by Jay Lake
We must believe it happened thusly, for if they returned only because the stars were right, well, no one can fight the stars.
Even the most optimistic of us do not bet on more than two decades remaining, and the general consensus is less than ten years. The loss of biomass may have started an irreversible decline in the atmospheric oxygen budget. What isn’t killed by the growing fungal tides, freezes to death instead. We might win, by freakish luck and blind chance, only to perish as free men instead of slaves.
No, we are not even slaves, for slaves have value. We are but an infestation, an annoyance or perhaps a sport to the priests, less than dust to the Old Ones.
Still, we make our plans, and we gather our data, and we try. What else can we do? The human race is terminal, a cancer patient at full metastasis, every organ riddled with rot, the specter of death crushing a bit more air from every heaving of the lungs.
So I listen to this plan to cultivate an obscure type of jellyfish venom. Surely, like the fungi, it is those jellyfish who far more resemble the Old Ones than the cephalopods and amphibians old Howard Phillips Lovecraft was so fond of citing. This beautiful, as-yet untainted young woman—how?—whose name we will never know and who must have been a child when the end first came, explains how the vial she carries can be cultivated in long, low trays of saltwater, with an admixture of organic nutrients to sustain the jellyfish cells that produce the requisite toxin.
It is Julia Child by way of War of the Worlds. We plot the downfall of humanity’s most vile traitors via kitchen science, and hope to blind the Old Ones back into restless slumber in doing so.
III
I stay that night in the lodge, for my string of boltholes doesn’t begin until about fifteen river miles inland, at Knappa, Oregon. As is our usual practice, most of the others leave. Those far along into the transformation, including Madeleine Gervais whom I’d known quite well back before the end, are far more nervous about this plan. The girl from Crescent City is unable to tell us how the poison might affect us, only that it has worked on captured priests, who cannot be slain except by extreme violence, followed by reduction and burning of the corpse.
We can make them die unknowing. Oh, the joy that thought brings me. These traitors who have already brought the deaths of billions are beyond any redemption of suffering or vengeance.
Curling in my little nest of borrowed blankets in one of the old basement saunas, I am quite surprised when the girl comes to me. I know her by her footsteps and her scent already.
Her fingers brush my shoulder, the light pressure of them through the fabric of the blanket the first human touch I have known in almost nine years. We do not hug, or even clasp hands, in the Second Resistance. “I saw that you understood,” she whispers.
The hairs on my neck prickle, as my cock strains like a clothyard shaft. “I do,” I whisper, then immediately curse the echoed meaning of those particular words. I still wear my wedding ring, though my finger has grown around it until the band is almost invisible. Most days I cannot recall the faces of my wife and daughter.
“It is darker here.” She squats back on her heels, shadows against shadow, barely an outline through some stray bit of light elsewhere in the basement. It is enough for me to notice the swing of her right breast beneath the concert T-shirt, and I recall enough of women to know she has done this on purpose.
“Darker than California?”
“Yes.” She shivers slightly. I realize her nipple has stiffened to something pleasingly mouth-filling. “So many of the Old Ones love their cold.”
“They are creatures of space, and night, and the darkest depths.” For no good reason, I add, “Such bright and risen madness in our names.”
That hand touches me again as the breast strains against its enclosing fabric. “Are you lonely?” she asks in a soft, lost voice. I am too taken up in her to wonder at the question, for already I am lifting my blanket to shew her just how lonely I am.
IV
The woman is gone the next morning, a note telling me she heads north for the Aberdeen lodge, if it can still be found. Here in Oregon we’ve had no word from the Washington side this year since the river thawed in May, though in past years they’ve come across at Longview two or three times a month by boat during the free-flowing months. Priests burned out the Lincoln City Lodge last December, the members stripped and broken and laid before the dark tide of shoggoths, digital prints of their deaths tacked to walls and telephone poles all up and down the Northwest coast as a warning to the remaining feral humans.
No such word of Aberdeen, for good or ill.
I should go back to my own routines, but there are vats of jellyfish toxin to establish. Someone will have to scale the odd-angled walls of the Risen City and carry the stuff in. Or allow themselves to be captured, and pray for a slow enough death to be able to spread the poison first.
In any case, the sauna room smells of sex and me and her, and I know I shall never again experience the sweet caress of a woman. The scent-memories are precious, while they remain.
I work for days, as Madeleine stays with me after the last stragglers depart. She knows that I touched the girl with my body, just as I will never again touch her lidless, staring eyes, and damp, spotted skin. The painful memory returns, that it was she who gave me the wedding band I still wear.
Can she be jealous now, beyond the end of all things?
Still, the little cells grow, the trays glowing slightly in a curious echo of the walls just offshore. Madeleine’s lips are no longer well formed for speaking, and neither is her larynx, but she grunts her fears to me.
The toxins will kill us all, or at least those of us who are transforming. Her. Me. Everyone but the girl from Crescent City. Or perhaps the toxins will kill no one, and this is all but a cruel hoax. Maybe the Old Ones toy with us, even now.
Finally I take her into my arms one night, in the old sauna. Though true coupling is not possible for us, I make love to my memory of who my wife once was, while her lidless eyes weep acid tears to scar my chest and shoulder.
V
In the morning, I find her shriveled corpse next to the toxin trays. A faint smear still glows around her lips. I wonder if I should cry, but tears are years gone.
There is nothing more to be done. I gather my strength and purpose. As we were instructed, I press the cells in old cloth, so the toxin can be more easily spread by air or contact. As it dries, I bottle the stuff into old light bulbs from which the metal stems have been broken off, then bind them with duct tape. If the priests beat me upon my capture, they will be very surprised.
I leave detailed notes and diagrams shewing our work, for when others of the lodge return. Eventually I step outside into the chilled mist and stare across the water at the Risen City. I shall take a dory and row me down to that watery hell, bringing blindness to the Old Ones, and death to my immortal enemies.
As I ply the oars, I wonder if the girl and Madeleine planned this for me. The waters around me roil with evil, the sky is Armageddon-dark, and I find it does not matter.
“I love you,” I tell the world. Then I row some more.
Her Fingers Like Whips, Her Eyes Like Razors
* * *
I always thought the fair folk Under the Hill were creepy as hell. So I set about showing that.
* * *
Mother never has been patient. Old as she is—and there are hills Above of which she can remember the birth—time has never blessed her with the sort of wisdom lore informs us is inevitable with the assumption of the grace of age.
This does not bother me. I am not one of the mabkin. They toil at her leisure, they sweat to her pleasures, they suffer to her pains. Sooner be a worker ant in a burrow than one of those pretty, pretty, doomed butterflies. Mother always pulls the wings off her children and eats them in the end.
No, my purpose in this life is different. Someone must keep the Doors, after all. The great copper hinges on which the boundaries of night and day swing do not clean them
selves of verdigris. Neither do the shadowed locks forged by Chronos himself in the time before the light first came into the world oil their own tumblers.
You who live Above tell stories. I am never certain if this is a sickness or a blessing, though in my weaker moments over a glass of lifewater I have confessed a time or two to envy. I have even caught the way of it from you. Everyone who comes begging at the Doors launches their plea on the wings of some tale. They tuck their feet beneath their knees amid the riot of spring flowers, or a moment later they huddle fast amid the snowdrifts and the winter wind, or a moment after that lean with the stiffness of their aging against some patient draft animal and croak out a querulous plea against the final bloody sunset of their mayfly days.
The Doorkeeper listens to all. The Doorkeeper hears all. The Doorkeeper is the keyhole to Mother’s heart, here Below. Mother is not patient, but I am, for I hold her heart in my left pocket along with a hawk feather, three apple seeds, and the list of True Names, which is so short and infinite that it has been scriven on the inside of a silver thimble.
Come, then, and tell me your story, for Mother will never listen, and I always will. Like the icy seed of winter hidden inside a summer rain, Below is always here. Like the golden fire of summer hidden inside a winter freeze, Below is always here. And you will never be on the right side of the Doors, unless your tale makes the seahawk fly from my vest, the three trees bloom, and the thimble whisper your True Name in the voice of the distant, amniotic sea.
Then Mother’s heart will take another beat, she will age another day, and we will all be a moment closer to freedom.
Come. Tell me.
* * *
The chemo port implant scars on Addison’s right chest still ached a little, and she ignored the continuing sensation that the surgeons had left a Bic pen inside her. Another twinge, to the chorus from her ribs and the partial thoracectomy that had removed her tumor. Besides, she was away from all that now, for a little while. Or maybe longer, despite the appointments next week back in Laramie.
The day here was fine and cold, the wind brisk, and she was outdoors. Addison climbed through what felt like more bracken than any hills had a right to be covered with. A week earlier, she hadn’t even known what bracken was. Ferns and flowers?
Hills without mountains seemed strange to her, but she was a long way from Wyoming. The last few nights camping in her little tent, she’d felt a long way from anywhere. It had taken her great mental effort to remember the name of the little airport she’d flown into over the weekend, after changing planes four times and crossing an ocean.
“I’m not worried,” she told the empty sky, over which not even a hawk circled. The sky held no answers.
She slipped a half-eaten Clif Bar from her pocket, which slowly became a three-quarter-eaten Clif Bar before her gag reflex kicked in. Figs, who the hell ever thought figs were a good idea? Addison was eating less each day, which was odd, because she wasn’t really at any significant altitude.
Just the top of the world, from this view.
Her grandfather Locke’s words kept coming back to her.
Start at the Heartbeck
The sunset behind you
Always climb higher
You’ll find your way true
He’d sung her to sleep with those words when she was a baby and a little girl, and later on made her memorize them. Addison had spent her winters with Grandfather Locke in the little house in Laramie, while her parents and brothers worked their high-country ranch. She’d been too weak for the deep snows, she’d been told all her childhood. Too delicate a constitution.
Addison had never had a cold a day in her life. Not a moment’s illness.
Not until now.
She crossed a ridge so low and subtle she almost missed the fact she wasn’t climbing anymore. The sun stood overhead, directly at its zenith. The scent was different here—the slight rank of bracken overwhelmed by the underlying acidity of the stony soil and a damp tang of metal.
The smell of magic, when you feel like you’ve been chewing wires.
Where the hell had that thought come from? In Grandfather’s voice.
There wasn’t any higher to climb. Not here, not now. No beck to put at her back, either. The watercourses had vanished to rivulets a day ago, and she was carrying her last two quarts on her hip. All she saw in front of her was a shallow bowl of a high valley, a place that by rights should have cupped a little tarn reflecting the blue sky with the indolence of water.
Close your eyes and follow your nose.
Grandfather Locke had died last winter with a smile on his face, looking no older than he ever had since she was born. Not even tired, just finished, as if his life work had been carving a young adult Addison from the stuff of childhood.
Now he was talking to her.
So she listened. That’s what she was doing here, right? Walking east from the Heartbeck.
Addison closed her eyes and breathed in the place she stood. Trace of bracken. Soil. Wind, bearing a bit of damp from some more fortunate locale. The droppings of something small and herbivorous. Metal.
Metal.
Copper.
Mouth open, she turned, facing first one way then the other, until she thought she knew where the metal tang was strongest. She advanced slowly, her hiking pole a cane now. No point in breaking an ankle in the one gopher hole for forty miles on this high, hollow hill.
Did they even have gophers on this side of the Atlantic?
Step, sniff. Step, sniff. Step, sniff.
When she bumped into the solid mass on the ground, Addison was not the least bit surprised.
She opened her eyes to see a pair of copper slabs stretched before her. No, not slabs, doors, for all that they were flat against the bottom of the little valley. They looked like nothing so much as the blast doors to a Wyoming missile silo, if the air force had been hiring Italian espresso-machine designers to build the Cold War infrastructure.
The margins of each door were worked in high-relief chasings of snakes and trefoils, which themselves seemed to form a script, though not one she recognized. Tiny eyes winked between the leaves. Tiny mouths screamed ecstasy and terror. Battles and seductions worked their way across the vast spaces between the margins. The doors seemed almost alive.
She looked about to find a girl who hadn’t been there a moment before sitting on one corner of the doors, twenty feet away. A young woman, much her build and age, wearing a rather smart denim miniskirt and a hunter green ragged wool vest far too large for her. And apparently nothing else, which made Addison’s heart skip a beat before she looked away from the curve of exposed breast, then found herself drawn back again.
The girl was the girl in the mirror.
“Hello,” the stranger said. Her voice was soft, familiar, though the accent was strange, like nothing Addison had ever heard.
“Uh, hello.” Addison’s own voice sounded odd in her ears now.
They stared at one another, ordinary brown eyes locked on ordinary brown eyes. She’d never been anything special, had always longed for the fiery red hair and green eyes of all the brave servant girls who were future queens in the books she’d devoured from the library, but Addison’s looks had remained resolutely plain.
On this girl in her ragged, open vest, here in the crown of the high hills, those looks were as exotic as any raving beauty on the page. Unthinking, Addison plucked at her own hair.
“Do you bear sorrow or joy?” asked the girl.
“You—” Addison blurted, then stopped. “You look like me.”
Laughter that could have rung the bells of morning. Why don’t I laugh like that? “Better to say you look like me, stranger.” A long, thoughtful pause, something deceptively close to compassion in those brown eyes. “No one finds these doors by accident. Well, almost no one. But surely not you.”
“No, no…” Addison paused, stared at her own slender, callused fingers a moment. She was still thirty feet from the other girl, but she coul
d smell her. A far-too-familiar scent somewhere between sex and sleep. It was … disturbing. “Grandfather sent me.”
“Whose grandfather?” Now the voice was gentle.
Why was this question important? She’d fallen into some modern version of the riddle game, like talking to her therapist but with such different, unknowable stakes. Addison stalled by walking around the verge of the doors. There was certainly no way she was going to set foot on them.
The other girl was patient. Addison got the impression the stranger would have waited a decade for her to round the corner and walk face-to-face to answer the question.
“My grandfather. Grandfather Locke.”
“Morfar or farfar?”
“Excuse me?”
“Your mother’s father or your father’s father?”
“Oh. Mother’s. Daddy was a Keyes.”
Something stirred in the girl’s vest pocket. She glanced down in apparent surprise, looking into a dark place that seemed much deeper than the ragged woolen vest could contain. “Lock and key,” mused the girl.
“I’m Addison Keyes.”
The pocket shifted again. Was she carrying an animal in there?
The girl just stared back.
Eventually Addison filled the silence. “And you are…?”
The answer was prompt if unhelpful. “Waiting.”
“For what?”
She patted the copper doors. “Locks and keys.”
Something shifted in Addison’s head, half-forgotten words of Grandfather Locke’s. Another verse.
Until you are truly lost
You will never be there
Always climb higher
And never ask where
He really had been a bit strange …
“I can take the hint,” Addison said. “Nominate determinism is just silly, but if you want me to be, I am both a Locke and a Keyes.”
“If you think names do not count, then you have learned nothing.” This close, the girl touched Addison’s hair, then sniffed. A spark passed between them, like petting a cat during thunderstorm weather. Addison didn’t jump, but was surprised at the tingle inside her breasts and groin. “You were raised by a mabkin.”