Shakespeare Vs Cthulhu Read online

  No, not mine, Jasmine reminded herself. His.

  Often, after rehearsals, some of the cast would get together for a drink, and although Jasmine was usually invited, she would never join them. She didn’t want to think of any of the other cast members outside of their characters; it would diminish their role in the ritual. Richard, she did keep onside, allowing him to join her for the occasional coffee, or lunch get-together in the canteen. Though he was keen for them to be closer, she had allowed little more than hand-holding and the odd chaste kiss.

  “Jasmine?” There was a knock on her bedroom door – Penelope. “Jasmine, my love?”

  “I’m studying, Mum. Go away.”

  The door opened and Jasmine quickly closed Nathaniel Creed’s book, shoving it under a stack of papers.

  “I just thought that you could use a cup of tea. You’ve been at it ever since you got home, and you hardly touched your dinner.”

  “Really, it’s fine. I’ve got a lot to get through.”

  But to her frustration, Penelope sat on the bed beside her and put her hand on her shoulder.

  “Look, I’m glad that you’re not seeing Richard outside of college, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a social life. You’re young, Jasmine, you should be enjoying yourself.”

  Jasmine brushed her mother’s hand away, and without looking up said, “I have a lot to do. I do not need a cup of tea, and I do not need you constantly disturbing me.”

  Penelope didn’t back away but leaned in closer.

  “Something’s gone wrong. Something isn’t... normal here.” She stood and started to pace the room. “I could burn some sage, a cleansing ritual would perhaps –”

  Jasmine snorted a contemptuous laugh and turned to glare at her mother. She didn’t say anything, just held her with her eyes until she backed out of the room and quietly closed the door.

  Jasmine shook her head. If only her mother realised that she was doing this for them.

  She turned back to the desk and closed her eyes. As she’d expected, the obsidian man was just on the other side of the darkness.

  He was leaning against the fountain in the middle of the night-black plaza, an amused expression on his face, as though he had been witness to the mother/daughter stand-off. The stars above him were closer than ever; blazing ethereal torches that Jasmine felt she could reach up and pluck from the heavens, if she so wished.

  “I must say,” said the obsidian man, filling a wine glass from the black stream pouring from the fountain, “that using the words of the Bard, the energy of performance, to enact the ritual is a stroke of genius. You are far more gifted than Nathaniel Creed was, or Arodias Thorne could ever hope to be.

  “Who is Arodias Thorne?” Jasmine said, taking the cup offered to her.

  But the obsidian man only replied with a cruel smile.

  As the first night of the play drew near, so the tension in Jasmine rose. Any fluffed line, any misreading of a stage direction from any of the cast was met with a rolling of her eyes and a sigh of exasperation. During one of the final dress rehearsals she had cut Mercutio short with a cry of, “No, you idiot! The emphasis should be on Queen, not Mab.”

  The director had had to pull her aside. “Jasmine, you need to remember who is directing this play, okay? And you need to relax. Take the rest of the evening off. You certainly know your lines well enough, so perhaps it’s time to give the others room to deliver theirs, okay?”

  Seeing the colour rise in Jasmine’s cheeks, and her glare change from one of annoyance to baleful intent, Richard intervened. “Come on, Jasmine, this is supposed to be fun. Why don’t we step out and grab a coffee?”

  She turned on Richard as though she intended to launch herself at him, but the warmth in his eyes and his smile cut through her rage, bringing her back to herself. He really did look every bit the youthful, brash, daring and reckless Romeo.

  “I... I’m sorry,” she said, letting him take her hand. “Yes, let’s get a coffee.”

  In the café, she tried to talk to Richard about Creed’s book, but he showed little interest and instead, asked, “How have things been, really? How’s your Mum, Jasmine?”

  But she shook her head and said, “I don’t know.”

  On the opening night, Penelope was as excited as her daughter was agitated.

  “I’m proud of you, you know?” she said, as she drove them to the college. “And your dad, he –”

  “I know, Mum. I know. Please don’t cry. You’ll only set me off.”

  Night had fallen in Ardenton. Across the fields, on the edge of town, a low mist had begun to roll in. No moon shone, but the sky was clear and the stars bright and cold. The air seemed to shimmer as Jasmine stepped from the car and just for a moment, she saw those other, alien stars. Her right hand trembled as she remembered the diagrams and strange geometries Creed has described in his book.

  “First night nerves?” Penelope said. “Don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll be fantastic. Now, away, I shall see you inside. Break a leg.”

  The discordant music Jasmine heard as she prepared herself backstage was only the college orchestra warming up. As she applied her make-up in the dressing room mirror there was a shadow standing in the corner that she knew no amount of light would dispel.

  She forgot all about the night as the house lights came down, and it was summer in Verona.

  The spell was almost broken in the first act when the young man playing Tybalt tripped over a line and then forgot the next. He must have seen the look of pure murder that Jasmine shot him from the wings because he quickly recovered. Thankfully that was the worst of the missteps and Jasmine began to sense the reality of the play imposing itself upon the fabric of the universe. The audience must have felt it too, because the gasp of horror when Tybalt was run through by Romeo sounded genuine. Even Richard looked shaken, as though he truly had blood on his hands.

  The director glanced at Jasmine and smiled nervously as she prepared for her next cue. Whatever happened on the stage it was out of the director’s control; this was no longer her play.

  Jasmine allowed herself a thought of what might have been as she shared a kiss with Romeo in Friar Lawrence’s cell. Richard held her lips for just a moment too long, as if afraid to let the fated tragedy take its course.

  By the beginning of the last act, the chill of the tomb filled the stage. There was a fetid odour too, and Jasmine heard the skitter of claws on stone, putting her in mind of rats within the walls. The stars were so close that their song put all thoughts of death from her mind. Soon she would be in control of her world, and if it was just a dream, she would make sure it was the sweetest dream ever dreamt.

  The tomb on which she lay felt like cold stone, though she knew it to be wood. She whispered along to the lines of the actors, feeling how each word was another key turned, another gate opened.

  She opened her eyes a crack and risked a glance at her mother, and was surprised to see tears streaming down Penelope’s face. She wanted to sit up and tell her that everything was going to be okay, but she would know that soon enough.

  Romeo leaned in for a final kiss, believing her as one dead, but she opened her eyes and he stumbled over his next line.

  “A... a dateless bargain to engrossing death.”

  “Richard, do you love me?” Jasmine whispered.

  He glanced at the audience nervously before whispering back, “With all my heart.”

  Before he could pick up the thread of his soliloquy, Jasmine withdrew the knife she had concealed in her robes and buried it up to the hilt in Richard’s chest.

  Arodias choked out a gasp and looked down at the knife handle protruding from his chest. Blood was pouring from the wound, but before it could reach the boards the flow was reversed, as the thing that had invaded his body began to use him up. Once he would have rejoiced at this touch of true chaos, but now he could only glance over at his lover with a wounded look as the darkness consumed him.

  * * *

  Jasmine
watched in fascinated horror as Richard dropped to his knees. The mortal wound she had struck was now bloodless, but there was no life left in him – at least, no human life.

  Blackness clouded Richard’s eyes, like ink dropped in water. His mouth stretched in a silent scream, his jaw gaping wide enough to tear his lips into a ragged smile. Richard’s head dropped and a stygian torrent poured from his mouth, falling not into a pool, but the form of her obsidian man.

  People were running for the exits now but whip-thin tendrils erupted from the torso of the obsidian man and dropped them to their knees. The night that he had brought with him began to fill the theatre, and when Jasmine felt its touch, she looked to Penelope.

  Her mother was on her feet, though black tendrils held her in place; she was straining against them as she fought to get to her daughter.

  Jasmine knew then that she had made a dreadful mistake. The obsidian man could not give them a world her mother would want to live in. She remembered what Penelope had said about Richard, that he was polluted, and now so was she. She looked over at the husk that had contained her lover, and there was no longer anything recognisably human there.

  The walls were beginning to dissolve as the tide of infinite chaos washed up against them. Those of the audience who were not dead were either catatonic with fear or gripped by hysteria – crying, laughing, singing. One man in the second row was repeatedly pounding his forehead into the seat back before him, chanting. “Iä, Iä, Iä, Iä, Iä, Iä.”

  “Mum,” Jasmine said. “Mum, I’m so sorry.”

  But Penelope could not respond and, in any case, it was too late.

  The obsidian man strode to the front of the stage and, looking down on the huddle of broken humanity that made up his audience, smiled.

  He opened his arms wide as the tide of chaos poured from him, and said, “Never was a story of more woe.”

  Act One

  “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.”

  Hamlet, Act II, Scene II.

  A Madness Most Discreet

  Michael Carroll

  My tale concerns three households, all alike in dignity, in Verona.

  Not “fair Verona” as other scribes might have it, for like all cities Verona is clad in a blithe veneer that hides a midden of corruption and woe. A cadaver may be draped in exquisite finery, garlanded with spring blossoms and laced with sweet perfume, but – for all that – it remains a corpse.

  I was a page to Count Paris, a man three years my senior, but in social standing countless leagues my superior. Some have painted him cruel to his servants, citing his aloof bearing and his often brusque manner when dealing with those beneath his station, but I knew him to be strong-willed and driven. That he was at times quick to rage and would demonstrate such through application of the whip or his ironclad fists was to be expected: a man who has been borne aloft for all his days will accept that as the norm, and does not dwell on the disposition of those bearing him.

  Men – of high birth or low – rarely allow their gaze to drift below their own horizon. We do not truly see what lies beneath us. We no more consider the plight of the lives of those who serve us than we do the well-being of the dirt underfoot. This is true for all. As a page in a great house, I was regarded with deference by the common villagers and farmers. To them, my lowly position was as unattainable as the count’s was to me. While on an errand for the count I carried myself as would a king, eyes aloft and manner stately, then shed that mask upon the instant of my return, approaching my master with small steps and bowed head.

  That is the nature of man: we look up with envy or ambition, and down with scorn or pity, and any man who claims contrary is a liar, a fool, or a conniving peddler.

  It is true for all, even the most high, and though I have always known this to be a fact, I did not – and could not – understand it in full until the time of my master’s encounter with the houses of Montague and Capulet.

  * * *

  Some believe that it begins with Montague, with his concern for the well-being of his son, Romeo, who was a youth of an outward melancholic and wistful nature. Montague himself was genial and well-regarded by all, but his gentle, understanding ways gave young Romeo leave to wallow in unwarranted sorrow.

  I once happened upon Romeo and his good friend Mercutio as they led their horses through the city – allowing their steeds some respite after a prolonged hunt, I recall. Both were deep in discourse of a heady nature and still young enough to be unmindful of their surroundings: a true gentleman might not openly acknowledge the serfs around him, but with age he learns to choose his words with care.

  Romeo and Mercutio passed me by without a glance in my direction, so all-consuming was their conversation.

  “I would swim against the tide for her,” Romeo said. “At night, too, in the face of a hurricane, and... and...”

  “With one arm tied?” Mercutio suggested, a smile upon those thin lips.

  “Yes! With an arm tied and stones filling my pockets!” Romeo laughed. “She is the sun, and I am a mighty oak, nurtured by her warm light.”

  “A mighty oak? I think not. A sapling, perhaps. Or maybe a weed.”

  Romeo cast a playful strike at Mercutio with his crop. “She is magnificent in her beauty and a delight in her manner. She is sweeter than sugar’d honey and as refreshing as the underside of the pillow on a sweltering night. Just the sight of her lifts my spirits – and other things besides.”

  “And yet, if you asked her, fair Rosaline would not deign to inform you whether ’twas dusk or dawn.”

  Romeo nodded. “This much is true. But the heart forges connections that the mind cannot fathom. She is mine, and I am hers, and it is only time that separates us.”

  “My father said that time is a mountain we all must climb,” Mercutio said. “At its foothills, looking up, it seems an impossible task. But years and miles later, looking back the way we have come, it seems to have been little struggle at all, and we can more easily see the other paths we might have taken.”

  At that, Romeo and Mercutio passed from earshot and I carried on about my errands, but I have always remembered Mercutio’s words, and there have been times when they were my sole comfort.

  I came into the employ of my Lord Paris through the officers of his uncle, Prince Escalus, who had found me orphaned in the Lagarina Valley. I have no memories of this, for I was no more than two years old when it occurred, so all I had ever known was the life of a servant. It suited me well, I think. I believe I was as well-regarded for my discretion as I was for my abilities to carry out my duties, whatever they may be.

  Once, in my presence, Prince Escalus asked a particularly unsavoury task of Count Paris. I cannot and will not divulge the exact nature of that task, but I will say that it was at the time deemed necessary, though unbecoming of a man of high-born stature. The prince spied me and curtailed his words, replacing them with, “Can that boy be trusted?”

  My lord glanced at me and said, “He can, Uncle. I trust him above all.”

  They then resumed the discussion of their plans, but I scarce absorbed them, I was in such shock. For the count to so acknowledge me was without precedent. I fancied, for a time, that in another life perhaps Count Paris and I might have been friends.

  My master never again made mention of the compliment, and nor did I, but it lifted me, and that was more than sufficient to ensure my loyalty.

  And loyal I was. When the count asked me to procure for him a particular object from a certain apothecary, despite the wretched nature of the object, I agreed to acquire it without question, though I was moved to request a greatly increased stipend.

  “Why so?” asked Count Paris, for once looking up from the ancient volumes that covered his writing desk.

  “My lord, the apothecary wears a veil of decency. His reputation among the gentry is unimpeached, and he knows that I am your man. He will not admit to one such as I that he trades in objects of a... base nature. I will need to employ a proxy to
acquire that which you need. And even that might not be sufficient. He will part with the item, but only to the right person and only for a sizeable sum.”

  Count Paris leaned back in his chair and regarded the ceiling for a moment. “The sum is scant consideration, but... perhaps the wisest move would be to apply a degree of stealth in place of coin. For if the item is purchased, then the fellow will know that someone has it, and might make use of it. Best if it is taken without his knowledge.” He tapped the end of his quill against his lips for a moment, then smiled. “Yes. I will request that he calls upon me for a consultation, and while he is here, you will find entry to his stores and retrieve the item.” He stood, and fixed me with his gaze. “Can this be done?”

  That was the manner of Count Paris. His words were, “Can this be done?” but their intent was somewhat different: “You will find a way to do this.”

  That very night saw me, shrouded in black and with muffling cloths wrapped around my feet, watching from the shadows as the apothecary hastened toward the palace, his pack laden with potions and salves. Once gone, I pried open the door to the shop and began to search through the shelves.

  The fates were on my side that night, for I located the item within moments – or perhaps it was not the fates, but something darker that guided my willing hand – and was back on my horse and on the road with such alacrity that I actually passed the apothecary before he reached the home of Count Paris.

  Thus it was that when he was presented to the count, I was at my master’s side, as always, with none any the wiser that I had ever left – and little chance of suspicion being cast upon me should the apothecary later discover that his stores had been plundered.