Through a Mythos Darkly

by Glynn Owen Barrass

  Thus far, both humans had made a not-unimpressive effort at keeping their wits intact and fear in check. Now, they drew together as if seeking strength. Each of their tottering steps brought them higher, R’lyeh spreading out beneath them in its convoluted geometry. Higher, and nearer to the gated archway…where the Spawnpriest awaited their arrival.

  He wore a robe of bloodkelp falling from an elaborate high-ridged coral collar. Suffering-pearls studded his diadem and belt. Tiny bone-white crabs scurried, preening, among the writhing nests of thin and ropey tentacles surrounding his beaked mouth. Sycophantic remorae clung to the gill-ridged underside edges of his backswept chitinous skull.

  “So,” said Spawnpriest Cthlullan, not so much speaking the word as letting it roll like a heavy stone into the depths. “Harald and Leif, the Freylindessons.” His slow, deliberate, and precise pronunciations of their names resonated from the ancient architecture in such a way it seemed R’lyeh itself trembled to its darkest core. “Your mother’s, and your nation’s, hostages to fortune for the sake of the entire planet.”

  They nodded almost imperceptibly. Both were shaking, and their flat faces had gone pale.

  “I will not insult you, or waste any of our time, with petty threats and warnings,” Cthlullan continued. “There is no need for that, don’t you agree?”

  Again, the humans nodded.

  “I simply trust you will honor your mother’s oath. After all, these next days will either see the ending of us all, or a new beginning.” The palpi around his mouth writhed into a seething semblance of a smile. “Who knows? We may come out of this as…friends.”

  The chamber to which Y’cthiss led them had obviously not been constructed or furnished with the human shape in mind. It gave the impression half of an undersea cave-grotto, half of the interior of some large spiral shell, with its doorway a giant clamshell set on edge. The predominant colors were pale gray, dark blue-green, and marbled black.

  There were no windows, which Leif considered in their case a bonus. He’d only barely held onto the brave marrow and courage of his forebears against the painful battering the sight of R’lyeh had already given him.

  It hurt the senses.

  It hurt the mind.

  He was just as glad not to have a constant view of its scenic monstrous panorama. Bad enough to have the feel of it, the knowledge of it, the tidal groan and pulsing all around and through him.

  Bad enough to have stood before that squid-headed abomination with the loathsome squirming smile. Who’d gone on to tell them—so unctuous, so magnanimous!—that they were permitted, within reason, to go more or less freely about the city, that they were not prisoners to be locked in a dungeon cell.

  As if the city itself was not both prison and living nightmare! As if they could leave whenever they wished!

  “You will find,” the jelly-squelch blob called Y’cthiss said, “some efforts made toward your comfort and accommodation. Power sources and connections are in place. You have rain-cistern fresh water. The resting-ledges have been padded with soft lichens.”

  It gestured with a riffled, rippling, ribbonlike appendage at these and other various amenities. Harald paid close attention, very close, seeming almost to hang on every word and motion. Leif only half-listened, pacing like a wolf in a cage.

  “The Spawnpriest,” he cut in, interrupting. “You said those who went in hostage exchange for us were his children?”

  “Of his brood-pod, yes.”

  “So they…look…like that?”

  “Fthaal and Yhidd are only of the third stage since their emergence,” Y’cthiss said. Murky oilslicks of color shifted weirdly within gelatinous dark flesh. He noticed his brother gazing at them with a strange, almost hypnotic, fascination.

  “What does that mean?”

  Harald cleared his throat and spoke the way he had to their tutors, as if glad to have a chance to show off what he’d learned. “They won’t have yet developed the, ah, elongated skull structure or distinct facial characteristics—”

  “They won’t have slimy masses of face-worms?”

  “Leif!” Harald spoke sharply.

  As if diplomacy mattered when dealing with a sea-slug who’d referred to them as fucked-up monkeys.

  “I will leave you to settle.” Y’cthiss squish-oozed out and the clamshell closed.

  “Why must you be so rude to her?” Harald demanded, rounding on Leif. “If we are to be kept here, it wouldn’t hurt our cause to—”

  “Rude? I—” Leif’s jaw dropped. “Wait, her? What do you mean, her? That thing is female?”

  “Of course she is!”

  “How do you…” He stopped, awash in a sudden aghast and revolted horror that made everything earlier seem small. “You…by Loki, what’s the matter with you? That polypy pile of sludge?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Harald reddened.

  “Don’t play dumb with me, brother-mine. And you chided me about Uncle Torvald. The snake-women of Leng were at least women!…sort of.”

  “You wouldn’t understand. I think she’s beautiful.”

  “I think this place has already driven you mad.”

  The world continued its spin, unconcerned with the petty scramblings of life upon it, oblivious to the oblivion plunging headlong toward its sun.

  Against the infinite glittering sweep of the skies, a speck became a streak.

  The orbits of outer planets and asteroids roiled in its wake, some settling, some altered forever.

  A streak became a brushstroke smearing back from a dull, baleful star. A smudged ember, a glaring and angry idiot eye, a blind and petulant striking fist.

  “…reports coming in from all over New Thingvellir…”

  “…scene of chaos and devastation…”

  “…multiple fatalities…”

  “…of a second explosion at the Althing Monument…”

  “…widespread panic…”

  “…can see behind us, smoke and flames…”

  “…being advised to take cover…”

  “…the White Hall has been evacuated…current whereabouts of…”

  “…burning out of control, emergency response teams on the scene but…”

  “…deliberate attack or…”

  “…fires like nothing we’ve ever…”

  “…soon to tell, though several groups…”

  “…eyewitnesses claim to have seen…”

  “…from a senior White Hall staffer that Lawspeaker Freylinde…”

  “…no closer than these police barricades…”

  “…known terrorists with links to Carcosa…”

  “…was in session at the time…”

  “…terrible burns…”

  “…which was also, as you know, serving as the guest housing for…”

  “…the glow from here…”

  “…hospitals overwhelmed…”

  “…ike a war zone…”

  “…described as some sort of symbol…”

  “…on Heimlandr soil since…”

  “…already in danger of total annihilation, would…”

  “…s the Yellow Sign…”

  “…unconfirmed, we cannot stress that enough, unconfirmed…”

  “…the Lawspeaker and her Wittan…”

  “…in their homes, not attempt to…”

  “…on the very eve of the joint effort to avert…”

  “…nation in shock, unable to…”

  “…do something so heinous…”

  “…is dead, I repeat, we now have official confirmation…”

  “…to contact R’lyeh have been…”

  “…urgent meeting of the jarls from…”

  “…spoken out against…”

  “…Eibon denying any involvement in or knowledge of…”

  “…of the Lawspeaker’s sons, who…”

  “…will mean for the proposed…”

  “…claiming responsibility, chanting ‘the will of the Kin
g’…”

  “…directly to a live press conference, where the announcement we’ve all been dreading…”

  A heavy, palpable silence filled the chamber after Harald switched off the screen.

  Leif gripped his shoulder, hard enough to hurt, but he bore it without wincing. He turned to his brother. Their eyes met—storm-gray to storm-gray, their mother’s legacy.

  For a moment, that shared look of stricken grief said it all, and then they clutched each other in a fierce, wordless embrace.

  Elsewhere in the citadel, a similar silence held.

  None of the attendant guards moved from their places, but appendages constricted and chromatophores blend-faded to make an instinctive and protective camouflage.

  The scrypool from which the mind-oracles communicated had gone dark, its liquids still roiling and rippling from the vicious slash of the Spawnpriest’s starfish claw.

  R’lyeh itself, for a moment, seemed to tremble.

  The new and nearing light loomed in the skies. Burning wormwood, baleful death, destruction, Grim-Ruin. A column of smoke by day, a pillar of fire by night.

  In Eibon and Leng, the gates waited, silver keys and conduits ready. From other, further dimensions, indifferent entities watched.

  And, in Carcosa, lost Carcosa, beneath the blackly-blazing Hyades, masked and robed sisters sang their paeans to the King…for there were other worlds than this.

  The clamshell door burst open on a tidal surge of rage as the Spawnpriest stormed into the chamber. “The prime of my brood-pods!” he bellowed.

  Leif and Harald rose to face him, both strong and defiant.

  “We lost our mother,” Leif said. “And many more of our folk and our friends.”

  The writhing nest of tentacles around Cthlullan’s beaked mouth lashed outward, seizing Leif by the head, face, and neck. His beak, hard-edged and sharp, snapped with menace a fraction of an inch from the tip of Leif’s nose.

  “If you imagine for one beat of your warm-blooded heart that your losses amount to a krill-squirt—”

  “Wait!” Harald stepped toward them, hands raised as if to interpose himself. ”Let me speak.”

  “Fear not,” said Cthlullan. “I will get to you next.”

  “This was not their doing,” Y’cthiss said.

  “You defend these land-apes, you wretched mongrel of shoggoths? They came into this knowing their lives would be forfeit if any harm befell—”

  In a sudden swelling of oily blackness, Y’cthiss quadrupled in size, sprouting whiplike pseudopods and bulging luminescent bladder-sacs. “Tekeli-li!” The piping cry shrilled from several fluted orifices at once, resounding in the chamber’s spiraled upper reaches as if echoed by thousands.

  Again, for a moment, R’lyeh seemed to tremble.

  Impossible though it was, given their biology, the humans and the Spawnpriest wore identical shocked expressions. They fell back, though Cthlullan did not relinquish his hold. Nor did Leif, whose fists had clenched bony-tight around tentacles.

  “There are others,” continued Y’cthiss, “enemies, who would have this truce fail and see this world fall. Perhaps you should hear the Freylindesson out.”

  Another moment passed, of heavy and palpable silence. R’lyeh did not so much tremble as to hold its breathless, dead breath.

  Ever-so-incrementally, the gripping tentacles relaxed. So did Leif’s fingers. The Spawnpriest’s attention shifted to Harald.

  “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t pull his brain from his head in moist pink chunks.”

  “Vengeance,” Harald said.

  Cthlullan paused, his shiny grapelike clusters of eyes narrowing. “Go on…”

  “Your mages will listen to you. The Heimlandr government—the jarls, the military—will listen to me.”

  “Yesssss…”

  “So, we stop Grim-Ruin, we save the world…” Harald lifted his chin, his jaw firm, his storm-gray gaze proud. “And then we get those Carcosan bastards.”

  As the Shuttle Thor’s-Hammer roared into the turbulent and doom-streaked sky, its sleek hull wreathed in shifting green sigils of R’lyehan magic, a cool, smooth pseudopod twined around Harald’s hand.

  He glanced over, startled, and found numerous scintillating orbs shining back at him, while the colors of the aurora played through amorphous dark-glassy flesh.

  “I had it mistaken,” Y’cthiss said, in a voice fluting like music. “It seems you are not such…fucked-up monkeys…after all.”

  In the unsighted, unlighted, unknown beyond and between, in the outsideness encompassing and within all, mindless dirges pipe and drum. Keys turn within keys and wheels within wheels, spheres revolve within spheres, to know all and see all and care for nothing.

  And ph’nglui mglw’nafh C’thulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn, not yet waking, not yet rising. A god bound to a world and bound to its fate, slumbering in dark dreams, conscious neither of danger nor hope.

  Red in the Water, Salt on the Earth

  Konstantine Paradias

  “EVER SEEN A DROWNEY FUNERAL FROM UP CLOSE, ROOKIE?” Brown asked over the rising bass hum of the throat-singing mourners.

  “Once, in Crawfish Rock,” Tieg said, nodding. “Three days before Christmas. There were three times as many, back there.”

  “L.A is drowney country. Can’t go two feet inna water without bumping into one of the rags. Got a cousin in the Channel Islands, tells me the water’s just thick with the bastiches,” Brown said, struggling to roll a cigarette under the soft glow of the gas lamp.

  Across the length of Baker Beach, came the beat of orca-bone drums. Slowly, the throat-singing faded into silence. As one, the mourners dropped to their knees and began to crawl toward the water. They splashed at the frothing sea with their open hands like children, sending whorls of foam and jets of spray across the Moon’s reflection.

  “They’d built a temple, near Long Beach. More like grew it, actually. Brought in some red corals from their home towns and let them take root in the ocean floor. In ten years’ time, there was a shiny red bell tower sticking out of the water. The mayor made us blow it up with depth charges,” Tieg said, looking down at the mourners, listening to the drumbeat slowly replaced by a gentle, sensuous hiss.

  “Did you get any of the punks?” Brown said, cigarette secured between his teeth. He struck a match against the hem of his raincoat.

  “A couple of them. The temple Oorl and his mate. There was a girl with them, though. A fuzzy duck by the name of Sophie Lamburg,” Tieg said and found that the guttural, back-of-the-throat slur of the Deep One word still came natural to him. You don’t learn, came the hoarse, croaking voice from his past. You remember.

  “That fream journalist? That was you guys, that done her in?” Brown growled. “Man, no wonder they sent you here. You musta rattled a hell of a lot of cages.”

  The hiss rose and fell in tempo. Tieg knew that was the sound of seaweed rakes, dragged across the drums. Theirs was the gentle churn of the ocean foam, the subtle thrum that meant home, sweet home. From the water, a silvery-scaled female sprayed water from her gills and let out a great, keening whistle. Further down the beach, another met her pitch with a contralto pitch. A male (his back and arms infested with barnacles) opened his mouth and let out a long, bass hum. Tiny voices rose up in song.

  “I never got that part,” Brown said, fingering his Tommy-gun. “What’s with all the bone-head crooning?”

  “It’s a chorus,” Tieg said, hands on his chest, head bent low. “They’re calling God, to come from the sea.”

  “We oughta make them give his holiness a bell, next time. Drowneys got my fillings rattling with all this crap,” Brown said, through clenched teeth. Tieg watched as the tide rose to meet the mourners, depositing its bounty of cowries in the sand. The parrs swam up to grab them, racing for the smoothest specimens. By this time next year, they would have gathered enough to string them into lariats; a proper courting gift for their future mates. Already, the cloying, thick scent of
the females’ excitement wafted in the night air. Once the time of mourning was over, Tieg knew, Long Beach would be coated in mating musk for days.

  “I said: got any snuff?” Brown barked, nudging Tieg out of his reverie. “I’m about to heave over here.”

  “It’s going to go away in a while,” Tieg lied. “You’re going to get used to it before you know it.”

  “Yeah, maybe in L.A, you hipsters can’t smell this crap. You got any snuff or what?”

  “Don’t be a ninny, Brown,” Tieg said, as he handed over the tin. Brown fumbled with the stuff and stuck a patch against the inside of his upper lip, sucking the bitter juices. “Quiet down, now. Here comes the big daddy.”

  The singing grew in pitch, as a dark shape rose from the water. Tieg saw the fin emerge, unfolding to its full extent. The wafer-thin membrane glistened and quavered, its blue veins pulsing like living filigree. It climbed higher, revealing the hump of the great Oorl; the dead man’s fingers infestation along its spine blossomed into a rigid fractal of brittle foliage on the back of his neck. His face rose to meet the moon, its cold brilliance reflected on the jet-black orbs of his eyes. Gills flaring, the elder Deep One rose to his full height: almost twelve feet of pure muscle that blocked the moon, covered in layers of ancient scales.

  “Ir’Lui!” he called, in a fierce bellow.

  “Ph’tha!” the mourners responded, beating their chests.

  “I’m calling it in,” Brown said, reaching for the dashboard radio in the squad car. Tieg grasped him by the collar of his raincoat, pulling him up against the door to pin him down.

  “You want us to get ripped to pieces, Daddy-O? You know what they are going to do to us, if we break up their funeral? They’re gonna rip off the top of your head and shit in your living brain!” Tieg whispered, his hand clamped tight over Brown’s mouth, muffling his screams.

  In the water, the great Oorl reached down among his flock, cupping his hands to receive the dead. With great care, his talons peeled away the strands of gossamer, revealing the gaunt thing inside: one of their own, a creature barely twenty summers old. Its neck hung at just the wrong angle. Perhaps it had ventured too far into land. Maybe the squares had found it looking at the right girl in just the wrong way and had decided to mete out a form of hastily thrown-together justice. The Oorl raised the gaunt thing toward the stars and let out a hoarse cry of supplication before running its claw across its chest, cutting through the layers of flesh to reveal the softly glowing treasures underneath. The mourners watched as the priest sank its teeth into the slain one’s heart, ripped it out of the chest cavity with his teeth. Females hissed with ecstasy, as the muscle resisted the holy one’s bites and finally caved, popping as it went. Black blood sprayed among the gathered.