The Keeper of Masks makes the final choice, selecting the face of Father Dagon for one of the two women, and the face of Mother Hydra for the other. The women are permitted to look upon the other’s mortal countenance one last time. And then the Keeper hides their faces, fitting the golden masks and tying them tightly in place with cords woven from the tendons of blood sacrifices, hemp, and sisal. When it is certain that the masks are secure, only then does the Keeper step back into the his place among the others. And the two women kneel bare-kneed on stone worn sharp enough to slice leather.
“Iä!” cries the priestess, and then the Keeper of the Masks, and, finally, the man who drew the lots. Immediately, the pilgrims all reply, “Iä! Iä! Rh’típd! Cthulhu fhtagn!” And then the man who drew the lots, in a sombre voice that barely is more than an awed whisper, adds: “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn. Rh’típd qho’tlhai mal.” His words are lost on the wind, which greedily snatches away each syllable and strews them to the stars and sinks them to that immemorial city far below the waves, its spires broken and crystalline roofs splintered by naval munitions more than eighty years before this night.
“You are become the Mother and the Father,” he says. “You are become the living incarnation of the eternal servants of R’lyeh. You are no more what you were. Those former lives are undone. You are become the face of the deep and the eyes of the heavens. You are on this night forever more wed.”
The two kneeling women say nothing at all. But the wind has all at once ceased to blow, and around the reef the water has grown still and smooth as glass. The moon remains the same, though, and leers down upon the scene like a jackal waiting for its turn at someone else’s kill, or Herod Antipas lusting after dancing Salomé. But no one among the pilgrims looks away from the kneeling women. No one ever looks away, for to avert their eyes from the sacrament would be unspeakable offence. They watch, as the moon watches, with great anticipation, and some with envy, that their names were not chosen from the bag of lots.
To the west—over the wooded hills beyond Essex Bay and the vast estuarine flats at the mouth of the Manuxet River—there are brilliant flashes of lighting, despite the cloudless sky. And, at this moment, as far away as Manchester-by-the-Sea, Wenham and Topsfield, Georgetown and Byfield, hounds have begun to bay. Cats only watch the sky in wonder and contemplation. The waking minds of men and women are suddenly, briefly, obscured by thoughts too wicked to ever share. If any are asleep and dreaming, their dreams turn to hurricane squalls and drownings and impossible beasts stranded on sands the colour of a ripe cranberry bog. In this instant, the land and the ocean stand in perfect and immemorial opposition, and the kneeling women who wear the golden masks are counted as apostates, deserting the continent, defecting to brine and abyssal silt. The women are tilting the scales, however minutely, and on this night the sea will claim a victory, and the shore may do no more to protest their desertion than sulk and drive the tides much further out than usual.
No one on the reef turns away. And they don’t make a sound. There’s nothing left for the pilgrims but to bear silent witness to the transition of the anointed. And that change is not quick, nor is it in any way merciful; neither woman is spared the least bit of agony. But they don’t give voice to their pain, if only because their mouths have been so altered that they will nevermore be capable of speech or any other utterance audible to human ears. The masks have begun to glow with an almost imperceptible phosphorescence, and will shortly drop away, shed skins to be retrieved later by the Keeper.
Wearing now the mercurial forms of Mother Hydra and Father Dagon, the lovers embrace. Their bodies coil tightly together until there’s almost no telling the one from the other, and the writhing knot of sinew and organs and rasping teeth glistens wetly in the bright moonlight. The two are all but fused into a single organism, reaffirming a marriage first made among the cyanobacterial mats of warm paleoarchean lagoons, three and a half billion years before the coming of man. There is such violence that this coupling looks hardly any different from a battle, and terrible gaping wounds are torn open, only to seal themselves shut again. The chosen strain and bend themselves towards inevitable climax, and the strata of the reef shudders repeatedly beneath the feet of the pilgrims. Several have to squat or kneel to avoid sliding from the rocks to be devoured by the insincere calm of the sea. In the days to come, none of them will mutter a word about what they’ve seen and heard and smelled in the hour of this holy copulation. This is a secret they guard with their lives and with their sanity.
No longer sane, the lovers twist, unwind and part. The Father has already bestowed his gift, and now it is the Mother’s turn. A bulging membrane bursts, a protuberance no larger than the first of a child, and she weeps blood and ichor and a single black pearl. It is not a pearl, but by way of the roughest sort of analogy or approximation. One may as well call it a pearl as not. The true name for the Mother’s gift is forbidden. It drops from her and lies quivering in a sticky puddle, to be claimed as the masks will be claimed. And then they drag themselves off the steep eastern lip of the reef, slithering from view and sinking into the ocean as the waves and wind return. They will spend the long night spiralling down and down, descending into that same trench the Ø-10 torpedoed eighty-two Februaries ago. And by the time the sun rises, and Devil Reef is once more submerged, they will have found the many-columned vestiges of the city of Y’ha-nthlei, where they will be watched over by beings that are neither fish nor men nor any amphibious species catalogued by science.
By then, the cars parked above the ghost town will have gone away, carrying the pilgrims back to the drab, unremarkable lives they will live until the end of April and the next gathering. And they will all dream their dreams, and await the night they may wear the golden masks.
THE SONG OF SIGHS
by ANGELA SLATTER
I
FEBRUARY 12TH
The song of Sighs, which is his.
Let him kiss me with his mouths:
for his love is better than ichor.
THE TRANSLATION IS coming along, but ponderously.
It takes so long to get the languages to agree, the tongues to collude. But it is close. Some days, though, I wonder why I don’t adopt an easier hobby, like knitting or understanding string theory. I tap on the thick folio with nails marred by chipped polish. I remind myself this is for fun and stare at the creamy slab of bound pages, let my eyes lose focus so all the notations of my pen look like so many chicken scratches. So they all cease to make sense. If I stare long enough, perhaps I might see through time, see the one who wrote this and ask, perhaps, for its greater meaning.
A polite cough interrupts my reverie. I look up and find twenty pairs of eyes fixed upon me. I realise that I heard the buzzer a full minute ago, that my class has quietly packed up their texts and pads, pens and pencils.
“Doctor Croftmarsh?” says one of them, a handsome manly boy, tall for his age, dreamy blue eyes. I cannot remember his name. “Doctor, may we go? Only, Master Thackeray gets annoyed when we’re late.”
I nod, pick his name from the air. “Yes, Stephen, sorry. Offer my apologies to the Master and tell him I will make amends. Read chapter seven of the Roux, we will discuss what he says about Gilgamesh tomorrow.”
Thackeray will expect expensive whisky in recompense; he does not miss an opportunity to drink on another’s tab. His forgiveness is dearly bought, but it is easier to keep him sweet than make an enemy of him. There is the scrape and squawk of chair legs dragged across wooden floorboards, and desk lids clatter as students check they’ve not forgotten anything.
As they file out, I offer an afterthought, “Those of you wishing to do some extra study for next week’s exams, don’t forget your translations. The usual time.”
“Yes, Doctor Croftmarsh,” comes the chorus. There will be at least six of them, the brightest, the most ambitious, those desiring ever so ardently to get ahead. This is what the academy specialises in, propelling orphans
upward. Idly, I make a bet with myself: Tilly Sanderson will be the first to knock at 6:30.
The door closes softly behind the last of the students and the space is silent, properly silent for the first time today, no whoosh of breath in and out, no nasal snorts or adenoidal whistles, no sneezes, no sighs, no surreptitious farts, no whispered conversations they think I cannot hear simply because they don’t want me to. Dust specks cartwheel in the shafts of light coming through the windows. I close my eyes, enjoying the sensation of not being scrutinised for however brief a time. A band of tension is tightening across my forehead. Beneath my fingers, the substantial cushion of journal pages is strangely warm.
II
FEBRUARY 13TH
Because of thy savour
thy name is as fear poured forth,
And thus do virgins fear thee.
The refectory is awash with polite noise, the clatter of cutlery against crockery, the ting of glasses and water jugs meeting. Students and teachers, all at their allotted tables, talk quietly to one another, all in their own class groups.
The academy is a large place, a great building in the Gothic style, four long wings joined to make a square, with a broad green quadrangle in the middle. Two sides of the structure face the sea, looking out over the epic cliff drop; the other two are embraced by the woods and the well-tended grounds. The nearest town is ten miles distant. There is a teaching staff of twenty, three cooks, four cleaners, two gardeners and a cadre of two hundred-odd students.
As a child, I was occasionally sent to stay with an acquaintance of my parents, here in this very house, before its owners’ dipping fortunes made a change of hands essential, and it became a school for exceptional orphans. I recollect very little about those visits, having but dim impressions of many rooms, large and dust-filled, corridors long and portrait-lined, and bed chambers stuffed with canopied beds, elaborate dressers and wardrobes that loomed towards one in the night like trolls creeping from beneath bridges. I remember waking from nightmares of the place, begging my mother and father not to be sent there again.
It was only after they were gone, when I was grown and qualified, seeking employment and a quiet retreat after the accident, that I saw an advertisement for a history teacher. It seemed like the perfect opportunity. I have been here for a year.
This is what I’m told I remember.
I’m assured it’s one of those things, this kind of amnesia that takes away some recollections and leaves others—I retain everything I must know in order to teach. I keep every bit of study I ever undertook tucked under my intellectual belt. I memorised the things that have happened since I came here. I may even recall the car accident—or at least, I have a sense of an explosion, of flying through the air, of terrible, intense pain—but I’m never quite sure what I can actually invoke of that time.
I suppose I am fortunate to be alive when my parents are not. I’ve been promised that many people I once knew are dead, but I’m uncertain whether I actually feel a loss. There are no remnants of that old life, no photos of my parents and me. No holiday snaps, no foolish playing-around in the backyard photos. I have no box of mementoes, no inherited jewellery, no ancient teddy bear with its fur loved off. Nothing that might provide proof of my growing up, of my youth, of my being.
I fear I have no true memory of who I am.
In the same notebook where I make my translations, in the very back pages are the scribbles I write to remind myself of who I am supposed to be. I read them over and again: I am Vivienne Croftmarsh. I have a Ph.D. I teach at the academy. I am an only child and now an orphan. I translate ancient poetry as a pastime.
This is who I am.
This is what I tell myself.
But I cannot shake the feeling that something is working loose, that the world around me is softening, developing cracks, threatening to crumble. I can’t say why. I cannot deny a sense of formless dread. My hands are beginning to ache; I rub at the slight webbing between the fingers, massaging the tenderness there.
“Wake up, dreamy-drawers.” Fenella Burrows is the closest thing I have to a friend here; she plants herself and her lunch tray across from me at the deserted end of the table I’ve chosen. Most of the faculty take the hint and stay away, but not her, and I don’t mind. She tells me we went to school together, but isn’t offended when I am unable to reminisce. She jerks her head towards the journal and my ink-stained fingers. “How’s it going?”
“Getting there. Second verse.”
“Second verse, same as the first,” she snorts. Fenella throws back her head when she laughs, all the mouse-brown curls tumbling down her back like a waterfall. She leans in close and says, “Don’t look now, but Thackeray is watching you.”
I pull a face, don’t turn my head. “Thackeray’s always watching.”
“Oh, don’t tell me you don’t think he’s attractive.”
Yes, he is attractive, but he stares too much, seems to see too much, seems to dig beneath my skin with his gaze and pull out secrets I didn’t know were there. That’s the sense I get anyway, but I don’t tell Fenella because it sounds stupid and she clearly finds him appealing. Her smile is limned with the pale green of jealousy. “He’s all yours,” I say.
She sighs. “If only. No one wants the plain bridesmaid.”
“How were your classes this morning?” I ask.
“Tilly Sanderson out-Frenched me.”
“That sounds appalling and punishable by a jail term.”
“Grammar-wise, you fool.” She adds more salt to the unidentifiable vegetarian mush on her plate. I can’t really bear to look at it. Fenella insists it’s an essential tool in her diet plan. I see no evidence: her face is still as round as a pudding and so is she.
“Well, she’s very smart.”
“Yes, but I hate it when the little beasts are smarter than us.” She shovels the mess from her plate to her mouth and seems to chew for a long time.
“Honestly, don’t you think eating is meant to be, if not fun, then at least easy? How much mastication does that require?”
“It’s good for you; it’s just a bit… fibrous.”
“It looks like the wrong end of the digestion process.”
“You’re an unpleasant creature. Don’t know why I talk to you.” She steals a chip off my plate.
I stare up at the head table, frown. “Have you seen the Principal lately?”
“A day or so ago,” she says. “Why?”
“Just feel like they haven’t been around for ages.”
“That’d be your dodgy memory. Old trout will be here somewhere,” she says dismissively. “You can always talk to Candide, if it’s urgent.”
“No, nothing really. Just curious. Also, I don’t want to get trapped by the Deputy Head—last time I ended up listening to him recounting his thesis from 1972 on the evils of the Paris student uprisings of ’68.” Candide’s about sixty, but he seems older and dustier than he should. Fenella hooks her thumbs under the front facing of her academic gown, tucks her chin into her neck and looks down her nose at me, adopting a sonorous intonation.
“‘Bloody peasants, disrespecting their betters. It’s all one can expect from a nation that murdered its own royalty and has far too many varieties of cheese.’”
“Don’t make the mistake of mentioning Charles I and the thud his head made on the scaffolding. I learned that the hard way.”
We laugh until we’re gasping, and the older teachers are looking at us disapprovingly. We’ll be spoken to later about the dangers of hilarity in front of the students and letting our dignity visibly slip. Causes the natives to become restless if they think we’re human and we lose our grip on the moral high ground.
III
FEBRUARY 14TH
Lead me, I will wait for thee:
the King once summoned me into his chambers:
and I was glad and rejoiced,
I remember thy love more than life:
All tremble before thee.
There are two
kinds of people in this world: those who, when faced with a window two floors up, will immediately accept the limitations it places upon them; and those who instantly look for a way to subvert both the height and the threatened effects of gravity. This room is full of the latter. It’s one of the reasons I love teaching: the opportunity to find those who would chance a fall in the attempt to fly, rather than stay safely within bounds.
The buzz of conversation in my oak-panelled rooms washes over me. Stephen and Tilly are arguing about whether Ishtar is more or less powerful as a profligate prostitute goddess, or is simply a male wish-fulfilment fantasy; the other five watch the back and forth of a teen intellectual tennis match. The tipple of port has made them aggressive and I imagine sex will be the result at some point. Time to nip that in the bud. I give a slow blink, to moisten my dry eyeballs, and clap my hands.
“Enough, enough. You’re not talking history any more, you’ve slid into pop culture, which is Doctor Burrows’ area, not mine,” I say. “Look at the time. Off you all go.”
“Goodnight, Doctor Croftmarsh,” they say. The closing of the door and then the one student left, the one who always waits behind; the one who stands out, and frequently apart from, her fellows. Tilly, who thinks herself special, and is, I suppose. So much talent, so clever; she will do well when she goes out into the world.
“How are you?” she asks and I am a bit taken aback. She steps close, takes my hands in hers, begins stroking the palms, an intimate, invasive gesture. I don’t think she knows she’s doing it. “Do you feel it yet? Has it begun?”
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