The Book of Cthulhu

by Neil Gaiman

  I lay quietly in my bed for an hour or so until I heard cars starting up, four in succession. I climbed onto the chair and watched as they drove to the gate and were let through. While I watched, the doctor himself strode across the parking lot to his car and left. Two others followed him within the next ten minutes, leaving only one car. When a fat man in uniform trudged from the gatehouse to the main building carrying a brown bag, I was sure the Facility had now shut down for the night.

  The gap between the door and the jamb wasn’t as wide as I’d thought. I couldn’t push the bolt in even when I leaned on it with all my weight. I hesitated to hammer it with the heel of my shoe, but I had no choice. If the guard heard me, I told myself, he would assume I was signalling for help and take his time about responding. I had another bad moment when the cheap bolt I was using as a lever seemed on the verge of bending. Again, I had no choice. I pushed harder. The bolt held and the door sprang open.

  I had the freedom of their new, plasterboard corridor, but an insuperable hurdle might remain: the heavy, iron door of the former ward. If they had locked that door—but they hadn’t. This was more of the doctor’s smug faith in drugs, I supposed.

  I prowled along the outer corridor, where the only light glowed in an EXIT sign. I heard tinny voices and laughter as I approached the main stairway, where a broad landing overlooked the lobby. The guard I had seen sat at a desk by the front door, watching television and eating a sandwich. It seemed rather melodramatic not to just stroll naturally across the landing, but I tiptoed.

  At the end of the next wing I found another ward converted to cubicles, and it seemed likely that this would be the women’s quarters. The first ten doors were unlocked, the rooms empty. When I found the eleventh locked, it seemed likely I would find Ondine Gilman behind it.

  This door was just as flimsy as the one on my own cell, and since it opened inward, I believed I could simply kick it open. This worked, but the thunderous crash of the door against the wall made me cringe. I ran to the outer corridor to listen. Minutes passed. I heard nothing except the canned laughter of the television until a human guffaw joined in, testimony that the guard’s attention was fully occupied.

  I felt confident enough to snap on the light after I had closed the woman’s door behind me. She didn’t stir.

  “Ondine!” I said, and, more loudly, “Miss Gilman!”

  Curled on her side, she breathed deeply and evenly. Her breathing didn’t change even when I shook her by the shoulder. I stood considering my options for a moment, then lifted her covers and pushed her green hospital gown above her waist. She continued to sleep soundly even when I peeled her underpants down and extricated her feet.

  I wasn’t displeased by what I saw and touched, but I wished I still had my ice-cream truck. An hour in the locker would have done wonders for her superior attitude. I restored everything as it had been except for the panties, indecent, red ones of the sort favored by roadside whores. After using them to wipe the evidence of my visit from her buttocks, I wadded them into my pocket and turned off the light. She continued to breathe evenly.

  I was tempted to try the stones for size, but decided she would keep while I explored the Facility.

  The stairs marked as an exit led me down to an unguarded rear door. I stepped outside and savored a warm night that was loud with crickets, frogs and… sirens? I strained my ears, but I couldn’t identify the sounds in the distance. They might have been sirens, or even thin screams.

  The stairs continued down to the basement, where I knew the medical department was housed. I had been given tests here, but I hadn’t suspected its extent. There was a fully equipped operating theater and other rooms that held machines liberally plastered with radiation warnings.

  The last room, and the largest, was obviously a morgue. Nevertheless it was a shock to pull out a drawer and find a naked body. And a second. And a third. And…. They were Innsmouth people, every one of them, and they were dead. I couldn’t say what had killed them, but they had all been stitched up crudely after autopsies.

  My knees wobbled, the room swam, and without further warning I found myself throwing up until my stomach clenched down on itself like a hard, painful, empty fist.

  My shock and sickness gave way to fury. I raged down the line, pulling out drawer after drawer. Fifteen of them. Twenty! Someone would pay, someone would pay dearly. These were my people, my own unique, precious people, standing even further above Saltonstall and his henchmen than those butchers fancied they stood above worms. Left to evolve in peace, they would have shed their simian traits and passed over into magnificent beings who would have lived for all time in the glorious kingdom of the Lord. But now, denied all hope of transfiguration, they were just so many dead chimps.

  “Father Dagon!” I screamed. “Mother Hydra! Where were you!”

  I came at last upon a drawer whose contents shocked me into stillness. Those evil savages had succeeded in meddling with something they couldn’t even begin to comprehend. It was the ultimate obscenity, a blasphemy for which no human words exist, and I forced my imperfect tongue to struggle with curses that were more appropriate, but still woefully inadequate to the horror. With drugs, with surgery or radiation, they had forced a Deep One to pass over on dry land.

  It was huge, and even in its desiccated state it was beautiful, godlike. My hands fumbled reverently over the dry scales, the pathetically limp crest of spikes that should have stood proud. Sobbing bitterly, I promised a hundred sacrifices, a thousand, a holocaust that would rouse Father Dagon and make the sea rise up to the sky and draw down the moon in its awful wrath.

  Stroking the massive chest, I realized that I felt no stitches. I looked closely. I saw no obvious wounds at all. I felt no heartbeat or respiration either, but it was possible, just barely, that he had shut down all his systems hard when faced with the horror of a landlocked metamorphosis. As Grandma was so fond of quoting, “That is not dead which can eternal lie….”

  I dashed back to the next room, where I had seen a sink. I looked about for a bucket of some kind, but—better! I smashed the glass case holding a firehose, oblivious to the shrieking alarm this set off, and wrenched the wheel over until the hose came to life like a wrathful dragon, spewing a destructive jet that smashed cases of fiendish instruments and foul drugs open and hurled their contents clattering and crashing through the torture-chambers.

  I manhandled it back to the morgue and directed the stream on the ceiling above the Deep One, bouncing down a flood of life-giving water on the poor victim.

  I didn’t notice when the alarm was silenced. I couldn’t understand why the hose suddenly went limp and dry. Then I became aware of the man quacking furiously at the door to the next room.

  “Put that down, you goddamn loony! Drop it, asshole, or you are dead meat!”

  I had found what I wanted, a human being to absorb the full force of my rage, and I threw the hose aside and stalked toward him.

  “Don’t you realize what you’re doing here!” I screamed. “Don’t you know—”

  “I know what I’m doing is catching a goddamn Loony who’s fucking up the hospital. Stop! Stop right now! This here is a .357 Magnum, shit-head, and it’s about to tear out your spine and pin it to the far wall. I am not joking with you.”

  I stopped. What could I have been thinking of? All hope of escape was lost. Dr. Saltonstall would lock me up tight. More probably he would take no more chances with me, and I would be filling one of these morgue-drawers before lunchtime tomorrow.

  “That’s better. Assume the position.”

  I knew what he meant. I turned to the wall, leaning forward to support my weight with my hands on a closed drawer. He strutted up behind me and took great delight in kicking my ankles wider apart.

  “Scabby son of an Innsmouth bitch,” he snarled, “I’m really hurting to blow your baldy-ass head all over the wall just for laughs, so don’t try nothing, you hear? I just want an excuse to blow one of you scum-suckers away. What the hell you
got here?”

  He had found the rocks I had been saving, which he hurled on the floor. He thrust his hand into my other pocket and extracted Ondine’s panties. After a moment of baffled silence, he made a gagging noise of utter loathing.

  “You goddamn pervert!” he screamed.

  The wall hit me in the face, cracking teeth. I only then became aware of a worse pain where he had hit the back of my head with his gun. I wondered how I had wound up on my knees. They hurt, too.

  “Bastard bastard bastard!” he screamed, kicking me in the back as if trying to squash a bug to paste. “You got me to touch your goddamn frogspawn jackoff rag—”

  He stopped kicking me. I tried to stop my sobbing and groaning so I could hear what he was saying, though his words were strangely muffled. It sounded as if he were choking. Was it too much to hope that he was dying of apoplexy?

  I managed to twist my head around. I couldn’t imagine what was happening to him. Most of his face was covered by a wet, black cloth, and he was apparently standing a foot off the floor, his heavy-duty oxfords and white tube-socks jerking spasmodically.

  But it was no cloth that covered his face. It was the huge, webbed hand of the dark figure that loomed behind him, the Deep One I had revived.

  “Praise Mother Hydra!” I sobbed.

  “Praise her name!” a rich, deep, croaking voice responded.

  “Sokay, sweetie,” I slurred, dumping Ondine Gilman into a lobby chair of the hotel that, most inaccurately, bore her name. “Jus’ get us a room, okay?”

  “Wha… ?Where?”

  I leaned forward and, under the pretext of giving her a kiss, pressed her carotid arteries until she lost consciousness again. After changing my modus operandii in the Northwest, I had learned that this was every bit as effective as an ice-cream locker for draining the will of baptismal candidates.

  “Excuse me, Sir! Just what—oh. It’s Mr. Smith, isn’t it?”

  “Bob. It’s good ol’ Bob,” I said, steering a wayward course for the desk and the clerk I had seen before, the one who had used a bandanna to pick up my bag. He was still wearing his Munch necktie. The image was a deliberate slur against my people.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Celebrash. Celebration. We’re outta that damn crazy-house.”

  “I can see that. What’s going on outside, I meant.”

  I pretended to hear the sirens for the first time. And there were indeed screams, too.

  “They’re celebratin’, I guess.” I heard a burst of automatic gunfire.

  “God!”he cried, starting from behind the desk.

  “Hey, wait. Need a room for me and my sweetie.”

  “I can’t rent you a room, you’re drunk. And I’m closing.”

  “Then gimme my bag,” I said. “Left my bag, remember?”

  “Oh. Sure. Then will you go?”

  “Drunk, huh?”

  “Where am I?” Ondine cried.

  “’Sokay, honey.”

  He dumped my bag on the counter, forgetting to protect his precious hand from my contagion in his confused haste. He fretted and fussed as I opened it, and he grew even more flustered at another burst of automatic fire in the distance.

  “I’m not really drunk,” I said clearly as I pulled the nine-millimeter Browning out of the bag and jacked a Black Talon round into the chamber.

  “What?”

  “I’m just very different from you, that’s all.”

  I put the bullet right through the Screamer’s bald, distorted head and through the clerk’s breastbone.

  “I’m coming, dear,” I told Ondine, and hurried over to deprive her simian brain of yet more oxygen.

  I was afraid she might not be able to understand what I was doing after I had stripped her and tied her to the bed in the room I had assigned us, but she came around as good as new. Nobody would have paid attention to her screams and curses over the similar noises in Town Square.

  I took all the time I wanted to amuse myself, but it surprised me when dawn broke while I was still thrusting into her. I turned and saw that it was a dawn of floodlights, powerful floodlights from the section of town sealed off by razor-wire. The gunfire had become constant, but it seemed as if fewer guns were in use.

  “You fucking bastard!” Ondine sobbed.

  “You got part of that right,” I grunted, “but I’m the one who’s legitimate, remember!”

  “Freak!”

  I’d had enough of her and her filthy mouth. I pulled out and rummaged among my clothing for the stones. Her screams found surprising new energy as I inserted them in the secret places, but I managed to ignore her as I recited the words. I’m not sure if the words and the procedure are exactly right, since Grandma explained them fully only at the very last, when she had passed over and was in a fearful hurry to rejoin her people, but I have always used them.

  I suspect that any human being who reads this account may think that my baptism of forty-eight women between 1982, the year Grandma passed over, and 1984 was somehow excessive. On the contrary, it was based on an exact calculation of the yearly baptisms Grandma was prevented from performing while she was interned in Oklahoma (four), and while she was confined in the nursing-home (forty-four). Despite all the hard work and laborious planning involved, to say nothing of the danger, I wanted to complete Grandma’s hecatomb and ensure that she was granted full honor among the Deep Ones as quickly as possible. Don’t you think she had suffered long enough and waited long enough already? If you still believe someone should be censured for upsetting the public with such a concentrated flurry of “criminal” activity, you might look to President Herbert Hoover, whose agents disrupted her life and prevented the free exercise of her religion, or to Sidney Newman, my grandfather, who did the same.

  It was my turn to scream as the door opened. I recoiled from the figure in black that stood there, but then I saw that it was Old Lady Waite.

  “I don’t know what you did, Bob,” she said admiringly, “but you sure stirred up the Host of the Sea. However,” she added as she set a crocheted bag on the bedside table and withdrew a large black book and a butcher-knife, “that’s not really the way to go about this business.” To Ondine she said, “Hush, now, child, this won’t take much longer at all. To baptize your soul we have to separate it from your body. Take heart from the fact that your suffering won’t be wasted. Even now your pain and shame are floating out like incense to feed those whose glory you can’t even begin to comprehend.”

  While I watched and listened, she showed me exactly how it should be done.

  The flapping roar of helicopters deafened us as we ran through the marsh. They raced toward us, flying barely higher than the reeds. I thought this was the end, but they passed right over us to the town, where they blasted the beach with rockets and cannon-fire.

  “They’re killing them!” I cried.

  “I doubt it,” Old Lady Waite said. “The Deep Ones are not stupid, you know. They wanted to destroy the Facility and give the boys in the back room something to chew on, and they’ve done it. They’re long gone by now, taking their dead with them. You’ll read in the papers tomorrow how some foreign fishermen got out of line when they thought they saw a sea monster, or maybe a mermaid, and how the dumb state troopers called in an air strike. There’s no fun on earth like reading the papers, if you know what to look for.”

  Whatever the papers might say, our position was untenable. Dr. Saltonstall knew what I’d done in the Northwest, he hadn’t just been on a fishing expedition, and he couldn’t be the only one who knew. I had made no attempt to hide the remains of Ondine and the hotel clerk. As for Old Lady Waite, she was sure that they would come hunting for any lingering Dagonites in Innsmouth, whatever the papers might say, with her at the head of their list.

  She had kept a small sloop ready for just such an emergency, and now it ghosted through the black creek under a small jib while she steered it expertly.

  “Where are we going?”

  “You mention
ed Fiji. It’s nice there. There’s an island where the Deep Ones mix freely with the people, just like they used to do in Innsmouth. Just like they’ll do again here when this blows over and Ramon does what I told him.”

  “We’re going to… to the South Pacific in this?”

  “Not we, I’ll be passing over before very long at all.” She laughed at the horror on my face. “What’s the matter, can’t you swim?”

  “Yes, of course, but—”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll make sure you know how to sail it before I pass over. Then I’ll stick by you, or maybe our friends will.”

  Old Lady Waite—but that was merely the name of her larval shell, soon to be discarded as she assumed the glorious form that I came to know and love, in every sense of those words, as Pth’th-l’yl-l’yth.

  It was the magnificent soul of that companion and lover-to-be who had guided me, and who now gestured at the black water. I saw nothing at first, then aglow in the depths, a trail of phosphorescence to one side of the boat. A second followed on the other side. Large, submarine creatures escorted us.

  ∇

  Lost Stars

  Ann K. Schwader

  Wind driven sleet spattered Obscura Gallery’s windows, turning a late November afternoon even gloomier. Sara sighed. Just what she needed, after a long day hanging large-format photographs for tomorrow’s meet-the-artist reception.

  Shards of Rameses II strewn across Lower Nubia mocked her in black and white. Lost Aegypt was their most important show this year—as her boss kept reminding her. Never mind that she’d already taken off, or that Sara herself should have been home half an hour ago.

  So much for attending that women’s spirituality meeting tonight. Not that she’d been looking forward to it, but Diane was counting on her… opinion? Support? Reassurance? Her friend hadn’t been clear, only anxiously enthusiastic.