Hesgathorpe's Model

A H.P.Lushcraft tale, re-typed and edited by Simon Barber

They say that Art is immortal, in a way nothing else is. Listen,
Dobson, shall I tell you something ? The greatest artist I ever knew,
was Eric Hesgathorpe - what, you've never heard of him ? Well, I'm not
surprised, in a way. Nobody will admit to knowing him now, and he isn't
around to complain. Dead ? No ... I very much doubt it. His was just
the sort of art that .... well, I'd better start at the beginning.
It was down at the Barnstoneworth market that I met him. You know
the place, in the old mill that the Resistance used in the Occupation,
before the Belgians were outcast from our spacetime. It's full of
incredible bargains; things they dig up from fabled cellars and
warehouses dug out of the ruins. You can find anything there.
I'd never have met him, if we hadn't grabbed the same video from
the antiques bin at the same moment. The stall owner, a lean, sinister
hawk-faced man (or possibly a man-faced hawk, I forget which) looked at
us and gave a cruel smile, when he saw what we were both holding. The
tape had seemed to just fall into my hand - and Eric Hesgathorpe had
spotted it at the same instant. Later, I wondered long about that.
Eric was a tall, rangy hound, that I'd have said had something of
the Red Setter in his makeup, barring his pale grey fur. More like a
concrete setter, in fact. He had that look in his eye; the sort of
expression you associate with mad celtic musicians who play steam-driven
bagpipe solos on blasted heaths beneath the sinister starlight. Normal
enough, for this part of the world.
He gave the tape a sort of shake, as if to test my grip on it. We
looked down, then up again as we measured each other for a
confrontation.
"Do you like this ?" He nodded down at the plastic thing that
joined us. I must have nodded. And then he gave that slow smile, the one
that makes people hurry home and nail themselves into the cellar with
silver wedges.
"If you'll let me buy this, I can point you in the direction of
something far more - interesting."

I thought it was odd, that the stallholder packed up as soon as

Eric handed him the money - and odder still that he didn't even count
it. Nor have I seen him since, though I've been back often to that place
of charred beams and strange mementoes. The tape, Dobson ? Yes, I'm
coming to that.
It was Old, a thing of oil-derived plastics, its contents in a form
that few now can read, save savants and a few discreet collectors to
whom the dread name "Betamax" still has meaning. And yet it was sealed:
Doom had come to whatever impious library had stored such things, before
it had been given as a shocking covenant to the new members of those who
had brought such things to our shores. The colours had caught my eye -
faded, yet of such a mix of pinks, blues and pastels which seemed to
have decayed in a way not easily explicable - and certainly not with the
mere passing of years. It was as if - they had been painted in the light
of some other sun, that fell on scenes not good for the health and
sanity of the viewer.
And what shapes those colours formed - even now, I do not like to
recall them too closely. There is a certain - association, in certain
forms and resemblances, that strike deep into ancestral memories of
things that our forebears knew, and fled from in time. They were
rounded, amorphous things of fluff; you could approximate them with
twisted cushions, but never sit so comfortably on a padded chair again.
I had grabbed the tape from some obscure impulse, but Eric - he Knew, I
think, even then, much of what I only later glimpsed.
We arranged to meet by the corner of Moortop Lane and Dagon Street,
just by the Social Club. It was raining, I remember, and the lenses of
my respirator were misting over. That was when the Anti-Social club
stood opposite: the mustard gas pouring out of their windows was making
things uncomfortable to stand too near downwind.
I was idly dabbing my suit down with Fuller's Earth to
decontaminate it, when I dimly recalled the name he'd given - Eric
Hesgathorpe, the artist. But it was not as an artist I associated the
name - something technical, rather than artistic. And then there was the
hound himself, stepping out of the shadows at the far side of the
street, dropping something into the collecting box of a pair of Aztec
Evangelists. He waved cheerfully, and even through the misted lenses I
could see that look in his eye.
"You know," he began, as we strolled up the restored cobbled road
in the rain. "It was a bit of luck meeting you here. I checked on your
name - you're a mathematician, aren't you ? At least, that's what the
public files say.
I had to admit, he'd been thorough. He even quoted at me from my
own book, "Forget diets - stay in great shape with Applied Topology",
which was well-known in geometric circles. I was as curious about him,
and said so.
He stopped, and I almost ran into him. "Ah, but, you see - I need a
mathematician. If you're interested in the - things I have, maybe we
could collaborate. I can pay you, genuine money."
He would say no more, but we waled on. Out of the familiar
alleyways and half-tunneled courtyards carved from the living stone of
the Yorkshire hills that were old when the first natives came on package
holiday flights from worlds where the exchange rate referred to
dimensions and not currency differences. The night grew late, and still
we walked on, down out of the friendly overshadow of the dripping woods
and aeon-mellowed monoliths rising firelit black against the skies.
I suddenly stopped, and laid a warning paw on his shoulder. "We
aren't going to the - Estate, are we ?" I demanded. "People don't go
there any more."
He rewarded me with one of those smiles again, and I wished I was
back home amongst the cheerful collection of tomb-loot my maiden aunt
left me. "Not very far in," he promised, as if that would reassure me
somehow. "Not very far at all. You see, I need the correct - Atmosphere,
for my work."
The light here had turned very dim. And it was orange; the kind of
sodium lamp glow that I don't think anyone's made since the nineteen-
eighties. We walked on, to the spot where the buildings began again -
very even and regular were their sides, and the roofs looming over us
were of sheet metal and plastic. Great weed-cracked spaces yawned
between the buildings, where petrol-driven vehicles had once been parked
by the dozen.
Suddenly there was a sound behind me - I turned, expecting to see
the familiar sight of some black trapdoor very slowly and deliberately
rise, or the jelly-like pulsing as an amorphous form oozed into the
mortal world. But there was nothing there, nothing but a gate of
plastic-sheathed wire swinging in the breeze. I had never felt so alone.
"It's really - suited to my work," Eric's tail twitched, as we
turned into a weed-grown courtyard, where long decades ago great neon
signs had been raised to the glory of nameless corporations. "Nobody
disturbs me here - I might as well be in the middle of the Girl Scout
nuclear testing range, down in Milton Keynes, for all the passing
traffic here. Look !" He gestured at a piece of broken tarmac where the
warding sign "No Parking" could still be seen. "All this space, and
being wasted. Just because there were a few little irregularities around
here during the Occupation - oh, very well, so we're two hundred metres
away from a Political Correctness Enforcement Community Centre. You
could see the chimneys, if it was light. But that was years ago."
My fur stood on end. I had been too young to join the Resistance at
the time, but my Father had joined in the sudden uprising of Agnostic
Fundamentalists that had helped free the North from tyranny. They had
fought to the end for what they believed in (or might believe in.).
But for all that, the Camps they had liberated had not been the
worst excesses of the EC's rule. Each occupied nation had a number of
sites, that had been mercifully - obliterated, without any living troops
being allowed to check the extent of the erasure. Even the androids sent
in later, recorded their findings to write-only memory downloads, and
all found ways to throw themselves onto high-tension lines before their
curious programmers could interrogate them in detail.
In other words, Dobson, I knew there had been some more than
fatally unhealthy places constructed in these parts. But that had been
awhile ago, and if nothing was done to disturb - to remind, certain
places of their function, maybe they would fade away, or at least sleep
dark and dreamlessly.
Eric opened a door, and we left the light of that single sodium
bulb, to see what was in the building. I was impressed at what I saw -
more fool, me.

He was an artist, in every sense of the word. But instead of

lifeless paint and canvas, or even sculpture, his figures lived.
Androids ? Yes, indeed they were. Some of them were most definitely
androids. The room was filled with components and half-assembled models
in a dozen and more basic shapes. Most of them were what you'd call
"companion" class, with rather fuller functions than you'd expect to see
detailed in a commercial catalogue.
As the light came on, I felt rather than saw a dozen sets of
scanning lenses turn towards me. There was a metallic rustle like a
sword slipping from its sheath, over in the far corner.
"Would M'seu prefer ... ?" The voice was almost perfect. And as to
its speaker.....
Imagine a slender skunk-form cast in brightly polished stainless
steel. Two metres tall, with the grace and poise of a chromium angel,
smooth curves and a great billowing tail that somehow looked soft, not
like the plastic and metal construct I knew it must be.
"This is Madelene," Eric waved offhandedly at the silver form,
while he rummaged through a pile of old issues of "Unpopular
Electronics" and "Not Very PC User" magazines that spilled on the floor.
"She's my latest - my latest finished one, anyway. She's helping me with
the new projects."
"Are you sentient ?" I looked her up and down curiously. For
several decades, android manufacturers had been producing companions
with the intelligence of, say, the average politician, but true humanity
had always eluded them. "Have you passed your Turing Tests ?"
She gave an exquisite shake of her head, that glorious tail
swinging like a flag. "Eh ! Turing Tests, they are for pocket
calculators. I did not feel like filling in all those questions."
As I looked at her, fascinated, still I could not help feeling a
shudder at the age of the place. This warehouse dated from the time when
designer pastels and matching formica doors were considered the height
of fashion. Dread panels of flat chipboard faced in hessian loomed
flatly at all sides - the far corners of the room took on strange
regular, Euclidean geometry in the dim light. I shuddered.
Madelene was eyeing me with the sort of calculating air that I
never associated with an android. And yet, I could see how her joints
were hinged, moving on regular pivots. That was definitely not a costume
she wore; she was as definitely a construct as the half-assembled
components around her.
"Eh, and you can be 'elping with our - constructions ?" Her voice
was level, yet loawded with meanings. I nodded. I forget what I said to
her - something about being interested in the new applications of
science. A silver eyebrow raised, the silver skin sparkling in the half-
light.
Eric turned round, a gleam of triumph in his eye. "Ah. Sorry to
keep you - like I said, Madelene's just the more - conventional, of my
projects. They're in here." With that, he slid open the door at the end
of the room - revealing not the familiar dank basement of a scientist,
but a direly nylon-carpeted split-mezzanine office. And what he was
building.....
It's no good, Dobson. I know you look at me so oddly, when I can't
bear to sit down on a cushion. Sorry about the wooden pews, I got them
cheap from the Jacobin Temple Of Reason across the road. But what I saw
.....
He was a great artist, I'll give you that. Those shapes ! They were
the nauseously over-rounded things on that impious tape, reproduced in
all their ghastly cuteness ! Only one thing was missing - the terrible
pastel of fur. I suppose each figure - there were twenty or thirty, at
various stages of construction - must have been a little over a metre
tall, with that unthinkable proportion of three and a half "heads high"
that you see in the films that came down to us from before the Milennium
- when we found out the true significance of such things. Like a finely
balanced radio aerial resonates, "attracting" certain frequencies from
the aether, there are certain shapes and forms you can make out of
ordinary materials that - attract.
"What's the skin made of ?" I found my voice, though I doubt it
came out as more than a whisper. Each completed figure was pleasantly
smooth, with a rubberyness that was reassuringly familiar, like the
glistening hide of a whale or seal.
His own, genuine fur eyebrow raised in amusement, and I saw where
Madelene had copied that part of her programming from. "Ah. That's where
your skills would help me. Just take a look at - this." I recognised the
small remote-control box in his paw, as the item he had just unearthed
from next door. He pointed it at the nearest figure, a kittenish thing
with eyes that made up fully two-thirds of her skull frontage.
He pressed the button. And as if it had controlled me and not the
thing that slumped before me, I froze in alarmed terror. For the smooth
plastic was suddenly hidden in a glowing cloud of pinkness, that seemed
to wrap around the figure like sea-fog on a still midnight ocean. And
then that fog changed.
"You see !" Eric's voice was madly triumphant, even as my ears
stiffened in terror "Look ! It gains focus - a hundred and more tiny
laser interference crystals to the square centimetre - wrap-round
Virtual Fluffiness !"
His face was wild with delight. Madelene stood behind, her silver
face suddenly inscrutable as a temple statue. "I found it just after I
built Madelene - there was an abandoned building, not far from here, in
a spot where all the vegetation had gone strange. I followed my muse,
and explored - this was in bundles with EC codes on the outside, so of
course nobody was going to come and claim it. Waste not, want not - this
must have been planned for camouflage suits, or something - you can rig
sensors to give it Chameleon abilities."
I had an uneasy feeling, as I thought about his tale. Apart from
this blasted Industrial Estate, there was, or had been, only one spot
where the taint had lingered in these hills. It had been a Government
research station - but the wholesome testing of chemical, biological and
vegetable warfare techniques had been replaced by something far more
sinister. That piece of land was now cordoned off with electrified
razorwire, each conducting metal strand carefully arranged to form a
belt of cold steel endlessly repeating a certain word in a language that
was ancient before the first cave-dwellers ever sunbathed on these
hills.
And yet - it could not have been such a place of horror, or it
would have met the fate of all the EC's main bases. It had been just
after the great tank battle on the North Yorkshire plain, the Thirsk
Salient, when things had become urgent. Fortunately, the EC had made a
mistake that cost them dear, when it came to their regulations licencing
antique vehicles that included launch vehicles as permissible. The
carefully refurbished force of ancient SS-18 "Satan" missiles in the
Albanian People's Aerospace museum in Tirana, were regularly inspected,
the EC's best beaureaucrats measuring the dummy warheads of reinforced
concrete they carried.
It was a limitation inherent in their mindset, I smiled as I
recalled it. The week before the fall of Belgium, Albania had been
treated to a spectacular firework display - as eighty ancient launchers
headed almost vertically up, registering as "harmless" to all the
legomancer's spells in Brussels. And indeed, twenty tonnes of concrete-
bound railway lines are harmless - unless, as the Ministries of
Agriculture, Aggro-Culture, and Political Correction found out, you drop
them from twenty-eight thousand miles, arriving at their destination at
three miles per second. "Project Thunderfall" had been such a great
success, the original vehicles had been replaced by the liberated
kingdoms of Europe, and stood today eternally vigilant .
The memories of that time passed, and I felt my fur bristle a
little less. But standing in that room, with the Belgium-crafted crates
around me, I could not shake off a vague feeling of dread.
"So ... what do you want Me for ?" I asked, staring uneasily at the
shimmering ball of fictional fur before me. Yet - there was something
definitely interesting about the project.
Eric gave a high, tense bark of a laugh. "Watch when I try and
increase the realism - it's got a pseudo-random element built into the
Artificial Fuzziness program - three, two, one, DOT." He stabbed the
yellow button of the remote control unit down, and I leaped back - as it
seemed to balloon outwards in an insanely writhing furball three metres
across !
"Rolls a critical on the fluffiness-related dice," my ears went up
in interest as my initial panic faded. "Yes - this could be of Definite
interest...."

That was how I got involved - it was my mistake, but I saw no harm
in it, honestly, I did not. Surface-tiling geometries always fascinated
me - you've noticed, the tesseract tiles in my bathroom ? This was the
sort of thing I was good at. Programming that holographic simulation for
the way fur binds and fluffs, took me weeks of work, off and on. Oh,
Eric paid me for it - he said he was selling the completed models. I'd
only actually go out there once a week, the place was a mess - fake fur
and that strange rubbery skin piled all over the place. He was a genius,
I'll tell you that as a fact - and if he was selling the working models
as companions, well, I was hardly going to complain. Not my problem.
I'll tell you, though. The first thing I ever really felt was
"off", was when he invited me round for a meal. The house was fine, a
timber-beamed place with pre-Norman style vaulting on the ceiling, and
the reassuring meeping and glibbering of ghouls seeping up from some
hidden sub-basement. He served the meal, while Madelene lounged like a
reclining statue on an extraordinarily fluffy rug before the fire. Her
long, silver fingers hissed through the fabric seductively, all the time
we talked. Flame and fur made strangely curved reflections dance around
the room.
Naturally, I was amazed how he'd managed to build her. You've seen
my own room, half the shelves are laden with old hard-copy manuals,
everything you need to know to construct a PC or a PI (the Incorrect
Machine) from the raw chips up. I was looking forwards to picking his
brains on his construction techniques - but do you know, he showed me
round the whole house from leering gambrel roof to conveniently earth-
floored basement, and there wasn't so much as an issue of "Unpopular
Mechanics" in the place ? There was just one shelf of books, and that
was in a locked, smoked-glass fronted cabinet that he hurried me past
without a word or a glance at.
I mentioned something jokingly about his achievements, how he must
have bought her off the shelf. We both knew that 'droids like Madelene,
they don't make, let alone sell commercially. And I remember just what
he said, after we'd finished eating and sat before the fire, with
Madelene grooming him and looking at me with that mercury-flexible
expression of hers.
"She was an - inspiration," he said happily, as the object of our
discussion enfolded him with that huge silver tail that should have
looked like a rubber boat sprayed silver, instead of the elegant
appendage that waved so realistically. "Oh, I got the parts, the
processor and everything, off the shelf. And she was nothing special,
for quite awhile. Form follows function, you know. And what I didn't
know was, it happens the other way round. When I'd got her shaped just
the way the vision said, everything started to .... happen. These days,
She hardly seems to need spare parts, even."
Just at that moment, the silver skunk whispered something in his
ear, and he immediately began talking about his older works. Her eyes
flashed, a danger signal that was somehow tinged with amusement, as if
she saw some joke that she was resolutely keeping secret.
I turned round, and in the firelight, I noticed something that I'd
been barely half aware of all evening. The air was ..... you've seen
motes of dust and fur, picked out in brilliant sunlight ? It was like
that, but more so - imagine the finest, silkiest fur, that makes
thistledown look like ten-centimetre steel cable. And imagine it
suspended very finely and evenly in the air, almost as if it was
dissolved in it. As Madelene stood up, it moved - you'd expect that. But
it moved in an odd sort of way, not how you'd expect swirling drafts to
behave. And the colour - you'd expect loose fur to match the pelts of
the people in the house, but this had colours that were - different. I
shuddered, later on, when I realised where I had seen colours like that
before.
As she left the room with the empty plates, I dropped a few
questions about where he got his ideas from. He gave me another of those
strange, searching looks.
"I'm not the sort who can just start with a raw block of material,"
he said, very slowly. "Not like just digging a ditch, where you start
chipping away till it's finished. No. Ideas, they just - come to me, I
wait till they're crowding inside so tight it hurts, then I just have to
... go." His ears dipped slightly. "Like these new models. Madelene was
my Inspiration - she doesn't have to say anything, she's just ...
around. And then, things happen." He hesitated, and I think he was about
to say something else when Madelene swept in with a silky glide that I
somehow doubted Eric had ever programmed into her limb activator
systems. A great artist, he truly was - but to produce something beyond
the state of those arts whose budgets would break some countries - I
couldn't see it. And yet I didn't think, and still don't think that he
was lying. He had made her - but what I was looking at, had already
departed very radically from what his hands had assembled.
I bade him goodnight half an hour or so later, and he went with me
to the door. I turned to go - and then I saw a very curious thing, or
thought that I did. You recall what I said about the infinitely fine
fuzz in the air, moving ? Well, as he stood there with the light and
Madelene behind him, I realised something.
It was a windy night. And yet this impalpable fluff was not
billowing in the draft from the open door. As he waved, it moved to
follow him, like - you know how iron filings arc round a bar magnet,
obeying invisible magnetic field lines ? The pattern was different - but
how different, I really would find it hard to put into words.
But then - I'd better tell this just as it happened. You can check
it with the official report - I wouldn't have believed it, if anyone
else had told it ... but, listen.

It was two months later; a still, damp night, not really raining,
but grey and overcast. I'd worked out a new refinement in the Artificial
Fluffiness algorhythm, and I was feeling pretty pleased with myself. I
can still remember the song I was humming, as I went to pick up the
phone - that old Cyberpunk track. You know the one ? "
"Anarchy in the algorhythms,
I wanna write code, with no divisions
Code ought to beeee, in anarcheeeeee..."
"Ok, Dobson, it might not be to your tastes, but it was how I was
feeling. I tried to phone through to tell Eric the good news - but the
phone was off the hook. I could just hear things - nothing definite - it
sounded like a soft bumping, the way you'd sound if you tied pillows to
your feet, and ran around an echoing room. But there wasn't just one set
of the flopping sounds - it sounded like dozens - hundreds ! I called
out down the phone - hoping to attract attention or what, I don't know -
and for a moment there was a scraping sound, then a soft "floomp" near
the mouthpiece. Then I heard the click, and the dial tone."
I stood there, and things seemed to fall into place. Somebody had
heard me, and then quickly picked the phone up - putting it back, but
muffling it, as if they'd a towel or something soft wrapped round their
hands. The room had been filled with noises, but not a word, not a
single breath did I hear. And something soft seemed to be standing very
close to me, that instant before the phone was put down.
I was more irritated than anything. I rang again, but there was no
answer. So I went out on the bike, down past the AntiSocial club, past
the posters for the UnDead Aid charity concerts, down through the
familiar gambrel-roofed streets. And then out, under the cold lid of
cloud, down into the flat land beyond the dying end of the hills, to
where the Industrial Estate had lain for strange decades unpeopled.
The single sodium light still burned, casting a strange uneldritch
glow, more yellow than the usual altar fire. It was - I put it out of my
head, or tried to, the idea that it was like to the sick rainbow hues I
had first seen on the cover of that ancient tape - the one that had
first brought me here. As I stood outside, my fur chill in the gusting
corner of unmouldering breezeblock walls, it was as if something had
gone from my mind - as if a cloud like that eddying around me, had been
hiding things that I should have thought of earlier. I looked at my
watch - exactly midnight. It's a good watch, it does sunrise and sunset
times, conjunctions of most planets, and if you stick this pull-out
probe into fresh blood, you can summon any one minor Daemon of the
Sumerian mythos, once a day. (Or more, but it really uses up the
battery).
But then - a sound came to my sharply erect ears, a natural one
indeed - or it would have been, if I had not known what I did about this
place. A creaking door, blowing in the wind - here in this place where
all the doors were nightly almost religiously locked and alarmed.
I was very quiet, as I looked at that open doorway. There was a
two-bore shotgun in the saddlebag: I unfolded the ground recoil spades
and pulled the cover off the multi-baffle muzzle brake, taking care it
was loaded with centimetre-gague tungsten shot. We'd had a bad
infestation of mimes that year, you remember, and I was still carying
protection. The autoloader gave a reassuring hum as I hoisted the
ammunition tank onto my back, and cautiously stepped through the
doorway. Into Eric's studio, where I had often been before.
The atmosphere of the place had - changed. I don't know how to
describe it exactly, but there was a sort of gleeful expectancy in the
air, as if a host of people were hiding behind doors, waiting to burst
out and surprise you. But, do you know, there was nothing ? I saw Eric's
coat and overshoes hung up by the doorway - I searched, but there was no
sign that he was anywhere near. And all around me, the almost-completed
plush figures stood or sat, in such stunningly lifelike poses that it
half scared me. I'd helped to build the damned things, I mean ! There
was hardly a bolt or electrical connection I couldn't sketch out even
now, and the Artificial Cuteness algorhythms I'd dreamed up myself - I
just woke up one morning, with the breakthrough already in my head.
I brushed past Eric's coat on the way out, already dismissing my
misgivings. Yet I did not like the way the fine fluff seemed to bunch
and knot in the corners of the room - there were shapes that it seemed
to make, just when you turned away from it. It was so impalpable, it was
hardly there at all - like the latent image on a piece of undeveloped
film.
I said, that I brushed past Eric's coat. And in the pocket, was
something hard and squareish. Without really thinking what I was doing,
I reached down and grabbed it - an old hard-copy book, that'd been
rebound in some thin furless skin as if to render it anonymous. If it
belonged to Eric, I told myself as I locked the place up behind me, I'd
give it back to him when we next met, and maybe joke about how he
shouldn't leave incriminating evidence lying around.
It's one of the great mysteries, don't you think, how we manage to
always think of the least suitable thing to say ? I was on the bike and
home safe in twenty minutes, and fast asleep an hour later. I remember
that sleep, Dobson - because I don't think I'll ever sleep as well
again.
It was the book. I told you, I'd only seen one small collection at
Eric's house, on the locked shelf ? When I opened those pages the next
morning in the clear night of day, I almost threw the thing on the fire
before finishing the first page - would to Nodens I had done ! Then I
might have slept nights - yet in my ignorance, a monstrous fluffiness
might have been unleashed upon the world.
 Oh, I've seen all the classics. I sneaked a peek at my sister's
junior pop-up "Necronomicon" when I was six years old - I'm not
prejudiced about that sort of thing. But there are - other - entities,
and some of them it truly is fearful to know.
In my trembling paws I held a copy of the infamous "Bibbity Boo",
the dread original of which was rumoured to have been found scrawled -
in crayon - upon a certain piece of wallpaper. The history of the work
was a fantastic piece of legend, having been only been printed once, in
a single batch of five million in Singapore. Almost all had been
remaindered and destroyed - but here was one of the last, shockingly
impious survivors.
The book seemed to fall open of its own accord. What I read - well,
I won't forget it in a hurry. There were several sections that were,
let's say, relevant.
"And concerning yr meddling with ye Outer ones, take heed on what
ye call down from splits and tears in ye curtain wall of Darkness. For
not by the holy symbols, viz. ye pentagram, Voorish sign nor yet the
stone rune-graven from ancient Mnar, will some of the Strange ones
consent to be bound. When ye do see those of short and swollen aspect,
plump of limb and graven in the image of flaxen dolls, cease ye to
meddle, and pray that the rent in the seams of ye worlde will heal
before great mischief be wrought.
"And should ye deal with ye Great Soft Ones, be doubly warned, for
they are doubly subtle, in what you do consent to. For like calls to
like, and even their lifeless images act to draw power from their Realm,
to draw power and act as horrid seed sewn in the world to grow fat and
plushie to our great woe. In the embrace of such is ye deadliest menace,
for e'en their images take life from that which walks and feed it to
that which must not be.
"They are soft and subtle. In dreams are they strongest, snaring
the souls of those who look too long upon the runes they have left among
us. In the runes of the heart, the flower and the rainbow have they
delight: in colours of bleached pinks and blues that are not to be seen
in goodlie skies. As a fluffieness shall ye know them; as a chirping and
yiffing in the darkness, and by the soft tread of their great paws in
the last of moments. For an image left to grow, shall bind itself
between two worlds, gnawing as a shipworm in a vessel, and draw forth
power of the Other realm ."
There was a lot more of the same. As I read it, I couldn't help
thinking - just how has Eric produced his masterpieces ? He had been
"inspired", all right - if you remember that word means "to breathe in".
I won't forget the sight of that damnably perfect silver thing
whispering in his ear. She'd been with him when he found that cache of
EC holographic-mode fibre, and maybe he thought it was coincidence. I
certainly don't !
What happened next ? I was down to the police station immediately,
gasping some half-incoherent story to the junior constable, waving the
book I'd found. Well, you know how much chance you've got of being taken
seriously. Within fifteen seconds launch keys were being turned in a
"Thunderfall" silo somewhere, and before even the police headquarters
had been told, twenty tonnes of artificial meteorite had punched that
brooding, decade-haunted Industrial Estate to a sizzling crater. That
constable's a Detective Inspector now.
But you know, Dobson, I couldn't be totally content, even
afterwards. Oh, they searched for Eric and Madelene, but the house
hadn't been used in a week. They only found his clothes, sort of lying
empty against a wall - they lay in a strange way, almost as if he'd been
wearing them when he was - pulled right out of them. He wasn't there -
but I remember how thick the strange fluff had hung in the air of the
deserted factory. I can't prove a thing - it's all damnable fancy and
hearsay - I didn't count exactly how many of those stuffies there were,
like bottles waiting to be filled with the animating force from some
chirping, yiffling nightmare.
But something answered the phone, you know. I can't forget the soft
gleeful noises, as of a host of padded feet skipping in some rite of
unhallowed celebration. And Madelene was gone - how many of her nascent
sisters and brothers had she taken with her, walking for the moment on
unliving plastic and circuitry ? And Eric - I said I didn't think he was
dead. But listen, for the book I found has one last thing to say.
"And of those that are servants to ye Soft Ones, they that give of
their life and trust to them, in sooth are they rewarded. When ye see
but dimly ye vapour of no known hue, depart, for life and sowle's sake.
For in that darkening, know that ye stand near to a yawning rent in ye
Worlde - as it was in Anaheim, in Tokyo, in Florida long sunken 'neath
the sea, and in diverse other places treated more cruelly. Ye Great Soft
Ones are amorous of the mortal worlde, and if they can plant their own
greatness of feet here or no, they delight in the taking of trophies to
their world, where they will have their shapes stripped and forms given
such as their new Masters find amusing."
What am I worried about, Dobson ? It was something I saw just as I
turned to leave that accursed industrial estate. I shrugged it off at
the time - my nerves were jangling like razorwire by then, true enough,
and I'd seen enough to imagine any sort of horrors. It was nothing too
frightening at the time, but what I know - Goddess, what I know now !
For I'm guilty too, you know. I helped give them shape, the shapes that
came out of my dreams, and if I can't forget it, I know that THEY won't
forget how I helped them. Eric is - not dead, I think, but he is Gone,
and only I remain. What I know now - a little knowledge truly is a
deadly thing. Sometimes I wonder, when I remember how Madelene used to
eye me up and down, as if - weighing me up, as if deciding something.
And the smile she'd give as she silently nodded that oversized head -
what wouldn't I give, if only that smile had been a disappointed frown.
The last time I turned back to look at that one sodium light,
before I gunned the bike's turbines and escaped into the healing
darkness, back to sane and healthy streets where vampires and shoggoths
walked in cheerful midnight moods unafraid. For a second - hardly an
instant - the rain seemed to take a half-solid form beneath the sickly
cone of light. Or was it rain ? Was it something else ? Is it the cloud
that I fancied I see out of the corner of my eye sometimes, when the
lighting grows dim ?
The shape - of no colour of Earth, and of a roundness and
plushieness that belongs in no sane Universe - still, in that shape, I
saw a blasphemous distortion - a re-moulding, caricatured, a degraded
counterfeit that only I would have recognised - the shape he wears now
in their world, him who was Eric Hesgathorpe !

####### End of Tale #########