The Madness of Cthulhu Volume One by S. T. Joshi

Author:S. T. Joshi [Joshi, S. T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: horror, Anthologies
Publisher: Titan Books
Published: 2014-10-06T22:00:00+00:00

THE WARM

DARRELL SCHWEITZER

NAME. PERHAPS I WAS THE ONLY ONE OF MY KIND WHO STILL HAD a name. I could not say it, not at first. I could not say much of anything, for my mouth no longer formed the old speech I once spoke—in the before time, before I was transformed, such as I had been transformed, however inadequately, however minimally. As for that new speech of gibbering and of howls, which we speak directly into the earth, pressing our faces into the mud, so that the very stones and the fires beneath it all tremble with our rages, our curses, and our jests—well, I was not very good at that either.

But I could think my name. I knew it. I remembered it, for all it stuck in my throat, like something I could neither swallow nor vomit up. If the others called me anything at all beyond mere insults, it was “Little,” because I had not grown great as they, because I remained one of the immature or deviant few who still looked back at the world from which we all had come. I was still one of those who made sport, for instance, by glaring out of ancient, iron-barred crypts on cloudy days, and if by chance my sickly, greenish gaze met the wide-eyed blue or brown or hazel of one of them and I was rewarded with an indescribable shriek, then—joy, a paroxysm of merriment, followed by bitterness beyond words, as I howled and pounded my head in sorrow against the walls and door of the tomb, smashing coffins in my rage, as I longed to recall something that, like my name, I could not articulate.

Sometimes I just stood there and reached out through the bars, trying to grasp the moon.

Being as I was, then, a rather pathetic excuse for my kind, I continued to burrow beneath the great city, lurking in cellars, and even—ecstasy upon ecstasy—emerging into the open air on certain moonless nights, to caper among the half-tumbled stones.

That was how I met the Warm. I felt a lightening of the air, down there in the dark, as the heavy wooden cover of a shaft was lifted off. I climbed toward the distant opening. I heard a sound, which might have been a summons, a kind of chanting, maybe even an incantation, and I followed it, until I emerged into an ancient and decayed cellar, deep underground still, but for me a place of almost unbearable brightness.

A lantern hung from a rafter. There, in that room, he was waiting for me.

The Warm. That is what we call them. Warm blood still circulating through fresh meat. Too fresh for taste, really, but if he had shown the slightest trace of fear, I would have tasted that and gone into a frenzy, and my own underdeveloped claws, however otherwise unimpressive, would have sufficed to tear him to shreds.

But he was not afraid. I tasted wonder, amazement, even a kind of dark joy—in the air, on his odor and his breath perhaps—but, no, he was not afraid.

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