New Cthulhu 2: More Recent Weird

by Elizabeth Bear

  The last dated entry in Julia’s diary was August 7, the day the “Peace Bridge” was opened between Fort Erie, Ontario, and Buffalo, New York: “Perhaps mankind has learned to live in Peace—God bless Prince Edward and Prince Albert and Governor Smith.”

  In late August 1927 Julia began obsessing on a hurricane that hit the Atlantic shore of Canada. She complained that authorities were unaware of the danger the sea stood for. She warned (somewhat prophetically) of an upcoming Pacific earthquake. In early September most of freedoms of movement in the hospital grounds were curtailed when she either shaved off or otherwise removed most of her hair. It was at this time Julia did involve herself in what limited art therapy the Butler offered. She painted five canvases of “disturbing maritime scenes.” These seem to have been sold at the annual art show; sadly little is know of them save that she used the (at that time) radical technique of grattage, which had been introduced to the art world by Max Ernst. Exactly how an undereducated American woman could invent the same art technique that a German surrealist had created for his series of paintings of “enchantment and terror,” is more than a bit of a mystery. Perhaps the art instructor had kept abreast of the European art scene. It is likely that during this time, the “channeled” portion of the diary was written.

  On September 14, an underwater earthquake in Japan killed 108 people. The next day a “Mr. Kenneth S. Gilman” paid a visit to Julia. All of Julia’s visitors had been either been family or former sewing clients, and it is assumed that he belonged in one of these categories. He paid three visits and, after winning the confidence of the staff, took Julia on a carriage ride. They never returned. The newspaper treated it as a major crisis—for two days.

  A legal notice of her being declared dead appeared seven years later. Three years after that Lovecraft died of intestinal cancer. Mr. Joshi suggests that Lovecraft, having taken an interest in the case because of the two articles in the Brown Daily Herald, had contacted the director of the institution. Perhaps a lack of interest or sense of shame on the part of Julia’s family had made them uninterested in the notebook. Perhaps the notebook had merely been lent to Lovecraft and he failed to return it

  In addition to the change of narrative voice in the last section of the diary, the handwriting becomes bolder. Some of the margins are decorated with little glyphs of stylized fish reminiscent of the Rongorongo glyphs of Easter Island. The theology and cosmology of the piece seem to be a mixture of aboriginal Australian religion and a good deal of Lovecraftian musings. Since Julia’s background would seem to suggest no clear method of knowing the former, and Weird Tales was an unlikely reading material for Butler Hospital—the passages are striking.

  Here are the final words of Julia Phillips, where Lovecraft has erased her words and written in his own we will indicate with italics:

  In the changeable world of land something dire is happening. The humans are learning to kill themselves, which is good I think, and learning to kill the seas, which would mean death to the world. The seas taste of their oil and trash. The beautiful mother of pearl walls of our new home, Devil Reef, is stained black. I hate this place, the waters are much too cold, and the fishing is poor. Our new home has no name, the Great Cthulhu has not dreamed of it yet. We had great hopes as He reached out to us and our weakened descendants, the humans, two orbits ago. He tries to bring Thought to all life here. That is why He came to this watery globe from the green star in my great-great grandmother’s time. He is such a suffering god. The humans have recast Him as one of their own. They think He brings salvation instead of Thought. All will think here, even the plants and the fungi, if the humans do not hurt the water too much. He rose briefly two orbits ago. He will stir in a few days, but not rise. We have learned how he tosses and turns. I am not hopeful for the humans, they are too far degenerated from us. Even those we have crossbred with can live only a few hundred orbits. No wonder they kill this world; they do not stay here long enough to love it. It seems wrong to me to bring self-awareness to such a species.

  The hope of Ra-natha-alene to save the human race by intermarrying with them is not held by many of us. It did not work in my youth and it does not work now. The humans are greedy for gold, so it was easy to make a deal with Marsh but they do not profit by our Teaching. In the spiral towers of their cells we help them find the way back, we make them more beautiful, but it is not enough. On the land they hide away when their Beauty starts to show. They wear our crowns, but they do not Think, or if they Think it is as something minor—an artist or a magician. No architects. No mathematicians. No biologists.

  There was a storm recently, much cold water was disturbed to the north of our new home. We had not controlled it by Dreaming. It is not in the Dreamtime and the hateful aurora wind from space keeps Deep Thoughts from hatching in our brains. The storm affected me badly, scattering some of my mind into human bodies. I will have to gather myself together. I hate their world with its right angles that turn thinking into sleeping. There were deaths in Canada, a cold white land. Not enough deaths I think.

  The humans of Innsmouth have learned a little about Dreaming in their Swirl, they spill blood and sexual fluids to Father Dagon and Mother Hydra, but they think in animal terms, they are too much of the life of this world. They have taken the animal needs and called them Sex and Money. Even when they become Beautiful, these two abstractions rule them. I am worried that they will subvert our goals. Some among them believe that warm-blooded animals are more evolved—more progressive than we. The humans worship themselves though a demon called Darwin. If their line of faith were right I would be greater than my grandmother, my grandmother would be greater than hers, and she would be greater than Mother Hydra. Yet a few of the humans have discovered entropy. A few know the cosmos is decaying.

  Bad news has come from the Esoteric Order of Dagon the humans of North America have spread the bloodlines beyond Ra-natha-alene’s plan. They know that when the Change comes upon humans they will seek us out. Therefore they reason that humans changing will move back to Newburyport and bring wealth and connections from their lives with them. They seek to intermarry with traveling salesmen in a ridiculous scheme to make their town more of a center of commerce. They don’t care how this can spread out tendrils of our souls. Their belief that each being has a unique soul leads to the simple numerical argument of more of “Us” equals more power. In orbits of bad sunspot activity (such as this year) the changing humans will Dream of us, or will have parts of the Dreamtime of Great Cthulhu become parts of their foundational consciousness. They don’t understand what a strain their Change places upon us. Each new hybrid pulls at our peace, especially in places not established by the Dreamtime. Soon such humans will come to Innsmouth and we will literally be pulled to the land to greet them, our nurturing instincts taking the place of our common sense. Worse still, humans, who have not heard the Dream cantrips when they eat their mother’s slime, will know great fear. They will see their Change in terms of death, not rebirth. And as they are not conscious entities they cannot think directly of death. Death to a being that can not remember anything before its hatching is a terrible consciousness. In the myths of the humans they dimly know what they were, they were deathless. But they see this as some sort of garden. One of the hybrid offspring in Florida is trying to recreate the Dreamtime there just as the people of Nan Madol did a few hundred orbits ago. Ra-natha-alene thinks these stirrings of true Architecture might trigger some ancestral memories on the human’s part, but I am dubious. Some of us are having glimpses of human minds during the daytime. I have seen myself trapped in a body with disgustingly scaleless skin and hair. I fear that I will Dream myself there, pushed by the aurora.

  I will dance at the Council and try to persuade the mothers to leave this place and swim back to our second home. We must regroup where the Architecture is strong, and Dreams are caught and farmed and milked in the old way. We must prepare against the human onslaught. Once our race was mighty. Were we not the race that called the do
lphins and whales back to the sea? Were we not the race that broke up the single large landmass and kept the ages of ice at bay? If only we had not experimented with the hairy ones, adding to their spirals. What arrogance seeking to bring self-awareness to this dying world. The humans inherited our arrogance but not our wisdom. They see us as their dry-land ancestors living in lands that have sunken—Atlantis, Lemuria, R’lyeh. As they degenerate their myths will say we lost our footing due to black magic. They can’t even guess that our life cycle is hampered by their yellow sun’s deadly radiation. If we last until that star is normal and the great bands of radiation leave this world, we will flourish again. Let us wait, I shall dance to the mothers, let us wait until the stars are right. Then we can Gift the creatures of this world with Dreamtime.

  Ra-natha-alene and her sisters mock me. They say that humans cannot grow to be a threat. They ignore the vast expansion of human numbers in the time since Nan Madol. They argue that as Great Cthulhu makes human artists and mystics Dream, humans will give up their fixation with death. No race can kill a planet they say. I warn them, there is no race as vile as humans.

  Worse news has come. The hybrids came to Devil Reef to swim and dance at the new moon. One of the wandering rogue offspring has come to Innsmouth. He does not know that he is of us. His instincts provoke him to actions and accidents that he sees as chance. He is at the hotel. The mothers grew excited, their gill slits flaring purple. They will rise and seek him out. I see that this will lead to disaster. They will seek to nurture and protect him. What will happen if he merely flees them? They cannot kill one of their children even if his blood is nauseatingly warm and his skin covered in hair. It could take only one revealing of our presence to harm us here. There is no Dreamtime in the walls of our new home. Humans have grown deadly, yet the mothers do not believe what the Spiral has told us of their war in Europe.

  It has happened, as I feared. The nursery parade gathered in town last night and the human saw them and heard the croaking of the nursery songs. The sounds released the Change, but he had not been fed the Dreams as the Innsmouth children had been. Even though I loathe humans, I felt pity for this long-lost cousin. I can imagine the rapid beating of his heart. I can imagine the cooling of his blood, which to him would feel like fear of death. The great Priestesses had put on their tiaras and the hybrid Priestesses had put on the robes. They made their slow awkward way toward his room. It was easy for him to outrun them. Without the Dreamtime to guide him he would have seen this all as nightmare.

  With luck his shock will silence him before he can tell others, and then when the Change comes upon him, he will seek us out. His skin will grow scaly and only the soothing feel of salt water will bring relief. His nascent gills will swell, and our thoughts will be drawn to his head like the bees of his world are drawn to blooming flowers. The Beauty will overcome terror. Tonight I will pray and Dance at the thrones of my ancestors Father Dagon and Mother Hydra. May they soothe his mind and still his lips! May his Change not bring fear!

  There have been Navy ships over our reef the last two days. We try to send them Dreams, but the steel hulls of the ships reflect our wills back to us. It is as I feared. It is not like the old orbits, when we touched their minds and they saw mermaids calling each to each. The mothers said the words of light and made the wheels of bioluminescence appear in the water, vast whirling signs. But this did not soothe the humans. Once humans have weapons they are not willing to be soothed, so far have they degenerated from us.

  Canisters began to fall from the sides of the ships, half our size. I began swimming. They were depth charges and they exploded with epic sound against our reef. The walls of our new home shattered, great panes of mother of pearl began wheeling through the water, reflecting the lights of the bioluminescent wheels and the explosions filling the sea with green and pink lightning. Shock wave after shockwave passed though the ocean—and dead and dying fish buffeted my body as I swam with all my might. Then some jagged pieces of the mother of pearl began to cut into me and my dark blood mixed crazily with the glowing waters. I felt the drums of my ears pop and the violent storm around me became strangely still. More of the fragments tore into me. I saw the arms of my mother floating by, leaving a wake of dark pupil blood and the smell of raw death. I prayed to Mother Hydra that she may Sleep and Dream until her next Cycle. I reached out for her soul and found nothing but the cold unforgiving water. Then a fragment of shell struck my face and I was cut free from my body. I tried to make my soul Sleep with the words that bring Sleep: Fhtagn nerzin kyron Meftmir!

  I did not Sleep but was sucked into the mind of a human, the one I had glimpsed before. A female that has not made the slime of motherhood. She was confined in a place of the mad, where the smells are terrible and the light is harsh. She is made to listen to a horrible caterwauling called “hymns,” and to eat dead food and be treated with metabolic poisons superstitiously thought to calm her mind. Fortunately her mind is strong, so strong that she had never been able to fit into their world. She was born in Innsmouth several orbits ago. She is one of the rogue lines, descendant from Marsh himself four generations ago. She was not brought up in our way, but as a human, and thinks that the divine would be found in her terrible form.

  I hate the way the air does not support her ugly body as she walks about. I try to Remember who I am by writing and painting. I tried once to Dance, but the other humans restrained the body. For days they kept me from moving. I cannot believe that they could be so cruel. I wished to kill the body and try again to Sleep, but the humans worship bodies and will not let me do so.

  In the past few days I have found ironic hope. I cannot send my soul far, so I know not what lies on the far side of the world. Yet I have no reason to presume that our Pacific home has fallen. Surely the strange angles of the Dreamtime have kept the Watery Abyss intact! But I found him. The one who brought the doom to Devil Reef. With the cruel irony of this planet, the Change came upon him the day of the depth charges. His body yearned for the sea just as our new home was pounded to flinders. I am nurturing him. As a true being I was not old enough to be a mother, but in this human body I can make the slime and feel the emotions. I enveloped him with the love of the mother.

  We have made a plan. He will come to this place and free me. He understands the human world well. He has done certain things to his appearance to hide the Change. He will spirit my body away. He tells me that this will be easy because humans do not value females and mad females are of no use. He has enough money to buy us train tickets to the West Coast. He will take me to a place with the lovely name of Land’s End and there we will shed both human clothes and form. I feel that I can awaken the sea form of this Julia. We will swim to our home and dwell there in glory.

  Thus ends the words of Julia Phillips’ diary. The only other item in Lovecraft’s envelope was a clipping from the Brown Daily Herald describing the testing of a new depth charge on Ward’s Reef near Newburyport. The bombing went on for three days . . .

  . . . a new abyss yawned indefinitely below the seat of the blast; an abyss so monstrous that no handy line might fathom it, nor any lamp illuminate it. . . . so far as they could ascertain, the void below was infinite.

  “The Transition of Juan Romero” . H. P. Lovecraft (1944)

  MOMMA DURTT

  Michael Shea

  It was a little past ten o’clock on a Friday night. Kimberly Haas, expert and easy, was riding the 580 rapids, steering a Titan northbound on that mighty freeway. Her half of the river was all ruby tail-lights, and the oncoming stream was all diamonds. What a rush! thought Kimberly, like riding a dinosaur—one that could do seventy.

  She was hauling twenty-K gallons along the star-spangled rim of the San Francisco Bay, and the Bay was a galaxy in a space movie, this huge array of blazing lights. Black void at its center studded with islands and necklaced with bridges. Kim Haas, starship trooper . . .

  “Hey, Alex,” she said to her partner, “Starship Troopers!”

  T
hey laughed. This was their sixth run driving for Kleenco. Though the pickup-points varied, the kind of load they hauled never did. Tonight: a pharmaceutical company in Hayward, a pesticide manufacturer in Emeryville, and a plastics plant in Oakland: solvents, sludges, and still-bottoms. A witches’ brew of industrial chemistry.

  “Let’s get a brewski,” Kim said. “We’re almost there.”

  “I dunno. We’re almost late now, and Chip seemed really pissed.”

  “Yeah, but he’s always pissed. And we’re always gonna be late!” Kim, though in her early twenties, was already tired of men’s pre-wired predictable hissy-fits. “We’re always gonna be late, because he never gives us enough time, and because while we’re pickin’ up there’s always some holdup or other in loading this shit at three or four different places every night!”

  Alex nodded, staring at the highway, and feeling his own doubts about this easy money they’d been amazed to fall into these last few weeks. Brooding on the river of lights he said, “True that. But he did make a really big point of it tonight, comin straight back.”

  Kim looked at him with his new Zapata ’stache—still a bit thin as yet—and thought that she still liked him just as she had in high school. Basically a nice guy, a bit touchy sometimes. She was a white country kid whose dad had driven big rigs for the vineyards, Alex a brown country kid whose several uncles still drove trucks back in Mexico. Since high school neither one of them had done anything even close to as cool as driving this tanker. Kim had clerked at the Circle K and Alex had rented out scaffolding and weed-whackers for Action Rents.