Minnis FROM DUNWICH TO INNSMOUTH

8 novellas and stories
1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-3-7487-7532-4
Verlag: BookRix
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 309 Seiten

She grabbed my hand, pulling me with her to the side of the road, so that we resembled two small, huddled, frightened children, haunted by the mad dance of the wind and the crippled trees. The pale white sun peeked out from behind a bulwark of clouds, but even its presence was no comfort - 'Don't look at it,' Sarah whispered. 'The sun?' 'The sky. Don't look at it. It's where they come from. The sky. The air. They see everything. He sees everything...' 'Sarah?', I asked, startled. 'Sarah, what's going on?' The terrified narrator's account of nameless horrors in Dunwich in the story The Girl Who Ran In Circles kicks off a round of new stories and novellas that do not conceal, even in their titles, that they follow H. P. Lovecraft's stories. Others evoke nameless horrors of an apocalyptic future or tell new fantastic adventures from the land of Averoigne - a fictional counterpart to a historical province in France - which appeared in a series of short stories from Clark Ashton Smith.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Minnis, Michael

Leseproben

  I WALK THE WORLD’S BLACK RIM
      I am Harald of the Harfagyr. I have seen twenty-eight winters, here, at the edge of the world, where sky and stone and sea meet.  Here, where the gulls keen and ride the north wind, the ghost-white spirits of those gone before me. Many have died by my hand: Arab and German, Frank and Goth.  Whether they are the fiercest of knights, the meekest of Christian monks, I am not particular in dealing out cold steel or fate.  Let earth be their lover and the wolves their mourners.  What of me?  I am strong.  Cunning.  Wicked.  My arms are as nicked and scarred.  My legs are bandy and bowed.  Where I stand nothing short of a lightning stroke will fell me.  My belly is flat and pale, like that of a sea serpent.  My fingers break rock like old tree roots.     I am not pleasing to the eye, and many prefer my iron helm to my face.  I have looked upon myself, from time to time, in the deep still pools of icy springs.  From the blackness, a visage.  Great staring pale eyes under brows like sea cliffs.  A wide, slack mouth fringed by a mustache and beard more lichen than hair.  And what of hair?  What little I have clinging to my head like ancient cobwebs, neither blonde nor gray nor white. And my skin.  Curious.  It is mottled and peeling.  The sun has no sway over it.  And no woman will touch it, for no woman will touch something that reminds her of old limestone and rotting seaweed. Monster, is what the warriors of Tyrggvason’s mead-hall called me.  As if I were no different than a troll or a frost giant; warty and matted and greasy with the fat and blood of men.   As if I were no different than the beast they call Nindhoggir, who lives under the dark waves that part and crash against the unforgiving cliffs; Nindhoggir, who is said to be older than the either the sea or the rocks, who comes forth when men sleep and the moon is dead.   Gunnar Tyrggvason was a brave man, and a good king, is what the songs say.  I lay hands and head upon his knee and took my oath.  He was old then, with a beard white as snow-blindness, aloof and proud.  I remember his knee, under his silver-threaded robe and against my cheek, feeling rather like a stone worn smooth by water.  I do not think he, or his lovely, coltish, red-haired wife Hetta, were pleased to have me.  Even then I was strange to my fellow men. They are gone now.  Ashes and bones.  Mead-hall, maidens, men.  All gone. Gunnar Tyrggvason was a fearsome foeman.  The Franks were quick to learn this, as were the Anglo-Saxons.  I served him well, though he was reluctant to acknowledge my bravery and loyalty.  He grew rich and rewards fell upon his followers like the rain in spring: horses, oxen, fat pigs, Carolingian swords pried from the hands of dying Frankish knights, gold and silver rings twisted like serpents, shields, virgin brides white-shouldered and harvest-scented.  All for the taking of his warriors.   And I?  An old axe and some breeches of beast-hair: moldy, moth-eaten, smelling faintly of urine and sweat.  They laughed at me – the men, the women, and the children.   »That will put an end to his smell!« Ungarth said.  He was a warrior, as handsome as I was ugly, a hunting falcon beside a toad.  I hated him. Lars, the king’s favorite, was eager to best Ungarth’s jest.  »But what is better, I ask?  To smell of old bear, or dead fish?« »Old bear or dead fish, either one might have been his father!« This was Wulf, who was as cruel as his namesake.   For it is true: my beginnings are strange and weird and lost to knowledge.  I have heard tales, however.  Terrible stories that few will bear to hear. I walk the world’s black rim.   It is said that I am not of Tyrggvason’s hall.  I am from another, much older clan, the Harfagyr, who lived close to the sea, among the wet weed-strewn rocks.   Of the Harfagyr little is mentioned.  Tales speak of them as blasphemers, who turned their backs upon Wodan and Tyr and Uller.  They instead made sacrifice to other beings: demons and blood-drinking ghosts and things unspeakable. Terrible legends surrounded their dark and brooding rites, the madness of their unholy devotion.   The Danes would scarcely speak of the things the Harfagyr worshiped, though there were whispers of a great sea demon, a Grand Kraken, winged and clawed like a dragon and tall as a mountain.  The Harfagyr believed that the Grand Kraken would someday rule in the stead of the gods, whom he far exceeded in age and corrupt wisdom.   »One thousand years and one day after Ragnarok the Grand Kraken will arise from his tomb, when the gods are dead and the giants are smoldering bones.  Then the sun shall be blinded and the moon will die.  The rivers will become as poison and the dead will stir in their graves.« That is what the Harfagyr say. Nor were they the Grand Kraken’s only servants.  Other things, men who lived in the icy sea, likewise worshiped Him, and they desired to bring his cult to those who lived on the land.  Nor was that all they were said to desire, and there was great traffic between the Harfagyr and the fish-men, who were said to be cold and scaled, and who gave gold in exchange for favors.  Some of the race, according to the Harfagyr, was gigantic in stature, nearly twice as tall as a man, and broad as an ox. A powerful sorcerer was the clan elder, rich as a king, able to call up mighty winds and make old bones walk.  The Harfagyr themselves were savages, little more than beasts.  But they did not lack for wealth, either; of gold, they were especially blessed, so that their rivals soon took notice. Gunnar and his henchmen were hardly more than bandits in those days.  Vagabonds and castoffs from the siege of Paris, the sack of Luna, any number of bloody faraway campaigns.   They heard of the riches of my clan, the gold and the silver, and flamed with jealousy and greed.  They ran their fingers along the blades of their swords, counted their spears, and made their decision. To hear old Lars, one would think that my kinsmen deserved their fate.  Perhaps they did.  I cannot speak for them.  I was a mere babe at the time.  Nor did the accounts of Tyrggvason’s warriors necessarily agree; they are quarrelsome as the men themselves.  Each tried to best the other’s wild tale of the numbers he faced, the foes he slaughtered, of the wounds he endured, and of the songs he sang all the while.  Then they would argue over fine points, in their attempts to impress their liege.  Occasionally they would come to blows, and old Gunnar would laugh and goad them on.  Pitiful, noisy fools. The battle came upon a weird winter day, muted and soundless.  The clouds hung low.  Snow fell from a sky smudged and bleary as the eye of a dead fish.  The sun was thin, greasy and faint.  As for the slab-stone village, gray-green with lichen, crusted white with salt-spray, no living thing could be seen.  Only the stink of rotted fish spoke of inhabitants. Tyrggvason looked upon it and said that the collection of rude huts and caves reminded him of a pile of skulls, picked clean by some unnamable thing. Drums beat all the while, slowly, like a great heart. Many of Tyrggvason’s warriors claimed that the sky darkened in a way that was not entirely the work of the season.  All shadows disappeared in a deepening gloom.  Did not the waves crash more furiously than before, and did not the sickening steady pulse begin to beat forth more loudly from the slimy holes before them, a slow solemn dirge, struck upon bones and stretched skin?  Nor was that all.  A chant rose from the depths.  At first it was little different than the voices of beasts, hooting and gibbering and howling, and yet words began to emerge from the din, or what might have been words, horrible and slurred, as if corpses long-dead had sudden reason to speak. Cthulhu fhtagn, was what they heard.  Again and again, weaving its way through the inhuman chant like a firesnake, black and burning and poisonous.  Cthulhu fhtagn.  Cthulhu.  R’lyeh.  Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.  Again and again, the words – if could they be called that – beat upon them like the sleet that fell upon their helms. Some of Tyrggvason’s warriors quailed at the sound.  One even went so far to claim that he had glimpsed a beast of some sort, black as pitch and twistingly formless as a kraken, pulling its way through the leaden sky high above their heads, swift as a falcon.  Several of the Danes saw it and threw themselves down into the snow in their terror.  They believed to be a messenger from Hel herself, sent to take them to the underworld.   But Gunnar was made of sterner stuff than that.  He took a horn of ivory and beaten copper from a shieldman, and blew a thunderous blast upon it, a sound fit to cleave the sky.  It echoed so among the slimy rocks and black caves that it seemed as if a mighty army, and not a mere band of raiders, was approaching.   »Come forth, Harfagyr!  Come forth, blasphemers and eaters of men!« Gunnar roared, and, longsword and shield in hand, he bounded like a wolf toward the...