The Children of Cthulhu

by John Pelan

  He had to eat, of course, and periodically replenished his supplies at some roadside stand, not in some brightly lit warehouse of bargains and massed humanity. And now and then he had to fill his tank and check the oil—preferring the last pump in the row, payable by credit card (although it was Janet's card, not yet canceled, and he felt ill with guilt each time he slid its magnetic strip through some slot and waited as faraway computers read his every thought and secret before flashing the “Approved” message).

  He slept in the van, among pillows and comforters gathered at the last minute from the bed he'd shared with her for more than thirty-five years. He wore one of Janet's old bathrobes to sleep in, for its warmth and fading Janet smell. Each night he parked the van as far away from the sea and the main road as he could, the doors securely locked and witi little Christmas bells attached to the handles to warn of intruders.

  At sundown on his sixth day on the road he drove into a town that had been consumed by some man c and far-ranging celebration. Signs everywhere proclaimed FESTIVAL! but none seemed to specify what the festival was for.

  Revelers with bright clothes and bare Hubs, armed with glasses in their hands, swirled uncomfortably close to his vehicle. He rolled his windows up quickly but not before their distinctive odor filled the interior. He imagined the sides of his van smeared with their bodily oils. He thought of how the paint might react and determined that when he left this town he would need to check the finish for damage.

  He thought of something Janet had asked him to do, years ago, something for her, and she had so rarely asked for favors from him. She had wanted him to go with her to a party at the neighbors'.

  “You might have fun. I'm told that the Galloways always throw a good party.” The eagerness in her voice had made him both sad and fearful.

  He could not help himself. He'd said, “Horey, you know how I hate a good party,” and the hurt in her face had reduced him.

  As suddenly as the revelers appeared they were gone again, and it seemed that he might continue on his way. But it bothered him that they could appear and disappea” so quickly. Some great accident was happening, some great catastrophe, some powerful and evolutionary celebration.

  So Malcolm began to turn the van onto street after street, down a succession of narrow and fetid alleys, catching now and then a glimpse of bright shirts and darkly tanned bodies, the flesh shiny with oils, the music loud and archaic and incomprehensible.

  They were always just a few blocks ahead of him—this great mass of smiling and joyful people, this grand party that went on all day without him —always just a chance few moments away.

  Then after a time Malcolm grew alarmed that he had no idea where he might be, that the sunset had long passed and without even thinking about it he had switched on his headlights and continued the search, that he was not sure if he could find the coast road ever again. The streetlights here were sparse, the houses quickly glimpsed with a flash from his lights distressingly shabby and poorly constructed. Now and again some vague, drunken shape—no doubt someone struggling home from the celebration that surely must have ended by now—brushed against the van, bumped it so strongly he feared he might have run them over. He could not bring himself to stop, to get out and search for the body.

  His tires began to squeal and slip as the streets deteriorated, vast potholes gleaming from too much moisture. The ancient ocean air had a corrosive effect on everything. It did not do to breathe it, and yet he and Janet and the boys had breathed it every day of their lives together. There had been times when he had suggested that they move, but Janet had been resistant— the boys' friends were all there (certainly not Malcolm's friends, Malcolm had no friends)—and he was not competent to pursue such a major undertaking as selling one house and buying another and managing a move, much less persuade his family to feel good about it.

  Suddenly he saw the colorful crowd in his windshield, approaching him, arms waving as if they had been searching for him, and having found what he had been looking for Malcolm panicked and threw the van into reverse, backing hard into darkness, hitting things, crashing into shadow shapes he was almost sure must be people. But he could not stop, and he continued this way until he came to another intersection of wet, gleaming streets and threw the van into forward again and tried to make his escape down a lane that wound into tall, leaning homes along his right.

  He continued for several blocks before the celebration surrounded him once again, the bodies pressed close to the van, mashed into the glass, and he was amazed ay their elaborate masks, the effort that must have gone into fashioning such fantastic visages, when he realized these weren t masks at all but people's faces, perfectly ordinary people's faces with mouths grinning and mouths open in laughter, eyes winking and eyes closed and the skin moving the countenance into a complete and joyful rapture.

  Then the people parted for a small space, just enough to allow passage for the van, and Malcolm roared through the crowd, again feeling the thumps and crashes, but he did not care, he could not stop, he had to get away, he could not breathe.

  Moon glistened off the black ocean waves. The passage the crowd had created for him had led to a beach.

  He moved the van slowly over the sand, peering into his rearview window at the steadily dwindling crowd. They were not following him. He stopped when the waves began lapping his front tires.

  He cut the engine quickly, compulsivel) needing to hear the ocean, needing to hear the crowd. He heard nothing, even after rolling down the van's windows. He locked into the rear-view mirror again. There was still no sign of movement. He opened the door and stepped down into the soupy sand. A smell of rotting fish filled the air.

  Malcolm turned and gazed at the crowd. Behind them an incredible vision: layer after layer of ancien:, decaying buildings, jumbled together and spread across the horizon, rising as far as he could see. Bits of cloth moved, curtains in windows, and other things he could not think about. The crowd still remained motionless, watching him with a kind of awkwardness, as if waiting to see what he would do. He imagined that they did not know what to make of him.

  But eventually they did begin to move toward him, one at a time, then two, then increasingly larger ragged bits of the crowd, their smell wafting over to him to blend with the odor of ocean and fish.

  As Malcolm walked out into the sea he could feel the moisture climb his clothes like some insistent and sumptuous aquatic creature. He could feel it sliding across his skin. He could feel it ease into his pores. He could feel his own blood grow eager for some kind of reunion.

  When he turned around he could see that some members of the crowd remained hesitant, waiting on the shore. Others entered the water eagerly, eagerly. He could not decide whether he was leading or being chased.

  He simply knew that once you were Outside, all things were possible.

  NOR THE DEMONS DOWN UNDER THE SEA

  Caitlin R. Kiernan

  (1957)

  The late-summer morning like a shattering bluewhite gem, crashing, liquid seams of fluorite and topaz thrown against the jaggedrough shale and sandstone breakers, roiling calcite foam beneath the cloudless sky specked with gulls and ravens. And Julia behind the wheel of the big green Bel Air, chasing the coast road north, the top down so the Pacific wind roars wild through her hair. Salt smell to fill her head, intoxicating and delicious scent to drown her citydulled senses, and Anna's alone in the backseat, ignoring her again, silent, reading one of her textbooks or monographs on malacology. Hardly a word from her since they left the motel in Anchor Bay more than an hour ago, hardly a word at breakfast for that matter, and her silence is starting to annoy Julia.

  “It was a bad dream, that's all,” Anna said, the two of them alone in the diner next door to the motel, sitting across from each other in a Naugahyde booth with a view of the bay, Haven's Anchorage dotted with the bobbing hulls of fishing boats.

  “You know that I don't like to talk about ray dreams.” Anna pushed her uneaten grapefruit aside a
nd lit a cigarette. “God knows I've told you enough times.”

  “We don't have to go on to the house,” Julia said hopefully. “We could always see it another time and we could go back to the city today, instead.”

  Anna only shrugged her shoulders and stared through the glass at the water, took another drag off her cigarette and exhaled smoke the color of the horizon.

  “If you're afraid to go to the house, just say so.”

  Julia steals a glance at her in the rearview mirror, wind-rumpled girl with shiny, sunburned cheeks, cheeks like ripening plums, and her short blond hair twisted into a bun and tied up in a scarf. And Julia's own reflection stares back at her from the glass, reproachful, desperate, almost fifteen years older than Anna, so close to thirty-five now that it frightens her; her drab hazel eyes hidden safely behind dark sunglasses that also conceal nascent crow's feet, and the wind whips unhindered through her own hair, hair that would be mouse brown if she didn't use peroxide. The first tentative wrinkles beginning to show at the corners of her mouth, and she notices that her lipstick is smudged, then licks the tip of one index finger and wipes the candypink stain off her skin.

  “You really should come up for air,” Julia shouts, shouting just to be heard above the wind, and Anna looks slowly up from her book. She squints and blinks at the back of Julia's head, an irritated, uncomprehending sort of expression and a frown that draws creases across her forehead.

  “You're missing all the scenery, dear.”

  Anna sits up, sighs loud, and stares out at a narrow, deserted stretch of beach rushing past, the ocean beyond, and “Scenery's for the tourists,” she says. “I'm not a tourist.” And she slumps down into the seat again, turns a page, and goes back to reading.

  “You could at least tell me what I've done,” Julia says, trying hard not to sound angry or impatient, sounding only a little bit confused instead, but this time Anna doesn't reply, pretending not to hear or maybe just choosing to ignore her altogether.

  “Well, then, whenever you're ready to talk about it,” Julia says, but that isn't what she wants to say; wants to tell Anna she's getting sick of her pouting about like a high school girl, sick of these long, brooding silences and more than sick of always feeling guilty because she doesn't ever know what to say to make things better. Always feeling like it's her fault, somehow, and if she weren't a coward, she would never have become involved with a girl like Anna Foley in the first place.

  But you are a coward, Julia reminds herseli, the father-cruel voice crouched somewhere behind her sunglasses, behind her eyes. Don't ever forget that, not even for a second, and she almost misses her exit, the turnoff that would carry them east to Boonville if she stayed on the main road. Julia takes the exit, following the crude map Anna drew for her on a paper napkin; the road dips and curves sharply away from the shoreline, and the ocean is suddenly lost behind a dense wall of redwoods and blooming rhododendrons, the morning sun traded for the rapid flicker of forest shadows. Only a few hundred yards from the highway there's another, unpaved road, unnamed road leading deeper into the trees, and she slows down and the Chevrolet bounces off the blacktop onto the rutted, pockmarked logging trail.

  The drive up the coast from San Francisco tc Anchor Bay was Anna's idea, even though they both knew it was a poor choice for summertime shelling. But a chance to get out of the laboratory, she said, to get away from the city, from the heat and all the people, and Julia knew what she reallv meant. A chance to be alone, away from suspicious, disapproving eyes, and besides, there had been an interesting limpet collected very near there a decade or so ago, a single, unusually large shell cataloged and tucked away in the vast Berkeley collections and then all but forgotten. The new species, Diodora thespesius, was described by one of Julia Winter's male predecessors in the department and a second specimen would surely be a small feather in her cap.

  So, the last two days spent picking their way meticulously over the boulders, kelp- and algae-slick rocks and shallow tide pools constantly buried and unburied by the shifting sand flats; hardly an ideal place for limpets, or much of anything else, to take hold. Thick-soled rubber boots and aluminum pails, sun hats and gloves, knives to pry mollusks from the rocks, and nothing much for their troubles but scallops and mussels. A few nice sea urchins and sand dollars, Strongylocentrotus purpura-tus and Dendraster excentricus, and the second afternoon Anna had spotted a baby octopus but it had gotten away from them.

  “If we only had more time,” Anna said, “I'm sure we would have found it if we had more time.” She was sitting on a boulder, smoking, and her dungarees soaked through to the thighs, staring north and west toward the headland and the dark silhouette of Fish Rocks jutting up from the sea like the scabby backs of twin leviathans.

  “Well, it hasn't been a total loss, has it?” Julia asked, and smiled, remembering the long night before, Anna in her arms, Anna whispering things that had kept Julia awake until almost dawn. “It wasn't a complete waste.”

  And Anna Foley turned and watched her from her seat on the boulder, sloe-eyed girl, slate-gray irises to hide more than they would ever give away. She's taunting me, Julia thought, feeling ashamed of herself for thinking such a thing, but thinking it anyway. It's all some kind of a game to her, playing naughty games with Dr. Winter, and she's sitting there watching me squirm.

  “You want to see a haunted house?” Anna said, finally, and whatever Julia had expected her to say, it certainly wasn't that.

  “Excuse me?”

  “A haunted house. A real haunted house,” and Anna raised an arm and pointed northeast, inland, past the shoreline. “It isn't very far from here. We could drive up tomorrow morning.”

  This is a challenge, Julia thought. She's trying to challenge me, some new convolution in the game meant to throw me off balance.

  “I'm sorry, Anna. That doesn't really sou id like my cup of tea,” she said, tired and just wanting to climb back up the bluff to the motel for a hot shower and an early di iner.

  “No, really. I'm serious. I read about this place last month in Argosy. It was built in 1890 by a man narred Machen Dan-dridge who supposedly worshiped Poseidon—”

  “Since when do you read Argosy?”

  “I read everything, Julia,” Anna said. “It's what I do,” and she turned her head to watch a ragged flock of seagulls flying by, ash and charcoal wings skimming just above the surface of the water.

  “And an article in Argosy magazine said this house was really haunted?” Julia asked skeptically, watching Anna watch the gulls as they rose and wheeled high over the Anchorage.

  “Yes, it did. It was written by Dr. Johnathan Montague, an anthropologist, I think. He studies haunted houses.”

  “Anthropologists aren't generally in the business of ghost-hunting, dear,” Julia said, smiling, and Anna glared at her from her rock, her stormcloud eyes narrowing the slightest bit.

  “Well, this one seems to be, dear.”

  And then neither of them said amthing for a few minutes, no sound but the wind and the surf and the raucous gulls, all the soothing, lonely ocean noises. Finally the incongruent, mechanical rumble of a truck up on the highway to break the spell, the taut, wordless space between them, and “I think we should be heading back now,” Julia said. “The tide will be coming in soon.”

  “You go on ahead,” Anna whispered, and chewed at her lower lip. “I'll catch up.”

  Julia hesitated, glanced down at the cold salt water lapping against the boulders, each breaking and withdrawing wave tumbling the cobbles imperceptibly smoother. Waves to wash the greenbrown mats of seaweed one inch forward and one inch back; like the hair of drowned women, she thought and then pushed the thought away.

  “I'll wait for you at the top, then,” she said. “In case you need help.”

  “Sure, Dr. Winter. You do that,” and Anna turned away again and flicked the butt of her cigarette at the sea.

  Almost an hour of hairpin curves and this road getting narrower and narrower still, strangling dirt r
oad with no place to turn around, before Julia finally comes to the edge of the forest and the fern thickets and giant redwoods release her to rolling, open fields. Tall yellowbrown pampas grass that sways gentle in the breeze, air that smells like sun and salt again, and she takes a deep breath. A relief to breathe air like this after the stifling closeness of the forest, all those old trees with their shaggy, shrouding limbs, and this clear blue sky is better, she thinks.

  “There,” Anna says, and Julia gazes past the dazzling green hood of the Chevy, across the restless grass and there's something dark and far away silhouetted against the western sky.

  “That's it,” Anna says. “Yeah, that must be it,” and she's sounding like a kid on Christmas morning, little-girl-at-an-amusement-park excitement; she climbs over the seat and sits down close to Julia.

  I could always turn back now, Julia thinks, her hands so tight around the steering wheel that her knuckles have gone a waxy white. I could turn this car right around ar.d go back to the highway. We could be home in a few hours. We could be home before dark.

  “What are you waiting for?” Anna asks aixiously, and she points at the squat, rectangular smudge in the distance. “That's it. We've found it.”

  “I'm beginning to think this is what you wanted all along,” Julia says, speaking low, and she can hardly hear herself over the Bel Air's idling engine. “Anchor Bay, spending time together, that was all just a trick to get me to bring you out here, wasn't it?”

  And Anna looks reluctantly away from the house, and “No,” she says. “That's not true. I only remembered the house later, when we were on the beach.”

  Julia looks toward the distant house again, if it is a house. It might be almost anything, sitting out there in the tall grass, waiting. It might be almost anything at all.