Cthulhu Fhtagn! Read online

  Contents

  Cthulhu Fhtagn!

  Other books by Ross E. Lockhart

  © 2015 by Ross E. Lockhart

  Dedication

  Ross E. Lockhart - Introduction: In His House at R’Lyeh…

  Walter Greatshell - The Lightning Splitter

  Ann K. Schwader - Dead Canyons

  Michael Griffin - Delirium Sings at the Maelstrom Window

  W. H. Pugmire - Into Ye Smoke-Wreath’d World of Dream

  Nathan Carson - The Lurker In The Shadows

  Orrin Grey - The Insectivore

  Richard Lee Byers - The Body Shop

  Michael J. Martinez - On a Kansas Plain

  Anya Martin - The Prince of Lyghes

  G. D. Falksen - The Curious Death Of Sir Arthur Turnbridge

  Christine Morgan - Aerkheim's Horror

  T.E. Grau - Return of the Prodigy

  Molly Tanzer & Jesse Bullington - The Curse of the Old Ones

  Cameron Pierce - Love Will Save You

  Scott R. Jones - Assemblage Point

  Gord Sellar - The Return of Sarnath

  Wendy N. Wagner - The Long Dark

  Cody Goodfellow - The Green Revolution

  Laird Barron - Don’t Make Me Assume My Ultimate Form

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright Acknowledgments

  Titles Available from Word Horde

  About the Editor

  Other books by Ross E. Lockhart

  Anthologies:

  The Book of Cthulhu

  The Book of Cthulhu II

  Tales of Jack the Ripper

  The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron (with Justin Steele)

  Giallo Fantastique

  Dead Suns (with Justin Steele) (forthcoming)

  Eternal Frankenstein (forthcoming)

  Novels:

  Chick Bassist

  Cthulhu Fhtagn! © 2015 by Ross E. Lockhart

  This edition of Cthulhu Fhtagn!

  © 2015 by Word Horde

  Cover Illustration by Adolfo Navarro

  Cover design by Scott R. Jones

  All rights reserved

  Edited by Ross E. Lockhart

  All rights reserved

  An extension of this copyright page appears near the end of this book.

  First Edition

  ISBN: 978-1-939905-13-0

  EBook ISBN: 978-1-939905-14-7

  A Word Horde Book

  http://www.WordHorde.com

  This one is dedicated to those who seek out, collect, buy, sell,

  and, most importantly, read

  strange books filled with stranger tales.

  And in particular, my friends at Copperfield’s Books in Petaluma, CA.

  Introduction: In His House at R’Lyeh…

  Ross E. Lockhart

  My nightmares fascinate me. Most are the usual anxious dreams: driving an unknown suburb on a foggy night, all the houses alike. Unanticipated public nudity, or invisibility, or ghoulishness (shades of “The Outsider”). The padlocked impossibility of loosing a scream. Sometimes I get movie monsters, but since my subconscious has long been steeping in the stuff of horror, most monsters come through in my dreams as too-familiar camp or titillating kink (or some combination of the two). Nothing to truly shock or scare. The most intense, effective nightmares are the ones that act on your most buried impulses, that primordial soup of wants and hopes and desires and fears that might just make Clive Barker blush. Fears that root in the most animal places in our collective unconscious. After all, we are animals. Animals with language, imagination, and houses.

  Speaking of houses, when I have nightmares, they are most often set in houses. Familiar houses. Places I’ve lived. The leaking beach storefront where damaged floor tiles had been partially removed, giving way to constant foot-high duststorms of asbestos and mites. The Victorian basement where effulgent fungus quickly grew on food left out to cool and the walkway flooded, ankle deep, during power outages. The apartment building where chittering conversations echoed up through a garbage chute. The parsonage with the shrouded baby’s room and the unfinished closet that opens upon an earthen pit. My parents’ house.

  That last one may be the most common setting for my nightmares of all. A three-level Southern California stucco-covered home, pale green, with a two-car garage, quite-climbable roof, and fruit trees beside it. I grew up in that house. My parents still live there.

  The funny thing is that it’s never the house as it is now. My parents have changed quite a few things over the years. Multiple kitchen remodels. Adding skylights. Converting a screened patio into a proper room. Covering concrete stairs with wooden ones. No, in my dreams it’s the house, circa 1972. Or ’78. Or ’87. Nightmares built around the small traumas of childhood and adolescence. Times when the house felt big, and permanent, and full of secrets. And because dreams are weird, they can trigger off the tiniest memories, say digging though one of my father’s drawers, and finding a pocketwatch, a switchblade knife, a pistol. Discovering the hashpipe my cousin hid in a box of old country-western records in a closet. Digging through the dead man’s toolbox that Dad brought home from a swap meet.

  As storytellers in the dark, fantastic realm of horror fiction, we take our nightmares, hew them into lumber, and build haunted houses. And what a neighborhood it is! Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto next door to Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic manse from The Mysteries of Udolpho. Poe’s ramshackle House of Usher across the street beside Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables. Down at the cul-de-sac sits William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland. And up the way Shirley Jackson’s Hill House and Richard Matheson’s Hell House.

  But the architect I’d like for you to contemplate today is none other than H. P. Lovecraft, whose haunted houses could populate an entire subdivision. Consider just the ones with “house” in the title: “The Shunned House.” “The Strange High House in the Mist.” “The Picture in the House.” “The Dreams in the Witch House.” The titles alone conjure all sorts of Gothic effects, set the hair on the back on one’s neck upright, invoking a wonderful shiver of fear. Of strangeness. Of the Weird.

  And speaking of the Weird, listen to the chant that echoes through one of Lovecraft’s best-known haunted houses, his 1926 story “The Call of Cthulhu.” Something canted by “Esquimaux wizards” and degenerate Louisiana swamp dwellers alike. Say it with me: “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”

  “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”

  Aklo, the incomprehensible alien occult language Lovecraft uses here, is deliberately imprecise. Vocal ululations impossible to form with human mouths, partially remembered transliterations, rough soundings of mind-bending calligraphies. Tongue-twisters. Lovecraft borrows the idea of Aklo from Arthur Machen’s “The White People,” and runs with it, adding his own vocabulary to it, creating an impressive array of occult language and arcane quotes, but never coming close to the meticulous worldbuilding inherent in, say, Tolkien’s Elvish. Or Klingon. Or Dothraki.

  Most Lovecraftian scholars look at the famous chant above and take the heart of it, “Cthulhu fhtagn,” to mean “Cthulhu sleeps.” Or “Cthulhu waits.” Or even “Cthulhu dreams.”

  I disagree. Because it was explained to me in a dream.

  “Cthulhu fhtagn” means “Cthulhu’s house.” Or “House of Cthulhu.” Which makes me think of campy monster movies, House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula. I might have called
this anthology House of Cthulhu, but it invoked the funhouse, more so than the haunted house.

  So I went with the title you hold in your hands: Cthulhu Fhtagn!

  In the aforementioned dream, I also learned that if you slightly rasp the final syllable, it means “Cthulhu’s home.”

  Think about it for a moment. We’re waiting that time when stars grow right. When Old Gods return. When Cthulhu comes home. That is the core cosmic terror in Lovecraft’s oeuvre, millenarian angst writ large: an advent is coming; the chickens are coming home to roost, bringing in the sheaves. And by “chickens,” I mean of course terrifying, ravenous god-things.

  Good thing we’re safe as houses.

  Haunted houses, that is.

  When I began assembling this anthology, I quickly noticed a theme emerging. Of hundreds of stories I read, the stories I loved, the stories I found myself drawn to re-read, to reconsider, all shared a common thread. Houses—and the expectations and definitions of home—figure loomingly in these stories.

  Perhaps I was drawn to these stories in particular because my wife and I have been house hunting. Considering neighborhoods, histories. Examining architecture, excavating public records. Making discoveries. Oh, someone died in this one. Where does that weird door go? What’s underneath that trapdoor? Are those rats… in the walls? Houses can be such strange and sinister spaces when one looks below the surface. And there is little more terrifying that making an offer on a home, knowing everything that could go wrong.

  And imagining worse.

  Regardless, I’d like to welcome you to this haunted house, Cthulhu’s house, its nineteen stories built by some of the finest writers working in dark fiction today. Herein you will find tales of tentacles, terror, and madness. And houses. And dreams. And stranger things. Please, feel free to show yourself around.

  But don’t wake the sleeper, whatever you do.

  Cthulhu Fhtagn!

  Ross E. Lockhart

  Word Horde

  The Lightning Splitter

  Walter Greatshell

  “Good morning! We’re from the Rhode Island Historical Society, and we were hoping to speak to the owner of this charming house.”

  “Well…that’s me.”

  “Oh, it’s a pleasure to meet you, sir. We’ve always loved this little place and we are so happy to see that it was bought by someone who wants to preserve it. We were terrified that the new owners would turn it into a student rental and pave the backyard for a parking lot. Are you aware of the colorful history of your home?”

  “Mm, not really, no.”

  “Did you know that George M. Cohan used to practice the piano in your living room?”

  “Is that right? The Yankee Doodle Dandy guy?”

  “Yes! And the famous author H.P. Lovecraft was a frequent visitor as well. His mother was of very old New England stock, and her family had some connection to the original owners. They also had a house next door, but it was destroyed in a fire. Rumor has it that superstitious locals burned it down because the family was believed to commune with evil spirits, which is rather exciting.”

  “No kidding. Didn’t they all wind up at Butler Hospital?”

  “Well, it’s a tragic story: Lovecraft’s childhood was quite privileged until his father suffered a mental collapse and died in the asylum, probably of syphilis. The family lost their home, lost everything, and eventually his mother had a similar breakdown, although her death is attributed to complications from surgery. Again, probably syphilis…or perhaps suicide. Doctors at the time were expected to protect the public reputations of their patients, so who knows? The point is, Lovecraft was plagued with nightmares for the rest of his life—terrible, ghastly nightmares he channeled through his classic stories. Sadly, his genius was not acknowledged in his lifetime; he died in poverty and obscurity, never knowing that his name would soon become famous.”

  We talked a little longer about the house, until the two elderly ladies thanked me for my time and left me with an envelope of Xeroxed historical documents. Reassured that they weren’t trying to sell me anything, I belatedly invited them in for a cup of tea, but they suddenly remembered a pressing engagement and hurried away, calling back, “Enjoy your lovely house!”

  Interesting. Getting my reading glasses, I sat down and opened the packet. The top sheet was a photocopied page from Homes section of the Providence Sunday Journal, dated October 13th, 1982. The headline read:

  LIKE LIVING IN A CHURCH

  But owners say Victorian cottage is also ‘cozy as a treehouse’

  The article that followed was basic real estate puffery, describing the house’s physical charms without mentioning any of the curious history I had just been told. I was more interested in the accompanying photos, which showed how little the place had changed in the last thirty years.

  My wife and I had only bought it a few months back, our first home. We had been living abroad for the previous eleven years as civilian employees of the military; our son was born overseas and had never lived in the States; we decided it was time to return. Having saved enough for a down payment on a house, all we needed was the house—and we found the perfect one.

  It was a Lightning Splitter, a type of Victorian cottage with a tall, steep-sided roof, sharp as a ship’s upturned keel—a perfect wedge against the elements. Amid the ranks of triple-decker apartments, it stood out like something from a fairytale, a tiny witch’s den in the working-class neighborhood of Fox Point. Though less prestigious than homes in nearby College Hill, it was walkable to downtown, a stone’s throw from the bay, and (most importantly) within our price range. After being shown around some really scary properties, we knew we had to take it. What really got us was that it was a “plaque house”—a building officially designated as historic, with a plaque listing its original owner and the date it was built. Ours read: Comfort Horton, 1861. Yet because it was not located in the historic district, the price was not commensurate with the plaque.

  Inside, the ceilings were surprisingly high for such a tiny house—we had browsed other houses seemingly designed by gnomes, with ceiling fans and chandeliers at eye level—and the two upstairs bedrooms were the highest of all, their angled walls rising some twelve feet before meeting at the peak of the roof. Downstairs, the house was divided between living and dining spaces, with a woodstove on one side and a fireplace on the other. Kitchen and bathroom were in a newer part of the house, a small additional wing obviously tacked on with the advent of indoor plumbing.

  The house had certain problems. There was virtually no closet space, and very little extra room to store anything. The wiring was a mess; we were forever resetting clocks and replacing lightbulbs. There was no access to the basement from inside the house, so that in order to get at the fuse box or do laundry it was necessary to go out the back door to a separate basement door, unlock it, and descend a treacherous stair of uneven stone slabs to the ancient, rock-lined cellar. It was like a cave down there, damp and earthy, with colonies of black mushrooms sprouting from the walls and cobwebs that grew back as fast as I could sweep them away.

  Clearly, the house had not been cared for properly in years, and we were not the ones to start. We hadn’t bought a house to practice our handyman skills, nor did we have extra money to hire professionals. I was willing to mow the lawn and paint the place, if necessary to keep up appearances, but that was about it. So of course God couldn’t resist punishing me with a little practical joke.

  Our tiny bathroom had no room for a tub, barely managing a shower stall, which the former owner had lined with wood in the style of a Japanese or Swedish sauna. We liked this a lot, but almost as soon as we signed the paperwork, the house was invaded by huge black carpenter ants, which I soon traced to the bathroom. They seemed to be coming from the walls of the shower.

  Examining the wood, I could feel that the boards had rotted at the bottom, crumbling between my fingers like moldy cheese. Crazy drunken ants sprinkled out of the cracks. I pried off the first few slats and c
ould immediately see the source of the trouble: the plaster wall behind the newer wood was slimy and soft, black with mold. Having been soaked for months or years, it fell apart under its own sagging weight the minute I exposed it to the light of day. It smelled like an open grave.

  Revolted, I spent the next two days cramped in that shower, digging out foul debris and dozens of huge gray-green slugs. Once the rot was all gone, I could see that the ants had eaten through the wall joists, nearly severing the big four-by-four corner post that supported the roof. The whole thing could have collapsed any second. Having missed a bullet, I learned my lesson—it was actually a pleasure putting that shower back together…this time the right way.

  The experience gave me a connection to the house; I had taken responsibility and thus felt the pride of ownership. I had fixed it. The downside was that there was so much more to fix. Well, I would have to get to it later. I had books to write!

  ***

  When my wife came home from work, I told her about the visit from the Historical Society, and the interesting factoids they had shared with me.

  “That’s so cool!” she said. “We should put up a sign: ‘George M. Cohan slept here!’”

  “I don’t think they said anything about him sleeping…”

  “And H.P. Lovecraft—wow! You know what we should do? We should go to Swan Point right now and get a grave-rubbing off his headstone. We can frame it and hang it over the fireplace!”

  “Who’s H.P. Lovecraft?” asked our son, Max.

  Racing the winter sunset, we drove to Swan Point Cemetery before it closed. We liked to do things like this, nonsense errands just to break the routine. Having met at the back of an old movie theater during intermission, we were both suckers for romance and foreign films. Max grumbled and I stood watch while Cindy got a good charcoal print off Lovecraft’s marker. It was nearly dark. Spraying it with fixative, she kissed me and said, “We should do this more often.”