The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction

by Paula Guran

  And I felt the examination grow more active, as whatever attended through the window started to prod at my flaws and cracks.

  The tattoo had been quick, done before I knew what was happening. Not so, here. This thing wanted to change me, though it clearly didn’t care about my opinion on the specifics – probably didn’t even consider that I might have one. I gasped, but still couldn’t rise from where it held me bent almost to the floor, stomach compressing uncomfortably and legs cramping and falling asleep. Worse, a part of me didn’t want to. I’ve never liked my body, not the ass and ankles and skin and face I deal with every day, and not the inside bits now suddenly forced into my awareness. Any change might be for the better – at the very least wouldn’t be anything I could be blamed for.

  But the part that knelt willingly was all conscious. A wave of revulsion and fear surged up to overwhelm any other reaction; my whole body shook and my pulse came so fast it hurt. In the throes of the panic attack, my instincts broke through whatever held me down, as they did everything that might have intent about it. I threw myself from the illuminated circle and scuttled backward until my back pressed against the nearest shelf. If the books wanted to bite me, I’d be ink all over.

  Slowly – no Sherise to interrupt my reactions, no David to talk me down – I started to think in words again. I stared at dust motes floating in the light from the window, made swirling nebulae by the colors. The light hadn’t moved while I curled frozen beside it. I’d lost track of time, but sunlight ought to have shifted across the floor. Maybe there was another room beyond this one, even if my unlikely map told me otherwise.

  If I got up and went closer, I might be able to glimpse whatever lay on window’s other side. That seemed like a bad idea.

  Maybe the books could tell me.

  I pulled myself to my feet, terrified every moment of toppling back into the light. My arm still ached with heat. In the panic’s aftermath I felt washed out emotionally, just numb enough to actually consider sticking around for what I’d come to get.

  The Nature of the Word was bound in calfskin, fine yellow-edged pages typeset save for hand-illuminated letters at the start of chapters. I winced at the yellowing; this ought to be in the rare book room, not the ordinary stacks. Palaces of History was library bound but looked like a reprint of something much earlier, each page imaged from a neatly handwritten monograph with intricate – if disturbing – illustrations. The simply named Libris looked like a Penguin Classics paperback, except that it came from Sarkomand Translations, a publisher and imprint I’d never heard of.

  I found a library cart lurking in a back corner, odd reassurance that the alcove existed for other people, too. Maybe they all knew to avoid the window, or maybe it liked them better. Or maybe I ought to report it – like telling someone when you spot a leaking pipe. I trundled the cart back toward the galactic core.

  I ducked my head at Determination and her companions as I settled at my desk. Powers want respect, Sherise had said, and until I knew what I was doing it was probably safer to give them at least a little. Epiphany’s gaze stood higher now, no longer focused on those of us below. I caught myself staring at her left hand, the one holding her robe. It wasn’t just a pose, I realized: she stood ready to bare her chest to Determination’s spear, and it was her opposite’s eye that she sought to attract.

  I shivered, and forced my attention back to the books. I started with The Nature of the Word: at any minute, I expected someone to come along and tell me it needed to go into protective storage until I could prove my need to touch its fragile pages. Selfish but not sociopathic, I did snag a pair of nitrile gloves from the check-out counter.

  Those who believe the universe was created, believe it was created with words. Those who know it for an accident still understand that language, once created, becomes a force in its own right. Fifteen million years before humanity’s birth, the Tay-yug claimed that miserly gods hid favored words in the hearts of stars, making them unstable and scouring life from worlds that spun too close.

  I sat back, breathing hard. It was a story, of course it was a story, a myth I’d never heard before. A myth of gamma ray bursts, in a book that looked older than the phenomenon’s discovery – but how much did I know about the history of physics? I ought to keep reading. Would, in a moment.

  When I was a kid, for a while I got really into urban legends. Even though I knew better, I’d sit up late reading about chupacabras and the Loch Ness monster. The one that really got to me was the Mothman. It was sort of a humanoid with big bug wings, and people would look out their windows and it would just be hovering there, staring at them. That was it – it never broke the window or hurt anyone, at least not who reported it later. But I’d pull my shades down tight, eyes squeezed shut so that if anything was out there, I wouldn’t see it. Knowing that if I hadn’t read about it, if I hadn’t known it was out there to look for, the windows would have been perfectly safe.

  Of course I already knew, now, that there was something outside.

  I scanned, sampled, turning pages cautiously but skimming as quickly as I could, looking for what I needed – something that would explain what had happened to me. Instead, I learned about books that started plagues or imprisoned their readers, and others that, read in the right place and at the right time, would let you cast your mind out to travel the stars. Stories that could leave your mind a husk colonized by parasitic characters, single words that could rewrite memory.

  I did not slam the book shut. I closed it, carefully, like the rare archival volume that it was. I could not give up reading, wouldn’t blind myself to what it offered, just because there might be monsters inside.

  I hadn’t found anything about tattoos, or stained glass windows – maybe another book would be more relevant. You’ve got to focus when you’re doing research, can’t just let yourself get sucked in by whatever seems shiniest. And “terrifying” is a lot like “shiny.” Libris, with its two-tone paper cover, looked reassuringly pragmatic.

  “How did you get ahold of that?” Sherise’s voice, sharp and angry, froze me with my hand on the cover. My eyes shifted toward The Nature of the Word and I felt my cheeks grow hot. But it was Libris that she snatched from my desk.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I found it in the Zs. I was trying to look up something about—” I pushed up my sleeve to show the galaxy tattoo. It was, I realized, the same shape as the stacks, the same colors as the window. And I’d just made my ignorance obvious, too. “I’m sorry,” I repeated.

  “I’m not mad at you.” She ran a finger across the cover, frowning. “But this shouldn’t have been shelved in the regular stacks. A bit past anything you need to be handling, right now.”

  “Does it eat your brain?” I felt my cheeks flare again, worse for the knowledge that it showed like a beacon.

  She smiled. “Not this one, no. But it’s not translated from any human language, and it’s safer to know what to expect before you get into it.” She tucked it under her arm, though not against bare skin.

  At this point, she could tell anyway that I didn’t know what I was doing. Still, it took a few dry swallows before I could get the words out. They were angrier than I’d intended. “Am I supposed to ask? Or am I supposed to figure it out all on my own and hope I don’t unleash a plague on the whole Gulf Coast?”

  She leaned against the edge of my desk, put Libris back down, patted the off ending volume a couple of times as if to reassure herself that it was still closed. Then she pushed her cloud of hair away from one ear. The whole outer curve had been sculpted into tiny scallops, like waves of flesh, and faded to cheap newsprint gray. It stood like a scar against the warm brown of the rest of her skin. She let the hair spring back.

  “Happened my first day at Crique Foudre. I can hear the books, and hear people and other things thinking when they mean to do harm. Prophecies, sometimes. And people arguing in whispers down the block when I’m trying to sleep. The gifts have sharp edges. There’s no way to know beforehan
d who can handle it all and who can’t, and we’ve learned the hard way that you have to find out most of it for yourself. If someone explains everything straight up, it always ends badly.”

  “Suppose I quit?” I swallowed, because again I hadn’t meant to speak so bluntly, and because I knew the answer. I’d show up at David’s studio, and he’d support me as best he could – no one in Chicago was hard up for librarians – and he wouldn’t criticize me for not being able to cut it in the real world.

  “You could do that. The lady before you left at two months – that’s why we were hiring so late in the summer.” Nothing about how I’d leave them in the lurch if I quit just before the semester started, though it didn’t really need saying. “This is riskier than holding down a desk just about anywhere else. The best I can offer is that if you stick around, you’ll become something special. We all do. Whether that special is more like yourself, or less, depends on luck. And on your own choices, at least a little.”

  I didn’t know whether I ought to be tempted by the “more” or the “less” – or whether I was even crazier than usual to be tempted by either. “What can you tell me? Without things ending badly?”

  She sighed, fidgeted the beads on her earring. I wondered if they drowned out the voices of the books. “That’s always a gamble, but I’ll give it a shot. You know about our patron.”

  “Yeah. Although no one’s told me his name. Or her name. I’d think there’d be a plaque or something – is this one of the things it’s dangerous to know?”

  “No, he just likes to keep a low profile. You might meet him, one of these days.” She closed her eyes and inhaled sharply. “Maybe that’s not the place to start. I’m sorry. I don’t feel like I’ve explained this right to anyone, yet. Maybe this’ll be the time – unless you want me to shut up and let you track it all down for yourself.”

  I shook my head, a bit spooked by her uncertainty.

  “Well. The universe is a dangerous place. It’s not trying to be dangerous, and it’s full of things that have never heard of humans and wouldn’t much care if they did – but not caring can do at least as much harm as hatred, from things that can break you just passing by. The safest way, for a species that wants time to grow up, is to make a few places that can focus the strangeness, draw it away from everywhere else, and help keep it from getting out of control. People have been doing that on earth for millions of years, maybe longer, each learning from fragments left by those who came before, and doing just a little better as a result. This library is one of those places for humans.”

  “Out in—” I just stopped myself from asking what – if she wasn’t just making this up – a vital shield against extinction was doing out in the middle of nowhere, in a state that most of the country couldn’t even bother to protect from floods.

  She smiled wryly, making me think I’d been pretty transparent. “Safer this way. Crique Foudre is heir to Zaluski Library in Warsaw. Our patron traveled there in the 1920s, and when the Nazis destroyed it he knew we’d need another one. He thought, a place that isn’t the capital of anywhere or the center of anything – it would be a lot safer from other humans.”

  “So we’re the quiet heroes who protect the world from terrible cosmic monsters?” I’d seen that show; I would have been happier to leave it on the screen.

  “You’ve been to the edge of the stacks. It’s not that simple. Sometimes we just keep the monsters happy, or distract them, or find a use for them, or study them to learn what else is out there. Sometimes we’re bait. Sometimes we can’t do a damn thing other than watch. And eventually we’ll lose the fight – either to other humans, like Zaluski, or altogether, like the three other species on this world that we know about before us.”

  I shivered. “One more thing to worry about.”

  “That’s one way to handle it, sure.”

  “What do you do?” I asked.

  “I go for distraction, personally. There are so many things to learn here, that you’ll never find in another library that isn’t doing the same work. Things to become. As long as you’re doing your job, the larger cosmic picture kind of takes care of itself, whether or not you grieve over it.”

  “Do you ever worry about asteroids?” I asked David. I was home, curled up with my laptop on the couch, insufficiently distracted by my pretty boyfriend.

  “Like the one that got the dinosaurs?” he asked. “Not really. It doesn’t seem like something that happens very often, and I’m not in a position to do anything about it in any case.”

  “Very logical.” I drew up my knees, watched him pass back and forth across the screen as he made French toast. “Suppose you could do something. Or thought you could?”

  “You mean like a desperate space mission to steer a comet away from Earth? Yeah, I would worry about that. I worry when there’s something I can try, and it matters if I screw up.” He smiled gently. “You’ve got to pick your battles – there’s only so much worry to go around.”

  “Unless you’re me.”

  “Even for you, gorgeous.”

  Later, I realized that I hadn’t asked if he’d rather be in a position to try something, even if he thought he’d screw up, or whether he’d rather do work he was better at, and not have to look.

  On the first day of classes, humidity spilled over the banks of the sky into a spectacular thunderstorm. I eased my car around puddles half-grown into lakes, breathing slowly through the constant strobe of lightning. I arrived ten minutes late, suit soaked through in spite of my umbrella. The AC set me shivering, but Sherise and the other librarians were talking and laughing in the staff room and one of them tossed me a giant beach towel.

  Sherise nodded at me and said, “We’re gonna get slammed even with the rain, so you know. And there are still a dozen professors who need pinning to the wall ’til they hand over their reserve lists.” By the time I got the last math professor to confess the identity of his textbook, and started on the English department, umbrellas filled the foyer and students swirled through the reading room.

  Most of the morning’s reference questions were about what I’d expected. Students wanted their course reserves and panicked about their first day’s homework and didn’t know how to manage the catalogue. But a lot of them seemed to realize they were in sacred space. I saw a dozen conflicting rituals. People blew kisses to the statues, or stood under the trompe l’oeil ceiling with arms raised. One student fussed at my desk for five minutes while I grew increasingly exasperated, then asked hesitantly if I could leave her offering “for the loa Epiphany” after the library closed. She slipped me a sandwich bag filled with cookies and tiny slips of calligraphed poetry, then wanted to know whether we’d fixed the PYTHIAS bugs over the summer.

  After the students cleared out at last, I stayed at my desk for a few minutes trying to catch my breath. Even the allegories seemed tired. Determination’s spear might have drooped a little, unless it just pointed at where some student had annoyed her. I got up and started to put the reference section back in order, then went to give Epiphany her cookies. In the wall below each statue, just above eye level, were little niches that I’d never noticed before. They were easier to spot now, as plenty of people hadn’t bothered with an intermediary for their offerings. There were flowers and pebbles, photos, cupcakes, a thankfully unlit candle, tiny jars of liquor that I was just going to assume came from faculty. I stuck the baggie in the appropriate spot.

  “Hey,” I told Epiphany. I still wasn’t sure about talking with them, but ignoring them didn’t seem wise, and the students knew the place better than I did. “Long day. Keep safe, okay?” I felt her attention on me, and knew that safety didn’t interest her at all – not to give, and not to receive. I trembled: equal parts awe and anxiety, both uncomfortable. Her companions seemed to perk up, their notice sharpening. The air brightened with storm-tinged ozone, and my ears ached as if I’d gone up too fast in an elevator. I felt again the urge to kneel. But I’d spent the day doing my job, and doing it mostly r
ight.

  I looked around, found myself alone in the reading room. “I’m not just going to do what you want,” I said. No response. I shivered.

  “I’m not ignoring you,” I went on. Then, swallowing. “I’m not running away, yet. But we’re going to work together on this, or it’s all going to fall apart.”

  Still no response – maybe Sherise would have been able to hear one – but the pressure lifted a little. My ears popped, painfully.

  “That’s better,” I said. I kept the shakes out of my voice, knowing I would pay later – if not through some screw-up here, then through breaking down when I got home and thought too hard about the whole thing. But then, I’d have paid that price whatever I did. “All right. Was there something you wanted to show me?”

  I left through Epiphany’s door, and followed the pulse of my little galaxy out into the stacks.

  Laird Barron is the author of several books, including The Croning, Occultation, and The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All. His work has also appeared in many magazines and anthologies. An expatriate Alaskan, Barron currently resides in upstate New York. Slate has aptly said of his short fiction: “Relentlessly readable, highly atmospheric, sharply and often arrestingly written – Barron’s prose style resembles, by turns, a high-flown Jim Thompson mixed with a pulp Barry Hannah – and situated in a dizzying assortment of precision-built worlds.”

  As for his contribution to this anthology, Barron explains: “Lovecraft’s fiction covers a broader spectrum than many people realize. It’s important to keep his versatility in mind when tilling this particular patch of earth for a themed anthology. ‘A Clutch’ isn’t meant to emulate Lovecraft, but rather to respond to certain elements of his work – black magic, corruption, ancient secrets best left buried, and lurking doom. I filtered these elements through my own conception of a weird tale. Crack the shell and have a look.”