by John Pelan
“So, what did you think of Ian?”
“Is that his name? I never asked. Oh, my child! He made me so dizzy I nearly swooned. It was rather peculiar, really. I almost seemed to remember him from somewhere else.…”
“Perhaps he's the man of your dreams.”
“Of my wet dreams, certainly,” I intoned, dramatically fanning my face with a hand. Blinking, I glanced about the room, until my eyes rested on one of Eve's works. 'And, speaking of liquid dreams, I've had a most curious vision about that piece of art.”
She looked to where my polished nail was pointing. “Really, you've been dreaming of The Vault of Time” That's cool. I'm flattered.”
Reaching for my robe of magenta silk, I rose and crossed to where the thing of stone sat upon a small stand. It was the twin of the ruins I had beheld in slumber, a thing of pillars and oddly formed steps that led to a kind of crypt. Eve had created a semblance of seaweed from some kind of cloth, with which she had dressed portions of the pillars. It was impressive.
“What, exactly, does it represent?”
She joined me and linked her slender arm with mine. “Well, the odd fact is that it's something I saw in a recurring dream, a vision I had during a special organic high.”
“Oh, my—narcotics.”
“Purely organic, freak boy. Don't be such a prude. If you're a good girl I'll share with you before you leave our lovely old town and return to your mad city life.”
“Whatever.” I traced the path of steps with a timid finger, then pressed a hand to my suddenly painful head.
“What?”
“My head feels rather queer, darling. Have you any aspirin?”
She took my head into her hands and softly stroked my hair. In a low and lovely voice, she hummed a melody, a tune that seemed slightly familiar. My flesh prickled. I gazed into her eyes, those golden eyes flecked with green and blue. “Before you leave us, I want to do your head. You're so gorgeous.”
Smiling, I bent to her and bit her bottom lip. Her balmy breath fanned my visage. She moved her mouth to my ear and sighed into its cavity the strange song. Her strong hands pushed against my dome. I imagined that I could feel my skull expand with shifting shape. The pain was delicious.
Her fingers combed my flowing hair. With eyes closed, I dreamed of young Ian, and suddenly it was his hands that loved me. I saw him twist the necklace until it broke. Catching the pearls that spilled into his hand, he tossed them above us. I watched as they formed a cluster of midnight stars that glistened as darkly as an idol's jeweled eyes. A cosmic wind rose in melody, accompanying the song that was blown into my ears by a hungry mouth. It was a song to cold black starlight, and as I eagerly listened to it I watched the dead stars crawl across the sky and form an esoteric signal.
“I'll see you tonight,” Eve whispered. I smiled but did not open my eyes. Lost in trance, I found my way back to bed. When again I awoke, the light of day had departed. Early evening graced the clear heavens. Staggering to the bathroom, I washed my numb face. My head still ached, and as I looked at my reflection I frowned in confusion. My face seemed subtly altered, as did the shape of my head. I lifted a strand of yellow hair, suddenly loathing how it felt to my touch, hating the sickly shade of it. I searched Eve's toiletries until I found the razor. Oh, how cool and smooth the blade felt as I slid it across my scalp.
My head still ached with dull pain, and my eyesight was blurred. I did not care. I filled my hands with warm water and washed it over my shaven head, felt the sting where tiny cuts bled minutely. I gazed at mv reflection for a long time, smoothing my hands over m soft dome. How wonderful it felt. I leaned closer to the glass so as to see more clearly the shape of my altered eyes. Then I noticed Eve's reflection joined with my own.
She smoothed powder over my scalp. How cool and soothing was her touch. “I've been waiting such a long time for this moment. I've suspected for ages that you v/ere kindred, ever since you first came to visit staid old Staney. It's wonderful how we sometimes know our own. Your transition is occurring far faster than mine. You can see it in my eyes alone. Sometimes in the shape of my mouth. I've too much bloody human in my genes. But not for much longer, praise Dagon.”
“Honey, whatever are you talking about?' She was still behind me. I could feel the fullness of her breasts pressing against my back. She began to take her wonderfi.1 hands from my head. Raising my own, I placed them upon hers, then leaned my head against her sleek hair.
She chewed upon my earlobe. “We share a genetic history that predates humanity. We are of the Deep. You cannot remember because of our soiled heredity, but I know that images and sensations are swimming to your cells and awakening memory. Ian has told me much that I did not understand. He's taken me to Innsmouth, the seaport wherein we once thrived.”
“And how did he know that you were a part of this culture, or whatever it is that we're a part of?”
“Because of my art. And because of where we first met. I'll show you on our way to this ball that Stanley insists we attend. Let's get ready for that.”
She dressed me and did my makeup. I delighted in the touch of her hands upon my face. I gazed into her eyes and studied their shape, seeing for the first time how widely round they were. As she dressed me in my flowing gown, she hummed a weird tune that was strangely familiar. Smiling, I hummed with her. She laughed and kissed me, then went to fetch the necklace. I watched her press the black pearls to her mouth, watched as she placed them at my throat and did the latch.
She took little time in getting ready, and I saw that she was not dressed for the ball. Rather, she wore a simple dress of green silk, her black cloak, and a felt hat. Around her throat was a clasp of smooth stone upon which alien symbols were embossed. As we walked to our destination, I kept looking at her astonishing beauty in the light of star and moon. Her eyes especially fascinated me. I saw a hint of this outre look of which she had spoken, and my sense of kinship blossomed.
She led me to a derelict section of the ancient downtown area. We walked through what I suppose was meant to be a park, although now it was the sleeping quarters of sad, homeless humans. Eve linked her arm in mine as we approached a kind of alcove. I heard the light music of tinkling water. Before us was a very strange sight. Together, the tilted columns composed a fountain, where water fell from various tiny holes.
Beyond the dripping columns was a wall of water. Slipping off her shoes and motioning for me to do likewise, Eve led me into the shallow pool of cool water. As we passed beneath the columns I noticed that upon their surface had been chiseled symbols that were similar to those on Eve's necklace.
We stopped before the granite wall. I watched the flow of water that covered it. “This is where 1 met Ian, when I first came to this city. I've told you a little of my upbringing, of my strict Christian family with their unimaginative ways. The one member of my family I felt close to was my crazy aunt Alison. She was deemed ‘mad’ because she made it no secret that she was a lesbian. She dressed in black, and so hated daylight that she came out only at night. She would read to me by candlelight. She hinted of a curious heredity that was dormant in all but a few of us. She would smile at me and say that I wore the taint.”
I watched the wall of water as I listened. Beneath its liquid surface I began to see the mammoth visage that had been subtly carved upon the granite wall.
“I escaped my horrible family at an early age. One day I came to this New England town and felt—I don't know, a sense of destiny. I had been sculpting for a few years and had a sketchbook filled with imagery found in dreams. You can imagine how stunned I was to find this neglected civic work of art, for it corresponded so amazingly with my dream visions. It was created during the spring of 1925, at a time when artists and madmen all over the world shared a vision of cities beneath the sea, of the slumbering titan housed therein.”
I walked toward the wall. I placed my hard upon the cool, wet surface. Closing my eyes, I saw the face that had been carved into the wall, but I saw it as a
living entity. It was my destiny, this being. I would not call it a god, lor gods are a creation of human ego. This thing was beyond squalid humanity. I felt my knees bend in ecstatic supplication.
My head writhed with numbing pain. I felt my skull stretch and bend with new shape. Eve's lovely hand soothed my dome. As I opened my eyes, I saw that she was kneeling next to me. Before us stood Ian, looking magnificent against a background of dark sky and starlight. Oh, those cosmic gems, those stars that shaped themselves into archaic symbol.; that named my kismet.
Reaching into his shoulder bag, Ian took torn it the tiara of white gold. I trembled as he placed it upon my head.
It was a perfect fit.
OUTSIDE
Steve Rasnic Tem
1 know always th at 1 am an outsider.
—H. P. LOVECRAFT, “THE OUTSIDER”
Three months after his wife died, and once the youngest of his three sons had gone off to college, Malcolm closed up their beautiful house by the sea and wandered tie coastline in a beat-up van he'd bought especially for the trip. He had no intention of returning, but he did not tell his boys this. He didn't sell the house, although he'd been sorely tempted to just rid himself of the memories it embodied—and God knows he needed the money; but he knew one or more of the boys would want that fine old house someday and he couldn't find it in himself to deny them. He loved those boys, even though they had never felt much a part of him.
Of course, he had never felt a part of anything.
Janet had understood that, accepted it, and with that poor material had worked miracles. She'd made them a family despite him. She'd made him love her despite his fear that she could not be what she seemed, because no one could be what they seemed. Not in this world of secrets and horrors.
If she had died from an accident, of anything besides the leukemia, he might have chanced a belief that she had escaped the dark plot of humanity. But she hadn't escaped, and on their last visit with their oldest son, Bill, and his wfe and their baby girl in their home in Cincinnati, Janet's blood flowing full of its poison, Malcolm recognized that his brand-new granddaughter was looking a bit—he had no word for it. Froglike would do.
No one escapes. As the T-shirt says: NO ONE GETS OUT OF HERE ALIVE. He'd known that since he was a boy—it shouldn't have been any surprise. But Janet had brought a phenomenal amount of hope into their relationship, into his life.
He could almost hate her for it. At least he could hate himself, as he lay beside his beloved wife night after night while she died, and instead of comforting her he struggled not to imagine what was happening inside her lovely shell: the way the cells were changing, the way the darkness might spread, the invisible tendrils and vague pseudopods and questings and encroachments of beings far older than humankind, but who had given to us our blood and the dark ancient closets within our poorer, smaller brains.
He'd never felt a part of anything. No one gets out of here alive. The whole blasted world was looking a bit—froglike.
As a boy his deepest fear had been that he would miss something. Every day there were opportunities to be left out, to be forgotten, unheard, to remain uninvited at the end of the day as everyone else went to the game, the club, the party at the friend's house.
And, of course, that was exactly what happened. “You wear your difference on your sleeve,” a short-term girlfriend had told him once during his college years. Although he'd pretended to be insulted, she couldn't have been more correct. He had his badge of freakiness, his authorization of solitude, even though it was not readily apparent when he looked into the mirror.
To recognize this quality, however, wasn't necessarily to understand it. Parsing the dynamics was quite beyond his capabilities. He had no idea what the rules were. He was clueless as to exactly what it was he lacked.
As a young adult, working a standard nine-to-five office job—not that he enjoyed it, but it seemed the very definition of normalcy and beyond all else he did appreciate that—he spent no time at all at coworkers' homes. He ate his lunches alone at his desk. In his suburban neighborhood he didn't know his neighbors, but they appeared to throw good parties.
He would not feel sorry for himself. It was a pitiful line he refused to cross.
All those years he lived this way. He lived this way with little understanding.
What little he did understand, however, was that sometimes the world operated outside the world, that some of the rules were subtle and written down in out-of-the-way places, that each and every day there are things, vast and complicated things, which we miss.
“Just let me take care of it, Malcolm. Just leave it to me. You really don't need to bother.” Janet always said it like a prayer, and although he recognized it as a kind of dismissal—what kind of adult would you say such things to?—she made it into the most wonderful thing anyone had ever done for him. She'd made him a part of the world without his having to be a part of the world. She handled him, and he adored her for it.
With three active boys there had been athletic meets and parent-teacher conferences and ceremonies. He had not participated because he could not participate. He distrusted the smell of teachers and coaches and all the other child-care professionals. That oh-so-earnest smell. Of course he understood that his absence bothered his boys but he spent copious amounts of alone time with them, far more time than a normal father might. Eventually they appeared to understand that a trade had been made, a bargain, and seemed to appreciate what their father would do in lieu of what he could not do.
After a time they took care of him in their way, just as Janet had taken care of him.
“Here, Dad, let me do it,” Bill had said, taking some prescription down to the pharmacist's to be filled. He'd been only thirteen, but quite the responsible young man. He knew how uncomfortable his father was in the drugstore, buying things to keep imperfect bodies running, buying things to manage their smells and infirmities, having to talk to the little man in the white coat who appeared to know everyone's infirmities.
Joe and Richard had been helpful in their own ways. Richard would talk to the postman if Janet wasn't around, or any service people who came to call with their tools and their incomprehensible conversation. Joe was good for food shopping, or when Malcolm needed a paper or magazine from the newsstand several blocks away.
Lovely boys, he'd felt so blessed to have them, so that he pretended not to smell them or hear the strange sounds their bodies made at night when he watched them in their sleep from the door. He never told them about the ugliness he occasionally saw in their eyes or in their eager faces.
He drove carefully down the long, narrow coast road, making sure that the police would have no reason to stop him. It wasn't that he distrusted police officers over any other group—his distrust was democratically distributed. But the police had the power to lock you away—at least for a time—if you were breaking the rules. And Malcolm imagined that he was always breaking the rules, not really understanding what the rules, in fact, were. Other people seemed to understand them without even talking about them. But in his younger days his attempts at action and conversation had so often been met with stares and awkward silences it had become painfully clear that he had no understanding.
Janet had not treated him with silence and if for no other reason than that kept him devoted to her a lifetime and beyond. His sons did not treat him that way to his face, but he had no doubt things were different when they were with friends. He could forgive them their secret complaints about the eccentricities of “the old man.”
It pleased him to no end that his admirable sons had always had so many friends, that they were, in fact, far better at the sport of being human than he had ever been. Surely someone in the family besides Janet had to deal fully with the world.
The coastal towns were few and far between, just as he remembered them from when he used to travel. But the individual towns were far larger than he remembered from his time among them. In fact, tremendously larger, with an especially unplann
ed, chaotic growth on the outskirts—endless shopping malls and complexes and townhouse communities. Like fat creatures spilling out of their clothes in all directions, threatening to capture the unwary passerby in some entanglement whose laws were not immediately discernible to those who hadn't lived there for some time.
But in each case he drove straight through the town, murmuring, “I live here, as well,” to himself with a microscopic sense of triumph.
After Janet's death, he might well have remained in their fine old house by the sea forever, and not had to face these rules and expectations and stares and silences ever again. And some who knew him (but, of course, there were none) might wonder why he had decided to leave his safely and undertake such a journey.
Simple enough, he thought, almost grinning for the first time in months. I wouldn't want to be trapped there once humanity decided to pay me its long overdue visit.
Malcolm understood perfectly well that some might label such an attitude paranoid, delusional, something-or-other ideation. Humanity had developed an entire vocabulary for dealing with its outsiders. But he wasn't about to be trapped. Better to be a moving target than a hibernating one. Better to take to the coast road in a rusty nondescript van.
The other issue, of course, was that their house was so close to the sea, and he could not look very far into the sea, he could not tell what had been covered by its dark, oily waves. Each night in that house he could hear the whisper the waters made along the shore, but he could not understand what it wanted, what it expected, what it said.
Now and then he passed hitchhikers, their thumbs wavering hopefully as if attached to palsied limbs. Much to his own surprise he was tempted to stop each time and offer his door to some gentleman or lady with a knapsack and a quiet, desperate air. Somehow he imagined that a hitchhiker was much like himself, forced to put a thumb out in order to travel through a world in which he or she was an outcast. But as he slowed the van at each vagabond he discovered he could not trust the look of them: the eager eyes and smiling mouths and skin no doubt salty and damp from the ocean. Each time he sped away, chased by their whining and imprecations.
