New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos by Ramsey Campbell Read Free Book Online

discovered. He reached the corner and looked around. It was funny, but all the arc-sodiums seemed to have gone out up here. The entire street looked different without them. Would it have to be reported, he wondered? And where was Vetter?
    He would walk just a little farther, he decided, and see what I was what. But not far. It simply wouldn't do to leave the station unattended for long.
    Just a little way.
    Vetter came in less than five minutes after Farnham had left. Farnham had gone in the opposite direction, and if Vetter had come along a minute earlier, he would have seen the young constable standing indecisively at the corner for a moment before turning it and disappearing forever.
    'Farnham?'
    No answer but the buzz of the clock on the wall.
    'Farnham?' he called again, and then wiped his mouth with the palm of his hand.
    Lonnie Freeman was never found. Eventually his wife (who had begun to gray around the temples) flew back to America with her children. They went on Concorde. A month later she attempted suicide. She spent ninety days in a rest home and came out much improved.
    Sometimes when she cannot sleep — this occurs most frequently on nights when the sun goes down in a ball of red and orange — she creeps into her closet, knee-walks under the hanging dresses all the way to the back, and there she writes Beware the Goat with a Thousand Young over and over with a soft pencil. It seems to ease her somehow to do this.
    PC Robert Farnham left a wife and two-year-old twin girls. Sheila Farnham wrote a series of angry letters to her MP, insisting that something was going on, something was being covered up, that her Bob had been enticed into taking some dangerous sort of undercover assignment. He would have done anything to make sergeant, Mrs. Farnham repeatedly told the MP. Eventually that worthy stopped answering her letters, and at about the same time Doris Freeman was coming out of the rest home, her hair almost entirely white now, Mrs. Farnham moved back to Essex, where her parents lived. Eventually she married a man in a safer line of work — Frank Hobbs is a bumper inspector on the Ford assembly line. It had been necessary to get a divorce from her Bob on grounds of desertion, but that was easily managed.
    Vetter took early retirement about four months after Doris Freeman had stumbled into the station in Tottenham Lane. He did indeed move into council housing, a two-above-the-shops in Frimley. Six months later he was found dead of a heart attack, a can of Harp Lager in his hand.
    And in Crouch End, which is really a quiet suburb of London, strange things still happen from time to time, and people have been known to lose their way. Some of them lose it forever.
    The Star Pools by A. A. ATTANASIO
    He wrapped his foot in a rag he found in the trunk of his car and sat for a while on the hood, looking out accross the swale to a clump of cedar pines where an hour before he had frantically dug up the mulchy earth. His cache was hidden in there.
    Beyond the green colony of trees, the land was tortured and rose in great broken-backed steps towards a haze of iron-spined mountains. Nobody would be coming out here to look for anything but steelheads.
    Reassured, already mindless of the itching throb in his foot, Henley Easton got into his car and swung out onto the highway. By dusk he was in New York City.
    He had a leisurely dinner at Shakespeare's and decided o limp across Washington Square Park to find a doctor he knew. At the coruer of MacDougal and Fourth, a rush of dizziness staggered him. It happened so quickly there was no time to cast about for support. He stagsat iered on the curb, tried hard to make it back to the sidewalk. But his eyes glazed dark, and he slid to his knees. A moment later he was sprawled in the gutter, his awareness sinking into the shadows of his body.
    There is a calling under the breath, a cry that goes on as a vein. It is the last senseless moment of the organism the instant of death that