And yet, in less gloomy mood, Anderson found himself more and more often dwelling upon Hamilton’s weird murder weapon, the pulsating green light. He was by no means an ignorant man, and he had read something of the recent progress in laser technology. Soon he had convinced himself that his brother had used an unknown form of foreign science to offer up his mad “sacrifices to Cthulhu”. If only he could discover how Hamilton had done it…
But surely science such as that would require complex machinery? It was while pondering this very problem that Anderson hit upon what he believed must be the answer: whatever tools or engines Hamilton had used, they must be hidden in the octopoid idol, or perhaps built into those ugly stone tablets which had formed a semicircle about the idol. And perhaps, like the electric-eye beams which operated the moving floors and blasts of cool air in the fairground’s Noah’s Ark, Hamilton’s chanted “summons” had been nothing more than a resonant trigger to set the hidden lasers or whatever to working. The smell of deep ocean and residual dampness must be the natural aftermath of such processes, in the same way that carbon monoxide and dead oil is the waste from petrol engines and the smell of ozone is attendant to electrical discharges.
The tablets, the idol too, still stood where they had stood in the time before the horror—the only change was that now the canvas partition was down and Hamilton’s ancient artifacts were on display with the other paraphernalia of the freak-house—but just suppose Anderson were to arrange them exactly as they had been before, and suppose further that he could discover how to use that chanted formula. What then? Would he be able to summon the green light? If so, would he be able to use it as he had tried to convince Hamilton it should be used? Perhaps the answer lay in his dead brother’s books…
Certainly that collection of ancient tomes, now slowly disintegrating in a cupboard in the caravan, were full of hints of such things. It was out of curiosity at first that Anderson began to read those books, or at least what he could read of them! Many were not in English but Latin or archaic German, and at least one other was in ciphers the like of which Anderson had only ever seen on the stone tablets in the freak-house.
There were among the volumes such titles as Feery’s Notes on the Cthaat Aquadingen, and a well-thumbed copy of the same author’s Notes on the Necronomicon ; while yet another book, handwritten in a shaky script, purported to be the Necronomicon itself, or a translation thereof, but Anderson could not read it for its characters were formed of an unbelievably antiquated German. Then there was a large envelope full of yellowed loose-leaves, and Hamilton had written on the envelope that this was “Ibn Shoddathua’s Translation of the Mum-Nath Papyri”. Among the more complete and recognizable works were such titles as The Golden Bough and Miss Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, but by comparison these were light reading.
During December and to the end of January, all of Anderson’s free time was taken up in the study of these works, until finally he became in a limited way something of an authority of the dread Cthulhu Cycle of Myth. He learned of the Elder Gods, benign forces or deities that existed “in peace and glory” near Betelgeuse in the constellation Orion; and of the powers of evil, the Great Old Ones! He read of Azathoth, bubbling and blaspheming at the center of infinity—of Yog-Sothoth, the “all-in-one and one-in-all”, a god-creature coexistent in all time and conterminous with all space—of Nyarlathotep, the messenger of the Great Old Ones—of Hastur the Unspeakable, hell-thing and “Lord of the Interstellar Spaces”—of fertile Shub-Niggurath, “the black goat of the woods with a thousand young”—and, finally, of Great Cthulhu himself, an inconceivable evil that seeped down from the stars like cosmic pus when Earth was young and inchoate.
There were, too, lesser gods and beings more or less obscure or distant from the central theme of the Mythos. Among these Anderson read of Dagon and the Deep Ones; of Yibb-Tstll and the Gaunts of Night; of the Tcho-Tcho people and the Mi-Go; of Yig, Chaugnar Faugn, Nygotha, and Tsathoggua; of Atlach-Nacha, Lloigor, Zhar, and Ithaqua; of burrowing Shudde-M’ell, meteor-borne Glaaki, flaming Cthugha, and the loathsome Hounds of Tindalos.
He learned how—for practicing abhorrent rites—the Great Old Ones were banished to prisoning environs where, ever ready to take possession of the Earth again, they live on eternally…Cthulhu, of course, having featured prominently in his brother’s madness—now supposedly lying locked in sunken R’lyeh beneath the waves, waiting for the stars to “come right” and for his minions, human and otherwise, to perform those rites which would once more return him as ruler of his former surface dominions—held the greatest interest for Anderson.
And the more he read, the more he became aware of the fantastic depth of his subject—but even so he could hardly bring himself to admit that there was anything of more than passing interest in such “mumbo-jumbo”. Nevertheless, on the night of the second of February, 1962, he received what should have been a warning: a nightmare of such potency that it did in fact trouble him for weeks afterwards, and particularly when he saw the connection in the date of this visitation. Of course, it had been Candlemas, which would have had immediate and special meaning to anyone with even the remotest schooling in the occult. Candlemas, and Anderson Tharpe had dreamed of basaltic submarine towers of titanic proportions and nightmare angles; and within those basalt walls and sepulchres, he had known that loathly Lord Cthulhu dreamed his own dreams of damnable dominion…
This had not been all. He had drifted in his dreams through those walls to visit once more the inner chambers and kneel before the sleeping god. But it had been an unquiet sleep the Old One slept, in which his demon claws scrabbled fitfully and his folded wings twitched and jerked as if fighting to spread and lift him up through the pressured deeps to the unsuspecting world above! Then, as before, the voice had come to Anderson Tharpe—but this time it had spoken in English!
“Do you seek,” the voice had asked in awesome tones, “to worship Cthulhu? Do you presume to His priesthood? I can see that YOU DO NOT, and yet you meddle and seek to discover His secrets! Be warned: it is a great sin against Cthulhu to destroy one of His chosen priests, and yet I see that you have done so. It is a sin, too, to scorn Him; but you have done this also. And it is a GREAT sin in His eyes to seek to use His secrets in any way other than in His service—AND THIS, TOO, YOU WOULD DO! Be warned, and live. Live and pray to your weak god that you are destroyed in the first shock of the Great Rising. It were not well for you that you live to reap Cthulhu’s wrath!”
The voice had finally receded, but its sepulchral mind-echoes had barely faded away when it seemed to the paralyzed dreamer that the face-tentacles of slumbering Cthulhu reached out, groping malignantly in his direction where he kneeled in slime at the base of the massive throne!
At that a distant howling sprang up, growing rapidly louder and closer; and as the face-tentacles of the sleeping god had been about to touch him, so Tharpe came screaming awake in his sweat-drenched bed to discover that the fairground was in an uproar. All the watchdogs, big and small, chained and roaming free alike, were howling in unison in the middle of that cold night. They seemed to howl at the blindly impassive stars, and their cries were faintly answered from a thousand similarly agitated canine throats in the nearby town!
The next morning speculation was rife among the showmen as to what had caused the trouble with the dogs, and eventually, on the evidence of certain scraps of fur, they put it down to a stray cat that must have got itself trapped under one of the caravans to be pulled to pieces by a Great Dane. Nevertheless, Anderson wondered at the keen senses and interpretation of the dogs in the local town that they had so readily taken up the unnatural baying and howling…