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

by Unknown

  Here was a sorrowful sight and Vern spent a long minute in dark thought. There was a recess in the back of the cave, small but with adequate room to pile these bones in, and he did so, lifting them as carefully—and as tenderly—as he knew how. He deposited them in one place, all piled together, and mounded as much dust over them as he was able to gather. It was a sad task, but not the worst he had had to perform.

  He felt that he ought to say some proper words over these rueful remains, but all that came to mind was the one familiar phrase and he mumbled it as he stood above the bones and poured over them a last scraping of dust.

  “Rest in peace.”

  Well, they had made up their minds to do that and now they rested. The task for Vern was to try to make sure they did not disturb Echo’s rest. If the toothy grins and hollow eye sockets frightened her, she might shriek for minutes, then moan for hours, rocking back and forth in Moms’ arms. She would not be able to communicate information about the shiny wall or anything else. He removed all the other traces he could find of the sad departed. He would warn Moms to keep Echo away from the back of the cave.

  For the evening meal, they had only a little water left in the flask, barely enough to wash down their nine mouthfuls of food. It was insufficient to slake Echo’s thirst and she complained, whining and twisting her torso so that her makeshift dress was in danger of falling apart. Moms finally quieted her by crooning an improvised lullaby. Queenie got only a single strip of dried meat and no water. She was growing weak.

  Vern and Moms were thirsty too—and hungry. Whatever the plateau might offer tomorrow, water and food must be found. How far could it be to the shiny wall of Echo’s vision? They could last only a few more hours without some replenishment. When their scanty food scraps ran out, they would share the fate of the last occupants of this cave, but in a more lingering fashion.

  Unless they jumped.

  Vern wondered about that misfortunate group. What had been the final straw, the situation that convinced them to effect their own ends? Might it have been the shrilling of the shoggoths, Tekeli-li, from the streamside below? His imagination failed in the attempt to picture those amorphous, globular agglutinations climbing the cliff side. Perhaps those people had heard the sound from above, from the cliff top that Vern and Moms and Echo and Queenie were trying to reach. That area looked treeless from below and those pursued would be exposed.

  Best for Vern to reconnoiter the place just at day-break. He did not know whether he could summon the strength to climb the steep trail, observe the scene, and then return and lead the others there. He would have to decide about that in the morning; maybe sleep would refresh him sufficiently.

  Echo was still resting in Moms’ arms. Her eyes were closed and she seemed to be listening, though Moms had left off her lullaby. Vern crept over to them and murmured “shiny wall, shiny wall,” though he expected that Echo was too tired and sleepy to be able to converse.

  She did respond, though, repeating Vern’s phrase in his own intonation. “Shiny wall.” Then she stopped and a lovely, quiet smile came to her face. To Vern, this was as surprising and delightful as a rainbow. Echo rarely smiled—almost never.

  Then, before he could speak further, she fell asleep and Moms laid her down, just as she was, on the floor of the cave and stretched out to sleep beside her. Queenie slept, always with her head on her outstretched paws, and only Vern was awake.

  And then he was not.

  The skeletons came crawling toward them, of course, clacking their bones in this weary darkness in which their nasty, eternal grins glowed and flickered. Vern knew that he was dreaming and was not frightened. He tried to dismiss the dream so that he could sleep more soundly, but it persisted, its loathsome images and sounds ever more vivid until he woke with a start and looked instantly to see if Moms and Echo were safe.

  They had not moved from where they had dropped, but their breathing was excited and irregular, and he knew that they too were dreaming, though probably not of skeletons. The three of them had gathered enough nightmare material to furnish out bad dreams for the remainders of their lives.

  He lay still for a long time. Just before sunrise a wind sprang up and the mouth of the cave resounded with strange humming. Vern listened hard but could hear no whistling of shoggoths in the wind. If only this cave were near water, he thought, it would be ideal to live in.

  Best not to dwell on fancies . . .

  When the light was bright enough to make out details—the paws of Queenie protruding from beneath her nose, the porcelain-pale hands of Echo on her tatterdemalion dress—he sat up and began to move about.

  It was not easy to do. His muscles were sore and his knees ached. It would be miraculous if he could get them to the top. Moms would be even more exhausted than he, so he would have to carry Echo the larger part of the way.

  Yet let them rest now, he thought, as long as they are able. He rose and went out onto the cliff-side path. In the early light the stream below seemed far away and he saw how it ran southward into the shadow of another cliff on the other side. It came to him that if they reached the top and went south upon the plateau, they would find a place that matched the map that Echo had drawn.

  Maybe it is not hopeless after all, he thought.

  But when he reentered the cave and saw Moms ministering to Echo, massaging his sister’s swollen feet and crooning soothing encouragement, he felt anew the weight of the responsibilities he had taken on and doubt crept over his spirit. Moms and Echo looked at him expectantly and he made himself smile as he began to arrange their scanty breakfast.

  And so, in a short few minutes, they were out of their shelter and struggling up the path that grew steeper with every step. Vern realized that they would have to stop often to rest and that the duty of mollifying Echo’s fear would grow more onerous, but there could be no turning back now.

  The weather was in their favor, with a mild blue sky and little wind, even at this height, and they made better going than he had reckoned they would. At the last sharp turn before the top, Vern told Moms to stop for a rest and mind Echo while he went up to see what lay before them on the plateau.

  The path they had been climbing was steeply graded, but the last eight feet or so had been cut into steps. These gave Vern an opportunity to peek over the edge, exposing only his head, so that his view of the prospect was at ground level. The area before him extended about fifty yards on three sides; the turf was short grass, composing what was traditionally called a “bald” in these mountains. At its south end was a long border of wildflowers—ironweed, jewelweed, bee balm, and the like—and these water-loving blooms held the promise of a spring. Beyond the flowers was a stand of low firs which cut off the long vista of the south.

  There were no signs of shoggoths or other animals or of the Old Ones. A preternaturally peaceful silence reigned over this grassy bald.

  Vern returned to the switchback in the path where Moms and Echo and Queenie waited. Moms was crooning earnestly to Echo, and Queenie snuggled against the pale girl, as if she, like Moms, were trying to stop Echo from looking down toward the stream.

  Vern did not know why he whispered the report of his discoveries to his mother and sister. Maybe the information was too happy to speak of in normal tones. Moms whispered too: “Oh, I do hope there is water.”

  “We will let Queenie go up first,” Vern said. “If there is water, she will find it.”

  So it was Queenie who led the way to the gentle greensward, bounding up the weather-rounded steps and springing joyfully over the edge. By the time Vern brought Echo and Moms into the sky-tented field, the dog was already halfway to the border of flowers. She had smelled water.

  Moms crawled onto the level surface, to sit cross-legged and receive Echo as Vern handed her up. Then Vern squirmed over too and the three of them sat for a few moments, to rest muscles and joints and to gaze back toward the way they had come, down the twinkling stream and over the tumbled, bushy hills, and through the shady glades and
hollers to the foot of the treacherous but hospitable cliff. They shared a feeling of achievement. Whatever happened next, they had come this far safely, answering the summons. They had overcome great odds, greater than they had realized during their hard march.

  Then Vern stood and turned toward the south and gazed upon a different world. Behind him was a landscape of forest, mountains, and green-blue valleys. Before him, beyond the flowers and the little firs, beyond the edge of this brief plateau, lay a vast panorama of immense, sky-spearing, cyclopean structures. So tall were these angular monuments, oblongs and cubes and spiry pyramids, that clouds obscured some of their tops. Their angles were all wrong, so that Vern experienced a fleeting vertigo.

  Wrongness—that was the first salience that attacked his senses and his instincts. He could not estimate how far away these structures stood, piled one past the other in an infinitely regressing series, because they seemed to be erected in a different kind of space than that which obtained here on the plateau. They seemed also to inhabit a different kind of time, so that if you traveled toward them—that is, if you could travel toward them—you would leave behind the now you were in and stand in a different now, a kind of time to which your body, mind, and spirit were direly unsuited.

  This knowledge flooded into his mind and gut all at once, as if from a suddenly unveiled black star.

  He did not cry out; he did not swoon. But the sight of this monstrous, incomprehensible landscape, mindscape, was so alien that he fell to his knees. Then he fell forward on his hands, retching and heaving for breath and grasping the grass in his fingers as if these handfuls of turf were his only desperate handhold upon the planet.

  I will not look up, he thought. I will not look at these things.

  He heard from behind a muffled moaning and knew that Moms and Echo were gazing upon this nightmare prospect. It was Moms who had uttered that soul- stricken, heartsick moan. She was standing upright, hugging herself with both arms, and silver tears streamed gleaming upon her cheeks. There was an expression of desolate comprehension in her eyes. She must have known better than Vern could know what these gigantic shapes that crushed the southern horizon implied and that what was implied had to be the thing she most loathed and feared, except for the striking-down of her children.

  “In their own image!” she cried.

  Vern understood. The Olders were remaking the world, the whole planet, in accordance with their icy intellectual designs. They were not building machines and monuments upon the planetary surface; they were reconfiguring the molecular structures of the world, from core to crust, from pole to pole. Earth was in process of losing its identity. No longer would it be an earth; it would be an alien object, an implement or instrument, a tool whose purposes might be unimaginable.

  Moms stood transfixed with horror, but Echo was not shrieking in terror, as Vern had supposed that she would be. She too was transfixed, but her expression was one of wonderment. Those unthinkably huge planes and angles and cleavages that folded inward and projected outward simultaneously in momentously slow formings and reformings exercised upon the autistic mind the same hypnotic fascination that a flickering light or a wind-trembled branch or a lightly dancing snowfall would produce. The fascination might be different by enormous degree, but it would not be different in kind from that which other and more familiar phenomena brought upon Vern’s sister.

  When he saw that Echo did not lose herself in terror, that she was not beating her face with her fists as she did when fear was too terrible in her, Vern came to himself a little. Even with the calming image of Echo before him, it took an effort almost beyond his powers for him to collect his senses and something of his reasoning power.

  He walked slowly to where Moms was standing and knelt and took the canteen from the book bag she had dropped in the grass. He grasped it in both hands and, keeping his gaze firmly turned toward the ground, never raising his eyes to the mind-wrenching panorama, trudged into the little marshy area outlined by the ranks of wildflowers.

  In a minute or so, he came to a thin, oily streamlet that oozed among clumps of marsh-grassed turf. He bent and filled the flask and tasted the water. Musky and muddy, it was not toxic. He drank a little more before carrying the flask back to the females. Queenie bounded out of the herbage and trotted along beside him. No more than Echo was she disturbed by the sight of the world in ruin.

  He fed Echo a grateful swallow at a time and she looked at him with her bright gray eyes brimming with gratitude. Moms seemed to find it difficult to drink; she rinsed her mouth and took the humus-tasting liquid in small sips. Then she dropped to the grass and stretched her legs out before her.

  She spoke to the air and the grass when she said, “We cannot live in a world like this.” She shook her head. “At least, I cannot.” She looked up at her son, into his weather-lined face with its sparse blond beard. “I feel I am on the verge of losing my sanity. I was afraid we would have no future. Maybe we can have one, but I do not want it. And now I think we have no past either.”

  “Last night we shared our shelter with some people who felt like you do,” Vern said.

  “What do you mean? I don’t know what you mean. Don’t talk in riddles.” Her voice rose almost to a shout. “Say something that means something.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe nothing means anything.”

  He made himself look again, staring with renewed horror at the immensities of those grotesque cubes and cylinders, cube-clusters, and five-angled projections. His mind could not divide this phantasmagoric panorama into parts, but it seemed to him that gigantic bridges arched over seemingly limitless abysses. Those bridges did not attach to the surfaces they touched but penetrated into the stone with the continuous motionless movement that a great cataract of water presents to vision. The simultaneous opening and closing of the five-angled edges gave the impression that the matter of which those pinnacles were constructed was both material and immaterial. More dimensions than four were in play; that vertiginous rampart that struck its bulk over a half kilometer of empty space extended into time as well as into space. It was what it was—and yet it was in process of becoming what it already was, and becoming something other and beyond that also.

  And it was all of a color that was no color at all.

  Moms spoke more quietly than Vern had heard her speak before. “I cannot bear it,” she said. “No one can.”

  Vern said, “Echo does not give up.”

  He pointed to his sister. Echo was clapping her hands and swaying in an excited dance, her face full of joy. “Shy-nee shiny shiny shiny shy- nee,” she sang. She left off dancing and broke into a clumsy run. The air was bright there at the cliff-edge and Echo ran to enter into it, to plunge into empty space.

  IV

  Tekeli-li.

  This transliterated approximation was the closest Terran English could approach to the piercing command-trilling the Old Ones’ shoggoths made as they traveled, each telling its whereabouts to its sibling organisms. It had been anciently recorded in the unfinished narrative left by Arthur Gordon Pym and further attested by later writers and adventurers, and it always carried with it a nauseating feeling of dread.

  Seeker held her face in her hands and drew deep, harsh breaths. She had not withdrawn from the Terran’s mind and the sound of that trilling had shaken her.

  “How close are the shoggoths to the Remnant?” I asked.

  She was silent a space, gathering her thoughts. Then she said she could not tell. “That sound is vivid in her mind because of her great fear, but I cannot judge distance.”

  “Navigator?” I asked.

  He studied his panel for some time. “Not so near as to be deadly, I think,” he said. “It is very difficult to judge distances.”

  “We have found where this Remnant is,” I said. “We also have pictures from the locators. Where shall we set down the beacon?”

  “Not so close as to attract the Old Ones to them nor so far that the autist cannot travel to it.”

&nb
sp; “We must put the beacon down soon,” Seeker said, “so that it can set the Gate in place. I will have to go down to the planet surface.”

  Three of us said no at once.

  “The danger is too huge,” I said. “If the Old Ones are close, your mind could be erased. A shoggoth could sense what you are. If you are lost to us, the Remnant is lost and so are we.”

  She looked at us steadily, each in turn. “If I do not exhibit myself in my own person, just as I have pictured me to the autist Echo and her queenie, they will not come through the Gate and we cannot bear them away. Then truly all will be lost.”

  “How have you pictured you?” I asked.

  “Looking as I do, but with all pleasantness and all welcoming and offering safety to the family. I have tried to picture myself happily to the queenie, but I do not know if she knows and interprets in the same manner as the others. She has strong smell-sense; I would like to transmit odors to her but cannot.”

  “Are you certain it is needed for you to descend?”

  “Yes,” Seeker said.

  “There is no other way?”

  She indicated no.

  “Then let us rehearse the protocols and do all speedily,” I said, and once more and assiduously we bent to our tasks.

  There was one procedure we could not rehearse.

  If the Old Ones mind-touched Seeker, they would recognize our mission and why and how. Then they would try to trace us back and locate the Great Ones’ operational point for this mission. The disaster that followed would endanger and probably result in the slaughter of many races on many planets and the Old Ones would then take care that no Remnants were left. They would scour clean every planet and sun-system.

  To prevent, I would kill Seeker. That is, I would order Ship to kill her before her mind could reveal its contents or before the Old Ones could assimilate. If the instruments detected that I did not emit the order quickly enough, Ship would enact its final program and detonate itself and all of us to atomic gas. There would be nothing left for the Old Ones to trace—but they would have been warned, and there would be consequences of that.