Neil Gaiman & Caitlin R. Kiernan & Laird Barron Read online

  The Book of Cthulhu

  Tales Inspired by H.P. Lovecraft

  edited by

  Ross E. Lockhart

  Night Shade Books

  San Francisco

  The Book of Cthulhu © 2011 by Ross E. Lockhart

  This edition of The Book of Cthulhu

  © 2011 by Night Shade Books

  Cover illustration © 2011 by Obrotowy

  Cover design by Claudia Noble

  Interior layout and design by Amy Popovich

  Edited by Ross E. Lockhart

  All rights reserved

  An extension of this copyright page appears on pages 527–529

  First Edition

  Printed in Canada

  ISBN: 978-1-59780-232-1

  eISBN: 978-1-59780-355-7

  Night Shade Books

  Please visit us on the web at

  http://www.nightshadebooks.com

  For Jennifer, my island of sanity

  amid the black seas of infinity

  Introduction

  In 1928, a young man, Conan creator Robert E. Howard, wrote a fan letter to Weird Tales magazine praising H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu,” which had recently appeared in the magazine’s pages. Howard described the story as “a masterpiece,” which he was “sure will live as one of the highest achievements in literature.”

  Since then, countless young men and women have discovered the Cthulhu Mythos cycle, and have come to the same conclusion. These stories, interlinked tales of tentacles, madness, and terror created by Lovecraft, but expanded upon by his contemporaries and correspondents—the so-called “Lovecraft Circle”—are more than just simple supernatural tales, they are literature, of the highest order, with complex themes (sanity’s fragility, existential angst, questionable parentage, fate, decadence, detachment, and deterioration, to name a few), precise writing style, intricate, layered storytelling… and monsters. Some of the best known monsters in modern fiction.

  Lovecraft’s impeccable storytelling—often filtered through his collaborators and “disciples”—has inspired many to pen their own Mythos tales, and the Cthulhu Mythos story cycle has taken on a convoluted, cyclopean life of its own, as further posthumous collaborations continue to expand the scope, scale, and ultimate interpretation of what is perhaps the most diverse shared fictional universe ever created.

  Today, the Cthulhu Mythos cycle includes tales by some of the most prodigious writers of the twentieth century… and so far, some of the most astounding writers of the twenty-first century as well. Mythos fiction has become one of the major cultural memes of our era—everybody knows what Cthulhu looks like, even if they haven’t read Lovecraft. And it would seem that Cthulhu and his minions are everywhere, not just books and short fiction (especially online short fiction), but represented in music, toys, audio dramas, feature films, comics, and games (video and otherwise).

  My personal discovery of the Cthulhu Mythos came in 1980, maybe early 1981. I received the Dungeons and Dragons cyclopedia, Deities and Demigods, which included a section—excised from later printings—detailing the Cthulhu Mythos pantheon. Erol Otus’s intricate pen-and-ink renditions of the strange alien beings of the Lovecraftian pantheon—particularly the shambling shoggoth, mysterious Mi-Go, and elegant member of the Great Race—astounded me, inspiring me to seek out the fictions on which such strange images were based. I asked around, and a friend pressed a book into my hands, telling me I had to read T. E. D. Klein’s “Black Man with a Horn.” The story scared the hell out of me, but I devoured it, and wanted more.

  “Black Man with a Horn” introduced me to the larger world of Mythos fiction, driving me to spend the next thirty years delving into and exploring the Mythos cycle in all its permutations, leading me to read authors like David Drake, Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, and, yes, even H. P. Lovecraft. It was also my introduction to John Coltrane. So it is my honor and privilege to include not just that story, but twenty-six other tales of Lovecraftian fantasy and horror—by many of the greatest names in Mythos fiction—in The Book of Cthulhu. A hand-picked selection representing the best post-Lovecraft Cthulhu Mythos literature, all in one place. Could this mean that the stars are finally right? Are we on the cusp of a Lovecraftian renaissance, or is dread R’Lyeh about to rise out of the Pacific Ocean?

  Welcome, readers, to The Book of Cthulhu. Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!

  ∇

  Andromeda Among the Stones

  Caitlin R. Kiernan

  I cannot think of the deep sea without shuddering…

  —H. P. Lovecraft

  October 1914

  “Is she really and truly dead, Father?” the girl asked, and Machen Dandridge, already an old man at fifty-one, looked up at the low buttermilk sky again and closed the black book clutched in his hands. He’d carved the tall headstone himself, the marker for his wife’s grave there by the relentless Pacific, black shale obelisk with its hasty death’s-head. His daughter stepped gingerly around the raw earth and pressed her fingers against the monument.

  “Why did you not give her to the sea?” she asked. “She always wanted to go down to the sea at the end. She often told me so.”

  “I’ve given her back to the earth, instead,” Machen told her and rubbed at his eyes. The cold sunlight through thin clouds was enough to make his head ache, his daughter’s voice like thunder, and he shut his aching eyes for a moment. Just a little comfort in the almost blackness trapped behind his lids, parchment skin too insubstantial to bring the balm of genuine darkness, void to match the shades of his soul, and Machen whispered one of the prayers from the heavy black book and then looked at the grave again.

  “Well, that’s what she always told me,” the girl said again, running her fingertips across the rough-hewn stone.

  “Things changed at the end, child. The sea wouldn’t have taken her. I had to give her back to the earth.”

  “She said it was a sacrilege, planting people in the ground like wheat, like kernels of corn.”

  “She did?” He glanced anxiously over his left shoulder, looking back across the waves the wind was making in the high and yellow-brown grass, the narrow trail leading back down to the tall and brooding house that he’d built for his wife twenty-four years ago, back towards the cliffs and the place where the sea and sky blurred seamlessly together.

  “Yes, she did. She said only barbarians and heathens stick their dead in the ground like turnips.”

  “I had no choice,” Machen replied, wondering if that was exactly the truth or only something he’d like to believe. “The sea wouldn’t take her, and I couldn’t bring myself to burn her.”

  “Only heathens burn their dead,” his daughter said disapprovingly and leaned close to the obelisk, setting her ear against the charcoal shale.

  “Do you hear anything?”

  “No, Father. Of course not. She’s dead. You just said so.”

  “Yes,” Machen whispered. “She is.” And the wind whipping across the hillside made a hungry, waiting sound that told him it was time for them to head back to the house.

  This is where I stand, at the bottom gate, and I hold the key to the abyss…

  “But it’s better that way,” the girl said, her ear still pressed tight against the obelisk. “She couldn’t stand the pain any longer. It was cutting her up inside.”

  “She told you that?”

  “She didn’t have to tell me that. I saw it in her eyes.”

  The ebony key to the first day and the last, the key to the moment when the stars wink out, one by one, and the sea heaves its rotting belly at the empty, sagging sky.

  “You�
�re only a child,” he said. “You shouldn’t have had to see such things. Not yet.”

  “It can’t very well be helped now,” she answered and stepped away from her mother’s grave, one hand cupping her ear like maybe it had begun to hurt. “You know that, old man.”

  “I do,” and he almost said her name then, Meredith, his mother’s name, but the wind was too close, the listening wind and the salt-and-semen stink of the breakers crashing against the cliffs. “But I can wish it were otherwise.”

  “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”

  And Machen watched silently as Meredith Dandridge knelt in the grass and placed her handful of wilting wildflowers on the freshly turned soil. If it were spring instead of autumn, he thought, there would be dandelions and poppies. If it were spring instead of autumn, the woman wrapped in a quilt and nailed up inside a pine-board casket would still be breathing. If it were spring, they would not be alone now, him and his daughter at the edge of the world. The wind teased the girl’s long yellow hair, and the sun glittered dimly in her warm green eyes.

  The key I have accepted full in the knowledge of its weight.

  “Remember me,” Meredith whispered, either to her dead mother or something else, and he didn’t ask which.

  “We should be heading back now,” he said and glanced over his shoulder again.

  “So soon? Is that all you’re going to read from the book? Is that all of it?”

  “Yes, that’s all of it, for now,” though there would be more, later, when the harvest moon swelled orange-red and bloated and hung itself in the wide California night. When the odd, mute women came to dance, then there would be other words to say, to keep his wife in the ground and the gate shut for at least another year.

  The weight that is the weight of all salvation, the weight that holds the line against the last, unending night.

  “It’s better this way,” his daughter said again, standing up, brushing the dirt off her stockings, from the hem of her black dress. “There was so little left of her.”

  “Don’t talk of that here,” Machen replied, more sternly than he’d intended. But Meredith didn’t seem to have noticed or, if she’d noticed, not to have minded the tone of her father’s voice.

  “I will remember her the way she was before, when she was still beautiful.”

  “That’s what she would want,” he said and took his daughter’s hand. “That’s the way I’ll remember her, as well,” but he knew that was a lie, as false as any lie any living man ever uttered. He knew that he would always see his wife as the writhing, twisted thing she’d become at the last, the way she was after the gates were almost thrown open, and she placed herself on the threshold.

  The frozen weight of the sea, the burning weight of starlight and my final breath. I hold the line. I hold the ebony key against the last day of all.

  And Machen Dandridge turned his back on his wife’s grave and led his daughter down the dirt and gravel path, back to the house waiting for them like a curse.

  November 1914

  Meredith Dandridge lay very still in her big bed, her big room with its high ceiling and no pictures hung on the walls, and she listened to the tireless sea slamming itself against the rocks. The sea there to take the entire world apart one gritty speck at a time, the sea that was here first and would be here long after the continents had finally been weathered down to so much slime and sand. She knew this because her father had read to her from his heavy black book, the book that had no name, the book that she couldn’t ever read for herself or the demons would come for her in the night. And she knew, too, because of the books he had given her, her books—Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, The World Before the Deluge, and Atlantis and Lost Lemuria. Everything above the waves on borrowed time, her father had said again and again, waiting for the day when the sea rose once more and drowned the land beneath its smothering, salty bosom, and the highest mountains and deepest valleys will become a playground for sea serpents and octopuses and schools of herring. Forests to become Poseidon’s orchards, her father said, though she knew Poseidon wasn’t the true name of the god-thing at the bottom of the ocean, just a name some dead man gave it thousands of years ago.

  “Should I read you a story tonight, Merry?” her dead mother asked, sitting right there in the chair beside the bed. She smelled like fish and mud, even though they’d buried her in the dry ground at the top of the hill behind the house. Meredith didn’t look at her, because she’d spent so much time already trying to remember her mother’s face the way it was before and didn’t want to see the ruined face the ghost was wearing like a mask. As bad as the face her brother now wore, worse than that, and Meredith shrugged and pushed the blankets back a little.

  “If you can’t sleep, it might help,” her mother said with a voice like kelp stalks swaying slowly in deep water.

  “It might,” Meredith replied, staring at a place where the wallpaper had begun to peel free of one of the walls, wishing there were a candle in the room or an oil lamp so the ghost would leave her alone. “And it might not.”

  “I could read to you from Hans Christian Andersen, or one of Grimm’s tales,” her mother sighed. “‘The Little Mermaid’ or ‘The Fisherman and his Wife’?”

  “You could tell me what it’s like in Hell,” the girl replied.

  “Dear, I don’t have to tell you that,” her ghost mother whispered, her voice gone suddenly regretful and sad. “I know I don’t have to ever tell you that.”

  “There might be different hells,” Meredith said. “This one, and the one father sent you away to, and the one Avery is lost inside. No one ever said there could only be one, did they? Maybe it has many regions. A hell for the dead Prussian soldiers and another for the French, a hell for Christians and another for the Jews. And maybe another for all the pagans.”

  “Your father didn’t send me anywhere, child. I crossed the threshold of my own accord.”

  “So I would be alone in this hell.”

  The ghost clicked its sharp teeth together, and Meredith could hear the anemone tendrils between its iridescent fish eyes quickly withdrawing into the hollow places in her mother’s decaying skull.

  “I could read you a poem,” her mother said hopefully. “I could sing you a song.”

  “It isn’t all fire and brimstone, is it? Not the region of hell where you are? It’s blacker than night and cold as ice, isn’t it, mother?”

  “Did he think it would save me to put me in the earth? Does the old fool think it will bring me back across, like Persephone?”

  Too many questions, hers and her mother’s, and for a moment Meredith Dandridge didn’t answer the ghost, kept her eyes on the shadowy wallpaper strips, the pinstripe wall, wishing the sun would rise and pour warm and gold as honey through the drapes.

  “I crossed the threshold of my own accord,” the ghost said again, and Meredith wondered if it thought she didn’t hear the first time. Or maybe it was something her mother needed to believe and might stop believing if she stopped repeating it. “Someone had to do it.”

  “It didn’t have to be you.”

  The wind whistled wild and shrill around the eaves of the house, invisible lips pressed to a vast, invisible instrument, and Meredith shivered and pulled the covers up to her chin again.

  “There was no one else. It wouldn’t take your brother. The one who wields the key cannot be a man. You know that, Merry. Avery knew that, too.”

  “There are other women,” Meredith said, speaking through gritted teeth, not wanting to start crying but the tears already hot in her eyes. “It could have been someone else. It didn’t have to be my mother.”

  “Some other child’s mother, then?” the ghost asked. “Some other mother’s daughter?”

  “Go back to your hell,” Meredith said, still looking at the wall, spitting out the words like poison. “Go back to your hole in the ground and tell your fairy tales to the worms. Tell them ‘The Fisherman and his Wife.’”

  “You have to be
strong now, Merry. You have to listen to your father, and you have to be ready. I wasn’t strong enough.”

  And finally she did turn to face her mother, what was left of her mother’s face, the scuttling things nesting in her tangled hair, the silver scales and barnacles, the stinging anemone crown, and Meredith Dandridge didn’t flinch or look away.

  “One day,” she said, “I’ll take that damned black book of his, and I’ll toss it into the stove. I’ll take it, mother, and toss it into the hearth, and then they can come out of the sea and drag us both away.”

  Her mother cried out and came apart like a breaking wave against the shingle, water poured from the tin pail that had given it shape, her flesh gone suddenly as clear and shimmering as glass, before she drained away and leaked through the cracks between the floorboards. The girl reached out and dipped her fingers into the shallow pool left behind in the wicker seat of the chair. The water was cold and smelled unclean. And then she lay awake until dawn, listening to the ocean, to all the unthinking noises a house makes in the small hours of a night.

  May 1914

  Avery Dandridge had his father’s eyes, but someone else’s soul to peer out through them, and to his sister he was hope that there might be a life somewhere beyond the rambling house beside the sea. Five years her senior, he’d gone away to school in San Francisco for a while, almost a year, because their mother wished him to. But there had been an incident, and he was sent home again, transgressions only spoken of in whispers and nothing anyone ever bothered to explain to Meredith, but that was fine with her. She only cared that he was back, and she was that much less alone.

  “Tell me about the earthquake,” she said to him, one day not long after he’d returned, the two of them strolling together along the narrow beach below the cliffs, sand the color of coal dust, noisy gulls and driftwood like titan bones washed in by the tide. “Tell me all about the fire.”