Oh, Great Cthulhu, dreaming in R’lyeh,
Thy priest offers up this sacrifice,
That Thy coming be soon,
And that of Thy kindred dreamers.
I am Thy priest and adore Thee…
And as the core grew smaller yet, he toppled the evil idol into its green center, following this act by throwing in the tablets and all those other items of fabled antiquity until the inner tent was quite empty. He would have kept all these things if he dared, but his orders—those orders he received in dreams from R’lyeh—would not allow it. When a priest had been found to replace Hamilton Tharpe, then Great Cthulhu would find a way to return those rudimentary pillars of His temple!
Finally, Henley switched off the single dim light and watched the green core as it shrank to a tiny point of intense brightness before winking out. Only the smell of deep ocean remained, and a damp circle in the dark where the sawdust floor was queerly marked and slimy….
Some little time later the folk of the fairground were awakened by the clamour of a fire engine as it sped to the blaze on the border of the circling tents, sideshows and caravans. Both Tharpe’s caravan and The Tomb of the Great Old Ones were burning fiercely. Nothing was saved, and in their frantic toiling to help the firemen the nomads of the funfair failed to note that their dogs again crouched timid and whimpering beneath the nighted caravans. They found it strange later, though, when they heard how the police had failed to discover anything of Anderson Tharpe’s remains.
The gap that the destruction of the one-time freak-house had left was soon filled, for “Madame Zala”, as if summoned back by the grim work of the mysterious fire, returned with her horse and caravan within the week. She is still with Hodgson’s Funfair, but known to anyone with even the remotest schooling in the occult, she is sometimes seen crossing herself with an obscure and pagan sign…
∇
Cinderlands
Tim Pratt
Close to the end:
Dexter West woke to the sound of claws skittering on hardwood floors above him, thinking in a muzzy, sleep-headed way that the upstairs neighbors must have gotten a dog, even though dogs weren’t allowed, and now the horrible noise was going to keep him up all night. But as he sat up in bed he remembered there was no upstairs here. He’d moved out of the apartment building into a house of his own. After turning on the lamp, he went into the walk-in closet, where the noise—the scuttling—seemed loudest. A heating duct ran along the ceiling, and he pressed his ear to the metal and listened to the click and patter of tiny claws rushing along inside.
Was it… rats? Rats in the ducts? Rats in the walls?
He banged hard on the duct with his fist, and the scuttling stopped.
“I’ll get a cat,” he said aloud. “I need the company anyway.”
He went back to bed, and dreamed of digging holes in his back yard. Holes filled with squirming, black-furred rats the size of kittens. Holes that went down forever.
∇
Earlier:
Dexter crouched beneath the toxic fruit trees in his grassless back yard, turning over black earth with the spade he’d taken from the old man, and every shovelful revealed worse things:
clumps of cinders and the dust of ashes;
rusting nails, practically dripping tetanus;
wickedly-curved shards of brown glass;
bullets of various sizes, crusted with dirt;
and a foot or so down, fragments of black-stone statuary, showing here the partial orbit of a life-sized eye, there a broken mouth filled with crude triangular teeth, here a tiny hand with six fingers, all clawed.
Dexter looked toward the unmended fence again and said, “What do you mean, this used to be the cinderlands?”
But the old man next door was gone.
∇
Earlier stilclass="underline"
Dexter moved in the early spring of his thirty-fifth year. The houses on either side of his own were boarded up, and the neighborhood had the appearance of a mouth filled with missing teeth: empty lots and empty houses outnumbered the inhabited three-to-one. But he didn’t mind. After living among noisy neighbors, the silence and solitude surrounding his new life as a homeowner seemed a blessing.
The faded yellow house at 65 Mumford Street was a sprawling one-story affair with additions of varying vintages sprouting from all sides. He loved the labyrinthine interior, despite its many flaws: sagging air ducts from an abandoned remodel, a roof shedding shingles, cracked linoleum. It was still a bargain at the bank’s price. The original owner had died, and the dissolute heirs had run the place as a sort of commune—one bank official leaned close and whispered “cult,” though she wouldn’t elaborate. When the heirs vanished and stopped paying the mortgage, the bank seized the property.
Dexter paid cash, using a little of his settlement money from the case against the city. A year before he’d been attacked and beaten by police on his way to work, a case of mistaken identity—he resembled an escaped serial arsonist who’d recently burned down an officer’s home. Even after buying the house he had more than enough money to take time off to fix up the place. He was sure the neighborhood would get better, justifying the investment—the recession couldn’t last forever—but in the meantime, he’d enjoy the quiet.
The back yard was full of fruit trees, shading the earth so deeply that no grass could grow, and he spent the evenings under the branches drinking beer and watching the wind stir the leaves, body aching pleasantly from painting, and sanding, and hammering, and laying tile. After so many years teaching history to high school students who barely seemed to care about what had happened to them yesterday, it was refreshing to work with his hands and see the measurable progress of that work each day.
As the trees began to blossom, he looked forward to the fruit—lemon, plum, crab-apple, cherry. He decided to plant some tomatoes in the yard, and choosing between the two spots where sunlight actually touched the ground when a voice from beyond the broken side fence said, “I wouldn’t put roots down here if I were you.” An old man dressed in a faded white suit of archaic cut leaned on a walkingstick and smiled affably from beneath a broad-brimmed straw hat.
“I didn’t realize anyone lived over there.”
“At my age I don’t come out often,” the man said. “Only when the weather is just exactly right. Saw you in that spot of sun. Thinking of gardening? Don’t. The soil’s poison.”
Dexter frowned. “The trees seem healthy.”
“Things might grow, but there’s so much… oh, lead, and mercury, and who knows what else in the dirt, I wouldn’t eat any of it. Plant in containers if you must, though even then…” He shook his head. “The air’s bad, too. This whole area used to be the cinderlands.”
“I guess I could get the soil tested for lead—”
“No need for all that trouble.” The old man reached into his suit and, improbably, drew out a spade with a gleaming blade. “Just dig down a little, you’ll see.”
“Okay.” Dexter had liked his neighbors better when they didn’t exist, but he took the spade, and dug… and found sharp, pointy, broken things, though the bits of statuary were the most disturbing. “What do you mean, this used to be the cinderlands?” The old man didn’t answer, and when Dexter went to the fence, he was gone, and the yard over there was as derelict as ever, the house just as uninhabited-looking as before.
∇
Later:
Dexter decided not to start a garden after all, and when the trees put forth fruit, he knew he’d made the right choice. The lemons were small, and while they were yellow, it was less the yellow of cartoon suns and more the yellow of jaundiced skin or nicotine-stained teeth. The plums seemed to rot rather than ripen, dripping off the branches in slimy clumps. The cherries were hard, and shriveled like shrunken heads, while the crab-apples grew so huge and fast they split their skins—and the inside of every apple was home to vast numbers of worms… possibly, he thought, of a kind unknown to science.