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

by Unknown

  This time the picture would be of Broken Dirt, whatever that might be, but when Echo took her hand from his wrist and snuggled her face into Moms’s shoulder, he thought that she must not have finished the picture and had given up. He had been struck by this fear before, that Echo was only making random scratches. She never closed her eyes to concentrate. It was as if she saw an image already in the sand and was merely tracing it out. So he leaned close and studied.

  It was not a picture of an animal or a person or of one of the Olders. Echo could not have drawn one of the latter without crying out in terror and retreating into herself for a long time. It was no machine that Vern could puzzle out; the lines were too far apart. Maybe it was some building or monument the Olders had constructed or that they were constructing now. They were always busy, always remaking the world around them into something it should not be, something that made Vern queasy when he saw it. Echo’s picture was of nothing that plied through the sky like the monstrous flying machines that whispered back and forth in the upper air on unguessable errands.

  Maybe it was something in the stream. There was a wavy line between two sets of straight- line segments that were joined. There were squiggly circles and lines disposed about the line-segments. He peered more closely at the wavy line between the segment sets; it was broken in two places with small empty spaces.

  Echo was watching him look, her face expressionless. When he pointed at one of the broken places and asked, “Is it a waggly?” she buried her face in Moms’ shoulder. Then she looked out again to watch him examine it.

  So, whatever, the hiatus indicated, it was not something that flapped or waved or fluttered in the breeze. Those irregular movements fascinated Echo; they were to her the salient parts of any landscape.

  “Is it a too-bright?”

  Echo rocked back and forth, excited, but she did not smile.

  A too-bright would be something that flashed or glittered or glimmered. There were two of them, so it probably wouldn’t be something that emitted a steady shine as an artificial light would probably do. What things in nature flashed or flickered intermittently?

  Well, it was a stream, of course, or a river. When the three of them went to bathe in the stream in the warm summer, the thing that captured Echo’s attention most firmly was the way the sunlight reflected off the wavelets. She was transfixed, watching these changing lights as fixedly as if she were trying to decipher a code.

  So then, if the wavy line were a stream, the surrounding segments would represent the banks. The squiggly circles and other lines would represent bushes and grasses.

  Except that Echo could not “represent” with abstract symbols. She always guided Vern’s hand to draw, as closely as the sand-medium would allow, the exact lineaments of the thing to be seen. So his interpretation must be wrong and these disjointed marks composed a realistic picture of something he could not recognize.

  Or—

  Or maybe it was a true-to-life drawing of the picture that was in her mind. Maybe it had come to her just as it was laid out here in the sand, a schematic diagram of a place. In that case, it must have been sent to her as a message—and not from the Olders or any of their slaves. Their aura about it would ravage his sister. She would crouch with her face to the cave wall, clutching her knees and wailing.

  He looked at her, safe in Moms’ arms, watching him. She was not frightened. The message had come from something or someone else than they knew, an entity that had searched to find a receptive mind and had encountered Echo. This was not the first of her extrasensory episodes. Such experiences had been remarked as fairly widespread among autistics, even before the advent of the Olders had heightened, in greater and less degree, according to individuals, those powers among humans. Some person, or group of persons, was trying to make contact, either with Echo alone or with the whole family by means of Echo.

  He examined the drawing again. Was he looking at a map? Did these scattered lines represent a specific place? He could not ask. “Place” would mean nothing to Echo. If she arrived at the location suggested by her drawing, she almost certainly would not be able to recognize it. It would be too detailed and, to her, would bear no resemblance to the lines in the sand.

  Well then, supposing that this telepathic being, whatever it might be, really had transmitted a map to Echo’s mind, and, supposing that Vern had interpreted the hiatuses in the wavy line correctly, how would the sender have known to include a representation of a “too-bright” in the scheme? The telepath would have to know her mind thoroughly, understanding the way Echo experienced things and reacted to them. But that would not be possible without her knowledge and if she had felt someone rummaging through her mind-pictures, her fear and trembling would alert her mother and brother.

  If, however, the telepath understood the kind of mind it had touched, it would not need intimate knowledge of its contact. If she or he or it recognized autism and had had previous commerce with autistic personalities, it would know how to contact them and how to communicate information without distressing that person. Echo had been disturbed; she had murmured in her sleep, reacting to the encounter, but she had not been distressed. The telepath was not immediately threatening . . . But the further intentions might not be benevolent.

  Now, supposing that his first two notions were not groundless, the situation would be that some being had made purposeful contact with the family, or at least with Echo, and had transmitted a map, though one with limited geographical information. Perhaps it had transmitted only as much as it estimated that Echo could receive and pass on.

  Why had it done so? Did it desire that the family travel to the mapped place?

  He passed his hand above the sand drawing and looked at Echo, into her unwavering stare, and asked, “Go here?”

  For a long time she did not respond and when she did, it was only to sing one of her songs. “All night all night all night . . .”

  “Queenie, play with Echo,” Vern said and the big black dog rose and came to his sister and nuzzled her elbow and suffered herself to be petted. This was one way to break Echo’s verbal cycles, but it did not always work.

  She had retreated from his question, Vern realized, because here meant to her not the place the diagram represented but the sand itself. Echo did not want to go sit in the circle and destroy her drawing; she was always proud when she had guided Vern to draw a picture that was in her head.

  She would never be able to say, “Yes, let us travel to the place we have drawn the map of. Something wants us to be there and it is important.” Those wishful sentences Vern furnished for himself in his anxiety to comprehend, and this fancy was a signal of his frustrated impatience.

  There might be other explanations for the contact. Vern knew that others had retreated to these caves to escape the onslaught of the Olders. In their small university town, most people had been killed with dreadful weapons or left to the mercies of the slave-organisms called shoggoths that had no notion of what mercy might be, and so killed lingeringly, as if taking enjoyment from the spectacle and music of the final agonies. A number of persons had been taken away to the colossal laboratory structures the Olders had reared and there they were divested of the knowledge the dire creatures judged might be useful to their purposes—whatever those might be.

  Among those who had managed to flee and hide in the caves that had once sheltered the abused Cherokee people, there might be another autistic with some of the extrasensory powers that Echo possessed.

  The question would still remain, however. Why should such a person transmit a map? Whoever sent it had sent an invitation. Or a summons.

  They were as well prepared as they could be to leave the cave and journey. Moms and Vern had made a list and gathered the accessories necessary for travel. “Someday,” she had said, “the Old Ones will come into our territory. They are always expanding their reach, tearing down our world and rebuilding it to suit them, remaking it in their own image. So we must gather supplies and put them away in the c
ave and be prepared. I heard once long ago that it is best always to be prepared.”

  So they had scavenged for twine and for whatever other binding materials they could find, for cloth of any kind that might warm, shelter, and hide them, and for any handy pieces of metal that could be beaten into useful shape or sharpened to an edge. There was no way to preserve foodstuffs, so Vern had laid several fish traps in the stream below the waterfall. An early autumn rain had washed away two of them, but there were three left, though only one now contained a trout.

  We have enough to travel a short way if we must, he thought. He thought too about how people used to discard all sorts of good things, now useful for the family. That time was a world ago and the kind of time it had existed within could never return.

  But if they were to travel, answering that summons, where would they go?

  He looked at the drawing again. The line segments crowded near the wavy line upon its left- hand side, but on the other side they were set farther away. So if the wavy line was indeed a stream that sparkled intermittently, the right bank was farther from its center. Or maybe that was just the angle of vision. If the right bank only appeared to be farther, it would mean that the stream was deep in a ravine and the map showed it from the right-hand side. The stream they lived beneath ran to the south and as it rolled down the mountainside, it had cut, over the millennia, deep declivities. Vern thought that if they decided to answer the summons, they should follow the stream, descending the mountain until they found a place that fit the map.

  He sighed. It was all very chancy, but this was the best interpretation he could come up with. He would talk it over with Moms in the evening. Now he would go to his daily chores, gathering food and fuel where he could and collecting any shard or scrap or leaf or root that might help to keep them alive. Then this evening they would hold council and decide.

  This was the best part of the day for them, although Echo, if she were overtired in the evening, would be fretful for a tedious time before settling to nestle in Moms’ lap. Vern and Moms were by this hour good-tired, the cessation of the long, active day pleasant after their labors were accomplished. This was the hour they talked, making plans and sometimes recalling the good things they had stored in memory.

  During this time they would also debate courses of action, and this evening Vern had asked Moms whether it would be wise to try to find the place Echo had depicted.

  “You say it is an invitation or a summons from someone or some people we cannot know,” Moms said.

  “That’s how I make it out.”

  “She is not in a state. She is not frightened by this . . . message.”

  They watched Echo. She had gone back to the circle and was playing with the sand, pouring the grains into one hand and then into the other and letting them spill through her fingers. Over and over she did this, over and over, while crooning a wordless song.

  “That is one reason I think I should try to find it.”

  “You?” Moms asked. “That cannot be. It would have to be the three of us together.”

  “I could go find it and, if I can figure out what is going on and see whether it’s safe, then I could take us there.”

  “But if you did not come back, Echo and I would perish.”

  “If we all go, we all might die.”

  “That would be better.” Her eyes moistened and she turned her head away. Vern heard her taking deep breaths to calm her emotions.

  “It would be hard traveling with three. Faster for me to go and come back and go again.”

  “But you can’t be sure you have found the right place unless Echo is with you. She will know the place when she arrives there.”

  “She might not.”

  “Whoever is sending the message now will tell her when she has arrived.”

  “What if it is some plan of the Olders to draw humans out?”

  “You have already rejected that idea or you would not even consider going. And if there was any slight hint of the Old Ones about it, Echo would smell them out. She is more sensitive to them than we are.”

  “Could they not find a way to disguise their presence?”

  “I don’t think so. I can’t pretend to understand their psychology; I don’t know that such a concept can even apply to them. But when I try to translate their ‘attitude,’ if I can call it that, to our terms, I would describe it as contemptuous in regard to humans. They probably hold us in less esteem than those amoebean slaves they created, those shoggoths. They think themselves invincible on our planet and maybe within the whole cosmos, as I heard once long ago. They would not think of hiding or disguising their presences. They do not confer upon us the dignity of being considered their opponents. We are, at most, mere nuisances.”

  “Yes.” Vern let the image of the star- headed monstrosity slip into his mind and then imagined its disappearance before it could bring up his emotional temperature. But their handiwork, all those immense towers and cyclopean, steeply sloped pyramids with ridged ramps, all that bewildering hyper-geometry of almost unvisualizable angles—these images and many others he allowed to register in his mind. They would not attract the attention of a probe, for they were only pictures of things that existed and any animal might be gazing upon them. “Yes,” he said, “we are only minor pests to them. But we know that they have enemies much more powerful than we are. They have battled Cthulhu and triumphed and were defeated and then triumphed again. This is something I heard once long ago. It may be that this call—this invitation or summons—is intended to entrap an enemy more dangerous than humans.”

  “But in that case the call would be cast in terms utterly alien to us. I do not think Echo could even react to it.”

  Again Vern looked at his sister. The world outside had darkened as the hour deepened and the sound of the curtaining waterfall seemed to grow louder. Echo, with her silvery long hair and porcelain-pale skin almost glowed ghostlike in the dim cave. She had stopped pouring sand and was gathering it into little mounds spaced out evenly from one another. After mounding a fifth small pile, she stopped and sat up cross-legged with her hands in her lap, looking toward the cave mouth.

  “Well, what do you think we should do?” Vern asked.

  “It is time to go to sleep. Maybe you’d like to scout around outside a little. Maybe when Echo goes to sleep tonight, she will receive another message and maybe it will be clearer than this map diagram she drew.”

  Moms’ suggestion was what Vern had expected. He supposed that prudence was probably their best policy, but he was apprehensive. Someone or something knew of their existence. They went on with their hardscrabble daily lives as if the Olders did not know about them, keeping as closely as possible to narrowly settled routines, to behavior that did not arouse their feelings or require unusual degrees of mental activity. Quietude was their only camouflage. If they had to journey, the stress of traveling with Echo might rouse attention, but if pursuers were closing in, there would be no choice but to travel.

  It was dark here; the detestable five-pointed orange moon was not in the sky—and he was grateful for that. Skirting around the waterfall by a familiar but barely traceable pathway over the rocks, Vern walked a little way down the stream edge. Then he stopped and breathed in the night air that was growing ever colder with the season. He shivered. The scraps of canvas and plastic and cloth Moms had spliced into a motley robe-like garment was draughty, to say the least. He hugged his chest.

  And then he thought he heard a sound different from the customary night noises. A thin, high yelping far, far away. Perhaps the Olders had introduced an animal new to this forest, some strain of wolf, or an animal of their own engineering.

  Then he heard it no more and decided that his imagination was overly exercised. He turned and headed back to the cave where Echo and Moms would be ready for sleep by now.

  Despite his apprehensions, Vern was sleepy. Although his day had been physically a little less active than usual, anxiety had depleted his mental energy. He lay fo
r a few minutes, listening. He could tell that Moms was not asleep; she was surely thinking through their discussion. Echo was asleep in her own way, though sometimes Vern wondered if she ever actually slept, the way that he and Moms and Queenie did—as Queenie was doing now, her large head laid on her large paws.

  Almost as soon as he closed his eyes, he began to dream. His viewing floated like an invisible balloon, bodiless, and traversed one of the Olders’ cities, if that was what they were to be called. He envisioned entering underground through a huge doorless opening. If he were making this journey in his body, his every nerve would be pulsing with fear as he passed tremendous pentagonal pools of unknown black liquids and drifted through rooms filled with curious and inexplicable utensils of myriad sorts. Then there were colossal caverns of intricate machines at whose purposes he could not guess. They were all motionless until he came to one larger than the rest. It was so large that the top of it must have extended through the cavern roof into the outside world. It seemed to buckle inward and outward continuously, the matte gray planes of its panels seeming to open and close simultaneously, as if it were a strange doorway allowing both entrance and exit in the same vertiginous movement. This machine uttered a high-pitched piping sound and it seemed to Vern that the noise was like the sound of the faraway yelping or baying he had thought he heard outside by the stream.

  Then he woke.

  Queenie was awake too, making her dangerous, nearly inaudible growl. And Echo was awake and Moms was sitting up straight, her eyes wide and glistening in the dark. The three of them listened to that piping; it was still far away, still small among the sounds of the waterfall and of the forest at night, but it was dreadfully intelligible:

  Tekeli-li Tekeli-li.

  II

  “Ship?”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “Are all things well?”

  “Very well. The mission is proceeding according to procedure.”

  “That is good,” I said and truly I felt a happy relief in my organism. “Am I sober enough to take command?”