Distractedly Leverett opened a copy of Dwellers in the Earth. He gazed at his lovingly rendered drawings of rotting creatures and buried stone chambers and stained altars—and everywhere the enigmatic latticework structures. He shuddered.
“Here,” Dana Allard handed Leverett the book he had signed. “And to answer your question, they are elder glyphics.”
But Leverett was staring at the inscription in its unmistakable handwriting: “For Colin Leverett, Without whom this work could not have seen completion—H. Kenneth Allard.”
Allard was speaking. Leverett saw places where the hastily applied flesh-toned makeup didn’t quite conceal what lay beneath. “Glyphics symbolic of alien dimensions—inexplicable to the human mind, but essential fragments of an evocation so unthinkably vast that the ‘pentagram’ (if you will) is miles across. Once before we tried—but your iron weapon destroyed part of Althol’s brain. He erred at the last instant—almost annihilating us all. Althol had been formulating the evocation since he fled the advance of iron four millennia past.
“Then you reappeared, Colin Leverett—you with your artist’s knowledge and diagrams of Althol’s symbols. And now a thousand new minds will read the evocation you have returned to us, unite with our minds as we stand in the Hidden Places. And the Great Old Ones will come forth from the earth, and we, the dead who have steadfastly served them, shall be masters of the living.”
Leverett turned to run, but now they were creeping forth from the shadows of the cellar, as massive flagstones slid back to reveal the tunnels beyond. He began to scream as Althol came to lead him away, but he could not awaken, could only follow.
Some readers may note certain similarities between characters and events in this story and the careers of real-life figures, well known to fans of this genre. This was unavoidable, and no disrespect is intended. For much of this story did happen, though I suppose you’ve heard that one before.
In working with Lee Brown Coye on Wellman’s Worse Things Waiting, I finally asked him why his drawings so frequently included sticks in their design. Lee’s work is well known to me, but I had noticed that the “sticks” only began to appear in his work for Ziff-Davis in the early ’60s. Lee finally sent me a folder of clippings and letters, far more eerie than this story—and factual.
In 1938 Coye did come across a stick-ridden farmhouse in the desolate Mann Brook region. He kept this to himself until fall of 1962, when John Vetter passed the account to August Derleth and to antiquarian-archeologist Andrew E. Rothovius. Derleth intended to write Coye’s adventure as a Lovecraft novelette, but never did so. Rothovius discussed the site’s possible megalithic significance with Coye in a series of letters and journal articles on which I have barely touched. In June 1963 Coye returned to the Mann Brook site and found it obliterated. It is a strange region, as HPL knew.
Coye’s fascinating presentation of their letters appeared in five weekly installments of his “Chips and Shavings” column in the Mid-York Weekly from August 22 to September 26, 1963. Rothovius, whose research into the New England megaliths has been published in many journals, wrote an excellent and disquieting summary of his research in Arkham House’s The Dark Brotherhood, to which the reader is referred.
THE BARROW TROLL
by David Drake
David Drake is both the assistant editor of Whispers and the assistant Town Attorney of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I know I could not do without him and figure that Chapel Hill would also be in dire straits if he decided to strike out on his own. Besides occasionally allowing me to purchase a story of his, he has offered and sold fiction to Analog, Galaxy (his Hammer series has been a cover feature), and the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. His heroic fantasy is strong stuff that is extensively researched for accuracy, and one feels the reality of the worlds he creates. “The Barrow Troll” was one of only four stories to be nominated for a World Fantasy Award in 1976. It is a brutal and shocking piece.
Playfully, Ulf Womanslayer twitched the cord bound to his saddlehorn. “Awake, priest? Soon you can get to work.”
“My work is saving souls, not being dragged into the wilderness by madmen,” Johann muttered under his breath. The other end of the cord was around his neck, not that of his horse. A trickle of blood oozed into his cassock from the reopened scab, but he was afraid to open the knot. Ulf might look back. Johann had already seen his captor go into berserk rage. Over the Northerner’s right shoulder rode his axe, a heavy hooked blade on a four-foot shaft. Ulf had swung it like a willow-wand when three Christian traders in Schleswig had seen the priest and tried to free him. The memory of the last man in three pieces as head and sword arm sprang from his spouting torso was still enough to roil Johann’s stomach.
“We’ll have a clear night with a moon, priest; a good night for our business.” Ulf stretched and laughed aloud, setting a raven on a fir knot to squawking back at him. The berserker was following a ridge line that divided wooded slopes with a spine too thin-soiled to bear trees. The flanking forest still loomed above the riders. In three days, now, Johann had seen no man but his captor, nor even a tendril of smoke from a lone cabin. Even the route they were taking to Parmavale was no mantrack but an accident of nature.
“So lonely,” the priest said aloud.
Ulf hunched hugely in his bearskin and replied, “You soft folk in the south, you live too close anyway. Is it your Christgod, do you think?”
“Hedeby’s a city,” the German priest protested, his fingers toying with his tom robe, “and my brother trades to Uppsala . . . But why bring me to this manless waste?”
“Oh, there were men once, so the tale goes,” Ulf said. Here in the empty forest he was more willing for conversation than he had been the first few days of their ride north. “Few enough, and long enough ago. But there were farms in Parmavale, and a lordling of sorts who went a-viking against the Irish. But then the troll came and the men went, and there was nothing left to draw others. So they thought.”
“You Northerners believe in trolls, so my brother tells me,” said the priest.
“Aye, long before the gold I’d heard of the Parma troll,” the berserker agreed. “Ox broad and stronger than ten men, shaggy as a denned bear.”
“Like you,” Johann said, in a voice more normal than caution would have dictated.
Blood fury glared in Ulf’s eyes and he gave a savage jerk on the cord. “You’ll think me a troll, priestling, if you don’t do just as I say. I’ll drink your blood hot if you cross me.”
Johann, gagging, could not speak nor wished to.
With the miles the sky became a darker blue, the trees a blacker green. Ulf again broke the hoof-pummeled silence, saying, “No, I knew nothing of the gold until Thora told me.”
The priest coughed to clear his throat. “Thora is your wife?” he asked.
“Wife? Ho!” Ulf brayed, his raucous laughter ringing like a demons. “Wife? She was Hallstein’s wife, and I killed her with all her house about her! But before that, she told me of the troll’s horde, indeed she did. Would you hear that story?”
Johann nodded, his smile fixed. He was learning to recognize death as it bantered under the axehead.
“So,” the huge Northerner began. “There was a bonder, Hallstein Kari’s son, who followed the king to war but left his wife, that was Thora, behind to manage the stead. The first day I came by and took a sheep from the herdsman. I told him if he misliked it to send his master to me.”