Cthulhu Fhtagn!

by Laird Barron

  His stomach convulsed and expelled whatever was left inside, which felt like nothing. This was what Gary feared—the dry heaves, with that endless span of trapped time that never seemed to end, freezing him in panic forever. Veins bulged in his neck and forehead. Blood vessels burst in his eyes. Gary’s face turned purple and the light dimmed. Finally, finally…a dribble of black ichor dripped past his lips and dotted the water like ink. In it writhed what resembled a dying tapeworm, but it had tiny legs, like a millipede. Parasite brought up from a tangle of guts.

  More suddenly bubbled out of him and everything went dark.

  ***

  Gary woke up on the bed as Gladys was getting dressed in a high waisted denim jumper. It was still dark outside, and the ocean sounded closer than before. Right outside the patio door, underneath the ground. The sheets chafed his skin, the terrestrial cotton strands clawing at him. “Oh, there you are,” she said cheerily. “Did you feel that shaking?”

  “What—?” Gary said, a deep-body shiver stealing his words that felt rounded and unfamiliar on top of his rubbery tongue. The rest of him felt numb. He tried to move but only quavered like a Mad Dog drunk drying out in an alley after a forty-year bender.

  “Between the walls moving and those noises you were making… Scared the dickens out of me. I ran into the bathroom and found you on the floor, all frozen and stiff with a bloody mouth. I was afraid you were having an aneurysm!” She laughed, but it came out shrill, like a bird.

  “I…” He put the ball of his head to his throbbing head. He felt worse than before. “Fuck…”

  “Language, Gary… You should have seen what was in that toilet. All sorts of weird things.” She sat next to him on the bed and placed a moist hotel towel on his forehead. “I think all those toxins are leaching out of your system. Must be this fresh air and organic seafood. I told you that we should start juicing. It worked for Jack LaLanne.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Well…”

  “I feel like…” He didn’t know how to describe it. Didn’t have the strength.

  “I know you do. Rest now. You’ll feel better in the morning.” She bent down, removed the towel and felt his forehead for a fever. It was clammy, cold. She paused for a second, then grabbed her purse and headed for the door.

  “Where’re…you going?”

  “Just out for a walk.”

  That fucking waiter.

  “Be back in a jiff!” The door closed behind her and he heard her mules clatter away faster than he thought possible. Gary closed his eyes and felt a thousand others opening up inside of him. He prayed for no dreams and knew that his mumbled pleas would fall on deaf ears, or maybe no ears at all.

  ***

  Gladys hurried up the deserted sidewalk, an address written on resort stationery clutched in her hand. She peered anxiously at the street signs. Something large and low to the ground shifted back into the shadows without making a sound. She never noticed as she moved on, the lines in her face carved deeper under the cathode lights swaying on poles above. Farther up, amid the jagged shadows that marked where the mountains bit into the sky, tiny fires burned and bobbed like dancing sparks escaping a smoldering log.

  She finally arrived at a set of barred windows decorated with a wired plastic sign. The painted cross had faded from red to a pale, unpleasant pink. The bulb was turned off. Gladys banged on the bars. “Hello?” Someone moved inside the clinic. She banged again. “Is anyone in there? My husband’s sick. He doesn’t…” She didn’t continue. Didn’t know how. She heard another sound, and peered through the window. A pair of wide, staring eyes looked back at her from the gloom. They were rounded and buggy, not like anything she’d seen on the island. They moved toward her without blinking, or giving away what was attached to them, even as they reached the bars. Gladys stumbled backwards, falling out of one of her shoes. She left it on the sidewalk behind her and hobbled on one heel further down the street.

  ***

  Gary forced himself to sit up. He wanted to be awake when she came home, smelling of garlic sweat and Oriental fuckery. He knew that stink all too well, from Burma to the Philippines. He’d be damned if his wife did too. He’d kill the bitch first.

  All of his old impulses born in piles of maggot-choked jungle corpses flowed back into him, firing his limbs and putting salt back into his spine. He stood up and strode to the dresser, taking off his clothes. He flexed in front of the mirror, muscles bulging with a youthful strength and vitality left on the college gridiron. He felt massive, transcendent. He felt like a goddamn monster.

  It was then that he saw the tiny black needle poke through the skin just above his unruly nest of pubic hair surrounding his erection. He stared at it, detached, as other spiky tendrils emerged from his rounded belly that swelled by the second.

  The room shuddered, or maybe it was his cells shouting out in protest and the walls never moved. A low tone rumbled deep below him like the last bass note on a million-key piano, reverberating from somewhere far beneath the ground. As if breaking a spell, Gary’s body sagged, and he puked up blood, holding it in his mouth under glassy, terrified eyes, and then swallowed, taking down skittering chunks that laughed at him…

  The island swallowed with him, stealing the air and leaving everything deathly still. The incessant sound of the crashing waves was gone, sucked back home, away from the shoreline that hated it.

  Jarred inside a cocoon of profound silence, Gary felt his chin dip and gore leak from his mouth as he looked down at the spreading forest of black writhing spines sprouting from his body. In a moment of instant clarity, Gary then realized that he was about to see exactly what his insides were made of. And he wasn’t afraid. He was curious.

  ***

  Gladys was lost, but that was the least of her apprehension. The entire city suddenly seemed deserted. Even the ocean seemed to have fled, as she couldn’t hear the surf, just an occasionally creaking, like her grandmother’s old porch swing. It was a thick, pregnant silence, amplifying her sobs.

  She moved one way, then the other, wiping at her eyes, looking at the mascara that clumped on her fingertips. It was black and runny, like what she’d found in the toilet next to her comatose husband… Her husband. Gary…

  She turned to run, then gasped, hope flickering in her face. Gladys kicked off her remaining shoe and ran toward the familiar restaurant. Up on the hills, far above town, thousands of people, not all of them local Wakaleans, stared down at the lone woman running through the street. Their naked flesh was decorated from toe to forehead with Polynesian tattoos of swirls and spirals, meshed with patterns far older and more ominous, of teeth and eyes, twisted geometry and forgotten glyphs. None of them moved as they watched, not even the waiter, who stood taller than the rest, his face painted yellow and green and dotted with black, his protruding eyes following Gladys below.

  All the signage was turned off in the window of the Seven Seas Grill, but the front door was open. Gladys ran inside and found it just as empty as the rest of the town, but there was no sign of a hasty exit. Tables were arranged neatly, chairs left on the floor, awaiting business the next day.

  “Hello!” she called out, startled by the sound of her own voice that seemed to echo back at her from a soft barrier. She rushed through the swinging double doors and into the overly bright, spotless kitchen that seemed to be missing most of its appliances and utensils. She looked around, not sure what to do. Out of reflex, she grabbed a butcher’s knife resting on a white plastic cutting board.

  Just then, Gladys discovered an insulated door slightly ajar in a far corner of the room. Moving as fast as her trembling legs would take her, she followed the knifepoint into the walk-in refrigerator, and found that it was more of a corridor, lined with prepackaged and canned food that one wouldn’t expect to find on an island surrounded by an ocean teeming with fish.

  She emerged from the passageway into a spacious cooler the size of a small plane hangar, her feet splashing in a pool of oily water on the flo
or. The smell of gasoline mixed with a noxious, heavy odor that stank more like a filthy reptile house at the zoo than the docks at high tide. A generator puttered and smoked just outside a window that provided the only light, blocked by a prodigious bulk that took up most of the room, rising to the high, reinforced ceiling.

  At first it looked to be a mound of dirt, or maybe a bus covered in a sprawling tarpaulin, held fast to the floor by small hillocks of melting ice. But as she moved forward, Gladys noticed a glistening quality to the shape in the low light. An almost phosphorescent glow, lined with creases and furrows. The smell was overpowering, and the water deepened the closer she crept, but she was drawn to the enormous mass. Just feet from it, she discerned deep cuts into one side of the deeply wrinkled hulk and large slabs of missing tissue, conjuring images of old whaling footage and the gashes left in the sides of great beasts by blades the size of a man. Gladys reached her hand forward, compelled to make contact with what could only be called wounds, when a shiver seemed to run across the surface of the shape. She froze, just as the colossal thing clenched and thrashed, booming against the corrugated roof.

  Gladys shot backwards and landed in the stinking slush. Outside, an emergency warning siren gathered itself into a scream from somewhere high and far away.

  “Oh my God…”

  ***

  Gary moved to the bed, his legs somehow still working but disjointed and jerky the way a marionette flails under the control of an inartful puppeteer. He lay back slowly onto the comforter, his skin bubbling like a latex balloon stuffed with beetles. The siren was blaring outside, then wound down to a long, extended murmur. Gary wasn’t breathing, just waiting with something resembling a smile pinched under his bloated face. He felt the sudden urge to roar, and did, just as his body imploded, falling in on itself as a mass of writhing creatures emerged from what was once him to feast on what was left, on each other.

  ***

  Gladys ran like she hadn’t since childhood, her arms flailing and breath caught in her chest. She moved on instinct, barreling onto a side street that angled downward, taking her to the seashore. Looking up the beach, she spotting the resort with a scream of joy, when her attention was caught by the sinking expanse of pitch black sand stretching out to her left, dropping out of sight where the water once was. The ocean was gone, exposing the lip of the island and nothingness beyond. She was suddenly standing on a box butte in central Nebraska, like the ones she and Gary marveled at outside of Salt Creek on their way to Denver as the pink sun faded to dusk, and the prairie yawned like a brown abyss below.

  ***

  Gladys flung open the door to their room at the Sea Pearl, and found the wall facing the sea eaten away. A trail of blood and debris led down to the ocean. She ran to the patio and saw a twisting mass slink toward the waterless beach, expanding as it went, moving from what looked like a pool of slime to actual shapes, finally growing erect, evolving with every quivering second, worming toward the shadow that was forming high in front of it.

  Gladys gaped up at the towering bulwark of water bearing down on the island. It was a mile out, and what looked like a mile high, and it made no sound. It didn’t have to.

  She turned and walked back into the room, lying in the blood and black-soaked bed, resting her head next to the desiccated eggshell skull that once belonged to her husband, who broke the mold and decided to take her on the honeymoon she always wanted.

  Gladys smoothed out the denim of her outfit and folded her hands over her stomach. She began to pray, but forgot the words.

  The Curse of the Old Ones

  Molly Tanzer & Jesse Bullington

  Father Randolph Carter’s voice rises to a desperate howl as the waters of the faintly glowing pool begin to bubble and roil.

  “Say the words!” he cries. Arms outstretched, hands clenched, he beseeches the girl who stands across from him, shivering on the rocky shore. Her spray-soaked white shift reveals just how cold she truly is. “Mary—say the words!”

  Mary Whatley nods. She clutches an encyclopedia-sized tome with NECRONOMICON written in gold gothic letters tightly to her chest; it presses her heaving, spray-moistened bosoms higher. She opens her mouth to speak—relief is evident on Father Carter’s face—but then Mary’s demeanor subtly shifts. She sensually licks her lips.

  “No!” cries Father Carter, stepping back in alarm. The black cassock he wears snaps and flutters with sudden movement. “You have to finish the ritual, Mary! You have to—augh!”

  He cries out as snakelike, sucker-lined arms emerge from the pool, thrashing wildly. He looks from them to Mary, and for a moment, it seems as if the frightened girl is back, swaying, close to fainting. Her eyelids flutter, and Father Carter sees her irises have gone milky-white.

  “For the love of God, Mary,” he pleads, “say the words!”

  Mary Whatley tosses her loose hair and laughs, showing that her incisors have lengthened into sharp but rather fetching fangs.

  Father Carter clutches his crucifix as he looks back and forth between the horror emerging from the pool and the newly-wanton Mary. It is evident he is unsure which terrifies him more. “No! Jesus Christ, no! Take me instead, ye devils of the sea! Take me!”

  With the practiced slowness of a burlesque dancer Mary Whatley sets the NECRONOMICON on a convenient rock. Her fingers snake toward the laces of her bodice; they are stretched to the limit in their effort to contain her ample charms.

  “Take you, little prietht?” Her new-sprouted fangs make her lisp ever so slightly as she undoes the knot. Her heavy breasts spill out. “However did you gueth?”

  Father Carter starts to sputter an indignant protest as a loud crack followed by a tremendous splash startles talent and crew alike. It takes everyone a moment to realize a floodlight has fallen into the pool, soaking Father Carter and Mary Whatley. It sizzles there, accompanied by gasps and exclamations of disbelief.

  “Cut!” calls Freddie, the director.

  Father Carter dabs at his face with a handkerchief as the lights come up, and the subterranean grotto is transformed once again into a kiddie pool lined with painted polystyrene rocks; the wriggling tentacles to wire-strung rubber props. “I say,” he says, “that’s the third accident this week.”

  Mary Whatley smirks as she shimmies back into the shoulders of her gown, tucking her breasts away in a perfunctory manner at odds with both the blushing girl and the possessed seductress. “Don’t worry, Peter. Ith juth the Curth of the Old Oneth. Thays tho right on the clapper. Haven’t you been paying attenthion?”

  “Call,” says Peter, with as much dignity as he can muster in wet clothes and running stage-makeup. “It’s Call of the Old Ones, Ingrid.”

  “Deep Ones,” cries the screenwriter, from just behind the director. All eyes swivel to the fellow. August’s flat cap is askew and he is clearly furious, red-faced as an apoplectic and clutching the script in his white-knuckled hands like it might try to wriggle away from him.

  “You’re right, Peter,” says Freddie, ignoring the writer’s outburst. “This is all getting to be a bit much. I’ll just go have a word with the gaffer…maybe the whole production team.”

  “No!” August stamps his foot like a little boy. “We must stay on schedule! There’s still so much to be done!”

  Silence descends in the wake of the man’s outburst.

  “I believe I’ll make those calls,” says Freddie. He is struggling to keep his tone friendly, Ingrid can tell. “Everyone, that’s lunch. August…” he turns to the writer. “Go wait for me in my camper. There are a few matters we need to discuss. Be back by two, everyone, all right?”

  “Shall we order lunch?” Peter asks as he helps Ingrid down from the platform. “I don’t believe I can stomach any more of craft service’s tuna mayos today.”

  Ingrid nods. “I’m tho hungry I could eat a horthe,” she lisps.

  “Not with those fangs,” he says, holding the door for her.

  ***

  Ingrid and Peter commandee
r the prop camper, sending the make-up artist’s assistant off-set to get curry takeaway after the girl removes Ingrid’s opaque contacts and false teeth. Sitting in ludicrously uncomfortable folding chairs, Peter pours them both a cup of Harrod’s finest tea as Ingrid lights up a joint of Camden’s worst.

  “Tell me the truth,” she asks, her voice strained from holding in smoke as she passes Peter the jay.

  Peter daintily takes a hit. “Mmmm?”

  Blowing out a rich blue plume, she says, “Is this the most ridiculous production you’ve ever worked on?”

  Peter passes the joint back, shakes his head, then pauses, nods, and then shakes it again as he begins to cough.

  “Is that a yes or a no?”

  “Difficult to say.” Peter smacks his lips and takes a sip of First Blend. “All these accidents! It’s enough to make one think the production is… cursed.”

  “Maybe it is.” Ingrid ponders the smoldering roach. She’s found filming The Curse of the Deep Ones or whatever it’s called rather trying. The accidents have been bad enough, but the screenwriter and director have both denied her requests to read the whole script all in one go. She feels she doesn’t quite have a handle on Mary Whatley yet, but all her appeals for more information have been denied. “This teasing out things one scene at a time. I can’t tell if it’s mysterious…or worrisome.”

  “I know they’re spinning it as a great mystery, but I think it’s just a… hahah, a smoke screen.” Peter waves his hand in front of his face. “Andy told me he heard a rumor that this is the second time they’ve tried to shoot Call of the Deep Ones.”