by Jay Lake
I counted to a hundred, but no knock came. Neither did the floorboard squeak again. Taking my courage in hand, I crept to the door and pressed my ear against the varnished wood, my nose reporting old oak, turpentine, and mold. I expected stentorian breathing, or some harsh life-noise of rough trade waiting to spring upon me.
Silence.
Noting that the clock now reported 7:15 of the evening, I rallied my intestinal fortitude and cracked open the portal, keeping the stout brass chain in place. I cannot say who or what I expected to find without, but no one stood in the hall.
Only the broad-brimmed hat lay there, upside down as if carelessly discarded before my door. Another piece of cardstock had been dropped into the inverted crown.
I listened a moment, for surely the visitor had not departed. I’d heard no footsteps, the floorboard had not squeaked, neither stairs nor front door had echoed in their invariable manners. Still, I heard no breathing, nor the rustling silence that usually shouts of a person holding themselves still and secret.
Either my visitor was a practitioner of one of those Asiatic arts of noiseless assault and stealthy concealment, or they had contrived to noiselessly vanish from the upstairs hall of my building. Into the apartment of one of my three immediate neighbors? I’d heard no knock, no click of latch, no usual murmur of polite social intercourse.
Once more summoning my courage, for by now I was deeply and obscurely disturbed, I pushed my door to, unsecured the chain, then opened it to step out into the fearful precincts that were my own front hallway transformed.
Only a hat threatened me. Damp, silent, inner band still warm from someone’s head, with a further bit of cardstock left carelessly therein. An afterthought, missive from an uncaring universe. I pulled on a latex glove from the supply I keep always in my pockets and carefully lifted the card.
Unadorned, unaddressed, this time smelling of pocket lint and damp wool, one side proclaimed “UTTON,” the other simply read “FRIDAY, 10:17 A.M.” in the same hasty hand and splattered fountain pen.
With a sigh, I took my prizes and retreated to the dubious safety of my apartment.
* * *
I washed my hands a good long while with three different soaps while contemplating my next move. Clearly some game was afoot, though I understood nothing of it yet. Just as clearly this was not a matter for the authorities. What complaint should I bring to the police? That someone had gifted me with a hat and a pair of odd notes? Unfair as it might be, I was already aware of my reputation in certain sections of the city. The compromise of my dignity through the mandatory psychiatric confinement of two years ago was unjust, as any reasonable person could see, but neither the courts nor the medical authorities were overly concerned with reason, preferring instead their petty little rules and straitened expectations.
No, I could expect no help from those quarters. I was, as usual in this life, set upon my own devices once more.
Properly cleansed, I examined the hat with stainless steel tongs and a lacquered chopstick. Under my patient and persistent prodding, the headgear revealed no particular secrets. It was a fine-grained leather, lined with dark maroon silk. There was no maker’s label or stamp on the inner band, though the threading indicated high-quality work, most likely a bespoke effort.
My children’s monster in the street had been a fashionable fellow, for all his or her air of menace.
After much thought, and no little steeling of my resolve, I tugged on a latex skullcap. My hair, auburn ringlets of which I allowed myself small vanity, fit well enough beneath. This was little different from those times when I dressed myself to be someone else in the world. After spraying the inside of the hat with disinfectants, I gingerly placed it upon my head.
Gloves and skullcap, I reminded myself. It would not touch the flesh of my body.
I stood and regarded myself in the mirror above the mantel. Adjusting the brim, I thought I could pass for the stranger in a view from above. Should that ever be necessary.
Passing was a skill of mine, carefully cultivated against necessities both dire and trivial. Binding or padding my breasts, lifts in my shoes, a change to the curve of my spine and shoulders, the proper wig—I could be anyone.
Except yourself, a voice whispered. After a moment’s startle, I recognized it for my own.
* * *
On Friday morning, the city was gloomy but no longer half-drowned. Not for the moment, at any rate. I sat by my window, the broad leather hat totemically perched upon my head. My street was busier than at the previous visitation; crowded with the usual midmorning traffic of rag pickers, letter carriers, delivery men, and harried mothers with preschool children.
I watched for the shambling visitor, and was not disappointed. Soon the mysterious figure appeared from behind a dark brown package truck disgorging some mercantilist sending into the home at 1406, near the beginning of my block. They shambled once more, this time bare-headed as any clown, curled hair moving in slight breeze outside. The car coat flapped, and their pace seemed more vigorous today. Of course, if my visitor cultivated anonymity, a slow, menacing gait would not be their best choice at such a busy hour.
Once again they disappeared from view just below me. Once again the front door swung open with the squeal of distressed hinges, the steps echoed, the floorboard outside my door squeaked. Once again there was no knock, only a psychic miasma of menace. Once again I stood, listening, waiting with the patience of snakes until the old railroad clock struck half past the hour.
I threw the door open in an outburst of showmanship to find a pair of tall leather boots in the hall, another cardstock note propped between them.
Elusive, once again.
* * *
Through the entire afternoon I scanned the sky for serpents. Sometimes I glimpsed the bladed and bloody future, another aspect of my life for which neither the civil authorities nor the medical establishment had any patience. The world to come leaves its tracks around us in the frost on hearses, railroad car graffiti, visible-but-secret patterns in park plantings and concert posters plastered to brick walls. One needs only attune oneself to read this.
I mostly keep my distance from these truths. They disrupt the flow of my life and introduce fears that can overwhelm. But the emergent structure of mysterious notes and visitations reminded me all too much of my prior visions.
So I watched, and waited, trying to catch sight of what might yet come.
Nothing emerged from the watercolor clouds but rain and more rain. No writhing tentacles, no bleary eye of God staring down in indifferent judgment. Haruspication is a lost art at the best of times, and my own small precognition has rarely served to provide more than trouble.
I was not sure this was trouble. Yet, something still moved.
* * *
“REED” was scheduled for “SUNDAY, 4:44 P.M.” I spent the day scrubbing down the apartment. I was out of lye, but was able to compensate with some additional HCl at 32 percent concentration. I wanted to be ready, and the cleansing always aided my thinking. The idea of installing small cameras in the hall seemed logical enough, but was beyond my means both fiscally and technically. I was reluctant to wait outside and watch. My usual horror of the filth of the world was very much at issue, but also an inner sense on my part that if I broke the pattern, so would my visitor.
So I scrubbed and thought, thought and scrubbed, and focused on what would come next. Perhaps I should throw open the door as soon as I heard footfalls on the stairs? Or wait for the creaking of the floorboard?
Except this had already assumed the aspects of ritual. Breaking a ritual was a fearful thing. I could not even bring myself to vary the order in which I filled my small basket at the grocery store every Sunday afternoon. How could I violate this implied trust?
In the end, I waited in the window, boots upon my clingwrap-coated feet, hat upon my latex-capped head. Just about 4:40 my visitor appeared, walking more slowly due to the crowding of the street. Visibly female now, her car coat flapped
behind her, her bare head flashing with auburn curls. From my vantage, she appeared to be barefooted.
I waited until she passed out of my sight into my building, then leapt to my door, a scrubbed and polished fireplace poker in my hand. The usual noises proceeded in the usual order, until I heard my neighbor’s door creak open. Mrs. Willets, in 2B, across the hall.
She must be even now encountering my mysterious visitor at the head of the stairs! I heard the murmur of voices, but could not make out what was said, even as I strained. The tones seemed to be those of guarded familiarity, not challenge.
I realized then with sick horror that everyone in my building was in on the conspiracy. My visitor left her gifts before my door, then slipped silently into Mrs. Willets’s apartment to outwait me.
No one was to be trusted. I’d learned that lesson practically in my cradle. But I’d let uncouth familiarity dull my wariness of those on whom most suspicion should naturally fall—the people around me every day. They were most in a position to deduce the patterns of my life, find my secret vulnerabilities, coöperate in a clandestine manner with the police and the doctors.
Angry now, I hurled open my door, poker at the ready.
Nothing was before me but a folded leather car coat and a piece of cardstock.
Frustrated, I stalked up and down the hall twice, but there was nowhere to hide and no one hiding there. Mrs. Willets was gone. The visitor was gone.
I used the tip of the poker to pick up the car coat—it took several tries—then kicked the cardstock through my open door. I retreated, shutting, chaining, and double-locking myself into the now-dubious safety of my apartment.
I did not want to have to move.
When I dumped the car coat onto the floor, I saw that the tip of the poker was mucky with some foulness. On close inspection, it was a mix of blood and hair. I whirled around, weapon at the ready, to see a naked woman slumped in my flowered wingback chair. Her neck was bent at an odd angle, while blood caked the right side of her face. Oddly, she wore a latex skullcap just like mine, and latex gloves no different from my own. Her features were as familiar as my mirror.
No, I thought. Not again.
I hurled the incriminating poker away from me. It clattered against the steam heater, then wound up beneath, leaving a deep maroon smear on my hardwood floor. Heedless, I picked up the cardstock and looked at it.
“URDER,” it read. “TOO LATE NOW.”
I understood that message well enough. It could be translated as, “We are coming, beware.”
Stepping to the window, I checked the sky for signs. Serpents flew from the house of the sun. The first of many sirens wailed in the distance.
Bare-headed and bare-handed, I shrugged myself into my car coat, donned my leather hat, pocketed my stack of cut-up cardboard and my father’s fountain pen, and stepped out into the glittering barbs of the gimlet-eyed future.
The filth of my life I left behind me.
Such Bright and Risen Madness in Our Names
* * *
And this is me directly writing in Lovecraft’s world. Which is great good fun, if you’re feeling creepy enough.
* * *
I
“Long have we dwelt in wonder and glory.”
The passwords are ashes in my mouth. The last of the First Resistance was crushed eight years ago, when shoggoths swarmed the final submarine base hidden in the San Juan Islands at the mouth of Puget Sound, but the Second Resistance struggles onward, ever guttering like a starveling candle flame.
My contact nods, his—or her? Does it matter anymore?—head bobbing with the slow certainty of a collapsing corpse. The Innsmouth syndrome transforms so many of us, who were once human. The voice croaking a response bespeaks more of the benthic depths than any child of woman born. “Such bright and risen days these are.”
And simply as that, I am admitted to the tiled lodge here at the mouth of the Columbia, amid the ruins of Astoria. We meet with our rituals and our secret rooms in imitation of Dagon and the Silver Twilight, because their rites worked.
Oh, we were warned. Lovecraft, Howard, Smith—they had a glimpse of the truth, which they disguised as fiction. Who believed? People actually made up games about the Old Ones. As if the mile-long shattered corpse still rotting across the Seattle waterfront nine years after the U.S. Air Force’s last bombing run could be made into a joke, or a rattle of dice.
All that saves us now is inattention. Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, all are like children in their godhood. Dead, they lay so long dreaming that they lost the habit of attending to the world, except through such rites as move them.
The First Resistance fought the elder gods themselves. But how does a B-2 fly against something that can warp the very fabric of the stars with the power of its mind? The Earth’s new masters did not need their priests to awaken them to those dangers, not after the Dunedin and Papeete nuclear strikes.
The Second Resistance struggles against the priests instead. Dread Cthulhu could snuff my life with the merest of thoughts, but he will no more bother to do so than I will snuff the life of a single amoeba deep within my gut. Traveling across 600 million years of time and space, then slumbering aeons beneath the waves in lost R’lyeh, does not equip one for such minutiae. His priests are the immune system, seeking to eradicate the last, hopeless glimmerings of human liberty and free spirit.
This lodge meets within the battered Sons of Finland hall along Astoria’s deserted waterfront, in the shadows of the ruined Astoria-Megler Bridge. This was once a thriving coastal city of nineteenth-century sea captains’ mansions, twentieth-century fisheries, and twenty-first-century tourism.
No more. Not a mile out on the bar of the Columbia River loom the unearthly non-Euclidian geometries of one of the cyclopean Risen Cities, strangely angled walls that endlessly glimmer a feeble green while screams echo across the water. Our priestly enemies hunt far and wide, but even under their noses we are scattered and furtive. We never see the stars anymore, and little of the sun, for the Old Ones’ emergence and the nuclear attacks of the First Resistance wrapped the Earth in permanent winter that varies only a little by season. A man may walk from Oregon to Washington across the frozen Columbia seven or eight months out of the year.
We are in the old ballroom now, a baker’s dozen of us. That number would once have been deemed unlucky, but Cthulhu and his fellow, rival gods have drained the world of luck.
The doorward drops his cowl. He is newly come among us, and must prove himself. Now I see he is a woman, as she lifts off a crowning mask that has misshaped her head. Beneath she is actually a reasonable-seeming human being, albeit as grubby and hunger-raddled as the rest of us. She slips from her robe as well, unhooks a padded hump, releases bindings on her legs, and stands straight, clad now in only blue jeans and a faded black T-shirt advertising a band called Objekt 775.
This is like looking at a piece of the past. I wonder where her parka is.
Inspired, I slip my cloak free and let it fall, along with my own fatigue coat, until I am clad only in ragged thermal underwear and combat boots. I am barely transformed, my hands overlarge and my fingers overblunt, but the change seems to have stopped there, as can happen with we who resist strongly enough.
Around me, others remove their cowls and hoods and cloaks, until we stand as an array of human and formerly human faces. Some eyes are bulbous and unblinking, others scowl furiously, but we all have the full measure of one another for the first time in years.
Also for the first time in years, as I look at our doorward, I feel stirrings in my groin. A natural woman …
“I am come from the lodge in Crescent City,” she announces. Now her voice is blessedly normal as well. “Bringing news from Mendocino and further south.” There are no lodges in the formerly great cities of the world, because none of those cities remain whole and unpolluted. “A lodge along the Sea of Cortez has made an important discovery. We have found a poison that will harm even the undying priests amid their armors and the
ir spells.”
“Despite the Old Ones’ protection?” I ask.
“Yes.” She smiles at me, and I am erect for the first time in years.
II
Just as foretold, the Old Ones are stripping the Earth from pole to pole. They are in no hurry, not by human standards—surely they perceive time so differently from us, this past decade may all be a single moment not yet passed to them, one thunderous tick of the clock of the long now.
Strangely, in places of some technology where electricity can still be induced to function, odd corners of the world away from the attention of the priests and their gods, we find that many of our space assets remain in order. Curiously, this is despite the abilities of the Byakhee and Mi-go to traverse the emptiness between planets. The last cosmonauts starved on the ISS seven years ago, and the station has since fallen burning from the sky, but their observations had proved invaluable. Likewise weather and spy satellites, not all of which have yet strayed from their courses or lost their mechanical minds.
The world’s cities were crushed or blasted or sickened, sometimes by human effort in the First Resistance, more often by the Old Ones themselves when they finally stirred from their watery graves. Now great, slow waves of fungal rot progress across the continents like a nightmare tide, swallowing forests and prairies and bottomlands alike. I’ve been as far east as Estes Park, and looked down on the Great Plains being scoured to bedrock. The mountains and coastlines are yet spared, but surely that is only a matter of time.
With this data, and a tenuous network of wanderers and observers, the Second Resistance has our guesses about how many years are left to do something against the priests who focus the lamps of the Old Ones’ eyes like mad projectionists beaming death about the world. That the gods themselves are narcoleptic was perhaps the world’s saving grace, before someone, somewhere, finally succeeded in summoning them to shore in their fullest strength.
