The Children of Cthulhu

by John Pelan

  By H. P. Lovecraft

  Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre:

  The Best of H. P. Lovecraft

  Dreams of Terror and Death: The Dream Cycle

  of H. P. Lovecraft

  The Road to Madness: The Transition of H. P. Lovecraft

  Other Lovecraftian Collections:

  Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

  Cthulhu 2000

  Shadows over Innsmouth

  TWENTY-THREE MASTERS OF DARK FICTION

  INSPIRED BY H.P. LOVECRAFT

  Poppy Z. Brite • Matt Cardin • Mark Chadbourn

  James S. Dorr • Paul Finch • Alan Dean Foster

  Brian Hodge • Caitlín R. Kiernan • Richard Laymon

  Tim Lebbon • L. H. Maynard & M. P. N. Sims

  China Mieville • Yvonne Navarro • Weston Ochse

  Meredith L. Patterson • John Pelan & Benjamin Adams

  W. H. Pugmire, Esq. • Michael Reaves • James Robert Smith

  Steve Rasnic Tern • James Van Pelt

  “RECOMMENDED…

  This collection of twenty-one tales brings H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos to a new generation.… Fans of Lovecraft in particular and dark fantasy in general will enjoy this standout anthology.”

  —Library Journal

  Contents

  Introduction: The Call of Lovecraft John Pelan and Benjamin Adams

  Details China Miéville

  Visitation James Robert Smith

  The Invisible Empire James Van Pelt

  A Victorian Pot Dresser L. H. Maynard and M. P. N. Sims

  The Cabin in the Woods Richard Laymon

  The Stuff of the Stars, Leaking Tim Lebbon

  Sour Places Mark Chadbourn

  Meet Me on the Other Side Yvonne Navarro

  That's the Story of My Life John Pelan and Benjamin Adams

  Long Meg and Her Daughters Paul Finch

  A Fatal Exception Has Occurred At… Alan Dean Foster

  Dark of the Moon James S. Dorr

  Red Clay Michael Reaves

  Principles and Parameters Meredith L. Patterson

  Are You Loathsome Tonight? Poppy Z. Brite

  The Serenade of Starlight W. H. Pugmire, Esq.

  Outside Steve Rasnic Tern

  Nor the Demons Down Under the Sea Caitlin R. Kiernan

  A Spectacle of a Man Weston Ochse

  The Firebrand Symphony Brian Hodge

  Teeth Matt Cardin

  Notes on the Contributors

  INTRODUCTION: THE CALL OF LOVECRAFT

  John Pelan and Benjamin Adams

  Perhaps no other author has exerted as powerful an influence over twentieth- and twenty-first-century weird fiction as Howard Phillips Lovecraft. His view of a chaotic and hostile universe fused the genres of horror, science fiction, and mythology in a manner truly unique, resulting in a body of work still avidly read more than sixty years after his death. Like any brilliant popular literature, Lovecraft's tales spawned a host of imitators. Lovecraft encouraged others to add to and expand upon his cosmology, and young writers of the 1930s such as Robert Bloch, Henry Kuttner, and August Derleth contributed stories to the rapidly growing canon. More established authors such as Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard referenced Love-craft's oeuvre in their own works, and thus the Cthulhu Mythos grew, and grew, and grew.…

  It's probably fair to say that “If it ain't broke, don't fix it” is one of the most overused axioms in the English language. Ultimately, though, what does it mean? That one shouldn't try to improve something that already works? What a frightening, Luddite concept. The only way we grow and move forward is to continually fix what ain't broke.

  In this case, of course, we're referring to the Cthulhu Mythos.

  Much of the fiction that has been passed off as Lovecraftian in recent years has boasted purple prose offered as “style” and bizarre proper nouns trundled out as “atmosphere.” We must assume the writers of tales such as these are seeing only the superficial elements of previous stories in the Cthulhu Mythos, rather than attaining a true grasp of H. P. Lovecraft's vision. What these authors see ain't broke, and they sure as heck ain't gonna fix it.

  The stories written by Lovecraft in the 1920s and 1930s were rife with a terrifying vision of an indifferent and chaotic universe populated by beings that were, in their total alienness, completely inconceivable by mere humans. Lovecraft's fashioned cosmology dealt at length with the tragic results of encounters between frail individuals and the Great Old Ones or their minions.

  Like so many bread crumbs, Lovecraft dropped names like Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, and Nyarlathotep throughout his loose myth-cycle, but the trail of crumbs leads nowhere. It was never meant to do so. His stories are frequently contradictory in their details about these monstrously alien beings that infiltrated Earth from the farthest reaches of space and time. The Cthulhu Mythos (so named by Lovecraft's protege August Der-leth, but more properly referred to as “Yog-Sothothery” by Lovecraft himself) is full of dangling loose ends and tantalizing hints at vast cosmic truths.

  The grand tradition of borrowing Lovecraft's concepts and, in many cases, expanding upon them led many later authors to add their own spices to the fictional stew, which as a result became more of a weak broth than a hearty meal. While it's true that some tremendously powerful material has been written by both the first and second generation of “Cthulhu's Children,” there is also much that tries to explain the unexplainable and codify the infinite. Many authors have completely missed the point that the true horror in Lovecraft's fiction lies in the unknowable… the mystery of a vast and infinitely strange cosmos.

  There have been numerous attempts to catalog the entities of Lovecraft's cosmology, to present a monstrous genealogy as it were; these attempts have for the most part exhibited a complete lack of understanding of his vision. And yet this literary calcification of Lovecraft's concepts has been so pervasive that these genealogies have been accepted as canon, leaving the whole structure that much more ossified and static, a vast, tottering monolith.

  And many lesser writers have fallen victim to the tendency to merely throw a few Lovecraftian beasties and the Necro-nomicon into their tales. These pastiches aren't so much derivative of Lovecraft as they are of others who followed him, including Derleth. And as such the stories have fallen into hidebound rhythms: Seeker after occult lore discovers an unspeakable volume and conjures up Cfhulhu, and all hell breaks loose. Many of the writers aren't even familiar with Lovecraft's own inspirations, such as Lord Dunsany, Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Machen, and M. R. James.

  For this collection, we asked authors to break past the “don't fix it” mentality and bring Lovecraft's original concepts kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century. The plain fact is that seventy years of literary conservatism have stripped away the awful power and hideous majesty of Lovecraft's creations. And while the elderly gentleman himself was terribly old-fashioned, what he wrought in his imagination was not. At their core, Lovecraft's stories are still among the most powerful and disturbing ever written. These stories have spoken to an entire new generation of authors, most of whom have rarely if ever essayed a Lovecraftian pastiche. What we have here is a book comprised of tales by authors who said “it may not be broken, but I want to fix it this way.…”

  And so they have.…

  The stories in this collection range from the historical to the futuristic. What they share is each writer's reaction to the vision of H. P. Lovecraft and an affinity for his core concepts. These stories are the literary Children of Cthulhu, and we hope you enjoy making their acquaintance.

  JOHN PELAN —Midnight House

  BENJAMIN ADAMS—Sacramento, California

  DETAILS

 
; China Miéville

  When the boy upstairs got hold of a pellet gun and fired snips of potato at passing cars, I took a turn. I was part of everything. I wasn't an outsider. But I wouldn't join in when my friends went to the yellow house to scribble on the bricks and listen at the windows.

  One girl teased me about it, but everyone else told her to shut up. They defended me, even though they didn't understand why I wouldn't come.

  I don't remember a time before I visited the yellow house for my mother.

  On Wednesday mornings at about nine o'clock I would open the front door of the decrepit building with a key from the bunch my mother had given me. Inside was a hall and two doors, one broken and leading to the splintering stairs. I would unlock the other and enter the dark flat. The corridor was unlit and smelt of old wet air. I never walked even two steps down that hallway. Rot and shadows merged, and it looked as if the passage disappeared a few yards from me. The door to Mrs. Miller's room was right in front of me. I would lean forward and knock.

  Quite often there were signs that someone else had been there recently. Scuffed dust and bits of litter. Sometimes I was not alone. There were two other children I sometimes saw slipping in or out of the house. There were a handful of adults who visited Mrs. Miller.

  I might find one or another of them in the hallway outside the door to her flat, or even in the flat itself, slouching in the crumbling dark hallway. They would be slumped over or reading some cheap-looking book or swearing loudly as they waited.

  There was a young Asian woman who wore a lot of makeup and smoked obsessively. She ignored me totally. There were two drunks who came sometimes. One would greet me boisterously and incomprehensibly, raising his arms as if he wanted to hug me into his stinking, stinking jumper. I would grin and wave nervously, walk past him. The other seemed alternately melancholic and angry. Occasionally I'd meet him by the door to Mrs. Miller's room, swearing in a strong cockney accent. I remember the first time I saw him, he was standing there, his red face contorted, slurring and moaning loudly.

  “Come on, you old slag,” he wailed, “you sodding old slag. Come on, please, you cow.”

  His words scared me but his tone was wheedling, and I realized I could hear her voice. Mrs. Miller's voice, from inside the room, answering him back. She did not sound frightened or angry.

  I hung back, not sure what to do, and she kept speaking, and eventually the drunken man shambled miserably away. And then I could continue as usual.

  I asked my mother once if I could have some of Mrs. Miller's food. She laughed very hard and shook her head. In all the Wednesdays of bringing the food over, I never even dipped my finger in to suck it.

  My mum spent an hour every Tuesday night making the stuff up. She dissolved a bit of gelatin or cornflower with some milk, threw in a load of sugar or flavorings, and crushed a clutch of vitamin pills into the mess. She stirred it until it thickened and let it set in a plain white plastic bowl. In the morning it would be a kind of strong-smelling custard that my mother put a dishcloth over and gave me, along with a list of any questions or requests for Mrs. Miller and sometimes a plastic bucket full of white paint.

  So I would stand in front of Mrs. Miller's door, knocking, with a bowl at my feet. I'd hear a shifting and then her voice from close by the door.

  “Hello,” she would call, and then say my name a couple of times. “Have you my breakfast? Are you ready?”

  I would creep up close to the door and hold the food ready. I would tell her I was.

  Mrs. Miller would slowly count to three. On three, the door suddenly swung open a snatch, just a foot or two, and I thrust the bowl into the gap. She grabbed it and slammed the door quickly in my face.

  I couldn't see very much inside the room. The door was open for less than a second. My strongest impression was of the whiteness of the walls. Mrs. Miller's sleeves were white, too, and made of plastic. I never got much of a glimpse at her face, but what I saw was unmemorable. A middle-aged woman's eager face.

  If I had a bucket full of paint, we would run through the routine again. Then I would sit cross-legged in front of her door and listen to her eat.

  “How's your mother?” she would shout. At that I'd unfold my mother's careful queries. She's okay, I'd say, she's fine. She says she has some questions for you.

  I'd read my mother's strange questions in my careful childish monotone, and Mrs. Miller would pause and make interested sounds, and clear her throat and think out loud. Sometimes she took ages to come to an answer, and sometimes it would be almost immediate.

  “Tell your mother she can't tell if a man's good or bad from that,” she'd say. “Tell her to remember the problems she had with your father.” Or: “Yes, she can take the heart of it out. Only she has to paint it with the special oil I told her about.” “Tell your mother seven. But only four of them concern her and three of them used to be dead.

  “I can't help her with that,” she told me once, quietly. “Tell her to go to a doctor, quickly.” And my mother did, and she got well again.

  “What do you not want to do when you grow up?” Mrs. Miller asked me one day.

  That morning when I had come to the house the sad cockney vagrant had been banging on the door of her room again, the keys to the flat flailing in his hand.

  “He's begging you, you old tart, please, you owe him, he's so bloody angry,” he was shouting, “only it ain't you gets the sharp end, is it? Please, you cow, you sodding cow, I'm on me knees.…”

  “My door knows you, man,” Mrs. Miller declared from within. “It knows you and so do I, you know it won't open to you. I didn't take out my eyes and I'm not giving in now. Go home.”

  I waited nervously as the man gathered himself and staggered away, and then, looking behind me, I knocked on her door and announced myself. It was after I'd given her the food that she asked her question.

  “What do you not want to do when you grow up?”

  If I had been a few years older her inversion of the cliche would have annoyed me: It would have seemed mannered and contrived. But I was only a young child, and I was quite delighted.

  I don't want to be a lawyer, I told her carefully. I spoke out of loyalty to my mother, who periodically received crisp letters that made her cry or smoke fiercely, and swear at lawyers, bloody smartarse lawyers.

  Mrs. Miller was delighted.

  “Good boy!” she snorted. “We know all about lawyers. Bastards, right? With the small print! Never be tricked by the small print! It's right there in front of you, right there in front of you, and you can't even see it and then suddenly it makes you notice it! And I tell you, once you seen it it's got you!” She laughed excitedly. “Don't let the small print get you. I'll tell you a secret.” I waited quietly, and my head slipped nearer the door.

  “The devil's in the details!” She laughed again. “You ask your mother if that's not true. The devil is in the details!”

  I'd wait the twenty minutes or so until Mrs. Miller had finished eating, and then we'd reverse our previous procedure and she'd quickly hand me out an empty bowl. I would return home with the empty container and tell my mother the various answers to her various questions. Usually she would nod and make notes. Occasionally she would cry.

  After I told Mrs. Miller that I did not want to be a lawyer she started asking me to read to her. She made me tell my mother, and told me to bring a newspaper or one of a number of books. My mother nodded at the message and packed me a sandwich the next Wednesday, along with the Mirror. She told me to be polite and do what Mrs. Miller asked, and that she'd see me in the afternoon.

  I wasn't afraid. Mrs. Miller had never treated me badly from behind her door. I was resigned and only a little bit nervous.

  Mrs. Miller made me read stories to her from specific pages that she shouted out. She made me recite them again and again, very carefully. Afterward she would talk to me. Usually she started with a joke about lawyers, and about small print.

  “There's three ways not to see what you
don't want to,” she told me. “One is the coward's way and too damned painful. The other is to close your eyes forever which is the same as the first, when it comes to it. The third is the hardest and the best: You have to make sure only the things you can afford to see come before you.”

  One morning when I arrived the stylish Asian woman was whispering fiercely through the wood of the door, and I could hear Mrs. Miller responding with shouts of amused disapproval. Eventually the young woman swept past me, leaving me cowed by her perfume.

  Mrs. Miller was laughing, and she was talkative when she had eaten.

  “She's heading for trouble, messing with the wrong family! You have to be careful with all of them,” she told me. “Every single one of them on that other side of things is a tricksy bastard who'll kill you soon as look at you, given half a chance.

  “There's the gnarly throat-tipped one… and there's old hasty, who I think had best remain nameless,” she said wryly. “All old bastards, all of them. You can't trust them at all, that's what I say. I should know, eh? Shouldn't I?” She laughed. “Trust me, trust me on this: It's too easy to get on the wrong side of them.

  “What's it like out today?” she asked me. I told her that it was cloudy.

  “You want to be careful with that,” she said. “All sorts of faces in the clouds, aren't there? Can't help noticing, can you?” She was whispering now. “Do me a favor when you go home to your mum: Don't look up, there's a boy. Don't look up at all.”

  When I left her, however, the day had changed. The sky was hot, and quite blue.

  The two drunk men were squabbling in the front hall and I edged past them to her door. They continued bickering in a depressing, garbled murmur throughout my visit.

  “D'you know, I can't even really remember what it was all about, now!” Mrs. Miller said when I had finished reading to her. “I can't remember! That's a terrible thing. But you don't forget the basics. The exact question escapes me, and to be honest I think maybe I was just being nosy or showing off.… I can't say I'm proud of it but it could have been that. It could. But whatever the question, it was all about a way of seeing an answer.