This was the fourth day of the five when the funfair was “in town”. It was an annual—event? The nomads of Hodgson’s Funfair had known better times, better conditions and worse ones, but it was all the same to them and they were resigned to it. There was, though, amid all the noisy, muddy, smelly paraphernalia of the fairground, a tone of incongruity. It had been there since Anderson Tharpe, in the curious absence of his brother, Hamilton, had taken down the old freak-house frontage to repaint the boards and canvas with the new and forbidding legend: TOMB OF THE GREAT OLD ONES.
Looking up at the painted gouts of “blood” that formed the garish legend arching over a yawning, scaly, dragon-jawed entranceway, Hiram Henley frowned behind his tiny spectacles in more than casual curiosity, in something perhaps approaching concern. His lips silently formed the ominous words of that legend as if he spoke them to himself in awe and then he thrust his black-gloved hands deeper into the pockets of his fine, expensively tailored overcoat and tucked his neck down more firmly into its collar.
Hiram Henley had recognized something in the name of the place—something which might ring subconscious warning bells in even the most mundane minds—and the recognition caused an involuntary shudder to hurry up his back. “The Great Old Ones!”he said to himself yet again, and his whisper held a note of terrible fascination.
Research into just such cycles of myth and aeon-lost legend, while ostensibly he had been studying Hittite antiquities in the Middle East and Turkey, had cost Henley his position as Professor of Archaeology and Ethnology at Meldham University. “Cthulhu, Yibb-Tstll, Yog-Sothoth, Summanus—the Great Old Ones!”Again an expression of awe flitted across his bespectacled face. To be confronted with a…a monument such as this, and in such a place…
And yet the ex-professor was not too surprised; he had been alerted to the contents of Anderson Tharpe’s queer establishment, and therefore the fact that the owner had named it thus was hardly a matter of any lasting astonishment. Nevertheless Henley knew that there were people who would have considered the naming of the fairground erection, to say nothing of the presence of its afore-hinted contents, blasphemous. Fortunately such persons were few and far between—the Cult of Cthulhu was still known only to a minority of serious authorities, to a few obscure occult investigators, and a scattered handful of esoteric groups—but Hiram Henley looked back to certain days of yore when he had blatantly used the university’s money to go in search of just such items of awesome antiquity as now allegedly hid behind the demon-adorned ramparts of the edifice before him.
The fact of the matter was that Henley had heard how this Tomb of the Great Old Ones held within its monster-daubed board-and-canvas walls relics of an age already many millions of years dead and gone when Babylon was but a sketch in the mind’s eye of Architect Thathnis III. Figures and fragments, hieroglyphed tablets and strangely scrawled papyri, weird greenstone sculptings and rotting, worm-eaten tomes: Henley had reason to believe that many of these things, if not all of them, existed behind the facade of Anderson Tharpe’s horror-house.
There would also be, of course, the usual nonconformities peculiar to such establishments—the two-headed foetus in its bottle of preservative, the five-legged puppy similarly suspended, the fake mummy in its red- and green-daubed wrappings, the great fruit (“vampire”) bats, hanging shutter-eyed and motionless in their warm wire cages beyond the reach of giggly, shuddering women and morbidly fascinated men and boys—but Hiram Henley was not interested in any of these. Nevertheless, he sent his gloved right hand awkwardly groping into the corner of his overcoat pocket for the silver coin which alone might open for him the door to Tharpe’s house of horror.
Hiram Henley was a slight, middle-aged man. His thin figure, draped smotheringly in the heavy overcoat, his balding head and tiny specs through which his watery eyes constantly peered, his gloved hands almost lost in huge pockets, his trousers seeming to hang from beneath the hem of his overcoat and partly, not wholly covering the black patent leather shoes upon his feet; all made of him a picture which was conspicuously odd. And yet Hiram Henley’s intelligence was patent; the stamp of a “higher mind”was written in erudite lines upon his brow. His were obviously eyes which had studied strange mysteries, and his feet had gone along strange ways; so that despite any other emotion or consideration which his appearance might ill-advisedly call to mind, still his shrunken frame commanded more than a little respect among his fellow men.
Anderson Tharpe, on the other hand, crouching now upon his tiny seat in the ticket-booth, was a tall man, well over six feet in height but almost as thin and emaciated as the fallen professor. His hair was prematurely grey and purposely grown long in an old-fashioned scholarly style, so that he might simulate to the crowd’s satisfaction a necessary erudition; just such an erudition as was manifest in the face above the slight figure which even now pressed upon his tiny window, sixpence clutched in gloved fingers. Tharpe’s beady eyes beneath blackly hypnotic brows studied Hiram Henley briefly, speculatively, but then he smiled a very genuine welcome as he passed the small man a ticket, waving away the sixpence with an expansive hand.
“Not you, sir, indeed no! From a gent so obviously and sincerely interested in the mysteries within—from a man of your high standing”—again the expansive gesture—“why, I couldn’t accept money from you, sir. It’s an honour to have you visit us!”
“Thank you,” Henley dryly answered, passing myopically into the great tent beyond the ticket booth. Tharpe’s smile slowly faded, was replaced by a look of cunning. Quickly the tall man pocketed his few shillings in takings, then followed the slight figure of the ex-professor into the smelly sawdust-floored “museum”, beyond the canvas flap.
In all, a dozen people waited within the big tent’s main division. A pitifully small “crowd”. But in any case, though he kept his interest cleverly veiled, Tharpe’s plans involved only the ex-professor. The tall man’s flattery at the ticket booth had not all been flannel; he had spotted Henley immediately as the very species of highly educated fly for which his flypaper—in the form of the new and enigmatic legend across the visage of the one-time freak-house—had been erected above Bathley Moor.
There had been, Tharpe reflected, men of outwardly similar intelligence before at the Tomb of the Great Old Ones; and more than one of them had told him that certain of his artifacts—those items which he kept, as his brother had kept them before him, in a separately enclosed part of the tent—were of an unbelievable antiquity. Indeed, one man had been so affected by the very sight of such ancientness that he had run from Tharpe’s collection in stark terror, and he had never returned. That had been in May, and though almost six months had passed since that time, still Tharpe had come no closer to an understanding of the mysterious objects which his brother Hamilton had brought back with him from certain dark corners of the world; objects which, early in 1961, had caused him to kill Hamilton in self-defence.
Anderson had panicked then—he realized that now—for he might easily have come out of the affair blameless had he only reported Hamilton’s death to the police. For a long time the folk of Hodgson’s Funfair had known that there was something drastically wrong with Hamilton Tharpe; his very sanity had been questioned, albeit guardedly. Certainly Anderson would have been declared innocent of his brother’s murder—the case would have gone to court only as a matter of formality—but he had panicked. And of course there had been…complications.
With Hamilton’s body secretly buried deep beneath the freak-house, the folk of the fairground had been perfectly happy to believe Anderson’s tale of his brother’s abrupt departure on yet another of his world-spanning expeditions, the like of which had brought about all the trouble in the first place.