by S. T. Joshi
I was the first to see one of them. In the abyss, as we climbed between the worlds, amid the stars, with the galaxies spread out before us like foam, I looked back, behind us—my friend, mentor, guide, cicerone gazed only forward and upward—and I saw something following us, which did indeed look insectoid, like an enormous louse or bedbug—vermin of some kind, the size of a large dog, with a shape the eye and the mind could not quite sort out, for all it distinctly had golden, segmented armor and dozens, maybe hundreds of limbs, with distressingly human-like hands, and an even more distressingly human-like face, which looked like my own in the mirror, only bloated and distorted and mad. It screamed at me, some kind of chanting, almost words.
The most horrible detail of all, I discerned as it drew ever nearer, was that it too had vermin upon it, millions of tiny replicas of itself, swarming, so that its very surface rippled like boiling water.
Now in one version of infinite probability, as the thing crawled over us, as it touched me, Walrus Stephens, my dear, dear friend and buddy and mentor, scurried rapidly on ahead and left me there to my fate, like the old joke about the guy who takes his crippled friend walking into a dangerous part of town and explains, I don’t have to outrun the muggers. I just have to outrun you.
Vile treachery! All those visions, adventures, stories, pretensions, and protestations of friendship just so that I could be bait, a diversion, and he could escape to make his way onward to whatever indescribable glory he sought.
But in another version, which I feel is more true, as soon as the first of those awful limbs brushed lightly over us, before the thousand pale, wriggling fingers began to take hold, my companion let out a cry of amazement and disgust, grabbed me by the wrist and yanked me off the strand we had been climbing, until we were falling through space once more, into the endless abyss, while the million scattered, fiery spiderweb strands drifted about us in all directions; and I had the great vision which has never left me for an instant, which haunts me in even drugged sleep, of an infinity of time and space completely infested, swarming with vermin which most people can’t see, which wriggle in their immeasurable masses all around us, in the air, in the earth, in the walls of our buildings, in the very stones, writhing and crawling, ever ready to burst out and consume us all.
Very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am, but why will you say that I am mad? I’ve said it a hundred times, but you don’t have to agree with me! Hearken! and observe how healthily—how calmly I tell you the rest—
We dropped out of the air, not into the Headless Shakespeare Bookshop or onto the seat of a speeding car—since the car was smashed up and destroyed, as I have already related—but into a shabby, trash-crammed apartment in a slum district in some northeastern city. I didn’t get much of a look around, only an impression. Glaring lights from outside. The place rattled as an elevated train roared by. I saw piles of rubbish of all sorts, one side room stuffed with file boxes of paper bursting out into a heap on the floor, books and manuscripts and letters and old junk mail ankle-deep everywhere, a pile of unwashed dishes in the kitchen sink, the whole place swarming with vermin, and I knew somehow that this was the core, the point of origin, back into which all the dreams and possibilities and wonderful, charming, tall tales of Walter Stephens (or whatever his name really was) collapsed like a house of cards into a debris of lies. Here they were not true, in this one place, cut off from infinity. Now that might have given one cause for hope, because if here, in this single reality, none of the foregoing was true, then the horrors which had followed us back out of that endlessly threaded infinity couldn’t be true either, and maybe, just maybe, if we just let go of everything and breathed very carefully, we could get on with our lives.
But it’s not that simple. If only you could break a plate or two over your head and make a silly noise and that would change everything; if only—
It was not that simple. Walrus was there with me, in his apartment, and he was weeping as he locked the doors and windows and then poured out gasoline from a fuel can over the accumulated rubbish.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I really am. I didn’t want it to end this way. But there is no other way it can end now.”
Maybe just a little bit of my own sanity actually returned at that point, because I began to reason and to think like the guy who outran his crippled friend to escape the muggers.
“You don’t have to do this,” I said. “Stop. Just come outside with me. Let’s talk. Come home with me. I have a spare room.”
He sobbed. “Yes, I do have to do it, now, while some part of my mind is still clear, while it’s still my own—”
And I saw then that he was telling the truth, that he was right, that he had only perhaps minutes left while any part of his mind, of his soul, was still his own and free to act, because he, his very flesh, was swarming with vermin. Even as they wriggled unseen in the air around us, in the walls, in the very earth beneath our feet, those things, things, devouring things, which swarm through the very cosmos to infinity, which you can read about in the real Necronomicon, so they also wriggled and multiplied within him, and I, I whose eyes had been opened, could see them. I could see his face, and the flesh of his hands bubbling and rippling like boiling water. They were inside him. They were devouring him, and he, he, in all his terrible agony, remained sane enough, brave enough to attempt to be the savior of mankind by destroying himself and everything he knew, and every connection he had made to that hideous infinity.
Only I, like the base, treacherous coward who abandoned his crippled friend, I only thought of myself and tried to escape. Stephens was twice my size, a huge man, powerful even when not frenzied. I knew I couldn’t overpower him. So I backed slowly toward the locked door while he poured out the gasoline.
I looked about desperately. I grabbed a folder of papers. It was the manuscript of what was supposed to be his next book of poems.
“Look,” I said. “I’ll just take this with me and get it published, as a memorial volume. Wouldn’t you like that? It’s good stuff. It should be preserved.”
He tossed aside the gas can and waded toward me. He had a cigarette lighter in one hand.
With the other he caught hold of my wrist with a grip that seemed to be breaking bones. The papers scattered to the floor.
I looked into his face. His features were almost unrecognizable, bruised, blackened, bubbling, and writhing, his face bursting in splatters of blood as little, screaming, verminthings chewed their way through the surface of his skin.
Only his eyes were still his. Only there did I catch one last, fading glimpse of my old friend Walrus. He was heroic at the end, I tell you. He held on to his humanity, his last shreds of self, to the very last minute, because he had to. I think that at the very end, he acted out of friendship. Not mercy, but desperate friendship.
“Somebody’s got to warn the world,” I said. “Someone has to tell them. About… everything.”
“Yes,” he said. “I guess someone does.”
He let go of my wrist, then reached up and unbolted the door.
I ran out onto the street. The apartment exploded behind me in a shower of hot glass as the windows blew out.
And that is how I escaped. That is how I am able to tell you this story.
But it’s not as simple as that. Nobody gets off so easily, you see, and it was only minutes before the morbid fear came over me that, if the vermin things had followed Walter Walrus Stephens out of hyperspace and infested him, they should have followed and infested me too. So of course I took the only logical course of action and with one of those hot shards that had blown out of the apartment I did my very best to cut the awful, screaming, wriggling things out of myself, and I’d done a pretty thorough job too before I fainted from loss of blood and the police found me; and since this particular mania—look, look, I have scars to prove it—falls well within the familiar paradigms of psychiatric medicine (it is a symptom of a particularly severe form of schizophrenia) or it least it is when you’re no
t really infested with wriggling, screaming, all-devouring vermin from beyond infinity—and so, well, conventional treatments were prescribed, and here I am, the only living witness to the fate of Walrus Stephens and the only person who can give you even a hint of the real truth about him.
I don’t have much more to say. Visiting hours are over anyway. You’ll have to go. You’re welcome. The least you could do is thank me for taking up so much of my valuable time.
Say, what’s that crawling on your shoulder?
One Tree Hill
(The World as Cataclysm)
CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN
Caitlín R. Kiernan is the author of several novels, including Low Red Moon, Daughter of Hounds, and The Red Tree, which was nominated for both the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy awards. Most recently, her seventh novel, The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, was published by Penguin. Since 2000, her shorter tales of the weird, fantastic, and macabre have been collected in several volumes, including Tales of Pain and Wonder; From Weird and Distant Shores; To Charles Fort, with Love; and The Ammonite Violin and Others. In 2011, Subterranean Press released a retrospective of her early writing, Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One), with a second volume planned for 2015. She lives in Providence, R.I., with her partner, Kathryn.
1.
I AM DREAMING. OR I AM AWAKE.
I’ve long since ceased to care, as I’ve long since ceased to believe it matters which. Dreaming or awake, my perceptions of the hill and the tree and what little remains of the house on the hill are the same. More importantly, more perspicuously, my perceptions of the hill and the house and the tree are the same. Or, as this admittedly is belief, so open to debate, I cannot imagine it would matter whether I am dreaming or awake. And this observation is as good a place to begin as any.
I am told in the village that the tree was struck by lightning just after sunset on St. Crispin’s Day, eleven years ago. I am told in the village that no thunderstorm accompanied the lightning strike, that the October sky was clear and dappled with stars. The Village. It has a name, though I prefer to think, and refer, to it simply as The Village. Nestled snugly—some would say claustrophobically—between the steep foothills of New Hampshire’s White Mountains, within what geographers name the Sandwich Range, and a deep lake the villagers call Witalema. On my maps, the lake has no name at all. A librarian in The Village told me that Witalema was derived from the language of the Abenakis, from the word gwitaalema, which, she said, may be roughly translated as “to fear someone.” I’ve found nothing in any book or anywhere online that refutes her claim, though I have also found nothing to confirm it. So I will always think of that lake and its black, still waters as Lake Witalema, and choose not to speculate on why its name means “to fear someone.” I found more than enough to fear on the aforementioned lightning-struck hill.
There is a single, nameless cemetery in The Village, located within a stone’s throw of the lake. The oldest headstone I have found there dates back to 1674. That is, the man buried in the plot died in 1674. He was a born in 1645. The headstone reads Ye blooming Youth who ſee this Stone / Learn early Death may be your own. It seems oddly random to me that only the word see makes use of the Latin s. In stray moments I have wondered what the dead man might have ſeen to warrant this peculiarity of the inscription, or if it is merely an engraver’s mistake that was not corrected and so has survived these past three hundred and thirty-eight years. I dislike the cemetery, perhaps because of its nearness to the lake, and so I have only visited it once. Usually, I find comfort in graveyards, and I have a large collection of charcoal rubbings taken from gravestones in New England.
But why, I ask myself, do I shy from the cemetery, and possibly only because of its closeness to Lake Witalema, when I returned repeatedly to the hill and the tree and what little remains of the house on the hill? It isn’t a question I can answer. I doubt I will ever be able to answer it. I only know that what I have seen on that hilltop is far more dreadful than anything the lake could ever have to show me.
I am climbing the hill, and I am awake, or I am asleep.
I’m thinking about the lightning strike on St. Crispin’s Day, lightning from a clear night sky, and I’m thinking of the fire that consumed the house and left the tree a gnarled charcoal crook. Also, my mind wanders—probably defensively—to the Vatican’s decision that too little evidence can be found to prove the existence of either of the twin brothers, St. Crispin and St. Crispinian, and how they survived their first close call with martyrdom, after being tossed into a river with millstones tied about their necks, only to be beheaded, finally, by decree of Rictus Barus. Climbing up that hill, pondering obscure Catholic saints who may not ever have lived, it occurs to me I may read too much. Or only read too much into what I read. I pause to catch my breath, and I glance up at the sky. Today there are clouds, unlike the night the lightning came. If the villagers are to be believed, of course. And given the nature of what sits atop the hill, the freak strike that night seems not so miraculous. The clouds seem to promise rain, and I’ll probably be soaking wet by the time I get back to my room in the rundown motel on the outskirts of the village. Faraway, towards what my tattered topographic map calls Mount Passaconaway, there is the low rumble of thunder (Passaconaway is another Indian name, from the Pennacook, a tribe closely related to the Abenakis, but I have no idea whatsoever what the word might mean). The trail is steep here, winding between spruce and pine, oaks, poplars, and red maples. I imagine the maple leaves must appear to catch fire in the autumn. Catch fire or bleed. The hill always turns my thoughts morbid, a mood that is not typical of my nature. Reading this, one might think otherwise, but that doesn’t change the truth of it. Having caught my breath, I continue up the narrow, winding path, hoping to reach the summit before the storm catches up with me. Weathered granite crunches beneath my boots.
“Were I you,” said the old man who runs The Village’s only pharmacy, “I’d stay clear of that hill. No fit place to go wandering about. Not after…” And then he trailed off and went back to ringing up my purchase on the antique cash register.
“… the lightning came,” I said, finishing his statement. “After the fire.”
He glared at me and made an exasperated, disapproving sound.
“You ain’t from around here, I know, and whatever you’ve heard, I’m guessing you’ve written it off as Swamp Yankee superstition.”
“I have a more open mind than you think,” I told him.
“Maybe that’s so. Maybe it ain’t,” he groused and looked for the price on a can of pears in heavy syrup. “Either way, I guess I’ve said my piece. No fit place, and you’d do well to listen.”
But I might have only dreamt that, as I might have dreamt the graveyard on the banks of Lake Witalema, and the headstone of a man who died in 1674, and the twisted, charred tree, and…
It doesn’t matter.
2.
I LIVE IN THE CITY, A SAFE CENTURY OF MILES SOUTH AND EAST of The Village. When I have work, I am a science journalist. When I do not, I am an unemployed science journalist who tries to stay busy by blogging what I would normally sell for whatever pittance is being offered. Would that I had become a political pundit or a war correspondent. But I didn’t. I have no interest in or acumen for politics or bullets. I wait on phone calls, on jobs from a vanishing stable of newspapers and magazines, on work from this or that website. I wait. My apartment is very small, even by the standards of The City, and only just affordable on my budget. Or lack thereof. Four cramped rooms in the attic of a brownstone that was built when the neighborhood was much younger, overlooking narrow streets crowded with upscale boutiques and restaurants that charge an arm and a leg for a sparkling green bottle of S. Pellegrino. I can watch wealthy men and women walk their shitty little dogs.
I have a few bookshelves, crammed with reference material on subjects ranging from cosmology to quantum physics, virology to paleontology. My coffee table, floor, desk, and almost every o
ther conceivable surface are piled high with back issues of Science and Physical Review Letters and Nature and… you get the point. That hypothetical you, who may or may not be reading this. I’m making no assumptions. I have my framed diplomas from MIT and Yale on the wall above my desk, though they only serve to remind me that whatever promise I might once have possessed has gone unrealized. And that I’ll never pay off the student loans that supplemented my meager scholarships. I try, on occasion, to be proud of those pieces of paper and their gold seals, but I rarely turn that trick.
I sit, and I read. I blog, and I wait, watching as the balance in my bank account dwindles.
One week ago tomorrow my needlessly fancy iPhone rang, and on the other end was an editor from Discover who’d heard from a field geologist about the lightning-struck hill near The Village, and who thought it was worth checking out. That it might make an interesting sidebar, at the very least. A bit of a meteorological mystery, unless it proved to be nothing but local tall tales. I had to pay for my own gas, but I’d have a stingy expense account for a night at a motel and a couple of meals. I had a week to get the story in. I should say, obviously, I have long since exceeded my expense account and missed the deadline. I keep my phone switched off.
