The Taint and Other Novellas

The Fairground Horror

This one was written in the first half of 1972. Kirby McCauley sold it on my behalf to editor Edward F. Berglund for an anthology that would be called “The Disciples of Cthulhu.” And indeed The Fairground Horror was so published—by DAW Books in 1976, in an attractive and now much sought after paperback edition—since when it has been reprinted variously, most recently in my TOR Books collection, “Beneath the Moors and Darker Places.” My Lovecraft dependency (and its resultant purple prose) is not so much visible as unmistakable in this novella…!

The funfair was as yet an abject failure. Drizzling rain dulled the chrome of the dodgem-cars and stratojets; the neons had not even nearly achieved the garishness they display by night; the so-called “crowd”was hardly worth mentioning as such. But it was only 2:00 P. M. and things could yet improve.

Had the weather been better—even for October it was bad—and had Bathley been a town instead of a mere village, then perhaps the scene were that much brighter. Come evening, when the neons and other bright naked bulbs would glow in all the painful intensity of their own natural (unnatural?) life, when the drab gypsyish dollies behind the penny-catching stalls would undergo their subtle, nightly metamorphosis into avariciously enticing Loreleis—then it would be brighter, but not yet.

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.

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!

But it was something about the face of the departed visitor—that rounded gentleman of obvious substance but doubtful future—which caused Anderson the greatest concern. He had finally recognized that face from elsewhere, and at his first opportunity he sneaked a glance through some of the archaeological and anthropological journals which his brother now spent so much time reading. It was as he had thought: Hamilton’s prey was none other than an eminent explorer and archaeologist; one whose name, Stainton Gamber, might be even higher in the lists of famous adventurers and discoverers but for a passion for wild-goose expeditions and safaris. Then he grew even more worried, for plainly his brother could not go on forever depleting the countryside of eminent persons without being discovered.

That afternoon passed slowly for Anderson Tharpe, and when night came he went early to his bed in the caravan. He was up again, however, as soon as he heard his brother stirring and the hushed whispers that led off in the direction of the freak-house. It was as he had known it would be, when for a moment pale moonlight showed him a glimpse of Hamilton with Stainton Gamber.

Quickly he followed the two to the looming canvas tent, and in through the dragon jawed entranceway, but he paused at the door-flap to the partitioned area to listen and observe. There came the scratch of a match and its bright, sudden flare, and then a candle flickered into life. At this point the whispering recommenced, and Anderson drew back a pace as the candle began to move about the interior of Hamilton’s museum. He could hear the hushed conversation quite clearly, could feel the tremulous excitement in the voice of the florid explorer:

“But these are—fantastic! I’ve believed for years now that such relics must exist. Indeed, I’ve often brought my reputation close to ruin for such beliefs, and now…Young man, you’ll be world famous. Do you realize what you have here? Proof positive that the Cult of Cthulhu did exist! What monstrous worship—what hideous rites! Where, where did you find these things? I must know! And this idol—which you say is believed to invoke the spirit of the living Cthulhu himself! Who holds such beliefs? I know of course that Wendy-Smith—”

“Hah!” Hamilton’s rasping voice cut in. “You can keep all your Wendy-Smiths and Gordon Walmsleys. They only scraped the surface. I’ve gone inside—and outside! Explorers, dreamers, mystics—mere dabblers. Why, they’d die, all of them, if they saw what I’ve seen, if they went where I’ve been. And none of them have ever dreamed what I know!”

“But why keep it hidden? Why don’t you open this place up, show the world what you’ve got here, what you’ve achieved? Publish, man, publish! Why, together—”

“Together?”Hamilton’s voice was darker, trembling as he suddenly snuffed the candle. “Together? Proof that the Cult of Cthulhu did exist? Show it to the world? Publish?” His chuckle was obscene in the dark, and Anderson heard the visitor’s sharp intake of breath. “The world’s not ready, Gamber, and the stars are not right! What you would like to do, like many before you, is alert the world to Their one-time presence, the days of Their sovereignty—which might in turn lead to the discovery that They are here even now! Indeed Wendy-Smith was right, too right, and where is Wendy-Smith now? No, no—They aren’t interested in mere dabblers, except that such are dangerous to Them and must be removed! Iä, R’lyeh! You are no true dreamer, Gamber, no believer. You’re not worthy of membership in the Great Priesthood. You’re…dangerous! Proof? I’ll give you proof. Listen, and watch—”

Hearing his brother’s injunction, the secret listener would have paid dearly to see what next occurred. A short while earlier, just before Hamilton had snuffed out the candle, Anderson had managed to find a hole in the canvas large enough to facilitate a fair view of the partitioned area. He had seen a semicircle of carved stone tablets, with the octopoid idol presiding atop or seated upon a thronelike pedestal. Now, in the dark, his view-hole was useless.

He could still listen, however, and now Hamilton’s voice came—strange and vibrant, though still controlled in volume—in a chant or invocation of terrible cadence and rhythmic disorder. These were not words the younger Tharpe uttered but unintelligible sounds, a morbidly insane agglutination of verbal improbabilities which ought never to have issued from a human throat at all! And as the invocation ceased, to an incredulous gasping from the doomed explorer, Anderson had to draw back from his hole lest he become visible in the glow of a green radiance springing up abruptly in the centre of Hamilton’s encircling relics.

The green glow grew brighter, filling the hidden museum and spilling emerald beams from several small holes in the canvas. This was no normal light, for the beams were quite alien to anything Anderson had ever seen before; the very light seemed to writhe and contort in a slow and loathsomely languid dance. Now Anderson found himself again a witness, for the shadows of Hamilton and his intended victim were thrown blackly against the wall of canvas. There was no requirement now to “spy” properly upon the pair; his view of the eerie drama could not have been clearer. The centre of the radiance seemed to expand and shrink alternatively, pulsing like an alien heart of light. Hamilton stood to one side, his arms flung wide in terrible triumph; Stainton Gamber cowered, his hands up before his face as if to shield it from some unbearable heat—or as if to ward off the unknown and inexplicable!

Anderson’s shadow-view of the terrified explorer was profile, and he was suddenly astonished to note that while the man appeared to be screaming horribly he could hear nothing of his screams! It was as if Anderson had been stricken deaf. Hamilton, too, was now plainly vociferous; his throat moved in crazed cachinnations and his thrown-back head and heaving shoulders plainly announced unholy glee—but all in stark silence! Anderson knew now that the mad green light had somehow worked against normal order, annulling all sound utterly and thereby hiding in its emerald pulsings the final act in this monstrous shadow-play. As the core pulsated even faster and brighter, Hamilton moved quickly after the silently shrieking explorer, catching him by the collar of his jacket and swinging him sprawling into the core itself!

Instantly the core shrank, sucking in upon itself and dwindling in a moment to a ball of intense brightness. But where was the explorer? Horrified, Anderson saw that now only one shadow remained faintly outlined upon the canvas—that of his brother!

Quickly, weirdly, paling as they went, the beams of green light withdrew. Sound instantly returned, and Anderson heard his own harsh breathing. He stilled the sound, moving back to his spy-hole to see what was happening. A faint green glow with a single bright speck of a core remained within the semicircle; and now Hamilton bowed to this dimming light and his voice came again, low and tremulous with emotion:

“Iä, naflhgn Cthulhu R’lyeh mglw’nafh,

Eha’ungl wglw hflghglui ngah’glw,

Engl Eha gh’eehf gnhugl,

Nhflgng uh’eha wgah’nagl hfglufh—

U’ng Eha’ghglui Aeeh ehn’hflgh…

That is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange aeons even death may die.”

No sooner had Hamilton ceased these utterly alien mouthings and the paradoxical couplet that completed them, and while yet the green glow continued to dim and fade, than he spoke again, this time all in recognizable English. Such was his murmured modulation and deliberate spacing of the spoken sequences that his hidden brother immediately recognized the following as a translation of what had gone before:

“Oh, Great Cthulhu, dreaming in R’lyeh,

Thy priest offers up this sacrifice,

That thy coming be soon

And that of thy kindred dreamers.

I am thy priest and adore thee…”

It was only then that the full horror of what he had seen—the cold-blooded, premeditated murder of a man by either some monstrous occult device or a foreign science beyond his knowledge—finally went home to Anderson Tharpe, and barely managing to stifle the hysterical babble he felt welling in his throat, he took an involuntary step backwards…to collide loudly with a cage of great bats.

Three things happened then in rapid succession before Anderson could gather his wits to flee. All trace of the green glow vanished in an instant, throwing the tent once more into complete darkness; then in contrast, confusing the elder brother, the bright interior lights blinked on; finally, as he sought to recover from his confusion, Hamilton appeared through the partition’s canvas door, his eyes blazing in a face contorted in fury!

“You!” Hamilton spat, striding to Anderson’s side and catching him fiercely by the collar of his dressing-gown. “How much have you seen?”

Anderson twisted free and backed away. “I…I saw it all, but I had guessed as much some time ago. Murder—and you my brother!”

“Save your sanctimony,” Hamilton sneered. “If you’ve known so much for so long, then you’re as much a murderer as I am! And anyway”—his eyes seemed visibly to glaze and take on a faraway look—“it wasn’t murder, not as you understand it.”

“Of course not.” Now it was Anderson’s turn to sneer. “It was a—a ‘sacrifice’—to this so-called ‘god’ of yours, Great Cthulhu! And were the others all sacrifices, too?”

“All of them,” Hamilton answered with a nod, automatically, as in a trance.

“Oh? And where’s the money?”

“Money?” The faraway look went out of the younger Tharpe’s eyes immediately. “What money?”

Anderson saw that this was no bluff; his brother’s motive had not been personal gain, at least not in a monetary sense. Which in turn meant—

Had those rumours and unfriendly whispers heard about the stalls and sideshows—those hints of a looming madness in his brother—had they been more than mere guesswork, then? Surely he would have known. As if in answer to his unspoken question, Hamilton spoke again—and listening to him Anderson believed he had his answer:

“You’re the same as all the others, Anderson—you can’t see beyond the length of your greedy nose. Money? Pah! You think that They are interested in wealth? They are not; neither am I. They have a wealth of aeons behind Them; the future is Theirs…” Again his eyes seemed to glaze over.

“Them? Who do you mean?” Anderson asked, frowning and backing farther away.

“Cthulhu and the others. Cthulhu and the Deep Ones, and Their brothers and kin forever dreaming in the vast vaults beneath. “Iä, R’lyeh, Cthulhu fhtagn!”

“You’re quite—mad!”

“You think so?”Hamilton quickly followed after him, pushing his face uncomfortably close. “I’m mad, am I? Well, perhaps, but I’ll tell you something: when you and the others like you are reduced to mere cattle, before the Earth is cleared off of life as you know it, a trusted handful of priests will guard the herds for Them—and I shall be a priest among priests, appointed to the service of Great Cthulhu Himself!”His eyes burned feverishly.

Now Anderson was certain of his brother’s madness, but even so he could see a way to profit from it. “Hamilton,” he said, after a moment’s thought, “worship whichever gods you like and aspire to whichever priesthood—but don’t you see we have to live? There could be good money in this for both of us. If only—”

“No!” Hamilton hissed. “To worship Cthulhu is enough. Indeed, it is all! That, in there”—he jerked his head, indicating the enclosed area behind him—“is His temple. To offer up sacrifices while yet thinking of oneself would be blasphemous, and when He comes I shall not be found wanting!” His eyes went wide and he trembled.

“You don’t know Him, Anderson. He is awful, awesome, a monster, a god! He is sunken now, drowned and dead in deep R’lyeh, but His death is a sleeping death and He will awaken. When the stars are right we chosen ones will answer the Call of Cthulhu, and R’lyeh will rise up again to astound a reeling universe. Why, even the Gorgons were His priestesses in the old world! And you talk to me of money.”Again he sneered, but now his madness had a firm grip on him and the sneer soon turned to a crafty smile.

“And you’re helpless to do anything, Anderson, for if you breathe a word I’ll swear you were in on it—that you helped me from the start! And as for bodies, why, there are none. They are gone to dreaming Cthulhu, through the light He sends me when I cry out to Him in my darkness. So you see, nothing could ever be proved…”

“Perhaps not, but I don’t think it would take much to have you, well, put away!” Anderson quietly answered.

The barb went straight home. A look of terror crossed Hamilton’s face and, plainly aware of his own mental infirmity, he visibly paled.

“Put me away? But you wouldn’t. If you did, I wouldn’t be able to worship, to sacrifice, and—”

“But there’s no need to worry about it,”Anderson cut him off. “ I won’t have you put away. Just see things my way, show me how you dissolve them in that green light of yours—I mean, in, er, dreaming Cthulhu’s light—and then we’ll carry on as before, except that there’ll be money…”

“No, Anderson,” the other refused almost gently, “it can’t work like that. You could never believe—not even if I showed you proof of my priesthood, which hides beneath this false head of hair that I’m obliged to wear, the very Mark of Cthulhu—and I can’t worship as you suggest. I’m sorry.” There was an insane sadness in his face as he drew out a long knife from its sheath inside his jacket. “I use this when they’re stronger than me,” he explained, “and when they’re liable to fight. Cthulhu doesn’t care for it much because he likes them alive initially and whole, but—” His knife hand flashed up and down.

Only Anderson’s speed saved him, for he turned quickly to one side as the blade flashed down toward his breast. Then their wrists were locked and they staggered to and fro, Hamilton frothing at the mouth and trying to bite, while Anderson grimly struggled for dear life. The madman seemed to have the strength of three normal men, and soon they fell to the ground, a thrashing heap that rolled blindly in through the flap of the canvas door to Hamilton’s “temple”.

There it was that finally the younger brother’s toupee came away from his head in the silent struggle—and in a burst of strength engendered of sheer loathing Anderson managed to turn the knife inward and drive it to the madman’s heart. He was quick then to be on his feet and away from the thing that now lay twitching out its life upon the sawdust floor—the thing that had been his brother—which now, where the top of Hamilton’s head had been, wore a cap of writhing white worms of finger thickness, like some monstrous sea-anemone sucking vampirishly at the still-living brain!

Later, when morning came, even had there been someone in whom he might safely confide, Anderson Tharpe could never have related a detailed or coherent account of the preceding hours of darkness. He recalled only the general thread of what had passed; frantic snatches of the fearful activity that followed upon the hideous death of his brother. But first there had been that half hour or so of waiting—of knowing that at any moment, attracted perhaps by strange lights or sounds, someone just might enter the tent and find him with Hamilton’s body—but he had been obliged to wait for he could not bring himself to touch the corpse. Not while the stubby white tentacles of its head continued to writhe! Hamilton died almost immediately, but his monstrous crown had taken much longer…

Then, when the loathsome—parasite?—had shuddered into lifeless rigidity, he had gathered together his shattered nerves to dig a deep grave in the soft earth beneath the sawdust. That had been a gruesome task with the lights turned down and Cthulhu’s stone effigy casting a tentacled shadow over the fearful digger. Anderson later remembered how soft the ground had been—and wet when it ought to have been dry in the weatherproof tent—and he recalled a powerful smell of deep sea, of aeon-old ocean slime and rotting seaweeds; an odour he had known on occasion before, and always after one of Hamilton’s “sacrifices.” The connection had not impressed itself upon his mind as anything more than mere coincidence before, but now he knew that the smell came with the green light, as did that strange state of soundlessness.

In order to clear what remained of the fetor quickly—having tamped down the earth, generally “tidied up”and removed all traces of his digging—he opened and tied back the canvas doors of the tent to allow the night air a healthy circulation. But even then, having done everything possible to hide the night’s horror, he was unable to relax properly as daylight crept up and the folk of the funfair began to wake and move about.

When finally Hodgson’s Funfair had opened at noon, Anderson had something of a shaky grip on himself, but even so he had found himself drenched in cold sweat at the end of each oratorial session with the crowds at the freak-house. His only moments of relaxation came between shows. The worst time had been when a leather jacketed teenager peered through the canvas inner door to the partitioned section of the tent; and Anderson had nearly knocked the youth down in his anxiety to steer him away from the place, though no trace remained of what had transpired there.

On reflection, it amazed Anderson that his fight with his brother had not attracted someone’s attention, and yet it had not. Even the fairground’s usually vociferous watchdogs had remained silent. And yet those same dogs, since Hamilton’s return from his travels abroad, had seemed even more nervous, more given to snapping and snarling than ever before. Anderson could only tell himself that the weird “silent state” which had accompanied the green light must have spread out over the entire fairground to dissipate slowly, thus disarming the dogs. Or perhaps they had sensed something else, remaining silent out of fear…? Indeed, it appeared his second guess was correct, for he discovered later that many of the dogs had whimpered the whole night away huddled beneath the caravans of their masters…

Two days later the funfair packed up and moved on, leaving Hamilton Tharpe’s body safely buried in an otherwise empty field. At last the worst of Anderson’s apprehensions left him and his nerves began to settle down. To be sure his jumpiness had been marked by the folk of the funfair, who had all correctly (though for the wrong reasons) diagnosed it as a symptom of anxiety about his crazy, bad-lot brother. So it was that as soon as Hamilton’s absence was remarked upon, Anderson was able simply to shrug his shoulders and answer: “Who knows? Tibet, Egypt, Australia—he’s just gone off again—said nothing to me about it—could be anywhere!”And while such inquiries were always politely compassionate, he knew that in fact the inquirers were greatly relieved that his brother had “just gone off again.”

Another six weeks went by, with regular halts at various villages and small towns, and during that time Anderson managed to will himself to forget all about his brother’s death and his own involvement—all, that is, except the nature of that parasitic horror which had made itself manifest upon Hamilton’s head. That was something he would never forget, the way that awful anemone had wriggled and writhed long after its host was dead. Hamilton had called the thing a symbol of his priesthood—in his own words: “The Mark of Cthulhu”—but in truth it could only have been some loathsomely malignant and rare form of cancer, or perhaps a kind of worm or fluke like the tapeworm. Anderson always shuddered when he recalled it, for it had looked horribly sentient there atop Hamilton’s head; and when one thought about the depth at which it might have been rooted…

No, the insidious gropings of that horror within Hamilton’s brain simply did not bear thinking about, for that had obviously been the source of his insanity. Anderson in no way considered himself weak to shudder when thoughts as terrible as these came to threaten his now calm and controlled state of mind, and when the bad dreams started he at once lay the blame at the feet of the same horror.

At first the nightmares were vague shadowy things, with misty vistas of rolling plains and yawning, empty coastlines. There were distant islands with strange pinnacles and oddly angled towers, but so far away that the unknown creatures moving about in those island cities were mere insects to Anderson’s dreaming eyes. And for this he was glad. Their shapes seemed in a constant state of flux and were not—pleasant. They were primal shapes, from which the dreamer deduced that he was in a primal land of aeons lost to mankind. He always woke from such visions uneasy in mind and deflated in spirit.

But with the passing of the months into summer the dreams changed, becoming sharper visually, clearer in their insinuations, and actually frightening as opposed to merely disturbing. Their scenes were set (Anderson somehow knew) deep in the dimly lighted bowels of one of the island cities, in a room or vault of fantastic proportions and awe-inspiring angles. Always he kneeled before a vast octopoid idol…except that on occasion it was not an idol but a living, hideously intelligent Being!

These dreams were ever the worst when a strange voice spoke to him in words that he was quite unable to understand. He would tremble before the towering horror on its thronelike pedestal—a thing one hundred times greater in size than the stone morbidity in the freak-house—and, aware that he only dreamed, he would know that it, too, was asleep and dreaming. But its tentacles would twine and twist and its claws would scrabble at the front of the throne, and then the voice would come…

Waking from nightmares such as these he would know that they were engendered of hellish memory—of the night of the green glow, the deep-ocean smell, and the writhing thing in his brother’s head—for he would always recall in his first waking moments that the awful alien voice had used sounds similar to those Hamilton had mouthed before the green light came and after it had taken the florid explorer away. The dreams were particularly bad and growing worse as the year drew to a close, and on a number of occasions the dreamer had been sure that slumbering Cthulhu was about to stir and wake up!

And then, himself waking up, all the horror would come back to Anderson, to be viewed once more in his mind’s eye in vivid clarity, and knowing as he did that his brother too had been plagued by just such dreams prior to his second long absence from the fairground, Anderson Tharpe was a troubled man indeed. Yes, they had been the same sort of nightmares, those dreams of Hamilton’s; hadn’t he admitted that “Cthulhu comes to me in dreams”? And had the dreams themselves not heralded the greater horrors?

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…

During the next fortnight or so Anderson’s slumbers were mercifully free of nightmares, so that he was early prompted to continue his researches into the Cthulhu Cycle of Myth. This further probing was born partly of curiosity and partly (as Anderson saw it) of necessity; he yet hoped to be able to gainfully employ his brother’s mysterious green light, and his determination was bolstered by the fact that takings of late had been dismal. So he closed off again the previously partitioned area of the tent and his spare-time studies now became equally divided between Hamilton’s books of occult lore and a patient examination of the hideous idol and carved tablets. He discovered no evidence of hidden mechanical devices in the queer relics, but nevertheless it was not long before he found his first real clue towards implementing his ambition.

It was as simple as this: he had earlier noted upon the carved tops of the stone tablets a series of curiously intermingled cuneiform and dot-group hieroglyphs, two distinct sets to each stone. This could not be considered odd in itself, but finally Anderson had recognized the pattern of these characters and knew that they were duplicated in the handwritten Necronomicon; and more, there were translations in that work into at least two other languages, one of them being the antiquated German in which the bulk of the book was written.

Anderson’s knowledge of German, even in its modern form, was less than rudimentary, and thus he enlisted the aid of old Hans Möller from the hoopla stall. The old German’s eyesight was no longer reliable, however, and his task was made no easier by the outmoded form in which the work was written; but at last, and not without Anderson’s insistent urging, Möller was able to translate one of the sequences first into more modern German (in which it read: Gestorben ist nicht, was für ewig ruht, und mit unbekannten Äonen mag sogar der Tod noch sterben; ), and then into the following rather poor English: “It is not dead that lies still forever; Death itself dies with the passing of strange years.”

When he heard the old German speak these words in his heavy accent, Anderson had to stifle the gasp of recognition which welled within him. This was nothing less than a variation of that paradoxical couplet with which his brother had once terminated his fiendish “sacrifice to Cthulhu!”

As for the other set of symbols from the tablets, frustration was soon to follow. Certainly the figures were duplicated in the centuried book, appearing in what Anderson at first took to be a code of some sort, but they had not been reproduced in German. Möller—while having not the slightest inkling of Anderson’s purpose with this smelly, evil old book—finally suggested to him that perhaps the letters were not in code at all, that they might simply be the symbols of an obscure foreign language. Anderson had to agree that Möller could well be right; in the yellowed left-hand margin of the relevant page, directly opposite the frustrating cryptogram, his brother had long ago written: “Yes, but what of the pronunciation?”

Hamilton had done more than this: he had obligingly dated his patently self-addressed query, and the surviving Tharpe brother saw that the jotting had been made prior to the fatal second period of travel in foreign lands. Who could say what Hamilton might or might not have discovered upon that journey? Without a doubt he had been in strange places. And he had seen and done strange things to bring back with him that hellish cancer-growth sprouting in his brain.

Finally Anderson decided that this jumbled gathering of harsh and unpronounceable letters—be it a scientific process or, more fancifully, a magical evocation—must indeed be the formula with which a clever man might call forth the green light in his dead brother’s “Temple of Cthulhu”. He thanked old Hans and sent him away, then sat in his caravan poring over the ancient book, puzzling and frowning long into the evening; until, as darkness fell, his eyes lit with dawning inspiration…

And so over the period of the next few days the freakhouse suffered its transition into the Tomb of the Great Old Ones. During the same week Anderson visited a printer in the local town and had new admission tickets printed. These tickets, as well as bearing the new name of the show and revised price of admission, now carried upon the reverse the following cryptic instruction:

Any adult person desiring to speak with the proprietor of the Tomb of the Great Old Ones on matters of genuine occult phenomena or similar manifestations, or on subjects relating to the Great Old Ones, R’lyeh or the Cthulhu Cycle of Myth, is welcome to request a private meeting.

Anderson Tharpe: Prop.

The other members of the fairground fraternity were not aware of this offer of Anderson’s—nor of his authority, real or assumed, in such subjects to be able to make such an offer—until after the funfair moved into its next location, and by that time they too had discovered his advance advertising in the local press. Of course, Bella Hodgson had always looked after advance publicity in the past, but she could hardly be offended by Anderson’s personal efforts toward this end. Any good publicity he devised and paid for himself could only go towards attracting better crowds to the benefit of the funfair in general.

And within a very short time Anderson’s plan started to bear fruit, when at last his desire for a higher percentage of rather more erudite persons among his show’s clientele began to be realized. His sole purpose, of course, had been to attract just such persons in the hope that perhaps one of them might provide the baffling pronunciation he required, an acoustical translation of the key to call up the terrible green glow.

Such authorities must surely exist; his own brother had become one in a comparatively short time, and others had spent whole lifetimes in the concentrated study of these secrets of elder lore. Surely, sooner or later, he would find a man to provide the answer, and then the secrets of the perfect murder weapon would be his. When this happened, then Anderson would test his weapon on the poor unfortunate who handed him the key, and in this way he would be sure that the secret was his alone. From then on…oh, there were many possibilities…

Through early and mid-April Anderson received a number of inquisitive callers at his caravan: some of them cranks, but at least a handful of genuinely interested and knowledgeable types. Always he pumped them for what they knew of elder mysteries in connection with the Cthulhu Cycle, especially their knowledge in ancient tongues and obscure languages, and twice over he was frustrated just when he thought himself on the right track. On one occasion, after seeing the tablets and idol, an impressed visitor presented him with a copy of Walmsley’s Notes on Deciphering Codes, Cryptograms, and Ancient Inscriptions; but to no avail, the work itself was too deep for him.

Then, towards the end of April, in response to Anderson’s continuous probing, a visitor to his establishment grudgingly gave him the address of a so-called “occult investigator”, one Titus Crow, who just might be interested in his problem. Before he left the fairground this same gentleman, the weird artist Chandler Davies, strongly advised Tharpe that the whole thing were best forgotten, that no good could ever come of dabbling in such matters—be it serious study or merely idle curiosity—and with that warning he had taken his leave…

Ignoring the artist’s positive dread of his line of research, that same afternoon Anderson wrote to Titus Crow at his London address, enclosing with his letter a copy of the symbols and a request for information concerning them; possibly a translation or, even better, a workable pronunciation. Impatiently then, he watched the post for an answer, and early in May was disappointed to receive a brief note from Crow advising him, as had Davies, to give up his interest in these matters and let such dangerous subjects alone. There was no explanation, no invitation regarding further correspondence; Crow had not even bothered to return the cryptic paragraph so painstakingly copied from the Necronomicon.

That night, as if to substantiate the double warning, Anderson once more dreamed of sunken R’lyeh, and again he kneeled before slumbering Cthulhu’s throne to hear the alien voice echoing awesomely in his mind. The horror on the throne seemed more mobile in its sleep than ever before, and the voice in the dream was more insistent, more menacing:

“You have been warned, AND YET YOU MEDDLE! While the Great Rising draws ever closer and Cthulhu’s shadow looms, still you choose to search out His secrets for your own use! This night there will be a sign; ignore it at your peril, lest Cthulhu bestir Himself up to visit you personally in dreams, as He has aforetime visited others!”

The following morning Anderson rose haggard and pale to learn of yet more trouble with the fairground’s dogs, duplicating in detail that Candlemas frenzy of three months earlier. The coincidence was such as to cause him more than a moment’s concern, and especially after reading the morning’s newspapers.

What was it that the voice in his dream had said of “a sign?”—a warning which he should only ignore at his peril? Well, there had been a sign, many of them, for the night had been filled with a veritable plethora of weird and inexplicable occurrences—strange stirrings among the more dangerous inmates of lunatic asylums all over the country, macabre suicides by previously normal people—a magma of madness climaxed, so far as Anderson Tharpe was concerned, by second-page headlines in two of the national newspapers to the effect that Chandler Davies had been “put away” in Woodholme Sanatorium. The columns went on to tell how Davies had painted a monstrous “G’harne Landscape”, which his outraged and terrified mistress had at once set fire to, thus bringing about in him an insane rage from which he had not recovered. More: a few days later came the news via the same organs that Davies was dead!

If Anderson Tharpe had been in any way a sensitive person, and his evil ambition less of an obsession—had his perceptions not been dulled by a lifetime of living close to the anomalies of the erstwhile freak-house—then perhaps he might have recognized the presence of a horror such as few men have ever known. Unlike his brother, however, Anderson was coarse-grained and not especially imaginative. All the portents and evidences, the hints and symptoms, and accumulating warnings were cast aside within a few short days of his nightmare and its accompanying manifestations, when yet again he turned to his studies in the hope that soon the secret of the green light would be his.

From then on the months passed slowly, while the crowds at the Tomb of the Great Old Ones became smaller still despite all Anderson’s efforts to the contrary. His frustration grew in direct proportion to his dwindling assets, and while his continued advance advertising and the invitation on the reverse of his admission tickets still drew the occasional crank occultist or curious devotee of the macabre to his caravan, not one of them was able to further his knowledge of the Cthulhu Cycle or satisfy his growing obsession with regard to that enigmatic and cryptical “key” from the handwritten Necronomicon.

Twice as the seasons waxed and waned he approached old Hans about further translations from the ancient book, even offering to pay for the old German’s services in this respect, but Hans was simply not interested. He was too old to become a Dolmetscher, he said, and his eyes were giving him trouble; he already had enough money for his simple needs, and anyway, he did not like the look of the book. What the old man did not say was that he had seen things in those yellowed pages, on that one occasion when already he had looked into the rotting volume, which simply did not bear translation! And so again Anderson’s plans met with frustration.

In mid-October the now thoroughly disgruntled and morose proprietor of the Tomb of the Great Old Ones looked to a different approach. Patently, no matter how hard he personally studied Hamilton’s books, he was not himself qualified to puzzle out and piece together the required information. There were those, however, who had spent a lifetime in such studies, and if he could not attract such as these to the fairground—why, then he must simply send the problem to them. True, he had tried this before, with Titus Crow; but now, as opposed to cultists, occultists, and the like, he would approach only recognized authorities. He spent the following day or two tracking down the address of Professor Gordon Walmsey of Goole, a world-renowned expert in the science of ciphers, whose book, Notes on Deciphering Codes, Cryptograms, and Ancient Inscriptions, had now been in his possession for almost seven months. That book was still far too deep and complicated for Anderson’s fathoming, but the author of such a work should certainly find little difficulty with the piece from the Necronomicon.

He quickly composed a letter to the professor, and as October grew into its third week he posted it off. He was not to know it, but at that time Walmsley was engaged in the services of the Buenos Aires Museum of Antiquities, busily translating the hieroglyphs on certain freshly discovered ruins in the mountains of the Aconcaguan Range near San Juan. Anderson’s letter did eventually reach him, posted on from Walmsley’s Yorkshire address, but the professor was so interested in his own work that he gave it only a cursory glance. Later he found that he had misplaced it, and thus, fortunately, the scrap of paper with its deadly invocation passed into obscurity and became lost forever.

Anderson meanwhile impatiently waited for a reply, and along with the folk of the fairground prepared for the Halloween opening at Bathley, a town on the northeast border. It was then, on the night of the twenty-seventh of the month, that he received his third and final warning. The day had been chill and damp, with a bitter wind blowing off the North Sea, bringing a dankly salt taste and smell that conjured up horrible memories for the surviving Tharpe brother.

On the morning of the twenty-eighth, rising up gratefully from a sweat-soaked bed and a nightmare the like of which he had never known before and fervently prayed never to know again, Anderson Tharpe blamed the horrors of the night on yesterday’s sea wind with its salty smells of ocean; but even explained away like this the dream had been a monstrous thing.

Again he had visited sunken R’lyeh—but this time there had been a vivid reality to the nightmare lacking in previous dreams. He had known the terrible, bone-crushing pressures of that drowned realm, had felt the frozen chill of its black waters. He had tried to scream as the pressure forced his eyes from their sockets, and then the sea had rushed into his mouth, tearing his throat and lungs and stomach as it filled him in one smashing column as solid as steel. And though the horror had lasted only a second, still he had known that there in the ponderous depths his disintegration had taken place before the throne of the Lord of R’lyeh, the Great Old One who seeped down from the stars at the dawn of time. He had been a sacrifice to Cthulhu…

• • •

That had been four days ago, but still Tharpe shuddered when he thought of it. He put it out of his mind now as he ushered the crowd out of the tent and turned to face the sole remaining member of that departing audience. Tharpe’s oratory had been automatic; during its delivery he had allowed his mind to run free in its exploration of all that had passed since his brother’s hideous death, but now he came back to earth. Hiram Henley stared back at him in what he took to be scornful disappointment. The ex-professor spoke:

“‘The Tomb of the Great Old Ones,’ indeed! Sir, you’re a charlatan!” he said. “I could find more fearsome things in Grimm’s Fairy Tales, more items of genuine antiquarian interest in my aunt’s attic. I had hoped your—show—might prove interesting. It seems I was mistaken.” His eyes glinted sarcastically behind his tiny spectacles.

For a moment Tharpes’ heart beat a little faster, then he steadied himself. Perhaps this time…? Certainly the little man was worth a try. “You do me an injustice, sir—you wound me!” He waxed theatrical, an ability with which he was fluent through his years of showmanship. “Do you really believe that I would openly display the archaeological treasures for which this establishment was named?—I should put them out for the common herd to ogle, when not one in ten thousand could even recognize them, let alone appreciate them? Wait!”

He ducked through the canvas door-flap into the enclosed area containing Hamilton’s relics, returning a few seconds later with a bronze miniature the size of his hand and wrist. The thing looked vaguely like an elongated, eyeless squid. It also looked—despite the absence of anything even remotely mundane in its appearance—utterly evil! Anderson handed the object reverently to the ex-professor, saying: “What do you make of that?” Having chosen the thing at random from the anomalies in his dead brother’s collection, he hoped it really was of “genuine antiquarian interest”.

His choice had been a wise one. Henley peered at the miniature, and slowly his expression changed. He examined the thing minutely, then said: “It is the burrower beneath, Shudde-M’ell, or one of his brood. A very good likeness, and ancient beyond words. Made of bronze, yet quite obviously it predates the Bronze Age!” His voice was suddenly soft. “Where did you get it?”

“You are interested, then?” Tharpe smiled, incapable of either admitting or denying the statements of the other.

“Of course I’m interested.” Henley eagerly nodded, a bit too eagerly, Tharpe thought. “I…I did indeed do you a great injustice. This thing is very interesting! Do you have…more?”

“All in good time.” Tharpe held up his hands, holding himself in check, waiting until the time was ripe to frame his own all-important question. “First, who are you? You understand that my—possessions—are not for idle scrutiny, that—”

“Yes, yes, I understand,” the little man cut him off. “My name is Hiram Henley. I am—at least I was—Professor of Archaeology and Ethnology at Meldham University. I have recently given up my position there in order to carry out private research. I came here out of curiosity, I admit; a friend gave me one of your tickets with its peculiar invitation…I wasn’t really expecting much, but—”

“But now you’ve seen something that you would never have believed possible in a place like this. Is that it?”

“Indeed it is. And you? Who are you?”

“Tharpe is my name, Anderson Tharpe, proprietor of this”—he waved his hand deprecatingly—“establishment.”

“Very well, Mr. Tharpe,” Henley said. “It’s my good fortune to meet a man whose intelligence in my own chosen field patently must match my own—whose possessions include items such as this.” He held up the heavy bronze piece and peered at it again for a moment. “Now, will you show me—the rest?”

“A glimpse, only a glimpse,” Tharpe told him, aware now that Henley was hooked. “Then perhaps we can trade?”

“I have nothing. with which to trade. In what way do you mean?”

“Nothing to trade? Perhaps not,” Tharpe answered, holding the canvas door open so that his visitor might step into the enclosed space beyond, “but then again…How are you on ancient tongues and languages?”

“Languages were always my—” The ex-professor started to answer, stepping into the private place. Then he paused, his eyes widening as he gazed about at the contents of the place. “Were always my—” Again he paused, reaching out his hands before him and moving forward, touching the ugly idol unbelievingly, moving quickly to the carved tablets, staring as if hypnotized at the smaller figurines and totems. Finally he turned a flushed face to Tharpe. His look was hard to define; partly awed, partly—accusing?

“I didn’t steal them, I assure you,” Tharpe quickly said.

“No, of course not,” Henley answered, “but…you have the treasures of the aeons here!”

Now the tall showman could hold himself no longer. “Languages,” he pressed. “You say you have an understanding of tongues? Can you translate from the ancient to the modern?”

“Yes, most things, providing—”

“How would you like to own all you see here?”Tharpe cut him off again.

Henley reached out suddenly palsied hands to take Tharpe by the forearms. “You’re…joking?”

“No.” Tharpe shook his head, lying convincingly. “I’m not joking. There is something of the utmost importance to my own line of—research. I need a translation of a fragment of ancient writing. Rather, I need the original pronunciation. If you can solve this one problem for me, all this can be yours. You can be…part of it.”

“What is this fragment?” the little man cried. “Where is it?”

“Come with me.”

“But—” Henley turned away from Tharpe, his gloved hands again reaching for those morbid items out of the aeons.

“No, no.” Tharpe took his arm. “Later—you’ll have all the time you need. Now there is this problem of mine. But later, tonight, we’ll come back in here, and all this can be yours…”

The ex-professor voluntarily followed Tharpe out of the tent to his caravan, and there he was shown the handwritten Necronomicon with its cryptic “key”.

“Well,” Tharpe demanded, barely concealing his agitation. “Can you read it as it was written? Can you pronounce it in its original form?”

“I’ll need a little time,” the balding man mused, “and privacy; But I think…I’ll take a copy of this with me, and as soon as I have the answer—”

“When? How long?”

“Tonight?”

“Good. I’ll wait for you. It should be quiet here by then. It’s Halloween and the fairground is open until late, but they’ll all be that much more tired…” Tharpe suddenly realized that he was thinking out loud and quickly glanced at his visitor. The little man peered at him strangely through his tiny specs; very strangely, Tharpe thought.

“The people here are—superstitious,” he explained. “It wouldn’t be wise to advertise our interest in these ancient matters. They’re ignorant and I’ve had trouble with them before. They don’t like some of the things I’ve got.”

“I understand,” Henley answered. “I’ll go now and work through the evening. With luck it won’t take too long. Tonight—shall we say after midnight?—I’ll be back.” He quickly made a copy of the characters in the old book, then stood up. Tharpe saw him out of the caravan with an assumed, gravely thoughtful air, thanking him before watching him walk off in the direction of the exit; but then he laughed out loud and slapped his thigh, quickly seeking out one of the odd job boys from the stratojet thrill ride.

An hour later—to the amazement of his fellow showmen, for the crowd was thickening rapidly as the afternoon went by—Anderson Tharpe closed the Tomb of the Great Old Ones and retired to his caravan. He wanted to practice himself in the operation of the tape recorder which he had paid the odd jobber to buy for him in Bathley.

This final phase of his plan was simple; necessarily so, for of course he in no way intended to honour his bargain with Henley. He did intend to have the little man read out his pronunciation of the “key”, and to record that pronunciation in perfect fidelity—but from then on…

If the pronunciation were imperfect, then of course the “bargain” would be unfulfilled and the ex-professor would escape with his life and nothing more; but if the invocation worked…? Why, then the professor simply could not be allowed to walk away and talk about what he had seen. No, it would be necessary for him to disappear into the green light. Hamilton would have called it a “sacrifice to Cthulhu”.

And yet there had been something about the little man that disturbed Anderson; something about his peering eyes, and his eagerness to fall in with the plans of the gaunt showman. Tharpe thought of his dream of a few days past, then of those other nightmares he had known, and shuddered; and again he pondered the possibility that there had been more than met the eye in his mad brother’s assertions. But what odds? Science or sorcery, it made no difference, the end result would be the same. He rubbed his hands in anticipation. Things were at last looking up for Anderson Tharpe…

At midnight the crowd began to thin out. Watching the people move off into the chill night, Anderson was glad it had started to rain again, for their festive Halloween mood might have kept them in the fairground longer, and the bright lights would have glared and the music played late into the night. Only an hour later all was quiet, with only the sporadic patter of rain on machines and tents and painted roofs to disturb the night. The last wetly gleaming light had blinked out and the weary folk of the fairground were in their beds. That was when Anderson heard the furtive rapping at his caravan door, and he was agreeably surprised that the ever-watchful dogs had not heralded his night-visitor’s arrival. Possibly it was too early for them yet to distinguish between comers and goers.

As soon as he was inside Henley saw the question written on Tharpe’s face. He nodded in answer: “Yes, yes, I have it. It appears to be a summons of some sort, a cry to vast and immeasurable ancient powers. Wait, I’ll read it for you—”

“No, no—not here!” Tharpe silenced him before he could commence. “I have a tape recorder in the tent.”

Without a word the little man followed Tharpe through the dark and into the private enclosure containing those centuried relics which so plainly fascinated him. There Tharpe illumined the inner tent with a single dim light bulb; then, switching on his tape recorder, he told the ex-professor that he was now ready to hear the invocation. And yet now Henley paused, turning to face Tharpe and gravely peering at him from where he stood by the horrible octopoid idol.

“Are you—sure?” the little man asked. “Are you sure you want me to do this?” His voice was dry, calm.

“Eh?” Anderson questioned nervously, terrible suspicions suddenly forming in his mind. “Of course I’m sure—and what do you mean, ‘do this’? Do what?”

Henley shook his head sadly. “Your brother was foolish not to see that you would cause trouble sooner or later!”

Tharpe’s eyes opened wide and his jaw fell slack. “Police!” he finally croaked. “You’re from the police!”

“No such thing,” the little man calmly answered. “I am what I told you I was—and something more than that—and to prove it…”

The sounds Henley uttered then formed an exact and fluent duplication of those Tharpe had heard once before, and shocked as he was that this frail outsider knew far too much about his affairs, still Tharpe thrilled as the inhuman echoes died and there formed in the semicircle of grim tablets an expanding, glowing greenness that sent out writhing beams of ghostly luminescence. Quickly the tall man gathered his wits. Policeman or none, Hiram Henley had to be done away with. This had been the plan in any case, once the little man—whoever he was—had done his work and was no longer required. And he had done his work well. The invocation was recorded; Anderson could call up the destroying green light any time he so desired. Perhaps Henley had been a former colleague of Hamilton’s, and somehow he had come to learn of the younger Tharpe’s demise? Or was he only guessing! Still, it made no difference now.

Henley had turned his back on Anderson, lifting up his arms to the hideous idol greenly illumined in the light of the pulsating witchfire. But as the showman slipped his brother’s knife from his pocket, so the little man turned again to face him, smiling strangely and showing no discernible fear at the sight of the knife. Then his smile faded and again he sadly shook his head. His lips formed the words, “No, no, my friend,” but Anderson Tharpe heard nothing; once more, as it had done before, the green light had cancelled all sound within its radius.

Suddenly Tharpe was very much afraid, but still he knew what he must do. Despite the fact that the inner tent was far more chill even than the time of the year warranted, sweat glistened greenly on Anderson’s brow as he moved forward in a threatening crouch, the knife raised and reflecting emerald shafts of evilly writhing light. He lifted the knife higher still as he closed with the motionless figure of the little man—and then Hiram Henley moved!

Anderson saw what the ex-professor had done and his lips drew back in a silent, involuntary animal snarl of the utmost horror and fear. He almost dropped the knife, frozen now in midstroke, as Henley’s black gloves fell to the floor and the thick white worms twined and twisted hypnotically where his fingers ought to have been!

Then—more out of nightmare dread and loathing than any sort of rational purpose, for Anderson knew now that the ex-professor was nothing less than a Priest of Cthulhu—he carried on with his interrupted stroke and his knife flashed down. Henley tried to deflect the blow with a monstrously altered hand, his face contorting and a shriek forming silently on his lips as one of the wormish appendages was severed and fell twitching to the sawdust. He flailed his injured hand and white ichor splashed Tharpe’s face and eyes.

Blindly the frantic showman struck again and again, gibbering mindlessly and noiselessly as he clawed at his face with his free hand, trying to wipe away the filthy white juice of Henley’s injured hybrid member. But the blows were wild and Hiram Henley had stepped to one side.

More frantically yet, insanely, Tharpe slashed at the greenly pulsating air all about him, stumbling closer to the core of radiance. Then his knife struck something that gave like rotting flesh beneath the blow, and finally, in a shortlived revival of confidence, he opened stinging eyes to see what he had hit.

Something coiled out of the green core, something long and tapering, grayly mottled and slimy! Something that stank of deep ocean and submarine weeds! It was a tentacle—a face-tentacle, Tharpe knew—twitching spasmodically, even as the hand of a disturbed dreamer might twitch.

Tharpe struck again, a reflex action, and watched his blade bite through the tentacle unhindered, as if through mud—and then saw that trembling member solidifying again where the blade had sliced! His knife fell from a palsied hand then, and Tharpe screamed a last, desperate, silent scream as the tentacle moved more purposefully!

The now completely sentient member wrapped its tip about Tharpe’s throat, constricting and jerking him forwards effortlessly into the green core. And as he went the last things he saw were the eyes in the vast face; the hellish eyes that opened briefly, saw and recognized him for what he was—a sacrifice to Cthulhu !

Quickly then, as the green light began its withdrawal and sound slowly returned to the tent, Hiram Henley put on his gloves. Ignoring as best he could the pain his injury gave him, he spoke these words:

“Oh, Great Cthulhu, dreaming in R’lyeh,

Thy priest offers up this sacrifice,

That Thy coming be soon,

And that of Thy kindred dreamers.

I am Thy priest and adore Thee…”

And as the core grew smaller yet, he toppled the evil idol into its green center, following this act by throwing in the tablets and all those other items of fabled antiquity until the inner tent was quite empty. He would have kept all these things if he dared, but his orders—those orders he received in dreams from R’lyeh—would not allow it. When a priest had been found to replace Hamilton Tharpe, then Great Cthulhu would find a way to return those rudimentary pillars of His temple!

Finally, Henley switched off the single dim light and watched the green core as it shrank to a tiny point of intense brightness before winking out. Only the smell of deep ocean remained, and a damp circle in the dark where the sawdust floor was queerly marked and slimy…

• • •

Some little time later the folk of the fairground were awakened by the clamour of a fire engine as it sped to the blaze on the border of the circling tents, sideshows and caravans. Both Tharpe’s caravan and The Tomb of the Great Old Ones were burning fiercely.

Nothing was saved, and in their frantic toiling to help the firemen the nomads of the funfair failed to note that their dogs again crouched timid and whimpering beneath the nighted caravans. They found it strange later, though, when they heard how the police had failed to discover anything of Anderson Tharpe’s remains.

The gap that the destruction of the one-time freak-house had left was soon filled, for “Madame Zala”, as if summoned back by the grim work of the mysterious fire, returned with her horse and caravan within the week. She is still with Hodgson’s Funfair, but she will never speak of the Tharpes. At certain times of the year well known to anyone with even the remotest schooling in the occult, she is sometimes seen crossing herself with an obscure and pagan sign…