The Children of Cthulhu

by John Pelan

  For other couples in their income bracket, marriage held the promise of more normal things—a house in suburbia, fancy cars with leather seats, a kid or two who would give them a double decade of agony. No thanks: Macy had five brothers and sisters, and her mother—who was one of twins—had eight siblings, including yet another set of twins. Macy and Paul had talked about this before they'd ever said their vows, and Macy had no desire to raise a duo or two of screaming kids—twins routinely skipped a generation and so, as one of her sisters had already proven, Macy could pretty well expect at least one set of her own. Again, no thanks: she had opted for a kid-free existence, and she and Paul were the happier for it.

  On the surface, the Arizona desert trip seemed inconsequential, but as she bent over the half-dozen poorly rendered maps he'd scrounged up on the Internet, then paged through that book of his, it began to sink in just how much he didn't know about this Bethmoora place—the truth of it was, the city might not even exist. All the odds seemed against it; according to what Paul had found out, Bethmoora was a city that existed in something called the Dreamlands, which in turn, existed in a realm accessible, perhaps, only in the mind. Yet the maps and notations he'd found here and there pointed to there being… something out there, a point at which they might find the entrance to the Dreamlands, and from there continue on.

  But to what?

  It was a wild concept, but there were things they'd seen, experienced, and learned in so many parts of the world that made her, them, believe many things could be accomplished that others, normal people, would dismiss out of pure ignorance.

  She and Paul would not be so foolish.

  The other books—the maps, the notes and perhaps the so-called encyclopedia—were full of half-truths and inconsistencies, clues that led to nowhere. There wasn't much solid to go on, other than the opinion that Bethmoora, once bustling and presumably beautiful, was now inexplicably abandoned by its inhabitants. But Paul, since he'd first run across this stuff, had this feeling about it, and now she had it, too.

  Bethmoora was out there, all right. Just waiting to be rediscovered.

  Revitalized.

  And they were just the people to do it.

  Even though it was late in the afternoon, above their heads the sun was a ball of blistering heat. They were smack in the middle of something their map indicated was the Palomas Plain in southwestern Arizona, and for as far as either of them could see, there wasn't much beyond the cacti and scrub grass poking up here and there through the rock-littered and sandy soil.

  They'd stopped on the shaded side, which wasn't saying much, of a small pile of boulders to eat a semblance of lunch and consult the maps.

  “What do you think?”

  Paul gazed at the papers spread on the ground, then looked dreamily out across the desert. “I think we're doing good,” he said. “A couple more hours that way.” He pointed vaguely northwest.

  “We're going to have to find it soon.” She hated to remind him of this, but they had only so much time and water left— if they didn't hit their goal, they'd have to turn and retrace their route to the car, left parked along the side of an unpaved road near the Sundad settlement the day before yesterday. It wouldn't be the end of the world, but it would be a damned disappointing end to this adventure.

  “We will,” he promised her, and there was something in his eyes that told her he believed it. “We've got a couple of good hours of daylight before we have to make camp. We'll use those, get an early start in the morning, and go for, say, four or five hours. That'll be our turnaround point.”

  Macy nodded but she knew Paul well, so well. He was organized and efficient, but also arrogant; there was no mistaking the tone of certainty she heard in his words, the unspoken statement: But we won't turn around, because we're almost there.

  And when she looked past him to where the open desert shimmered with heat and a thousand deadly creatures seen and unseen, she knew, without a doubt, that he was right.

  Nightfall on the Palomas Plain was a spectacular thing to experience.

  In English, Macy was pretty sure that palomas meant white-caps, and it was a fitting description. The fiery reds and purples of the sinking sun had an odd effect on the light-colored desert spread out before them, broken in the distance by small mountains. Instead of darkening the ground, it turned the lumps and bumps of distant rocks, shrubs, and barrel cacti into something that vaguely resembled small waves breaking over an unnamed ocean. She didn't know if this was what had inspired the area's name, or if the tiredness brought on by days of hiking in the heat-soaked desert was skewing her vision, but Macy enjoyed the sight anyway—it was kind of like walking on the surface of a sea filled with scorpions, giant desert centipedes, blister beetles, and tarantula hawk wasps instead of sharks and poisonous jellyfish.

  “There,” Paul said suddenly. Her gaze followed his pointing finger to a pile of beautiful, sunset-washed boulders at the bottom of an incline that led up the side of a small mountain, just one of dozens that remained anonymous on their maps. There were darker shadows amid the huge rocks, deeper crevices that begged for exploration but were likely already occupied. As if to confirm this, they heard the high-pitched wail of a coyote somewhere on the mountainside. “That's where we'll sleep tonight.”

  It took another twenty minutes to get there, with nighttime slipping in and greedily sucking away the last of the evening's light and the final traces of the day's heat as well; it was as if someone had opened a cosmic refrigerator and they were caught in the escaping wash of frigid air. Still, the desert was anything but done for the day—there was a sense of expectation in the chilly, creosote-scented air, and she knew from the expression on Paul's face that he felt it, too. It didn't matter that they were exhausted to the bone, because sleep would be a long time coming.

  Macy gratefully released the buckles on her hiker's backpack and shrugged it off, sweeping the ground with one hiking boot to make sure she wasn't setting it on top of something alive, and listening for the warning rattle of a snake. But there was only the quiet; the covote's cry had dwindled away and nothing had moved in to take its place —even the desert grass seemed reluctant to make noise in the occasional stingy breeze.

  “Let's eat,” she suggested as Paul pulled himself free of his own pack and let it drop. He nodded, and it wasn't long before they'd made a little dinner, working in sync to fire up the camp stove and pull together a no-frills meal of reconstituted beef stew and crackers, a pot of decaf coffee. Afterward they sat in silence, gazing unseeingly at the desert. Its blackness surrounded them, nearly smothering beneath a moonless sky that would have melted into the horizon had it not been for the mad paintbrush sweep of stars overhead, crystalline points of light in the unpolluted air. She was fatigued, yes, but she was… excited, too, full of the desert's odd sense of expectation and that deep heat that she always got around Paul when they were “out in it,” as they sometimes called their treks into the dangerous unknown. She could see him watching her across the last flames of the small can of fuel, his eyes as dark as the crevices in the rocks at his back, his hair a layer of blackness that made the white of his skin almost shocking.

  Macy rose to meet him, ready when he stood and reached out to her. When he would have lowered her to the ground she jerked him toward her instead, pulling hard until she fell back against the gritty surface of the boulder behind her. They yanked away each other's clothes and he took her upright, with her spine scrapping against rock that was still warm from the day's sun, and their mouths locked as tightly as their bodies. The orgasm that hammered through her was astounding, ten times deeper than anything she'd ever experienced; it seemed to go on and on, as though it had become a living thing on its own, something wild and wonderful with a thousand fingers that could reach into every fiber of her body. Even her teeth seemed like they were vibrating inside her mouth as she gasped for air and held on to her husband as best she could. She thought she heard him cry out with the immensity of his own climax, but ma
ybe it was just her own voice, or maybe it was the two of them shouting together. Then they were slipping and she felt the skin on her back and rear end scrape all the way to bloodiness as they went sideways between two huge rocks and fell into darkness.

  Macy woke within the safe circle of Paul's arms, but she had no idea where she was, or how they'd gotten there.

  A cavern of some kind—she had the sense of an immense domed ceiling above them although she couldn't really see it. Stalactites and stalagmites were everywhere, flowing from where the walls sloped away into darkness, inverting into multicolored, layered cones that crept upward from the floor and were as beautiful as any she'd ever seen. There was light, but it was an unsteady red and purple, as though the evening's spectacular sunset had somehow made its way into this place and become trapped. It moved restlessly and without pattern, shifting here, touching there, starting to blossom in one section of the cavern, only to wink out and appear at random somewhere else.

  “What is this place?” she asked Paul as she sat up. Her voice echoed eerily as cool air washed her breasts and she realized she—they—were still naked. There was a red stain where the flesh of her back had pressed against Paul's chest and arm—she must have ground herself up pretty good during their coupling… and yet she felt no pain. If anything, her body tingled, the leftover effects of the unimaginable pleasure of a short time ago. “How did we get here?”

  “I don't know how we got here,” Paul answered slowly, “but I think I know where we are.” He tilted his head at something high up and to the right, and when she peered into the shadows above her head she could just make out an oversized carving, letters she recognized from the book etched deeply into the multicolored rock wall in an arching pattern above a dark and pitted wall of solid rock.

  BETHMOORA

  “But how?” she whispered. “We were just outside, we—”

  Paul reached out and pulled her back against his chest. “Maybe we're dreaming,” he suggested softly. “Everything the book and the maps said about Bethmoora indicated it was in the Dreamlands. You could only get there in your sleep, remember? Maybe when we fell?”

  Macy thought about this as she gazed around the cavern, or whatever it was they were in. She felt awake, lucid, healthy— yet every bit of intelligence suggested she ought to be feeling a damned good sting from the lost skin on her back and butt. Paul, too—she could see painful-looking scrapes and bruises along his knees and elbows, yet he didn't appear to even notice them. “But I feel awake,” she said. “This doesn't have the sensation of a dream, it's not fragmented like that—I mean, we're having a coherent conversation here.”

  “Sleepwalking, then.”

  Macy raised an eyebrow. “Both of us? At the same time, and talking to each other?”

  Her husband gave her an I-don't-understand-it-either shrug, then released her and clambered to his feet. “Let's find a way out of here,” he said, and held out a hand. She let him pull her up, but only reluctantly; the truth was, she didn't feel any inclination to leave, and maybe that was a telling thing in itself. If they really were awake, wouldn't she want to find their way back? She didn't know about Paul, but for her it was quite the opposite—leaving was really the last thing she wanted, although she couldn't exactly say why.

  Macy felt something bump against her collarbone as she stood, and her fingers found her black-slashed ruby, the one she had pilfered from the temple in Burma. Funny that the necklace was the only item she was still wearing. Even her socks and boots were gone, although she hadn't so much as unlaced them during the bout of sex. The precious stone felt warm against her skin, almost uncomfortably so, and suddenly she realized Paul was staring at her—no, at it.

  “What?”

  “Your necklace,” he told her thoughtfully. “It's glowing.”

  “Really?” She scrunched her chin down and could just barely see what he was talking about. It was, pulsing in heated hues of scarlet just above the dip between her breasts. The sight of it sparked something deep in the pit of her stomach—a flutter of excitement or, more likely, anticipated danger. The sensation made her lick her lips. “Damn.”

  Whatever was in the air, Macy could tell Paul felt it, too, could see the evidence of it in the way his eyes sparkled in the light shifting around them. Was it her imagination or did even that seem to be moving more rapidly now, bouncing back and forth around the rocks with an almost frantic energy?

  Her husband looked at the ruby for a few more moments, then shrugged again. “Come on,” he said. He gestured toward an area that looked like it might lead to a corridor of some kind. “Let's try over there.”

  “Okay.” She let him take the lead and followed, feeling the cool currents of the cavern's air slide across her bare skin as they stepped gingerly along the rock-strewn floor. Their path took them next to the wall of rock beneath the Bethmoora sign, and Macy stumbled as she passed its center, threw out a hand to balance herself and fell sideways anyway. She twisted at the last second so that the back of her right shoulder hit the rock, and by the time Paul had turned to see if she was all right, she'd straightened herself again.

  And once more, she found her husband staring at her.

  “What now?” she demanded, then realized he wasn't gaping at her but past her, at the rock wall against which she'd stumbled. She turned, then froze.

  Where her skin, its surface bleeding from a half-dozen tiny cuts, had brushed against the rock, a small whirlpool of light had started. It spun counterclockwise, like a smeared, deep scarlet rose being painted by an insane artist, around and around. At its center was a spot of compact blackness as dark and mysterious as a hidden tar pit.

  Paul eased up beside her. “Do you see it?” he whispered. “That spot—it looks like your necklace. Same size and shape.”

  Macy leaned in a little.… Yes, she did see exactly that. Coincidence? Unlikely, and she found herself instinctively reaching to undo the clasp at the back of her neck. She wasn't even sure what she was going to do until the stone was in her palm, then she reached out and pushed it into the center of the swirling mass of light.

  And, like molten lava sliding down the side of a mountain, the rock wall melted away.

  Beyond it was a different world, a place that belonged in neither the underground cavern in which Macy had thought she and Paul were trapped, nor the desert they had presumably left somewhere above. The vista in front of them seemed more suited to the tropics—Hawaii, perhaps, or Tahiti. Verdigris copper gates were thrown wide on each side of the gaping hole, and everything about the stone entrance had a sort of liquid look at the edges that made it impossible to tell where the stone ended and the copper metalwork began. Palm trees and long, lush grasses swayed beneath a bright sun, and Macy could smell something fruity—pineapples, maybe — on a hint of warm breeze that danced over her face.

  “My God,” Paul breathed. His voice was actually trembling. “Macy, it's Bethmoora. It really exists, and it's beautiful.”

  And so it was. There were buildings perhaps a quarter mile away through desert spotted with tall, proud cacti, perfect specimens every one. Beyond that began a slow spread of hills, rolling gently into far-off, grass-covered lumps for as far as they could see. Intrigued, the two of them stepped cautiously through the gate, then clasped hands and ran forward, closing the distance and welcoming the soft grass beneath their feet after the cave's rock-filled floor.

  The city itself was small and quaint, picturesque in every respect, a medieval version of perfection uncrowded by the small, meticulously maintained houses and shops sprouting between the larger inns and city buildings built along its cobblestone streets. Birds flew among the palm fronds, tiny geckos blinked at them and skittered up the walls, now and then something small and furry—desert jackrabbits perhaps—scampered between the neatly trimmed hedges. It would have been a lovely place to live, Macy thought, except—

  “Where are the people?” Paul asked darkly.

  She didn't know the answer and didn't try t
o speculate. There was an aura of abandonment to the small metropolis, a stillness in the air beneath the pleasant breeze that spoke more of a place centuries unoccupied than the surface sort of pretty that lay before them. Fingers still entwined, they wandered through the clean, flower-festooned streets, and Macy felt a little as if they were Adam and Eve in a modern but deserted Garden of Eden —no clothes, no supplies, not even a single piece of jewelry now that her necklace was gone. Everywhere they turned, around each corner and into each new street, the scene was as lovely and unblemished as the one before it.…

  But all good things, so they say, must come to an end.

  “Over there,” she said suddenly and skipped on ahead, pulling Paul along as she changed directions.

  “What?” he asked. “Do you see someone? Where—Jesus.”

  He jerked to a stop next to her and they both stared. Farther down this street, this particular one that might have been just another clean and nameless little avenue in Bethmoora, the daylight was… disappearing. There, maybe a hundred feet away from them, it stopped and a pervasive sense of shadow began, narrowing in on itself in a funnel shape until it came to a doorway, open to nothing but thick and utter blackness.

  And, waiting in that doorway, was something just as nameless as the streets they traveled.

  Not quite visible, it radiated an undeniable presence, a sense of menace that was both dreadful and, for them, full of the familiar forbidden anticipation. So many places they'd been to, yet almost all had ultimately fallen a bit short in fulfillment. That moonless night in Burma had been the exception, the temple with the stolen jewel that tied them to this city in a land of nowhere… yes, that temple, with its huge, black creatures, beings inexplicably chanted into existence by the bloody-garbed guardian priests, which had then chased them from the temple and damned near caught them.