Living Forever & Other Terrible Ideas
Page 19
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There is a lake just outside our town where children swim and old men fish. Nestled between craggy hills choked with mouldering pines, Needle Lake was shady all hot summer long, and frozen solid all winter. I always hated it. It was one of those lakes where one step off the bank puts you knee-deep in frigid water, a second step gets you waist deep, and by the third step you're swimming. The water was murky and, to my mind, menacing.
Who knew what was down there?
Legend said Needle Lake had no bottom, but I always knew it did. A lake that had no bottom would pass right through the Earth, and you couldn't just have a hole in the planet like that. Magma and other stuff would bubble up and fill it, and certainly water wouldn't stay in it. The truth was that no one knew how deep the lake was, until a few months ago. A team of cartographers from old MU finally surveyed it and came to the shocking conclusion that it was 1,666 meters deep, or 5,466 less evil-sounding feet deep. It was the deepest lake in the world.
Considering the lake's small size, this was even more shocking. Its sides must truly drop straight down, as though a giant bored a hole in the Earth. MU was determined to (literally and figuratively) get to the bottom of this mystery.
Of course, Father and his cult of lunatics were even more excited. This explained why he hadn't found slumbering Cthulhu in the ocean! All this time the god had been in our own backyard! His eyes lit up with manic fire when he heard the news.
Miskatonic still had Father's equipment from his failed oceanographic voyage, so they enlisted him to guide the deep-diving submersible, nicknamed DeeDi, into the bottomless pit, cataloguing what they found there. We were alone on the boat when he winched her aboard—none of the undergrads MU had assigned could stand to work with Father, so he'd roped me in as an assistant.
DeeDi swung to the deck with a gentle scrape, dripping mud and an ichorous green slime like putrid seaweed. Nevertheless, Father ran to it like a long-lost lover, hugging and nuzzling it like a kitten. "What eldritch secrets have you brought with you?" he whispered.
I turned my head away in revulsion, as he smeared lake-gunk all over himself. The trees on the nearest shoreline shook in a breeze. To me they looked like multi-limbed figures crossing themselves against a great evil. For the barest of moments, I glimpsed the symbol from my family crest among them, before flexible branches bent another way and the mirage passed.
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I'd been watching the video feed as DeeDi explored the lake, so I knew no colossal monster slumbered there. There were barely any fish either, though they may simply have been nimble enough to stay out of DeeDi's headlights. The deeper she went, the less we were able to see through the stagnant murky water.
But that very murkiness told us that something was down there. When we putted into the dock, the first thing the undergrads did was hose DeeDi off with a high-pressure hose and decontaminants and collect the sealed samples she'd collected. They hosed Father off too, eyes darting askance at each other as they did.
I never knew for sure what DeeDi dredged up, as the University never released that information. I cannot actually prove that what came next came from Needle Lake.
But it did.
It took a while to notice the change in Father. He'd been nuts for years, maybe always, and he surrounded himself with people who supported and reinforced his insanity. When he started speaking in tongues, Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn, and so on, he was at a cult meeting. The others simply joined in.
Soon, though, he became ill. He couldn't eat, and when he did he could keep nothing down. He spiked a high fever and shook with the chills it wrought. I carted him in to the MU teaching hospital after a day of this, but we couldn't save him.
Mother buried him in an ornate coffin, carved with the family crest. The day was drizzly and flat gray. And when I looked at the crest in the cemetery, clods of dirt raining upon it and turning to thick, dark mud, it looked like a virus.
Oh no, I thought. What have we unleashed?
Father wasn't the only one it was too late for. By the time he died, the hospital was full of people like him, ranting in a consonant-heavy babble and vomiting up their lives.
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After Father's funeral I went straight to the lab at the hospital. I didn't even change out of my black dress, just threw a lab coat over it, swapped heels for sneakers, and knocked on Gina's window. She looked up from a microscope, frowned, and then waved to me with gloved hands. She stood and stripped them off, opening the door with a geeky smile on her face. People were dying, but she had a mystery to solve, and her enthusiasm for her work couldn't be hidden.
I smiled back at her, despite a growing cold fear in my stomach.
"Riley," she said. "You've got to look at this." She stood behind the wheeled stool she'd just vacated, gesturing to the microscope's eyepiece.
I was terribly afraid I'd see a familiar shape. "Dammit Gina," I tried to joke, "I'm a doctor, not a microbiologist."
She didn't laugh. She just grabbed me by the shoulders and gently pressed me onto the stool. I bent my head to the microscope and saw—I really couldn't say. It didn't look like anything I'd seen before and, to my immense relief, it didn't resemble my family crest.
My relief was so immense I almost laughed. To think I'd almost believed in Father's end-of-the-world nonsense!
As I watched, one of the little blobs shivered and stretched and split into two. It seemed to happen very fast, but what did I know?
Gina explained to me, very impatiently, that this microbe behaved unusually. It seemed able to manipulate the host's DNA, yet it replicated using mitosis and a lot of other highly technical stuff that I mostly failed to follow. The kind of doctoring I did largely comprised prescribing antibiotics and ointments and referring patients to specialists. Joking aside, I was rusty on the biological basics.
I tuned back in when she said she could develop a vaccine. And then it was all I could do not to kiss her like that soldier in Times Square. Maybe for lots of reasons.
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Gina delivered the vaccine in less than a week. Many people died in that week, and MU was losing control of their carefully tended secrecy. Rumor had it the CDC was on its way to take over if we didn't clamp down on our disease STAT.
Gina tested it on herself, because she is a real-life hero. It worked, so we gave it to everyone. It even worked, in slightly modified form, as a treatment for people who'd already been infected. Overnight the death rate from the new disease dropped to zero, and everyone in the Miskatonic Valley sighed with relief.
I did a round to all of my rural patients, vaccinating all of them. The county made the vaccine mandatory in schools and offered it for free at the library and post office and all the chemists.
With the danger behind us, I took a break to mourn my father. We hadn't exactly seen eye to crazy eye in life, but I found I missed him. Insane or not, it was nice to be around someone with that kind of certainty. Without him life seemed ordinary. I often found myself drifting off, eyes locked on the crest above our fireplace.
A phone call snapped me out of distressing thoughts. "Help, Dr. Riley," the voice said. My phone's caller ID said Mike Maguerrin, but it didn't sound like his voice—it was discordant, almost inhuman in its depth, like there was a growl underlying it.
I asked a few follow-up questions, but he was unresponsive. I suspected tonsillitis or strep throat, made sure I had tongue depressors and flashlight, and set out to help poor Mr. Maguerrin.
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It was dark when I got to the Maguerrins' house, and quiet as a grave.
I rapped on the screen door, and for a long moment heard nothing. When sound came, it was in the form of an otherworldly wail that loosened my bowels. I admit that I almost dropped my medicine bag and ran like a ninny back to my car. But I'd taken an oath, and furthermore curiosity compelled me to see what was inside the house, even if it was some form of monster. I felt my father with me, his apocalyptic curiosity tugging me forward.
The screen do
or creaked open, and behind it I found the door unlocked. I pushed inward very slowly, calling out for Mike, or Clara, little Belle and even baby Billy. All I heard was a sort of whimpering from down the hall. I fumbled on the wall for a lightswitch, finally flicking on the porch light. It did little to illuminate the house, and much to lengthen all the shadows into eerie monstrous forms. But it was light enough for me to pick my way across the living room floor toward the hall.
The living room looked like it had seen a fight. A shoddy armchair had been overturned, and books and other detritus littered the floor. A lamp lay broken on the floor, still plugged in. "Mike!" I called again. "It's Dr. Riley. I'm coming toward your bedroom."
A grunting murmur was my only answer, and a scuffling that got louder as I approached the door. And then a little girl's voice from behind me nearly scared me out of my skin. "Dr. Riley," it said, and of course it was only Belle. I turned and saw her in the low light, a silhouette of a little girl clutching a baby doll in one hand. And yet something about it seemed off. I groped again at the wall for a lightswitch, and this time when I found it the light was almost blinding.
And what I saw... Words fail me. Belle was a little girl still, but she was also... not. Her skin was a bilious shade of green somewhere between mucus and seaweed, and her once-long hair was gone. In its place—and, indeed, in many places on her naked body—tendrils sprouted that waved and groped in the air with unspeakable intelligence. I could swear that some of them were eyelessly watching me. Her eyes were not a child's any longer. They were black pits deeper than the murk of bottomless Needle Lake. They were abominable eyes.
I recoiled, and stumbled backward right into Mike and Clara's room. In here, too, the light was off, but what spilled in from the hall was more than enough to reveal the unutterable horror that lay within. It was a monster. The very monster I'd feared through childhood, the very monster from my Father's fevered dreams. It writhed like a mass of snakes, shifting like a mirage of hot pavement. Its skin looked similar to Belle's, but with more maggoty limbs and more of the... tentacles... that sprouted from its head and torso and other parts I could not name.
Worse still, this creature that writhed and moaned and seemed unable to right itself—it had two heads.
"Doctor," Belle said, now quite near to my side, and her voice sounded rough and low, as though she were coming down with strep throat. "What's wrong with Mom and Dad?"
"Where are they?" I started to ask, but then I looked to Belle, festering and slimy-looking. I looked back at the two-headed thing in the room. As I watched, the heads grew closer together, like mitosis running in reverse. Ripples spread through the palsied, tentacular body, as mass shifted. And just then, one appendage flailed toward me, and as it did a glint of gold caught the light.
Against all sense I stepped toward the hideous limb and grabbed it, feeling my way toward what passed for fingers, where I'd spotted the gold. I had an icy weight in my stomach, already sure I knew what it was.
It was a wedding ring.
I threw the limb away from me, shrieking incoherently. If poor Belle was looking to me for help, she would be severely disappointed, for I could think of nothing but escape. The heads of the figure in the room shifted even closer to each other, blobbing into one. And for a moment, before the terrible heads resolved into one, I saw in the figure a shape so burned into my brain that I could never stop seeing it. But it was really there this time, big as life: two-headed Cthulhu, the Lovegood family crest.
But the horror didn't stop there. When I finally found my quivering legs under me and turned to run, for the first time I clearly saw the doll that Belle was holding. It wasn't a doll at all; it was baby Billy, his skin as leprous as the rest of theirs, but his head bashed in on one side. And she wasn't holding him by the hand either; their hands had grown together into one deformed appendage, linking them like paper dolls.
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I drove without knowing where. But I wasn't surprised to end up at the hospital, rapping on the window of Gina's lab. I was surprised to find her there, it being late evening, and the crisis, as far as anyone knew, solved.
"I need to see it," I said by way of greeting. When her only response was a puzzled look I continued, gesturing to her microscope. "The vaccine. Show it to me."
She nodded. "We've had some very... weird... reports of side effects. Rashes and such. Psychological effects. It's like nothing I've seen before."
I couldn't respond. On the one hand, to call what I'd witnessed side effects was the most enormous understatement ever. But on the other hand, I'd expected her to disbelieve me. I'd wanted her to disbelieve me, because I wanted to be wrong. Here in the hospital, under the harsh fluorescent lights, none of it seemed possible.
It took Gina a few minutes to prepare a slide, and in that time I doubted myself. Surely I'd imagined the whole thing. After all, madness ran in my family. I had seen a thing because I was looking for it, was always looking for it, thankyousomuch Father. I scratched absently at an itch on the inside of my leg.
When the slide was ready I leaned toward the microscope, prepared to laugh at my foolishness. I closed my left eye and squinted into the eyepiece with the right.
And there it was.
It wasn't exactly the same as the family crest, or the monster I'd seen at the Maguerrins' house. Not at first. But watch these wee beasties long enough and they'll show their fanciest trick. One of the cells in the slide stretched, parted, and slowly cleaved in two, replicating. And as it did, for a two-headed moment, it was the symbol from my crest, the missing puzzle piece in my descent into madness.
I stared long enough to watch it happen again and again. And more. The monstrous cells divided, but then they converged, and just as Mike and Clara had, they merged into one. The resulting cell was the same as the others, only larger and growing larger still the more of its neighbors it consumed.
An itch on the back of my hand brought me back to the present. I scratched it with my other hand and felt skin peeling off in thin strips under my nails. My eyes snapped down and, to my horror, I saw three perfect strips of scaly reptilian skin beneath what remained of my own flesh.
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I knew immediately how the story would play out. Mike and Clara Maguerrin had already become one, and Belle and Billy were well on their way. I had no doubt that it was happening in all the houses of town, in each one where people had been inoculated against Father's disease.
The cure was much, much worse than the disease.
They'd rise from their various homes and wander out, and when they met one another, they'd merge like mercury beads coming together. They'd merge and merge until—Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn—until Father's vision, his—my—destiny was fulfilled, and Cthulhu rose.
Logic told me that Father would want to be a part of it, so there was only one sensible thing to do. It wasn't easy with my skin flaking away, but I enlisted Mother and the surviving members of the cult, and they helped me dig. I injected his body with the vaccine, hoping it would take hold despite the formaldehyde in his dead veins. The cult members took it from there. They chanted and held each other as their flesh putrified and they became one.
But I had other plans. Oh sure, I knew we'd all be together in the end, serving the Great One. But before that happened I figured I had one last human choice to make, the most human of all choices, really: I could pick who to be nearest to.
I chose Gina. I ran to the hospital, and this time I was not surprised to find her in her lab, her skin like a puddle of quavering jelly. It was hard to tell, with her face transformed into a blasphemous, throbbing mass framing eyes like infinite malevolence, but I swear she opened her tentacles to me.
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Bio:
Dr. Riley Lovegood, daughter of esteemed astrophysicist Corina Elderbaum and marine researcher Thomas Lovegood, earned her M.D. from Miskatonic University and went into private practice. She’s run several marathons and charity races, including a few zombie runs. The
se days, Riley spends most of her time with partner Gina as part of the ineffable evil overtaking New England.
***published in That Ain’t Right: Historical Accounts of the Miskatonic Valley, September 2014
Story notes:
I’ve never been big into the Lovecraftian mythos, but when I was asked to submit to a Mad Scientist Journal anthology I couldn’t resist. That was years ago, but even then I felt that the only thing scarier than a big monster was an incredibly tiny monster, so tiny you couldn’t see it until it was far, far too late.
I am writing these notes on Day I Have No Idea of the Covid-19 pandemic, which I hope by the time you’re reading this is just a terrible memory of that time we were all a bit lonely. But suffice it to say that this story seems even scarier to me right now than it did when I wrote it. And that bit about developing a vaccine in a week? I guess this story goes to show that some things shouldn’t be rushed.
It also goes to show what can happen when you really ignore physical distancing during an outbreak.
Snow Angels
The snow starts late in the morning, flakes like white rose petals rushing past my window onto the grime of Pioneer Square: pterosaur weather.
Whoever had theorized that dinosaurs were cold-blooded had been about as dead wrong as anyone could be—with the possible exception of the scientists who thought cloning them was a good idea. They were dead, as well as dead wrong. As it turned out, dinosaurs loved cold weather, especially the flying ones. Massive Quetzalcoatlus seemed to love striking like lightning out of dark clouds, plucking pedestrians to their deaths.