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

by Unknown

“The Devil’s beating his wife,” she says. “Meaghan would love this. I hope she’s better soon.”

  “She will be,” Delmar replies. He says it automatically, like it’s a programmed response, a catechism. The growth on the side of his wife’s face thickens into an articulated tentacle, long as a tablespoon, and like one of those, it flares and bulges at its end. The growth waves up and down as if it’s sniffing the air. Lynda brings the cob to her mouth, paying no attention to her new deformity.

  Delmar goes to the stove, where he has set a wooden-handled butcher knife so that the top half of its blade rests on a red hot coil. He picks up the knife. “Honey, I’m sorry, but I need you to hold still a second.”

  What he does next he does with the impassive face of the parent who must every day hold his daughter with cystic fibrosis upside down and beat her to make sure she can breathe another day. Lynda holds still, closes her eyes, seems to shut down, almost. When he finishes, there’s a raw circle on her cheek, like a cross- section of severed sausage, bloodless; and in seconds it’s stretched over with new skin, pink and healthy. She starts again as if nothing has happened, picks up her ear of corn and starts to gnaw.

  The black thing squirming in Delmar’s hands screams when he drops it in the pot, but he has the lid over it before it can crawl out. Before it can speak. He knows he can’t let it speak. Why he knows this, he can’t really say, it’s as if someone is whispering in his ear, whispering frantically, don’t let it, don’t let it, don’t let it, but there’s no one else in the room, just him and Lynda.

  Outside, the rain-sound stops, and the landscape brightens, though the clouds stay gray as ever.

  “Sweetie,” calls Lynda, “could you bring me the butter?”

  “You bet,” he says, keeping the pot lid pressed down hard. “In a minute. Just a minute.” He eyes her sidelong. “Just don’t forget who loves you.”

  She smiles widely over the decimated contents of her plate. “I haven’t. Ever.”

  After lunch, he trudges out to the vegetable garden, not a trouble on his mind. Though there’s no break in the clouds, the light that so kindly warms his land makes its gentle presence known on his face. Most of his farm is given over to pastureland—he likes to joke to Lynda that he’s renting from the horses—but he keeps a half-acre tilled and the animals, with preternatural discretion, leave it alone. He’s never even had to put a fence around it.

  He’s imagining a sweaty but productive day spent plucking hungry bugs off the potato leaves, pulling weeds from between the beanstalks, harvesting the ripest ears of corn. How easily the work comes to him, a lifestyle he once knew only from the half- listened-to tales—more like shaggy-dog complaints, really, long growly rants with no real point—from his grouchy father, God rest his soul. Delmar agrees now with his father; that he really was born to this work. He can hardly remember his life before he brought Lynda and Meaghan here.

  The cornrows tower at the edge of the tilled square furthest from the house. He gets to that task last of all, and once he’s there something in him grows uneasy, and a sensation crawls through his shoulders—like the prick, prick, prick when a wasp alights and starts to scurry across exposed flesh—but he feels this on the inside of his skin, not the outside.

  And at once his mind fills with the sight of the black limb twitching on his wife’s face. The texture of her flesh when he cut into it, spongy and yielding not a speck of blood. He doubles over, his insides pricking, but that voice is back, soothing in his ear, Don’t think about it, just don’t think about it, don’t let yourself think about it.

  And though his heart is racing he can stand up straight. The pricking sensation is gone. He breathes deeply; his eyes take in the beauty that surrounds him, the grass-green slopes, the fecund garden, thriving as a result of his proud handiwork. Yet he’s still not at ease.

  Beyond the corn lounges a long stretch of pasture that the animals hardly ever visit. Beyond that rises a gray haze of fog. He thinks nothing of it—this wall of fog is always there, misting up in a thick curtain to join with the low-hanging clouds overhead.

  Instead, a spark of light in the pasture catches his eye, orange and pulsing like fireplace embers. A brush fire? Couldn’t be. Something pricks in his belly, once, sharp, and stops.

  His boots whisk softly through the grass.

  For as long as he can remember, there’s been an oddity present in this particular pasture, a blackened spot, perfectly circular, about the size of a manhole, where nothing grows. It’s a lightning strike, that internal voice always tells him, whenever he gets close. Nothing special. Not important.

  But now the burnt circle in the ground has rekindled. He comes upon it to find it alive with curling lines of pulsating orange and yellow light. Stranger still, the lines etched by the glow form patterns, some of which he recognizes, though it’s as if a brick barrier stands in his mind between recognition and understanding. The patterns throb.

  A sound from the fogbank. A sob.

  The pricking beneath his skin returns. Delmar takes a step toward the foggy veil, despite the voice whispering, Stay away. Stay far away.

  “Who’s out there?” he means to shout, but the sound barely leaves his throat.

  The sobbing within the fog continues. It’s unquestionably the sound of a man, weeping.

  Delmar goes pale. It’s been months at least since he’s ever heard another human voice out here. There’s been no one save him and his wife and his daughter, safe from the rest of the world, the way he’s wanted it to be. Confusion and anger and that hideous pricking fear all slither inside him.

  Worse, he thinks he recognizes the voice, but he can’t place it. The man’s sobs grow louder, the sound of someone unhinged with grief, a father finding a child’s murdered body in the trunk of a car.

  Delmar takes another step toward the gray wall. “Get out of here,” he says, louder, but still not with the strength he’d like. “You’re trespassing. Go back where you came.”

  The man in the fog starts to scream. It’s a sound ripped from the belly, and the screams keep coming, like the man is being shredded inside by something small and burrowing. And Delmar has heard this agony before, this man screaming in torture, and he covers his ears, because he can almost make out words. He reels and steps back—

  No, no, no! hisses the voice in his ear.

  He looks down. He nearly stepped into the black circle, which is no longer burning, no longer glowing. And he shudders. He doesn’t know why, but he knows he should never step in the circle. Never cross its edge.

  The screams in the fog have gone silent. He feels no desire to know who it was, whose voice shrieked from the fog, no more than he feels desire to know why that fog never moves, why the sky never clears.

  Go to your family. Love them. Let them love you.

  And he goes back to the garden, not a trouble on his mind. Before the light starts to fade, he’s filled a big wooden basket full of fresh-picked ears of corn. He’ll shuck them so Lynda can slice off the kernels and can them. They like to do this together, let their smiles do all the speaking. They’ll do it tomorrow. He so looks forward to it.

  But things in the house take a turn for the worse. His heart won’t settle. His mind won’t stay quiet.

  Dinner goes wonderfully enough, built around two thick steaks he set out to thaw early that morning. He even speaks to Meaghan for a little while once the rich meal lulls her mom into an evening doze. While Lynda slumps comatose at her end of the sofa, he settles comfortably at the other end and listens to his daughter’s high, sweet voice sing the alphabet, or mouth nonsense syllables to the same calliope tune, and he feels consciousness drifting off.

  An electric hum accompanies a constant, steady rattling. It takes him a moment to place what he’s hearing: the rapid-fire click-click-click of a home movie projector. Delmar hasn’t heard that noise since his twelfth birthday, when his father dug out that seemingly ancient machine to show the gathering of school chums embarrassing footage of th
e family dog wrapping her leash around a younger Delmar’s stumpy legs.

  It’s now Delmar’s father who sits with him, hunched at the other end of the couch. His father’s head turns on a neck mutated by swelling cancer lumps. You asked me to dig out this one, his father says, the sound coming through the surgery hole in his throat. Don’t whine to me. This is all your cross to bear.

  The beam from the heard-but-not-seen projector shines on a wall of fog that conceals the other side of the room. Distorted on the fog, Meaghan’s face flickers in close-up, framed by straight dark hair just like her mother’s. The footage is black and white, rendering her bright green eyes a moist gray. He recognizes her unicorn pajamas.

  A large hairy arm, a man’s arm, reaches into frame, takes her wrist. Her eyes bug, her face contorts. Delmar feels the prickling inside as the huge hand turns her wrist palm up, as another hand, the right to match the left, stabs a butcher blade into her forearm, slices a long black line.

  All this has unfolded free of all sound save the rattling projector, but when Meaghan’s mouth stretches open to scream it’s loud and piercing and absolutely real.

  Delmar starts awake. Lynda is beside him on the couch, still comatose. Meaghan screams again, somewhere in the house. Lynda doesn’t stir.

  Delmar can’t bring himself to move, paralyzed by a gut-dragging-and-twisting spin of disorientation. He can’t remember a time when he’s heard Meaghan’s voice without Lynda close by, and he knows something is wrong with that, really wrong, and the voice that protects him is saying that too, that something’s wrong, he can’t really be hearing that. Yet upstairs—she has to be upstairs—she cries again, “Dadd-eeeeeeee!”

  The noise as raw and loaded with pain as if she’d fallen on a bed of nails.

  He runs for the stairs pell- mell. His daughter screams again, the sound like pins stabbed into his eardrums. When he reaches her bedroom door, her shrieks hardly sound human.

  But he throws the door open, and she isn’t there. There’s nothing there. The room is empty, even of furniture.

  Meaghan shrieks again. Now, the noise comes from downstairs.

  The voice in his ear is whispering, It’s gotten out of control. You need the book. You need to get it now.

  Delmar doesn’t understand what the voice wants. Or something in him doesn’t want to understand.

  At Meaghan’s next howl, he plunges back down the stairs. But stops halfway.

  On the couch, in Lynda’s place, a monster writhes, a black sunburst of ropy worms. The shrieks he hears are coming from somewhere in its center. It lurches to the floor, dozens of snaky limbs flopping blind, turning over lamps and end tables, capsizing the TV.

  The book, hisses the voice in his ear. This time, he understands, and knows he has to obey.

  He dashes through the den, toward the hall and the utility room at its end, but one of the black ropes twines around his ankles, and then the thing is pulling itself on top of him, wailing in Meaghan’s voice. Keening syllables that are almost words.

  His bare hands tear at the cables of black flesh sliding against his skin, but it’s as if two tendrils replace each one he breaks, lashing around his forearms and thighs and belly, struggling to hold him still. The thing is still screaming, now with Lynda’s voice. A snake-smooth band of contracting muscle coils around his neck, starts to tighten.

  But he is stronger. He shoves to his knees, rips out the boneless limbs by their roots, hurls the thrashing tangle across the room.

  Lynda screams, screams, screams.

  He returns from the utility room with a huge book, its leather binding on the verge of crumbling, its pages flopping as he holds it open. The symbols in dark brown ink mean nothing to him, though they radiate a head-spinning wrongness. If these scribblings form words, he doesn’t know what they say—and yet he does. It’s as if another person inside him uses his eyes to see, his mouth to speak, knows the precise rhythms and pauses. And as this happens the squealing black thing in the den begins to foam, to buck, to lengthen and thicken and lighten in hue. Delmar’s vision blurs, with tears that he understands no more than he does the incantation.

  His voice rises in crescendo, and all the space around him seems to ripple, in a way that can’t be seen physically—yet his mind still senses it. The ripple starts where he’s standing and spreads through the room, the house, even the land beyond, and he knows that the power in that subtle wave is setting things to right. The voice tells him so.

  The black thing is gone. There’s only Lynda, resting peaceful on the couch, her only motion the soft rise and fall of her breath. There is no sign of Meaghan, but the voice is telling him not to worry about that. He might not see her, yet whenever he asks, she’ll speak, and he’ll know she still loves him.

  Lynda’s limp as a bag of straw, but he’s strong enough to lift her. He carries her to bed.

  Using the book always makes him uneasy—vaguely, he recalls he’s had to before—but now all is restored. Outside, there are no stars, but neither is there darkness. Just as with the sunlight, an unseen moon bathes his farmland in its shine. He can make out the shapes of the horses, straight-legged and still possibly sleeping.

  He snuggles in beside his lovely, witchy wife, no troubles on his mind, and settles his head in the pillows.

  He’s back on the sofa, and behind him the projector rattles. Meaghan sits next to him, kicking her legs, which don’t quite touch the hardwood floor. I asked Grandpa to get this out again, she says. We haven’t watched it since forever.

  The film unspools in grainy black and white, just like before. But now it resembles hidden camera footage, the view angled down from a corner of the ceiling. From this vantage point the disembodied observer peers into a large room with cinderblock walls, its carpet and other objects, mostly large plastic toys—a playhouse, a hobby horse, a Sit-and-Spin—shoved hastily against the far wall to bare the cement floor. Three figures huddle at the center of the bare floor, a man, a woman, a girl maybe seven years old. And the man has a book, a huge ominous tome. There is a small window in the far wall, placed high, indicating a basement room. The window is just out of the camera’s range of clear focus. Beyond it, through dingy glass, shadows move with chaotic fury. Sometimes blinding light flares there. Sometimes the window goes completely dark.

  The man is drawing frantically on the ground. The film speeds, somehow recorded in time lapse, an effect that drastically accelerates the chaos seen in silhouette through the high window. The man completes a huge circle inscribed along its entire circumference with headache-inducing sigils. The circle encloses him and the woman and child.

  “You were always so good at drawing when you worked at that school,” Meaghan says beside him.

  “University,” he corrects out of reflex.

  She giggles. “I remember how you came home all the time with those weird drawings in your coloring book.”

  “Sketchpad, darling. It was a sketchpad.”

  “How you said you got ’em from some book you were studying and you never let me look at ’em. Never.”

  He turns to tell her to stop sounding mad, it was all for her own good, but she’s gone. Yet he’s not alone: he’s looking at a copy of himself, but with bruises on his face, a cut down one cheek, dressed in an oxford shirt with a deeply stained collar, a torn sweater vest, fancy slacks ruined by more flowing stains. He looks like an academic who just escaped from the mouth of hell. He’s dressed just like the man in the movie. He is the man in the movie.

  I try to stop you from remembering, this new self says, but you fight me. Some part of you is always warring with me, trying to remember everything. And when you do, you’ll understand why you have to forget again. Understanding means madness. The man’s voice, the voice of this other self, is the voice he always hears whispering in times of terrible stress.

  His guardian self keeps talking, but Delmar stops listening, because a new voice distracts him, murmuring right in his ear. It’s Meaghan again; he can practically feel
her lips against his skin. “Don’t listen, Daddy. He can’t stop you from knowing.”

  Delmar watches himself in the film, scrambling to draw a second, smaller circle, about the size of a manhole, at the center of the larger one. It’s an agonizing, slow process, taking time even in time lapse, with the activity seen in shadow at the far window getting more and more frenzied, impossible to comprehend. Often times the mother, who his mind admits is Lynda, must be Lynda, seems like she’s having an exasperating time keeping the little girl inside the circle.

  As Delmar watches, his immediate surroundings fade. Soon there’s nothing left but the picture show flickering on the fog and Meaghan’s voice in his ear.

  “Sweet Daddy. Don’t you worry ’cause I still love you. I understand it all. You tried to use evil to do a good, good thing, but you had to be evil to use evil. But you did it ’cause you love us and love can be evil and good together.”

  The time lapse reverts to normal speed. In black and white, Delmar and Lynda are arguing. She turns hysterical, terrified as his gestures grow more frantic. In the background, unnoticed by either of them, the little window rattles. Darkens. Bizarrely, it looks like hair is growing around the frame.

  The voice changes oh-so-subtly, still with the timbre of a child, but more adult, more knowing. “What you did was so powerful it could never work, never, without the blood of an innocent. I know, Daddy, I know.”

  In the film he screams, the contortion of his face grotesque in total silence, and his wife pushes his daughter toward him. He takes her wrist, produces the knife. Still unnoticed, the window pushes open, just a crack, and the hair-tendrils that have worked their way into the room begin to thicken and lengthen into streams, into ropes. Something huge is oozing through the gap around the glass, pouring down the wall as if made from soft clay.

  “I should have been smarter, Daddy. I shouldn’t have been so scared.”

  The image goes out of focus, becomes a crazy split screen, left and right visions going out of sync. In one lobe, Delmar, weeping as he chants, holds his daughter’s bleeding arm over the inner circle, its black designs coming to life, shining, burning as the blood strikes it. In the other lobe, the windowpane bows and shatters as a slimy mass of dense hairy jelly shoves its way through, unfurls in an explosion of sucking lamprey mouths and clusters of lidless human eyes.