Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (66 page)

I saw the field myself—we were allowed to approach by the
inspector of police from Llandalffen, who knew Urquart. My first impression was that it had been an earthquake rather than an ordinary explosion. An explosion produces a crater, or clears a more-or-less flattened area, but the ground here was torn and split open as if by a convulsion from underneath. A stream flowed through the field, and it had now turned the area into a lake. On the other hand, there were certain signs that are characteristic of an explosion. Some trees were flattened, or reduced to broken stumps, but others were untouched. The wall between the field and the main road was almost intact, although it ran along the top of a raised mound or dyke, yet a wall much farther away in the next field had been scattered over a wide area.

There were also, of course, the disfigured human and animal relics that we had expected to find; shreds of skin, fragments of bone. Few of them were identifiable; the explosion seemed to have fragmented every living creature in the field. The donkey’s leg found by the farmer was the largest segment recovered.

I was soon feeling severely sick, and had to go and sit in the car, but Urquart limped around for over an hour, picking up various fragments. I heard a police sergeant ask him what he was looking for, and Urquart said he didn’t know. But I knew; he was hoping for some definite evidence to connect the gypsies with Mu. And somehow, I was certain that he wouldn’t find it.

By now there must have been a thousand sightseers around the area, trying to approach closely enough to find out what happened. Our car was stopped a dozen or more times as we tried to drive away. Urquart told everyone who asked him that he thought a flying saucer had exploded.

In fact, we were both fairly certain what had happened. I believe that old Chickno had gone too far—that he told me too much. Urquart thinks that his chief mistake was to think of the Lloigor as somehow human, and of himself as their servant, entitled to take certain liberties. He failed to realise that he was completely dispensable, and that his naive tendency to boast and present himself as an ambassador of the Lloigor made him dangerous to them.

We reached this conclusion after I had described my talk with Chickno to Urquart. When I had finished reading him my notes, Urquart said, “No wonder they killed him.”

“But he didn’t say much, after all.”

“He said enough. And perhaps they thought we could guess more than he said.”

We had lunch in the hotel, and regretted it. Everyone seemed to know where we had been, and they stared at us and tried to overhear our conversation. The waiter spent so much time hanging about in the area of our table that the manager finally had to reprimand him. We
ate as quickly as we could and went back to Urquart’s house. There was a fire in the library again, and Mrs. Dolgelly brought in coffee.

I can still remember every moment of that afternoon. There was a sense of tension and foreboding, of physical danger. What had impressed Urquart most was old Chickno’s scorn when I told him that Urquart thought “they” had no real power. I still remember that stream of contemptuous bad language that had made several people in the pub turn their heads. And Chickno had been proved right. “They” had plenty of power—several kinds of power. For we reached the conclusion that the devastation of the gypsy encampment was neither earthquake nor explosion, but some kind of mixture of both. An explosion violent enough to rip apart the caravans would have been heard clearly in Southport and Melincourt, and most certainly in Llandalffen, barely five miles away. The clefts and cracks in the earth suggested a convulsion of the ground. But a convulsion of the ground would not have torn apart the caravans. Urquart believed—and I finally agreed with him—that the caravans and their inhabitants
had
been literally torn apart. But in that case, what was the purpose of the convulsion of the earth? There were two possible explanations. This had happened as the “creatures” forced their way from underground. Or the “earthquake” was a deliberate false trail, a red herring. And the consequences that followed from such a supposition were so frightening that we poured ourselves whiskies, although it was only midafternoon. It meant that “they” were anxious to provide an apparently natural explanation for what had happened. And that meant they had a reason for secrecy. And, as far as we could see, there could only be one reason: they had “plans,” plans for the future. I recalled Chickno’s words: “This is their world anyway.… They want it back again.”

The frustrating thing was that, in all his books on occultism and the history of Mu, Urquart had nothing that suggested an answer. It was hard to fight off a paralysed feeling of hopelessness, of not knowing where to begin. The evening paper increased the depression, for it stated confidently that the explosion had been caused by nitroglycerine! The “experts” had come up with a theory that seemed to explain the facts. Chickno’s son and son-in-law had worked in stone quarries in the north, and were used to handling explosives. Nitroglycerine was occasionally used in these quarries because of its cheapness and because it is easy to manufacture. According to the newspaper report, Chickno’s sons were suspected of stealing quantities of glycerine, and of nitric and sulphuric acid. Their intention, said the report, was to use them for blowing safes. They must have manufactured fairly large quantities of the nitroglycerine, and some kind of earth tremor set it off.

It was an absurd explanation; it would have taken a ton of nitroglycerine to do so much damage. In any case, a nitroglycerine explosion leaves behind characteristic signs; there were no such signs in the devastated field. A nitroglycerine explosion can be heard; no one heard it.

And yet the explanation was never seriously questioned, although there was later an official investigation into the disaster. Presumably because human beings are afraid of mysteries for which there is absolutely no explanation, the mind needs some solution, no matter how absurd, to reassure it.

There was another item in the evening paper that at first seemed irrelevant. The headline ran: “Did explosion release mystery gas?” It was only a short paragraph, which stated that many people in the area had awakened that morning with bad headaches and a feeling of lassitude, apparently signs of an impending attack of influenza. These had cleared up later in the day. Had the explosion released some gas, asked the reporter, that produced these symptoms? The newspaper’s “scientific correspondent” added a note saying that sulphur dioxide could produce exactly these symptoms, and that several people had noticed such a smell in the night. Nitroglycerine, of course, contains a small quantity of sulphuric acid, which would account for the smell.…

Urquart said, “Soon find out about that, anyway,” and rang the Southport weather bureau. They rang us back ten minutes later with the answer; the wind had been blowing from the northeast in the night. And Llandalffen lies to the north of the site of the explosion.

And still neither of us saw the significance of the item. We wasted hours searching through my translation of the Voynich manuscript for clues, then through thirty or so books on Mu and related subjects.

And then, about to reach down another volume on Lemuria and Atlantis, my eye fell on Sacheverell Sitwell’s book
Poltergeists
. I stopped and stared. My mind groped for some fact I had half-forgotten. Then it came.

“My god, Urquart,” I said, “I’ve just thought of something. Where do these creatures get their energy?” He looked at me blankly. “Is it their own natural energy? You need a physical body to generate physical energy. But how about poltergeists …” And then he understood, too. “Poltergeists” take energy from human beings, usually from adolescent girls. One school of thought believes that poltergeists have no independent existence; they are some kind of psychic manifestation from the unconscious mind of the adolescent, an explosion of frustration or craving for attention. The other school believes that they are “spirits” who need to borrow energy from an emotionally disturbed person; Sitwell cites cases of poltergeist disturbances in houses that have remained empty for long periods.

Could this be why so many people in the area felt tired and “fluey”
when they woke up—because the energy for the explosion came
from them?

If this was so, then the danger was not as serious as we had believed. It meant that the Lloigor had no energy of their own; they had to draw it from people—presumably sleeping people. Their powers were therefore limited.

The same thought struck us both at the same time. Except, of course, that the world is full of people.…

Nevertheless, we both felt suddenly more cheerful. And in this new frame of mind, we faced our fundamental task; to make the human race aware of the Lloigor. They were not indestructible, or they would not have bothered to destroy Chickno for talking about them. It might be possible to destroy them with an underground nuclear explosion. The fact that they had remained dormant for so many centuries meant that their power was limited. If we could produce definite proof of their existence, then the possibility of countering the menace was high.

The obvious starting point was the Llandalffen explosion: to make the public aware that it pointed unmistakably to the reality of these hidden forces. In a way, Chickno’s death was the best thing that could have happened; they had shown their hand. We decided to visit the explosion site again in the morning, and to compile a dossier on it. We would interview the citizens of Llandalffen and find out whether any of them really
had
smelled sulphur dioxide in the night, and whether they would persist in the story when we pointed out that the wind was blowing in the opposite direction. Urquart knew a few Fleet Street journalists who had taken a vague interest in the occult and supernatural; he would contact them and hint at a big story.

When I returned to my hotel late that night, I felt happier than for many days. And I slept deeply and heavily. When I woke up, it was already long past breakfast time, and I felt exhausted. I attributed this to my long sleep, until I tried to walk to the bathroom and found that my head throbbed as if I had picked up a flu germ. I took two aspirins, had a shave, then went downstairs. To my relief, no one else showed signs of a similar exhaustion. Coffee and buttered toast in the lounge refreshed me slightly; I decided that I was suffering from ordinary strain. Then I rang Urquart.

Mrs Dolgelly said, “I’m afraid he’s not up yet, sir. He’s not feeling too well this morning.”

“What’s the matter with him?”

“Nothing much. He just seems very tired.”

“I’ll be right over,” I said. I told the desk to ring me a taxi; I was far too tired to walk.

Twenty minutes later, I was sitting at Urquart’s bedside. He looked and felt even worse than I did.

“I hate to suggest this,” I said, “feeling as we both do, but I think we’d better get out of this place as soon as possible.”

“Couldn’t we wait until tomorrow?” he asked.

“It will be worse tomorrow. They’ll exhaust us until we die of the first minor illness we pick up.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

Although it all seemed too troublesome for words, I managed to get back to the hotel, pack my bags, and order a taxi to the station in Cardiff, where we could catch a London train at three o’clock. Urquart encountered more difficulty than I did; Mrs. Dolgelly showed unexpected strength of mind and refused to pack a case for him. He rang me, and I dragged myself back there again, wanting nothing so much as to climb back into bed. But the effort revived me; before midday, the headache had vanished, and I was feeling less exhausted, although oddly light-headed. Mrs. Dolgelly believed my explanation of an urgent telegram that made our journey a matter of life and death, although she was convinced that Urquart would collapse on the way to London.

That night, we slept in the Regent Palace Hotel. And in the morning, we both woke up feeling perfectly normal. It was Urquart who said, as we waited for our egg and bacon at breakfast, “I think we’re winning, old boy.”

But neither of us really believed it.

And from this point on, my story ceases to be a continuous narrative, and becomes a series of fragments, and a record of frustration. We spent weeks in the British Museum searching for clues, and later in the Bibliothèque Nationale. Books on cults in the South Seas indicate that many traditions of the Lloigor survive there, and it is well known that they will one day return and reclaim their world. One text quoted by Leduc and Poitier says that they will cause a “tearing madness” to break out among those they wish to destroy, and their footnote says that “tearing,” as used in this context, means to tear with the teeth, like a man eating a chicken leg. Von Storch has records of a Haitian tribe in which the menfolk became possessed of a demon that led many of them to kill wives and children by tearing at their throats with their teeth.

Lovecraft also provided us with an important hint. In “The Call of Cthulhu” he mentions a collection of press cuttings, all of which reveal that the “entombed Old Ones” are becoming more active in the world. Later the same day, I happened to meet a girl who worked for a press-cutting agency, who told me that her job was simply to read through dozens of newspapers every day, looking out for mention of
the names of clients. I asked her if she could look for items of “unusual” interest—anything hinting at the mysterious or supernatural—and she said she saw no reason why not. I gave her a copy of Charles Fort’s
Lo!
to give her an idea of the kind of items I wanted.

Two weeks later, a thin buff envelope arrived, with a dozen or so press clippings in it. Most of them were unimportant—babies with two heads and similar medical curiosities, a man killed in Scotland by an enormous hailstone, reports of an abominable snowman seen on the slopes of Everest—but two or three were more relevant to our search. We immediately contacted several more press-cutting agencies in England, America, and Australia.

The result was an enormous amount of material, which finally occupied two enormous volumes. It was arranged under various headings: explosions, murders, witchcraft (and the supernatural in general), insanity, scientific observations, miscellaneous. The details of the explosion near Al-Kazimiyah in Iraq are so similar to those of the Llandalffen disaster—even to the exhaustion of the inhabitants of Al-Kazimiyah—that I have no doubt that this area is another stronghold of the Lloigor. The explosion that changed the course of the Tula Gol near Ulan Bator in Mongolia actually led the Chinese to accuse Russia of dropping an atomic bomb. The strange insanity that destroyed ninety percent of the inhabitants of the southern island of Zaforas in the Sea of Crete is still a mystery upon which the Greek military government refuses to comment. The massacre at Panagyurishte in Bulgaria on the night of March 29th, 1968, was blamed, in the first official reports, upon a “vampire cult” who “regarded the nebula in Andromeda as their true home.” These are some of the major events that convinced us that the Lloigor are planning a major attack on the inhabitants of the earth.