The Relic In The Egyptian Gallery & More Tales Of The Cthulhu Mythos Read online

  THE RELIC IN THE EGYPTIAN GALLERY

  & More Tales Of The Cthulhu Mythos

  by Mark McLaughlin & Michael Sheehan, Jr.

  Table Of Contents

  The Lurker From The Kelp Forest

  The Nightmare In Delapore Tower

  The Power Of Azalareon

  Another Terrible Old Man

  The Thing From Beyond The Living Door

  The Relic In The Egyptian Gallery

  About The Authors

  The Lurker From The Kelp Forest

  by Mark McLaughlin & Michael Sheehan, Jr.

  The ocean looks lovely tonight. Serene.

  But, serenity can be deceiving. All oceans are beautiful, but their depths can conceal nightmares. Something horrible lurks in the Pacific, deep down among the swirling fronds of a certain kelp forest.

  I came to this picturesque island, just off the coast of California, because I needed some time to myself. My parents had purchased the island, years ago, and arranged for the construction of a bungalow. My mother had planted a flower garden around the house, adding every blue flower that would grow there.

  It was always best to approach the island from the south, since the waters for miles to the north were filled with a lush kelp forest. It was still possible to navigate small boats in that area, but a novice wouldn’t want to try it.

  Both of my parents loved the ocean and were highly skilled at boating, so the thought of journeying into the kelp forest never worried them. The three of us would visit the island frequently. My mother used to stare over the edge of the boat – into the water, down into the kelp – and comment on the beauty she saw. “It’s a wonderland down there, Patrick,” she once said to me. “A green wonderland, filled with magic. And secrets, too.”

  “What kind of secrets?” I asked. I was about seven years old at the time. “Are there monsters down there?”

  “Oh my, yes,” she said. “Green monsters with pretty gems for eyes. Lots of gems, lots of eyes. You have to be patient, but you can see them sometimes, if you let them know you’re friendly.”

  She spent a lot of time on that boat, often by herself. Father used to tell her that she spent too much time out on the boat, and it turns out, he was right. One day she went out on the boat, but only the boat drifted back.

  After that, my father needed a place to just be alone, and that proved to be the island. One would think that because his wife had died in the ocean, he would stay away from the water. A few of his friends even mentioned this. To them he would say: “She was also breathing before she died. Should I stay away from oxygen?”

  Whenever my father visited the island, always by himself, he would have the maid look after me. Her name was Emerald and the name fit her well, since she had the most luxuriously green eyes you ever saw. My mother, whose name was Grace, had beautiful green eyes, too. I used to dream about marrying the maid when I grew up, because she was so kind and lovely.

  And I did. I married Emerald, even though I was twenty-one and she was thirty-six. My dad didn’t mind. He always let me do whatever I wanted. Emerald insisted that we have a baby right away, because she didn’t want to wait too long. She was afraid the baby would have birth defects, since she was close to forty. I thought she was being overly cautious, but I agreed.

  As it turns out, the baby was born perfect – but at a price. People think that because my family is rich, we have no problems. But death doesn’t care if a person is rich or poor. Emerald died in childbirth. So I named the newborn after her mother, who just wanted to have a healthy baby.

  Raising little Emerald myself was a challenge, but I enjoyed every minute of it. She was a beautiful baby and an equally beautiful girl. So kind, just like her mother, and absolutely brilliant, with the same amazing green eyes. I remember once, she asked me, “Do butterflies go to Heaven when they die?” I told her: “Of course they do. That’s where your mother is, with all the butterflies.”

  So for twenty years, my life with Emerald was absolutely marvelous. She received lessons from the finest tutors, and her education didn’t stop there. We traveled extensively, learning from ancient ruins and modern cities alike. We had so much fun. With our excess of time and money, the world was our fantastic classroom and playground.

  But like death, disease doesn’t care how much money you have in the bank. Eventually I found myself feeling tired all the time. I ate pure superfoods, exercised, but still, the fatigue never left me. I wasn’t surprised by the diagnosis of cancer, but of course I was incredibly saddened. It was an especially virulent form of the disease, an inoperable condition, and my doctors did not foresee my survival. My sweet, green-eyed daughter, now a young woman, would have to journey into the future without me.

  When I received the diagnosis, I didn’t tell Emerald. I sent her on a girls-only vacation with some of her college friends. I then took a motor boat out to the island, approaching from the south side. I did let Emerald know that I would be staying there, going through my father’s journal. That part was certainly true. Reviewing that information was part of what I needed to do on the island.

  My father told me, just before he died, that he believed my mother’s body was tangled in the kelp just off the island. He said that over the years, a lot of divers and sailors had lost their lives in the kelp forest – usually because they or their vessels had become enmeshed in the fronds. For years after she disappeared, he would get into his scuba gear and go swimming in all that thick, bright-green kelp for hours on end. He always took a machete, in case he became tangled in the weeds.

  He searched time and time again, but he never discovered even a trace of the body. Not even a single bone – surely the flesh had been eaten away by sea life after so much time. Eventually he gave up on his search. He retired to the island and drank his way into an early grave.

  I had no idea how much longer I had to live, but I felt that my father would want me to find my mother’s remains. I wanted to find them, too. It was utterly ghastly, thinking that her fish-gnawed bones might be tangled up in that kelp. They needed to be buried in a distinguished resting place on dry land.

  The problem was, the kelp forest was huge. It went on for miles. I strapped on some scuba gear myself, and like my father, I took a machete. I explored the kelp forest several times, and now and then, I thought I saw something large moving in the distance … something covered with kelp, as well as sparkling points of bright-green light. But whenever I tried to concentrate on it, it disappeared.

  I knew that my father kept a personal journal in the form of dozens of notebooks. These notebooks were lined up in a large cedar bookcase, along with many books on a variety of occult topics. In his journal entries, he chronicled his search for my mother’s remains. And while he did his best to document the search, his notes were too vague to provide any guidance. Only he could have understood any of the more personal references. For example, one note that I found read: Searched for a half-hour by those rocks she said were so pretty. There was no way to know where that might be.

  Even so, that particular note reminded me of something my mother had once said – that the kelp forest was home to green monsters with pretty gems for eyes, and that you could see them, if you let them know you’re friendly.

  As a child, I’d never believed in Santa or the Tooth Fairy or any other mythical personages. So of course, at the time I’d figured she was just being silly. But still, the memory of her comments made me wonder: If there were living things in the kelp, what could they be … and how would one go a
bout befriending them?

  One day, late in the afternoon, I stood on the beach, looking out at the ocean. I’d already downed a few drinks, so I was in a lighter mood than usual. I called out over the waters, “I’m here, my friend. Come to me, please. I want to see your pretty eyes.”

  I waited, sipping a gin and tonic, but nothing happened. Finally, I returned to the bungalow, ate dinner, and read my father’s journals for a few hours in the living room. The patio doors were wide open, and the breeze drifting in was so cool, I decided that I would sleep on the large and very comfortable red paisley sofa.

  I went to sleep around ten. I remember having a wonderful dream in which I was a child, walking with my beautiful mother on a beach of white sand, strewn with thousands of glittering green emeralds. “Don’t step on the eyes,” my mother said. I knelt on the sand to look more closely and saw that indeed, the gems were lustrous eyes. I should have been frightened, but the eyes clearly held no malice – only friendly, rapt interest.

  A moment later, I found myself resting on the couch in the bungalow. Yet I was still in the dream. I knew because the walls of the living room were covered with writhing strands of seaweed.

  By the moonlight that streamed through the open patio doors, I could see that something massive had entered the room. Something that glistened with dripping slime. It stood on thick, trunk-like legs and was encircled by multiple angular limbs tipped with pincers. The entire body was covered with slick fronds of shimmering kelp. Scattered across its body were hundreds of round, curious eyes, bright like emeralds. There didn’t seem to be an actual head, though the body was topped with a pulsating scarlet mouth ringed with yellow fangs.

  The creature stared at me with its sparkling eyes. “I’m here, Patrick,” said my mother’s voice. “I’m here inside of my friend.”

  “You have to come out!” I cried. “Come out of there!”

  Her beautiful laughter echoed through the house. “I can’t come out, and I wouldn’t want to. I am wonderfully safe as part of Yagdolak. This is heaven. This is forever. You can join me, if you like.”

  “Heaven?” I couldn’t believe my ears. “You’re a nightmare lurking in a kelp forest. Do you know what you look like?”

  She laughed again. “Life in the kelp forest is beautiful. There are no mirrors there, so I don’t care what I look like.”

  “This thing.… Is that Yagdolak?”

  “‘Thing’ is an ugly word,” my mother said. “Perhaps I’m rushing you. Clearly you need more time to think. As you approach death, you will see things differently. Just don’t wait too long.”

  “You know that I’m dying?”

  “I don’t know, but Yagdolak does.” The eyes regarded me with pity. “Yagdolak can taste impending death in the air. The flavor is strong here.”

  So saying, the creature began to fade away, along with the seaweed that crept on the walls. I found myself quickly drifting from the dream into the black void of deep sleep.

  When I awoke, I was still resting on the couch, facing the morning light. The lurker from the kelp forest was gone. The floor was perfectly dry. The walls were free of seaweed, without a single picture frame misplaced.

  I spent the rest of the day going through my father’s journals. Up until then, I had started my reading with the first notebook and moved onward according to their dates. I decided it might be better to skip ahead to the last notebook, to get to the heart of the matter.

  Sure enough, I found a key entry just a few minutes after I started reading: At times, I saw some sort of huge kelp pile moving across the ocean floor. I had the strange impression that it was looking at me, but it always dropped from view whenever I tried to take a good look at it.

  A few pages later, I found this: The kelp pile came to me in a dream and talked to me in Grace’s voice. I’m sure it was just a weird nightmare caused by sorrow and exhaustion, but still, it sounded so much like her. It talked like her, and laughed like her, too. It wanted me to join her. To join her in that pile of green filth. That couldn’t be my Grace. It couldn’t!

  Six pages later, I found another, considerably longer reference to the creature: The thing visited me again in a dream. Grace’s voice told me that she was part of a being called Yagdolak. It came to Earth from the southern ocean region of the Dreamlands, she said. It had been summoned by a warlock who once lived in a shack on the island. Yagdolak tried to absorb the warlock’s soul but the old man did not wish to unite with it. Then he died of a heart attack and without his help, the creature wasn’t able to return to its own world. So the thing apparently developed a new strategy. It must have lured Grace, and others, too, with the lure of the ocean’s beauty, because she actually asked if I would join her in that slimy green hell. I’m thinking the thing can only add new occupants if they engage willingly, and now they’re using Grace to try to get to me. But I’d rather die than allow that to happen.

  I checked my books on the occult to see if other quadrants of the Dreamlands are connected to our reality. I thought that if there were other connections, Yagdolak could somehow be sent back through one of them. I learned that the Plateau of Leng, located in the northern Dreamlands, also has a location in our dimension, in Central Asia. An interesting fact, but it does me little good.

  A creature that lived in both the real world and dreams? It hardly seemed possible, but I couldn’t deny what I had perceived in my dream, before I’d read those passages. I’d also seen that large, sparkling form moving through the kelp forest.

  What could I do? My mother had been entranced by the thing and her soul dwelled within it. Obviously her soul would perish, if it was removed from where it now abided. It was a horrid thought, and no doubt it was why my father drank himself to death.

  And yet, there was no denying that Grace – or at least, what remained of her – was happy. But, I still wanted to find her bones. I decided that I would wait until she came to visit again, and then ask where I could find her remains. Once I gave them a decent burial, I would return to civilization and settle my affairs, leaving my mother to her hideous bliss in the kelp forest.

  That night, I went back to the beach and called out over the waters. “I’m here, Mother. Come to me, please. Tell me where your bones are, so I can give you the burial you deserve.”

  I returned to the bungalow. There I made myself a gin and tonic, opened the patio doors in the living room, and waited. At one point, I heard a motorboat near the south side of the island, but that wasn’t uncommon. Just some tourists, I figured.

  Before long, I again noticed a hideously familiar illusion: seaweed was creeping up the walls. It dawned on me that the first time that Yagdolak had come to me had been in a dream. The thing lived in both the real world and dreams, so apparently it could come to call in either realm.

  Yagdolak crept with fluid ease into the living room, staring at me with its cold, glittering eyes. Then the voice of Grace said, “You wanted to know the location of my bones. I shall grant your request. I shall even make it easy. Ridiculously easy, really. My bones are coming to you.”

  Yagdolak slowly turned toward the open patio doors. I watched in horror and disbelief as the skeleton of Grace entered the room. The bones were bound together at the joints by the creeping seaweed. The eye sockets of the skull were occupied by living barnacles.

  “I would like for my bones to be buried in my garden of blue flowers,” Grace said.

  I had picked the weeds in that garden recently, and it now looked quite lovely. I followed Yagdolak and the walking skeleton to the garden of blue flowers. The skeleton stood in the garden and put its hands up in the air. The creature waved a gleaming pincer toward the skeleton and the bones began to sink slowly into the earth.

  I was so absorbed in the hideous sight before me, it took a moment to realize that I heard footsteps approaching. I turned and saw my daughter Emerald, emerging from the trees behind me. Her duffel bag had caught on a bush, so she hadn’t yet noticed the ghastly spectacle in the garden. “I�
�m back, Dad! I rented a motorboat and stayed away from the kelp like–”

  That was when she noticed what was going on … and began to scream.

  By that time, the arms of Grace’s skeleton had sunk halfway into the ground. Yagdolak slid toward my daughter and extended a pincer toward her lovely face. My poor Emerald was too frightened to move.

  “Get away from her, you freak!” I shouted. “Leave her alone!”

  Eyes blazing, the lurker from the kelp forest said, in a voice too deep and hateful to be that of Grace, “Do you think to give me commands, you pitiful ape?” I could only guess that this new personality and voice belonged to the actual entity.

  Emerald finally overcame her shock. She picked up a branch and begin to beat at Yagdolak. “Help me, Dad! We’ve got to kill this thing!” The horror responded to her outburst by waving its pincers at her, slapping her to the ground.

  Without thinking, I launched myself at the monster, tearing at its slimy fronds and pincers. No one was going to attack my daughter and get away with it. The creature reared up and pushed me away. I landed in the garden, just as the earth closed over the skeleton’s upstretched fingers. Grace’s bones were now buried.

  Yagdolak tried to wrap its angular limbs around Emerald. Maybe it was only trying to stop her from beating at it, but at the time, I was in no state to analyze the situation. I rushed into the house and grabbed the machete. I ran back outside and hacked at the creature, until one side of it was reduced to a thick green gel. Hissing with fury, Yagdolak began to fade away, but before it disappeared, it uttered in a baleful low voice, “Both of you shall soon join the dead.”

  “What was that – that monster?” Emerald said, trembling with fright. She pointed to the flower bed. “What was happening to that skeleton?”

  “I’ll tell you, but not right now,” I said. “First we need to get off this island. Please take me to your boat.” I had my own boat, but I figured that her rental would be newer and faster. I just wanted to put distance between myself and that enraged horror as soon as possible.