New Cthulhu 2: More Recent Weird

by Elizabeth Bear

  None of us spoke at first; we stood close together and took in our surroundings. Glenn squeezed my wrist and pressed his hip against mine. Victor hadn’t taken a single picture, demonstrably cowed upon encountering something so far beyond his reckoning and Dane’s mouth actually hung open. I whispered into Glenn’s ear, “The History Channel isn’t quite the same, is it?” He smiled and pecked my cheek. That broke the tension and, after shucking their packs, the others began exploring the hollow. My uneasiness remained, a burr that I couldn’t work loose. I checked the book again—the author hadn’t written much about the site proper, nor documented any revelations about its history or importance besides the astronomical diagrams in the appendix. I stowed the guide and tried to set aside my misgivings as well.

  The moss that bearded the dolmen was also thick upon the ground that it sucked at my boots as it sucked at the voices of my friends and the daylight itself. I thought of lying in a sticky web, of drowsing in the heart of a cocoon. The pain in my arm spiked and I shook off the sudden lassitude. We approached within a few feet of the tomb and stared into the opening. This made me queasy, like peering over the lip of a pit. This was a stylized maw, the mossy path its unfurled tongue.

  “This isn’t right,” Glenn said. Victor and Dane flanked us, so our group stood before the structure in a semicircle.

  “A hoax?” I said without conviction, thinking of the artificial Stonehenge modern entrepreneurs had erected in Eastern Washington as a tourist attraction.

  “I don’t think so,” Glenn said. “But, I’ve seen a few of these in France. They don’t look like this at all. The pile of rocks is close. That other stuff, I dunno.” The stones were covered in runes and glyphs. Time had eroded deep grooves and incisions into shallow, blurred lines of demarcation. Lichen and horrid white fungi filled the crevices and spread in festering keloids.

  Dane forged ahead and boldly slashed at some of the creepers, revealing more carvings. Fat, misshapen puffball mushrooms nested in beds among the creepers and his machete hacked across some and they disintegrated in clouds of red smoke. I joined him at the threshold and shined the beam of my flashlight through the swirling motes of mushroom dust, illuminating a chamber eight feet wide and twenty feet deep. Stray fingers of reddish sunlight came through small gaps. Vines had penetrated inside and lay in slimy, rotten loops and wallows along the edges of the foundation. My hair brushed against the slick threshold and beetles and pill bugs recoiled from our intrusion. Just inside, the chamber vaulted to a height of fifteen feet and was decorated with multitudes of fantastical carvings of symbols and creatures and stylized visages of the kind likely dreamt by Neanderthals. The far end of the chamber dug into the mountain; a wall of shale and granite sundered by long-past seismic violence into a vertical crack, its plates and ridges splattered rust orange by alkaline water oozing from rock.

  The floor was composed of dirt and sunken flagstones, and at its center, a low mound of crumbling granite that was an an oblong basin, the opposite rim worked into the likeness of a massive, bloated humanoid. The statue was worn smooth and darkened by grime with only vague hollows for its eyes and mouth in a skull too proportionally small for its torso.

  I clicked off the flashlight and allowed my eyes to adjust to the crimson gloom.

  “Okay, I’m thunderstruck,” Glenn said.

  “Gob smacked!” Victor said, his jovial tone strained. He shot a rapid series of pictures that promptly ruined my night vision with the succession of strobe flashes. The glyphs crawled and the primeval visages yawned and leered.

  Dane must’ve seen it as well. “Stash that goddamned camera or I’m going to ram it where the sun don’t shine!”

  Victor frowned and snapped the lens cap in place and in the midst of my visceral reaction to our circumstances, I wondered if this exchange was a window into their souls, and how much did Glenn know about that. I watched Glenn as he examined the idol and the pool. I felt a brief, searing contempt for his gawky frame, his mincing steps and too-skinny ass. I hung my head, ashamed, and also confused that something so petty and domestic would impinge upon the bizarre scene. For the hundredth time I considered the possibility my meninges were filling with blood like plastic sacks.

  Up close, the basin was larger than I’d estimated, and rudely chiseled, as if it were simply a hollowed-out rock. Small square-ish recesses were spaced at intervals around the rim, each encrusted with lichen and moss so they resembled mouths. Cold, green water dripped from the ceiling and filled the basin, its surface webbed with algae scum and fir needles and leaves. The attendant figurehead loomed, imposing bulk precariously inclined forward, giving the illusion that it gazed at us. I glanced at my companions, their faces eerily lighted by the reflection of the water.

  . . . A horrible idea took root—that these men masked in blood, eyes gleaming with febrile intensity, had conned me, maneuvered me to this remote and profane location. They were magicians, descendants of the Salamanca Seven, necromancers of the secret grotto, Satan’s disciples, who planned to slice my throat and conduct a black magic ritual to commune with their dear dead Tom, perhaps to raise him like Lazarus. Everything Glenn ever told me was a half-truth, a mockery—Tom hadn’t been the black sheep sidekick, oh no!, but rather the darksome leader, a sorcerer who’d initiated each of them into the foul cabal. Any moment now, Dane or my sweet beloved Glenn would reach into his pocket and draw the hunting knife sharpened just for my jugular, Victor’s coil of rope would truss me, and then . . .

  Glenn touched my arm and I choked back a cry and everybody flinched. Their fear and concern appeared genuine. I allowed Glenn to comfort me, smiled weakly at his solicitous questions.

  Victor said, “Boys, what now? I feel like calling CNN, the secretary of the interior. Somebody.”

  Glenn rubbed his jaw. “Vicky, it’s in the book, so apparently people are aware of this place. There’s a burned-down village back thataway. That explorer, Pavlov, Magalov, whoever, named it after himself. People surely know.”

  “Just because it’s in the book doesn’t mean jackshit. How come there’s no public record? I bet you my left nut this site isn’t even on the government radar. Question is, why? How is that possible?”

  I said, “An even better question is, do we want to screw around with the ineffable?”

  Victor sighed. “Oh, come on. You got the heebie-jeebies over some primitive art?”

  “Take a closer look at the demon faces,” Dane said. “This is forces of darkness shit. Hardcore Iron Maiden album cover material.” He snorted and spat a lump of gory snot into the water. For moment, we stood in shocked silence.

  “If you want to flee, dears, say the word.” Victor laid the sarcasm on too thick to fool anybody. “Let’s march back to the land of beer, pizza, and long, hot showers.” He drew a cigarette and leaned against the basin to steady himself. The snick of his lighter, the bloom of flame, shifted the universe off its axis. He shuddered and dropped the lighter and stepped back far enough that I glimpsed a shivering cord the diameter of a blue ribbon leech extended from beneath the lip of the basin and plunged into the junction of his inner thigh and groin.

  Greasy bubbles surfaced from the depths of the stagnant water, and burst, their odor more foul than the effluvium of the dead vines liquefying along the walls, and the scum dissolved to reveal a surface as clear as glass. The trough was a divining pool and the water a lens magnifying the slothful splay of the farthest cosmos where its gases and storms of dust lay like a veil upon the Outer Dark. A thumbnail-sized alabaster planetoid blazed beneath the ruptured skein of leaves and algae, a membranous cloud rising.

  The cloud seethed and darkened, became black as a thunderhead. It keened—chains dragging against iron, a theremin dialed to eleven, a hypersonic shriek that somehow originated and emanated from inside my brain rather than an external source. Whispers drifted from the abyss, unsynchronized, unintelligible, yet conveying malevolent and obscene lust that radiated across the vast wastes of deep space. The cloud peel
ed, bloomed, and a hundred thousand miles long tendril uncoiled, a proboscis telescoping from the central mass, and the whispers amplified in a burst of static. I went cold, warmth and energy drained from my body with such abruptness and violence, I staggered.

  Glenn shouted and jerked my shoulder, and we tripped over each other. I saw Dane scrambling toward the entrance, and Victor frozen before the idol, face illuminated in the lurid radiance. His expression contorted and he gripped his skull in both hands, fingernails digging. The slimy cord drew taut and released from the muscle of his leg with a wet pop, left a bleeding circle in the fabric of his pants. Another of these appendages partially spooled from the niche nearest me, writhing blindly as it sought to connect with warm meat.

  The howl intensified. My vision distorted into streaks of white, resolving to the flickering vacuum of space where I floated near the rim of the Earth, and the moon slid as a black disk across the face of the sun.

  12.

  Glenn cuffed and shook me awake. His cheeks were wet with tears. “You weren’t moving,” he said. I sat up and looked around. The unearthly light had faded to a dull glow, but I could make out some details of the chamber. Victor stood beside the idol, his back to us. He caressed the statue’s rotund belly, palm flat the way a man touches his wife’s stomach, feeling for the baby’s kick. Dane was nowhere to be seen.

  I said, “Vicky? Vicky, you okay?” It required great effort to form the words.

  Victor slowly turned. Something was wrong with his face. Dried gore caked his forehead and temples. He grinned ghoulishly. “You should’ve seen what I saw. This isn’t a tomb . . . it’s . . . ” He laughed and it gurgled in his throat. “They’ll be here soon, my sweets.”

  Victor’s certitude, the lunacy in his expression, his tone, frightened me. “Glenn, we’ve got to get out of here.” I pushed away his arm and rose. “Vicky, come on. Let’s find your husband.”

  “Where’s Dane going? He won’t leave me here, nor you, his best buddies. However, if he doesn’t come to his senses, if he’s run screaming for the hills, I’ll visit him soon enough. I’ll drag him home to the dark.”

  “Vicky—” Glenn said.

  Victor mocked him. “Glenn! Be still, be at peace. They love you. You’ll see, you’ll see. Everything will change; you’ll be remade, turned inside out. We won’t need our skin, our teeth, our bones.” He licked his thumb and casually gouged his chest an inch above the nipple. Blood flowed, coursed over his rooting thumb and across the knuckles of his fist.

  Glenn screamed. I glanced at the ground near my feet, hoping for a loose rock with which to brain Victor. Victor ripped loose a flap of skin and let it hang, revealing muscle. “We won’t need this, friends. Every quivering nerve, every sinew will be laid bare.” He leaned over and reached for the switchblade taped to his ankle.

  “Oh, shit,” I said.

  Glenn said shrilly, “What’s that?” There was movement in the fissure. A figure manifested as a pale smudge against the background. It was naked and its skin glistened a pallid white like the soft meat of a grub. Its features were hidden by the gloom, and I was glad of that. Victor raised his arms and uttered a glottal exclamation.

  The Man (it was a man, wasn’t it?) crept forward to the very edge of the crevice, and hesitated there, apparently loath to emerge into the feeble light despite its palpable yearning do so. Whether man or woman I couldn’t actually determine as its wattles and pleats disguised its sex, but the figure’s size and proportions were so large I couldn’t imagine it being a woman. The weight of its hunger and lust echoed the empathic blast I’d received from the black cloud, and my mind itched as this damp, corpulent apparition whispered to me, tried to insinuate its thoughts into mine via a psychic frequency.

  I beheld again the cloud, a dank cosmic mold seeping from galaxy to galaxy, a system of hollow planets and a brown dwarf star nested within its coils and cockles. Sunless seas of warm ichor sloshed with the gravitational spin of those hollow, lightless worlds, spoiled yolks within eggshells. Hosts of darksome inhabitants squirmed and joined in terrible communion. I felt unclean, violated in bearing witness to their coupling.

  Beyond the entrance of the dolmen and the encircling trees, the sun burned cool and red. Soon it would be dusk . . . and then, and then . . .

  “Vicky! For the love of God, get over here.” Victor ignored me and shuffled toward the figure, and the figure’s luminous flesh darkened with a spreading, cancerous stain, like a piece of paper charring in a flame, or a sheet soaked in blood, and it reached, extending a hideously long arm. Its spindly fingers tapered to filthy, sharp points. Those fingers crooked, beckoning languidly. What did it promise Victor, with its whispers and wheedles?

  I moved without thinking, for if I’d stopped to think I would’ve sprinted after Dane, who’d obviously exercised common sense in beating a retreat. I tackled Victor and slung him to the ground. The impact sent shocks through my wounded arm and I almost fainted again, but I hung tough and pinned him. Stunned, he resisted ineffectually, flopped like a worm until I freed the pistol from my pocket and smacked him in the forehead with the butt. That worked just like the movies—his eyes rolled back and he went limp. Glenn came running and we grabbed Victor beneath the arms and dragged him from the chamber. The figure in the crevice laughed, a hyena drowning or a lunatic with a sliced throat.

  The flight down the trail toward camp was harrowing. We bound Victor’s hands with his own belt, and made a tourniquet to staunch the bleeding from his leg as it refused to clot, and half-carried him as he raved and shrieked—I finally pistol-whipped him again and he was quiet after that. The entire way, I glanced over my shoulder fully expecting the dreadful presence to overtake us. Hysteria galvanized me into forty minutes of superhuman exertion—had Glenn not been there, I’m sure I could’ve easily hoisted Victor onto my shoulders and made like a track star.

  Dane jumped from the bushes near the main road and Glenn nearly lopped his head with a hatchet. Dane had run to the camp before his panic subsided and he’d mustered the courage to double back and find us. His shame was soon replaced by horror at Victor’s condition, which neither I nor Glenn could fully explain. I convinced Dane there wasn’t time to talk lest someone or something had followed us from the dolmen. So, the three of us lugged Victor to camp, loaded into the Land Rover and got the hell off Mystery Mountain.

  13.

  I put the pedal to the metal and Glenn made the calls as we hurtled down the logging road in the dark. The authorities were waiting at the campgrounds. Victor recovered from his stupor as they strapped him to a gurney. He cursed and snarled and thrashed until the paramedics tranquilized him. Dane, Glenn, and I were escorted to the local sheriff’s office where the uniforms asked a lot of questions.

  The smartest move would’ve been to fudge the details. That’s the movies, though. None of us were coherent enough to concoct a cover story to logically explain the hole in Victor’s leg, or the monster, or the bad acid trip phantasmagoria of the pool. We just spilled the tale, drew an X on a topographical map and invited the Sheriff and his boys to go see for themselves. It didn’t help our credibility that the cops found Victor’s weed stash and several hundred empty beer cans in the truck.

  Ultimately, they let us walk. The fight at the tavern wasn’t mentioned, despite our mashed faces and missing teeth, which surprised the hell out of me. Victor’s wound was presumed an accident; the investigators decided he harpooned himself on a branch while we were drunkenly wandering the mountainside. Personally, I preferred that version as well—the reality was too frightening. Victor’s deranged state was obviously a hysterical reaction to the near death incident. Our statements were taken and we were shown the door. Once the cops put two and two together that the four of us were queer, they couldn’t end the conversation fast enough. Someone would be in touch, thank you for your cooperation, etcetera, etcetera.

  Dane went to stay with Victor at Harborview Hospital while Glenn and I returned home. Neither of us was i
n any shape to linger by Victor’s bedside. I’d tried to talk Dane into crashing at the house, to no avail—he hadn’t even acknowledged the offer. His face was blank and prematurely lined. I’d seen refugees from shelled villages wearing the exact same look. In his own way, he was as removed from reality as Victor.

  Glenn fared a little better—he was a wreck too, but we had each other. I dreaded his reaction when the shock dissipated and the magnitude of the tragedy sank in. He’d lost one friend, possibly forever, and the jury was out on the other. God help me, a bit of my heart savored the notion I finally had him all to myself. Another, even more bitter and shriveled bit slightly gloated over the fact it was finally his turn to suffer. I’d done all the crying in our relationship.

  Daulton meowed when we came in and turned on the lights and circled our ankles. The house, our comfy furniture and family pictures, all of it, seemed artificial, props from someone else’s life. I showered for the first time in several days, spent an hour with my forehead pressed against the stall tiles. I saw the wound in Victor’s leg, his mouth chanting soundlessly, saw the stars thicken into a stream that poured into that black hole. The black hole, the black cloud, was limned in red and it made me think of the broken circle on the cover of Moderor de Caliginis. These images were not exact, not perfectly symmetrical, yet the hot water cascading over my back no longer thawed me. My teeth chattered.

  I wrapped myself in one of the luxuriously thick towels we’d gotten for a mutual anniversary gift and shuffled into the hall and found Glenn on hands and knees, his ear pressed to the vent. “What the hell?” I said.

  He gestured awkwardly over his shoulder for quiet. After a few moments he rose and dusted his pajamas with a half dozen brisk pats. “I thought the TV was on downstairs. It’s not. Must’ve been sound traveling along the pipes from the neighbors, or I dunno. Let’s hit the rack, huh?”