by John Wilson
“Where are we going?” he asked, as much to break the oppressive silence as to get an answer.
“Wherever we’re supposed to, I guess,” said Cate. “I’m not certain of anything, but so far so good.”
“That’s what the guy who fell off a high-rise said as he passed each floor,” replied Howard, remembering an old joke he had once heard.
Cate didn’t laugh, but a chuckle echoed around his head from Heimao.
“But don’t you get the feeling that this is somehow…I don’t know…right?” Cate asked.
Howard took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, pushing his worries away as much as possible. This wasn’t like the cramped, terrifying tunnel he had gone through in the AIPC basement. He had no idea where this tunnel led, but Cate was right. Deep down, Howard knew he was doing what he was meant to do.
Then black feathers edged in over his peripheral vision, and a cool breeze blew up the tunnel, making him shiver. Before he could say anything, a horrible nausea overwhelmed him. He felt as if he were spinning insanely fast through perfect emptiness. He couldn’t see a thing, but somehow he knew with unquestionable certainty that there was nothing in any direction. Not the feeling of nothing he knew from looking down a deep well or off the edge of a high cliff, but a terrifying awareness of an absolute absence of everything—no ground, no planets, no stars, no air, not even a single atom of any substance—stretching off to infinity all around. Howard was floating in an overwhelming sense of aloneness.
Then his feet touched ground, and the beam from Cate’s head lamp cut through the darkness. She was standing beside him.
“Did you feel that?” he asked as he fought to get his heart rate back under control.
“The loneliness?” Cate whispered, her voice breaking with emotion.
Howard put his arm around her shoulder and hugged her. She returned the gesture, and the pair stood for a moment, both overwhelmingly relieved that there was another human being nearby.
Cate stepped back. “That must be what it’s like between the threads of dimensions.”
“It was terrifying,” Howard said. That didn’t even come close to describing it, but there were no words for what he’d felt.
Cate swung her head lamp around. The beam illuminated fallen pillars and dark stone blocks covered in unreadable hieroglyphs. They were piled around a black arch.
“We’re on the island!” Howard exclaimed, looking around to see if there were any sea creatures crawling over the stone. “And there’s another arch.”
“I don’t think it’s another arch. I think it’s just the other end of the same arch. Nobody said how long the arch was going to be.”
Cate shone her head lamp into the arch—it showed only blackness. The pair took a couple of faltering steps forward. With each step, Howard’s agitation increased. His breathing became shallow and rapid, and it took Herculean effort to place one foot in front of the other. He forced his way forward until he was close enough to reach out and touch the stones on either side of the arch.
Cate’s lamp still showed nothing. It was as if the darkness in the arch was thicker somehow—too thick to allow light to pass through. It was the blackness that had been affecting Howard’s vision, but it was deeper and more frightful than anything he had ever experienced. His fists were clenched, and he was beginning to sweat profusely. He knew with absolute certainty that the blackness was hiding horrors he could not even imagine.
“I can’t go in there,” he managed to croak out.
“Me neither.” Cate’s voice sounded just as strained as Howard’s.
“I’m not keen on it myself,” Heimao added.
Howard glanced at Cate and saw she was tense and sweating. The three stood paralyzed, staring into the utter black. It was Cate who moved first, lifting her head to sweep her light slowly around the edge of the arch. The narrow beam illuminated a series of geometric symbols, curling whorls and hieroglyphs representing no animals Howard had ever seen. They seemed random, but he had a strong sense that the symbols were writing in some unknown language.
“What does it mean?” he asked.
“It’s an incantation,” Cate replied.
“Can you read it? What’s its purpose?”
She waited a long time before answering. “I can read it. It opens the portal.”
“You mean it lets us out this end of the arch?”
Cate nodded. Her beam was fixed on a large hieroglyph at the center of the writing. It showed the globular mass of writhing tentacles, set around teeth-lined mouths and far too many eyes, that they had glimpsed as a statue in Leon’s media room. It was crudely carved, but it radiated a primitive power that forced Howard to look away.
“What is that?”
“Yog-Sothoth,” Cate said. She paused and then continued in a monotone, as if reciting something from memory. “The blind idiot god Azathoth, who gnaws hungrily in unlit chambers at the center of Ultimate Chaos, gave birth to Nyarlathotep, who lives at the center of the world and who in turn birthed Yog-Sothoth, the keeper of the gate.”
“Those names don’t sound Chinese,” Howard said.
“These names are older than China. They are older than humanity itself.”
“Okay,” Howard said hesitantly. “Can this Yog-Sothoth open the portal for us?”
“He can.”
“Then let’s say the incantation and do whatever it is we have to do.”
Cate turned to look at Howard. Her eyes were wide with fear. “There are two problems. First, although the words on the arch will open the gate for us, they are also an incantation to revive the dead. And second, Yog-Sothoth is the grand sire of Cthulhu.”
“Sooooo, what else will happen if you say the incantation?”
“We’ll go through the portal and then…I don’t know.”
“But we have no choice,” Howard said, struggling to sound braver than he felt. “We have to say it. We’ve come too far to stop now. We must take the next step. It’s either that or wait in terror for Hei and Leon to find another way to summon the horror back into our world. To never sleep because of the insanity of the dreams beckoning us. To be always looking over our shoulders, in whatever short time is left, for the wall that is leaking seawater or the disgusting tentacle reaching out of the nearest sewer.”
Heimao surprised Howard by saying, “That was awesome! Really well said.”
Despite his fear, Howard smiled. “Thank you. It just sort of popped into my head.”
“You’re right,” Cate said. “We have no choice. Here goes.”
As she started the incantation, her voice was deeper than normal and came from far back in her throat. It sounded as if she was almost choking at some parts. Howard stood beside her, looking around nervously and wondering if the world was about to end.
Cate intoned:
Y’ai’ng’ngah
Yog-Sothoth
H’ee-L’geb
F’ai Throdog
Uaaah.
She finished with a long-drawn-out wail, and they both looked expectantly at the arch, Howard silently praying that no huge, slimy tentacle was going to whip out and drag them both into whatever hellish dimension existed on the other side of the dark.
Nothing happened.
There was a long, soft sigh and a cool, gentle breeze that carried the faintest suggestion of piped music. The darkness thinned, and the light slowly revealed a titanic vista of shattered walls, crumbling towers and cracked streets running off as far as the head lamp’s beam could discern.
Nervously the three edged forward. Nothing horrifying happened as they passed under the arch, and Cate and Howard both sighed with relief. As they took their first tentative steps along the street, they noticed that the sky was lightening. They looked up, but there was no obvious source. The light was flat and dull and seemed to be coming from everywhere at once, and it cast no shadows. It was as if there were high clouds diffusing the light, but there was no brighter spot where a sun or a full moon could have been. Cate s
witched off her head lamp.
The road that stretched before them was constructed from irregularly shaped slabs of dark, fine-grained greenish rock. There was a layer of gray dust on top that muffled the sound of their footsteps and preserved their prints as they progressed. As they proceeded cautiously forward, they had to weave between or clamber over huge stone blocks that had fallen from the surrounding walls. Heimao kept as close as possible.
“Where do we go?” Howard asked as he apprehensively checked the buildings on either side.
“The most powerful place in a city is usually at the center,” Cate replied. “That’s where most cultures build their important temples and cathedrals. I assume this road will lead there.”
What Cate said made sense, but Howard also had an idea. There were towers rising from the ruins along the road. “If there’s a way up one of these towers,” he suggested, “we might be able to get a sense of where we are and how far we have to go.”
Cate agreed, and they selected the least damaged nearby tower and entered by climbing over a pile of rubble in the doorway. The faint light illuminated a hollow space about the size of a regular house. The floor was littered with masonry blocks that had crashed down from above. The space narrowed gradually as the walls rose to a ragged circle of light at the top. There was a spiral ramp winding around the inside of the wall. It looked sturdy enough and was about the width of a normal corridor, but there was no guardrail, so if something went wrong, it was a straight drop to the ground.
“If you have no objection,” Heimao said to both of them, “I’ll wait here. Someone has to guard our rear.”
As they started up the spiral ramp, Cate said, “Heimao doesn’t have much of a head for heights.”
“She’s a cat,” Howard pointed out. “They always land on their feet.”
“As you may have noticed,” Cate said, “she’s not quite your ordinary household tabby.”
They climbed slowly, one behind the other, keeping tight against the inside wall. Howard hadn’t said anything, but he wasn’t particularly keen on heights himself. A visit to Niagara Falls when he was eight had been a traumatic experience that had given him nightmares about falling for weeks afterward. But he forced himself to look at the wall and keep climbing. He even managed to negotiate a couple of places where stones falling from above had caught the edge, chipping off large chunks and narrowing the width. He prayed that he wouldn’t have one of his nauseous spells up here. He was beginning to regret suggesting this.
After what felt like a week but couldn’t have been more than half an hour, they reached a point where the tower was too damaged to allow them to go farther. The last solid piece of the ramp was complete enough for them both to crawl onto. Cate sat looking out over the edge, while Howard lay flat and peered around the corner. They were looking approximately in the direction they had been traveling, and the view, even through Howard’s nervousness, was awe-inspiring.
The vast ruined city stretched away to a distant horizon where Howard could just make out a range of snow-capped mountains against the pale gray sky. The view looked a little like the old photos he had seen in history class of the bombed cities of the Second World War—Hamburg, Dresden or Berlin. The difference was that those destroyed German cities had been built and populated by humans. Whoever or whatever had built this place knew nothing about humans or the geometry Howard had learned in school.
The city was constructed of stone, yet it looked as if it had grown straight out of the ground—there was hardly a straight line or right angle anywhere. Roadways curved wildly in strange directions and suddenly disappeared below ground or soared into the air on impossibly thin supports. Some buildings resembled immense gnarled tree trunks at ground level but widened and branched into what looked like great organic inverted pyramids.
Jagged needles of stone jutted from high on the buildings, marking where walkways had once joined them together. Ramps wrapped themselves around some of the buildings. They twisted and turned so sharply that anything traveling along them would have had to defy gravity not to fall to its death.
The magnitude of the view, combined with a total lack of recognizable landmarks, made it impossible for them to understand the scale of what they were looking at. At times it seemed like a toy city, and Howard felt that he was hovering over it. At others, he felt like a tiny speck of dust falling forever through the vastness. He pressed himself against the solid stone of the ramp and tried to fight off the vertigo.
“It’s incredible,” Cate breathed.
The height and the strangeness didn’t seem to bother her, and she was leaning perilously far out to get a better view. Howard wanted to grab her and drag her back to safety, but that would have meant moving, and he doubted he could let go of the piece of stone he was embracing. He grunted something he hoped sounded like agreement.
“Look,” Cate said, leaning even farther out and causing Howard to whimper in fear, “the city’s designed like some octopus creature. See? The arch we came through is at the end of one of the arms, and we were walking toward the center.”
Howard took a deep breath and inched forward until he could see a bit more of what Cate was talking about. Only his head was sticking out the gap in the wall of the tower, but when he made the mistake of looking down, it felt as if his whole body was about to hurtle onto the stones below. He closed his eyes until the feeling passed.
Looking up, he could see that Cate was right. The road they had traveled on was the arm of an octopus—or rather, one of dozens of arms that twisted and intertwined as they wound toward the city center. Where they crossed, one sometimes descended to become a tunnel below the other. Elsewhere one arm would rise on thin trunk-like supports to fly over the other. Some of the arms were roads like the one they had walked along. Others had no obvious purpose. Buildings, towers and impossible upside-down pyramids lined both sides of all of them.
The spaces between the winding arms were mostly open. There were a few small buildings here and there, and some low mounds with what looked like entrances to caves, but most of these spaces were piled high with black cinders, like the aftermath of some great fire. As the arms came together, the spaces between them narrowed and became filled with buildings, until they formed a solid ring around the two biggest structures in the city. These were sharply curved on one side and almost flat on the other, and they faced each other like the open jaws of some unimaginable predator. Just looking at the two edifices made Howard feel a creeping sense of dread.
“Are we going there?” he asked weakly.
“That has to be the center,” Cate said. She sounded distracted as she peered out over the city. “That’s where the power must be. That’s where we have to go.”
“And what’ll we do when we get there?”
“I don’t know.” She turned from the view to look at Howard. “Are you okay?” she asked, worry crossing her face.
“Heimao’s not the only one who’s not good with heights,” he admitted.
“I’ll help you,” she offered, standing up.
Howard wanted to scream, “Get down! You’ll fall!” but his throat seemed to be as paralyzed as the rest of him. He watched wide-eyed as Cate stepped past him, her feet on the very edge of the broken ramp. If she fell, he’d never be able to move again.
When she reached Howard’s feet, she said, “Give me your hand.”
Very slowly and carefully, he rolled over and took Cate’s hand, trying not to crush it. Knowing what was outside the tower made the journey down much worse than the one coming up, and Howard didn’t think he could have managed without Cate’s encouragement. As it was, he was shaking like Jell-O by the time they were back on level ground.
“Nice view?” Heimao asked.
Howard would have said something rude if he hadn’t been so relieved to be back on the ground.
“Did the city remind you of anything?” Cate asked as they returned to the road.
“Apart from my worst nightmare?” he said. “No, n
ot really.”
She reached into her satchel and pulled out a piece of yellowed paper.
“That’s the map that was folded in the back of the book.”
“Yeah. I thought it might be important, so I brought it along.”
“What’s it a map of?”
“I think it’s this city.” Cate held the paper up for Howard to see. It did look a bit like the city they were in. It was roughly circular, and there were roads crossing and recrossing each other. But it wasn’t exactly the same.
“It’s much more complex than the arms we saw from the tower,” Howard said after a long look, “and there doesn’t seem to be any sign of the buildings we saw at the city center.”
“I know,” Cate agreed. “It’s not quite right. There are no buildings marked at all.”
“What’s that?” Howard pointed at a bright spot between two of the arms.
Cate shrugged. “I’ll keep looking at it as we go. Maybe it will make more sense as we get closer to the center.”
As they set off again, Howard looked back up at the tower they had climbed. It didn’t look nearly as high from below as it had from the top. A thought struck him. “If this is R’lyeh,” he asked, “won’t Cthulhu be sleeping here somewhere?”
“Yes. But I don’t think we’ll wake him.”
“As long as we don’t stumble into his bedroom.”
Cate laughed, and for a moment Howard felt wonderful. Then she said, “Remember the poem that Aileen recited?”
“Bits of it.”
Cate stopped and closed her eyes and began to recite it:
The Ancient One in R’lyeh lies,
Shrouded in deathlike sleep.
If death shall die and
