Sulkdodds
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This was what I would have entered into the short story compo, but it wasn't an original composition. I thought I'd post it here, though, because although I must confess that I have only ever read one story of Lovecraft's, and so am hardly equipped to parody him, I am slightly proud of it.
Dekstar also said he had a past pastiche that he wanted to post up, so he might wish to make use of this thread as well.
Context: on the ZM forums there was a forum cthulhu story thread, the idea being everyone would post five sentences and it'd combine to make a narrative. Obviously, it got silly and didn't work, so I decided to post this in it. I've patched it up, but there are problems with it - it was an extended forum post on the spur of the moment rather than anything planned. But it is quite fun.
IN THE TEETH OF THE TERROR
my eyes began to water; my legs would not carry me. I was forced to sit down on the stump of a tree, making every attempt - in vain - to avert my eyes from the tangled and quiet horror of the body-bank, which lay like a carpet or a fall of awful snow upon the street.
It was for some time that I reposed in this attitude. The world seemed too large. I could not understand how it could have come to pass that such a sudden calamity had leaped out of the cloudy realm of possibility to strike here, now - Gods! It is 1913 in the Year of Our Lord! How, how, how? - a wail it seemed to me, a desperate cry into an uncaring void - how can such things happen in a modern age? And why, why, should it be me, the poor agent of a sensible lawyer, who should travel so far and be the first to intrude on this funereal hush? What reason? Could there be one? Stiff hands waved at me from the village square.
It was long before I rose. But rise I presently did, and began to walk into the village, resolving to find a telegraph and send news of this. To somehow compress a mute history of the grief that had transpired here into a series of dots and dashes - why, to speak at all ? seemed impossible. I walked on down the high street. Wind whipped at the clothes of the dead and gusted in their hair. Scores of them left still. Death had claimed so many. They were tied up in knots, become mere bundles of acute angles and grasping fingers, torn clothes, staring eyes, open mouths - scores of dead, like I had never seen, as if fallen without a chance to speak or think. Bodies choked the roads, the doorways, the porches; silence cloaked the streets, the empty windows and the very rooftops of the leaning buildings, every one of which conveyed the sensation that something in this village was somehow, subtly wrong.
The dark mouth of an inn swallowed me. I found the interior dry and musty; it was a little place, but the empty seats and the clean tables made it look large. On the bar a few half-empty tankards stood as if abandoned in the very drinking. My footsteps felt unnaturally loud. Furthermore there was an odd odour in the air - not rot but a burning.
It didn't take long to search every room of the inn but the cellar. I had found nothing, save a face-down corpse behind the serving counter. I had drunk the drinks but I felt no better - only glad the body had been covered by a white sheet. I stood contemplating the darkness of the wine cellar, unsure of my next move, when I heard a muffled thump from the main room.
Returning, I stood dumbstruck - the body was gone! I searched and searched again about the bar and under each unladen table - there was nothing. Had I imagined its presence? Had the solitude sent me mad after a mere hour? Fie! What rot to go insane at such short notice, at such little provocation; I had imagined, and fervently hoped, that I was made of sterner stuff. But it struck me then that perhaps it was best the fault lay in my head. For if it lay elsewhere -
My train of thought was interrupted by another noise - from above this time! But it was impossible. I had checked upstairs, had scrutinised and examined with a dull vigour each and every room. Nothing had I found, nothing that might suddenly - thump, again. A movement. My heart chilled. I could not bring myself to approach the staircase. When the thump came again, I ran.
Yes, ran! Under the oppressive silence of the village my resolve broke. It was too much. I raced to the door and tried to wrench it open, found it unyielding, pulled and pulled until I saw the tiny card that read 'PUSH'. I threw myself gratefully against the barrier and, mercifully, it burst before me, and I fell out into the street. No sooner had I got my bearings than I was up and running again, down the street, away from this village - which suddenly leapt up, ceasing to be static, twisted and turned on its head, and the dry ground fell upon my head.
In panic I realised I had tripped; I tried to get up but felt an iron grip around my leg. A hand had taken hold of me!
*
There now ensued a series of incidents which transported me to the opposite extremes of ecstasy and horror; incidents which I tremble to recall and dare not seek to interpret. It began with the iron grip on my leg. Terrified, I could not look away, as first one, then two, then a dozen or more of the bodies began to tremble. And then, slowly, implacably, they started to move. Fingers twitched. Eyes flicked open. Heads were raised up. And slowly, but surely, every one of the bodies rose to its feet, dusted itself off, and turned, very slowly to look at me.
"SURPRISE!", they yelled, as one.
In the same instant that I screamed, the people - living people, I now realised - rushed at me. Though ragged and dusty, they exhibited a wild aura of joy and revelry, singing songs of sublime and ethereal rambunctiousness. Around me gathered a constantly increasing throng of half-luminous, laughing men and maidens with tousled hair and joyful countenance. We slowly ascended together, as if borne on a sharp breeze which blew from outside of the earth, back towards the inn. They brandished eldritch cylinders which I soon realised were bottles of beer - they were thrust at me, and, god preserve me, I could not help but drink.
"Welcome," they said, "Welcome!"
"Help!" I cried, "Help!"
But the crowd had me. Cheering, singing, plying me with their vile liquour, they carried me inside the pub.
"In the name of all that is holy!" I whimpered. "I don't understand!"
A very comely woman nudged me, raising her voice above the roar of the crowd as they pushed me towards the bar. "Welcome to Dunbar, sir, welcome indeed. We was just having our annual siesta. That's Spanish, sir, we're a very cosmopolitan people here." I shivered at this barbarous Mediterranean display; clearly the town had some dark mixing of blood in its past. "Well, we don't get many travelers, sir, and on a lovely day like this - " ( the skies were befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, a venomous seething. I could not bring myself to ask what they considered bad weather ) - "on a lovely day like this, sir, why, stay inside! Not us, sir. We like to be sociable and to appreciate the pleasantness of our town. We sleep in the streets, sir, would you believe! I expect Hector gave you quite a fright."
A gurning man with huge yellow teeth gurned happily beside us; Hector, I presumed. I could not bear to look at his face for long - there was something of the Congo about his features, faintly, subtly, but to the eyes of a broader instinct unmistakable the hideous physiognomy of Africa's most primal grovellers.
"Arr," said Hector, offering me a bottle.
"Argh!" said I, pushing it away.
"Don't mind him, sir, he lost his tongue in the war with the Mexicans - terrible shame, sir, but he's a very good fellow, yes indeed" - Doris, for such I gathered later to be her name, went on. I wondered on which side this curious man might have fought. "Why, sir, both! But see here - what luck for you to come at this time of year, for a special time of year it is - it's not every day we sleep in the streets, no sir, nor have our siesta - " of course, Doris. You are not savages. You only act like them on the sabbath day, perhaps? " - no sir, this once a year - why, it is the Village Fete, sir! Oh, you shall love it!"
I had little choice. I was showered in that awful liquid, until the taste in my mouth was bitter no more, and I could hardly walk. It was only through tactics of distraction that I was able to escape from the crowd and stagger upstairs. At the sound of clumping footsteps behind me I wailed in desperation - they would drag me back and ply me with more of that horrific mother's milk - but at the last second a door suddenly opened and I was pulled inside.
*
Darkness was total. Something spat and I thought for a minute perhaps I had been dragged into some parallel realm to be drizzled with black hell-fluid.
"Bah," said a voice. "You alright, son?"
It was a supreme effort for me to answer, so awfully was I addled by my experiences, but I managed to slur out - "this village - I - help me."
"Ah, they got you too." The thing in the darkness spat. "Yesshiree, they will ply you with their drinking and their loose women, but shir..."
Upon the pronouncement of his 's' letters it would slur, and let out a hoarse little whistle, as if through a conducive gap in his teeth. The voice itself was of old paper, ancient documents, a dry crypt rustle still whispering after ages past.
"Shh(weeee)ir, they shpeak with the cursed voices of azazel, of buzrael, of bleezebub and belial. I hear them e'en now from under ground, and myshelf only a fortnight ago caught the plain discourse - plain as day, shir - of evil powers in the hill behind this inn, wherein a rattlin', a rollin', a groanin' an' a 'hissin', such as no thing upon this earth my raise up." Whatever was speaking in the darkness hawked, and spat again.
Something wet and slimy touched my leg and there was a panting in the gloom. But the voice continued apace, and the horrible thought struck me that to be so engaged in two activities at once, the creature which addressed must have more than one mouth.
"Yeshir, they are having their village fete out there - but no innoshent feshtival, sh(weee)ir, no, no, no, no..."
Upon this muttering there was a sudden blaze of light into the room, for with a crinkly appendage the creature had flicked up a blind over the window. In the thin shaft of brightness I saw the being before me. He was naught but an old man: bald, hunched, so dry he looked as if he might immediately burst into flames. I looked down to find a small ungainly dog licking at my bare ankle, so exposed because my trousers were in disarray, rolled up almost to the knee without my noticing.
"Come," shaid the old man, beckoning me to the window. "Look upon these works, ye mighty - and despair."
My legs seemed to push me from the chair he had dumped me in of their own accord - rose me to the window. I peered out between the blinds that he was holding open.
I shall not begin to describe the horror of that creeping chaos that unfolded itself, like some dread butterfly from out of its dark cocoon, before my frenzied eyes, quivering jellies which beheld such a sight as they had never beheld before, and which no living person can believe he has seen save in the delirium of a fever or the inferno of narcotic. The villagers were swarming on the street among tents and stalls, playing and talking with one another. Even as I watched, men and women chatted, children sported at their feet, and old women laughed together in clutches. One family tried their luck at a coconut shy, while another were clutching little tickets, and soon enough as if by some lustful gravity, the lot of them began to congregate before a wild-eyed man who stood beside a tombola. Above him the peaked shapes of the tents seemed to follow the symmetries of some cosmic geometry unknown to earth or the solar system. As I gazed on, unable to look away, an unnatural hush fell, and the man began to spin the tombola. Around and around it went, spinning out of control, the lost numbers within tumbling and bouncing in an incomprehensible flurry, jostled on the harsh walls of their world. I felt dizzy. The drum became a blur. The lips and gums of the man flapped and gibbered. A ragged cheer was raised up. Finally the tombola slowed to a stop and the man reached inside; he groped, he searched, and drew out a scrap of paper bearing some number I could not see. Somehow the neat integer was decipherable yet, and all eyes fell upon him as he examined the ticket. The crowd breathed heavily.
Then I heard him cry out the number and the villagers became wild beasts, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and revelling in joy in a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. A tearful old woman came forward, religious vision flowing from her face in tears, as she waved her own ticket aloft. I could not see if the numbers matched, but she claimed her prize - a porcelain duck from the raffle basket - and the townsfolk enveloped her joyfully.
As I stared at the spectacle, the old man intoned:
"Fate's frightful wheel grinds all things by and by,
and with no ticket, even death may die."
I hardly heard him. For my gaze was still fixed on the display in the square below, wide-eyed, contemplating at last the true fear and the unwhisperable destiny that try as I might I saw no chance to escape - a Fete worse than death.
To be continued?
Dekstar also said he had a past pastiche that he wanted to post up, so he might wish to make use of this thread as well.
Context: on the ZM forums there was a forum cthulhu story thread, the idea being everyone would post five sentences and it'd combine to make a narrative. Obviously, it got silly and didn't work, so I decided to post this in it. I've patched it up, but there are problems with it - it was an extended forum post on the spur of the moment rather than anything planned. But it is quite fun.
IN THE TEETH OF THE TERROR
ZM Story Thread said:
my eyes began to water; my legs would not carry me. I was forced to sit down on the stump of a tree, making every attempt - in vain - to avert my eyes from the tangled and quiet horror of the body-bank, which lay like a carpet or a fall of awful snow upon the street.
It was for some time that I reposed in this attitude. The world seemed too large. I could not understand how it could have come to pass that such a sudden calamity had leaped out of the cloudy realm of possibility to strike here, now - Gods! It is 1913 in the Year of Our Lord! How, how, how? - a wail it seemed to me, a desperate cry into an uncaring void - how can such things happen in a modern age? And why, why, should it be me, the poor agent of a sensible lawyer, who should travel so far and be the first to intrude on this funereal hush? What reason? Could there be one? Stiff hands waved at me from the village square.
It was long before I rose. But rise I presently did, and began to walk into the village, resolving to find a telegraph and send news of this. To somehow compress a mute history of the grief that had transpired here into a series of dots and dashes - why, to speak at all ? seemed impossible. I walked on down the high street. Wind whipped at the clothes of the dead and gusted in their hair. Scores of them left still. Death had claimed so many. They were tied up in knots, become mere bundles of acute angles and grasping fingers, torn clothes, staring eyes, open mouths - scores of dead, like I had never seen, as if fallen without a chance to speak or think. Bodies choked the roads, the doorways, the porches; silence cloaked the streets, the empty windows and the very rooftops of the leaning buildings, every one of which conveyed the sensation that something in this village was somehow, subtly wrong.
The dark mouth of an inn swallowed me. I found the interior dry and musty; it was a little place, but the empty seats and the clean tables made it look large. On the bar a few half-empty tankards stood as if abandoned in the very drinking. My footsteps felt unnaturally loud. Furthermore there was an odd odour in the air - not rot but a burning.
It didn't take long to search every room of the inn but the cellar. I had found nothing, save a face-down corpse behind the serving counter. I had drunk the drinks but I felt no better - only glad the body had been covered by a white sheet. I stood contemplating the darkness of the wine cellar, unsure of my next move, when I heard a muffled thump from the main room.
Returning, I stood dumbstruck - the body was gone! I searched and searched again about the bar and under each unladen table - there was nothing. Had I imagined its presence? Had the solitude sent me mad after a mere hour? Fie! What rot to go insane at such short notice, at such little provocation; I had imagined, and fervently hoped, that I was made of sterner stuff. But it struck me then that perhaps it was best the fault lay in my head. For if it lay elsewhere -
My train of thought was interrupted by another noise - from above this time! But it was impossible. I had checked upstairs, had scrutinised and examined with a dull vigour each and every room. Nothing had I found, nothing that might suddenly - thump, again. A movement. My heart chilled. I could not bring myself to approach the staircase. When the thump came again, I ran.
Yes, ran! Under the oppressive silence of the village my resolve broke. It was too much. I raced to the door and tried to wrench it open, found it unyielding, pulled and pulled until I saw the tiny card that read 'PUSH'. I threw myself gratefully against the barrier and, mercifully, it burst before me, and I fell out into the street. No sooner had I got my bearings than I was up and running again, down the street, away from this village - which suddenly leapt up, ceasing to be static, twisted and turned on its head, and the dry ground fell upon my head.
In panic I realised I had tripped; I tried to get up but felt an iron grip around my leg. A hand had taken hold of me!
*
There now ensued a series of incidents which transported me to the opposite extremes of ecstasy and horror; incidents which I tremble to recall and dare not seek to interpret. It began with the iron grip on my leg. Terrified, I could not look away, as first one, then two, then a dozen or more of the bodies began to tremble. And then, slowly, implacably, they started to move. Fingers twitched. Eyes flicked open. Heads were raised up. And slowly, but surely, every one of the bodies rose to its feet, dusted itself off, and turned, very slowly to look at me.
"SURPRISE!", they yelled, as one.
In the same instant that I screamed, the people - living people, I now realised - rushed at me. Though ragged and dusty, they exhibited a wild aura of joy and revelry, singing songs of sublime and ethereal rambunctiousness. Around me gathered a constantly increasing throng of half-luminous, laughing men and maidens with tousled hair and joyful countenance. We slowly ascended together, as if borne on a sharp breeze which blew from outside of the earth, back towards the inn. They brandished eldritch cylinders which I soon realised were bottles of beer - they were thrust at me, and, god preserve me, I could not help but drink.
"Welcome," they said, "Welcome!"
"Help!" I cried, "Help!"
But the crowd had me. Cheering, singing, plying me with their vile liquour, they carried me inside the pub.
"In the name of all that is holy!" I whimpered. "I don't understand!"
A very comely woman nudged me, raising her voice above the roar of the crowd as they pushed me towards the bar. "Welcome to Dunbar, sir, welcome indeed. We was just having our annual siesta. That's Spanish, sir, we're a very cosmopolitan people here." I shivered at this barbarous Mediterranean display; clearly the town had some dark mixing of blood in its past. "Well, we don't get many travelers, sir, and on a lovely day like this - " ( the skies were befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, a venomous seething. I could not bring myself to ask what they considered bad weather ) - "on a lovely day like this, sir, why, stay inside! Not us, sir. We like to be sociable and to appreciate the pleasantness of our town. We sleep in the streets, sir, would you believe! I expect Hector gave you quite a fright."
A gurning man with huge yellow teeth gurned happily beside us; Hector, I presumed. I could not bear to look at his face for long - there was something of the Congo about his features, faintly, subtly, but to the eyes of a broader instinct unmistakable the hideous physiognomy of Africa's most primal grovellers.
"Arr," said Hector, offering me a bottle.
"Argh!" said I, pushing it away.
"Don't mind him, sir, he lost his tongue in the war with the Mexicans - terrible shame, sir, but he's a very good fellow, yes indeed" - Doris, for such I gathered later to be her name, went on. I wondered on which side this curious man might have fought. "Why, sir, both! But see here - what luck for you to come at this time of year, for a special time of year it is - it's not every day we sleep in the streets, no sir, nor have our siesta - " of course, Doris. You are not savages. You only act like them on the sabbath day, perhaps? " - no sir, this once a year - why, it is the Village Fete, sir! Oh, you shall love it!"
I had little choice. I was showered in that awful liquid, until the taste in my mouth was bitter no more, and I could hardly walk. It was only through tactics of distraction that I was able to escape from the crowd and stagger upstairs. At the sound of clumping footsteps behind me I wailed in desperation - they would drag me back and ply me with more of that horrific mother's milk - but at the last second a door suddenly opened and I was pulled inside.
*
Darkness was total. Something spat and I thought for a minute perhaps I had been dragged into some parallel realm to be drizzled with black hell-fluid.
"Bah," said a voice. "You alright, son?"
It was a supreme effort for me to answer, so awfully was I addled by my experiences, but I managed to slur out - "this village - I - help me."
"Ah, they got you too." The thing in the darkness spat. "Yesshiree, they will ply you with their drinking and their loose women, but shir..."
Upon the pronouncement of his 's' letters it would slur, and let out a hoarse little whistle, as if through a conducive gap in his teeth. The voice itself was of old paper, ancient documents, a dry crypt rustle still whispering after ages past.
"Shh(weeee)ir, they shpeak with the cursed voices of azazel, of buzrael, of bleezebub and belial. I hear them e'en now from under ground, and myshelf only a fortnight ago caught the plain discourse - plain as day, shir - of evil powers in the hill behind this inn, wherein a rattlin', a rollin', a groanin' an' a 'hissin', such as no thing upon this earth my raise up." Whatever was speaking in the darkness hawked, and spat again.
Something wet and slimy touched my leg and there was a panting in the gloom. But the voice continued apace, and the horrible thought struck me that to be so engaged in two activities at once, the creature which addressed must have more than one mouth.
"Yeshir, they are having their village fete out there - but no innoshent feshtival, sh(weee)ir, no, no, no, no..."
Upon this muttering there was a sudden blaze of light into the room, for with a crinkly appendage the creature had flicked up a blind over the window. In the thin shaft of brightness I saw the being before me. He was naught but an old man: bald, hunched, so dry he looked as if he might immediately burst into flames. I looked down to find a small ungainly dog licking at my bare ankle, so exposed because my trousers were in disarray, rolled up almost to the knee without my noticing.
"Come," shaid the old man, beckoning me to the window. "Look upon these works, ye mighty - and despair."
My legs seemed to push me from the chair he had dumped me in of their own accord - rose me to the window. I peered out between the blinds that he was holding open.
I shall not begin to describe the horror of that creeping chaos that unfolded itself, like some dread butterfly from out of its dark cocoon, before my frenzied eyes, quivering jellies which beheld such a sight as they had never beheld before, and which no living person can believe he has seen save in the delirium of a fever or the inferno of narcotic. The villagers were swarming on the street among tents and stalls, playing and talking with one another. Even as I watched, men and women chatted, children sported at their feet, and old women laughed together in clutches. One family tried their luck at a coconut shy, while another were clutching little tickets, and soon enough as if by some lustful gravity, the lot of them began to congregate before a wild-eyed man who stood beside a tombola. Above him the peaked shapes of the tents seemed to follow the symmetries of some cosmic geometry unknown to earth or the solar system. As I gazed on, unable to look away, an unnatural hush fell, and the man began to spin the tombola. Around and around it went, spinning out of control, the lost numbers within tumbling and bouncing in an incomprehensible flurry, jostled on the harsh walls of their world. I felt dizzy. The drum became a blur. The lips and gums of the man flapped and gibbered. A ragged cheer was raised up. Finally the tombola slowed to a stop and the man reached inside; he groped, he searched, and drew out a scrap of paper bearing some number I could not see. Somehow the neat integer was decipherable yet, and all eyes fell upon him as he examined the ticket. The crowd breathed heavily.
Then I heard him cry out the number and the villagers became wild beasts, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and revelling in joy in a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. A tearful old woman came forward, religious vision flowing from her face in tears, as she waved her own ticket aloft. I could not see if the numbers matched, but she claimed her prize - a porcelain duck from the raffle basket - and the townsfolk enveloped her joyfully.
As I stared at the spectacle, the old man intoned:
"Fate's frightful wheel grinds all things by and by,
and with no ticket, even death may die."
I hardly heard him. For my gaze was still fixed on the display in the square below, wide-eyed, contemplating at last the true fear and the unwhisperable destiny that try as I might I saw no chance to escape - a Fete worse than death.
To be continued?
