Shakespeare Vs Cthulhu Read online

  But I did not act, and perhaps it would have made no difference.

  Juliet’s clean blood had mixed with Paris’s, and though now dead, his body was not still. Something moved within his chest.

  A sound, next. A wretched, hacking laugh, that came not from my master’s throat, but from somewhere deep within him, somewhere beyond life and death.

  I backed away, knowing that I could not stay to witness what came next.

  Romeo’s horse was nearby, and I ran for it, jumped into its saddle and began to ride and did not stop.

  The horse collapsed from exhaustion a day later, and then I ran, and kept running. And though half a century has now passed, I am running still.

  All of Europe lies in permanent, putrid darkness with Verona at its wretched heart. The houses of Capulet, Montague and Paris are gone, all but forgotten, and the rest of the world struggles, with noble futility, against the slithering forms that come to feed on us each night.

  And always the darkness grows, each plundered soul adding to its strength. The creature that was once a man I called “Master” is its guide and its gateway to this Earthly realm. Paris had long sought power, but true power had sought – and found – him.

  He was a freezing man who invited a tiger into his hut for the warmth it might provide, but a tiger’s needs and strength are greater than a man’s and cannot be harnessed.

  The few who have escaped the darkness bring with them tales of wings – giant, black and leather-like – blocking out the stars, of odours so rank that they inflict an instant nausea, of scaled creatures bearing fangs longer than a man’s arm, of flickering tongues that drip a burning venom, of boneless, sinewy limbs that reach from the shadows to coldly – almost lovingly – caress soft human flesh... and then take hold.

  I fear that one day I shall see my master again, in the foul form he now takes, and I pray to whatever gods remain that when he gazes upon me with his many eyes he will recall my good work and regard me with mercy.

  But I no longer fear damnation, for Hell has come to Earth, and I played no small part in that.

  It is no consolation to suggest that this was all inevitable, that Paris would have found a path to Juliet’s blood regardless of Romeo’s interference, but there is a modicum of comfort in knowing that the two young lovers were spared the true horrors that followed their deaths.

  For never was a story of more woe than this, of Juliet and her Romeo.

  Something Rotten

  Adrian Tchaikovsky

  This is not what I told Fortinbras, Prince of Norway, when he arrived with his little band of followers; the desperate adventurer who had heard the Danish royal family was failing and had come to stake his claim.

  Well, he has it all now: Norway, Denmark, all of it. And perhaps he sleeps easy, believing what I told him. But he never entered Elsinore. He never saw what I saw, what nobody should have to see. It’s better that way. Let him sleep easy right up until the restless history of that castle returns from that undiscovered country.

  You’ve heard the story, of course, the one I told to Fortinbras. I made it lurid and bloody enough that nobody would think to go behind it and find the far more lurid and bloody truth.

  But let me introduce myself: I am Horatio. I had the privilege of being the Prince of Denmark’s only confidant. And even now I cannot tell you what was true, what he did not confide in me, whether or not he was mad. I would far rather Hamlet had been mad.

  And yet I fear – and it keeps me awake at nights – that there was method in it.

  I knew Hamlet at Wittenberg. We were students together. He had an insatiable thirst for learning; he said that, back where he came from, they did not care for the new sciences. He was a child of his mother, though, and she had sent him away from Elsinore at a young age to be educated. He very seldom returned home. Often, when he threatened it, she came to see him instead. His father he described as “distant, almost faceless.” But then, Old Hamlet was the King. Small wonder he had no time to be a loving parent as well.

  And then news came to Wittenberg that Old Hamlet the King was dead. Word came to summon young Hamlet to court for the funeral. He was slow to respond. He told me his mother had warned him that one day he would revisit Elsinore, and never leave. I had always assumed this meant duties of state.

  I travelled with him to that dark and shrouded castle by the sea, God help me. He needed me. He knew there was something terrible in wait in his ancestral home, in his past, in himself.

  Even before we got there, the rumours were rife. Hamlet’s uncle Claudius was publicly over-familiar with the widowed Queen.

  Not hard to see why the common tongues were wagging about infidelity.

  Not so great a step from that to murder. Had Claudius done away with his brother so he could make room in Gertrude’s bed? Ask any tosspot in any tavern in Denmark and they’d tell you so. Hamlet must have heard the accusations as we travelled to Elsinore.

  And yes, that is the story I put about, when Fortinbras came calling. Why would I so shame the family of my dead friend? Believe me, I was protecting their reputation. I was protecting everyone.

  We arrived to find Old Hamlet had been interred with suspicious haste, and Claudius enthroned and wed to Gertrude, further feeding all that tavern speculation. The wake had become the wedding breakfast, though both were sparsely attended. The Danish court seemed like an atrophied stump of earlier days. I met them all, that cast of wonders. It should have been the social opportunity of a lifetime for a poor scholar like me but I was already wishing I’d stayed in Wittenberg.

  There were the twins, a pair of simpletons who spent their time obsessively tossing coins and would talk in garbled tones of a deterministic universe where free will counted for nothing and we were all the pawns of vast and cosmic powers. There was a handful of ageing retainers and guards. There was Ophelia, her brother and her father.

  The brother, Laertes, I had seen occasionally at Wittenberg. He was a rake and a brawler, given to sudden passions and angers, quick to act and quick to regret. I had not known he had a sister, much less one so striking as Ophelia.

  I say “striking” advisedly. She was beautiful, but there was something about her that disconcerted. I was put in mind of those poor working girls that all students know, whose beauty is a brief bloom of a handful of years before hard life, pox and childbirth bring their long winter. Ophelia’s beauty burned like a fever that must kill or pass. And what she would become, in her season, I could not have said.

  Yes, she drowned, of course. Or that is how I told it. I saw her in the water, that much is certain.

  And there was her father, Polonius, advisor to the crown since time immemorial. An old, old man, now – too old surely to have such young children, and no word of who their mother was. And disfigured, they said – so gnarled by time or disease that he must hide his face behind a veil that fluttered and undulated when his whispering voice issued from behind it.

  So Hamlet, who had come home for a funeral, found himself the guest at a wedding. They did not let him look upon his father’s body. It had been a closed casket from the start. I wish we’d just gone, then. I wish I’d never tried to help.

  But Hamlet was suspicious, itching to find some evidence against his uncle. And I was his friend, and in truth Claudius did not delight my eye. He was a big man, the fine clothes straining about the bulges of his body, and there was something unwholesome about his makeup, the wide eyes, the broad mouth, the boneless way he slumped upon the throne.

  So I went to speak to the retainers, and with proper applications of flattery and familiarity and rum I began to hear strange stories. Hamlet’s father had been seen after the funeral, dancing atop the waves at midnight, far out to sea.

  And I was a fool and told my friend, who began to worry that his father’s restless spirit was seeking someone to avenge its murder. Was it because he had barely known Old Hamlet that Young Hamlet felt his filial duty so keenly? Was it because he had been kept from Elsino
re so long that he now made the unravelling of that knot his grand purpose? Or was some other voice speaking to him, soft and low where no-one else could hear?

  That was when his mind began to slip. And from here on there is much I cannot know, because the truth of it existed solely in Hamlet’s brain. He took to the battlements, staring out over the endless waves as though he could see into the great sunken depths they hid. He said he saw his father there, just as the retainers whispered they had.

  The sight of the ghost reproached him, he said. It bobbed and turned over in the water like a drowned thing.

  I did not see it. I could not look out at those waters for long without turning away. I cannot vouch for ghosts, but the seas off Elsinore were murky and troubled, and there were motions in the water that wind and wave cannot account for. I averted my gaze because I did not want to see what might surface like the kraken, if I watched another moment. And so Hamlet would stand and look out into the maelstrom while I, the coward, sat with my back to the crenulations and shivered in the spray.

  So there was the business of the proof. Hamlet was an educated man. He was not going to mount a coup because of a remarriage and a revenant. He was even then starting to distrust his own judgment. And so he found some players and concocted… I know not what. I have heard people say my version of events is tenuous, with the poison in the ear and whatnot, and I cannot deny it. I was making it all up as I went along; Fortinbras’s arrival had not given me much time to prepare.

  That was not the play Hamlet ordered them to put on. No Murder of Gonzago, but another piece. You may have heard of it. It was a play about a king. There was a city by a lake. There was a creature in it, half fish, half man. There was a great deluge and a drowning. And I cannot say what it was that caused Claudius to rise like a man who has seen his own death, but the new king stumbled blindly from the chamber and that was Hamlet’s proof. Despite my pleas he was on his uncle’s trail in moments, with murder on his mind.

  I found him later, pale and shaking and stabbing his bodkin at the castle walls until I thought the blade would break.

  “I couldn’t do it,” he told me, and then, “I found him at his prayers.”

  And I, naive that I was, agreed that it was a hard thing, to kill a man at prayer, and waxed scholarly about the state of men’s souls, until Hamlet cut me off angrily and told me it was not piety that had stayed his hand. “It was the sight of what he prayed to,” he said, and then would say no more.

  In my story to Fortinbras I left plenty of room for my friend’s mental state to be just a clever ruse, to throw off the suspicions of Claudius and the shambling, masked figure of Polonius. The truth is somewhat different. I cannot say if Hamlet was mad, by the end, or if his actions were those of a sane man confronted with a mad world.

  He went to his mother. Aside from me – and what help could I be? – she was his only ally. Unless he tried to speak of it to Ophelia – I saw them talking closely several times – but she was a part of the old Denmark, the world of his father and uncle, that his mother had married into twice.

  This is where my account must begin to break down. I papered over the holes for Fortinbras, but then he was a simple man and ready to believe the penny-ballad lies I told him.

  Hamlet went to his mother, that much is true. I think he went to accuse her of complicity in his father’s murder, or to reproach her for her remarriage. Or perhaps it was to ask questions best not asked, of what dire secrets had so irrevocably bound her to the Danish royal line. All I know is that they were not alone. I can only imagine the horror when, in some fraught pause between himself and Gertrude, Hamlet heard the eavesdropper’s laboured, liquid breathing.

  He killed Polonius. That much he told me. He stabbed the old man through the tapestry because he thought it was his uncle there. Then, when he drew back the hanging and saw what was revealed, behind the disordered robes and fallen veil, he stabbed and stabbed again. He did not need to hide the body, he told me. It was deliquescing even as he finished his work, and the ichor stung his hands though he scrubbed at it with soap. The details of what he had seen, the deformities of old Polonius, he would not say with clarity, only references to goatish features, to tendrils that pulsed and darkened in time with the old man’s failing breath…

  Events began to move swiftly after that. Hamlet was a changed man, from what he had seen and what he learned from his mother. The light of an unhallowed knowledge was in his eyes.

  I told Fortinbras he was banished to England. England, that island nation, is such a useful shorthand. It is easy to say that Denmark has a long maritime tradition of maintaining diplomatic ties to England. People will understand, when you state that the Danish royal line has many blood ties to the English, and that the faces of Hamlet’s ancestors often manifested that English look in so many of their features.

  It is true, there was a sea voyage that Hamlet undertook in the company of the witless twins. I overcame my fears that once, and watched his boat through a telescope, as he rowed it far out across the midnight sea. I saw him stand up in it, as though daring it to capsize. He cast his weighty burden into the waters and I saw the waves go still as glass around him. I heard his voice echo out as he cried out the name of his father, and something vast and fungous moved beneath the boat as though coming in answer to his call. Or perhaps my hands shook, and I did not see these things. Perhaps I cannot, in the end, tell a hawk from a handsaw after all.

  But I know that I saw Ophelia in the water, later. I saw her pass in the river, lithe as an undine. I know what I told Fortinbras, but in truth she was waving, not drowning.

  We went to the tomb after that. I had given my sanity and my life over to Hamlet’s cause by then; I would dare anything with him. And he was fired with madness or purpose, and the two are so often indistinguishable. He found the gravedigger and he threatened the old man until the family sepulchre was opened, the lid of the tomb raised. So it was we looked upon the final resting place of Old Hamlet.

  It was empty, a cenotaph where should have been a grave. And then Hamlet took the tools from the cowering gravedigger and set to his grandfather’s memorial, and then his great-grandfather’s, demolishing his line a king at a time. None showed the common signs of human mortality; not a corpse did we find, no dust, no bones, as though all those hoary generations of Danes had not succumbed to death after all, but had gone on, transformed, to some other life beyond the understanding of men. And I remember sitting amongst the broken tombs as dawn came up, as Hamlet raved and trembled at this fresh evidence that the world as we knew it was just a skin over some vaster mystery. I remember marking how, as the carven tombs grew older, so their decoration was more of the ocean: marble seawrack and fish, tentacled beasts and strangely manlike gilled things… and I thought of the old Danish tale, of the prince who takes as his bride the girl from the sea, who even now waits on her rock outside Copenhagen for her lover to return.

  Then Hamlet chose one last tomb to desecrate – belonging to a mighty warrior ancestor from pagan times who was known to have fallen in battle against the sledded Pollack. Here was one who must surely be genuinely interred within the sepulchre.

  And he was, that old ancestor. Bones only, we found in his stone sarcophagus, that was decorated with twining weed and eels and stranger things. It was the sight of those bones that drove Hamlet past the bounds of human sanity.

  That warrior predecessor of his had been laid out in fine robes that had now mouldered, leaving only a skeletal framework of gold thread to show their contours. There was some golden jewellery too, marvellously yet curiously formed: a tiara or crown, a heavy torc and other pieces. None of it was worked in any familiar style and the crown in particular was shaped for a head of unusual proportions. We did not wonder at it, though, for we had before us the skull that crown was wrought for.

  What can I say about that set of bones we were faced with?

  What will be believed? Shall I speak about the size and orientation of the eye sockets, the ra
nks of pointed teeth? The flatness and length of the skull? Or what about less certain matters – the quantity and proportions of the other bones, the length and slenderness of the fingers and toes, the delicate arches that flanked the neck. And these the remains of a man who was Hamlet’s direct ancestor, some generations removed.

  Small wonder he lost his mind. I would have run away and set myself on fire, if I had seen within myself the echo of that terrible cadaver.

  But Hamlet did not run. When he turned to me from those bones he was a changed man, his face forever altered by understandings no one should have to bear.

  “What now?” I asked him.

  “Now I go to the bosom of my family,” he told me. And then, as if to himself, “I am the last son of the Danish crown.”

  We made for Elsinore, but we were intercepted on the road.

  A familiar face met us: Laertes, Polonius’s son. He was raging, his bare steel drawn, demanding revenge for his father. I could only look into his pouchy, pop-eyed face and feel a horror. He had that English look to him as well, and I did not want to think about what Hamlet had seen in Laertes’s father, when the old man’s veil had dropped.

  Polonius had been advisor to the crown for many generations, they said. None knew how old he truly was. Likewise, I cannot know how far his transformation had progressed.

  Hamlet had a sword, and I thought he would be glad to meet a problem that could be solved with a blade. Instead, he put Laertes’s point to his chest and told the angry youth that he would submit to the stroke, but first Laertes must hear him out.

  He had me stand aside, then: I, Horatio, his closest friend. There were things he must reveal to Laertes it was not fit I know. It hurt at the time, when I thought he did not trust my resolve. Now I look back and believe that he sought to spare me. Perhaps that forbearance is the reason I am still alive, and only came to the very door of madness. Hamlet and Laertes passed that portal and ne’er looked back.