Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos

I was quite calm about it. When her breathing had become safe, I took the key gently from the necklace. With something that was more instinct than purpose, I got my revolver from the night-table drawer; it was fully loaded. I locked Cassandra in and went down the hall to the library. The gun made me feel better. It was something solid and sane to hold onto. A month later, the prosecution used the gun as exhibit “A”; they called it the murder weapon!

What I found beyond the massive, chiseled portal was a thing that laughed at the puny, human bravery of guns; a malignant, flowering evil that spawned itself in the pen-scrawled words of a man long-since food for the gnawing maggots of an unspeakable hell. As I pushed open the door, staring blindly into the pit of darkness beyond, I almost wished for a stinking, flesh-born terror with which I could clash; an evil that lived and breathed, and could bleed and die. I found nothing but a dusty, dry-rot smelling chamber, that had been too long without air and sunlight. A mouldering, half-burned candle stood at the edge of what Lazarus Heath had used as a writing-table; I held a match to it.

A butterfly of flame sputtered to lift, throwing mammoth shadows along the crumbling plaster walls, casting an unwanted eye of light on the endless shelves of books long used to the privacy of night, untouched by curious hands. I wandered aimlessly about the high, barren room, gazing upon titles so antiquated, so much a part of a past beyond remembrance, beyond life and death, that I should have sworn it was a library straight from the flaming abyss of Hell. They were books not meant for mortal eyes, tales told by cults that sank into oblivion before time was measured, cast out from earth, trailing the ruins of their hideous, blood-thirsting rites behind them. Here and there, more sane, understandable volumes came to view. There was a priceless collection of sea lore, and in one spider- webbed corner, I found a yellowed, thumbed copy of “The Odyssey”; one section had been underscored, its battered pages mute testimony of endless reading and rereading. It was the passage describing the escape of Odysseus from the syrens. God knows, Lazarus Heath had reason to be fascinated by it.

* * *

The shrill tumult of Cassandra’s wild babbling still thundered softly in my brain. I stood very still, thinking, “This is the room.” The root of it had to be tangled in the tomb-like dust of this shadowy chamber. But, where? my mind echoed. Where? My wanderings had brought me to the worm-eaten throne-chair behind Heath’s writing- table. The light of the candle did a danse macabre as I sank heavy into the seat; it washed the black marble table-top with a flood of icy yellowness. Then, I saw the diary. I gave it a casual, irritated glance, and then, as the frenzied scrawl impressed itself upon my consciousness, I leaned closer. Faint gold-washed letters glittered brassily in the semi-darkness. “Lazarus Heath — His Book.”

It may have been only the figment of a sick, overwrought imagination; I don’t know. I know that I felt it there within me, the instant I touched the book. I felt the evil that sighed through Heath House, suddenly come to life, as I thumbed nervously through the water- stained pages of Lazarus Heath’s diary. The demented tittering of the storm rose from a whisper to the howl of a rabid dog baying at the moon. Sleet lashed at high casement windows and the silken portieres rustled anxiously. Even before I began to read that incredible, unholy record, I knew I held the root in my hands.

There was nothing sinister in the first entry. It was made in the steady, squarish script of a self-educated seaman, and dated February 21st, 192-. The words were sure and sane, with no hint of the hell- penned horror that lay in the final pages of the book.

Lazarus Heath had shipped out as First Mate aboard the freighter Macedonia, bound Southeast for Africa. It was as simple and prosaic as that. For pages there was nothing but the easy, satisfied chatting of a sea-faring man setting down, for his own amusement, the record of an interesting but mundane voyage. The first leg of the journey had gone well; even the weather had been with the Macedonia. The crew was competent and not too quarrelsome, and already looking forward to a “time” in the African coast-towns. Then, somewhere in the Southern Atlantic, they ran into the fog.

At first, Lazarus Heath made only passing mention of it; although it had come upon them unexpectedly and was intensely thick and disconcerting, it was judged that they would sail on through it on instruments without too much difficulty. There was a controlled, sensible attitude in Heath’s script at this point; he was writing for himself the things he had told his men. At the dose of the entry he wrote, as though loathe to admit it, even to himself: “There is a certain uneasiness among the men; it is not good for the nerves, this endless, blinding fog….” The writing trailed off with the first whisper of the uncertainty that was laying siege to Lazarus Heath’s mind.

The next entry was made four days later in a dashing, cold hand. It was short and bewildered. “Still this damnable fog, and that is not the worst of it. The instruments have begun to act queerly. We must go on as best we can and trust in the Almighty. Men very jumpy….” And, on the night of the same day, the controlled hand had wavered perceptibly as it scribbled: “Instruments gone dead. What in God’s name does it mean?” The story continued.

The coming of the voices was not sudden. It began with Dyke. Lazarus Heath knew little about the gangling, blond-bearded kid called Alan Dyke. He had signed on in New York as a fireman. A quiet, uneasy individual, he spent most of his leisure with books. He affected the bilge-water lingo of the sea, but underneath, he was only a kid, and he was scared. It began, according to Heath, when the engines went dead. They had expected that for what seemed a century. The Macedonia couldn’t go on plowing in blind circles forever; the fuel gave out. The hell-fire in the bowels of Heath’s ship guttered and died; there was only an echoing ghost of the roar that had choked the engine room.

* * *

It was too quiet. An unholy, nerve-rending silence enveloped the becalmed Macedonia. After a time, the men even gave up talking, as if the very echo of their voices, hollow and dead in the smothering fog, terrified them.

Dyke was on the foredeck when he heard the voices. Heath, standing beside him, had sensed an abrupt new tautness in the bony, coltish frame. Dyke’s adolescent face strained to one side, marble- blue eyes gazing blindly into the mist; he listened. His words came to Lazarus Heath as though they had been separated by some yawning, fog-choked abyss.

“You hear them? The voices? I can hear them; they’re calling us…. The syrens are chanting the melodies of watery death…. Zoth Syra calleth…The voice was no longer Dyke’s. It was light and cloying, possessed of a malignant beauty. Men froze and stared; they seemed not to hear Heath’s sharp commands. “I heard nothing,” Heath wrote that night. “Still, the sounds must have been there. Dyke must have been listening to something; he and the others…. But, I mustn’t believe these whispered legends of sea-syrens. Someone must hold this God- forsaken crew together… if only I have the strength… if only I can keep from hearing the voices….” That was the prayer of Lazarus Heath, the night the Macedonia ran aground and sank off the ghostly shores of a lost, uncharted island.

Little space separated the next entry from those last frantic words, scribbled unevenly across a water- streaked, foul-smelling page of the diary, yet, reading on, I had the sensation of an endless spinning through some dark, watery nothingness. I lived the nightmare of which Lazarus Heath wrote with the calm sadness of a completely sane man.

The end of the Macedonia had been sudden and strange. By the hour, they had known it must be noon in that outer world with which they had lost all hope of contact. Their own existence had become a perpetual fog-swarming night; the monstrous ticking of the ship’s clocks only taunted them. The bells of the Macedonia ricocheted mockingly into the boundless darkness of the mist. They had been chiming when the end came.

Lazarus Heath had spent most of his life on the water; he had survived more than one shipwreck. Panic and the smashing fury of the sea were nothing new to him. It was the quiet that terrified the Macedonia’s First Mate. The crew seemed not to understand; his lashing, bitter orders fell on deafened ears. The swirling Atlantic sucked thirstily at their feet and they did not move. Officers and men alike, they stood or sat in a speechless, apathetic stupor, unmindful of the death that swirled and lapped on every side. Each face held the same rapt, hypnotized expression. One would have said they were listening….

Heath steeled himself. He mustn’t listen. He mustn’t let himself hear what they could hear. He wanted to live. He stalked the length of the bridge angrily, bawling harsh commands. Only the fog and the sea listened and echoed. The Macedonia groaned mournfully and listed to port; water, thick and brine-tangled, flooded her hold. No one moved. She was going fast. He had to do something, make them hear him, bring them back to life….