She nodded, just once, wondering whether those who fed her the words could see her.
Strength returned to her. She regained her feet to gaze down at the ring in the bottom of the sink. Facing her was an engraving of a rather ugly creature, with tentacles and large eyes—a squid, she supposed, for that was what it reminded her of, her only point of reference. Yet it was not a squid; it was more than a squid. As she gazed down at it, dread and loathing began to suffuse her, tempered by an inexplicable adoration for the creature depicted on the ring. She felt no contradiction between the extreme emotions. The feelings filled her as if they had always existed within her as a response to seeing the creature. But what did they signify?
The voices within her grew louder, yet remained indistinct. She clapped her hands to her head, oblivious to the fish goo still on them, and tried to silence the voices. Subdued, they hovered once more in her background like a Greek chorus awaiting the play’s next cue.
Cautiously she lowered her hand, index finger out, to touch the ring. The tip of her finger began to tingle as it drew near. An inch from the ring, she paused, suddenly fearful. This ring was not a natural object. The flounder was a bottom-feeder; the ring had come from the depths of the sea, of the ocean. From Hell? That thought made her tremble as she peered more closely at the creature. Was that a mouth? It seemed capable of swallowing her up, even as the trembling and tingling consumed her.
Tara moved her finger closer and touched the ring.
She expected to see a glow or a reflection, something to indicate that her finger had made contact with the metal. Her fingertip brushed the engraving, feeling the ridges and grooves, absorbing the sensations of the metal. Yet nothing fantastical happened. The ring simply waited, as if for something more.
Waited, she thought, applying the word to the ring as if it were somehow alive.
Really? she thought. But where did that word come from? She seldom had a use for it. Why did it pass through her now?
Had it come from the voices?
A part of her urged her to pull her finger back. Another part told her to put the ring on. As she considered this, the voices in her head resumed its chorus, now slow and deep, almost like a Gregorian chant. The sounds they made seemed to be more distinct now, as if they were meant to form words. But what words? Certainly not English. She supposed they might be Gaelic, though she knew very little. She maintained contact with the ring and listened.
Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.
It made no sense. They were nonsense syllables, comprising nonsense sounds, as one might say “goo, goo” to a child. Yet they were repeated over and over, as if by dint of repetition she would be compelled to understand them. Uncomprehending, she let the simple fact of them dominate her background.
She washed the ring under the faucet, dried it on her shirt, and slipped it onto the middle finger of her left hand.
Claaaaaaaaaiiiiirrrrrrre, she heard.
Now that, she thought, was definitely the voices. Claire: a person? Yet of that name there was no one of her acquaintance.
Really!
Tara started. There it was again, that word. It was more distinct now, and as she reviewed the sound of it, she realized that it was not quite “really,” but something else, something unfamiliar. Something . . . alien. Alien and quite, quite old.
Claire. Yes, a name for sure. But whose?
Movement outside the window above the sink caught her eye, just a flicker of something. Wind mounted and began to buffet the shanty, but outside she saw no sign of wind. Even so, the shanty trembled. Inside her mind, the voices seemed to gather for one mighty word. The power behind that gathering shook her to her core. She stood with arms braced on the counter by the sink, holding on as if for dear life, though no threat was apparent. Outside the window, the world remained calm.
A gust blew, inside her. The word came, hovered, and passed on with the gust.
Go!
It was a booming sound, like a great burst of thunder, though no lightning had struck. Tara sensed that somehow the voices were now exhausted, having delivered themselves at last of that which they had to say.
Of that which they had been directed to say.
For the moment, silence reigned. She closed her eyes and keened an ear to it. Blessed silence. The voices, at last, were stilled. The gust that had shaken the shanty was stilled.
At length she raised her hand to examine the ring. It seemed to shine even more brightly now, as if somehow it had acquired a purpose. She tried without success to connect the wearing of the ring with the stilling of the voices and to connect it with the buffeting gust. Perhaps the ring represented a spirit. Perhaps it even conveyed the power of that spirit.
To protect her? The shanty had avoided storm damage, after all.
To guide her, to instruct her? She thought about that. Very well, how had she been instructed?
Claire. Really. Go. Go!
Fright arrived, unwanted, like quicksand. Her feet sank into it, then her lower legs. She felt its pressure, squeezing blood and life up into her torso. She could not move, except to gasp for breath. The pressure reached her hips, her belly, crushing the air from the bottom of her lungs. Her heart felt on the verge of an explosion, the way one presses a grape almost to the bursting point. Her chest—.
Be not afraid. Claire. Really. Go.
The quicksand sank back whence it had come. She could breathe. She drew air deeply, savoring it while she gaped at the ring on her finger.
Who is Claire? she asked it.
As if from a distance, the beating of wings and the sound of hooves on a packed dirt road reached her ears. The sounds seemed to come from within her, like the voices. Louder they grew, until she felt as if the flying creature and the galloping creature had to be speeding past her eyes. Or past her window. She peered outside and saw only the storm-ruined hamlet.
Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.
The sounds faded, replaced by a vision of green fields that blurred into a crescent of sand along a broken shoreline washed by green-gray waves. A shoreline on which water-burred boulders slicked with algae lay strewn as if cast there by some monstrous sea creature. Even as the vision grew, she could hear the roar of the creature. Or was it the sea that she heard, bursting onto the rocks? She could not be certain.
Once more, wings beat on the wind and hooves thudded the land.
The land of Clare.
Breath left Tara. County Clare. In the old country. Creatures of the Old Ways had just told her where to go.
Elation filled her. Now she knew! Now it was all clear to her.
Really!
*****
The ticket purchased. The passage booked. The great ship sailed.
Fearful of assault or robbery in steerage, Tara took a small berth on the second upper level, where a porthole afforded her a view of the Atlantic Ocean. She kept to the room—not much more than a forgotten alcove where once had been stored utility items for cleaning the decks—and even arranged with Scott, the purser’s aide, a winsome young man about her own age, to take her meager meals there. She husbanded her funds, for once the ship made port at Galway, she still had to travel south by rail, toward Ennistymon and Hags Head.
The first day out of Boston, Tara felt a connection form between herself and the ring. Tendrils of sensation, like a nerve gently stroked with a fine cloth, grew up her arm and across her shoulder, into her chest. By the third day, she was certain that a network was growing within her, substantial but untouchable—a presence, like an adjunct to the soul. She began to study the ring on her finger more closely. She ran her fingertip over the grooves that defined what she regarded as tentacles. She slid her fingernail across the mouth, as if to clear debris from it as one might clean the dirt from under a nail. Her movements slowed; she drew pleasure from contact with the silvery metal—surely it was silver, though her lack of education in that regard limited her, for she knew of few other metals a
nd could readily eliminate only gold and copper. Pleasure grew with prolonged contact and caressing to an addiction—she had to have, could not live without, that metallic contact. By the end of the fifth day, two days out of Galway, she had no attention for anything save the ring. By the end of that day, too, her body—her being—had been suffused by the network of tendrils, so that she had become two persons in one. The second, however, the network, remained unconscious within her.
On the sixth day, one day from port, Tara realized that her belly was swelling at a rate that was almost perceptible. It was not possible, of course, for her to be pregnant, yet the indications of pregnancy were present—among them, skin stretched taut and an abnormally frequent need to visit the toilet. She readily accepted the new condition but not the significance of it, for she had not known a man. She attributed it to the ring. Whatever the ring asked of her, she would do, as devotedly as a medieval mystic.
As yet it did not occur to Tara that the ring might ask her to give birth.
On the seventh day, just past midday, the great ship arrived at Galway port. Tara’s condition astonished no one save the purser’s aide, for no one else remembered seeing her on board. The aide, who had brought meals to her berth and had caught glimpses of the changes in her, wore an expression both confused and sympathetic as she passed by him on her way to the gangplank. She was not surprised when he caught her up and took her by the elbow to usher her safely down to land. He mumbled something to her—she was not certain of the words—and she limited her response to a polite nod. In the back of her mind, she was aware that under other circumstances she might have dallied a bit longer—and who-knows-what might have happened then, for he had a strength about him that seemed to reassure her—but the ring and, more importantly, the network impelled her onward.
A taxicab brought her to the train station. Though of Irish ancestry, she knew but a few words. Still, she was able with little difficulty to convey the desire of converting her remaining American dollars to pounds sterling for use in the Irish Free State. The man in the railway ticket window spoke English so badly, however, that it might as well have been Gaelic. Tara was reduced to scrawling the name of the town, Ennistymon, on a slip of paper. After a brief inspection of her condition, the ticket master, clucking in sympathy, gently tugged a few leafs of currency from the folded wad she was carrying and handed her a schedule of stops and a ticket, pointing to a number on the latter that indicated the wagon number.
The train conductor proved equally sympathetic to Tara’s condition. Although she had not requested one, he assigned her to a lower sleeping berth—the upper being unoccupied, and by his gestures and tone she understood him to indicate that it would not be occupied. She inserted herself into it, dropped the privacy curtain, and laid down on her right side, her head snug on the pillow. She held the schedule close, to read it in the dim light. If the train was on time, it would reach Ennistymon at eight the next morning. She had nothing to do until then but sleep. Sleep, and caress the ring.
*****
Sleep included dreaming. She’d experienced the same dream each night aboard the great ship, and each succeeding night it had resolved itself into clearer and clearer images. On board the train now trundling south toward Ennistymon, the beating wings morphed into heavy winds and the hoof beats surged as massive gray waves onto a crescent shoreline of coarse yellow sand. The voices returned in force as Tara picked her way over rounded dark boulders slicked with algae. Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn. It was a litany of the incomprehensible. Only the sounds of the words—if words they were—compelled her onward.
The dark waters beckoned, their froth-capped waves fluttering as if they were the waves of a great hand. Tara slipped, sat down hard on a rock. Pain...
She awoke, gasping for breath.
What had just happened? What had she seen?
Ocean, water, waves, darkness. A dark shape.
Words calling to her.
Now that she had wakened, they continued to call to her. Gently, insistently, like the words of an ardent lover. She ran her hands over her swollen belly. Under her fingers, something moved. Not a kick, but a pressure. Her face twisted as she tried to find a word that matched what she had just felt. Something had slid around inside her. Like a snake, trapped in there. It had...writhed.
The concept and the movement engendered no revulsion in Tara. She had accepted the ring, the contact, the network growing inside her, the swollen belly. The dreams, the words. Now this. The one simply added to the accumulation of all the others. It seemed the most natural thing in the world that she should appear as she did.
Strange, but natural.
It was also only natural that she should be curious. In the empty moments of her fresh wakefulness, Tara felt a question form. As it began to resolve itself, the voices rose to the occasion. Now, instead of clamoring for attention, they soothed her spirit. Everything was as it should be. Everything was all right.
But what was it that should be?
The train lurched, jostling her. The snake inside her writhed again. She looked at her belly and at the fingers of the hand spread over her belly. At the ring on the finger on her belly.
Not a snake. A tentacle.
The creature depicted on the ring had grown inside her.
She smiled to herself. Curious, she thought, and lay back down.
*****
At Ennistymon Station, Tara waddled up to a small lorry that already had taken on two passengers and purchased a ride to the coast. Her obvious condition gained her a seat in the cab, while the other two rode in the wagon. The driver, an old man who reeked of tobacco and rye, alternately cursed the ruts in the dirt road and cast sympathetic glances at her. After a few miles, he offered her a drink of water from a battered steel canteen, which she accepted gratefully. He tried speaking with her, a few tentative queries, but her English was no match for his Gaelic and his brogue and he soon abandoned the attempt at conversation, the failure mitigated considerably by her smile of appreciation for his efforts.
Behind them, the sun did battle with great banks of dark gray clouds that had gathered from horizon to horizon and finally gave up the attempt to light their journey. Inside Tara’s belly, tentacles slid and twisted, the effect on her oddly calming, as if they were caressing her very soul. In the west, thunderclouds touched the horizon, and touched the ocean, illuminating the world with lightning. Tara felt herself more strongly drawn to the waters the closer they got to the coast. Here and there the road failed and was reacquired. The jostling of the lorry began to cause her discomfort. Tentacles writhed. She bit at her lip and held tightly to the door handle.
Great raindrops began to pelt the lorry windshield. Only the wiper on the passenger side functioned, and that unevenly. Each time the driver leaned over to get a clearer view, that side of the lorry dipped into the mud forming at the edge of the road and he jerked the steering wheel to bring the vehicle back under control. Tara began to fear for the journey and even for her safety. Rain rebounded off the ground as a heavy mist, pierced only a little by a beam from the right front headlight. Within that mist might be all manner of dreadful creatures, from dragons to...to whatever was the source of the ring and the source of the now-squirming form inside her. She clasped both hands over her belly now, squeezed her eyes shut, and prayed that the voices would come and reassure her.
Sounds reached her, separating themselves on this occasion into what had to be words. Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn. The words of her dream the night before. She wondered now whether they might be Gaelic. Looking at the driver, she repeated them aloud as best she could, but he merely shrugged and uttered no response.
Suddenly the image of a great and distorted city of slime-smeared stone and murky spheres suffused Tara’s mind. The city seemed to be underwater. The spheres were not unlike the beach stones she had scrabbled over in her dream, save they were much larger. Within them, dark creatures writhed, just as
within her the tentacles shifted position. She felt one wrap itself around her heart, caressing it, soothing it. Fear departed from her like a final breath. All was as it should be. As it was meant to be.
The lorry slid to a halt in long grass. The driver spoke, gesticulating. The words meant nothing to Tara but the overall meaning was clear: he would go no further until the rain ceased.
The voices grew insistent. Driven to obey, Tara opened the lorry door and climbed outside into the rain. The driver called after her but she waved him off and, blinking against the rain, managed a reassuring smile before she turned and started walking toward the coast.
Her feet slipped on the thick wet grass and her shoes took on water and mud. Several times she stumbled and caught herself. Now and then she thought she heard the ocean but it might have been the wind and rain. She dragged a forearm across her eyes and peered into the deluge, but the world ahead of her remained a montage in various shades of sopping wet gray. The very air seemed ready to slide off the edge of the Earth.
Without warning she came upon the beach.
Although shrouded in rain, the land appeared as in her dream. Clutches of water-burred boulders, laden with slick algae now made more perilous by rain, impeded her path to the water. She stood on the edge of the beach, where the grass met the sand, and groaned.
You must proceed, Tara.
But she could not move. Could not take another step. Already she had lost her footing too many times. What if she fell on the rocks? What if she harmed whatever was inside her? She dared not risk it.
She felt an ache growing in her groin.
It grew from a sore muscle to an arthritic elbow to a tooth on the verge of infection. The tentacles writhed as if demanding release. She sat down on the sodden grass and tore off her lower garments and opened her legs.
The Idolaters of Cthulhu Page 18