Cthulhu Fhtagn!

by Laird Barron

  Finally, he sat up on his mat, glancing briefly upon his master Terea, who slept tangled in the limbs of a pair of nude slaves, one a powerful grey-skinned male, and the other a sallow, slender female with a shaven head and pierced lips. Terea’s face was curiously serene, but then, her sleep was never troubled: she apparently trusted both her detail of guards and her steel-woven tent—which, at least, had been tested successfully against the few specimens various adventurers had brought back to Celephaïs. But Ajal worried about those variegated forms that had not been glimpsed before, the new and strange contraptions in the mechanical army that clattered all around. What they might do to the wondrous modern inventions of those in the employ of Terea, he hated to imagine.

  When morning came, Ajal rose bleary-eyed, and found he had dreamed, if but little—only enough to wander out of the tent, to glimpse strange lights amid the mildly acrid lake-mists, before running toward the mechanical city and through a horde of little creeping things, all decked in steel, that took no notice of his dream-form’s passing. He had hurried through the city’s open gates, sprinting along walls and leaping from one steel-scaled roof to the next, seeking some hidden wellspring of dreams from which the things might have emerged.

  Then he remembered falling through a high, domed roof, tumbling down onto a great altar of dark yellow-green chrysolite; he recalled rising from it, and at a glance recognizing the famous word scratched across it, faint and faded through many years, but still just barely visible. He’d fled, and somehow finally he had reached a high place, a tower far above the city; and then he had tumbled down, plummeting toward the roiling mess of clattering machines as the breaking dawn had rendered their myriad forms discernible.

  He had woken before striking the ground, to the sound of Terea’s laughter—at a slave’s flirtatious joke, doubtless—and the smell of grilled smokemeats and roasted chical infusion. When he rose, Terea gestured toward a plate bearing sliced bread, fruit, and a few morsels of smokemeats. As Ajal approached, she muttered, “Did you dream?”

  “Yes. Fruitlessly,” he replied. “But the city…it is Sarnath. I saw the altar where the high priest scratched the word ‘Doom.’ The whole place… they’ve overrun it.”

  Terea popped a spoonful of steaming spelt porridge into her mouth, as she ran her free hand along the shoulder and bicep of the male slave seated upon her lap. As she chewed it, she asked, “And the wellspring of the machines? Was there a…a way through to their world?”

  Ajal shook his head. “I saw something, but…then I woke. The city is a…violent place,” he said. The words were wrong. Too small, too soft to describe what he’d glimpsed.

  Terea only nodded, and urged him to eat.

  ***

  An hour later, Ajal was back outside, under the blinding, broiling sun.

  Terea luxuriated high upon the flat roof of her steel tent, where the observation deck stood, sunning herself and sipping chill water tinged with the juice of sorachi-buds. But on the ground, where Ajal stood, guardsmen muttered of the night before: of coldly drifting lights in the mists that shrouded the lake; and of silent, inhuman figures glimpsed creeping among the shadows of broken Ib.

  One of the guards, too young for Ajal to have bothered to learn his name, rehearsed his story ceaselessly to whoever would listen. Variations aside, the plot remained consistent: wandering into the darkness to take a piss, something had set him on edge—some breeze or odd noise, perhaps, or some primal, unnameable instinct. When his eyes had adjusted a moment later, he’d seen several hunched, shadowy humanoid figures lumbering toward him, their bulging eyes glowing weirdly. When he’d struck the nearest one down with his blade, and summoned his fellows with a cry, the silent things had fled, abandoning their stricken friend.

  Or so the boy claimed. At dawn, a black stain had been found in the sand where he claimed it’d happened, but no corpse was discovered anywhere nearby. Ajal had been inclined to dismiss the claims on first listening, until he’d glimpsed the boy’s eyes; there, he’d glimpsed something he had seen once before, in his own father’s eyes when the old man had lain on his deathbed: absolute terror. Ajal knew then that the boy had seen something; the exaggerations and shifting details were, he realized, merely the struggle of a mind fighting to explain the inexplicable, to understand its most terrifying experience.

  Throughout the day, Terea dispatched parties into the city, with differing commands: the first was sent inside a clanking steam-powered tank to find the temple Ajal had dream-visited; another was driven forth on pairs of greased stilts, seeking of a passage down into the hidden underworld, to hunt for human descendants of Sarnath’s ancient natives—the possible authors of this steely return of the ancient city; yet another group was sent upon riding-zebras, straight into the writhing mass of the machines itself, to test how it reacted to foreign bodies. The guard-boy who’d spread his rumor of glimpsed nocturnal Ib-ites was among the latter group, and Ajal wondered whether Terea had sent him to stem the tide of rumor and panic.

  But that made no sense: the third party was lost almost immediately, their screams terrifying all who looked on from within Terea’s camp. The carnage, though unsurprising, disheartened everyone: even the special armor given to these unlucky men had proven useless. (Terea’s reaction to the slaughter did not help: as the air filled with screams, she munched on dried fruit and sipped fruited water, pausing only momentarily to frown.)

  But as for the other two parties, Terea patiently awaited their return. Only hours later did she turn to her most-prized slave and whisper, “Go now and find them, my Ajal…”

  ***

  Dreamers, especially those of Ajal’s prodigious talents, did not require night’s darkness to sleep or dream, yet that afternoon Ajal found his body resisting sleep, despite the weariness that followed the previous night’s poor sleep.

  It was the noise: the chittering, the hiss, the clatter-jangle, the clanking and cries of those mechanical voices: his thoughts turned constantly to writhing machines, and then from them to the face and voice of the boy, still clear in his mind…and thence, to the shadowy figures that Ajal was certain the boy had glimpsed in the darkness.

  But after prodigious effort, he managed to descend into somnolescence, and beyond, rising soon again as pure mind, unanchored from body. Then Ajal turned toward Terea, whom he knew could not now see him. She was barking orders to guards, to stand watch over his body, as always. As they saluted her, they seemed little boys playing dress-up, suddenly; certainly not real guardsmen of an important caravan through a precarious waste, in search of occult secrets.

  Ajal knew better than to tarry: if he woke without news of the scouting parties’ fates, or where a portal might lie, Terea’s rage would be hard to quell. He feared that in her frustration she might add to the scars she’d left in his hide over the years, and so Ajal swept from the room, using his powers to hurl himself into the air and out through the wall of Terea’s steel tent.

  Outside, the mechanical horde still writhed, steam and smoke pouring into the air above it as the things clambered—with chilling mindlessness—over one another, bearing bits of metal, colorful wires, the failed bodies of others of their kind, and more. Ajal gaped in horror as he soared above the buzzing horde, sweeping ever nearer to the city, and wondered: when we gaze upon them, do they gaze upon us? Do they see us? And if they do, are they equally horrified by what they see?

  Then Ajal soared over the iron turrets of Sarnath, carefully tracing the human logic of the design below: the roadways lined by windowed buildings, the wells that plunged into the dark depths of the earth and towers that rose above everything. And yet, the place was empty of humans; the only things moving below were mechanical, and numbered in the millions, swarming and crammed upon every available surface. The parties had to be lost, he knew. He needed other information if Terea was to be appeased.

  Ajal hurried along those chaotic roadways, slipping through the walls of suspicious-looking buildings and mysteriously retrofitted steel-sw
addled ruins. He plunged through windows and steel doorways, into grand halls and underground chambers, always to find only bones and rags and more of the mechanical things, but no living human souls. Tracing the paths of several underwater rivers, he found no hidden refuge of humans; twice, he emerged from the depths, swimming up through the earth, passing layers of different-hued stone littered here and there with precious gems and seams of strange metals, glimpsing briefly the immense fossilized corpses of bewildering ancient creatures too terrible to gaze upon longer, until he finally burst up into daylight among the ruins of Ib. And there he glimpsed with his own bodiless eyes shadowy figures that immediately retreated into the waters of the enormous, frigid lake, their passing marked only by faint ripples upon the water’s surface.

  Finally, Ajal decided to hurry back into the city, to inspect the tower-tops. He knew, as an experienced and lore-versed dreamer, that not all points of world-juncture clung to the ground: some hung far overhead, up in the air where they could be reached only from the spires and towers of temples and fortresses. And so Ajal soared upward, through clouds of black smoke and foul steam, hoping to find some portal above; if this failed, then he could conduct a more time-consuming search of the interiors of the city’s towers, room by room.

  He soared through the thick, acrid fog, searching for any sign of a portal: a glinting light, a strange noise, a particularly unusual, otherworldly aroma. In the end, it was a breeze that caught his attention: a chilly, hard gust of air that seemed out of place in the broiling Mnari desert. He scrambled toward its source, and found a gaping window of blackness hovering amid the thick smog, a few feet above the pinnacle of a flat-topped tower ringed with high stairs.

  An ancient window nobody had thought to shut.

  Trespass between worlds was dangerous, he knew, but freedom called to him, siren-voiced: his body was safe, and anyway Terea would send him to scout beyond the portal eventually; once she heard of it she would, absolutely, insist on crushing the endless machines, on ascending the tower and plunging through the portal herself.

  So, with a glimpse downward, Ajal traversed the dark portal, into the world of deeper slumber.

  ***

  Almost immediately, Ajal realized where he was.

  Not, of course, where in terms of this dreamworld’s geography, but rather in which world—and in which of its ages—he had arrived. It was the dead dreamworld, the one that had once teemed with humans and a myriad of other wondrous creatures, but was now a universal ruin: the fouled air, damp and hot in some places, and devastatingly frigid in others; the deadly forests teeming with wild, malformed beasts; the great dead cities that dotted the planet in broad, foul, half-drowned ruins…all of it. And though he could not guess this particular city’s forgotten name—could it matter now?—this type of place was familiar from past dream-voyages through this world. It was a junkyard of abandoned machines, of hopes and triumphs forsaken by the lost race of humankind: a crumbled land of dreams turned nightmarish.

  Ajal stood amid a mess of trash and broken machines, piled all around and overgrown with weeds and creeper vines. Enormous wasps’ nests hung here and there, the wasps themselves buzzing lazily through the musty, fungal-smelling air. The skies above hung sullen and dark, long ago clogged by the smoke from the steel city by the lake—for that greasy smoke and foul steam poured out through the portal, and had done so perhaps for so long that it had filled up this whole world’s airy vaults. The reek of decay and hopeless doom hung heavy here, in whatever city this was. Here and there, on the scattered, ruined machines, he glimpsed a bewildering script, a sort of ancient, non-alphabetical language that he’d seen before in the Easternmost lands of this dream-realm, but could not read.

  Ajal concentrated, reminding himself he was dreaming now, and willed himself airborne. Though he could still fly here, his body was no longer ghostly, as it had been during dreams within his own world. His heart could wound, and his neck could snap; perhaps his body knew this, and that was why it seeemed to hesitate before rising up into the air. And yet, when he did rise skyward, he did so rapidly. From high aloft, Ajal searched the cityscape for familiar signs. After all, this could be an abandoned junkyard in an earlier age, during the rule of man rather than during humanity’s decline, or centuries after his extinction…all three eras had dreamers visited, and Ajal had witnessed each with his own eyes, each with its own beauties and its own unique dangers.

  But he already knew: this was that third and final age, the silenced world in which abandoned cities collapsed onto themselves, into the flooded subterranean tunnels that formed their roots. Ajal glimpsed the distant skyscrapers leaning upon one another, on the verge of collapse, dressed in the green of aggressive climbing weeds. Below, cracked pavements led down into drowned roadways. Ajal had dream-voyaged to here before, searching for the secret of the world’s demise, this once-vibrant and crowded world of humans and their pet machines; he had slipped beneath the ocean tides to glimpse the strange creatures that dwelt there—at a distance, seeming almost human, and yet utterly alien when examined up close. He had soared across the faces of the oceans, following the swimming forms of great ochre-hued, many-tailed horrors below, until he reached an island missing from all the dead world’s ancient maps, one that must have surfaced anew.

  But of that city, of its bewildering and awful geometries and streets full of terrible noises—those streets that all led to the same black, kelp-strewn palace with its awful god ruling within—of all of that, Ajal dared not remember anything at all. He drove the thought from his mind, as panic choked him. Claustrophobia struck, a squeezing tightness within his chest. Was the island only half a world away? Perhaps less? He could almost sense that horrible, distant god-thing groping ravenously within his mind again. He felt sure that it knew he had returned to this world. His only comfort was in knowing that he could escape whenever he liked, through the portal nearby that led back to the light and comfort of home; or, at least, to the sanity of his own world, where the oceans still lived, and cities like Celephaïs and Ulthar still bustled with men and women and cats, and the perils of zoogs and night-gaunts and the mastiff-riders of the south were all known, familiar, and far from insuperable.

  Ajal let himself sink back down into the junkyard, now dead certain of the doom that had befallen the world, and turned to a more immediate concern: locating the origin of the mechanical crawlers. He turned first to the portal, and found that it was no longer where it had been when he’d first arrived. Panic set in: he’d heard vague, dubious gossip of one-way portals and stranded dreamers being trapped in one or another distant dreamworld…but had always doubted these tales, never having experienced such a thing himself. What if they’d been true?

  Ajal managed to remain calm: one did not become one of history’s finest dreamers without a sense of reserve. He crouched for a few minutes, scanning the dim junkyard, before his self-control was rewarded: the portal had simply drifted aside, as if nudged by some caustic breeze toward a pile of old screen-boxes. (Their proper name, Ajal had once learned when journeying through an earlier era in this world’s history, where he’d seen people spend whole days or weeks staring into the faces of these machines, and their images of distant people and places…but he had long forgotten that word.) The gateway flickered, shimmering momentarily, and then disappeared as it drifted straight into the discarded machines. There followed a curious sound, of suction and then a bang, and the precarious pile of screen-boxes shifted. Several of the relics tumbled to the ground, and one screen even shattered.

  Ajal remained still.

  Soon, the portal shifted back out of the pile of screen-boxes, shifting direction suddenly and gliding rapidly back toward Ajal himself. He jolted out of its way just in time to see it drift toward a morass of wires and nuts and bolts torn from the guts of some dead machine. Several wires stood on end as the portal approached, shivering in the darkness, and then all at once slipped up toward it, disappearing through it with a flash.

  Aj
al rushed toward the portal, peeping through it, and caught a glimpse of something falling down from it, onto the lofty tower-top below: a tangle of writhing, unarguably living serpent-like things squirmed there, bright as the copper wires the portal had swallowed. He barely had time to glimpse the now-living things slither over the edge of the tower before he felt himself being dragged through the portal as well. The pull homeward was powerful, and to resist it, he had to withdraw his head back into the dark and ruined dreamworld. Though memories of his last visit made him yearn to escape, he knew Terea would only send him back if he did not complete his investigations.

  For a moment, he stood perplexed: what would the philosopher Mendt have made of this? How, in merely passing through a simple portal between worlds, could scattered trash take on life? Nothing in his studies or journeys had ever prepared him for such a notion…and still, the portal drifted, now gliding past other wreckage, a nearby pile of broken metal vehicles. Ajal knew these things well, recalled seeing them in an earlier age of this world. The roads of the great cities—and the endless roads that linked those cities—had teemed with these things, almost as densely as the crawling things had teemed in the streets of what Sarnath had become…if it could be truly called Sarnath. These machines had linked the world…and now, they rotted by the millions in the mist and rain, the endless gravestones of an ancient, doomed civilization.

  He took a seat nearby, and watched the portal draft to and fro, first close and then far, through rusted steel girders, and flood-ruined furnishings, through the hanging wall-hung screens through which people had talked and shouted in their ancient days. And Ajal found a pattern: though the portal drifted ceaselessly, always it returned to a specific point, an empty spot in the middle of the junkyard. It was tethered there, perhaps loosely but also certainly, by some invisible force, he reasoned…and it could be found again when needed.