The Children of Cthulhu

by John Pelan

  “Need something?” he asks, not turning around.

  Something in here smells really ripe.

  “Uh,” I manage, genius that I am. “I don't guess this is where I could find… um… a copy of the Pnakohc Manuscripts? In English?”

  “Can't do English,” he says, still facing the wall. “Greek okay?” Goddamn, he's having a hard time pronouncing rs and Is, but that's nothing to complain about!

  “That's fine,” I blurt out, not caring so much about seeming geekily eager anymore. “Which shelf is— “

  “Table,” he cuts in, and waves at the end nearest him. I skirt up the other side, breathing through my mouth, and indeed there's a collection of pages there—a proper manuscript, not bound into a book. A heavy paper—papyrus?—cover sits to one side. The title reads Pnakotoi.

  I turn to the open manuscript and begin to decipher the lines, word by word:

  … Thus do the ancient ghiils, eaters of the dead, keep their counsels in the lightless vaults far below the surface of the world. There do they meep and glibber to one another, amid their collections of human bones and flesh. They delight in pools of standing water, mounds of reeking filth, and the hoards of mysteries they scavenge from human lives. The brave man who descends to the ghiils may bring back secrets, but not without some change to himself.…

  “Who translated this?” I ask aloud. The man at the bookshelves grunts.

  “Nah. Dictated. Long time 'go.”

  I turn the page and keep reading, though I wish I had some notepaper with me. The manuscript goes on to talk about ghouls preserving meticulous records of writings from all over the globe—from some places with names I recognize, like Thera and Pompeii, and others, like Lomar, that I've never heard—but as I read further, it's hard to remember what I saw on the previous pages. “From a language that died out before Classical Greek?”

  “Nah. Not dead. }ust real old.” Owd, he says, like a Yorkshire-man or someone with a full mouth.

  “How do you know it's not dead?”

  His shoulders shake, and he lets out a whuffy sort of chuckle. “ 'Cause I'm not.”

  I set the page down a little too quickly and stare at him. “You speak this? What language is it?” My head feels awfully fuzzy all of a sudden. “Is there a copy in the original? Can you show me?” I've got to remember it all, but it's so hard to keep it all sorted out in my head! I flip the papyrus sheets back and forth two or three at a time, searching for key phrases to remember, but the world is swimming before my eyes and it's hard to make out the words. “Please!” I call out. “Please, I just want to understand how it works, that's all I care about!”

  Reeling, I lean against the table for support, but it sags like modeling clay under my weight. “I have to learn what I can before I wake up!” I shout, while the room twists and warps around me. Two images pass before me, so quickly I can barely tell them apart: high up against one of the vaults, a painting of a wall marred by a gaping hole surrounded by half-human creatures; and, turning toward me to see what's wrong, the blond-haired man, a puzzled “What?” escaping from his impossibly canine jaws.

  Somewhere beyond the dark doorway, there erupts a chorus of frenzied meeps—

  And, once again, I woke up.

  Fifteen minutes. It was only 11:49 P.M. I couldn't have been asleep longer than fifteen minutes. Half an hour at the outside. Such an incredibly vivid dream, yet it already felt like it took place decades ago. All I could still recall clearly were the sounds—deep grandfatherly voices, that rough guttural speech, the wild meeping noises.

  Then the connection went click in my head.

  Mockingbirds don't make their own calls. They have to mimic something.

  Deep… buried…

  It was completely impossible, of course. It couldn't be the call of an actual living thing. Especially not with those teeth, all I could remember of the face in my dream.

  But Pickman was a realist.…

  I lay back down and closed my eyes; better just to go back to sleep and forget about it. Time passed while I listened to the crickets outside. Looking at the inside of my eyelids was getting really dull.

  I glanced over to the clock again. Five after midnight. Lying in bed wasn't getting me anywhere, particularly not back to sleep.

  “Fine, then,” I said, throwing the covers back and getting up. I dragged a pair of hiking boots and a big Mag-Lite out of the closet, pulled on the shoes, shoved the flashlight into my satchel, and headed back to campus to shut up my overactive imagination. Maybe then I could go back to bed.

  The tone of the meeping was different when I got to the park: deeper, more resonant, not so birdlike anymore. I slung my satchel over one shoulder, pulled out the flashlight, and played the beam over the trees and benches. Those looked the same, but one of the tunnel grates was swiveled out of alignment, leaving a crack just big enough for a person to get through. Holding the light like a police baton, I dragged a bench one-handed over to the open vent, climbed up, and shone the light down.

  Something down there leaped away into the darkness.

  “Hey!” I shouted, waving the light around the bottom of the shaft. “Who's there?” Must be some kids from the dorms, I thought, but then another sound welled up from below: a burbling, trilling sound undercut with low grumbles. All in all, glibber wasn't a bad name for it.

  “Hey!” I shouted again. “Come back!” And in the single stupidest moment of my life, I clambered omo the top of the shaft, grabbed the first rung of the ladder, and climbed down.

  The tunnel headed off in a straight line, vaguely toward the admin building. In the distance, by flashlight, I could still see something loping away. “Come back, dammit!” I called one more time before chasing after it, satchel knocking against my legs as I ran.

  It wasn't quite as fast as me, but it had a good lead, and more than once I thought I'd lost it around a corner. It ducked right, then right again, then left in quick succession, and I realized two things: One, it was following a pattern, and two, the tunnels were sloping downward. It turned again, sharply, down a fetid-smelling tunnel—this one with no ovenead steam pipes. I rounded the corner after it, maybe only twenty feet away by now. It didn't run like a human.

  “Slow downl” I called, just as it turned once more. This time it spun left instead of right—straight into a blind alcove. I trained the flashlight on it and sprinted up to look at it. Him. He was blond. His face, the part he wasn't shielding from the light, looked like someone had grafted a dog's lower jaw onto it. His teeth were enormous. I'd seen him before.

  “Turn it off,” he whimpered.

  “And have you rip me open and eat me? Not hardly.” I gripped the barrel harder.

  “Won't.” He rubbed his lips with one wrist. “You're too fresh.”

  … amid their collections of human bones and flesh.

  “I'm remembering the dream from last night,” I said, trying to hide the note of surprise in my voice. “You were there. Tell me what you said. Prove it's you.”

  “The records. Showed them to you in Greek. Didn't have English.” His voice was muffled against the wall from trying to cover his eyes. I twisted the nose of the flashlight just a little, to diffuse some of the spot of light on him.

  “I couldn't remember what I read after I woke up. Why is it coming back to me now?”

  He peered back at me with crimson eyes. “You followed me. Down a bolt-hole.” I jiggled the flashlight, and he hissed. “Through steam tunnels, back into the dream.”

  “So I'm dreaming now?”

  “No.”

  “Then where are we?”

  “Going to the vaults.”

  What am I even doing here? I asked myself, fully expecting the scene in front of me to waver away into nothing again. I'm not really underground, am I? Isn't this just a recurring dream?

  The world refused to spin.

  “I don't understand what's happening,” I said, reaching for my satchel with my free hand. “It started with that manuscript,
all I wanted was a proper translation, and I haven't found a single person who could do that.”

  He crossed his arms, still squinting. “People can't.”

  “Then was the version in Greek a fake one?” He shook his head once, hard. “So who dictated it?”

  “Ghouls.”

  As Chomsky argued, it would be impossible for us to understand a nonhuman language.

  Thus do the ancient ghiils, eaters of the dead, keep their counsels in the lightless vaults far below the surface of the world.…

  “And you're a…”

  He nodded.

  “Do you have a name?”

  “Oous.”

  “Come again?”

  He slipped a paw into his back pocket and pulled out a beat-up cloth wallet. He opened it under the light and pointed to a Georgia driver's license—unexpired. Lewis Wilson, it read. The face was perfectly human.

  “Where'd you get this?”

  He snatched it away and stuffed it back into his pocket. “ 'S been mine.” I looked hard at his face again. The hair was right, as were the eyes and ears. If it weren't for the impossibly large fangs and jaw, it would have been the exact same person.

  “And you're saying you used to be a…”

  He nodded again.

  “How?”

  He pointed to the flashlight. “Turn it down? I'll show you.”

  Ghouls could read the Manuscripts. The)' could even show me how. And if all of them were this light-sensitive, the flashlight was insurance that would get me back to the surface. I nodded slowly and dimmed it.

  He reached out a hand. “Hold on. Gets slippery from here.” So I did, and along we went, deeper into the bolt-hole into dream.

  “Why're you so interested?” he asked as we walked.

  I thumped my satchel with the flashlight handle. “I've got my copy of the Manuscripts with me. I want to find out what's really in it.”

  “Whafor?”

  “Just… to know what's really there,” I said. “I can't think of anything I'd do with it, except that.”

  He glibbered something softly, and we kept on going.

  Finally, after what felt like miles of walking through silent, ripe-smelling darkness, the tunnel opened up into a small den of a cave. Lewis squeezed my hand and stopped, then let out a series of meeps. Seconds later, crimson eyes blinked into view in the shadows. I shrank back, tripped over Lewis, and scrabbled with the flashlight. Something hissed as the beam passed over it. “Shh.” Lewis found my hand again and helped me up.

  “Guides.” I took a deep breath and pointed the flashlight down again. Two voices meeped back.

  “C'mon,” said Lewis, and led onward.

  The rear of the cave narrowed into a passage only wide enough for one person. Three sets of glowing eyes moved single-file into it, and apart from the rocks lit by ambient flashlight glow, they were all I could see. We moved about thirty paces along the rough floor, and then I saw dim light and felt smooth stone under my feet again. “Here,” said Lewis's voice, and he stopped. I blinked, looked around, and saw chiseled floors, ceiling vaults and crammed shelves, just like the basement of the library at Ulthar.

  And ghouls by the dozens, all of them more or less dog-faced, some glibbering quietly in small groups, some reading alone by candlelight, some gnawing on lumps of meat. I couldn't smell anything at all anymore. Our guides meeped softly and trotted off to the back of the gallery.

  “ 'Scuse,” said Lewis, and let go of my hand. He loped over to one of the others, glibbered briefly, picked up a meat-covered bone and went after it teeth-first, even though it was the size of a human arm. When he came back, carrying the remains, he looked brighter, more refreshed —maybe also a little more flat-nosed and pointy-eared, too.

  “That's how you… become like this? Eating raw meat?”

  “Dead. For a while now. Grave meat. 'S good.”

  I shuddered slightly, though less than I expected myself to. “That's inhuman.”

  “Yup.”

  Something else clicked into place then. “Then you can't show me how this language works, after all.”

  Lewis cocked his doggy head to the left. “Can translate it for you…”

  I shook my head. “It's not the same, though. I want to know how it functions—what all the rules are. Like in school. Is that something you can explain in English?”

  His face twisted into an impossibly large, thoughtful frown. He pursed his lips a few times, as if about to speak, but finally shook his head no.

  So this was what it had come down to. Perhaps Lewis and his fellow ghouls weren't quite human anymore—but they were still human enough to retain a command of English, not to mention dozens of other human languages, judging from the books I'd seen last night. Yet they were not-human enough to understand a communication system that a mind specialized for human speech could never grasp.

  And, the thought occurred, not-human enough in other ways, if the Manuscripts were right. Being a human scholar meant claiming an agenda and clinging to i: tooth and claw-had meant that for centuries, though it seemed so much worse these days. There just wasn't room for someone who only wanted to learn, collect, and preserve. Not on the surface, anyway.

  That's not what I want; I thought. But there's more. I know what I do want, now.

  “It's all right, Lewis,” I told him, putting a hand on his forearm. “Don't feel bad. I still want you to show me. It's just going to take a while.” And I patted his wrist for comfort, took the meaty bone from his hand, and raised it to my lips.

  ARE YOU LOATHSOME TONIGHT?

  Poppy Z. Brite

  When Elvis was first cutting records in Memphis, back before pills and Colonel Parker really got their hooks into him, he used to shop at a black men's clothing store on Beale Street. The store was owned by a black man, and the clothes were aimed at young jiveass black men: ruffled shirts in painful colors, wide-legged pants with glittery stripes, jackets decorated with a king's ransom of rhinestones. Blue suede shoes.

  No other white people ever shopped there. Elvis never forgot the fact that the owner had let him take clothes on credit back when his tastes outstripped the size of his wallet, and he patronized the store until it closed in 1968. Bought the owner a Cadillac, too.

  Of course Elvis loved the clothes at this store, but there was another thing that fascinated him: an eight-foot albino python the owner kept in a tank near the shoe display. Elvis could never quite get it through his head that the snake wasn't poisonous. “Looks just like a big ole worm,” he'd say. “But if it bit you you'd fall down dead in two seconds.”

  “Naw, Elvis,” the owner kept telling him, “only way that snake could hurt you is to get 'round your neck and squeeeeeeeeeeze.”

  Elvis never listened. Well, maybe he did just a little. He'd always had a taste for things that made him feel endangered without truly being dangerous, movies with plenty of blood and guts, books by men who'd traveled through deserts or to the North Pole and written down every awful detail, snakes that weren't really poisonous but could still squeeze you to death.

  After his momma died, though, Elvis no longer cared so much whether things just seemed dangerous. For years now he has been edging closer to real danger in ways he can still deny from day to day. Pounds, kilos of bacon. Peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches fried in butter. Dilaudids and Seconals and Nembutals and Placidyls and Quaaludes… the names themselves are soporific to him now, making the back of his brain seem to lubricate with anticipation, much as his mouth waters when he smells food.

  There was never a time in his life when Elvis couldn't get all the drugs he wanted. But sometimes even he has to level off a little in order to enjoy the next ride down. When that happens, when he begins to crave his handful of pills, the desire is like a big white snake moving slowly in his gut.

  He loves the pills so much that the man who supplies them, Dr. Nick, was recently able to talk him into lending the Presley name—previously unsullied by product endorsement—to a chain of racq
uetball courts. Even in his fog, Elvis can see the pathetic humor in that idea, which fortunately never came to fruition. He loves the pills so much that once, when a doctor tried to talk him into cutting down, he threatened to go out and buy his own damn drugstore.

  Onstage in Vegas in 1974, Elvis told his audience, “In this day and time you can't even get sick—you're strung outl Well, by God, I'll tell you something, friends: I have never been strung out in my life except on music. When I got sick here in the hotel, from three different sources I heard I was strung out on heroin. I swear to God. Hotel employees, Jacl! Bellboys! Freaks who carry your luggage! Maids! If I find, or hear, the individual that has said that about me — I'm gonna break your neck, you sonofabitch! That is dangerous, that is damaging to myself, to my little daughter, to my father, to my friends, to my doctor. I will pull your goddamn tongue out by the roots! Thank you very much.”

  Then he sang “Hawaiian Wedding Song.”

  These days Elvis spends most of his time in his bedroom and adjoining bath. When maids come in to clean these rooms, Elvis sits awkwardly in the chintz- and doll-filled chamber that is always kept ready for Lisa Marie's visits. The maid has to open Lisa Marie's windows afterward to get the lingering smell of him out of the pale pink room: a heavy sir ell of hair oil and sweat, for Elvis has a lifelong fear of water and hates to bathe. Often there is a faint chemical edge to his odor, the excess nostrums and toxins coming right out of his pores.

  He is supposed to leave on tour tomorrow, twelve days, twelve shows without a night off. The list of cities alone would be enough to kill a lesser man: Utica, Syracuse, Hartford, Uniondale, Lexington. Fayetteville, Tennessee. And more. He doesn't want to be anywhere but this batiroom. He's told everybody he's not going, but nobody believes him. The colonel says he can't afford not to go, and the hell of it is that this is true: Elvis spends so much, and his noney has been so poorly managed, that he'll be broke within the year.