The Book of Cthulhu 2

The Drowning At Lake Henpin

Paul Tobin

I have never before filed a shooting report and I appreciate your patience in this matter. It has taken me some time to steady myself, to steel my nerves and commit this queer incident to paper. Writing has been difficult, and not only from a standpoint of my mental state. For these past several days my fingers have been… wet. They made the paper slippery. Smeared the ink. I have been sweating. It’s only sweat. Nothing else. I’m sure of it. There’s no reason to be alarmed. To be honest I’m still somewhat shaken, and while it’s customary for police officers to deny any need for psychiatric help, I think it’s best that I do speak with someone in some official capacity. Someone who will understand me. If such a thing is anymore possible.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have so clearly stated my above thoughts here in this file. I do not personally believe that asking for help is a sign of weakness, but there are those that do and it may come back to haunt me. I hope that I will not be denied advancement in the force. To be candid, I hope to be transferred to another district, to act as a constable somewhere away from the village of Leighton, certainly away from Lake Henpin and any members of the Cabershaw family. It’s only that these visions won’t leave my head. I can see Marken in that damnable pool of blood. Or what should have been blood. I cannot be mistaken on this. It most definitely should have been blood. Correct? It should have been blood. Of course.

Despite my earlier statements, such as those when I was being removed from the scene, I now realize it’s not possible that I saw my bullet leaving the barrel of my Webley. A bullet moves too quickly to be seen. That’s rather the point of a bullet. But I saw it. I witnessed it coming from the barrel. There was an explosion of light. Not the bright kind of light. It was the dull variety. Until that singular moment I hadn’t known of this blacker light, that there is a light that steals brightness as it travels along its path. It was a light that did not share. It… it was a greedy light. That’s all I can say about it. And the bullet came from my barrel and it paused and then something spoke. Not the bullet. I don’t mean that. I’ve been misquoted. What I meant to say it that there was something else at the scene. I mean someone else, of course. Not something else. Someone said something that I could not understand, that I dared not understand, and I was only screaming in the hopes of driving out the damnable noise but nothing was working because the words were dripping inside my head and I could see the air moving aside from the bullet as if it were plunging through water. The air was rippling. My bullets were curving in arcs.

I am told that Christopher Marken, there with Cecil Cabershaw at the lake house shooting, was long dead. Dead for two days, I’ve heard. Drowned and dead before I fired the shots that killed him. I’m told that my shots (there were three bullets missing from my Webley, but I stand by my earlier testimony that I fired four rounds) were not the cause of Christopher Marken’s death. The reports say he drowned. I cannot account for whatever results Marken’s autopsy have brought forth. I can only say that they are a mistake. Some vials must have been mistakenly tagged. Perhaps tampered with. The samples must have been compromised. I tell you that Marken screamed when I shot him, and I can tell you that he lunged for me, that he had me by my collar, that he whispered words to me as he died, that his hands began dripping a foul wetness down the front of my uniform and that his eyes were screaming. He was screaming. I tell you he was screaming.

You must believe me.

* * *

I feel better now.

My visits with Mr. Ulton have helped. He agrees with me that there is no reason to feel weak merely because I’m seeing a psychiatrist like him. We have decided, after some discussion, that my shooting report should involve the whole of the incident. That it should not be a simple statement of, “Marken had an axe and I shot him.” It is best that I begin with the first disappearance, that I speak of the first bodies, of the shooting itself and, of course, of the lake where I was found. Lake Henpin.

Cecil Cabershaw was the first to go missing and I, of course, was assigned to the case. Cecil has lived for some time, alone, more or less, in the abbey. It is not much of an abbey, I’d say. Arrogant to call it as such, but it has been known by the name for some three or four centuries, now. The villagers wouldn’t know what else to call it. They’re simple, as a rule. I do not mean to fault them for that.

Cecil lives in the main house. That sprawling ancient mess. Not as old as the tower building, of course, but it still reaches back some few hundreds of years. It’s been anyone’s guess why the tower and the house, being part of the same estate, were built so far apart. Half a mile at the least. The tower is near the lake. My father always wondered why a defense tower would be so far removed from the main house and the main road. He wondered why it was so close to the lake. I could tell him, now. I’ve solved the mystery. I am pleased that my father is no longer with us. He would not want this knowledge.

Cecil spent the greater part of his life caring for his elder sister, Maple, doing so since the days of her near-drowning at Lake Henpin. This was some fifteen years ago. She’d been a bright child, but she’d slipped beneath the waves one afternoon, foundered by a cramp is the general belief, though she hasn’t spoken a word since that day. By chance my father and mother were on the lake as part of a boating party, like the ones you see in Impressionist paintings, my father said. He was fond of art. He was fond of calling the Cabershaw house an abbey. The cancer took him on my twenty-sixth birthday, but that’s nothing to this story. Nothing at all.

My father saved her. He was the very one who pulled Maple from the waters. She was limp. Like a rag, he was fond of saying. She’d been down for some time before my father found her. He hauled her up into his boat and he tried to get air back in her lungs, blowing at her mouth and massaging her lungs, pushing at her ribs, literally rocking the boat, as it were, so that the other boats (there were three in the party) came close in order to steady my father’s boat, so that it would not be spilled.

Maple gasped back to life. Heaving air. Father said she wasn’t the only one who gasped. It was like watching the dead come back to life. They’d all given up hope. They’d all thought the water had taken her life and spat back her body. It wasn’t far from the truth, I suppose, because she’s been silent ever since and holds a strange fascination with water. When her parents committed suicide (Albert and Dorline drank cyanide some few months after the lake incident, and then slid into the warm waters of their bathtub, to be found by their maid) Cecil was all that Maple had left. She is beautiful, in a wasted way. Haunting, I’d say. Almost as if her beauty was frozen away in time, caught in some trap with her words. She needs constant care. Cecil gave his life to her. For nearly fifteen years. Then, he went missing. There were signs of a struggle. The bathroom, the same room where Cecil had lost his parents, was smashed up a bit, as if men had been wrestling, tossing each other about. Maple was found sitting quietly in her own room. There was a bowl of oats on her lap. Half eaten. She would not give it up. She still kept the bowl, even when she was moved to the psychiatric ward of the hospital in Wath-upon-Dearne. She said nothing, of course, about any attacks or her missing brother.

The villagers widely regarded Cecil’s disappearance as a simple case of a young man (he was thirty, but that’s young enough) deciding that his life must be lived, and his sister must therefore be abandoned. There were few who blamed him. Few who wondered at the signs of the scuffle in the bathroom. Perhaps he had been in a rage, mad at himself over his upcoming flight? It was a plausible theory, but it is not the work of a policeman to devise interesting theories and move on. We must have our proof.

There were several tracks outside the bathroom. A toothbrush. A razor and a strop. These footprints, though, were largely upon a bed of Copper Beech tree leaves, making it impossible to determine their outlines or origins. My theory was that there was more than one set. I still hold this to be true.

The footprints led to the woods. I lost them several times. I had the dog with me. The one Captain Levetts had trained. Steggs was his name. An Irish Setter. Named after an army friend of the captain’s, I believe. The dog was eager for the run, at the first, but as the woods closed in the hound was less in love with the game. He was shivering, and there was a wetness to him, as if he’d been romping through the morning dew. The woods were humid. The dog was unnerved. Oh, he was still barking and such, but he was looking to me in question. I urged him on. Several times. He kept on past the clearing where the festivals are held. He circled. He whined. We carried on past the tower and its recent renovations, but Steggs did not find it to be of any interest. We moved through the woods. There were more tracks, now. I wish someone else would have seen them. I am sure of them. The late September heat had been about, but the footprints were wet. I can remember thinking that perhaps young Cecil had been in his bath. That his kidnappers had taken him straight from his daily preparations.

The dog and I emerged from the woods at the edge of Lake Henpin on the opposite side from the old docks, across from the boarded up lake house that had been built when the lake was considered a tourist attraction, in the days before the stuffy bastards from Basil College ran their experiments but could not tell us why all the fish in the lake have perished.

Steggs was no longer barking. He was, in fact, hiding behind me, and he was glad of it when I eventually determined that there was nothing to be seen. Had Cecil’s kidnappers taken a boat across the waters? If so, I could find no hint of a mooring or any place where a boat had been slid into the waters. I could find nothing at all, and the dog’s unease was wearing on my mood. When Steggs ran off, I followed after him willingly enough. I wanted nothing of the lake.

The Miller girl went missing only three days after.

* * *

Christopher Marken had been raised in these parts, if you’ll remember. I was actually with him in school. Up to Third Year, I mean. We learned our numbers together, but little else, for we did not mingle. He was standoffish, and to be honest I was a bit of a bully in those days. Marken (we called him Markie) was picked up after school by his father, having been deposited by his governess in the morning. He was good at his books, which none of the rest of us cared for. He left almost before we were out of our short pants. He was little remembered, his absence less mourned.

When he returned last year he purchased Cabershaw Tower. You’ll remember the outcry, at first, when the villagers did not believe an outsider should be in charge of any part of the abbey. The tower has been vacant for some hundred years, and we were content for it to remain as such. Cecil Cabershaw had argued for the sale, argued that he needed the money for Maple’s medicines, and that he didn’t give a tick about heritage or the past, not when his sister needed help in the present. Still…still… it didn’t seem right. It wasn’t settled until the town meeting where Marken reminded us of the boy he had been. That he was indeed a child of Leighton. That he was little Markie. Returned.

Extensive renovations began on the abbey’s tower. Marken had the audacity to hire outside workers. A scandal, there, owing to how there are good men in Leighton who need a hammer to swing and fresh bread on their plates.

As like any village policeman, it is my duty to make sure each and everything is proper, not just the laws but the morals. I surprised Marken and his men one day by touring the restorations. They were superficial in the upper tower, where Marken was making his rooms, but the renovations were more extensive in the lower basements. And the wet of the lake was coming through the walls, so much so that I wished I’d brought my rubber boots. I was past my ankles at some points, sploshing about. The waters were chilly. The abbey tower is well above the lake and I would not have thought the basements could be so damp, but I suppose earth draws water like a napkin on a table. Water goes where it wishes, if you give it a path.

Marken was not on the premises. Not for the first hour.

The workers were an ill sort. Dark men. Not dark skinned, I mean, but dark eyed. And they kept their gaze away from me and did not speak. You’ll remember they never came into the village. Not for the dances or the taverns. Not to flirt with our women or play darts with our champions. Marken bought all the supplies himself. There were meats and cheeses, but no liquors, which we all thought a bit odd. A man needs his drink, of course. When I began my surprise inspection, one of Marken’s men tried his best to bar me from the door but I had my badge and I’ve never been a man too easily put off my course. I took my tour.

The interior walls, down below, were strange. Perhaps it was just the water playing havoc with all the angles. I thought as much, any way, at the time, though it did not explain how the walls and the ceiling met at such sharp angles that I could not poke my fingers along the edges. It was ancient architecture, of course. Likely settled poorly over the centuries. The abbey is one of those places that is built upon one thing that is built upon an earlier dwelling that is built upon an earlier structure and so on. It likely goes all the way back to some distant bonfire, my father was fond of saying.

I was well beneath the old abbey and there were carvings on the wall. Intricate scratchings. Marken later told me the abbey had often held prisoners (political prisoners, I assumed) and they’d scratched their words on the walls, using spoons and such. Much of it was vulgar. And there were also crude drawings clearly spat out from diseased minds. Drawings of men with no heads. Men with no legs, pulling themselves along the ground in the manner of a caterpillar. Women being bothered by fantastical creatures. The water was so blasted cold, around me. I had to throw away my shoes, in the end. Damn good shoes, too.

I’d never been in the tower, before. Not below, I mean. As children, I suppose it was a Leighton tradition to shiver ourselves through the gaps in the blocked outer doors, explore the upper tower, imagine ourselves as adventurers with princesses to be won and dragons to be gutted, but none of us ever thought to tear away the boards that kept the basement sealed. I can remember, myself, being dared to do it, to venture below. I remember willing my hands to tear away the first of the boards, but the wood was cold and quite moist and I lost my nerve. We all did. This too, was a Leighton tradition. We all knew the tower, but none of us knew the basements. It was strange to be down in them. Like sealing away part of my childhood… gaining a man’s knowledge of somewhere else that had been only lurking, waiting below.

I discovered a small room with what appeared to be a stone altar. I suppose it could have been a bed. I’ve seen enough books to know ancient people made their beds of stone. They’d have been piled high with cushions, of course. The stone altar (I still couldn’t help but think of it as such, and of course now I know so much of the truth) was carved of all one piece. Rough on its surface, like pumice. Small bits of it broke off when I touched the damn thing. I watched the bits settle in the water. The ripples disappearing. Then I turned, hearing a sloshing behind me, and it seemed every one of the damned workers was in the doorway, staring at me. I asked them about the room but they said nothing. The room’s ceiling had a vault design, but curved and twisted, as if had at one point been a proper dome but some divine hand had reached down and twisted it into the shape of carnival ice cream on a cone. It was unsettling. Water was dripping down from above. I could hear it up above, trickling and rippling along the odd curves before it fell to the waters around me.

There were many more carvings on the walls of this room. Better ones, I might add. Whatever prisoner had been kept in this room, he or she was a more talented artist. Likely as insane, I might add. The carved figures were just as fantastical. Men with multiple arms. Fish with legs. There were several images of what I assume was the sun, with radiant energy spread out all around it. Words were carved into the walls of this room as well. Not a word of it in English, though, this time. Latin, I presumed. Or a barbaric tongue. I speak and read nothing but the King’s own, if you take my meaning. Captain Levetts fancies himself a scholar, though, and I took a rubbing of some of the words so that he could make of it what he would. I used the back of a summons and a stub of pencil and put it on the wall right above the strange stone altar. I still have the rubbing. “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn ~ Lw’nafh ch’Henpin.” Seems to be utter nonsense, though it ends with Henpin, an obvious reference to our lake, so I thought the captain might like it for local lore.

Right as I was taking the rubbing, Marken returned. I’d known he’d gone off to the Leighton general store, seeing about pickaxes and wheelbarrows, and I’d timed my visit while he was out. It’s always best to poke around a bit oneself.

“Why are you here?” he demanded. He was holding a pickaxe. I didn’t like it. My feet were wet and the workmen’s constant presence had given me a tension in my neck.

“Poking around,” I told him. “Seeing about the tower.” Marken’s hands were twisting on the handle of his pickaxe. He was a good seven or eight feet distant, and of course the water meant he wouldn’t be dashing closer any too quickly, but I’ve seen a man hit with a pickaxe before, in the days before the mines flooded, and the thought of it put my hand on the handle of my Webley. Only in a casual manner, mind you. Still… a message.

Marken saw where my hand had gone and, I think, for the first time truly noted the pickaxe in his hands. He immediately handed it over to one of the workmen, but the fellow’s hands were wet and he dropped it into the water, then fished around for a bit, trying to find it, not having much luck. It was comical enough to break the mood, and Marken and I were soon up on dry land having tea on the lawn in front of the abbey, as my shoes and pants were no longer fit for any indoor conversations.

I found Markie to be pleasant enough. A great wit, truth be told. He remembered me a good deal more than I remembered him, though when he talked of my earlier bullying I felt a few flashes of the old memories returning. I’d been an awful bastard, but Markie thought it was funny, now. Days gone by and all that. I caught him up to speed on the village (he seemed to know everything already, as if it were only another of the tests he always studied for) and I caught him up on the story of my life, which wasn’t much. A few women. My wife, now. The futility of fishing the lake. The best places to sit in each of Leighton’s three pubs.

Marken’s life had gone in more interesting directions. He’d taken in with an antiquarian up in Bradford. Playing the part of an apprentice. Learning to tell if a scarab was four thousand years old, or only four weeks. He’d also gone crazy for languages, learning them by the basket. I asked about the writing in the rooms below the abbey and the rubbing I had taken, but he said he couldn’t read a word of it. Looking back, he was lying, of course. Looking back, I know I missed his reluctance to return the paper to my grasp.

I asked why he wanted to restore the old tower. Nobody had lived within its premises for some hundred years, and there were further centuries of accumulated dust even so, and a man of his means (trading in antiquities seemed to be remarkably profitable, though I might add that Marken comes from money, and a rich man slides along the path to money, while a poor man stumbles) might well have had any house in Leighton, or perhaps even renovated the lake house, a far more modern and hospitable structure. He’d shuddered when I mentioned the lake house. I need no hindsight, here. I noticed it even then.

We talked of women, of course… of our own wives and other women, and also of women we wished had been our wives. Much laughter, of course. Women may weep over spoiled romance, but men such as Marken and I see the comic side. We also spoke of the local football clubs and how strikers seem to be born and goalkeepers seem to be idiots. Women see the comic side in such things as that, but men such as Marken and I are nearly driven to tears.

What I mean to say is that the mood had been good until I spoke of the renovations, the strange quality of the basements. Marken did not speak for some moments and I had the feeling that I should remain quiet as well. He looked off in the distance, mostly, but his eyes kept returning to mine. I could see that he was calculating. Gauging. Weighing facts and emotions. That sort of thing. All nonsense. We know in an instant whether we trust a man. All the rest is mere twaddle.

Marken did a very extraordinary thing.

Before finally speaking, he nabbed up the teapot, still half filled with water. Cooled by then, of course, as we’d been talking for nearly an hour.

He poured it on the lawn. Not in any casual manner, but in that precise and sadly focused way a man will line up a good shot on a dog that’s gone bad.

I took a long look at Marken, then. The cut of his suit was beyond adequate. Much better than mine, and I do take some care with my general grooming. He had the sideburns of a learned Bradford man. His hair was perhaps longer than we prefer in Leighton, but there’s no law against a man’s hair catching the wind. His hands were strong, and his general form was that of a fellow who could ride a horse or swing a golf club without huffing or heaving. His eyes were dark and there was a certain moistness to his skin that I assumed was sweat, as the day was balmy and we’d taken chairs in the sun to hasten the drying process of our shoes and trouser legs, soaked as they were by the excursion into the renovations.

His skin was somewhat leathery, and dark and spotted by the sun, but that’s as a man should be.

Marken placed the teapot upended on the table and emptied both our cups into the grass. I did not protest. Too curious to form words, I admit.

Then, he said, “Have you heard of the Book of Eibon? Or the Cthäat Aquadingen?”

It is that moment that I consider my first step into madness.

* * *

Joslie Miller was a peach of a girl. A peach. She had been visiting her friend, thirteen-year-old Constance Grane, a visit during which the two of them had crafted several paper dolls, clever cutouts from newspapers Joslie’s father had brought back from a recent excursion to Stoke-on-Trent for medical reasons. Joslie’s mother had taken ill. Some sort of wasting sickness. A cancer, I hear, but I hear other things and give them more credit, now.

The paper dolls had been connected to each other, cut away from the papers so that each of the duplicate figures was holding hands. I heard people talking, later, of how the search parties were similar, with all of us holding hands, moving across the meadows and through the woods as best we could, staying within reach of each other because Joslie was such a small girl and could be missed so easily.

She’d never come home from the Granes’ house. Joslie’s mother had waited a fretful time and then come to me, and I take things seriously at all times and the disappearance of Cecil Cabershaw was still biting at my mind. I rounded up as many of the villagers as I could, and we took such lanterns and torches as were available, and we set out.

As it happens, I was the one to find her. Joslie’s little body was crumpled no more than a hundred feet from her mother’s house. Caught in the weeds, she was, at the edge of the fallow field, half hidden by the tall grass and the wheat. She was cracked and she was broken as if some monster had crumpled her there, or she’d fallen from a cloud. She was soaking wet and… just before I found her, I could have sworn I heard a running stream, but the nearest river was a half mile distant. These phantom sounds were drowned away by the swish of running men as they came plunging through the wheat when I cried out, and of course soon there was nothing but her mother’s wails.

* * *

By the time the dogs began to disappear, over the course of the next several days, Marken and I had become friends. We were something, anyway. I take to friends slow, I admit, but Marken was on his way. It would have gone quicker without the disappearances, and without his madness, and certainly without the way his madness began to make sense. I think that was what disturbed me most of all.

He had theories about Leighton. About the town and the lake. He explained these theories to me when we were drinking, and once I had his words in my head I didn’t want to stop drinking. Not ever. I didn’t want to be sober in my bed, my wife going about her duties in the kitchen, me listening to my thoughts and to the raindrops coming off my roof, or the hissing complaints of a teapot set to boil.

“The tower is old,” Marken told me. He had several papers spread out on his table. Drawings of the tower within which we were sitting. I say they were papers but they were not. They were on parchment. Papyrus. Or leather. And there was one drawing of the tower in a book that Marken called the Cthäat Aquadingen, as old a book as I’ve ever seen. I’ve never been a book man, and now I never will be, because that book is in my head. It got in my head. Dripped inside. It has me.

Marken said, “Versions of this book first appeared in the 5^th century. Nobody knows who wrote it. God give him a good grave, though. God grant him that. This one is in English, and there was a Latin version mentioned in damnation by the first of the Knights Templar, and they called it a new book, then, which I suppose would date it to the 11^th or 12^th century.”

“I suppose,” I said. I was looking at the book. It was stained. Stained with what I hoped were coffees or wines or waters. And the book seemed to be creaking. A thick and ugly thing, it was. Several hundred pages long. A folio. Bound in a leather of which I wanted no knowledge. Bulging. That book was bulging. Solid and resting motionless on Marken’s table, but it felt like it was creaking open nonetheless. I was sweating. The circulation in the abbey tower is not good. Marken had opened the book to an image of the very tower we were in. The image was hundreds of year old, but the base structure of the tower was unmistakable, as was its proximity to the lake. Unsettling, then, to see how the tower was only the beginning of the image, with the earth cut away beneath, basements and cellars and caverns reaching down an unimaginable depth. Strange creatures roamed below, and channels were connected to the lake. And then, far beneath, a being of inconceivable size. A protoplasmic blob that could have stretched itself from Leighton to London.

“This is Ubbo-Sathla, the Unbegotten Source,” Marken told me. He was hesitant to even touch the image. I could hear a rustling from below, in the basements beneath us, and while I knew it would only be Marken’s workmen going about their tasks, I still shuddered. We were drinking wine. I drank more. More than I should have. Or less.

“It looks like some viscous fluid,” I told Marken. “An oil stain. A jam spilt upon the floor.” I was making light of it. I could see outside the window and down to the lake, where it was black. A dog was howling, somewhere. The days had been playing hell with their kind. The villagers were pressing hard at me on the disappearances. The hounds. Cecil Cabershaw. Especially little Joslie’s murder. But I had nothing. No gypsies to roust or travelers to condemn. No donkey where I could pin the murderous tail. Now, ten dogs dead or missing in the last week. The dog that Marken and I could hear howling was undoubtedly being kept at home, mournful that it was not allowed to roam free at night.

“Ubbo-Sathla is the creator of all life on Earth,” Marken told me, and he began to spin a fantastical tale of the vastness of space, of visitors marooned on our planet, stranded long before life here began. It was a story of Ubbo-Sathla huddled beneath ice, spitting forth creatures into a glacier melt… drop after drop of life, small organisms that soon sprang into the strange and foul creatures Ubbo-Sathla created at whim, life as no more than a toy, these beings stumbling away to cover the Earth, passing the centuries, the millennia, hundreds of millions of years, becoming grotesque fish, or dogs that howl in the night, or the villagers in every English town.

“But not every creature changed,” Marken told me. We were on our third bottle of wine. I excused myself to the bathroom, standing over the toilet and listening to Marken’s words as he called out, as I relieved myself, as I watched the faucet of Marken’s sink dripping out, drop after drop. I was thinking of my wife, alone, at home. She would be mending. Reading. Having tea. I thought of her running the faucets. I thought of her hair. Her smile. I thought of going home but in my madness I needed to hear what Marken had to say.

He called out, “Some of the foulest creatures kept their form, kept their hatred for their new home and for all their brothers. Unchanged, they watched as eternity cantered by, with endless steps. Or perhaps they do have an end.”

I returned to my chair. To my cups of wine. I asked, “What do you mean?”

“The Cabershaw family,” he spoke. There was great import in his words, but I had no idea of his meaning. There was little left to the Cabershaw family. They were dying out. Was this what he meant?

“Cecil has gone missing,” I said. “Maple is in Wath-upon-Dearne. A hospital. For her mind.”

“You don’t understand. Time has no meaning. None at all. To the ones who came before, to Cthulhu, to Kassogtha, to the Black Goat of the Woods with his thousand young, time is only a tool. We are neither here nor there. Not in the past or the future. Every Cabershaw who has ever lived, they are still here. Still among us. Still going about their tasks.”

“Their… tasks?” I asked. I felt as a man who cannot help himself from entering a cavern’s depths. The dogs of Leighton were all howling, now, calling from off in the distance, for the most part, though some were coming closer. The night had gone so dark that I could no longer see the lake from my seat next to the window. The curtains were rustling. A wind was visiting.

“They are caretakers since time immemorial,” Marken said. “Since before they were human. Since before there were humans.” He was turning pages of the Cthäat Aquadingen. The book was hundreds of years old, but the pages were not brittle. I wondered of their origin. Inside, there were texts in several languages. Most of them alien to my eyes. There were chunks of pages filled with nothing but dots in intricate patterns. And pictograms with figures that made my eyes itch and burn. I wondered of the illustrations I was seeing as Marken heaved page after page of the giant tome aside, all the images of fantastical creatures that I would never have believed existed, except Marken believed, and he did not seem as if any madness had taken him, or the wine had misguided him. My father had often told me that sometimes it is only a madman that see or speaks the truth.

“Here,” Marken said. “The Cabershaw family.” He made as if to speak more, but then stopped, said nothing. I wondered, with all that he had been speaking, what madness he had decided was best left unsaid. He tapped on the pages and at first I did not look. I only reached for more wine. We’d opened another bottle. Outside, there were the sounds of dogs moving closer, racing through the woods and towards, I somehow felt, the lake.

There was an image of the Cabershaw family in the book. Of Cecil Cabershaw. An exact likeness. Even, God help me, the clothes that he had been wearing the last time he’d been seen, when he was at the general store retrieving an order of two hundred canning jars suitable for vegetables or meats. The clerk remembered him well, wondering of such an order from a man not known to garden or to prepare much for the future.

But there he was, just as the clerk had described, just in the clothes that Cecil normally wore… the same vest and the pocket watch and the hat and everything in place, even the cut of his hair, and all of it in a book whose pages had been created while the Vandals were still sacking Rome. My forehead was moist. My hand was on my Webley, for reassurance. The metal felt cold and real. It began raining outside. Soft rain. Dribbles and drops. One after the other. I could hear a pack of hounds racing past. An awful racket. I could hear the blood in my ears. A small thump in my temple. I’d have a headache, soon, I believed. I wanted to be home in bed with a cloth on my head, with my wife’s loving hands holding it in place.

Instead of this, I said, “What role do you have? Why are you here, Marken? Why have you come back to Leighton?”

He pondered my question. No immediate answer. I could see another of those rounds of calculation in his eyes. This time, I sensed, he was deciding not if he would answer, but only how he would answer.

Finally, he said, “You’ve heard the dogs?”

I nodded. The dogs were gathering by Lake Henpin. I could hear their baying, their growls, their whimpers and such. The wine and Marken and the strange leather book had put me in a mood where the dogs seemed unreal, foreign, as far away as the stars. At any other time I would have sprang to my feet and raced outside in wonder at their actions. Dogs are wise, you know. My father said to trust a dog more than a man, because a dog has never learned to lie.

“Dogs are not the only ones that hunt,” Marken told me.

* * *

The dogs had been disappearing at night. For a week. One a night. Sometimes two. At first it was assumed they’d simply run off. Dogs need freedom. They’d soon come home. There were one or two jokes gamboled about… talk of how something was in the air. Cecil had started a trend by running away on his sister. The dogs were following suit. I didn’t laugh at these jokes. It is not my job to do so. And Joslie had been put to rest in her grave. A policeman can’t be seen to be smiling when a girl’s grave is still so fresh.

As the disappearances continued, there were no more jokes. Leashes were found chewed apart. Or broken. And then the dogs began to wash up on the lake. Drowned, they were. And some animal had been at them. Dogs are not talented swimmers, and nobody could hazard a guess why they’d been going into the waters. Nobody but me, that is, standing at the shore, watching the small waves lapping for a foothold on land, and remembering the tales I’d been hearing from Marken.

* * *

We followed the dogs to the lake, did Marken and I. There wasn’t any part of me that wanted to be near Lake Henpin at night, not since seeing the drawings in that damned book, not since hearing tales of the Sathlattae, rituals and chants and spells related to Ubbo-Sathla. Incantations with which water spirits could be raised. Summoned. Created. And, thankfully destroyed. It was the last knowledge that Marken had been seeking. Not just since he’d come back to Leighton. From earlier. Much earlier.

“My family is charged with destroying the Old Ones,” he said as we moved through the woods. I had my Webley and he an old axe that looked brittle, carved with pictograms and strange words. More a work of art than a weapon, though he clenched it as tight as his teeth.

Marken said, “The tower wasn’t erected to stop any Saxons. Not for any Vikings or Normans, either. It’s a defense against invaders from the lake. It wasn’t part of the original abbey. Has nothing to do with it, unless you count fighting for the other side.” The dogs were still howling at the lake, but it was too dark, too many trees in the way. I could see nothing. My heart was a hammer, beating against my chest in waves.

“I’ve travelled the globe. Fighting. Well… not much fighting. Acquiring artefacts, mostly. Stopping others from fighting. And I’ve been learning about the Cabershaw family. Learning about the lake house. Learning about… God help me and keep my soul in His hands… Lake Henpin.”

It was then that I saw the glow from the lake. And as sure as a man knows light from dark, I knew that light was wrong. It was unsettled. Not shimmering, but… moving. Creeping out from the lake. Like a mist. The dogs were growling. Whining. I think they would have fled if they weren’t all together in a pack, with a thousand teeth and a mob’s nerves.

I realized at that moment that I had a hundred questions for Marken. That I’d finally begun to understand. That the wet coming down from the sky in infinite raindrops was different than the wet that was gathered together in the lake. And that Marken was, I suppose, an officer of a greater law than I’d ever served, with answers as far above my own eyes as if a child had been asking me about mine.

I began to understand that he had much to tell me. That he had been keeping many things hidden. That I wasn’t ready. That I had only a drop of knowledge. Just the taste of an ocean.

We were still, I swear and believe, a hundred feet from the edges of the lake. But that makes no matter. None at all.

We still fell in.

There was a rush of earth, of water, as if the lake had nabbed us from below in the manner of a mole stealing vegetables from a garden. The dogs were in chaos, paddling as best they could, but the water was churning and alive and I lost sight of the surface, of Marken, of everything. I tumbled and flailed. There was nothing but the water. For long moments, there was nothing but the water. And me, of course, being drawn down below. Then… old Steggs, the police dog, came sinking past me, struggling as he was for air. I dove for him, needing to save something, to act for a cause, to believe in something. I dove for that dog. Down and down. Down and down. Always down. My lungs should have been bursting. My lungs should have been furious. But I felt nothing. Only dove for the dog. He was just out of reach. Looking to me. Scared. Trusting. But I couldn’t reach him.

I pulled up short when I saw the city.

Nothing could induce me to put onto paper what I saw of that city. Of its people. Police psychiatry be damned… I will not bid my mind to speak of what I will never forget. Those temples of stone. Those streets made of nothing but water, curling through and around and over the buildings, and men walking about them as if these streets were a true surface, as if water could hold them, as if the wet were solid. And the men were not men, of course. I only call them men to save my mind. They were as much slugs as men. Creatures of jelly. Blobs of flesh that changed shape with every facsimile of a step. Tendrils always and ever reaching out, but tendrils changing to arms, to wings, to faces, to legs, then all of these at the same time, and then they were nothing, nothing at all, only whisked away by the water that whirled around the spires and the rooftops, each surface of each building worn by untold millennia of footsteps, grooves worn into the stone of the rooftops and the walls and everywhere, all of the motion a mad whirl around me, and down past it all at the bottom, down at the bed of the lake, past Steggs, past the sinking dogs, there was the source of the light. A glacier, I thought, at first. A strange white glacier that was beneath the water, that covered the bottom of the lake, that stretched into caverns that went even farther below, that sank deep into the heart of this world.

A glacier.

But of course it was not. I will not write anything more of it in this report. Nothing of how, without eyes, it looked up to me. Nothing of how, without a mouth, it spoke my name.

I swam madly for the surface. I swam away from the buildings, from the city that stretched beneath me. I abandoned the dogs that were floating past me, their dead eyes bulging in fear, then closing in death, then opening once more, staring at me, though I had no thought that they had come back to life. None of that.

I could see the surface. It was like a roll of clouds above me. A hundred feet, it seemed. I swam as a madman. Closing the distance. Planning how I would run when I was on land. No destination. No stopping. Just running. I would run.

A hand went on my shoulder.

Marken, I hoped. I hoped for Christopher Marken.

But when I turned it was Maple Cabershaw.

At first I thought she was drowning. At first I wondered how she had traveled from Wath-upon-Dearne, where I knew she was being kept, to find herself in the waters of Lake Henpin. But then I saw the look of blackness in her eyes. The depths of space within her. The smile that was somehow both uncaring and malignant at the same time. I heard her laugh, even underwater, casting aside Earth’s rules and speaking to me even as water filled her lungs, even as her skin flashed into impossible colors and her limbs flickered into tendrils, or thick seaweeds, and then back to human again.

But she was not human. She had never been human. The Cabershaw family were guardians and I had come too close to their secrets and their domain. Maple slid her fingers into my hair and began to pull me back down, back down, laughing at my struggles and whispering through the water and into my ears. She spoke of citadels. Of rulers. Of servants. Of sustenance. Of life. But nothing of her words was of Earth. It was all madness. Grand madness. And all true. Her madness was true.

I fought. I fought and I clubbed her with the Webley that I still held clutched in my hands. I brought it down on her face, shattering nothing. Her features merely moved aside. Slid around the impact. My lungs were heaving and I clutched at her throat; I clenched at her throat while trying to choke the life out of the beautifully strange creature, but her smile never changed. I was nothing. Only a minnow swimming against a whale. Still, a minnow may fight, and fought I did. I fought until I saw how we were near the surface of the lake, how I was nearly to freedom, separated momentarily from the creature I once believed was human, who I once believed was Maple Cabershaw, a woman who had sat for long years in silence, and who had once nearly drowned in this lake.

She swam for me, and I saw no humanity in her eyes. Only death.

But then, before she could reach me, hands came down from above. A man’s hands. Maple gave a start of surprise, and then a grin of realization, and then she smiled at me as she was plucked up and out of the waters. She went limp as she surfaced.

Air. Sweet air. I heaved to the surface and into… sunlight. My face was barely above the waves. My face was only inches from a boat. My eyes, looking up, saw my father, my father who has been dead so many years. He was gasping and he was holding the still frame of Maple Cabershaw, desperately trying to breathe life into her limp form, as all around him the boating party came to the aid of the young girl who had nearly drowned in the lake.

* * *

Time is nothing to them. What of it to me, then? Why should I care how I found myself in the lake house? Why should I care that the floors were new? The curtains clean? The smells of fresh bread in the kitchen so delicious? I remembered little of finding my way. Of slipping beneath the waves, away from the past, away from my father, swimming unseen and away from the newest madness, rising from the lake, sodden, dripping, always dripping, hearing nothing but the echoes of barking dogs but being drawn by something, some thread that was dancing me on its string, and then I was in the great hall of the lake house, where I found Christopher Marken holding Cecil Cabershaw by his hair, raising his brittle-looking axe and bringing it down, beheading the man. There was a hiss of smoke without flame, cold without a source, and Cabershaw’s body shivered, but the head, God save us, still lived. The head still lived. It grew tentacles, tendrils like seaweed, and it began to run, to escape, to flee the promised kiss of that brittle axe.

“Shoot it!” Marken said, seeing me. “We can’t let it escape! Bring it down!”

And I rose my gun, and I fired four shots. Four. Only three bullets missing from my Webley, but I know what I have done. I fired four shots. Four bullets. But they curved. The trajectory of my bullets curved. They slammed into Marken. Brought him down. He was an innocent. He was a good man.

I have been misquoted, you understand. I never said he killed the dogs. I never said he killed young Joslie. I only said he was responsible. He said as much to me, cursing his failure, as he died.

It was not blood that came from his veins. It was water. Water from the lake.

Despite this, I believe that Markie was a good man.

When I awoke, I was sprawled outside the decrepit and long-unused lake house, with the waters of Lake Henpin slapping at my feet.

* * *

Captain Levetts, I fear I am no longer writing a shooting report. This is now a note to you. And to my wife, if you think that is best. I have learned many things in the days since Marken’s death. I have recovered some of what he left behind in the tower, ferreting them away before the mysterious fire that claimed the lives of his workmen and collapsed the entire tower into the basements and caverns below. I have read of the Cabershaw family in such books as the Cthäat Aquadingen and Unaussprechlichen Kulten. I now have more knowledge that I can possibly hold. My brain wants to scream it away. I will allow my brain to do this in the only way possible. I am writing this in your office bathroom, now, where I have excused myself for some moments from Mr. Ulton, the psychiatrist, and where I am watching the sink in your bathroom dripping and dripping and dripping, and I could stand here and speak to it. But I won’t. I won’t do that.

I know that you have my gun in your desk. My Webley is there. Taken from me. For the best, it was said. It will be a simple matter to force open your locked desk. I will find my gun.

First, before that, I will save you from the embarrassment of having a suicide on your force. I hereby resign.

It has been a great honor to serve the people of Leighton. Tell my wife I love her, and to never let the water run for too long. It’s a waste, you know. An awful waste.

Oh.

A thought.

I have just now solved the mystery of my Webley.

Three bullets or four?

I understand, now.

Time means nothing to them.

The fourth shot has yet to be fired.

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