Cassey felt a weight in her chest. Something unnatural was happening here. She guessed Cruise felt it too for he backed away quickly.
Selene went silent.
The lights flickered. Selene’s mouth snapped wide open with a ‘click.’ The lights flashed again, then went out.
The following scream made Cassey drop her phone and cover her ears in pain. Even then it overwhelmed her, sending her down to her knees.
Selene’s voice was more akin to a siren than anything a human being could produce.
The light from outside, meagre as it was, illuminated Selene’s shadowy form. Cassey stared at her, her fingers gripping painfully into her scalp. Then, to her added horror, the woman’s chest started to pulse.
A dark shape filled the window, and the glass exploded.
Instinct made Cassey duck her head, small pieces of glass hitting her hair and back as she curled herself into a ball.
A deep, bass-filled buzzing sound, even louder than Selene’s wail, filled the room.
Cassey heard something clamber in through the broken window, a noisy scraping followed by a ‘thud.’
The buzzing was so powerful it made her teeth rattle. She was absolutely terrified. An animal whine escaped her lips.
The drone wavered, then formed words. “Time to end this. The probe is broken.”
Thudding footsteps followed, footsteps that paused terribly close to where she crouched.
“Not yet. We can repair it.” This, another buzzing voice, came from the doorway behind her.
“What of the others?” it continued. “This interference is unwanted.”
More thumping followed, from both sides of the room.
“Neutralize the male,” the first voice said. “The other bears observing, after some adjustments.”
A heavy, vibrating object touched her head.
“Sleep Cassandra,” the unseen horror said, and the noise and fear disappeared.
* * * *
When she considered how insistent Cruise had been for her to help, Cassey felt annoyed at this sudden cancellation. The text had arrived a few minutes after her arrival at the FIKA bar, and read: ‘Sorry Ms. Bane. All is resolved now. Bill me the hours.’
She hadn’t bothered replying, yet. Rather, she sat drinking her rapidly cooling espresso while thinking over her day so far.
Even without this, her morning had been a bad one. Her car had been broken into overnight—nothing of value taken, just a smashed window and some ransacking. Then there was her laptop, dying as soon as she powered it up in the office.
Most of her files were backed up on the Cloud, so only those pertaining to Cruise were gone, and what loss were they, really?
“Might as well get back to other cases,” she said, and retrieving her cellphone from the table, dropped it in her inside pocket. But there’s something I’m forgetting here. What is it?
Cassey shook her head. She swallowed the rest of her coffee, rose from her seat, and left the café.
THE HUTCHISON BOY, by Darrell Schweitzer
Caleb Hutchison was over at our house, playing video games with my son Jackie the night the world ended.
It was cold that evening. Late October at the New Jersey shore is not exactly beach blanket weather, but there was Caleb at the front door of our cottage as he always was, dressed in rags that must have been adult cast-offs, a checkered flannel shirt that fit him like a tent, with the elbows out, and baggy jeans torn off just below the knees; he was barefoot as always, which wouldn’t have been unexpected for a beachfront in July, but in thirty-something weather with the wind howling and spray and maybe even sleet ratting against the windowpanes, and him sopping wet with his pale, wispy hair plastered to his head, and himself so appallingly skinny that his limbs looked like pale, bluish sticks, the result was that before he could say more than a faint “Hello” my wife Margaret had screamed, “Oh my God!” and hauled him off to the bathroom, where after a minute or so I could hear the shower running and steam poured out from under the bathroom door. Then the hair drier was going, and by the time she produced him again Caleb wore a pair of borrowed jogging pants and a sweat shirt that drooped down to his knees and a bathrobe over that and fluffy slippers, and only then did he manage to blurt out, “Can I play with Jackie now?”
A minute later you could hear the two of them laughing over the assorted beeps, whistles, and explosions from the game console in the TV room.
The borrowed clothes were actually mine, because, for all he was about the same age as Jackie, twelve or so, Caleb was a full head taller and his build was so different from that of our rather short, chubby offspring that nothing of Jackie’s would have fit.
It occurred to me that Caleb hadn’t been shivering. Margaret had described him as “cold as ice” but he hadn’t seemed the least bit uncomfortable.
“Where are that boy’s parents? That’s what I want to know,” Margaret whispered to me angrily.
It was a good question. I didn’t have an answer.
“That kid’s got some kind of weird skin condition,” she added. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
I just remained silent.
It was later that night that the power went off, and never came back on again. I don’t think it ever will.
* * * *
As for the question of where Caleb Hutchison’s parents were, the answer was they lived somewhere north of us along this remarkably undeveloped stretch of southern Jersey ocean front, past what the kids called Dead Man’s Cove for its alleged piratical associations, a swerve of shore and bend of bay which was actually rocky along its edge—unusual in these parts—so that it was more practical, especially at low tide, to wade across than make your way around by land, particularly if you were barefoot, which helped explain why Caleb usually showed up at our place wet; which explained nothing at all, really, such as why Caleb showed up at all, but I confess I was not paying attention.
Caleb had become Jackie’s new best friend that summer. I was glad for that, because Jackie was picked on at school and it was good for him to have a friend at all, even a weird one, even if they made a Mutt and Jeff or Laurel and Hardy type pair. (Caleb, oddly, knew those references. Jackie, of course, did not.)
Could I meet Caleb’s parents sometime, like maybe when I drove him home some night?
No, there wasn’t any road to their place. Caleb always left on his own, wading along the water’s edge, even if it was very late.
Besides, they were busy with their “church.”
We were different, I knew. I and my family were summer people. They were all-year-round people, though I gathered, not native New Jerseans, but originally from somewhere much farther north, some place in New England I’d never heard of, whence the family had fled years and years ago after the Great Persecution of 1927, whatever that was.
(I tried to look it up on Wikipedia. Nothing. Another of Caleb’s stories. He was full of stories.)
Okay, so my son’s best and only friend and constant companion was this weird urchin whose parents probably belonged to some even weirder cult and probably chanted gibberish while sacrificing nude virgins; girls, I hoped, which would leave Jackie safe, and Caleb too; and this is where I admit that I’m selfish and a bad parent and neglectful—though never abusive toward my own kid—because, you see, our presence at the Shore that year was not entirely a vacation. I was trying to work. Here I was the alleged Highly Artistic Novelist, the hottest thing since Thomas Pynchon, and, for all I lied non-stop to agents and publicists and editors about How Well The Book Was Coming, the truth of the matter was I was tearing my hair out and completely empty of ideas and writing shit that I couldn’t show anyone. Margaret was a teacher of languages nobody cared about, who was about to be laid off from the Philadelphia school system, and, oh by the way, an up-and-coming part-time professional photographer who suddenly seemed to be a no-timer because she couldn’t get any assignments. So you will appreciate that the two of us were . . . under a considerable amount
of stress for our own vain and petty (not to mention financial) reasons, and when we were not on the phone, begging or cajoling or telling outright lies, we were all too often screaming at each other, enough so that she said we needed counseling and I said she needed a shrink or maybe just a lobotomy. And for all, in some deep, inner drawer of my brain I still loved her and Jackie and wanted everything to be happy the way it once was (in our imagination at least), there were surely times when I concluded that my whole life up to this point had been a mistake and I should have remained unmarried and become a shoe salesman.
A sure thing. I mean, everybody needs shoes, right?
Except maybe Caleb.
The deep dark secret, I think, is that Margaret likewise was glad Jackie had a friend, for all the right, maternal reasons, but for all the wrong ones too. Translation: it got him out of the way so we could fight with each other and not have him see it.
May and June, I heard a lot about Caleb at the dinner table, but I hadn’t met him. Margaret seemed to be in on the secret well before me; maybe she had; maybe, I sometimes suspected this Caleb was a collective hallucination between the two of them, the kind of imaginary playmate who told Jackie the most remarkable things. I mean, why else would a twelve-year-old who liked video games, comics, and Japanese animation be asking me if there really was a golden city under the ocean near here, a place with shining pillars, where fish-men lived forever and worshipped a god that looked like a giant frog?
No, I had to admit, I didn’t know anything about that.
Maybe it was something he got out of the comic books, which, I understand, have become a lot more challenging than they were when I was Jackie’s age, or maybe it was the anime, which never made sense to me anyway.
But Caleb knew all about that kind of thing.
And there was that night when neither Margaret nor I had noticed that Jackie was gone until it was almost dawn, and we caught him sneaking back into the house, and he admitted that he’d been out on the beach with Caleb, looking at the stars where they “opened” (which was apparently Caleb’s phrase) and making marks in the sand with sticks that somehow glowed (whether the sticks, the marks, or both, I am not sure) while talking to voices from out of the air.
That we didn’t do anything, that we just let things proceed without any intervention, I feel guilty about now. Yes, it was bad parenting.
It must have been about the first of July that I came home from what I was pretending was a research trip, and there was supper on the table, and an extra place set because we had been joined by the elusive Caleb, who smelled of seawater and was barefoot and wore cut-offs and a ripped tank-top that fit him so badly he looked damned near naked in the thing. My first thought is that this is the kid who is so skinny that when he comes into the schoolroom sideways the teacher marks him absent, and my second was that I wondered if he ever went to school. The next thing I did was give him an old Philadelphia Phillies t-shirt of mine, which fit him like a night-gown, but he put it on and gravely said, “Thank you, Sir.”
Oddly, for a kid who knew how to say “Thank you, Sir,” he also gave me the initial impression at dinner that he didn’t know what a fork was for, but he was a good mimic, and sly about it, and I could tell he was watching us before he did anything, and after a minute or so he definitely had the hang of it. He ate ravenously too, everything Margaret could feed him, but it was like all the food went into hyperspace, not into his stomach, because it never seemed to make him even an ounce heavier.
But when he started to talk, I forgot all that, even as I forgot I was talking with a twelve-year-old at all. I began to wonder if Jackie’s new friend wasn’t the next budding Einstein, because he did mention hyperspace, and something about “angles in space-time” and the stars being “right” and a lot of stuff I just couldn’t follow at all. I glanced over at Margaret, and she looked blankly back and shook her head, but, incredibly Jackie, who had never been very good at school, seemed to have some idea what Caleb was talking about, like it was a private language between them; and they did use some gibberish words between them, a little furtively, which definitely were not English, maybe something from that weirdo church that Caleb’s parents belonged to.
But then dinner was over and the two of them ran off into the TV room and they were just kids again.
That summer, you will recall, was the Summer of Strangeness, or the Time of Signs, or whatever you want to call it. There were lights in the sky at night, which nobody could explain, sometimes great swirling spirals of color that would last until dawn. Sometimes the stars themselves seemed to ripple. The pundits and the papers and the internet were full of talk of UFOs and the Second Coming and gravitational disturbances, solar storms, and whatnot. It was also a time of storms on Earth, and after Superstorm Obed wiped out Miami and New Orleans pretty much for good this time, and the sea level rose even faster than the Global Warming alarmists said it would, people began to get the idea that this was, maybe, serious. As a result, several new wars broke out in the Middle East, and a couple in Europe, and the End of Days Militia made its famous stand outside of Tucson and died to the last man.
There were things seen in the ocean, sometimes photographed and shown on Facebook (before they were mysteriously taken down) that didn’t make much sense either. And I can tell you that not too far from us, down in Port Norris, something washed up on the beach, the size of a railroad car, with flippers but with an almost human face. I saw it myself. I stood there in the mid-day sun watching the thing melt away like wax. The newspapers said it was a whale. Then they didn’t say anything.
With phone service intermittent and a national emergency declared, our failing careers seemed to have less and less to do with reality, but still Margaret and I soldiered on. By about the middle of August Margaret got a call telling her that she definitely would not be returning to her job in the fall, and on the 20th, my literary agent shot himself, so, yeah, it was a great summer.
Jackie and Caleb did what boys do, off by themselves much of the time. They seemed to be having fun.
Caleb came over a lot more often. He was around most days, at least until he and Jackie went traipsing off on their latest adventure.
One day Jackie asked me if the two of them could borrow a shovel.
“Are you going to dig up pirate treasure?” I asked him.
“Yeah, Caleb knows where there is some. Over by the Cove.”
I looked over at Caleb for confirmation, but he just glanced down at his feet and wiggled his toes in the sand. He was wearing the ill-fitting tank top again that day, and it struck me that for all the tank top didn’t cover much of anything, he was still almost impossibly pale, but he didn’t have sunburn either. There was something odd about his eyes. They seemed about to pop out of his face.
But I didn’t say anything and just gave them the shovel. Off they went, and very much to my surprise, they found something. I won’t say they unearthed an old-fashioned sea chest, but when they came back they’d converted Jackie’s t-shirt into a sack by tying the sleeves together; and when they dumped the haul out onto our kitchen table, it thumped heavily, and, God damn it, really looked like gold. Margaret protested as sand and pebbles rattled onto her clean floor, but she was as quiet as was I when she stared at the gleaming heap of strange jewelry and a misshapen crown of some sort and dozens of what might have been coins, though they were irregular in shape and the size of large cookies, and stamped with what might have been swirling tentacles.
Caleb rummaged among the pile and selected a pedant that looked a bit like a fish and partially like a man. It was on a thin chain. He put it around his neck.
“This is all I need,” he said. “You can have the rest.”
Jackie found another such pendant and put it on. Margaret only gaped at the two of them, speechless. Then they went outside like nothing had happened, and were just boys again, and I think they spent much of the night on the porch swing, reading manga comics by the porch light.
I swept the
rest of the gold into a cardboard box. Judging by its weight, I did not doubt that it really was gold. I couldn’t imagine where it had actually come from.
“Well, this ought to alleviate our financial worries for a while,” I said, and the look Margaret gave me indicated that she knew as well as I did just how stupid that sounded.
* * * *
But even stupidity may contain its own nuggets of wisdom, or turn out to be prophetic, because only a few days later there was a “completely unprecedented” earthquake in eastern Pennsylvania, and the earth swallowed up a good deal of Philadelphia, even the high parts in the Northeast, which were definitely above the fall line. When a neighbor finally got through to my cell phone he said our house was gone. There was nothing worth salvaging. “Just a smoking hole in the ground,” is what he said.
So we were going to have to stay down at the Shore beyond Labor Day. We registered Jackie in the local school, and he started to attend. Caleb was not in his class, or there at all.
Then there came the cold night in October when the power went out for good.
Jackie let out a yell. “Dad! Can you fix it?”
I went and checked the circuit-breakers, but no, I could not fix it. The phone was dead too. I tried my cell. No signal.
I couldn’t fix it. Nobody could.
So there were the two of them, sitting alone in the dark in the TV room, and I tried to tell myself it was only my imagination that Caleb’s eyes seemed unnaturally wide and faintly luminous.
Then the sounds came. That was also the first night of the Boomers or the Voices from the Sea or the Heralds of the Apocalypse, or whatever you want to call them.
At first I thought it was a ship’s horn, then a fog horn, then several fog-horns. Caleb got up. He led Jackie by the hand. Margaret and I could only follow the two of them out into the darkness, down to the beach. It was still raining, and there was sleet in it. Caleb led us all. He’d kicked off the fluffy slippers and discarded the bathrobe, but, still wearing my sweat shirt and running pants, he stood in the surf, gazing out to sea, where, in the otherwise impenetrable gloom, lights began to appear; like spheres rising out of the black water, like moons, I thought, no, like eyes, opening. From out of that darkness and distance, from those glowing whatever-they-were came the sounds, a deep and thunderous booming at first, but then the notes began to modulate and they became a kind of song, which Caleb answered, making whistling and howling and screeching sounds that I swear no human throat has ever made.
The Third Cthulhu Mythos Megapack Page 18
