by Laird Barron
I kissed her back, longer. “Absolutely,” I said.
“Can we just go?” Max said.
The wind was picking up as we returned home, shaking the huge maple tree in the backyard. I always had trouble sleeping on windy nights, imagining that tree falling on us. I made dinner while Cindy mounted the print in an ornate old picture frame she had picked up at the Salvation Army.
“Beautiful,” I said, giving her a taste of the sauce. “Yummy,” she agreed.
Eating dinner beneath our new work of art, we drank a toast to Lovecraft, and afterward decamped to the living room couch for a showing of the movie “Re-Animator.” Max left to play videogames in his room. We finished the movie and read for a while before going to bed. Our last day together.
We never should have returned to Providence. That was my big mistake—come to think of it, the same mistake Lovecraft made after things didn’t work out for him in New York. A lot of people try to leave Providence, but most eventually come back. In our case it took eleven years for the curse to get us.
I woke in the middle of the night, my heart racing. My impression was that there had been a jarringly loud noise, but the more my wits returned, the more I realized I had probably dreamed it. Cindy was not in bed with me, and I assumed she had gone downstairs to the bathroom, or possibly to make herself a cup of warm milk and meditate on the couch. Max was snoring in the next bedroom. I stared at the ceiling for a few minutes before deciding to go down and sit with my wife. We both had learned to like such moments of unscheduled quality time in the wee hours—they seemed to exist outside the fuss of normal reality.
Cindy was not downstairs. I could practically see the whole house at a glance; there was nowhere to hide. Feeling a worm of panic in my stomach, I called, “Honey?” The sound of my anxious voice was worse than the silence, and I didn’t want to wake Max. Where the hell was she? The car was still in the driveway, so she hadn’t taken it for a joyride.
The only place I hadn’t checked was the basement—but why would she go down there? She wouldn’t, certainly not in the middle of the night. Not without telling me. Unless…unless maybe she realized she had left something in the washer or dryer, something she needed to wear for work in the morning? But no—I could see through the floor vent that the basement light was off.
I suddenly realized it wasn’t even possible for her to have left the house. The security alarm was still set; she would have had to turn it off to go outside. Which meant she was still in here…somewhere.
Channeling my growing worry into motion, I turned on all the lights and searched every cubbyhole, every cabinet, looking under furniture and behind appliances. Nothing. The cat was freaking out, and I was losing it myself. On the verge of calling 911, I stumbled upon what I was looking for: not my wife, but an answer to the mystery.
The shower. It was literally the first thing I checked, and I had missed it. In the dark, I had not looked carefully enough at the floor. Re-checking it in the light, I realized at once what must have happened to my wife, and it wasn’t good.
The floor of the shower was gone. Where there had been a solid stone slab with a drain in its center was now a square black hole, a bottomless pit.
Oh my God—my worst fears realized. All the time I had been rebuilding that shower, I was nervous that the floor might collapse under me. I pictured myself trapped there, pinned against the wall by the heavy slab, my flailing hands grabbing for the faucet and inadvertently spinning it to the hottest setting so that I was boiled alive under the searing spray. Despite these fantasies, I had not pulled up the slab to check the supports—it would have been a big job, requiring plumbing and masonry expertise. It seemed solidly placed in its corner of the foundation, so I left it alone. My hair stood on end at the sickening thought: Had I killed my wife with my stupidity?
But maybe she was alive! The hot water wasn’t running, so at least she couldn’t have been poached to death! She might be okay down there, just a bit shaken up!
Grabbing for this flimsy straw of hope, I called down the hole, “Honey! Are you okay?” Not waiting for her answer—and there was none—I got down on my belly and leaned as far as I could into the dark opening. I couldn’t see a thing, and cursed myself for not replacing the batteries in the flashlight. “Honey, can you hear me? Try to make a sound if you can!”
There was a sound, or maybe I imagined one, a kind of faint gurgle which could have been the sewer pipe under the toilet, but which in my terror I heard as the cry of my injured wife. “I’m coming, baby, hold on!” Wedging my right foot between the toilet and the wall, I thrust my upper body into the hole, reaching as far down as I could with my arms. I wasn’t sure how deep it was, since the area beneath the addition was separated from the main basement by the original stone foundation; I had always assumed it was little more than a crawlspace. But as I dangled my searching hands in that clammy well, I could not find anything within reach. “Take my hand,” I begged her. “Can you see me? I’m right above you.”
Without warning, my wife’s ice-cold hand grabbed mine—and suddenly I was slipping, yanked face-first into the pit by her claw-like grip. I landed hard on a pile of concrete rubble, but the pain meant nothing to me—my wife was alive! Crawling to my feet in my robe and slippers, I said, “Oh my God, honey—” but she was not there. “Honey?”
My eyes adjusted enough to see that I was standing in a circle of greenish light from the shower above, but otherwise the darkness was total, thick with the smell of must and decay. The hole was barely out of reach. I might be able to jump up and catch hold of the rim, but I knew I was nowhere near strong enough to hoist myself back inside the house. Shit.
Trying to sound calm, I said, “Well, now we’re both stuck down here.” Why didn’t she answer?
I tried to find her, venturing away from the light and feeling my way along the damp walls of the foundation. Nothing! Flinching from imagined spiders, my fumbling hands almost missed the opening—a narrow tunnel. A sound of pure incredulity escaped my lips, echoing in the fathomless dark. A tunnel, sure, why not?
Careful not to bump my head, I ventured under the low brick archway and down the passage. It was wetter in there, the walls slick with moss, and my slippers were soon soaked. Squish-squishing along, I thought I heard the murky tinkling of a piano, but when I stopped to listen it went silent.
“Honey!” I yelled. “Cindy!” I was beginning to wonder if that had even been her hand that grabbed mine—maybe she had been grabbed too. The thought was too unnerving to contemplate.
My fears were interrupted by the pain of stubbing my toe against a flight of stone stairs. By my reckoning I was somewhere under the backyard, so I knew the stairs had to be a dead end. But as I climbed them, they just kept going and going as if ascending a tower, far beyond what was even remotely possible. My body shuddered involuntarily, my legs turning to jelly so that I had to sit down for a minute. Could I be dreaming? I often thought I was awake when I was dreaming, but never the opposite. This was definitely real…yet how could it be? I dearly wished it were not.
Gradually I became aware that I could see. Light was coming from somewhere above, and as I kept climbing it got brighter, illuminating the steep passage so I could make out the weird greenish-gray stone of which it was built. It was the same translucent mucous color as the slugs in the shower. At last I reached the source of the light, a square opening atop the last flight of stairs. It looked like bright daylight, although I knew sunrise was still hours away—but I was far past such quibbles. I just wanted to get out of there and find my wife.
Shading my eyes against the orange glare, I emerged to a sight so impossible that I couldn’t even be shocked, merely blank. My dullness morphed into sick fascination: Welcome to Mars.
For it really looked something like Mars, or maybe an artist’s conception of Mars from a lurid old pulp magazine: a red desert of low hills and jagged rocks as far as the eye could see. The sky was something else again. It seemed almost liquid, like
an inverted sea of molten lava, rolling and heaving above the planet as if with a life of its own—a mind of its own. It had an eye, a half-eclipsed monster sun whose radiant menace was palpable on my skin, cancerous, and I knew that if it turned the full light of its gaze on me I would die.
As my eyes adjusted, I could make out human figures scattered across the landscape. They were all kneeling in the same direction, their rapt faces turned upward and their mouths hanging open in frozen awe. I could also see more doorways like the one I had come through, each on its own little hill. Hoping and fearing to find my wife, I walked towards the nearest people, three of them sitting together holding hands, two men and a woman. All were wearing vintage formal clothes—costumes reminiscent of old photos and silent movies. One of the men looked familiar, though I wouldn’t have recognized him if not for my recent Google search. He was H.P. Lovecraft. I supposed the other two were his parents…or maybe the second man was George M. Cohan. I didn’t care.
They all seemed to be dead, inert as fossilized tree stumps, their fogged eyes wide to the heavens and their dry mouths full of sand. Passing them by, I searched further, scanning the alien wasteland for the only one I cared about.
And there she was. I choked, “Cindy.”
Running to my wife down the slope of the hill, I tripped over my slippers and tumbled in the sand. I was babbling like an idiot. It’s her, yes it’s really her, thank God it’s her. I was terrified she would be like the others, and she was…but her eyes were still clear, her skin pliant, her lips soft and moist. She was still warm. Grabbing her by the shoulders, I shook her and shouted in her face, “Honey! Come back to me! You hear me? You have to come back!”
For what felt like forever she didn’t move, and I broke down then, falling beside her and sobbing into her hair. I wrapped my robe around her, making hopeless sweet-talk under the sleeping eye of that black sun. I wanted to be beside her when it woke up, so it could take me too. We would worship it together, forever, like the family Lovecraft.
“Dad?”
Holy shit, it was Max. He had followed me! The last person I wanted to see right now was my nine-year-old son. Jumping to my feet, I cried, “Max! What the hell are you doing here? You’re supposed to be in bed!”
“I had to pee. I couldn’t find you guys. Where are we?”
“That’s none of your business! You shouldn’t even be here! Go back!”
He wasn’t listening to me, agog at all the strange sights. “What’s wrong with Mom?”
“She’s just…I don’t know, but we have to get her out of here! God damn it, grab her legs!” Cindy was stiff in her kneeling position, but I got my hands under her arms and we lifted her between us as best we could.
As we lugged her back toward the door in the sand, she began to loosen up. The sight of her coming to life made me sob with relief, but then she started getting difficult, rubbing her eyes and moaning, “Mmmno! Leggo! Put me down!” She kicked and squirmed like a madwoman, but we kept dragging her all the way up the hill. No way I was going to let go of her now.
“Dad, look.”
Something was happening to all the other frozen bodies—they were waking up and moving. Toward us. Not slow but fast. The Lovecraft trio had already hustled to intercept us at the doorway. Nearing them, I could see that they were drooling sand, their white eyes bugging out of their sockets like the eyestalks of slugs, their pinpoint black pupils fixed on the sky as their animated bodies scrambled to stop us.
“Stay with your mother,” I told Max. “I’ll keep these guys busy while you get her to the stairs.” She had stopped fighting us and was actually wobbling along with minimal support, mumbling incoherently.
Struggling to control her, Max said, “I can’t carry her there all by myself!”
“Yes you can! Just guide her in the right direction!”
Wearing nothing but my boxer shorts, I charged straight at the Lovecrafts, intending to bowl them over with my sheer momentum. I’m a pretty big guy. But when I hit them, they exploded—it was like hitting three mummies. Their bodies burst in a cloud of dust and brittle dry bones; their clothes fell apart in shreds. What was inside their heads, though, was more substantial. Lively as Mexican jumping beans, their disembodied skulls danced around me on the sand, jaws clattering, and I made the mistake of kicking one. It shattered like a clay pot, unleashing a whirling monstrosity resembling a thorny black starfish with a vile mouth at its center. An instant later the other skulls burst open as well, hatching two more grotesque, gnashing maws surrounded by tentacle-like petals that flapped and spun, flinging greenish slime. All three dervishes screamed like rabid pigs as they came for me.
And now the Sky-God was waking up.
The sun was coming out, the red desert turning gold. In that awesome and awful light, all the sleepwalkers were falling to their knees again, faces canted to heaven. The three black whirligigs froze in their attack and dropped quivering to the sand, their putrid mouths prolapsing in orgiastic bliss…and I too felt the hideous ecstasy stealing my will, prostrating my body to its unearthly purpose.
With my last strength, I wrenched my burning eyeballs away from the sky toward my wife and son. They had just reached the stairs and were climbing down. Good. I didn’t want them waiting for me. I might be awhile.
Dead Canyons
Ann K. Schwader
Darkness. Lifeless, thirsting darkness. Layer upon layer of alien history bled out, worn down to a depth unmatched in the solar system. An open wound in a dying world.
And at the bottom, scrabbling like a beetle in the shadow of a boot, one small machine intelligence twists its wheels toward retreat—
“Are we disturbing you, Susan?”
Dr. Susan Barnard flinches in her seat. Flash dream. Another damn flash dream, in the middle of a meeting—and in front of the mission director, always a plus. Inez’s crow-bright eyes are merciless.
“Sorry. Haven’t gotten a lot of sleep lately.”
Truer to say she’s been avoiding sleep, but Inez probably doesn’t want that truth. Or the explanation behind it. Or, indeed, her presence on the Clementine II team.
Nikolai should be here instead, offering his tenured analysis of Clem’s recent behavior. He could make Inez listen. Maybe even understand the rover’s…reluctance?…panic?…in the face of what infuses Melas Chasma. Clem’s “mind” was his baby, the field test of the Sarkov Process.
A test he hadn’t survived.
Eleven months ago, she’d been sitting beside him in the control room, watching Clem plunge toward the Martian surface. Only she had noticed her supervisor’s sweat-slicked forehead, his grunt of shock and pain as he slumped over. By the time she’d started CPR, it was already too late: decades of nicotine and chronic overwork had spoken.
When Nikolai’s records proved to be (a) in longhand, (b) in Cyrillic, and (c) illegible even to the native speaker Susan located, Inez nearly had her own cardiac event. Recruiting Sarkov had been the gamble of her career. Determined to upstage Clem’s predecessor Curiosity on a fraction of its budget—“Cheaper and Deeper!”—she had moved the whole mission from California to his Colorado home campus. She’d even hired his postdoc assistant for the team.
Sarkov insisted that she was essential. The look Inez gave Susan that day said she’d misunderstood completely—
But Inez is speaking again. Something about the rapidly approaching solar conjunction, and getting Clem under control before she’s out of contact with Earth for two weeks. The team’s engineers enumerate the fixes they’ve tried.
Few make much sense to Susan, who knows better.
Inez cuts them off. “So you’re saying it’s not the hardware.”
When they nod, her glance turns to Clem’s chief programmer.
“Or the software?”
He glares. More than anyone else here, he distrusts the secret sauce Clem’s “mind” holds. Piggybacked onto a perfectly adequate operating system, rigged to overrule and overthink it, Sarkov’s little box is
the bane of his existence.
“The software I know about.”
The mission director’s mouth tightens. Her glance shifts to the far end of the table.
“Three days left.” She exhales sharply. “Maybe. And this rover’s suddenly got a mind of its own.”
But wasn’t that what you paid for?
As Susan’s exhaustion tests her mind/mouth barrier, she reminds herself how much she needs this job. Robot behaviorists aren’t exactly in demand. With Nikolai gone, only Inez can write her a recommendation.
It’s a good thing Nikolai’s notes were unreadable. Despite Inez’s fervent expectations, his Process did not create near-AI, but something stranger. Something Susan is paying for every day—and night—of her life.
“So what exactly is going on, anyhow?”
When Susan doesn’t answer at once, Inez slams down her metal coffee mug. It rings into silence—
Annihilation flavors the powdery dirt, the flecks of stone peppered with useless microfossils. No life here again, ever. A hunger beyond understanding, beyond the primitive corporeal, has claimed it all and found it not enough—
Susan sucks in her breath. “She’s scared.”
This is not science. Not anything Inez was wanting, or expecting. Her thin eyebrows threaten her hairline. “Repeat that, please.”
The whole team is watching now.
“Clem is scared.”
***
Hours afterwards, Susan cuts through campus on the way to her car, pulling her collar high against encroaching night. The sunken footpath turns the buildings into sandstone canyon walls, dotted here and there with small lights—lives?—abruptly winking out as she passes.