The Book of Cthulhu

by Neil Gaiman

  Once out of the building his mind teetered like a dislocated compass. Again the sky seemed brittle glass, ready to crack, and when he moved to shake off the obsession he found himself urged towards the edge of Brichester. A woman flinched from him as he snarled himself to a halt. “Sorry,” he called after her. Whatever’s in that direction, it isn’t the show I’ve been invited to. But there must be something there. Maybe I went there when I was young. Have a look when I can. Before I sleepwalk there.

  Although he could have taken a bus into Lower Brichester, where the exhibition was, he walked. Clear my head, perhaps, if I don’t get high on petrol first. The sky was thin and blue; nothing more, now. He swung his briefcase. Haven’t heard of these artists before. Who knows, they could be good.

  He hadn’t been through Lower Brichester for months, and was taken aback by its dereliction. Dogs scrabbled clattering in gouged shop-fronts, an uprooted streetlamp lay across a road, humped earth was scattered with disembowelled mattresses, their entrails fluttering feebly. He passed houses where one window was blinded with brick, the next still open and filmy with a drooping curtain. He examined his ticket. Believe it or not, I’m on the right track.

  Soon whole streets were derelict. There was nothing but Ingels, the gaping houses and uneven pavements, the discreet sky, his footsteps alone; the rush of the city was subdued, quiescent. The houses went by, shoulder to shoulder, ribs open to the sky, red-brick fronts revealing their jumble of shattered walls and staircases. Ingels felt a lurking sympathy for the area in its abandonment, its indifference to time. He slowed down, strolling. Let myself go a bit. The private view’s open for hours yet. Relax. He did, and felt an irrational impulse pleading with him.

  And why not, he thought. He glanced about: nobody. Then he began to lope through the deserted streets, arms hanging, fingers almost touching the road. Unga bunga, he thought. One way to prepare myself for the primitives, I suppose.

  He found his behaviour touched a memory; perhaps the memory was its source. A figure running crouched through ruins, somewhere nearby. A kind of proof of virility. But they hadn’t been deserted city streets, he thought, loping. Just flat blocks of black rock in which square windows gaped. Abandoned long before but hardly affected by time. A figure running along a narrow path through the stone, not looking at the windows.

  Clouds were creeping into the sky; darkness was suffusing the streets around him. Ingels ran, not looking at the houses, allowing them to merge with the memory they touched. It was coming clearer. You had to run all the way along one of the stone paths. Any path at all, for there were no intersections, just a straight unbroken run. You had to run fast, before something within the windows became aware of you, rather as a carnivorous plant becomes aware of a fly. The last part of the run was the worst, because you knew that at any moment something would appear in all the windows at once: things that, although they had mouths, were not faces—

  Ingels stumbled wildly as he halted, glaring up at the empty windows of the houses. What on earth was that? he thought distractedly. Like one of those dreams I used to have, the ones that were so vivid. Of course, that’s what it must have been. These streets reminded me of one of them. Though the memory felt much older, somehow. From the womb, no doubt, he shouted angrily at his pounding heart.

  When he reached the exhibition he walked straight past it. Returning, he peered at the address on the ticket. My God, this is it. Two of a street of dingy but tenanted terraced houses had been run together; on the front door of one, in lettering he’d taken for graffiti, were the words LOWER BRICHESTER ARTS LAB. He recalled how, when it had opened last year, the invitations to the opening had arrived two days later. The project he’d described after a hurried telephone interview hadn’t looked at all like this. Oh well, he thought, and went in.

  In the hall, by the reception desk, two clowns were crawling about with children on their backs. One of the children ran behind the desk and gazed up at Ingels. “Do you know where the exhibition is?” he said. “Up your arse,” she said, giggling. “First floor up,” said one of the clowns, who Ingels now realised was a made-up local poet, and chased the children into a playroom full of inflatables.

  The first floor was a maze of plywood partitions in metal frames. On the partitions hung paintings and sketches. As Ingels entered, half a dozen people converged on him, all the artists save one, who was trying to relight a refractory cone of incense. Feeling outnumbered, Ingels wished he’d made it to the maze. “You’ve just missed the guy from Radio Brichester,” one said. “Are you going to talk to all of us, like him?” another asked. “Do you like modern art?” “Do you want coffee?”

  “Now leave him be,” said Annabel Pringle, as Ingels recognised her from her picture on the cover of the catalogue. ”They’re new to exhibiting, you see, you can’t blame them. I mean, this whole show is my idea but their enthusiasm. Now I can explain the principles as you go round if you like, or you can read them in the catalogue.”

  “The latter, thanks.” Ingels hurried into the maze, opening the typed catalogue. A baby with an ear-trumpet, which was 2: Untitled. 3 was a man throwing his nose into a wastebasket, and Untitled. 4: Untitled. 5, 6, 7—Well, their paintings are certainly better than their prose, Ingels thought. The incense unravelled ahead of him. A child playing half-submerged in a lake. A blackened green-tinged city shouldering up from the sea. A winged top hat gliding over a jungle. Suddenly Ingels stopped short and turned back to the previous painting. He was sure he had seen it before.

  22: Atlantis. But it wasn’t like any Atlantis he’d seen pictured. The technique was crude and rather banal, obviously one of the primitives, yet Ingels found that it touched images buried somewhere in him. Its leaning slabs of rock felt vast, the sea poured from its surfaces as if it had just exploded triumphantly into sight. Drawn closer, Ingels peered into the darkness within a slab of rock, beyond what might be an open doorway. If there were the outline of a pale face staring featurelessly up from within the rock, its owner must be immense. If there were, Ingels thought, withdrawing: but why should he feel there ought to be?

  When he’d hurried around the rest of the exhibition he tried to ask about the painting, but Annabel Pringle headed him off. “You understand what we mean by associational painting?” she demanded. “Let me tell you. We select an initial idea by aleatory means.”

  “Eh?” Ingels said, scribbling.

  “Based on chance. We use the I Ching, like John Cage. The American composer, he originated it. Once we have the idea we silently associate from it until each of us has an idea they feel they must communicate. This exhibition is based on six initial ideas. You can see the diversity.”

  “Indeed,” Ingels said. “When I said eh I was being an average reader of our paper, you understand. Listen, the one that particularly interested me was number 22. I’d like to know how that came about.”

  “That’s mine,” one young man said, leaping up as if it were House.

  “The point of our method,” Annabel Pringle said, gazing at the painter, “is to erase all the associational steps from your mind, leaving only the image you paint. Of course Clive here wouldn’t remember what led up to that painting.”

  “No, of course,” Ingels said numbly. “It doesn’t matter. Thank you. Thanks all very much.” He hurried downstairs, past a sodden clown, and into the street. In fact it didn’t matter. A memory had torn its way through his insomnia. For the second time that day he realised why something had looked familiar, but this time more disturbingly. Decades ago he had himself dreamed the city in the painting.

  II

  Ingels switched off the television. As the point of light dwindled into darkness it touched off the image in him of a gleam shooting away into space. Then he saw that the light hadn’t sunk into darkness but into Hilary’s reflection, leaning forward from the cane rocking-chair next to him, about to speak. “Give me fifteen minutes,” he said, scribbling notes for his review.

  The programme had shown the pertur
bations which the wandering planet had caused in the orbits of Pluto, Neptune and Uranus, and had begun and ended by pointing out that the planet was now swinging away from the Solar System; its effect on Earth’s orbit would be negligible. Photographs from the space-probe were promised within days. Despite its cold scientific clarity (Ingels wrote) and perhaps without meaning to, the programme managed to communicate a sense of foreboding, of the intrusion into and interference with our familiar skies. “Not to me it didn’t,” Hilary said, reading over his shoulder.

  “That’s sad,” he said. “I was going to tell you about my dreams.”

  “Don’t if I wouldn’t understand them either. Aren’t I allowed to criticise now?”

  “Sorry. Let’s start again. Just let me tell you a few of the things that have happened to me. I was thinking of them all today. Some of them even you’ll have to admit are strange. Make some coffee and I’ll tell you about them.”

  When she’d brought the coffee he waited until she sat forward, ready to be engrossed, long soft black hooks of hair angling for her jawbone. “I used to dream a lot when I was young,” he said. “Not your average childhood dream, if there is such a thing. There was one I remember, about these enormous clouds of matter floating in outer space, forming very slowly into something. I mean very slowly … I woke up long before they got there, yet while I was dreaming I knew whatever it was would have a face, and that made me very anxious to wake up. Then there was another where I was being carried through a kind of network of light, on and on across intersections for what felt like days, until I ended up on the edge of this gigantic web of paths of light. And I was fighting to stop myself going in, because I knew that hiding behind the light there was something old and dark and shapeless, something dried-up and evil that I couldn’t make out. I could hear it rustling like an old dry spider. You know what I suddenly realised that web was? My brain, I’d been chasing along my nervous system to my brain. Well, leave that one to the psychologists. But there were odd things about these dreams—I mean, apart from all that. They always used to begin the same way, and always about the same time of the month.”

  “The night of the full moon?” Hilary said, slurping coffee.

  “Funnily enough, yes. Don’t worry, I didn’t sprout midnight shadow or anything. But some people are sensitive to the full moon, that’s well enough documented. And I always used to begin by dreaming I could see the full moon over the sea, way out in the middle of the ocean. I could see the reflection resting on the water, and after a while I’d always find myself thinking it wasn’t the moon at all but a great pale face peering up out of the ocean, and I’d panic. Then I wouldn’t be able to move and I’d know that the full moon was pulling at something deep in the ocean, waking it up. I’d feel my panic swelling up in me, and all of a sudden it would burst and I’d be in the next dream. That’s how it happened, every time.”

  “Didn’t your parents know? Didn’t they try to find out what was wrong?”

  “I don’t know what you mean by wrong. But yes, they knew eventually, when I told them. That was after I had the idea my father might be able to explain. I was eleven then and I’d had strange feelings sometimes, intuitions and premonitions and so forth, and sometimes I’d discovered they’d been my father’s feelings too.”

  “I know all about your father’s feelings,” Hilary said. “More than he knows about mine.”

  Soon after they’d met, Ingels had taken her to see his parents. She’d felt his father had been too stiffly polite to her, and when she’d cross-examined Ingels he’d eventually admitted that his father had felt she was wrong for him, unsympathetic to him. “You were going to let me tell you about my dreams,” he said. “I told my father about the sea dream and I could see there was something he wasn’t saying. My mother had to make him tell me. Her attitude to the whole thing was rather what yours would have been, but she told him to get it over with, he’d have to tell me sometime. So he told me he’d sometimes shared his father’s dreams without either of them ever knowing why. And he’d had several of my dreams when he’d been young, until one night in the mid-twenties—early 1925, I think he said. Then he’d dreamed a city had risen out of the sea. After that he’d never dreamed again. Well, maybe hearing that was some kind of release for me, because the next time I dreamed of the city too.”

  “You dreamed of a city,” Hilary said.

  “The same one. I told him about it next morning, details of it he hadn’t told me, that were the same in both our dreams. I was watching the sea, the same place as always. Don’t ask me how I knew it was always the same. I knew. One moment I was watching the moon on the water, then I saw it was trembling. The next moment an island rose out of the ocean with a roaring like a waterfall, louder than that, louder than anything I’ve ever heard while awake; I could actually feel my ears bursting. There was a city on the island, all huge greenish blocks with sea and seaweed pouring off them. And the mud was boiling with stranded creatures, panting and bursting. Right in front of me and above me and below me there was a door. Mud was trickling down from it, and I knew that the great pale face I was terrified of was behind the door, getting ready to come out, opening its eyes in the dark. I woke up then, and that was the end of the dreams. Say they were only dreams if you like. You might find it easiest to believe my father and I were sharing them by telepathy.”

  “You know perfectly well,” Hilary said, “that I’d find nothing of the sort.”

  “No? Then try this,” he said sharply. “At the exhibition I visited today there was a painting of our dream. And not by either of us.”

  “So what does that mean?” she cried. “What on earth is that supposed to mean?”

  ‘Well, a dream I can recall so vividly after all this time is worth a thought. And that painting suggests it’s a good deal more objectively real.”

  “So your father read about the island in a story,” she said. “So did you, so did the painter. What else can you possibly be suggesting?”

  “Nothing,” he said at last.

  “So what were the other strange things you were going to tell me?”

  “That’s all,” he said. “Just the painting. Nothing else. Really.” She was looking miserable, a little ashamed. “Don’t you believe me?” he said. “Come here.”

  As the sheepskin rug joined their caresses she said “I don’t really need to be psychic for you, do I?”

  “No,” he said, probing her ear with his tongue, triggering her ready. Switching off the goose-necked steel lamps as she went, she led him through the flat as if wheeling a basket behind her; they began laughing as a car’s beam shone up from Mercy Hill and seized for a moment on her hand, his handle. They reached the crisp bed and suddenly, urgently, couldn’t prolong their play. She was all around him, working to draw him deeper and out, he was lapped softly, thrusting roughly at her grip on him to urge it to return redoubled. They were rising above everything but each other, gasping. He felt himself rushing to a height, and closed his eyes.

  And was falling into a maelstrom of flesh, in a vast almost lightless cave whose roof seemed as far above him as the sky. He had a long way still to fall, and beneath him he could make out the movements of huge bubbles and ropes of flesh, of eyes swelling and splitting the flesh, of gigantic dark green masses climbing sluggishly over one another. “No, Christ no,” he cried, gripped helpless.

  He slumped on Hilary. “Oh God,” she said. “What is it now?”

  He lay beside her. Above them the ceiling shivered with reflected light. It looked as he felt. He closed his eyes and found dark calm, but couldn’t bear to keep them closed for long. “All right,” he said. “There’s more I haven’t told you. I know you’ve been worried about how I’ve looked lately. I told you it was lack of sleep, and so it is, but it’s because I’ve begun dreaming again. It started about nine months ago, just before I met you, and it’s becoming more frequent, once or twice a week now. Only this time I can never remember what it is, perhaps because I haven’t dreame
d for so long. I think it has something to do with the sky, maybe this planet we’ve been hearing about. The last time was this morning, after you went to the library. For some reason I don’t have them when I’m with you.”

  “Of course if you want to go back to your place, go ahead,” Hilary said, gazing at the ceiling.

  “In one way I don’t,” he said. “That’s just the trouble. Whenever I try to dream I find I don’t want to sleep, as if I’m fighting the dream. But today I’m tired enough just to drift off and have it anyway. I’ve been getting hallucinations all day that I think are coming from the dream. And it feels more urgent, somehow. I’ve got to have it. I knew it was important before, but that painting’s made me sure it’s more than a dream. I wish you could understand this. It’s not easy for me.”

  “Suppose I did believe you?” she said. “What on earth would you do then? Stand on the street warning people? Or would you try to sell it to your paper? I don’t want to believe you, how can you think they would?”

  “That’s exactly the sort of thing I don’t need to hear,” Ingels said. “I want to talk to my father about it. I think he may be able to help. Maybe you wouldn’t mind not coming with me.”

  “I wouldn’t want to,” she said. “You go and have your dream and your chat with your father if you want. But as far as I’m concerned that means you don’t want me.”

  Ingels walked to his flat, further up Mercy Hill. Newspapers clung to bushes, flapping; cars hissed through nearby streets, luminous waves. Only the houses stood between him and the sky, their walls seeming low and thin. Even in the pools of lamplight he felt the night gaping overhead.

  The building where he lived was silent. The stereo that usually thumped like an electronic heart was quiet. Ingels climbed to the third floor, his footsteps dropping wooden blocks into the silence, nudging him awake. He fumbled in his entrance hall for the coat hook on the back of the door, which wasn’t where Hilary kept hers. Beneath the window in the main room he saw her desk spread with her syndicated cartoon strip—except that when he switched on the light it was his own desk, scattered with television schedules. He peered blearily at the rumpled bed. Around him the room felt and moved like muddy water. He sagged on the bed and was asleep at once.