Frank's heart pounded. "No, I--"
The old man raised the bottle. "Got a glass?"
Frank went to the kitchen, came back with two glasses.
"You never knew what you were into, here." The man poured them both triples. "Even now you don't."
Frank accepted one. An earthy smell, like Laphroaig's peat, but strange. The potent burn came as a relief after too much wine. "We were separated when I visited before."
"Visited. Made that lake girl pregnant." The old man glared. "Why'd you think your boy swam down?"
The mention of Moshe stabbed Frank in the chest. "What are you talking about? Swam down?"
"The lake might beguile a person." The old man revealed teeth like butts in an ash tray. "You picture her, don't you? See her around, like dreaming wide awake? Maybe today?"
He was right. Frank had seen her standing over Lucy. "Maybe."
"You think at all what brought you back here? Every reason to stay away, this is the place you deliver the family?"
Lucy breathed in a slow, sleepy rhythm. Frank rubbed his eyes and smelled the strange liquor on his hands. Definitely not whiskey. "Why are you here?"
The man paused as if taking measure. "I think you paid enough. Now get away before there's more." He gulped the glass empty and clunked it on the table.
"You've got to go." Frank stood, grabbed the man's arm and hustled him down the hall.
"Your wife done no wrong." The old man didn't resist, but his voice became a threatening caw. "You get her away tonight."
Frank slammed the door against the intruder. His heart thudded against his ribs as he returned to the living room.
Lucy sat up, disoriented, blurry drunk. "Who's here?"
"An old man. Local."
"What about?" she asked, eyes half-mast.
Frank was about to sit by Lucy's feet, but his urge to comfort her was outmatched by exhaustion. "Condolences. Behalf of the town." He wanted to get away. If he went to bed she might just follow. He might go down the lake. Aybree's bar?
"Look." Lucy slurred, both with sleep and drink. She stretched her bare feet into the lamp's circle. Blotchy marks stained her vivid red from toes to shins.
The room distorted, a wave of heat and fear washing over him. Something's wrong, something bad.
"You have them." She angled the lampshade. "Sucker marks!"
He choked out a foreign sound, realized he was crying. It's not just Moshe, he thought. Something's wrong with us. He compared their feet. "Maybe just a rash?"
Lucy squinted at the liquor bottle, half-empty on the coffee table. Frank hadn't noticed the antique label, letterpress-printed with a mermaid insignia, glued-on with thick green wax.
Mermaid's Nectar
Special 3-grain
17yr pvt issue
[ cask strength ]
"Some local distillery?" he guessed.
"Mermaid, that's strange," she said. "Your dream. You fucked a mermaid."
"I did?" He averted his eyes, trying to remember. "No."
"You told me about it, after you came home from the separation." She sat up. "I dreamed it too, just now."
He recalled not the dream but the exile of separation. Sickening loneliness, unbearable. The return home felt like a plunging on fire into water's cool rescue and relief.
Lucy nodded. "In my dream, you said Moshe's gone because you fucked that mermaid. You said, you thought you only fucked her in your dream, but it turned out real. That's why we lost him." Her voice trailed off in a squeal, her face desperate glowing white, spotlight-struck. Tears returned, not the afternoon's raging howl, but plaintive, exhausted grief.
Frank couldn't sleep. After a while he tired of staring at patterns on pine ceiling boards and went to the window. Out on the deck Lucy cradled a glass, the end of her third bottle. She'd gone beyond swaying and slurring to emerge into vacant stillness, transparent and ghostlike against pinpoint stars.
As if she sensed Frank watching, Lucy's sobs recommenced, then something else: a spoken word stretched out into a cry. "Mosheeeee." She elongated the name into a howl.
Frank heard nothing of his son within that terrible sound.
"Mohhhhhsheeee." So much pain.
Frank slid the door open. "We need to do this together--"
"Together!" she barked, throat ragged. "Since when?"
"I'll never leave again--"
"Shhhhh." She froze, poised. "Hear that?"
"What? I don't--"
She halted him with a raised hand. "Music," she whispered. "On the lake. Just like Mo said."
Frank leaned at the rail, straining to hear. "You sure?"
Lucy trembled visibly. "Little Mo... he heard it."
She climbed barefoot up the deck rail and swayed. Momentum almost carried her over. Twenty feet below the packed dirt was sprinkled with dead pine needles.
"Stop!" Frank lunged, grabbed her legs.
"Get off!" Lucy screamed. She teetered on the edge.
He slid up to clamp around her thighs and lifted her down. "You can't jump down here, Lu. It's too high." He averted his face from her flailing hands.
Lucy's feet touched down. Her elbow smashed Frank's temple and he reeled. She vaulted the rail and disappeared into the dark. A terrible, meaty THUNK coincided with a SNAP.
Frank raced to the rail. Maybe she landed on a bush, a tree, something to break her fall? Only thin traces of light from above filtered down through the deck. Was that a human shape in the dark? Something wobbled sideways in the lakeside mud. Crablike, slurping and flailing, barely outlined by the moon. The shape of a woman heaved on bent-wrong legs. Moans, wounded-animal scuttling.
Frank raced downstairs to the yard. His eyes adjusted but he found nothing in the dark stillness. Where she must have landed, a rough spot of ground. A stain he hoped wasn't blood.
Find her. Don't lose another.
Water sounds, like trout splashing. He rushed to the edge.
"Lucy! Lucyyyy!" His throat was raw, painful. It was the second time that day he'd yelled after someone lost.
Frank waded in shallows, crawled the mucky shore. Time blurred in desperate seeking. In some unknown segment of the lake's perimeter he found a small moorage. Heart rattling, hands trembling, he mounted the pier. A rotten, disintegrated rope tied an abandoned boat to a pile. He climbed into the wobbling craft. A shredded life jacket sloshed in shallow, brackish water. A single oar. He pushed out.
I should've seen him. Could've stopped him going under.
Had there been any sign, anything in Moshe's face? He should've been watching, not thinking of the girl.
He rowed toward the rental house, back muscles aching. He cried out for Moshe, then remembered Lucy and alternated between their names. He found nothing in the water near the house so he swerved toward the public beach. Every sound raised hope. He changed course, kept seeking, but found nothing. The boat worked a random zigzag toward the lake's center.
Were you scared, little Mo? Oh God, water in your lungs.
Sweat soaked Frank's shirt, streamed down his neck. Beyond the reach of shore lights, the dark water yielded nothing. Through exhaustion and despair he considered giving up. Then below the surface, he saw something. A subtle glow. Maybe a trick of his mind, a wish? He tried to blink the light away but it remained.
That light drifted nearer the surface, carrying some kind of sound. Music, some old-timey tune. The static of radio, or gramophone noise.
I'll find you, Mo. I'll catch up.
Hands reached toward him from just below the surface, as if from the opposite side of a pane of glass. Frank dropped the oar and reached. Watery hands tugged him under. His chest scraped over the boat's side and by the time he realized what was happening he was submerged.
The water supported, seduced. It filled his mouth, streamed through his lungs. The sensation panicked him briefly, until the music soothed him. A chill spread through his body. Fingers pulled him down. He wanted to follow.
Show me the way to the s
ongs.
The water, murky green at the surface, cleared to brilliance. Nearby flashed the mermaid's skin. Light glinted off eyes like goldfish. The green-haired creature unlaced her bikini top, let it drift. Together again, like at the docks. By the light from below, her belly and breasts glowed perfect white. Gold and green scales ran down sleek sides to her hips. Brighter now, everything brighter. The moon rising from the lake's bottom. A shifting shape, a taste on his lips. A girl, white and green.
Somehow he'd known of the baby. She must have reached out, sent a message. Somehow compelled him to return.
Gently tugging gelatinous strands, barely more solid than water, wrapped and pulled him along. Headfirst he descended until he faced a great, open pipe, like a tunnel emergent from the sloped bedrock. Strewn near the opening were shovels and pickaxes, some standing like candles on a rough birthday cake. Most lay scattered, silt-covered amid awful, pulpy rot.
Within the tunnel two figures beckoned. A woman and child hovered adrift in currents, waving, mouths in motion. Beckoning.
He moved again, swam without effort. The woman and child were well ahead. Urgency drew him onward like a magnet.
Near the end of the pipe brightness increased. Frank emerged in a crowded restaurant and lounge, elegant white marble everywhere. In water clean and perfect as air he felt no need to breathe. Formally-attired patrons gathered around a shallow-walled pool, raised like a stage. Mounded gelatinous creatures seethed within, invertebrate things squirming and spilling one over another.
The refined atmosphere turned ominously dark, threatening. Despite growing revulsion Frank could not turn back. The creatures were not the unthinking monsters he'd first assumed. Human-like intelligence was apparent in their actions and demeanor. They watched him, seemed to understand without words. Though at first they seemed to tangle aimlessly, Frank saw they fought over raw meat, cracking bones and rending blood-red flesh. With flexible arms they shredded prey which appeared human.
From among the well-dressed crowd of men and women, some shifted in form, became more like the monstrous things and joined them in the pool to take part in the feeding. Other shapeless things, having fed, resolved into human shape and rejoined the crowd of watchers. They were all the same, shifting between varied forms. All but Frank, and some few like himself, unable to change, solidly human, casually dressed drifters or vacationers.
Amid the throng gathered on the pool's opposite side, the green-haired girl wore the shape he remembered. He thought even now of the taste of her kiss. That sweet, vaporous tingle of lips and tongue, like strong liquor. No longer nude, but dressed as when they first met. The crowd shifted to reveal an infant floating at her side, holding her hand. The toddler's black hair flowed like seaweed with a current.
What he first took to be indifferent passivity on the part of those few genuinely human visitors present, apart from himself, now registered as the paralyzed terror of cattle led down the slaughterhouse chute. No screams, no sounds of any kind except that distant radio music. Despite its faraway quality the song originated from the mass of thrusting, vying creatures, who came here from surface lives surrounding the lake's shore, where they passed as bartenders or shopkeepers, until by night they shifted and submerged to mingle among their own. To sing. Sometimes to feed.
A wet-faced gray thing, its pink inner mouth speckled black, shuffled over the pool's low walls. Half-floating, half-lurching, ever nearer. Frank knew its intent. The music pierced his mind. No longer distant but shrill, immediate, though still as inscrutable as a foreign tongue. Their voices soared to crescendo the way a stage crooner concludes with a crowd pleaser at show's end. Emotion rose within the throng, and within Frank, a transcendent sublimity. The voices of the soft things merged, harmonized.
The green-haired girl stood forth from the crowd and held the child up for Frank to see. A tiny body, wrapped to the chest in white swaddling which disguised its shape.
"Your father," she said to the child. Then to Frank, "Your only son."
He looked around for Lucy and Moshe but couldn't find them. The girl's shape shifted like a slow current, from woman to mermaid to a shimmering, amorphous convolution like the singing beasts. What was her true basis? Her form shifted to the white breasted, green flanked gold eyed creature. His mouth tingled.
Beside her, floating higher, the child. Frank never knew his name, but recognized the eyes.
The gray thing gripped him with multiple arms but did not stop singing as it pulled.
Michael Griffin's fiction has appeared in Phantasmagorium and Electric Spec, among others, and will appear soon in Apex Magazine as well as the Thomas Ligotti tribute anthology The Grimscribe's Puppets and the Current 93 tribute Mighty in Sorrow. He's also an electronic musician and founder of Hypnos Recordings, an ambient music label he and his wife operate in Portland, Oregon. He blogs at griffinwords.wordpress.com and his Twitter feed is @griffinwords.
Story illustration by Nick Gucker.
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Cthulhu Does Stuff is a monthly comic strip by Ronnie Tucker and Maxwell Patterson. Visit their website, Max and Ronnie do comics.
Maxwell Patterson is a freelance writer, available for parties, corporate events and Bat Mitzvahs. You can contact him at [email protected].
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Echoes from Cthulhu’s Crypt #2
The Lovecraftian Life Cycle
by Robert M. Price
I have had the great pleasure of a decades-long involvement (if that’s a strong enough word. Addiction maybe?) with the work of H.P. Lovecraft. I hopped aboard the hell-bound train back in 1967 when the second printing Lancer paperbacks appeared (The Colour out of Space and The Dunwich Horror). It was a great time for me as a nerd. I was exulting in the great paperback revival of pulp fiction and classical fantasy. The love of it will never leave me. But I have noticed certain changes in focus and in scope over the years. I’ll bet most of my readers will know just what I mean.
At first, of course, it was the fiction of the Old Gent that grabbed me (though, oddly, I did not read the novellas till several years later, I don’t know why). I soon branched out a bit to read some of Clark Ashton Smith’s fantasy and Robert E. Howard’s horror tales as I expanded my reading of Howard from my original focus on his heroic fantasy. But in terms of Cthulhu Mythos fiction, I trod the path followed by so many in the pulp era until now: I plunged into August Derleth. It was clear to me that Derleth was not writing on Lovecraft’s level, but so what? It was great fun and placed me in the midst of familiar and beloved territory. As I remember, I naively accepted Derleth’s retooling of the Mythos, Elder Gods, elementals, elder signs and all. It would be several years before, reading Richard L. Tierney and Dirk W. Mosig, that I understood the differences between Lovecraft’s and Derleth’s visions. But in the meantime, I was devouring whatever Mythos material I could get my mitts on. Paramount among these, of course, was Derleth’s seminal anthology Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos and Ramsey Campbell’s The Inhabitant of the Lake, soon joined by Colin Wilson’s The Mind Parasites.
So thus far the direction my interest took was one of expansion: from Lovecraft to the Mythos, to which Lovecraft was essentially one contributor (as blasphemous as that sounds). Some would say I had become lost, that the great Mirkwood of Mythos fiction was a distraction, a cancerous growth upon Lovecraft’s work. I should venture that Lovecraft expert David E. Schultz (compared to whom I am to be judged the veriest tyro) might paraphrase what Rudolf Bultmann said in his monumental Theology of the New Testament to the effect that Jesus is more of a presupposition for the New Testament than one of its voices. Even so, Lovecraft might be considered the premise of the Mythos but not really a Mythos writer. I would not go quite that far myself, but I understand and appreciate the sentiment.
After the expansi
on came the contraction. Under the influence, as I have intimated, of Tierney, Mosig and Mosig’s disciples, I repudiated “the Derlethian heresy” (Peter H. Cannon) and looked askance at most of the Mythos fiction outside Lovecraft’s own canon. Partly this was because I had made a late acquaintance with Brian Lumley’s Mythos work and did not then much care for it (though now I enjoy it a great deal). My reaction to the Mythos work of Lin Carter was mixed: I cared little for his pastiches of the Necronomicon and The Book of Eibon (though, again, it was not long before I came to forgive their flaws), while I really enjoyed his pastiches of modern-era tales, emulating Derleth and, interestingly, the secondary “revision” tales of Lovecraft. So my “back to Lovecraft” phase was neither totalistic nor long-lived. It was not long before I widened my scope again, though without placing everything on the same level. With the awareness that there were phases and stages of development in Mythos fiction came an interest in the historical evolution of the whole business. Viewing the matter this way I found I had a new interest even in amateurish efforts and began a series of anthologies called The Fan Mythos. This didn’t mean those stories were so great; it just meant they had a particular kind of interest to them.
The same sort of expansion and contraction dynamic marked my interest in media versions of Lovecraft. How fascinating, at first, to discover movie adaptations of HPL! Even bad ones (which one might consider most of them). And comic books! And music! And toys! Gaming was for many a prime area of Lovecraft addiction, but after a tepid attempt or two to play “Call of Cthulhu,” I abandoned that. No judgment, just not for me. How remarkable, though, that many young people seem to have begun with the game, then moved into Lovecraft and other Mythos fiction as they grew curious about the sources of all the Mythos data they had mastered. It was because of this phenomenon that Chaosium approached me to edit the Cthulhu Cycle series of Mythos anthologies in the early nineties. It began as a kind of remediation, making it easy for such late-comers to the Mythos to catch up. And thus did many of them become interested in the fiction for its own sake, a salutary development indeed.
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