New Cthulhu 2: More Recent Weird

by Elizabeth Bear

  And there was always the story, Cynthia thought, and that would do more good than a hundred beacons. Their distress call was answered, less than a week out, by a liveship, the Judith Merrill, and her crew lost nearly all their native distrust of Arkhamers in their desire for the details—Cynthia, as a non-Arkhamer, was pestered nearly to death. But she was willing to tell the story as often as necessary to make people believe it, and she knew perfectly well that half the reason she got so many questions was the Judith Merrill’s crew double-checking what the Arkhamers told them. Everyone knew Arkhamers lied.

  She was amused, though, and also touched that their greatest concern was for what Fiorenzo had done to the Charles Dexter Ward. They were fiercely protective of their ship, and while they were horrified by the idea of Fiorenzo reanimating the dead, it was Charlie they wanted to lynch her for. It was the wreck of the Charles Dexter Ward that was going to make the story, and Fiorenzo would be merely its villain, not a scientist striving—however wrong-headedly—for knowledge.

  With the Jarmulowicz Astronomica in a cargo bay, Cynthia and Hester (and a random assortment of cheshires) were sharing a dormitory cubicle somewhere under the Judith Merrill’s left front fin. The purser had offered to put her somewhere else, but Cynthia had turned him down. Until they reached Faraday Station, her contract bound her to the Jarmulowicz Astronomica. And even after that, friendship would bind her to Hester.

  And, the bare truth was, she didn’t want to try to sleep alone.

  When Cynthia reached their cubicle at the start of her next sleep shift, she said, “What makes forbidden knowledge forbidden, anyway?”

  Hester looked up with visible alarm.

  “No, I haven’t found another Mi-Go canister,” Cynthia said, amazed to find that she was able to joke about it. “I was just thinking about Fiorenzo and, well, how do you figure out where to draw the line? Because apparently I don’t know.”

  “You do know,” Hester said. “You knew Fiorenzo was wrong before I did.”

  “I knew Fiorenzo was suicidal. That’s not quite the same thing.”

  “No,” Hester said. “You looked at Ngao and you knew it was wrong. You saw the person suffering first, not the scientific achievement.”

  Cynthia winced. She had looked up Major Ngao—Major Kirawat Ngao, RN, MSc—but had had to draw back from attempting to contact his next of kin. What could she say? I’m sorry your loved one was murdered and reanimated by an unscrupulous scientist, and is still animate and possibly conscious—though in pieces—in the belly of a dead boojum. That was rank cruelty.

  It was Ngao and the rest of the Charles Dexter Ward’s crew that she still felt worst about; Charlie himself was at least peacefully dead—even the pseudoghosts had faded out before the Jarmulowicz Astronomica was picked up by the Judith Merrill, showing that the spacetime disruptions were healing. But the reanimated were trapped in their dead ship, and the best that could be hoped for was that Fiorenzo’s serum might someday wear off.

  “Someday,” which might just be another word for “never.”

  “You said yourself,” Hester continued, pursuing the argument and jarring Cynthia out of a sad and pointless spiral of thought, “that you wouldn’t put anyone in a canister, and I suspect you wouldn’t have experimented at all if it had still had a brain in it.”

  “No,” Cynthia said, then muttered rebelliously, “I still think we could find really valuable applications for the knowledge.”

  “Which is exactly what we told you about Fiorenzo,” Hester said.

  “Ouch,” Cynthia said. She swung into her hammock and rearranged the cheshires to give her space.

  “Mostly, I’ve always thought ‘forbidden knowledge’ was another way of saying, ‘don’t do that or the bandersnatches will get you,’ ” Hester pursued thoughtfully. “Or, I suppose, the Mi-Go.”

  “Which is frequently true,” Cynthia said.

  “Yes, but it never stops us.” Hester looked up at Cynthia, her eyes dark. “Maybe that’s the worst part of human nature. Nothing ever stops us. Not for long.”

  “Not for long,” Cynthia agreed and petted the tentacled horror on her lap until it cuddled close and began to purr.

  With him he bore the subject of his visit, a grotesque, repulsive, and apparently very ancient stone statuette whose origin he was at a loss to determine.

  “The Call of Cthulhu” . H. P. Lovecraft (1928)

  ALL MY LOVE, A FISHHOOK

  Helen Marshall

  Listen.

  It was not that I believe my father did not love me. He did. It is not that I fear I do not love my own son. I do. I do love him. It is a truth written in my blood and bones. Inescapable. As strong as faith and deep as ritual. But there is a thing that pulls inside me—it pulled inside my father, my babbas, this I know—and it is something like love and something like hate.

  Do you know the feeling of being on a boat for the first time? It is a feeling of alternating weightlessness and great heaviness. Now your body is light—soaring even!—and now your knees are catching the great burden of you. Some men stagger about as if they are drunk. It makes others ill. Being a father is very much like that. There is great joy in the littlest thing. A smile. A skill freshly mastered. The way he walks on legs that have not learned to carry him. The shape his mouth makes when he begs for milk. But also a great blackness that descends. Your child will not be mastered. He grows at odds to you. Now he is your friend. Your comfort. Now he is your enemy. He will best you. He will live long after you have died, make his way in a world that no longer needs you or cares for you. Now he is your greatest luck. Now you wish you had drowned him at birth.

  Stefanos was quiet as a boy. Prone to long silences, eyes fixed on the horizon, his little fingers dancing across his palm as if he were counting. He is quiet as a man. Dark-haired. His jaw has the same sharp line that mine does, that my babbas had once. But his eyes are the same tawny brown as his mother’s: like the heartwood of an olive tree. They grow very round when he laughs, which is seldom. He smiles rarely, but he has a very beautiful smile.

  Perhaps it is something hooked inside all the men of our line—the way my babbas would jam a fishhook in a piece of wood for luck and quick healing if he cut himself on it. I remember dark spells when I was a child. I would disappear to the cliff face around sunset some days when the wind was high enough to maybe send a young boy—small for my age—reeling off the edge and into the dark waters of the Aegean. I called these the knuckle cliffs. Their cracked ridges reminded me of my father’s hands—callused hands, unyielding as granite. Yet in the evening the sun would catch hold of the edges of the gneiss and send up very beautiful sparks of light.

  My mother worried for me during these spells, but when I returned, wind-chapped and shivering, she would brew strong coffee over the gas burner and sit with me as my body, wracked with shivers and nearly blue, quieted. Together we would listen to the wind scrabbling at the cliffs, whistling through the holes in the plaster and brick. Her voice was a plucked string humming out tunes of worry: “Kostas, what were you doing out there? The wind, you hear, boy? Aieee!”—a toothless whistle, a half-sucked breath—“Please don’t go out again. Please. I could not stand for it.”

  My babbas would say little, but his eyes were flinty and cold. He would work me hard the next day, re-caulking the boat or checking the nets until my fingers bled from loosening and retying salt-hardened knots. He was impatient with me. A hard man, intolerant of weakness. He had survived two wars in his lifetime, buried his brothers, seen his home ravaged by looters and communists. Sometimes I hated him. Sometimes I think he hated me.

  But I loved him too. Perhaps even more because of that hardness. We are like that as children—always chasing storms, running toward the wolf ’s teeth. And perhaps he did love me. He taught me a trade and made sure I never starved as he had, never suffered the ache of a stomach gnawing away at itself. But he grew to smile less and less for me. Eventually the love I had for him, at high tide when I was sev
en or so, began to recede. When it did, it left little behind but sharp rocks, broken shells and the gasping struggles of tiny fishes—ignorant of death until they were taken.

  It is one such memory—a broken fragment whose shape I have never fully understood—that I hold closest to my heart. So close it cuts me, I know, but that is the way of memory.

  Our family had lived on the island for many years. My babbas was a sailor and a fisherman. He kept a single caïque for long lining, which he made himself, from memory, without any plan. It was on my father’s caïque I learned to navigate the waters around the island, to work the windlass if we were trawling. It was there I learned to obey.

  Though Mama kept several crosses in the house and mass was a regular, solemn ritual for us, my babbas was not a particularly religious man. Like many of the older sailors he had his own private rituals, his own fears and superstitions, his own way of spitting in the nets before he cast them, or reading the clouds for signs of storms. He kept sacred objects. A medallion of Saint Christopher which Mama gave him when they married. A little pouch filled with the bones of a bat. But his most precious possession—and never mentioned in the house after the incident I will tell you, for Mama did not like to think of her husband as an old pagan—was a small statue. Babbas told me that it was shaped in the image of Poseidon who had once owned the island of Delos—the sacred island, a place of many gods once, where it was forbidden for any to be born and any to die. I have seen this island from the water. It is filled with broken columns and arches, a graveyard now.

  The statue was very old, a stone lump, now the color of old teeth. There was a face, yes, but its features had been worn down to something of a skull: gaping eye sockets big enough to hold my thumbprint when I was an infant. A snake’s nose—just two slits in a little mound. The upper arm had broken off, leaving a solid stump like a growth. The right arm, clenched against the body, had worn away into a ribbed mass.

  The statue was very dear to my babbas, and it is perhaps this love for it that drew me to the thing when I was a child. I longed to hold it. Mama said I wept for it in the secret language of babes before any could understand me. Once, in my infancy, I remember knocking it from its position beneath Mama’s portrait of Jesus above the table. Babbas was furious! I remember bursting into tears immediately at the sight of him, red-faced and grunting like a bull, his fists clenching and unclenching.

  “Mama!” I cried, lunging for the safety of her arms. But Babbas was faster, terrible in his fury, like a storm overtaking me on the cliffs: hot air whistling from his nostrils, the sudden slick sweat of his hand pressing against my mouth. There was violence in him. I had known that always. Babbas was an ocean. His strength was irresistible. My arms were weak, my skin soft and ready to bruise.

  He took a knife to my palm and cut a single red line. He would have severed my thumb if I struggled, but I did not. I was helpless. As brittle and breakable as the twig of bone he kept in his pouch. I could not see his face. His hair hung lank and damp as a curtain. It clung to his chin in a strange pattern. Mama was screaming at him, and this shocked me more than anything, how suddenly these people I loved had become like animals to one another. To me!

  Babbas pressed my bleeding hand against the little statue—and in that moment it seemed like a great tooth. Oh, how I howled! I feared it would gobble me up! But the blood only smeared against the jagged line of that lumpish stone body, the little withered arm smashing against my palm.

  Then it was over. Aieee. It was over.

  Perhaps I am lucky. In another age Babbas might have drowned me in the sea. Or left me on a hill to be torn apart by animals. It is strange to look at one’s own father and think he might have done such a thing, but I cannot say with any certainty that it would have been beyond him.

  I loved him. He was a stranger to me. The scar still grins at me when I look for it.

  When I was older, Mama told me that some piece of the statue had broken in the fall. I had not known, I was too young then, but the family’s luck was not good for several years. Babbas’s boat was loosed from the shore in a bad storm while all the other boats were safely harbored. No one knew how the ropes slipped or the knots failed. But they did. Much of our meager savings went to repairs. I know Babbas blamed me.

  But that thing—whatever it was that had my clumsy infant fingers reaching and reaching and always reaching for it—it never left me. Babbas took the statue away and kept it in a secret place, but by the time I was ten I had discovered it again. I would sneak into his room and take hold of it from behind the loose brick where he kept it among his other sacred possessions. I would turn it over gently in the uncertain light and run my fingers along its grooves. I could see the rusted spots of my own blood, ancient then, or so it seemed to me. It could have been anyone’s blood.

  It was blood that bound me to Babbas. Our shared blood. Sometimes it made me smile to see my blood upon the statue. Sometimes it made me feel proud.

  My babbas left Mama when I was fifteen.

  It was a shock to me but by then I cannot say it was an unwelcome one. I had lived in the shadow of his temper for many years, and grown up stunted the way a tree does when it must cling to rocky soil. I knew he was unhappy. There are many forms of violence that one can do upon another when love is gone. Once blood bound us like a knot. Now blood made my mother and me weak to him, vulnerable, those first touched by the storms of his passions. There were ways he could hurt us for loving him when he did not love in return.

  What we did not know was that he had found happiness with another woman. She was pregnant, Babbas told us. He had responsibilities to her. I was close enough to fully grown that Mama would not starve if I was a man. He delivered the words like kicks. Carefully. They were meant to cripple, perhaps; to wound, almost certainly. But to me they simply brought relief in the knowledge that, with another child, he would not return to us.

  He took few things. A wool blanket. His favorite knife. A pot he had mended on several occasions. It heated unevenly, burnt whatever it touched or left it raw, but when it disappeared from its hook, Mama wept like a child and I wrapped her in my arms. Arms muscled from turning the winch on our boat, hauling nets from the sea. They were not weak arms. They were a man’s arms. We would survive.

  It was only some time later that memory struck me. I raced to Babbas’s room—the room he had shared with Mama for all the years of my life. I went to the little hiding place. He had left the stub of a candle. A tin medallion of Saint Christopher. A satchel filled with bat bones—they were lucky, he had told me once. But the statue was gone. Of course it was gone. These other things were trinkets. These were the lesser lucks he had carried with him. He had taken his greater luck with him for that new child.

  I hoped his seed would stunt and shrivel.

  I hoped he would never have another son.

  I hoped the baby would be weak.

  I hoped its mouth would mewl for milk but no milk would sate it.

  I hoped its lungs would howl and howl and howl as the wind howled in the winter but there would be no season for it, only the howling, forever and ever.

  He was not coming back. He had abandoned us entirely.

  Time passes. The sea goes out. It comes in again.

  By the time my son was born my mother and Babbas had reconciled. The other woman moved to the mainland to work in a shop that sold jewellery to the foreigners. I never knew what happened to the child: if he had been real or simply a convenient fiction on my father’s part. A reason for leaving we might understand.

  I was twenty. A man as my father had demanded and my mother had required.

  At first I was afraid of fatherhood.

  I confess that when Marina—the beautiful dark-eyed girl I had married—told me of the child planted in her belly, I was tempted to demand she find us a way out of the mess. Such things were possible, I knew. There were things to be done to loose the thing from the womb, to let it unspool in blood like a badly wound ball of yarn.

>   I even spoke to Babbas of this. It was midday. The sun falling on the water looked, not like a mirror as some say, but like fine blankets of lace piled high upon one another, the kind of blanket under which an old man might sleep in the winter.

  “Aieee, Kostas,” my babbas said, making the same whistling noise my mother had made once. They were growing into the same person, these days. “Of course, you will have the child.”

  “What can you tell me of fatherhood?” I asked him.

  “A child is a blessing,” he said, and spat. The water shivered. The old man in the ocean was sick today.

  I smiled at him, and tried to find love in the answer he gave me, but the old scar itched when I worked the winch. I watched my father in the stern with the tiller. His hair was a tangle more silver now than black, the skin of his face bruised into dark pouches beneath his eyes. His tongue, when it touched his teeth, was tobacco-stained, the color of a worm. I, who had been a small boy once and weak, towered over him now.

  I wondered if I had been a blessing to my father.

  I wondered at that other child he had left behind. Or had died. Or had never lived.

  I knew Marina could not keep the baby.

  But that night when I saw my wife, her face was shining with excitement. Excitement, yes, and maybe just a hint of fear that I would say to her exactly what first sprang into my head.

  “Are you happy too, Kostas?” she asked me. She was curled against me in the bed we shared, her hands resting in the knotted wire of my hair, salted and damp. Her voice was soft, sweet. She sounded nothing like me.

  She spoke her words the way they are spoken on the mainland. The way farmers speak them.

  “A child is a blessing,” I told her.