“This is Ubbo-Sathla, the Unbegotten Source,” Marken told me. He was hesitant to even touch the image. I could hear a rustling from below, in the basements beneath us, and while I knew it would only be Marken’s workmen going about their tasks, I still shuddered. We were drinking wine. I drank more. More than I should have. Or less.
“It looks like some viscous fluid,” I told Marken. “An oil stain. A jam spilt upon the floor.” I was making light of it. I could see outside the window and down to the lake, where it was black. A dog was howling, somewhere. The days had been playing hell with their kind. The villagers were pressing hard at me on the disappearances. The hounds. Cecil Cabershaw. Especially little Joslie’s murder. But I had nothing. No gypsies to roust or travelers to condemn. No donkey where I could pin the murderous tail. Now, ten dogs dead or missing in the last week. The dog that Marken and I could hear howling was undoubtedly being kept at home, mournful that it was not allowed to roam free at night.
“Ubbo-Sathla is the creator of all life on Earth,” Marken told me, and he began to spin a fantastical tale of the vastness of space, of visitors marooned on our planet, stranded long before life here began. It was a story of Ubbo-Sathla huddled beneath ice, spitting forth creatures into a glacier melt… drop after drop of life, small organisms that soon sprang into the strange and foul creatures Ubbo-Sathla created at whim, life as no more than a toy, these beings stumbling away to cover the Earth, passing the centuries, the millennia, hundreds of millions of years, becoming grotesque fish, or dogs that howl in the night, or the villagers in every English town.
“But not every creature changed,” Marken told me. We were on our third bottle of wine. I excused myself to the bathroom, standing over the toilet and listening to Marken’s words as he called out, as I relieved myself, as I watched the faucet of Marken’s sink dripping out, drop after drop. I was thinking of my wife, alone, at home. She would be mending. Reading. Having tea. I thought of her running the faucets. I thought of her hair. Her smile. I thought of going home but in my madness I needed to hear what Marken had to say.
He called out, “Some of the foulest creatures kept their form, kept their hatred for their new home and for all their brothers. Unchanged, they watched as eternity cantered by, with endless steps. Or perhaps they do have an end.”
I returned to my chair. To my cups of wine. I asked, “What do you mean?”
“The Cabershaw family,” he spoke. There was great import in his words, but I had no idea of his meaning. There was little left to the Cabershaw family. They were dying out. Was this what he meant?
“Cecil has gone missing,” I said. “Maple is in Wath-upon-Dearne. A hospital. For her mind.”
“You don’t understand. Time has no meaning. None at all. To the ones who came before, to Cthulhu, to Kassogtha, to the Black Goat of the Woods with his thousand young, time is only a tool. We are neither here nor there. Not in the past or the future. Every Cabershaw who has ever lived, they are still here. Still among us. Still going about their tasks.”
“Their… tasks?” I asked. I felt as a man who cannot help himself from entering a cavern’s depths. The dogs of Leighton were all howling, now, calling from off in the distance, for the most part, though some were coming closer. The night had gone so dark that I could no longer see the lake from my seat next to the window. The curtains were rustling. A wind was visiting.
“They are caretakers since time immemorial,” Marken said. “Since before they were human. Since before there were humans.” He was turning pages of the Cthäat Aquadingen. The book was hundreds of years old, but the pages were not brittle. I wondered of their origin. Inside, there were texts in several languages. Most of them alien to my eyes. There were chunks of pages filled with nothing but dots in intricate patterns. And pictograms with figures that made my eyes itch and burn. I wondered of the illustrations I was seeing as Marken heaved page after page of the giant tome aside, all the images of fantastical creatures that I would never have believed existed, except Marken believed, and he did not seem as if any madness had taken him, or the wine had misguided him. My father had often told me that sometimes it is only a madman that see or speaks the truth.
“Here,” Marken said. “The Cabershaw family.” He made as if to speak more, but then stopped, said nothing. I wondered, with all that he had been speaking, what madness he had decided was best left unsaid. He tapped on the pages and at first I did not look. I only reached for more wine. We’d opened another bottle. Outside, there were the sounds of dogs moving closer, racing through the woods and towards, I somehow felt, the lake.
There was an image of the Cabershaw family in the book. Of Cecil Cabershaw. An exact likeness. Even, God help me, the clothes that he had been wearing the last time he’d been seen, when he was at the general store retrieving an order of two hundred canning jars suitable for vegetables or meats. The clerk remembered him well, wondering of such an order from a man not known to garden or to prepare much for the future.
But there he was, just as the clerk had described, just in the clothes that Cecil normally wore… the same vest and the pocket watch and the hat and everything in place, even the cut of his hair, and all of it in a book whose pages had been created while the Vandals were still sacking Rome. My forehead was moist. My hand was on my Webley, for reassurance. The metal felt cold and real. It began raining outside. Soft rain. Dribbles and drops. One after the other. I could hear a pack of hounds racing past. An awful racket. I could hear the blood in my ears. A small thump in my temple. I’d have a headache, soon, I believed. I wanted to be home in bed with a cloth on my head, with my wife’s loving hands holding it in place.
Instead of this, I said, “What role do you have? Why are you here, Marken? Why have you come back to Leighton?”
He pondered my question. No immediate answer. I could see another of those rounds of calculation in his eyes. This time, I sensed, he was deciding not if he would answer, but only how he would answer.
Finally, he said, “You’ve heard the dogs?”
I nodded. The dogs were gathering by Lake Henpin. I could hear their baying, their growls, their whimpers and such. The wine and Marken and the strange leather book had put me in a mood where the dogs seemed unreal, foreign, as far away as the stars. At any other time I would have sprang to my feet and raced outside in wonder at their actions. Dogs are wise, you know. My father said to trust a dog more than a man, because a dog has never learned to lie.
“Dogs are not the only ones that hunt,” Marken told me.
* * *
The dogs had been disappearing at night. For a week. One a night. Sometimes two. At first it was assumed they’d simply run off. Dogs need freedom. They’d soon come home. There were one or two jokes gamboled about… talk of how something was in the air. Cecil had started a trend by running away on his sister. The dogs were following suit. I didn’t laugh at these jokes. It is not my job to do so. And Joslie had been put to rest in her grave. A policeman can’t be seen to be smiling when a girl’s grave is still so fresh.
As the disappearances continued, there were no more jokes. Leashes were found chewed apart. Or broken. And then the dogs began to wash up on the lake. Drowned, they were. And some animal had been at them. Dogs are not talented swimmers, and nobody could hazard a guess why they’d been going into the waters. Nobody but me, that is, standing at the shore, watching the small waves lapping for a foothold on land, and remembering the tales I’d been hearing from Marken.