Shakespeare Vs Cthulhu Read online

  “But Creed never managed it, did he?” Jasmine said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well I’ve been reading the book, and from what I can work out, it’s mostly about his failures. He never seemed to do any actual magic.

  And the book... well, it ends halfway through a sentence. What do you think happened to him?”

  Richard ignored the question and said, “Creed knew more than he would let himself realise. His philosophy was mostly sound, but his ritual technique was all –”

  “– wrong. Yes, that’s what I thought.” Jasmine said, interrupting him. “There’s a bit where he really seems to be onto something.”

  Richard looked at her as though he were only now truly seeing her; Jasmine thought that if she wasn’t careful she could lose herself in those eyes.

  “Show me?” Richard said, holding out the book.

  He sat beside her on the bed as she carefully turned the brittle pages.

  “Here we are. It’s like the words of the ritual are mostly right, but the cadence, the rhythm is all wrong.”

  “Yes,” Richard said, leaning in closer. “I must admit that had never occurred to me.”

  “It’s about patterns. See this diagram? He’s got the basic idea right, but he’s not followed it through.”

  Jasmine pointed to a picture drawn in dark brown ink. Richard nodded emphatically and put his hand over hers where it rested on the page. She looked up; his face was inches from her own.

  “‘And palm to palm is holy palmer’s kiss’,” he said, entwining his fingers with hers.

  “Richard?”

  “Yes, Jasmine.”

  “I believe that’s my line.”

  She leaned in and kissed him. For a moment his lips didn’t seem to know what to do, but then they found their place. Jasmine moved away and smiled.

  “‘You kiss by the book’,” she said and Richard laughed. “Anyway, shall we carry on?”

  “Yes, Jasmine.”

  * * *

  As she closed the front door behind Richard, Penelope said, “Jasmine? A word.”

  “Christ! You made me jump. And don’t talk to me like that. I’m not five. Anyway, I have things I need to be getting on with.”

  “Stand right there and bloody well listen.”

  Jasmine had never seen her mother so angry, but there was also an edge of fear in her voice.

  “Jasmine, I love you. You know that. But I will not have that boy in our house again.”

  “What? He was polite as could be during dinner. I only wish I could say the same for you. Honestly, Mum, I have no idea what’s got into you.”

  “You really don’t see it do you?” Penelope took her daughter by the shoulders, and though she tried to pull away, held her firm. “Listen to me. This is important. Richard is... polluted. It’s been a long time since I’ve encountered someone with an aura so awry, but trust me when I say he’s bad news. Rare as it is, I know genuine evil when I see it.”

  Jasmine knocked her mother’s hands away. “Oh, please! Don’t spin me any more of your Harry Potter bullshit.”

  “I just want you to be safe.”

  “No, you’re just afraid of what will happen when I take control of my life.”

  Jasmine did something then that she hadn’t done since her early teens: she stormed upstairs and slammed her bedroom door.

  She could still smell Richard in the room – incense and mothballs – and Nathaniel Creed’s book lay open on the bed where they had sat.

  Jasmine looked at the diagram in the book before picking up a notepad and a pen, and correcting Creed’s mistakes. The ritual he had been attempting to realise was all about the sounds and rhythms of words spoken aloud, except that Nathaniel had been no poet, had no feeling for verse and his attempt to formulate a chant had fallen at every hurdle. He understood the concept; he just hadn’t had the wherewithal to put it into practice.

  “The problem, Creed,” Jasmine said, “is that you lack poetry.”

  She looked at her version of the diagram, studying its overlapping lines and symbols. “Poetry...”

  Jasmine took up the script, flicking through the text, trying to get a feel for Shakespeare’s words. She read aloud from Romeo and Juliet, while she traced the intricacies of the diagram with her right hand.

  “Look to behold this night,

  The all-seeing sun

  Ne’er saw her match since first the world begun.”

  She shaped the text to her will and as she spoke, she became aware of another will, beginning to impose itself upon the world. It was coming from an almost impossibly far distance, and it was approaching fast.

  “Our solemn hymn to sullen dirges change.”

  Her body was filled with a pleasant languor, a seductive dream state.

  “Tears distilled by moans.”

  Jasmine closed her eyes, noting, as she did so, the closeness of the darkness beyond her bedroom window. Her right hand spasmed and twitched as it continued to trace the complex geometries of the diagram.

  “Thou sober-suited matron all in black

  All the world will be in love with night.”

  Boundless space surrounded her – a formless chaos imbued with life by each word.

  “Thus I enforce thy rotten jaws to open.”

  A wind rose from nowhere; Jasmine faltered and she grasped for her next line before the power could elude her.

  A voice spoke into the void.

  “In fair Verona, where we lay our scene.”

  Jasmine opened her eyes, to find herself sitting in a plaza in the environs of an extraordinary city.

  Every building, every tower, minaret and spire, had been constructed from the same obsidian stone. Above her, a depthless sky was strewn with the jewels of a million unfamiliar constellations. Across from where she sat, a fountain sang with dark wine – its heady perfume undercut with the scent of bitter herbs. Such a vast city should be home to a vast population, yet she appeared to be alone, even though voices and the sound of footsteps surrounded her; she felt the touch of silk and heard feminine laughter as something brushed past. From a church across the way, strange music sounded, as of many pipes playing, not always to the same purpose.

  Jasmine looked down at her hands to find that she still held Nathaniel Creed’s book, though of Romeo and Juliet there was no sign.

  She rose to her feet and, across the way, a section of wall seemed to detach and come towards her. It took Jasmine a moment to realise that it was the figure of a man, cast from the same stone as the city. His clothes had been spun from a midnight thread – or was she seeing the absence of clothes on the absence of a man? – and neither colour nor lightness relieved his darkness.

  “Jasmine,” he said, and described a courtly bow, his right foot forward, his right arm swept low. He was dressed like a Renaissance prince or nobleman, and his features were youthful, though Jasmine suspected she would never be able to determine his true age. As he rose, she gasped, for the depths she had first seen in Richard’s eyes were here limitless.

  He saw the book in her hands, and laughed. “You used Nathaniel Creed’s words to summon me?”

  “I used the ideas behind the words. The words themselves were from a different source, as I’m sure you’re aware,” she said, gesturing to the city that surrounded them.

  The discordant music coming from the church ceased. Above them the stars began to fall. Sickly yellow light bled from the church’s windows and the doors opened; within, she could hear the sound of something massive shuffling across a stone floor – it put her in mind of the elephant house at the zoo. She wasn’t sure that she wanted to enter the church, or see what would emerge, but the obsidian man held out his hand and there was nothing that she could do but take it.

  “My lady?” he said, gesturing to the church, and together they stepped forward.

  Arodias felt invigorated, full of a boundless energy and a breathless anticipation such as he hadn’t experienced in many a year. There had b
een a period in the late 18th century when he had lived, for a time, in the catacombs of a deconsecrated and abandoned monastery where – after much meditation and the ingestion of a number of highly toxic fungi – he had encountered a being that had instilled in him a similar feeling. But that had been an inter-planar entity, and Jasmine was a mortal human woman; one who understood the truth, and in whom Arodias sensed a desire to set it free.

  When he opened the front door, he felt like announcing to the entire household that he was in love, but no one would answer, not with Uncle gone and the rest of them lost in their own esoteric venturings.

  Still, he had to tell someone.

  He found Cousin in the dining room. He had clearly been sitting at the large dark wood table for some time; a mantle of dust rested on his shoulders and a spider had made its home between his left ear and the back of the chair on which he sat.

  Cousin was a long way away, but Arodias brought him back.

  “Arodias,” he said, “is it time to attempt to open the gates again so soon?”

  “Not quite, Cousin, but not long now.” Arodias leaned forward and then recoiled when he got a whiff of his relative’s fetid odour. “I have met someone. A girl.”

  Cousin’s dry laugh rattled loose two of his teeth. “A girl? Arodias, are you not a bit beyond that, your present form excepted?”

  “But, this is no schoolboy crush. She was the one who discovered Nathanial Creed’s book, and she understands it, Cousin. The dark truths and arcane secrets speak to her.”

  “You know better than to let love interfere with your esoteric commitments.”

  “But that’s just it, Cousin. None of us – not one member of this family, over however many centuries it’s been – has been able to open the gates and call him into this world. But with Jasmine it feels not just possible, but probable. The stars are right. You feel it, don’t you Cousin?”

  “Be careful, Arodias.”

  “You know that he is near. Don’t tell me that you don’t.”

  Cousin expelled a breath and leaned forwards, shedding dust and destroying his spider companion’s home. His right hand came up with the crackle of dry tendons stretching. There was the sound of ancient bone fracturing, but he showed no pain as his hand made the sign of the Crawling Chaos.

  “Yes, Arodias,” Cousin said. “He is near.”

  Jasmine was in love. She had not slept, yet she was wide awake. Penelope noticed her buoyant mood at breakfast and had scowled at her daughter when she had been asked to pass the butter.

  “Mum, lighten up. Let’s forget about last night and start over, okay? Richard means nothing to me. He is nothing.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” Penelope said, but there was wariness in her words, as though she were a little afraid of her daughter.

  The world revealed itself anew as Jasmine walked to college that morning; no more real than scenery painted on cloth and poorly hung, and now that she saw this, she felt confident that she could recast it to her own desires. All she needed was her obsidian man. If she gave him access to their universe, he had promised that there would be a corner of reality that was eternally hers. It didn’t matter that everything else would be gone; what mattered was that Jasmine would be able to rectify the mistakes of the past: the divorce that had changed everything, the misfortune that had dogged her and her mother at every turn. And whether any of it were true or not, well, what did that matter? The obsidian man had told her the truth, or at least hinted at it, and though a part of Jasmine had shrunk away in the face of it, wanted to erase the knowledge that been revealed to her, she realised that unless she embraced the chaos, it would destroy her.

  And she was in love. The entity that had eluded Nathaniel Creed had noticed her, and taken her by the hand. Unlike Creed, she understood the true power of words, how the sounds and rhythms they made were as important as their meaning. Jasmine wished that she could share this knowledge with her fellow English Literature students, but her new lover had forbidden it.

  Richard greeted her effusively at the lunchtime rehearsal, even going so far as to lean in for a kiss, which she didn’t reciprocate, much to the amused glances and raised eyebrows of the rest of the cast.

  Once she was in character, none of that mattered. The college disappeared and they were in Verona.

  Jasmine felt every line, every word of the fated tragedy. This would be her ritual. When she kissed Romeo she could taste the grave and that which waited beyond.

  “Okay, and let’s leave it there,” called the director, shattering the illusion, leaving Jasmine blinking in a shaft of sunlight that streamed in through one of the windows.

  “Jasmine? That was excellent, but I’m wondering if we’re over-playing it a little. I think you can rein in some of that intensity without lessening the performance.”

  What did she know? Jasmine merely smiled and tilted her head in something approximating a nod.

  “That was amazing,” Richard said, leaning in again for a kiss, which this time was returned. “Did you bring the book?”

  “I think that you love Creed’s book more than me.”

  “I can assure you that’s not the case.” And she was amused to see that he was genuinely mortified she would think such a thing. “I just really enjoyed our time together last night, that’s all.”

  “No, I didn’t bring the book. But we can return to it soon.”

  “Listen, I was thinking that after the play, maybe we could go out for dinner some time? Without the book; just the two of us. We don’t even have to talk about the occult.”

  After the play. Jasmine smiled. “After the play, Richard, all manner of things will be possible.”

  For the first time in several hundred years, Arodias was having doubts.

  Jasmine could help him complete the ritual – that he was sure of – but he could not guarantee her safety once the gates were opened. His god didn’t give a fig for human relationships, let alone love. He might grant Arodias mastery over chaos, but he could also take away the first person he had genuinely cared about in a very long time.

  Usually, he would change out of his college clothes at the end of the day – and sometimes he even changed form – but that evening his troubled mind insisted that he seek counsel.

  He couldn’t find Cousin anywhere, and both Brothers had shut themselves in the scullery, from which blasphemous sounds and peculiar smells emanated. Arodias found Sister in the attic, studying the patterns of spiders as they spun their webs between the roof beams.

  “Arodias,” she said, without turning around, “you appear to be flustered.”

  “Where is Cousin?”

  “I believe that he has taken himself to Leng.”

  Then he wouldn’t see Cousin for some time, if at all.

  “You should be in a much more jubilant mood, Arodias. The stars are right, yet I detect in you a certain melancholy.”

  “Do you ever have doubts, Sister?”

  “Doubts, Arodias?”

  “About whether what we’re doing is right.”

  “Come now, you know not to apply morality to these matters.”

  “The situation has changed. Sister, I’m in love.”

  Sister did turn then, and she laughed, the malice in her mirth distorting her already terrible visage.

  “Oh, but that is priceless. Just because you have become a teenage boy, Arodias, it doesn’t mean that you have to act like one. Does anybody else in the family know?”

  “Just Cousin.”

  “Yes, well that would explain his sudden departure. Arodias, do I have to remind you what happened the last time you permitted yourself to fall in love?”

  Katherine had been a publican’s daughter, and normally Arodias wouldn’t have given her a second glance, but there was a wickedness in her that appealed to him. At first they had shared only a bed, but over time, and despite himself, Arodias had revealed certain arcane secrets to her, hinting at the dark realities that lay just beneath their own. One evening, after a
long and uncomfortable carriage ride back from Bristol, he had found her paging through a tome from his private library – access to which he had strictly forbidden. Arodias hadn’t castigated her, or cast her out, but had instead taken the book from her hands and helped Katherine to understand what was written there. He wished he hadn’t.

  One stiflingly warm night, not long after, as Arodias had tossed and turned in fitful sleep, while beside him Katherine slept as one dead, something had descended from the moon on membranous wings and plucked his lover from their bed. The shadows thrown by the single guttering candle meant that Arodias only caught a hint of this horror’s true from, but it had been enough to send him to a sanatorium for a prolonged period.

  The thing that had stolen his lover might as well have taken his heart.

  “Really, Arodias,” Sister said, “you should have left your humanity behind with the rest of us a long time ago. Were we wrong to make you our avatar?”

  In Jasme, he had found something of his humanity again. Much to his surprise he found that he cared what happened to her. The hunger in her eyes for forbidden knowledge – the underlying desperation to impose her will upon the world – reminded him all too keenly of Katherine. This time, however, he could make sure that such a terrible fate did not befall his beloved. For her sake he must put aside his diabolical mission. True, it would mean regaining his mortality – oblivion would come for him in the end – but better that than the eternal alien cruelty he saw in Sister’s eyes as she waited for his answer.

  “No, Sister,” Arodias lied, “you were not wrong.” He raised his right hand in the sign of the Crawling Chaos. “Thank you for your council. Praise Nyarlathotep.”

  Jasmine lost herself in Juliet. She had come to know the play intimately, had memorised not just her own lines, but the words of every character in every scene. She could recite Shakespeare’s play backwards if needs be, though she didn’t think that it would ultimately add anything to the ritual. Instead, she focused on the words that held weight; the verses that would best give themselves to her purpose.