Cumbrian Cthulhu

The Echo of Echoes

2012-02-11T17:08:00.001Z

The Echo of Echoes

Written and illustrated by Andy Paciorek,

With special thanks to Andreea V. Balcan .

The day will come when you will be forced to take sides. There will be no luxury of apathy, no sitting on the fence, for those who do not oppose nor conform, will be crushed underfoot without mercy. The time will come to decide, whether humanity itself is worth defending against all odds or whether self-preservation and abandonment of your own species and everything you ever thought you knew is the wiser option. Either way you will lose.

I sit here within this circle of stone sisterhood, scribbling my thoughts into my notebook with my papers scattered around me. My back reclining against the monolithic matriarch of Long Meg herself; I would rather, in what may be my last moments, be nestling my head in the lap of a living woman rather than a petrified witch of legend. Yet so foul now is the miasma of horror that exudes from my every pore, that I fear I would be shunned by the most lowly drug-addicted harlot. But not for any satiation of carnal desire do I crave the company anyway, so sombre and wretched has my demeanour been of late that there is no amour nor affection residing within my being. No, I would wish more for such a thing for the sensation of comfort and warmth, a reminder of what it means to be human, perhaps the illusion of hope that everything is going to be alright, that the world as we think we know it is not going to end. But everything is Not going to be all right! I have heard the echoes and the end times approach.

Perhaps I should explain how I came to be here on the dawn of this wintering day, here on the moors of Maughanby near Penrith, and how my life came to be in such disarray. Until recently I was a journalist, not for some mighty media empire or broadcasting giant, but merely a reporter for a local rag, The Westmoreland & Cumberland Chronicle, but still I was good at my job … too good. Attention to detail was my downfall, in career and in life. Closer scrutiny of certain local cases, recent and then as I delved further, I discovered historically, started to reveal strange patterns. In investigating myriad cases, - disappearances, strange deaths, thefts of religious and artistic artefacts, vague connections kept appearing regarding the names and properties of the Mordrake and Moorecroft families. Loose connections I grant you, nothing concrete to directly incriminate, yet I feel .. I know, that this is due to skilled concealment and repression of evidence on their part and of their associates from both sides of the law. From my research into both of these houses, I learnt that this was a skill that they had honed over centuries. Tracing the family trees back beneath dark soil to their tangled and gnarled roots, I discovered a hazy trail of mystique and maleficence weaving back to Brigante times and probably beyond. Oh yes, names had changed over time, but the blood lines remained strong and true, if at times mutated by interbreeding.

Though the names of Demdike and Chattox and the like may be familiar to readers of the accounts of North British witchcraft, the names of Mordrake and Moorecroft are mysteriously absent, yet in terms of esoteric involvement and influence these families were and still are at the heart of weird and woeful occult, heathen practice. Sacrifice and slaughter and sexual deviancy are as endemic to them as the wealth and respect that they have gathered about themselves.

I took my findings to my editors, Mr Leigth and Mr Bradley – two of the most different characters ever to work together. I had left my car-keys in the office one evening and had returned to collect them, when from behind closed doors I heard them discussing both my report and me. Actually it was only the heated voice of Bradley I heard; Leigth, though in many ways the dominant character of the pair is a man of few words. Bradley ranted about good reporters gone bad and law-suits from wealthy respectable members of the community who kept themselves to themselves, and a tirade of how the paper was concerned with facts and not works of fabulous fiction. So it was the next day, that Mr Leigth called me into his office and to cut to the chase, basically informed me in a gentle and tactful manner that I was due a rest and was required to take leave of an indefinite period. I was livid, but could say nothing and did as was bid. Yet I continued my research and it took me in an unforeseen direction, wide reaching in both geography and fields of study. And though my report was buried in favour of the usual and mundane tales of cattle markets and rescues of careless tourists to the lakes and hills, my research did not remain unknown to those parties it directly concerned. In my investigation, I learnt to my dismay that Mr Leigth was a close and personal friend of one Mr Algeron Moorecroft.

That my career in the press had come to an end was without doubt and was the least of my worries. Though I was nothing but an insignificant ant in the families’ grand plans, it is an undeniable fact that the fate of many an ant is to be trampled beneath the heel of a heavy boot. Though I doubt there was anything I could do to halt their cataclysmic ambitions (of which I was only becoming aware at that point) I knew I might be considered an irritation, best rid of. I wondered only whether they would try to conform me or simply to annihilate me.

They made it known to me that I was known to them. They made their displeasure apparent, not in so vulgar and obtuse a manner as verbal threat or poison pen letter; instead they spoke to me in dreams, telling me to desist. But these were not the worst of my night-thoughts by any means. As my research intensified and I delved further into the past and further across the globe, unearthing more and more dark buried secrets, nightmares of terrible landscapes, abnormal practices and malformed, grotesque beings infested my every sleeping moment. I had little respite when awake, but I could at least then try to master my own thoughts, even if the skin of what I considered reality peeled away before my eyes like the layers of a rotten onion.

So I shunned sleep, I drowned myself in caffeine and through the shadier contacts I had made as a matter of course of my newspaper work, I armed myself with a hearty supply of amphetamine.

But I have not spoken of their plans have I? Well not here, there are many folders of paperwork and files on my computer back at my house detailing my research, but already I suspect they may have been destroyed. The plans of the Moorecrofts and Mordrakes, and not only them but of kindred dark souls across the entire globe were nothing less than the end of the world itself. To be more precise they planned to be the heralds and the conduits through whose means the Old Gods would return to rule the earth for future aeons.

The Old Gods … the forgotten monstrous force of eternity, their presence hidden from the masses, but known and served for centuries and across numerous nations by certain clans and families. The fools! Blind and greedy in their devotion to those foul eternal monsters, they think they will be rewarded for their obedience to the Ancient Ones but once they have paved the way of the New Dawn, set the machinery running for the re-emergence of the Outer Gods, they will have served their purpose and course and be utterly destroyed like the rest of mankind. Of that I am sure! I say re-emerge for they have never left this world, least not all of them. Many of greater and lesser degree sleep beneath the soil, within the mountains, below the lakes and oceans. Their tendrils spread across the entire planet, yet there are places where their presence still is more manifest – in the frozen wastes of the Artic and Antarctic, in New England, the Himalayas, regions of North Africa and in Asia and here in sleepy, beautiful Cumbria.

I know how this must sound – the sleep-deprived, chemically polluted ravings of a man close to the edge. Yes, though I teeter on the precipice, I have never been more lucid. I even now emit a laugh, not the roar or a lunatic, but a small weary smile of gallows humour as I think on the irony of Bradley’s words. Fiction – Ha! All the miserable facts of everyday existence are the fiction, masks concealing the huge clandestine truth of existence. It is in the fantastic fiction of novelists and poets, in the images of artists where the real truths have if not entirely revealed, been most alluded to. What may be considered imagination or inspiration is instead sensitivity to the unknown things. There is more fact in the purple prose of the notorious Providence pulp-writer than in all the newssheets of the world.

It is inevitable that it is so, of such magnitude is the presence and manifestation of the Great Old Ones that from the dawn of time to the dusk of their awakening and the midnight that falls at the death of the universe, ripples of their being have undulated back and forth across the vast dimension of time. It is to be expected that such echoes would touch the minds of and be represented as best possible by those of an openly creative disposition. It is there, manifest in the grotesque visions of Hieronymous Bosch, in the perverse ink-lines of Alfred Kubin and in the strange half-sleep drawings of Austin Osman Spare.

It is there in comic-books and celluloid – Kubrick felt drawn and revealed truths without perhaps knowing it in his choice of literature to film – masked orgies, madness in the mountains, the worship of a devastating force, violence on the streets of a broken society, even in the silent sentinel monoliths the monstrous presence is manifest.

Oh, they may claim other sources of inspiration, find other explanations to claim the monstrous genius as their own, but would they have dared admit that they didn’t know or even if they did know from where those thoughts and images truly sprung?

The echoes resonate in some of the lines of Gogol and Baudelaire, of Rabelais and Poe. William Blake knew it, he felt it – when he spoke of an eternity in a grain of sand he may well have spoke of the Old Gods; of their great cosmic fractal entity that replicates eternally from the microcosm of a molecule of a speck of dust on the scale of a butterfly’s wing to the ravenous nebulae that span light years across the depths of space. The echo of echoes, the harmony of chaos – the discord of logic, the end of the beginning and the beginning of the end; such is the magnitude of the Ancient Ones. Resonating through time they are the Ouroboros of the archaic alchemists – the infinite serpent that continuously devours and gives birth to itself.

The echoes have of course been felt by others, still and growing stronger as the days approach. Manifest not in words of novels or poems, or on marks on paper or canvas but as acts of the most saddening violence and depravity. The world grows insane; lurid, tragic news-clippings gather by my feet, headlines screaming “Gruesome Torture-Den Found in Whitehaven Shed”, “Archaeology Students Die in Mysterious Circumstances”, “More Strange Disappearances at Ashness Bridge” “Young Mother Murders Newborn Son” … the list goes on and on. More and more people turn now to drink and drugs to blind their nightmares and waking horrors, as the Ancients stir from their womb of sleep, their presence becomes felt more by even the less sensitive. And there are other signs – the fluorescent froth that floats on Windermere heralding the awakening of the amphibious underlings of the breathing darkness. The black beacons are once more lit on the hilltops, invisible to many but drawing others to their death. And in the wider world, rioters take to the streets as nature rebels also wreaking more and more environmental disasters.

Long hours I spent in my house engrossed in newspaper stories and genealogy papers, and in books and articles on science, witchcraft, ufology, meteorology, astronomy, clairvoyance, cryptozoology, applied mathematics, ley-lines, earth mysteries and many more diverse and esoteric subjects besides. I was gripped by the practice of reading and reinterpreting the riddles of Meso-America and of the Middle East, and the lines of grimoires and Enochian script and other eldritch tomes. Then what seemed at first like random and strange abstract jigsaw puzzle pieces began to lock into place displaying a weird and terrifying truth. Synchronous interconnections of people and places and events of past, present and future revealed themselves.

The ancients felt the ripple of echoes, Nostradamus saw the hazy shapes in his pail of water, John Dee heard the faint whispers and glimpsed the vague forms of the Others in the reflections of his black obsidian mirror. In the glyphs and codices of the ancient Egyptians and the ancient Mayans, fluctuations to the common order were recorded but they were vague and more dimly understood for they spoke more of mathematical equations and of astronomy rather than of the horrendous events that will unfold. Much has been said of 2012 but the days of October 28 or December 21 or December 24 may pass unremarkably as the matter of configuration of the sun, earth and centre of the galaxy are just minor recurrent movements, single steps in a much longer dance. All molecules of matter will concur, not in a straight line but as a great expanding Mandelbrot spiral as the awakening occurs. The end may not come upon any of those specific dates, it is in motion already and the calendar becomes meaningless anyway for when the rebirth of the Old Ones and the death of the human aeon coincide birth and death throes will echo and ripple back and forth across the ribbons of time.

And on the fringe, some have spoken of the return of the dark planet, Nibiru, but science has scoffed this with their data and astronomical observation, but their telescopes are faced the wrong way. Nibiru, Planet X … call it what you will, will return but from beneath, not from outward. It will rise from the soil and rise from the sea and explode forth from the mouths of men and beasts.

And he too will return from his slumber at the bottom of the ocean, that great Devil-Fish deity I dare not name. He was sealed within his sleeping tomb for millennia, but I hope it may be possible that he may be trapped again but such folly for I fear his confinement was of his own bidding.

He may be released by the direct intervention of the faithful deviant followers or it may occur through the foolhardiness and greed of deep-sea explorers. The hidden texts declare that the walls of his nadir cell are marked with warnings of all the written tongues of the time – Sumerian, Egyptian, Akkadian and the forgotten languages of the Atlanteans, Lemurians, Hyperboreans and of other forgotten extinct races. But did Carter and Carnarvon pay heed to the warnings on the tomb of Tutankhamun? They did not, and though the curse there was of questionable merit, should this submerged edifice be breached, he will awaken and he will rise and when he does great tsunamis will rage for hundreds of miles inland, drowning cities and claiming multitudes of lives.

I discovered this and many more grim truths in my studies, but what could I do? I could write and warn, perhaps scupper the intentions of certain individuals who seek to bring about the abominations upon the earth, but there were too many others to take their place. I could not turn my mind off; still I dug deeper and deeper into more arcane material. I rarely left my home at that stage, only fleeting journeys to buy fast food, more coffee and cigarettes and the occasional drive into Newcastle or Carlisle to procure more Speed.

But then I noticed I was being watched, being followed and it was no longer safe to stay at home, so I drove and wandered and walked and wondered. I knew I could not run forever, but I wanted more time to learn more, to satiate my self-devouring addiction to this terrible knowledge. And so I eventually roamed here to Long Meg.

And now as I scribble what may be my final words, the light fails suddenly. Does the twilight fall already? I look upwards –the golden sun sinks into a spiralling winter sky of blue and grey and crimson. For all the cruelty of fate and the wasted chances of mankind, this is a beautiful place. The light falls sublimely on the sisterhood of standing stones circling me, in the distance horizon the faint outline of the mounts of the English Lake District. It is indeed a beautiful place … A beautiful place to die perhaps. I know my time is coming, I feel the anticipation of great change … the calm before the storm. I fear it but welcome it more for I know I will not bear witness to the darker times ahead.

They are coming. I see their shadowy forms beyond the edge of the stone circle. Men, no not men, amorphous smoky man –like forms. Perhaps the bodies of men acting as the vehicles of another force, hungry to get out but confined in these mortal vessels until the physics of the planet are altered to suit their needs. Tendrils of purple mist seems to issue from their fingers and to caress the stone bodies of Long Meg’s daughters and is it my fancy or do I hear faint ecstatic sighs emitted from these petrified maidens upon the return and touch of their dark masters?

They come nearer. The faint purple mist creeps beneath the stones approaching me It is strange, they say your life flashes in front of your eyes when death approaches, I hastily scribble these words, but all that comes to my mind is an image of myself within the womb, strange … a comfort mechanism perhaps – I wondered whether before birth I had a vision of my death. Perhaps this is not death but rebirth.

Closer still .. I feel a serene dread and both love and abhorrence for the encroaching beings. I realise I have not chosen a side to be on … the choice is not mine.

My fingers touch the stone of Long Meg and I feel the grooves of a ‘cup and ring’ marking. The design of concentric circles engraved by the crude tools of prehistoric man . Oddly the touch of it soothes me, I recognise it as the eternal spiralling circle of time and existence, reverberations of infinite endless realities – the echo of an echo of an echo…

They are here …

Friends of Cumbrian Cthulhu: Eolith Designs

2012-01-31T14:46:00.004Z

Eolith Designs' sculptures take their inspiration from the dawn and dusk of civilisations; from real and imagined histories, and the world of myth and legend. Bringing together things that were, things that could have been, and things that may be.

Each Sculpture is a unique work of art created by the artist. The processes involved in casting and finishing ensure that no two will ever be identical. Each design is also strictly limited and each sculpture comes with it's own certificate of authenticity, signed and numbered by the artist. The collection will change and grow as new designs emerge and others are lost to history.

Check out the descriptions and links below to see the fantastic images on the Eolith Designs website!

“If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing.”

H.P. Lovecraft – The Call of Cthulhu

Egyptian Cthulhu is approximately 8½ inches (21cm) tall and weighs approximately 600g.

Egyptian Cthulhu

Following the collapse of the Hittite Empire around 1180 BC strange new religions emerged amongst The People of a Thousand Gods.

Kutullu appears to have been worshipped as an aspect of Illuyankas the great sea dragon. Few inscriptions remain and little is known of his cult. This statue hastily buried by priests before his temple fell to invaders is the only known image of the deity.

Hittite Cthulhu is approximately 9 inches (22.5cm) tall, including his base, and weighs approximately 330g.

Syro-Hittite Cthulhu

Langdale and Pike Investigate, Part Four

2012-01-25T08:49:00.004Z

Langdale and Pike Investigate, Part Four

Written by Richard W. Straw

Illustrated by Andy Paciorek

The express train from Manchester to Carlisle sped through the night as the detective checked his watch. Eight and a half minutes past one o’clock. He replaced the watch in his waistcoat pocket, and settled back into his seat, eyes alert as they gazed through the outside window into the sharp November darkness. Beside him, his friend was sat fiddling with a copy of Bradshaw, but not really reading it.

They had been alerted to the case by a friend at the Yard, and the detective had to admit that there were several points of extreme interest. He only investigated cases that could truly challenge his keen mind, and with Scotland Yard badly overstretched with the Fenian bombings, they had been only too glad for him to deal with this rather desperate sounding plea from the farthest corner of Northern England. He already had seven possible theories forming in his mind, but in the absence of further data, he had left them sequestered away in a small corner, awaiting the input of new information before he developed them further.

In the seats opposite, two other men were sitting and waiting. They had been joined in the first class carriage at Manchester by a middle-aged Dutch doctor and his friend, a doctor of psychiatry. The Dutchman was a metaphysician and haematologist, and the detective’s friend, himself a medical man, had engaged him in some conversation about recent developments in the fields. The detective had made a few private observations of his own about the men as the conversation had continued. They were well-travelled, and some of their clothing indicated a considerable amount of time in Eastern Europe. They were both leading men in their respective fields, but had not practised in those fields for some time. They both wore prominent silver crosses over the tops of their jackets, which indicated some form of superstitious sentiment. In addition, the Dutchman had a small tattoo on his left wrist, the image of a magical symbol from South Sea iconography. It was a curious detail in a middle-class academic, and the detective reasoned that it added to the sense that the man harboured some level of belief in the supernatural. The detective smiled to himself. It was odd to find such things in men of science. They did sometimes occur, but he himself rejected such notions. His was a world of logic and rationality. It was not possible to reason if one believed in magic, for it removed the ability to eliminate the impossible.

He chose to keep these thoughts to himself, however, and merely watched the night go by as the train moved on. The duo had seemed friendly enough, but became slightly reticent when pressed about their business in Cumbria, and soon they had all lapsed into a companionable silence.

The train slowed as they approached the sharp incline between Tebay and Shap, one of the steepest gradients on the line. As they gently chugged up the slope, nothing could prepare any of the men for what happened next. Suddenly, and utterly without warning, the train stopped. Despite their slow speed, the suddenness of the halt threw all four of them from their seats. As they picked themselves up, they could hear shouts and cries from forward of their carriage.

The detective was the first to get up, his long thin frame moving quickly. He moved to the carriage window and opened it, peering out into the cold air. Nothing obvious could be seen, either forward or behind. He had been joined by his friend by now, and as he swung the carriage door open, they took turns to make the five foot jump to the ground below.

The sound of the engine screamed at them as the descended. It sounded as if it was fighting against a force that was holding it back, but there was nothing to see. As they looked about them, the detective could see people at the windows of their carriages, and he shouted to them to stay inside. He didn’t need others crowding him and getting in the way of his investigations.

He began to walk down the hill, towards the back of the train. As he reached the end of their carriage, he suddenly found himself unable to move on any further. There was nothing in front of him, yet he clearly felt impeded. He raised his long, pale hands and placed them out in front of him. They met resistance almost immediately, and he felt the slightest of tingling in his fingertips. Carefully studying the air before him, he could just make out the palest red tinge to the air where it met his hands.

“Intriguing,” he murmured, “a barrier of pure energy, holding the train in place.”

“Trying to stop the train?” his friend asked, pressing his hand to the air.

“Possibly. But I am more inclined to think that this is to do with cutting something off. The train has merely become trapped by virtue of the barrier falling exactly between two of its carriages.” Up the hill, the engine howled into the night, causing both men to wince. “Be a good fellow, and tell them to stop doing that, would you. This train is going nowhere for the moment.”

His friend nodded, turned and proceeded up the hill towards the engine. The detective was now aware that he had been joined by his two colleagues from the carriage.

“I’ve seen something like this before north of the Carpathians,” the Dutchman said, “Devil’s work.”

The detective felt a flash of irritation at hearing such words from a man of science. His sharp retort was cut short however, as a scream erupted from the next carriage up.

All three men turned. It had been a woman’s scream, and it continued, now mingled with a roaring bark, as if of a dog. Against the closed door of the carriage, what seemed like a small pony, or a very large dog, was hurling itself viciously against the carriage door. Its head, high enough to reach the windows, had smashed through the glass, and was reaching into the carriage for its victims.

It wasn’t possible in the dark to make out the creature, but it was clear that there was something not quite right about it. The detective didn’t hesitate. He pulled his short-barrelled revolver from his coat and sent several bullets into the creature’s hide. Beside him, the Dutchman and his friend had done the same. The creature howled with pain, but did not fall. Then more shots rang out. His friend was running down the hill, gun levelled. The combined weight of the shots finally did their work, and the creature collapsed, dying, to the ground. As it did so, the detective was immediately to its side, examining it. It was indeed a dog, bigger than any species he knew, and from its torso there erupted a huge tangle of tentacles, writhing in their death throes.

“Not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen,” his friend said in hushed tones.

“Quite,” the detective muttered, “Although I fear this specimen is far more real than our late friend.”

He rubbed his hand across his high forehead and stood, peering out sharply into the darkness. A litany of growls, barks, croaks, gibbering and moaning reached his ears. Shapes were moving towards the train. Some were on all fours, some walked like men. None were human.

“Fascinating,” the detective murmured. “Perhaps ghosts do apply after all.”

“Seems we have a fight on our hands,” his friend said. He had reloaded his military service revolver, and he raised it determinedly.

“God’s holy work,” agreed the Dutchman. “It never ceases.”

The creatures closed in and the fighting began in earnest.

* * *

Langdale had taken a chance, and it had worked.

First time for everything. He had never been a lucky man. He had lost out in every raffle, every tombola and every domino match he had ever entered at the police socials, and the Cumbrian bookmakers more or less knew him as their favoured son for his lack of judgement on the nags. But this time, things were different.

The house was silent, no sign of life anywhere. As they crept back across the lawn and to the far corner, Langdale sent prayers heavenward to the God he didn’t believe in. Maybe it was the presence of Blake, or perhaps just blind chance, but those prayers were answered.

As they reached the corner of the house where the carriages had been, they found bodies. Human bodies, none of them robed. It was a collection of servants and coachmen, no doubt to the so-called men of power. They had been clawed and beaten to death.

“He doesn’t have any need for people like this,” Blake said sadly.

Any other time, Langdale would have paused to agree. But not this time. “Thankfully, he also doesn’t need something like that.”

He was pointing at the automobile. They quickly ran to it, and Langdale climbed into the driver’s seat, whilst Blake readied himself at the crank.

It was only then that they looked at each other.

“Do you know how to drive this thing?” they both asked.

* * *

Six o’clock. The vaguest hints of the dawn were striking the slopes opposite, as Nyarlathotep stood looking down the gentle hillside at the outer edge of the town of Windermere. Descending down a long series of roads towards the lake, Windermere would eventually flow into the town of Bowness, before reaching the water’s edge. If he wanted to do what he had been sent to do, he must reach the water and raise he whom his followers truly worshipped. Then, the ancient chaos would return, and the world could be reshaped. An eternity of suffering, with him as the architect. He ached with joy at the prospect, and now it was so near that he could smell it.

Pike stood at his left shoulder, as lost and compliant as before. To his right, a young stockbroker from Kendal, Peter Bradwell, pulled back his hood to stare in the same direction. In the continuing absence of Freeman and Gould, he had become the de facto figurehead of the dark man’s followers. He wasn’t enjoying himself. He wanted to be back in the warm with his wife and baby daughter, but he knew that matters had now spiralled for out of control and beyond the confines of his normal life. There was no going back now.

Behind this trio, the remaining human followers were gathered, each as nervous as Bradwell, but equally unable to break free of his sinuous power. About them, a horde of Shoggoths paced and pawed at the ground, their instincts for killing barely held in check by the force of the dark man’s authority. Behind them, the hillside teemed with the amphibious humanoids that had menaced Pike just days earlier. They stood, they crawled, they hopped, they burned with anticipation as they waited the word from their master to be unleashed and play their part in the release of their god.

Bradwell watched them nervously. He was sure that he and his fellow men would have been easy prey for them if the dark man had not kept them in check. He wondered what value he had to the man. He then decided it was probably best not to think in that direction, lest his master also realise how redundant his services were.

“The portal is that way.” The dark man placed a hand on Pike’s unresisting shoulder.

“What do you want us to do, sir?” Sir? It seemed bizarre to talk to a god in this way, as if he was no more than an elderly schoolmaster. God, he wished Gould or Freeman was here. They had the arrogance of knowing they were better than other men. They could have dealt with the dark man’s demands without thinking too hard about them.

Nyarlathotep looked straight into his face and snarled. “Kill everyone. The Shoggoth will take care of the slaughter, and the Deep Ones will take control of the buildings. It will be our capital as we reshape the land.” He pointed down the hill and raised his voice. “Now bring me into that town.”

* * *

About a mile down the road in the automobile, and Langdale was already beginning to regret his bright idea. The ride in the vehicle was atrocious, worse than the most unstable farm cart, and his spine jostled and banged over even the slightest bump in the very uneven driving surface. Blake was now behind the wheel, gunning the engine as fast as he dared in their battle against the clock.

“There’s just one thing I don’t understand,” he yelled at Blake, more to take his mind off the pain than because he really cared.

“Just the one?” Blake said mildly.

Langdale decided to ignore the implied sarcasm. “Why here? Why the Lake District? What can this area possibly have to do with – ” he struggled for a word “ – things from beyond?”

Blake considered for a moment. “Apart from the abundance of deep water, you mean? It’s probably a coincidence of people. Gould was a doctor on a whaling ship, yes?” Langdale nodded. “Five shillings give you ten, he went to the South Pacific.”

Langdale nodded at this. “His house was full of stuff from the place. And he had a manservant. Polynesian or Hawaiian, something like that.”

“Ponapeian, I would guess.”

“Where?”

“Ponape. An island in the Pacific. A lot of whaling ships stop there. And its supposedly less than five hundred miles south of the location of R’lyeh.”

Not for the first time in the last few days, this conversation was beginning to get away from Langdale. “Where?” he said again.

“R’lyeh. It’s an ancient sunken city, and supposedly the resting place of Cthulhu himself. Ponape is hugely influenced by the place. It’s a hotbed of Cthulhu worship.”

“So you reckon Gould was affected by his time there?”

“It would be an enormous coincidence if he weren’t. My guess is, he brought a large quantity of material back with the intention of setting up a Cthulhu Temple. Allerton House would be perfect. He’s a Yorkshireman by birth, but his family have roots in Keswick. The house must have seemed like a Godsend to him. Isolated area, large bodies of water, and enough small rural communities that a man like him could prove to be a huge influence.” A small pause. “Does that answer your question?”

“I suppose so.”

“Good. I’d hate you to have died wondering.”

They drove on in silence for a short while, and then Blake spoke again of his own accord.

“Gould is – was – the least of our worries. The thing that worries me is the portal.”

“The thing in the lake?”

Blake nodded. “Everything we have done will be a waste of time if we can’t close it. The thing is, it can’t be a natural phenomenon. There must be a mechanism.”

“A machine?” Something tickled at the back of Langdale’s mind. A thought flitted across, tantalisingly out of reach.

“There’s a bit of a misconception regarding these things. People call them gods, but they are not gods. They are creatures many orders of magnitude greater than we are, but they are not gods. They are bound by certain laws of their universe just as we are, and that means their powers are limited.”

Langdale snorted. “I hadn’t noticed.”

“Yes, well the limits are very wide, but they do exist. They cannot just magic things up, they need mechanisms, machines. That’s why they need Nyarlathotep. Remember what you read about him. All that talk about glass and metal, that’s what he does. He acts as a conduit between our world and theirs, and creates mechanisms to bridge that gap.”

The whole thing sounded bizarrely mundane compared to what Langdale had witnessed over the past few days. Blake simply shrugged.

“Most of life’s great mysteries are fairly banal when you break them down to its basic facts. I think it’s the only way we can deal with these things without going mad. Take all the ritual and language used to worship these creatures. All of that is really just an advanced form of mathematics. It’s all power equations and formulae dressed up as pseudo-religion.”

In all of this talk, a slow realisation had dawned on Langdale, and mentally he kicked himself. Hard.

“A machine,” he groaned, “It was staring me in the face all this time.”

Briefly, Blake looked across at him. “What was?”

“The Windermere Patented Electricity Company. That bugger Freeman has a bloody great machine set up in the middle of Bowness. All glass and metal, like you said. Claimed it was for creating electricity, but I thought the crafty sod was hiding something.”

Blake smiled. “That’ll be it. We destroy that, we might just have a chance.”

“It’s a big bastard of a machine. Be a hell of a job to destroy it.”

“I’m not without resources in Windermere.”

Langdale shook his head in wonder. “What the devil sort of vicar are you?”

Blake’s smile became a grin. “Adaptable. Contrary to what you might think, the church moves with the times. This is the twentieth century, after all.”

The first hints of the sun were showing on the horizon. Blake pushed the engine just a little harder, and the car sped on.

* * *

Seven o’clock. Windermere and Bowness burned and bled. The rising sun, catching on the surrounding trees, stained the lake with the same scarlet that now flowed down the streets. It had taken less than an hour for the two towns to be broken and gutted of their hearts by Nyarlathotep and his army.

A few people, mainly on the outskirts of the towns, had escaped, fleeing into the surrounding countryside at the first intimations of the carnage. Most, asleep in their beds as the attack came, had fallen. The robed followers, until today respectable men of the community, business owners, councillors and tradesmen, entered homes and bludgeoned men and women to death. Dark, crawling figures climbed the walls of buildings, breaking into bedrooms and seizing small children and babies by the throats with choking, web-fingered hands. Those who fled their homes were pounced upon and ripped apart by snarling, merciless Shoggoths.

There were some spared. The new empire would need its slaves, and so a few people, identified as useful specimens, were taken and chained by the necks, hands and feet, and flung into dark rooms to await their fate. Others, mostly further into the towns and alerted by the fate of their fellow townsfolk, banded together into small groups and fortified themselves in heavy stone buildings. The Masonic Hall was now commandeered by the flamboyant Captain Tobias Clay, who had rescued a group of people from a Shoggoth by impaling it on one of his old whaling harpoons, and some of the churches had also been turned into temporary fortresses, but these were few in number, and already heavily besieged by Shoggoth and the amphibious creatures who clambered nimbly across the walls, probing every possible weak point for a way in.

As the automobile trundled slowly through the upper streets of Windermere, Langdale and Blake surveyed the scene in horror. Langdale had seen some terrible things in his time on the force, but this was beyond belief. With most of the slaughter having relocated into the lower part of the town, these streets were stilled with an unnatural calm. The air was filled with an unholy stench, the mixture of dead flesh, burning buildings, and a curiously out of place smell of fish. There were no people to be seen. Occasionally a face would appear at a window, but those faces were not human. Their eyes glowed, and their mouths moved soundlessly. They would stare out briefly, unblinkingly, and then withdraw suddenly back into the darkness.

“Deep Ones,” Blake muttered, “Cthulhu worshippers. An abomination in the sight of God and man. They don’t normally show themselves in daylight. They must be getting confident.”

Langdale had only had one question. “Can we kill them?”

Blake was pointing over to the left. “Let’s find out.”

One of the Deep Ones was squatting in the doorway of a house, attempting to pull what looked like the body of a woman into the building. Langdale didn’t want to know why. Aware that it had been spotted, it was now looking at them, then it stepped out into the street, its scaled, amphibious humanoid body standing straight and tall, and ran at them, hissing and croaking in a parody of human shouting.

Langdale raised his shotgun and pulled the trigger, then swore profusely as the hammers fell on empty chambers. He had forgotten to reload it. As the creature reached the automobile, he and Blake scrambled from the seats to the far side of the vehicle. For the next minute or so, they played a bizarre game of ‘it’ with the thing, ducking around the automobile, always keeping the bulk of the vehicle between them and its grasping hands. Finally, in sheer frustration, it screamed out and seized the car, using its huge strength to turn it onto its side. As the two men fell back from their ruined vehicle, it leapt onto the car’s side, and hissed down at them. Then it was on Blake, seizing him by the throat, its needle teeth questing for flesh. Momentarily bereft of the shotgun, Langdale grabbed for the only weapon he could find, one of the headlights that had come free in the clatter of the car’s overturning. Grabbing it with both hands, he slammed it down, glass first, onto the creature’s head. Glass smashed, metal bent, and the creature, not particularly injured, but angry and distracted, turned its furious gaze on the inspector. Blake, able to breathe again, unsheathed the blade from his sword stick, and rammed it through the creature’s exposed throat. With a keening croak, it fell forward, impaling itself further. As Blake twisted his wrists, the life went out of the thing very suddenly, and it fell sideways, snapping the blade near the handle.

Blake threw the now useless sword stick away, and then knelt beside the dead thing, seizing it by the chin and looking into the sightless eyes with disgust.

“There will be hordes of these by the lake. This is not going to be easy.”

Langdale was examining the car. Even if they could have got it back onto its wheels, it was clear that it would not move again. He stared down the street. It was a long way to the lake. “That’s assuming we can either get near the lake anyway. Looks like we’re on foot.” He located and loaded the shotgun, checked the revolver in his pocket, and retrieved a large branch from a nearby tree that was sturdy enough to act as a cudgel. “Still, when I run out of bullets, I’ll just have to beat the buggers to death.”

They began to run, moving downhill, along New Road, then onto Lake Road that would lead them all the way to the waters of Windermere themselves. Every so often, they would see a Shoggoth or a Deep One, but this time, they were ready. Shots rang out across the nearly empty streets, and Langdale administered heavy, bone-smashing blows to the heads and bodies of the creatures, and eventually the followers of the dark man knew well enough to stay clear of them. Soon they reached the centre of Bowness, where it was only a small distance to the lake.

The noise here was nearly unbearable, an insane chorus of croaks and screams that blended into a hellish symphony. Langdale checked his supply of shotgun shells and bullets. Not many left. Two of the shells he had kept for something special, the rest – well, he’d work out what to do when they ran out and not before.

Blake was looking down at a small church that stood near the lake. It had become something akin to a hive of Deep Ones, almost its entire surface covered with crawling green figures.

“The church is lost,” he told Langdale, but if we can get to the other side, I have a small storehouse of useful items. He tipped his head to one side. “We have been prepared for something like this for a long time.”

“Fat lot of sodding good it did you.” Langdale was hesitating, then he decided to come out and say it. “You go. I have something else to do.”

“But the machine – “

“Face it, lad, you’ll have far more chance of sorting it out on your own without this old sod slowing you up. I have faith.” Langdale looked out in the opposite direction, to the lakeside. “And I have to find Pike.”

“Of course.” Blake sighed. “You are a sentimental old fool,” he said, but he was smiling as he said it.

They gripped each other’s arms briefly, exchanged a cynical smile, and then each was off in the opposite direction.

* * *

With the Deep Ones focussed on their assault on St Martin’s Church, it was relatively easy for Blake to move surreptitiously across the graveyard and into the small yard beyond. At the far end was a pair of locked double doors. He quickly produced a small key from his waistcoat pocket, unlocked the doors, and slipped inside the building.

Once inside, Blake located an oil lamp and used it to illuminate the darkness, revealing a small barn. The greasy yellow light cast unpleasant shadows, but to his relief those shadows hid nothing more sinister. The room had not been invaded. At the front of the barn, next to the doors, was a small cart. Behind this were three stalls. Only one was occupied. The local vicar normally tended the horse for him, and Blake only saw him occasionally, but the animal still whinnied gently in happy recognition. He padded softly over to the horse, and stroked its neck. He could feel the tension and unhappiness in its muscles, as it sensed all that was going on outside, but for now, the animal stayed as calm as it could.

Leaving the horse for the moment, he stepped into the second stall, and loaded several crates onto the cart. Insurance for later, he told himself. Then he moved into the third stall. A single large case stood there. He pulled back the lid, and held up the lamp to throw light onto the contents. Inside were revolvers, rifles, bullets by the box, two long-bladed cavalry swords of Napoleonic origin and a series of small round explosive charges. Blake nodded in satisfaction. It had been a long time since he had made use of these weapons, but they remained in good condition. He worked fast, loading revolvers and stuffing his pockets with bullets, then taking a small shoulder bag from a hook on the wall and filling it with small incendiary devices. Finally, he took up one of the swords and moved back to the first stall.

“I’ll be back, old friend,” he told the horse, then strode to the door with heavy purpose. “Work to do first.”

Venturing back out into the dark morning, he was surprised to find his route to the Windermere Patented Electricity Company relatively impeded. Only once was he threatened, by a Deep One that had wandered free of its comrades. A single blow from the heavy sword had beheaded the creature, and he had continued without even breaking his stride. Finally, he was at the large, long building that Langdale had visited mere days earlier. It looked innocuous enough, no sign that its existence was crucial to the destiny of the world. Blake made for the main doors, observed that there was nobody about, and quietly slipped through the reception into the main hall.

There, he took his first look at Nyarlathotep’s great work, and even as he was appalled by its purpose, he had to admire the dark man’s artistry in its creation. The thing throbbed with power and purpose. Energy pulsed obscenely through its metal housings, rainbow sparks leapt between terminals, and a coruscating rainbow of infinite shades flowed through the glass tubes.

And the thing was vast. So massive that he had no obvious way of destroying it. The few small charges that he had brought with him would barely scratch its surface.

Refusing to be beaten, he began to examine the machine in more detail. One small, crazy part of him hoped to find a button marked ‘off’. More sensibly, he hoped to locate a key part of the machine, a main system that could be damaged enough either to deactivate the rest of it, or even to set off a chain of damage that could destroy the whole thing. It was not easy. The design of the machine was not obvious, not based on the basic logical principles of the western world and its industrial designs. Trying to decide which part of the machine was more important than another was an almost insurmountable task.

Have faith and ye shall find, Clovis, he told himself, mother always told you that. Yes, and she always told you that you had a special destiny, too. Did you believe that part? It was very clear now that he was going to have to proceed on the basis of blind faith and luck. Well, it had always served him in the past. He took the first charge from the shoulder bag, and bent place it down at the base of what he hoped was some significant section of the machine. He extended a fuse wire from the charge, then linked it to another, that he placed across a long linking glass section. He had the third charge out of his bag when he became very aware that he was no longer alone.

“What are you doing?” The voice was low and strangulated. He whirled around, revolver raised. Two men were standing in the doorway. Mordecai Freeman’s face was a yellow and black mosaic of bruises, his jaw clicking unnaturally as he tried to speak. He had discarded his robes, and stood in his normal clothes of suit and overcoat, the precisely knotted cravat and pin incongruous against the ruin of his face. Beside him was a shambling, stumbling figure in blackened and blood-spattered robes, his face indescribably burnt, skin peeling away in bloodied strips. One eye was permanently closed, and the other bulged whitely in its socket, almost seeming to move about of its own accord on Gould’s destroyed visage.

“I said, what are you doing?” Freeman repeated. The words were muffled, as if his mouth were stuffed with gauze, and he was clearly having difficulty breathing.

“Putting an end to your insane enterprise.”

Gould began laughing. It gurgled horribly in his throat. “The insect tries to hold back the foot that will squash it,” he said gleefully. His voice was a bass growl erupting from his tattered and singed vocal cords.

“I’m afraid we can’t allow it,” Freeman said. The reasonable words sounded ridiculous in the circumstances, and Blake started to laugh at him. Gould’s remaining eye flashed in anger, and he waved his hand in the air.

Behind the two Men of Power, a gathered legion of Deep Ones began to flow into the room, crowding along the tight walkway towards him. Blake looked back behind him. No good. There were more of them, numbers beyond counting, clawed fingers lusting at him, each desperate to be the one that claimed him.

Well mother, he asked, is this what you meant by destiny?

The nearest Deep One was now barely a foot away. He raised the sword in a mock salute, then swung it into the advancing mass of flesh.

* * *

It didn’t take Langdale long to find Pike. A gut feeling led him down the Lake Road to the shores of Windermere. The surface of the lake was choppy, surging in great swells even though there was no breeze. And about thirty feet out in the centre of the lake, he could see the launch where he and Pike had gone about their ill-fated underwater expedition. Standing on the deck of that launch, looking for all the world like a preacher leading his flock, was Pike. His arms were spread wide, and he appeared to be speaking. The naked form of the dark man hovered at his left shoulder, like a baleful angel.

Langdale cast about desperately. A series of small rowing boats were still moored to the jetty, untouched amidst the chaos and carnage. He quickly ran to one, and started to untie it. How he was going to row and shout and shoot he didn’t know, but it was the only idea he had for now. A hiss from behind him, and he felt himself thrown off his feet and onto his back. One of the Deep Ones had him, its teeth buried in his shoulder. He cried out as he felt the sharp points break through the thick material of his overcoat and pierce the flesh beneath.

And then the thing was thrown aside, shrieking. A robed figure was before him, a huge plank of wood in its hands. The hood was back, and he could see the face of a young man, black with dirt, streaked with tears, smoke reddened eyes hysterical with anger and fear as he pounded the Deep One with the makeshift weapon, again and again and again. Only once the Deep One’s skull had been stoved in completely, and it had ceased to show the slightest sign of movement, did the young man drop the wood and fall to his knees, sobbing. He then found himself staring down the barrels of Langdale’s shotgun.

“I am having a very bad day, my lad, and you better have one hell of a good explanation why you’re wearing those robes.”

“My – my name is Peter Bradwell,” the man babbled. He was on the edge of total hysteria, “I live in Kendal. My wife’s name is Maud, and I have a daughter named Mary. I didn’t want this!” The last sentence was torn from him in a hoarse cry, and he fell forward, knocking the shotgun barrels with his head.

Taken aback, Langdale lowered the gun. Was this what the ‘Men of Power’ really constituted? Terrified young men? What had Gould and Freeman assembled? Probably, he reasoned, the people that they knew they could control. Figures of some small resource, small influence and small scope.

“Listen to me,” he said quietly and quickly. He hadn’t time to muck about mollycoddling this child. “I don’t know why you’re involved, but you know this is all wrong. You know we have to stop it.”

The young man nodded. “I’ve – I’ve seen things.” He was trying to put some control into his voice – and largely failing. “They were my friends and they were killing people. They were killing children! And those – those things …what are they? What are they?” he repeated. The dam broke and full tears coursed down his face.

Langdale wasn’t feeling particularly charitable, but he decided to continue the soft soap approach. He pulled an over-grubby handkerchief from his coat and offered it to Bradwell, who used it to mop his face. “How did you get yourself into this mess?”

“It wasn’t meant to be like this.” Bradwell was shaking his head in denial. He seemed to be talking to himself as much as to Langdale. “I’m a stockbroker. It was good for business, that’s what Andrews told me. I only joined them because I thought they were about having friends in high places. Good for business,” he said again, almost as a mantra. “And the Masons wouldn’t have me,” he added, sounding more ashamed of that last fact than of anything else.

Social hierarchies, the bane of all small communities. Langdale had seen pathetic local snobberies cause all manner of trouble in his time on the force. Albeit not apocalyptic, but today seemed to be the day for extremes. “So what are you going to do now?”

The man looked up at him, puzzled. “I don’t understand.”

Langdale looked him directly in the eye. “You’ve bollocksed up, son. Big time. But it’s not too late to do something about it.” He indicated the body of the Deep One. “I think you hate these bastards as much as I do. Want to do something about it?”

Bradwell seemed to be dragging himself together as he watched. He stood up, pulling the robes up and over his head and discarding them. Underneath, he wore just a plain shirt and trousers. “What can I do?”

Langdale jerked his thumb towards the lake. “Get into one of those boats and row as if our bloody lives depend upon it.”

Which, by and large, they do, he didn’t add. Probably best not to mention that.

* * *

Blake was laughing as he killed. He had never known a joy like this, doing the Lord’s work in the most incredible way imaginable. Again and again the Deep Ones surged at him, on their own or en masse, and every time his sword sang in his hand, cleaving, biting, tearing into flesh and hacking through bone. The screams of the dying were mixed with his laughter, and he waded ankle deep through their blood. He took injuries, his face was scratched and bleeding, and his left shoulder was clawed to the bone. The damp of his own blood was running down the front of his shirt, and the pain was burningly intense, but he would not allow himself to feel it. He did not have the luxury of surrendering to the welcoming abyss of death. He forced himself on, using the pain to increase his focus, to move himself faster and faster in response to everything that was thrown at him.

And then suddenly there were no more to fight. He felt the pressure ease instantly, felt his killing focus dissipating, reality coming back to him. He knelt on a pile of amphibious corpses, sword dripping with dark-hued blood, breathing heavily. Only Gould and Freeman were left, still standing where they had been. They were looking at him in astonishment, unable to believe what he had just done.

“There will be more,” Gould promised him. “They will take you eventually.”

“Perhaps. But will they be fast enough?” Blake smiled at them, and reached into his coat, removing a small ferrocerium lighter from the pocket.

Freeman was watching him very carefully as he backed away to the bottom corner of the room. “You can’t hope to destroy his great work with your childish devices.”

Blake nodded. “You’re probably right. I can’t destroy the whole thing. But maybe I don’t have to. Maybe if I can just target one specific piece, I can do enough damage to bring this obscene creation to a halt.” He was nearly to the corner now, and Freeman was advancing upon him. He never dropped his eyes from the other man’s, probing, feinting, trying to see any sign that what he was saying was having an effect. “What part could it be? This?” – a tangle of metal piping and a collection of small levers – “or this?” – an electrical junction of copper wiring and small glass cylinders – “or perhaps this?”

He pointed at the section nearest the corner, a glass monument to industrial creativity, a labyrinth of glass pipes, twisted and knotted in impossible angles. Through those pipes there flowed sparking, writhing serpents of energy, lighting his face with an unhealthy glow.

There it was, the sign he needed. Freeman twitched, and a flicker of uncertain fear showed as his gaze dropped away from Blake’s.

“Thank you,” Blake said, quite genuinely, “I think that tells me everything I need to know.”

“You fool!” Gould screamed.

Freeman snarled and rushed at Blake, bundling the clergyman into the corner. In this final moment of desperation, the big man was stronger than he had ever been, and Blake felt his grip on the lighter loosening, and the man’s hands moving to his throat. But he knew he had one chance. From the corner of his eye, he had glimpsed Gould raising a gun, his arm wavering and trembling with the effort. As he felt rather than saw the doctor’s finger squeeze the trigger, he lifted his feet and set them against the wall, and then surged forward, twisting with Freeman and turning him directly into the path of the bullet.

The impact was sudden and shocking. Freeman gave a single sharp breath as he was shot in the back. Gould dropped the gun in horror. Freeman was gasping now, no longer able to draw enough breath to speak, a slow trickle of blood frothing at the corner of his mouth. Blake grabbed the large figure and spun him around, holding him briefly in a neck lock with one arm. With his free hand, he took the last charge from his bag, then let go of Freeman. He flicked open his ferrocerium lighter, and applied the flame to the fuse. Then he thrust the charge into Freeman’s hand, and with a single foot propelled him into the heart of the conglomeration of glass tubes.

The glass gave way easily beneath Freeman’s bulky momentum, releasing the energies within. Even before Freeman had begun screaming as his body was shredded by the multicoloured flames and sparks, Blake was moving, applying the flame to the other charge fuses, then hurling himself to the other side of the pile of corpses, desperately scrambling for the slightest cover.

* * *

The small boat rocked appallingly as it moved across the surface of Windermere. Bradwell struggled at the oars, constantly catching at the grey, rocking waters, and Langdale, kneeling in the front of the boat as it drew nearer to the launch, found himself fighting constantly to keep his balance. He braced himself against the boat with the shotgun, trying to prevent his seemingly inevitable tumble into the depths below.

The boat was about fifteen feet away from the launch when he suddenly realised that he had done it again. He had come out here without the slightest idea what to do. Another brilliant Langdale plan, reacting without thinking. He tested his aim with the shotgun, but he couldn’t be sure that anything he sent in the direction of Nyarlathotep wouldn’t hit Pike instead. So he decided to resort to his usual line of action when it came to Pike. He started shouting at him.

“Pike!” he yelled, “ What the hell do you think you’re doing, you bloody stupid sod?”

Nothing. Not the slightest reaction.

“Pike! This is an order from a superior. Stop that at once and report!”

Insulting him hadn’t helped, and the sting of discipline did nothing either. Pike just kept talking, intoning. Over the noise of the waters he could hear him, a breathless chant in an unknown language, on and on without cease.

“Pike! Think about what your Elsie would say!”

Was that the slightest hint of a blink? Pike lived in a perpetual state of half-adoration, half-terror of his wife. If there was anything that could get through to him, it was appealing to that emotion.

“Yes! Come on, Pike, think of Elsie. Or if not her, what about me? What the hell am I supposed to tell her when I’ve been forced to blow your idiot brains out?”

Pike kept on speaking, but his voice slurred slightly, hesitating. Langdale still wasn’t sure if he was getting to him. Only one thing was certain. Nyarlathotep had finally taken notice. He locked eyes with the inspector, and there was no mistaking the red glow of anger.

The boat stopped. He thought perhaps the waters had calmed, but one glance about him told him that this was not the case. Besides, that still wouldn’t have made any sense. The boat was suddenly stock still on the tumultuous waters, as if being held fast by an invisible force.

Not invisible, he realised. There were places he couldn’t see.

Beneath the boat.

“Mr Langdale,” Bradwell said quietly, his voice shaking, “I think something’s got hold of the oars.”

The faces were the first to emerge, the wide pale eyes leading them as they burst from the surface of the water. Then the long and wiry arms, thin but hardened muscles propelling them at the two men in the boat. It didn’t take long for the tiny boat to be surrounded with Deep Ones, clawing at Langdale and Bradwell in a frenzied assault. Langdale lost his grip on the shotgun. He scrambled his revolver from his coat, and sent six of the creatures back into the water with point-blank bullets. The hammer on the revolver finally clicked on empty, and he flung it at the next one’s head. Then, bereft of weapons, he turned to swinging his arms at the creatures, punches connecting with heads and torsos. Behind him in the boat, Bradwell was screaming. He had unhooked one of the oars from its rowlock, and was swinging it about him like a quarterstaff. He got in a couple of good blows before it was snatched free and thrown into the water. Then they were on him, dragging him bodily from the boat and into the lake. His head resurfaced once, just long enough for a last bubbling cry of despair, and then he was gone. He did not appear again.

The things now teemed over Langdale, claws catching at his coat, pulling at him from every direction. He felt their smothering bodies all over him, the boat rocking again as they tried to overturn it and drag him into their eternal darkness. He started to shout, almost drowning out their endless hissing with his yelling and swearing, punches flying out at random. It was no use. As Pike had realised during his underwater struggles, their inhuman strength and weight of numbers was just too much. It was over. In the chaos, he had the briefest of seconds to taste the bitterly absurd pill of his failure. Langdale’s last case ending in this, he told himself, a faceful of fish and an ignominious drowning –

They stopped suddenly, pulling back from the boat and disappearing back into the water. Langdale sat up. He was alone in the boat. A sudden, almost anticipatory silence, had fallen. And he noticed one more thing. Pike had stopped talking. Was that good or not? He was immediately answered by the boat tipping almost completely over, as the entire lake seemed to be gripped by a single monstrous wave of water. As the boat righted itself and slapped back onto the water, Langdale fell onto his knees, looking about him feverishly. There was still no sign of the Deep Ones, although whether they had fallen back in fear or triumph, he wasn’t sure. He reached his hand out for the shotgun, and was relieved to find it still with him. It had become like an old companion in the short hours since he had acquired it, and he wasn’t going to let it go now.

Pike was now totally still, the expression on his face blandly neutral. Not so the dark man. He threw back his head in a howl of triumph more animal than man, then reached out and placed his long hands about the sergeant’s throat.

The double blasts of Langdale’s shotgun removed Nyarlathotep’s head from his shoulders. His hands fell limply to his sides, and his body bent over towards the water as if in worship. He plunged over the side of the launch, and was almost immediately lost to sight in the waters of Windermere.

As if angered by the sacrifice that had been made to it, the waters rose up higher than ever. Langdale seized the side of his boat with one hand, and the remaining oar with the other, and desperately tried to paddle himself towards the launch. Pike, remaining stock still, made absolutely no effort to right himself as the launch was thrown back and forth, and finally, inevitably, he fell, head first, following the path of the dark man into the water.

Langdale moved faster than he ever had in his life. One last effort with the oar, then he threw himself half out of the boat, his fingers grazing against the surface of the churning waters, and just seizing the sergeant by the collar. Heaving with one massive effort, he pulled Pike’s recumbent form out of the water and into the boat.

For about ten seconds, he feared he was too late. Pike lay there, pale and unmoving, his eyes staring out lifelessly. Then there was a blink, a cough, and suddenly he was spluttering up water, sitting up and looking at the inspector, that look of guileless innocence returning to his eyes.

“What the heck’s going on, sir?” he asked.

Langdale couldn’t answer that. He wasn’t sure himself. He looked back at the long way to the shore, over waters whose turbulence would have shamed the Atlantic, then contemplated the single oar. Finally he said, “You’ve rather gone and done it, lad, that’s what’s going on. Now, how fast can you row?”

* * *

Blake’s meagre cover had been just enough. The explosion blew the bodies of the Deep Ones, doll-like, into the air, and he was taken with them. He fell heavily, briefly winded, and then there was momentary oblivion. Then, blinking away the shock, he got to his feet and looked about him.

His faith had paid off. His hope had been correct. The destruction of that one part of the machine had set off a chain reaction of explosions and fires that were threatening to claim more than just the machine. The headquarters of the Windermere Patented Electricity Company were rapidly becoming an inferno as the machine burned itself into the ground. There was nothing left of Freeman. His skin, flesh and bones had been seared into dust by the charge that had been delivered through his body. Gould was still standing in the doorway, hesitating. Blake took away his choices by raising his gun and shooting him, precisely and carefully, in the left kneecap. As the doctor collapsed to the floor, weeping and whimpering, Blake walked over to him, every step deliberate and considered.

“My beliefs advocate mercy,” he told the doctor, “but there is always room for an exception.”

The fried skin on Gould’s face cracked as he twitched his remaining eye at him. “You are a man of God.”

“I am also an initiate of the Knights of St Michael.”

Recognition flashed over Gould’s face. “The Warrior Angels,” he croaked.

They both looked up as the whole building shook to the sound of a scream, deeper and louder than anything heard so far. It reverberated about the building, threatening to tear it down. As if in answer, the flames started to lick higher, reaching to the roof.

Gould smiled. “Too late. He is here.”

“I’ve destroyed your portal. No more can come through.”

“And what will you do about the risen one?” Gould asked, his thin voice crackling with insanity.

“I’ll think of something.”

He put a bullet through Gould’s brain and calmly walked from the collapsing building.

* * *

As the tiny boat reached the shores of Windermere, one final surging wave pushed it onto the land. Langdale and Pike were thrown clear, and lay there on the soaked grass, frozen to the bone by the waters of the lake. Langdale finally stood, throwing off his dripping overcoat. His arms burned with the effort of rowing against the huge tide with a single oar, but he didn’t care. For the first time in days, the cold was not troubling him. He just stared at the thing that was now emerging from Windermere. It was beyond vast, looming more than forty feet over their heads, a constantly shifting amalgam of creatures of sea and land and air that defied definition. There was a great greenish-blue bulk, pitted with scales, unnatural growths and tentacles of a size to humble the largest squid, surmounted by a head that resembled no animal that had ever been seen on earth. Two eyes, black as night, filled with unfathomable knowledge, were set above a mass of insanely writhing tentacles that took the place of a mouth. It had been awoken from a sleep that had lasted forever and a day. And in this world that had changed beyond recognition, it was angry.

Behind them, the town was dying. Nyarlathotep’s creatures and followers had done their job well. The creatures had turned their attention from the people of the town to their god in the water, and they now thronged the lakeside, their gibbous bodies bent in veneration, their wordless screaming mixing with a single, endless roar from the creature in the lake.

Without warning, a horse and trap burst through the line of Deep Ones, barrelling down to the lakeside and drawing up alongside them. The enraptured beings made no move to stop Blake as he leapt down from his seat at the reins to join the two policemen. Bloodied and bandaged, he presented a singular sight, but he appeared to pay his injuries no heed as he began unloading a pair of large boxes from the trap. The three men turned at the sound of a low growling. A Shoggoth had loped up behind them, and it flung itself onto the horse, wrapping about its neck with its tentacles and sinking teeth into its flesh. The horse screamed its last, it rearing up, and the entire trap toppled over, trapping the creature beneath it. As it struggled to free itself, Pike calmly stood up and took the shotgun from Langdale. One hard swing and the butt had cracked open the creature’s head. Its snarls became whimpers and it died as its brains flowed and mixed with the horse’s blood on the grass.

“You with me, lad?” Langdale shouted above the din.

“Always, sir,” Pike replied. “Although what Elsie would say, I really don’t know.” He seemed his old self again. He raised the shotgun to his shoulder and aimed it into the mass of flesh that continued to erupt forth. It was now so high that they could not see the head, even with their heads craned fully back.

“Machine’s done?” Langdale asked Blake. The clergyman was softly stroking the horse’s head, a look of inexpressible sadness on his face.

“Done, but rather a little too late,” Blake replied. He turned his attention to the ever expanding bulk of Cthulhu. “Wider still and wider,” he murmured, “shall thy bounds be set.” He opened the boxes and began assembling what appeared to be a Gatling gun.

“What?” Langdale shouted at him.

“Nothing. Just a song. Catchy little tune, but it probably won’t be terribly relevant soon.” He finished his work, and flicked down the firing catch on the Gatling. Then he held out a long-barrelled revolver, handle first, to the Inspector.

Langdale bent down to his coat and reached into his pockets, bringing out pipe, tobacco and matches. Wrapped in an old oilskin, they had stayed safe from the water that had saturated almost everything else. Slowly, methodically, he packed the tobacco into the bowl, lit a match and applied it to the pipe. In the midst of the chaos, the ritual was wonderfully comforting. He placed the matches back into his pocket, and took the proffered revolver from Blake. The pipe spluttered into life, and he drew slowly, gloriously, on the rich smoke.

“Finally,” he murmured, “I can die a happy man.”

Tentacles flowed towards them, faster than they could see. They aimed their guns and let fly.

Langdale and Pike Investigate, Part Three

2012-01-25T08:47:00.003Z

Langdale and Pike Investigate, Part Three

Written by Richard W. Straw

Illustrated by Andy Paciorek

For a long time after his visitors had left, Gould stood in the hall, looking at the picture of the whale. Finally, he strode to the far door, and passed through it into his study. A huge oak desk dominated the centre of the room. A large fire roared, with plush leather armchairs set about it. The final touch was a drinks cabinet by the door. On the desk there was mounted a large specimen examination board, and on the board was pinned the corpse of a grasshopper-like insect, but far larger than any normal specimen, more than a foot across. Gould examined the insect through a large magnifying glass that was mounted to the board, then took up a brandy and soda in one hand and a scalpel in the other, and began to saw at the creature’s carapace. He carried on with his work as Mordecai Freeman entered the room through the same door.

“I think we may have a problem.” Gould did not look up from his work, but the tone of his voice made his feelings very clear.

Freeman shook his head, and poured himself a drink. “The man’s an idiotic insect.”

“Indeed. But idiots have a habit of blundering into the truth. He came very close to saying something. I nearly had to ask Toanui to intervene.”

“That might have been entertaining, at least.” More than once, he had seen the burly servant set upon an obstinate opponent. “What did the fool actually want, I wonder?”

“I am not sure.” The scalpel passed through the outer shell of the insect specimen, and a glutinous green substance poured forth. Gould quickly moved a small test tube to collect it. “Trying to make me reveal something, I think. A slip of the tongue.” He laughed. “I think he was the one who nearly did that.”

“We could always have him killed.” Freeman settled himself into one of the armchairs, glass in hand, and took a large cigar from his jacket.

Gould paused, finally glanced up at the other man, considering, then shook his head. “Probably not worth the effort. I think it would be better to accelerate matters. We have all we need, I don’t see any point in waiting.” He resumed the dissection. “Send out the word. It’s tonight.”

* * *

All the way through the conversation with Gould, Langdale had rested his hand on the revolver in his coat pocket. Now, as he stood just outside the gates of the house, it was clutched tightly about the handle. He seethed with anger, both at the unctuous face and form of Doctor Gould, and at himself. He knew he’d come very close to confronting the man directly, and even closer to punching him in the face. Neither of which would have done a great deal of good.

“He knows,” he muttered, “the bloody buggering bastard knows and he’s laughing at me because there’s not a bastard thing that I can do.”

The truth was, the doctor was correct. The investigation was floundering. Somehow, it had ended up based on mythology and religion and the mad ramblings of a lunatic vicar. He had what felt like half the county of Cumbria against him. He had lost his closest ally, and all he had to rely on were two decent but stolid local policemen.

He examined his watch. Twenty-two minutes past four. The skies above were just beginning to darken. Time to take a chance.

“Where’s the nearest village?” he asked Knowles, who was waiting loyally for orders.

“Ormathwaite, sir. About a mile away. Little place, sir, not much there.”

“Pub?”

“Think so, sir.”

“Good. Then we, gentlemen, are going to retire there for the next few hours. And then we are going to leave the trap there, and hike back here on foot.”

Whitehead seemed to be getting the idea. “Are we going to make an unannounced visit, sir?”

Langdale grinned. “We are indeed, my lad. Now, none of what I’m going to ask you both to do is strictly legal, so I would suggest you speak now or forever hold your peace.”

Whitehead returned the grin. “I’ve got a few tricks for breaking into posh houses, sir.” At a look from Knowles, he shrugged. “I wasn’t always a copper, sarge.”

“Excellent. Then off to the pub.”

He led the way down the hill back to the trap.

* * *

It was a quarter past ten, and the skies above were clouded. Every so often, beams of full moonlight would strike the lawns of Allerton House with terrifying clarity. Ducking between these beams, keeping to such shadows as there were, a trio of figures sidled towards the house as stealthily as three members of Her Majesty’s Constabulary were able.

Freshly fortified by steak and ale pie, washed down with two pints of local bitter, Langdale felt a sense of excitement that he could barely suppress. All of his career had been a sordid trawl through the darker alleyways of Carlisle. Suicides, petty robberies, crimes of dull passion, wives being battered by husbands for no particular reason. This felt like another world. Despite his fears for his sergeant, he had to admit, he was almost enjoying himself. He could feel the same thing emanating from the two men beside him. Knowles and Whitehead had embraced his plan with an enthusiasm to demonstrate that life as a provincial bobby must be even less exciting.

Allerton House was a basic rectangle in shape, and as they crept around the far left corner and moved towards the back, they came across a small collection of vehicles. One or two horse drawn carriages, a farmer’s cart, there was even one of the new imported automobiles from America.

“Visitors,” Langdale whispered, as the ducked out of sight of a couple of loafing coachmen, “and rich ones by the look of it. Something’s up.”

As they pulled back, they saw that they were crouched beneath a large sash window. Without words, Langdale gestured to Whitehead. The constable was up in seconds, working on the window to seek an entrance whilst the other two kept watch. Knowles, Langdale noticed, was being particularly diligent, probably in order to pretend he hadn’t noticed his constable’s rediscovered talent for housebreaking.

That talent proved to be equal to the task, and within two minutes, the bolt had been drawn back, the window moved up, and the three of them were clambering into the house. The room they entered was pitch black inside, but Langdale had requisitioned a small oil lantern from the pub, and as he opened the shutter on it, it illuminated what appeared to be a small box room.

The cards had fallen in their favour. They had hit an unoccupied room that was stacked with large sealed packing crates. There was no carpet, and Langdale indicated for them to move as quietly as possible across the floor and to the door at the far end of the room.

It was unlocked. Opening it a crack, the inspector peeped out. It opened onto a long corridor, lit by electric light bulbs, painted an imposing shade of red. A large oak door stood at the opposite end of the corridor, and about halfway down on the left, a second corridor appeared to run off at a right angle. Langdale slowly inched the door open, wincing at every tiny creak, then took the first step forward. Soon, the trio were moving down that corridor towards the intersecting passage.

And then their luck ran out. As he took the first step across the intersection, Knowles found himself face to face with another man.

Face to face was not entirely accurate, as the man’s features were hidden beneath a large hood. The sergeant reacted instinctively, swinging up his right hand at the man’s face. The punch was not a heavy one, but the man crumpled immediately with a delicate sigh, allowing all three men to gather over him. The man was dressed in a long white silken robe, emblazoned with words in an alphabet that none of them recognised. Knowles reached forward and pulled the hood away to reveal a thin, pale face, delicate wispy hair and a half-hearted attempt at a goatee beard. He was also clearly out for the count.

“It’s Mr Ffoukes,” the sergeant said with surprise. To Langdale, the name was vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t quite place it, so the sergeant added, “The artist who did us the portrait of poor Mr Russell, sir.”

Langdale drew a cleansing, heavy breath. “Is there anybody around here who isn’t part of this bloody thing?”

Whitehead had dropped to his knees and was rapidly divesting Ffoukes of his robe. Beneath, the artist was clad in a plain white shirt and dark trousers. The robes were voluminous, and they fit easily over the constable’s own clothes as he began to don them.

“What exactly are you doing, constable?” Langdale asked.

Whitehead was lost somewhere in the robes, and his voice was muffled. “Disguise, sir. Best way of getting in among them.”

Langdale was shaking his head at this. “I admire your stupidity, lad, but absolutely no way whatsoever. Far too dangerous.”

His head appeared from the robes, and he pulled the hood back. “Well, with respect, if you have a better idea, sir, I’m happy to take it.”

Knowles was being no use whatsoever head “He’s right, sir.” Then he glared at Whitehead. “But not you, Whitehead. This is no work for a junior constable.” He held out his hand for the robes, but the constable simply stepped back and indicated Ffoukes.

“Begging your pardon, sergeant, but Mr Ffoukes is a rather small man. Both you and the Inspector are a bit too big.”

After a good deal of argument, Whitehead was not to be dissuaded, and under these circumstances, the chain of police command didn’t seem to be getting either of his superiors very far. Finally, Langdale acquiesced grumpily. The constable slipped into the robes, which, it was true, concealed him completely. He indicated the door at the far end of the original corridor.

“I assume he was going this way, sir,” he said.

Since when were you in charge, constable? Langdale thought, but he had to admit that it made sense. He and Knowles nodded. They dragged the body of Ffoukes to the box room and secured him as best they could. Then they followed the newly disguised constable towards the door.

Again, the door was unlocked. Clearly the Men of Power were not security conscious. Pushing it open a crack, Langdale got his head around the corner to take in the room beyond. It was the hall where they had met Gould what was just a few hours ago, only now it lay under a thick blanket of darkness. Struggling to pick out anything, Langdale squinted to the end dominated by the picture of the whaling ship. It was the only part of the room that was illuminated, by a small circle of dim lamps. Within that circle was gathered a number of human figures. It was difficult to tell, but he counted at least ten, maybe more. All were dressed in the same robes as Whitehead now wore, all had their faces concealed by the large hoods. He indicated them to the constable.

“Think you can manage that, lad?”

Whitehead grinned. “ ‘Course I can, sir.” He pulled the hood forward and moved out into the room, rapidly advancing towards the group of men. One or two of the figures turned to look at him, but nobody reacted as if this was out of the ordinary. Clearly Mr Ffoukes’ late arrival had been expected. As their attention was diverted, Langdale and Knowles crept from the door and moved quietly and quickly in the other direction. Peering through the dark, Langdale indicated the spiral staircase to the minstrel gallery. They swiftly ascended, and ducked behind the ornate banisters. The gallery offered an excellent view of the hall, and whatever was about to occur.

Ffoukes’ arrival seemed to herald the start of something. One of the hooded figures stepped into the middle of the circle, and raised his hands. The others reciprocated, and there then followed a lot of moving backwards and forwards and random chanting in languages neither the Inspector nor the Sergeant recognised. Langdale almost found himself laughing, the entire spectacle was so utterly absurd.

“Off their rockers, I reckon,” Knowles whispered.

Langdale nodded. “But dangerous with it, sergeant.” He had his revolver firmly in his hand, and he indicated for Knowles to do the same.

This ritual continued for at least another ten minutes. The figure of Constable Whitehead was easy to pick out, and more than once Langdale was forced suppressed a groan of frustration, as he watched his clumsy attempts to emulate the ritual moves. He briefly had a vision of one of the last engagements he had attended with his wife, a station dance that had been a painful four hours of being unable to waltz. Finally, to the inspector’s immense relief, the central figure held up his hand, and the movement and chanting ceased. He pulled back the hood, to reveal Gould. Although still smiling, the doctor’s face was no longer smug. Now the smile was hard, satisfied.

“It is time. We have made contact with a new emissary who will open the way for us.” The overly formal words sounded odd in the rounded Yorkshire tones. “Now we will call forth the dark one, and he will lead us.”

There was a low, accepting murmur from the assembled figures. Gould stood back, and swung his right arm in a sweeping motion towards the door to his study. It swung open, seemingly of its own accord, and another robed man stood revealed. His hood was back. It was Pike.

Langdale’s breath caught in his throat as he watched his sergeant walk calmly over into the middle of the circle to join Gould. Beside him, he could hear Knowles’ breath quicken, his body tensing. The doctor placed his hands on Pike’s shoulders and leaned forward, gently kissing him on the forehead. Then he turned back to the others.

“Bring him forth,” he intoned.

They began to circle again. Pike opened his mouth and began to speak. To Langdale the words were gibberish, but clearly they meant something to the other men, as they responded, at first hushed, then rising in volume, becoming fervent, even frenzied.

“What the hell is he saying?” Langdale hissed. Beside him, Knowles shook his head helplessly, but then, at his right ear, he heard a voice gently whispering.

“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtahn. In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”

He turned in surprise. It was Blake, of course. The vicar had swapped his cream suit for dark clothes, although the dog collar remained at his neck. In one hand was a revolver, the other held a silver topped walking cane. As he joined Langdale and Knowles, he motioned for them to stay silent and continue watching.

The ceremony was clearly very close to completion. Gould raised his hands again, and they stopped suddenly. Only Pike continued to speak, rhythmically reciting in that unknown tongue. Langdale did not like the expression on his face. This was not the dimly, reliably optimistic look that the sergeant normally adopted. The face was blank, his eyes unseeing. The sergeant stood there physically, but his mind was clearly not there.

Pike’s words built to a climax and then he too stopped. A dark space lay between Gould and the sergeant. Langdale blinked, rubbed his eyes. Was it really a space? It seemed to have substance, seemed to be moving of its own accord. He stared, lost in the horror of that moment. Even after everything he had seen and heard, it was impossible to believe what he was witnessing, as the figure of a man formed itself out of the swirling darkness.

He was tall, well over seven feet, dwarfing the men about him. His naked body was tightly muscled and slender, hairless and smooth skinned. And that skin was black. This was not the dark tones of an African or Asian, his skin was literally jet black, coloured as if of death. As his gaze took in his followers, his grin was calculating and wolfish.

“Nyarlathotep,” Blake said. The single, quiet word was chilling.

And then, the final blow. Pike simply looked straight up and back, and his eyes met Langdale’s. The blank look changed to an innocent smile.

“It’s quite all right, sir,” he said, “There really is nothing to worry about. You can come down now.”

He knew it wasn’t really Pike speaking, knew that the true sergeant did not currently reside in that form, but still, hearing those words in that voice, the betrayal bit deep. Lost for thought, Langdale looked across at Blake. The vicar nodded, and then pressed his hand to the inspector’s. In doing so, he handed him a small pistol, something akin to an American single-shot derringer. Langdale returned the nod, and slipped the weapon deep into his coat pocket. Then, a single deep breath, a locking of the eyes with Knowles, and both policemen stood up.

Lights flashed into their eyes, and the group of robed men all looked up at them. Langdale could feel the eyes of the dark man on him, and it hurt. He closed his eyes against the searching, probing gaze, and heard Gould give orders to take them. When he opened his eyes again, Blake was not there. Instead, three of the robed men stood about them. One of them, hood back, was Toanui, the huge South Sea Islander he had met that afternoon.

He hesitated. Blake seemed to have indicated that they should surrender, but it went against every fibre of his being to do so. Knowles, however, took the decision away from him. He moved to raise his gun, trying to aim at Toanui. The servant reacted instantly. His left fist flew straight into the sergeant’s face. There was a sharp series of cracks, and Knowles’ head fell back to a sharp and unnatural angle. Face smashed and bleeding, the gun falling from his dead fingers, he collapsed lifelessly.

One punch was all it had taken to kill the sergeant. Langdale knew he was worsted. He let his hands drop, and felt his revolver being taken away. He locked eyes with the big man.

“You’ll regret that.”

Toanui grinned, supremely confident. Langdale said nothing more as he was dragged down to the hall and set in front of Gould and the dark man. He felt the massive servant’s arms about him, pinioning him. He tried to flex his muscles, but the man’s grip was pure steel.

“Kneel before him,” Gould ordered.

Langdale smiled. “Fuck off, you sweaty fat bastard.”

There was a low ripple of breath amongst the throng, and a flash of anger across their leader’s face. Beside him, Pike didn’t react at all. Ever since he had first spoken and revealed his former ally, he had been silent.

“He is disrespectful.” The words had come from the dark man. His blackened voice matched his appearance. The speech was accentless, and he spoke slowly, as if language itself, let alone English, was an alien concept to him.

Gould spat at Langdale. “He is a fool. He must be taught.”

“Very well.” The dark man closed his eyes, and his body dissolved back into blackness. In a matter of seconds, that blackness had reformed into another shape. This one was more terrifying than anything Langdale had seen so far. It had no organisation, no centre. It was an amorphous mass of blue-black tentacles, uncountable in number. Four of the tentacles supported the thing like legs, the rest writhed and stretched towards him. At the end of each was a mouth, a slavering, red, pulpy maw that bristled with teeth and spat black drool.

He could see it tense as if to spring, and then shots rang out. Whitehead had made his move. He had sent four bullets into the centre of the mass of flesh. Nothing. It didn’t even flinch. Instead, it turned very slightly, and sprang upon the constable. His robes ran suddenly scarlet as several of the mouths seized upon his head and throat and ripped them open. His hood was up, and Langdale was glad. Cowardice had seized him, and he didn’t want to see Whitehead’s face as he died.

A huge steel bolt, more than a foot long, flew out of the darkness, straight into the body of the thing. It propelled it back and up off the ground, and pinioned it to the wall behind, where it hung, screaming with pain.

Seeing the object of their veneration being assaulted in this way seemed to paralyse the men around him. Toanui was staring at the suspended form, transfixed, and, just very slightly, Langdale felt his grip relax. He managed to get his hand into his pocket, and pulled the small pistol free. Unable to move his hands up, he took the only action he could. He pointed the gun downwards and pulled the trigger. The bullet tore into Toanui’s left foot, removing two of his toes. He let out a huge yell, and fell, whimpering. As his grip ceased completely, Langdale pulled himself free. He could see his own revolver where it had been dropped, and he quickly scooped it up. Then he turned around. Blake was standing behind him. In his hands, he held what looked like an antique crossbow.

“Hurry. That will hold him. But not for long.”

The bolt and the shots had thrown the room into pandemonium. Men milled about, apparently unable to decide what to do. Gould was trying to shout out orders, but the words were lost in a maelstrom of noise. Above all, the creature screamed and screamed and screamed, high and keening, hysterically pained. This was the time to move. Langdale and Blake backed quickly towards the door, guns up. Nobody tried to stop them, and they were quickly through and into the entrance hall. Pushing the door closed, Blake indicated a large wooden table, and they manoeuvred it in front of the door to prevent it from being opened.

“That won’t do a great deal of good. Come on.”

Then they were out, running down the driveway faster than Langdale had ever known himself move.

“Where are we going?” he said, barely able to catch his breath.

“It doesn’t really matter. Away from here.”

“What about Pike?”

“Later. Run away and live to save him. Or stay and die in the attempt.” The words were harsh but true. He didn’t argue.

Beyond the house, to both sides, were thick copses of evergreen trees. Picking the left hand side seemingly at random, Blake led him into their shadow.

* * *

It had taken several minutes for the followers to remove the bolt from the creature. It had immediately reformed back into the shape of the dark man, showing no sign of injury. Now he prowled backwards and forwards in the hall. He no longer grinned. Now his face was savagely angry, as bestial as his other form. His eyes seemed to glow as he spat his words.

“Violation,” he hissed, “must be punished. I will not suffer them to exist.”

Beside him, Gould and Freeman watched his movements silently, neither prepared to speak out. The other men were standing in a huddle in the middle of the room, nervous and suddenly uncertain. Around them, other figures had begun to appear. Humanoid, tall, thin, their skin greenish grey, their eyes yellow, fishlike and staring, they crawled across the floor and walls, watchful and ready.

Only Pike did not appear to react to anything that was happening. Seemingly forgotten, he simply stood to one side, not moving, not reacting, eyes drooped as if he was asleep.

Finally the dark man stopped his movement, and looked directly at Gould.

“I must have followers. Your pitiful collection will do for a start, and my children will join us in time. I must go to the lake.”

“What about Langdale and his friend?” Freeman finally managed to say.

“You will deal with them.” A sweep of his arm took in Freeman and Gould. “I will send servants to aid you.”

The two men looked unconvinced by this, but were sensible enough not to argue. Instead, Gould said, “The authorities will act eventually. We should isolate ourselves.”

“It is already done. The area is cut off from the outside world by a barrier that nobody will be able to penetrate. Now, we can allow matters to develop unfettered by interference.”

The dark man raised an arm towards Pike. His hands were unnaturally long, the fingernails sharply extended, and the gesture seemed obscenely effeminate.

“Bring him.”

At the order, two of the scurrying creatures moved to take the unresisting sergeant by the arms. They led him forward, his feet moving automatically, although he gave no other reaction.

The dark man led the way to the door, and the others followed. On the way, he knelt down beside Toanui, and gently broke his neck. He had no place in his followers for the injured.

* * *

The trees were densely packed, blocking out a lot of the light. Blake appeared to know where he was going, but Langdale wasn’t going to ask. They kept up a strong, brisk pace for at least half an hour, all of the time descending rapidly, sometimes losing their footing and scrabbling desperately, never stopping moving. Behind them, they eventually began to hear the slightest sounds of pursuit. There were human voices, shouting wordlessly. But most of the sounds were not human. Langdale tried not to think of it, concentrating instead on keeping his footing as they raced on.

The trees began to thin out, and finally ceased altogether. Before them there was a series of large open fields, fenced off. They had reached farmland. About two hundred metres away, they saw a small building. Blake indicated it wordlessly, then set off again. He vaulted the first of the fences in a single movement. Langdale, hampered by age and overcoat, took slightly longer, swearing all the way, but soon they were haring across the open ground, exposed, but moving faster than they had.

The building was a shepherd’s cottage, small but solidly constructed, the sort one could see all over the county. As they reached the door, Blake stopped and put finger to lips.

The door was slightly ajar. Blake twisted the top of his cane, then pulled, to reveal a slender sword stick. Holding it out in front of him, he gently pushed the door open.

The door opened onto a large parlour. An open fire burned in the corner, a large range beside it, and a dining table and chairs were set about the centre of the room. Lying directly in front of that table, sightless eyes staring at them, was a man in rough clothing, a shotgun clutched unfired in his left hand. Standing over him, plucking at his mangled throat, was what initially appeared to be an enormous dog, the size of a small pony. Its black matted fur teamed with tentacles, however, at least twenty, sprouting directly from its torso, and as it turned to them, its savage eyes glowed with fire.

Langdale’s hesitation in the face of this latest abomination was momentary. Blake’s was non-existent. He sprang forward, the sword skewering the creature in the side. As it howled with pain, Langdale raised his revolver and sent a shot through its head. The creature collapsed, not moving. The tentacles writhed helplessly for a few seconds more before also subsiding.

“A Shoggoth,” Blake replied to the unasked question, “Or rather a Lesser Shoggoth.”

“That makes it all right then,” Langdale muttered bitterly.

“Be grateful. If they had been able to call upon a full blown one, there’s no way we would have survived. Not a form I’ve seen before. Probably an advance scout. We can’t stay long.” Blake prodded at the lifeless tentacles with his foot, and then ran a hand across his face, stroking an imaginary beard in thought. “There’s hope yet. This suggests that they haven’t yet been able to call upon their full resources.”

Langdale finally felt able to breathe. He walked over to the dead man and prised the shotgun from his fingers. It was still loaded, and after a brief search he found a box of shells sitting on a sideboard. Pocketing them, he asked, “Is So we can kill them?”

Blake nodded, cleaning his sword on the creature’s side. “The low grade creatures, yes. They can be vulnerable.”

“And what about that…thing at the hall?”

“You can’t kill him in that form.” He shrugged. “Actually, you can’t kill him in any form. In his … human shape you could at least temporarily inconvenience him. But he would soon reform.”

Two doors led off from the room. Blake quickly searched the rest of the cottage, then appeared from what must have been a bedroom with two blankets. He wrapped the Shoggoth in one, dragging it into one of the other rooms and mercifully out of sight. More gently, he closed the dead man’s eyes, and pulled the other blanket over his face. Langdale pulled up a chair by the fire. Fatigue was finally beginning to hit him.

“What was he…it?”

Blake pulled the heavy table against the front door before moving to sit beside him. “Nyarlathotep. The Crawling Chaos. Messenger of the blind idiot god. Sent to the world to raise his followers and bring about the carnage that was prophesied.”

Langdale shook his head in weary despair. “For God’s sake. You move your mouth and words come out, but all I hear is utter gibberish.”

In answer, Blake took from his pocket the small book that they had found at Russell’s House. Langdale had forgotten that he had it. He tapped it with his cane. “This book contains all of the most secret and significant passages from the Necronomicon.”

“The what?”

“The Necronomicon is a book of ancient lore, forbidden secrets, that sort of thing. This is what you might call a condensed version.” He opened the book to a particular passage and pointed it out to Langdale. He took the book and read.

It was the time for the coming of that frightful soul and messenger of infinity’s other gods. It was said that he had risen up from the darkness of twenty-seven centuries, and had heard messages not of this realm. Into the world came Nyarlathotep, dark, slender, and sinister. He took up instruments of glass and metal and combined them into devices yet stranger. And where Nyarlathotep went, life vanished, for the hours were rent with the screams of a nightmare.

Something about the passage struck him. ‘Instruments of glass and metal’. Why did that seem familiar?

Blake was nodding to himself. “That is Nyarlathotep. One of the ancient gods, risen again to walk the world. He will go to Windermere, and he will raise Cthulhu.”

One simple question occurred. “Why?”

“That’s the worst thing of all. These creatures are the most terribly destructive things ever to walk the world. They were not meant to exist with men. But they are also not deliberately evil. Man is so infinitely far beneath their gaze that at best they are indifferent. They sweep him aside. Nyarlathotep is different. He is malevolence personified, and he delights in the carnage that he can cause.” Blake stood up and walked over to the window, peering out, scanning the landscape for signs of pursuit. “We have two chances to stop this. One, we can kill his human form. It will not destroy him completely, but it will remove him from the picture long enough to deal with other matters. The other is to close that portal.”

“The one in the lake?”

“Yes. The trouble is, I have no idea how it exists. It cannot be a natural phenomenon. It has to have come about by some other means. We have to find that, and stop it.”

Langdale came back to his earlier question. “What about Pike?”

Blake didn’t say anything for a long time. He was turned away so that Langdale could not see his expression. Finally, he turned to face him

“Pike has become their conduit to the other realms. I don’t know how. I suspect he was always sensitive to these things, like Mr Russell, and whatever happened to him in the lake opened him up. Nyarlathotep will need him to bring about the final act. If we could kill him, we might be able to stop things.”

An emphatic shake of the head. “Over my dead body.”

“If I have to.” Blake’s jaw was set. His determined expression made Langdale realise something. He pointed at the young clergyman accusingly.

“You set us up. You sent us after Gould to see what would happen.”

Blake wasn’t meeting his eye. “I do what I have to.”

“Appointed by God, no doubt,” Langdale sneered. “You bastard. Whitehead and Knowles were good men. They didn’t deserve that.”

“No, they didn’t. But they will be the first of millions if we don’t do something. So believe me, I will kill Pike, you, anybody, if I have to.” He smiled suddenly. “Probably won’t come to that. They’ll be keeping him as isolated as possible.” He clapped his hands, and changed the subject. “Food. We could do with something to eat, and this poor fellow must have had some vittles somewhere. Then we can move on.”

It didn’t take them long to find a small supply of bread, cheese and salted meats, and they ate greedily. Blake found a small bag in the bedroom and threw a few extra provisions into it. Swinging the bag over his shoulder, he walked to the door, moving the table out of the way, and pulled it open.

They had left it just slightly too late. Standing outside the cottage, about ten feet away, were Gould and Freeman. They were still clad in their ceremonial robes, which were now mud-spattered and torn. About them were the figures of three of the dog-like Shoggoths. The monstrous creatures pawed the ground, pacing behind them, clearly desperate to attack.

“You cannot defy him,” Freeman said slowly, “We have been sent to kill you.”

“So I gather,” Blake said drily. “Clearly Nyarlathotep thinks us more of a threat than I guessed.”

Gould shook his head. “You are a minor irritation. But you insulted him. You insulted me. You cannot be allowed to do that and live.”

Blake was amused. “You’ve started talking like my bishop. I don’t think you’re entirely sane anymore, doctor.”

“Why are you doing this?” Langdale asked desperately. “What the hell can you gain from ending the world?” He was playing for time. He really didn’t care why the mad were mad. But he had given them a chance to proselytize, and Freeman took it gleefully.

“Power,” he exclaimed, “I told you. You are either a Man of Power or you are nothing. He makes us what we are.”

Behind him, Blake snorted humourlessly. “Nyarlathotep draws followers to him like lice. These fools had no choice.”

Freeman was wise enough not to react to the deliberate provocation. Not so Gould. His jowled face trembled, and flushed with anger. He gestured at the two men. “Remove these insects.” The Shoggoths snarled, anticipating the kill with brutal joy, and lunged at them.

They fell back, through the doorway and into the parlour. The creatures were so large that they had to advance one at a time, and that gave them their one chance. Langdale raised the shotgun, and sent both barrels into the first one’s head, killing it instantly. There wasn’t time to reload however, and before they knew it, moving far faster than their strange bulk suggested, the other two were in and on them, one moving at each man. Behind them, Langdale could see Gould and Freeman, the doctor screaming insanely, encouraging the creatures to rip them apart.

Langdale found himself thrown onto his back, the Shoggoth ravening closer and closer to his throat. He was able to get the shotgun up and across its mouth, blocking the creature’s route to the exposed flesh. As it snarled, the gun caught between its huge teeth, he got to his feet, and backed around to the front door. There was a small stand behind the door, containing walking sticks and an ornamental old-fashioned shepherd’s crook. He grabbed at it, using its five foot length to try to hold the creature off . It fell back onto its back legs, shaking the gun free from its mouth, and paused to spring. That pause gave him his moment. As the creature leapt, mouth wide open. He held the crook out like a pike. The Shoggoth’s momentum carried it onto the crook, entering through its mouth pand enetrating deep into its throat and down into its innards. Balefully, it screamed out, then collapsed onto the stone flags, dying, blood and intestinal fluid flowing from its mouth.

Langdale slumped onto the floor, mopping his brow. Beside him, Blake had made short order of the other Shoggoth with pistol and sword stick. The two men now turned to their more human attackers. Both were now less certain, backing towards the door of the cottage, fear clear on their face. In another second, Blake and Langdale were onto them. Bereft of their suprahuman guardians, the two older men were no match for them.

As he threw punch after punch into Freeman’s face, Langdale’s one regret was that Blake had taken on Gould. The doctor had something coming from him. Still, this one would do as a substitute, and soon Freeman was on his knees, then his back as blows rained down. His face was a bleeding mess, and several of his teeth were loosened.

“Man of power, eh?” Langdale grinned. He put his revolver to the side of Freeman’s head. The man’s eyes widened in terror, and he tried to cry out, his breath gurgling in his ruined mouth. Langdale felt a dampness on his knees as the man’s bladder gave way. He pushed aside his disgust, then grabbed Freeman by the hair and banged his head against the stone floor, Freeman went suddenly limp, immediately unconscious.

Gould’s huge bulk had stood him in better stead against Blake, and he had forced him back towards the fire. In the end, however, the younger man’s speed and strength showed. He slipped around the slower doctor, seized him by the back of his head, and thrust it against the lintel. The crack was very loud, drowned out only by Gould’s screams. With one final motion, he took the doctor’s feet out from under him. Gould crashed down, and his head fell into the fire. He screamed and screamed this time, but the screams, and the insane, uncoordinated thrashing of his limbs quickly subsided.

“I think the word is efficacious,” Blake said, his eyes alight. Not even pausing for breath, he picked up swordstick and revolver and headed for the door. Langdale grabbed the shotgun from the floor, and followed. He felt in his pocket for the shells. Nestling next to the box he felt the familiar and comforting shape of a pipe. He had a brief, wistful moment, then shook his head. No time.

After the warmth of the fire and the adrenaline of the fight, the cold outside hit them like a hammer blow. Langdale found his breath catching, and he wheezed heavily as Blake set a fast pace across the fields.

“We’ve got to get to Windermere,” Blake shouted in answer to his unasked question. “Our only hope is to get there before Nyarlathotep.”

“On foot, in the dark? You have got to be joking.”

“I’m open to suggestions.”

“Find a farm. There’ll be horses, maybe even a cart. We can ride there.” I’ve never ridden a horse in my life. What the hell makes me think that I can do so now?

“We could spend hours blundering around looking for something like that. If we do, we will. Otherwise, I suggest you keep running.”

Story of my life, Langdale told himself. Steeling himself, he prepared to do as he was told. Then, a thought struck him.

“How far are we from Allerton House?”

Blake stopped moving. “Still not too far. Why?”

“Which way?”

The young churchman seemed to have an unerring sense of direction. He pointed back the way they had came, then indicated off to the left. Langdale nodded, then set off in that direction.

“What’s back at the house?” Blake shouted as he followed him.

“A chance. Only one we’ve got.” Langdale said no more. It was an uphill struggle he had against him and he was saving his breath.

* * *

Langdale and Pike Investigate, Part Two

2012-01-25T08:45:00.003Z

Langdale and Pike Investigate, Part Two

Written by Richard W. Straw

Illustrated by Andy Paciorek

It had been late afternoon by the time Langdale had left the hospital, and it was nearly six when the train lumbered slowly up towards Shap. Whitehead was sitting opposite Langdale, looking very nervous. He wasn’t sure if it was the situation, or having to take up the slack for Pike.

Shap was up a very long slope, and as the train rumbled into the small local station, and the constable flung open the carriage door, Langdale shrivelled into his overcoat in the face of a brutally cold blast of air. It was always the same. Victim, suspect, witness, why did they always have to live in these freezing hamlets that were beyond the back of beyond? He was sure they all got together regularly to decide how next to make his job as difficult as possible.

Steeling himself, he led Whitehead into the small village, and they soon found the place they were looking for. John Russell’s butcher’s shop was easy to find, located on the main street, and the house where he had lived was situated behind and above the shop. After a good deal of fiddling with skeleton keys that the constable suspiciously already had on his person, they entered the shop. Other than it being freezing, there was not a great deal to see. The shop had clearly been deserted for a few days, and what little meat there was that lay on slabs had long since been frozen into submission by the unrelenting cold. They pushed their way back into the house, and Langdale quickly turned up the gas to see into the darkness.

The house consisted of four rooms. A small, spotlessly clean kitchen, a sitting room that seemed to double up for dining, and two small bedrooms. In three of those rooms, they found nothing whatsoever. Russell had lived alone, and the house seemed to reflect that. Lounge, kitchen, bedroom, not a thing.

It was when they entered the second bedroom that things became interesting. The room was a shambles. A table beneath the window was turned over, two chairs lay on their backs, the contents of the large oak wardrobe were strewn across the floor amidst a sea of papers. As he reached down and began to gather a few of the papers, Whitehead spoke.,

“Bed’s not been touched, sir.”

He straightened up. The constable was correct. The large single bed in the middle of the room was absolutely pristine. Pillows at one end, bolster at the other, perfect smooth counterpane and sheets laid out with not a single ripple, like the sheet of ice on Windermere. He furrowed his brow, and then, on instinct, threw himself onto the bed and laid his head on the pillow.

Whitehead was staring at him as if he’d turned bright purple. Realising what he’d done, if not the reason why, he scrabbled about for an explanation.

“Just testing a theory constable,” he said hastily, “sometimes the feel of a bed can give us a clue when it was last used.”

And if you believe that, he told himself, we’ll get on very well, my lad. Now that he mentioned it, something did feel odd. There was a small lump in the mattress, just below his left shoulder blade. And his head didn’t feel quite right on the pillow either. He sat up, and reached beneath the pillow. His hand met metal, sharp metal, and he withdrew hastily. Lifting up the pillow, he found himself staring at a small butcher’s cleaver.

“Give me a hand with this, constable,” he said. A story was coming back to him, something he had once read to his daughter when she was small. Something about a princess and a pea. They stripped the bed down to the mattress, throwing the sheets and blankets on top of the rest of the mess. Langdale then scoured the area where he had felt the lump. Finally, he felt his fingers slip into a tiny gap in the mattress' surface. Peering closer, he saw that a small tear had been made in the mattress, neatly and unobtrusively, and then very carefully sewn up again. He reached into the gap, tearing the stitches, and his fingers came upon what felt like a book, stuffed across one of the springs. He pulled it out and looked at it. It was indeed a small book, the size of a church prayer book or hymnal, bound in red. The cover had been embossed with a design of a skull that appeared to be sprouting tentacles.

Tentacles again. He opened it to the first page. The book was old, and the pages creaked against his fingers. Across the yellowing title page, in what appeared to be a barely decipherable handwritten script, were the words ‘The Book of Mysteries and Divinities’.

He threw it to Whitehead. “What do you make of that, constable?”

Whitehead had a quick leaf through it. He frowned at the design on the cover. “Don’t know sir. Doesn’t look quite right to me.”

“Right?”

“You know, sir. Ungodly.” He held the book open. “It all seems to be handwritten. Something heathen-looking, if you ask me sir.”

Langdale was about to tell him that he hadn’t asked him, but then realised that this wasn’t actually the case. Shaking his head at another parochial churchman, he took the book back, and tucked it into his coat pocket, followed by the cleaver, wrapped in a pillow case.

There was nothing else to be found in there. The papers all seemed to be butcher’s business documents, bills of sale for cattle and pigs and chickens, rent notices, plus a few letters from Russell’s mother in Carlisle. Langdale was prepared to wager that the book had been what the mysterious ‘they’ had been looking for. As the evening moved on towards night, he finally gestured to Whitehead that they were done. They left the room behind them and closed the door.

It was as they were walking across the sitting room that Whitehead noticed something. He quickly walked over to the grate of the fire. It had long burned cold, and there were a few ashes and scraps of coal left. Whitehead had seen something in that mess in the grate.

“Just caught it out of the corner of my eye, sir,” he said as he turned up the gas and knelt down. Langdale nodded appreciatively. Lad would go far, if there was any justice in the world, which there invariably wasn’t.

“What is it?”

“Bit of a letter, sir. Seems someone was trying to burn it.” He handed the small lump of charred paper to his superior. Langdale squinted at it. Whitehead’s eyes were evidently better than his. Still, he did have twenty years on him. It was indeed what appeared to be the end of a letter.

“ ‘I pray God that we will meet very soon, and that He shall protect you from all that assails you’, ” he read out loud, “Then there’s a signature. C. Blake, I think. Bloody awful handwriting.” The piece of paper started to flake away in his hand, and he dropped it back into the grate. “Mean anything to you, constable?”

“Well, there is Mr Blake, sir.”

“Mr Blake?”

“Reverend Clovis Blake. Local vicar, sir. At St Petra’s in Penrith. Me and my mother, we’re always there of a Sunday, sir. Good vicar he is, too, if a bit young, sir. Very compelling sermons. Keeps you awake on a Sunday morning, does Mr Blake.”

Despite himself, he smiled. It was as if Pike had never gone away, Even if Whitehead’s opinion of the vicar differed. Still, Clovis Blake? What sort of a name was that? He put the question to one side for now. This was it, the connection he needed. Why would a reclusive butcher from Shap go all the way to Penrith to be killed in a back street? To see this Blake, this impressive reverend.

Of course, that didn’t answer the next question. Why go to see Blake? What use was a vicar if you were under threat, even a persuasive one who was good with a sermon? Spiritual succour? He dismissed the idea almost immediately, but then thought again. Langdale had never been a religious man. The last time he had been to a church service had been for his daughter’s christening. He had too much real-world terror to deal with without looking for devils and demons beyond this life. Such things would take care of themselves in time. But other people, they could and would believe in such nonsense. But if that, why Blake? Why not the local vicar? And given that Russell had clearly been under threat from something very corporeal and real, otherwise why would he sleep with a meat cleaver under his pillow, Langdale came back to the original question. Why a vicar? Why not the police?

He realised that Whitehead was looking at him, waiting. He took a deep, clearing breath, and put a hand on his shoulder.

“Good work, constable,” he said. Whitehead smiled, but it was not a particularly happy smile. There was something he had seen here that had troubled him.

The last train left Shap at ten o’clock, and soon both inspector and constable were headed back to Windermere. Their route was an indirect one, but the journey back seemed shorter, possibly, Langdale told himself, because it was all downhill. The light in the carriage stubbornly refused to work, so Langdale gave up trying to look at the book, and simply sat there thinking. The book – he felt somehow that it was important. So important that Russell didn’t dare carry it on his person to be found, but also took bizarre lengths to hide it from some unknown enemy. But if the book was dangerous, if – to Russell at least – it foreboded some sense of the supernatural and profane, then why not destroy it? Was he too scared even to do that?

The search had given some answers, true, but to a hard headed man, such as Langdale professed himself to be, the answers did not lead down a path of rational, sane thought. At times like this, he needed the simple, steadfast ability to believe that he saw in Pike and Whitehead. Trying to deal with the case of a man who feared for his soul was beyond him.

He looked across at the constable. He was clearly not happy. He sat, looking out of the window at the stars in the dark, clear sky. Every so often, the moonlight would illuminate a troubled expression. He said nothing, and Langdale did not attempt to interrupt his ruminations.

When they finally made it back to the station at Windermere, it was nearly midnight. Henderson reported that Pike was still in the hospital, asleep. Knowles was still with him, steadfastly keeping vigil as ordered. There wasn’t a great deal more to do for the moment, so Langdale set up camp in a small office in the station. He settled himself in the least uncomfortable chair, set his feet on a small table, and tried to sleep. Sleep was, however, elusive. He still had too many questions, too many issues to rattle around his brainpan. Finally, he gave up. He turned up the gas, took the book from his coat pocket, and tried to read it.

The book was delicate, revealing its age, and he turned the pages with an almost reverential care. There was no narrative. It seemed to be a list of things, all of it in that near-illegible handwriting. Much of it was terribly random, talk of robes to wear for ceremonies that were detailed elsewhere. There was a lot about rites to unspeakable things, sacrifices and knowledge that was not meant to be known. More than once, he found himself laughing aloud at pronouncements that were clearly meant to be meaningful but simply sounded absurd. Some of it wasn’t even in English. The alphabet was English, yes, but the language was a jumble of random letters. His schoolboy French could make nothing of it, nor, he was certain, was it German, Dutch, Italian or Spanish. Possibly Eastern European? The words had a tendency towards consonants that rendered them more or less unreadable. Some of them were names, to judge by the capital letters, but what they meant was another matter altogether.

Only one word stood out. Time and again, in passages in both English and that other language, it leaped from the page, meaningless at the moment but clearly significant.

Necronomicon.

But even the tingle of unease that the word induced could not fight against the fact that it had been a very long day. It was two o’clock, and his eyes were burning with tiredness from trying to squint against the writing and the light. He found his chin drooping onto his chest, and slumber taking him. The book slipped from his fingers, and even the sharp slap of its collision with the linoleum was no enough to awaken him from his slumbers.

His dreams were not good. Every so often, Pike would wander across his field of vision, looking vague and lost and heartbreakingly innocent. There was also a tentacled skull, similar to that on the cover of the book. Otherwise, it seemed to be a procession of terrifying figures of authority. His father, various teachers of differing levels of brutality, Chief Superintendant Briggsby, and more often than he cared to see, his wife, Elizabeth, looking less angry with him than sad, which was always the worst.

There was no cup of tea for him when he woke, cold and uncomfortable, at a little past seven o’clock. There was only the concerned face of Henderson, and the news that Knowles had been assaulted, and Pike had disappeared.

* * *

When Langdale arrived at the Cottage Hospital less than half an hour later, he found Sergeant Knowles sitting in a chair beside the bed that Pike had previously occupied. The sergeant clutched a large steak to the black eye that was rapidly swelling up.

“Dunno what it was, sir,” he said, “One minute he was in his bed, the next he’s standing up and talking.”

“Talking?”

“Well, mumbling, to be honest, sir. Couldn’t make much of it. Anyway, I ask him what the problem is, then I reach out, just to help him back to bed, sir, and that was when he lamped me.”

“Just like that?”

“Yes, sir. Just swung a punch at me. He’s got a hell of a right hook, sir. Put me down like a sick heifer. Next thing I know, it’s a couple of hours later, and the sergeant’s gone. ‘Course, I got the message to you straight away, sir.”

Langdale sighed heavily. That early in the morning, there had been very few people in the hospital, and nobody had witnessed a pyjama’d figure staggering away into the night. He’d send Whitehead out to try and find witnesses in the surrounding streets, but somehow he doubted that he’d get anything positive back. Where would he go? Back to Penrith? Just wander? It was nearly impossible to put together any coherent picture when it wasn’t even clear if Pike had been in his right mind.

Knowles was looking pathetically unhappy. “I’m sorry, sir.”

“It’s not your fault, Knowles.” So now he was reduced to comforting sad sergeants. Tremendous. “But we’ll get a search on straight away. Get out there and find Whitehead, then the pair of you go and talk to Henderson.”

Knowles nodded and stood up, grateful for the chance to do something. “What about you sir?”

That was a point. What was he going to do? Help with the search himself? Wander the streets looking for a missing sergeant? Or follow up the only lead he had?

The question more or less answered itself. Solve the mystery, find Pike, he was sure of it.

“I’m going back to your home beat, sergeant,” he said, “to talk to your local vicar.”

* * *

Thanks to the ever-present efficiency of the Lancaster and Carlisle Railway, it wasn’t long before Langdale found himself back in Penrith. As he trudged towards the Church of St Petra , Langdale thought to himself, well, finally on your own. Bereft even of the substitute presence of Constable Whitehead, it felt very odd to be striking out alone. He missed Pike’s simple certainties, and he had to admit, there were elements of this case that were beginning to challenge even his hard-headed belief in a rational, normal world. Langdale didn’t believe in anything beyond what he could see in front of him. To him, if a man was found down a dark alley with a caved in skull, then the likely solution lay in a whack on the noggin with a big stick simply because someone hadn’t liked his face. This case went down the road of beliefs, of churches and forces and powers. Such things just didn’t exist in his world. The problem was, even if he refused to believe in these things, the fact remained that others did, and it seemed more than likely that they were acting on those beliefs.

The Church of St Petra was an early Victorian building, dark stoned and as cold as the day. He found the main doors closed, and glared at them. They seemed to glare back at him, and remained barred, so he tried two other doors around the side, with equally unhelpful result. There was no reply at the church hall, nor again at the vicarage. He banged his feet against the vicarage door step in disgust. For all the fact that he seemed to be a popular vicar, the Reverend Mr Blake was clearly not much of a sociable man.

Man after my own heart, he thought, only you don’t really get that privilege if you take the cloth. He stood swinging his arms against the cold, trying to clear his thoughts. If I were a vicar, where would I spend my days? Pub, most likely.

It was at this point that he realised something. The vicarage ran along the back a row of houses that was one street away from Lowther Street, the scene of the original murder that had dragged him into this mess. A connection? It would have been an astonishing coincidence otherwise. Having little else to do at the moment, he retraced his way to Lowther Street and the scene of the crime.

There had been little change there. The puddle had defrosted, and the colour of blood had faded, diluted into the grubby water, but the passage of a couple of days had done little else. It was still ultimately just a large puddle of water. Nothing to see here, move along –

He stopped. Why did he feel he was being watched? Nobody about, as far as he could tell. Suspicion seemed to be taking over, paranoia becoming his watchword. This case was clouding his brain, allowing his basic natural caution to turn into full-blown craziness. He shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts, then knelt.

He really hadn’t been sure what he was going to see. What he wasn’t expecting was for a tentacle to explode impossibly out from the water, reaching up fifteen feet into the air. It just hung there, waving back and forth, blindly probing the air. Scrabbling back, he jumped to his feet and tried to take in what he was seeing. His brain was desperately pawing at a rational explanation, whilst his eyes absolutely refused to come to that conclusion. A vast green tentacle, like that of an octopus, with suppurating suckers down its inner length, had just emerged from a pool of water that wouldn’t be enough to sustain a goldfish.

So that’s it, he told himself. That’s the mystery solved. A huge tentacle emerged from this small puddle of water and tore John Russell open. Probably because he was going to see a vicar about something. Right. Try putting that in a report to the superintendant, and he’d be out on his arse in ten seconds flat.

He had stood still for just slightly too long. The tentacle stopped moving, then flew at him, grabbing at him, wrapping about his torso and lifting him off his feet. The breath was torn from him as he felt it squeeze about his body. He flailed at the heavy, wet flesh, even as it tightened its grip on him. Only one arm was now free, and he desperately scrabbled in his coat for the one thing that might help. Finally, his fingers worked through layers of cloth and touched upon the wooden handle of John Russell’s butcher’s cleaver.

By now, he could feel the suckers starting to tear at the material of his thick overcoat. He could see the face of Russell, marked and torn, and the terror that induced gave him new strength. He swung the cleaver against the tentacle, hacking repeatedly at it. Finally, it lodged in the flesh, tearing it from his grip. The tentacle screamed out with pain

It screamed.

He found himself flung free for a moment as the tentacle thrashed about, but the respite was brief. As he tried to get to his feet, it lashed out again, the tip catching him a slight blow across the forehead. Briefly stunned, he fell, and the tentacle wrapped about his legs and pulled. It was pulling him towards the water. His arms were now free, and he flailed desperately at the ground, trying to find purchase on the wet cobbles. No good. Nothing could stop it –

Two gunshots. The sound of metal swishing through the air. Another scream, inhuman and terrible. The pressure eased on his legs, and he felt arms pass under his, dragging him up and away. Dazedly, barely able to focus, he looked back. The tentacle was waving frantically now, pumping black, ichorous blood from a huge wound. It seemed to go limp then suddenly, almost sulkily, it withdrew its entire length back into the water and disappeared.

Even in his disorientated state, he knew it didn’t make sense, but he was not going to argue on this occasion. His rescuer pulled him along the streets to a building and then through a door, and he felt himself being dumped in a blessedly soft, comfortable chair. He felt the heat of a fire on his face and hands, and his entire body slumped, unable to cope. For what seemed like a long time, he just sat there, eyes closed, breathing heavily. Finally, he opened his eyes. On a table beside him were a revolver and a long, wide-bladed scimitar. And standing next to the fire, looking at him with an expression that was half-concerned, half-smiling, was a man. He was young, maybe his early thirties, with clear, good looks, and almost nordically blonde hair, dressed in a cream linen suit and a black shirt. A dog collar completed the effect.

“Hello,” the man said in clear, unaccented tones, “my name is Clovis Blake. I understand that you’ve been looking for me.”

For a long time, he wasn’t able to reply. His rescuer continued to stand, smiling slightly, giving him the time to think.

“Your parents must have had a devil of a sense of humour,” was all that he could manage.

Blake laughed at that. The sound was so clear and pure that it seemed out of place in the context of the last few days. “My parents were unconventional believers. Clovis was the first Christian king of Dark Age Europe. I was raised in a certain faith. And part of that faith is rather direct … intervention.”

“I’m very grateful for your … intervention. Where are we, by the way?”

“In the vicarage.” Blake held out a cup, which Langdale took gratefully. It was hot, sweet tea, and it tasted better than anything he could have imagined. He drained it quickly, then said, “Who are you?”

Blake took the cup and refilled it from a delicate china teapot before adding milk and sugar lumps. He stirred languidly. “Just a vicar.”

Langdale indicated the sword and revolver. “Onward Christian soldiers?”

“Something like that.” He handed the cup over. “You’ve been looking for me,” he repeated.

The first trace of a smile returned to the inspector’s face. “In connection with murder by person or persons unknown. But I suspect that you knew that anyway.”

Blake inclined his head very slightly. “Mostly. But there are a few details that might help.” He went over to the table and hefted the gun in his hand. “I carry these around as my own life is now under threat as a result of what I have seen and heard. There are things at work in this town and elsewhere that are beyond the normal order of creation.” Langdale opened his mouth in protest, but Blake shook his head. “You know I’m telling the truth. I’ve been keeping an eye on you ever since you came here. The thing that attacked you, the thing that killed poor John Russell, whatever fate has befallen your sergeant, it is all connected. You know that.”

Langdale sat back, accepting the impossible for now. “Pray tell,” he said quietly.

Blake pulled another chair up beside his own, and then sat down, staring into Langdale’s face. “John Russell came to me Just over a week ago, seeking – well, I suppose you might call it spiritual solace. He had become involved in something that threatened his soul.” Langdale snorted, but he held up his hand and shook his head.

“I mean the phrase quite literally,” he went on. “What you need to realise, inspector, is that the world we live in is not quite as it seems.” He held up the revolver again. “You perceive this gun as being real and solid, because you can see it and touch it. That is the first level of reality. But there is something far beyond your ordinary perceptions. The real world is something quite unknowable to ordinary human senses.”

“You’ll pardon my saying this, Mr Blake, but I would expect you to say something like that. Surely that’s part of being a priest.”

“Of course. But the conventional wisdom of Christian philosophy is merely one part of the reality I’m talking about. There are many others, realities that we cannot normally see, worlds where creatures exist that are simply not anything you or I could understand. Occasionally, those worlds touch. People see the things that lurk beyond, and one of two things occurs. They either go mad, as they cannot cope with what they have seen, or they quest to return to that reality, or, more accurately, to bring it to us. But this world was not meant to touch these things. They are simply too powerful, too much for mortal men to perceive. That is why our brains reject these things. These things that have lurked in the corner of the eyes for millennia. But there are men at work who wish to bring them forth. Men of power.”

He sat up at those familiar words. “I’ve heard that phrase before.”

“I know. From Mr Mordecai Freeman.” How the hell did he know that? “I have long suspected him. You must understand that these men are very dangerous. By men of power, I don’t mean politics or money, or anything basely human. I mean an ability to tap into the raw stuff of the universe, to draw forth the things that hide behind the veil.”

“And you’re telling me that John Russell was one of these … men? He was a butcher, for Christ’s sake.”

Blake ignored the blasphemy and nodded. “Nothing to do with his status. He had an ability to perceive things that was useful to them. I don’t know how they found him, but he offered them a way to contact the other world. But once he was part of it, once he saw what they intended to do, he ran from them, and found me. I was trying to help him, but I believe that they tracked him down and unleashed one of their things upon him. These creatures have an affinity for water. The doors that lead to their world can be accessed by the slightest of means. You’ve seen that yourself.”

Langdale rubbed his eyes. He was feeling every single one of his forty eight years. “Let us assume for just a moment that I believe any of this and don’t refer you to the sanatorium. Why would he come to you?”

“I am not a … conventional vicar. I have made the knowledge of these matters my speciality for the last few years. And word gets around. Even to Shap” His head dropped suddenly, his expression darkening. “For all the good it did him. I failed.”

How could you comfort someone when you were talking about things like this? “If what you’re saying is true, then how could you succeed? Fighting … powers like this.”

“Perhaps.” Blake stood suddenly, and paced in front of the fire. There was a sudden gleam in his eyes, a fervour that was unsettling. “I am not a local man. I came here because there have long been rumours about the Lake District. Long ago, many of the creatures we talk about roamed the World. They don’t appear in the fossil records, but the slightest reading of the Bible makes it clear. Ever read Ezekiel?” When Langdale didn’t reply, he shrugged. “They didn’t die. They simply retreated to the dark places. The lakes, the seas, everything that is deep and lost.” He stopped suddenly. “Something has opened in Windermere. A door to the other world. Through that door, there is something that is blindly probing, seeking a way to our reality.”

“The thing that killed the children.”

“Of course. I believe that these men of power want to raise it, let it free on the face of the earth. If they do, it will be the time of chaos. Everything will end. A revelation,” he added softly to himself.

“So what can we do?” Langdale could feel every certainty slipping suddenly away from him. That suddenness would not allow him to do anything other than react to Blake’s words.

“You were correct. In ordinary ways, we can’t fight them,” Blake said, “They are simply beyond any human weapons. But we can do something about their human followers. They are the conduit. Remove them, and we might prevent these creatures having access to our world.

“And by the way,” he said suddenly, “I believe that you have a book that might be of interest.”

Langdale shouldn’t have been surprised. This unassuming young man had been ahead of him at every turn so far. He reached into his coat and extracted the small read volume. Blake took it from him and sat down again. Leafing through it, his expression was a mixture of revulsion and satisfaction.

“I thought as much.” He gestured to Langdale, who moved over to his chair. Blake pointed to one word in the book. Cthulhu. To the inspector, this was merely a jumble of random letters. To Blake, clearly it was everything,

“The name of the beast,” Blake said, arching an eyebrow in a way that Langdale assumed was meant to be significant. “That is the thing these people serve. This book is a repository of hidden knowledge, of ritual and superstition, all of the things that are needed to draw the hidden world into view. Russell said that he had something like this, and he promised to let me see it. But they got to him first.”

“What’s the language?” Langdale asked, “I’m damned if I can make it out.”

“I’m not sure. It may be one of the more obscure Polynesian dialects. There are many connections between the people of the South Seas and these matters.” He had reached the end of the book, and began to examine the lining. Pushing a fingernail under the end piece, he pushed gently, and it came away, revealing a hidden page. “Take a look here.”

The writing on the page was in a different hand to all of the others, clearly more recent, and clearly meant to be hidden away. Blake was nodding as he read. “I guess that this was what Mr Russell wanted me to see.”

A list of names. One or two Langdale knew, including Freeman, but most were a mystery to him.

“Men of power,” Blake said, “I know a lot of these people. Prominent men around the whole of the Lake District.”

The inspector noticed at one name in particular, and his heart sank. “Gould. I know him, he’s the police doctor. I spoke to him not two days ago. He did the examination on Russell, for God’s sake.”

“Don’t be too surprised. Until such time as they are called upon to act, these men live normal lives. They carry on as they have always done. Pillars of the community, respected figures.” Langdale stood up angrily and walked to the door. “Where are you going?”

“To see Gould,” he said, “I’m going to beat the hell out of the bastard until he tells me where to find my sergeant.”

“I really couldn’t advise it,” Blake said. He held up his hand to forestall any argument. “By all means, talk to this doctor. But do not say anything directly. Up until now, they believe that you have been no danger. You have blundered about, a million miles from the truth. Do something precipitant now, and they will kill you. They have held back because they did not want to draw attention to themselves. They took action over Russell because he was going to talk to me. Killing an obscure village butcher is one thing. A police inspector is quite another. But they will do it if you push them too far. Please. Trust me.”

Langdale’s fists clenched and unclenched for half a minute. Then he nodded. “I’m still going to see the bastard.”

“I know. But please, try your best to be subtle.” The vicar stood up himself, and picked up his gun, pocketing it. “I have been here too long. I must move on, but I shall be nearby if you need me.”

The words, vague as they were, were rather reassuring. Langdale nodded again, and reached for the door handle. He paused briefly.

“All you’ve told me,” he asked, “Where does God fit into this?”

He had expected the question to throw Blake, but he was disappointed. The young man simply offered him that gently infuriating smile. “These things are far beyond human understanding. And God is far beyond the understanding of these things. Faith can cope.”

* * *

The cold outside was a bracing dose of reality after what he had heard. Langdale strode briskly to the police station, giving puddles a wide berth, drawing on a cigarette that failed utterly to relax him.

My name is Andrew Frederick Langdale, he told himself. I was born in my parents’ house in Brampton. I joined the police at seventeen, and have now served for thirty-one years. I gave up on God after I saw my first murder victim, a drunk in a Carlisle back street with a slit throat. I believe in humans and their actions, in lust, greed and stupidity as the great motivators in the world.

It was no good. Try as he might, he believed what he had been told. There was simply no way to explain that tentacle. How he would deal with it all was, however, a very different matter.

Back at the station, he found Knowles and Whitehead waiting for him in the small back office. They were munching down on a lunch of bacon butties and swigs of the station’s repulsive tea. The search for Pike was still ongoing, and they had come back to Penrith on the basis of a confused idea that he might have headed back here. Langdale was glad to see them both. His generally poor opinion of the local Cumbria and Westmoreland Constabulary was being rapidly revised in the face of their solid reliability.

“What now, sir?” Knowles asked through a mouthful of bread and bacon.

“To see Doctor Gould. All three of us.” He didn’t mention the morning’s adventures, nor the astonishing conversation with the local vicar. He wasn’t sure they could have taken it. But he was quietly determined now. Gould had been laughing at them all of this time, and he was going to stop up that laughter. “One question, sergeant. Do we have any weapons in the station?”

If the sergeant was surprised by the question, it did not show in his reaction. “Unofficially, sir.” He went over to a small cabinet, unlocked it and passed out three revolvers. One looked like an ex-service weapon, and Langdale weighed it experimentally in his hand. He’d never fired a gun in his life, but he feared that a first time was fast approaching. Pocketing the gun in his heavy overcoat, along with a small box of bullets, he nodded to the other two men.

“Gould is involved in this up to his fat bastard eyebrows. We are going to be subtle, but we are going to find out how and why.”

They didn’t argue, they just nodded. Langdale smiled. Finally, he felt he was getting somewhere.

Following a short train ride to Keswick, the three men commandeered a small pony and trap, taking the small drive up the hills outside the town to Allerton House.

‘House’ was a ridiculous misnomer. Allerton House was a small mansion, an enormous edifice of Tudor beams and heavy stone, looming up at them at the end of a long driveway and large garden grounds. It was, Langdale had to admit, quite superb, and not for the first time, he wondered just why he had decided to pursue a career in the force, if this was what prodding about with a scalpel and prescribing tonics could get you.

Envy, the beginning of most of the trouble in the world. He suppressed the feelings, and bounded confidently up the large sandstone doorsteps. He seized the bell rope and gave it a hefty pull, then instinctively took a couple of steps back.

The three men stood waiting, hands deep in pockets, desperately trying to pretend that they weren’t feeling the freezing wind that cruelly drifted across them from the hills. An answer was a long time coming, and Langdale had decided that someone was being deliberately sadistic when the door finally cracked open and a face peered out at them.

“May I help you?”

Neither the face nor the voice were English. Not even European. The shape of the head was squared off, the nose broad, and the skin a healthily tanned light brown.

“We’re here to see Gould.” He wasn’t in a mood to be respectful.

“Doctor Gould is busy. He is not seeing visitors.” The words were perfectly pronounced, but the enunciation was over precise, the sign of someone not raised to speak English.

“We are not visitors. Tell him that Inspector Langdale needs to talk to him.”

“I shall convey the message.”

The door closed again abruptly, and it was then that he realised what the face reminded him of. It had looked like the pictures of Maoris and South Sea Islanders that he remembered seeing in a book about Captain Cook many years ago. That rang another bell. Annoyingly, he couldn’t quite make the connection.

“Not very friendly, sir.” Whitehead seemed offended.

“Upper classes rarely are, constable. I’d be amazed if we don’t get shown to the tradesman’s entrance.”

After another bitterly cold wait, the door finally reopened, this time a little wider. It was the same man, revealed as a huge, bulky figure, in butler’s livery that looked incongruous on his vast form.

“The doctor will consent to see you now.”

That was it. No apology, no frills or fancies. Langdale bit back what he really wanted to say, and merely gave a quick nod. He indicated to his two colleagues to follow him into the house.

The butler led the way across an opulent looking red-carpeted reception room, to a large set of oak double doors. Pushing his way through them, the three men entered a huge hall.

The butler gave a short bow. “If you would just wait here, please, the doctor will be with you presently.” He disappeared to a small door at the bottom of the hall, leaving them to wonder at the enormous room. To Langdale, it was almost like being thrown back nearly forty years. The room – he supposed it was a dining room, although the term seemed ridiculous – was like the old assembly hall at school, large and oak panelled. There was even a small raised stage area at the far end. A minstrel gallery above their heads was reached via a small spiral staircase. The walls were adorned with paintings, some portraits, mostly pictures of ships at sea. A hugely impressive picture of a sailing ship being menaced by a very large whale dominated the far wall.

All around the room were glass cabinets, filled with ornaments. Langdale signalled to the other two men to examine them, then walked over to one of them himself. The ornaments were a strange collection. A lot of them seemed to be little more than stones, with strange scratchings. There were pieces of sea-blasted masonry, mangled bits of metal and one or two things that seemed vaguely Egyptian, for what little he knew about such things. One item in particular caught his eye. It was a large flat stone, inscribed with strange symbols, some sort of alphabet he didn’t recognise. And in the centre was the image of a tentacled skull.

He spent a long time looking at the stone, and as he heard the slow, measured tread of footsteps behind him, deliberately chose not to turn around.

“Polynesian,” said a voice in a Yorkshire accent. “I served as sawbones on a whaling ship many years ago. I brought an awful lot of things back from the South Seas.”

Langdale turned slowly. Gould was standing behind him, in shirtsleeves and apron, face flushed, smiling that same smug smile. He stank of antiseptic, and as Langdale shook his proffered hand, it felt wet and cold.

“Some interesting designs,” he said neutrally. Gould nodded.

“The cultures have fascinating ideas about the world. They understand things in a way that we can only dream of.” He indicated the butler, who was standing a few feet away, hands folded behind his back, expression blank. “Toanui here was another of my … acquisitions. Splendid fellow. Terribly loyal, and very strong.” There was the merest hint of threat in the words. “But you didn’t come here to talk about the whims and fancies of my past. How can I help you? Another autopsy?”

It was at that point that Langdale realised that he had absolutely no idea what he was going to say. There was subtle, and then there was complete and total blank idiocy. Briefly, he floundered.

“One or two things, doctor,” he finally managed to improvise. “There’s a couple of points in our investigation that need clarifying.”

“Professionally?” Gould’s smile never wavered. Buggeration, he wanted to knock that fat nose in. He could see Knowles and Whitehead watching them, and he gestured for them to stay where they were.

“Largely, doctor. I assume you have heard about the … incidents on Windermere?”

“Yes. Sounds like a lot of nonsense. Tentacles in the lake? Ridiculous.”

“Still, with what you said the other day, I do wonder…”

Gould cut him off. “Extremely idle speculation, inspector. As I recall, I talked about a man being murdered by an octopus on dry land.” He spread his fat hands in a gesture of resigned amusement. “When one comes across odd symptoms in a death, one is often inclined to think aloud. I do hope that you haven’t been taking one or two of my silly words literally.”

“Could Mr Russell have been killed in the lake and taken to Penrith?”

Was there a flicker of recognition when he had motioned the name? He couldn’t be sure. But Gould’s smile was now openly mocking. “For what reason, inspector? And it’s very unlikely anyway. The amount of blood that was at the scene, he was definitely killed there.”

I know that, Langdale told himself, trying to forestall the irritation he felt at the doctor’s tone of voice. He felt like he was being lectured. He confined himself to one of his best non-committal grunts, and added, “Every avenue needs to be examined, doctor. I just needed to be sure.”

“Really.” The tone indicated that Gould didn’t believe a word of it. “I was under the impression that your investigation was floundering, inspector. I keep abreast of local issues, and what I have heard has not impressed me.” Now the doctor’s expression was clearly hard, the tone openly unpleasant. “Is it not the case that you have managed to incur the wrath of the Chairman of the Board of Commerce with an ill-advised excursion on the lake? And that you are actually no closer to finding the killer? And that Scotland Yard are being called in to replace you?” When Langdale didn’t answer, he went on, “And haven’t you even managed to lose your sergeant?”

“Temporarily misplace,” Langdale muttered with wounded dignity. Gould waved his hand in dismissal.

“Your entire investigation has been little short of a disaster, Inspector Langdale.” He laid an offensive emphasis on the last two words. “And therefore I haven’t the first idea why you came to me. Clutching at straws, perhaps?”

Langdale was angry now, and he spoke without thinking. “More a question of your connection to matters, sir.”

He regretted the words as soon as they had been said. Gould knew he had won, and the smile returned. “I do hope that wasn’t some sort of accusation, inspector.”

Now what? “No, doctor. Just…silly words. One is often inclined to think aloud.”

Throwing Gould’s words back at him had no effect. “Good.” The doctor turned away dismissively. “You know where the door is, Inspector.”

* * *

Langdale and Pike Investigate, Part one

2012-01-25T08:40:00.002Z

Langdale and Pike Investigate

Written by Richard W. Straw

Illustrated by Andy Paciorek

They found the body a little after nine o’clock on the evening of November 17^th, in the year of our Lord 1904. A young couple, walking home from an evening out, hurrying to escape the cold, took the short cut along the back of Lowther Street. And so they came across the body, lying in a puddle of gradually freezing water and blood.

They had to call in the big boys for this one. Murder was unheard of in Penrith. Violence was rare, save the occasional bruise-up outside the Druids’ Arms when spirits were both flowing and high. The local police station was not equipped for such things. Constable Whitehead, junior at the office by virtue of being the most recent recruit, had been sent careering off on the road to Kendal on the station bicycle, and from there, a telephone call had gone to Carlisle.

By the time the message got to Detective Inspector Langdale, via a healthy knock on the door from Sergeant Pike, it was well past midnight. Langdale was trying against all the odds to get a decent night’s sleep, his first for a long time. Cursing the world and all its iniquities, he stumbled to the front door, swaddled in blankets and sheets. The sight of Pike, big, bluff, enthusiastic, was almost enough to make him slam it shut without a word, but duty overrode annoyance just enough to restrain him. He stared at the sergeant questioningly.

“Bad one, sir,” Pike said. That was enough for Langdale. “Body, very messed up, Penrith.”

Langdale suppressed a groan of despair. Thirty-one years in the force, and still these cases seemed to find him. Another long, cold journey to look at a corpse. Wonderful fun for a November weekend. He ushered Pike into the sitting room. The fire had long since died, and the room was morgue-like in its frigidity, but this didn’t seem to bother the sergeant, who perched himself on the chaise-longue, bowler on knee, smiling stupidly, whilst Langdale swore his way back to the bedroom, and attempted, with only moderate success, to get dressed in the dark and without unwinding himself too much from his sheltering cocoon of warm bedclothes. Ten minutes later, they were in a police trap, heading for Penrith. It was about then that Langdale noticed that his boots were on the wrong feet.

They drew up to the police station at Penrith at about half past three. Langdale had attempted to sleep on the journey, but the bumps and bangs of the roads had made it impossible, so he had been reduced to huddling down into his overcoat and glaring jealously at Pike as he gently snored in the seat opposite, head buried beneath scarf and hat. There was no morgue, so a makeshift facility had been put together in one of the larger cells beneath the station. It was freezing down there, somehow even colder than in the open air. They were awaiting the county pathologist, but the messenger who had been despatched to Hamilton Gould’s house in Keswick had been told in no uncertain terms that he would not be rising before eight o’clock, and the dead could certainly be left in these temperatures. So for the moment, there seemed little to do. Langdale had sent Pike to the George Hotel to try to rustle up a couple of rooms, but the landlord was clearly more obstinate than the inspector, and no amount of banging on the door would rouse him at this time in the morning. An offer from Knowles, the local Sergeant in charge, to go and see the site where the body was found was met simply with an Anglo Saxon epithet. Langdale was sure Doctor Gould was correct. The body and the murder site could wait. He just wanted to sleep. Was that too much to ask?

* * *

He and Pike spent the rest of the night on opposite benches in one of the empty cells, being gently serenaded by the drunken snores of one of their neighbours. He supposed he must eventually have fallen into slumber, as he was conscious of being woken by Pike just after nine o’clock, and a large mug of rather stale-smelling tea being thrust under his nose.

“Doctor’s here,” Pike said, with loathsome chirpiness, “Thought you might like a cup of tea, sir.”

There was no other breakfast forthcoming, so he sipped gingerly at the tea, trying not to gag on the foul taste, and wandered to the makeshift pathology lab. He had barely got his nose around the door before Gould barked at him to “Leave me alone for at least an hour!” He beat hasty retreat and decided that the murder site might be a better bet.

It was a short walk to the murder site. There was a huddled hush across the town, people scurrying about in the frozen morning air, not looking at each other. Langdale wondered if the word was out already. He supposed police activity in a small town like Penrith was limited, and people would have noticed the new arrivals pretty quickly.

About halfway down a cobbled back street, Constable Whitehead was standing, looking even more miserable and uncomfortable than Langdale felt. A makeshift cover of police capes draped over small chairs had been assembled. It looked fairly ludicrous, but as Pike and the constable moved the chairs, Langdale caught his breath. The puddle was very large, at least eight feet across in all directions, and covering the cobbles completely. It was now totally frozen over, a dark morass of crimson and grey.

Langdale knelt down beside it. “Is there this much blood in the human body?”

Knowles stood over him. “Most of it’s not his, sir,” he said. “He was found in a huge puddle of water. He mixed the blood in himself, if you take me sir.”

Pike was wandering up and down the street, looking closely at walls, trying doors. He looked back at Langdale and shook his head. Nothing interesting there, then. He sighed and stood up.

“Anything else significant?”

“Pose of the dead man sir. He was lying straight on his back, arms stretched straight out to both sides. Bit like our Lord and Saviour on the cross, you might say, sir.”

Despite himself, the inspector smiled at the image. “Religious man, sergeant?”

“Not really, sir. Christmas and Christenings only, I suppose. Not much worth believing in, these days.”

“Probably not.”

“And one other thing sir. There were…marks on his face and neck.”

“Marks?”

Knowles hesitated, and Langdale looked at him. The sergeant was a big man, in his forties, probably a veteran of the force. And he was really scared. “I think it’s better if the doctor talks to you about that, sir”

Pike had come back over after his fruitless search. By now, Langdale was swearing again. There was no breeze, but try as he might, he couldn’t get his pipe to light. A succession of matches was thrown over his shoulder in despair. “Who was it who found him?”

Pike drew forth his notebook. “Local couple sir. Ellis and Alice Ellen.”

Langdale grunted. He put his matches back in his pocket. “Try saying that when you’re three sheets.”

“Nothing much to say about them, really. He’s a stockbroker’s clerk, she doesn’t work. Seems his parents were looking after the children, they went out for the first time in six months.”

“They were coming home,” Knowles added, “this is a pretty popular shortcut for the houses on the far side of the town. As far as I can tell, they aren’t any bother. Certainly not under suspicion.”

“Still, wouldn’t hurt to get a statement. Pike, get onto it, would you?” He indicated the constable, who was rapidly turning blue. “Take this fellow with you too.”

As Pike strode off, the Constable Whitehead hurrying to keep pace, Langdale ruminated on his unlit pipe. Knowles walked over to him. The big sergeant was clearly worried.

“This is a decent town, inspector,” he said quietly. “We rarely have any real bother around here. Hasn’t been a murder in over a hundred years. Word of this spreads, and people will panic.”

Langdale nodded. He took of his hat, and ran his hand through his thinning dark hair. It was a gesture he often made in times of perplexity. Then a cold breeze drifted over his head, and he hastily replaced the hat and decided to stroke his beard instead. “Worse than that, if I can’t sort this out, London will get involved. We’ll get some flash sod from Scotland Yard. Or even – “he shuddered “- a private detective. One way or another, sergeant, we need to solve this one quickly.”

* * *

When they got back to the station, they found Gould sitting beside the corpse. In one hand, he held a small silver hip flask, which Langdale eyed jealously. In the other, he was holding a glass specimen jar up to the light. Something that looked like it belonged on a butcher’s slab floated in formaldehyde. Langdale felt like whimpering as Gould dipped his finger into the liquid and then tasted it slightly.

“Devil of a mess, Langdale, devil of a mess,” he said, his rich Yorkshire accent echoing around the icy room. He pulled back the sheet from the corpse’s face. Langdale winced. The man looked normal enough – a man of thirty to forty, white, blonde, nothing much to look at ordinarily – except that his face was covered in torn, bloodied marks. They were circular, and slightly puckered. They reminded him of something, but he couldn’t quite place it. He needed his pipe to think, and he scrabbled around in his pockets to find it.

Gould indicated something further. The marks continued around the neck, winding in a pattern all about the man’s throat. And the neck was horribly bruised. Langdale had seen the necks of strangulation victims. Two weeks ago, he had helped cut down the body of a sailor who had hanged himself in a warehouse in Silloth. But these marks were worse than anything he had ever seen.

“Was he strangled?”

“Yes, but not to death.” Gould pulled back the sheet to expose the man’s chest. It was indeed a devil of a mess. Gould had stitched him back up, but the wounds were very clear from groin to neck. Clearly the man had been ripped open.

“This is his liver.” Gould held up the sample jar. “Once I’d squished all the rest back in, there wasn’t any room left. I’ll keep it for the collection.” Langdale twitched. Gould was clearly enjoying himself. “Official line will be blood loss and internal injuries. Assault by person or persons unknown. Well, I say persons,” the doctor added, “but I think it’s more likely that an animal did this.”

Langdale had another go at lighting his pipe, but before he had even applied the match, the pathologist had plucked it from his mouth. He set it down on the victim’s chest, his own bulky body blocking the inspector’s route to retrieving it.

“Not in here, please. This is a sterile environment.”

“An animal?” Langdale had read his Jules Verne. “An octopus?”

“Well, that’s what the marks on the face indicate. But I’ll tell you one thing…” Gould paused, drawing out the drama, “…aside from the puddle he was found in, this man hasn’t been near the water.”

* * *

About an hour later, Gould was done. He had packed up his things, scrawled a few cursory notes on the back of a charge sheet, promised a full report and a substantial bill for services rendered in the next couple of days, and then decamped back to his luxurious and no doubt warm country house that overlooked Derwent Water. Pike had returned from talking to the Ellens with very little to report. They seemed to be nothing more than an innocent young couple who had simply been unfortunate in their choice of short cuts. The sergeant had commandeered a small office next to the cells, and he and Langdale sat sipping at the station’s fetid tea, and trying to keep the cold out. Without success, Langdale thought. He had only just managed to rescue his pipe from being wrapped up with the corpse, but once again the tobacco was stubbornly refusing to ignite. Finally, he hurled it across the room, narrowly clipping Pike’s left ear. It whacked into the wall opposite and fell to the floor, neatly cleaved into two pieces.

“It’s a filthy habit anyway, sir. My Elsie told me to give it up years ago. Never been happier since I did that.”

“I bet you don’t drink either,” Langdale said poisonously.

“Not really sir. Occasional pint of Grayrigg’s best bitter on my birthday. Healthy body, healthy mind, that’s what they’re saying these days, sir.”

Langdale decided to change the subject. “How is your wife anyway?”

“Very bonnie, thank you sir. Off visiting the mother in Newcastle.”

Langdale grunted again. It seemed to be the response of the day; much easier than actually having to say something coherent. His wife was off visiting her mother too. In Gretna. For the last six years. He decided to change the subject again. Second time lucky, he hoped. He threw Gould’s notes onto the desk in the middle of the room.

“So we have a man who has been strangled to death by an octopus. In the middle of a very dry town. No witnesses. No suspects. And we don’t even know who he is. Was,” he added pedantically.

Pike frowned. “Maybe someone was using some sort of weapon, to make those marks. You know, to incriminate the octopus.” The words sounded ridiculous as soon as he had said them, and the sergeant shrugged helplessly. Langdale laughed.

“You’ve been reading too many books, sergeant. The number of years you’ve been on the force, thought you would have left that sort of thing behind.” The inspector was already feeling a familiar tang of pessimism coming over him. The calling up of Scotland Yard was beginning to figure largely in his thoughts, and with that always came the terrible throb of failure.

Pike, being young and filled with boundless stupidity, was being more positive. “Well, the best thing to do is find out who he is. It’s a small town. We could put out an appeal.”

“You want a poster out in this good town of that smashed-up face, with the header, ‘Do You Know This Man?’ We’d be lynched.”

“Well, how about an artist’s impression, sir? Elsie said that her friend Mabel said that these places are full of artists from London. They go round painting the lakes and being deep. Make money from doing portraits.”

“Very well, lad,” Langdale shrugged a resigned pair of shoulders. “You go and find an artist. Assuming you can get one with a strong enough stomach, get him to do a sketch of the victim looking…normal. Then you can put out your poster.”

Pike jumped up, happy to be engaging in semi-productive industry. “What about you sir?”

The inspector pulled his hat down over his eyes. “Thinking time,” he muttered.

* * *

He spent the next couple of hours dozing in the chair, wrapped up in overcoat and scarf, whilst a few speculative thoughts passed through his mind. Finally, tiring of this, he got up and wandered out, past Pike, who was ushering a young, delicate looking man into the station, and out into the streets of Penrith. A self-stated aim of wandering the town in search of inspiration lasted about a quarter of an hour. He bought a new pipe, and finally he ended up in the nearest hostelry, the Druids Arms, where he downed a pint of the best local bitter. The atmosphere in the place was odd – not unwelcoming or hostile, but fearful. He felt eyes on him the entire time he was there, gazes that questioned him and his success in dealing with the death that had come to the town. Clearly, Sergeant Knowles had been correct. Word was spreading. A few desultory attempts at conversation with the landlord came to nothing. He didn’t feel anything was being held back. It was simply that nobody knew anything. That was what was scaring them the most. Finally, reluctantly, he dragged himself away from the fire that was cosily banked up in the main parlour, and went back out into the cold.

By now it was late afternoon, and the frost was settling in nicely. Langdale strode as briskly as possible back to the station. Thinking time had not really been very much use – he felt as in the dark as he had before going out. No identity, no clues, the only thing that seemed relevant was wounds from an animal that couldn’t possibly have been responsible. His head hurt, and he was sure that it wasn’t from the beer or the cold.

He stopped. For a moment, he felt the same feeling that he had in the pub. Eyes on him. He was being watched. He looked about. The usual hustle of a small town square, shops, two pubs, a small library and several offices, accountants, lawyers and the like. The shops were in the process of closing for the day. There were plenty of folk about, but nobody who seemed interested in the slight, uninteresting figure of a district police inspector. But the feeling remained. Finally, he shrugged. Let them watch him. As long as they left him alone, they could look at him all they liked. He trudged on.

From the shadow of the library, a tall man watched as the policeman walked on. There had been a brief second of danger, but the moment had passed. The man was a fool, barely capable of understanding this world, let alone anything infinitely greater than it. The man smiled to himself. Remain vigilant, of course, but there was little threat here. Matters could continue.

* * *

When he got back to the station, Langdale found Pike with a happy smile and a large pencilled portrait in his hands. It seemed Mr Seymour Ffoukes, of Lodge Cottage by Windermere, had done his work well.

“Queer sort,” Pike told him, “Bit of a molly, if you get me, sir. But he’s done his job well.”

Langdale had to agree. The picture was an accurate depiction of the man of mystery laid out in cell six. He gave orders for it to be copied and distributed. As Pike and Constable Whitehead went through the laborious task of photographing the picture for distribution, Langdale decided the day had been long enough. He headed towards the George Hotel, where with almost pathetic relief, he was able to secure a room for the night. The delightedly roaring fire was leaping about the grate as he clambered into bed after a healthy dose of steak and kidney pudding in the hotel bar. It wasn’t more than five minutes before he was snoring roundly.

* * *

A gentle tapping woke him. He opened his eyes to see, of course, Pike, bright eyed and happy as ever. Another cup of tea was preferred towards him.

“Sunday sir,” said the sergeant, “Coming to church?”

Biting back a particularly vicious comment about God and all his angels and where they could go, Langdale shook his head muzzily. He had forgotten Pike and his wife were happily committed Anglicans. The sergeant rarely mentioned it, but church on a Sunday morning was taken as a given. “I think my soul’s long gone, sergeant,” he managed eventually, “Go on without me.”

One thing for Pike, he knew when not to argue. He placed the tea on a table, annoyingly just out of reach, and left. Langdale finally extracted himself from the bed and grabbed for the cup as the one warm thing in the room. He gritted his teeth and took a sip. Rather better than the station’s, at least.

When he arrived at the station, he found Knowles looking unpardonably smug. They had good news, and Langdale found himself feeling the first tiny glow of progress. Constable Whitehead was seated in the small back office with a little old lady, the picture of their murdered unfortunate between them.

“This is Mrs Johnson, sir,” the constable told him, “She claims she recognises the gentleman in our picture.”

Langdale nodded suspiciously at the old lady. He was automatically suspicious of any female over forty. Something went wrong with them over that age. This one seemed no different, a wizened creature, eighty if she was a day, dressed in clothes that had been the height of fashion some time around the Battle of Inkerman. She stared back at him in equal suspicion, sharp little eyes focussing over her pince-nez

“Do you indeed, Mrs Johnson?” He was trying for friendly and expansive, but feared he just sounded drunk. He sat down. “So then, what can you tell us?”

“Well,” she began, clearly loving being the centre of attention, “I came to Penrith this morning to pay a call on an old friend of mine, Mrs Kaye. She lives just two streets over, you know. Have you met Mrs Kaye? She’s ever such a nice soul. Husband passed over in ’71, I’m afraid. Taken by the colic. And I always told her, Florence, I said – ”

“Could we stick to the original story, please, Mrs Johnson,” Langdale interrupted. How he hated elderly witnesses. You got every fact except the relevant ones.

“Oh yes, well, I was passing by your station and I saw that picture on your notice board, and I says to myself, ‘I’ll swear that’s our Mr Russell, if it’s not then he has a twin’, so I comes over to look at it a bit closer, and yes, I swear again, that’s Mr Russell, such a nice lad, Mr Russell, even if he is a bit odd, and he always keeps a bit back for me of a Tuesday, and – ”

“Keeps a bit back? A bit of what?” Langdale asked, dreading the answer.

“A bit of sausage,” she told him. The inspector quailed in horror. “He’s the butcher.”

Perhaps sensing the inspector’s keen desire to lamp the old trout, Whitehead had decided to step in “Where would that be, then, Mrs Johnson?”

She looked at him pityingly, as if he were a simple child. “Well, Shap of course. That’s where I live. Where else would he be from?”

Langdale suppressed his twenty-third despairing sigh of the day. “So this Mr Russell, he’s from Shap then?”

“Well, of course. How else would I know him?” She seemed astounded at the inspector’s mental processes. “I must say, though, I was surprised to see a picture of him in this town. Bit of a – what’s the word – cuts himself off – recluse, that’s it, bit of a recluse, is Mr Russell. I haven’t seen him for a few days. Not since he gave me that nice bit of mince last Tuesday. ” She paused in her ramblings. “I do like a bit of mince, and I’ve got lovely Mr Wallace coming over for tea tonight”, she said significantly, “I’m a widow, you know.”

Hurriedly, Langdale indicated to Whitehead to cut the conversation short. The young constable rose from his seat. “Well, many thanks, Mrs Johnson, I’m sure you’ve been a great help. This information will no doubt help us to progress this case quite significantly.”

“Well, I do hope Mr Russell is alright,” she told them innocently. At the door she stopped and looked back. “I don’t suppose there’s a reward or anything?”

Langdale fought back the impulse to yell at her as if she were a junior constable. “I’m sure Sergeant Knowles will make you a nice cup of tea.” And you’re more than welcome to that witch’s brew, you old harpy, he silently added.

Pike returned from church at around eleven o’clock. He hadn’t been very impressed with the local vicar – a bit of a non-conformist, it appeared. He told the inspector about his sermon, something about not truly perceiving the world that was around us, but by this point Langdale wasn’t listening. He was processing the information of the morning. If Russell had been such a recluse, what was he doing in Penrith? Logically, he had come to see something. Or possibly someone? Find the reason, find the killer. Langdale was not yet prepared to believe that the killer had not been a human being. Sea creatures did not attack people in the street. Not in Edward’s England, anyway.

“Got to admit it, Pike, you were right about that picture.” Pike waved a modest hand, and the inspector went on, “We’ll have to get to this Shap then. Train?”

“Should think so, sir.”

“Then get a timetable. We’ll go as soon as we can and take a look at this butcher’s.”

This plan of action was unfortunately, and rather suddenly, curtailed. Whitehead entered hurriedly, clutching a piece of paper in his hand.

“Sorry to be bothering you, sir, sergeant,” he told them, “but we’ve just got a message. Seems there’s been a bit of trouble at Windermere.”

A frown creased Langdale’s mouth. Just as things were looking up. “Lake or town, constable?”

“Lake sir.” He waved the paper. “Says here three children were skating on the lake, seeing as it’s been frozen in this weather sir, and they’ve gone in the water, sir.”

Langdale hoped his expression wasn’t as wearily nonplussed as he felt.. “That’s very unfortunate, but I’m not sure what it has to do with us.”

“Well, sir, you told us to look out for anything unusual. Seems the children didn’t just fall in the lake, sir, seems they were – ” he wavered over his choice of word, “ – well, seems they were dragged in, sir.”

Langdale seized the paper from Whitehead and scanned it swiftly. His eyebrows quested for the ceiling in surprise.

“Tentacles?” was all that he could eventually manage.

* * *

As they wound down the hill towards the town and the lakeshore, Langdale could feel a suppressed sense of tension in the streets on Bowness. Murder of an adult male in Penrith had been bad enough. The seemingly random deaths of children in an apparently impossible way had set everything on edge. People in these small towns lived their lives by certainties and ritualised order. The smallest challenge to such order could set their lives spiralling out of control. And this challenge was far from small.

Down by the lakeside, a large crowd of people were gathered, being held back by what seemed an impossibly small number of policemen. Langdale and Pike leapt from the carriage as it arrived, and walked over to two men who stood behind the ring of police. One was Henderson, the local sergeant. He and Knowles eyed each other warily like dogs in a territory war. Langdale sent the pair of them away to argue over boundaries and demarcation, and then turned to the other man, a tall, middle aged fellow in large astrakhan coat.

“Mordecai Freeman”, the man said, as if that explained everything. Langdale shook his offered hand, and came away with a business card. ‘The Windermere Patented Electricity Company’, it read.

“Chairman of the Local Board of Commerce,” Freeman added. Langdale frowned. One of those self-appointed local leaders, he thought. Always bothersome. He let it go without comment however, and walked with Freeman onto one of the jetties that fringed the lakeshore, Pike on their heels. In the bitterly cold late morning weather, the edge of the lake was frozen over to about forty feet out. It was here, Freeman told them, that a group of children had been skating.

“And it was definitely tentacles?” Pike asked.

“That is what the witnesses say,” Freeman replied. “I have at least three people prepared to state under oath that large tentacles emerged from the lake just beyond the ice and seized upon three of the children. However, the local folk are often given to purposeless superstition and hysteria. “

“No sign of them since?” Langdale lit a cigarette, and drew on it slowly. It just wasn’t the same.

“Children or tentacles?” Freeman let out a bark of bitter laughter. “Well, it’s the same answer. No. Not a ripple.”

They looked back at the crowd. The stand off against the police was quiet for now, but the undercurrent that Langdale had felt as they entered the town was sharper than ever. Unfocussed anger, fear, uncertainty. All of which could be set off by the slightest spark. And if they did, there weren’t enough police here to control them.

Freeman nodded, reading his expression. “They are afraid and angry. Several of them have tried to take boats out onto the water to hunt … whatever it is down. And we had an ex-whaling captain living up in Windermere Village who offered to lend people his collection of harpoons. The sergeant has tried to close the lake, but it’s a very big stretch to cover. This could end very badly indeed.”

“So what do we do?” Langdale asked. The question hung there unhappily, all three men’s gazes swinging between crowds and water in equal, uncertain measure.

“Does anyone have a diving suit?” Pike said finally. Langdale sighed deeply. Just why did the sergeant have to open his mouth?

“Probably,” Freeman replied, “Why?”

“Well,” Pike said, “Someone should take a look down there.”

“You won’t get anyone in their right minds to go down there lad,” Langdale muttered. He could see where this was going, and he really didn’t like it.

“I’ll have a go,” Pike said, confirming his fears. Freeman’s face had clouded over darkly at all of this, and he shook his head fiercely.

“No, never, too dangerous,” he said emphatically, “I couldn’t possibly allow it.”

If there was anything guaranteed to get Langdale irritated, it was being told what to do by officials. Especially self-appointed ones. The pompous look on Freeman’s face made his mind up.

“You’ll excuse me saying this, sir,” he said, “But I’m not sure you have any choice in the matter.” He turned to Pike. “All right, lad. You’re on. But just make sure you come back,” he added, “because I don’t want to be the one who has to tell your wife.”

* * *

Two hours later, and Pike, clad in a John Brown rig, was seated on the edge of a launch floating in the middle of the lake. To one side, Langdale was muttering platitudes and offering advice, to the other, Jones, a local boatman and owner of an old diving outfit from his days in the Liverpool shipyards, was tightening the screws on the heavy copper helmet that had been placed over the sergeant’s head. Behind him, two more men were finishing the set-up of the air pump that connected to the helmet via a long flexible tube. A second line, attached to Pike’s weighted belt, would keep him connected to the launch at all times and allow him to be hauled up in case of emergencies.

Langdale gazed across the lake to the shore, where Freeman was standing arguing with Sgt Henderson, of the Bowness Constabulary. The businessman had proclaimed and complained and threatened, but in the end, the sergeant had stood by the inspector and declared that if he wanted to send someone into the lake, then at least that was doing something, and unless Mr Freeman (sir) had something practical to offer, then he really would be better off going home. Freeman had lapsed into sullen silence at that, but clearly he was off again now. Langdale didn’t care. As long as he was far enough away that he couldn’t hear him, then he could rant all he liked.

Behind the two men, the crowd of people had grown, but now they seemed more like a group of spectators than an angry mob. The illusion of activity that had been created by Pike’s act of foolhardiness had, for the moment, calmed their spirits.

“Now remember, lad” he told Pike, “Straight down and have a quick look around. I don’t really know what we’re trying to achieve here, so I don’t want any stupid risks.”

Pike tried to nod, but the suit prevented him. He resorted to a simple “Yes, sir.” Truth was, now that was seated on the edge of the water, he wasn’t sure what he was trying to achieve either. If his wife had been there, he would have been on the end of the worst tongue lashing imaginable. The inspector was right. He’d be back, if only to spare his superior from that fate.

Jones lifted the faceplate up to the helmet. He felt Langdale’s hand on his shoulder.

“Good luck, lad.” There was genuine warmth in the inspector’s voice. As the faceplate was screwed into place, cutting him off from the outside world, Pike smiled to himself. He knew the inspector wasn’t really the miserable soul he liked to pretend he was. Not all the time anyway.

Moving awkwardly in the suit, he stared down into the water. The grey skies reflected back from the surface, making the lake look colder than ever. Nothing was visible beyond that reflection. The air in the suit began to roar around his head, and he hesitated. Then he steeled himself. Faint heart, and so on. He took a deep breath – silly, of course, but it was strangely comforting – and pushed himself off the deck and into the water.

As he hit the water, the shock of the cold nearly finished him off there and then. He was clad in warmest clothes, jumpers and thick trousers, and the suit was as insulated as possible, with layers of twill and rubber laid on each other, but it was still a cold like he had never known before. Deep breaths, two, three, four, gradually he felt his body adjust. Not exactly comfortable, but bearable for a short while.

In the time it had taken him to do this, the weights in his boot and belt, compensating for the buoyancy in his helmet, had dragged him down towards the lake bed. At this point, the lake was about one hundred and fifty feet down, and it wasn’t long before he felt his feet touch bottom. He stood there for a long time, unmoving, feet sunk slightly into the silted lake bed. Then, slowly, carefully, he took one step forward. It wasn’t as difficult as he had feared. Slow, slightly awkward, constantly pushing against an unseen force, but possible. Another step, then another. Soon he was moving about with reasonable confidence.

It was only after about a hundred steps forward that he realised three things.

Firstly, he had no idea what he was actually looking for.

Secondly, he had no idea what he would do if he found it.

Thirdly, he realised that nobody had actually told him how to get back to the surface when the time came.

Elsie was not going to be pleased. And if he met an octopus then there would be hell to pay. For him and it.

He stretched his neck and back to look up at the surface of the lake. Enough of the cold light was permeating down to allow him to see. Far above, he could see the bottom of the launch, and the two lines snaking down to him. They seemed terrifyingly slight. Hardly the sort of thing to place one’s life on. He tried not to think about it. He straightened up, and tried peering through the grill-covered glass of the helmet.

It was a world like nothing he had ever seen before. Grey, leaden beds of mud, tangled with weeds and wood, detritus from the boats that sailed obliviously on above him, and an almost constant sense of murk. He couldn’t see any fish, but he wasn’t sure if that was significant. Maybe they were just avoiding him. He tried to shrug, and then laughed as it was nearly impossible in the suit.

He set off, foot over foot, trying to move outward in what he hoped was a widening spiral of about a hundred feet. The mud, stirred up by his heavy treads, threatened to blot out the light more than once, but on he went, constantly moving his head back and forth in the helmet, trying to pick up anything remotely out of place down here.

For a moment, he thought he had seen something. A shadow, flickering across his view. He shook his head inside the helmet. The shadow had not been large. In fact, it had almost seemed – man-like? No, not possible. He told himself every argument for why it could not have been, why it must have been an illusion caused by the seemingly endless miasma of mud. Still, just for that second…

It was then that his eye caught the glint of metal. Just the tiniest glint, but it drove all other thoughts from his mind. Moving to his left, as fast as he could, he advanced about ten steps and tried to focus. The glint of metal had been the edge of a skate blade. Attached to a skate, worn on the foot of a little girl.

He stood and stared at her for a long time. Her legs had lodged beneath a large rock, which was preventing her body from floating to the surface. He briefly contemplated trying to get her free, but then he wasn’t sure anyone would want to see a child like this. He and Elsie hadn’t yet been blessed with children, but then, they’d only been married a year, so there was still plenty of time. He knew the inspector had a daughter, barely older than this girl, on whom he doted. She was with her mother in Scotland, and the inspector barely saw her, but he knew how much he cared about her. All of this flashed through his thoughts as he looked at the small form. She was blonde, about twelve years old, clad in a woollen dress and a red coat. The colour was stark against the paleness of her skin and hair. The blonde tresses, rendered near-white in the light, floated about her head in a halo. Her eyes were open. He wanted to close them so much, but knew it was impossible in these gloves. Those eyes – they were haunted by something terrible…and they were reflecting something.

He turned himself fully around and stared through the water. About twenty feet away from him, something glowed blackly. That didn’t make sense, he told himself, but it was the only description that came to mind. Something was sitting on the bed of the lake, and it did not look natural. The girl temporarily put from his mind, he took strong steps towards it.

It was as if someone had put a plughole in the lake. Pike found himself looking at an almost perfect circle, about ten feet in diameter. It sat amidst the mud, simply a hole in the earth, but beyond that hole, he could see nothing. It was pure black, but this was a black that was more than simply an absence of colour. This seemed alive, flowing and moving as he watched. Water did not seem to be entering the hole. In fact, it was the opposite. It was as if the hole had extruded itself into the lake from somewhere else, and was reaching out, feeling its way into the world.

He had never seen anything remotely like it before. A sinkhole in the world. Where had that idea come from? He didn’t know, but he knew that it was true. And he knew that this was the ultimate source of all of their troubles.

He was concentrating so hard on the hole that, at first, he did not notice the shapes that were drawing around him. It was only when one of them touched him on the arm, just gently, but enough to be noticed, that he realised he was not alone. He jerked his arm back, shocked, and craned his head sideways in the helmet to stare out of the side port.

A face looked back at him.

It was not a human face, although there were elements that were familiar. The head shape was longer and thinner, the nose was pulled back into the forehead, the ears were shrunken and the mouth was almost fishlike, turned down in a perpetual frown of dismay. But it was the eyes that really scared him, yellow and lidless, gazing at him with a lack of emotion. The bald, grey-green skull was mounted on a scaled body, humanoid in form, but with webbing across fingers and toes, and a hugely ridged back, resembling the creatures in the reptile house at Edinburgh Zoo. At the neck were what seemed like gills, pulsing in slow, regular time.

At the same time that he gazed at this creature, his mind was refusing to accept it. Pike had always been a practical man. He knew that Langdale sometimes regarded him as bone-headed, but that didn’t bother him. It was simply that he was methodical and careful in his analysis of things. This – this was beyond anything that he could ever have imagined seeing.

It took little more than ten seconds for him to take all of this in. Another ten seconds, and he had realised that this thing was not alone, that he was surrounded by at least ten, possibly more, of the same creatures. They were all looking at him. Then, he felt arms upon him. This time, the touch was not gentle. It was strong, furious, pulling and tearing at him with absolute hostility.

He thrashed about him wildly, the suit’s restrictions forgotten in his desperation. Briefly, he shook himself free of the attackers, then they re-gathered themselves, and flew at him with a renewed fury. He screamed out, the sound rebounding back at him from the confines of his helmet, deafening him, and in the moment of hesitation that this caused, they had him. They swept him off his feet, and were upon him, pushing him down into the ooze.

An absolute madness of terror seized Pike, and he fought like he had never done so before. The weight of the suit and the water became nothing to him. Pike was not a small man, and he had grown up in a tough part of Carlisle. Despite his usually calm exterior, fighting was second nature to him, and he did it well. Punches flew left and right, the creatures falling away. He swung the helmet directly at one of them, feeling the satisfying whack of copper into skull, and the crunching of fish bones beneath the impact. But, in the end, there were just too many of them. He felt claws and teeth ripping into the suit, passing through the layers to let in the frozen water. Hands seized his arms and legs, more arms passed about his chest, pinning him down, bringing his struggles under control. Finally, and worst of all, he felt a sudden jerk at his head as the air line was torn free. Lying there, his view almost blocked by the grey weight of bodies, he could see it floating away towards the surface. Water began to flow into the helmet, and he choked on the muddy silt.

One last effort. With a final scream, he pulled free of the creatures and struggled to his knees, then to his feet. He scrabbled at the weighted belt. If he could lose the belt and the boots then he might just be able to make a break for the surface.

No good. They were on him again, their attack worse than ever. He suddenly saw how close he now was to the hole. Man and creatures teetered on the edge. And in one single flash of calm, he decided. He dug his feet deep into the mud and pushed, his body moving forward, accepting it. And they all plunged into the black.

It wasn’t what he expected. It was not some free fall into oblivion. Instead, he felt almost cushioned, gently moving downwards. The water no longer flowed about his head, and the creatures no longer grasped at him. He was alone, lost in deadening silence.

Images flashed across his eyes. Langdale, standing in a room, looking serious and sad. A face he didn’t know, a blonde haired man, dressed in grey and black. Gould, fat and self-satisfied. And then someone else. He couldn’t quite make out the features. The face was thin, dark as if tanned, eyes shining sharply in shadow like a cat’s, and a vulpine smile spread across the mouth.

The faces fled, driven away by a new image. He seemed to be floating above a city, but this was not the simple and understandable architecture of a Carlisle or Newcastle. This was an insane, sprawling, underwater metropolis, an impossibly angled tumble of minarets and temples, vast libraries and echoing halls that stretched away from him in all directions for as far as he could see. Domed towers stretched up towards the furthest point, whilst endless deeps loomed beneath, threatening and dead. And over the surface of all the buildings, things crawled. Some of them he recognised as the strange humanoids that had attacked him. They gathered in small communities, staring sightlessly out at the world. Others had no clear form, swarms of flesh and tentacles, flowing into each other until he wasn’t sure whether it was one creature that he saw, or a myriad of forms.

Something else moved. Something that lurked within one of those deep places, something larger and more terrible than anything he had thus far seen. It stirred, and regarded him with an inarticulate malice.

No more. He could bear no more of this, and tried to close his eyes against it, but it was no good. This world and its inhabitants were alive inside his head, dragging him deeper and deeper to join them in the perfect abyss.

Finally, he saw the face of his wife. He had never seen anything so beautiful, and he nearly wept for sight of her. As the blackness took him, he saw her smile and tell him that everything was going to be alright.

There was nothing else.

* * *

Standing pensively on the launch, waiting, Langdale only felt the first lurch very slightly. Something had pulled at the line that was attached to Pike’s belt. He moved over to that line and plucked at it. It felt taut, as if pressure was being applied from beneath the surface of the lake.

The second time it happened, Langdale’s stomach lurched with the boat. And the third time, he felt it very clearly and cried out. Something was pulling at the line.

The launch began to move violently back and forth, causing the inspector and the other men to lose their footing. Narrowly avoiding being pitched into the icy water, Langdale reached for the motor that operated the pulley system on Pike’s line. He never reached it. His left hand was still resting on the line, and suddenly he felt the tension in it ease. He froze, staring at the line. It was a tough steel spun cable, capable of resisting an enormous amount of pressure. If something had caused it to come free…

One of the boatmen slammed his hand onto the lever on the pulley motor. It spluttered into life against the cold, hauling in the line. The line moved faster than it should have done, and then, suddenly, the end was flying at them, wrenched out of the water by the small engine. As the pressure on the line eased, the boat ceased its rocking motion, allowing them all to regain their footing. The cable danced angrily about the boat for a moment, then Langdale seized it and stared. It had been totally severed, the end neatly cut as if by a knife.

Langdale swore angrily. But any further action was forestalled by a shout from Jones. He was pointing out into the water. As he looked, the inspector’s heart seemed to slow, then stop completely.

Pike’s airline was floating free on the surface of the lake. The sergeant was clearly not attached to it.

I’ve killed him. It was the only thing that he could think. Pike, good, plain-spoken, ever-willing, decent, Sergeant Josiah Pike was dead, and it was all because of him. He felt so numb that he had even stopped noticing the cold.

Then he realised that Jones was now looking beyond the water, back to the shore. A small crowd of nine or ten people had gathered on the jetty. Freeman and Sergeant Henderson were at the centre of the crowd, and they stood over the kneeling Constable Whitehead. And Whitehead was kneeling over the form of a man in a helmeted diving outfit.

Even as he told himself it was impossible, he shouted at Jones. “Get this sodding boat back to land as fast as you can!”

* * *

Pike lay staring up at the ceiling, his pale expression blank and glazed. Beside him sat his helmet, badly bashed, faceplate glass cracked open.

Langdale stood beside the bed in the Windermere Gate Cottage Hospital, watching a small phalanx of doctors and nurses tending to his sergeant. Physically, despite being exhausted and borderline hypothermic, Pike was fine. But he had made very little response to anyone who had tried to talk to him or rouse him. He had simply lain there and stared. Once or twice, words had been heard, but they seemed little more than delirious gibberish.

Nobody knew how he had got to the shore. One minute Sgt Henderson had been looking out across the lake, watching the launch moving violently on the water, the next there had been a shout from the crowd, and he had turned to see the body of the young detective lying on the jetty, spread-eagled and unmoving. There were witnesses prepared to swear that he had appeared out of thin air, but Langdale wasn’t having anything of that. Somehow, he had got to the surface, whereupon his strength had given out. What had happened in the meantime, however, only Pike knew, and at the moment, he wasn’t telling. There were rips in the diving outfit, however, and dents in the helmet that told an extremely disturbing story.

He had given immediate orders to seal off the entire lake – an impossible task, of course, but Henderson was doing his best, and had dragged in men from the neighbouring towns. Thankfully, the locals appeared to have lost their appetite for outrage, and had drifted back to their homes, shops and businesses with a sulky acceptance that this was more than they could deal with. How long that would last, Langdale wasn’t sure, but he’d take it for now.

Other than that, there really wasn’t a great deal they could do. The sergeant was in good hands, being tended for a few superficial wounds. Until he chose to come out of this hypnotic state, they would just have to wait.

Langdale did all of his best waiting with his pipe, but for now, it still stubbornly refused to light. As he was trying his sixteenth match, Whitehead entered the room with a message.

More of a summons actually. Mr Freeman was deeply concerned and would appreciate a word. He crumpled the note up in disgust and threw it over his shoulder. Then he retrieved it and put it in his pocket. Might be useful for lighting his pipe later.

Deep breaths, Langdale, he told himself. He left Whitehead to stay with Pike, then set off for the Windermere Patented Electricity Company Headquarters. This was a long, low building set just off the lake shore, in small grounds of its own. Oddly, as he walked towards the building, and then entered the main door, he saw nobody about. Not one person, not even anyone to greet him. He had heard that automotive processes were making the ordinary worker extraneous, but this was ridiculous.

Beyond the small main porch, the company seemed to consist solely of one large room. And within that room – well, to call it a machine was like calling the Endeavour a boat. It was a vast cathedral of brass and glass, a huge edifice that ran the thirty foot length of the room, full of twisted metal, sparking tubes and turning pistons. It chugged gently along, making surprisingly little sound, although Langdale for the life of him couldn’t see the source of its energy. Maybe it generated the energy that ran itself, he thought, although he was aware that really didn’t make any sense.

He didn’t notice he wasn’t alone until he heard the voice. “The patented electricity machine itself,” Freeman said. He jolted and turned to see him. The man was standing directly behind him, looking decidedly proud of his creation. “A prototype, of course, but in time, it will supply the electricity of the entire Lake District.”

And turn you a healthy profit, too, Langdale added internally. Aloud, he confined himself to, “It’s all very interesting, Mr Freeman.” If honest, he was telling the truth. He stooped to stare down one particularly finely wrought glass tube. “How does it all work, exactly?”

Freeman tapped his nose. “Trade secrets, Inspector.”

“Probably wouldn’t understand anyway,” he admitted.

“Probably not,” Freeman agreed. The look on his face was not friendly. “But that is beside the point anyway. The reason I brought you here, inspector, was to tell you that I am extremely displeased with the way that you have handled this matter. I warned you not to take any precipitant action, and you wouldn’t listen. And now your sergeant hangs on the edge of death and we have a town that has been scared out of its wits.”

“Sergeant Pike is something of a law unto himself.” Then, feeling guilty at landing his prostrated sergeant in it, he quickly added, “But in any case, I support what he did. Better that than standing around doing nothing.”

“You are his superior. I would not tolerate any underling of mine taking such action.”

Yes, well you don’t have Josiah Pike for an underling. In the face of the man’s grotesque pomposity, Langdale felt very protective of his young bulldog of a sergeant. Time to take the obvious way out of this. “Be that as it may, in the end, Mr Freeman, I am not answerable to you.”

“Maybe not. But I am not without local influence. There are men of power, Inspector Langdale, and despite your small title, you are not one of them. I have sent word to your superiors in Carlisle, and I have no doubt that they will soon be recalling you following this debacle, and will replace you with someone a good deal more competent. Preferably from Scotland Yard, since I believe that the local constabulary are hardly equal to the intellectual challenge of this crisis.”

There was an awful lot of other-cheek-turning required at all of that, but somehow he managed. He confined himself to, “Is that it, Mr Freeman? Because I have work to do.”

Freeman glowered at him. “For now. Although I am sure we will not meet again anyway, Inspector. Enjoy your trip back to Carlisle.”

Langdale would be buggered if he was going let the pompous sod have the last work. He put on his most formal accent, suppressing his Cumbrian vowels. “Well, thank you for wasting my time, Mr Freeman. Now, if you’ll excuse me, until such time as I am told otherwise, I have an investigation to run and a sergeant to help.”

He swung on his heel and left before another word could be uttered. Striding back to the hospital, his brain turned over the conversation. Scotland Yard – well, that had been inevitable since the case had started. Even if every message went as fast as possible, he had at least a day to pursue his investigations, and he intended to use every minute of it. Pike’s ordeal – whatever it had been – had galvanised him. There was a connection between everything he had seen so far, and he was determined, for Pike’s sake, to see this through.

He paused in his step. Men of power? What had Freeman meant by that? Secret handshakes and the old school tie? Or merely self-aggrandisement? He doubted it. The phrase had sounded rehearsed.

He put that from his mind as he reached the hospital. Pike had changed little, although he had now closed his eyes and was snoring gently. Morphine, according to Constable Whitehead. He looked down at the sergeant. His face had assumed an expression of almost idiotic innocence in its slumber. Nice to be able to sleep the sleep of the saved, Langdale thought. He turned to the sergeant.

“Stay with him, Knowles, and don’t let anyone near him. Least of all Mr Mordecai Freeman.” He wasn’t sure why he had added that. Somehow, Freeman didn’t feel safe. “Constable, we are taking the train to Shap.”

“What for, sir?” The constable’s questioning tone was so disingenuous that Langdale had to laugh.

“To visit the butcher’s,” he replied, “I’ve a hankering for a good sausage.”

* * *

A Mist Friend

2012-01-08T16:01:00.003Z

A Mist Friend

Written by Paul Musgrave

Illustrated by Andy Paciorek

Nothing is black or white. Even night and day are entwined. There is an indistinguishable line between; discovery and theft, preservation and cowardice, innocence and guilt.

Sometimes things are grey; a bit misty.

I am waiting for an old friend which I have not seen for some time. Well at least I cannot recall when I last properly seen him. I have not slept for a while you see. Here I sit in the town square, my hometown of Keswick. I gaze up anxiously at the Old Moot Hall Clock Tower, checking to see if it was closer to the rendezvous time. I drink deeply and ask the waitress for a refill. All around the Northern Fell Mountains sit in attendance; as if awaiting a court in session.

He was never late since the day when we were kids. Only for school, but not for adventure. We were best friends and every weekend we had expeditions to the surrounding massifs. With backpacks filled with none essentials apart from our compasses. The moral ones we would loose in the passage of time.

I can no longer make a distinction between awake and daydreaming. Although maybe a greater distinction can be made in the terminology; replacing day with night and dream with mare.

My eyes were open, but before they were shut. The tourists and people were no more than gliding apparitions. The tangible world around me was merging into a more spectral one. Even the recognition of time as I fixed my gaze at the clock face was seamless with the precognitions. He would be here soon.

Although oblivious to most around me, my eyes descended upon two boys balancing on the steps below. As boys, we would precariously balance on the old dry stone walls which one day would be adventures along the Great Wall of China. I believed our friendship would always be as long lasting and as strong as those walls. It was in Asia where I last saw him.

We had both decided to take an expedition after we both graduated from our respective universities. Although we never excelled at school, we both passed with flying honours in our respective fields. I specialized in Crypto zoology as part of my Zoology course. He took Archeology, and it was definitely the physical excavation he desired, and not the boring pre planning and ploughed fields he was interested in. We were ready for a real adventure.

The legend of Pangboche Hand had always fascinated us. And in our separate fields of expertise, we had obtained from good sources that it was real and still held in its monastery.

It was a long remote journey from Katmandu to the monastery after our long flight. The journey was hard like the weather beaten faces of the Sherpas and ponies. They carried most of the burden of our trip; but not as heavy as the burden I carry today.

In part the terrain was Alpine pastures, a place where the same flowers now grew in the gardens back home. The rope bridges over raging river torrents were harsher, and the freezing higher passes and immense ragged peaks bore no resemblance to the more humble flat tops of our mountains.

Villages lay scattered like our own isolated farmsteads and the children always greeted us. But they were never seen or straying away from them like we did. At every settlement Singh Lion statues stood guard and Nagas sat above every door warding off evil spirits; which showed they feared something more than any bipedal ape man in which we believed.

At the monastery we were met with warmth; a rampart against the cold siege. The monks were hospitable unlike the ensuing elements outside. We would be undeserving of their kindness. We sought to deceive them once we saw the artifact. The discovery excited us more than when we were kids and came upon a colony of carnivorous local plants called Sundew. We would take it. They were a spiritual community who believed in the whole. We believed in the self, the glory.

The time is close now. I can see him coming; but only in my minds eye. A bank of mist had gathered on the top of Skiddaw Pike, and suddenly like a serpent apparition it consciously weaves its way down, through the dark woods and along the edge of Derwent Water. The image made me think in a twisted way of Wordsworth’s poem; I wandered lonely as a cloud. The mist itself was a procession, like Centurion guards before an emperor. An emperor about to pass sentence. An Osprey above screeches and recoils in flight, sensing what lurked within the shroud.

We made it away from the Monastery with our Unholy Grail. No one pursued and we believed we were clear, unlike the darkened nebula sky above. We were out of the woods, but now endured frozen peaks. We would make it in the most severe conditions. We would spur each other on through whipping winds and snow storms.

We came upon a ridge which we needed to negotiate. I was always the stronger climber and was at the top first. He was trailing by a few meters and was having problems with his sling. Suddenly, mist began to rise from below. The slightest touch froze me through my insulated jacket, more than any freezing wind. Then we heard a cry which echoed all around. The superstitious Sherpa guides had previously described such a thing. The fear on his face, his eyes pleading. This was far from the adrenalin rush we got from ranting farmers or compliant rangers who gave chase.

The mist had reached and now encircled the Hanwell Memorial Cross; the inscription read ‘Great Shepherd of the Heavenly flock’. The large, dark, unearthly figure gave no recognition to the monument, not this time. The passage bore no resemblance to itself as it had its own passage; a less celestial one.

I reached as I had done countless times before. My rucksack slipped off, extra rope, webbing and provisions, spilling to the ground, including the Hand of Unholy Glory. He gazed up at me with pleading urgency, his hand imploring for my dependable grasp. The artifact rolled in its casing, about to tumble, never to be salvaged. I turned with immediacy to gather the accursed object to put back into its holding. By the time I returned my attentions to my life long friend, he was engulfed in the mist. I could here his beseeching voice and mumbled payer, but could barely see his silhouette. I fastened myself securely and reached again and felt his gloved hand trembling.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, a larger, darker form loomed from below. Its roar must have also made the surrounding peaks tremble. My friend screamed with his last breath as the thing tore his body and soul apart. Only my eyes were spared from the wretchedness below me. His limp hand was pulled from my grasp. I could not reach him as he could not reach me. I turned and ran and ran.

Now I have stopped. Thousands of miles I have ran and now I am tired. The consolation of loosing everything was that the test done on the bone fragments from the hand proved inconclusive. Possibly the elusive ape known as the Yeti. I did not need any laboratory tests. The Sherpas talked of an evil entity called a Banshir. A thing which could take the form of a Jackal, a monkey, or a giant, a soul taker. These were just superstitious ramblings to explain an undiscovered animal we first thought. We believed that lore of young Buddhist monks battles with evil spirits were mere parables. I laughed out loud alone at my table; you would think me mad.

The mist like funneled steam from a train pushes through a gate and onwards down a track. It is not long before it reached the town. Like a giant centipede, it looked as if its antenna were feeling for directions as it passes the museum and art gallery. The cursed thing within does not even give a cursory glance to the street where it was brought up. It continued on its course. Its shroud now spreading and as grey as the local flint stones it clung to.

As it came closer to the town centre, people instantly take refuge down alleyways and doorways, as if this enveloping haze was poisonous gas. Somehow, they never see the horrific abomination contained within; the once sunny boy who ran and played here a lifetime ago.

I see him coming as I has seen him in my being a hundred times before. The mist like fumes from a fire spreads throughout the market square spelling impending doom for me. The big hand strikes twelve on the clock. He is here; never late. A big hand, barbarous and talon like, reaches out. The remnants of his glove hung in shreds. His grip on my hand is much firmer and vice like. It would hold me to my end this time.

I never look up as I am more afraid to see his betrayed gaze than the twisted unrecognisable beast he had become. Like a prisoner, I am dragged, staggering, disorientated and fearful, but resigned to whatever fate awaited me. It must be deserved. Had I put fame and glory before saving my friends life ? I felt I did all I could. Was it the fact we stolen a treasured artifact ? Was I trying to unveil mysteries for my own satisfaction ? Was I too, to become a terrible, vengeful thing ? Had I already lost my soul, or was I already the monster concealed within human skin ? Or is that truly who we are ?

Where once as boys we would mockingly pull each other back, I was now being hauled up the steep slopes of Skiddaw. Any last earthly thoughts, was that of the irony; that the clouds above were of divinity and that Hell is a searing place that lied below. Things become cloudy in my mind before it is lost to me. The only last distinction I can make is that there is a distinction between the friends we were and the fiends we become.