[anthology] Darrell Schweitzer (ed) - Cthulhu's Reign

by Unknown

  it’s a gift to have fins,

  it’s a gift to have gills

  when Cthulhu wins.

  When all the stars are right,

  on world’s last night,

  we will swim in the glory of R’lyeh’s light.

  But will they? Do vast cosmic intelligences like Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth make deals, much less keep their promises, with beings they must perceive as vermin or bacteria, if they are even aware of mankind’s existence at all? Are the Cthulhu cultists as deluded and doomed as anyone else? A couple stories here address that very point.

  I suppose I should warn you that this isn’t a very cheerful book, what with all that cosmic nihilism inherent in the Lovecraftian worldview. What these stories do is go bravely where few others have, following the Cthulhu Mythos to its ultimate, logical conclusion.

  THE WALKER IN THE CEMETERY

  Ian Watson

  When our tourist bus arrived at the side gateway to the necropolis of Staglieno on our tour around Genoa, a couple of cheery garbage men were loading floral tributes into a crusher truck. The afternoon was bright and breezy. Twenty meters’ length of the high perimeter wall and the pavement were stacked with huge arrangements of roses, irises, lilies, and tropical blooms interspersed with palm fronds and other foliage, undoubtedly several thousand euros’ worth of beauty. Into the crusher those were all going, either crammed into a big wheeled green bin first or, if too large, bourne on their wooden frames in the arms of the garbage collectors. Bird of paradise flowers passed by me, as did giant blooms in the shape of large lacquered red hearts from which protruded what looked like long thin white penises with green foreskins.

  And all of the flowers and foliage were fresh and perfect, at least until the crusher compacted them.

  Questions flew. Our guide, Gabriella, said that the tributes were from just this one day. Owing to cremations, there was no space to let that glory of blooms remain on display.

  “But cannot they go to brighten a hospital or an old people’s home?” asked a German woman indignantly. English was the language of this tour.

  Her husband said, “Suppose you’re in hospital, or very old, do you wish to see flowers of the dead?” His grey hair cropped very short, he had a noble bearing; I thought of a Prussian general of olden days.

  He turned to me sharply, as if to say, Am I not correct, madam?

  Startled, I said nothing.

  And so we entered a gallery of that amazing cemetery which was to become for us a huge prison and abattoir of mystifying horrors.

  Like any good guide, Gabriella began discoursing as we gazed along the first of the lengthy gloomy arched galleries, statues on plinths inside niches, ornate plaques crowded between the niches, the regular slabs underfoot covering the dead sealed away beneath.

  “. . . perhaps our cemetery here in Genoa is the most astonishing in Europe . . . The revolutionary Enlightenment no longer wished to use churches and churchyards to bury the dead . . . The posh old families, some rich ever since Genoa contended with Venice for mastery of the Mediterranean . . . New nineteenth-century bourgeois wealth demanded sculptural realism like three-dimensional photographs in stone . . . At first a classical romanticism, then symbolism, and ultimately art deco . . . Angels of consolation becoming disturbingly erotic and sensual . . . Death becoming an uneasy ambiguous mystery—”

  “Excuse me,” said a tall skinny Dutchman, “why the different colors of the candles?”

  We were beside a memorial to a nun, whose photograph taken long ago was surrounded by dozens of little imitation candles jostling on ledges, with lavish fresh bouquets to either side; she was still adored. The pseudo-candles, squat tubes with a protected bulb shining dimly atop each in the shaded daylight, were like feeding bottles with plastic teats for babies or maybe squeezy bottles of skin cream. Some were blue, others red, though all bore an oval image of the Pope gesturing a blessing.

  “Some,” said Gabriella, “shine for a week, others for a month.”

  Ah, different sorts of battery.

  We would need those pathetic little lights later . . .

  A profusion of galleries was here, and a huge population of marble statues seeming particularly lifelike because of darker dust upon them. As Gabriella escorted us, talking now and then, I came upon a bald- headed, long-bearded monk, his hood resting on the back of his neck, who had turned away—permanently—to consult a little book. He was yet another statue, as if petrified while alive. Trickles of white stains seemed caused by windblown rain that had reached him; but what took my attention most regarding the masses of more sheltered statues was how the dark grey dust of a century and a half had added a velvety shading to all the pleats and folds of drapery, intensifying the naturalism. Too vast a task, presumably, to keep so many hundreds, or thousands, of statues clean. I licked my finger and rubbed a sculpted leg. The moisture made a little dark mark, yet my fingertip came away clean, not coated in grime.

  “The dust becomes united with the stone,” said Gabriella, noticing. “That adds chiaroscuro.”

  Indeed. Some of the realism was astonishing. The sheer details of stockings or of a baby’s bonnet, for instance! Families or individuals in perfectly rendered clothing of the nineteenth-century middle class stood or knelt by memorials, grieving or consoling or gazing. Stone doors stood ajar, as though the soul of the departed had only just disappeared through them.

  And then the sensuality of female curves, and drapery, and petrified flesh! A beautiful young woman nude to the waist swooned in the arms of a robed Death, his veiled skull apparent; yet at the same time this couple might well have been dancing a tango.

  Emerging into sunlight, we took in a fieldful of more orthodox modern gravestones and flowers, lined with many tall slim cypresses and junipers, beyond which a great stairway ascended to a domed Pantheon flanked by monumental colonnades. Behind and to the sides, a wooded hill arose, from which hundreds of white mausoleums reached up like temples or the spires and towers of cathedrals.

  Yet by now we’d used up the time alloted for our glimpse of the necropolis of Staglieno. Shepherded by Gabriella, the twenty-odd of us trooped back along a gallery towards the gateway.

  Just then the tombstone-slabs, which composed the floor of the gallery, trembled. The gallery itself shuddered, and daylight dimmed. Dust didn’t exactly stir into the air, yet visibility lessened considerably as though the air itself had become grey.

  Gabriella called out, “I think that’s an earthquake tremor, but don’t worry.” She was a busy, practical woman, mid-forties. “Genoa is actually on a fault line. However, a big quake offshore in 1887 didn’t do much harm to this cemetery even though many buildings in the city were badly damaged.” Was our guide being totally honest? “So you’re in a safe place. Probably there’ll be no more tremors. I’ve lived here all my life.”

  So we proceeded onward.

  Could clouds have suddenly darkened the sun at the very same moment as the tremor? No doubt that was a coincidence, yet I almost felt as if—so to speak—reality had shaken somewhat. Strangely, we seemed to walk for ages, as though we were treading the same slabs over and over again, although we weren’t, for I looked down in puzzlement at the progress of my feet.

  From the office inside the gateway, a couple of middle-aged men in shirtsleeves emerged. The cemetery’s superintendent and a subordinate, a caretaker maybe? Jabbering at one another, they stared up at what we could see, now we were in the open, was a dull pearly sheen masking the sky, as if a peculiar bank of mist had descended over the cemetery—and I was surprised to see the very same just outside the gateway, as if that was an exit to nowhere and nothing rather than to parked cars and a tour bus.

  “Signora Vigo!” Of course the superintendent would know all the tour guides by name. Urgently he gestured Gabriella to come—along with the rest of us, who crowded as best we could, in the wake of the two men and Gabriella, into an office where a largish TV set was showing silently in flickery black-and-white wha
t I took to be an old Japanese monster movie.

  An enormous tentacle- headed thing with a scaly body and what looked like stumpy, spiky wings was standing up in the sea near an ocean liner. The creature was a grotesque blend of octopus, humanoid, and dragon, and dwarfed the boat, which seemed the size of a toy. Waves from the monster’s motion through the water caused the vessel to tilt alarmingly, though it righted itself. What giant bathtub had this epic been filmed in?

  I couldn’t understand any of the rapid- fire Italian, perhaps Genovese dialect, being exchanged between the two men and Gabriella, who looked ashen. Abruptly the movie changed its scene to a view of New York, where another of those monsters stomped in the Hudson River as if that was merely a shallow gutter. The malign creature towered above the skyscrapers of Manhattan, which it began to wreck, flailing elephant-trunks of arms before turning and heading seawards, as if toward its proper home, capsizing merchant ships and ferries like scraps of flottsam.

  To my astonishment the channel was CNN, an English-language banner running along the bottom of the screen. An old monster movie showing on CNN? And in flickery black and white? With no sound? I realized that the TV hadn’t been showing CNN when we crowded into the office; spontaneously the TV had jumped channels. And now I caught up with the words as they scrolled sideways.

  . . . GIANT SEA MONSTERS ATTACK SHIPS WORLDWIDE . . .

  The channel hopped again. Paris, obviously; Arc de Triomphe in the distance. Creatures exactly the same in appearance as the enormous “sea monsters”—yet now more like two storeys high rather than two thousand—were proceeding with a rolling gait along the Champs Élysées destroying cars either by collision or by treading upon them. All silently. I glimpsed two of the tentacled dripping behemoths themselves colliding and fusing of a sudden into one—while further along the avenue I could swear that a single creature became two identical creatures. Suddenly the TV went blank.

  The people in our group were babbling, and the three Italians were voicing off wildly, until the German man drew himself up and bellowed, “Silence!” Our uproar diminished to a few whispers. The German glanced at me and nodded approvingly since I hadn’t been contributing to the noise. Then he tapped his watch significantly.

  “Here in Genova it is 2:30 in the afternoon. In New York it should be 7:30 in the morning, maybe 8:30, I am not sure exactly. But I am sure I saw an oval shape of light to the west, way beyond the New Jersey heights. Presumably that was the sun, although looking distorted. Unless it was the fireball from a nuclear weapon . . . But assume it was the sun. Right now it should not be evening in New York. Did any of you feel something strange about time after the shock while we walked here?”

  I raised my hand, and he beckoned me to him, while Gabriella was apparently translating for the benefit of her two fellow citizens.

  I said, “I felt as if I was walking over the same space many times. I even watched my feet to make sure they were moving forward.”

  “And you are?” he asked.

  “My name’s Sally Hughes. I work at CERN in Geneva. The big particle accelerator.”

  “So you are a physicist!”

  “No, I’m an administrative assistant in the Director-General Unit, Relations with the Host States Service. That means I deal with the various French and Swiss authorities, update regulations about the site we’re on, that sort of thing.”

  Less than three per cent of the people at CERN were actual physicists. The site employed masses of engineers, electricians, low temperature specialists, just for instance. How else could CERN have functioned?

  “But you are English?”

  “My mother is Belgian. I went to school in Liège for a few years.”

  “So you’re a bureaucrat, not a physicist.”

  “I’m fairly familiar with what we’re doing scientifically at CERN. As are most of the staff.”

  “Is anyone here a scientist?” demanded the German, but everyone shook their heads.

  “Miss Hughes, was any important experiment at CERN scheduled for today?”

  “All the experiments are important, and they happen constantly. But it can take a bit of time to interpret results.”

  “Your physicists are trying to recreate the earliest primitive state of the universe, is that not so?”

  “That’s an important part of it.”

  The superintendent pulled out his mobile and jabbed, but then he frowned at its screen; whereupon he resorted to a fixed line phone on the desk, before gesturing helplessly, non-plussed. Quickly I discovered that my own mobile had no signal. Nor did those of others in our party. We were cut off.

  “Did you observe,” our German asked me, “that the enormous krakens in the sea and the smaller but still sizable creatures in Paris had exactly the same appearance? As if the latter were identical to the former, merely on a smaller scale?”

  I nodded. “I think I saw two of them join into one, and another suddenly divide into two.”

  Ruefully: “I missed that. This suggests to me that both sizes are iterations of the same thing. Assuming that we were indeed watching reality, not a hoax.”

  “Iterations?”

  “The repetitions of a process, for instance in a computer program, or in fractal geometry such as the Mandelbrot set where the same figure is generated at ever diminishing scales. Or the pattern of a Blumenkohl, a cauliflower. Chaos theory gave rise to this.”

  “You ain’t kidding about chaos!” cried a buxom American woman. “That was chaos from hell itself we saw in New York. Hell has broken through into the world! This is the end time right now. That’s the very Antichrist, as prophesied.”

  “Verily it is,” called out her presumed husband.

  “Be calm, madam, sir,” said our German. “We must analyse. That is why we have brains.”

  “You seem to be a scientist,” I said to him quickly, in case the Americans might take offense.

  “I am Thomas Henkel, a historical novelist of some reputation, but I have wide-ranging interests, particularly in the history of science present and past, including Chinese, which I taught myself. This is my spouse Angela.” Ann-gay-la.

  “I’ll see if our bus is waiting for us,” announced Gabriella, perhaps clinging to a lifeline of routine.

  “Excellent idea,” said Henkel, and we all filed out quickly in her wake.

  The gateway, and that shimmery mist pressing upon the entrance . . . Gabriella strode towards and into the mist, promptly disappearing; just a moment later she was returning, and gaping at us all.

  “I did not turn round!” she cried out. “Mother of God, I did not turn round. I walked straight. I swear that.”

  “Come back here,” Henkel said in a consoling, though authoritative tone. “We must all stay together now.” He alone was standing still, tall on a step, while the rest of us milled about. “Listen to me, while you, Gabriella, translate for your countrymen. If this is no hoax, such as we saw on the television before it failed, and if we are not somehow miraculously protected by nothing external being able to enter here, analogous to Signora Vigo being unable to leave—an assumption that we dare not make!—and if those krakens multiply and iterate themselves at progressively smaller scales, being all essentially reflections of the same entity, then we might encounter one or more within these very walls, of a scale more in accordance with our own size. For which reason, we must all arm ourselves with whatever suitable maintenance tools the Superintendent can make available immediately.”

  This certainly made sense, as did the wisdom of acting in an organised manner as regards morale, which might have been Henkel’s major motive. Major or general, I thought. Well, someone needed to take charge.

  “Miss Hughes,” he called out to me, “I need an aide, or rather an adjutant.” So Henkel was indeed thinking of himself as a sort of high- ranking officer. “I believe your job qualifies you. We shall see to introductions and assess our skills just as soon as we are all armed.”

  From a storeroom near the entrance we were
soon equipped, like some band of medieval peasants cajoled to war, with spades, various forks, a scythe, a couple of sickles, shears that could stab, hammers. I myself took a fork and Henkel a spade that could deliver a flat blow as well as jabbing or slicing; and now our impromptu general could get on with formal introductions, to the extent that we hadn’t already spent a whole morning together informally. Dutifully I listed the names and occupations in a notebook taken from the office.

  Thomas Henkel, historical novelist, German

  Angela Henkel, ex-archivist, researcher, German

  Hans-Ulrich Kempen, literary translator, German

  Sally Hughes, CERN administrator, British

  Gabriella Vigo, guide, Italian

  Rudolfo Grasso, cemetery superintendent, Italian

  Gianni Celle, cemetery assistant, Italian

  Jimmy Garrett, evangelic Protestant pastor, American

  Mary-Sue Garrett, business secretary, 1970s Kansas

  beauty queen, American

  Paul Goldman, Harvard University Press, American

  Betsy Goldman, romantic novelist, American

  Alice Goldman, their teenage daughter, American

  Wim Ruyslinck, architect, Dutch

  Anne Gijsen, art student, Dutch, Wim’s girlfriend

  Dionijs Ruyslinck, Wim’s elder brother, computer assieted

  designer, Dutch

  Nellie van Oven, art historian, Dutch