“Perhaps it fell in?” I suggested as we approached the structure.
David shook his head. “No,” he said, “there never was a roof. Look at the tops of the walls. They’re flush. No gaps to show where roof support beams might have been positioned. If you make a comparison with the other building you’ll see what I mean. Anyway, whatever its original purpose, old man Carpenter filled it with junk: bags of rusty old nails, worn-out tools, that sort of thing. Oh, yes— and he kept his firewood here, under a tarpaulin.”
I glanced inside the place, leaning against the wall and poking my head in through the vacant doorway. The wall stood in its own shadow and was cold to my touch. Beams of sunlight, glancing in over the top of the west wall, filled the place with dust motes that drifted like swarms of aimless microbes in the strangely musty air. There was a mixed smell of rust and rot, of some small dead thing, and of... the sea? The last could only be a passing fancy, no sooner imagined than forgotten.
I shaded my eyes against the dusty sunbeams. Rotted sacks spilled nails and bolts upon a stone-flagged floor; farming implements red with rust were heaped like metal skeletons against one wall; at the back, heavy blocks of wood stuck out from beneath a mould-spotted tarpaulin. A dead rat or squirrel close to my feet seethed with maggots.
I blinked in the hazy light, shuddered—not so much at sight of the small corpse as at a sudden chill of the psyche—and hastily withdrew my head.
“There you are,” said David, his matter-of-fact tone bringing me back down to earth. “The brass.”
Above our heads, central in the stone lintel, a square plate bore the original of David’s rubbing. I gave it a glance, an almost involuntary reaction to David’s invitation that I look, and at once looked away. He frowned, seemed disappointed. “You don’t find it interesting?”
“I find it... disturbing,” I answered at length. “Can we go back to the house? I’m sure June will be up and about by now.”
He shrugged, leading the way as we retraced our steps along sun-splashed, weed-grown paths between scrubby fruit trees and dusty, cobwebbed shrubbery. “I thought you’d be taken by it,” he said. And, “How do you mean, ‘disturbing’?”
I shook my head, had no answer for him. “Maybe it’s just me,” I finally said. “I don’t feel at my best today. I’m not up to it, that’s all.”
“Not up to what?” he asked sharply, then shrugged again before I could answer. “Suit yourself.” But after that he quickly became distant and a little surly. He wasn’t normally a moody man, but I knew him well enough to realise that I had touched upon some previously unsuspected, exposed nerve; and so I determined not to prolong my visit.
I did stay long enough to talk to June, however, though what I saw of her was hardly reassuring. She looked pinched, her face lined and pale, showing none of the rosiness one might expect in a newlywed, or in any healthy young woman in summertime. Her eyes were red-rimmed, their natural blue seeming very much watered-down; her skin looked dry, deprived of moisture; even her hair, glossy-black and bouncy on those previous occasions when we had met, seemed lacklustre now and disinterested.
It could be, of course, simply the fact that I had caught her at a bad time. Her father had died recently, as I later discovered, and of course that must still be affecting her. Also, she must have been working very hard, alongside David, trying to get the old place put to rights. Or again it could be David’s summer “miasma”—an allergy, perhaps.
Perhaps...
But why any of these things—David’s preoccupation, his near-obsession (or mine?) with occurrences and relics of the distant past; the old myths and legends of the region, of hauntings and misty phantoms and such; and June’s queer malaise—why any of these things should concern me beyond the bounds of common friendship I did not know, could not say. I only knew that I felt as if somewhere a great wheel had started to roll, and that my friend and his wife lay directly in its path, not even knowing that it bore down upon them...
VI: DAGON’S BELL
Summer rolled by in warm lazy waves; autumn saw the trees shamelessly, mindlessly stripping themselves naked (one would think they’d keep their leaves to warm them through the winter); my businesses presented periodic problems enough to keep my nose to the grindstone, and so there was little spare time in which to ponder the strangeness of the last twelve months. I saw David in the village now and then, usually at a distance; saw June, too, but much less frequently. More often than not he seemed haggard—or if not haggard, hagridden, nervous, agitated, hurried—and she was... well, spectral. Pale and willow-slim, and red-eyed (I suspected) behind dark spectacles. Married life? Or perhaps some other problem? None of my business.
Then came the time of the deep kelp once more, which was when David made it my business.
And here I must ask the reader to bear with me. The following part of the story will seem hastily written, too thoughtlessly prepared and put together. But this is how I remember it: blurred and unreal, and patterned with mismatched dialogue. It happened quickly; I see no reason to spin it out...
***
David’s knock was urgent on a night when the sky was black with falling rain and the wind whipped the trees to a frenzy; and yet he stood there in shirt-sleeves, shivering, gaunt in aspect and almost vacant in expression. It took several brandies and a thorough rub-down with a warm towel to bring him to a semblance of his old self, by which time he seemed more ashamed of his behaviour than eager to explain it. But I was not letting him off that lightly. The time had come, I decided, to have the thing out with him; get it out in the open, whatever it was, and see what could be done about it while there was yet time.
“Time?” he finally turned his gaze upon me from beneath his mop of tousled hair, a towel over his shoulders while his shirt steamed before my open fire. “Is there yet time? Damned if I know...” He shook his head.
“Well then, tell me,” I said, exasperated. “Or at least try. Start somewhere. You must have come to me for something. Is it you and June? Was your getting married a mistake? Or is it just the place, the old farm?”
“Oh, come on, Bill!” he snorted. “You know well enough what it is. Something of it, anyway. You experienced it yourself. Just the place?” the corners of his mouth turned down, his expression souring. “Oh, yes, it’s the place, all right. What the place was, what it might be even now...”
“Go on,” I prompted him; and he launched into the following:
“I came to ask you to come back with me. I don’t want to spend another night alone there.”
“Alone? But isn’t June there?”
He looked at me for a moment and finally managed a ghastly grin. “She is and she isn’t,” he said. “Oh, yes, yes, she’s there—but still I’m alone. Not her fault, poor love. It’s that bloody awful place!”
“Tell me about it,” I urged.
He sighed, bit his lip. And after a moment: “I think,” he began, “—I think it was a temple. And I don’t think the Romans had it first. You know, of course, that they’ve found Phoenician symbols on some of the stones at Stonehenge? Well, and what else did the ancients bring with them to old England, eh? What did we worship in those prehistoric times? The earth-mother, the sun, the rain—the sea? We’re an island, Bill. The sea was everywhere around us! And it was bountiful. It still is, but not like it was in those days. What’s more natural than to worship the sea—and what the sea brought?”
“Its bounty?” I said.
“That, yes, and something else. Cthulhu, Pischa, the Kraken, Dagon, Oannes, Neptune. Call him—it—what you will. But it was worshipped at Kettlethorpe, and it still remembers. Yes, and I think it comes, in certain seasons, to seek the worship it once knew and perhaps still... still...”