The House of Cthulhu: Tales of the Primal Land Vol. 1 Page 2

  On a line due west of the inner sea’s centre lies the continent’s second active volcano, an island cone standing off in the Unknown Ocean. This volcano, in its birthing, brought down and destroyed and buried beneath a lava plain the city of Bhur-Esh, which knew its heyday when Klühn, the modern capital on the eastern coast almost three thousand miles away, was merely a fishing village. Nevertheless, and while Bhur-Esh is to Klühn what Ur is to, say, modern Cairo, legends of Bhur-Esh came down to Teh Atht in his wizardly apartments overlooking Klühn’s great bay, and he dutifully recorded them in his runebooks. And so we know the story of Kank Thad the barbarian, who departed slowly from and returned quickly to Bhur-Esh all in the same day, and thereafter wandered no more . . .

  To return to the eastern coast:

  Almost eight hundred miles south of Klühn—across the Lohr and several smaller rivers, surrounded by dense coastal forests—lies the city of Yhemnis. It is a splendidly barbaric city of gold, ivory and ironwood, home and citadel of swart Yhemni slavers and pirates. East again, across the stormy Straits of Yhem and eighty sea-miles distant, the jungle-island Shadarabar (with Shad, its capital, squarely facing Yhemnis on the mainland) is also home to Yhemni tribes. Mercifully these dark brown peoples are as often at each other’s throats as at war with the rest of the Primal Continent’s more civilised people. But from this it must not be reckoned that the Yhemni are Theem’hdra’s only barbarians—no!

  For diagonally across the continent, at its north-westerly extreme, is a land of fjords and lochs and chilly waters. Nomadic wooly mammoths wander the great plains to the west of this region, hunted by towering white savages who—while there are many individual tribes and families—generally go under the group name of Northmen. More commonly, however, they are known simply as Barbarians!

  The true Northern Barbarian is easily recognised: by his massive strength, his lightly browned skin, his love of soft women and hard drink, his rapidly alternating moods (between soaring high spirits and deepest, darkest depressions), his dread of sorcery, and by the distinctive mane of hair he wears, short and bristly, from nape of neck to base of spine.

  Fishermen famed for their hunting of the great whales, sailors crafted in boat-building, warriors dreaded for the sheer madness of their berserker rages—yes, and traders, too, whose pelts and ivory are valued highly in Khrissa and Thandopolis—the Northmen are colourful, heroic characters, with a whole-hearted love of piratical adventurings and tall-tale telling and song-singing. They are also wanderers who may be found far from their chill homeland, in almost every part of Theem’hdra.

  Of Khrissa (mentioned above, a cold and lonely city of basalt slabs at the mouth of the Greater Marl River four hundred miles east of the Mammoth Plains): its gaunt, sparsley-clad priest-inhabitants are a race aside from the majority of Theem’hdra’s peoples. Tall and thin they are, bald-pated and shaven of all bodily hair; and equally austere their lives. Aye, for their sole task in life would seem to be the sending of prayers to their many gods that the ice barrier to the north might encroach no closer to the northern shores of Theem’hdra.

  In the Year of the White Whales—when the ice only stopped after mounting the thousand mile reef, while to the east it even cast its creeping frosty-silver cloak about the feet of Tharamoon—Khrissa’s priests sacrificed no less than three hundred of their women in order to still the deadly white advance. Woe betide any stranger in Khrissa when the ice crackles out of the north and the winter snows drift deep and ominous!

  North-east of Khrissa, indeed, at the most northerly point of the mainland, there, ten miles out in the Chill Sea, Tharamoon the Mountain Island rises silent, forbidding and forbidden. Atop the highest needle peak a massive castle of grey stone glooms against greyer skies, and even though its one-time wizard inhabitant, Mylakhrion the Elder, is long dead and blown as dust in the wind, still the island lies vacant; for no man would tempt the monstrous magicks and curses Mylakhrion doubtless called down upon that blasted rock in his last days. No, not for all the wizard’s treasures, fabled to rest with his bones, broken at the base of the castle’s walls . . .

  But while Mylakhrion, ancestor of Teh Atht himself, was old in Theem’hdra’s youth (he had been dead eleven hundred years when Teh Atht dreamed his dreams of the BEGINNING and the END), nevertheless other, darker magicks had survived the centuries, creeping down the years to modern Theem’hdra.

  Until recently the most hideous of all of these dark forces was chained, by rune and spell of Elder God, in a bottomless crypt upon Arlyeh, island of nameless ruins mid-ocean between the Frostlands and Klühn. And it was the reaver Zar-Thule who, together with the men of his dragonships, sailed in unto and landed upon the island, seeking out the priceless treasures of the House of Cthulhu . . . But that is another story.

  Of the Frostlands, bitter regions to the east of the Great Ice Barrier:

  Yaht Haal was the only city beyond the confines of the Primal Continent proper known to Theem’hdra’s peoples: Yaht Haal, the Silver City at the edge of the Frostlands, which Zar-Thule sacked before his ill-omened landing upon Arlyeh. He sacked Yaht Haal and burned it down, torturing and killing all of the city’s priests and doing worse things to its gentle, fur-clad snow-folk. And following the rape of the Silver City, the very next winter, the Great Ice Barrier came down and buried its desecrated temples and houses deep beneath crystal glaciers; for there were no longer priests and wizardlings to keep the ice away with their chants and spell-spinnings.

  Now, I may seem to be making a lot of Theem’hdra’s magicians and wizards and sorcerers, and I know that in our 20th Century such are frowned upon as the stuff of fairy tales and fables. But I repeat that Theem’hdra was millions of years ago, when this world of ours was still a very young one, whereon Nature experimented and created and did myriads of strange and nightmarish things. After all, Nature herself was in her youth, and she had not yet decided which talents men should have and which should be forbidden, discontinued.

  In some men, in certain women, too, the wild workings of capricious Nature wrought weird wonders, giving them senses and powers additional to the usual five. Often these powers were carried down through many generations; aye, and occasionally such a man would mate with just such a woman, and then, eventually, through genealogical patterns and permutations long forgotten to 20th-Century scientists, along would come the seventh son of a seventh son, or the ninth daughter of a ninth daughter . . . and then?

  Oh, yes, there was certainly magick in those times, though perhaps today, in our “enlightened” age, we would find different names for such as wizards, lamias, weirdlings and warlocks. For Nature has never truly ceased her dabbling, and now we casually acknowledge such words as telepathy, telekinesis, teleportation, and so on. And was not Einstein himself a magician, whose runes were just as powerful as any wizard’s in old Theem’hdra?

  But that is to labour a point . . . And so let us now return to the topography and anthropology of Theem’hdra:

  North of the Bay of Monsters, between the mighty River Luhr and the Great Eastern Peaks, lie the Steppes of Hrossa where dwell the fierce Hrossaks. Tremendously skilled riders of fearsome lizard mounts, warriors almost without peer, the Hrossaks feud intermittently with the armies of massive-walled Grypha at the mouth of the Luhr, and with the Yhemni in their coastal forests. Other than the occasional raid or skirmish, however, the bronze Hrossaks are content to live at peace in their steppes where they farm and pride themselves in practicing the arts of war, and where they breed their lizard herds, providing leather and meat and sport a-plenty. The River Luhr is sacred to them and they will not cross it, and the peaks of the eastern range are much too high for them; generally, they are not good climbers.

  Across the Luhr to the west, two hundred and fifty miles away rise the foothills of the Great Circle Mountains, within which, to the east of the inner sea, oozes the slimy Marsh of Slugs. Even the wildest, loudest adventurers dare only mention this vast and boggy nightmare of a region in the merest whis
pers, for that’s the sort of place the Marsh of Slugs is—all forty thousand square miles of it! And so we’ll linger there no longer but move on west across the great crater sea to the Inner Isles.

  Central in that enclosed sea which was once the throat of a vast volcano, like green jewels strewn on a mantle of beautiful blue, the Inner Isles reach up their lava mountains to touch the sky. Here, rumour has it, dwells a tall, slender, comb-headed race of silver-grey beings who are not entirely human. Their houses are wooden and nestle on the slopes of their mountains; their needs are simple and are all supplied by the islands themselves and the teeming sea; their ways are gentle, even though they have strengths not immediately apparent, and their lives are ones of quiet and peaceful contemplation.

  Yes, and their minds are the finest in all Theem’hdra, with senses that reach beyond the normal range of those we know. They are called the Suhm-yi, which means “the Rarely Seen,” and it is because they are so rarely seen that we can offer no real proof of their existence, only the tales of wandering barbarians whose travels have taken them over the high northern rim of the Great Circle Mountains and across the deep blue inner sea.

  Thus the area enclosed by these volcanic mountains holds both terror and beauty . . . but it also holds mystery. Mystery in the shape of massive stone cubes, featureless blocks with sides hundreds of feet long, which stand amidst the inner foothills all along the western range and are fabled to be the long-vacated houses of the world’s first race, which was not human but came down to Earth from the stars in Theem’hdra’s prehistory. Great mystery there, aye, and mystery too in the Black Isle, standing dark and still in a subsidiary lake of the inner sea to the north-east; but of that place, so far, we know nothing except that it is there . . .

  AND THAT IN the main is Theem’hdra. From the bay of Klühn in the north-east to the Paps of Mam, Mother of Gods, at the continent’s south-westerly extreme, and from the grim Teeth of Yib and the fjords of the north-west to Shadarabar off the south-east coast. In all, the continent is about 2400 miles east to west and 2000 miles north to south, with a total land area of about 3,750,000 square miles.

  Including the peoples of Yaht Haal (if any remain alive) Theem’hdra houses six distinct races: the Northern Barbarians, the scattered white settlers of the coastal cities, the fabled Suhm-yi of the Inner Isles, the Hrossaks of the steppes, the swart and fiery Yhemni, and a pigmy race fabled to dwell in the Marsh of Slugs. Its gods are many, and some of them are in no way gods for prayers, rather for cursing by. Gleeth, blind Moon God, is believed to be benevolent, as is Shoosh, Goddess of the Still Slumbers, and Mam, Mother of Gods; but Ghatanothoa is a dark and doomful god—and even more so Cthulhu, though His worship is mercifully restricted to small, secret sects—Yib-Tstll, too. Then there are the Ice-Gods, whose names are kept secret by the priests of cold Khrissa, except for Baroom, God of the Avalanche, whose name is often invoked at the great drinking festivals of the Northmen.

  And so little more remains to be told of Theem’hdra. Oh, there are rivers and lakes, towns and cities and other places that I have not mentioned; yes, and others I myself do not yet know, will not until Thelred Gustau translates more of Teh Atht’s runebooks—but that lies in the future.

  Thus I welcome you to the fables and legends of a time long dead and hitherto forgotten. If you choose to think of them as “fictions” in the modern vein, well, that is your choice. For myself: I have come to know Theem’hdra quite intimately and can go there simply by closing my eyes and sending my mind winging back across the aeons. Why not join me there, now, in that raw adventurous world in an age before all other ages of man, in the Primal Continent at the dawn of time?

  POSTSCRIPT

  . . . Since penning the above, for use as an introduction to an original book of Thelred Gustau’s translations, the fantastic, the inexplicable has occurred. No, on second thought perhaps the occurrence was not entirely inexplicable; but if my guess is correct, certainly it was fantastic.

  I had known for weeks that Thelred was excited about something, and, in respect of his age, I had warned him against the excessive amount of work he was putting in on Teh Atht’s Legends of the Olden Runes. It had seemed to me that he was neither eating nor sleeping normally and that something—some aspect of his work of which he had made no mention—had become an obsession with him.

  On the day in question his housekeeper, Mrs. Petersen, prepared a breakfast which he no more than glanced at before hurrying to his study. There, as the morning grew towards noon, he sat at his desk with scratchily moving pen in hand and all the paraphernalia of his golden box within easy reach.

  All through the forenoon he sat, disposing of a continuous supply of coffee, climbing from one level of high excitement to the next, until noon when he left the study and retired to his bedroom. The look on his face as he passed by Mrs. Petersen was: “wild, flushed, exultant!—but he was also plainly very tired.” He asked that she rouse him at 7 P.M. and place coffee and sandwiches in his study before going home.

  She followed his instructions to a point, but was so concerned by her employer’s behaviour that she did not immediately go home. Instead she sat in her little kitchen and listened to the muffled sounds of the professor stirring in his study . . . to those, and to his frequent, excited exclamations.

  She must have drowsed, for her next memory is of a terrific blast of sound, of a triumphant cry in the professor’s voice, of a deeper, bass booming which could only barely be described as a voice, and finally of a splintering, crashing impact that shook the very house.

  Rushing to his study she threw open the door on a scene of chaotic disorder. In the ceiling the chandelier swung on its chain and cast flickering shadows from light-bulbs made faulty by whatever blast had wrecked the room. Books and documents lay scattered all about; loose leaves still fluttered to the carpeted floor; the great bay window had been forced outwards from its frame into the garden, where even now a great shadow stirred black against the night.

  Mrs. Petersen staggered to that unnaturally shattered window in time to see . . . a shape! A shape like that of a monstrous bird or bat that loomed up massive before rising into darkness to the whirring thrum of great wings, a black silhouette bearing upon its back the lesser shape of . . . a man!

  I WAS AMONG the few, called upon by the police early the next day, to go along and make what I could of Mrs. Petersen’s story. Did I have any idea exactly what the professor was working on?—they wanted to know—and had I known that he was experimenting with explosives? And what sort of explosives might they have been? These and many other questions, all of which I could only answer by shaking my head in utter bafflement. Plainly it had been an explosion of some sort that caused the damage to the professor’s study, particularly the window, but that did not explain his total absence.

  Surely there should be a body, or at least—traces of one! But no, there was nothing like that, no sign of any harm done to his person. What then had happened? And if he lived, where was Thelred Gustau now?

  Later I was allowed to gather all of his scattered notes, documents, books and miscellaneous curiosa together, examining each item for damage . . . and then the puzzle began to piece itself into a pattern. Some weeks were to pass, however, before my conclusions were concrete, and even then they were not such as I might pass on to the police.

  The clues were in Thelred’s notes, in those copious if disjointed scribblings formed partly of translated fragments from Teh Atht, mainly of his own excitement at some tremendous breakthrough which he was sure was coming. And of course that breakthrough had come, on the night of the blasted study, the bass alien “voice,” and the bat-bird shape that bore a triumphant manlike figure away into unknown dimensions.

  For Thelred had written of the strange properties he believed to lie hidden in the stopped-up silver whistle, and of the potent energies locked in a tiny bottle of golden-yellow liquid from Teh Atht’s box. He had likened these items to certain things hinted at in the peculiar, almost eso
teric works of Dr. Laban Schrewsbury, and at the same time had jotted down notes concerning gigantic flying creatures called “Byakhee” and a tentacled, immemorially worshipped God-thing named Hastur.

  Tenuous clues, all of them; and yet had he not recently complained bitterly of the ever-increasing scorn with which erstwhile colleagues now greeted his work? And had he not often stated his desire to be “away from all this . . .?” Never at peace with the hustle and bustle of our 20th Century, always seeking the solitude of vast ocean vistas and the lure of distant desert places, what was there to hold him here? And by “here” I mean in this world of men, at least in the present-day world of here and now.

  Often he had declared his admiration for those tales of olden Arabia, where djinni might be found in magic lamps and brave men sought adventure high above the world on arabesqued, gravity-defying carpets. And now . . . has he discovered a magic carpet of his own, astride the back of a trans-dimensional Byakhee, which might fly him to those worlds of wonder he so admired?

  Deny me if you will, but in my mind’s eye I see him working at his desk, see him leap to his feet with an astounded exclamation to tremulously sip of the golden mead. I hear him hoarsely chant the invocation to Hastur and blow on the whistle so recently unstoppered. Aye, and then the blast of energy that heralds the coming of the Byakhee, tumbling the contents of the study and blowing out the windows while yet the summoner stands unharmed.

  I see it all and know that it must have been so, for of all the incunabula of the golden box only the silver whistle—that and one of the tiny bottles—were absent upon my investigation . . .

  AND NOW I alone am executor to the estate, and I know that soon I shall have mastered the legends writ so many aeons ago in alien cyphers upon the fine skins of Teh Atht’s runebooks. What Thelred Gustau started I shall finish, but until then there are those fables already translated which, as I have said before, you may accept for what they are or, if you so desire, name “fictions” in the modern vein. The choice is yours.