“I have come to take Bertie back,” I said.
“You cannot have him! He is already given to the gods. Go back, I tell you!”
At this, the creature let out a groaning screech which filled the cathedral cavern with hellish sound. Cutbirth turned his back on me and again addressed the monster:
“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh, wgah-nagl fhtagn—”
Having uttered his cry, he stooped and picked up from the ground something shining and curved like an oriental knife. Then, with his other hand, he gathered up the unconscious form of Bertie by the collar. Bertie’s head lolled back, unwittingly presenting his white throat to Cutbirth’s blade.
“Put him down or I shoot,” I said.
Cutbirth laughed. “You wouldn’t dare, you damned sandal-wearing, psalm-singing socialist!”
I pulled the trigger, but the wretched gun jammed. It was a heavy, clumsy old thing. I pulled the trigger again and the gun fired, but the shot went wide and the recoil nearly threw me onto my back. The echoes of the shot filled the cavern with a clatter like machine-gun fire.
Then, gripping the gun in both hands, I steadied myself and took aim at Cutbirth’s head. I fired again. The bullet missed Cutbirth by quite a margin, but it hit the creature which loomed before him. It went into one of its huge, milky eyes. The eye seemed to explode with the impact, spraying out torrents of green bile in the process. A hideous shriek filled the cavern.
Cutbirth dropped the knife and turned again towards me with rage and hatred in every knotted vein of his face. It was a fatal mistake. The beast, assuming that Cutbirth had been the perpetrator of the outrage against its eye, launched one of its great tentacle limbs against him, lashing him to the ground. Cutbirth scrambled to his feet and tried to make a run for it, but the beast was onto him with more of his limbs. A terrible unequal struggle ensued.
Meanwhile I ran towards the unconscious form of Bertie. I was glad to find he was not dead, just heavily drugged from some hideous narcotic that Cutbirth had pumped into him. I picked him up in a fireman’s lift and ran towards the little cavern entrance.
There I put Bertie down because there was not room enough to carry him on my back through the tunnel. I would have to drag him by the feet.
I took one last look into the cavern. The creature had Cutbirth wrapped in its limbs and their two heads were very close together. It looked horribly like a lover’s embrace. As the creature bent its head towards Cutbirth’s, I saw the man’s face for the last time. It was full of agonised fear, but also a wondering ecstasy, as if he half-welcomed the devouring kiss of his deity.
I heard a rustling and saw that the cavern was beginning to fill with other creatures, some bigger, some smaller than the one that was now feasting on Cutbirth. They were all piscine, shambling, unearthly, imbued with some sort of mind and power that was beyond my capacity to comprehend.
I took Bertie’s feet and began to drag him through the passage. As I was doing so he started to groan. Consciousness of a kind was returning to him, but he was still impossibly weak.
We reached the bottom of the well, and then I had to half-drag, half-carry him up the spiral staircase. It took an age.
When we reached the rope ladder I was faced with a problem. He was still too doped and feeble to climb it himself and I could not carry him up it on my back. Then I remembered the rope that I had tied to the staple at the bottom of the rope ladder.
I detached the rope from the staple and tied one end of the rope securely around Bertie’s waist. Then, taking the other end of the rope, I climbed with it to the top of the rope ladder. Dawn was breaking over the Cathedral as I clambered over the well parapet. Fortunately the Dean was still there.
With much heaving on the rope we managed to pull young Bertie to the top. He was just revived enough by this time to scramble over the well enclosure and flop exhausted onto the dewy lawn of the cloister garth.
Over the next few hours I managed to get some sort of a story out of him. The silly young blighter had still got the coronet with him when we had come out of the well the previous evening. He had then done something which exceeded even my estimation of his fat-headedness. He had taken it to show Felix Cutbirth.
Apparently, Bertie had struck up a weird sort of friendship with Cutbirth, owing to a mutual interest in folklore and local legend. It was undoubtedly Bertie who had alerted him to our schemes with regard to the well.
To cut a long story short, Cutbirth, no doubt with promises of “treasure chambers” and the like, persuaded young Bertie to take him to the well and make another descent in the small hours. Bertie’s memory collapses at this point, but one can guess the remainder.
We are both in a state of shock, and no doubt the reaction will hit us more heavily later on. Meanwhile, the Dean has given orders that the lid is to be put back on the well and the padlocks restored. But has the genie been put back in the bottle? I doubt it.
OCTOBER 5TH, 1938
This is the first time I have written in my journal for some days. I am recovering at Margate and my sister is with me. She takes me down to the front every day, puts me on a bench and tucks a plaid travelling rug around my knees, as if I were an elderly aunt with arthritis. I feel such a fool because there is really nothing wrong me, but every time I close my eyes they come. I can barely sleep, and when I do it is not long before I wake up screaming.
So I sit here watching the sea as it makes its slow gestures of advance and retreat upon the sand, like a sluggish invading army. Sometimes I fancy I see shapes forming themselves in the waves. I wait for them to resolve themselves into the monsters I once glimpsed, but mercifully they never do. One day beasts will come out of the waves, beasts of iron and steel, but not today.
I have just heard news of Bertie Winship. He had it worse than I did. He is in some sort of special Church of England nuthouse, but they tell me he makes a little progress. Bertie will recover, I feel sure of it, but he will never be the same Bertie he once was. Just as well, you may say, the perishing little pill! All the same, a part of me will regret the passing. By the end of it all we’ll none of us be the same.
I know now what I am going to do. I am going to resign my lectureship at Wessex and enlist in the South Morsetshire. Chaos is coming, rivers of blood will flow, and I feel it is better to be in the midst of chaos, than on the edge of it looking down into the black hole…
I must stop this.
It was St. Anselm himself who said: credo ut intelligam—“I believe so that I may understand”. I wish I did not believe. I wish to God I did not understand.
YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW
by ADRIAN COLE
DAWN HAD JUST started to edge the clouds behind the blocked silhouettes across the river, a white-grey mist. For a few moments the Manhattan skyline looked alien, like something Cyclopean, a hundred suns away. But the two men hardly registered the change in the light. Engrossed in their thoughts, they sat on a bench, focused on the shared inner dilemma that had occupied them throughout the night and previous evening.
The man wearing the distinctive blue of the NYPD, a sergeant, leaned back and yawned: he looked exhausted. Beside him, no less tired, the police detective watched the cold water thoughtfully. From the pocket of his raincoat he pulled a small audio tape, idly turning it over in his fingers. The other looked at it uneasily, hands shoved deep in his own pockets, as though a sudden chill breeze had ruffled him.
“So what’s the deal, Hal?” said the detective, though his eyes were still on the river. “You want to hear this again before I turn it over to the chief?”