New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos Read Online Free PDF Page A

path, and couldn't see one anywhere. Images swirled before her eyes — the bikers who had looked like rats for a moment, the cat with the pink chewed face, the boy with the claw-hand.
    Lonnie! she tried to scream, but no words came out.
    Now there were sounds of a struggle. The moaning had stopped. But there were wet, sloshing sounds from the other side of the hedge. Then, suddenly, Lonnie came flying back through the stiff dusty-green bristles as if he had been given a tremendous push. The left arm of his suit-coat was torn, and it was splattered with runnels of black stuff that seemed to be smoking, as the pit in the lawn had been smoking.
    'Doris, run!'
    'Lonnie, what — '
    'Run!' His face pale as cheese.
    Doris looked around wildly for a cop. For anyone. But Hillfield Avenue might have been a part of some great deserted city for all the life or movement she saw. Then she glanced back at the hedge and saw something else was moving behind there, something that was more than black; it seemed ebony, the antithesis of light.
    And it was sloshing.
    A moment later, the short, stiff branches of the hedge began to rustle. She stared, hypnotized.
    She might have stood there forever (so she told Vetter and Farnham) if Lonnie hadn't grabbed her arm roughly and shrieked at her — yes, Lonnie, who never even raised his voice at the kids, had shrieked — she might- have been standing there yet. Standing there, or . . .
    But they ran.
    Where? Farnham had asked, but she didn't know. Lonnie was totally undone, in a hysteria of panic and revulsion — that was all she really knew. He clamped his fingers over her wrist like a handcuff and they ran from the house looming over the hedge, and from the smoking hole in the lawn. She knew those things for sure; all the rest was only a chain of vague impressions.
    At first it had been hard to run, and then it got easier because they were going downhill. They turned, and then turned again. Gray houses with high stoops and drawn green shades seemed to stare at them like blind pensioners. She remembered Lonnie pulling off his jacket, which had been splattered with that black goo, and throwing it away. At last they came to a wider street.
    'Stop,' she panted. 'Stop, I can't keep up!' Her free hand was pressed to her side, where a redhot spike seemed to have been planted.
    And he did stop. They had come out of the residential area and were standing at the corner of Crouch Lane and Morris Road. A sign on the far side of Morris Road proclaimed that they were but one mile from Slaughter Towen.
    Town? Vetter suggested.
    No, Doris Freeman said. Slaughter Towen, with an 'e.'
    Raymond crushed out the cigarette he had cadged from Farnham. 'I'm off,' he announced, and then looked more closely at Farnham. 'My poppet should take better care of himself. He's got big dark circles under his eyes. Any hair on your palms to go with it, my pet?' He laughed uproariously.
    'Ever hear of a Crouch Lane?' Farnham asked.
    'Crouch Hill Road, you mean.'
    'No, I mean Crouch Lane.'
    'Never heard of it.'
    'What about Norris Road?'
    'There's the one cuts off from the high street in Basing-stoke — '
    'No, here.'
    'No — not here, poppet.'
    For some reason he couldn't understand — the woman was obviously buzzed — Farnham persisted. 'What about Slaughter Towen?'
    'Towen, you said? Not Town?' 'Yes, that's right.'
    'Never heard of it, but if I do, I believe I'll steer clear.'
    'Why's that?'
    'Because in the old Druid lingo, a touen or towen was a place of ritual sacrifice — where they abstracted your liver and lights, in other words.' And zipping up his windcheater, Raymond glided out.
    Farnham looked after him uneasily. He made that last up, he told himself. What a hard copper like Sid Raymond knows about the Druids you could carve on the head of a pin and still have room for the Lord's Prayer.
    Right. And even if he had picked up a piece of information like that, it didn't change the fact that the woman was . . .
    'Must be