Now Anderson thought back on it all…
He and his brother had grown up together in the fairground, but then it had been their father’s property, and “Tharpe’s Funfair”had been known throughout all England for its fair play and prices. Wherever the elder Tharpe had taken his stalls and sideshows—of which the freak-house had ever been his personal favourite—his employees had been sure of good crowds. It was only after old Tharpe died that the slump started.
It had had much to do with young Hamilton’s joy in old books and fancifully dubious legends; his lust for travel, adventure, and outré knowledge. His first money-wasting venture had been a “treasure-hunting” trip to the islands of the Pacific, undertaken solely on the strength of a vague and obviously fake map. In his absence—he had gone off with an adventurous and plausible rogue from the shooting gallery—Anderson looked after the fair. Things went badly and all the Tharpes got out of Hamilton’s venture was a number of repulsively carved stone tablets and one or two patently aboriginal sculptings, not the least of which was a hideous, curiously winged octopoid idol. Hamilton placed the latter obscenity in the back of their caravan home as being simply too fantastic for display to an increasingly mundane and sceptical public.
The idol, however, had a most unsettling effect upon the younger brother. He was wont to go in to see the thing in the dead of night, when Anderson was in bed and apparently asleep. But often Anderson was awake, and during these nocturnal visits he had heard Hamilton talking to the idol. More disturbingly, he had once or twice dimly imagined that he heard something talking back! Too, before he went off again on his wanderings in unspoken areas of the great deserts of Arabia, the sensitive, mystery-loving traveller had started to suffer from especially bad nightmares.
Again, in Hamilton’s absence, things went badly. Soon Anderson was obliged to sell out to Bella Hodgson, retaining only the freak-house as his own and his prodigal brother’s property. A year passed, and another before Hamilton once more returned to the fairground, demanding his living as before but making little or no attempt to work for his needs. There was no arguing, however, for the formerly sensitive younger brother was a changed, indeed a saturnine man now, so that soon Anderson came to be a little afraid of him.
And quite apart from the less obvious alterations in Hamilton, other changes were much more apparent; changes in habit, even in appearance. The most striking was the fact that now the younger Tharpe constantly wore a shaggy black toupee, as if to disguise his partial premature baldness, which all of the funfair’s residents knew about anyway and which had never caused him the least embarrassment before. Also, he had become so reticent as to be almost reclusive; keeping to himself, only rarely and reluctantly allowing himself to be drawn into even the most trivial conversations.
More than this: there had been a time prior to his second long absence when Hamilton had seemed somewhat enamoured of the young, single, dark-eyed Romany fortune-teller, “Madame Zala”—a Gypsy girl of genuine Romany ancestry—but since his return he had been especially cool towards her, and for her own part she had been seen to cross herself with a pagan sign when he had happened to be passing by. Once he had seen her make this sign, and then he had gone white with fury, hurrying off to the freak-house and remaining there for the rest of that day. Madame Zala had packed up her things and left one night in her horse-drawn caravan without a word of explanation to anyone. It was generally believed that Hamilton had threatened her in some way, though no one ever taxed him over the affair. For his own part, he simply averred that Zala had been “a charlatan of the worst sort, without the ability to conjure a puff of wind!”
All in all the members of the funfair fraternity had been quick to find Hamilton a very changed man, and towards the end there had been the aforementioned hints of a brewing madness…
On top of all this, Hamilton had again taken up his nocturnal visits to the octopoid idol, but now such visits seemed less frequent than of old. Less frequent, perhaps, but they nevertheless heralded much darker events; for soon Hamilton had installed the idol within a curtained and spacious corner of the tent, in the freak-house itself, and he no longer paid his visits alone…
Anderson Tharpe had seen, from his darkened caravan window, a veritable procession of strangers—all of them previous visitors to the freak-house, and always the more intelligent types—accompanying his brother to the tent’s nighted interior. But he had never seen a one come out! Eventually, as his younger brother became yet more saturnine, reticent, and secretive, Anderson took to spying on him in earnest—and later almost wished that he had not.
In the months between, however, Hamilton had made certain alterations to the interior of the freak-house, partitioning fully a third of its area to enclose the collection of rare and obscure curiosities garnered upon his travels. At that time Anderson had been puzzled to distraction by his brother’s firm refusal to let his treasures be viewed by any but a chosen few of the freak-house’s patrons: those doubtfully privileged persons who later accompanied him into the private museum never again to leave.
Of course, Anderson finally reasoned, the answer was as simple as it was fantastic: somewhere upon his travels Hamilton had learned the arts of murder and thievery, arts he was now practicing in the freak-house. The bodies? These he obviously buried, to leave behind safely lodged in the dark earth when the fair moved on. But the money…what of the money? For money—or rather its lack—patently formed the younger brother’s motive. Could he be storing his booty away, against the day when he would go off on yet another of his foolish trips to foreign places? Beside himself that he had not been “cut in”on the profits of Hamilton’s dark machinations, Anderson determined to have it out with him; to catch him, as it were, red-handed.
And yet it was not until early-in-the spring of 1961 that Anderson finally managed to “overhear” a conversation between his brother and an obviously well-to-do visitor to the freak-house. Hamilton had singled out this patently intelligent gentleman for attention, inviting him back to the caravan during a break in business. Anderson, knowing most of the modus operandi by now and, aware of the turn events must take, positioned himself outside the caravan where he could eavesdrop.
He did not catch the complete conversation, and yet sufficient to make him aware at last of Hamilton’s expert and apparently unique knowledge in esoteric mysteries. For the first time he heard uttered the mad words Cthulhu and Yibb-Tstll, Tsathoggua and Yog-Sothoth, Shudde-M’ell and Nyarlathotep, discovering that these were names of monstrous “gods” from the dawn of time. He heard mention of Leng and Lh’yib; Mnar, Ib and Sarnath; R’lyeh and “red-litten” Yoth, and knew now that these were cities and lands ancient even in antiquity. He heard descriptions and names given to manuscripts, books and tablets—and here he started in recognition, for he knew that some of these aeon-old writings existed amid Hamilton’s treasures in the freak-house—and among others he heard the strangely chilling titles of such works as the Necronomicon, the Cthaat Aquadingen, the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the R’lyehan Texts. This then formed the substance of Hamilton’s magnetism: his amazing erudition in matters of myth and time-lost lore.
When he perceived that the two were about to make an exit from the caravan, Anderson quickly hid himself away behind a nearby stall to continue his observations. He saw the flushed face of Hamilton’s new confidant, his excited gestures; and, at a whispered suggestion from the pale-faced brother, he finally saw that gentleman nodding eagerly, wide-eyed in awed agreement. And after the visitor had gone, Anderson saw the look that flitted briefly across his brother’s features: a look that hinted of awful triumph, nameless emotion—and, yes, purest evil!