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Text File | 1993-09-09 | 13KB | 205 lines

Nyarlathotep
Copyright (c) 1993, Robert McKay
All rights reserved



                              Nyarlathotep
                            by Robert McKay
                 Dedicated to Howard Phillips Lovecraft


     It is hard to believe that in our modern world entire communities
in the United States can be effectively cut off from American society
as a whole.  Yet such is the case in Scarllett.  A town of few
inhabitants, and those few of the most unappetizing kind, Scarllett
lies in a dusty, cactus-strewn bowl, reached by one road of dubious
quality.
     On the eastern side of San Bernardino County, California, is
Needles, situated at an old crossing over the Colorado River.  Today I-
40 turns south there, forsaking this old ford and moving east into
Arizona at Topock.  On the western edge of the county is San
Bernardino, the county seat, 200 miles from Needles.  In between lies a
harsh land of alkali flats, dry lakes, dead volcanic cones,
rattlesnakes, road runners, jack rabbits, coyotes, and fanged
mountains.  Moving east on I-40, one comes eventually to Fenner, now a
dead spread of dust, but once a thriving town on US 66; Mountain
Springs, an isolated pass over a shoulder of Goffs Butte, where there
is little more than a wide shoulder; and the Searchlight Cutoff, the
last exit from the freeway before one actually arrives in Needles.
Exiting at any of these three points, one eventually can arrive at the
town of Goffs.  This small community sits on what was once a thriving
crossing of the Santa Fe Railroad and US 66.  With the opening of I-40,
the town's importance faded, and now only 20 people live there,
presiding over the restored school house, the abandoned cemetery, a
scattering of houses, the silver Santa Fe water tank out of which comes
the clear cold delicious well water, and a store that doubles as gas
station and bar.
     Only one road leads north from Goffs.  Called variously the Goffs
Road and Cedar Road, it moves out under the high tension wires into a
wilderness of yucca and cholla.  Only the desert rats love this land,
and they love it with a passion that can only be experienced, not
explained.  The road leads north, and takes one through Hackberry Pass.
right as one crosses the pass, a collection of tanks and windmills
called The Hogieboom provides water for the tough wild cattle that roam
the open range.  North of the pass the traveler enters Joshua tree
country.
     Continuing north, the traveler, now convinced that he has left
civilization far behind, comes to a phone booth, literally miles from
nowhere.  To the right, invisible through the greasewood and cholla and
the first Joshua trees, is the ruined town of Lanfair, its adobe
construction worn nearly away by the scarce but pounding rains of the
flash flood season.
     Forsaking the straight road the leads on northward, the traveler
can turn left at the phone booth, on the Cima Road.  As he passes down
the unpaved road, to the right he will see, near at hand, the basalt
slopes of the Grotto Hills, rising a few hundred feet above the spike-
growthed plain.  At a point three or four miles from the phone booth,
he will not notice the rutted, sandy, brush-crowded track that leads
into the shimmering north.  Eventually the traveler arrives at Cima,
and continues on to I-15 or Kelso or Nipton.  He does not realize that
he passed the track to Scarllett.
     No one from the outside ever turns up that primitive track.  Only
occasionally do the natives descend to the civilized world, driving
rattletrap vehicles pitted with desert scars down to Goffs for
supplies.  Even rarer is the expedition to Needles.  The citizens of
Scarllett find themselves unwanted outside of their own community;
their features bear the deformities of long-term inbreeding, and their
language is barely recognizable as English, so crude is the uncouthly
accented mix of old and new they speak.
     Scarllett is the home of a few old men and women, a larger
scattering of individuals whose age must be placed somewhere between
the teens and middle age, and a dirty crowd of children who appear more
savage animals than human beings.  A solitary windmill, crudely
patched, pumps water into the community tank; from the generally
unwashed condition of the populace, it appears that the water is not
commonly used for bathing.  A crude meeting hall sits in the dusty
square of the town, while houses have been dropped indiscriminately
around with no discernible pattern or reason.  The town sits in a
depression, with brush and cactus growing thickly on the rim; unless
one actually follows the approximation of a road into the bowl, the
place is invisible.  And that is precisely as the natives wish it.
     There is a hill nearby, to the northwest, whose dark slopes bake
under the desert sun with more than typical blackness.  The ubiquitous
basalt of desert topography - for the desert is not all dunes and
cactus - seems less weathered here, darker, and even in the blazing sun
of August maintains an appearance of being cold with a chill deeper
than even the vacuum of space.
     Near the top of the hill an opening grimaces toothlessly at the
town.  It is denominated Horror's Cave, and is shunned by the
inhabitants of Scarllett.  Curiously, in front of the cave's mouth is
an altar, and around the altar the ground is trampled free of growth by
constant and heavy use.  The altar is of the dark basalt of the
country, and barely shows the stains running down its sides.
     Scarllett was never a popular place.  Too far from other
settlements, with nothing to set it apart from the rest of the country,
the bowl was left alone until the early part of the twentieth century.
Then, furtively, a small band of men came out of the east in their
shaky Model Ts and constructed the rude shacks of the town, naming it
after their leader.  They would only say that they were from a place
called Innsmouth, in Massachusetts; why they had left was a question
none would answer.  A year after the men had arrived in the desert, the
women were brought in.  It was 1929.
     In 1990 a curious thing happened at Scarllett - or to Scarllett,
which would be more accurate.  Few outside of the town ever heard of
it, and then only in the most fragmentary way.  Those who did hear had
two reactions; an uneasy desire to contact the authorities, which had
to be quashed for lack of concrete reasons, and cold terror.  The
inhabitants of Scarllett seemed to also feel the terror, though in
their case a strange reverence and awe was mixed in.
     On April 25, 1990 a child was born to an unmarried woman of
Scarllett.  In the eyes of the law, of course, no one in Scarllett was
married; no minister had ever set foot in the town, and none of the
citizens cared to come forth and have their unions solemnized by legal
or church authority.  There were some rituals associated with pairings,
but they were of a sort unknown to the marriage code of the state, and
all children born in Scarllett would have been considered illegitimate
- had the authorities cared to speak on the subject of children born in
a place that could hardly be found and that was so far from air-
conditioned offices.
     This child appeared fully human; at least, within the parameters
of Scarllett's inbred standards this was so.  The mother was a lineal
descendant of the Innsmouth Gilmans, while the father carried the blood
of Marshes and Waites in his veins.  The child was expected by the
citizens, therefore, to be a more or less average baby in Scarllett,
growing up to be a dirty, uneducated, reclusive part of the community.
But such was not to be.
     The child, named Gilbert Marsh, did not grow abnormally.  But his
mental powers were totally unheard of.  At the age of two months he
began to talk.  By the time he had reached four months he spoke with as
great a fluency as any grown member of the Scarllett tribe.  And when
he reached that point, he began to make demands.
     It appeared from what he said that he was, or claimed to be, the
incarnation of some great and half-forgotten god.  He had once
been worshipped by the inhabitants of Innsmouth, but in the events that
had led to the exodus from that town to the California desert - events
that were all but vanished from the dim minds of the degraded citizens
- the god had been neglected, and the long years of the exile had
robbed him of the devotion he expected from those whose fathers had
brought offerings to his altar.  It was time, the child said from its
knocked-together cradle, for the rites to begin again.
     Most of the townspeople received this ultimatum with dull apathy.
They neither knew nor cared what the child talked about; that Gilbert
brat, they said, was a strange 'un.  A few, however, who had not fallen
quite so far into the physical and mental depravity that comes with
continual recourse to the same gene pool, were interested.  Old Seth
Whately, who was been connected with Dunwich people somewhere in his
ancestry, was especially eager to hear more.  His family had preserved,
more by accident than by design, some fragments of a copy of a copy of
an ancient book.  The crumbling title page, painstakingly lettered by
hand in crude imitation of the original, bore the name Necronomicon.
This book, or the remnants of it at least, spoke of strange gods, of
stranger rites, of ancient wars and dire dooms.  The fragments were not
coherent, and Old Seth's interpretation was even less so, but he had
pieced together enough to realize that here, in Gilbert Marsh, was the
culmination of his long years of pondering the vague pieces of his
ancestors' religion.
     On a moonlit night, therefore, Old Seth led the way, at Gilbert's
imperious direction, up the slope of the black hill to the flat space
in front of Horror's Cave.  The altar, which was adorned with Indian
pictographs nearly worn away with the passing of immense spans of
years, stood as it had always stood; as it had stood even before the
town of Scarllett was founded.  Old Seth stood by as Gilbert, rested by
his mother on a misshapen hip, gave directions.  The first was shocking
- take a young girl, whom he pointed out, and slay her on the altar.
     The protest was immediate, though not strong.  The apathy of
Scarllett muted the outcry.  Finally, the girl was seized by two men
who, moved by either fanaticism or drink, gave in to the angry demands
of the precocious child.  She was laid supine on the altar, and Old
Seth, trembling but obedient, approached with his bowie knife.  The
girl, a dull specimen with little intelligence, had remained silent
until now, but when she saw the knife, she began to scream.  The
screams were cut short.
     As the blood ran down the altar, the child's voice continued to
speak, but with a change.  Instead of the fully human sounds that had
previously issued from that young throat, there were roars, gurglings,
and cries that could not possibly have been uttered by anything human.
Rising on the night air, the sounds came from a voice deeper than any
in the village: "Ia!  Ia!  Cthulhu ftaghn!  Ng'll'wngh ptr'kng Cthulhu
wlhg'h'nlt!"  And suddenly Gilbert's mother screamed, and threw the
child from her.
     The baby's body landed with a thump between the altar and the
mouth of the cave, and rose to its feet.  At four months, the baby rose
and walked toward the altar, and grew as it walked.  The human flesh
began to slough off in stinking masses of corruption, and the face
melted together, becoming a bubbling mass of writing tentacles.  The
child, no longer human, approached the still-bleeding body of the
sacrifice, ten feet tall, legless, its progress marked by a loathsome
sucking sound and a trail of inch-thick slime that steamed and stank.
An appendage that was not an arm reached out and lifted the body.
Bones crunched as the body was literally bent in two backwards, and
crushed into a single pulpy mass.  The horror turned, howling madly in
a voice that seemed it would split the rocks and call out every demon
in the desert, and slobbered into the cave.
     Old Seth never returned from the hill.  He was found the next
afternoon by a trembling search party, standing stock still on his
feet, stark dead from terror.  Of the girl there was no sign, and the
men didn't search for the monster that had disappeared within the cave.
A strange stench issued from that dark hole, and the slime trail the
monster had left lay glistening on the sand and dust and rock of the
hill.
     Old Seth's grandson, heir to the old man's possessions, provided
the answer.  He searched the bits and pieces of old manuscripts left to
him by his grandfather, and came up with one word - Nyarlathotep.