Shakespeare Vs Cthulhu Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title

  Credits and Copyright

  That Way Madness Lies - An Introdution

  Prologue

  Star-Crossed

  Act One

  A Madness Most Discreet

  Something Rotten

  Once More Unto the Breach

  A Tiger’s Heart, A Player’s Hide

  What Dreams May Come

  Act Two

  The ‘Iä’s of March

  The Undiscovered Country

  The Suns of York

  A Reckoning

  The Green-Ey’d Monster

  Act Three

  Exit, pursued by…?

  The King in Yellow Stockings

  The Terrors of the Earth

  Exeunt

  Epilogue

  Something Wicked This Way Comes

  Curtain

  #tempest

  Dramatis Personae

  About the Authors

  About the Artists

  About the Editor

  Acknowledgements

  Kickstarter Backers

  Encore! Bravo!

  Lovecraft’s Labours Lost

  Lovecraft’s Labours Won

  SHAKESPEARE Vs CTHULHU

  An anthologie of fine stories inspir’d by the Bard of Stratford and the Lovecraftian Mythos

  Edited by Mr Jonathan Green

  SHAKESPEARE Vs CTHULHU

  Edited by Mr JONATHAN GREEN

  Featuring divers tales of terror by

  Mr JONATHAN OLIVER

  Mr MICHAEL CARROLL

  Mr ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY

  Mr C L WERNER

  Mr JOSH REYNOLDS

  Mistress NIMUE BROWN

  Mr ANDREW LANE

  Mr IAN EDGINTON

  Mr ADRIAN CHAMBERLIN

  Mr GUY HALEY

  Mistress DANIE WARE

  Mr JAMES LOVEGROVE

  Mr ED FORTUNE

  Mr PAT KELLEHER

  Mr JOHN REPPION

  Mr GRAHAM MCNEILL

  Mistress JAN SIEGEL

  Illustrated by

  Mr MALCOLM BARTER, Mr KEV CROSSLEY,

  Mr TONY HOUGH, Mr RUSS NICHOLSON,

  Mr NEIL ROBERTS & Mr TIERNEN TREVALLION

  Proudly published by Snowbooks

  Copyright © 2016 Jonathan Green, Jonathan Oliver, Michael Carroll, Adrian Tchiachovsky, C L Werner, Josh Reynolds, Nimue Brown, Andrew Lane, Ian Edginton, Adrian Chamberlin, Guy Haley, Danie Ware, James Lovegrove, Ed Fortune, Pat Kelleher, John Reppion, Graham McNeill, Jan Siegel

  Jonathan Green, Jonathan Oliver, Michael Carroll, Adrian Tchiachovsky, C L Werner, Josh Reynolds, Nimue Brown, Andrew Lane, Ian Edginton, Adrian Chamberlin, Guy Haley, Danie Ware, James Lovegrove, Ed Fortune, Pat Kelleher, John Reppion, Graham McNeill, Jan Siegel assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work. All rights reserved.

  Snowbooks Ltd

  email: [email protected] | www.snowbooks.com.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available

  from the British Library.

  Paperback 978-1-909679-86-3

  ePub: 978-1-911390-21-3

  First published August 2016

  That Way Madness Lies

  Jonathan Green

  “To die, to sleep.

  To sleep, perchance to dream – ay, there’s the rub.

  For in that sleep of death what dreams may come...”

  Hamlet, Act III, Scene I.

  “In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”

  The Call of Cthulhu.

  Imagine if it had been William Shakespeare, England’s greatest playwright, who had discovered the truth about the Great Old Ones and the cosmic entity we know as Cthulhu, rather than the American horror writer H P Lovecraft. Imagine if Stratford’s favourite son had been the one to learn of the dangers of seeking after forbidden knowledge and of the war waged between the Elder Gods in the Outer Darkness, and had passed on that message, to those with eyes to see it, through his plays and poetry… Welcome to the world of Shakespearean Cthulhu!

  The 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare, on 23rd April 2016, seemed like the perfect time to bring together the fantastical worlds of the Bard’s plays and Lovecraft’s most terrifying creations, and so I set about gathering together a group of like-minded individuals: a cult, if you like, of authors who I knew could do justice to both the legacy of the Cthulhu Mythos and the greatest writer ever in the history of the English language.

  After all, Cthulhu and Shakespeare are the perfect match. There is a trail of madness and horror that runs through much of Shakespeare’s work – from Lear’s ranting at the heavens on the blasted moor and the macabre cooking suggestions of Titus Andronicus, to Macbeth’s weird sisters and Ophelia’s downward spiral into insanity and ultimately death.

  Just as in many of Lovecraft’s stories the only sane response, when faced with the truth of the uncaring nature of the universe and man’s insignificant place within it, is to lose one’s sanity, so madness is a recurring theme in Shakespeare’s plays – from Othello’s green-ey’d monster, to Lady Macbeth’s suicide-inducing insomnia. Of course during the Bard’s lifetime medical practitioners still held on to the belief that mental illness was more often than not the result of the malignant attentions of dark powers; how appropriate.

  But Shakespeare’s life is just as fascinating as any of his plays, as much because of what we don’t know about the Bard of Stratford, as what we do. Considering he is the world’s most famous and most popular playwright, despite commemorating the occasion of his birth (and his death) on 23rd April, we don’t actually know when he was born. We don’t know the date of his marriage to Anne Hathaway. We don’t know for certain the identity of the Dark Lady, to whom he wrote some of his most famous sonnets, and neither are we absolutely sure who the Fair Youth was to whom many of the remainder are dedicated. We’re not even sure what he looked like.

  It is precisely because of this lack of information that some have argued that William Shakespeare did not write his plays at all, although that is not an argument you will find upheld here. The man was a certifiable genius, rather than just certifiable (as are so many of the victims of the stories contained within this anthology).

  Of particular interest to scholars of Shakespeare’s life are the infamous “lost years”, a seven-year period between 1585, following the birth of his twins, Hamnet and Judith, and 1592, the year Robert Greene published his pamphlet in which he referred to Shakespeare as an “upstart crow”. During this time Shakespeare left no historical traces, other than being party to a lawsuit to recover part of his mother’s estate, which had been mortgaged and lost by default. Many have surmised what he was up to during that time – was he a sailor, a soldier, a clerk of law, a teacher, or even a spy? – but is the truth that he was really out there in the world, fighting monsters and thwarting the schemes of the cultists of Cthulhu?

  That’s what three particular stories bound up within the anthology deal with. This trilogy begins with Josh Reynolds’ A Tiger’s Heart,

  A Player’s Hide, set during the summer of 1592, when an outbreak of plague resulted in the closure of all of the theatres in London. Next comes Guy Haley’s A Reckoning, which takes as its inspiration the circumstances surrounding the murder of Shakespeare’s friend, and fellow playwright, Christopher “Kit” Marlowe in a tavern brawl in Deptford, in 1593. The last of these stories, John Reppion’s Exeunt, takes place towards the end of Shakespeare’s life, in 1616, and to say any more would spoil the surprise.

  The rest of the stories take some of Shakespeare’s most famous works and give them an ap
propriately dark, Lovecraftian twist. Indeed, Shakespeare’s plays are such an inspiration to so many that more than one play has produced more than one story for the anthology.

  Take Romeo and Juliet, for example. Jonathan Oliver’s Star-Crossed forms the Prologue to our performance, set as it is in the present day, while Michael Carroll’s A Madness Most Discreet throws us back through time, into the Machiavellian world of Renaissance Italy. Likewise, The Tempest is responsible for two entries in this book. First there is Ian Edginton’s The Undiscovered Country, which considers what befell the sorcerer and wronged Duke of Milan Prospero before he and his baby daughter Miranda made landfall on Sycorax’s magical island, while the anthology concludes with Jan Siegel’s very different #Tempest, a teasing tale for the Twitter generation.

  Another contemporary retelling is Graham McNeill’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, which relocates Shakespeare’s infamous Scottish Play to the present day and considers the dangers of the modern cult of celebrity.

  Of course Shakespeare wasn’t only a playwright, he was a poet as well, most famous for his 154 sonnets. Nimue Brown’s What Dreams May Come and Danie Ware’s The Green-Ey’d Monster form a fitting tribute to the Bard of Stratford whilst also honouring Lovecraft’s literary legacy.

  No play is free from the taint of the Great Old Ones and the Outer Gods in this anthology, whether tragedy, history or comedy. Shakespeare’s most widely performed tragedy, that of Hamlet, is the inspiration behind Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Something Rotten, and has the doomed Prince of Denmark having to deal with more than just his obsession with death, while Pat Kelleher’s The Terrors of the Earth puts a new spin on an old story, that of the mythical monarch of Britain, King Lear. And then there’s Andrew Lane’s The “Iä”s of March, which revisits the Rome of Julius Caesar, and puts the plotting and scheming of Brutus and his fellow conspirators into a new and terrifying context.

  Henry V, that Shakespearean celebration of English might, is revisited in C L Werner’s Once More Unto the Breach, while Adrian Chamberlin takes Richard III as his subject in The Suns of York, turning the hunchbacked Duke of Gloucester into even more of a monster.

  There’s little to laugh at in the tales of Lovecraft, and the same is true of Ed Fortune’s The King in Yellow Stockings, which takes one of the Bard’s most famous comedies, Twelfth Night, and turns it into an abject tragedy.

  Even stage directions are not safe from the warped imaginings of our Cthulhu-inspired authors, and Shakespeare’s most famous stage direction – “Exit, pursued by a bear” – from The Winter’s Tale forms the basis of an entire story in James Lovegrove’s Exit, pursued by…?

  But before you turn the page and dive into the plethora of disturbing delights that await you within, I must first pass on a word of warning from the Bard himself:

  “That way madness lies.”

  King Lear, Act III, Scene IV.

  Jonathan Green

  July 2016, London

  Prologue

  “I defy you, stars.”

  Romeo and Juliet, Act V, Scene I.

  Star-Crossed

  Jonathan Oliver

  A bird flying over Ardenton would not notice anything remarkable about this small Midlands town, yet it is here that we set our scene.

  Two will meet, the offspring of two magical families, two lives that will be governed by cosmic forces they can neither understand nor fully control.

  Above – far, far above our fictional bird – stars are moving, constellations coming into alignment like courtiers waiting to take their places in an ancient and arcane dance. Beneath the earth, tectonic plates shift infinitesimally, too little to register on any charts – but it is enough.

  The conditions will be met. The gates will open, and the actions of our lovers will seek to unleash upon the world forces that could consume it entire.

  “I see a stranger.”

  “Tall, dark and handsome no doubt. Really, is that the best you can do?”

  “This card suggests a new start: a meeting that will lead to new opportunities. And this...” Jasmine’s mother turned over another card. “Is...”

  “Is that supposed to be The Hanged Man?”

  Penelope turned the card to face her. “Well, obviously... It’s, erm... Hand me those instructions again will you?”

  “And you’ve got how many boxes of these, Mum?”

  “Around fifteen. I think.”

  “You think?”

  “Okay. I have thirty.”

  “Great. And how are you going to shift thirty boxes of tarot cards when no one can tell what the pictures on them are supposed to be?”

  “Special offer? Buy one get one free?”

  “Bloody hell, Mum. Please tell me that you got these on sale or return.”

  “No... No, I didn’t.”

  Jasmine sighed and looked around the poky little shop. Her mother had once been a highly-valued member of the magical community – a reliable psychic, gifted clairvoyant, and a white witch of considerable power and reach. Now she was reduced to this: selling trinkets and junk to the impressionable and desperate.

  “Look, let’s put half a box’s worth out on display for now and see how it goes,” Penelope said, attempting to sound hopeful. “In the meantime the rest of them are in the kitchen, if you don’t mind taking them downstairs.”

  Jasmine did mind. The basement was at the bottom of three turns of a stone spiral staircase – like something from a medieval dungeon – and it took her a good half hour to lug all the boxes down. The basement had a low ceiling and smelled of mould. On days when it rained heavily there was the disconcerting sound of what seemed like a river’s worth of water flowing just beyond the walls.

  Jasmine opened the basement door, revealing barely half a metre of free floor space before the towers of boxes and miscellaneous junk that filled the rest of the room.

  “Thanks a lot, Mum!” she shouted up the stairs.

  A lot of the boxes were either half- or two-thirds full, and Jasmine spent almost an hour redistributing stock, and making room. A stack of cartons towards the rear of the basement budged barely an inch when she tried to move them, the topmost box swaying threateningly towards her.

  “Gods! What is in these?” she said, looking for a product description. “Obsidian skull essential oil vaporisers. Fantastic!”

  Jasmine sighed and wrapped her arms around the stack again.

  It leaned ominously, looking like it was about to topple, and, reacting on instinct, she thrust out her hands, pushing the boxes away.

  The tower fell with the sound of heavy things breaking.

  It wasn’t just the ornamental skulls within that had broken, however. One of the boxes had fallen against a damp section of basement wall, shattering the plaster and revealing a space within.

  The smell of mould intensified, but there was something else; something more animal.

  Jasmine knelt and cautiously peered into the hole she had inadvertently created.

  Inside, resting on an inch of dust was a book wrapped in cloth.

  She briefly thought of calling out to her mother to come and see what she had discovered, but then something told her that this was just for her.

  Jasmine reached for the book and withdrew her hand the moment she touched the wrapping. It hadn’t felt like cotton or hessian, but something unpleasantly organic.

  Stealing herself against disgust, Jasmine snatched up the book, quickly throwing off its noisome shroud.

  It looked ancient. Evidently hand-written, the tome was illustrated throughout; some of the pictures made her flesh crawl. Screw the magical knickknacks and mass-produced enchantments her mother pedalled, she thought, this was the real thing. The book was likely worth a fortune, and it might well be just what Jasmine needed to turn things around.

  “The book has been found.”

  Uncle’s voice jolted him out of his contemplations, so suddenly had it been dropped into the silence. In the study, the only light came from a guttering can
dle on the mantelpiece. They did not require light for their studies. Any strong illumination would only dampen the potency of their manipulations and transgressions.

  Arodias stood. “Is it nearby?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Then you were right to bring us here. Rest now, Uncle. Your work is done.”

  The sigh of the old man’s final exhalation filled the room as the smell of decay bloomed from his body. Come the morning there would be little of him left; perhaps just a smear of grease where he had sat.

  Arodias crossed to the mantel and lit another candle. In the spotted and tarnished mirror his gaunt face looked back at him. He looked old.

  And he was old, his life extended well beyond his naturally allotted span of years. But that was alright, Arodias could change.

  By the time term had started at the new college, Jasmine had begun to translate the book. At first she thought it was written in Latin, but after a few failed attempts at trying to make sense of the text with the aid of Babelfish, she realised that what she was looking at was archaic English. It was written in such a crabbed hand and expressed in such an esoteric style that it took her a whole afternoon of staring at one page before the words began to give up their meaning.

  It wasn’t like any book on magic Jasmine had ever read, and her mother had an impressive library, even if she herself now made little use of it. Jasmine was well-acquainted with nature magic, magical thinking and the various branches of sympathetic sorcery, but the arcane text in the ancient book referred to none of these things.