New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

My sister refused to accompany me out to Culebra Avenue; she saw no attraction in visiting the place once occupied by a fugitive MalaysJan, nor did she share my pulp-novel fantasy that, by actually living there myself, I might uncover some clue unknown to police. ('Thanks to the celebrated author of Beyond the Garve...') I went alone, by cab, taking with me half a dozen volumes from the branch library. Beyond the reading, I had no other plans.

The Barkleigh was a pink adobe building two stories tall, surmounted by an ancient neon sign on which the dust lay thick in the early afternoon sunlight. Similar establishments lined the block on both sides, each more depressing than the last. There was no elevator here and, as ! learned to my disappointment, no rooms available on the first floor, the staircase looked like it was going to be an effort.

In the office downstairs I inquired, as casually as I could, which room the notorious Mr Djaktu had occupied; I'd hoped, in fact, to be assigned it, or one nearby. But I was doomed to disappointment. The preoccupied little Cuban behind the counter had been hired only six weeks before and claimed to know nothing of the matter; in halting English he explained that the proprietress, a Mrs Zimmerman, had just left for New Jersey to visit relatives and would not be back till Christmas. Obviously I could forget about gossip.

By this point ! was half tempted to cancel my visit, and I confess that what kept me there was not so much a sense of honour as the desire for two days' separation from Maude, who, having been on her own for nearly a decade, was rather difficult to live with.

I followed the Cuban upstairs, watching my suitcase bump rhythmically against his legs, and was led down the hall to a room facing the rear. The place smelled vaguely of salt air and hair oil; the sagging bed had served many a desperate holiday. A small cement terrace overlooked the yard and a vacant lot behind it, the latter so overgrown with weeds and the grass in the yard so long unmown that it was difficult to tell where one began and the other ended. A clump of palms rose somewhere in the middle of this no-man'sland, impossibly tall and thin, with only a few stiflened leaves to grace the tops. On the ground below them lay several rotting coconuts.

This was my view the first night when I returned after dining at a nearby restaurant. I felt unusually tired and soon went inside to sleep. The night being cool, there was no need for the air conditioner; as I lay in the huge bed I could hear people stirring in the adjoining room, the hiss of a bus moving down the avenue, and the rustle of palm leaves in the wind.

I spent part of the next morning composing a letter to Mrs Zimmerman, to be held for her return.

After the long walk to a coffee shop for lunch, I napped. After dinner I did the same. With the TV

turned on for company, a garrulous blur at the other side of the room, I went through the pile of books on my night table, final cullings from the bottom of the travel shelf; most of them hadn't been taken out since the thirties. I found nothing of interest in any of them, at least upon first inspection, but before turning out the light I noticed that one, the reminiscences of a Colonel E. G. Paterson, was provided with an index. Though I looked in vain for the demon Shoo Goro~n, I found reference to it under a variant spelling.

The author, no doubt long deceased, had spent most of his life in the Orient. His interest in Southeast Asia was slight, and the passage in question consequently brief:

... Despite the richness and variety of their folklore, however, they have nothing akin to the Malay shugoran, a kind of bogey-man used to frighten naughty children. The traveller hears many conflicting descriptions of it, some bordering on the obscene. (Oran, of course, is Malay for "man,"

while shug, which here connotes "sniffing" or "questing," means literally, "elephant's trunk.") I well recall the hide which hung over the bar at the Traders' Club in Singapore, and which, according to tradition, represented the infant of this fabulous creature; its wings were black, like the skin of a Hottentot. Shortly after the War a regimental surgeon was passing through on his way back to Gibraltar and, after due examination, pronounced it the dried-out skin of a rather large catfish. He was never asked back.

I kept my light on until I was ready to fall asleep, listening to the wind rattle the palm leaves and whine up and down the row of terraces. As I switched off the light I half expected to see a shadowy shape at the window, but I saw, as the poet says, nothing but the night.

The next morning ! packed my bag and left, aware that my stay in the hotel had proved fruitless. I returned to my sister's house to find her in agitated conversation with the druggist from upstairs; she was in a terrible state and said she'd been trying to reach me all morning. She had awakened to find the flower box by her bedroom window overturned and the shrubbery beneath it trampled. Down the side of the house ran two immense slash marks several yards apart, starting at the roof and continuing straight to the ground.

My gawd, how the years fly. Stolidly middle-aged - when only yesterday I was young and eager and awed by the mystery of an unfolding world. – H.P LOVECRAFT, 8/20/1926

There is little more to report. Here the tale degenerates into an unsifted collection of items which may or may not be related: pieces of a puzzle for those who fancy themselves puzzle fans, a random swarm of dots, and in the centre, a wide unwinking eye.

Of course, my sister left the house on Indian Creek that very day and took rooms for herself in a downtown Miami hotel. Subsequently she moved inland to live with a friend in a green stucco bungalow several miles from the Everglades, third in a row of nine just off the main highway. I am seated in its den as I write this. After the friend died my sister lived on here alone, making the forty-mile bus trip to Miami only on special occasions: theatre with a group of friends, one or two shopping trips a year. She had everything else she needed right here in town.

I returned to New York, caught a chill, and finished out the winter in a hospital bed, visited rather less often than I might have wished by my niece and her boy. Of course, the drive in from Brooklyn is nothing to scoff at.

One recovers far more slowly when one has reached my age; it's a painful truth we all learn if we live long enough. Howard's life was short, but in the end I think he understood. At thirty-five he could deride as madness a friend's 'hankering after youth,' yet ten years later he'd learned to mourn the loss of his own. 'The years tell on one!' he'd written. 'You young fellows don't know how lucky you are!'

Age is indeed the great mystery. How else could Terry have emblazoned his grandmother's sundial with that saccharine nonsense?

Grow old along with me; The best is yet to be.

True, the motto is traditional to sundials - but that young fool hadn't even kept to the rhyme. With diabolical imprecision he had written, 'The best is yet to come' - a line to make me gnash my teeth, if I had any left to gnash.

! spent most of the spring indoors cooking myself wretched little meals and working ineffectually on a literary project that had occupied my thoughts. It was discouraging to find that I wrote so slowly now, and changed so much. My sister only reinforced the mood when, sending me a rather salacious story she'd found in the Enquirer - about the 'thing like a vacuum cleaner' 'that snaked through a Swedish sailor's porthole and 'made his face all purple' - she wrote at the top, 'See? Right out of Lovecraft.'

It was not long after this that I received, to my surprise, a letter from Mrs Zimmerman, bearing profuse apologies for having misplaced my enquiry until it turned up again during 'spring cleaning.'

(It is hard to imagine any sort of cleaning at the Barkleigh Hotella, spring or otherwise, but even this late reply was welcome.) 'I am sorry that the minister who disappeared was a friend of yours,'

she wrote. 'I'm sure he must have been a fine gentleman.

'You asked me for "the particulars," but from your note you seem to know the whole story. There is really nothing I can tell you that I did not tell the police, though I do not think they ever released all of it to the papers. Our records show that our guest Mr Djaktu arrived here nearly a year ago, at the end of June, and ]eft the last week of August owing me a week's rent plus various damages which I no longer have much hope of recovering, though I have written the Malaysian Embassy about it.

'In other respects he was a proper boarder, paid regularly, and in fact hardly ever left his room except to walk in the back yard from time to time, or stop at the grocer's. (We have found it impossible to discourage eating in rooms.) My only complaint is that in the middle of the summer he may have had a small coloured child living with him without our knowledge, until one of the maids heard him singing to it as she passed his room. She did not recognize the language, but said she thought it might be Hebrew. (The poor woman, now sadly taken from us, was barely able to read.) When she next made up the room, she told me that Dr Djaktu claimed the child was '~is," and that she left because she caught a glimpse of it watching her from the bathroom. She said it was naked. I did not speak of this at the time, as I do not feel it is my place to pass judgement on the morals of my guests. Anyway, we never saw the child again, and we made sure the room was completely sanitary for our next guests. Believe me, we have received nothing but good comments on our facilities. We think they are excellent and hope you agree, and I also hope you will be our guest again the next time you come to Florida.'

Unfortunately, the next time I came to Florida was for my sister's funeral late that winter. I know now, as I did not know then, that she had been in ill health for most of the previous year, but I cannot help thinking that the so-called 'incidents' - the senseless acts of vandalism directed against lone women in the South Florida area, culminating in several reported attacks by an unidentified prowler - may have hastened her death.

When I arrived here with Ellen to take care of my sister's affairs and arrange for the funeral, I intended to remain a week or two at most, seeing to the transfer of the property. Yet somehow I lingered, long after Ellen had gone. Perhaps it was the thought of that New York winter, grown harsher with each passing year; I just couldn't find the strength to go back. Nor, in the end, could I bring myself to sell this house; if I am trapped here, it's a trap I'm resigned to. Besides, moving has never much agreed with me; when I grow tired of this little room - and I do - I can think of nowhere else to go. I've seen all the world I want to see. This simple place is now my home - and I feel certain it will be my last. The calender on the wall tells me it's been almost three months since I moved in. I know that somewhere in its remaining pages you will find the date of my death.

The past week has seen a new outbreak of the 'incidents.' Last night's was the most dramatic by far. I can recite it almost word for word from the morning news. Shortly before midnight Mrs Florence Cavanaugh, a housewife living at 24 Alyssum Terrace, South Princeten, was about to close the curtains in her front room when she saw, peering through the window at her, what she described as 'a large Negro man wearing a gas mask or scuba outfit.' Mrs Cavanaugh, who was dressed only in her nightgown, fell back from the window and screamed for her husband, asleep in the next room, but by the time he arrived the Negro had made good his escape.

Local police favour the 'scuba' theory, since near the window they've discovered footprints that may have been made by a heavy man in swim fins. But they haven't been able to explain why anyone would wear underwater gear so many miles from water.

The report usually concludes with the news that 'Mr and Mrs Cavanaugh could not be reached for comment.'

The reason I have taken such an interest in the case - sufficient, anyway, to memorize the above details is that I know the Cavanaughs rather well. They are my next-door neighbours.

Call it an ageing writer's ego, if you like, but somehow I can't help thinking that last evening's visit was meant for me. These little green bungalows all look alike in the dark.

Well, there's still a little night left outside - time enough to rectify the error. I'm not going anywhere.

I think, in fact, it will be a rather appropriate end for a man of my pursuits - to be absorbed into the denouement of another man's tale.

Grow old along with me; The best is yet to come.

Tell me, Howard: how long before it's my turn to see the black face pressed to my window?

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

S WARNES

My memories are very confused. There is even much doubt as to where they begin; for at times I feel appalling vistas of years stretching behind me, while at other times as if the present moment were an isolated point in a grey formless infinity. I am not even certain how I am communicating this message. While I know I am speaking, I have a vague impression that some strange and perhaps terrible mediation will be needed to bear what I say to the parts where ! wish to be heard.

My identity, too, is bewilderingly cloudy. I seem to have suffered a great shock - perhaps from some utterly monstrous outgrowth of my cycles of unique, incredible experience.

These cycles of experience, of course, all stem from that worm-riddled book. I remember when I found it in a dimly lighted place near the black oily river where the mists always swirl. That place was very old, and the ceiling-high shelves full of rotting volumes reached back endlessly through windowless inner rooms and alcoves. There were, besides, great formless heaps of books on the floor and in crude bins; and it was in one of these heaps that I found the thing. I did not learn its title at the time, for the early pages were missing; but it fell open towards the end and gave me a glimpse of something which sent my senses reeling.

There was a formula - a sort of list of things to say and do - which I recognized as something black and forbidden; something which I had read of before in future paragraphs of mixed abhorrence and fascination penned by those strange ancient delvers into the universe's guarded secrets whose decaying texts I loved to absorb. It was a key - a guide - to certain gateways and transitions of which mystics have dreamed and whispered since the race was young, and which lead to freedoms and discoveries beyond the three dimensions and realms of life and matter that we know. Not for centuries had any man recalled its vital substance or known where to find it, but this book was very old indeed. No printing press, but the hand of some halfcrazed monk, had traced these ominous Latin phrases in uncials of awesome antiquity.

I remember how the old man leered and tittered, and made a curious sign with his hand when I bore it away. He had refused to take pay for it, and only long afterwards did I guess why. As I hurried home through those narrow winding mist-cloaked waterfront streets, I had a frightful impression of being stealthily followed by softly padding feet. The centuried, tottering houses on both sides seemed alive with a fresh and morbid malignity - as if some hitherto closed channel of evil understanding had abruptly been opened. I felt that those walls and overhanging gables of mildewed brick and fungoid plaster and timber - with eyelike diamond-paned windows that leered -

could hardly desist from advancing and crushing me ... yet I had read only the least fragment of that blasphemous rune before closing the book and bringing it away.

I remember how I read the book at last - whitefaced, and locked in the attic room that I had long devoted to strange searchings. The great house was very still, for I had not gone up till after midnight. I think I had a family then - though the details are very uncertain - and I know there were many servants. Just what the year was, I cannot say; for since then I have known many ages and dimensions, and have had all my notions of time dissolved and refashioned. It was by the light of candles that I read - I recall the relentless dripping of the wax - and there were chimes that came every now and then from distant belfries. I seemed to keep track of those chimes with a peculiar intentness, as if I feared to hear some very remote, intruding note among them.

Then came the first scratching and fumbling at the dormer window that looked out high above the other roofs of the city. It came as I droned aloud the ninth verse of that primal lay, and I knew amidst my shudders what it meant. For he who passes the gateways always wins a shadow, and never again can he be alone. I had evoked - and the book was indeed all I had suspected. That night I passed the gateway to a vortex of twisted time and vision, and when morning found me in the attic room I saw in the walls and shelves and fittings that which I had never seen before.

Nor could I ever after see the world as I had known it. Mixed with the present scene was always a little of the past and a little of the future, and every oncefamiliar object loomed alien in the new perspective brought by my widened sight. From then on I walked in a fantastic dream of unknown and half-known shapes; and with each new gateway crossed, the less plainly could I recognize the things of the narrow sphere to which I had so long been bound. What I saw about me, none else saw; and I grew doubly silent and aloof lest I be thought mad. Dogs had a fear of me, for they felt the outside shadow which never left my side. But still I read more - in hidden, forgotten books and scrolls to which my new vision led me - and pushed through fresh gateways of space and being and lifepatterns towards the core of the unknown cosmos.

I remember the night I made the five concentric circles of fire on the floor, and stood in the innermost one chanting that monstrous litany the messenger from Tartary had brought. The walls melted away, and I was swept by a black wind through gulfs of fathomless grey with the needlelike pinnacles of unknown mountains miles below me. After a while there was utter blackness, and then the light of myriad stars forming strange alien constellations. Finally I saw a green-litten plain far below me, and discerned on it the twisted towers of a city built in no fashion I had ever known or read of or dreamed of. As I floated closer to that city I saw a great square building of stone in an open space, and felt a hideous fear clutching at me. I screamed and struggled, and after a blankness was again in my attic room sprawled fiat over the five phosphorescent circles on the floor. In that night's wandering there was no more of strangeness than in many a former night's wandering; but there was more of terror because I knew I was closer to those outside gulfs and worlds than I had ever been before. Thereafter I was more cautious with my incantations, for I had no wish to be cut off from my body and from the earth in unknown abysses whence I could never return.

Nevertheless, wary as I was, still my grasp on familiar scenes faded into infiniteness as my new unholy vision asserted itself and made my every glimpse of reality seem unreal and geometrically disturbing. My hearing also became affected. The chimes that came from the distant belfries sounded more ominous, terrifyingly ethereal, as if the sound was carried by disembodied wraiths from nether regions, where tormented souls eternally cry out in anguish and pain. With every passing day I drew farther away from temporal surroundings, aeons removed from earthly perspectives, and dwelt among the unnameable. Time became extrinsic, and my memory of events and people I had known before ever I acquired the book drifted away on dim mists of unreality no matter how desperately I attempted to cling to them.

I remember the first time I heard the voices; weird unhuman sibilant voices, issuing forth from the outer reaches of blackest space, where amorphous beings cavort and caper before a great black fetor-belching idol worn by the passing of uncountable centuries. With the commencement of these voices came visions of horrifying intensity, dread chimeras of dual black and green suns, shining on towering monoliths and citadels of evil, which rose, tier upon tier, as if seeking to escape their earthly attachments. But these dreams and illusions were as nothing compared to the dread colossus that was later to encroach upon my consciousness; even now I cannot recall the horror in its entirety, but when ! think on it I have an impression of vastness, of size beyond measure, and groping tentacles, pulsating, as if with an intelligence of their own, alive with malignant depravity.

Around this base enormity pranced cadaverous monstrosities, their voices rising in a cacophonous chant:

'Mwl'fgah pywfg fhtagn Gh'tyaf nglyf lghya.'

These horrors were with me always as was that shadow from beyond.

Still I would study the books and scrolls and pass blacker gateways into unknown dimensions, where dark beings would instruct me in arts so infernal that even the most prosaic of minds was likely to be blasted at the thought of them.

I remember how I discovered the title of the book; it was late at night as I sat poring over the vermiculated pages that I came across a passage which threw light on the mysterious volume:

'Nyarlathotep rules in Sharnoth, beyond space and time; in his gigantic ebony palace he awaits his second coming, served by his minions he broods and festers in blackest night.

'Let none meddle with spells and enchantments concerning him, for he is quick to trap the unwary. Let the ignorant beware, heed the Black Tome, for terrible indeed is the wrath of Nyarlathotep.'

In secret delvings I had found mention of this 'Black Tome': that legendary manuscript written centuries ago by the great necromancer Alsophocus, who lived in the land of Etongill before ever modern man had taken his first uncertain steps upon the earth.

The mystery was explained; this was indeed the blasphemous Black Tome. With this knowledge I eagerly began devouring all the evil lore in that book; runes of binding, naming, and shaping were all within my grasp, and I basked in my new power. New gateways and thresholds were made available, demons of the darkest reaches were at my command; but there were still barriers I dare not pass, those black unplumbed depths of space beyond Fomalhaut, where the ultimate terror lurked, crouching obscenely and gibbering blasphemies older than the stars. In Ludvig Prinn's De Vermis Mysteriis and the Cultes des Goules of the Comte d'Erlette I sought for elder secrets, but all those ancient mysteries were as nothing compared to the evil knowledge of the esoteric Black Tome. This book contained incantations of such awesome power that perhaps even Alhazred himself would have trembled at the contemplation of their use: the citing of Boromir, the foul secrets of the Shining Trapezohedron - that window on time and space - and the calling of great Cthulhu from his watery palace in the oceanwhelmed city of R'lyeh; they were all there, waiting for him who would be brave, or insane, enough to use them.

I was now at the height of my power; time expanded or contracted at my will, and the universe revolved around my evergrowing intellect. My hold on all earthly aspects of life was broken by my occult studies, and my strength became such that I attempted the inconceivable, the passing of that final dreadful threshold, the gateway to the black secrets of beyond, where the Old Ones hold their court and plot their return to the earth from which they were banished by the Elder Gods. In my obtuse vanity I imagined that I a tiny speck of dust in the vast cosmos of time - could pass through the black gulfs of space beyond the stars, where iniquity and chaos rule, and return with my mind intact and untouched by the aeons-old corruption that dwells there.

Again I made the five concentric circles of fire on the floor, and standing in the innermost one, invoked powers beyond all imagining with an incantation so inconceivably terrible that my hands trembled as I made the mystic passes and symbols. The walls dissolved and the great black wind swept me away through dark gulfs of space and grey regions of matter. I travelled faster than thought, past unlit planets and vistas of unknown realms which swirled and shifted across immensurable distances; the stars flashed by so rapidly that they appeared as gossamer-fine threads of brightness interlaced across the universe, minute shooting stars of brilliance shining against black aether that was darker than the fabled depths of Shung.

A minute may have passed - or perhaps a century and still I was rushed along. The stars had thinned considerably: they were clustered in groups, as if attempting to find solace in the company of others; nothing else changed. I suffered utter loneliness on that journey; hanging suspended in space and time I appeared stationary, although the speed of my flight must have been phenomenal, and my spirit cried out at the awesome solitude and the dreadful stillness and silence of space; I was as a man entombed in a grim black sepulchre while yet alive. Aeons passed, and then I saw far ahead the last star cluster, the last light for countless millennia; beyond there was nothing but impenetrable blackness, the end of the universe. As on that earlier terrifying occasion I screamed and struggled, but to no avail; I continued on my endless quest through corridors of silence and dread.

For endless eternities I travelled, with no change except the unsteady beating of my heart. And then it came, a green-tinged light, or perhaps only a suggestion of light; I had passed through an absence of time and matter; I had passed through Limbo. Now I was beyond the universe, unrelatable distances from the cosmos that is normally imagined; I had crossed the final threshold, that last gateway before oblivion. Ahead were the dual suns of my visions, towards which I drifted at what now seemed to be an infinitely slow speed; around these black and green prodigies rotated a single planet; ! knew it for the home world, Sharnoth.

Toward this dark cold globe I floated slowly, and as I approached I saw the green-litten plain far below me, upon which rested the gigantic twisted city of my earlier visions, looking misshapen and out of proportion in the unnatural glow. Over the roofs of this dread metropolis I drifted, noting the crumbling masonry and the cracked pillars that stood stark and frightening against the broken black skyline. In all the city not a thing moved, and yet there was a feeling of life there, of evil prurient life that sensed my presence.

As I descended towards that city I felt my physical senses returning; I felt cold, ice-cold, and my fingers were numb and paralysed. I alighted on the edge of an open space, in the centre of which was a gigantic square stone building with a tall arched doorway that yawned blackly like the maw of some terrible primeval creature. From this building radiated an aura of palpable malevolence; I was stunned by the intensity of dread and despair that assailed me, and as I stood outside that monstrous edifice I remembered a small passage from the Black Tome:

'In an open space in the centre of the city stands the palace of Nyarlathotep. Here all secrets may be learned, although the price of that learning is terrible indeed.'

I knew beyond doubt that this was the abode of grim Nyarlathotep. Although the thought of entering that dark structure appalled me beyond measure, I walked unsteadily towards the doorway, my legs guided by some intelligence other than my own. Through that mighty portal I passed and into utter blackness as dark as my unlit journey through the aether to this abominable place.

Gradually the impenetrable gloom gave way to the weird green glow that lit the outer planet's surface; and in that sickly gangrenous light I saw that which no man should ever be condemned to see.

I was in a long hall with a high vaulted ceiling that was supported by pillars of purest ebony; along both sides of this chamber were lined creatures of various nightmare shapes. Khnum the ram-headed was there, as was jackal-headed Anubis and Taueret the Mother, terrible in her obesity.

Leprous beings gibbered and leered, and cancerous things eyed me with malignity; through these ranks of amorphous and hellish creatures my body dragged itself against my will. Talons clawed at my arms and legs, and my stomach twisted with revulsion at the touch of diseased flesh. The air was filled with the sound of their titterings and screamings as they danced obscenely and capered around me in a blasphemous ritual of depravity; and at the far end of the hall was the most terrifying sight of all, that dread black colossus of my visions, the inhabitant of the palace, Nyarlathotep.

The Old One looked upon me intently, his gaze tearing at my soul and filling me with a horror so terrible that I screwed my eyes shut so as not to see that terrible visage of unnameable evil. Under that gaze my being began to melt away, as if it was being absorbed by some irresistible force. I was losing what little identity was left to me; my necromantic powers, which I now realized were as nothing compared to the powers of the inhabitant of this dark world, were stripped from me and scattered across the universe, never to be recovered.

Under that gaze my mind and soul were attacked from all sides by fear and loathing; I staggered as he tore at my being, peeling away my life layer by layer. Sheer desperation took hold of me, but I was powerless to fight, unable to hold back the irresistible force that overwhelmed me. Slowly something was drawn out of me, something insubstantial, but totally necessary to my future existence; I could do nothing, in my folly I had taken a step too many, and now I was paying the ultimate penalty. My vision clouded in a myopic haze; images and visions of my home and family swam before my eyes and then vanished as if they had never existed. And then, slowly at first, I felt myself melting, dissolving into nonexistence.

I rose upward, bodiless; above the heads of that nightmare throng I drifted, passing through the cold stone ceiling of the palace that was no obstacle to my progress, and out into the evil light of the planet. I was something less than alive, yet death had been made unavailable to me. The city spread out below me in a panoramic view of splendour and terror, and from that grim black edifice that was the palace of Nyarlathotep I saw a gigantic amorphous mass spreading over the whole metropolis. Slowly it radiated outward until all was hidden from sight, and when it had covered the whole landscape as far as my eyes could survey, it contracted to form once more the black colossus of my visions. Inwardly I shuddered, but as I rose ever higher, away from the city, the scene shrank to microscopic proportions and I viewed the spectacle with a more detached interest.

Gradually the land mass below me took on the appearance of a globe as I journeyed away from the planet and into the black depths of space. Hanging motionless, neither moving towards nor away from the realm of the Ancient One, I witnessed the last act in the drama that had unfolded before me. From the planet's surface there issued forth a beam of light or energy, travelling away from that world and into the starless night, voyaging, I knew, to the planet of my birth. Then all was still, and I was left totally alone in that universe beyond the stars.

My memories fade by the hour; soon I will remember nothing, soon I will be empty of all vestiges of humanity. And as I hang here, suspended in time and space as I shall be for all eternity, I feel something akin to contentment. I have peace here, a greater peace than the dead will ever know; but this peace is disturbed by one barely remembered thought, and I am glad that soon it will be put from my mind for ever. I do not remember how I know this, but I am more certain of it than of my own existence. Nyarlathotep no longer walks the surface of Sharnoth, he no longer holds court in his great black palace, for that beam of light that journeyed into the dark aether carried with it the scourge of mankind.

In a small dimly lighted attic room a body stirs and raises itself to its feet. His eyes burn like smouldering black coals, and across his face plays a dreadful enigmatic smile; and as he surveys the roofs of the city through the small dormer window, his arms rise in a gesture of triumph.

He has passed through the barriers set upon him by the Elder Gods; he is free, free to walk the earth once more, free to twist men's minds and enslave their souls. It was I who gave him his chance of escape, I, through my insane quest for power, supplied him with the means he needed for his return to earth.'

Nyarlathotep walks the earth in the guise of a man, for when he took my being and my memories he also took my physical aspect. My body now houses the immortal essence of Nyarlathotep the Terrible.

Than Curse the Darkness by DAVID DRAKE

What of unknown Africa? - H.P LOVECRAFT

The trees of the rain forest lowered huge and black above the village, dwarfing it and the group of men in its centre. The man being tied to the whipping post there was grey-skinned and underfed, panting with his struggles but no match for the pair of burly Forest Guards who held him. Ten more Guards, Baenga cannibals from far to the west near the mouth of the Congo, stood by with spears or Albini rifles. They joked and chattered and watched the huts, hoping the villagers would burst out to try to free their fellow. Then killing would be all right...

There was little chance of that. All the men healthy enough to work were in the forest, searching for more trees to slash in a parody of rubber gathering. The Law said that each adult male would bring four kilograms of latex a week to the agents of King Leopold; the Law did not say that the agents would teach the natives how to drain the sap without killing the trees it came from. When the trees died, the villagers would miss their quotas and die themselves, because that too was the Law -

though an unwritten one.

There were still many untouched villages farther up the river.

'If you cannot learn to be out in the forest working,' said a Baenga who finished knotting the victim to the post with a jerk that itself cut flesh, 'we can teach you not to lie down for many weeks.'

The Forest Guards wore no uniforms, but in the Congo Basin their good health and sneering pride marked them more surely than clothing could have. The pair who had tied the victim stepped back, nodding to their companion with the chicote. That one grinned, twitching the wooden handle to unfurl the ten-foot lash of square-cut hippopotamus hide. He had already measured the distance.

A naked seven-year-old slipped from the nearest hut. The askaris were turned to catch the expression on the victim's face at the first bite of the chicote, so they did not see the boy. His father jerked upright at the whipping post and screamed, 'Samba!' just as the feathery hiss-crack! of the whip opened an eight-inch cut beneath his shoulder blades.

Samba screamed also. He was small even for a forest child, spindly and monkey-faced. He was monkeyquick, too, darting among the Guards as they spun. Before anyone could grab him he had wrapped himself around the waist of the man with the whip.

'Wau? shouted the Guard in surprise and chopped down with the teak whip handle. The angle was awkward. One of his companions helped with a roundhouse swing of his Albini. The steel butt-plate thudded like a mallet on a tent stake, ripping off the boy's left ear and deforming the whole side of his skull. It did not tear him loose from the man he held. Two Forest Guards edged closer, holding their spears near the heads so as not to hit their fellow when they thrust.

The whipped man grunted. One of the chuckling riflemen turned in time to see him break away from the post. The rough cord had cut his wrists before it parted. Blood spattered as he took two steps and clubbed his hands against the whip-wielder's neck. The rifleman shot him through the body.

The Albini bullet was big and slow and had the punch of a medicine ball. The father spun backward and knocked one of the Baengas down with him. Despite the wound he stood again and staggered forward towards Samba. Both the remaining rifles went off. This time, when the shots had sledged him down, five of the spearmen ran to the body and began stabbing.

The Baenga with the whip got up, leaving Samba on the ground. The boy's eyes were open and utterly empty. Lieutenant Trouville stepped over him to shout, 'Cease, you idiots!' at the bellowing knot of spearmen. They parted immediately. Trouville wore a waxed moustache and a white linen suit that looked crisp save for the sweat stains under his arms, but the revolver at his belt was not for show. He had once pistoled a Guard who, drunk with arrogance and palm wine, had started to burn a village which was still producing rubber.

Now the slim Belgian stared at the corpse and grimaced. 'Idiots,' he repeated to the shamefaced Baengas. øI~ree bullets to account for, when there was no need at all to fire. Does the quartermaster charge us for spear thrusts as well as bullets?'

The askaris looked at the ground, pretending to be solely concerned with the silent huts or with scratching their insect bites. The man with the chicote coiled it and knelt with his dagger to cut off the dead man's right ear. A thong around his neck carried a dozen others already, brown and crinkled. They would be turned in at Boma to justify the tally of expended cartridges.

'Take the boy's too,' Trouville snapped. 'He started it, after all. And we'll still be one short.'

The patrol marched off, subdued in the face of their lieutenant's wrath. Trouville was muttering,

'Like children. No sense at all.' After they were gone, a woman stole from the nearest hut and cradled her son. Both of them moaned softly.

Time passed, and in the forest a drum began to beat.

In London, Dame Alice Kilrea bent over a desk in her library and opened the book a messenger had just brought her from Vienna. Her hair was gathered in a mousy bun from which middle age had stripped all but a hint of auburn. She tugged abstractedly at an escaped lock of it as she turned pages, squinting down her prominent nose.

In the middle of the volume she paused. The German heading provided instructions, stating that the formula there given was a means of separating death from the semblance of life. The remainder of the page and the three that followed it were in phonetic transliteration from a language few scholars would have recognized. Dame Alice did not mouth any of those phrases. A premonition of great trees and a thing greater than the trees shadowed her consciousness as she read silently down the page.

It would be eighteen years before she spoke any part of the formula aloud.

Sergeant Osterman drank palm wine in the shade of a baobab as usual while Baloko oversaw the weighing of the village's rubber. This time the Baenga had ordered M'fini, the chief, to wait for all the other males to be taken first. There was an ominous silence among the villagers as the wiry old man came forward to the table at which Baloko sat, flanked by his fellow Forest Guards.

'Ho, M'fini,' Baloko said jovially, 'what do you bring US?'

Without speaking, the chief handed over his greywhite sheets of latex. They were layered with plantain leaves. Baloko set the rubber on one pan of his scales, watched it easily overbalance the four-kilogram weight in the other pan. Instead of setting the rubber on the pile gathered by the other villagers and paying M'fini in brass wire, Baloko smiled. 'Do you remember, M'fini,' the Baenga asked, 'what I told you last week when you said to me that your third wife T'sini would never sleep with another man while you lived?'

The chief was trembling. Baloko stood and with his forefinger flicked M'fini's latex out of the weighing pan to the ground. 'Bad rubber,' he said and grinned. 'Stones, trash hidden in it to bring it to the weight. An old man like you, M'fini, must spend too much time trying to satisfy your wives when you should be finding rubber for the King.'

'I swear, I swear by the god Iwa who is death,' cried M'fini, on his knees and clutching the flapping bulk of rubber as though it were his firstborn, 'it is good rubber, all smooth and clean as milk itself!'

Two of the askaris seized M'fini by the elbows and drew him upright. Baloko stepped around the weighing table, drawing his iron-bladed knife as he did so. 'I will help you, M'fini, so that you will have more time to find good rubber for King Leopold.'

Sergeant Osterman ignored the first of the screams, but when they went on and on he swigged down the last of his calabash and sauntered over to the group around the scales. He was a big man, swarthy and scarred across the forehead by a Tuareg lance while serving with the French in Algeria.

Baloko anticipated the question by grinning and pointing to M'fini. The chief writhed on the ground, his eyes screwed shut and both hands clutched to his groin. Blood welling from between his fingers streaked black the dust he thrashed over. 'Him big man, bring nogood rubber,' Baloko said.

Osterman knew little Bantu, so communication between him and the Guards was generally in pidgin. 'Me make him no-good man, bring big rubber now.'

The burly Fleming laughed. Baloko moved closer, nudged him in the ribs. 'Him wife T'sini, him no need more,' the Baenga said. 'You, me, all along Guards we make T'sini happy wife, yes?'

Osterman scanned the encircling villagers whom curiosity had forced to watch and fear now kept from dispersing. In the line, a girl staggered and her neighbours edged away quickly as if her touch might be lethal. Her hair was wound high with brass wire in the fashion of a dignitary's wife, and her body had the slim delight of a willow shoot. Even in the lush heat of the equator, twelve-yearolds look to be girls rather than women.

Osterman, still chuckling, moved towards T'sini. Baloko was at his side.

Time passed. From deep in the forest came rumblings that were neither of man nor of Earth.

In a London study, the bay window was curtained against frost and the grey slush quivering over the streets. The coal fire hissed as Dame Alice Kilrea, fingers tented, dictated to her male amanuensis. Her dress was of good linen but two buttons were missing, unnoticed, from the placket, and the lace front showed signs of lunch bolted in the library ... 'and, thanks to your intervention, the curator of the Special Reading Room allowed me to handle Alhazred myself instead of having a steward turn the pages at my request. ! opened the volume three times at random and read the passage on which my index finger fell.

'Before, I had been concerned; now I am certain and terrified. All the lots were congruent, referring to aspects of the Messenger.' She looked down at the amanuensis and said, 'Capital on

"Messenger," John.' He nodded.

'Your support has been of untold help; now my need for it is doubled. Somewhere in the jungles of that dark continent the crawling chaos grows and gathers strength. I am armed against it with the formulas that Spiedel found in the library of Kloster-Neuburg just before his death; but that will do us no good unless they can be applied in time. You know, as I do, that only the most exalted influence will pass me into the zone of disruption at the crucial time. That time may yet be years to come, but they are years of the utmost significance to Mankind. Thus I beg your unstinting support not in my name or that of our kinship, but on behalf of life itself.

'Paragraph, John. As for the rest, I am ready to act as others have acted in the past. Personal risk has ever been the coin paid for knowledge of the truth.'

The amanuensis wrote with quick, firm strokes. He was angry both with himself and with Dams Alice. Her letter had driven out of his mind thoughts of the boy whom he intended to seduce that evening in Kettners.

He had known for some time that he would have to find another situation. The problem was not that Dame Alice was mad. All women were mad, after all. But her madness had such an insidious plausibility that he was starting to believe it himself

As presumably her present correspondent did. And the letter to him would be addressed to 'His Royal Highness...'

In most places the trees grew down to the water's edge, denser for being able to take sunlight from the side as well as from above. The margins of the shallow backwaters spread after each rain into sheets thick with vegetable richness and as black as the skins of those who lived along them. In drier hours there were sandbanks and easy expanses on which to trade with the forest folk.

Gomes's dugout had already slid back into the slough, leaving in the sand the straight gouge of its keel centred in the blur of bare footprints. A score of natives still clustered around Kaminski's similar craft, fondling his bolts of bright-patterned cloth or chatting with his paddlers. Then the steamship swung into sight around the wooded headland.

The trees had acted as a perfect muffler for the chuffing engine. With a haste little short of panic, the forest dwellers melted back into concealment. The swarthy Portuguese gave an angry order and his crew shipped their paddles. Emptied of its cargo, the dugout drew only a few inches of water and could, had there been enough warning, have slid up among the tree roots where the two-decked steamer could never have followed.

Throttled down to the point at which its stern wheel made only an occasional slapping, the government craft edged closer to Gomes. On the Upper Kasai it was a battleship, although its beamy twenty-four meters would have aroused little interest in a more civilized part of the world.

Awnings protected the hundreds of askaris overburdening the side rails. The captain was European, a blond soft-looking man in a Belgian army uniform. The only other white man visible was the noncom behind the Hotchkiss swivelmounted at the bow.

'Messieurs Gomes and Kaminski, perhaps?' called the officer as the steamship swung to, a dozen yards from the canoe. He was smiling, using his fingertips to balance his weight on the starboard bridge rail.

'You know who we are, de Vriny - damn you,' Gomes shot back. 'We have our patent to trade, and we pay our portion to your Soit Cosmopolite. Now leave us!'

'Pay your portion, yes,' de Vriny purred. 'Gold dust and gold nuggets. Where do you get such gold, my fine mongrel friends?'

'Carlos, it's all right,' called Kaminski, standing in his grounded boat. 'Don't become angry - the gentleman is doing his duty to protect trade, that is all.' Beneath the sombrero which he had learned to wear in the American Southwest, sweat was boiling off Kaminski. He knew his friend's volcanic temper, knew also the reputation of the blond man who was goading them. Not now! Not on the brink of the success that would gain them entree to any society in the world!

'Trade?' Gomes was shouting. 'What do they know about trade?' He shook his fist at de Vriny and made the canoe rock nervously, so that the plump Angolan woman he had married a dozen years before put a calming hand on his leg. 'You hold a rifle to the head of some poor black, pay him a ha'penny for rubber you sell in Paris for a shilling fourpence. Trade? There would be no gold coming out of this forest if the tribes didn't trust us and get a fair value for the dust they bring!'

'Well, we'll have to explore that,' grinned the Belgian. 'You see, your patent to trade was issued in error - it seems it was meant for some Gomez who spelled his name with a "z" - and I have orders to escort you both back to Boma until the matter can be resolved.'

Gomes's broad face went saffron. He began to slump like a snow figure on a sunny day. 'They couldn't take away our patent because of a spelling mistake their own clerks made?' he whined, but his words were more a sick apostrophe than a real question.

The Belgian answered it anyway. 'You think not? Don't you know who appoints the judges of our Congo oh-so-Free State? Not Jews or nigger-wenching Portuguese, I assure you.'

Gomes was probably bracing his sagging bulk against the thwart, though he could indeed have been reaching for the Mauser lying across the pack in front of him. Presumably that was what the Baenga thought when he fired the first shot and blew Gomes into the water. Every Forest Guard with a rifle followed in a ragged volley that turned the canoe into a chip dancing on an ornamental fountain. Jets of wood and water and blood spouted upward.

'Christ's blood, you fools!' de Vriny cried. Then, 'Well, get the rest of them too!'

Kaminski screamed and tried to follow his paddlers in a race for the tree line, but he was a corpulent man whose boots punched ankle-deep into the soft sand. The natives had no chance either. The Hotchkiss stuttered, knocking down a pair of them as the gunner checked his range.

Then, spewing empty cases that hissed as they bounced into the water, the machine gun hosed bullets across the other running men. Kaminski half turned as the black in front of him pitched forward haemorrhaging bright blood from mouth and nose. That desire to see his death coming preserved the trader from it: the bullet that would otherwise have exited through his forehead instead drilled through both upper maxillary bones. Kaminski's eyes popped out as neatly as oysters into a gourmet's silver spoon. His body slapped hard enough to ripple the sand in which it came to rest face up.

The firing stopped. Capsized and sinking, Gomes's shattered dugout was drifting past the bow of the steamer. 'I want their packs raised,' de Vriny ordered. 'Even if you have to dive for them all day.

The same with the packs onshore - then burn the canoes.'

'And the bodies, master?' asked his Baenga headman.

'Faugh,' spat the Belgian. 'Why else did the good Lord put crocodiles in this river?'

They did not take Kaminski's ear because it was white and that would attract comment. Even in Boma.

Time passed. Deep in the forest the ground spurted upward like a grapefruit hit by a rifle bullet.

Something thicker than a tree hole surged, caught at a nearby human, and flung the body, no longer distinguishable as to sex or race, a quarter mile through the canopy of trees. The earth subsided then, but in places the surface continued to bubble as if made of heated tar.

Five thousand miles away, Dame Alice Kilrea stepped briskly out of her solicitors' office, having executed her will, and ordered her driver on to the Nord DeutscherLloyd Dock. Travelling with her in the carriage was a valise containing one ancient book and a bundle of documents thick with wax, ribbons, and gold foil those trappings and the royal signature beneath. On the seat across from her was the American servant she had engaged only the week before as she closed her London house and discharged the remainder of her establishment. The servant, Sparrow, was a weaselly man with tanned skin and eyes the frosty colour of lead cast in too hot a mould. He said little but glanced around frequently; and his fingers writhed as if with separate life.

Occasionally chance would merge the rhythm of mauls and axes splitting wood in a dozen parts of the forest. Then the thunk-thunk-THUNK would boom out like a beast approaching from the darkness. Around their fire the officers would pause. The Baengas would chuckle at the joke of it and let the pounding die away. Little by little it would reappear at each separate group of woodsmen, finally to repeat its crescendo.

'Like children,' Colonel Trouville said to Dame Alice. The engineer and two sergeants were still aboard the Archiduchesse Stephanie, dining apart from the other whites. Colour was not the only measure of class, even in the Congo Basin. 'They'll be cutting wood - and drinking their malafou, wretched stuff, to call it palm wine is to insult the word "wine"- they'll be at it almost till dawn.

After a time you'll get used to it. There's nothing, really, to be done, since we can only carry a day's supply of fuel on the steamer. While they of course could find and cut enough dry wood by a reasonable hour each night, when one is dealing with the native mind...'

De Vriny and Osterman joined in their colonel's deprecating laughter. Dame Alice managed only a preoccupied smile. During the day, as the craft steamed upriver from the Stanley Pool, she had stared at the terrain in which her battle would be joined: heavy forest, here mostly a narrow belt fringing the watercourse but later to become a sprawling, barely penetrable expanse. The trees climbed to the edge of the water and mushroomed over the banks. Dame Alice could imagine that where the stream was less than the Congo's present mile breadth, the branches would meet above in laced blackness.

Now at night, blackness was complete even on the lower river. It chilled her soul. The equatorial sunset was not a curtain of ever-thickening gauze but a knife blade that separated the hemispheres.

On this side was death, and neither the laughter of the Baenga askaris nor the goblets of Portuguese wine being drunk around Trouville's campfire could alter that.

Captain de Vriny swigged and eyed the circle. He was a man of middle height with the roundedness of a bear, a seeming softness which tended to mask the cruelty beneath. Across from him, Sparrow dragged on the cigarette he had rolled and lit his face orange. The captain smiled.

Only because his mistress, the mad noblewoman, had demanded it did Sparrow sit with the officers.

He wore a cheap blue-cotton shirt, buttoned at the cuffs, and denim trousers held up by suspenders.

Short and narrow-chested, Sparrow would have looked foolish even without the waist belt and the pair of huge double-action revolvers hanging from it.

Dame Alice was unarmed by contrast. Like the men she wore trousers, hers tucked into low-heeled boots. De Vriny looked at her and, shaping his mocking smile into an expression of friendly interest, said, 'It surprises me, Dame Alice, that a woman as well born and, I am sure, delicate as yourself would want to accompany an expedition against some of the most vicious submen on the globe.'

Dame Alice lifted the faintly bulbous tip of her nose and said, 'It's no matter of wanting, captain.'

She eyed de Vriny with mild distaste. 'I don't suppose you want to come yourself- unless you like to shoot niggers for lack of better sport? One does unpleasant things because someone must. One has a duty.'

'What the captain is suggesting,' put in Trouville, 'is that there are no lines of battle fixed in this jungle. A spearman may step from around the next tree and snick - end all your plans - learned though we are sure they must be.'

'Quite,' agreed Dame Alice, 'and so I brought Sparrow here - ' she nodded to her servant, ' -

instead of trusting to chance.'

All heads turned again towards the little American. In French, though the conversation had previously been in English to include Sparrow, de Vriny said, 'I hope he never falls overboard. The load of iron-mongery he carries will sink him twenty metres through the bottom muck before anyone knows he's gone.'

Again the Belgians laughed. In a voice as fiat and hard as the bottom of a skillet, Sparrow said,

'Captain, I'd surely appreciate a look at your nice pistol there.'

De Vriny blinked, uncertain whether the question was chance or if the American had understood the joke of which he had been made the butt. Deliberately, his composure never more than dented, the Belgian unhooked the flap of his patent-leather holster and handed over the Browning pistol. It was small and oblong, its blued finish gleaming like wet sea]skin in the firelight.

Sparrow rotated the weapon, giving its exterior a brief scrutiny. He thumbed the catch in the grip and stripped out the magazine, holding it so that the light fell on the uppermost of its stack of small brass cartridges.

'You are familiar with automatic pistols, then?' asked Trouville in some surprise at the American's quick understanding of a weapon rarely encountered on his native continent.

'Naw,' Sparrow said, slipping the magazine back home. His fingers moved like those of a pianist performing scales. 'It's a gun, though. I can generally figure how a gun works.'

'You should get one like it,' de Vriny said, smiling as he took the weapon back from Sparrow.

'You would find it far more comfortable to carry than those yours.'

'Carry a toy like that?' the gunman asked. His voice parodied amazement. 'Not me, captain. When I shoot a man, I want him dead. I want a gun what'll do the job if I do mine, and these forty-fives do me jist fine, every time I use 'em.' Sparrow grinned then, for the first time. De Vriny felt his own hands fumble as they tried to reholster the Browning. Suddenly he knew why the askaris gave Sparrow so wide a berth.

Dame Alice coughed. The sound shattered the ice that had been settling over the men. Without moving, Sparrow faded into the background to become an insignificant man with narrow shoulders and pistols too heavy for his frame.

'Tell me what you know about the rebellion,' the Irishwoman asked quietly in a liquid, attractive voice. Her features led one to expect a nasal whinny. Across the fire came snores from Osterman, a lieutenant by courtesy, but in no other respect an officer. He had ignored the wine for the natives'

own ma]afou. The third calabash had slipped from his numb fingers, dribbling only a stain on to the ground as the bearded Fleming lolled back in his camp chair.

Trouville exchanged glances with de Vriny, then shrugged and said, 'What is there ever to know about a native rebellion? Every once in a while a few of them shoot at our steamers, perhaps chop a concessionaire or two when he comes to collect the rubber and ivory. Then we get the call -' the colonel's gesture embraced the invisible Archiduchesse Stephanie and the dozen Baenga canoes drawn up on the bank beside her. 'We surround the village, shoot the niggers we catch, and burn the huts. End of rebellion.'

'And what about their gods?' Dame Alice pressed, bobbing her head like a long-necked diving bird.

The colonel laughed. De Vriny patted his holster and said, 'We are God in the Maranga Concession.'

They laughed again and Dame Alice shivered. Osterman snorted awake, blew his nose loudly on the blue sleeve of his uniform coat. 'There's a new god back in the bush, yes,' the Fleming muttered.

The others stared at him as if he were a frog declaiming Shakespeare. 'How would you know?' de Vriny demanded in irritation. 'The only Bantu words you know are "drink" and "woman."'

'I can talk to B'loko, can't I?' the lieutenant retorted in a voice that managed to be offended despite its slurring. 'Good o1' Baloko, we been together long time, long time. Better fella than some white bastards I could name...'

Dame Alice leaned forward, the firelight bright in her eyes. 'Tell me about the new god,' she demanded. 'Tell me its name.'

'Don' remember the name,' Osterman muttered, shaking his head. He was waking up now, surprised and a little concerned to find himself centre of the attention not only of his superiors but also of the foreigner who had come to them in Boma as they readied their troops. Trouville had tried to shrug Dame Alice aside, but the Irishwoman had displayed a patent signed by King Leopold himself... 'Baloko said it, but I forget,' he continued, 'and he was drunk too, or I don' think he would have said. He's afraid of that one.'

'What's that?' Trouville interrupted. He was a practical man, willing to accept and use the apparent fact that Osterman's piggish habits had made him a confidant of the askaris. 'One of our Baenga headmen is afraid of a Bakongo god?'

Osterman shook his greying head again. Increasingly embarrassed but determined to explain, he said, 'Not their god, not like that. The Bakongos, they live along the river, they got their fetishes just like any niggers. But back in the bush, there's another village. Not a tribe; a few men from here, a few women from there. Been gitting together one at a time, a couple, a year, for Christ... maybe twenty years. They got the new god, they're the ones who started the trouble. They say you don'

have to pay your rubber to the white men, you don' have to pray to any fetish. Their god gonna come along and eat up everything. Any day

now.'

Osterman rubbed his eyes blearily, then shouted, 'Boy! Malafou?

A Krooman in breeches and swallow-tailed coat scurried over with another calabash. Osterman slurped down the sweet brain-stunning fluid in three great gulps. He began humming something meaningless to himself. The empty container fell, and after a time the Fleming began to snore again.

The other men looked at one another. 'Do you suppose he's right?' the captain asked Trouville.

'He could be,' the slim colonel admited with a shrug. ~hey might well have told him all that. He's not much better than a nigger himself despite the colour of his skin.'

'He's right,' said Dame Alice, looking at the fire and not at her companions. Ash crumbled in its heart and a knot of sparks clawed towards the forest canopy. 'Except for one thing. Their god isn't new, it isn't new at all. Back when the world was fresh and steaming and the reptiles flew above the swamps, it wasn't new either. The Bakongo name for it is Ahtu. Alhazred called it Nyarlathotep when he wrote twelve hundred years ago.' She paused, staring down at her hands tented above the thin yellow wine left in her goblet.

'Oh, then you are a missionary,' de Vriny exclaimed, glad to find a category for the puzzling woman. Her disgusted glance was her reply. 'Or a student of religions?' de Vriny tried again.

'I study religions only as a doctor studies diseases,' Dame Alice said. She looked at her companions. Their eyes were uncomprehending. 'I.. ~' she began, but how did she explain her life to men who had no conception of devotion to an ideal? Her childhood had been turned inward to dreams and the books lining the cold library of the Grange. Inward, because her outward body was that of an ugly duckling who everyone knew had no chance of becoming a swan. And from her dreams and a few of the very oldest books had come hints of what it is that nibbles at the minds of all men in the darkness. Her father could not answer or even understand her question, nor could the vicar. She had grown from a persistent child into an iron-willed woman who lavished on her fancy energies which her relatives felt would have been better spent on the Church ... or, perhaps, on breeding spaniels.

And as she had grown, she had met others who felt and knew what she did.

She looked around again. 'Captain,' she said simply, 'I have been studying certain - myths - for most of my life. I've come to believe that some of them contain truths or hints of truths. There are powers in the universe. When you know the truth of those powers, you have the choice of joining them and working to bring about their coming - for they are unstoppable or you can fight, knowing there is no ultimate hope for your cause and going ahead anyway. Mine was the second choice.'

Drawing herself even more rigidly straight, she added, 'Someone has always been willing to stand between Mankind and Chaos. As long as there have been men.'

De Vriny snickered audibly. Trouville gave him a dreadful scowl and said to Dame Alice, 'And you are

searching for the god these rebels pray to?''Yes. The one they call Ahtu.'

From the score of firelit glades around them came the thunk-thunk-THUNK of axe and wedge, then the booming native laughter.

'Osterman and de Vriny should have their men in position by now,' said the colonel, pattering his fingertips on the bridge rail as he scanned the wooded shoreline. 'It's about time for me to land, too.'

'Us to land,' Dame Alice said. She squinted, straining forward to see the village the Belgian force was preparing to assault. 'Where are the huts?' she finally asked.

'Oh, they're set back from the shore some hundreds of metres,' Trouville explained offhandedly.

The trees hide them, but the fish weirs - ' he pointed out the lines of upright sticks rippling foam tracks down the current, ' - are a good enough guide. We've stayed anchored here in the stream so that the villagers would be watching us while the forces from the canoes downriver surrounded them.'

Muffled but unmistakable, a shot thudded in the forest. A volley followed, drawing with it faint screams.

'Bring us in,' ordered the colonel, tugging at the left half of his moustache in his only sign of nervousness.

The Archiduchesse grated as her bow nuzzled into the trees, but there was no time now for delicacy. Forest Guards streamed past the Hotchkiss and down the gangplank into the jungle. The gunner was crouched behind the metal shield that protected him only from the front. Tree boles and their shadows now encircled him on three sides.

'I suppose it will be safe enough on the shore,' said Trouville, adjusting his harness as if for parade instead of battle. 'You can accompany me if you wish - and if you stay close by.'

'All right,' said Dame Alice, as if she would not have come without his permission. Her hand clutched not a pistol but an old black-bound book. 'If we're where you think, though, you'll need me very badly before you're through here. Especially if it takes till sunset.' She swung down the companionway behind Trouville. Last of all from the bridge came Sparrow, grimy and small and deadly as a shark.

The track that wound among the trunks was a narrow line hammered into the loam by horny feet.

It differed from a game trail only in that shoulders had cleared the foliage to greater height. The Baengas strode it with some discomfort - they were a Lower Congo tribe, never quite at home in the upriver jungles. Trouville's step was deliberately nonchalant, while Dame Alice tramped gracelessly and gave an accurate impression of disinterest in her physical surroundings. Sparrow's eyes twitched warily as they always did. He carried his hands waist-high and over his belted revolvers.

The clearing was an anticlimax. The score of huts in the centre had been protected by a palisade of sorts, but the first rush of the encircling Baengas had smashed great gaps in it. Three bodies, all of them women, lay spilled in the millet fields outside. Within the palisade were more bodies, one of them an askari with a long iron spearhead crosswise through his rib cage. . About a hundred villagers, quavering but alive, had been forced together in the compound in front of the chief's beehive hut by the time the force from the steamer arrived. Several huts were already burning, sending up shuddering columns of black smoke.

Trouville stared at the mass of prisoners, solidified by fear into the terrible stinking apathy of sheep in the slaughtering chute. 'Yes...' he murmured appreciatively. His eyes had already taken in the fact that the fetishes which normally stood to the right or left of a well-to-do family's doorway were absent in this village. 'Now,' he asked, 'who will tell me about the new god you worship?'

As black against a darkness, so the new fear rippling across faces already terrified. Near the Belgian stood an old man, face knobbed by a pattern of ritual scarring. He was certainly a priest, though without a priest's usual trappings of feathers and cowrie shells. Haltingly he said, 'Lord, 1-lord, we have no new gods.'

'You lie!' cried Trouville. His gloved fingertip sprang out like a fangú 'You worship Ahtu, you lower-thanthe-apes, and he is a poor weak god whom our medicine will break like a stick!'

The crowd moaned and surged backward from the colonel. The old priest made no sound at all, only began to tremble violently. Trouville looked at the sky. 'Lieutenant Osterman,' he called to his burly subordinate, 'we have an hour or so till sunset. I trust you can get this carrion - ' he pointed to the priest, ' - to talk by then. He seems to know something. As for the rest ú.. de Vriny, take charge of getting the irons on them. We'll decide what to do with them later.'

The grinning Fleming slapped Baloko on the back. Each seized one of the priest's arms and began to drag him towards the shade of a baobab tree. Osterman started to detail the items he needed from the steamer, and Baloko, enthusiastic as a child helping his father to fix a machine, rattled the list off in translation to a nearby askari.

The evening breeze brought a hint of relief from the heat and the odours, the oily scent of fear and the others more easily identified. Osterman had set an overturned bucket over the plate of burning sulphur to smother it out when no longer needed. Reminded by Trouville, he had also covered the brush of twigs he had been using to spread the gluey flames over the priest's genitals. Then, his work done, he and Baloko had strolled away to add a bowl of malafou to the chill, Thank you, lieutenant,' which was all the praise Trouville had offered for their success.

The subject of their ministrations - eyes closed, wrists and ankles staked to the ground - was talking. 'They come, we let them,' he said, so softly and quickly that Trouville had to strain to mutter out a crude translation for Dame Alice. ~I"ney live in forest, they not bother our fish. Forest here evil, we think. We feel god there, we not understand, not know him. All right that anybody want, wants to live in forest.'

The native paused, turning his head to hawk phlegm into the vomit already pooled beside him.

Dame Alice squatted on the ground and riffled the pages of her book unconsciously. She had refused to use the downturned bucket for a stool. Sparrow paid only scant attention to the prisoner.

His eyes kept picking across the clearing, thick and raucous now with Baengas and their leg-shackled prisoners; the men and the trees beyond them. Sparrow's face shown with the frustrated intensity of a man certain of an ambush but unable to forestall it. Shadows were beginning to turn the dust the colour of the noses of his bullets.

The priest continued. The rhythms of his own language were rich and firm, reminding Dame Alice that behind Trouville's choppy French were the words of a man of dignity and power - before they had brought him down. 'All of them are cut men. First come boy, no have ears. His head look me, like melon that is dropped. Him, he hear god Ahtu calling do what god tell him.

'One man, he not have, uh, manhood. God orders, boy tells him... he, uh, he quickens the ground where Ahtu sleeps.

'One man, he only half face, no eyes... him sees, he sees Ahtu, he tells what becoming, uh, is coming. He-'

The priest's voice rose into a shrill tirade that drowned out the translation. Trouville dispassionately slapped him to silence, then used a rag of bark cloth in his gloved hand to wipe blood and spittle from the fellow's mouth. 'There are only three rebels in the forest?' he asked. If he realized that the priest had claimed the third man was white, he was ignoring it completely.

'No, no ... many men, a ten of tens, maybe more. Before we not see, not see cut men only now and now, uh, again, in the forest. Now god is ripe and, uh, his messengers...'

Only a knife edge of sun could have lain across the horizon, for the whole clearing was darkening to burnt umber where it had colour at all. The ground shuddered. The native pegged to it began to scream.

'Earthquake?' Trouville blurted in surprise and concern. Rainforest trees have no deep taproots to keep them upright, so a strong wind or an earth tremor will scatter giants like straw in the threshing yard.

Dame Alice's face showed concern not far from panic, but she wholly ignored the baobab tottering above them. Her book was open and she was rolling out syllables from it. She paused, turned so that the pages opened to the fading sun; but her voice stumbled again, and the earth pitched. It was sucking in under the priest whose fear so gripped him that, having screamed out his breath, he was unable to draw another one.

'Light!' Dame Alice cried. 'For Jesus' sake, light!'

If Trouville heard the demand against the litany of fear rising from the blacks, guards, and prisoners

ú alike, he did not understand. Sparrow, his face a bone mask, dipped into his shirt pocket and came out with a match which he struck alight with the thumb of the hand that held it. The blue flame pulsed above the page, steady as the ground's motion would let the gunman keep it. Its light painted Dame Alice's tight bun as she began to cry words of no meaning to any of her human audience.

The ground gathered itself into a tentacle that spewed up from beneath the prisoner and hurled him skyward in its embrace. One hand and wrist, still tied to a deep stake, remained behind.

Two hundred feet above the heads of the others, the tentacle stopped and exploded as if it had struck a plate of lightning. Dame Alice had fallen backward when the ground surged, but though the book dropped from her hands she had been able to shout out the last words of what was necessary.

The blast that struck the limb of earth shattered also the baobab. Sparrow, the only man able to stand on the bucking earth, was knocked off his feet by the shock wave. He hit and rolled, still gripping the two handguns he had levelled at the afterimage of the light-shot tentacle.

Afterward they decided that the burned-meat odour must have been the priest, because no one else was injured or missing. Nothing but a track of sandy loam remained of the tentacle, spilled about the rope of green glass formed of it by the false lightning's heat.

Colonel Trouville rose, coughing at the stench of ozone as sharp as that of the sulphur it had displaced. 'De Vriny? he called. 'Get us one of these devil-bred swine who can guide us to the rebel settlement!'

'And who'll you be finding to guide you, having seen this?' demanded the Irishwoman, kneeling now and brushing dirt from the fallen volume as if more than life depended on her care.

'Seen?' repeated Trouville. 'And what have they seen?' The fury in his voice briefly stilled the night birds. They will not guide us because one of them was crushed, pulled apart, burned? And have I not done as much myself a hundred times? If we need to feed twenty of them their own livers, faugh! the twentyfirst will lead us - or the one after him will. This rebellion must end!'

'So it must,' whispered Dame Alice, rising like a champion who has won a skirmish but knows the real test is close at hand. She no longer appeared frail. 'So it must, if there's to be men on this earth in a month's time.'

The ground shuddered a little.

Nothing moved in the forest but the shadows flung by the dancers around the fire. The flames spread them capering across the leaves and tree trunks, distorted and misshapen by the flickering.

They were no more misshapen than the dancers themselves as the light displayed them.

From a high quivering scaffold of njogi cane, three men overlooked the dance. They were naked so that their varied mutilations were utterly apparent. De Vriny started at the sight of the one whose pale body gleamed red and orange in the firelight; but he was a faceless thing, unrecognizable.

Besides, he was much thinner than the plump trader the Belgian had once known.

The clearing was a quarter-mile depression in the jungle. Huts, mere shanties of withe-framed leaves rather than the beehives of a normal village, huddled against one edge of it. If all had gone well, Trouville's askaris were deployed beyond the hut with Osterman's group closing the third segment of the ring. All should be ready to charge at the signal. There would not even be a fence to delay the spearmen.

Nor were there crops of any kind. The floor of the clearing was smooth and hard, trampled into that consistency of thousands of ritual patterns like the one now being woven around the fire. In, out, and around crop-limbed men and women who hobbled if they had but one foot; who staggered, hunched, and twisted from the whippings that had left bones glaring out of knots of scar tissue; who followed by touch the motions of the dancers ahead of them if their own eye sockets were blank holes.

There was no music, but the voices of those who had tongues drummed in a ceaseless chant:

'Ahtu! Ahtu?

~he scum of the earth,' whispered de Vriny. 'Low foreheads, thick jaws; skin the colour of a monkey's under its hair. Your Mr Darwin was right about man's descent from the apes, Dame Alice -

if these brutes are, in fact, kin to man.'

'Not my Mr Darwin,' the Irishwoman replied.

The Krooman steward, in loincloth now instead of tailcoat, was behind the three whites with a hissing bull's-eye lantern. Dame Alice feared to raise its shutter, though, and instead ran her fingers nervously along the margins of her open book. Three other blacks, armed only with knives, stood by de Vriny as couriers in case the whistle signals were not enough. The rest of the captain's force was invisible, spread to either side of him along the margin of the trees.

'Don't like this,' Sparrow said, shifting his revolvers a millimeter in their holsters to make sure they were free in the leather. 'Too many niggers around. Some of 'era are apt to be part of the mob down there, coming back late from a hunt or something. Any nigger comes running up in the dark and I'm gonna let 'im hold one.'

'You'll shoot no one without my order,' de Vriny snapped. The colonel may be sending orders, Osterman may need help - this business is going to be dangerous enough without some fool killing our own messengers. Do you hear me?'

'I hear you talking.' A stray glimmer of firelight caught the throbbing vein in Sparrow's temple.

Rather than retort, the Belgian turned back to the clearing. After a moment he said, 'I don't see this god you're looking for.'

Dame Alice's mouth quirked. 'You mean you don't see a fetish,' she said. 'You won't. Ahtu isn't a fetish.'

'Well, what kind of damned god is he then?' de Vriny asked in irritation.

The Irishwoman considered the question seriously, then said, 'Maybe they aren't gods at all, him and the others ... it and the others A]hazred wrote of. Call them cancers, spewed down on earth ages ago. Not life, surely, not even things - but able to shape, to misshape things into a semblance of life and to grow and to grow and to grow.'

'But grow into what, madam?' de Vriny pressed. 'Into what?' Dame Alice echoed sharply. Her eyes flashed with the sudden arrogance of her bandit ancestors, sure of themselves if of nothing else in the world. 'Into this earth, this very planet, if unchecked. And we here will know tonight whether they can be checked yet again.'

'Then you seriously believe,' de Vriny began, sucking at his florid moustache to find a less offensive phrasing. 'You believe that the Bakongos are worshiping a creature which would, will, begin to rule the world if you don't stop it?'

Dame Alice looked at him. 'Not "rule," the world,' she corrected. 'Rather become the world. This thing, this seed awakened in the jungle by the actions of men more depraved and foolish than I can easily believe... this existence, unchecked, would permeate our world like mould through a loaf of bread, until the very planet became a ball of viscid slime hurtling around the sun and stretching tentacles towards Mars. Yes, I believe that, captain. Didn't you see what was happening last night in the village?'

The Belgian only scowled in perplexity.

A silver note sang from across the broad clearing.

De Vriny grunted, then put his long bosun's pipe to his lips and sounded his reply even as Osterman's signal joined it.

The dance broke apart as the once-solid earth began to dimple beneath men's weight.

The Forest Guards burst out of the tree line with cries punctuated by the boom of Albini rifles.

'Light!' ordered Dame Alice in a crackling alto, and the lantern threw its bright fan across the book she held. The scaffolding moved, seemed to sink straight into ground turned fluid as water. At the last instant the three figures on it linked hands and shouted, 'Ahtu? in triumph. Then they were gone.

In waves as complex as the sutures of a skull, motion began to extend through the soil of the clearing. A shrieking Baenga, spear raised to thrust into the nearest dancer, ran through one of the quivering lines. It rose across his body like the breaking surf, and he shrieked again in a different tone. For a moment his black-headed spear bobbled on the surface. Then it, too, was engulfed with a faint plop that left behind only a slick of blood.

Dame Alice started chanting in a singsong, moulding a tongue meant for liquid Irish to a language not meant for tongues at all. A tremor in the earth drove towards her and those about her.

It had the hideous certainty of a torpedo track. Sparrow's hands flexed. De Vriny stood stupefied, the whistle still at his lips and his pistol drawn but forgotten.

The three couriers looked at the oncoming movement, looked at each other... disappeared among the trees. Eyeballs white, the Krooman dropped his lantern and followed them. Quicker even than Sparrow, Dame Alice knelt and righted the lantern with her foot. She acted without missing a syllable of the formula stamped into her memory by long repetition.

Three meters away, a saw-blade of white fire ripped across the death advancing through the soil.

The weaving trail blasted back towards the centre of the clearing like an ant run blown by carbon disulphide.

De Vriny turned in amazement to the woman crouched so that the lantern glow would fall across the black-lettered pages of her book. 'You did it!' he cried. 'You stopped the thing!'

The middle of the clearing raised itself towards the night sky, raining down fragments of the bonfire that crowned it. Humans screamed - some at the touch of the fire, others at tendrils extruding from the towering centre wrapped about them.

Dame Alice continued to chant.

The undergrowth whispered. 'Behind you, captain,' Sparrow said. His face had a thin smile. De Vriny turned, calling a challenge. The brush parted and a few feet in front of him were seven armed natives. The nearest walked on one foot and a stump. His left hand gripped the stock of a Winchester carbine; its barrel was supported by his right wrist since there was a knob of ancient scar tissue where the hand should have been attached.

De Vriny raised his Browning and slapped three shots into the native's chest. Blood spots sprang out against the dark skin like additional nipples. The black coughed and jerked the trigger of his own weapon. The carbine was so close to the Belgian's chest that its muzzle flash ignited the linen of his shirt as it blew him backward.

Sparrow giggled and shot the native through the bridge of his nose, snapping his head around as if a horse had kicked him in the face. The other blacks moved. Sparrow killed them all in a ripple of fire that would have done justice to a Gatling gun. The big revolvers slammed alternately, Sparrow using each orange muzzle flash to light a target for his other hand. He stopped shooting only when there was nothing left before his guns; nothing save a writhing tangle of bodies too freshly dead to be still. The air was thick with white smoke and the fecal stench of death. Behind the laughing gunman, Dame Alice Kilrea continued to chant.

Pulsing, rising, higher already than the giants of the forest ringing it, the fifty-foot-thick column of what had been earth dominated the night. A spear of false lightning jabbed and glanced off, freezing the chaos below for the eyes of any watchers. From the base of the main neck had sprouted a ring of tendrils, ruddy and golden and glittering overall with inclusions of quartz. They snaked among the combatants as flexible as silk; when they closed, they ground together like millstones and spattered blood a dozen yards up the sides of the central column. The tendrils made no distinction between Forest Guards and the others who had danced for Ahtu.

Dame Alice stopped. The column surged and bent against the sky, its peak questing like the muzzle of a hunting dinosaur. Sparrow hissed, 'For the love of God, bitch!' and raised a revolver he knew would be useless.

Dame Alice spoke five more words and flung her book down. The ground exploded in gouts of cauterizing flame.

It was not a hasty thing. Sparks roared and blazed as if the clearing were a cauldron into which gods poured furnaces of molten steel. The black column that was Ahtu twisted hugely, a cobra pinned to a bonfire.

There was no heat, but the light itself seared the eyes and made bare flesh crawl.

With the suddenness of a torn puffball, Ahtu sucked inward. The earth sagged as though in losing its ability to move it had also lost all rigidity. At first the clearing had been slightly depressed. Now the centre of it gaped like a drained boil, a twisted cylinder fed by the collapsing veins it had earlier shot through the earth.

When the blast came it was the more stunning for having followed a relative silence. There was a rending crash as something deep in the ground gave way; then a thousand tons of rock and soil blew skyward with volcanic power behind them. Where the earth had trembled with counterfeit life, filaments jerked along after the main mass. In some places they ripped the surface as much as a mile into the forest. After a time, dust and gravel began to strinkle down on the trees, the lighter particles marking the canopy with a long flume downwind while larger rocks pattered through layer after layer of the hindering leaves. But it was only dirt, no different from the soil for hundreds of miles around into which trees thrust their roots and drew life from what was lifeless.

'Goddamn if you didn't kill it,' Sparrow whispered, gazing in wonderment at the new crater.

There was no longer any light but that of the hooked moon to silver the carnage and the surprising number of Forest Guards straggling back from the jungle to which they had fled. Some were beginning to joke as they picked among the bodies of their comrades and the dancers.

'I didn't kill anything,' Dame Alice said. Her voice was hoarse, muffled besides by the fact that she was cradling her head on her knees. 'Surgeons don't kill cancers. They cut out what they can find, knowing that there's always a little left to grow and spread again...'

She raised her head. From across the clearing, Colonel Trouville was stepping towards them. He was as dapper and cool as always, skirting the gouge in the centre, skirting also the group of Baengas with a twoyear-old they must have found in one of the huts. One was holding the child by the ankles to drain all the blood through its slit throat while his companions gathered firewood.

'But without the ones who worshipped it,' Dame Alice went on, 'without the ones who drew the kernel up to a growth that would have been ... the end of man, the end of life here in any sense you or I or those out there would have recognized it ... It'll be more than our lifetimes before Ahtu returns. I wonder why those ones gave themselves so wholly to an evil that would have destroyed them first?'

Sparrow giggled again. Dame Alice turned from the approaching Belgian to see if the source of the humour showed on the gunman's face.

'It's like this,' Sparrow said. 'If they was evil, I guess that makes us good. I'd never thought of that before, is all.'

He continued to giggle. The laughter of the Baengas echoed him from the clearing as they thrust the child down on a rough spit. Their teeth had been filed to points which the moonlight turned to jewels.

The Faces at Pine Dunes by RAMSEY CAMPBELL

When his parents began arguing Michael went outside. He could still hear them through the thin wall of the trailer. 'We needn't stop yet,' his mother was pleading.

'We're stopping,' his father said. 'It's time to stop wandering.'

But why should she want to leave here? Michael gazed about the trailer park - the Pine Dunes Caravanserai. The metal village of trailers surrounded him, cold and bright in the November afternoon. Beyond the dunes ahead he heard the dozing of the sea. On the three remaining sides a forest stood: remnants of autumn, ghosts of colour, were scattered over the trees; distant branches displayed a last golden mist of leaves. He inhaled the calm. Already he felt at home.

His father was persisting. 'You're still young,' she told his father.

She's kidding! Michael thought. Perhaps she was trying flattery. 'There are places we haven't seen,' she said wistfully.

'We don't need to. We need to be here.'

The slowness of the argument, the voices muffled by the metal wall, frustrated Michael; he wanted to be sure that he was staying here. He hurried into the trailer. 'I want to stay here. Why do we have to keep moving all the time?'

'Don't come in here talking to your mother like that,' his father shouted.

He should have stayed out. The argument seemed to cramp the already crowded space within the trailer; it made his father's presence yet more overwhelming. The man's enormous wheezing body sat plumped on the couch, which sagged beneath his weight; his small frail wife was perched on what little of the couch was unoccupied, as though she'd been squeezed tiny to fit. Gazing at them, Michael felt suffocated. 'I'm going out,' he said.

'Don't go out,' his mother said anxiously; he couldn't see why. 'We won't argue any more. You stay in and do something. Study.'

'Let him be. The sooner he meets people here, the better.'

Michael resented the implication that by going out he was obeying his father. 'I'm just going out for a walk,' he said. The reassurance might help her; he knew how it felt to be overborne by the man.

At the door he glanced back. His mother had opened her mouth, but his father said, 'We're staying. I've made my decision.' And he'd lie in it, Michael thought, still resentful. All the man could do was lie there, he thought spitefully; that was all he was fit for. He went out, sniggering.

The way his father had gained weight during the past year, his coming to rest in this trailer park reminded Michael of an elephant's arrival at its graveyard.

It was colder now. Michael turned up the hood of his anorak. Curtains were closing and glowing.

Trees stood, intricately precise, against a sky like translucent papery jade. He began to climb the dunes towards the sea. But over there the sky was blackened; a sea dark as mud tossed nervously and flopped across the bleak beach. He turned towards the forest. Behind him sand hissed through grass.

The forest shifted in the wind. Shoals of leaves swam in the air, at the tips of webs of twigs. He followed a path which led from the Caravanserai's approach road. Shortly the diversity of trees gave way to thousands of pines. Pine cones lay like wattled eggs on beds of fallen needles. The spread of needles glowed deep orange in the early evening, an orange tapestry displaying rank upon rank of slender pines, dwindling into twilight.

The path led him on. The pines were shouldered out by stouter trees, which reached overhead, tangling. Beyond the tangle the blue of the sky grey deeper; a crescent moon slid from branch to branch. Bushes massed among the trunks; they grew higher and closer as he pushed through. The curve of the path would take him back towards the road.

The ground was turning softer underfoot. It sucked his feet in the dark. The shrubs had closed over him now; he could hardly see. He struggled between them, pursuing the curve. Leaves rubbed together rustling at his ear, like desiccated lips; their dry dead tongues rattled. All at once the roof of the wooden tunnel dropped sharply. To go farther he would have to crawl.

He turned with difficulty. On both sides thorns caught his sleeves; his dark was hemmed in by two ranks of dim captors. It was as though midnight had already fallen here, beneath the tangled arches; but the dark was solid and clawed. Overhead, netted fragments of night sky illuminated the tunnel hardly at all.

He managed to extricate himself, and hurried back. But he had taken only a few steps when his way was blocked by hulking spiky darkness. He dodged to the left of the shrub, then to the right, trying irritably to calm his heart. But there was no path. He had lost his way in the dark. Around him dimness rustled, chattering.

He began to curse himself. What had possessed him to come in here? Why on earth had he chosen to explore so late in the day? How could the woods be so interminable? He groped for openings between masses of thorns. Sometimes he found them, though often they would not admit his body. The darkness was a maze of false paths.

Eventually he had to return to the mouth of the tunnel and crawl. Unseen moisture welled up from the ground, between his fingers. Shrubs leaned closer as he advanced, poking him with thorns.

His skin felt fragile, and nervously unstable; he burned, but his heat often seemed to break, flooding him with the chill of the night.

There was something even less pleasant. As he crawled, the leaning darkness - or part of it -

seemed to move beside him. It was as though someone were pacing him, perhaps on all fours, outside the tunnel. When he halted, so did the pacing. It would reach the end of the tunnel just as he did.

Nothing but imagination, helped by the closely looming tree trunks beyond the shrubs. Apart from the creaking of wood and the rattling sway of leaves, there was no sound beyond the tunnel -

certainly none of pacing. He crawled. The cumbersome moist sounds that accompanied the pacing were those of his own progress. But he crawled more slowly, and the darkness imitated him. Wasn't the thorny tunnel dwindling ahead? It would trap him. Suddenly panicking, he began to scramble backward.

The thorns hardly hindered his retreat. He must have broken them down. He emerged gasping, glad of the tiny gain in light. Around him shrubs pressed close as ever. He stamped his way back along what he'd thought was his original path. When he reached the hindrance he smashed his way between the shrubs, struggling and snarling, savage with panic, determined not to yield. His hands were torn; he heard cloth rip. Well, the thorns could have that.

When at last he reached an open space his panic sighed loudly out of him. He began to walk as rapidly as seemed safe, towards where he remembered the road to be. Overhead black nets of branches turned, momentarily catching stars. Once, amid the enormous threshing of the woods, he thought he heard a heavy body shoving through the nearby bushes. Good luck to whoever it was.

Ahead, in the barred dark, hung little lighted windows. He had found the trailer park, but only by losing his way.

He was home. He hurried into the light, smiling. In the metal alleys pegged shirts hung neck down, dripping; they flapped desperately on the wind. The trailer was dark. In the main room, lying on the couch like someone's abandoned reading, was a note: BACK LATER. His mother had added MIGHT BE LATE.

He'd been looking forward to companionship. Now the trailer seemed too brightly lit, and false: a furnished tin can. He made himself coffee, leafed desultorily through his floppy paperbacks, opened and closed a pocket chess set. He poked through his box of souvenirs: shells, smooth stones; a minute Bible; a globe of synthetic snow within which a huge vague figure, presumably meant to be a snowman, loomed outside a house; a dead flashlight fitted with a set of clip-on Halloween faces; a dull grey ring whose metal swelled into a bulge over which colours crawled slowly, changing. The cardboard box was full of memories: the Severn valley, the Welsh hills, the garishly glittering mile of Blackpool; he couldn't remember where the ring had come from. But the memories were dim tonight, uninvolving.

He wandered into his parents' room. It looked to him like a secondhand store for clothes and toiletries. He found his father's large metal box, but it was locked as usual. Well, Michael didn't want to read his old books anyway. He searched for contraceptives, but as he'd expected, there were none. If he wasn't mistaken, his parents had no need for them. Poor buggers. He'd never been able to imagine how, out of proportion as they seemed to be, they had begot him.

Eventually he went out. The incessant rocking of the trailer, its hollow booming in the wind, had begun to infuriate him. He hurried along the road between the pines; wind sifted through needles.

On the main road buses ran to Liverpool. But he'd already been there several times. He caught a bus to the opposite terminus.

The bus was almost empty. A few passengers rattled in their lighted pod over the bumpy country roads. Darkness streamed by, sometimes becoming dim hedges. The scoop of the headlamps set light to moths, and once to a squirrel. Ahead the sky glowed, as if with a localized dawn. Lights began to emerge from behind silhouetted houses; streets opened, brightening.

The bus halted in a square, beside a village cross. The passengers hurried away, snuggling into their collars. Almost at once the street was deserted, the bus extinguished. Folded awnings clattered, tugged by the wind. Perhaps after all he should have gone into the city. He was stranded here for -

he read the timetable: God, two hours until the last bus.

He wandered among the grey stone houses. Streetlamps glared silver; the light coated shop windows, behind whose flowering of frost he could see faint ghosts of merchandise. Curtains shone warmly, chimneys smoked. His heels clanked mechanically on the cobbles. Streets, streets, empty streets. Then the streets became crowded, with gleaming parked cars. Ahead, on the wall of a building, was a plaque of coloured light: FOUR IN THE MORNING. A club.

He hesitated, then he descended the steps. Maybe he wouldn't fit in with the brand-new sports car set, but anything was better than wandering the icy streets. At the bottom of the stone flight, a desk stood beside a door to coloured dimness. A broken-nosed man wearing evening dress sat behind the desk. 'Are you a member, sir?' he said in an accent that was almost as convincing as his suit.

Inside was worse than Michael had feared. On a dance floor couples turned lethargically, glittering and changing colour like toy dancers. Clumps of people stood shouting at each other in county accents, swaying and laughing; some stared at him as they laughed. He heard their talk: motorboats, bloody bolshies, someone's third abortion. He didn't mind meeting new people - he'd had to learn not to mind - but he could tell these people preferred, now they'd stared, to ignore him.

His three pounds' membership fee included a free drink. I should think so too, he thought. He ordered a beer, to the barman's faint contempt. As he carried the tankard to one of the low bare tables he was conscious of his boots, tramping the floorboards. There was nothing wrong with them, he'd wiped them. He sipped, making the drink last, and gazed into the beer's dim glow.

When someone else sat at the table he didn't look at her. He had to glance up at last, because she was staring. What was the matter with her, was he on show? Often in groups he felt alien, but he'd never felt more of a freak than here. His large-boned arms huddled protectively around him, his gawky legs drew up.

But she was smiling. Her stare was wide-eyed, innocent, if somehow odd. 'I haven't seen you before,' she said. 'What's your name?'

'Michael.' It sounded like phlegm; he cleared his throat. 'Michael. What's yours?'

'June.' She made a face as though it tasted like medicine.

'Nothing wrong with that.' Her hint of dissatisfaction with herself had emboldened him.

'You haven't moved here, have you? Are you visiting?'

There was something strange about her: about her eyes, about the way she seemed to search for questions. 'My parents have a caravan,' he said. 'We're in the Pine Dunes Caravanserai. We docked just last week.'

'Yeah.' She drew the word out like a sigh. 'Like a ship. That must be fantastic. I wish I had that.

Just to be able to see new things all the time, new places. The only way you can see new things here is taking acid. I'm tripping now.'

His eyebrows lifted slightly; his faint smile shrugged.

'That's what I mean,' she said, smiling. 'These people here would be really shocked. They're so provincial. You aren't.'

In fact he hadn't been sure how to react. The pupils of her eyes were expanding and contracting rapidly, independently of each other. But her small face was attractive, her small body had large firm breasts.

'I saw the moon dancing before,' she said. 'I'm beginning to come down now. I thought I'd like to look at people. You wouldn't know I was tripping, would you? I can control it when I want to.'

She wasn't really talking to him, he thought; she just wanted an audience to trip to. He'd heard things about LSD. 'Aren't you afraid of starting to trip when you don't mean to?'

'Flashbacks, you mean. I never have them. I shouldn't like that.' She gazed at his scepticism.

'There's no need to be afraid of drugs,' she said. 'All sorts of people used to trip. Witches used to.

Look, it tells you about it in here.'

She fumbled a book out of her handbag; she seemed to have difficulty in wielding her fingers.

Witchcraft in England. 'You can have that,' she said. 'Have you got a job?'

It took him a moment to realize that she'd changed the subject. 'No,' he said. 'I haven't left school long. I had to have extra school because of all the moving. I'm twenty. I expect I'll get a job soon. I think we're staying here.'

'That could a good job,' she said, pointing at a notice behind the bar: TRAINEE BARMAN

REQUIRED. 'I think they want to get rid of that guy there. People don't like him. I know a lot of people would come here if they got someone friendly like you.'

Was it just her trip talking? Two girls said good-bye to a group, and came over. 'We're going now, June. See you shortly.'

'Right. Hey, this is Michael.'

'Nice to meet you, Michael.'

'Hope we'll see you again.'

Perhaps they might. These people didn't seem so bad after all. He drank his beer and bought another, wincing at the price and gazing at the job notice. June refused a drink: 'It's a downer.' They talked about his travels, her dissatisfactions, and her lack of cash to pay for moving. When he had to leave she said, 'I'm glad I met you. I like you.' And she called after him, 'If you got that job I'd come here.'

Darkness blinded him. It was heavy on him, and moved. It was more than darkness: it was flesh.

Beneath him and around him and above him, somnolent bodies crawled blindly. They were huge; so was he. As they shifted incessantly he heard sounds of mud or flesh.

He was shifting too. It was more than restlessness. His whole body felt unstable; he couldn't make out his own form - whenever he seemed to perceive it, it changed. His mind was unstable too; it felt too full, of alien chunks that ground harshly together. Memories or fantasies floated vaguely through him. Stone circles. Honeycombed mountains; glimmering faces like a cluster of bubbles in a cave mouth. Enormous dreaming eyes beneath stone and sea. A labyrinth of thorns. His own face.

But why was his own face only a memory?

He woke. Dawn suffocated him like grey gas; he lay panting. It was all right. It hadn't been his own face that he'd seemed to remember in the dream. His body hadn't grown huge. His large bones were still lanky. But there was a huge figure, nonetheless. It loomed above him at the window, its spread of face staring down at him.

He woke, and had to grab the dark before he could find the light switch. He twisted himself to sit on the edge of the couch, legs tangled in the blankets, so as not to fall asleep again. Around him the trailer was fiat and bright, and empty. Beyond the ajar door of his parents' room he could see that their bed was smooth and deserted.

He was sure he'd had that dream before - the figure at the window. Somehow he associated it with a windmill, a childhood memory he couldn't locate. Had he been staying with his grandparents? The dream was fading in the light. He glanced at his clock: two in the morning. He didn't want to sleep again until the dream had gone.

He stood outside the trailer. A wind was rising; a loud whisper passed through the forest, unlit trailers rocked and creaked a little at their moorings; behind everything, vast and constant, the sea rushed vaguely. Scraps of cloud slid over the filling moon; light caught at them, but they slipped away. His parents hadn't taken the car. Where had they gone? Irrationally, he felt he knew, if only he could remember. Why did they go out at night so much?

A sound interrupted his musing. The wind carried it to him only to snatch it away. It seemed distant, and therefore must be loud. Did it contain words? Was something being violently ill, and trying to shout? The moon's light flapped between a procession of dark clouds. A drunk, no doubt, shouting incoherently. Michael gazed at the edge of the forest and wondered about his parents.

Light and wind shifted the foliage. Then he shrugged. He ought to be used to his parents' nocturnal behaviour by now.

He slammed the door. His dream was still clinging to him. There had been something odd about the head at the window, besides its size. Something about it had reminded him unpleasantly of a bubble. Hadn't that happened the first time he'd had the dream? But he was grinning at himself: never mind dreams, or his parents. Think of June.

She had been in the club almost every evening since he'd taken the job, a month ago. He had dithered for a week, then he'd returned and asked about the notice. Frowning, the barman had called the manager - to throw Michael out? But June had told them her parents knew Michael well. 'All right. We'll give you six weeks and see how you do.' The barman had trained him, always faintly snooty and quick to criticize. But the customers had begun to prefer Michael to serve them. They accepted him, and he found he could be friendly. He'd never felt less like an outsider.

So long as the manager didn't question June's parents. June had invited Michael to the cottage a couple of times. Her parents had been polite, cold, fascinated, contemptuous. He'd tried to fit his lanky legs beneath his chair, so that the flares of his trousers would cover up his boots - and all the while he'd felt superior to these people in some way, if only he could think of it. They aren't my kind of people either,' June had told him, walking to the club. 'When can we go to your caravan?'

He didn't know. He hadn't yet told his parents about her; the reaction to the news of his job hadn't been what he'd hoped. His mother had gazed at him sadly, and he'd felt she was holding more of her feelings hidden, as they all had to in the cramped trailer. 'Why don't you go to the city? They'll have better jobs there.' 'But I feel at home here.'

'That's right,' his father had said. 'That's right.' He'd stared at Michael strangely, with a kind of uneasy joy. Michael had felt oppressed, engulfed by the stare. Of course there was nothing wrong, his father had become uneasy on hearing of his son's first job, his first step in the world, that was all.

'Can I borrow the car to get to the club?'

His father had become dogmatic at once; his shell had snapped tight. 'Not yet. You'll get the key soon enough.'

It hadn't seemed worth arguing. Though his parents rarely used the car at night, Michael was never given the key. Where did they go at night? 'When you're older' had never seemed much of an explanation. But surely their nocturnal excursions were more frequent now they'd docked at Pine Dunes? And why was his mother so anxious to persuade him to leave?

It didn't matter. Sometimes he was glad that they went out; it gave him a chance to be alone, the trailer seemed less cramped, he could breathe freely. He could relax, safe from the threat of his father's overwhelming presence. And if they hadn't gone out that night he would never have met June.

Because of the wanderings of the trailer he had never had time for close friendships. He had felt more attached to this latest berth than to any person - until he'd met June. She was the first girl to arouse him. Her small slim body, her bright quick eyes, her handfuls of breast - he felt his body stirring as he thought of her.

For years he'd feared he was impotent. Once, in a village school, a boy had shown him an erotic novel. He'd read about the gasps of pleasure, the creaking of the bed. Gradually he'd realized why that troubled him. The walls of the trailer were thin; he could always hear his father snoring or wheezing, like a huge fish stranded on the shore of a dream. But he had never heard his parents copulating.

Their sexual impulse must have faded quickly, soon after he was born - as soon, he thought, as it had served its purpose. Would his own be as feeble? Would it work at all? Yes, he'd gasped over June, the first night her parents were out. 'I think it'd be good to make love on acid,' she'd said as they lay embraced. 'That way you really become one, united together.' But he thought he would be terrified to take LSD, even though what she'd said appealed deeply to him.

He wished she were here now. The trailer rocked; his parents' door swung creaking, imitated by the bathroom door, which often sprang open. He slammed them irritably. The dream of the bubbling head at the window - if that had been what was wrong with it was drifting away. Soon he'd sleep.

He picked up Witchcraft in England. It looked dull enough to help him sleep. And it was June's.

Naked witches danced about on the cover, and on many of the pages. They danced obscenely.

They danced lewdly. They chanted obscenely. And so on. They used poisonous drugs, such as belladonna. No doubt that had interested June. He leafed idly onward; his gaze flickered impatiently.

Suddenly he halted, at a name: Severnford. Now that was interesting. We can imagine, the book insisted, the witches rowing out to the island in the middle of the dark river, and committing unspeakable acts before the pallid stone in the moonlight; but Michael couldn't imagine anything of the kind, nor did he intend to try. Witches are still reputed to visit the island, the book told him before he interrupted it and riffled on. But a few pages later his gaze was caught again.

He stared at this new name. Then reluctantly he turned to the index. At once words stood out from the columns, eager to be seen. They slipped into his mind as if their slots had been ready for years. Exham. Whitminster. The Old Horns. Holihavan. Dilham. Severnford. His father had halted the trailer at all of them, and his parents had gone out at night.

He was still staring numbly at the list when the door snapped open. His father glanced sharply at him, then went into the bedroom. 'Come on,' he told Michael's mother, and sat heavily on the bed, which squealed. To Michael's bewildered mind his father's body seemed to spread as he sat down, like a dropped jelly. His mother sat obediently; her gaze dodged timidly, she looked pale and shrunken - by fear, Michael knew at once. 'Go to bed,' his father told him, raising one foot effortfully to kick the door shut. Almost until dawn Michael lay in the creaking unstable dark, thinking.

'You must have seen all sorts of places,' June said.

'We've seen a few,' said Michael's mother. Her eyes moved uneasily. She seemed nervously resentful, perhaps at being reminded of something she wanted desperately to forget. At last, as if she'd struggled and found courage, she managed to say, 'We may see a few more.'

'Oh, no we won't,' her husband said. He sat slumped on the couch, as though his body were a burden he'd had to drop there. Now that there were four people in the trailer he seemed to take up even more room; his presence overwhelmed all the spaces between them.

But Michael refused to be overwhelmed. He stared at his father. 'What made you choose the places we've lived?' he demanded.

'I had my reasons.'

'What reasons?'

'I'll tell you sometime. Not now, son. You don't want us arguing in front of your girl friend, do you?'

Into the embarrassed silence June said, 'I really envy you, being able to go everywhere.'

'You'd like to, would you?' Michael's mother said. 'Oh, yes. I'd love to see the world.'

His mother turned from the stove. 'You ought to. You're the right age for it. It wouldn't do Michael any harm, either.'

For a moment her eyes were less dull. Michael was glad: he'd thought she would approve of June's wanderlust - that was one reason why he'd given in to June's pleas. Then his father was speaking, and his mother dulled again.

'Best to stay where you're born,' his father told June. 'You won't find a better place than here. I know what I'm talking about.'

'You should try living where I do. It'd kill your head in no time.'

'Mike feels at home here. That's right, isn't it, son? You tell her.'

'I like it here,' Michael said. Words blocked his throat. 'I mean, I met you,' he hawked at June.

His mother chopped vegetables: chop, chop, chop the sound was harsh, trapped within the metal walls. 'Can I do anything?' June said.

'No, thank you. It's all right,' she said indifferently. She hadn't accepted June yet, after all.

'If you're so keen on seeing the world,' his father demanded, 'what's stopping you?'

'I can't afford it, not yet. I work in a boutique, I'm saving the money I'd have spent on clothes.

And then I can't drive. I'd need to go with someone who can.'

'Good luck to you. But I don't see Mikey going with you.'

Well, ask me! Michael shouted at her, gagged (by his unsureness: she mightn't have had him in mind at all). But she only said, 'When I travel I'm going to have things from everywhere.'

'I've got some,' he said. 'I've kept some things.' He carried the cardboard box to her, and displayed his souvenirs. 'You can have them if you like,' he said impulsively; if she accepted he would be more sure of her. 'The flashlight only needs batteries.'

But she pushed the plastic faces aside, and picked up the ring. 'I like that,' she said, turning it so that its colours spilled slowly over one another, merging and separating. She whispered, 'It's like tripping.

''There you are. I'm giving it to you.'

His father stared at the ring, then a smile spread his mouth. 'Yes, you give her that. It's as good as an engagement, that ring.'

Michael slid the ring on to her finger before she could change her mind; she had begun to look embarrassed. 'It's lovely,' she said. 'Have we time for Mike to take me for a walk before dinner?'

'You can stay out for an hour if you like,' his mother said, then anxiously: 'Go down to the beach.

You might get lost in the woods, in the fog.'

The fog was ambiguous: perhaps thinning, perhaps gathering again. Inside a caravan a radio sang Christmas carols. A sharp-edged bronze sun hung close to the sea. Sea and fog had merged, and might be advancing over the beach. June took Michael's hand as they climbed the slithering dunes.

'I just wanted to come out to talk,' she explained.

So had he. He wanted to tell her what he'd discovered. That was his main reason for. inviting her: he needed her support in confronting his parents, he would be too disturbed to confront them alone -

he'd needed it earlier when he'd tried to interrogate his father.. But what could he tell her? I've found out my parents are witches?

'You know that book you lent me-'

'No, I didn't really want to talk,' she said. 'There were just too many bad vibes in there. I'll be all right, we'll go back soon. But they're strange, your parents, aren't they? I didn't realize your father was so heavy.'

'He used to be like me. He's been getting fatter for the last few months.' After a pause he voiced his worst secret fear: 'I hope I never get like him.'

'You'll have to get lots of exercise. Let's walk as far as the point.'

Ahead along the beach, the grey that lay stretched on the sea was land, not fog. They trudged towards it. Sand splashed from his boots; June slid, and gripped his hand. He strained to tell her what he'd found out, but each phrase he prepared sounded more absurd: his voice echoed hollowly, closed into his mind. He'd tell her - but not today. He relaxed, and felt enormously relieved; he enjoyed her hand small in his. 'I like fog,' she said. 'There are always surprises in it.'

The bronze sun paced them, sinking. The sea shifted restlessly, muffled. To their left, above the dunes, trees were a fiat mass of prickly fog. They were nearly at the point now. It pulled free of the grey, darkening and sharpening. It looked safe enough for them to climb the path.

But when they reached the top it seemed hardly worth the effort. A drab patch of beach and dunes, an indistinct fragment of sea scattered with glitterings of dull brass, surrounded them in a soft unstable frame of fog. Otherwise the view was featureless, except for a tree growing beside the far dunes. Was it a tree? Its branches seemed too straight, its trunk too thick. Suddenly troubled, Michael picked his way over the point as far as he dared. The fog withdrew a little. It wasn't a tree.

It was a windmill.

A windmill by the sea! 'My grandparents lived here,' he blurted.

'Oh, did they?'

'You don't understand. They lived near that windmill. It's the same one, I know it is.'

He still wasn't sure whether she felt his confusion. Memories rushed him, as if all at once afloat: he'd been lying on the couch in his grandparents' decrepit trailer, the huge head had loomed at the window, vague with dawn. It must have been a dream then too.

He followed June down the path. Chill fog trailed them, lapping the point. His thoughts drifted, swirling. What did his discovery mean? He couldn't remember his grandparents at all, not even what they'd looked like. They had been his father's parents - why had the man never mentioned them? Why hadn't he remarked that they'd lived here? The sun slid along the rim of the sea, swollen as though with glowing blood. Had his grandparents also been witches?

'Did Mike's grandparents live here, then?' June said. His mother stared at her. The spoon and saucepan she was holding chattered like nervous teeth. He was sure she was going to scream and throw everything away - the utensils, her self-control, the mask behind which she'd hidden to protect him: for how long? For the whole of his childhood? But she stammered, 'How did you know that?'

'Mike told me. The windmill just reminded him.'

'Is dinner ready?' Michael interrupted. He wanted to think everything out before questioning his father.

But June was opening her mouth to continue. The trailer was crowded, suffocating. Shut up! he screamed at her. Get out! 'Were they born here, then?' June said.

'No, I don't think so.' His mother had turned away and was dishing vegetables. June went to hold the dishes. 'So why did they come here?' she said.

His mother frowned, turning her back; within her frown she was searching. 'To retire,' she said abruptly.

His father nodded and smiled to himself, squeezing forward his ruff of chins. 'You could retire from the human race here,' June said sourly, and he wheezed like a punctured balloon.

As the four ate dinner, their constraint grew. Michael and June made most of the conversation; his parents replied shortly when at all, and watched. His mother observed June uneasily; he read dislike in her eyes, or pity. He felt irritably resentful, her uneasiness made his skin nervous. Night edged closer to the windows, blank-faced.

His father leaned back as if his weight had toppled the chair, which creaked loudly. He patted his quaking stomach. 'Just storing it up for the winter,' he said, winking at June.

His arms flopped around her shoulders and Michael's. 'You two go well together. Don't they, eh?'

But his wife said only, 'I'm going to bed now. I'm very tired. Perhaps we'll see you again,' which sounded like dutiful politeness.

'I hope so,' June said.

'I know we will,' Michael's father said expansively. Michael walked June to the bus stop. 'I'll see you at the club,' she said through a kiss. Smoldering cones of yellow light led the bus away, and were engulfed. As he walked back, twisted shapes of fog bulked between the trees. Nearby in the dark, something shifted moistly.

He halted. What had it been? Blurred trees creaked with a deadened sound, thin trails of fog reached out for him from branches. He'd heard a shifting, deep in the dark. A vague memory plucked at him. He shivered as if to shake it free, into the chill clinging night. A restless moist shifting. He felt as though the depths of the forest were reaching for his mind with ambiguous tatters of grey. He strode rapidly towards the invisible light. Again he heard the slow moist shifting.

Only the sea, he told himself. Only the sea.

As he emerged into the open, the clouds parted and the moon rolled free. The enormous shape in the open space glistened with moonlight. The unstable head turned its crawling face towards him.

The dream trailed him to Liverpool, to the central library, although the space and the head had faded before he could make them out - if indeed he had wanted to. But a rush of rain, and the bright lights of the library, washed the dream away. He hurried up the wide green stairs to the Religion and Philosophy Section.

He pulled books from the shelves. Lancashire Witches. North-West Hauntings. Ghostly Lancashire. The banality of their covers was reassuring; it seemed absurd that his parents could be mixed up in such things. Yet he couldn't quite laugh. Even if they were, -~›hat could he do? He slammed the books angrily on a table, startling echoes.

As he read he began to feel safer. Pine Dunes wasn't indexed in North-West Hauntings. His attention strayed fascinated into irrelevances. The hanged man's ghost in Everton Library. The poltergeist of the Palace Hotel, Birkdale. Jokey ghost stories in Lancashire dialect, ee lad. Rain and wind shook the windows, fluorescent light lay flat on the tables. Beyond a glass partition people sat studying, library staff clattered up and down open staircases, carrying scraps of paper. Reassured, he turned to Lancashire Witches. Pine Dunes. It was there, on three pages.

When he made himself search the pages they didn't say much. Over the centuries, witches had been rumoured to gather in the Pine Dunes forest. Was that surprising? Wouldn't they naturally have done so, for concealment? Besides, these were only rumours; few people would have bothered struggling through the undergrowth. He opened Ghostly Lancashire, expecting irrelevances. But the index showed that Pine Dunes covered several pages.

The author had interviewed. a group the other books ignored: the travellers. Their stories were unreliable, he warned, but fascinating. Few travellers would walk the Pine Dunes road after dark; they kept their children out of the woods even by day. A superstitious people, the author pointed out. The book had been written thirty years ago, Michael reminded himself. And the travellers gave no reason for their nervousness except vague tales of something unpleasantly large glimpsed moving beyond the most distant trees. But surely distance must have formed the trees into a solid wall; how could anyone have seen beyond?

One traveller, senile and often incoherent, told a story. A long time ago he, or someone else - the author couldn't tell - had wandered back to the travellers' camp, very drunk. The author didn't believe the story, but included it because it was vivid and unusual. Straying from the road, the man had become lost in the forest. Blinded by angry panic, he'd fought his way towards an open space.

But it wasn't the camp, as he'd thought. He had lost his footing on the slippery earth and had gone skidding into a pit.

Had it been a pit, or the mouth of a tunnel? As he'd scrabbled, bruised but otherwise unhurt, for a foothold on the mud at the bottom, he'd seen an opening that led deeper into darkness. But the darkness had been moving slowly and enormously towards him, with a sound like that of a huge shifting beneath mud. The darkness had parted loudly, resolving itself into several sluggish forms that glistened dimly as they advanced to surround him. Terror had hurled him in a leap halfway up the pit; his hands had clamped on rock, and he'd wrenched himself up the rest of the way. He'd run blindly. In the morning he'd found himself full of thorns on a sprung bed of undergrowth.

So what did all that prove? Michael argued with himself on the bus to Pine Dunes. The man had been drunk. All right, so there were other tales about Pine Dunes, but nothing very evil. Why shouldn't his parents go out at night? Maybe they were ghost-hunters, witch-hunters. Maybe they were going to write a book about their observations. How else could such books be written? His mind was becoming desperate as he kept remembering his mother's masked fear.

His parents were asleep. His father lay beached on the bed, snoring flabbily; beyond his stomach his wife could hardly be seen. Michael was glad, for he hadn't known what to say to them. He wheeled out the bicycle he'd bought from his first month's wages.

He cycled to the Four in the Morning. His knees protruded on either side of him, jerking up and down. Hedges sailed by slowly; their colours faded and dimmed into twilight. The whirr of his dynamo caught among the leaves. He struggled uphill, standing on the pedals. Dim countryside opened below him, the sea glinted dully. As he poised on the edge of the downhill rush he knew how he could unburden himself, or begin to. Tonight he would tell June everything.

But she didn't come to the club. People crowded in; the lights painted them carelessly monochrome. Discotheque records snarled and thumped, swirls of tobacco smoke glared red, pink, purple. Michael hurried about, serving. Dim wet discoloured faces jostled to reach him, shouting,

'Mike! Mike!' Faces rose obsessively to the surface of the jostling: June's, who wasn't there; his mother's, her eyes trying to dodge fear. He was suffocating. His frustration gathered within him; he felt swollen, encumbered. He stared at luridly pink smoke while voices called. 'I've got to go home,'

he told the barman.

'Had enough, have you?'

'My parents aren't well. I'm worried.'

'Strange you didn't say so when you came in. Well, I've managed by myself before.' He turned away, dismissing Michael. 'You'll have to make do with me tonight,' he told the shouting.

The last of the lit streets faded behind Michael. The moon was full, but blurred by unkempt fields of cloud; it showed him only a faint windy swaying that surrounded him for miles. When he confronted his father, what would his mother do? Would she break down? If she admitted to witchcraft and said it was time Michael knew, the scene would be easier - if she did. The moon struggled among plump clouds, and was engulfed.

He cycled fast up the Pine Dunes road. Get there, don't delay to reconsider. Gravel ground together squeaking beneath his wheels; his yellow light wobbled, plucking at trees. The depths of the forest creaked; distant tree trunks were pushed apart to let a huge unstable face peer through. He was overtired - of course there was nothing among the far trees but dark. He sped into the Caravanserai; random patches of unlit trailers bobbed up and faded by. His trailer was unlit too.

Perhaps his parents weren't there. He realized furiously that he felt relieved. They were in there all right, they'd be asleep. He would wake his father, the man might betray himself while still half-asleep. He'd dazzle his father awake, like an interrogator. But his parents' bed was empty.

He punched the wall, which rang flatly. His father had outwitted him again. He stared around the room, enraged. His father's huge suits dangled emptily, like sloughed skin; his mother's clothes hid in drawers. His father's metal box of books sat on top of the wardrobe. Michael glanced resentfully at it, then stared. It was unlocked.

He lifted it down and made to sit on his parents' bed. But that made him feel uneasy; he carried the box into the main room. Let his father come in and find him reading. Michael hoped he would.

He tugged at the lid, which resisted then sprang open with a loud clang.

He remembered that sound. He'd heard it when he was quite young, and his mother's voice, pleading: 'Let him at least have a normal childhood.' After a moment he'd heard the box closed again. 'All right. He'll find out when it's time,' he'd heard his father say.

The box contained no printed books, but several notebooks. They had been written in by numerous people; the inks in the oldest notebook, whose spine had given way, were brown as old bloodstains. Some of the writing in the latest book was his mother's. Odd pages showed rough maps: The Old Horns, Exham, Whitminster, though none of Pine Dunes. These he recognized; but he couldn't understand a word of the text.

Most of it was in English, but might as well not have been. It consisted largely of quotations copied from books; sometimes the source was indicated - Necro, Revelations Glaaki, Garimiaz, Verrnis, Theobald, whatever they were. The whole thing reminded him of pamphlets issued by cranky cults - like the people who gave all their worldly goods to a man in America, or the others who'd once lured Michael into a seedy hotel for a personality profile, which they'd lied would be fun. He read, baffled.

After a while he gave up. Even the entries his mother had written made no sense. Some of the words he couldn't even pronounce. Kuthullhoo? Kuthoolhew? And what was supposed to be so Great about it, whatever it was?

He shrugged, sniggering a little. He didn't feel so worried now. If this was all his parents were involved in, it seemed silly but harmless. The fact that they'd concealed it from him so successfully for so long seemed to prove as much. They were so convincingly normal, it couldn't be anything very bad. After all, many businessmen belonged to secret societies with jargon nobody else could understand. Maybe his father had been initiated into this society as part of one of the jobs he'd taken in his wanderings!

One thing still troubled Michael: his mother's fear. He couldn't see what there was to fear in the blurred language of the notebooks. He made a last effort, and let the books fall open where they would - at the pages that had been read most frequently.

What a waste of time! He strained his mind, but the pages became more bewildering still; he began to laugh. What on earth was 'the millennial gestation? Something to do with 'the fosterling of the Great Old Ones'? ',The hereditary rebirth'? 'Each of Its rebirths comes closer to incarnation'?

'when the mind opens to all the dimensions will come the incarnation. Upon the incarnation all minds will become one.' Ah, that explains it! Michael sniggered wildly. But there was more: 'the ingestion,' 'the mating beyond marriage,' 'the melting and merging' -

He threw the book angrily into the box. The skin of his eyes crawled hotly; he could hardly keep them open, yet he was wasting his time reading this. The trailer rocked as something huge tugged at it: the wind. The oldest, spineless, notebook began to disintegrate. As he knocked it square, an envelope slipped out.

It was addressed in his father's large handwriting; the last word had had to be cramped. TO

MICHAEL: NOT TO BE OPENED UNTIL AFTER I AM GONE. He turned it over and began to tear, but his hand faltered. He'd been unreasonable enough to his father for one day. After a moment he put the envelope unopened in his pocket, feeling sly and ashamed. He replaced the box, then he prepared to sleep. In the dark he tried to arrange his limbs on the sagging couch. Rocking, the trailer sounded like a rusty cradle.

He slept. He wasn't sure whether he was asleep when he heard his mother's low voice. He must be awake, for he could feel her breath on his face. 'Don't stay here.' Her voice trembled. 'Your girl friend's got the right idea. Go away with her if that's what you want. Just get away from here.'

His father's voice reached for her out of the dark. 'That's enough. He's asleep. You come to bed.'

Silence and darkness settled down for the night. But in the night, or in Michael's dream, there were noises: the stealthy departure of a car from the park; heavy footsteps trying not to disturb the trailer; the gingerly closing of his parents' door. Sleep seemed more important.

His father's voice woke him, shouting into the bedroom. 'Wake up. The car's gone. It's been stolen.'

Daylight blazed through Michael's eyelids. He was sure at once what had happened. His father had hidden the car, so that nobody could get away. Michael lay paralysed, waiting for his mother's cry of panic. Her silence held time immobile. He squeezed his eyelids tighter, filling his eyes with red.

'Oh,' his mother said at last, dully. 'Oh, dear.'

There was more in her voice than resignation: she sounded lethargic, indifferent. Suddenly Michael remembered what he'd read in June's book. Witches used drugs. His eyes sprang wide. He was sure that his father was drugging his mother.

It didn't take the police long to find the car, abandoned and burnt out, near the windmill. 'Kids, probably,' one of the policemen said. 'We may be in touch with you again.' Michael's father shook his head sadly, and they le~.

'I must have dropped the car keys while we were out.' Michael thought his father hardly bothered to sound convincing. Why couldn't he tell the man so, confront him? Because he wasn't sure; he might have dreamed the sounds last night - He raged at his own cowardice, staring at his mother. If only he could be certain of her support! She wandered desultorily, determinedly cleaning the trailer, as though she were ill but expecting company.

When his gagged rage found words at last it weakened immediately. 'Are you all right?' he demanded of her, but then could only stammer, 'Do you think you'd better see a doctor?'

Neither of his parents responded. His unsureness grew, and fed his frustration. He felt lethargic, unable to act, engulfed by his father's presence. Surely June would be at the club tonight. He had to talk to someone, to hear another interpretation; perhaps she would prove that he'd imagined everything.

He washed and shaved. He was glad to retreat, even into the cramped bathroom; he and his parents had been edging uneasily around one another all day - the trailer made him think unpleasantly of a tin can full of squirming. As he shaved, the bathroom door sprang open, as if often did. His father appeared behind him in the mirror, staring at him.

Steam coated the mirror again. Beneath the steam, his father's face seemed to writhe like a plastic mask on fire. Michael reached to clear the mirror, but already his father and the man's emotions were upon him. Before Michael could turn his father was hugging him violently, his flesh quivering as though it would burst. Michael held himself stiff, refusing to be engulfed. What are you doing?

Get away! In a moment his father turned clumsily and plodded out. The trailer rumbled, shaking.

Michael sighed loudly. God, he was glad that was over. He finished shaving and hurried out.

Neither of his parents looked at him; his father pretended to read a book, and whistled tunelessly; his mother turned vaguely as he passed. He cycled to the club.

'Parents all right?' the barman said indifferently. 'I'm not sure.'

'Good of you to come.' Perhaps that was sarcasm. 'There's some things for you to wash.'

Michael could still feel his father's clinging embrace; he kept trying to wriggle it away. He welcomed the press of bodies at the bar, shouting, 'Mike!' - even though June wasn't among them.

He welcomed the companionship of ordinary people. He strode expertly about, serving, as the crowd grew, as smoke gathered. He could still feel swollen flesh pressed hotly against his back. He won't do that to me again, he thought furiously. He'll never - A tankard dropped from his hand, beneath a beer tap. 'Oh, my God,' he said.

'What's up with you now?' the barman demanded. When his father had embraced him, Michael had thought of nothing but escape. Now at last he realized how final his father's gesture had been. 'My parents,' he said. 'They're, they're worse.'

'Just sent you a message, did they? Off home again now, I suppose? You'd better see the manager, or I will.'

'Will you watch that bloody beer you're spilling!' Michael slammed shut the tap and struggled through the crowd. People grimaced sympathetically at him, or stared. It didn't matter, his job didn't matter. He must hurry back to head off whatever was going to happen. Someone bumped into him in the doorway, and hindered him when he tried to push them aside. 'What's the matter with you?'

he shouted. 'Get out of the way!' It was June.

'I'm really sorry I didn't come last night,' she said.

'My parents dragged me out to dinner.''All right. Okay. Don't worry.'

'You're angry. I really am sorry, I wanted to see you - You're not going, are you?'

'Yes, I've got to. Look, my parents aren't well.'

'I'll come back with you. We can talk on the way. I'll help you look after them.' She caught at his shoulder as he tried to run upstairs. 'Please, Mike. I'll feel bad if you just leave me. We can catch the last bus in five minutes if we run. It'll be quicker than your bike.'

God! She was worse than his father! 'Listen,' he snarled, having clambered to street level. 'It isn't ill, they aren't ill,' he said, letting words tumble wildly as he tried to flee. 'I've found out what they do at night. They're witches.'

'Oh, no!' She sounded shocked but delighted.

'My mother's terrified. My father's been drugging her.' Now that he was able to say so, his urgency diminished a little; he wanted to release all he knew. 'Something's going to happen tonight,'

he said.

'Are you going to try and stop it? Let me come too. I know about it. I showed you my book.'

When he looked doubtful she said, 'They'll have to stop when they see me.'

Perhaps she could look after his mother while he confronted his father. They ran to the bus, which sat unlit in the square for minutes, then dawdled along the country roads, hoping for passengers who never appeared. Michael's frustration coiled tighter again. He explained to June what he'd discovered: 'Yeah,' she kept saying, excited and fascinated. Once she began giggling uncontrollably. 'Wouldn't it be weird if we saw your father dancing naked?' He stared at her until she said, 'Sorry.' Her pupils were expanding and contracting slightly, randomly.

As they ran along the Pine Dunes road the trees leaned closer, creaking and nodding. Suppose his parents hadn't left the trailer yet? What could he say? He'd be tongue-tied again by his unsureness, and June would probably make things worse. He gasped with relief when he saw that the windows were dark, but went inside to make sure. 'I know where they've gone,' he told June.

Moonlight and unbroken cloud spread the sky with dim milk; dark smoky breaths drifted across the glow. He heard the incessant restlessness of the sea. Bare black silhouettes crowded beside the road, thinly intricate against the sky. He hurried June towards the path.

Why should his parents have gone that way? Something told him they had - perhaps the maze he remembered, the tunnel of undergrowth: that was a secret place. The path wound deeper into the woods, glinting faintly; trees rapidly shuttered the glow of the moon. 'Isn't this fantastic,' June said, hurrying behind him.

The pines gave out, but other trees meshed thickly overhead. The glimpses of fiat whitish sky, smoldering with darker cloud, dwindled. In the forest everything was black or blanched, and looked chill, although the night was unseasonably mild. Webs of shadow lay on the path, tangling Michael's feet; tough grass seized him. Bushes massed around him, towering, choking the gaps between trees. The glimpses of sky were fewer and smaller. 'What's that?' June said uneasily.

For a moment he thought it was the sound of someone's foot, unplugging itself from the soft ground: it sounded like a loud slow gulp of mud. But no, it wasn't that. Someone coughing? It didn't sound much like a human cough. Moreover, it sounded as though it were straining to produce a sound, a single sound; and he felt inexplicably that he ought to know what that was.

The bushes stirred, rattling. The muddy sound faded, somewhere ahead. There was no point in telling June his vague thoughts. 'It'll be an animal,' he said. 'Probably something's caught it.'

Soon they reached the tunnel. He knelt at once and began to crawl. Twigs scraped beside his ears, a clawed dry chorus. He found the experience less disturbing now, less oppressive; the tunnel seemed wider, as though someone stout had recently pushed his way through. But behind him June was breathing heavily, and her voice fluttered in the dark. 'There's something following us outside the tunnel,' she said tight]y, nervously.

He crawled quickly to the end and stood up. There's nothing here now. It must have been an animal.'

He felt odd: calm, safe, yet slyly and elusively excited. His eyes had grown equal to the dark. The trees were stouter, and even closer; they squeezed out masses of shrub between them. Overhead, a few pale scraps of sky were caught in branches. The ground squelched underfoot, and he heard another sound ahead: similar, but not the same.

June emerged panting. 'I thought I'd finished tripping. Where are we going?' she said unevenly. 'I can't see.'

'This way.' He headed at once for a low opening in the tangled growth. As he'd somehow expected, the passage twisted several times, closing almost impenetrably, then widened. Perhaps he'd noticed that someone before him had thrust the bushes apart.

'Don't go so fast,' June said in the dark, almost weeping. 'Wait for me.'

Her slowness annoyed him. His indefinable excitement seemed to affect his skin, which crawled with nervousness like interference on the surface of a bubble. Yet he felt strangely powerful, ready for anything. Wait until he saw his father! He stood impatiently, stamping the mushy ground, while June caught up with him. She gripped his arm. 'There it is again,' she gasped.

'What?' The sound? It was only his feet, squelching. But there was another sound, ahead in the tangled creaking dark. It was the gurgling of mud, perhaps of a muddy stream gargling ceaselessly into the earth. No: it was growing louder, more violent, as though the mud were straining to spew out an obstruction. The sound was repeated, again and again, becoming gradually clearer: a single syllable. All at once he knew what it was. Somewhere ahead in the close dark maze, a thick muddy voice was struggling to shout his name.

June had recognized the sound too, and was tugging at his arm. 'Let's go back,' she pleaded. 'I don't like it. Please.'

'God,' he scoffed. 'I thought you were going to help me.' The muddy sounds blurred into a mumble, and were gone. Twigs shook in the oppressive dark, squeaking hollowly together.

Suddenly, ahead of him, he heard his father's voice; then, after a long silence, his mother's. Both were oddly strained and muffled. As though this were a game of hide-and-seek, each had called his name.

There,' he said to June. 'I haven't got time to take you back now.' His excitement was mounting, his nervous skin felt light as a dream. 'Don't you want to look after my mother?' he blurted.

- He shouldered onward. After a while he heard June following him timidly. A wind blundered through the forest, dragging at the bushes. Thorns struggled overhead, clawing at the air; the ground gulped his feet, sounding to his strained ears almost like words. Twice the walls of the passage tried to close, but someone had broken them apart. Ahead the passage broadened. He was approaching an open space.

He began to run. Bushes applauded like joyful bones.

The thick smoky sky rushed on, fighting the moonlight. The vociferous ground was slippery; he stumbled as he ran, and almost tripped over a dark huddle. It was his parents' clothes. Some of them, as he glanced back impatiently, looked torn. He heard June fall slithering against bushes.

'Don't!' she cried. But he had reached the space.

It was enclosed by trees. Ivy thickened the trunks and had climbed to mat the tangle overhead; bushes crowded the cramped gaps between the trees. In the interstices of the tangle, dark sky smoldered.

Slowly his eyes found the meagre light; outlines gathered in the clearing, dimmer than mist.

Bared wooden limbs groped into the space, creaking. The dimness sketched them. He could see now that the clearing was about thirty feet wide, and roughly circular. Dimness crawled on it, as though it were an infested pond. At the far side, a dark bulk stood between him and the trees.

He squinted painfully, but its shape persisted in eluding him. Was it very large, or was the dark lying? Across the clearing mud coughed and gurgled thickly, or something did. Dimness massed on the glistening shape. Suddenly he saw that the shape was moving lethargically, and alive.

June had hung back; now she ran forward, only to slip at the edge of the clearing. She clutched his arm to steady herself, then she gazed beyond him, trembling. 'What is it?' she cried.

'Shut up,' he said savagely.

Apart from her interruption, he felt more calm than he had ever felt before. He knew he was gazing at the source of his dreams. The dreams returned peacefully to his mind and waited to be understood. For a moment he wondered whether this was like June's LSD. Something had been added to his mind, which seemed to be expanding awesomely. Memories floated free, as though they had been coded deep in him: wombs of stone and submarine depths; hovering in a medium that wasn't space, somehow linked to a stone circle on a hill; being drawn closer to the circle, towards terrified faces that stared up through the night; a pregnant woman held writhing at the centre of the circle, screaming as he hovered closer and reached for her. He felt primed with centuries of memories. Inherited memories, or shared; but whose?

He waited. All was about to be clarified. The huge bulk shifted, glistening. Its voice, uncontrollably loud and uneven, struggled muddily to speak. The trees creaked ponderously, the squashed bushes writhed, the sky fled incessantly. Suddenly, touched by an instinct he couldn't define, Michael realized how he and June must look from the far side of the clearing. He took her arm, though she struggled briefly, and they stood waiting: bride and bridegroom of the dark.

After a long muddy convulsion in the dimness, words coughed free. The voice seemed unable to speak more than a phrase at a time; then it would blur, gurgling. Sometimes his father's voice, and occasionally his mother's - high-pitched, trembling - seemed to help. Yet the effect was disturbing, for it sounded as though the muddy voice were attempting muffled imitations of his parents. He held himself calm, trusting that this too would be clarified in due course.

The Great Old Ones still lived, the halting voice gurgled loudly. Their dreams could reach out.

When the human race was young ... and strayed near the Old Ones ... the dreams could reach into the womb... and make the unborn in their image. Something like his mother's voice spoke the last words, wavering fearfully. June struggled, but he gripped her arm.

Though the words were veiled and allusive, he understood instinctively what was being said. His new memories were ready to explain. When he read the notebooks again he would understand consciously. He listened and gazed, fascinated. He was in awe of the size of the speaking bulk. And what was strange about the head? Something moved there, rapid as the whirl of colours on a bubble.

In the dark the face seemed to strain epileptically, perhaps to form words.

The Old Ones could wait, the voice or voices told him. The stars would come right. The people the Old Ones touched before birth ... did not take on their image all at once ... but gradually, down the centuries. Instead of dying, they took on the form ... that the Old Ones had placed in the womb of an ancestor. Each generation came closer to the perfect image.

The bulk glistened as though flayed; in the dimness it looked pale pink, and oddly unstable.

Michael stared uneasily at the head. Swift clouds dragged darknesses over the clearing and snatched them away. The face looked so huge, and seemed to spread. Wasn't it like his father's face? But the eyes were swimming apart, the features slid uncontrollably across the head. All this was nothing but the antics of shadows. A tear in the clouds crept towards the dimmed moon. June was trying to pull away. 'Keep still,' he snarled, tightening his grip.

They would serve the Old Ones, the voice shouted thickly, faltering. That was why they had been made: to be ready when the time came. They shared the memories of the Old Ones... and at the change their bodies were transformed ... into the stuff of the Old Ones. They mated with ordinary people ... in the human way, and later... in the way the Old Ones had decreed. That way was...

June screamed. The tear in the clouds had unveiled the moon. Her cry seemed harsh enough to tear her throat. He turned furiously to silence her; but she dragged herself free, eyes gaping, and fled down the path. The shadow of a cloud rushed towards the clearing. About to pursue June, he turned to see what the moon had revealed.

The shadow reached the clearing as he turned. For a moment he saw the huge head, a swollen bulb which, though blanched by moonlight, reminded him of a mass dug from within a body. The glistening lumpy forehead was almost bare, except for a few strands that groped restlessly over it -

strands of hair, surely, though they looked like strings of livid flesh.

On the head, seeming even smaller amid the width of flesh, he saw his mother's face. It was appallingly dwarfed, and terrified. The strands flickered over it, faster, faster. Her mouth strained wordlessly, gurgling.

Before he could see the rest of the figure, a vague gigantic squatting sack, the shadow flooded the clearing. As it did so, he thought he saw his mother's face sucked into the head, as though by a whirlpool of flesh. Did her features float up again, newly arranged? Were there other, plumper, features jostling among them? He could be sure of nothing in the dark.

June cried out. She'd stumbled; he heard her fall, and the thud of her head against something: then silence. The figure was lumbering towards him, its bulk quaking. For a moment he was sure that it intended to embrace him. But it had reached a pit, almost concealed by undergrowth. It slid into the earth, like slow jelly. The undergrowth sprang back rustling.

He stood gazing at June, who was still unconscious. He knew what he would tell her'. she had had a bad LSD experience, that had been what she'd seen. LSD reminded him of something. Slowly he began to smile.

He went to the pit and peered down. Faint sluggish muddy sounds retreated deep into the earth.

He knew he wouldn't see his parents for a long time. He touched his pocket, where the envelope waited. That would contain his father's explanation of their disappearance, which he could show to people, to June.

Moonlight and shadows raced nervously over the pit. As he stared at the dark mouth he felt full of awe, yet calm. Now he must wait until it was time to come back here, to go into the earth and join the others. He remembered that now; he had always known, deep in himself, that this was home. One day he and June would return. He gazed at her unconscious body, smiling. Perhaps she had been right; they might take LSD together, when it was time. It might help them to become one.

Notes on Contributors

A. A. ATTANASIO was born in Newark, New Jersey, but has travelled widely and now resides in Hawaii. The author initially encountered H. P. Lovecraft in his seventh-grade literature class: The Colour Out of Space disguised beneath a jacket for Sir Walter Scott. Attanasio's first science fiction novel, Radix, was published by William Morrow and Company.

RAMSEY CAMPBELL was born in Liverpool, which has provided a setting for many of his stories. Since 1973 he has been a full-time writer and also reviews films for BBC Radio Merseyside. Such spare time as he has is occupied by listening to music from Bach to Tippett, reading far less than he would like, relaxing with jigsaws, and watching wrestling matches. His collections include The Inhabitant of the Lake, Demons by Daylight, and The Height of the Scream, and his most recent novels are Obsession and The Hungry Moon. One of his ambitions is to write a single successful Lovecraftian story.

BASIL COPPER is one of the most prolific writers in this field. For thirty years he was a journalist, and ultimately editor of a Kent newspaper, but he has been a professional author since 1970. Not all of his nearly sixty books repose within the domain of the macabre, but those which do include such renowned collections as From Evil' s Pillow, And Afterward, the Dark, When Footsteps Echo, and Voices of Doom; the Gothic thriller Necropolis; and a science fiction novel, The Great White Space. More recently Copper has donned deerstalker and inverness to create a new series of adventures featuring the London detective Solar Pons.

DAVID DRAKE lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he is assistant town attorney.

Previously he was at~ached as interrogator to the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment in Vietnam, and his stories based on that experience have appeared in Analog, Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Galaxy. Drake is the author of a fantasy novel, The Dragon Lord, and of the science fiction collection Hammer's Slammers.

STEPHEN KING is the most phenomenally successful horror writer of his generation, whose novels such as Carrie, The Shining, 'Salem's Lot, and The Stand have become contemporary American classics of the genre. King has long been an admirer of Lovecraft, and his contribution to the present volume was conceived during a period of residency in London where he visited a fellow writer, Peter Straub, in Crouch End: an innocent beginning for a nightmarish story. Other books by this author include the novels Firestarter, Pet Semetary and Misery, and a nonfiction study, Stephen King's Danse Macabre.

T. E. D. KLEIN lives in New York City in an apartment on the West Side, surrounded by fantasy books, Hopper paintings, a pet mouse, a preserved tarantula, sculptures, and much else. After receiving degrees from Brown and Columbia Universities, he spent a year teaching high school in Maine and three years working in the Paramount Pictures story department. He has written articles for the New York Times, and his fiction has appeared in various anthologies, including the Years Best Horror series.

FRANK BELKNAP LONG is the only member of the original Lovecraft Circle to be represented in this anthology. His affectionate and informative memoir of those days, HPL: Dreamer on the Nightside, is available from Arkham House, which also has published two collections of his weird tales, The Hounds of Tindalos and The Rim of the Unknown, his short Mythos novel The Horror from the Hills, and a volume of poetry, In Mayan Splendor. In Dreamer on the Nightside he compares his fiction with Lovecraft's: 'My own stories followed a somewhat different pattern in their approach to the macabre and were less cosmic.' But Lovecraft approved of his work and undoubtedly would have enjoyed the present nostalgic story, 'Dark Awakening.'

H. P. LOVECRAFT is the most influential American author of weird fiction in this century. Among the many writers who acknowledge his influences are Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, August Derleth, Henry Kuttner, Fritz Leiber, and Colin Wilson, nor should one forget the Illuminatus! trilogy or the Lovecraftian jokes of Gahan Wilson. His collected fiction, and five volumes of his letters, are obtainable from Arkham House (USA).

BRIAN LUMLEY was born in Horden, a colliery village in County Durham on the northeast coast of England, and served as a sergeant in the British Royal Military Police. The author loves 'Robert E. Howard, Lovecraft, budgies, his wife, three kids, kite-soaring, his typewriter, fish and chips, and brandy.' His most recent novel is the horror epic Necroscope II: Wamphyri!

MARTIN S. WARNES was born in Bradford, England, where he works in the textile industry. 'The Black Tome of Alsophocus' is a posthumous completion of the 1934 Lovecraftian fragment The Book,' previously published in Dagon and Other Macabre Tales.

RETURN TO THE CAVES OF ABOMINATION

Mythmaker, visionary, conjuror of nightmare, outsider in his own century, H. P. Lovecraft called a whole universe into being: Great Cthulhu, the blind idiot god Azathoth, the sunken realm of R'lyeh, the infamous Necronomicon-a world peopled with a festering pantheon of creatures who stalked upon the Earth before humanity's spanning...

H. P. LOVECRAFT T.E.D. KLEIN

STEPHEN KING A.A. ATTANASIO

RAMSEY CAMPBELL DAVID DRAKE

FRANKBELKNAPLONG MARTIN S. WARNES

BRIAN LUMLEY BASIL COPPER

In their own startlingly modern interpretations of the Cthulhu Mythos, these contemporary adepts of abomination will guide you to the caves of abject, unrelenting terror, where vast unspeakable presences wait in the clammy darkness. Then they will turn off the lights...

'The writers here have incorporated the Cthulhu elements subtly and skilfully in wellcrafted, powerful tales'

LIBRARY JOURNAL

'A memorable anthology for weird fiction fans'

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

ALSO IN PAPERBACK FROM GRAFTON BOOKS

TALES OF THE CTHULHU MYTHOS (edited by August Derleth)

Front cover illustration by Tim White

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ISBN 0-586-20093-2