But only part of me.
Another part, however, the little old man behind the curtain, viewing the world cynically from an invisible passenger seat behind my eyes, always stays lucid and rational. Sometimes he quiets down, but he never shuts up, never goes away, and never lets me forget who I am.
I resent that most of the time.
I was all fucked up on whatever tea Holly had given me. I was seeing things in the darkness spread out in front of us, but I was still rational and I knew that none of it was real. I could feel the movements of the air, the presence of a vast space below. My mind helpfully populated the darkness with a whole array of terrible things with tentacles and rainbow-hued serpents, but I knew them for hallucinations. Beyond what my mind created, I could not see a thing.
“Uh, help me out,” I said, nudging Dawes, while Josh came wheezing up behind us. “What I am looking at, exactly?”
“This is the Vale of P’nath,” Professor Dawes said, sounding affronted, as if I had asked him to read me the Hollywood sign. “The great plain below us, though it may appear to be a craggy highland, is in fact as flat as a pancake. The contours are the great piles of bones discarded by all the ghouls in the world into this place. Deep within the piles the Dholes roam, seeking out whatever nameless things that they hunt…”
“Dholes?”
I couldn’t help but imagine some sort of pineapple related monster.
“A horrible worm creature. They are quite large, as I understand it, and their heads are rather like a squid in appearance…”
Ugh. Everything was determined to be gross today.
“I’m sorry,” I said apologetically. “But I can’t see a damn thing, Professor.”
“You can’t?”
I shook my head.
“Nothing? Not the great mountains of bones, the skeletons of who-knows-how-many deceased? Not the monstrous worms that roam the piles, blindly hunting the charnel depths? And in the background…”
“I see darkness. With some squiggly colorful things that I’m going to write off as an effect of the drugs.”
Dawes turned back from the gorge to look at me as if I was insane.
“Preposterous! This is the grandest vista in the Underworld…”
“Prof,” Josh said, leaning against the mossy wall of the tunnel, panting from our walk through the tunnels. “He can’t see in the dark.”
“Ah, yes. Of course,” the Professor said, with obvious relief. “I had forgotten.”
“You can?”
“Ghouls can,” Dawes affirmed, like that advantage somehow made up for his vile dietary decisions.
“Well, I guess corpses must be high in Vitamin A. Lucky you.”
I couldn’t see Josh’s expression, but I am sure it was condescending.
“Forget about it, Prof. Just tell him about the tunnels.”
The longer I stood at the edge of the barely visible gulf in front of me, the more uncertain my balance became. I started shuffling back in the direction I thought we had come from, because my footing felt treacherous, but again, Dawes had to intervene to prevent me from staggering off the edge of the subterranean cliff.
“Certainly,” Professor Dawes said, pressing me against the wall for safety. “The tunnels are as ancient as the city itself. They stretch from the oldest neighborhoods, rotting wooden houses built three hundred years ago, ending in cellars and forgotten sub-basements. They lead to secret entrances near the sea, smuggler’s coves and hidden vistas of the sunken city where unearthly things wash up with the tide and the stone is scarred with ancient and indecipherable carvings. The tunnels connect certain bad houses to the sea, and others to the graveyards…”
“Oh,” I said, leaning my head against the cold stone in an attempt to calm my roiling stomach. “I don’t like where this is going.”
Professor Dawes nodded, but if his eyes held any shame, any disgust at his own debased practices, then the darkness hid it.
“It is exactly what you think. The city buries its dead from above, and we harvest what we need from below. The tunnels serve us in many ways, and we ghouls have lived and walked amongst them as long as this city has known man, but we did not build them. True, we have extended certain sections to accommodate the growth of the city and created points of intersection with the subway system and utility tunnels in the modern neighborhoods, but much of what you see is as we found it. And there are stretches of tunnel, particularly the paths that lead deep below the city which no one has ever followed and returned from. Beyond the Basalt Gates and down the Seventy Steps…"
It was probably a good story. But right about then is when the tea got the best of me, and I contributed the contents of my poor stomach to the mountains of bones I could not see, somewhere in the vast and invisible Vale of P’nath.
***
The tunnel emerged into a miasma of saltwater, rotting plant matter, and a sickly odor that reminded me of grapes. The beach was rough grey sand, almost gravel, scattered with driftwood and the crumbling remains of what might have once been cottages. The sky stretched out in front of us, almost the same color as the sea below .
“Have you ever seen anything like it?” Josh asked proudly.
Looking out at the ocean, which appeared packed with multicolored, luminous jellyfish, I had to agree. Skimming below the surface of the dull grey water, they were like paper lanterns, drifting gently with the waves, pulsing in a hypnotic array of hues. My jaw literally dropped.
“Ahem,” Professor Dawes said, clearing his throat politely, while he took me kindly by the shoulder and adjusted my view. “It’s actually this way, Preston.”
Ah. The drugs.
The sea was not polluted with jellyfish.
Past the breakers I could see what at first appeared to be columns rising up out of the sea. Even at a distance they were so large that I could tell they were made from the same green-flecked stone as the Kadath Estates, some rising many feet above the slow waves. Then, as my eyes adjusted to the light, I started to notice the shadows beneath them.
“Like an iceberg,” Professor Dawes said quietly. “You can only see the very top of R’yleh, the tops of the towers and chimneys. Most of it still sleeps beneath ocean. Less every year, though.”
“R’yleh? Is that, like, Arabic?”
“Not even slightly,” Professor Dawes, shaking his head. “It’s quite a bit older than any language currently spoken, I’m afraid. Older than the city we live in, Preston. We are fortunate that it remains buried by the sea.”
“Freaks me out,” Josh observed, hanging back by the tunnel mouth as if the open air made him nervous.
“As it should,” Dawes agreed. “The city of R’yleh is where a dead god dreams, after all. We are blessed, Preston, that the seas shifted, and lucky that the water still covers that city. For among those great towers, amid cyclopean ruins and bizarre constructions of stone, a monstrous thing makes its home. The oldest books that we can read tell us that there is a dead god there, an octopus-faced dragon being from another world, who waits for the sea to recede, waits and dreams.”
“I thought you said he was dead…”
“He is.”
“Then how can he dream?”
“Everything is permitted, Preston. Nothing is real,” Professor Dawes said, as if that explained anything. “Even death has its limits. I personally have always wondered what a dead god would dream about. The thought haunts me on the nights when I cannot sleep, when I wander amongst the old books in forgotten languages, what it might dream of, dead for millennia, in the cold grasp of the ocean…”
Josh nudged him urgently.
“Prof. I think Preston’s gonna be sick again…”
The good Professor moved in time to save his shoes. Stupid drugs.
***
Holly stood amidst a silent pack of mangy cats, sitting so still that I initially mistook them for statues. Josh was forced to support me during the last stretch of tunnel, the one that had brought us up to the heart of the
Enchanted Wood. My vision swam and I was soaked in sweat, my heart beating so hard that I could barely hear Josh whining.
“Well?” Holly’s voice was gentle, almost hopeful. When she reached to pet the black cat nearest her, there was a luminous aura around her skin. “Did you learn what you needed to, Preston?”
Josh let go of me and I collapsed against the base of a convenient tree.
“It didn’t go exactly as we planned,” Professor Dawes admitted.
10. Some Girls Wander by Mistake
Listening to her breathe in the grey light of the sickly sun rising. Imagine satellites aligning, manipulation of electromagnetic activity within the delicate web of cranial nerves. No sleep, the ache of the early morning cold seeping into my bones.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
Kim stood directly in my path on the walkway just outside my door, her arms folded like a small but immensely formidable wall. My arms were loaded with our bags and I could barely see her over them. April peered nervously around me, her hands clamped to the back of my jacket.
“Kim, we can’t stay anymore,” I said, unable to keep the desperation out of my voice. “Something – something bad happened. We aren’t safe here. And we don’t have much time. Please, we need to go. Please.”
Kim’s glare was as fierce as the noon sun and I wilted like dry grass beneath it.
“Preston, you moron! How can you possibly be so dense? The minute you walk out the door, they are going to be all over you! Why do you think they haven’t taken you already?”
The mountain of bags in my hands threatened to collapse as I struggled to shift the weight somewhere more comfortable. Lovecraft came darting out from nowhere, tangling himself in my legs and making further progress impossible.
“Because they haven’t found us yet?”
Kim’s double take was way over the top, no matter how shocked she was by my ignorance. Then again, even Lovecraft appeared disappointed in me.
“They found the Nameless City. They found you on the street. But they can’t find the building where you rent an apartment?” Kim piled on the scorn. “Does that make any sense at all? Shouldn’t it be easier to find out where you live?”
Kim had a point. A very good one, actually. I was embarrassed that I had not considered it myself. Then again, my ass had been handed to me pretty thoroughly twice in the last week, so I was not at my best.
“Well…”
“There are two possibilities,” Kim continued, staring me down. “The first is the people hunting April are far less competent than you believe them to be. Does that seem likely?”
I shook my head, remembering a tiny motel with a desolate view of the eastern Sierras where they had caught up with us. They had not seemed incompetent or ill informed. We had barely survived the encounter, more by luck than anything else. Only perpetual motion had kept us ahead of them since. Until we moved into the Kadath Estates, that was.
“Well, that leaves one remaining option. That you are better protected here than you realize. Have you really not noticed?”
It was like an algebra equation; once x is clear, everything falls into place. Kim accepting blatantly false paperwork and babysitting. Josh’s volunteer hacking. Sumire watching over April when she went to school. Holly’s warnings, all of them.
Probably even the ones about me.
“You’ve been protecting us,” I said slowly, not sure exactly what to feel. “From the very start, right? All of you.”
“I told you this already,” April said quietly, from behind me. “Can we go back inside now?”
“Listen to April,” Holly urged, climbing gingerly down the stairs, wobbling on her platforms like a ship on rough seas. “She is the brains of your operation. I know running has become part of who you are, Preston. I know your instincts have kept you alive this long. However, we cannot protect you if you leave. And you can’t run any further.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said heatedly, my arms starting to burn from the burden of our luggage. “There’s a whole world out there.”
“Is there?” Holly asked, apparently quite serious. “Have you checked outside lately, Preston?”
“What?” I felt helpless in the face of her illogic. “What does that mean?”
“They’re right, Preston,” April said, tugging at my jacket. “And it’s cold out here. Let’s go back in and have breakfast.”
“We can’t have breakfast! We have to get out of here! What the hell is wrong with you people?” I realized that I was shouting and making a fool of myself, but I could not curb it any longer. “Maybe this is a game to you, but it isn’t to me. If these people find us, they will not simply kill us – or maybe I am wrong. Maybe I will get lucky and they will kill me. But they will take April back to the Institute, okay? And I can’t let that happen.”
There was a sound like a piece of meat slapping down on a countertop, and my knees buckled. I did not truly black out; my body simply stopped doing what I wanted and folded like newspaper instead. Somebody was nice enough to catch my head before it hit the ground.
I tried to warn them, I really did. Many things can be taken lightly, many people are safe to turn your back on. April Ersten is not among them. Sumire barely managed to set me on the ground before things went bad. I wanted to do something, but my eyes insisted on closing. Moving was out of the question, so all that I had was hope.
Like honesty, hope has never been one of my strong points.
The next thing I remember, Sumire was sprawled next to me, white-faced and breathing hard, staring at her hand as if she had never seen it before. This was true, in context.
She probably had not seen it with a pair of steel scissors driven through the palm until they wedged into the chipped concrete floor.
I rolled over in time to expel the contents of my stomach on the floor. The pain from my side and from the back of my neck was intense. I sat up partway, my hand going automatically to my side when I felt something tear. My palm was bright red when I held it up to my eyes. Sumire looked at me with the mad, rolling eyes of a frightened horse, hyperventilating.
“Ouch. Why did you hit me so damn hard?”
It was a rhetorical question. I did not expect any answers out of the panicked schoolgirl in front of me. I did not see Kim anywhere, but Holly was sprawled near the stairs, her arm pinned beneath her at a funny angle. Standing was out of the question, so I crawled over to check on her. After fumbling about for a pulse, I noticed that she was breathing, so I decided that would have to be good enough and made my way on hands and knees to Sumire.
“I tried to warn you,” I complained, not sure to whom I was speaking, or if it mattered. “The same thing happens wherever we go. Everyone insists on believing April is harmless. The security guard at the hotel in Kansas. The old lady in Nevada who thought she was her grandchild. Our neighbor in Austin who came over to ask if the cable was out. And now you people, too. I always find myself cleaning up after her.”
The journey to Sumire seemed to take an absurd amount of time. My side burned as if I had an extremely localized fever, my head swam and my vision was distorted. I wondered exactly how badly I was hurt.
“April has rules. If you live with April then you have to abide by her rules. And one of the fundamental rules is nobody hurts me but April. Even Jenny Frost isn’t that stupid. What did you think was going to happen? Couldn’t we have talked this over?”
Sumire looked at me with blank terror. I crouched down next to her to take a closer look at her hand and then immediately wished I had not.
“Okay. I need you to calm down,” I said, moving slowly, so as not to startle her. “Take a deep breath, Sumire. This is going to hurt. A lot.”
She gasped a couple of times in utter panic, then nodded at me, her face glistening with sweat.
I lost my grip on the sticky-wet metal handle on my first attempt, then Sumire yelped and tried to pull away, making everything worse. After the screaming and swearing subsided,
I moved in and gave it another shot. I took a better grip on the bloody scissors, planted my feet, and pulled with everything I had, ignoring my side. I hope that someday I will forget the noise the scissors made sliding out of her hand. Sumire’s screams drowned it out a little, though.
“Jesus,” I said, dropping the scissors and rolling onto my back, exhausted. “I thought you said you were invulnerable.”
***
I hit Leng Street mean and feeling good about it. I would need to be mean to make it through the night.
Paranoid Magical Thinking (Unknown Kadath Estates) Page 18
