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

by Unknown

  The cult was far more cautious and guarded about a book that Beckman claimed to have translated. He claimed that his was the only accurate translation anywhere. “All other followers of the mad Alhazred made mistakes. That’s why everyone from Whately to Akeley—who refused to act, the fool!—ultimately failed to open the gate. Yog-Sothoth is indeed the gate, but it’s only the first of six!”

  It all had something to do with seals.

  “Like at the circus?” Detwiler had asked.

  Stipe had replied, “No, I don’t think so.”

  All he expected Detwiler to do was pretend to be a rich refrigerator magnate and a total believer in Beckman’s lunacy. “A couple nights in the house, we wait till everybody’s asleep, load up all we can carry, and get out of there. By the time they notice we haven’t shown up for mimosas, we’re like in New Hampshire.”

  It sounded ridiculously simple, which was probably why Detwiler thought it couldn’t possibly work. But once he was inside the house and, dressed in a rented tuxedo, was given a tour of the place, he had to admit it looked as simple as it sounded. The artwork wasn’t wired. The safe was left ajar. And when he mentioned this to Beckman, the answer astounded him. “After we open the gate, my friend, there’ll be no need for alarms, security, protection.” As Beckman explained, he puffed on a cigar the size of the Hindenberg. “We shall rule the world!”

  Yep, Detwiler agreed, nuts. There was no time to waste. The group was preparing for a big ritual the following night. Detwiler worked out the scenario: the two of them would pretend to get drunk while celebrating and pass out downstairs, allowing all others to go to bed. Then they would clean the place out. He determined the fastest route through the house while carrying priceless Miros and Picassos. He’d already gotten the code number that opened the front gate of the estate—the one security element Beckman did rely upon (and which Stipe had missed). All they had to do was join in the group’s little event.

  Of course things hadn’t exactly followed the script. The ceremony with the weird stone seal, which Beckman split in two, had ripped open reality, a horrible, lightning-charged rending that Detwiler still couldn’t believe he’d witnessed. From some other foul and pestilent dimension, Cthulhu slithered into this one. Unfortunately, he proved to be about the size of Godzilla, far larger than Beckman’s house. The whole place came down, beams and ceilings caving in, circuits bursting into flame. Cultists were crushed left and right, including Beckman himself.

  Detwiler hightailed it into the study as the building collapsed around him. He threw open the door of the walk-in safe, at which point something clocked him. Stipe later claimed it was a plumbing fixture from the second floor, just as he claimed that Detwiler had survived only because Stipe had dragged him into the walk-in safe. That had shielded them both. But Detwiler had awakened alone. True to form, Stipe had snatched half the cash from the safe and taken off.

  Cash, of course, had already become a useless commodity. Cthulhu and the rest of his loathsome, wet, leathery entourage leveled Maine in an afternoon, and then settled in for a long stay, laying siege to the whole East Coast. The next week was like a bad B- monster movie, with various militaries throwing everything at them. Some of the lesser creatures were destroyed, but Cthulhu seemed only to devour the energy flung his way. Even the nuclear option failed, although nobody would be living in Baltimore again before 2400 A.D.

  Like cockroaches that had lurked in the woodwork, a network of cults uncannily like Beckman’s had emerged across the world, pledging their allegiance to the god. According to stories that he heard later, only some of them survived the contact. “Some people never learn,” Detwiler mused. Granted, the ones who did survive had it better than most everyone else. The arrangement reminded him of trustees in Otisville.

  Detwiler lived quite some time in the Beckman house safe. It provided protection against the weather, and the location remained undisturbed. Nobody wanted to come near.

  From the remains of the house—notably the basement pantry—he managed to retrieve assorted canned goods and jellies. A plethora of jellies. It seemed that Mrs. Beckman had enjoyed canning jalapeño jelly for all occasions. In Detwiler’s case, “all occasions” meant just that.

  He scrounged boxes of crackers, but really missed not having some cream cheese. Somebody, probably Cthulhu, had stepped directly on the refrigerator.

  The next weeks, he pulled up various parts of the house, occasionally finding someone’s remains, including Beckman’s. The cigar case and lighter from the suit jacket were about all that survived intact. Finally he came upon the broken seal and other objects from the ceremony.

  When the food was about to run out, Detwiler gathered up the remaining supplies and recovered items in a large leather laptop satchel and over a period of months worked his way down the coast and back to the Bronx, or what it had become.

  The creatures had taken over. They had marshaled the survivors of Beckman’s inter-dimensional holocaust into an army of slaves to build monuments to the great Cthulhu, with cultists as their overseers. Already the landscape was starting to look like a representation of ancient Egypt, if the Egyptians had ingested a lot of magic mushrooms before constructing their pyramids. He learned to avoid the barrel-shaped guardians with eyes on tentacles and huge bat wings, and subsisted mostly on canned goods while trying to ascertain what use somebody with his skills was in a world turned so upside down.

  He came upon people hiding out in underground garages and former basements and shooting each other over who got to sleep on a dirty piece of cardboard. How good it was to see that we’d all settled our differences in the face of a common enemy.

  The general opinion was that over a billion people had perished in the first week alone. Nobody knew what was true. It was merely the prevailing rumor. The future for Detwiler narrowed to encompass how to get food, how to survive the night without being shot, and how to stay warm as the weather turned cool. The last thing he expected ever again was to encounter Stipe.

  One afternoon as he was creeping through some rubble, Detwiler came to an oddly fashioned tunnel. It wasn’t a sewer tunnel or a subway. It was something that looked freshly carved and weirdly organic, glowing with an eerie rippling phosphorescence, as if the walls within were pulsating, a kind of living formation that produced patterns as he passed by—at least it seemed organic until he came to a wall of immense, roughly rectangular stones. Those appeared to be the foundation for something aboveground. Detwiler suspected that he’d blundered beneath one of the weird temples. He turned to leave, only to find his way blocked by a Twinkie.

  As such creations went, this was the granddaddy of Hostess desserts, a slithering brown, granular lump the size of a Clydesdale that only moved when necessary—and very quietly at that. He was trapped, but instead of crushing him or absorbing him or whatever else he expected it to do, the thing let him sidle past, and then herded him back out of the tunnel and up to the surface, where three more joined it, offering him only one course to take. They drove him across a roughly hewn stalagmitic plaza toward one of the many ugly, off-kilter temples. Well, he thought, he’d had a good run, come about as far as anyone could hope in this twisted world. That’s when he heard someone call his name, looked up, and found Stipe striding across the knurled landscape. Stipe, wearing a black suit and white shirt, looking for all the world like a beaming Jehovah’s Witness come to lay on him a copy of The Watchtower; the Twinkie wranglers parted to let Stipe through.

  Stipe slapped him on the shoulder, took him by the arm. “Man, I almost didn’t recognize you with the beard. Good to see you. I was sure you’d do okay.”

  “Yeah, I was real safe in that safe.”

  “Safe in the safe, ha!” Stipe laughed, wiped at his eyes. “That’s a good one. Here, come with me.”

  Detwiler eyed the clustered Twinkies.

  Stipe insisted, “No, really, it’s okay. They know you’re one of us.”

  “Us?”

  “You know what I mean.
You’re a Beckman.”

  “I’ll have nightmares forever.”

  “Well, I think maybe I can help with that. You need a bath, John. A shave. Come on.” They walked off across the plaza toward a group of humans, all dressed in much the same garb as Stipe, even the women. Some of them looked to Detwiler a little peculiar, as if maybe their parents had been spadefoot toads. Stipe explained to them that Detwiler was a surviving member of Beckman’s group. The others oohed and aahed as if he was a lost treasure. They welcomed him to New R’lyeh.

  Eventually Stipe dragged him off for a tour of the facilities.

  “What’s New R’lyeh?” Detwiler pronounced.

  “It’s what Cthulhu renamed New York. The parts he’s had rebuilt, anyway.”

  “What happened to Old R’lyeh?”

  “I think it sank into the Pacific. Anyway, this is where we all are now.”

  “Home, sweet ph’nglui.”

  Stipe chuckled. “Hey, you remembered some of the words from the ceremony.”

  “One or two.”

  As they entered through a gaping doorway, Stipe asked, “So, like, what d’you have in the bag?”

  “Toothbrush,” replied Detwiler.

  “Right.”

  The inside of the place was just as rough and knurled. No surface was either exactly horizontal or vertical. The light came from more phosphorescence.

  “Lichen,” Stipe explained.

  As they walked, something huge, brown, and repulsive flew by. Its stalked eyes turned to observe them. Its leathery wings flapped heavily. Then it shat something green and noxious. “Oh, great. Can we go another way?” Detwiler asked.

  “It’s just fhtagn poop.”

  “I’d say this whole farkakte setup’s fhtagn.”

  “Aw, don’t be like that. We’re gonna score hugely here, man, now that you’re back.”

  “No kidding,” Detwiler replied. “How do we define hugely in the universe of flying tentacled beer barrels?”

  Stipe explained that Cthulhu’s human followers were already hoarding all kinds of treasures: great works of art, things lifted out of what had been the Met and the MOMA: jewelry, gold, silver, anything that seemed like it might one day represent wealth for a new ruling class.

  “Like that cash you made off with.”

  Stipe shrugged. “Yeah, that didn’t play out too well. Why I had to rejoin the overseers.”

  “So where are they keeping all this wealth-to-be?”

  “Inside the monuments. Well, underneath them, really.”

  “Like the tunnel I just came from?”

  Stipe’s eyebrows raised. “No wonder they nabbed you. Cthulhu’s got a thing for tunnels. Loves ’em.”

  “Why? He’s the size of the moon. He couldn’t fit his left nut in one.”

  “And you know what else?” Stipe confided. “Some of the other groups showed up with more seals.”

  “Seals like Beckman’s, you mean?”

  “Absolutely. A shame Beckman’s book got smushed.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, see, that’s the only translation that was accurate, just like Beckman claimed.”

  “So nobody can work the seals.”

  “Nope, and now they’re not gonna get the chance.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, Cthulhu doesn’t want anyone to have them.

  Every time somebody’s shown up with another one, it’s confiscated.”

  “He doesn’t want to open the rest of the gates?” Stipe shrugged. “Not yet, I guess. Probably wants to finish remaking the world in his image so he can show it off to the other gods.”

  Detwiler glanced around at the carved interior, the canted doorways, vaulted ceiling, rough and narrow steps. “Seems to be having some success with that.”

  “I got a place picked out we can move everything till we need it.”

  “Place?” Detwiler asked.

  “Yeah, awhile back I found an old abandoned subway line that I don’t think has been in operation since like forever. The tunnelers covered it up to bore one of Cthulhu’s tunnels, but I made sure to leave one way into it. It’s so close to the Temple of Yuggoth, though, that nobody else’ll go near it.”

  “Why not?”

  “You haven’t been there, have you?” asked Stipe.

  “How would I know?”

  “’Cause if you had you’d be a gibbering mess now.

  The place exudes cosmic dread like a noxious gas. You hallucinate loathsome star clusters, and feel your very atoms come apart in slow motion, in agony so terrible that most people hurl themselves to their death at the very start of it.”

  “Yeah, I think I’d remember that.”

  “We only get together and chant there like once a year.”

  “How is it anybody’s left?”

  Instead of answering, Stipe went on, “I figure we can pull whatever we want out of the other temples, store it down under there. Sell it back to them if we have to, but otherwise we sit it out till we need some capital. Then we bargain.”

  “You’re talking about the seals.”

  Stipe smiled broadly. “You always were a smart guy, Detwiler.”

  “Not smart enough.”

  “That’s why you got me.”

  Detwiler closed his eyes and said nothing.

  And so they’d spent days worshipping Cthulhu and his inhuman underlings at various sites around New R’lyeh, and their evenings scouting each elephantine temple and slimy tunnel until they’d located the collected Seals of Kadath, a matter made harder by the repeated denials they heard, mostly from the Cthulhulians themselves, that the seals had never existed at all.

  With the stone pulled out, the two slipped into the unguarded vault beneath the Temple of Ultimate Chaos, which Detwiler observed looked like a greenish-black intestinal polyp.

  They filled the duffels with the five seals, and Detwiler took time to add as many of the rough- cut diamonds as he could scoop up before Stipe nervously said, “They’ve stopped chanting.”

  It had indeed grown silent overhead. But no one was making their way down the Stygian stairways to this vault either. Detwiler snatched a few more jewels.

  Stipe grunted as he hauled his duffel over to the hole. It took the two of them to lift it up and over, and lower it down the outside. The weight of the bag almost pulled Stipe out the opening. They repeated the act with the other two before climbing out. Stipe was dirty and sweating. Detwiler imagined that he looked much the same. “We’re gonna have to come back for the third one of these.”

  “Just to the end of the tunnel for now,” said Detwiler.

  “You’re crazy.”

  “I must be.” He lifted his duffel and started walking, bow-legged and slow. Stipe followed him. At the mouth of the tunnel, Detwiler set his bag down and went back in for the third one. He carried that with less trouble, and set it on top of Stipe’s bag. They looked out into the night. This was the part of the journey that presented the most peril. The duffels had to travel to the subway entrance, a good half a mile away. But Detwiler had worked that all out. After checking to be sure no one was watching from outside the glowing tunnel, he crept off into the dark and returned a few minutes later with a dinged up wheelbarrow.

  “Where’d you find that?” Stipe asked.

  “I used to move with it before your Twinkies caught me.”

  “You’re a genius, John.”

  “Now and then.” They loaded the last of the duffels and then Stipe’s into the barrow. “We’re still going to have to leave the third one here. Three’s too heavy.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll stay with it,” Detwiler said. “I know how you like to make off with the goods. And I can wait.”

  Stipe lifted the wheelbarrow onto its single wheel. “Yeah, I can handle this okay. I’ll be back in under an hour.”

  “Be careful.”

  Stipe headed off, shortly disappearing over the rise and into the landscape. Amazing how dark it got without str
eetlights, Detwiler thought. No wonder we invented them.

  He set to work. First he recovered his satchel, which he’d been careful to hide near the tunnel’s mouth. Now, in the dull greenish glow of the fungi at the opening, he pulled out the battered copy of Beckman’s Necronomicon , and with a few loose bricks set it up so that he could read from it. Next he unzipped the duffel. He’d put two of the seals in the bag in order to ensure that Stipe could transport the remaining duffels by himself. Now he hauled them out one at a time, afterwards rolling each to where he could see it clearly in the pulsating glow.

  A low, shambling sound caught his attention, and one of the Twinkies slid sluglike into the edge of the tunnel’s luminescence. Detwiler edged back to the book and flipped through the pages. “Regna’d kesin,” he read. The Twinkie flexed as if something invisible had poked it. “K’la ye’hah!” It turned and scuttled away. “Bug-shoggoth.”

  Detwiler glanced from the book to the seals. The runes on each were distinctive, and only one bore the correct symbols as illustrated in Beckman’s book. When he was absolutely certain he rolled the other one across the rubble to where an old fire hydrant still stood, anchored to pavement below the debris. Certain he’d end up with a hernia, he lifted the round stone over his head and then as hard as he could dashed it on the tip of the hydrant. The seal shattered. Somewhere, distantly in the night, something squealed like a lobster being immersed in a pot of boiling water. The sound faded. Thunder rumbled.

  “Hey!” a voice called.

  Detwiler turned. Stipe was approaching with the empty wheelbarrow.