THE WATCHERS AT THE PORTAL (2025 Edit)

Mt. Peterson has strange gravity and even stranger things happening at night

Although I had already driven around the base of the mountian twice without locating any sign of a mansion or house of any kind, my natural stubbornness told me that there just had to be a house there. So, ignoring the urge to turn tail and drive 300 kilometres straight back to Melbourne, I started driving slowly around the base of the mountain for a third time.

This time, I did see something. But not the missing split-level mansion that my Uncle Lindsay Stafford’s executor, Thomas J. Holland, had assured me that I would find at the base of Mount Peterson -- also known as Haunted Mountain, for reasons that I would soon discover. What I saw was merely a hint of white among the tall, native Australian grass growing beneath and upon the mount.

Climbing from my orange Mitsubishi Magna, I walked across to examine the white streak, expecting it to be nothing more than a chocolate bar wrapper. Instead, it turned out to be the remains of an address post. “William C. Stafford”, I could just make out upon the worm-riddled wood that crumbled to dust in my hands.

‘So much for the split-level mansion, complete with gables, gambrels, and great bay windows!’ I thought, remembering the description that the Carlton legal firm had given me over the telephone. ‘There obviously was some kind of structure here once, but God knows how many years, or even decades ago it collapsed into mounds of termite fodder!’

With a frustrated sigh, I turned to start back toward my car...Only to see it twenty metres or more up the side of the mountain, slowly reversing up the mount.

“My God, I must have left the stupid thing in gear!” I said starting after the Mitsubishi. Although even as I spoke, I realised that it did not explain the car rolling uphill!

Never much of an athlete (having always finished last at school sports meets, to the consternation of my father, who had once almost qualified for a place on the Australian Olympic track-and-field team and had hoped his son might actually make the Olympic squad. Some hope!) I set off up the mountain without any real expectation of being able to catch the car. To my great surprise, though, I found that I could easily lope up the side of the mountain, without even raising a sweat. ‘If only dad could see me now!’ I thought as I sprinted up the mountain like a true Olympic athlete.

I had almost caught up with the car and was actually reaching for the door handle, a quarter of the way up the mount, when my left foot snagged on something in the tall grass and I went sprawling to the ground.

Cursing as I pulled myself to my feet again, to my surprise, I saw that I had fallen over a long, white weatherboard. ‘Well, I’ve found part of a house at any rate!’ I thought as I started off after the Mitsubishi again.

A few hundred metres further on, I saw a hint of white. But this time, I was astute enough to jump over the white weatherboard concealed in the long native grass.

As I continued up the mountainside, still loping along without any sign of fatigue, every few hundred metres I saw one or two long weatherboards hidden in the tall grass.

I had almost caught the car again at the top of the mountain, when to my shock I saw a tall, rambling white weatherboard house, three-storeys high, complete with seemingly a myriad gables, gambrels and square bay windows as described by my Uncle Lindsay’s executors and thought, ‘The mansion! It has to be the bloody mansion that was supposed to be at the base of the mountain! Some lawyer you are, Thomas J. Stafford Esquire!’

In stopping to ponder the sudden discovery of the missing mansion, I had, however, allowed my car to race out of my grasp again. ‘Oh well, that’s the end of that!’ I thought as the Mitsubishi topped the peak of the mountain and started down the other side.

After one last look at the weatherboard mansion, I set off again, expecting to find my car racing down the other side of the mountain -- if it was not already smashed to pieces at the bottom of the mountain. To my astonishment, though, when I topped the peak of the mount, I found that my car had at last stopped, just beyond the crest of the mountain.

Although it had already come to a complete stop, taking no chances, I leapt inside the car and pulled on the handbrake. Then I set off back to the other side of the mount to have a closer look at the mansion. It was a three-storey, weatherboard house with loose planks hanging half away from the sides, and gaps where planks had previously fallen away down the years. ‘Well, that explains the loose boards all the way down the side of the mount!’ I thought. Although I knew that it did not explain how the boards had got themselves spread all the way down the side of the mountain. ‘Gravity works in mysterious ways!’ I joked, recalling how effortlessly I had raced up the mount, unaware just how prophetic the thought would turn out to be.

Going across to the small front porch, I saw a rocking chair across which was draped a blanket and a fawn cardigan. Both of which were spotlessly clean, free of the decrepitude that seemed to wrack the house itself -- showing that the house had obviously been in use fairly recently.

Walking across to the door, I saw an ornate brass nameplate saying ‘The Gables’, confirming that it was the house for which I searched. Shaking my head in amazement, I said, “At the bottom of the mountain! I’m going to have to sack that incompetent lawyer!” while trying the key that I had been given in the lock.

The key turned easily, I swung the door open and stepped inside the house...And was immediately overwhelmed with dizziness. My head swam for a moment as though I were about to faint -- possibly I even did for a second or two. When my head cleared, I found myself walking through the doorway on my hands, my feet pointed straight up into the air like a circus acrobat!

When I tried to lower my feet to the ground, they were pinched tightly at the ankles as though a giant talon was holding them -- the points of the claws digging lightly into my flesh. However, when I struggled around enough to look up, there was nothing visible holding me.

I had walked three or four metres on my hands into the great entrance hall and was still peering up, searching for some sign of my invisible captor, when my ankles were suddenly released and I went tumbling to the hardwood floor with a resounding crash.

After a stunned moment, I climbed to my feet and brushed myself off, then set out timidly to explore the mansion:

The first floor was laden with tables and chairs, cabinets and other furniture, all shrouded in form-concealing dust covers, making them look like squatting ghosts. In places, the dust had piled up many centimetres, like a thick carpet that disintegrated upon contact with my feet. The second floor was a little better. In one room, I located a great, ancient, floor-to-ceiling length bookcase and lifted out a large leather-bound volume. Only to see the pages plop out as fine dust at my feet, leaving me holding the empty shell of the cover.

The third floor was in noticeably better condition, with no obvious signs of dust and no covers over the furniture. I realised that the old man must have lived on the third floor, more or less abandoning the first two. ‘As you would expect with one old man living alone in a house this size for decades,’ I thought. Although I wondered why he had not chosen to live on the ground floor and left the upper two deserted. ‘Same result, but at least he would have saved himself walking two flights of stairs every time he entered or left the house!’

There were two bedrooms maintained in liveable condition; however, in one room I located a two-shelf bookcase containing what I first took to be a complete set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. But upon closer examination I realised that it was a hard-bound forty-odd volume personal diary, which my uncle, Lindsay Stafford, had kept for eighty-five years, from before World War One to his death a week ago in August 1999.

After turning on the light so that I could read in the gloomy room, I gathered a stack of the diaries around me, sat on Uncle Lindsay’s bed and began to peruse the large, leather-bound volumes.

Volume one contained details of my uncle’s early life at the Gables as a teenager. Early in volume two, he was married to a local beauty, Gwendolyn Bowers. But by the end of that volume (June 1920), Gwendolyn had died, a victim of the flu epidemic that killed twenty million people worldwide that year.

The third volume covered nearly fifteen years of my uncle’s life, as Lindsay Stafford sank deeper and deeper into his grief over the death of Gwendolyn. For that decade and a half, he did nothing more than count off the days of his life. Until March 1935, when he suddenly reported: “Something is wrong...with the very fabric of time and space itself, each day it seems as though it is becoming a little easier to walk up the once almost unscaleable mountain, and a little more difficult to walk down. Almost...as though gravity has somehow started to reverse itself on the mountainside!

“At first, I thought it was an illusion of my tired old mind. Then I noticed that the house was starting to slip. Only to be expected in an old house like this, of course...Built in 1836, it’s almost a century old. But as crazy as it may sound, the house is not slipping down the hill...but up!”

‘Poor old bloke,’ I thought, ‘obviously crazy from grief over the death of his wife!’ But then I flicked forward a few pages in the diary and was shocked to see a grainy old black-and-white photograph of what was unmistakably the Gables standing at the base of Mount Peterson! Exactly as my uncle’s executor had assured me.

‘It must be another house,’ I thought logically, ‘an earlier house that predates the Gables!’ And as I flicked through the next few pages of the diary, I felt that I had found the answer, since there was no noticeable change in the position of the mansion to the mountain in the photos. But then, after three or four pages, there was a slight change. Instead of being at the very base of the mountain, the house had slipped up a few metres, hardly enough to notice at first. As I pored through page after page, hundreds after hundreds of photos, I realised the mistake that my uncle had initially made: in taking so many photos (a dozen or more a day it seemed for the first few months at least), he had hidden the movement in the early photos. Being so close together meant that any noticeable shift only occurred every couple of dozen photographs.

Over the next few volumes of the diary, there was little else but hundreds of black-and-white photos showing the mansion ever-so-slowly sliding up the mount -- with just a line or two of commentary by the old man every day or two:

“There can be no doubt,” wrote Uncle Lindsay at one point, “that the Gables is definitely slipping up the side of Mount Peterson in defiance of all the known laws of science! I know that no one will ever believe me without suitable proof, so I have carefully maintained this photographic evidence that should silence even the sternest of sceptics.”

It certainly silenced me. Undoubtedly, today, any halfway decent photographer could easily enough forge a series of photos of a mansion slipping gradually uphill. But these were undeniably grainy, decades-old black-and-white originals. And as time passed, and my uncle had become astute enough to take the photos further and further apart (at first daily, then weekly, then monthly, then finally three or four times a year), the movement of the mountain became increasingly obvious.

As I examined the photos of the house (at first a tenth of the way up the mount, then a fifth, a quarter, a third, a half, two-thirds), I remembered the loose weatherboards that I had seen (and fallen over) earlier in the long grass while chasing my car. ‘So that explains it!’ I thought. As the house grew older, boards started to fall off, and Uncle Lindsay was too poor to repair it. So he left the boards lying in the tall grass beside the house until the house moved on, leaving them behind! But wouldn’t the weatherboards themselves have moved up the mount after the house? Unless they were too light, maybe an object has to be a certain weight and size before it can be drawn up the side of the mountain?’

For decades, there was almost nothing in volume after volume of the diaries, except photographs of the up-sliding mansion and one-, or two-line comments by my uncle. Right up until August 1968, when he suddenly experienced the invisible force grabbing him by the ankles and forcing him to walk on his hands through the doorway for a few metres whenever entering the mansion.

“At first I thought I was going crazy,” wrote the old man, “so I invited a few people from nearby Glen Hartwell for a visit. Each of them, in turn, ended up walking through the doorway on their hands, confirming that it was more than a mental aberration of mine. Their initial reaction was to shriek from terror, then to make light of the experience, laughing and joking at the ‘great fun’, and even in the case of Gregory Singleton, going outside to enter again to experience it a second time. But although they all laughed heartily, no one else was prepared to try it a second time, and even Greg wasn’t game to try it a third time. They stayed for an hour or so, laughing and joking, promising to return soon for another go at it. But, of course, none of them ever did come back!”

As the years progressed, it seemed as though virtually no one visited my uncle at all. He certainly made no mention of visitors. Until December 1973, when, a few days before Christmas, he reported the arrival of Morton Matthews and leLande Strange:

“Matthews,” he wrote, “looks like the archetypal black sorcerer with short, jet black hair, high widow’s peak and an exaggerated goatee. Strange, on the other hand, is refreshingly ordinary in appearance, looking more like a school teacher: tall, thin, with horn-rimmed glasses, and crew-cut ginger hair. Both men seemed puzzled to find the Gables on top of Mount Peterson --” ‘So it got to the top by December 1973!’ I thought. At first, I wondered why, in more than twenty-five years since then, it had not slipped back down the other side of the mount. Until I remembered how my Mitsubishi had crossed the crest of the mountain earlier, before abruptly stopping. “And both men claim to be nature-lovers exploring the flora and fauna upon the mount. Yet neither man seemed capable of distinguishing between the commonest plants, and neither had noticed that there was no animal or bird life of any kind on the mountain....”

‘No animals or birds!’ I thought, wondering whether the old man had cracked up after all. ‘There must be at least small arboreal animals on a mountain this size, surely?’

Going back to the diaries, I read: “As I have mentioned elsewhere in these diaries, the quantity of animal life has gradually been fading out (if that is the correct expression) on the mountain since the early 1960s. As though small life forms are somehow unable to cope with the strange new laws of physics that seem to now govern the mount. By 1968, the insects had all vanished, by the next year, the last of the birds, and by 1972, the last of the small animals. Leaving me the only living creature upon the mount, or so I had thought. Now it seems Matthews and Strange will be wandering about the place plant-watching....”

I skipped forward a few pages and read: “Strange and Matthews have turned out to be odd botanists! They do most of their plant-watching at night. I’ve heard of bird watchers and zoologists stalking about at night, since there are plenty of species of nocturnal birds and animals that can only be studied at night. But I have never heard of nocturnal plants! I must ask them about it the next time that I see them....”

After that, I began skipping through the diaries looking for passages specifically about Strange and Matthews. Finally, I found one in September 1974: “Well, they’ve turned up again, the amateur botanists. I haven’t seen them for six months -- although I have heard them creeping around the mount at night on many occasions. Then this morning they turned up and made an offer to buy the Gables of all things! ‘You’re welcome to stay on the other side of the mountain,’ I offered, hoping to put them off. ‘That’s very kind of you,’ said leLande Strange in his high, reedy voice, ‘but you see the Gables is the focus...’ He stopped suddenly, receiving a withering look from Matthews and obviously realised that he had almost said too much. ‘Er, ah, that is the focus of our attentions.’ ‘Your attentions?’ I asked. ‘Er, ah...’ stammered Strange. ‘Botany,’ explained Morton Matthews without missing a beat. ‘The Gables is ideally situated for our study of plant life upon the mountain.’ ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but this house has been in my family since it was built in 1836, one year before the town of Glen Hartwell was even founded.’ When I refused to sell, they started to up the ante, offering me larger and larger amounts, then finally resorting to threats, warning me that ‘odd things are going on upon the mount’, as though I hadn’t already known that for the last forty-odd years. Finally, they left, vowing ‘Not to be held responsible for anything that might happen to you!’ I considered venturing into Glen Hartwell to report the threat to the local police chief, Lawrie Grimes, but then thought better of it.”

Feeling famished I stopped reading and glanced at my wristwatch to find to my astonishment that it was after 9:00 p.m. Tentatively returning to my car (uncertain whether I would do handstands again walking out; relieved to find that I did not) I collected a hamper of food, only to find that my uncle had left the refrigerator well stocked when he had died a week earlier.

After fixing and devouring with relish a hastily thrown together meal of bacon and eggs, I settled down for an early night in my Uncle Lindsay’s room....Only to awaken a short time later to the sound of a loud electric crackling. At first, I thought that it was lightning outside my bedroom window. But as I looked up, to my astonishment, I saw a flashing streak of silver-white, like static electricity, but as thick as my index finger, three or four metres long, flashing only a dozen centimetres above my head, like an electric eel swimming through the air.

I watched the ‘static snake’ for what seemed like ten minutes or more when I was startled by the sound of a loud crash upon the corrugated-iron roof, followed by the sound of something large scuttling about across the creaking roof.

‘So much for there being no animal life on the mount!’ I thought, assuming that it was some kind of possum that had leapt onto the roof from an overhanging tree.

It was only at that instant that I noticed the static snake had vanished.


The next morning, I had hardly finished breakfast when I heard a loud rapping on the front door. Going downstairs to investigate, I saw two men: one with a high widow’s peak on his jet black hair, piercing brown eyes, and an exaggerated goatee, whom I recognised from my uncle’s diary description as Morton Matthews; the other tall, lean, with short, reddish-brown hair, and horn-rimmed glasses, who I realised could only be leLande Strange.

“Peter Richmond,” I introduced myself to the two men, who indeed announced themselves as Matthews and Strange.

“Won’t you come inside?” I invited.

The two men hesitated for an instant, exchanging a wry look, and then stepped forward. And both ended up walking through the doorway on their hands, their legs thrust up rigidly, pointing toward the ceiling.

“Oh, gentlemen, I’m terribly sorry,” I apologised, having temporarily forgotten the weird phenomenon connected with entering the mansion. “I should have warned you....”

“That’s quite all right,” assured Matthews after the two men had returned right side up -- considerably more gracefully than I had done, both managing to land on their feet again, rather than tumbling to a heap as I had, making me aware that they had both experienced the phenomenon more often than I had, as they soon confirmed:

“We’ve both been inside the Gables many times in the past,” said Strange, “when dealing with your uncle...” He stopped suddenly after receiving a sharp look from Matthews, who I realised was obviously the spokesman of the two.

“We wanted to welcome you to Glen Hartwell,” said Matthews, shaking my hand. Then, without wasting words, he quickly added, “And to ask if you would be willing to sell the Gables to us?”

“We’re willing to pay almost any price you think reasonable: $200,000; $300,000; $350,000...” chipped in Strange, again being silenced by a glare from Morton Matthews.

“I don’t know whether you’re aware of it, but we were negotiating with Lindsay Stafford for the sale of the Gables before his tragic demise,” said Matthews.

“Tragic? Well, he was ninety-odd,” said Strange, receiving a hard look from Matthews which shut him up.

Ignoring Strange, I said, “Yes, I’ve read in my Uncle Lindsay’s diaries about your attempts to purchase the Gables.”

“Diaries?” asked Strange in a worried voice, receiving a withering glance from Matthews.

“According to my uncle’s diaries, you are both botanists?”

“Botanists...?” began leLande Strange.

“Only amateur botanists,” corrected Morton Matthews. “Actually, we are both retired nuclear physicists.”

“I worked at Woomera Rocket Range from 1953 till 1973 when it was blown up by the English Government,” said Strange.

Astonished, I said, “I wasn’t aware that the rocket range had been blown up?”

“Well, you see, they almost unleashed something that they couldn’t control,” replied Strange, making Matthews’ eyes almost glow from rage.

“The English Government was secretly experimenting with nuclear power at Woomera, without the knowledge or permission of Canberra,” explained Matthews a little too quickly. “When the incoming Whitlam government discovered what the English had been up to, they agreed to completely raze the installation to prevent it from snowballing into an international incident!”

I was astounded by this odd tale. I knew that the English had been involved in secret, illegal nuclear tests at Maralinga in South Australia, during which they had used Aborigines as live guinea pigs to test the effects of ultra-high radiation on human beings. But I had never heard of similar tests performed at Woomera. Looking across at Strange, I could tell by his vacant expression that he was just as puzzled as I was. However, he quickly recovered his composure to say, “Yes, yes, that’s right. Er, anyway, we both retired after that and moved to Victoria....”

“To study botany,” finished Matthews.

Although their story was plausible, there was one thing that troubled me, and I said, “If you don’t mind me saying so, you both look much too young to have retired more than twenty-five years ago.”

“Thank you,” replied Matthews, quickly flashing another glance at Strange. “We’ll take that as a compliment. But I assure you that we are both much older than we look....” At which leLande Strange began to giggle childishly, until being silenced by a withering glance from Morton Matthews.

“Well, the truth is that with your uncle’s forbearance, we have been living on the other side of Mount Peterson since early 1974.”

“And have been trying to buy the Gables since early 1974,” said Strange before Matthews could stop him.

“Why would you spend twenty-five years trying to buy one house,” I asked, “when you could have built any number of houses of your own in that time?”

“Yes, that’s true, but you see the Gables is the focal point...” said Strange, wheezing to a stop as he received an elbow in the solar plexus from Matthews.

“The focal point?” I asked. I recalled that a similar term had been mentioned in my Uncle Lindsay’s diaries.

“To the flora and fauna on the mount,” explained Matthews after a moment’s delay.

“That’s odd,” I said, “I would have thought that the lower regions of the mount would have more interesting plant life. And as far as I can ascertain, there is a mysterious lack of animal life of any kind on the mountainside.”

Strange and Matthews exchanged an odd look, then Matthews rather cryptically said, “Oh, there is animal life...of a sort on the mountain, all right.”

I started to argue, but then remembered the sound of the heavy animal scurrying across the rooftop the night before. Before I could stop myself, I told the two men of my experience.

Strange and Matthews were almost delirious with delight when told of the occurrence. “A large animal!” cried Strange, with childlike glee, making me almost expect him to clap his hands with pleasure. “Yes, I guess you could call it a large animal, a very large animal indeed!”

Obviously, realising that his associate was getting out of hand, Morton Matthews clamped a hand on his shoulder and started to lead him away. As they stepped out onto the porch, Matthews looked back and called out, “Please consider our offer, Mr. Richmond. We’re willing to pay any reasonable price for the Gables.”


Later that day (although loath to step outside for fear of what would happen when I re-entered the mansion), I went for a short walk around the top of the mountain.

After a short time walking through the lush native grass, on a whim, I decided to explore the other side of the mount, curious to see where Strange and Matthews claimed to have been camping for the last twenty-five years.

What I found, however, was not a campsite, but a blackened ruin: a black forest looking like a negative of a white Christmas scene. Black trees stood up like giant sticks of charcoal, amid black grass and a thick snow of black ashes, half a metre thick, covering almost a quarter of the circumference of the mountain, running from the top of the mountain to more than halfway down.

At first, I stepped tentatively through the black forest, half expecting the ashes to still be hot underfoot. But I soon realised that whatever holocaust had engulfed the mount had done so years, or even decades earlier. Yet I was puzzled that there was no trace of new green shoots among the black, only ash and charcoal. I scraped at the ground with the toe of one shoe and discovered to my dismay that even the dirt itself had been burnt crisp like badly burnt toast.

‘But what kind of fire could even burn dirt?’ I wondered. Then, remembering Matthews and Strange’s claim that they were both retired nuclear physicists, I thought, ‘A nuclear blast perhaps! That would explain why only one section of the mountain was scorched, whereas a bush fire would probably have ravaged the entire mountain!’

Although I realised that the idea was absurd -- how could two men have detonated an atomic bomb? -- nonetheless, afraid of contracting radiation sickness, I hurried back toward my own side of the mount as fast as my legs would carry me.

Seeing the great, rambling structure of the Gables, I started across toward it when, to my astonishment, I saw a vast flock of pink-billed seagulls flying across the mountain. ‘So there is bird life on the mount after all?’ I thought in awe, watching the birds which I realised were either heading toward the Yannan River near Glen Hartwell, or Lake Cooper at nearby Harpertown.

I watched the great curtain of whiteness seemingly blocking out the entire sky for a few moments, and then started off toward the Gables again.

I had hardly started walking again, though, when I was belted across the back of the neck by what felt like a damp sponge with a large rock in the middle.

As I fell to the grass, I heard a thump-thump-thump-thump-thump like giant hailstones falling all around me. After being hit a second time (on the back of my left leg) I curled up into the foetal position and covered my head with my arms to protect myself.

The ‘hail’ thundered down around me, deafening me as the thump-thump-thump took on almost an express train roar as it seemed to continue endlessly, as though the heavens had decided to unleash all of Victoria’s annual supply of hailstones on Mount Peterson in a single murderous outpouring. As I was struck a third, fourth, then fifth painful blow, I had started to suspect that I had made a mistake curling up on the ground to protect myself. If the hailstorm lasted long enough, eventually I would receive a major injury. After three or four minutes and a dozen painful blows, I was debating the wisdom of climbing to my feet and making a run for the Gables, which had been only a couple of hundred metres away when I had been felled. Then suddenly, the tumultuous din finally started to abate. After striking me one final painful blow to the back, the hailstorm abruptly ended.

I lay on the grass for a moment longer before painfully climbing back to my feet with great difficulty since the grass all around me was now slick and greasy, making it almost impossible to find a foothold. When at last I stood again, I was horrified to see that I was covered from head to foot in blood!

But looking around the mount, I saw immediately that most of it was not my own blood. For as far as the eye could see, the grass was covered in literally thousands (if not tens of thousands) of bloody seagull carcases! The hailstorm that had stranded me out on the open was actually a rain of seagulls falling from the sky by the thousand!

“My God, what could have caused it?” I cried, horrified by the sight of the shattered seagulls. But then, recalling Strange’s cryptic remark that “The Gables is the focal point,” I thought, ‘My God, they really are nuclear physicists! Somehow they must have built and detonated a home-made atomic bomb on the mountainside, and now the whole damn mount is radioactive!’

Despite my natural aversion to walking through the thick carpet of dead seagulls, which now covered much of my side of the mount, I hurried back to the mansion as quickly as possible, from time to time falling upon the blood-slickened carcases, thinking as I ran, ‘No wonder there’s no sign of bird or animal life upon the mount! The radiation kills it off as soon as it strays onto or over the lethal mountain!’

Back at the Gables, I hesitated before entering the house, but rather than stay outside with the loathsome sight of the bloody seagulls, I forced myself to step through the doorway. And again ended up walking on my hands for a few metres, my feet securely held up in the air by some invisible claw-like hand.

Right side up again, I showered, then changed, then returned to my late uncle’s bedroom and started poring through his diaries again, hunting for further references to leLande Strange and Morton Matthews. After leafing through the volumes for a few minutes I located a section in late 1976 when Lindsay Stafford spoke of going around the side of the mount to find the camp site of Matthews and Strange: “Instead of a camp, however, I found a great white circle painted onto the grass, and saw twelve purple-robed figures (six men and six women) dancing anti-clockwise around the circle, holding hands, while Morton Matthews stood within a white, five-pointed star inside the circle, chanting loudly to the stars in some weird dialect, hands raised to the heavens in supplication as though pleading with the stars themselves. Looking more than ever like the stereotype of a warlock, ‘Iä! Yog-Sothoth! Iä! Shub-Niggurath! Iä! Nyarlathotep!’ he chanted on and on, a seemingly endless spiel of drivel. I realised to my horror that Matthews and Strange were really witches!”

I gave up the diaries for the night at that point, starting to fear that Uncle Lindsay must have been growing senile by that time, by 1976, my uncle would have been eighty-odd. I decided that the next time I met with the two men I would probably agree to sell the mansion to Morton Matthews and leLande Strange.

That night, I had hardly fallen asleep when I was awakened by the loud, electric hissing sound, which I recognised even before looking up to see the long white snake of static electricity three or four metres long whiplashing like a repeatedly cracking whip only centimetres above my head. This time, even the air that I breathed seemed charged with electricity so that my throat and lungs tingled from the very act of breathing.

Just as I had started to fear that I was having some kind of attack, I heard a faint buzzing sound. I strained my ears to listen and finally realised, “My God, chanting!” And indeed that’s what it was, the eerie sound of chanting heard dimly from a long way off.

After a while, the static crackling in the air vanished, and once more I heard a loud thud upon the corrugated-iron roof, followed by the sound of something scampering across the roof. Something which I realised sounded much too large for any possum.

I had now firmly made up my mind to sell the Gables to Matthews and Strange the next time that I saw them. However, despite the diaries’ claims that the two men had harassed my uncle almost every day for more than twenty years to sell them the house, when I decided to sell out, the two men failed to put in an appearance.

The next day, I forced myself to go outside the Gables, despite my reluctance to go out onto the blood-strewn mountainside. To my astonishment, there was no sign of the thousands of seagull corpses that had coated a large portion of the mount the day before. Where the bloody carcases had been earlier, the ground was now broken and torn up as though a large-toothed hoe or other digging implement had been dragged around the mount, removing most of the grass to leave wide, deep grooves, making the field look like a badly sewn field. At one point, a great hole yawned, looking for all the world like a bite mark. But a bite of incredible size: a great chasm more than ten metres deep had been scooped out of the side of the mountain. No creature that had ever walked this planet (dinosaurs included) could ever have made such a bite.

After staring at the ‘bite’ in disbelief for almost fifteen minutes, I returned to the mansion to look for a shovel to fill in the hole. Instead, I found a grey-haired couple waiting on the porch: The man tall, lean and distinguished looking; the woman short, slightly plump, and very beautiful, despite being in her early sixties.

They introduced themselves as Sebastian and Eleanor Hilliard.

I hesitated to invite the Hilliards into the house for fear that the shock of walking on their hands might prove too much for the elderly couple. Instead, we stood talking on the front porch.

After a moment’s hesitation, Sebastian said, “Rather than beat around the bush, Mr. Richmond, I’ll come straight to the point. We are members of a society called the Ordo Templi Australis, or the Order of the Templars of the South.” He paused for a moment, obviously uncertain of himself, before adding, “Look, this is none of our business really...But we’ve come round to ask you, no, to beg you not to sell the Gables to Morton Matthews and leLande Strange.”

“But how...?” I asked, dumbfounded.

“Then they have approached you already?” asked Eleanor.

“Well...yes,” I admitted.

“Please don’t,” she begged.

“We...we asked your uncle also. But fortunately, Lindsay Stafford had no intention of selling the family manor,” said Sebastian.

“But, whyever not?” I asked. I somehow resisted the temptation to ask, “What business is it of yours anyway?”

The elderly couple exchanged a long, hard look for a moment. Then finally Eleanor said, “We might as well come clean, Mr. Richmond... Sebastian and I are witches...” Seeing my stunned look, she laughed, and then added, “No, I suppose we’re not exactly how you would picture witches. But then, most of the standard picture of witches is all media hype. The truth is that witchcraft is an ancient fertility cult. We aim to attune ourselves to the natural forces of the Earth. We worship the White Goddess, Hecate...” She rambled on for a few minutes in this vein, before finally realising that she had lost my interest, she said, “But that’s not what we came here to talk to you about....

“We came to warn you about Morton Matthews...” She paused for a moment before saying, “I first met Matthews in 1948....”

“1948!” I repeated, shocked, thinking she must mean 1984. In 1948, Eleanor Hilliard would have been a mere teenager, Morton Matthews hardly even that.

Noting my surprise, she laughed again, then said, “I assure you Mr. Richmond, it’s the truth. I met him in 1948 when I joined the Ordo Templi Australis as a sixteen-year-old neophyte. Apprentice witch, that is. Matthews...Well, Morton Matthews looked exactly as he does today...Like a man in his mid-fifties. Which he may well have been at the time...But, of course, that was more than fifty years ago.” She paused to allow the statement to sink in.

“But wait...” I started to protest.

“Which means that even if he really was in his mid-fifties then, he now must be more than one hundred years of age!” put in Sebastian.

“I know it sounds incredible, but it’s the truth, I swear it,” insisted Eleanor. “When I joined in 1948, Matthews had risen through the ranks of the Ordo Templi until he was second in charge. A position that he held for another fourteen years, but then, in 1962, he became impatient and made an unsuccessful takeover bid. Soon afterwards, our leader, Barry Hawthorne, died mysteriously.”

“He was the victim of a spontaneous combustion,” explained Sebastian. Then, in case I did not understand what the term meant, “That is when a human being bursts into flames for no apparent reason and burns to ashes in seconds...Leaving their clothing and any surrounding furniture unsinged.”

“Yes, I’ve heard of it,” I said, “Dickens mentions it in Bleak House. But surely spontaneous human combustion is only a myth?”

“I assure you, it is not,” said Eleanor. “You see we were all there when it happened. Barry was conducting a simple healing ritual with all the Ordo Templi Australis in attendance. When suddenly he burst into flames before our eyes...” Although it had happened more than thirty years earlier, the old woman was almost crying as she spoke.

Placing a comforting arm around her, his own eyes a little misty from the memory, her husband said, “But not ordinary flames...Strange, luminous, almost phosphorescent flames...If that makes any sense at all.”

“Soon afterwards, Matthews made another try for the leadership. But Barry’s death was never solved, and we were wary of Matthews, fearing that he had somehow been responsible...”

“Also, of course, people had started to notice the fact that he did not visibly age. Well, they could hardly fail to notice...In 1962, Matthews looked not a day older than he had in 1948. Of course, some people are lucky and age well...But no one ages that well...Not naturally, that is.”

“Which had us fearing that Matthews had started to dabble in sorcery, in the quest for such fabled goals as the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of youth....”

“But what’s the difference between witchcraft and sorcery?” I asked, genuinely perplexed. “Surely they’re the same thing?”

“No. Only in the eyes of Australia’s yellow news media...” assured Sebastian. “In reality, they are totally unrelated. Witchcraft involves worship of nature; the four elemental forces: earth, wind, fire, and water. Sorcery is an outgrowth of alchemy; in essence, a perverted form of chemistry. An attempt to work magic through the use of chemical concoctions for strictly personal gain: turning base metals into gold or silver, or achieving longevity. Like demonology (which also is totally unrelated to witchcraft), sorcery sometimes involves human sacrifices....”

“After the death of Barry Hawthorne, Morton Matthews was expelled from the Ordo Templi Australis, despite his protestations of innocence. Soon after he founded the Cult of Cthulhu....”

“At first we took it all as a bit of a joke,” said Sebastian. “In 1962, H.P. Lovecraft was far from the legendary figure that he is today, but his reputation had started to build and we had read enough of his fiction to realise that he was the inventor of the ‘fictitious’ Cthulhu....”

“Or at least so we thought at the time...” added Eleanor. “For the next few years, the Cult of Cthulhu slowly built up a following, without any great controversies...Then in the early 1970s, he recruited leLande Strange, who soon became Matthews’ right-hand man.”

“Don’t let Strange’s outer persona fool you,” warned Sebastian. “He appears to be a giggling cretin...but in reality the man is an evil genius, with an I.Q. of 200.”

“Strange seemed to be the missing link for Matthews, Strange had been employed at the Woomera Rocket Range, in South Australia, working on super-secret nuclear reactor experiments for twenty years from the early 1950s. Then in 1973, there was a catastrophe at Woomera. A nuclear reactor went into overload and temporarily opened a portal between Woomera and sunken R’lyeh, almost allowing Great Cthulhu to slither into existence in the desert of South Australia. As a result, the rocket range was shut down and blown up. However, Strange was confident that he could reproduce the result -- which had included a partial materialisation of Great Cthulhu himself. But to avoid any trouble with the Australian or English Governments (the latter of whom had actually been in charge of Woomera), Strange moved his operations from South Australia to Victoria....”

“And promptly met up with Morton Matthews,” put in Eleanor.

“As far back as August 1980, Matthews and Strange set off a controlled nuclear reaction on the far side of Mount Peterson and managed to open a portal between our world and far-off Yuggoth. However, to date, they have not been able to properly control the portal or call anything through. Nonetheless, I fear that they might be on the brink of success...If it can be called that. Heaven alone knows how those two lunatics expect to control Yog-Sothoth, Shub-Niggurath, Father Yig, or any of the other Great Old Ones if they do manage to call them through the portal, and heaven help the world if anything does make it through the portal between Earth and far-off Yuggoth...!”

As I listened to the Hilliards’ strange tale, I started to wonder about the sanity of the locals, and started to become increasingly convinced that my best bet might be to sell the Gables to Matthews and Strange (if I ever saw them again).

Seeing a sad look come into the pale blue eyes of Eleanor Hilliard, I realised that she was aware of what I was thinking. A fact confirmed when she hurriedly interrupted her husband to announce that they had to be leaving.

“But please consider our words Mr. Richmond,” she pleaded, looking back as they stepped off the porch. “Selling the Gables to Matthews and Strange could have catastrophic consequences, for the whole world!”

Having made up my mind to sell the mansion to Matthews when next I saw him, the sorcerer suddenly seemed reluctant to put in an appearance. For a whole week, the two men failed to appear, and every night for that week, I was awakened by the sound of the static hissing as the glowing electric coil whiplashed in the air overhead. Every night, I heard the distant buzz-buzz-buzz of far-off chanting. Every night, as the static snake abated, a loud crash resounded upon the corrugated-iron roof, followed by the crashing-thumping of some large animal racing around atop the roof.

Finally, I decided that I had had enough. This time I waited up, seated upon a chair beside the bed, for more than two hours until the sound of chanting started. Then I raced outside and started across the mountainside in pursuit of the distant, chanting voices.

I had only gone a few metres across the dark mount before realising that the chanting was emanating from the opposite side of the mountain, where the burnt section was. As I approached the fire zone the chanting grew steadily louder.

I stepped over a rise upon the mount and was shocked to see a circle of chanting witches exactly as my uncle had described, in flowing, purple-satin robes, dancing widdershins around a white circle in which stood Morton Matthews.

Holding his hands wide apart above his head, Matthews chanted as though praying, “Iä! Great Cthulhu answer our supplications. We are your servants, the keepers of the silver key, the watchers at the portal. Iä! Great Cthulhu, arise from your watery bed in far-off sunken R’lyeh and come to rule us. Iä! Great Cthulhu, we are your willing slaves, ready to assist you in conquering and destroying the human race!”

‘My God,’ I thought as I watched incredulously, ‘I was wrong about you, uncle, you were perfectly sane till the day you died. These are the loonies!’

“Oh Great Cthulhu!” shrieked Morton Matthews as I turned and started back toward my own side of the mount.

After this experience, quite frankly, I did not know what to believe; who were the local loonies: Matthews and Strange, or the Hilliards?

At daybreak the next morning, I set out for nearby Glen Hartwell to investigate the Hilliards’ story. However, first I had to get down the side of the mountain. I had noticed when investigating the other side of the mount that travelling down the mountain was not as easy as running up it had been. The inverted gravity on the mount meant that walking down even ten metres had me gasping for breath. Likewise, my Mitsubishi, which had effortlessly rolled up the hill upon my arrival, now coughed and spluttered, continually stalling through what should have been a quick drive down the mountain, turning it into an endurance test. Then, as we passed from the bottom of the slope to the level ground, the car suddenly took off, forcing me to slam my foot onto the brake pedal to avoid rocketing into a large blue gum on the other side of the small path at the bottom of the mountain.

In the late-1990s, Glen Hartwell (or the Glen as the locals call it) was a large country town of nearly 2,500 people. The two-man police station, situated in Mitchell Street, at the northern end of town, was manned by Sergeant Danny ‘Bear’ Ross and his constable, Terry Blewett. Bear Ross was a fair-haired man in his late thirties, more than 200 centimetres tall, with a huge barrel chest, and bulging muscular arms and thighs, leaving no doubt as to how he had come by his nickname.

“Take a seat,” offered the big man affably, waving me toward a tall-back wooden chair beside his blackwood desk. “What can I do for you?”

I hesitated, uncertain how to start, aware that he might end up thinking me as crazy as I was convinced that Matthews, Strange, and the Hilliards all were...Finally, I blurted out, “I...I was hoping you might be able to provide me with some background details about an organisation called the Ordo Templi Australis?”

When Ross failed to answer, I explained, “I recently inherited the Gables, a mansion on top of Mount Peterson....”

“Haunted Mountain?” said Bear Ross.

“Er, yes...” I hesitated for a moment before summoning the courage to give a fairly lengthy (and I hoped believable) account of all of the goings on at the mountain over the last ten days or so.

My tale told, I waited for some response from the big man. He sat with a puzzled look on his face, hands clasped before him for an inestimable time, before saying, “I can’t tell you anything about Matthews or his Cult of Cthulhu...However, we do have a file on the Ordo Templi Australis.”

Getting up from the desk, he went across to the four-drawer metal filing cabinet and pulled out the second top drawer. After leafing through the drawer for a moment, he extracted a Manila folder bulging with newspaper clippings and typed police reports.

Returning to his desk, Bear leafed through the official police summary for a few minutes before saying, “It all happened a little before my time, I’m afraid. There was a series of ritualistic murders, involving beheadings and disembowellings, committed in Glen Hartwell and neighbouring Daley through the first half of 1982. My predecessor, Lawrie Grimes, handled the investigations and initially suspected the Ordo Templi Australis. However, after interviewing members of the OTA a few times, he couldn’t prove anything against them and retired in June 1982 with the murders still unsolved. In June that year, Terry Blewett, Lawrie’s constable, took over as acting sergeant for four months, but by that time the murders had ceased, and he was unable to make any headway. When I came to the Glen in October 1982, the murders were already cold. I did my best to investigate them through into early 1983, at which time the Ash Wednesday bushfires became my main priority.”

“How many murders were there?” I asked.

He leafed through the papers again before replying, “Eleven.”

“And you simply stopped investigating them?” I asked incredulously, not meaning it to sound like a reproach.

“There wasn’t a lot more I could do,” he said apologetically. “I interviewed members of the OTA myself, but concluded that they were harmless kooks...Incapable of the level of horrendous brutality perpetrated by the murderer or murderers....”

“But you could have been mistaken?” I goaded.

“Well...Yes...I’m not perfect,” he conceded. Then, after a moment’s embarrassed silence, “Look, maybe it would be best if I took you round to speak to Lawrie Grimes...Lawrie lives on Howard Street, just a few blocks away. Although he’s in his seventies now, his mind is still razor sharp and he has almost computer-like recall; he’s bound to remember the only mass murders to have ever occurred in the area in his time...He could probably tell you a hell of a lot more out of his head than he ever put down in the files....”

Naturally, I accepted the offer and we were soon knocking at the door of a lemon-yellow double-fronted weatherboard house in Howard Street.

Lawrie Grimes was as tall as Bear Ross, but almost deathly thin, with dark brown hair, which made him look fifteen years less than his age of seventy-plus. Seeing Bear Ross, Grimes reached out to shake the big man’s right hand in obviously genuine affection.

Grimes showed us into his pale blue walled lounge room and sat us on the sofa while he potted about at the other end of the house, making coffee. Upon returning, he sat in a black leather armchair to listen, while Bear tentatively filled him in on why we were calling.

“Yes, yes,” said the old man enthusiastically, “that’s one case I’ll certainly never forget, one of the few unsolved murders in the twenty years that I served as sergeant, and the only mass murder in the Glen in that period.”

“Your notes say that you suspected the Ordo Templi Australis?” I asked.

“At first, yes,” he agreed. “But after investigating them for a while, I concluded that they were exactly what they claimed to be: worshippers of elemental magic. Perfectly harmless, if not exactly your everyday religious types...At the time of the murders, the gutter press claimed the OTA was an offshoot of Aleister Crowley’s infamous Ordo Templi Orientis, the Order of the Templars of the East, trying to claim that Crowley had personally founded the OTA on a tour of Australia and New Zealand early this century. Of course, Crowley never legally entered this country, although immigration and customs controls were very slack at the turn of the century, so he could have entered secretly without any real difficulty. Besides which, the press chose to ignore that aspect, concentrating instead m the fact that Crowley’s best known High Priestess-Courtesan, Leila Waddell, or ‘sister Cybele’ as Crowley called her, was born in Australia. But with the help of the local priest at the time, Father Benjamin, I managed to confirm that Ordo Templi Australis’ roots can be traced back more than eight hundred years to southern Europe. Remembering that Australis is Latin for ‘Southern Land’, which is where Australia got its name from, and also Austria, since it was considered one of the world’s southernmost countries before the discovery of the Americas by Amerigo Vespucci, and then Australia by Captain Cook....”

The old man rambled on for a moment before I interrupted, asking, “Is there any chance of me speaking to this Father Benjamin?”

“I’m afraid not,” said Bear Ross. “Fr. Benjamin and his young curate, Father Dominique were both brutally murdered in early 1986...” Then, seeing my startled look, he added, “No, their killings were totally unrelated to the ones in 1982. The priests’ killer was finally caught.”

“The current priest at St. Margaret’s, Father Benedict, was a close friend of the young curate Fr. Dominique,” put in Lawrie Grimes, “you can talk to him if you like. But I doubt he could tell you anything much.”

“Was he in the Glen in 1982?” I asked.

“No, but he visited Fr. Dominique several times between 1982 and 1986 and was visiting at the time the two priests were murdered. He was probably lucky Bear caught the killer, or else he most likely would have been victim number three.”

I nodded my agreement, realising that the murder of two priests could not be a mere coincidence; the murderer had to have been a freaked-out maniac with a major hate-on for the Church. Trying to get the discussion back onto track, I asked, “What can you tell me about the Cult of Cthulhu?”

“Other than that it has been led since 1962 by the apparently ageless Morton Matthews?” said Lawrie. “Not a lot really. Although after I ruled out the Ordo Templi Australis, the Cult of Cthulhu became my next most likely suspects....”

Clearly startled, Bear Ross sat up quickly, almost spilling hot coffee over himself and said, “Yet you don’t even mention them in your notes of the case?”

“How the hell could I?” demanded Lawrie defensively. “Cthulhu was a mythical being invented by the father of American science fiction, H.P. Lovecraft, how the hell could I have mentioned Cthulhu or Lovecraft in official police records? Particularly since by 1982 Lovecraft had already become a household name the world over...Of course, in the decade and a bit since then, many writers have hinted that the so-called Cthulhu mythos is more than mere fiction; that Lovecraft somehow stumbled onto a ‘nest’ of supernatural invaders and didn’t dare write of them as non-fiction for fear of being locked away, so instead he hinted at them in works of ‘fiction’. Drawing on the fact that H.P. Lovecraft died mysteriously in 1937, aged forty-six, hinting that he may have been murdered somehow by the Great Old Ones whom he wrote about....

“But, of course, that’s all supposition; none of it can be proven, and it wasn’t even hinted at (at least in my hearing) in 1982. But even if it had been, I wouldn’t have dared mention Great Cthulhu or the Great Old Ones in my official notes. Christ, I was within a few months of retiring when the murders started. The last thing I needed was to be given the push four months early and miss out on my pension....” He paused to gather his thoughts for a few moments, obviously feeling guilty under Bear’s questioning. “But I swear to you I did check out the bastards to the best of my ability. I’m almost certain that the Cult of Cthulhu was responsible for the eleven murders; some kind of weird blood sacrifices to call Great Cthulhu through into our world. But I couldn’t prove it then, and I can’t prove it now.”

I considered that for a while before deciding to shift my field of questioning a little by asking the old man about the Hilliards’ claim that Matthews and Strange had managed to detonate a controlled nuclear explosion on one side of Mount Peterson in August 1980.

Clearly surprised by the suggestion, Grimes considered for a moment before saying, “I guess anything is possible with that pair...There’s no doubt that there was one hell of an explosion around that area at that time....

“Did you investigate it at all?”

“Oh yes, Terry Blewett and I spent the better part of a month scouring the countryside, looking for the source of the explosion...but we never considered a nuclear blast. Our main thought was either space junk falling to Earth, like the U.S. Skylab not long before that...or more likely a meteorite.”

“A meteorite?” asked Bear Ross, sceptically.

“It can happen,” said Lawrie defensively. “Admittedly, due to the force-field effect, it’s unlikely, but it occasionally does happen.”

“Force-field effect?” asked Bear, obviously as puzzled as I.

“Yes, when a planet has three factors, a very heavy gravity, a very dense atmosphere, and a rapid rotation about its axis, all of which the Earth has, it effectively generates a force field at the outer rim of the atmosphere. That’s why meteorites rarely strike the Earth, but the moon, close by, looks like Swiss cheese. The moon has one-sixth the Earth’s gravity, no atmosphere, and no rotation about its axis. So any meteors, comets, et cetera passing by either smash into the moon or hit the Earth’s ‘force field’ and carom off like a billiard ball. Nonetheless, one occasionally does get through to the Earth...Which is what we assumed had happened in August 1980. Of course, we couldn’t find any debris, but we couldn’t possibly search every square centimetre of the forestland. And, of course, if it had been an ice-comet meteorite, it would have disintegrated upon impact.”

He paused to consider for a while before admitting, “Still, it could have been a nuclear blast, set off by those two loonies....” He scratched his chin ruminatively for a few seconds before adding, “Although considering what Matthews and Strange are into, it could have been something far more ominous....”

“More ominous than a nuclear blast?” asked Bear.

Lawrie looked across at the younger man guiltily, as though ashamed to admit what he was thinking in his presence. “If Matthews and friends hope to open some kind of portal between our world and Yuggoth, the explosion could have been the tearing of space itself caused by the opening of the portal. Considering what could shamble through such a portal, I’d suggest that was a hell of a lot more ominous than a mere nuclear blast.”


I left Lawrie Grimes’ Howard Street house more firmly convinced than ever that the people of Glen Hartwell suffered from some form of hereditary insanity. (A view seemingly shared by Bear Ross, who very sheepishly apologised as we drove away, saying, “You have to make allowance for Lawrie being in his seventies; his mind isn’t as sharp as it used to be.”) I was no longer sure what, if anything, I could believe of the crazy tale that I had been told by the Hilliards and the retired policeman. I half feared that they were all plotting together for some reason, to scare me into selling the Gables and leaving the Glen. Although the Hilliards had warned me not to sell out to Matthews and Strange, I decided that their true reason may well have been so they could make a bid for the mansion themselves.

Returning to Mount Peterson, once more, I found the Mitsubishi eagerly raced up the mountain even in first gear, as you would expect it to race down. Although it was only early afternoon, I decided against further investigating that day, deciding instead to retire to my uncle’s bedroom to leaf through the voluminous diaries of Lindsay Stafford, but without discovering anything new.

My uncle had also met the Hilliards along with other members of the Ordo Templi Australis, whom he had started off mistrusting, but whom he had soon come to regard as his allies: “My God, how wrong I have been in thinking that Matthews and Strange were mere harmless witches. If only that was all they were! I know now that Morton Matthews and leLande Strange are worshippers of an ancient, evil religion that predates the dawn of mankind! They have been trying for years to break through to far-off Yuggoth, or to call back Great Cthulhu from his eternal sleep beneath the waves...” he wrote at one stage, making me doubt the old man’s sanity, thinking, ‘Is anyone at all sane around this place?’ I half-wondered when the inverted laws of physics on the mount would start to affect me. Then I wondered whether they already had, whether my whole experience to date, including my encounters with Matthews, Strange, the Hilliards, and Lawrie Grimes, as well as the rain of seagulls, and even my uncle’s diaries, might all be part of some weird fever dream which I was having?

Common sense told me to leave the mount immediately, that very minute; abandon my clothes and flee in my Mitsubishi Magna, but after a short period of intense panic, my curiosity took control again and I decided to stay on, at least until I had discovered the truth, or otherwise of the Hilliards’ claims. ‘If the worst comes to the worst,’ I thought, ‘I can always abandon the Gables and move to a hotel in Glen Hartwell or Daley to continue my research.’

Flicking through Lindsay Stafford’s diaries again, I read, “Morton Matthews has been attempting to get in contact with one of the Great Old Ones for decades. Despite his appearance of being permanently in his mid-fifties, if the Hilliards are right, Matthews must be at least a hundred years of age!”

This told me nothing new, though; nothing that I had not already heard from Eleanor and Sebastian Hilliard. If the elderly couple were both certifiable, as seemed probable, then quite likely, when they had visited Lindsay Stafford, they had managed to infect my uncle with their madness. As they could have infected Lawrie Grimes when he interviewed them while investigating the eleven unsolved murders in mid-1982.

Turning over the page of the diary, I saw a whole series of photographs that were listed as a gift from the Hilliards. The photos were mainly grainy old black and whites, and like the photos of the Gables’ slow ascent up Mount Peterson, their subject was identical: the unsmiling visage of a widows peaked Morton Matthews, looking unagingly in his mid-fifties. But unlike the earlier photographs, these, although startling, were not as irrefutably convincing, as my Uncle Lindsay admitted: “Of course, a cynic might say that they are not all of the same man from the 1920s through to the 1990s. In theory, they could depict Morton Matthews, his father, various uncles, brothers, and other male relatives. Although exact look-a-likes are rare, even in families, they are not completely unheard of. If the pictures were of a great series of related men, each at the same age (in different years), theoretically (although improbably) they could look exactly alike at that age. Or at least enough alike so that their photographic images look identical, allowing for the fact that the camera most definitely CAN lie.”

Fascinated, even perplexed by the photos, I flipped back and forth through the dozen or more pages of pictures, rereading my uncle’s words until late in the evening.

Finally, I stood to stretch my back, which had started to cramp from the hours of sitting upon my uncle’s bed, and was almost hit by the crackling static snake, which materialised only centimetres in front of my face. As I jumped back out of the way, the snake coiled toward me as though it were a living thing which had seen (or sensed) my movement and followed me.

For a few seconds, as I continued to back away, it slowly coiled around my body like some kind of phosphorescent boa constrictor. Then, getting a grip on my nerves, I forced myself to stand rigidly still, and after a moment or two fluttering around me, the snake lost interest and unwound to slither across to Lindsay Stafford’s bed, which it hovered above for seemingly five minutes or more before finally vanishing....

To be quickly followed by the thud upon the corrugated-iron roof, followed by the clatter-crash of the still unknown animal racing helter-skelter across the iron roof.

It was only as the clatter-crashing finally settled down for the night that I heard the distant sound of chanting from the opposite side of the mount, although it had probably started much earlier and had been concealed by the crashing. Listening to the buzzing hum from my uncle’s bed, where I had finally gone to lie down, I decided to get to the bottom of things one way or the other the next day, which would mean another day spent in Glen Hartwell.


My first thought, however, after breakfast the next morning, was to take a short walk around to the opposite side of the mountain for another quick look at the black forest on the other side of Mount Peterson, where, according to the Hilliards, Matthews and Strange had detonated a controlled nuclear blast. One quick look at the charcoal forest was enough to convince me that whatever had caused the burnt patch, it had been no ordinary fire. But recalling Lawrie Grimes’ talk of a meteorite blast, I decided that that was a more likely explanation than a two-man nuclear explosion. Just as last time, I left the black forest after one quick look, then hurried back to my own side of the mount, where (I hoped) it was safe.

As I started my Mitsubishi on the slow, tedious drive down the mountain, the question was where to start my new day’s investigations? It was possible that old Lawrie Grimes knew more than he had told me the previous day, and might be more forthcoming without the presence of his replacement, Bear Ross, listening in. On the other hand, if I could track down the Hilliards (whose home address could be located from the local electoral rolls in the Glen Hartwell City Library, of course), it might be worth another chat with the elderly couple.

Throughout the drive to the Glen, my mind wavered between Lawrie Grimes and the Hilliards, before finally settling upon the elderly couple. Reaching Glen Hartwell, I drove up Blackland Street and had almost reached the library on the corner of Dirk Hartog Place, when my eye was caught by the fluttering of paper. Looking to my right, I saw an ad. for the Glen Hartwell Herald Daily Mail in a metal holder, and thought, ‘Of course, the newspapers!’ If eleven people had been butchered in the area in 1982, the newspapers would have had a field day revelling in all the gory details at the time, and would have back-copies or clippings stored in their records section.

Moments later, I pulled up outside the Herald Daily Mail, situated opposite the railway station in Theobald Street. The Mail was housed in a small-fronted, three-level building, with the printing presses on the top level, the reporters and business offices at ground level, and the records department in the basement. After paying the $25.00 finders’ fee, I explained to the small, balding, bespectacled records clerk, Mendell Watts, that I was interested in finding details of the eleven unsolved murders committed in the area in mid-1982....

“Oh yes, yes,” said Watts, hitching his glasses a fraction up the bridge of his nose with one finger, licking his lips, eyes shining from interest, “yes, I remember the case very well. As luck would have it, I only started working in the basement a few days before the first murder was committed...Otherwise, I might have missed some of the more sensational details!”

‘How lucky can you get!’ I thought, careful not to voice the thought aloud, for fear of offending Watts. It turned out to be fortunate for me that he had picked up the gory details, since apart from being able to locate clippings almost immediately, he was also able to supply me with many details off the top of his head, details which confirmed Lawrie Grimes’ story.

Deciding it would be a crime to waste Watts’ phenomenal knowledge I took the plunge and asked him about the Cult of Cthulhu and the Ordo Templi Australis. He professed to have never heard of the C.O.C. (and I have no reason to doubt his word); however, he chuckled at the mention of the OTA. “So you’ve heard of that, have you?” he asked, but then, seeing my blank look, “The lawsuit.”

“I’m sorry?” I said.

Realising that I had not heard the juicy details before, he quickly looked around to make certain none of his superiors were lurking in the basement, then, at a whisper, he explained, “Like most small country newspapers, the Mail tends to rush in where even fools fear to tread. When Sergeant Grimes investigated the first murders, he suspected the Ordo Templi Australis of being responsible.”

Reaching behind him, he had started to leaf through the large leather-bound cutting books, while talking and extracted a volume which he laid open before me on the rickety old wooden reading desk: “DEVIL WORSHIPPERS PERFORM EVIL BLOOD SACRIFICES IN GLEN HARTWELL!” the page one headlines announced.

“Somehow the Mail found out about the OTA,” explained Watts, “and promptly declared them guilty till proven innocent.”

“Police Chief Grimes suspects local devil worshippers, the Ordo Templi Australis, the Order of the Australian Knights, of complicity in the local ritual murders committed recently...” declared the Mail, going on to give an almost unbelievably inaccurate account of the OTA and the murders.

“Unfortunately,” explained Mendell Watts, fingering his glasses up along his nose again, “the OTA was quickly proven innocent. After a month or so Lawrie Grimes officially cleared the OTA of any involvement in the killings, and then on the advice of lawyers, the Ordo Templi Australis successfully sued the Mail, who had to cough up $50,000, a huge amount for a small country paper in those days, and had to print a formal retraction.”

He quickly leafed through the clipping book until locating a small cutting saying, “The Herald Daily Mail hereby wishes to apologise for an earlier article in which we unintentionally slandered a local fertility cult, the Order of the Southern Saints, by implying that they might be associated with the recent series of ritual-style killings, committed in the Glen Hartwell and Daley area.”

“They still didn’t get the OTA’s name right,” I pointed out.

Watts chuckled and then said, “No, the Mail never has been very big on accuracy.”

He happily pulled further volumes out of the racks, showing me the clippings on all eleven murders. But they told me little of importance about the OTA, and not a word about Matthews, Strange, or the mysterious Cult of Cthulhu.

Still hoping to get my $25’s worth out of Mendell Watts, I asked him about the ‘meteorite’ explosion in August 1980.

“Unfortunately, that was a little before my time,” admitted the records clerk. But after a few moments’ search, he managed to unearth a couple of small cuttings about the blast. But unlike the unsolved murders, which had warranted front-page headlines for a month and inside headlines for another three or four months, the two clippings were both from deep inside the paper. I remembered Lawrie Grimes saying that he had searched for the ‘meteorite’ for a month without ever locating it, and realised that without a 'body', the meteorite obviously was not as newsworthy as the eleven gory murders.

I stayed in the basement for another half hour or so, without learning anything new, before finally leaving. After checking my wallet, I decided I could afford the cost of one more $25.00 finder’s fee, so I stopped in next door at the premises of the Glen Hartwell Daily Record.

The Daily Record charged only $10.00 finders’ fee; however, without a record clerk of the order of Mendell Watts, they told me nothing new about the murders or the ‘meteorite’.

So, since it was still early in the day, I decided to call on the Hilliards at their home. But first, I called into the Glen Hartwell City Library, where the head librarian, Glenda Pettyjohn, quickly checked the electoral rolls to locate the Hilliards’ home address: 114 Jedasa Road at the southern end of Glen Hartwell. But my rapping went unanswered and I waited at the front door of the Hilliards’ small redbrick house for nearly five minutes before deciding to leave.

I considered calling on Lawrie Grimes, but decided instead to return to Mount Peterson, which turned out to be a fortunate choice, since I found the Hilliards waiting on the front porch for me.

“Hello,” greeted Eleanor tentatively, obviously anxious about what my reaction to them would be, aware of my negative reaction to them two days earlier.

Opening the front door, I invited the elderly couple inside. To my surprise, they each took a small silver talisman on a chain from around their necks. Holding both hands around the talismans, they chanted a few words which I could not make out but thought might be in Latin, then walked through the doorway and into the hall...without walking on their hands as I had done while entering the house.

Chuckling at my astonishment, Eleanor explained, “We told you that witches are worshippers of the Earth’s natural forces. Although the forces that grip the Gables are hardly of this world, after experiencing the upside-down effect a few times while calling upon Lindsay Stafford, we managed to devise a mantra to hold off the ‘demon at the doorway’ as we call the invisible entity.”

I shuddered at what the expression suggested; however, since the Hilliards claimed that their magic worked with elemental forces, I assumed (hoped!) that she had been speaking figuratively. But I had to admit to myself that it certainly felt like a powerful, clawed hand holding my ankles each time that I did a handstand while entering the house.

I invited the Hilliards into the downstairs living room, which, along with the bathroom, my uncle’s upstairs bedroom, and the kitchen were the only rooms in the three-storey mansion that I had taken the trouble to make liveable. As we seated ourselves around the room, I related my research to the elderly couple, although still a little uncertain whether I could really trust them.

“Good, good,” said Sebastian, obviously impressed by my endeavours. “We realise that our story must have been almost impossible to believe, thrown up at you out of the blue as it was. I’m glad to see that you had enough sense to do your own research, rather than merely reject our story out of hand.”

“Do you still think we are kooks?” asked his wife.

“Eleanor?” said Sebastian, shocked by his wife’s forthrightness.

Chuckling at her husband’s reaction, she added, “Or are you now prepared to believe us?”

“Your story seems a lot less crazy now than it did two days ago,” I admitted, drawing another chuckle from the old lady. “But there’s still one thing that puzzles me: You said that Matthews and Strange opened a portal between our world and Yuggoth with a nuclear explosion in August 1980, yet according to my Uncle Lindsay’s diaries, the 'inverted physics’ on Haunted Mountain goes right back to early 1935...?”

I paused, expecting a reply, but then, realising that the Hilliards did not understand my point, I added, “How could an explosion in 1980 be responsible for something which started thirty-five years earlier?”

“Oh no, no,” assured Eleanor, “you’ve obviously drawn the wrong conclusion from what we told you and what you have discovered. The inverse physics, as you call it on Haunted Mountain, was not caused by the nuclear blast, no, it was the other way around.”

This time it was my turn not to understand. “I’m sorry?” I said.

“Frankly, we have no explanation for how the physics on Mount Peterson became reversed. Somehow, a tiny portal between Earth and Yuggoth opened in 1935, ‘poisoning’, the physics of the mountain...We have no way of discovering how it occurred. After Matthews founded the Cult of Cthulhu in 1962, he spent more than a decade trying to open a portal between the two worlds, without any success. It was only bad luck that in 1973 he discovered Mount Peterson and immediately realised that a tiny portal had already joined the two worlds atop the mount. He and Strange spent seven years before finally detonating a nuclear blast, thereby widening the portal between the two worlds....

“At Woomera, they had the combined might of the Australian and English military behind them and only managed to achieve a very temporary portal. Strange and Matthews, working with only a few dozen followers and limited funds would never have had any hope at all of even minor success if they had not had the fortune to stumble across the existence of a tiny portal already on Mount Peterson.”

“So you see,” added Sebastian, “the nuclear blast opening the portal did not cause the weird physics of the mount; rather, the inverted physics of Mount Peterson allowed the portal to be widened.”

More thinking aloud than speaking to me, Eleanor said, “It must have been quite a shock to Matthews and Strange to find your Uncle Lindsay living upon the otherwise deserted mountain.”

“That’s why they spent twenty years trying to buy him out?”

“Yes.”

“But if they were ruthless enough to murder eleven people in 1982, in the vain hope of calling Cthulhu to appear before them, why didn’t they simply slaughter Lindsay Stafford when he refused to sell up and move away?”

“Because after the death of his wife, Gwendolyn, in 1920, your uncle became a recluse,” explained Sebastian. “He never went outside at night, and rarely even in the daytime. So they had little hope of trapping him. Of course, they visited him at the Gables, but after the first few times, from what he told us, your uncle was very suspicious of the pair and only spoke to them through the door.”

“Besides, if they had openly entered the Gables by day, then murdered him there was a good chance they would have been seen, or would have left fingerprints or other clues to lead to their capture....”

“Then why didn’t they simply burn down the mansion at night with my Uncle Lindsay inside? Since he lived on the third storey, there would have been little chance of my uncle getting out alive.”

The Hilliards exchanged a shocked look, and I wondered if I had offended them by talking so offhandedly about ways my uncle could have been murdered. After a while, Eleanor said, “You don’t seem to understand Mr. Richmond. The tiny portal, which the nuclear blast widened, is directly above the Gables. That’s why gravity reversed on the mountain in the first place: The portal acts like a magnet of sorts, trying to suck the mountain and everything on it through into Yuggoth....”

“Which is why the mansion crept up the mount in the first place,” interrupted Sebastian, “it was too large to resist the pull of the portal. But once at the top of the mount, the portal was not strong enough to pull it through into the next world, so the Gables have remained where it is for the last twenty-three years since reaching the top of the mount.”

‘Which would also explain my Mitsubishi racing backwards up the mountain!’ I thought, half-fearing that the portal might be strong enough to pull me and the car through into Yuggoth the next time that I drove the car, whereas it was not strong enough to pull a three-storey mansion through.

“Matthews and Strange have no way of knowing to what extent the existence of the portal is now linked to the Gables since they have been ‘connected’ for so long,” explained Eleanor. “Possibly burning down or blowing up the mansion might not affect the portal. But equally possibly, it might have the effect of closing the portal forever, making it impossible for the Cult of Cthulhu to bring any of the Great Old Ones through into our world.”

“So as long as they could not lure your Uncle Lindsay out onto the mountainside at night, all they could do was try to buy him out,” explained Sebastian.

We talked for a few minutes longer, and then I asked about the photos of Morton Matthews in Lindsay Stafford’s diaries. The Hilliards admitted to having provided my uncle with the photos, as they had provided him with newspaper cuttings about Woomera and about leLande Strange.

“How did you get the information about Strange?” I asked. “There was very little about the closure of Woomera in the newspapers at the time, and no hint of Great Cthulhu materialising there.”

“That’s one of the advantages of being witches,” answered Eleanor.

“You mean you can discover things by magical means?” I asked in awe.

Both the Hilliards chuckled at my expense at this, but then Eleanor explained, “No, I meant that we have contact with other witch covens around the world. The Ordo Templi Australis has a branch in Adelaide, and our High Priestess there, Helen Fogarty, tracked down Strange’s background history for us, after we had traced him back to South Australia. It was Helen who discovered that he had worked at Woomera and who unearthed the real reason for the rocket range’s mysterious shutdown.”

We talked until almost supper time, then, despite my invitation to dine with me, the Hilliards insisted that they had to leave. I had seen them back to the front door before thinking to say, “There is one last thing that puzzled me about my late uncle’s conduct.”

“What was that?” asked Eleanor.

“I’m puzzled that after shutting up most of the rooms of the mansion, he chose to live on the third storey. Allowing for the fact that he was unable to take care of such a big house by himself, I can understand the fact that he only kept a few rooms in liveable condition...But surely, particularly in his later years, when the two flights of stairs must have required a near-Herculean task to climb up and down, it would have made more sense for him to have lived on the ground floor?”

The Hilliards exchanged a guarded look for a moment, as though uncertain whether or not it was in my best interests to know the answer to the question, before finally Eleanor replied, “There were two reasons why Lindsay chose to live on the third storey. Firstly, because he feared that despite their reasons for not daring to break into the Gables, eventually Matthews and Strange might become desperate enough in their quest to acquire the mansion to throw all caution to the wind....”

“And naturally living on the first storey would have made him a much easier target,” explained Sebastian.

“But the main reason was that he was more than a little terrified of the ‘demon at the doorway’. Although our nature-magic allowed us to combat the phenomenon, your uncle became increasingly obsessed with the notion that it really was an invisible monster, rather than an effect of the mount’s topsy-turvy gravity.”

After seeing the elderly couple out, I started toward the kitchen to prepare myself a meal of steak and eggs. But before I had time to reach the kitchen, there came a loud rapping at the front door. Thinking that the Hilliards had returned for some reason, I raced back to open the door....

Only to be confronted by the unsmiling visages of Morton Matthews and leLande Strange. For a few seconds, none of us said anything, but finally, leLande Strange blurted out with his usual candour, “So you’re plotting with them against us!”

“Plotting with whom?” I asked, astonished by the outburst.

“With the Hilliards, of course!”

“I haven’t been plotting with anyone!” I insisted, angry at this treatment in my own house.

“We’ve been watching you!” admitted Strange before Matthews could stop him. “And we know that they’ve visited you at least twice!”

“Yes, to introduce themselves as my neighbours,” I lied. “Apparently, they were both very good friends of my late Uncle Lindsay.”

“Then you aren’t planning to sell the Gables to them?” asked Matthews.

“Of course not, they haven’t even made an offer for it.”

“Then perhaps you have had time to consider our offer?”

“I’ve considered it,” I admitted, “and have decided not to sell the Gables.”

“But you must sell...!” insisted Strange.

“Actually, I’ve been thinking of tearing down the Gables to build a new house on the site,” I said on the spur of the moment, to test their reactions. Matthews looked sick, and Strange looked as though he were about to pass out at the idea.

“But you can’t do that!” protested Strange.

“Why not? It’s my property.”

“But you might close...” began Strange, stopping as he received a withering look from Matthews. “But we might never be able to open,” he began, only to stop again, making me convinced at last that the Hilliards were the ones whom I could trust.

“Is that definite?” asked Morton Matthews in a rather ominous tone. “Your plans to tear down the mansion and rebuild on the site?”

Realising that if Lawrie Grimes and the Hilliards were right about Matthews and Strange, I could be putting my life at peril by angering the two men, I said, “No, it’s not definite. But I certainly have no plans to sell the Gables at this stage...Either to the Hilliards, or to you.”

Obviously deciding that they could jeopardise their plans by being too aggressive, Matthews now apologised for their earlier rudeness. “The Hilliards and we have long been vying for the opportunity to purchase the Gables, which is why we were upset about them calling on you. At the time of his death, Lindsay Stafford had as good as promised to sell us the mansion, but of course the Hilliards are very unscrupulous people and would not feel honour bound to tell you that,” he explained, although, of course, I knew from his diaries that my uncle had not trusted Matthews and Strange and doubted that he would ever have sold the mansion to them for any price.

“Well, as I said before, they have not even mentioned the subject to me,” I assured them truthfully. Then, not wanting to stay talking to the pair any longer, I pointed out that I had been on the way to make my tea when they had called. To my surprise, they left without further argument.

After supper, I returned to my uncle’s room to lie in bed and read through his diaries, which added very little to what I had already heard from the Hilliards and from Lawrie Grimes. I had been reading for hours when I almost dropped the diary from terror as the static hiss started across the air again, a thick yellow-white cord of energy slithering along the air like some bizarre electric sea snake, swimming through the atmosphere, less than a metre away from where I lay upon my late uncle’s bed.

I attempted to ignore the static snake to return to the diary. But almost immediately, the snake vanished as a loud thump resounded upon the corrugated iron roof, followed again by the sound of some large animal scuttling around the rooftop.

“Not again!” I said, getting up to go downstairs to investigate, taking with me a powerful flashlight to beam up toward the roof.

Shining the torch toward the roof, I finally saw the creature: It was like an obscene caricature of a gargoyle: Jet black, basically human in shape, but more than five metres in height, with large, membranous batwings extending from each of its six pairs of arms. Beneath and around the arms writhed dozens of long, snaking tentacles, attached to the ends of which were lethal, crab-like pincers that click-clicked continuously like bored castanet players.

As the torchlight shone upon it, the creature turned round quickly and glared toward me with its snake-like slitted eyes. Hissing more like a cat than a snake, the ‘gargoyle’ extended itself to its full height, waved its arms above its head menacingly, flapping its heavy membranous wings wildly.

It suddenly let out a hellish shriek like nothing I had ever heard before, and then leapt off the roof toward me!

Screaming from terror, I turned and raced across the mount toward my car, only hoping that I still had the keys to my Mitsubishi in my cardigan pocket.

As I climbed into the car, I looked back toward the Gables for an instant and saw the monster hovering in the air, flapping its wings furiously yet unable to fly more than a few metres away from the house. As I located my car keys and placed them in the ignition, I saw a small rectangle of blinding yellow light open in the sky above the mansion. In seconds, the rectangle expanded out above the monster, and it began to shriek hellishly, flapping its evil wings ever more wildly in a desperate attempt to break free from the rectangle of light, which I realised was the portal that my uncle’s diaries mentioned.

For just a moment, as the portal opened wider and wider, I caught a glimpse of an evil, nameless world on the other side. A world whose monstrous structures defied all known laws of physics and seemed designed to send any Earth architect into fits of screaming insanity. Then slowly the ‘gargoyle’ was sucked up into the portal of light, still shrieking its protest and struggling vainly, until it was pulled back into its own world.

As I started the car and headed down the mountain (with great difficulty), I remembered the words of Sebastian Hilliard a few days earlier, “Heaven help the world if anything does get through the portal between Earth and far off Yuggoth!” and my thoughts returned to the bite mark taken out of the mountainside a few days earlier, and to the question of what had caused the bite? Obviously not the gargoyle, for one thing, it had not been powerful enough to escape the pull of the portal to come further into our world than the roof of the mansion. But then on Earth there are billions of life forms, ranging from single-cell amoebae right up to giant whales; no doubt the same variety in shape and size applies to the life forms on Yuggoth also. As terrifying as the gargoyle had been, I realised that it was tiny compared to whatever behemoth had taken the bite out of the mount, presumably scooping up and devouring the dead seagulls, leaving the mountain covered in its teeth marks (which I had taken to be the grooves of a hoe or shovel). The fact that the bite and teeth marks were so far from the mansion showed that unlike the gargoyle, the unknown behemoth could (at least temporarily) escape the pull of the portal to enter much further into our world than the mansion, although possibly still not beyond the base of Mount Peterson, and I knew I had to escape before the unknown colossus returned.

Despite my panic, I forced myself to drive into Glen Hartwell, where, despite the late hour, I managed to get a room at Bateman’s Hotel in Lawson Street.

Early the next morning, I somehow summoned up the courage to return to Mount Peterson, after stopping at the nearest service station to buy two twenty-gallon Jerry cans of petrol.

I spent half an hour dousing the Gables inside and out, expecting at any moment to be stopped by Matthews and Strange. As it was, there was no sign of them until I had finished and was about to toss a flaming rag onto the mansion.

“No!” shrieked Matthews as they started across the mount toward me. “You don’t know what you’re doing!” But too late, I had already tossed the rag onto the three-storey building.

Doused in gasoline, the 160-year-old house went up like a bomb. It burnt furiously for fifteen minutes before the sky above the house began to crackle with lightning and thunder. The static hiss, which I had seen many times inside the house, now appeared outside, above the mansion. But not a single snake, rather dozens, then hundreds of static snakes whiplashing above the mansion as thunder and lightning continued to rage. After twenty minutes or so, there came a deafening roar, high above the Gables, like a great atomic blast in the sky, throwing the three of us to the ground, clutching our ears in agony.

When I dared look up again, I saw the rectangular portal of yellow light had opened wide above the mansion again, revealing the visages of myriads of indescribable, tentacled, winged monstrosities, ranging in size from the gargoyle I had already seen to great leviathans, many times larger than any whale.

Seeing the great, gaping portal, Matthews and Strange began to laugh from near hysterical joy; obviously thinking that my plans to seal shut the portal had backfired. But their laughter ended abruptly when there was another great explosion and the portal slammed tightly shut.

Instantly, the roaring thunder, lightning and whiplashing static snakes above the mansion all vanished, leaving the mountain strangely silent. For only a few seconds, before the mansion began to creak and groan alarmingly.

“Noooooooooo!” shrieked Morton Matthews, realising before I did what was about to happen.

“What...?” I started to ask, but my words were cut off as the three-storey building started to slip down the side of the mountain. At first slowly, but then quickly picking up speed, until it was racing down the slope like a roaring express train.

The three of us stood together watching in amazement as the mansion raced down the mountain, only stopping as it reached the bottom....

It crashed into the level ground with a sound like a dynamite explosion, collapsing into a great mound of firewood, unable to survive atop the mount away from its foundations, after gravity returned to normal, when the portal to the far-off planet Yuggoth had slammed shut forever.

THE END
© Copyright 2025 Phil Roberts
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia