"The Tugging"

by Ramsey Campbell
originally published The Dsiciples of Cthulhu, DAW Books, 1976

Ingels is the arts editor for The Herald, a Brichester newspaper.  Lately he's been troubled by strange dreams of menacing, cosmic vistas.  And he's troubled over recent news events: a wandering planet has entered Earth's solar system.  A crank amateur astronomer has claimed its a threat to life on Earth.  Government scientists have been claiming its no big deal, but lately their seems to be some evidence they may not be right, and the crank may not be such a crank.

Visiting a surrealist exhibit, Ingels spies a painting titled "Atlantis" which depicts a huge, sinister city rising from the ocean.  It triggers a memory that, as a child, he dreamed such a scene.  He also dreamed of a pale, disturbing face under the surface of the ocean, somehow connected to the city, and of those cosmic vistas he's now dreaming about again.  

Even stranger, he remembers his father admitting to also having such dreams in his youth - identical dreams.  They peaked somewhere around 1925 (geddit?).  

Not only that, but Ingel's grandfather also described such dreams...

Ingels has another cosmic dream, ending in a scenario in which he's a man in the upper story above a theater, watching the stars through a telescope and checking charts and notes.  In his dream, he goes into the gaslit streets.  Upon waking, Ingels realizes he knows the streets, and the theater.  

Ingels checks out the neighborhood.  The theater building is still there, but now its a furniture warehouse.  Checking the archives at his newspapers office, he finds a 19th century story of a burglary at the theater, foiled by the resident.  The resident accused the burglars of being members of a blasphemous cult, but may have had ties to that cult himself.  And ... the resident was Ingels' grandfather.

Ingels tries to question his parents, but they are hostile and dismissive.  He visits the furniture warehouse, and finds the upper stories are sealed off, but easily broken into.  Inside, the telescope, books and charts he saw in his dream are all present.  The books include The Revelations of Glaaki, in which he finds illustrations that recall his dreams, including the city in the sea.  He finds passages that seem to make reference to the wandering planet, which is called Ghroth in the Revelations.  What's more, Ingels finds he can actually see the wandering planet, which he too now thinks of as Ghroth, through the telescope.  It seems to have moving, growing features on its surface.  And the Revelations implies that Ghroth is the harbinger of some apocalyptic event...

This is one of Campbell's most effective stories, with its usual depictions of decaying British urban terrorscapes, anxious and neurotic narrators whose behavior and even experiences are difficult to trust or follow, and a genuine sense of apocalyptic doom rare in Cthulhu stories.  Potent stuff!