The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction

by Paula Guran

  Noor was shaking. Her bladder let go and wetness spread from her thighs to her navel. The cadets had begun to chant. The voices loud and eerily synergistic in the murk rose higher and higher. “Our blood Yours, our meat Yours. On this day gladly we give You our sins . . .”

  Tabinda uttered a sudden sob. Her eyes were craters filled with fear and exhilaration. Abar stepped forward. “Don’t cry, slut. Don’t you dare,” he said in a guttural voice that wasn’t his. “For this part, we steel our heart.” He handed her the knife. It nicked the hollow below her thumb and a drop of blood appeared. Tabinda held the glass knife high like a hammer. The muscles of her shoulders were quivering. The knife blade lashed out. A gurgling sound, and the bundle was thrashing. The perfect fingernails drummed. Tabinda’s hand sawed back and forth and glistening dark liquid gushed into the hole.

  “He whose house is a-boil, the Adar Anshar. The Croucher in the Mounds. The Terrible Emperor of the Night.”

  Noor was mute with fear. This wasn’t happening. This couldn’t be happening. She was at the college in Petaro, there had been an accident, and she was in a coma. She was still in the Burn Center at New York Presbyterian after the blast. Her shoulder burns had become infected and she was delirious, watching her wounds glisten blue-green.

  The cadets crooned and gathered around her. The glass spears were thrown away. Between them they hauled her to the edge of the hole, bare feet chaffing on the brick. Tabinda paused, leaned back, wiped her forehead. In the lamp flame the liquid pouring down the hole was ochre. Tabinda murmured. Abar grabbed Noor’s head and yanked it back. Fiery bits of glass impaled on metal skewers were jabbed into her nostrils. She struggled but it was futile. The smoke singed her sinuses, parched her tongue, flayed her throat. She gasped for water. A metal chalice was thrust into her hand and she drank eagerly, a grainy hot liquid that could have been molten glass or blood swirled with sand.

  In this new state, this moiled clenching, Noor rose. She was twisted upward in a spiral beguiling as the lines on a newborn’s palm.

  Below her were barren lands stripped by heat, their dwellers evolved into the formless. Towering mammoth structures squelched in magma. Half-buried in this boiling ground were giant hunchbacks whose humps formed the city’s mounds. When they stirred, brackish fluid gushed through ciliated maps wavering from their flesh. The maps beat with an unnatural rhythm. Drawn from the hunchbacks’ vasculature, they pumped pyroclastic liquid through the land’s anatomy. A veined umbilical cord surged from the city center, rising higher and higher, trembling through its singed sky, until it traversed it. The cord shot outward, connecting this world with a blue-green one.

  My blood is Yours. My skin is Yours.

  Noor splayed her hooves against the throbbing meat tunnel of this omphalos and crawled up-down inside it like a spider. She had three faces, myriad eyes, and a swollen belly. Her brother Muneer hung impaled on a giant claw on the opposite wall. His tongue was rotten, he was covered with running sores. As she watched with her dozen eyes, he swelled suddenly and exploded.

  Noor cried out. Her many limbs retracted; suddenly she was falling, tumbling, plummeting until she landed on a hard surface, shattering her extraneous appendages. A dense liquid clogged her airways. She couldn’t breathe. She gasped and kicked and someone slapped her back, grabbed her hair, pulled her up.

  She sat before the now-bubbling aperture, drenched in hot blood. Clots were already beginning to form in her hair. The citadel was dark except for the intermittent flaring of oil lamps. The mist was thicker, the whirling of the procession speedier. Noor couldn’t make out who they were, how many they were. The locus of the dance had shifted away from her toward the other end of the pool. She couldn’t see Tabinda anywhere. Her hands and feet were still tied. Sobbing, she slid backward on her buttocks, turned, and began wriggling to the ledge like a worm. Faces glistening with blood protruded from the mist and disappeared. Hundreds of eyes blinked and died.

  Someone touched her foot. Noor screamed. Images of that monstrous city swirled in her brain and her eyes bulged until a red curtain slipped over her vision – just like in the early days after Muneer’s death. The smell of his flesh, cooked from the blast, on her skin; the sharp iron odor of his blood; the taste of her own misery and terror as she stood shrieking in the summer wind, watching the red-and-white debris that was once her brother – they would come to her months after she left the hospital.

  In the end, Muneer had been the only one to die that terrible day. She – she had run to a cop. Had fled her murderous sibling and had been fleeing since. But, afterward, everywhere she looked was a skein of red death wavering like a heat cloud – in the evenings and in the shadowy mornings, until she could hardly leave the house.

  Her removal to Pakistan had been a relief.

  The Pashtun boy Dara’s face loomed above her. It was covered with gashes. He had blood around his mouth. He put a finger to his lips – sshh! – slid a glass knife out, and began to hack at the rope around her ankles.

  The air thrummed. Voltaic ideograms crackled in the mist. A blueblack diagonal shimmered twenty feet away. A door set low and very wide. The oil lamps were clustered around it, flickering like fireflies.

  Dara’s hands dripped with sweat. A final swipe, and her feet were free. She couldn’t believe it. She could move her legs. Sobbing with relief, she flexed her thighs until she was on her knees. Her period was flowing again, but she hardly noticed. It pooled around her feet and snaked toward the libation hole.

  The knife moved to her wrists.

  “Goat,” Dara said, his eyes dead and crimson. “Depart, goat. Leave before He arrives.”

  He slashed at the rope on her wrists until it, too, gave. Noor tottered to a stand. The room tilted and her vision turned foggy. She shook her head. A loud noise, like a door banging shut in the wind, came from behind her. Someone screamed in terror or triumph.

  Without looking back, Noor broke into a run.

  Blackness behind her and darkness in front. She lurched to the stairway and took them three at a time. On the ninth step she slipped and the crack of her butt landed on its edge. Such pain rocketed through her, she thought she’d fractured her spine. Scraping noises in the distance, then galloping. Whatever it was, it moved fast. One hand on her hip, teeth clenched, heart thundering in her ears, Noor glanced back.

  Tabinda was at the first step, snorting, pawing at the bricks. She was on all fours. Her face was completely static now, her forehead smooth. Not a fold, not a single crease, as if she were made from polished glass. Drool dangled in corkscrew threads from her chin.

  As Noor watched, Tabinda lowered her head, sniffed the bricks stained with Noor’s menstrual blood, and began to lap at them.

  Noor turned and scuttled up the rest of the stairs. Pain chewed her ribs and back and hips, but she leapt blindly, not caring if she broke every bone in her body. Tabinda’s smell behind her was acrid and meaty. It rushed at Noor. Noor vaulted across the last step and sprang toward the iron door.

  Outside, the fog was a solid wall. Noor slammed through it, running – blind and barefoot – using the brooding stupa as her only directional marker. Chips of glass and sharp pebbles stung her soles. Branches and what felt like bird bones crunched. Something bellowed behind her. A loud animal grunt, then a pause. Noor clapped a hand over her mouth and kept running. She was wet and cold and trembling. Where was the fucking chopper? The night sky was silent. Her shalwar was soaked. She expected to crash face first into a wall any moment now. Instead, the sounds of the creature faded behind her. Was it licking her blood trail at every step?

  Noor fled, weeping. The sharp bites of the alley became hard ground. The fog thinned, showing her the school bus sprawled in the lot like a dead animal. She bounded toward it before remembering she didn’t have the keys.

  Noor wanted to scream, to slap her breasts, and fall down, crying. She fought the impulse. Behind her the city was wailing. An earsplitting surreal ululation that bounced from wall to wall, door
to door, and razored through her head. Lights bobbed in the corner of her eye. She sped past the vehicle, heading toward the road winding out of the ruins, spraying up dirt behind her.

  The fog thickened again. Icy air knifed in and out of her lungs. When the sounds of the ruins died, she slowed to a trot. She was shaking all over and crying. Hot tears on frosted cheeks. Her feet were slippery with blood and stung in a hundred places. She had no idea where she was and the moon was dead somewhere. She was plodding through squelching mud now. Another step and her foot sank ankle deep. The wind whistled and picked up. Something rattled. She flinched from the sound. Pattering of feet or clomping of hooves? Terror washed over her. She yanked her foot out, lunged, and landed in gelid water. Something slithered over her foot. A shower of water plumed over her when she struggled upright, tripped, and nearly fell again.

  A misshapen root wide as her arm. She was at the riverbank. Had she once thought its smell rotten? It was mossy and sweet. The Sind River gurgled and babbled. Malformed cypress knees poking out of the fog like tombstones. Ghost acacia and lilacs swayed above her, their cocooned branches rustling. Glinting eyes speckled the webs. They undulated and disappeared as she splashed through the tree line. The fog curtain was so dense now she could wrap it around herself and disappear forever.

  A figure bobbed ahead in the trees. A flash of light that ignited the mist briefly and was gone. Noor’s eyes widened. Her heart lurched and began to thunder in her temples. Part of her wanted to turn and bolt, but what if it was the army come to find them? With utmost care she lifted the cuffs of her shalwar and tiptoed through the water. Curls of dark moss like a woman’s hair floated between her legs which gleamed with congealed blood. The cypress knees were more numerous here. They protruded in various geometric shapes.

  One was almost like a little stool.

  Her sight rippled, but not before she saw the figure crouching in the foliage. It was very tall and angular and seemed to perch on or by a poplar trunk. It wore something around its head, which could have been a headdress or a shawl.

  Hamid! The bus driver. It had to be him. Dear God, let it be him. Noor choked back a sob and sloshed through mist and river water toward the silent figure riding the trees.

  Silvia Moreno-Garcia wrote “Legacy of Salt” around the time she was reading a lot of philosophy of biology materials and also a Darwin biography as part of her Master’s degree studies. “Some of the scientific issues I was exploring collided with this story. I have always found ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ to be quite fascinating since it seems to dip its toes into the notion of repulsion/attraction. Is it such a bad thing to swim eternally in underwater palaces? I kind of like the idea. The Yucatán peninsula is definitely nothing like New England but the numerous markers for archeological sites somewhat reminded me of the notion of the past creeping upon the present, which occurs in some of Lovecraft’s fiction.” The story also features a family – as with the Marshes of Innsmouth – who has an odd heritage.

  Moreno-Garcia is the author of Signal to Noise, a novel about music, magic, and Mexico City. Her first collection, This Strange Way of Dying was a finalist for The Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. Her stories have also been collected in Love & Other Poisons. She has edited the anthologies She Walks in Shadows, Dead North, and Fractured: Tales of the Canadian Post-Apocalypse.

  Legacy of Salt

  Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  ——

  The journey to He’la’ was uneventful. He arrived on time, the noon heat greeting him like an old lover. The train platform was filled with vendors hawking their wares. Eduardo ignored them and looked for their chauffeur, but it was a young fellow he did not know who greeted him. The driver had a bit of the Marin look – the hooded eyes, fleshy lips – and Eduardo wondered if he was one of the family’s by-blows. It would not be uncommon.

  He slid into the car. The Lincoln Phaeton had been a beauty when his uncle had it imported from the States, but that was more than forty years ago, in 1923. Time had chipped its paint, dented it a bit, and now it looked more an oddity than a sensation.

  It took an hour to drive from He’la’ to the hacienda and with each minute the terrain grew more rugged, the towns smaller, until only old Mayan ruins greeted him from the side of the road, an ancient stone frog, associated with the rain god Chaac, staring blindly at Eduardo as they plunged down a hill. A few minutes later they reached the gates of the white hacienda. Before the Revolution it had produced henequen, but now the machine house lay quiet.

  It looked the same since Eduardo had left, when he was twelve, to study at a boy’s school in Mexico City. He could glimpse the dirt road that led behind the house, towards the small cenote of perfect blue waters where he swam as a child. There were several waterholes near their home – they dotted all of the peninsula.

  A little girl in a faded pink dress sat in front of the house. He wondered if she was a servant or one of his younger cousins, but she scrambled inside before he could introduce himself.

  “They told me to bring you to the Blue Room as soon as you arrived,” the driver said.

  “Very well,” he replied, though he had been hoping he could shower and change his clothes before meeting the family.

  He followed the driver to the main living room – which still had its blue velvet curtains and heavy wooden furniture, the portrait of grandfather Ludovico with his thick moustache dominating the room. Beneath the portrait was the old armchair that uncle Zacarias preferred. But uncle Zacarias was not in his usual place, smoking his pipe. Instead it was a young woman in a dress of antique lace who rose to meet him.

  He did not recognize her, though she was a Marin. She had the heavy-lidded eyes fringed with thick lashes and long black hair that curled past her shoulders. Her neck was long and elegant and her hands, as she extended one towards him in greeting, were delicately formed. Despite her anachronistic dress and hairdo she was very beautiful.

  “Cousin, I trust you had a good trip,” she said, smiling and with the smile came recognition: Imelda.

  She’d been a child of nine when he had left, carrying an antique doll under her arm.

  “Very good, thank you,” he said.

  “You must forgive us. My father wanted to greet you himself but he is indisposed and Aunt Celeste is watching over him. He’ll speak to you tomorrow. But today you will have supper with me. You must want to take your nap.”

  A nap. Yes. He’d forgotten about that. They’d sleep until the midday heat had dissipated.

  “I can show you to your old room,” she said.

  Old was the right word. He recognized the faded wallpaper, the great armoire, the four-poster iron bed with its white sheets. Nothing had changed. The paintings were the same and so were the prints he’d left on the walls. In a corner, forgotten and lonesome, was the rocking horse of his childhood, which was no horse, actually, but a seahorse with a curling tail. The only new element in the room was his suitcase.

  He was glad he had not brought Natalia. She would have found the place alien, depressing. He himself could not help the disappointment as he looked around. Everything seem so worn and faded.

  “Thank you,” he said. “May I use the telephone? I should call my fiancée.”

  “Have you forgotten?” Imelda said. “There is no telephone.”

  Eduardo frowned. “But you phoned me.”

  “Our lawyer phoned you, from his office in He’la’,” she said. “If you want to send a telegram you can give the message to Mario and he’ll send it for you.”

  “No, it’s fine.”

  He did not plan to stay for long. In fact, he wanted to leave the next day but first he must speak to his uncle. Zacarias was the head of the house and he had been generous with Eduardo’s allowance. Eduardo was aware that this generosity could cease. If his uncle summoned him, he must present himself.

  “I’ll let you rest,” Imelda said. “Mario will fetch you when it’s time for supper.”

>   Alone, he explored the room, opening the armoire and running his hands over the hangers. He browsed the dusty books he’d left behind, and even gave the old seahorse a little kick, setting it in motion.

  He fell asleep quickly and the warmth of the jungle inspired wild dreams. He dreamt Natalia was in labor and he was attending the delivery of his first child, but what pushed out from between her legs was not a baby. It was a pale, strange thing that had no legs and in place of a face only a maw full of sharp, needle-like teeth. It let out a piercing scream and he woke covered in sweat, his heart hammering in his chest.

  Mario – that was the name of the young man who had picked him up at the station – came for him a couple of hours later. He took him to the formal dining room. The dishes were the fine porcelain ones, which were ushered out for special occasions. He sat across from his cousin.

  “Is it just the two of us?” he asked.

  “Aunt Celeste is still watching over Papa and the young ones have eaten already.”

  He recalled the girl with the pink dress. Yes, he’d heard Aunt Isabel had married and had children. The little girl might be her daughter.

  “Are they the only elders left at La Ceiba? Where is Aunt Isabel?”

  “She’s left. The change came upon her last summer. Bartolomeo and Patricio changed two years ago. Juana is in He’la’, and it seems she will not change, so I imagine she’ll remain there.”

  “Then it’s just Celeste and your father.”

  “Well, there are the other branches,” Imelda said, with a flicker of her hands. “There are plenty of elders in Los Azulejos and others in Principio.”