Ashes and Entropy

by Laird Barron

  ~

  I came to slowly in a moving car. Astrid’s car, in which the mustard-coloured seat coverings was as much of an affront as the dog-scat exterior. “What the sh—". But moving made my head hurt. I tried in vain to squint away the sun.

  "Thought you were a goner there for a second. Couldn’t wake you. Had to carry you all the way out to the car. And I had to bring the car closer, which was a bitch because there's a fucking mountain pile of rubble by the east entrance—"

  "This isn't the city." We drove past row upon row of withered grapevines recoiling under the blazing sun, then past a graffiti’d road sign that had once read "Morgenster" but now snarled FUCK PROGRESS.

  Astrid laughed – at the sign, I hoped – wondering if she found my discomfort funny. Hasn’t she gone out of her way to look after you? I hated being taken care of. Maybe she had ulterior motives. Maybe she was going to sacrifice me to some fungus out here in the boendoes.

  "Remember my buddy who trades me biofuel for weed? Spoke to him last night, after you dropped on me like a sack of potatoes.”

  I slowly got myself upright in the passenger seat, wincing at a nasty twinge in my neck. The road was now lined by uncharacteristically green trees.

  "Klaas knows a lot about what happened. He told me to bring you to him."

  "Bring me to him? Please tell me this guy isn't some whack job with an online degree in schizoid physics.”

  “When you passed out last night, you talked blackspeak.”

  "What? That’s impossible. Even the cultists hardly speak it. Well, they obviously speak some, but not very well. I like to think they had no clue what they were saying, because otherwise they may have thought twice about what they did. Whatever I said was probably gibberish. Trust me, it’s been known to happen.”

  “Was that a garbled attempt at self-effacement?”

  “No, the sun is making me delirious.”

  “Uh-huh.” Astrid shifted gear while giving me some serious side-eye and I wished she’d keep her eyes on the road. All at once, the car felt too small.

  Rest of the drive we didn’t talk much. When Astrid drove past what was left of the Spier wine estate I amused myself by taking in small details. The window was down only halfway because the southeaster was throwing a tanty, lashing at everything like an overly tired five-year-old.

  There used to be a cheetah rehabilitation centre somewhere close-by. After the Koeberg Event there were reports that the big cats – seven of them at the time – had escaped their enclosures. Apparently, nuclear fallout had mutated them into things you really wanted to avoid at all costs. Local legend claimed they roamed the roads between Somerset-West and Stellenbosch, stalking meals of the two-legged variety. Similar stories have grown arms, legs, tails and horns about the animals once kept at Cape Town Zoo. Of course, no-one has ever seen any of this first-hand, but I guess we needed new myths to replace the old ones.

  ~

  Halfway between the big Cape Dutch house and the end of the driveway, a Golden Retriever eyed up the Toyota, tail wagging as the car slowly scuttled forward on loose-gravel. Unlike the mangy wild dogs that roamed the city streets, the dog was obviously well-cared for; its sociable demeanour induced a pang of nostalgia that I permitted for only seconds before mentally kicking myself in the head.

  Chaos. Nuclear fallout. Mutated man-eating cheetahs.

  Once out of the car I instantly recognised the silence. Mary and Joseph, such beautiful quiet. Except for the dog's short yelps of excitement and animated ministrations as it weaved between Astrid's legs, the air related nothing but heat and a blessed sense of peace. Even the wind had miraculously died down to no more than a puff and flurry, creating hushed whispers among the poplars padding the driveway on both sides. The dog trotted around the front of the car to suss me out and I stooped to give it a good scratch.

  “Sawubona!" A tall man, broad smile, with obsidian skin waved at us from the open front door. Astrid beckoned me; the dog followed.

  The black man wasn't Klaas but his boyfriend, Mthandeni. A Zulu, he was a big man, chiselled and prone to easy smiles. When he took my hand in a traditional African shake of friendship the sense of peace was further solidified.

  Mthandeni (“Just Thande” – big smile) led us through the front of the house into the kitchen where he’d been baking fresh bread. I joked: where are all the nice Zulu girls who do the same for their girlfriends?

  "They've left this place, sisi. Back to their roots. They're not waiting for the government to take care of them. Neither should you."

  "Who said I was." But I wondered: maybe I had been?

  Klaas was an Afrikaans boertjie who reminded me of rugby players back in the day when worrying about whether the Springboks would qualify for the World Cup had been a national priority. A mop of dirty blonde hair and a neck like an ox, Klaas was a full head shorter than Thande, but obviously also used to physical grind. I wondered how long the two men had been out here on their own.

  Red wine that Klaas brought up from the cellar helped us to break down social barriers while we ate. Also, cold beer with steak and boerewors, the latter essentially impossible to get your hands on in the city. Another tick of nostalgia, all too suddenly ruined by the memory of my parents. I washed the bitter taste down with rapidly warming beer.

  Later still, sitting on the solid dry ground around a fire with the open sky respiring above us and my tongue loosened by alcohol, I gambled: "So, the elephant in the room,” – everyone laughed at that because we were outside – “apparently, I blackspeached after passing out in Astrid’s shop last night.”

  Klaas was sitting between his boyfriend’s legs, leaning against Thande’s chest. "When you have visions, what do you usually see?"

  It was kind of a no-no to ask someone that because talking about visions was like admitting that you had a kind of tumour; one that didn’t show itself but instead haunted the nebulous highways of your subconscious. But since yesterday, since Astrid and what I grudgingly continued to recognise as her having done me a real solid instead of leaving me on that well-worn library carpet, qualms about discussing my visions had seemingly slipped away unnoticed. Or maybe I just didn’t care talking about them here. “They used to be nothing. Shadows and flashes, mostly. Obscurities I couldn’t clarify. That changed yesterday. I saw burning stars. I saw the ocean and things trying to rise out of it.”

  Thande: “No-one has ever seen the stars. You’re the first.”

  Klaas: “Thande’s an inyanga. He talks to the ancestors.” Klaas turned his head to look

  at the man behind him. “Our real ancestors. But he’s shy about it, so I thought I’d let you know in advance.”

  “You mean the Elder Gods?”

  My cynicism must have been obvious. Klaas smiled around his beer bottle. “Ja Astrid,

  I can see why you like her." He tipped the bottle and drained the dregs then leaned forward to nudge the fire with a stick, sending a wave of sparks into the night sky. “You know, after the ginormous fuck-up that was Koeberg, the cultists all conveniently began suffering from collective amnesia. So much shit shovelled under the rug because many of them were rich and the government needed their money. And you know – or maybe you don’t – that thing they called here? It wanted to talk to them. They’d called it after all. But the reality of what they’d done sent those people’s tiny brains freewheeling off their collective axes. That’s why the damned thing started drinking people left right and centre. It thought it could absorb a sense of humanness, maybe that way it could understand what the cultists wanted.”

  The notion sank in while the fire cracked. Thande: “Nyarlathotepi, he has been waiting for someone to see his stars.” The Zulu’s dark eyes held mine. “The chaosman wants to talk to you, sisi.”

  Sometime later, when the fire died and it became cold we went back inside the house. I’d had no idea. I thought everyone’s visions were the same. Of course, I thought, Why me? And true to form, some smart-ass piped up in the back of my
head – Why not?

  On a well-worn couch in an enormous lounge, Astrid and I waited. Klaas and Thande had asked us to. They were somewhere around the back of the house, doing something I wasn’t sure I wanted to think about. The rational part of my brain was trying to help: He meant metaphorically; some African new age ubuntu; they probably want you to pray with them; didn’t a lot of hippies live out here?

  "Where do you think they are now," Astrid asked, "the people who used to live here?"

  "Who knows and who cares. Locked away behind a six-foot wall in Sandton, probably. Bankrupting their insurance provider."

  "It’s okay. I’d be scared, too."

  I didn't want to get into an argument. I was enjoying it out here, away from the city. Even with people I hardly knew, on a once-thriving vineyard that had been abandoned

  and repossessed by a boertjie and his Zulu boyfriend, it felt like the most normal thing in the world.

  Astrid's phone twittered. “They’re ready. Come on.” I followed her back into the night. The sky above remained clear, starlight bleeding down.

  I followed Astrid toward the glow of the garage light. At the same time, I felt my sense of perception shift. Some finespun shade rippled at my peripheral vision, trying to break through. A few feet out front, Astrid's bodyline shifted and coalesced; for a preternatural pulse, I thought – we’re everywhere – before reality cohered again.

  The bright garage light bled down on our small group of four.

  "You okay?" Klaas asked.

  "I think so".

  Klaas gave Thande the subtlest of nods and the Zulu raised his arms high in the air. ''Ia! Ia! Gnaiih hupadgh tag shogg, nog!"

  Reality cracked.

  A sticky coldness fingered itself into my bones while space puckered into a vacuum that grew into a maelstrom, a frenzied vortex that sucked time, existence, everything into the small space of the garage. In the eye of the storm I felt nothing; beyond, in the indistinct distance were three figures, one very tall, his arms in the air, frozen in a gesture of supplication.

  The walls collapsed to make way for transcendent darkness. It slithered itself into a wave, riding the spiralling vortex like some bizarre fairground attraction, coming closer, obliterating the three ill-defined figures. The scorched stars began falling, a mesh of lancing light that pooled until there were only two colossal spheres of blazing gas rising in the air to reach a disturbingly familiar height. Then sounded the rising chafe and clamour of tone-deaf piping flutes to announce the chaosman, mounting like leviathan, eyes roiling hot light that swallowed everything —

  His eyes are like a flame of fire…

  and on his head are many diadems…

  and he has a true name written that no one knows but himself—

  Look away, look away, look away—

  Screeching anechoics invaded the soft tissue inside my skull and gave rise to a string of loops and shrieks that, despite still breathing, I thought for a second had shattered every bone and soft bubble in my body.

  —Inqlath, lughnaqh, morbidnagth—

  From within the void came Thande’s voice:

  ::Nyarlabhokop, the Mouth of Nyarlathotep::

  —Hlugh..gof’nn —

  ::starchild. speak::

  My lips formed the words as if I’d been contemplating them for millennia. “Why did you do this to us?”

  ::They did this to you::

  “Then why are you punishing us?”

  ::Punishment is power::

  “It’s killing us.”

  ::You kill yourselves::

  “We’re scared.”

  ::Only one to listen::

  “Do you mean me?”

  ::You listen::

  “Listen to what?”

  ::You are here::

  “What do I tell the others?”

  The darkness climbed inside me and I was sealed within those burning stars. And Nyarlabhokop, Mouth of Nyarlathotep, talked straight into my brain, nattered and chattered words that stung like a thousand needles, susurrating a secret message.

  ~

  We found the causeway on a donkey-dirt road between the rubble of Koeberg and what used to be Duynefontein. Just like that night on Klaas and Thande’s farm, reality folded as I approached, and for an unhinged instance, the star-eyes opened again inside me.

  The portal at the end of the road was a live canvas. Astrid, Klaas and Thande watched as I touched it, fingers moving across the rippling surface, images flowering in their wake. Vivid representations of my will.

  —R’luh phlegeth .. sgn’wahl .. pflughshug, gintrghhal—

  Who sees the stars and do not turn have learned,

  inside will hold the will to change, to not lie down, reject all shame

  have mastered the Master

  and their will shall be made flesh.

  AIN’T MUCH PRIDE

  by Nate Southard

  Used to be, I loved fish. Tuna, swordfish, red snapper, striped bass—if you found me a chef who knew how to cook it, I’d belly up. I’m not talking about deep frying catfish or beer-battered cod, either. Any goon can do that. Cooking a real piece of fish; that takes skill. Try to say I’m wrong, you get cuffed behind the ear. Hard.

  Now? Man, I hate fish. The look, the smell, the taste. Jesus Christ. Makes me sick just to think about it. Seven months hiding out in international waters will do that to you, though. Don’t matter if you’re on a luxury yacht or not. No steak or pork or chicken on this floating tomb. Just fish. We eat what we got; we get more. It’s like the circle of life, except with a skeleton crew, couple of girls, a looming drug trafficking charge, and so much sea food it’ll grow you gills.

  ~

  Boss Wilburn sits in one of the yacht’s bigger rooms—I know crap about boats, but my guess is it’s a ballroom…maybe a dining room—in one of his better suits. Months without a dry cleaner have left it smudged with salt air, but he still suits up every Thursday. Says it’s important to keep things formal. He insists on formality while doing lines off Betty Numero Uno, whose name is Cynthia.

  I stand in the corner, hands folded in front of my crotch like I need to piss. The 9mm is hard against my ribs, but I’m used to it.

  Gregory reads him one of the latest encrypted emails. Wilburn receives one a week, no more, and he’s powerful enough to afford keeping a lawyer like Gregory on board to explain all of them. Back when boredom hadn’t chained him to a gold straw, he’d insisted this would keep us all safe and secure. I want a steak so bad I’ve been considering a Facebook account so I can display our location, maybe tag the Feds. Pretty sure they don’t serve fish in prison.

  “Okay, yeah, sure,” Wilburn says. “Skip the pretty words and tell me what it means.”

  “It means the Feds aren’t tossing the investigation,” Gregory says. “Another month, maybe, but for right now we’re staying put.”

  “Fine with me. Ain’t it fine with you, Cindy?”

  Cynthia giggles, her stomach spasming, and Wilburn holds up both hands. “Hold still, dammit! I got two lines left.”

  “Sorry, Baby.” Her red hair lies in a perfect fan on the mahogany tabletop.

  “It’s good, Sugar. We all so good.”

  The lines disappear, and I dream of fried chicken.

  ~

  Gregory seems an okay man, but I don’t trust him. Wilburn thinks having someone like Gregory around keeps him safe. Whatever. I ain’t ever met a hired hand worth trusting.

  Sometimes, I wonder if Wilburn knows about Gregory and Ericka. Ericka’s Betty Numero Dos, a little brunette who used to be a hostess at one of Wilburn’s favorite joints. When she first climbed onboard, she did as the boss expected, meaning she, along with Cynthia, was his and his alone. That was then. Now, coke leaves Wilburn ineffective in the bedroom, and Ericka gets bored. Shit happens.

  Wilburn averages a day awake followed by a day asleep, so it’s not like Ericka and Gregory don’t have enough time to play. Cynthia and me, we spend those hours playing Clue. I�
�ve gotten pretty good at it. Ain’t nobody capping Mr. Body without me cracking the case.

  Cynthia sighs in that bored way that tells me she doesn’t have another game in her.

  “Want to watch a movie?” I ask.

  “I want to go home.”

  “You probably shouldn’t tell me that.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. I’m supposed to tell the boss that kind of thing.”

  “Are you going to?”

  I shrug. It’s as good an answer as any.

  ~

  “What’s going on?”

  Wilburn sounds pissed. We tried to keep the commotion down, but I guess we cut into his latest coke binge. He stomps toward us in an open bathroom, pale belly jiggling over silk boxers. Behind him, Ericka looks both bored and worried. She wears a sheet against the sea air. White powder still marks her nose.

  I stand with Gregory and Captain Ross, who smells like cheap bourbon and sweat. Not that I’m much better. If I concentrate, I can still smell Cynthia’s hair, and I wonder how much longer I can keep our alone times on the movie and board game level.

  “Life raft,” Gregory says. “Captain spotted it about ten minutes ago.”

  “So what? You think I give a damn?”

  “Don’t worry,” I say. “No survivors.”

  “Good. That’s good.”

  Looking down at the yellow rubber vessel and the body it contains, I feel a quick stab of relief I won’t have to off someone today. Calling the coast guard ain’t an option.

  Captain Ross kicks a rope ladder over the side, and I swing a leg and start down. I keep my eyes straight ahead. The ladder swings, and my knuckles rap against the ship’s hull a time or two before my toe touches the raft. One more rung, and then I let go with one arm, turn so I can see what I’m working with.