Suddenly the Woman saw a gigantic hand rearing out of the sandy desert. It was a very masculine hand with short, stubby, powerful fingers. The back was covered with hair; the palm was soft.
“What a beautiful hand!” exclaimed the Woman. “I could rest in that hand while the fingertips caress my lovely body.” She crawled into the hand and cuddled on the soft palm.
“Love me, you wonderful masculine hand,” she commanded.
The fingers and thumb closed on her, slowly crushing her to death.
Cthulhu screamed. Now on earth he had no place to live. His failure was complete. There was nothing for him to do but return to Saturn.
Man had won the war. Humanity was safe. A finer civilization rose on the ruins.
THE DUNSTABLE HORROR
BY ARTHUR PENDRAGON
A PALEOGRAPHER CANNOT BE THOUGHT A MADMAN. TO AVOID such a charge I have suppressed until my retirement the story which I now add to this book of memoirs. Do not doubt the accuracy of the tale. My memory has not failed me in probing the skin of this earth; it could not betray me now, for I bear like an old unclosed wound the remembrance of that horror in the forest north of Dunstable.
I had come from the British Museum to Dunstable in northern New England during the rainy March of 1920 in order to find and study the long-buried records of the Massaquoit tribe of red Indians. They were an isolate and obscure nation, a sea-marsh people who perished shortly after the foundation of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. My grips and gear were thrown from the creaking passenger train at the Boston & Maine depot on the outskirts of the town. From the platform of the small Victorian building the landscape was singularly depressing. The continual drizzle of winter’s end reduced all to a monochrome grey of muddy flats and dripping scrub-topped hills. I would have been stranded were it not for the New England type lounging with the stationmaster in the telegraph office. As I entered the warmth of the waiting room he casually surveyed my dripping waterproof and the cut of my clothes, remarking drily, “Looks like the tourist season has begun.”
I took an instant dislike to the man which went beyond the sneer in his remark. However, since his was the only team outside I forced myself to be polite, to suffer his arrogance for the sake of a ride to town and a warm billet. After a few minutes of conversation he rose to his feet and grudgingly offered to drive me into Dunstable if I would help him load the wagon.
We wrestled several boxes of parts for his lumber mill, apparently the only industry in this area of rocky farms, into the back of the wagon, and added my gear. As the team plodded through the cold mist I found him more talkative than the traditionally taciturn New Englander. He commented, in a fragmentary fashion, on his mill, his position of authority in the town, and his affluence. From the very beginning his family, the Varnums, had inhabited the town, and he was the culmination of the line. Although unmarried at forty, he had decided to take a wife when time allowed in order to perpetuate the Varnum house.
The wagon swung onto a paved and wider thoroughfare posted as the Black North Road. Varnum finished his monologue and eyed me suspiciously, asking why I had come all the way up the coast to Dunstable. I decided to put an end to his egoistic spouting by exploiting the awe for learning shared by the middle classes, and so replied, “I am Thomas Grail of the British Museum, and I have come to find Pauquatoag.” To my utter astonishment he recognized the name of the great sorcerer of the Massaquoits, the evil Merlin of the New England tribes.
Varnum saw the surprise on my face. “Oh, yes. The family had a certain—ah—contact with Pauquatoag when they first landed.” He smiled darkly and alluded to several diaries he had inherited with his father’s estate. I would not learn the peculiar nature of that contact, and its terrible result, until later.
We rolled onto the covered bridge over the Penaubsket River. On the far bank lay Dunstable, its lights wanly glowing against the foggy dusk. “I suppose this means you’ll be going up north into the forest,” Varnum said. “You’ll have a hard time getting anyone to go with you.” I told him that I could offer good wages, and that the work would not be difficult, merely a bit of digging. “You’ve got three things working against you,” he replied. “Number one—the frost is coming out of the ground and the farmers’ll be putting in the seed pretty soon. Number two—the ice broke on the Penaubsket and the Kennebago last week, so the mill will be running at top speed in a few days.” He cracked the reins as we left the bridge for the main road. “And number three—everyone’s been sort of reluctant to go farther north than the logging camps since the animals came floating down river.”
He pointed out a mill pond at the side of a small dam. The oily water circled and foamed in endless eddies. “That pond has been almost full of dead animals two or three times since the thaw began. Came floating downstream from beyond the last logging camp. Squirrels, foxes, even a deer or two. Never saw anything like it.”
I asked how they had died. “As far as we could tell, by drowning. As if something had driven them into the river. When the snow melts in the uplands the current gets vicious. You’ll see it at its worst in about a week. Ever since then, nobody has gone beyond the camps. Superstitious peasants.” He laughed wryly. “And some of my men who’ve been past the camps laying out cutting stakes even say they saw a glow in the forest after dark, near the marshes. I just couldn’t convince them that they had seen an ordinary will o’ the wisp.”
I recognized the popular name for ignis fatuus, a light seen at night moving across bogs, thought to be caused by the slow oxidation of gases from rotting vegetation. “But surely,” I said, “they must see that sort of thing often around here, judging from the number of fens I passed on the train.”
Varnum snorted. “They all said this light was different—steady, not flickering, and moving from the marshes into the forest. They’re just trying to get out of camp duty. Lazy oxes. I have to keep after them all the time.”
We reined up before the Dunstable Inn, which looked as though it had received its last repair in colonial times. “Well, that’s what you’re up against, Mr. Grail-of-the-British-Museum.” Varnum dropped my bags into the muddy street. “If you’re going to come all this way to dig up a three-hundred-year-old Indian, you’ve got to expect little problems like this. If you ask me, you grave-robbers are all a little bit off.” He laughed and reined on the team, spattering me with mud as the wagon was enveloped in the steady drizzle. Chilled and disgusted, I collected my gear and entered the inn.
* * *
Varnum was correct in his prediction about the difficulty of obtaining guide service. The following morning, after a restive night in a battered four-poster, I began to make the rounds. At the feed and general store I was met with the reticence and suspicion of the highland New Englanders. The booted farmers and hands fell silent when I entered, awed by my accent. When I told them of my purpose they shifted their bodies uneasily. I promised a good week’s wages, and in some I could see raging the battle between the desire for money and some strange dread. But they all hung back, muttering lame excuses, saying, “You’re sure to get someone at the mill.”
The millpond was already filling with rafts of logs ridden downstream by the pikemen. The rasp of a giant saw somewhere in the bowels of the mill trembled across the damp air. At the hiring office I was informed that the mill was laying on a second shift that night, and that no one would be available for a week’s leave. Furthermore, the foreman doubted that I would be able to get a single townsman to accompany me because the news of the dead animals and the light in the forest had made the residents fearful of traveling beyond the logging camps on the two rivers.