Cthulhu Fhtagn!

by Laird Barron

  He remembered the way the story began:

  “In the darkness between the stars, the world eater sits and waits, sharpening its black claws and picking its black teeth.”

  “Please stop,” Boyd begged. “Please.”

  “No, keep going,” Sister Hauer commanded.

  “It sits and waits for dinner time,” Ylie whispered.

  “It’ll eat up all the light,” Sister Hauer added, her voice strong and clear. “It’ll eat up all the worlds.”

  “It’ll eat up all the stars and all the boys and girls.” Ylie’s legs shook. He’d told this story so many times before he’d outgrown it, and he had almost forgotten how terrifying it really was. No wonder Boyd had been afraid.

  The other priests were doing something, he realized, painting symbols on the floor beneath the orrery in their black goo. One stopped in front of Boyd and painted a line down the novice’s face. Ylie could smell it now, the same smell as Sister Hauer’s hands and the strange coating on the orrery’s steel. This time he recognized it.

  “Blood,” he whispered. “Where did you get all the blood?”

  “You already know.” Sister Hauer smiled like his old schoolmaster when he was encouraging the children to solve some simple kind of problem. “Why do you think there aren’t enough workers down in the mine?”

  Pa shook his head. “No. I won’t believe it. You’ve been killing people?”

  A black-robed priest slapped his paintbrush in Pa’s face. The black goo ran down his forehead and ran in rivulets down his cheeks and lips.

  “We’ve done what we could to keep the world eater at bay. But it’s hungry. And it sees us, the last of the human worlds. A few small sacrifices just aren’t enough any more.”

  Gears ground deep within the base of the orrery, and the worlds began to turn, slowly at first, and then faster. Blue Shogrin sped by, its waters never touched by human visitors. Orange Bijou crawled along behind it, its dusty skies not much different in color from Patrie’s, but unbreathable by human lungs. Those worlds were safe, Ylie knew. What the world eater hungered for was not just dirt and minerals and water, but life.

  The small steel ball of Patrie began to fall into line.

  “I can’t stop the turning of the worlds,” Sister Hauer said, and for the first time, she sounded sad. “But I can open a door into the darkness and show the world eater we are not just a meal.”

  “What?” Sister North struggled against her captors, but the two other priests held her fast. “What do you mean?”

  “There is a science beyond your science,” Sister Hauer said. She took the bowl of blood from her acolyte and carried it to stand before Sister North. “And there are deals to be struck.”

  The moons and worlds moved slowly above their heads, their colors twinkling in the candlelight. It was both the most beautiful and the most horrible thing that Ylie had ever seen, and he found he couldn’t take a deep breath. If no one had held him up, he would have collapsed from the spinning in his head and the thickness of the air.

  She began to paint a shape upon Sister North’s forehead: a star that was not a star, a shape of such darkness it made Ylie’s eyes rebel. He had to look away.

  Sister North’s scream made him look back.

  A length of steel jutted out of her chest. Blood bubbled up out of her mouth and spilled down her chin. Bright blood, not the old black stuff staining her forehead. In the golden light, her blood was very nearly the brilliant auburn of her close-cropped hair.

  “No,” Ylie whispered, but the life was already going out of Sister North’s eyes.

  The orrery groaned as it sped faster and faster, and a darkness began to flicker in the air above Sister North’s dying body. If darkness could gleam, then this darkness did. It sucked the light into itself with a cruel hunger.

  Ylie could feel the wrongness of it weighing down the air like his secret had once weighed down his feet. He struggled against his captor. “No!”

  Sister Hauer turned to him. She pulled back the hood of her robe. For the first time, he saw her face fully, the weathered cheeks and the long black-and-gray-streaked hair. He saw the lines pressed into the skin around her eyes, lines made from squinting into the darkness and watching the stars for long lonely years.

  And he saw her eyes, huge and dark, deep pits of nothing, like the space between the stars.

  “Yes,” she said, and the darkness opened.

  The Green Revolution

  Cody Goodfellow

  Sometime after midnight, just before they got thrown off the Olancho bus on the muddy, rutted road to La Colonia, Whitney found proof.

  The girl dozed in the seat behind her, beside an old man with a hooded gamecock in a cage on his lap. Emerald sweat beaded on her copper brow, smelling sweeter than cane sugar.

  When the girl awoke to find a strange gringa collecting swabs of her sweat, she screamed. The other passengers woke up and cursed Whitney in Spanish and Pech when she tried to offer the girl money. When she said Ciudad Blanca, hands grabbed her and shoved her out into the aisle.

  Beside her, Colin awoke to angry peasants dragging him out of his seat by his dreadlocks. The driver flipped through Whitney’s journal as if he could read it, confiscated her seeds and water samples. She tried to catch his hooded, mud-yellow eyes to guess whether he knew what he was protecting.

  When the bus limped off down the road, it took the only light, leaving her feeling as if she’d been sealed in a bag of primordial ooze and biting insects.

  Flinching and throwing punches at the dark, Colin hyperventilated, “What just happened?”

  She started hiking. “We were right to come down here.” Even though she felt like she was breathing hot water, she dug in her backpack’s side bellows pockets for her cigarettes.

  “What were we right about? I’m down here because I probably can’t ever go home…”

  “Try to keep up,” she called over her shoulder, stifling a hacking cough. He’d tried to complicate things again last night. He wasn’t getting over it like she’d hoped. They hooked up once back in Oregon, right after their cell broke up and everybody else got arrested. He just went along with the plan. She didn’t even have to ask. He needed to think he was saving her, so she’d let him.

  After a few minutes, he shouldered his pack and ran after her, following just close enough to splash mud on her with his stomping combat boots. “If this is the rainforest,” he demanded, “where are all the fucking trees?”

  Whitney Dirksen and Colin Bushong had warrants out in three states, and the FBI was probably looking for them. They fled the U.S. the same way millions snuck in every year. They rode south through Mexico on the roof of a freight train, swam a river of sewage to reach Guatemala, and stowed away among the freshly cut logs of hundred-foot jungle sentinels on a flatbed semi to get into Honduras. She had told him only that they had to disappear. Only that they were running, never what they were running to.

  The burnt-flesh and diesel stink of the capital still coated the back of her throat. They lurked around an airstrip until they got lucky, hitching a ride in a Mormon missionary’s Cessna to Catacamas. She thought they were in the clear, but Internal Security goons showed up when she tried to use a stolen credit card to rent a jeep. Running from the banana republic dragnet, they somehow caught the bus. This latest reversal of fortune was all part of the pattern, the agonizing, peristaltic pull that had drawn them into the jungle.

  Aside from package tours and charter flights, there was no direct route into La Mosquitia. Before today, hiking the undeveloped jungle would’ve sounded like magic, but she knew they were being tracked and blocked, and she’d tipped somebody off to their location, if not their intent. They could be waiting in La Colonia, at the end of the road. Or they could find no trail, no sign, nothing, and she’d have to decide if she was hardcore enough to go into the jungle on foot, chasing a ghost.

  Eastern Honduras had no railroads except for a few broken-down relics built by the fruit companies, and
more canoes than cars. The roads all ended at the edge of La Mosquitia’s thirty-two thousand square miles of wilderness, or veered around it to reach the coast.

  When United Fruit turned every other country in the region into banana plantations in the 1890s, Honduras proved too wild to bother with. In Guatemala, the first railroad they built to connect the plantations with the Mosquito Coast cost four thousand lives for the first twenty-five miles of track. Honduras was so much worse, they never really tried.

  It was exactly the kind of place he would hide. If he was really alive…

  Her lighter reflected off flurries of glossy wings. She had to hide the cherry of her cig from suicidal insects.

  The largest primary tropical rainforest in Central America, La Mosquitia had been subdivided into a host of national parks and nature preserves, but the ecotourism revenue Honduras hoped to steal from Costa Rica failed to bootstrap the country into the new millennium. Honduras was still second poorest in the hemisphere and number one in murders, a fine conduit for cocaine traffic, and a bivouac for Contras—too passive, backwards and dangerous to become a resort destination. The poverty and lack of basic healthcare were extraordinary. She never thought she’d feel bad to see humanity losing to the jungle.

  But the war was far from over. As their eyes adjusted to the dark, they saw high grass and blackened stumps stubbling the hills, cattle starving on ruined pasture land. They set up their tent under a stand of breadfruit trees filled with birds that sounded like Verizon cell phones. She didn’t sleep.

  “We have a chance to find something better than what we’ve been doing,” she said to the dark. “Burning, blowing up and sabotage are their games. We don’t have to play them anymore. We can help build a new way… something truly sustainable…”

  Colin didn’t answer, but she saw him blinking away mosquitos that tried to drown in his tears.

  Just after sunrise, they came limping into a village that wasn’t on the map. Little more than a few rings of cinderblock huts with tin or thatched roofs that might have been slapped together yesterday, the village was already overrun by strangler figs and broadleaf cheese vines. A white ceiba tree towered over the village square like a huge, half-melted candle, elephantine roots plowing up the granite paving stones and vast, parrot-infested canopy draping nearly the whole village in green shadow.

  “D’you smell that?” Colin asked. She shook her head. “Yeah, me either. There’s no meat cooking, no fossil fuels. It’s a vegan village. This might be the place…”

  “Go find us something to eat,” she said. He gave her a dark look, but plugged in his earbuds and disappeared.

  Hurt to admit it, but he was right. She saw no power lines, smelled no burning diesel, heard no motors, and saw none of the clearcut subsistence farms that pit Indians against their own forest.

  A line of Pech and Tawahka women carrying sacks and baskets brimming with unidentifiable fruits waited outside a hut on bowed stilts. A crowd of men and boys gathered around a rusted storage shed that somebody had tried to use as a church. Some were Miskito or Pech Indians, while others had grotesque gang tattoos on arms, necks, faces. Sitting or standing, they remained frozen as she walked past. Not drugged or exhausted or weary or drunk—frozen. Their broad, bronze faces turned to the rising sun, their eyes closed, like a patch of sunflowers.

  She looked in vain for the Coca-Cola sign that always denoted the local market. Almost out of cigarettes, damn it. Usually, she tried to blend in and observe, but a tall, green-eyed redhead in hemp fatigues, carrying a huge backpack, usually sparked at least some reaction, greed or lechery, raw curiosity or the silent shunning born of jealousy and superstitious fear. She’d never felt more out of place, or more invisible.

  A squat, spiny tree squeezed out between two collapsing shacks, brimming with star-shaped burgundy fruit. She picked one and walked away eating it—something like a fig, but smelling like floor wax—and noticed people watching her. They seemed to scowl at her like they knew she was a thief; then it dawned on her that they were looking at her the same way she and her comrades looked down on anyone they saw eating meat.

  She paced the square, circling round the trunk of the tree, when he came out of the chapel shed. In a spotless white shirt and pressed slacks, he looked like a missionary. His white beard and shoulder-length, carelessly tousled silver hair set off his piercing black stare and red-gold, acne-scarred complexion.

  He hadn’t aged. As he walked through the motionless crowd of human sunflowers, touching their heads and smiling, he looked like an artfully aged actor playing him in a Hollywood biopic.

  Then he looked at her, bowed his head and came ambling towards her as if she were expected.

  To call Silvio Aguirre an environmentalist would be like calling John Brown a civil rights leader. The closest this apathetic backwater ever came to a true revolutionary, Aguirre was a Honduran ecology professor who joined the Sandinistas and was educated in Cuba. He soon renounced all human politics and returned to Honduras as a rogue “deep ecologist.” A gallant fusion of Che and Hayduke, he coordinated peasant revolts and sabotage campaigns to protect virgin rainforests in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras from ’87 to ’98. Because he was apolitical, shunned media and never directly took a single human life, he never became an outlaw celebrity like Che, Chavez or Subcommander Marcos, but North American corporate interests were terrorized, and he had more than a little to do with United Fruit pulling out of the region altogether.

  Aguirre’s lectures read like metascientific love poetry—Castro’s bottomless spleen shot through the Gaia-philic poetics of Thoreau—perfect for Yanqui fundraising and capturing the hearts and minds of college coeds like Whitney Dirksen. His words somehow unmasked everything else the world said as a lie. “Always when they talk of human history,” he wrote, “they start with Man coming down from the trees, and everything since an inevitable improvement. Our whole journey began with a wrong turn.”

  The Earth could not sustain the gluttonous orgy of modern human society, which he described as a global machine for making shit. “Renounce the machine,” he proclaimed, “and return to the trees before the Mother awakens.” When U.S. Rangers out of Panama were covertly deployed to snatch him, he and his guerillas vanished into the Nicaraguan cloud forest.

  By the time Whitney left school and plunged into environmental activism in ’98, Silvio Aguirre had gone missing. Two of his old compañeros surfaced to claim he was murdered by a roving CIA-trained death squad and left in an unmarked grave in the heart of La Mosquitia, before they themselves disappeared.

  She modeled her own mission on Aguirre’s teachings, but she was surrounded by fair-weather activists who quit or got picked off for less idealistic crimes and turned snitch. When there was nothing left for her in the States, she turned to her initial inspiration, to Aguirre’s writings, to learn what she should do next. And within a week, the world sent her marching orders.

  One of her old message boards buzzed with a slew of uncorroborated reports of radical ecoterrorism in Honduras. Twenty-two men from an illegal logging operation on Rio Patuca all went missing; evangelical missionaries disappeared or found dead, attacked by wild animals. At the same time, a couple grainy pictures and rumors surfaced suggesting that Silvio Aguirre had been spotted in a village on the outskirts of La Mosquitia, and was linked to a group called Ciudad Blanca. Peasant stories of la gente de árbol, wandering curanderos who healed the sick and in whose wake fruit-bearing trees sprouted, became urban legends with the speed of a new messianic faith. They were either murderous ecoterrorists, a humanitarian aid group or an evangelical cult, from one web page to the next.

  “Good morning,” he said with a tired smile. “You are American, yes?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so…” She choked up, it was him! “But…we’re not tourists. We came a long way, actually…to find you.”

  “You need a doctor? I have many patients to see, but if it is an emergency…”

  She tried to get in front of
him as he moved, tried to trap his eyes. “No, please. We—I—have followed your work for years. We came to join the struggle. I know who you, um…who you really are.”

  A stormy, Mosaic frown. “I apologize for your difficult journey, but you must have mistaken me for someone else…”

  “What do you think you know about me?” This was not the way to start. “I’ve proved myself—”

  “This is not about you. Many Americans come looking for the last wild rainforest, searching for something they invented in their heads…”

  “I’m not a goddamn tourist. We came down here to—”

  “You came here to hide, and perhaps to burn and break and kill to purge your guilt.”

  “You were the one who opened my eyes. Loggers and missionaries have gone missing down here. The government militias are killing your people on the road. There’s a war on, whether you’re fighting or not.”

  He shook his head, touched her shoulder with a hand lighter than a leaf. “This is not a safe place to chase fantasies. Now, if you are not sick…” He turned to leave.

  She caught his arm and dragged him to a halt. “We came to find Ciudad Blanca.”

  He stopped and shook his head, came close enough to whisper. “Who knows you are here?”

  “No one. Like I said, I came here to help, however I can…”

  “What can you do to ‘help,’ pale, soft thing that you are? What do you even know about the true struggle, or who is fighting, or what the stakes? You don’t even know what you are chasing.”

  “You don’t know—” She blinked back tears. “We have nowhere else to go. We want to fight to save the forest, just like you.”

  Smiling sadly, he threw up his hands to the vast ceiba canopy. “The forest needs no one to fight for it. Men fight. Nature wants no revenge. She wants harmony, where every species thrives in its place.”