The Lovecraft Squad: Dreaming Read online

  The Lovecraft Squad Series

  Waiting

  Dreaming

  Rising (forthcoming)

  All Hallows Horror

  They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R’lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him.

  —H. P. Lovecraft

  “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926)

  The Story So Far . . .

  Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.

  (In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.)

  GROWING UP WITHOUT A father, young Howard Phillips Lovecraft learns from Ward Kindred, his enigmatic new tutor, not only the secrets of his strange heritage but also what the future might hold . . .

  Years later, following the FBI’s raid on the ichthyic denizens of the Massachusetts seaport of Innsmouth, gruff bureau Director J. Edgar Hoover discovers that Lovecraft, now an impoverished pulp author, has fictionalized those events and others from his dreams. As a result, Hoover forms a secret organization known as the Human Protection League to combat these otherworldly threats, and appoints Special Agent Nathan Brady to head up this new group, which reports directly to him.

  Although Lovecraft’s unexpected death prevents him from joining the League, Brady begins to recruit the brightest and most talented agents available, including the oddly deformed Randolph Carter, who is in charge of the Dream Division.

  Over the years, the dedicated members of the HPL battle supernatural threats all across the world and even from out beyond the stars and, in time, this group of unusual secret agents comes to be colloquially known as “The Lovecraft Squad.”

  But now the Armies of the Night are rising. Such clandestine cults as the Olde Fellowes and the Esoteric Order of Dagon, who worship a group of eldritch deities called the Great Old Ones, are harnessing occult powers to open the doorways to the Dreamscape and other dimensions beyond space and time. Something big is coming—something that is already sowing the seeds of madness and chaos into the psyche of the world—and only the agents of the Human Protection League stand between this rising tide of evil and the enslavement and eventual destruction of the human race itself . . .

  PROLOGUE

  The Black Ship

  Far out at sea was a retreating sail

  White as hard years of ancient winds could bleach

  But evil with some portent beyond speech

  So that I did not wave my hand or hail.

  —“The Port” by H. P. Lovecraft

  Some papers and notes collected by the late George Vilier, Consulting Professor of Ontography, Miskatonic University, Massachusetts.

  “MAGOTIE HEADED” WAS HOW Anthony à Wood described his friend John Aubrey (1626–1697), and with some justification; all the same, we owe him a great deal. Aubrey was a collector of esoteric learning, and his Brief Lives is a treasure house of anecdotal detail about figures from the 16th and 17th centuries. He hardly published anything in his lifetime, and at his death in 1697 Aubrey’s papers were found to be in a fantastic state of confusion—hence “magotie headed,” I suppose. Manuscripts of his are still being rediscovered, and I was the lucky—or unlucky?—discoverer of one such cache.

  In 1957, the National Trust took over an ancient 16th-century manor house called Old Pierce Hall in the English county of Morsetshire. Aubrey had inherited the Hall in the 1650s and lived there for a while before he was forced to sell it, being no man of business and constantly short of money.

  It was bought by Aubrey’s brother-in-law, one Trismegistus Moreby, in whose family the house remained until the Moreby line apparently died out sometime after the last war, since when the property was maintained by a private management company. However, by that time, the place was in a state of near-ruin—there were great holes in the roof, it was overrun with rats, and a thick layer of dust carpeted most of the rooms.

  The last Moreby inhabitant had been a recluse of strange and unpleasant habits, and when the National Trust was unexpectedly offered the Hall in lieu of unpaid taxes, they were at first reluctant to take it on. Various experts were summoned to look at furniture, fabrics, pictures, and so on, to see if the place was worth rescuing. I was called in to examine the documents and papers, which were gathered in boxes in a “muniment room.” My academic specialization is in personal manuscript records (diaries, letters, and the like) from the 17th and 18th centuries.

  The papers were mostly routine stuff that you find in nearly all old country houses—account ledgers, legal documents, game books, letters, interesting enough in their way; but the contents of one box made my time at Old Pierce Hall worthwhile, or memorable at least. The box itself is rather a handsome thing: Wooden, studded with round-headed brass nails, and covered in what had once been scarlet velvet, now faded to a sort of mildewed greenish pink. On the top of the box had been pasted a vellum label on which in sepia ink, faded almost to illegibility, was inscribed the words:

  Olde Fellowes

  I had no idea what this could possibly mean, but I was excited because I thought I recognized on that label the strange, crabbed hand of John Aubrey himself.

  The box was locked, with the key nowhere to be found, and it took some time to get the Trust’s permission to force it open by means of a chisel and a hacksaw. I, and my assistant, Helen—a girl from the United States, and the brightest of my graduate research students—took some trouble in our efforts to break open the box without damaging it too much.

  When we eventually succeeded, we found it filled with documents neatly tied with ribbon into packages. They were written in a number of hands, one of which was Aubrey’s, and it was his handwriting that inscribed a sheet of paper on top of all the others. It read:

  Concerning the Olde Fellowes, their wayes, darke customes and origins:—some remarkes and testimonies, together with a narrative of the Black Ship.

  Johannes Aubrey, anno 1696.

  And then a verse quatrain:

  Lette no one read that doth not knowe,

  And those who knowe, lette them be ware

  For shadowed Feare doth stalke in woe

  And meets you sudden on the staire.

  I had no idea what this might mean. Helen gazed at the inscription and then shook her head.

  “Well,” she said with a show of cheeriness. “Sooner you than me. I’ll leave you to it.” And she did. It was odd, because I had put Helen down as one of life’s enthusiasts, but not this time. Is it some kind of retrospective imagination which makes me recall that, as she left the muniment room, a sudden breath of damp, cold air invaded it?

  The neat packaging of the manuscripts was misleading. It took me some time before I was able to make any sense of them, and now I am not at all sure that I should have done.

  It begins with a packet of notes which seem to be a supplement to Aubrey’s life of Dr. John Dee, the famous Elizabethan occultist and astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I. It consists of a detailed record of a conversation in the 1650s with an old lady called Goodwife Faldo, who knew Dee in his last years in Mortlake. As Aubrey’s spelling is erratic and Faldo’s narration, though comprehensive, is rambling and repetitive, I will summarize,
quoting directly where necessary.

  By 1608, Dee’s glory days were long over and he was living in an impoverished state, at his house in Mortlake, then a village outside London on the south bank of the River Thames. He was just about subsisting by drawing up horoscopes for money, and occasionally accepting handouts from rich aristocratic friends. His young wife, Jane, had died of the plague two years previously and Dee himself, now aged eighty, was not long for this world.

  The one thing that remained to him was his great library, consisting of some seven hundred volumes, many of them in manuscript, an extraordinary number for those days. But, with creditors pressing, even that was under threat. Goodwife Faldo, who kept house for him after a fashion, would often see him slip out of the building at night with several books under his arm, only to return much later without them. She could not think what he was doing, but later it was discovered that he had buried them in a field next to his home.

  Faldo, being a shrewd and observant woman, though illiterate, noticed that there were certain volumes that Dee kept close by him, and he would often move them from room to room in his house, “as if they were his verie companiouns.” There was one in particular—“about the size of the greate churche Bible at Mortlak and all bounde in black with a claspe and a lock on it”—from which he was inseparable. It was such a weight that she would often offer to carry it for him, but he would never allow her to do so.

  One night in October, a great storm blew up and battered Dee’s house at Mortlake. Goodwife Faldo insisted on laying a fire in the parlor, and though Dee at first opposed it on the grounds of expense, he finally agreed. Fuel was costly, and the old man had little to money to spare. As soon as it was lit, Faldo saw Dee seat himself near the fire and stare into it, crouched and withered, but his eyes blazing with some inscrutable flame of their own.

  Beside him on a stool was the great book, whose smooth binding of black leather he occasionally stroked but did not open. “For it was locked with a claspe,” said Faldo, “and he had the key to it ever about his neck upon a silver chaine.”

  Suddenly there was a knocking at the door. “Such a knocking as never I heard,” said Faldo, “and never hope to againe, as Christe is my Saviour.” Before Dee had time to prevent her, Faldo had unbarred the door and let in a stranger wearing a black cloak and steepled Puritan hat, who stood wet and dripping from the rain.

  He was, according to Faldo, “an exceeding tall black man” (by which I think she means dark-complexioned, not actually of African descent) “and verie gaunt withal.”

  When Dee turned and saw the stranger, he seemed fearful. There then ensued a conversation which Faldo only partly heard because she was very soon dismissed from the room. The dark man gave her such a threatening look that she was glad to go, but she listened behind the door.

  From this she gathered that the man had come from Edward Kelley. At this Dee expressed both astonishment and dismay. Kelley had been his one-time assistant and medium in a series of séances, during which Kelley would stare at a stone of polished black obsidian called a “scrying stone” and then announce what he heard or saw while Dee wrote it down. These were the famous “angelic conversations” later published by Meric Casaubon, though some of the words spoken were far from angelic.

  Kelley and Dee moved to Prague where, after the famous wife-swapping incident (apparently encouraged by the “angels”), Dee abandoned his medium and returned to England. Kelley prospered for a while in Prague and then, apparently, died in mysterious circumstances. Accounts of his death had been vague and conflicting, but, according to the dark man, Kelley was not dead at all, but was now a powerful figure in a society calling itself the “Odd Fellowes” or the “Olde Fellowes,” Faldo could not say which. At this, her old master Dr. Dee was “much affrighted.”

  The man, who introduced himself as “Master Moreby,” seemed to be demanding the return of a book from Dr. Dee, a book called “The Necropicon” according to Faldo, though she could not be sure. Apparently, while they were in Prague in the 1590s, Kelley and Dee had discovered and acquired this volume which contained “much curious and very ancient knowledge.” Kelley was now claiming it as his because it had been his “scrying” (i.e., Mediumistic clairvoyance) that had pointed Dee to where the book could be found.

  Dee refused emphatically to release the volume, at which point voices were raised and the dark man began snarling “like unto a wilde beaste.” At this point Faldo felt it her duty to intervene and, grasping her “good besom” (a broom), she entered the room, upon which Master Moreby glared at the two with malignant eyes and strode out of the house.

  Dr. Dee seemed utterly cowed by the meeting with Moreby. “He prayed me barre the door and permit no one in until I was sure they were no enemy.” For about a week after this encounter, Dee rarely left the house and became more secretive than ever.

  Then there came a night when Faldo had to be away to tend to a sick relative in the village. Dee had begged her to stay, but Faldo insisted. She told him that if he barred and locked all the windows he could come to no harm. Reluctantly, Dee let her go.

  When she returned the next morning she found the door still barred, but her knocking would not rouse the doctor. Then she saw that one of the windows at the front had been smashed in. Being at the time an active young woman, Faldo climbed in through the shattered casement. The house was in disarray. She found Dee lying on the floor of the parlor incapable of moving, but still alive and moaning slightly.

  When she had got him into a chair and made him a posset, Dee was able to tell her what had happened. Thieves had broken in during the night and had terrorized Dee. They had not stolen much, but what they had taken had greatly distressed him. They had taken, said Faldo, “his black polish’d stone for scrying and ‘the booke,’ and when I asked what booke he would not say, but asked for pen and paper and on it he wrote a worde which I, being unlettered, could not tell, but I have the paper still.”

  Then, writes Aubrey, this good old woman did fetch the paper and did give it me and on it was written but one word which I here sett down:

  NEKRONOMIKON

  But yet I cannot tell what this may signifye, yet others who come after might.

  Dee went on to tell that the thieves had set on him brutally, and threatened him. He showed her the scars on his neck where the key on the silver chain had been brutally wrenched from his ancient body. After that, Faldo told Aubrey, Dee had entered into a decline and died “of a seizure” a few months later.

  “He spoke but once thereafter of that night,” said Faldo, “and that was to say that if they had but let him to finish the translation of the booke, he would have died content, but it was not to be. And woe be to them, sayd hee, who look into the book without understanding, for they would see forms and portents which they cannot containe and which will bring destructioun.”

  Aubrey writes that: On hearing this most marvellous relation from Goodwife Faldo, I took much paines to discover who were these “olde fellowes” and what this Nekronomikon was, for I had heard tell of these “olde fellowes” from another source. [His own family connection with the Morebys?] And though I found little concerning the latter, yet what I found of the former, is here contained. Yet let them be ware who read.

  The other relevant documents come mainly from two sources: The journal of one Martha Edwards and the log of Captain Reynolds, Master of the ship Speedwell, which was intended to accompany the Mayflower on its voyage to the New World. How Aubrey acquired these records is a mystery I have yet to uncover. Again, I will paraphrase and summarize somewhat.

  In the cold upper room of a house in the Dutch city of Leiden, on an evening in July 1620, the curtains are drawn. One candle lights the scene. The emaciated figure of Hopewell Edwards lies in bed, while his wife, Martha, and daughter, Mercy, look on. Hopewell stretches out a hand to Martha. It is like a skeleton, with a thin covering of pale skin and veins.

  “You must go,” he says. “Your passage is paid for. There is nothing
for you here, and I am not long for this world.”

  “I cannot leave you.”

  “You must. It is the Promised Land. I am sick unto death and cannot join you, but I shall be with you in spirit. Promise me you will go.”

  Martha did so and made her oath, at her husband’s urging, on the Bible. A few days later she and Mercy took their berth on the Speedwell, which left the port of Delfshaven on July 22nd. Her account of the voyage to Southampton and then on to Plymouth in the company of fellow Pilgrims is perfunctory, but she makes one remark: “My fellow voyagers did ask why I went alone with my daughter. I told them that my husband was lately deceased, and it was he who had enjoined me to seek out a new life in the Promised Land, if he did not live, for he was sick unto death. But methinks few did believe me, wherefore I was contemned most unjustly by these good people.”

  When the ship reached Plymouth, most of the families aboard the Speedwell transferred to the Mayflower, a larger ship and more suited to the voyage across the Atlantic. It was made clear to Martha that she and her daughter would not be welcome aboard the Mayflower, “on account of some malicious and wagging tongues which sayd that I had deserted my husband, or even that I had made away with him by some wicked device, and nothing could persuade them to the contrary. Wherefore I did despaire and thought to return to Leiden with my daughter, but for the sacred promise I gave to my husband on his deathbed. But Captain Reynolds, the master of the Speedwell, took pity on me and sayd that his vessell was to followe the Mayflower, taking aboard more company, and that I might stay aboard and fulfil my vow. He sayd, moreover, that though his vessell was smaller than Mayflower, yet it was handier and a well-found craft and might yet touch the shores of the New World before the greater ship.

  “With this I was mightily consoled, but I asked him who might be my companions on this voyage, for the far greater part of my fellow colonists from Leiden were gone into the Mayflower. To which Master Reynolds replyed that he did not know, but was assured of a goodly company.”