Behind him, he heard Bose say, ‘Mr Shadrach is through, Mr Cabal! Quickly, Mr Corde! Your turn!’
Cabal performed a rapid mental calculation and decided that he would have to hold the ghouls off for a little longer than he had hoped. Down below, he could hear chewing. Ghouls are a notoriously unsentimental race, and once one is dead it is immediately redefined in the minds of its friends and colleagues as lunch. It would seem that even their great desire to reach the gateway before it closed came second to a quick snack.
Cabal drew back the hammer again, the loud click as the lock engaged serving to reconcentrate the minds of the ghouls marvellously. There was some muttered speech, a disgusting meeping and glibbering that appalled Cabal’s linguistic sensibilities. It appalled him even more to have to speak in the same tongue.
‘You down there,’ he garbled, aware that his accent was poor. Silence suddenly fell. ‘I have no argument with your people. Go back, and no more need die.’
‘You have the gateway,’ barked a voice, presumably that of the pack leader.
‘What need you of the gateway? Your people can travel to the Dreamlands easily. The gateway is ours for the moment. Leave us in peace.’
There was a pause. Then the ghoul said, ‘I know you.’
Cabal’s eyes narrowed. He could feel an uncomfortable tension uncurling like an electric eel across his neck and shoulders. It took him a moment to realise that it was fear. He stamped it down immediately: this was the very irrational terror that caused the Fear Institute so much exasperation. Yet it was the irrationality of it that concerned him more than the way his heart pounded or the sweat that suddenly beaded his cool brow. He had encountered ghouls before, and they had never given him more than momentary inconvenience. Why was he afraid?
With an effort, he brought his mind to bear on the situation at hand. This ghoul was a cunning one, but not nearly cunning enough. It would engage his curiosity to take him off guard and then charge the stairs. He braced his gun hand and prepared to fire. ‘I don’t know you.’
‘You would not, but you knew me once,’ said the ghoul, and it said it in English. ‘Oh, you knew me once, Johannes Cabal.’
Silence fell once more. The moment drew out. ‘You knew me once, Johannes Cabal,’ the voice repeated. Still, there was no reply. On the stairs, a hideous hiccoughing growl arose. The ghoul was laughing.
In the garret where Eldon Harwell once lived, and where a police investigation would later find no clues as to his disappearance but a bloodstain on the stairs that analysis showed not to be human, the Gateway of the Silver Key flickered and extinguished. Of Harwell and his four mysterious visitors, there was no trace.
Surviving fragments of Cyril W. Clome’s manuscript for The Young Person’s Guide to Cthulhu and His Friends: No. 1 Great Cthulhu
Now, best beloved, let us consider Great Cthulhu. He is the greatest of the Great Old Ones and is a god. Yes, he is. A real god. Not one of those pathetic gods that depend on silly people having ‘faith’ in them (‘Faith’ is a word that means ‘having to pretend’, O best beloved). Not one of those stupid, weak, powerless gods that simpering people invent to try to keep them warm in the endless freezing void of the true reality, in the aching futility of our fleeting, impotent lives. We know a song about that, don’t we?
(Text illegible due to scorching)
No, Great Cthulhu does not need us to worship him – he is real whether we do or not. But we better had, because one day he will wake in his cosy little sunken city of R’lyeh (which is at 47º 9´ S, 126º 43´ W in the South Pacific Ocean, make a note), have a lovely big yawn and a stretch I should think – ‘Yaaaawwwwwwn!’ – and then kill everyone. But if you’ve been good little boys and girls and worshipped him properly, he might not kill you first. Isn’t that splendid?
Chapter 3
IN WHICH CABAL LEADS AN EXPEDITION BEYOND THE WALL OF SLEEP
The mountain stood taller than any mountain had any right to stand without liquefying its own base with the sheer weight of rock upon it. Even close by that base, the four men looked out and stood speechless at the astonishing vista spread before them, like the world before gods. Well, three of them stood speechless with awe, the fourth was entirely preoccupied with beating dust from his trousers where he had stumbled on escaping the rapidly closing Gateway of the Silver Key.
‘My God,’ breathed Corde, finally rediscovering speech. ‘It’s . . . magnificent. I never dreamed . . .’
‘No, you doubtless have,’ said Johannes Cabal, as he smacked dust from his calves. ‘You have forgotten it, though. That is the nature of dreams.’ Finally, about as satisfied as he was going to be without a valet with a clothes-brush to hand, he straightened and took in the vast world that stretched out before them. He sniffed, stuck out his jaw and picked up his Gladstone. ‘If it were a view in the waking world, I would be impressed. As it is, it is the shared fantasy of a hundred billion sleepers. Impressive in its own way, but I shan’t be buying any postcards.’
‘A hundred billion, Mr Cabal?’ said Shadrach. ‘You are mistaken. There are not even two billions in the world today, and fewer than half are sleeping at any one time.’
Cabal turned to him and gave him the sort of look a teacher might give a disappointing pupil before correcting him, and then thrashing him. ‘You are correct in as far as there are no more than two billions in the world. You are in error if you believe that I am only considering the Earth.’ He paused and looked Shadrach up and down. ‘What in the name of Azathoth’s little drummer boy are you wearing?’
‘What am I wearing? That’s an . . . Good Lord!’
Shadrach no longer looked nearly so much like an undertaker. Instead, his clothing fell more into the category of ‘gorgeous’, not a description that had ever before been attached to him in all his years. He wore a burgundy simarre in the Tudor style, trimmed with fur of a curious pattern, over a doublet of cream samite, slit upper hose of the same burgundy but with a brave crimson silk within, black lower hose double gartered in yellow, and square-toed shoes. He reached up and removed the slouching brown velvet cap from his head and looked at it in wonder. The overall effect was of a successful merchant of the sixteenth century, an Antonio before all that unpleasantness with Shylock.
‘I – I don’t understand,’ stammered Shadrach, his usual bloodless composure shattered. For his answer, he received an equally astonished cry from Corde as he, too, discovered a change in his wardrobe.
Corde’s profoundly unenterprising twill three-piece, trilby and woollen tie had been replaced with something altogether more dashing. Again the tone was a strange mix of very late medieval and Tudor, but the cut seemed to owe more to the cinema: a brown leather jerkin with slashed sleeves over a white doublet, black breeches and knee boots, a sword at the hip, a soft black hat with a black feather tipped in red, held in place by a small brooch of a dagger bearing a single tiny ruby.
After all the crying out and holding out of hands in astonishment, Bose’s thunder had been too thoroughly stolen for him to do much more than look down at his own clothes and mumble a slightly surprised, ‘Oh.’ For he, too, had experienced a transformation. Gone were his previous clothes which, while conservatively stylish and expensively cut, had not made much of an impression on anyone. Now he wore a simarre much like Shadrach’s, but where that had complacently proclaimed wealth, this was of profound blackness, such that the moleskin collar seemed verging on the gaudy. The whole ensemble, from shoes to the four-sided flat hat perched upon Bose’s surprised head, was black, the only touches of colour being his pale face, the wide red-gold chain he wore running across his shoulders and down to a medal in the middle of his chest, and the blue carbuncle in the ring he wore upon the middle finger of his gloved left hand.