Why should his parents have gone that way? Something told him they had—perhaps the maze he remembered, the tunnel of undergrowth: that was a secret place. The path wound deeper into the woods, glinting faintly; trees rapidly shuttered the glow of the moon. “Isn’t this fantastic,” June said, hurrying behind him.
The pines gave out, but other trees meshed thickly overhead. The glimpses of flat whitish sky, smouldering with darker cloud, dwindled. In the forest everything was black or blanched, and looked chill, although the night was unseasonably mild. Webs of shadow lay on the path, tangling Michael’s feet; tough grass seized him. Bushes massed around him, towering, choking the gaps between trees. The glimpses of sky were fewer and smaller. “What’s that?” June said uneasily.
For a moment he thought it was the sound of someone’s foot, unplugging itself from the soft ground: it sounded like a loud slow gulp of mud. But no, it wasn’t that. Someone coughing? It didn’t sound much like a human cough. Moreover, it sounded as though it were straining to produce a sound, a single sound; and he felt inexplicably that he ought to know what that was.
The bushes stirred, rattling. The muddy sound faded, somewhere ahead. There was no point in telling June his vague thoughts. “It’ll be an animal,” he said. “Probably something’s caught it.”
Soon they reached the tunnel. He knelt at once and began to crawl. Twigs scraped beside his ears, a clawed dry chorus. He found the experience less disturbing now, less oppressive; the tunnel seemed wider, as though someone stout had recently pushed his way through. But behind him June was breathing heavily, and her voice fluttered in the dark. “There’s something following us outside the tunnel,” she said tightly, nervously.
He crawled quickly to the end and stood up. “There’s nothing here now. It must have been an animal.”
He felt odd: calm, safe, yet slyly and elusively excited. His eyes had grown equal to the dark. The trees were stouter, and even closer; they squeezed out masses of shrub between them. Overhead, a few pale scraps of sky were caught in branches. The ground squelched underfoot, and he heard another sound ahead: similar, but not the same.
June emerged panting. “I thought I’d finished tripping. Where are we going?” she said unevenly. “I can’t see.”
“This way.” He headed at once for a low opening in the tangled growth. As he’d somehow expected, the passage twisted several times, closing almost impenetrably, then widened. Perhaps he’d noticed that someone before him had thrust the bushes apart.
“Don’t go so fast,” June said in the dark, almost weeping. “Wait for me.”
Her slowness annoyed him. His indefinable excitement seemed to affect his skin, which crawled with nervousness like interference on the surface of a bubble. Yet he felt strangely powerful, ready for anything. Wait until he saw his father! He stood impatiently, stamping the mushy ground, while June caught up with him. She gripped his arm. “There it is again,” she gasped.
“What?” The sound? It was only his feet, squelching. But there was another sound, ahead in the tangled creaking dark. It was the gurgling of mud, perhaps of a muddy stream gargling ceaselessly into the earth. No: it was growing louder, more violent, as though the mud were straining to spew out an obstruction. The sound was repeated, again and again, becoming gradually clearer: a single syllable. All at once he knew what it was. Somewhere ahead in the close dark maze, a thick muddy voice was struggling to shout his name.
June had recognised the sound too, and was tugging at his arm. “Let’s go back,” she pleaded. “I don’t like it. Please.”
“God,” he scoffed. “I thought you were going to help me.” The muddy sounds blurred into a mumble, and were gone. Twigs shook in the oppressive dark, squeaking hollowly together. Suddenly, ahead of him, he heard his father’s voice; then, after a long silence, his mother’s. Both were oddly strained and muffled. As though this were a game of hide-and-seek, each had called his name.
“There,” he said to June. “I haven’t got time to take you back now.” His excitement was mounting, his nervous skin felt light as a dream. “Don’t you want to look after my mother?” he blurted.
He shouldered onward. After a while he heard June following him timidly. A wind blundered through the forest, dragging at the bushes. Thorns struggled overhead, clawing at the air; the ground gulped his feet, sounding to his strained ears almost like words. Twice the walls of the passage tried to close, but someone had broken them apart. Ahead the passage broadened. He was approaching an open space.
He began to run. Bushes applauded like joyful bones. The thick smoky sky rushed on, fighting the moonlight. The vociferous ground was slippery; he stumbled as he ran, and almost tripped over a dark huddle. It was his parents’ clothes. Some of them, as he glanced back impatiently, looked torn. He heard June fall slithering against bushes. “Don’t!” she cried. But he had reached the space.
It was enclosed by trees. Ivy thickened the trunks and had climbed to mat the tangle overhead; bushes crowded the cramped gaps between the trees. In the interstices of the tangle, dark sky smouldered.
Slowly his eyes found the meagre light; outlines gathered in the clearing, dimmer than mist. Bared wooden limbs groped into the space, creaking. The dimness sketched them. He could see now that the clearing was about thirty feet wide, and roughly circular. Dimness crawled on it, as though it were an infested pond. At the far side, a dark bulk stood between him and the trees.
He squinted painfully, but its shape persisted in eluding him. Was it very large, or was the dark lying? Across the clearing mud coughed and gurgled thickly, or something did. Dimness massed on the glistening shape. Suddenly he saw the shape was moving lethargically, and alive.
June had hung back; now she ran forward, only to slip at the edge of the clearing. She clutched his arm to steady herself, then she gazed beyond him, trembling. “What is it?” she cried.
“Shut up,” he said savagely.
Apart from her interruption, he felt more calm than he had ever felt before. He knew he was gazing at the source of his dreams. The dreams returned peacefully to his mind and waited to be understood. For a moment he wondered whether this was like June’s LSD. Something had been added to his mind, which seemed to be expanding awesomely. Memories floated free, as though they had been coded deep in him: wombs of stone and submarine depths; hovering in a medium that wasn’t space, somehow linked to a stone circle on a hill, being drawn closer to the circle, towards terrified faces that stared up through the night; a pregnant woman held writhing at the centre of the circle, screaming as he hovered closer and reached for her. He felt primed with centuries of memories. Inherited memories, or shared; but whose?
He waited. All was about to be clarified. The huge bulk shifted, glistening. Its voice, uncontrollably loud and uneven, struggled muddily to speak. The trees creaked ponderously, the squashed bushes writhed, the sky fled incessantly. Suddenly, touched by an instinct he couldn’t define, Michael realised how he and June must look from the far side of the clearing. He took her arm, though she struggled briefly, and they stood waiting: bride and bridegroom of the dark.
After a long muddy convulsion in the dimness, words coughed free. The voice seemed unable to speak more than a phrase at a time; then it would blur, gurgling. Sometimes his father’s voice, and occasionally his mother’s—high-pitched, trembling—seemed to help. Yet the effect was disturbing, for it sounded as though the muddy voice were attempting muffled imitations of his parents. He held himself calm, trusting that this too would be clarified in due course.
The Great Old Ones still lived, the halting voice gurgled loudly. Their dreams could reach out. When the human race was young and strayed near the Old Ones, the dreams could reach into the womb and make the unborn in their image. Something like his mother’s voice spoke the last words, wavering fearfully. June struggled, but he gripped her arm.
Though the words were veiled and allusive, he understood instinctively what was being said. His new memories were ready to explain. W
hen he read the notebooks again he would understand consciously. He listened and gazed, fascinated. He was in awe of the size of the speaking bulk. And what was strange about the head? Something moved there, rapid as the whirl of colours on a bubble. In the dark the face seemed to strain epileptically, perhaps to form words.
The Old Ones could wait, the voice or voices told him. The stars would come right. The people the Old Ones touched before birth did not take on their image all at once but gradually, down the centuries. Instead of dying, they took on the form that the Old Ones had placed in the womb of an ancestor. Each generation came closer to the perfect image.
The bulk glistened as though flayed; in the dimness it looked pale pink, and oddly unstable. Michael stared uneasily at the head. Swift clouds dragged darknesses over the clearing and snatched them away. The face looked so huge, and seemed to spread. Wasn’t it like his father’s face? But the eyes were swimming apart, the features slid uncontrollably across the head. All this was nothing but the antics of shadows. A tear in the clouds crept towards the dimmed moon. June was trying to pull away. “Keep still,” he snarled, tightening his grip.
They would serve the Old Ones, the voice shouted thickly, faltering. That was why they had been made: to be ready when the time came. They shared the memories of the Old Ones, and at the change their bodies were transformed into the stuff of the Old Ones. They mated with ordinary people in the human way, and later in the way the Old Ones had decreed. That way was.…
June screamed. The tear in the clouds had unveiled the moon. Her cry seemed harsh enough to tear her throat. He turned furiously to silence her; but she dragged herself free, eyes gaping, and fled down the path. The shadow of a cloud rushed towards the clearing. About to pursue June, he turned to see what the moon had revealed.
The shadow reached the clearing as he turned. For a moment he saw the huge head, a swollen bulb which, though blanched by moonlight, reminded him of a mass dug from within a body. The glistening lumpy forehead was almost bare, except for a few strands that groped restlessly over it—strands of hair, surely, though they looked like strings of livid flesh.
On the head, seeming even smaller amid the width of flesh, he saw his mother’s face. It was appallingly dwarfed, and terrified. The strands flickered over it, faster, faster. Her mouth strained wordlessly, gurgling.
Before he could see the rest of the figure, a vague gigantic squatting sack, the shadow flooded the clearing. As it did so, he thought he saw his mother’s face sucked into the head, as though by a whirlpool of flesh. Did her features float up again, newly arranged? Were there other, plumper, features jostling among them? He could be sure of nothing in the dark.
June cried out. She’d stumbled; he heard her fall, and the thud of her head against something; then silence. The figure was lumbering towards him, its bulk quaking. For a moment he was sure that it intended to embrace him. But it had reached a pit, almost concealed by undergrowth. It slid into the earth, like slow jelly. The undergrowth sprang back rustling.
He stood gazing at June, who was still unconscious. He knew what he would tell her; she had had a bad LSD experience, that had been what she’d seen. LSD reminded him of something. Slowly he began to smile.
He went to the pit and peered down. Faint sluggish muddy sounds retreated deep into the earth. He knew he wouldn’t see his parents for a long time. He touched his pocket, where the envelope waited. That would contain his father’s explanation of their disappearance, which he could show to people, to June.
Moonlight and shadows raced nervously over the pit. As he stared at the dark mouth he felt full of awe, yet calm. Now he must wait until it was time to come back here, to go into the earth and join the others. He remembered that now; he had always known, deep in himself, that this was home. One day he and June would return. He gazed at her unconscious body, smiling. Perhaps she had been right; they might take LSD together, when it was time. It might help them to become one.
On the Slab
HARLAN ELLISON
Lightning was drawn to the spot. Season after season, August to November, but most heavily in September, the jagged killing bolts sought out George Gibree’s orchard.
Gibree, a fanner with four acres of scabrous apple trees whose steadily diminishing production of fruit would drive him, one year later, to cut his throat with a rabbit-skinning knife and to bleed to death in the loft of his barn in Chepachet, near Providence, Rhode Island, that George Gibree found the dismal creature at the northeast corner of his property late in September. In the season of killing bolts.
The obscenely crippled trees—scarred black as if by fireblight—had withstood one attack after another; splintering a little more each year; withering a little more each year; dying a little more each year. The McIntoshes they produced, hideous and wrinkled as thalidomide babies. Night after night the lightning, drawn to the spot, cracked and thrashed, until one night, as though weary of the cosmic game, a monstrous forked bolt, sizzling with power, uncovered the creature’s graveplace.
When he went out to inspect the orchard the next morning, holding back the tears till he was well out of sight of Emma and the house, George Gibree looked down into the crater and saw it stretched out on its back, its single green eye with the two pupils glowing terribly in the morning sunlight, its left forearm—bent up at the elbow—seeming to clutch with spread fingers at the morning air. It was as if the thing had been struck by the sky’s fury as it was trying to dig itself out.
For just a moment as he stared down into the pit, George Gibree felt as if the ganglia mooring his brain were being ripped loose. His head began to tremble on his neck … and he wrenched his gaze from the impossible titan, stretched out, filling the thirty-foot-long pit.
In the orchard there could be heard the sounds of insects, a few birds, and the whimpering of George Gibree.
* * *
Children, trespassing to play in the orchard, saw it; and the word spread through town, and by stringer to a free-lance writer who did occasional human-interest pieces for the Providence Journal. She drove out to the Gibree farm and, finding it impossible to speak to George Gibree, who sat in a straight-back chair, staring out the window without speaking or even acknowledging her presence, managed to cajole Emma Gibree into letting her wander out to the orchard alone.
The item was small when published, but it was the beginning of October and the world was quiet. The item received interested attention.
By the time a team of graduate students in anthropology arrived with their professor, pieces of the enormous being had been torn away by beasts of the field and by curious visitors. They sent one of their group back to the University of Rhode Island, in Kingston, advising him to contact the University’s legal representatives, readying them for the eventual purchase of this terrifying, miraculous discovery. Clearly, it was not a hoax; this was no P. T. Barnum “Cardiff Giant,” but a creature never before seen on the Earth.
And when night fell, the professor was forced to badger the most amenable of the students into staying with the thing. Coleman lanterns, down jackets, and a ministove were brought in. But by morning all three of the students had fled.
Three days later, a mere six hours before the attorneys for the University could present their offer to Emma Gibree, a rock concert entrepreneur from Providence contracted for full rights to, and ownership of, the dead giant for three thousand dollars. Emma Gibree had been unable to get her husband to speak since the morning he had stood on the lip of the grave and stared down at the one-eyed being; she was in a panic; there were doctors and hospitals in her future.
Frank Kneller, who had brought every major rock group of the past decade to the city, rented exposition space in the Providence Civic Center at a ridiculously low rate because it was only the second week in October … and the world was quiet. Then he assigned his public relations firm the task of making the giant a national curiosity. It was not a difficult task.
It was displayed via minicam footage on the evening news
of all three major networks. Frank Kneller’s flair for the dramatically staged was not wasted.
The thirty-foot humanoid, pink-skinned and with staring eye malevolently directed at the cameraman’s lens, was held in loving close-up on the marble slab Kneller had had hewn by a local monument contractor.
Pilbeam of Yale came, and Johanson of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, and both the Leakeys, and Taylor of Riverside came with Hans Suess from the University of California at La Jolla. They all said it was genuine. But they could not say where the thing had come from. It was, however, native to the planet: thirty feet in height, Cyclopean, as hard as rhinoceros horn … but human. And they all noticed one more thing.
The chest, just over the place where the heart lay, was hideously scarred. As though centurions had jammed their pikes again and again into the flesh when this abomination had been crucified. Terrible weals, puckered skin still angrily crimson against the gentle pink of the otherwise unmarred body.
Unmarred, that is, but for the places where the curious had used their nail files and penknives to gouge out souvenirs.
And then Frank Kneller made them go away, shaking their heads in wonder, mad to take the creature back to their laboratories for private study, but thwarted by Kneller’s clear and unshakable ownership. And when the last of them had departed, and the view of the Cyclops on its slab could be found in magazines and newspapers and even on posters, then Frank Kneller set up his exposition at the Civic Center.
There, within sight of the Rhode Island State House, atop whose dome stands the twelve-foot high, gold-leafed statue of the Independent Man.
The curious came by the thousands to line up and pay their three dollars a head, so they could file past the dead colossus, blazoned on life-sized thirty-foot-high posters festooning the outer walls of the Civic Center as The 9th Wonder of the World! (Ninth, reasoned Frank Kneller with a flash of wit and a sense of history uncommon to popularizers and entrepreneurs, because King Kong had been the Eighth.) It was a gracious hommage that did not go unnoticed by fans of the cinematically horrific; and the gesture garnered for Kneller an acceptance he might not have otherwise known from the cognoscenti.
Cthulhu 2000 Page 47