Cthulhu Fhtagn!

by Laird Barron

  She nodded, but he kept staring at her as if she hadn’t understood.

  “What?” she finally snapped. “I’m sorry…I…” She could not bring herself to say, I’m dying for a smoke.

  The one horrible habit from her death-culture youth that she’d never been able to shake. She knew some kind of chemical imbalance in her brain kept her smoking, but she couldn’t function without it.

  He reached into a pocket in his baggy white shirt and pressed a small handful of berries into her hand. So purple, almost true black, like ingots of tar.

  “This should cure your craving,” he said. He watched until she ate one, then said, “Forgive me.” He moved off to join a Tawahka hunting party which came roaring down the street bearing a prize out of the jungle.

  Whitney reflexively looked away from the expected sight of blood and dead flesh, but their trophy appeared to be some kind of huge fleshy bean pod, over twenty feet long and draped over their shoulders like a sea serpent. Those not paralyzed by the sun gathered around the party to touch the trophy as it passed.

  It was here, she realized. Ciudad Blanca. Here.

  From Chiapas to Cali, there was talk among the Indian underclass of a small, anonymous group led by a saintly doctor, dispensing miraculous medicines. The rumors surfaced in a suppressed WHO report indexing infant and adult mortality among Honduras’s Miskito and Pech Indians, but few others connected the dots.

  What it said—and what ruined the career of the Scottish epidemiologist who wrote it—was that all health and nutritional indices for indigenous people living in the region had rocketed past most urban working class conditions in North America in the last ten years. This unlooked-for miracle had occurred even as missionaries reported that more of their charges had stopped coming for help, and Tegucigalpa’s oligarchs phased out basic state medical programs and were accused of burning down overcrowded prisons to cut costs. His spitball hypothesis for the miracle? He pointed to the stories of la gente arboles and Kao Kamasa, as the Pech called Ciudad Blanca. Legends persisted that somewhere in La Mosquitia was a lost pre-Mayan ceremonial center greater than Copan, which had been reborn as the home of the Tree People.

  She expected crowds. She had eavesdropped on suspicious whispers among the packs of drifters waiting for the next northbound trains to Mexico, but no one would talk to her. Only the most desperate still sought Ciudad Blanca.

  The pilgrims who’d left their homes in hope of a new life had come back disappointed, if they returned at all. Paranoid rumors that the government was rounding up the pilgrims for deportation or worse met with stony denials from the capitol. Mass graves had been found in the jungle near Catacamas and Wampusirpi, but none of the dead could be identified. Even in poor, tightly-knit societies, these were invisible people. Whitney was sure, now, that she had found them.

  Her mouth tingled with the quickening tartness of the berries, a metallic tang like smart drinks loaded with neurotransmitter precursors. She’d chewed coca leaves before and thrilled to the rush, but this was much more than a stimulant. It was the catalyst for a neurological sea change cascading through her system. The rusty keyholes in her brain that she’d clumsily pried open all her life with street and prescription drugs turned inside out, the convoluted knots of anxiety that twisted her gray matter suddenly unwound, leaving her mind a sea of ecstatic bliss. She felt not just faster and happier, but perfected, and knew as her shaky steps began to become surer, that this was not just a drug. This was permanent.

  She couldn’t stop grinning. When Colin came up and asked for a cigarette, she said, “Try this.” She gave him a berry and ran down the street after Aguirre.

  The crowd pushed her back, only to split open and suck her deeper, until she was pressed against him.

  She caught his arm. “Show us more,” she said.

  His smile was sad. “Open your eyes, and see.”

  The crowd seemed to multiply, the noise to build, until it was Times Square and Mardi Gras and then blinding green light and a sustained shriek like dry ice on steel. A smiling, toothless old woman took her by the arm and led her off the street. She became heavier and slower with every step, until she sat down in a small clearing under a twisted guanacaste tree crowded with chattering scarlet macaws. Colin sat across from her, slack-jawed, oblivious as a couple kids rifled through his bush vest and fanny pack.

  She reached out to stop them, but they disappeared. Colin started to smile and say something, but before he could open his mouth, the sun fell out of the sky. Colin was still as stone, but the jungle quivered and screamed and turned to a roiling wall of emerald fire.

  She had tripped on acid, psilocybin, mescaline, DMT and even taken the Yage sacrament, but nothing like this…

  Leaves and tendrils quivered and throbbed with the breeze and the light. They were not moving but growing, seeking light and space and Colin.

  Rain fell in a single, devastating slap. Clouds of mosquitoes and flies descended on her exposed skin like a shotgun blast, but her sweat exuded a thick, astringent citrine odor that drove them away. She lifted a hand to swab her brow and taste it (was it green?), but before her hand had stirred in her lap, night had fallen.

  The moon rose and fell and the sun climbed into the trees and the plants commenced a polymorphous orgy with sexual fireworks that blossomed and exploded in extravaganzas of flower and fruit.

  Seeds fell all around them like wedding confetti and some took root and unfolded into tender green appeals for earth and water and sunlight. An unlovely, odorless flower loomed before her nose, and then she realized it was her hand, come at last.

  The sun went away when she blinked and came back before she opened her eyes. The flowers yawned and ate daylight, twisting eager, beaming faces to follow it across the sky.

  With no visible animal life, yet there was endless, mindless violence. A cowering berry bush was dismantled by golden streaks that must’ve been leafcutter ants, its leaves and fruit vanished, leaving only a few gnawed stalks. She watched in horror as a strangler fig sent up questing tendrils that thickened around the slender neck of the young guanacaste tree and throttled it with all the ferocity of a murderer taking the life of a child.

  All around her, cheese plant vines climbed helpless trees and unfurled broad, elephant-ear leaves and ejaculated packets of seeds that erupted in green Catherine wheels of unbridled avarice. Orchids and bromeliads and pitcher plants seduced insect suitors and swooned and rotted under the weight of their own beauty.

  The state of harmony she imagined reigned over the vegetable kingdom was an illusion. Observed from within, the jungle was in a constant state of war, not just with humanity and animals, but with itself. All growth and reproduction was an act of desperation and bravado. All of nature seemed to tear itself apart in its sleep. Underneath the perfume of seduction and rot, she began to perceive the constant olfactory screams, the chemical expressions of hunger and pain, fear and fury, of every plant in the jungle.

  The sun rose and fell and rose and fell and at last she could hear it behind the unfathomable din of animal life, under the rustle and thrust of growth and fertilization and domination that was, if anything, more brutal than the animal kingdom…under it all, she could hear their respiration, their millions of stoma gasping and flexing in unison, and whispering Her many, Her million names.

  She opened her eyes to see the sun looking back at her through a perfect curtain of green. When she moved, dead skin split and peeled away in long, fibrous strips from her wooden flesh. A cocoon, she thought, looking at Colin.

  He was petrified, a bony Buddha in a neglected garden. White as a slug’s belly underneath a shaggy shell of roots and mosses, opportunistic fungi and lichens, many of which appeared to be growing under his skin. A tiny orange frog leapt out of a pool in his slack, half-open mouth.

  She inhaled to scream and choked, gagging and coughing until she expelled something solid into her hand. A mass like a generous steak of pinkish black flesh studded with tumors like tiny pearl
onions.

  A gentle hand, thorny with calluses, settled on her neck. “Not all who come survive the loss of their sickness. For many, the shock is worse than losing their name.”

  Breath came in deep, stabbing seizures. Her chest felt empty, her lungs scraped clean. Everything burned…

  Aguirre knelt beside her. “You did not know you were dying?” He looked grave, like he was sending someone to war.

  She made herself get up and crawl towards Colin. His eyes were closed, his mouth quirked, just starting to smile. “He’s dead…you killed him…”

  “No, girl. He sleeps, as you did. In his dream, he still seeks the door to awakening. When the Mother finds a purpose for him, he will be harvested.” Running a gentle hand over Colin’s petrified face, he added, “He must be planted, and allowed to ripen.”

  Standing, he turned and walked down a trail out of the grove where she’d sat for—a week? A month? A season? She felt stiff and dehydrated, but no more so than if she’d hiked all night. Her clothing had rotted to colorless rags. Patches of furry moss and a few puffball fungi grew on her skin. She wondered if it was growing inside her, as well. She felt hollowed out and unable to take any initiative.

  “Stop! Wait!” she croaked, but he only nodded and disappeared into the overgrowth. Two Indians uprooted Colin and carried him down the trail after Aguirre.

  Before, she realized, she had seen only the undifferentiated mass of the jungle, an idealized state of nature less real than Disneyland. Now, she saw every one of the millions of plant and animal organisms that made up the jungle, even as she saw the whole of the great, green thing that was their collective face.

  Finding words was like rummaging through a junk drawer packed with broken, alien tools. “Hey, goddamn it… Stop! Stop and look at me!”

  Aguirre paused on the trail and turned. His patience was not so saintly now, but something cold and stiff. “Your friend will be taken care of. You have seen what you came to see. If you learned from it, you will go where the wind blows you…”

  She rubbed her eyes very slowly. She felt like she should be hysterical.

  Aguirre gave her a green waterskin. It was a huge, bloated flower, like a pitcher plant. The water from it was cool and infused with nectar that burned her lips and warmed her throat like brandy as it went down, but charged her muscles with a weirdly serene strength.

  Staring out into the jungle as he walked, Aguirre said, “We have been blinded to our true wealth. Man is like a rat that has just discovered it has sprung a trap. And its only thought, when it has one, is whether it can eat all the cheese before the bar crushes its head.”

  “You’re not a fighter, anymore.”

  “It is a different fight. We don’t wage war upon human society, for it must destroy itself. Our true enemies are the domesticated crops that rule their lives. Before nature can be saved from man, humanity must be delivered from the Cavendish banana, the Red Delicious apple, the Russet Burbank potato, from patented Monsanto corn.

  “Think of it. Mankind has domesticated plants for ten thousand years, changing them to suit his desires. But plants emerged on land millions of years before the first walking fish, and they have had two hundred million years to learn to make animals serve them.

  “All of humankind is enslaved by grains, fruit and livestock. All these species drove men to reshape the world to spread their genes. At the behest of corn and bananas and coffee and cocaine, man has cut down nearly all of the forests. They have cut out their lungs to fill their bellies. They mutilate DNA to produce sterile ‘terminator’ seeds, to protect their monopoly. It would take only a simple further twist of the genome to make them pass the terminator on to its consumers. It would be a mercy.”

  He caught her eyes glazing over and laughed. He could still lecture like Castro. “I assure you, I am still a fighter. But in the plant kingdom, warfare is slower and subtler. We have found something better than endless conflict and destruction. We have found the path to a true and final peace.”

  He pushed aside a curtain of fleshy leaves and stepped down into the shovel-shaped bow of a thirty-foot dugout pitpan nosed into the red mud of a sluggish river.

  Colin’s pallbearers gingerly settled him in the middle. Stringy, trailing roots like the eyes of an overripe potato dangled from the rotten rags of his shorts.

  She was parched. Staring longingly at the muddy water, she sat down in the tail of the dugout. The Indians pushed them out onto the water, but only one waded in after and climbed into the stern to fire up an ancient outboard motor.

  The shovel nose of the mahogany pitpan slipped into the sluggish red river, into a darkness deeper than night. They meandered through stagnant swamps and forced their way up rock-strewn cataracts between white limestone cliffs like towering teeth. Howler monkeys and iguanas watched from the trees on the right bank, but she saw nothing larger than insects on their left. The density of plant life was maddening to her raw senses, its endless profusion, its subtly veiled violence. When she was tripping, she had felt its blind, inwardly curved antagonism. Now, she seemed to smell a sour chemical condemnation in the air. Nature was not asleep, out here. It was awake and aware…and angry.

  She looked everywhere but at Colin, whose wooden, half-lidded smile looked more content than he ever had when he was alive.

  When the dugout finally beached on a mud bank in the grip of a mangrove tree like a giant, greedy octopus, Whitney was loath to climb out. The Indian lifted Colin out of the canoe by his shoulders. Aguirre took his legs. Hesitant, she followed them up the bank and into the deep forest.

  The game trail was crowded with thorny nettles and more vicious plants. Huge spiderwebs stretched between the trees. Skyscraper trunks festooned with pitcher plants the size of washing machines crowded close. Stray sunlight passing through the veiny gullet of one specimen showed her the half-digested silhouette of a howler monkey floating inside. Every known vegetable barrier had been deployed to deflect animals from the glade in which they emerged. They set Colin down on a hillock of ferns. Aguirre took up a shovel.

  “You’re just going to bury him out here…?”

  Aguirre walked out into the shafts of sunlight penetrating the triple canopy as if crossing a minefield. He wandered over the broken ground, bending to smell the riotous grasses, to pick up a fruiting body or an insect and taste it. “This is not a graveyard, señorita. It is a garden.”

  She looked around and realized that the earth was turned in tight rings of elliptical furrows beneath the thriving beard of secondary growth, like the regimented lines of a plow. Dozens, hundreds of delicate green saplings stood knee-high out of the tilled earth. Their tightly coiled, fleshy leaves looked like human ears.

  “There are five million Maya alive today,” Aguirre said, “more than at the height of the empire. This is a surplus of people created by monoculture and urban crowding, and we would not see them wasted. We plant them here and elsewhere, so that whatever comes to pass, true humans will not pass from the earth.”

  As he talked, Aguirre dug a hole in the earth. It was soft and fine as cheese, but choked with roots like veins and arteries, like a dense net of capillaries that gushed strange syrup when severed by the blade.

  “They only see us as cut flowers or fruit rotting in their homes, so most humans dismiss plants as fleeting, temporary things, but the oldest living things are trees. Man must see that he is not the gardener. He is, at best, only the fruit.”

  “But when you dig them up…they’re fit to join Ciudad Blanca? Is that what you’re calling the new movement?”

  “Not a movement. Uno crecimiento. A growth. We care for the people’s health and education, and we try to offer what their old leaders could not.” He swept the field with his arms as if to embrace a cheering crowd. “We are building a new way to live. They might try the old ways of fighting, but it will come to nothing.”

  “You accept everyone who comes to join you? You don’t just…bury all of them?”

  Aguirre was alr
eady knee-deep in his hole. “Most go in the ground. They sleep and dream of the green world to come, but they also share their old lives, their knowledge and languages and memories. Most will sleep and germinate for the Long Count, but some will be needed to go forth and heal and lead, when the changes overwhelm the old brown world.”

  Aguirre laid down the shovel to pry clumps of rootbound rocks from the hole. The Indian stood over him, chanting and bowing to the four points of the compass.

  What they believed…it was wonderful and pathetic and insane, a grotesque sham. But could she really say it was impossible, after what she’d already seen? Put away your prejudices, she ordered her reactive mind. This is their world, and they know best how to survive in it. It could just be the miracle she’d dreamed of.

  “So…you worship Mother Nature?”

  He laughed. “No more than any child worships its mother. It is not an act of faith. She has opened Her arms to embrace us, kindled the dead seeds in us to bear much fruit. She is not our mother. She is motherhood itself. We are not so much her children as the extension of Her indivisible body. She is all of us, all life on Earth, the force that drives us to adapt, to conquer and create.

  “Even the seed feels terror. Even the egg knows despair. Without Her love, all life is an empty machine. The only crime, the only sin, is in believing oneself a separate entity. Anyone who can accept that is one of us…”

  At last, he stopped digging. At the bottom of the hole, a convex green-black bulb jutted out of the compacted mesh of rootlets. Aguirre took out a knife. “A Christian missionary at Wampusirpi was killed last week by the narcos. The children must still be educated, the sick must still be treated, and the people must be fed in a way that will not make them despoilers and slaves. This one will help them.”

  Stabbing at the hard green wood, like an enormous, whorled walnut shell, Aguirre cracked it open and peeled it back, like shucking a seedpod. Inside, packed tightly in a bed of roots, Whitney saw a jade green human face.