Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

I thought, my pride blinding me, I need only sing them to sleep. But when the last notes of my song died away, I watched the great things stir and begin to wake. And I could not bear the thought that they would walk once more, that my wife might be endangered, that our child might be cast upon an altar for the satiation of beings that had come from dark stars.

And so I played again.

And again.

And again.

Forever again.

But lately, I am tired. I have been too long beneath the storm-tossed waves. Centuries, aeons passing while I go on in an extended state of decay, neither living nor dying. I know not if I am a thing that remembers itself a man, or a man who thinks himself a thing.

My wife long ago was bones and dust, carried along the river of time.

My masters likewise have turned to ash.

What care I for a world I no longer know?

What care I for anyone else when all I wish for is the balm of sleep? The balm I have given to these things for so very many years?

My fingers slow upon the strings and my song stops.

“Awake!” I say, and they do.

I watch them turn and roll, sloughing off their slumber like giants, like continents rising out of the sea with the steam and stink of Earth-birth hazing their grey-green skin. The water around us boils as if a volcano had grown.

Limbs like monumental trees shift, torsos like cliff-faces heave, visages bereft of benign intent turn themselves upward so they might find the underside of the sea’s surface and know which way to go. They uncoil their bodies, stretch towards the sky and the air, think and seek to break the hold the waves have upon them and to reach once more into the dreams of men.

“Rise,” I say, and they do. Released from sleep they believe it a time when they might reclaim all that had been theirs.

Their largest, their lord, their priestly god ascends first, speeds upwards fastest to break free. The strokes of his great arms cause tidal waves; the bubbles from his newly filled lungs, his once-forgotten breath, move big as buildings. Dead Cthulhu rises from his house in R’lyeth, his dreaming done and his waking mind focused upon an end, a finish, a catastrophe. Around me, his kin, his followers hum a tune of destruction, one that sounds so like my song that I feel a’sudden the keen dagger of my betrayal.

I think of what I have done. Of the promise I have broken, the covenant I have dishonoured. I think of the disappointment on my wife’s face should her shade discover my treachery. And I weep though my tears mix with the sea and no one but I would know of my remorse. I feel my own sleep creep upon me; a death and a forgetting, so close, so sweet.

And I fight it.

I put my hands once more to the sinuous strings of my harp and strum a tune to draw them back, these monstrous mountains, these Great Old Ones who could bring only ruin to whatever roams above, whatever takes wing in the skies. All would fall beneath the merciless behemoth feet.

My voice catches all of them. Most of them. All but one. The others still close enough to be caught upon the sweet hook of my song, the enchanting notes of my harp, settle once more. They go back to their dead, drowned houses, open the doors of heavy stone and retire.

But the greatest, the first amongst them, him I did not snare.

Cthulhu in rising, not dreaming, escapes the bonds of slumber.

Cthulhu rose and I know not where he resides or what destruction he causes. But I remember his terrible eyes as he swam upwards, as he gave me a single contemptuous glance and knew what I had done, both to him and his, and to my own kind. He judged me a hollow water-logged thing, a thing that remembers itself a man, barely worthy of a glance.

And it is that look, that longest, shortest of looks that keeps me playing, praying that my notes will linger forever.

THE LONG LAST NIGHT

by BRIAN LUMLEY

I HAD MET or bumped into the old man on what was probably the very rim of the Bgg’ha Zone. And after careful, nervous greetings (he had a gun and I didn’t) and while we shared one of my cigarettes, he asked me: “Do you know why it’s called that?”

He meant the Bgg’ha Zone, of course, because he had already mentioned how we should be extremely careful just being there. Shrugging by way of a partial answer, I then offered: “Because it’s near the centre of it?”

“Well,” he replied, “I suppose that defines it now. I mean, that’s likely how most people think of it; because after a number of years a name tends to stick, no matter its actual origin. And let’s face it, there’s not too many of us around these days—folks who were here at the time—people like myself, who are still here to remember what happened.”

“When the Bgg’ha Zone got its name, you mean?” I prompted him. “There’s a reason it’s called that? So what happened?”