davywavy | David's Halowe'en Tales o' Terror, Vol. 5

Well, we're into December, it's almost Christmas, so what could be more festive than a spooky Hallowe'en story almost six weeks late? Terrifying, huh? I wouldn't be surprised if a few of you expired from fright at the very thought.

Today, we're veering into 'wierd tale' territory. A story of elder beings from beyond the sane universe. A tale which would make HP Lovecraft himself pull the blanket up around his ears and look around nervously. And it's got

ukmonty in it, like all my stories do. I think it's quite nice that he can maintain an LJ presence without ever posting any more.

Anyway...it's a tale I call...

At the mountains of Cadness

It is with the direst forebodings that I take up my pen again now, so many years after the events I shall herein tell. It had been my sincere hope that the veiled and half mentioned warnings we had given after our return from the Davy-Monty expedition of 1929 to the Antarctic should have been enough to dissuade any who might choose to follow in our tracks, but now I hear that further expeditions to that accursed place are planned and our warnings have gone unheeded and so I consider it my duty to relate the full tale of what befell us.
It began, as my tales so often do, in my club with my boon companion, Monty. And, as my tales so often begin, with my asking him the same old question.
“Monty”, I asked, looking at his glass.” What the bloody hell are you drinking?”
He raised his tumbler, filled to the brim with some awful, thick yellowish concoction, and contemplated it. “Antarctic Absinthe”, he answered. “Made from fermented penguin eggs.” He took a deep swig. “It’s a bit like a cross between eggnog and turpentine.” He took another. “Not half bad, when you’re used to it. I’ve certainly drunk worse.”
“Well, that doesn’t surprise me”, I said. “But Antarctican Absinthe? What the devil put into your head to try it?”
“Ah, well, you see I was in the reading room of the British Museum the other day, browsing that eldritch tome of the mad arab Abdul Alhazred...”
“Not the Necronomicon?”, I interjected in a low whisper.
“Lord, no. The Alconomicon. An earlier work, and some say that it was under the influence of some of the cocktails in the back that he went on to write the Necronomicon. You know how Muslims aren’t allowed to drink alcohol? Well, the Alconomicon is why. And reading it, I can understand why that might be. Do you know that he recommends using a rather nasty Bulgarian Merlot in the Black Mass? And a blended whisky in the witchcraft rituals of the Orkneys? No wonder they said he was mad.” He sat and nodded to himself for a moment.
“Yes, but what has that to do with anything?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, in one of the marginalia, written in a crabbed, almost indecipherable script in some half-forgotten dialect of Aramaic, I came across reference to antarctican absinthe – and of other, more ancient secrets which may even now lay entombed beneath the primordial ice of the southernmost continent.” He downed a good half gill in a single gulp. “I was putting together an expedition to go and take a looksee. We’re leaving next Tuesday. Want to come along?”
“Leaving aside how come you can read Aramaic –“
“Learned it from the labels on long-sunken Anatolian wine amphorae fished intact from the bottom the anaerobic zone of the Black Sea.”
“Leaving that aside, who would be coming on this possibly suicidal mission of yours?”
“Right now, it’s just me and six, maybe ten, definitely no more than a dozen shapely young lasses of my acquaintance to help me with the scientific work. Mostly archaeology and geology undergraduates, exotic dancers, climatologists, that sort of thing.”
“Would...” I asked. “Would my girlfriend be coming along?”
“She can if she likes, the more the merrier. Shall I ask her?”
“Oh, er, no.” I replied. “Don’t worry, I’ll... um...ask her. Yes. I don’t think it sounds like her sort of thing at all, though. I doubt she’ll be interested. But I’m keen. Very keen. So. See you next week, then?” I reached out and picked up the wrong glass, taking a large mouthful of the Antarctican absinthe before I realised my mistake.

***

We had taken ship on the former whaling vessel Dover which was commanded by a man named McReady; a tough, dour scot with ample experience of both Antarctic waters and heavy drinking – both of which we expected to be invaluable on our trip. As for the voyage from Bristol to the icy-bound waters of that southernmost sea around the Ross ice-shelf, there is little to tell. We crossed the tropics and the equator with Monty staring blearily from his hammock with a keg of grog at his side, and me in my cabin nursing a nasty black eye and several other injuries which had stemmed from an unfortunate but entirely innocent misunderstanding of my motives during an early-morning callisthenics session with our female companions. We had sailed in November to catch the best of the Southern summer, and by January we had sighted our first ice-berg. Within days after that the great looming fortress-like walls of the great ice continent loomed before us, and Monty had insisted upon us taking out the jolly boat and chipping some of it away to pop in his G&T
.
McReady found us an anchorage and shortly after we had founded our base camp on a low gravel shore. We raised our tents and levelled a section of ice to use as a runway for several aeroplanes of the latest design which has undergone special modifications to withstand the thin air and cold temperatures. Both Monty and I were qualified pilots, as I had won several medals in my time as an air-ace over Normandy during the war, and it turned out that Monty had flown a rum-runner from Canada to New England for the mob during prohibition. As we worked on setting up, our geologists were making initial excavations into the rock of the region and, in corroboration of certain passages Monty claimed to have read in the Alconomicon, soon uncovered a stratum rich in microscopic life forms of a pre-Cambrian sort, as well as a large selection of empties, bottle caps, and even some strange indentations long solidified into the rock which appeared to strangely resemble footprints.
“Spats, if I’m any judge”, said Monty. “Or maybe a fairly decent Oxford Brogue.” He gazed for some time. “I haven’t seen a pattern on a sole like that since...” And then he was silent, and would say no more.

By the third day on the continent, our camp was well-established and our initial discoveries logged. Our reports back to the exclusives desk at Modern Drunkard magazine were apparently exciting great interest back home, and it was time for us to take the next step. According to Monty, the Alconomicon had given him clues to two possible areas of interest. In a map of the Ross Ice Shelf which had plainly be drawn by a madman, scrawled and deranged but recognisable, Monty said two things stood out. A chain of mountains perhaps a half day of flight away where eldritch symbols on the map had indicated some strange antediluvian presence, and secondly, some miles to the East, the simple, cryptic legend: “PH”.

“Well, Monty”, I said. It’s pretty clear that we should do. You take one plane and investigate that strange ‘PH’ symbol, whilst the ladies and I will take the other and investigate the mountains.”
“Nice try”, said Monty dismissively. “You’re coming with me.”
“But...”, I said. “The girls. It might be dangerous for them. There’ll probably be polar bears to protect them from, or something.”
“Polar bears live at the end other end of the planet.”
“Feral, rabid penguins?”
“Just leave it, David. You’re coming with me whilst the ladies go off on their own investigation.”
I lowered my head in resignation. “Bagsy I’m driving, then.” I said.

***

Donning our furs and goggles we took off in what would have been – had the sun set – the early light of the next morning. Our high-powered aeroplane carried us over the endless white of the ice and I began to see how a man might be driven mad in a place like this. Even in the short time we had been there, my eyes had begin to see strange shapes in the clouds – unusual, inhuman, even blasphemous things against which consciousness reeled. I’m pretty sure I saw several ex-girlfriends, for starters. It took Monty shouting “There!” and pointing out of the aeroplane window to shake me from my dazed thoughts.
“What?” I asked.
“Down there. Look!”
I followed his pointing arm and there, silhouetted against the eye-paining gleam of that ancient plain was a small hillock of some sort. A simple protuberance from the ice amidst the otherwise featureless landcape. It was clear we had reached our destination. I guided the plane down and set its skis onto the snow, wondering as I did what discovery awaited us.
Monty was out of the plane almost as soon as the engine had stopped, and I was only a short way behind him. Together, we gazed in awe upon our discovery. There before us, standing out of the primordial ice, was a single pillar of strange, greenish stone. Decorated with ancient carvings which had resisted the workings of time and nature for years uncounted I saw things upon it which I do not care to clearly recall and which retained their unnatural forms as sharply as the day they were created. On the side of this tower of uncountable ages there was an opening, dark and cavernous and clearly designed as an entrance – and above it, in curiously formed letters and sigils more than six feet tall, the wall bore the terrible legend: “Wine Bar”.
“Well” said Monty. “That’s a stroke of luck.”

***

Something about the place meant we spoke in hushed whispers as we lit our torches and prepared to enter that vast and awful hostelry.
“Do you realise what this means?” asked Monty. “Those strange hints in the Book of Dyzan. That oft-misinterpreted passage in von Juntz’ Untrinkbar Kulten. They speak of strange, pre-human boozers. They speak”, he waved one arm expansively, “of this!”
The flashing lights of our torches revealed rack upon rack of glassware and bottles, untouched by the eons since the final last orders had been rung in this unholy den of depravity. Monty seized upon them in excitement. “Look!” he cried. “The legendary Pnakotic Gin! The Baileys of Eibon! Even...” his voice fell to quiet adoration “even De Vermiis Montrachet”.
“Monty!”, I hissed. “These bottles are of no human shape.”
“Tommyrot”, was the reply as Monty poured a generous measure of each of the bottles he’d mentioned and more into his oversized hip flask. “I’m human, and I’m holding ‘em. What’s more, I’m going to mix myself up the cocktail to end all cocktails”. He turned back the racks. “Oooh! Jurassic Merlot! The 65,887,651bc, in fact. An excellent year, I’ve heard.” He added a hefty measure to his flask.
“Now look, Monty”, I said. ” Don’t you think we ought to be at least slightly concerned? On our guard? We stumbled upon the awful remains of some preternatural structure, bedecked with geometric bas-reliefs of awful implication, and filled with bottles of spirituous liquor which undoubtedly predate the rise of humanity on the face of the Earth. Doesn’t this strike you as at least worthy of comment? What if some antediluvian bouncer even now crawls intently towards us upon awful appendages, growing ever closer to ringing some terrible bell and announcing that it is”, I gulped. “Time gentlemen, please?”
Monty gave this due consideration. “You’re right”, he said.” I’d best hurry up. You wouldn’t have such a thing as a funnel about you?”
I shook my head and hastened him as best I could, encouraging him to speed even as he rifled through the contents of the wine racks with an occasional cry of happiness as some previously unsupposed gem of pre-Cambrian distillation came to light. Eventually I grew tired of waiting for him and returned to the aeroplane, only to discover that several hours had passed since we entered that unholy structure, and whilst we had been away McReady had been trying to contact us on the radio.
“Whit’s that ye say?”, was his reply when finally I answered his panicky hails and told him of our discovery. “Ye’ve spent the last few hoors doon the pub? Och, yer Bampots!” Can ye no’ stay wi’in earshot o’ yon radio? ‘tis urgent, the noo!”
I calmed his Caledonian oaths and asked him what was wrong.
“It’s the lassies!” he cried, his voice distorted by static. “The poor, wee lasses ye sent oot on their own to that other place! They’re no’ replying. They’ve simply vanished into thin air!”

***

Perhaps it is now a matter of public knowledge what it was that had befallen our companions as Monty and I busied ourselves in the matters of brewing archaeology, but at the time who can say what thoughts were uppermost in our minds? As soon as I had relayed the message from McReady to Monty, the urgency of learning what had happened was our greatest priority. Monty took no more than a quarter of an hour to collect some of the more interesting-looking bottles and we were in the air shortly after, willing our little plane to greater speed as we flew direct to those distant mountains whose existence we had only learned of from an insane, twisted script in some ancient tome. I observed to Monty as we flew that taking directions from the lunatic scrawling of a semi-literate madman a thousand years dead (and who had allegedly been torn apart by invisible demons) was not necessarily the most sensible basis of scientific studies, but Monty was distracted by sampling one inhuman bottle after another and I feared my words were not being heard. At one point he brandished a bottle and suggested we set down and add the contents to the fuel tank as “This beauty has a real kick to it”, but I turned him down and flew on.
It felt appropriate that my chronometer showed the time to be dusk back home in England when I was bringing the plane to land on the icy plateau where the second camp had been put up. The antarctican summer sun was still bright by there was a curious sense of darkness about the place. The ladies camp had been professionally set up; the tents neatly arranged, both accommodation and scientific, but the icy wind whipped through the loose canvas. There was no immediate sign of anyone.
The two of us made our way to the largest of the sleeping tents, where a terrible vista greeted us; fully a dozen bodies lay scattered about. The bedding was in a state of considerable disarray and it looked like some sort of altercation had taken place. Monty knelt next to the nearest of the ladies and checked for vital signs.
“Is she...?”, I asked.
He nodded. “Out cold.”
“Oh! Not dead, then?”
“No.” He ran a practised eye over her. “Do you know what this looks like? It looks like she’s swooned after suffering”, his voice cracked with the horror. “A fate worse than death”.
“You mean...” I made a suggestive hand gesture, and Monty nodded.“But...”, I said. “But what sort of...absolute rotter would leave a lady unaccompanied out in a place like this after having his way with her? It defies all sane explanation!”
We quickly checked the others and the same was the case with all of them. Brightly flushed in some sort of post-coital hysterical swoon, all were insensible . “Do you...ahem...do you think that any of them might need chest massage?” I asked. Monty just shot me a look of withering a contempt and set about ensuring the girls were kept warm before grabbing me by the shoulder and leading me to the science tent where (he said) he hoped to learn more of what had befallen the camp.

The ice wind blew through the unlaced entrance to the science tent, and the place had an air of dereliction. Notes and diagrams lay scattered about or fluttered in the draft and several tables were overturned. Monty examined a number of odd footprints in the snow which had drifted onto the floor. “Perhaps a half dozen of them. Doing a drunken conga, if I’m any judge. And...” he held up a bread roll, “playing tennis or cricket with side dishes.” He shook his head. “Whatever they found here, it as something terrible.”
“Here”, I said. “Take a look at this.”
I had sorted through the notes and diagrams of the expedition’s leading biologist and found several of interest. “It looks like they found something – or some things - entombed in ice tens of thousands of years old. Something eldritch and uncanny. And here – “ I pointed at some rough, hand-drawn sketches. “Look; almost like humans, but possessed of a blasphemous, cyclopean...”
“They’re aren’t cyclopes”, said Monty, interrupting. “They’ve got two eyes, look. It’s just that it’s wearing a monocle.”
“So they do”, I said, looking closer. “And wearing a top hat too, if I’m any judge. And white tie, by the looks of it.”
“So that’s it”, said Monty. “Our companions discovered – disturbed, perhaps – something which should have been left to slumber. Some horror from an elder world, these beastly rotters, these scoundrels, these bounders. These cads from before the dawn of man.”
“Oh, come off it”, I said. “Antediluvian lounge lizards? It hardly seems likely.”
“Nope”, he said decisively. “Knaves from before the dawn of man, that’s got to be it. Alhazred dicusses them in the Alconomicon, you know. The Elder Cads, he called them. Apparently a few survived the deluge which drowned forgotten Hyperborea and lived on. It’s why Arabs started keeping their womenfolk in Harems, you know. To protect them from being chatted up at 3am by sharply dressed alien drunkards.”
“Well”, I said. “I’ve heard it all now.”
Monty took a deep draught of that unholy cocktail in his hipflask and, after his eyes had stopped watering and he could breathe properly again he looked me square in the eye. “We must go to the mountains.”
“Eh? What? You’ve had enough”, I said, trying to take the flask from him.
“No, I’m serious. Science demands we do. And not just science, but humanity.”
“You have had too much to drink.”
“Can you imagine what would befall the world if the Elder Cads escaped their ancient imprisonment on this forsaken continent? The havoc they would wreak? They should be the terrors of the Earth, and you know it. Moreover, you’d never get a date again.”
“Again?” I muttered, bitterly. “And anyway”, I said. “What of our delicate feminine companions, who are scattered about in their swoons after an experience which one can only assume was worse than death? Someone should stay here to look after them. Some of them”, I added hopefully “might need their corsetry loosening.”
“They’re warm and safe, now. The Cads, however, are doubtless on some diaboloic lash as we speak. Tying one on in an appalling, primeval bender.”
“Come, on, Monty”, I objected. “We know what’s going to happen. They’ll head back to their ancient, forgotten dreaming city beneath the ice where the shoggoths, long fallen from the ken on man, will set about them and sort them out. No worries.”
“Let the shoggoths deal with it?” said Monty. “That’s your solution to everything. Broken lightbulb? Let the shoggoths deal with it. Petty street crime? Let the shoggoths deal with it. Gordon Brown in Number Ten? Let the shoggoths deal with it.”
“I still say that wouldn’t have been such a bad idea”, I pointed out.
“Maybe so, but that’s beside the point. Come on”. And so saying, he grabbed me by the earlobe with one hand, took another unhealthily large swig from that unnatural concoction in his hip flask with the other, and dragged me once more into the howling teeth of the numbing, driven Antarctic snow.

****

The things we discovered buried beneath the ice that day are public knowledge. The huge city of some ancient epoch, richly decorated with carvings of go-go girls and flashy cars and filled with buildings of strange stone carved in angles which seemed to the human eye to be in some way unnatural. Monty would sometimes look at some doorway or stairwell carved and formed in a twisted arabesque of preternatural design and mutter to himself “Now that’s a bit of six-pint architecture”, or “The only time I ever saw a room shaped like this was after that night on the Ukrainian potato brandy.” The photographs we took in the huge alien halls may be seen in the May 1930 edition of National Geographic magazine under the heading You have got to be kidding us. When I first showed the editor of that august journal the negatives, he described the first as being “Squamous, rugous, gibbous and horribly twisted in an aesthetic which was plainly inhuman in inspiration” – and that was just a picture of my brother which had got mixed up with the others. He was less praising of what came after.

But of the topless towers shaped as of gigantic bottles of gin; the great halls with their massive brass mash tuns; the detritus of endless bygone parties; and the six foot tall albino penguins which I never saw but Monty swore blind were “coming out of the walls and pecking at me, pecking, pecking” after he’d got two-thirds of the way down his flask I need say no more. They are admirably covered in the literature which has come before this tale and need not be repeated here. Instead, my tale involves the track which we followed through those archaic and unbelievable halls. Tracks of giants doing a foxtrot here, and quickstep there and once some unmentionable and blasphemous flamenco, they moved purposefully along the paths towards some unknown distant goal in the bowels of the earth. I found myself wondering in terror what horrors awaited us at our goal. I dreaded some decadent, Pliestocene hoochy-coochy club or speakeasy filled with unmentionable vices. I’d have the devil’s own job getting Monty out of such a place, never mind dealing with any Elder Cads we might encounter there.

Until, finally, our wavering steps brought us to a final hall, for we went no further and instead were forced to turn and flee for our lives and sanity by the horror which awaited us there. Monty had gone on ahead whilst I examined some small find of champagne corks made of the flesh of a cycad long vanished from the world, but I hurried to catch up which I heard the fearful bellowing and roaring which came echoing down the corridor. Breaking into a nervous run, I almost stumbled over Monty as he crouched in the shadow of a grotesque saloon door.
“Stop!” he hissed at me. “Up ahead – the Cads, and...”. He said no more, but merely indicated. There I saw them, those scoundrels of the ancient world. Huge and red-faced they seemed to me, their faces riddled with broken capillaries and with a leer in their eyes which promised soul-shattering decadence and acts which would make any well-brought-up lady reach for her smelling salts. But though this horror was almost too terrible to behold, there was worse – for amongst them was a great seething terror. A nightmarish plastic column of black, fetid iridescence which oozed with an obscene menace as it laid ruin amongst the Cads. A shapeless congerie of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of tiny eyes which rose from its form and vanished again in a pustulent obscenity. I gaped in despair.
“Monty!”, I said. “The tales of the mad Arab are true. See! The Shoggoth! The nightmare of the ancient world come forth to wreak destruction upon all! Our doom is upon us!”
“Don’t be so bloody stupid”, said Monty. “Haven’t you seen what I’ve been drinking? That’s no shoggoth – it’s my liver.”
“Oh, fair enough”, I said. “I should have recognised it.”
“Sure I can’t tempt you to a nip?”, asked Monty proffering his flask, which sloshed and gurgled in an alien manner.
I eyed the carnage in the next hall and considered it. “All in all”, I said. “I think I’ll pass.”