"The Keeper of Dark Point"

by John Glasby
originally published The New Lovecraft Circle, Fedogan and Bremer, 1996

It's the summer of 1936 and Stephen Delmore Ashton has disappeared.  And Martin, our narrator, has some ideas as to where.

Stephen came from an ancient British family, who owned a crumbling ancestral manor, not far from an abandoned lighthouse on the Cornish coast.   Martin met Ashton in college, where they shared an interest in "pre-human civilizations" (these dudes must have been popular!).  They remained in touch as Martin became a historian/auhor and Stephen traveled the world in search of rare and odd things.

One night Stephen turns up at Martin's place, not looking so well.  He is on the hunt for a certain rare book, and wants Martin to translate it for him.  They head out to the family manor for some spooky atmosphere, some creepy hints about Stephen's family history, and another long-winded explanation of the Cthulhu Mythos.  He also has a bad habit of staring off into the horizon, and Martin notices lights in the night sky, in the vicinity of the abandoned lighthouse.

The family manor is in ruins, having been burned down 10 years ago by neighbors freaked out about the Ashton's occult hobbies.  A trapdoor in the ruins leads to some underground chambers, where they find an ancient book, and a note from Stephen's mom.  It seems Steph's parents weren't mere followers but actual minions of the GOO.  "Do not fear what lives beneath the manor" it admonishes.  The letter points them to two rituals in the book (one is needlessly hidden) which need to be performed under certain celestial conditions.  

They head out to the lighthouse, which is also in bad shape.  Encountering some hideous wailing coming from behind a locked door, they open it, catching a glimpse of "something scaly and of a hideous green" before they haul ass out of there.

Stephen performs the ritual, which closes an extra-dimensional gate.  Many bizarre sights are seen, and Stephen himself is sucked away.  Martin admits that the critter in the lighthouse, which lived in a tunnel connecting the lighthouse to the manor, had the head of Stephen's mother.

Despite its somewhat goofy reveal, this isn't altogether half-bad.  It's a Lovecraft pastiche that heavily apes HPL's structural storytelling - a series of vaguely or un- related facts and incidents slowly coming together to reveal a supernatural terror.  The writing is somewhat Lovecraftian in style, too, though the adjectiveitis is under control, and Glasby doesn't have HPL's feverish passion.  He writes a cool, very British, old-fashioned spook story line.

All in all, hardly a great story but a very decent, traditional Lovecraft pastiche.