The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction

by Paula Guran

  It is only once I’ve reached the edge of the village that I remember he has not given me the onions at all.

  Nan is disappointed with me, I can tell from the way that she scowls ever so slightly and clutches at the hem of her cardigan but she’ll not tell me that I’ve done badly.

  “They’re a vicious lot, absolutely vicious! But they daren’t harm you, dear, not an Arkwright, whatever that boy might’ve said.”

  “Then— you don’t think he might’ve put something in the potatoes? He was so angry!”

  It’s this thought that has been haunting me, that perhaps he’s poisoned them.

  “It’s not a thing to be worried at.”

  “But you didn’t see him, Nan. Not his face, or his— his eyes! I’ve never seen him like that before. And he might’ve put something in them, mightn’t he? And if he did, what could we do? There’s little enough left from before and I didn’t even remember the onions, there’d be nothing at all to eat for days and days!”

  “I expect we’d manage somehow. There are things you don’t know,” she says.

  There’s a way Nan has of shaking her head when she has well and truly had enough of my questions so that the skin wobbles around her neck. This is the headshake she’s given me now but I can’t stop myself from going on and on.

  “But how? What other provisions? Not fish, nor flesh, nothing that has lived and nothing that has died, nor any other thing but what they give us, isn’t that right?”

  “Look to your studies, Caroline—”

  “Caro,” I remind her.

  “Shush now, granddaughter, I don’t like that other name! It isn’t a good thing, whatever you might think, and I shan’t call you by it. You’re far too loose with your words. A thing is what it is. You can’t change it just by asking and you are Caroline Eve Arkwright. Now enough of all this fretting, I’ll go to the village tomorrow and be straight with them.”

  “But you can’t, Nan!”

  Now I’m thinking of her shuffling walk. I’m thinking of the sound her chest makes when she breathes in and out heavily.

  “I’m not so far gone as you would have me, not yet. There’s still some good I can do. It’s like when they put their thumb on the scale, they know it doesn’t break with the bargain. We’re allowed the onions and they must give them over.”

  “But the potatoes?”

  “He hasn’t poisoned the potatoes, Caroline! Now hurry along and fetch your books. We’ll try the passive periphrastic today. Your mother made such a fuss over that in her day, but we’ll see if you can’t master it quicker than she did!”

  * * *

  It has been three days since Nan went to the village.

  For three days I’ve eaten little flour pancakes. To start with they were as big as my fist, but now they’re no bigger than a mussel shell. I tried to make the coffee just as Nan does, but my hands were shaking so badly that I spilled the grounds. I’ve tried to collect them, but I can see plainly that it isn’t only coffee I’ve got but salt too.

  And I haven’t dared to touch the potatoes, whatever Nan said!

  Nan came to visit me this morning. I’d been so anxious I could hardly look at my books! But then I heard the winch turning and turning and I knew it was her coming back to me at last!

  The villagers wrapped her in a beautiful, winding sheet of red silk. I’ve only seen that color once before. Nan told me that it was called carmine and that it can only be made with the shells of certain insects. It’s very expensive.

  The word carmine is very like the word carmen, carminis which is charm, prayer, or oracle.

  Her body was very light, so light I thought, for a moment, that perhaps there was nothing wrapped in the silk at all – but when I moved her, the silk fell away and I saw her hand. The nails were a colorless yellow and the veins were a colorless blue and I’ve no other words for what I saw except that I knew the hand could belong to no other.

  It was a kindness they did her, wrapping her up in red silk.

  I took her in my arms very gently and still she was so light.

  I unhooked that platform just as she used to do but Nan was so much better at it than I am! It’s very hard when you’re all by yourself. The hook was difficult to manage and the fourth wheel was broken off completely. But they wrapped her in red silk and that was kind, I think, for they mightn’t’ve done that.

  They might’ve taken her away and never sent her back to me at all.

  Still I can’t come to the thought properly.

  Moriturus est.

  She has died.

  The platform moves very slowly.

  It isn’t balanced very well but I don’t know how to make it better. I don’t want to touch Nan. I can’t bear the thought that she’s underneath the red silk. It’s as if she were sleeping and not actually dead. It’s as if she could wake at any moment. But when I touched her she didn’t wake up, when I shook her she was so still! Her skin was very cold and it made me think about what she said last time, about how it’s very cold where we must go and I take a blanket for myself and the blanket is pale green with golden flowers and it’s one of my favorites but then I think I don’t want to take my favorite blanket because then I’ll always be thinking on the red silk when I wear it, so instead I settle for my second favorite blanket which is old and gray.

  But then the blanket is bulky and it’s difficult to move in. It keeps getting trapped under the wheels of the platform. At last I let it lie beside the rail. I shall return for it eventually. I must come this way again.

  But am I being foolish?

  “Will I be warm enough, do you think?” And then: “I’m frightened of the way. Please. Please wake up. I don’t want to go by myself.”

  Her silence is terrible.

  I decide not to leave the blanket after all. Instead I wrap it around myself the way I’ve seen the Romans in the pictures do it so that it falls like a heavy dress around me. If I had string I would cinch it around my waist but I don’t have any string.

  I pass the pantry and the sitting room. The blanket catches again and I must adjust it. I pass the bedrooms. The sunlight is still very bright here. It echoes the way that sound echoes and sometimes the colors it makes upon the walls are beautiful. There are all sorts of colors but none is the same color of red as the winding sheet of silk.

  And then we are moving into darkness – past the eleventh chamber where I faltered, past the twelfth chamber and the thirteenth chamber. I never asked Nan how far the way was. I never asked Nan what must come next. I don’t think I’m brave enough for this but I must be brave enough because there is no one else to do this for her, no one but Caro, Caro passing into car . . .

  From the darkness comes a new kind of light as if the walls themselves have begun to shine very softly. They are all studded with silvery white blooms that remind me very much of the flowers I’ve seen in the village in springtime, all clustered together in little beds. Or perhaps these things look like teeth. Or snow. There are long shining spindles that hang suspended and I must be careful when I step underneath them. Some have broken away. Their edges look very sharp. When I look at them I can see myself carrying Nan reflected a thousand times, perhaps ten thousand times, but each image I see isn’t me exactly.

  I touch my eyes. They begin to water and burn dreadfully. My hands are almost white, the silk sheet is almost white.

  This is what death looks like, I think, and it is a very frightening thought: but I’ve never seen anything as white as this!

  Around and around, through chamber after chamber, the walls shrink around me until I feel as if I could reach out on either side and touch them. At the same time they begin to feel larger and larger as if there were some method by which I can detect the dimensions of the room which relies upon neither my eyes nor my fingers. It is strange to think I’m perhaps not so very far from my own bedroom. I’m within the place I’ve always lived. It shouldn’t be frightening for all around me are the places I’ve walked all my life. But th
ey aren’t this place, are they? This place stands in the center of all that. The air stings my eyes, it tastes like the ocean air but much sharper.

  Now there is shadow, and with it, the sense of something deliberately obscured.

  I feel very giddy. It is impossible to continue further.

  But I remember what Nan said to me when I was afraid of going to the village the first time. She took my hands in hers, but they were warm then, very warm, and she said: “Listen, Caroline, no one there will hurt you, no one will touch you, I promise and I promise.”

  “But they hate us so much!”

  “Oh, no, darling, no, no – it isn’t hatred! It can’t ever be hatred, it goes beyond hatred or fear or even love what they feel for us. It is only that there is a voice that whispers to them in their dreams and it makes them all so terribly afraid. But they shan’t hurt you, they won’t, I will never, ever let them touch you.”

  “But what does the voice whisper, Nan? What makes them so afraid?”

  “It whispers morieris, dearest, which, as you shall learn, means all things must die. Caro, carnis. Everything dies except for salt.”

  And I think perhaps it’s comforting, what Nan said, and I say to myself: “Don’t be afraid, Caroline, no one there will hurt you, no one will touch you!”

  I even use my own true name just as Nan wanted me to.

  But it doesn’t make me braver. For now there’s a noise I can hear or I’ve been hearing it for some time now, I can’t tell exactly. Perhaps it is only the sound of the ocean reflected inward, the deep and heavy huff of the waves. It sounds very much like breathing. But as I strain my ears, a second noise becomes clearer to me: a sharp tap-tap-tapping sound that I don’t like one bit, for it becomes louder and louder, maddeningly loud, so that I must press my hands against my ears lest I begin to shriek!

  A hot blast of air gusts through the chamber, but from where it comes I could not say only that it’s as if I’m in my dream and this is Mother’s breath, warm against my skin and sweet smelling.

  “Mother,” I cry out. “Oh, Mother!”

  But I can’t see her! It is as if the air around me has begun to heave and writhe. But it isn’t the air, it is clouds of white dust, sharp and stinging – the walls billow, but it isn’t the walls, it is clothes of all different colors, blues and oranges and purples and yellows and green and they are all fluttering around me as if I’ve become lost within a flock of birds!

  Then the wind dies away and all the clothes come to settle once more only they don’t lie properly as they did before. I can see now, I can see what lies beneath them. Nan never lied to me! For here they are, just as she promised, the ones from the village – all our visitors! There are so many of them! Some I recognize like Tom’s mother with her hair as golden as wheat but there are so many of them and I think to myself that I could not possibly have seen so many for they go on and on and on into the darkness. Those closest to me are just as they were in life, all pale and pretty with white, white cheeks – but those further are as strangers to me. Their flesh has withered and hardened into a yellow-veined shell – like saxa, which is stone – and all I can see are their jagged teeth set in the widened, black circle of their mouths.

  And one by one by one it is as if I can see lights coming on within.

  They are tiny at first, the barest glow, but they become brighter and brighter, each of them smaller than my smallest finger, set in a gilded carapace like a Roman soldier! And they are moving, oh, they are moving! In and out they go, scuttling on a thousand tiny legs, through the mouth, through the empty holes of the eyes and the nose, over the fingernails and the ribs.

  How enchanting these creatures are, how absolutely beautiful!

  There is a part of me that has become very happy. I know I should be frightened but these little things with their tap-tap-tapping don’t frighten me one bit. How is it that I’ve not thought through this particular part of the conundrum? A person is not only a person, a person can also be a house. Caro in carno. Just like me. And all the villagers have become like houses, row upon row of tiny houses: each with their own towers and colonnades, their own hushed streets and marvelous gardens. It seems perfectly obvious to me now! The soul is merely a single occupant, and when the soul has fled, of course, something else shall come to lodge itself within them.

  They are very small and even if there are so many of them all wiggling around I know that I could crush them if I wanted to, I could press my fingers down upon them until they bled. But I shan’t do that, shall I? I shan’t, even though I could. They are so little, just like babies! And they are mine, aren’t they? I am Mother to them – and it shall be my voice that whispers, “Morieris” to them in the night. But they needn’t be afraid, for perhaps death is not so terrible a thing, perhaps it is only an inward movement, the casting away of the veil of dreams.

  And so I take Nan gently in my arms and I bury my fingers in the smooth red silk of her covering. When I lay her upon the salt shelf I’m careful to wrap the cloth around her frail body. I loved her very much. But the world isn’t an apple. It isn’t sweet and perfectly formed – or if it was once long ago then it has fallen away into rot. It is a shell, a husk, an infinite spiral – caro in carno, all of it moving inward, passing over, ever slumbering, ever waking.

  But I shall be Caro in carno no longer. I’ve heard the voice which whispers, you will die, and I’m not afraid; for to me it whispers sweetly, come to me, beautiful child, and I shall cradle you as you sleep, I shall watch over your dreaming and you shall at last be safe.

  I’ve gone to the village for the last time now. It is true that I’ve come to love the stone houses with their pretty wooden roofs, their straight flowerbeds, the people all milling about, tending to the day’s business. There is a simple charm to the world they inhabit, how their years are governed by the planting season and the reaping season and yet it is amazing how little they know of the true mechanisms of the earth! But that is unfair of me for they are hardly scholars and perhaps only the barest gleanings of nature’s operations are enough for survival if one requires little enough.

  The grocer would not look at me. His face was a red mask of suffering and I could see the way his fists clenched. He would have hurled stones at me if he could. “There shall be no food for you, Miss Arkwright, not ever again. So don’t you come back, d’you hear? No more of that devil’s bargain, there shall be nothing given between mine and yours, not ever!”

  But I did not make the journey to speak with him and so his curses meant very little to me. It is as Nan said, they will not touch me, not ever – for it is they who are afraid and their fear is well deserved.

  Tom has filled out very nicely even without his handsome black suit. His hands are strong worker’s hands with thick pad on his thumbs. He has been raised coarsely but even I can see there is finer stuff within.

  “You there!” I call to him.

  He’s mute.

  “Tom!”

  “What is that you want, miss?”

  “I wanted to tell you about your mother.”

  “My father is watching us right now,” he tells me sullenly. “He’ll go get the others if there’s any trouble. The deal’s broken now, isn’t it? We don’t want no more of it. You shouldn’t be here.”

  But I ignore all this. The agreement isn’t necessary any longer. I’ve found a way to manage on my own. I have looked to my studies just as Nan said.

  “Don’t you want to know what your mother had to tell you?”

  He looks at me uncertainly. I know this is cruel, that I’m teasing him a little, but he was cruel to me once as well. I can’t help it.

  “Very well then.”

  “Wait!” he calls as I begin to cross the street. “Please! Wait, miss! What did she—” he’s almost shuddering now “—did she say something to me? Did she give you a message?”

  I turn to look at him once more. He’s standing at the edge of the porch, straining forward. I can see that he’s breathing very h
eavily and his eyes are wet and shining like glass.

  “She said she loves you very much. She says she longs to hold you in her arms once more. Will you come to her?”

  I do not tell him the truth. I know what she whispers. She whispers, “Morieris” – and so it is, but not yet, not yet.

  “I don’t know what you mean, miss.” I watch his Adam’s apple bob up and down.

  “You know well enough, Tom.” His lips are very red. It is lonely without Nan, oh, not so lonely as you would think – I have my studies after all! – but still lonely enough.

  “Come if you like, Tom,” I say, smiling my very best smile. From here I can almost taste the salt of his tears. How magnificent you are, I want to tell him! You carry within yourself the stuff of eternal life – and yet you shed it so easily! “The way goes down and down and down but it isn’t so difficult. And we shall be ever so happy to have you join us for a while.”

  Sandra McDonald’s story draws specifically on H. P. Lovecraft’s ideas and language, albeit in a unique way. Its setting is R’lyeh, the city under the waves with its “slimy green vaults,” a place that calls to the darkness in all of our hearts.

  McDonald served as a commissioned officer in the US Navy for eight years and remains fascinated by issues of tradition and protocol. More than seventy of her short stories and eight novels are in print, ranging from young adult to military science fiction to paranormal romance. Her first collection of fiction, Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories, was a Booklist Editor’s Choice, an American Library Association Over the Rainbow Book, and winner of a Lambda Literary Award for transgender fiction. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Southern Maine and teaches college in Florida.

  The Cthulhu Navy Wife

  Sandra McDonald

  ——

  Security

  Sometimes the nature of your husband’s work means you will not know exactly where he is going, or for how long, or what he will be doing in service to the Old Ones. He may not be able to answer questions you pose or discuss other details of his deployment. You might roll over in bed one gray, dreary morning to find him already gone. Perhaps he will return shortly, or several months from now, or not at all. But the little ones need breakfast or changed diapers, so get up with good cheer and face the day. A Navy wife never shirks from duty.