The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction

by Paula Guran

  “I guess not as many families are traveling right now since it’s so close to school.”

  Leonard nodded, satisfied, but the hostess didn’t wait long enough to see it.

  She sat them in a booth by the window. Alexandra saw the western sky and the sun change color like autumn leaves.

  “I still can’t believe you’ve never been to the ocean,” Leonard said over his menu, not lifting his eyes from the rows of barbecued meat and pasta. “You’ve never felt the urge? Not even once?”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s never really been a priority, I guess. I’ve never been much of a traveler.”

  “Wow, that’s amazing. I feel like I’d be happy if all I did was travel. You know: get on a plane and hop from one place to another – like that couple in the story you told me about earlier. Maybe stick around for a few days. When I was just out of school, I took a trip around Europe. It was fantastic!”

  She nodded, not sure how to explain that she’d never felt the same drive. The idea left her queasy. Already, she felt so lost, so untethered, that the only way she could hang on was to surround herself with the familiar, the comfortable. At home, she knew where her favorite restaurants were, where to get the clothes she liked. At home, she knew how far it was to the office and how long it took her to get back in the evening. At home, she was safe, and the constant gnawing fear that seemed so much worse at night, in the dark, behind her closed eyes – that fear that she was anything but safe, adrift in the void of the unfathomable universe – was a muted shout from deep within. The terrors squirmed inside of her, but she was able to keep them contained.

  Leonard couldn’t understand. He clearly enjoyed the sensation.

  “What’s great about Europe is how old everything is.” He looked at her, but his eyes saw something more. “We don’t have that same sense of history here. You walk around a European city, you feel part of how ancient everything is. It’s all stood for so long you begin to wonder if it was there before there were people to see it. The old world is so close at hand, yet it’s so distant and unknowable. You walk by buildings with the most beautiful and ornate carvings – even those half in ruin – and they seem so impossible. Yet, there they stand, and have stood through riots, revolts, and marches; man has done so many things by uniting into a single force, both for good and evil. It’s amazing to be in touch with all of that.”

  “I’ve always thought about going,” Alexandra lied, “but I’ve just never done it. Maybe one day.”

  “We should totally go. I’d love to show you around. I think you’d really get a kick out of it.”

  She smiled. Then the waitress arrived with their drinks.

  “Are you sure this is right?”

  They’d driven for an hour after leaving the restaurant, and in that time traffic had thinned and the dark orange sun had reached the horizon. The encroaching dusk only heightened her panicked anxiety.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “We’re still in upstate New York, but I can’t figure out where. Nothing matches the map.” Worries swam in her head in frenzy, and she couldn’t stop herself from feeling she’d made horrendous mistake in her calculation, and her precious map was wrong. If that were true, she truly was adrift, and the feeling of the earth widening around her made her limbs stiffen, her breath wheeze. If Leonard feared the same, his face did not betray it, covered as it was by deepening shadows.

  “Maybe it’s time to pull over for the night. We can’t be that far from the coast – maybe a few hours? Let’s stop at a motel and get a new start tomorrow when we have light.”

  It took another twenty minutes to find a motel, and by that time the highway was so dark the motel’s glowing red sign shone brighter than the moon. Leonard pulled into the parking lot, and helped Alexandra out of the car. After traveling for so long, she felt unsteady, as though her body was still hurtling forward along the highway, and it took a few steps before she saw the world through human eyes again.

  The man behind the counter couldn’t have been more than eighteen, his face spotted and blotched, his curly hair shaved near the temples. He was courteous, but he was bored and tired and went through the motions because he had to. Even when, for her peace of mind if nothing else, Alexandra asked him to show her where on the map the hotel was, he did so with a vague point, and wouldn’t be pressed to do more. He seemed more interested in whatever he’d been doing as they arrived, and when she looked over the reception desk partition while he entered Leonard’s name into the computer, she saw textbooks lying spine-flat beside the phone. The titles were upside down, but the pictures looked like star charts.

  “So you do know something about maps. Are you studying astronomy?”

  He didn’t bother looking away from the computer screen. He simply and unceremoniously slid his open notebook to cover the page. She looked at Leonard, who shrugged nervously but said nothing to the boy. Alexandra hated herself for backing down. She even thanked the boy when he gave them the key.

  Later, in the motel room, she remained fuming at the small wooden desk, trying to retrace the route on her map. All the lines looked the same to her, all the roads feeding into the highway like rivulets. Leonard off-handedly dismissed her unhappiness.

  “He was probably worried you were from head office or something, checking to make sure he was doing paid work and not school work.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, looking from her map as he buttoned his shirt. “It didn’t feel like that’s what he was worried about.”

  “Well, what else could it be?”

  She didn’t know. And, she supposed Leonard was right. It didn’t matter. “All that matters is that we’re here, together,” he said. He ran his fingers through her hair and she put down her pen and looked at him. She touched the side of his warm face, felt the stubble scratch her fingers. He took her hand.

  The room was small. The only other furniture was the uncomfortable queen-sized bed, and its springs creaked with each small movement. Leonard suggested they move the blankets onto the floor, where it was quieter, and it was lying there that he moved his hand under the front of her nightshirt and placed it on her bare breast. He then lifted himself onto his other arm and placed his mouth over hers.

  He tasted of salt, but mixed with the sweetness of his saliva Alexandra didn’t mind. His tongue found hers, invading her mouth tentatively, and the flesh was rough and soft and made the hairs along the back of her neck stand. Her mind drifted for a moment, swaying as though in a dream, and she had to focus herself to remain in the present with Leonard and not recede into her crowded thoughts.

  Leonard’s face twisted as he pushed into her, as though willing himself to occupy the same physical space, to join with her on a quantum level. Yet though she bit her lip and arched her back, and though she felt her flesh warm to the point of fire, she felt herself powerlessly being pulled away from him all the same, cast backward into her mind, a powerless witness to events unfolding. Leonard’s breath hitched, his brow knitted, he cried some unintelligible word, and she felt the warmth of him flooding into her, coursing through her body like an violent tide, reaching each extremity. Her fingers vibrated, her scalp raised. Leonard continued thrusting afterward, but she couldn’t tell for how long while lost in her muddled head. When he finally rolled off, out of breath, she had returned to the surface of her thoughts, and felt aching sadness, but she did her best to throttle it as he perched his head on his bent arm and brushed the hair from her face with the other. He said it was so he could see her better, but she saw nothing in the dark.

  “Are you enjoying the trip so far?”

  “I think so,” she said. “I like that we’re doing it together. I don’t think I could have done it alone.”

  It wasn’t until she spoke the words that she realized how true they were. Her father’s leaving had done more to keep her tied down than anything else, and she had succumbed until she was no different than those giant shadows of slow-spinning blades she and Leonard seen f
ixed to the horizon, in motion yet unmoving. They were the reason she let Leonard take her away from where it was safe. If she didn’t try to rebel against the sickness she felt the farther from home she traveled, he would surely be the next person lost to her. So she followed him into the unknown, with only her thin overdrawn map as protection, and did her best to endure.

  Leonard stroked her hair as the two lay in the dark of the motel room. He whispered to her encouragingly, trying to ease her terror, and she struggled to concentrate on what he said and not get lost in her own anxieties.

  “I keep thinking about how much you’re going to love the ocean. You’ll absolutely freak when you see it – especially if we take a boat out to watch the whales. I went once before with a— well, she was a girl I knew. It was a few years ago. Anyway, going out on the ocean is a trip, pure and simple.” He paused, uncertain he should continue, giving her a chance to ask about who that other woman was. She wondered how many women he’d taken there, how many before her had there been. But Alexandra was succumbing to the warmth of his touch, and his droning voice. She didn’t want to disturb it by speaking.

  “Even if you don’t see any whales, you see all sorts of other crazy things. When I was out there, I just happened to be on the boat with a marine biologist, and she pretty much became the de facto tour guide for us. There was this school of fish . . . Have you ever seen a huge school of fish before? Maybe on television? It was larger than that. It was massive. All those sleek black bodies slicing through the water, all moving as one.” He moved his hand away as if to illustrate the size, but even if it weren’t too dark to see, Alexandra did not open her eyes. “They say the reason a school of fish can react so quickly is because they act together, each fish part of a single super-mind. They’re much more of a hive than bees are, I think. The school stretched out so far I couldn’t see its edges, as though they encompassed the sea – millions of lithe bodies becoming one giant creature beneath the waves – all sharing a single thought, all using a single voice. It was so beautiful. I really hope we get to do that – go out on the water. You have no idea what it’s like!”

  Leonard’s disembodied voice continued whispering nonsense to her in the dark. It was warm and comforting, so she let him ramble on as the day’s journey finally found her.

  * * *

  In her dreams, she and Leonard drove the length of an extended highway bridge, flanked on both sides by endless water. The wheels hummed as they passed over the asphalt, so filling the car with volume she heard nothing else. Not the radio, not Leonard beside her, not the black shapes that crested the water’s turbulent surface before submerging once more. She heard nothing but the teeth-gnashing drone. Even her shouts were inaudible over the noise. Lost and panicked, she felt they’d been driving that road forever. They were moving too fast, and when she looked down she saw her own foot pressing the pedal to the floor of the car. Reflexively, she lifted it, and the throbbing in her head intensified in response. The only way to quell her nausea was to press the pedal harder, move faster, burn along the solitary bridge. She looked beside her but the passenger seat was empty; she alone was driving. She alone was crying. And she drove. And drove. And drove.

  And she did not wake well rested. She felt drained; her swollen, tired eyes nearly impossible to open. At some point before morning Alexandra had moved into the bed, dragging a single blanket with her, and from beneath it she watched Leonard perform his morning rituals. She rolled her sour tongue and wished she had some water, though the notion of drinking anything made her ill.

  “Good morning,” Leonard said. “I’m pretty much ready if you want to hop in the shower now.”

  “I think I might lie here a bit longer. I’m not ready to get up yet.”

  “Er . . . okay,” he said. “But we’ve got to check-out, so don’t leave it too long.”

  “Why? I thought we had until eleven.”

  He stopped his preparations to look at her. “What time do you think it is?”

  She rolled over and checked the display on her cell phone. The digits didn’t immediately make sense. How could it be nearly half-past ten?

  “Why did you let me sleep so long?”

  “Let you? How was I supposed to stop you? You wouldn’t budge this morning. That must have been some dream.”

  Fragments surfaced in her memory, flashes of that expansive body, the foreboding of what lay ahead. She felt restless and agitated, possessed by a tension nearly at its limit

  “Yeah, it was pretty crazy,” she said, then stretched her arms as far as she could and sat up. The discomfort in her head worsened. “Ugh. I feel horrible.”

  “Take your shower. You’ll feel better once we eat.”

  She rubbed her palms against her face, doubtful.

  Out the Chevrolet’s window the trees had returned, though they kept a cautious distance from the highway. Leaves slipped off in the breeze in a steady stream, golds and scarlets in long spiraling chains through the air. Alexandra and Leonard continued eastward, and with each mile traveled the tether Alexandra felt tightening since she awoke, the tether to her home in the dry country, stretched thinner and thinner. Staring out the window, trying to keep her eyes open while her skull tightened, she felt something like a soft pop, and her vision filled with light. Somewhere ahead, somewhere distant, somewhere future, a soft gentle roar echoed. The waves, the surf, the vastness. Leonard was right. There was power in the ocean. She heard its whisper for the first time, urging her onward. Fingers wriggling inside her head.

  “How long before we get there?” she asked. Her condition hadn’t improved since waking, but the discomfort had become a dull ache behind her eyes. Her mouth parched, head throbbing, she did her best to hide it from Leonard.

  “Only a few hours. Maybe two? You’re the one with the map.”

  She nodded and looked down at it, but the brightness of the sun seemed to flare, and no matter how she squinted she couldn’t see the lines she had drawn. Everything was escaping, fluttering into the ether, and no matter how desperately she tried to catch and draw it back they merely slithered through her fingers.

  “I know you have everything plotted out,” Leonard said, nodding his head toward her without taking his eyes from the road or the cars he was weaving among, “but it’s amazing how much has come back to me. I remember that hill over there—” He pointed off to the left at a large incline, the peak of which was a new horizon across the cloudless sky; “—and how shadows moved across it. This place, where we are right at this second, is so beyond real that I can barely process it. Some people say there are extra senses? This must be what they’re talking about, because I can sense how much we belong together, on this journey, right now.”

  Alexandra nodded, though barely understood him as he continued. The pain rattling through her skull intensified. But instead of dulling and distancing her from reality, it drew the world into sharper focus. The rush of the ocean a hundred miles away echoed in her crowded head, quelling her lifelong displacement and isolation. The car traveled quicker toward the coast, quicker than she’d thought possible, and while Leonard spoke Alexandra’s eyes returned to the over-bright map crumpled in her hands that was coming into focus. The folds condensed the lines she had plotted, shortening the distance between where their trip had begun and their final destination. The truth of the journey slipped into focus, and Alexandra finally understood. Eased of the nag of dislocation, the knowledge of where she was – of when she was – became clear. And it felt good to finally understand. Beneath the discomfort of her throbbing head she wondered if that was how the rest of the world felt. Present. Aware.

  Cars whizzed past as the Chevrolet raced across the highway, barely slowing for the austere toll booths. Leonard’s face was serene in the bathing sunlight, while Alexandra’s was covered by jittering hands working her throbbing temples. When the pain became too unbearable, Alexandra asked if they could pull into a rest stop so she could use the washroom, and there she splashed water on her face and t
ook some chalky tablets, but the endeavor did nothing. She remained in excruciating pain, and yet was terrified Leonard might stop if he learned the truth. The risk was near incalculable, so instead, with the taste of bland chalk still on her tongue, she smiled and told him everything was fine. But even as she did she barely saw his face behind the stars that had gathered in her vision. His muted voice asked her twice if she were okay, and Alexandra responded with forced casualness. She hoped she didn’t look as pale as her reflection in the washroom mirror has suggested, or speak with the slur she certainly heard. But if Leonard noticed either, he was too polite to say, and they were soon back in the car speeding toward the ocean.

  The highway signs increased with the amount of traffic, forcing them to slow down, but it was clear they were closing in on the coast. Commuters clogged the lanes beneath a sun risen to near its height, and the heat in the car steadily increased. Leonard seemed unbothered, but Alexandra had to remove her jacket and cardigan in an effort to cool down. The spasms in her head multiplied.

  “The earliest we can check into the hotel is three o’clock, so we might as well go to the ocean first. There a little town off the water called Bearskin Point that would be perfect. It’s where I caught the whale-watching boat, so we can find out when it runs as well.”

  Alexandra’s headache knotted itself, but she kept her face calm. “Sure,” she said. It was all she could manage without betraying distress.

  After a time, Leonard stopped asking questions as he navigated the merging highways to Bearskin Point. Alexandra looked down at her map through squinting eyes as the lines contorted and skewed. Each time she thought the car was off-course, a landmark passed suggesting the opposite. She asked Leonard how he knew where he was going.

  “I don’t. I’m just following the signs.” But even with the throb in her head, she knew there were no such signs. The map had been important until then, the foundation on which she’d been able to survive for so long. But the ocean, too, called to her, its quiet voice growing, and she didn’t know which she could trust.