Worlds of Cthulhu

by Robert M. Price

  * * * * *

  Justin, we were more than friends. I was your slave for years, Renfield to your Dracula. I would have done anything for you. You knew that.

  You knew, too, that I wouldn’t cry out, even when you took hold of me again, and maybe I was still afraid of what you might have intended for my nubile self.

  But it wasn’t that. It was never that.

  You sat on the couch. I sat at your feet, back to you, so that your legs held my shoulders in place, and you placed your terrible, speaking hands on either side of my head, and somehow you were inside my mind then. I think, I thought then at least and for a long time after, that it was some kind of hypnosis, because I didn’t believe in magic, or telepathy, and I had an absurd flash of an image of Mr. Spock with his Vulcan Mind Meld. Then I stopped thinking at all, because I was soaring, with you, into the vision you deigned to share with me, and it was a kind of rape, a head-rape, or mind-fuck, to use the commoner parlance, as I, too, shared the vision and we soared through the black spaces, beyond the Earth, to places with impossible names, to Yuggoth and Shaggai and the darkness beyond; to the Gardens of Ynath, where, somehow I knew, ancient intelligences waited, minds frozen in ice for all eternity but alive for all eternity; waited, to talk to us.

  It was all so real. I seemed to come right to the threshold. I could just begin to hear the ancient voices speaking, like a buzzing inside my head, just begin to feel their soothing, timeless wisdom. I wanted it so badly to continue, to become clearer—

  And then I fell away, and I was in the room with you again, and I think I did cry out, and maybe I even wept.

  After a very long time, you sighed and said, “Opie, now you know about the old family curse. My father had these visions, and my grandfather before him. They dreamed thus every night, as I do. They knew many things which I myself am only beginning to discover, but they, too, reached for the Gardens of Ynath, and could never reach them. They leapt. They fell short. Now you know what it feels like.”

  At long last, I asked a very sensible question.

  “Why are you sharing this with me?”

  You smiled, but only, I think, from a sense of irony. You did not laugh at me. I will thank you for that. I think you answered me honestly when you said, “A combination of ego and loneliness. I want a disciple.”

  Now maybe one or both of us were out of our minds. That would have been the logical explanation. But I didn’t think so, not then.

  Justin, if you had been Christ calling out to me, “Come, follow me,” I would have come and followed, and hoped I would be promoted to apostle one day.

  * * * * *

  It was only much later that I understood that you were taking me up to the mountaintop to show me the treasures of the world (not to mention the universe), which would be mine if I would but fall down and worship you. And I did fall down and worship you, but if you were devoting this much attention to plain old Opie, a.k.a. Brian Simmons, it must have been some kind of dry run, to prepare you for the Big Job which was to come later.

  Get thee behind me, Justin.

  I never said that. Not until now.

  * * * * *

  In the Vermont farmhouse, as we groped through the dark and you paused to light one candle, then another, and finally a third, I could tell that time had not treated you well. It had been twenty-five years. Thirty? I don’t know any more. You were starting to look old, your relatively gigantic frame bent, your face lined, haggard, your voice raspy.

  I, on the other hand, was pretty much the same as ever. True, in middle age I became bald as an egg, but if I kept my hat on I was the same old Opie.

  The place stank. It was a wreck. We had to walk gingerly where the floorboards had been torn up.

  “Answers,” you muttered. “Looking for answers.”

  Gaining courage, I asked, “Did you find any?”

  You glanced down at the torn up floor and said nothing.

  * * * * *

  Awakening once more, I gaze into the greater darkness, the great hole in space, the black mouth that swallows stars. Accelerating, close to the speed of light, the winged ones bear me into that darkness. Colors shift, stars streaming like some brilliantly luminous fluid, rippling from red to golden to unbearably brilliant violet.

  * * * * *

  It’s not enough to say that you changed my life, Justin. You were my life. I would have told everyone on campus of your genius, whether they wanted to listen or not, but you commanded me to keep everything a secret, because the world wasn’t ready yet, you said, because misunderstandings could happen, because it could be the end of the human race if somebody screwed up.

  Yes, you told me that. I took it as par for the course.

  Call me Opie. Call me Renfield. Call me whatever you like.

  So I learned to deceive, to hold things close, to walk through life as if the mundane things around me mattered, when I knew how trivial they were. I got straight A’s. I gave up trying to become an artist. I studied science, then accounting. It didn’t matter. My parents thought I was “coming down to Earth at last.”

  Ha ha. I don’t remember if we ever found time to laugh at that one.

  Justin, I think the most amazing revelation of all to me was not that you and your family had shared visions of alien worlds, or had even spoken, treated with, or served intelligences from Beyond, but that you were from Vermont, too, silly as that sounds. We were almost neighbors, but I’d grown up in Brattleboro, which is a little nothing town, where, yeah, kids rode skateboards and played pinball (before there were videogames) and watched the same reruns of The Andy Griffith Show on television that everybody else did.

  You, on the other hand, were raised way up in the hills, but by no means a rustic, being privately tutored by your rich, eccentric daddy, who was a man of great culture and education, like his father before him and his before him, all of them devoted to, yes, “research” which had something to do with gardens of ice and winged creatures from outer space. That your father had perished when the family mansion burned down, or exploded, or just plain vanished, didn’t seem to have discomfited you too much. You had his bank accounts. And his talents.

  You told me a lot more that summer, when I brought you home with me. On the train on the way up, you told me the whole story, like a story, and so I tell it like a story, because it seems, as we do, entirely fictional: that the Outer Ones or Old Ones or whatever you want to call them had descended from the sky into the Vermont hills sometime in the remote past. They were described in various Indian myth cycles, and in folklore whispered from generation to generation. It was rumored, too, that sometimes they recruited human agents, or even spokesmen, and that one day, when it pleased them, they would make themselves known to mankind, and history as we know it would come to an end.

  Their purpose, no one had ever figured out. Some guessed it was mining, but what kind of rock would be worth journeys over quadrillions of miles and millions of years?

  You didn’t think it was that at all. Your theory was that other entities lay sleeping in the Earth, vast powers that orthodox science had never suspected, nor could ever conceive; that the Outer Ones came to speak with them, to exchange dreams, and humanity was no more a part of the process than if the greatest scholars and philosophers and poets had come together for some vast, sublime conversation and all these sages just happened to be infested with fleas, and we were the fleas.

  “Maybe we can join the flea circus,” I said.

  “Maybe we already have,” you replied.

  Now the really funny thing about that trip and that visit was how my parents treated you.

  Father gave you his bluff, hearty handshake and a slap on the back.

  You turned to me and smiled gently.

  At dinner, that first night, Mother said, “Brian, I am so glad you are starting to make friends. I was worried about you for a while there.
”

  Father put down his fork, but still spoke with his mouth full. “That’s it, son. We want you to be normal.”

  How very funny.

  Then you and I announced we were going “camping.” Mother took us aside and said, “Justin, I trust you because you’re Brian’s friend, so I just want to ask you to look after him.” That was funny, too.

  The unfunny part came later. Off we went, with backpacks and tent. We spent several days in the woods. The air was so wonderfully clear. The sky at night was intensely beautiful, as it is in Vermont, so far from the cities. But you and I looked at the stars in a different way, knowing that among them, or beyond them, lay the Gardens of Ynath, where the Outer Ones might carry us in transcendence and glory, where we might live forever and know all the mysteries of the cosmos.

  That was your promise to me.

  That was what I hoped for, longed for.

  And my mother thought we were off being “normal.”

  We came to places where ancient stones stood in strange circles, where, you told me, the Indians, and some wild, degenerate white men once danced naked on moonless nights, hoping to draw down the Outer Ones to accept barbarous sacrifices. We came to a hill filled with noises, where rocks somehow pressed together beneath our feet, making a trembling, muted thunder.

  And by the edge of a broad stream, in the white sand, we found the tracks, where something had walked, leaving prints like pairs of crab claws pressed into the ground.

  I knew that certain people who ventured too far into such places often did not return, or if they did, they were so changed in subtle, terrible ways, that it would have been better if they had not.

  But we were not afraid. We had our visions. In our dreams, we reached to the very edge of the Gardens of Ynath, and we heard its whispers.

  Then it happened. We camped before the mouth of a cave on one of those moonless nights which the local people had once learned to dread, and out of that cave rose what first seemed an enormous cloud, but which resolved itself against the stars into thousands of winged, flapping shapes, huge things, trailing long limbs and tails, like winged jellyfish I thought, no, like flying crabs, but really like nothing anyone has ever described or put into words or ever could.

  We had sought them out. We found them. You stood up. You waved a flashlight and shouted, “Here I am! Come and take me! I want to go!”

  I. Me. Me. Me. Meaning you, Justin Noyes. Just one. Singular.

  I think that was how the spell broke. If you’d said “Take us,” oh, how the whole history of the world might have been different—

  “Take me!”

  I wasn’t your friend. I wasn’t even your instrument anymore. Was I ever more than an excuse to get back to Vermont?

  “Take me!” you cried out, and they swarmed over you like a tide. They reached down. They took you.

  But about dumb little Opie? Did you notice? Did you wonder?

  No, I don’t think you noticed or cared that I huddled there in the tent, shit-scared, motionless, that somehow, when the time was upon us, I wasn’t ready to go, that I thought back over all sorts of incoherent things: games I’d played as a child, my electric train set, collecting butterflies, what I was learning in school, the names of all the presidents, anything, everything that bound me to humanity, to the Earth.

  I wasn’t ready. At the crucial moment I turned away. I buried myself under a sleeping bag.

  And I dreamed terrible dreams all that night, and it seemed to me that great swarms of the Outer Ones poured down from the stars, bearing metal tubes of some kind, perhaps weapons, which released a gas, a darkness, which covered over the Earth’s cities. The lights went out one by one, until all the world was still, and then the stars began to fade; and I saw the Outer Ones descending upon me at last, reaching out with those sharp, double-claws of theirs; and they spoke among themselves, making a humming, buzzing noise, and I was no more a part of the conversation than a flea would be.

  When I awoke screaming in the morning, you were gone.

  I left the tent where it was. I wandered for what must have been several days in a delirium. When I finally made it back home, bruised, cut, starving, my clothing torn, one of my shoes missing, I fell into my mother’s arms and couldn’t say anything for quite some time. At last I was able to say that there had been a misunderstanding, and that you, Justin, weren’t coming back.

  And my father just shook his head and said, “What did he turn out to be? Some kind of faggot?”

  * * * * *

  But you did come back, didn’t you?

  I am getting ahead of myself.

  Justin, this is the part of the story where the hero grows up.

  Childhood ends. Things change.

  And then I became normal.

  I became more normal than you could have ever imagined. I banished my dreams, my visions. By sheer force of will, a force you probably never suspected I had, I turned from the Gardens of Ynath, and looked upon them no more.

  And when I became a man, I put aside childish things.

  You might even say that I developed a backbone, a sense of self-worth, a separate identity.

  Suffice it to say that when I went back to college the following semester, I became aggressively normal. I worked hard, dressed plainly, earned good grades, got drunk at the occasional fraternity party, and voted straight Republican when Ronald Reagan was running. I moved to New York after graduation, where I could hide from the brilliant stars beneath the city’s glare, and never gaze up at the Gardens of Ynath. My last concession to my allegedly artistic nature was an attempt to become a set-designer for an Off-Off-Very-Off-Broadway theater company, but before long I ended up keeping the accounts for them, because I really did have a talent for numbers, and when the accounts were all straight goose-eggs, I moved on.

  Later, I met Melanie, who worked in banking, and was even more normal than me. I took her once to my parents’ place in Brattleboro, but she hated Vermont, the country air and the possibility that there might actually be things (insects) flying in it, which she had never experienced growing up in Jersey City; so we were an obvious match and married soon thereafter.

  And, yeah, we made lots of money, bought a big house in Queens, raised the statistically normal 2.5 children (I exaggerate but slightly), and together we kept statistics, became statistics, and brought into the world more little statistics, and, in short, had a life.

  It wasn’t a great life. But it was a life. It was ours. Melanie was a good woman. I think I even loved her.

  And then you came back, returned to Earth, came out of hiding, or whatever.

  I remember that I first heard of you in what was doubtless intended as a comedy spot on a late-night “fact” show of the sleazier variety: THAT’S INCREDIBLE. VERMONT GURU SAYS HE HAS BEEN ON ANOTHER PLANET FOR YEARS AND NOW HAS A MESSAGE FOR ALL OF US.

  You had commanded me, once, to keep these things a secret, because the world was not ready. But now? Talk shows, tabloids, a best-selling book which was the biggest thing since that last one about the guy who was abducted and buggered by aliens disguised as giant peanuts or some damn such.

  You started a religion. You gathered hundreds of followers, then thousands to your old estate in the Vermont hills, until the place was dotted with tents and swarming with reporters and cops and unhappy locals. Was this going to be another Waco, Jonestown, what? The story went that you were waiting for the world to end in 2000 and everybody was going to be carried to Heaven in a flying saucer, or at least that’s how the newspapers told it.

  And then you started writing to me. I don’t know how you got my address, but you got it, and the letters started coming. I burned the first as soon as I realized who it was from. I intercepted several more before Melanie found them, but of course she did find them in the end, and so we sat up one night at the kitchen table over coffee and I told her the deep dar
k secret of how I had known this real weirdo in college and maybe even associated with him for a while.

  But I was better now, I assured her. I was normal.

  A great revelation is at hand, you wrote. Come and join us. Be a part of the glory of transformation.

  “Sounds like he thinks he’s Christ,” Melanie said.

  “Something like that.”

  “And you hung out with this guy?”

  “He wasn’t quite as wacky then.”

  But you wouldn’t leave me alone. You got on my e-mail and sent me vaguely threatening letters, all of which boiled down to Join me now before it is too late.

  Frankly I was glad when that raid happened, when your “compound” got flattened by the Feds looking for guns, drugs, wild sex orgies, abused children, or human sacrifices, none of which would have interested you—or your Masters—in the slightest. I was glad, not because I ever wished you any ill, but because I wanted to be rid of you, and I thought I was. Never mind that three prosecutors in a row died of heart attacks, and none of the witnesses would talk, and your followers just dispersed and went back to their lives as if they had awakened from some long dream, the victims of collective amnesia.

  Never mind that. You dropped off the radar. Good riddance. Gone. I went on with my normal life.

  And it was only a year ago that I got your postcard, postmarked Vermont (of course), which made me so very afraid.

  Opie, you wrote, I know I have made mistakes, and there are misunderstandings, but I know, too, that you will come back to me and join me on the Great Journey, because They who have directed and shaped our lives all this time have ordained it so. Don’t resist. Obey your dreams and all will still be well. But do not stray from the path, for the dangers of the dark spaces are very real.

  * * * * *

  What the hell was that supposed to mean to a normal guy like me? I think you knew. I think you, the Outer Ones, somebody made it mean something, as I strayed from the ordained path, into the darkness.

  I don’t have to tell you then any of the details about how, as he approached school age, my son Matthew had motor problems and speech problems and was declared autistic by the time he was six. Nor do I have to tell you about Matthew’s big sister Carol, who had been such a sweet child, but now went with a very different crowd in high school and came home with her nose pierced, then with metal things dangling from her lips. When I said something she just stuck out her tongue and there was what I can only describe as a penis-shaped cufflink screwed right through the middle of it. Tattoos followed, chains, leather, spikes, drugs, the foul language, and the enormous boyfriends who looked like killer androids out of some trash movie, who threatened to break my fucking back fucking in half if I ever laid a fucking hand on fucking Spike (which was what Carol called herself now) like, fuck, you know?