New Cthulhu 2: More Recent Weird

by Elizabeth Bear

  Mercifully, the dining room had been unchanged, its table, chairs, and china cabinet highlighted by the streetlight’s orange glow. Unchanged, that is, except for the absence of the cooler from the table, and why had she been so certain that, wherever the container was, its lid was open, its contents gone? Rick’s father’s laptop had remained where her husband had set it up, its screen dark. Connie had pressed the power button, and the rectangle had brightened with the image of one of the T-shaped stone monuments, its transverse section carved with what appeared to be three birds processing down from upper left to lower right, their path taking them over the prone form of what might have been a man—though if it was, the head was missing. The upright block was carved with a boar, its tusks disproportionately large.

  Thinking Rick might have decided to sleep in the guestroom, she had crossed to the doorway to the long room along the back of the house, the large space for which they had yet to arrive at a use. To the right, the room had wavered, as if she had been looking at it through running water. One moment, it had bulged toward her; the next, it had telescoped away. In the midst of that uncertainty, she had seen . . . she couldn’t say what. It was as if that part of the house had been a screen against which something enormous had been pushing and pulling, its form visible only through the distortions it caused in the screen. The sight had hurt her eyes, her brain, to behold; she had been not so much frightened as sickened, nauseated. No doubt, she should have fled the house, taken the car keys from the hook at the front door and driven as far from here as the gas in the tank would take her.

  Rick, though: she couldn’t leave him here with all this. Dropping her gaze to her feet, she had stepped into the back room, flattening herself against the wall to her left. A glance had showed nothing between her and the door to the guest room, and she had slid along the wall to it as quickly as her legs would carry her. A heavy lump of dread, for Rick, alone down here as whatever this was had happened, had weighed deep below her stomach. At the threshold to the guest room, she had tried to speak, found her voice caught in her throat. She had coughed, said, “Rick? Honey?” the words striking the silence in the air like a mallet clanging off a gong; she had flinched at their loudness.

  Connie had not been expecting Rick to step out of the guest room as if he had been waiting there for her. With a shriek, she had leapt back. He had raised his hands, no doubt to reassure her, but even in the dim light she could see they were discolored, streaked with what looked like tar, as was his mouth, his jaw. He had stepped toward her, and Connie had retreated another step. “Honey,” he had said, but the endearment had sounded wrong, warped, as if his tongue had forgotten how to shape his words.

  “Rick,” she had said, “what—what happened?”

  His lips had peeled back, but whatever he had wanted to say, it would not come out.

  “The house—you’re—”

  “It’s . . . okay. He showed me . . . Dad.”

  “Your father? What did he show you?”

  Rick had not lowered his hands; he gestured with them to his mouth.

  “Oh, Christ. You—you didn’t.”

  Yes, he did, Rick had nodded.

  “Are you insane? Do you have any idea what—? You don’t know what that thing was! You probably poisoned yourself . . . ”

  “Fine,” Rick had said. “I’m . . . fine. Better. More.”

  “What?”

  “Dad showed me.”

  Whatever the cooler’s contents, she had been afraid the effects of consuming it were already in full swing, the damage already done. Yet despite the compromise in his speech, Rick’s eyes had burned with intelligence. Sweeping his hands around him, he had said, “All . . . the same. Part of—” He had uttered a guttural sound she could not decipher, but that had hurt her ears to hear.

  “Rick,” she had said, “we have to leave—we have to get you to a doctor. Come on.” She had started toward the doorway to the dining room, wondering whether Wiltwyck would be equipped for whatever toxin he had ingested. The other stuff, the darkness, the orchids, the corner, could wait until Rick had been seen by a doctor.

  “No.” The force of his refusal had halted Connie where she was. “See.”

  “What—” She had turned to him and seen . . . she could not say what. Hours later, her nerves calmed if not soothed by the vodka that had washed down her throat, she could not make sense of the sight that had greeted her. When she tried to replay it, she saw Rick, then saw his face, his chest, burst open, pushed aside by the orchids thrusting their eggplant and rose petals out of him. The orchids, Rick, wavered, as if she were looking at them through a waterfall, and then erupted into a cloud of darkness that coalesced into Rick’s outline. Connie had the sense that that was only an approximation of what she actually had witnessed, and not an especially accurate one, at that. As well say she had seen all four things simultaneously, like a photograph overexposed multiple times, or that she had seen the cross from the top of the cooler, hanging in the air.

  She had responded with a headlong flight that had carried her upstairs to the laundry room. Of course, it had been a stupid destination, one she was not sure why she had chosen, except perhaps that the side and front doors had lain too close to one of the zones of weirdness that had overtaken the house. The bottle of Stolichnaya had been waiting next to the door to the deck, no doubt a refugee from their most recent party. She could not think of a reason not to open it and gulp a fiery mouthful of its contents; although she couldn’t think of much of anything. She had been, call it aware of the quiet, the silence pervading the house, which had settled against her skin and become intolerable, until she had grabbed a blanket from the cupboard and let herself out onto the deck. There, she had wrapped herself in the blanket and seated herself at the top of the deck stairs.

  Tempting to say she had been in shock, but shock wasn’t close: shock was a small town she had left in the rearview mirror a thousand miles ago. This was the big city, metropolis of a sensation like awe or ecstasy, a wrenching of the self that rendered such questions as how she was going to help Rick, how they were going to escape from this, immaterial. From where she was sitting, she could look down on their Subaru, parked maybe fifteen feet from the foot of the stairs. There was an emergency key under an overturned flowerpot in the garage. These facts were neighborhoods separated by hundreds of blocks, connected by a route too byzantine for her understanding to take in. She had stayed where she was as the constellations wheeled above her, the sky lightened from blue-bordering-on-black to dark blue. Her breath plumed from her lips; she pulled the blanket tighter and nursed the vodka as, through a process too subtle for her to observe, frost spread over the deck, the stairs.

  When the eastern sky was a blue so pale it was almost white, she had noticed a figure standing at the bottom of the stairs. For a moment, she had mistaken it for Rick, had half stood at the prospect, and then she had recognized Rick’s father. He’d been dressed in the same tuxedo he’d worn in her second dream of him, the knees of his trousers and the cuffs of his shirt and jacket crusted with red mud. His presence prompted her to speech. “You,” she had said, resuming her seat. “Are you Rick’s dad, or what?”

  “Yes.”

  “Great. Can you tell me what’s happened to my husband?”

  “He’s taken the seed into himself.”

  “The thing from the cooler.”

  “He blooms.”

  “I don’t—” She’d shaken her head. “Why . . . why? Why him? Why this?”

  Rick’s father had shrugged, and she had done her best not to notice if his face had shifted with the movement.

  She had sighed. “What now?”

  “He will want a consort.”

  “He what?”

  “His consort.”

  She would not have judged herself capable of the laughter that had burst from her. “You have got to be fucking kidding me.”

  “The process is underway.”

  “I don’t think so.”

&nb
sp; “Look at your bottle.”

  “This?” She had held up the vodka. “It’s alcohol.”

  “Yes. He thought that might help.”

  “What do you—” Something, some glint of streetlight refracting on the bottle’s glass, had caused her to bring it to her eyes, tilting it so that the liquor sloshed up one side. In the orange light shimmering in it, Connie had seen tiny black flakes floating, dozens, hundreds of them. “Oh, no. No way. No.”

  “It will take longer this way, but he thought you would need the time.”

  “ ‘He’? You mean Rick? Rick did this?”

  “To bring you to him, to what he is.”

  “Bring me—”

  “To bloom.”

  “This is— No. No.” She had wanted to hurl the bottle at Rick’s father, but had been unable to release her grip on it. “Not Rick. No.”

  He had not argued the point; instead, before the last denial had left her mouth, the space where he’d stood had been empty.

  That had been . . . not that long ago, she thought. Time enough for the horizon to flush, for her to feel herself departing the city of awe to which the night’s sights had brought her for somewhere else, a great gray ocean swelling with storm. She had squinted at the bottle of Stolichnaya, at the black dots drifting in what remained of its contents. Rick had done this? So she could be his consort? Given what she’d witnessed this night, it seemed silly to declare one detail of it more outrageous than the rest, but this . . . She could understand, well, imagine how an appearance by his father might have convinced her husband that eating the thing in the cooler was a good idea. But to leap from that to thinking that he needed to bring Connie along for the ride—that was something else.

  The thing was, it was entirely typical of the way Rick acted, had acted, the length of their relationship. He plunged into decisions like a bungee-jumper abandoning the trestle of a bridge, confident that the cord to which he’d tethered himself, i.e. her, would pull him back from the rocks jagged below. He dropped out of grad school even though it meant he would lose the deferment for the sixty thousand dollars in student loans he had no job to help him repay. He registered for expensive training courses for professions in which he lost interest halfway through the class. He overdrew their joint account for take-out dinners when there was a refrigerator’s worth of food waiting at home. And now, the same tendencies that had led to them having so much difficulty securing a mortgage—that had left the fucking cell phone’s battery depleted—had caused him to . . . she wasn’t even sure she knew the word for it.

  The sky between the trees on the rise was filling with color, pale rose deepening to rich crimson, the trunks and branches against it an extravagant calligraphy she could not read. The light ruddied her skin, shone redly on the bottle, glowed hellishly on the frosted steps, deck. She stared through the trees at it, let it saturate her vision.

  The photons cascaded against her leaves, stirring them to life.

  (What?)

  She convoluted, moving at right angles to herself, the sunlight fracturing.

  (Oh)

  Blackness.

  (God.)

  She lurched to her feet.

  Roots tingled, blackness, unfolding, frost underfoot. Connie gripped the liquor bottle by the neck and swung it against the porch railing. Smashing it took three tries. The last of the vodka splashed onto the deck planks. She pictured hundreds of tiny black—what had Rick’s father called them?—embryos shrieking, realized she was seeing them, hearing them.

  Blackness her stalk inturning glass on skin. Connie inspected the bottle’s jagged top. As improvised weapons went, she supposed it wasn’t bad, but she had the feeling she was bringing a rock to a nuclear war.

  The dawn air was full of the sound of flapping, of leathery wings snapping. She could almost see the things that were swirling around the house, could feel the spaces they were twisting. She released the blanket, let it slide to the deck. She crossed to the door to the laundry room, still unlocked. Had she thought it wouldn’t be? Connie adjusted her grip on her glass knife, opened the door, and stepped into the house.

  . . . that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity—the boundless daemon-sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time . . .

  “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” . H. P. Lovecraft (1943)

  AT HOME WITH AZATHOTH

  John Shirley

  When Frederic DuSang saw the eye text from Filrod, he knew the bait had been taken. He knew it before he even read the eye-t. He had that tingle, like when code was about to become a program; that particular shiver of closure.

  But it wasn’t over yet. He still had to reel him in . . .

  Walking down the Santa Cruz Beach boardwalk to the VR ride, on a wet September morning, Frederic tapped the tiny stud, under the skin beneath his right eye, the contact cursor in his fingernail telling the device to transcribe a subvocalization—he had learned to subvocalize his voice-recogs for security. And he subvocalized, “Text: ‘Come over at seven tonight if you want it, FilRod. FdS.’ ”

  The head chip heard and obeyed, sending the text to Filrod’s palmer.

  The guy’s name was Rodney Filbern but everyone called him by his screen name, and Filrod replied almost immediately: Not a good time for me. Just tranz it?

  Frederic responded: Tough, sorry, leaving town. Not offering it any other way. Wouldn’t work. Need you there in person.

  Filrod bit down harder on the hook. OK Fred u dick, will be there.

  Frederic snorted. He hated being called Fred.

  He reached the perpetual carnival on the boardwalk, waved to his manager, a bruise-eyed, rasta-haired old surfer, and went to work at the VR ride, putting pallid teenagers through full-body virtual experiences and cleaning up the stalls afterward . . . As always, as he mopped, thinking, I need a new goddam job. Vraiment, yo.

  Frederic’s thoughts were sometimes in French because his parents were French and they’d tried to make him bilingual. Never quite got there, but they left their mark.

  His mom had left his father four years earlier, after Jackie killed himself. Jackie was . . . had been . . . Frederic’s younger brother . . .

  Frederic’s père was a thin man with shoulder-length white hair and an eagle-beak nose. When Frederic came home that evening, he looked at Frederic over his glass of Bordeaux—with that familiar dull wince, that dépression nerveuse expression he got when he thought about his son.

  Okay, Frederic thought, so I’m almost twenty-six and still living with you, so what. I know what you don’t know, you old fils de pute.

  He nodded to his dad, in honor of the free rent, and started for the basement door.

  “Frederic,” Dad said muzzily. “A moment, eef you please. We should talk about . . . Oh I don’t know, somezing . . . ”

  Frederic paused and looked back at his dad. There was a little extra slurriness, a particular mush in his father’s voice, and more French accent then usual, too much for a bottle of wine. Probably he was back on the Oxycontin. Supposedly he took it for a work-related injury. Right, Dad. Frederic’s father had been a computer programmer in Silicon Valley. Made good money, too, till Jackie died and Mom left, and then Dad started sinking, slowly sinking, and now they were living mostly on his disability, since Frederic spent most of his money on AI and chip augs.

  “Dad, I thought you weaned off that shit.”

  Dad opened his mouth to deny he was on it but Frederic looked at him evenly—and his père gave him the ol’ Gallic shrug. He licked his lips and articulated more carefully, “Oh well, you know, zuh scan . . . the scan, it said the crack in the vertebrae was open again, so . . . ”

  “Whatever. Come on. You’re just . . . it’s about Mom and Jackie. So if you gotta self-medicate, whatever. You do that, go ahead. I’ve got my own thing. Okay?”

  Frederic turned and went down into the b
asement, thinking he should probably get his old man to go to a therapist, but dad hated shrinks and Frederic just couldn’t carry the weight of dealing with dad’s stuff. He did, in fact, have his own thing.

  He veered between storage boxes and went to his basement room.

  Once his father’s den, the room was now Frederic’s own little sound-proofed warren of linked-up used hard drives, monitors, transervers, low-grade floating AI, a desk he used for extra shelf space, and in a corner—almost an afterthought—was an old futon with yellowed sheets reeking of mildew. The Skuzz Den, Frederic’s mom had called it. Laughing, though, as she said it. That was something he loved about her, that she laughed at you in a way that meant she didn’t care if you had failings, it was all good, no one’s perfect. Now he hardly ever saw her.

  Frederic sat on the futon, bunched up pillows behind his back, and reached over to the hardware to activate the tranz box. The virtual screen appeared in front of him—something only he could see, at the moment, thanks to his implants—and Frederic muttered the keywords that would activate the floating AI ovoid bobbing near his bed. The AI chirped and Frederic muttered the first password, got his menu, flicked a finger at the air to open SpaceHole, got the prompt screen, and . . .

  And hesitated. It always made him nervous, kind of sick and giddy, to open this program. Buster Shecht was still missing. But Buster was a crazy fuck, could be missing for lots of reasons. The reason didn’t have to be the Azathoth.

  Anyway, Buster Shecht wasn’t half the programmer Frederic was; couldn’t hack his way out of a paper bag. Could be he’d screwed something up and got some kind of brainfry—maybe the yellowflash feedback effect in an implant? It wasn’t unheard of. Frederic was not going to screw up.

  He licked his lips and spoke the three entry words—words that Buster had found online, in the Necronomicon file.

  The “screen” flickered in his mind’s eye; shashed, pixel bits spinning like water going down a drain in the center . . . and then in the very center of the virtual screen they interacted, as cellular automata do, and formed a spreading organization—something ugly, jagged, but hinting darkly at life.