overlooked the street, while Julia composed herself and recovered from her ordeal, Harry notice several posters on the wall of the building opposite. He had seen similar posters in Szolyhaza, and his knowledge of the language was just sufficient for him to realize that the event in question - whatever that might be - was taking place tonight. He determined, out of sheer curiosity, to question Herr Debrec about it when they returned to the inn.

After all, there could hardly be very much of importance happening in an area so outof-the-way. It had alread been decided that nothing should be said about their visit to the ruins, the exceedingly unpleasant hour spent in the doubtful company of Herr M/ihrsen.

Twilight was settling over the village when they got back. Julia, complaining of'a splitting headache, bathed and went straight to her bed. Harry, on the other hand, felt strangely restless, full of physical and mental energy. When Julia asked him to fetch her a glass of water and a sleeping pill, he dissolved two pills, thus ensuring that she would remain undisturbed for the night. When she was asleep he tidied himself up and went down to the bar.

After a few drinks he buttonholed Herr Debrec and questioned him about the posters; what was happening tonight? Debec told him that this was to be the first of three nights of celebration. It was the local shooting carnival, the equivalent of the German Schiitzenfest, when prizes would be presented to the district's best rifle shots.

There would be sideshows and thrilling rides on machines specially brought in from the cities -

members of the various shooting teams would be dressed all in hunter's green - beer and wine would flow like water and there would be good things to eat - oh, and all the usual trappings of a festival. This evening's main attraction was to be a masked ball, held in a great barn on the outskirts of a neighbouring village. It would be the beginning of many a fine romance. If the Herr wished to attend the festivities, Debrec could give him directions... ?

Harry declined the offer and ordered another drink. It was odd the effect the brandy was having on him tonight: he was not giddy - it took a fair amount to do that - but there seemed to be a peculiar excitement in him. He felt much the same as when, in the old days, he'd pursued gay young debutantes in the Swiss resorts or on the Riviera.

Half an hour and two drinks later he checked that Julia was fast asleep, obtained directions to the Schiitzenfest, told Herr Debrec that his wife was on no account to be disturbed, and drove away from the inn in fairly high spirits. The odds, he knew, were all against him, but it would be good fun and there could be no possible comeback; after all, they were leaving for Budapest in the morning, and what the eye didn't see, the heart wouldn't grieve over. He began to wish that his command of the language went a little further than 'good evening' and 'another brandy, please.'

Still, there had been plenty of times in the past when language hadn't mattered at all, when talking would have been a positive hindrance.

In no time at all he reached his destination, and at first glance he was disappointed. Set in the fields beside a hamlet, the site of the festivities was noisy and garishly lit, in many ways reminiscent of the country fairgrounds of England. All very well for teenage couples, but rather gauche for a civilized, sophisticated adult. Nevertheless, that peculiar tingling with which Harry's every fibre seemed imbued had not lessened, seemed indeed heightened by the whirling machines and gaudy, gypsyish caravans and sideshows; and so he parked the car and threaded his way through the swiftly gathering crowd.

Hung with bunting and festooned with balloons like giant ethereal multihued grapes, the great barn stood open to the night. Inside, a Costumed band turned up while masked singles and couples in handsome attire gathered, preparing to dance and flirt the night away. Framed for a moment in the huge open door, frozen by the camera of his mind, Harry saw among the crowd the figure of a girl -

a figure of truly animal magnetism - dressed almost incongruously in peasant's costume.

For a second masked eyes met his own and fixed upon them across a space of only a few yards, and then she was gone. But the angle of her neck as she had looked at him, the dark unblinking eyes behind her mask, the fleeting, knowing smile on her lips before she turned away - all of these things had spoken volumes.

That weird feeling, the tingling that Harry felt, suddenly suffused his whole being. His head reeled and his mouth went dry; he had consciously to fight the excitement rising from within; following which he headed dizzily for the nearest wine tent, gratefully to slake his thirst. Then, bolstered by the wine, heart beating fractionally faster than usual, he entered the cavernous barn and casually cast about for the girl whose image still adorned his mind's eye.

But his assumed air of casual interest quickly dissipated as his eyes swept the vast barn without sighting their target, until he was about to step forward and go among the tables in pursuit of his quarry.

At that point a hand touched his arm, a heady perfume reached him, and a voice said: ~here is an empty table on the balcony. Would you like to sit?'

Her voice was not at all cultured, but her English was very good; and while certainly there was an element of peasant in her, well, there was much more than that. Deciding to savour her sensuous good looks later when they were seated, he barely glanced at her but took her hand and proceeded across the floor of the barn. They climbed woeden stairs to an open balcony set with tables and cane chairs. On the way he spoke to a waiter and ordered a bottle of wine, a plate of dainties.

They sat at their tiny table overlooking the dance floor, toying with their glasses and pretending to be interested in completely irrelevant matters. He spoke of London, of skiing in Switzerland, the beach at Cannes. She mentioned the mountains, the markets of Budapest, the bloody history of the country, particularly of this region. He was offhand about his jetsetting, not becoming ostentatious; she picked her words carefully, rarely erring in pronunciation. He took in little of what she said and guessed that she wasn't hearing him. But their eyes - at first rather fleetingly - soon became locked; their hands seemed to meet almost involuntarily atop the table.