The Book of Cthulhu 2

by Lockhart, Ross

  She nodded. “There’s one larger piece you ought to see, though. Its design flow is…extraordinary. A multi-figure grouping with complex mythic structure, and the finest coral work in this exhibit.”

  Sweat broke on his forehead as she mentioned the coral. Still, there was no turning away from those eyes—or their unspoken challenge. Wayland disliked women who challenged him. Fists clenched at his sides, he asked where this marvelous piece was and why it didn’t appear on the exhibit posters.

  The docent shrugged and gestured left toward a deep alcove.

  Wayland scowled, annoyed at having overlooked it himself. Without thanking her, he headed for that oblong of darker shadow, trying to ignore his shoes squishing in the carpet.

  Wet carpet and damp air, despite the prominent warning on that dehumidifier. Worse, the carpet exuded an unpleasant vegetative smell, like something long dead on a beach. Was the curator an idiot? After he saw this “complex mythic structure,” he was heading downstairs to complain.

  The alcove was longer than it had looked from outside—and darker. He squinted around for any sign of another large display case.

  When his foot hit the tiny switch concealed by the carpet, it took him a few seconds to connect that click with the rising light up ahead. Not a spotlight, exactly, but a series of tiny recessed spots, each illuminating the target briefly before winking out again. The flickering effect resembled candles seen through water.

  Long twining shadows swayed to that same rhythm on all the walls. They urged his attention forward, to the very end of what now seemed more tunnel than alcove.

  Wayland gasped.

  He’d been wrong about the display case. No glass glinted between him and this last, largest Object. Despite the unmistakable value of the strange whitish gold—and the coral’s fleshy masses—it stood unprotected on a block of dark stone. Raw and unpolished, that base drew the viewer’s full attention upward.

  As promised, the sculpture was a multi-figure grouping. And certainly mythic, since it depicted a ritual sacrifice about to begin.

  The entity Wayland had first recognized as a design element—the design element—in the misshapen tiara seemed to be the object of that sacrifice. Surging up from the rough stone, it curved its shining, sleek-muscled, and utterly inhuman body over the ritual’s participants. Arms twisted and supple as seaweed spread wide, ending in long-fingered hands with delicate webbing between the digits. Polished black coral nails scythed out from each of those digits. And its face…

  Her face…

  “You’re allowed to touch this one.” The docent’s voice behind him was muted but insistent, her odd accent stronger in the alcove’s hush. “In fact, you’re encouraged to. It will enhance your appreciation of the design flow.”

  Even as some desperate bit of Wayland’s consciousness recoiled, he felt his feet propelling him forward. Strands of carpet clung to his ankles as he reached the base of the massive sculpture.

  “If you can reach that high,” her soft voice continued, “the textural quality of the hair is quite extraordinary.”

  Wayland didn’t want to reach that high. Even from here, gazing straight ahead, he could see thick ropy strands coiling down from the entity’s shoulders. Shifting light from the ceiling spots added an illusion of motion, making individual strands “flow” around the bodies of the ritualists—all female, he noted automatically. Female and either naked or getting there.

  But not human. Not even remotely, despite the yammering of his hormones.

  “And the sensual flow of precious metal, those flawless additions of coral…”

  Wayland’s hands trembled. He remembered these feelings: desire and rage and disgust all at once, the strong hot undertow of temptation. He didn’t want to touch this sculpture. He didn’t even want to stand close to it, yet he was already here—already reaching out for the nearest gleaming gold-white form.

  The taste of cheap beer and cigarette smoke filled his mouth. The docent’s voice beside him was her voice now, as his nightmares remembered it.

  “I’ll see you again,” she’d whispered as he left her. At the time, half drunk himself and hoping she was worse off, he’d forced a smile. Even muttered something back, though he had no intention of revisiting that decrepit Massachusetts college town.

  “That’s right. You have to touch the design flow to experience it.”

  The docent’s smile flashed white in the alcove’s wavering illumination. White and sharp. As Wayland recoiled from her, turning for the exit (but where?), his left ankle twisted in the sodden carpet. He felt himself tumbling backwards, though he didn’t have far to fall. He’d already been close enough to brush one golden thigh with his fingertips.

  “Iä, Hydra Mother!”

  Wayland’s last coherent thought was that there had been no placard, so how the hell did she know what this sculpture depicted? Then he was falling, flowing, inexorably toward its center, where a moment ago there had been only an empty carved slab. The rest of the figures swayed outward to envelop him, then closed again into their circle which turned as the stars must…forever and forever…towards the rightness of Her dead and dreaming lord’s return.

  Wayland’s scream froze deep in his lungs. His flesh writhed as the seachange took it, turning meat to blue-veined coral—living, feeling coral—of a uniquely disturbing hue. Spread-eagled upon the sacrificial platform, bound ankle and wrist with fetters of pale oceanic gold, that material awaited only the descent of Her priestess’s gutting hook, forged in the image of the Mother’s own smallest claw.

  The wait was not long.

  Of Melei, of Ulthar

  Gord Sellar

  Haunted went Melei that evening into the streets of Ulthar, haunted by what she had seen in the dream-voyage of the night before; desert fires burning distant across the dark and dusty plain, and an immense black silhouette of some enormous outcropping of rock rising up, upward into the sky to blot out the tiny flickering stars across half of the heavens. In a dream, too, had she heard voices echoing against the stone walls of buildings crammed together along narrow streets, voices laden with care and worry, crying her name out into the blackness of deepening night.

  Her name—but not Melei, not that name she used in waking—had crouched in wait beneath her tongue; perhaps it was only natural, in the dreaming, in this other world, to be called something else. That name, strange in her mouth, cold and quivering when she nearly whispered it to herself, was hers. And why not? She was alone, she lived alone, and with nobody shared the secrets of her nocturnal voyages, for who would call her anything but mad…?

  So that awake, by the lengthening hours of that slow, still-warm autumn endlessness, Melei stalked the cozy, jumbled streets of Ulthar. Listlessly; suffering through a sunny afternoon as faraway gleam of dreamt flames in darkness, and the tempo of faint faraway cries and chanting, haunted her waking mind.

  Cats—for in Ulthar, where there was one, there were ten—traipsed past in little dainty-footed troupes, eyeing her with the wary look of beings that glimpsed her dark secret as no human could. She yielded the road to them just as everyone in Ulthar did, occasionally stooping to rub one behind the ear. Briefly, just until its tail batted back against her elbow and it turned its head slightly before going on along its carefree, shiftless way. Always one with black and white patches, always with white paws, she knelt to touch those chiaroscuro beasts with the slightest hesitation only, with a trepidation she prayed nobody noticed, most of all the beasts themselves. And yet she was sure in her heart’s blood that they knew. They knew.

  And then, round some corner would she follow the troupe of cats, and find a pack of soldiers standing together. Staring at her from behind grilled black faceplates. She would stop, as other citizens did not, and stare into those night-dark eyes, glimpse the dark folds of eyelids surrounding those bold orbs, and sigh gently and slowly to herself, for these people looked to her like the folk of her dreams, almost. Swarthy, yes, and smelling of exotic, perplexing spic
es. Beside them, in the street, as clouds drifted in overhead, over the tops of gods-haunted mountains, she took comfort in that strange aroma, the hint of myrrh and tehenna and cinnamon, the broad brown lips pursed stern. The foreign soldiers looked at this bold young woman with wonder, for none of Ulthar had done as she, pausing to gaze into their eyes with something like recognition, perhaps, or fascination, in their own.

  Only Melei.

  She gazed thus, for a few brief moments, upon these strange and ever-surly foreigners, as a wanderer sometimes, but only sometimes, looks upon the walls of the city where her people have dwelt since forgotten ages. In dreaming, she often had seen folk like these, sat at fires and eaten with them, sung songs she only half-understood, songs shared with that hopeful, dire world which filled her waking days with longing.

  But no songs now. Instead, she whispered a word to them, a single word in her own language. One of them, in his fluted blue steel armor, shrugged slightly. They looked at one another, and then at her again, the expectation being that she would move on.

  “Atal,” she asked them, a name, a single word so pathopoeic that the warriors could do nothing but ache from it, and she nodded her fair head past them, to a distant gate behind, up to the high temple carved from hillstone there, where ancient Atal was, in those days, thought still to linger. His image had been painted last as a priest in repose, feeble and centuries-worn Atal in white robes, shaven head resting upon a stone pillow; his eyes full of longing, staring up from the canvas. Melei had seen the picture in a public hall, gazed reverently on it for an hour while closing her eyes and opening them again, over and over until the image was stamped upon her mind perfectly, indelibly.

  The soldiers only pursed their dark, broad lips harder and shook their heads. They nodded down the road. Not towards wherever Atal now was, if indeed the old priest lived still; these footmen of the new conqueror were directing her nowhere except away. Melei gazed upon them a moment more. What songs had they sung as boys? What games had they played amidst fires burning among the darkling foothills surrounding the great peaks of the south? Slowly, she turned and followed a quiet old striped tomcat away, along a gutter. But she heard them speak of her, then, to one another.

  And then, suddenly, Ulthar was no longer tinged by her dreams, no longer dressed in that enchantment she had smuggled back from the world of her slumbering voyages. As the soldiers spoke with muted words at once utterly gibberish and completely familiar, she gave up on her earlier half-fancies that she might even have understood them, at least the sense in them, if only she could have heard their voices a little more clearly. It was a lie. They were not mystical creatures. They were quotidian men of muscle and sinew, and Ulthar was simply a holding in their masters’ empire.

  And Melei longed for more.

  She felt their eyes upon her as she wandered down the road, and round a corner, her eyes searching the sky for the first stars, that she might turn homeward and settle herself down to the repose and reverie that only sleep could bring her.

  The black night-ocean roared beneath, broad and noisy with the lapping of waves that she could hear clear as children’s voices, so silently did she glide through the deep, familiar sepia that always preceded sunrise on these flights.

  The ocean was new: often, she had soared above grasslands, occasionally among the buildings of a smog-choked city, but tonight, this dream-morning, she found herself above some expansive southern ocean. Below, from time to time, a lumbering darkness could be seen, spilling light from tiny windows, luminance far different from any reflection of the whole and simple face of the single crescent moon above her. These were windows in the hulls of lumbering ships that crawled across the ruined sea.

  As sepia slowly burnt into orange with the coming of the morning sun, Melei spied the coast ahead. It was an immense and hideous metal graveyard, the hulls and decks of broken ships protruding from the sand, their bare bones laid out as if upon an examiner’s table. Among them gathered labouring men, already at work hauling enormous rusty chains and ruined slabs of metal ashore. The ships looked as if they had been hewn in half by some enormous, awful blade and left to bleed into the ocean. For the waters, too, were sullied here, stained black and putrid. The rancid stink of the waters wafted up into the air, and Melei gasped in stunned disbelief.

  This was not the same site as she had visited in previous dream-flights, though the people shared the same dark hue of skin, wore the same resignation on their faces. A man beneath her dropped his load, a gargantuan link of chain slamming down onto his leg, and he collapsed upon the poisoned sand with a cry so loud she could hear it as she soared past.

  It was exquisite, wrenching but enchanting. It was a place where mistakes mattered, and this was why Melei kept returning. Because this world was one of consequences and dire meanings, godless and hard and amazing. But this beach was not the precise place she sought. In Ulthar, Melei was a mere seamstress, a needle-girl who day in and day out walked the streets careful not to step in cat shit. But in this strange world, she found herself possessed of powers beyond anything a real person in Ulthar could have boasted in millennia. She could soar in the sky, and she could go anywhere.

  And there was a place that she was seeking, these nights.

  Below her, a fence surrounded an enormous tent village. Men shouted, and there was a violent clattering sound, and screams. She saw people running, people clothed in white that shone against their dark flesh. To Melei they were unspeakably beautiful in their terror. Running for their lives, panicked. She felt her tears welling up. Such awful lives; and yet they held onto them so desperately. What humbling beauty, what endless rapture, that beings could live that way, in a world so starved of magic and gods. It enchanted her, as she swooped down low enough to brush her fingertips against the tattered hems of a few of the dingy white shirts that ran long enough to reach down past the knees of the scrambling men and women.

  Melei concentrated, and suddenly spun in the air, soaring now into the northwest. There was a city there that she had read of in secret books hidden in the drab tearooms of Ulthar, books only secret because nobody read them—for the denizens of Ulthar spoke only of the failed expeditions to unearth Kadath, old dead Kadath, and of gossip in the wracked court of Ulthar that was now under Southern rule. But Melei had read on fragile, forgotten pages of the wild tangled passage-roads that ran between the great grey monoliths of that old city on the coast, the city with the unbroken towers and the bridges and the streets laden with music and voices and wavering lights. Across an ocean, it lay: unutterably far by the standards of these folk; but for a dream-traveler, its bright roads and bustling noise lay within reach, if the will was strong.

  If only she could find that strange and mystic polis… nobody had done so in aeons of dreaming, not in the lifetimes even of gods. The sky swallowed her, and she soared into it not lightly, but as an arrow soars toward its victim’s death: unstoppable, unabashed, and filled with the most resolute certainty imaginable.

  Excrescences thick and strange rose from the drowned streets, wafting steamily up from broad, jagged-barred holes in the ground, and Melei swept down into the fog of the broken city. This was the place, but no longer the city of the pages, not the city about the magnificences of which had been whispered and scribbled out by dream-wanderers in ancient tomes long-lost. This polis had changed, its million secret details discarded like the flimsy skin of an ancient serpent drifting through the slow eternity of its being.

  The city had, by some horrid magic or doom, been drowned, and slain. Ruined, its towering spirit smashed apart, the smithereens tossed into cold water and frozen away into bitter ice.

  Here, a great library stood encrusted in ice that gleamed chill as diamonds in darkness; and before it, barges poled by men in thick woolen coats, shivering and calling out in their strange tongues, baleful cries. Old men and women gathered upon the library steps and huddled at its high windows as flakes of snow fell enormous and faintly grey with the ash of fires half a
world away.

  And there, further along, the great old temples of the last true religion in that world, the fanatic cult-houses of the worshippers of the magical curve, the endless blessed marketeers and insatiable blood-hungry pirates of water and light and time. There, these rectangular temples of lost merchandises stood with windows smashed, empty from lootings, empty except for the poor useless souls who took refuge in their icy halls remaining since the cult had loosed its foul and terrible powers upon the world, and toppled everything that humankind had once built up.

  Thence flew Melei, deeper into the city, over crumbled steel bridges and the steeples of abandoned, burnt-down churches. She heard singing, not of human voices, not of ghosts—for this world, haunted though its inhabitants’ faces were, was a place bereft of stalking ghŭls and spirits hungrily wandering. No, not like the frightening lands that lay distant from Ulthar; nothing like the shadowy passes near high Old Kadath or the caverns of B’thaniss. Only the wretched faces of the living gazed out through the smashed-glass windows. The voice she heard was none other than her own, crying out her exultant terror.

  An open square between the broken buildings spread out below her, and she wondered whether this had been a park, or the base of some enormous destroyed temple, or perhaps that square where, in ancient frigid nights, the folk of the city had gathered to witness the death-knell of the ending year and cry out jubilant with the beginning of the new. No hint suggested which guess might be correct.

  She thought again of living here, in this strange world of cold consequences, as often she had before. Shivering—not from cold, for her dreaming self was swaddled in thick, warm wool, and something of the power of her dream-voyaging shielded her from the worst of the awful, ruined clime—but rather from a titillation derived less from horror at the ruined city, or that such ruination was possible, than out of the purer terror that shook her upon witnessing the magnificent finality of the fact of the ruination itself.