Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (63 page)

“All right. Look in the paper in the morning. Tell me what strikes you.”

“But what am I to look for?”

He was amused by my refusal to “wait and see.” He should have known that old men are less patient than children.

“The crime figures.”

“Can’t you tell me more?”

“All right.” We were parked outside the hotel by now, and it was still raining heavily. At this hour of the night, there was no sound but the fall of rain and the gurgling of water in the gutters. “You’ll find that the crime rate in this area is three times that of the rest of England. The figures are so high that they’re seldom published. Murder, cruelty, rape, every possible kind of sexual perversion—this area has the highest figures in the British Isles.”

“But why?”

“I’ve told you. The Lloigor achieve the strength to reappear every now and then.” And to make it clear that he wanted to go home, he leaned over and opened my door for me. Before I had reached the door of the hotel, he had driven off.

I asked the caretaker on duty if I could borrow a local newspaper; he produced me one from his cubbyhole, which he said I could keep. I
went up to my cold room, undressed and climbed into bed—there was a hot-water bottle in it. Then I glanced through the newspaper. At first sight, I could see no evidence for Urquart’s assertion. The headline was about a strike in the local dockyard, and the lead stories were about a local cattle show in which the judges had been accused of accepting bribes, and about a Southport girl swimmer who had almost broken the record for the cross-Channel swim. On the middle page, the editorial was on some question of Sunday observance. It looked innocent enough.

Then I began to notice the small paragraphs, tucked away next to the advertisements or among the sports news. The headless body that had been found floating in the Bryn Mawr reservoir has been tentatively identified as a teenage farm girl from Llandalffen. A fourteen-year-old boy sentenced to a corrective institution for inflicting injuries on a sheep with a hatchet. A farmer petitioning for divorce on the grounds that his wife seemed to be infatuated with her imbecile stepson. A vicar sentenced to a year in prison for offences against choirboys. A father who had murdered his daughter and her boyfriend out of sexual jealousy. A man in the old-folks’ home who had incinerated two of his companions by pouring paraffin on their beds and setting them alight. A twelve-year-old boy who had offered his twin sisters, age seven, ice cream with rat poison sprinkled on it, and then laughed uncontrollably in the juvenile court. (The children luckily survived with bad stomach-aches.) A short paragraph saying that the police had now charged a man with the three Lovers’ Lane murders.

I jotted these down in the order I read them. It was quite a chronicle for a peaceful rural area, even allowing that Southport and Cardiff, with their higher crime rates, were fairly close. Admittedly, it was not too bad a record compared to most places in America. Even Charlottesville can produce a crime record that would be regarded as a major crime wave in England. Before falling asleep, I pulled on my dressing gown, and found my way down to the lounge, where I had seen a copy of
Whitaker’s Almanac
, and looked up the English crime rate. A mere 166 murders in 1967—three murders to every million people of the population; America’s murder rate is about twenty times as high. Yet here, in a single issue of a small local newspaper, I had found mention of nine murders—although admittedly, some of them dated back a long way. (The Lovers’ Lane murders were spread over eighteen months.)

I slept very badly that night, my mind running constantly on invisible monsters, awful cataclysms, sadistic murderers, demoniac teenagers. It was a relief to wake up to bright sunlight and a cup of morning tea. Even so, I found myself stealing a look at the maid—a pale-faced little
thing with dull eyes and stringy hair—and wondering what irregular union had produced her. I had breakfast and the morning paper sent up to my room, and read it with morbid interest.

Again, the more lurid news was carefully tucked away in small paragraphs. Two eleven-year-old schoolboys were accused of being implicated in the murder of the headless girl, but claimed that a tramp “with smouldering eyes” had actually decapitated her. A Southport druggist forced to resign from the town council when accused of having “carnal knowledge” of his fourteen-year-old assistant. Evidence suggesting that a deceased midwife had been a successful baby farmer in the manner of the infamous Mrs. Dyer of Reading. An old lady of Llangwm seriously injured by a man who accused her of witchcraft—of causing babies to be born with deformities. An attempt on the life of the mayor of Chepstow by a man with some obscure grudge.… I omit more than half of the list, for the crimes are as dull as they are sordid.

There was no doubt that all this brooding on crime and corruption was having its effect on my outlook. I had always liked the Welsh, with their small stature and dark hair and pale skins. Now I found myself looking at them as if they were troglodytes, trying to find evidence of secret vices in their eyes. And the more I looked, the more I saw it. I observed the number of words beginning with two L’s, from Lloyd’s Bank to Llandudno, and thought of the Lloigor with a shudder. (Incidentally, I thought the word familiar, and found it on page 258 of the Lovecraft
Shuttered Room
volume, listed as the god “who walks the winds among the star-spaces.” I also found Ghatanothoa, the Dark God, mentioned there, although not as the chief of the “star dwellers.”)

It was almost intolerable, walking along that sunlit street, looking at the rural population going about their everyday business of shopping and admiring one another’s babies, to feel this awful secret inside me, struggling to get out. I wanted to dismiss the whole thing as a nightmare, the invention of one half-crazed mind; then I had to acknowledge that it all followed logically from the Voynich manuscript and the Lovecraft gods. Yes, there could hardly be any doubt: Lovecraft and Machen had simply obtained some knowledge of an ancient tradition that may have existed before any known civilisation on earth.

The only other alternative was some elaborate literary hoax, organised between Machen, Lovecraft, and Voynich, who must be regarded as a forger, and that was impossible. But what an alternative! How could I believe in it and still feel sane, here in this sunlit high street, with the lilting sound of Welsh in my ears? Some evil, dark world, so alien from ours that human beings cannot even begin to understand it; strange powers whose actions seem incredibly cruel and vengeful, yet who are simply driven by abstract laws of their being that would be incomprehensible to us. Urquart, with his reptilian face and his
morose intelligence. And above all, unseen forces bending the minds of these apparently innocent people around me, making them corrupt and depraved.

I had already decided what I would do that day. I would get Mr. Evans to drive me out to the “Grey Hills” mentioned by Machen, and take some photographs, and make some discreet enquiries. I even had a compass with me—one I usually kept in my car in America—in case I managed to
lose
my way.

There was a small crowd gathered outside Mr. Evans’s garage and an ambulance stood by the pavement. As I approached, two attendants came out, carrying a stretcher. I saw Mr. Evans standing gloomily inside the small shop attached to the garage, watching the crowd. I asked him:

“What happened?”

“Chap upstairs committed suicide in the night. Gassed himself.”

As the ambulance pulled away, I asked, “Don’t you think there’s rather a lot of that around here?”

“Of what?”

“Suicides, murders, and so on. Your local paper’s full of it.”

“I suppose so. It’s the teenagers nowadays. They do what they like.”

I saw there was no point in pursuing the subject. I asked him whether he was free to drive me to the Grey Hills. He shook his head.

“I promised I’d wait around to make a statement to the police. You’re welcome to use the car if you want it.”

And so I bought a map of the area, and drove myself. I stopped for ten minutes to admire the mediaeval bridge, mentioned by Machen, then drove slowly north. The morning was windy, but not cold, and the sunlight made the scene look totally different from the previous afternoon. Although I looked out carefully for signs of Machen’s Grey Hills, I saw nothing in the pleasant, rolling landscape that seemed to answer that description. Soon I found myself passing a signpost that announced Abergavenny ten miles away. I decided to take a look at the place. By the time I arrived there, the sunlight had so far dispelled the night vapours from my head that I drove round the town—unremarkable enough architecturally—and then walked up to look at the ruined castle above it. I spoke to a couple of natives, who struck me as more English than Welsh in type. Indeed, the town is not many miles away from the Severn Valley and A. E. Housman’s Shropshire.

But I was reminded of the myth of the Lloigor by a few sentences in the local guidebook about William de Braose, Lord of Brecheiniog (Brecon), “whose shadow broods darkly over the past of Abergavenny,” whose “foul deeds” had apparently shocked even the lawless English of the twelfth century. I made a mental note to ask Urquart how long the Lloigor had been present in South Wales, and how far their influence
extended. I drove on northwest, through the most attractive part of the valley of the Usk. At Crickhowell, I stopped in a pleasantly old-fashioned pub and drank a cool pint of mild ale, and fell into conversation with a local who proved to have read Machen. I asked him where he supposed the “Grey Hills” to be situated, and he told me confidently that it was directly to the north, in the Black Mountains, the high, wild moorland between the valleys of Usk and the Wye. So I drove on for another half hour, to the top of the pass called the Bwlch, where the scenery is among the finest in Wales, with the Brecon Beacons to the west, and woodland and hills to the south, with glimpses of the Usk reflecting the sunlight. But the Black Mountains to the east looked anything but menacing, and their description did not correspond to the page in Machen that I was using as a guide. So I turned south once again, through Abergavenny (where I ate a light lunch), and then through minor roads to Llandalffen, the road climbing steeply again.

It was here that I began to suspect that I was approaching my objective. There was a barrenness about the hills that suggested the atmosphere of “The Novel of the Black Seal.” But I kept an open mind, for the afternoon had become cloudy, and I suspected it might be pure imagination. I stopped the car by the roadside, close to a stone bridge, and got out to lean on the parapet. It was a fast-flowing stream, and the glassy power of the current fascinated me until I felt almost hypnotised by it. I walked down by the side of the bridge, digging in my heels to keep my balance on the steep slope, and went down to a flat rock beside the stream. This was almost an act of bravado, for I felt a distinct discomfort, which I knew to be partly self-induced. A man of my age tends to feel tired and depressed after lunch, particularly when he has been drinking.

I had my Polaroid camera round my neck. The green of the grass and the grey of the sky made such a contrast that I decided to take a picture. I adjusted the light meter on the front of the camera, and pointed the camera upstream; then I pulled out the photograph, and slipped it under my coat to develop. A minute later, I stripped off the negative paper. The photograph was black. Obviously, it had somehow been exposed to light. I raised the camera and took a second shot, tossing the first one into the stream. As I pulled the second photograph from the camera, I had a sudden intuitive certainty that it would also be black.

I looked nervously around, and almost tripped into the stream as I saw a face looking down at me from the bridge above. It was a boy, or a youth, leaning on the parapet, watching me. My timing device stopped buzzing. Ignoring the boy, I stripped the paper off the photograph. It was black. I swore under my breath, and tossed it into the stream.
Then I looked up the slope to calculate the easiest way back, and saw the youth standing at the top. He was dressed in shabby brown clothes, completely nondescript. His face was thin and brown, reminding me of gypsies I had seen on the station in Newport. The brown eyes were expressionless. I stared back at him without smiling, at first only curious as to what he wanted.

But he made no apologetic movement, and I felt suddenly afraid that he wanted to rob me—perhaps of the camera, or the traveller’s cheques in my wallet. Another look at him convinced me that he would not know what to do with either. The vacant eyes and the protruding ears indicated that I was dealing with an imbecile. And then, with sudden total certainty, I knew what he had in mind as clearly as if he had told me. He meant to rush at me down the slope, and knock me backwards into the water. But why? I glanced at the water. It was very fast, and perhaps waist-deep—perhaps a little more—but not deep enough to drown a grown man. There were rocks and stones in it, but none large enough to hurt me if I was dashed against it.

Nothing like this had ever happened to me before—at least, for the past fifty years. Weakness and fear flowed over me, so that I wanted to sit down. Only my determination not to betray fear prevented me. I made an effort, and scowled at him in an irritable manner, as I have occasionally scowled at my students. To my surprise, he smiled at me—although I think it was a smile of malice rather than of amusement—and turned away. I lost no time in scrambling up the bank to a less vulnerable position.

When I reached the road a few seconds later he was gone. The only cover within fifty yards was the other side of the bridge, or behind my car. I bent to peer under the car, to see if his feet were visible; they weren’t. I overcame my panic, and went to look over the other parapet of the bridge. He wasn’t there either. The only other possibility was that he had slipped under the bridge, although the water seemed to be flowing too fast. In any case, I was not going to look down there. I went back to the car, forcing myself not to hurry, and only felt safe when I was in motion.