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

by Unknown

  All that saves us now is inattention. Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, all are like children in their godhood. Dead, they lay so long dreaming that they lost the habit of attending to the world, except through such rites as move them.

  The First Resistance fought the elder gods themselves. But how does a B- 2 fly against something that can warp the very fabric of the stars with the power of its mind? The Earth’s new masters did not need their priests to awaken them to those dangers, not after the Dunedin and Papeete nuclear strikes.

  The Second Resistance struggles against the priests instead. Dread Cthulhu could snuff my life with the merest of thoughts, but he will no more bother to do so than I will snuff the life of a single amoeba deep within my gut. Traveling across six hundred million years of time and space, then slumbering eons beneath the waves in lost R’lyeh, does not equip one for such minutiae. His priests are the immune system, seeking to eradicate the last, hopeless glimmerings of human liberty and free spirit.

  This lodge meets within the battered Sons of Finland hall along Astoria’s deserted waterfront, in the shadows of the ruined Astoria-Megler Bridge. This was once a thriving coastal city of nineteenth-century sea captains’ mansions, twentieth-century fisheries and twenty-first century tourism.

  No more. Not a mile out on the bar of the Columbia river loom the unearthly non-Euclidian geometries of one of the cyclopean Risen Cities, strangely angled walls that endlessly glimmer a feeble green while screams echo across the water. Our priestly enemies hunt far and wide, but even under their noses we are scattered and furtive. We never see the stars any more, and little of the sun, for the Old Ones’ emergence and the nuclear attacks of the First Resistance wrapped the Earth in permanent winter that varies only a little by season. A man may walk from Oregon to Washington across the frozen Columbia seven or eight months out of the year.

  We are in the old ballroom now, a baker’s dozen of us. That number would once have been deemed unlucky, but Cthulhu and his fellow, rival gods have drained the world of luck.

  The doorward drops his cowl. He is newly come among us, and must prove himself. Now I see he is a woman, as she lifts off a crowning mask that has misshapen her head. Beneath she is actually a reasonable-seeming human being, albeit as grubby and hunger-raddled as the rest of us. She slips from her robe as well, unhooks a padded hump, releases bindings on her legs, and stands straight, clad now in only blue jeans and a faded black t-shirt advertising a band called Objekt 775.

  This is like looking at a piece of the past. I wonder where her parka is.

  Inspired, I slip my cloak free and let it fall, along with my own fatigue coat, until I am clad only in ragged thermal underwear and combat boots. I am barely transformed, my hands overlarge and my fingers overblunt, but the change seems to have stopped there, as can happen with we who resist strongly enough.

  Around me, others remove their cowls and hoods and cloaks, until we stand as an array of human and formerly human faces. Some eyes are bulbous and unblinking, others scowl furiously, but we all have the full measure of one another for the first time in years.

  Also for the first time in years, as I look at our doorward, I feel stirrings in my groin. A natural woman . . .

  “I am come from the lodge in Crescent City,” she announces. Now her voice is blessedly normal as well. “Bringing news from Mendocino and further south.” There are no lodges in the formerly great cities of the world, because none of those cities remain whole and unpolluted. “A lodge along the Sea of Cortez has made an important discovery. We have found a poison that will harm even the undying priests amid their armors and their spells.”

  “Despite the Old Ones’ protection?” I ask.

  “Yes.” She smiles at me, and I am erect for the first time in years.

  II

  Just as foretold, the Old Ones are stripping the Earth from pole to pole. They are in no hurry, not by human standards—surely they perceive time so differently from us, this past decade may all be a single moment not yet passed to them, one thunderous tick of the clock of the long now.

  Strangely, in places of some technology where electricity can still be induced to function, odd corners of the world away from the attention of the priests and their gods, we find that many of our space assets remain in order. Curiously, this is despite the abilities of the Byakhee and Mi-go to traverse the emptiness between planets. The last cosmonauts starved on the ISS seven years ago, and the station has since fallen burning from the sky, but their observations had proved invaluable. Likewise weather and spy satellites, not all of which have yet strayed from their courses or lost their mechanical minds.

  The world’s cities were crushed or blasted or sickened, sometimes by human effort in the First Resistance, more often by the Old Ones themselves when they finally stirred from their watery graves. Now great, slow waves of fungal rot progress across the continents like a nightmare tide, swallowing forests and prairies and bottomlands alike. I’ve been as far east as Estes Park, and looked down on the Great Plains being scoured to bedrock. The mountains and coastlines are yet spared, but surely that is only a matter of time.

  With this data, and a tenuous network of wanderers and observers, the Second Resistance has our guesses about how many years are left to do something against the priests who focus the lamps of the Old Ones’ eyes like mad projectionists beaming death about the world. That the gods themselves are narcoleptic was perhaps the world’s saving grace, before someone, somewhere, finally succeeded in summoning them to shore in their fullest strength.

  We must believe it happened thus, for if they returned only because the stars were right, well, no one can fight the stars.

  Even the most optimistic of us do not bet on more than two decades remaining, and the general consensus is less than ten years. The loss of biomass may have started an irreversible decline in the atmospheric oxygen budget. What isn’t killed by the growing fungal tides freezes to death instead. We might win, by freakish luck and blind chance, only to perish as free men instead of slaves.

  No, we are not even slaves, for slaves have value. We are but an infestation, an annoyance or perhaps a sport to the priests, less than dust to the Old Ones.

  Still, we make our plans, and we gather our data, and we try. What else can we do? The human race is terminal, a cancer patient at full metastasis, every organ riddled with rot, the specter of death crushing a bit more air from every heaving of the lungs.

  So I listen to this plan to cultivate an obscure type of jellyfish venom. Surely, like the fungi, it is those jellyfish who far more resemble the Old Ones than the cephalopods and amphibians old Howard Phillips Lovecraft was so fond of citing. This beautiful, as-yet untainted young woman—how?—whose name we will never know and who must have been a child when the end first came, explains how the vial she carries can be cultivated in long, low trays of saltwater, with an admixture of organic nutrients to sustain the jellyfish cells that produce the requisite toxin.

  It is Julia Child by way of War of the Worlds. We plot the downfall of humanity’s most vile traitors via kitchen science, and hope to blind the Old Ones back into restless slumber in doing so.

  III

  I stay that night in the lodge, for my string of bolt-holes doesn’t begin until about fifteen river miles inland, at Knappa, Oregon. As is our usual practice, most of the others leave. Those far along into the transformation, including Madeleine Gervais, whom I’d known quite well back before the end, are far more nervous about this plan. The girl from Crescent City is unable to tell us how the poison might affect us, only that it has worked on captured priests, who cannot be slain except by extreme violence, followed by reduction and burning of the corpse.

  We can make them die unknowing. Oh, the joy that thought brings me. These traitors who have already brought the deaths of billions are beyond any redemption of suffering or vengeance.

  Curling in my little nest of borrowed blankets in one of the old basement saunas, I am quite surprised when the girl comes to me. I know h
er by her footsteps and her scent already.

  Her fingers brush my shoulder, the light pressure of them through the fabric of the blanket the first human touch I have felt in almost nine years. We do not hug, or even clasp hands, in the Second Resistance. “I saw that you understood,” she whispers.

  The hairs on my neck prickle, as my cock strains like a clothyard shaft. “I do,” I whisper, then immediately curse the echoed meaning of those particular words. I still wear my wedding ring, though my finger has grown around it until the band is almost invisible. Most days I cannot recall the faces of my wife and daughter.

  “It is darker here.” She squats back on her heels, shadows against shadow, barely an outline through some stray bit of light elsewhere in the basement. It is enough for me to notice the swing of her right breast beneath the concert t-shirt, and I recall enough of women to know she has done this on purpose.

  “Darker than California?”

  “Yes.” She shivers slightly. I realize her nipple has stiffened to something pleasingly mouth-filling. “So many of the Old Ones love their cold.”

  “They are creatures of space, and night, and the darkest depths.” For no good reason, I add, “Such bright and risen madness in our names.”

  That hand touches me again as the breast strains against its enclosing fabric. “Are you lonely?” she asks in a soft, lost voice. I am too taken up in her to wonder at the question, for already I am lifting my blanket to show her just how lonely I am.

  IV

  The woman is gone the next morning, a note telling me she heads north for the Aberdeen lodge, if it can still be found. Here in Oregon we’ve had no word from the Washington side this year since the river thawed in May, though in past years they’ve come across at Longview two or three times a month by boat during the free flowing season. Priests burned out the Lincoln City Lodge last December, the members stripped and broken and laid before the dark tide of shoggoths, digital prints of their deaths tacked to walls and telephone poles all up and down the Northwest coast as a warning to the remaining feral humans.

  No such word of Aberdeen, for good or ill.

  I should go back to my own routines, but there are vats of jellyfish toxin to establish. Someone will have to scale the odd-angled walls of the Risen City and carry the stuff in. Or allow themselves to be captured, and pray for a slow enough death to be able to spread the poison first.

  In any case, the sauna room smells of sex and me and her, and I know I shall never again experience the sweet caress of a woman. The scent-memories are precious, while they remain.

  I work for days, as Madeleine stays with me after the last stragglers depart. She knows that I touched the girl with my body, just as I will never again touch her lidless, staring eyes, and damp, spotted skin. The painful memory returns, that it was she who gave me the wedding band I still wear.

  Can she be jealous now, beyond the end of all things?

  Still, the little cells grow, the trays glowing slightly in a curious echo of the walls just offshore. Madeleine’s lips are no longer well formed for speaking, and neither is her larynx, but she grunts her fears to me.

  The toxins will kill us all, or at least those of us who are transforming. Her. Me. Everyone but the girl from Crescent City. Or perhaps the toxins will kill no one, and this is all but a cruel hoax. Maybe the Old Ones toy with us, even now.

  Finally I take her into my arms one night in the old sauna. Though true coupling is not possible for us, I make love to my memory of who my wife once was, while her lidless eyes weep acid tears to scar my chest and shoulder.

  V

  In the morning, I find her shriveled corpse next to the toxin trays. A faint smear still glows around her lips. I wonder if I should cry, but tears are years gone.

  There is nothing more to be done. I gather my strength and purpose. As we were instructed, I press the cells in old cloth, so the toxin can be more easily spread by air or contract. As it dries, I bottle the stuff into old light bulbs from which the metal stems have been broken off, then bind them with duct tape. If the priests beat me upon my capture, they will be very surprised.

  I leave detailed notes and diagrams showing our work, for when others of the lodge return. Eventually I step outside into the chilled mist and stare across the water at the Risen City. I shall take a dory and row me down to that watery hell, bringing blindness to the Old Ones, and death to my immortal enemies.

  As I ply the oars, I wonder if the girl and Madeleine planned this for me. The waters around me roil with evil, the sky is Armageddon-dark, and I find it does not matter.

  “I love you,” I tell the world. Then I row some more.

  THE SEALS OF NEW R’LYEH

  Gregory Frost

  “Did you hear something?” Detwiler asked. Stipe paused to listen.

  Detwiler couldn’t help himself; he glanced back down the tunnel. He could hear blood ringing in his ears; underneath that he wasn’t sure if he heard wind or the “whump-whump” of leathery wings. It was paranoia. He needed confirmation of that.

  “Besides wind, you mean?” Stipe asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Just them chanting upstairs. But you have to listen hard.”

  “Fine. Let’s hurry up.” Detwiler turned his attention back to his pry bar. He’d already chipped out the mortar around the massive stone block, enough room to wedge the bar in. Whatever else he had to say about life under Cthulhu, he appreciated the dependability of the architecture—dependable in the sense that it made the removal of one stone from the foundation wall a simple matter of physics. Fulcrums, levers, and offset stones. Stipe referred to the form as Ugaritic. In the old days, Stipe had read a lot on the toilet, mostly National Geographics. Detwiler only cared that he could pull out one stone and not have the whole wall collapse on top of him.

  Together they revolved the loosened stone. Then Stipe got a rope around it, and they pulled it out. It hit the floor of the tunnel with a boom that must have set off seismographs in Mongolia, assuming either Mongolia or seismographs existed any longer.

  They paused to listen again. No wings, no sound beyond the distant roar of wind. Nobody—more to the point, nothing—was crawling down the tunnel after them; and now there was a hole in the wall big enough to climb through.

  “This better work,” said Detwiler.

  “John. If Cthulhu catches you inside the vault, what’ll he do to you?”

  “Pull me apart like your little brother torturing an insect?”

  “And if you go back to living in the rubble of our dying world?”

  “The same, I suppose. Just, you know, later on.”

  “So?”

  “Yeah, great.” Detwiler flicked on his halogen flashlight and pulled himself halfway into the hole.

  Inside lay a vault exactly as Stipe had described, as huge as a cathedral, with twisted columns of stone supports. It was almost how he’d imagined Ali Baba’s cave to look back when he was a kid. Ali Baba had been something of a role model. Thieves who rode in, got what they wanted, and rode out again to their secret lair. Detwiler figured a lot of his disappointments as a thief were because nobody rode in on horseback anymore. And that was before Cthulhu had shown up and pretty much flattened civilization. Try to find a horse now.

  This time, however, things were looking up. The vault abounded with riches, and everywhere golden and silvery objects glinted in the light of his torch. Two enormous soapstone tubs presented heaps of cracked emeralds and what he dared to hope were uncut diamonds, a few as big as his fist. The tubs were covered with carvings, inhuman figures in relief. He wondered who had done the work. Some poor slob enslaved by the hideous Cthulhu, probably destroyed the moment he finished. “There are jewels in here, Stipe!” he called back. “We have to take some jewels. We can’t break in here and not take some jewels.”

  “Okay, we’ll get some jewels, but what about the stuff?”

  Detwiler waved the flashlight around. Across the chamber, set on clawfooted displays stood five
circular seals the size of garbage can lids. “Oh, yeah,” he said.

  “Let me see!” Stipe pulled him out of the hole. Detwiler handed him the torch, and Stipe leaped into the hole almost froglike. Then, “Oh,” he said, as if a woman had just unexpectedly made a pass at him—which for Stipe would have been a life-changing event. He drew himself out. “The seals.”

  “They’re worth a lot, right?” Detwiler asked doubtfully.

  “Detwiler. They’re so valuable nobody even believes they exist.”

  He considered that. “Good,” he replied. “Then nobody will believe when they aren’t there anymore.”

  Stipe bent down and picked up one of three duffels they’d brought, pushed it into the hole, and climbed in after it. Detwiler sighed. Grabbed the remaining two bags. So typical of Stipe that he had taken only his own duffel. Stipe the solipsist, a curse and a blessing; it meant that he was always looking for a score, but also that once he had his own, he lost all interest in everybody else’s circumstance. This had resulted in Detwiler’s one stretch in juvie two decades ago, and five months in Otisville more recently.

  Now that Cthulhu had come along and shredded the fabric of society, not to mention time and space, everybody he’d known in the joint was free. A lot of them, he thought, probably shouldn’t have been. And because of Stipe, Detwiler felt he bore some responsibility for Cthulhu in the first place, an opinion that was not going to make him popular with the remaining clusters of humanity.

  Not unless his plan worked.

  The cult of Glynn Beckman had caught Stipe’s attention for a couple of reasons. First, most of its members were wealthy inbred loons too scabrous even for the Ayn Rand followers to tolerate, but like Rand’s thugs, smug in their superiority, so much so that they tended to leave a lot of things unlocked—like for instance the walk- in safe in Beckman’s study where the cult’s finances and papers were kept—and available, like the valuable art-works decorating Beckman’s walls. That appealed to Stipe so much he joined the cult before they’d finished buttering him up. Actually, they didn’t know him as Stipe, but as Kellogg, the current and insanely wealthy scion of the cereal empire of the same name.