Cthulhu Fhtagn!

by Laird Barron

  Eyes opened. Rigid muscles twitched in slow motion like a flower opening to the dawn. The man in the ground smiled.

  The Indian knelt beside the hole and spoke in a proto-Mayan dialect and then listened, smiling at the whispered news from beneath the earth.

  “Your friend,” Aguirre said. “What was his dream? What would he become, if he had his heart’s desire?”

  Colin Bushong wanted to be an ecowarrior and torch Hummers and ski lodges, and Colin wanted to love me and he came here to be my protector… Colin wanted…

  “A teacher,” she murmured, looking in vain for the sky. “He wanted to be a teacher.”

  ***

  The jungle grew thicker and the trees grew taller—over two hundred feet by her best guess, though that was impossible. The thin, rain-leached topsoil should not support such giants, let alone so many giant hardwoods, some clearly thousands of years old. This was not just a primary growth rainforest. It was primordial, and yet they passed underneath a military jeep lodged in a tree, forty feet above the forest floor, and it wasn’t thrown or blown up there. The tree had grown up under it.

  Aguirre walked even faster with no trail, threading a path between monolithic trees draped in lianas and broadleafed saprophytes, leaving her to stumble and fight. Roots and vines tripped her; thorns and poisoned nettles carved livid stripes in her arms and legs; hummingbirds plunged at her like ruby-throated knives, intent on drinking her eyes.

  She heard a cacophony of insects, birds and frogs, but no larger animals. The trees and even the vines bore flowers and fruits that defied everything she knew about rainforests. An abundance of health and freakish variety was garishly displayed in orchids like gigantic genitalia and clusters of fruit that glistened like fire opals with an eerie phosphorescence. Not one species in a hundred was identifiable.

  Butterflies and bees the size of canaries made their rounds of the blinding riot of flowers. She was watching them admiringly when she tripped over a vine and fell into a patch of overripe melon-shaped fruit. Bursting under her touch, they unleashed a stench worse than durian and swarms of enormous gold-headed ants that ran up her sleeves to sink their mandibles in her arms, neck and chest.

  She rolled in black rot until the biting stopped. He helped her to her feet and looked away modestly as she shed the last rags of her shirt. He offered her a pale fuchsia cloak that felt like the skin of a kiwi fruit. It was a single leaf.

  Ahead of them loomed a white limestone stela, twelve feet tall and slightly tilted, settling into the soft earth. Here and there underfoot, the white remains of a Mayan sac be—a paved road—held back the encroaching roots.

  Even faded by rain and shrouded in lianas and morning glories, the stone was of exquisite workmanship, the bas-relief carvings seeming to dictate the floral overgrowth’s bizarre animal motifs. Intricate ideograms and calendar calculations crawled over it like moss-encrusted ants. The goddess in the central image had an obscene flower for a head, from which spilled a host of twisted chimera that partook equally of animal and vegetable symbols.

  Aguirre bowed his head as he approached the stone. “The Mayan empire reveled in its decadence for centuries, but it was drought and famine that undid their hold upon the land, long before the Spaniards came. Ix Chel, the mother of all, had forsaken those that forgot her true name.

  “Ciudad Blanca was the first city, and the last stand of the Maya against the fall of its empire in the Petén. Their chroniclers erased it because they could not accept the peace that the priests of the White City had come to offer. And when they would not yield to the new way, they went into darkness. The calendar has turned to the year 8 Ahau again. This is the apocalypse, the fork in the path, that confronts us again.”

  Once, there was a city here, more ornate than Copan and reaching higher than the pyramids of Tikal. The jungle had all but devoured it. Now, it was a green cathedral.

  Now, it was a city of trees.

  The rootbound ruins of a colossal step pyramid loomed at the north end of a vast, quarter-mile square plaza. The white limestone steps and combed roof were split apart and dwarfed by a skyscraper of bone-white trunk that emerged from the summit, stretching another two hundred feet into the sky to form an unbroken canopy of perfectly interlocked leaves with its four cardinal rivals. Many of the leaves in the green roof were transparent prisms, which allowed scattered rainbows of broken sunlight to fall upon the plaza floor.

  Crumbled white paving-stones and bas-relief monoliths reared up everywhere under garlands of flowering creepers. From ruined pyramids and temples at each of the compass points another monolithic tree grew, each larger than the largest Sequoia redwood. A gnarled black tree emerged from the forest of crooked columns around a goddess’s temple, dripping rain from clouds trapped in its branches. A red mahogany grew from the sundered dome of an observatory at the east end, its gnarled, blistered surface flowing and folding upon itself like a glacial geyser of lava. A yellow, thorny tree, shorter than its siblings but forking into hundreds of sprawling horizontal trunks, grew out of the cloistered remains of a nunnery in the west.

  And in the center of the square beneath the pillars of the Earth, a monstrous green-barked ceiba at least three hundred and fifty feet tall, thrusting out aerial prop roots like a herd of daughter trees, and flinging out an impossible tangle of branches like a naked circulatory system that terminated in a labyrinthine canopy, rife with huge, woven nests like giant cobwebs.

  And everywhere in its branches, she saw people.

  They lived in the tree, and they were the tree. Some ran up and down the trunk like squirrels, or brachiated from branch to branch like spider monkeys. Others were tethered to vines that joined seamlessly with their spines, playing out like extension cords as they snatched flying prey from the air, only to snap taut and retreat back into the green.

  Others were little more than tumors on the trunk and branches. Their green skins were scaly and infested with fibrous growths, their bodies bloated to translucence, converting sap and nutrients by some weird internal alchemy into nectar for endless lines of thirsty workers.

  They climbed a ladder of shelf fungi up the flank of a spreading root the size of a subway car to behold the vertical gardens of the trunk. Close up, the tree was a forest unto itself, shaggy with orchids, staghorns, bromeliads, pitcher plants and stranger flora that reminded her of an old European satire about a place called the Island of Tools, where the trees grew weapons and other useful human artifacts.

  He led her up onto a horizontal branch as wide as an avenue ending in a cluster of galls hollowed out into huts. A naked old woman whose whole face was one great, glistening black eye sat before a hut. Her engorged, tuberous breasts drooled syrup into cysts that she pinched off into discrete pods at a twitch of her long, splendid spider-fingers. Wriggling masses in her drooping apron of a belly like unfinished babies that never reached escape velocity, unformed things yearning to be born.

  Smiling with dangling onion root teeth, the cyclops drained violet milk from one of her dugs and rubbed it into Whitney’s seething insect bites. As the pain turned to an equally unsettling euphoric glow, she went stupid with gratitude.

  Their society was everything she was fighting for. Harmony with nature… it should feel wonderful, it should be heaven…

  Nothing was wasted. Passing on a low branch over a compost heap, she nearly slipped from the wash of steam as well as the shockingly potent stench of vegetal carrion. Hulking, faceless workers turned the compost and tended gardens of bloated luminescent fungi among the tree’s enormous roots. The gardeners’ stunted heads bristled with outsized tongues like the sticky tendrils on sundew plants, attracting and trapping flies and other insects by the fistful to feed as they worked.

  Her repulsion metastasized into panic, threatening to send her running off into empty space, which only drove the screws deeper. “It’s just like a maquiladora. They’re slaves!”

  “Aren’t we all?” he chuckled. “To our bodies, to our minds. They ar
e doing the work of the forest. Synthesizing the compounds, poisons, and medicines that sustain life. The jungle has always produced a bounty, and it can serve man, if he will but serve the Mother.”

  She saw birds, some bigger than she was. She really thought they were birds; they glided on the winds over the roof of the rainforest, circling and sporting on the updrafts like eagles. Their iridescent green plumage left sparkling trails against the setting sun. They were women.

  “They are seeds,” he told her. “When the season comes, the right wind, they will fly away.”

  “The people in the mass graves…turn into these?”

  “No, my girl.” He sat beside her, his hands kneading and stroking the waxy green bark of the branch between his feet. “These are the children of the forest. My first group became so adapted that they entered into a deep symbiosis… The forest bore all of our needs…and our children…are they not beautiful?”

  “So…they killed you. And you got buried in the ground. And when you woke up…you were…”

  Where he touched the bark, it had become softer…fleshy. “A part of the forest,” he smiled, “a fruit of the Forbidden Tree.”

  “Are you in charge, here?”

  “I told you. We are not the gardeners, my girl. We are the fruit.” Under his fretful hand, the wood formed unnervingly familiar shapes. An anus became an ear, then an eye… “Men have called Her Ixchel, Coatlique, Kali, Astarte and Demeter and Gaia. Her true name…only the so-called lower animal kingdoms can even speak it. Under Her reign, the forest will spread over all but the deserts. The coastal cities will drown and billions will die without a choice. But they don’t have to. The world could become a garden…”

  She did not notice his hand moving up her arm until it was working the knotted muscles of her neck. She felt hot and giddy, and barely even outraged at the crude methods by which her own body was manipulating her.

  He took her by the arm and led her up a coiling spiral branch to an aerie high inside the leafy canopy. The floor of the plaza and the sprawling roots of the tree were misty with distance, far below.

  The spherical nest had portholes looking out into the jungle, a knothole filled with fresh water, and a pallet of furry leaves.

  She felt a queer heat in her guts and just under her skin. He watched her expectantly as she paced the pod. “Perhaps you need another lesson,” he said. “We are nothing, if not patient.” Smiling, he turned and began to disrobe.

  She had allowed herself to be seduced when she needed to feel wanted, or when she wanted something done she could not do herself (sorry, Colin), but now she quivered with rage. Her body was not her, and now it was not even hers. “I don’t—listen, stop, okay? I don’t think, right now, it would be right for us to…”

  “But my dear, in the only meaningful way there is for such as we…we already have.”

  He turned around and moved into a hazy green bar of sunlight. His naked body was lithe and muscular for a man Aguirre’s age. It was also covered in burgeoning encrustations that looked black in the green light, yet glistened like jewels, like clusters of ripe, purple berries…

  “What I freely gave you, you took and ate. Your chemistry and ours have become…entangled…”

  In thick clusters and clumps from the spread of his pectoral muscles, the tiny bitter berries gave way to larger and more varied fruit until they reached his groin, where a grotesque cornucopia of gourds and fungi erupted from the otherwise featureless fork of his crotch. Like some horrid Arcimboldo portrait, the cunningly disguised flesh of his body underwent a dizzying metamorphosis in her tearing eyes as she realized what he was, all along.

  The berries he fed her, that she fed Colin…weeks ago? Months? It was too late to feel disgust. Far too late to vomit it out of herself.

  Gentle hands roaming over the shiny growths on his body, he plucked a twisted root from his groin and offered it to her. “All that I am, all that I have, I have shared with you…”

  “You’re not…him…”

  “I never claimed to be. I was the first seed, properly fertilized by the man you wanted to find. Through his ambition, all this came into being, but only because She willed it. She will not abide the ruin of Her body. I became Silvio Aguirre to serve the people and spread Her seeds, and who can say if it was not true? However…”

  He sat at ease on the branch, his hand slowly growing towards her like a strangler fig. He seemed to sag into her like a passive dance partner when she twisted his arm, kicked his feet out from under him and sent him out the window and plummeting to the plaza floor.

  He burst like a pumpkin on the white stones, spraying seeds and spores and nothing remotely human inside. No organs, no bones, no brains…

  She stood looking down, waiting for sirens or irate jungle drums, but nothing changed. The sound of birds that were not really birds at all thickened, maybe talking about her. The walls glittered like stars, she realized. Hundreds of tiny eyes looked at her out of the wood.

  Branches that seemed as wide as a crosswalk when they’d climbed up now seemed like greased slides as she tried to run on them. She passed a few arboreal Indians like giant spider monkeys stained deep green with chlorophyll. They looked at her quizzically as she pushed past them and jumped down to a broader branch. It was their screams that she heard first, that told her something was chasing her.

  Clinging to the bark like a three-toed sloth in severe cardiac distress, she looked back and nearly flung herself into thin air.

  The tree was coming after her.

  The branch she’d leapt from flexed, shedding massive shreds of rigid green bark. Underneath, shiny as new snakeskin and so green it glowed, twisting around as fluidly as a gigantic tentacle, shaking off green people like aphids in its eagerness to smash her.

  Whitney crawled almost faster than she could run down the unfathomable girth of the trunk, trying not to panic and throw herself away from this thing, trying not to think, it only looks like a tree!

  Nets of creepers closed like fists around her and she began to ascend faster than she’d fallen. Her knife came out and slashed through the vegetal straitjacket, making her sick at the blinding stink of chemical agony that was louder than any scream.

  Falling, she passed two tiers of branches and crashed into a dense crowd of bloated bodies, crushed several of them into a soup of human rinds and mildly electrified plasma.

  Packed cheek by jowl on a wide branch under a patch of naked sunlight, they were like human solar panels, making sugar and electricity that flowed up the umbilical vines snaking between their vestigial feet. Like leaves shrinking from a browsing cow, they shriveled against the bark floor into fetal bumps. The coiling vines dangled overhead. She ran to the edge and leapt off without looking. She fell nearly fifty feet and plunged into a compost mound.

  Walls of putrefaction closed over her head. Stunned, she held her breath and struggled against the undertow pulling her down into the hot, homogenous depths of the heap. Kicking and clawing, she struggled to bring herself horizontal and swim, as if she were caught in quicksand.

  Hard objects—plastic, metal, bone—jabbed at her body. The stench flooded her lungs. Black slime clung to her face and plugged her nostrils. Buried alive like a lost skier in an avalanche, she felt an oppressive languor seeping into her muscles, a longing to lie down in the warmth and let nature take its course.

  She broke the surface and was sick. The whole compost mound rose up under her, turned over in a rolling wave. Whitney paddled and kicked and swam just ahead of something ripping apart the earth to get at her, the rumble of seismic violence sending her rolling head over heels across the broken flagstones of the plaza. The roots of the great green tree churned the earth to black foam and sent yawning cracks racing across the plaza beneath her drunkenly stumbling feet.

  She could not look back, could only see directly ahead. If she paused to look, if she even cast a glance at the massive cords of drill roots ripping up the Mayan flagstones to either side, she would stumble
and fall and never get up. It was bigger than the biggest tree, but it wasn’t a tree at all. Its seed was a man. Its roots went down into the seething womb of the Earth, where the Great Mother dreamed of a new order for Her children… And Whitney had awakened Her.

  Her body wanted to crash in a heap when she passed the great white stela and staggered into the flowering garden, but the ground still trembled beneath her, so she kept running.

  Now the game trails were vividly clear. She ran and ran until she broke through a wall of vines and cobwebs and stumbled into the clearing where they buried Colin.

  Two men in jungle camouflage fatigues pointed rifles at her, screaming in a language that sounded like German after extensive oral surgery. She threw up her arms and collapsed, trying to catch her breath to beg for help, but a third man came up behind her and clipped her across the top of the head with a shovel.

  She woke up in a dank canvas sack in the back of a Land Rover. Hogtied, hands behind her back, ankles curled up almost to meet her wrists. She should scream, panic, struggle, but she knew there was no use, and a weird, mellow calm welled up in her chest. The last thing she wanted was to be let out of the bag.

  Inside, she could hear their angry, unhinged screaming, smell the poisoned sweat and fetid breath of her captors, their cigarette-ravaged lungs and the red meat rotting in their guts. A certainty that all was right kept her from trying to communicate with the foreigners who shouted at each other in Spanish and Dutch as the Land Rover bounced and skidded up winding roads. Drifting in and out of sleep, she wondered where they were going, but only as a way of passing the hours. When she slept, it was dreamless, perfect blackness, the muted, protean dreams of a seed sleeping in the earth.

  Awakening to find the Land Rover sitting idle, she stretched her arms and was surprised to feel the ropes snap from her wrists. She untied herself and tried to find her way out of the bag. It was tied shut, but it tore like wet paper. Her muscles felt soft, feeble, but the material was rotten.

  Only the dimmest, dull green light filtered through the coating of scum on the windows. All three men sat in their seats with their heads tilted back. Their faces were lush carpets of moss with curling, questing vines spilling out of their nostrils and gaping mouths.