by Unknown
I tune the dials of the ham radio, call out a few more S.O.S. messages.
The .45 sits on the blanket before me. I stare at it, gleaming with silver promise.
Evelyn isn’t here to stop me this time. One quick, clean shot, and I won’t smell the ocean stench any more, won’t have the dreams anymore, won’t hear the static. The unbroken, white static.
My bottled water is running out. I can’t drink the rain, but I know sooner or later, I’ll have to. I don’t want to think what it will do to me. But thirst is a demon no man can outrun for long. I sit staring at the gun, listening to the radio static, making my decision.
I pick up the .45 and slide the barrel into my mouth. It tastes cold and bitter. Static fills my ears. I fix my thumb so that it’s resting on the trigger. I say a silent prayer, and think of my daddy’s face.
Something breaks the static.
A momentary glitch in the wall of white noise. I blink, my lips wrapped around the gun. I pull it from my mouth and fiddle with the knobs. There it is again! A one-second break in the static . . . a voice!
I turn the volume up, wait a few moments, then pick up the mike, dropping the pistol.
“Hello!” I say, my voice hoarse like sand on stone. “Hello! Is anybody there?”
White noise static . . . then a pause, followed by a single word, ringing clear as day from the dusty speaker, thick as mud.
Cthulhu.
I drop the mike. Something twists in my gut, and I step back from the radio like it’s another monstrosity burst from Evelyn Colton’s belly.
Again it speaks to me, a voice oozing out of the cold ocean depths.
Cthulhu.
The word sinks into me like a knife, a smooth incision . . . a length of cold metal between the eyes would be no less effective. The pain is a spike of understanding. I bend over, my hand hovering between the silver-plated pistol and the radio mike. I grab the mike, not the gun, and raise it to my lips.
I stare into the darkness at the back of the cavern and sigh out my reply.
“Cthulhu . . .”
I drop it to the floor and kick over the little table on which the radio sits. It crashes against the stone, spilling the lantern. Flaming oil ignites the blankets, and the cavern fills with noxious smoke. I turn my back on it and walk toward the smell of briny rain, my throat dry as bone.
As I come up out of the silver mine for the last time, the storm rages, winged things soar between the clouds, and I hear a chorus of howling and screeching punctuated by moaning thunder. Thirst consumes me.
I open my mouth to the black skies and drink the oily rain. It flows down my throat like nectar, quenching my terrible thirst in the most satisfying way. It sits cool and comforting in my belly, and I drink down more of it.
I’ll never again be thirsty, I realize.
This isn’t the end of the world.
It’s the beginning.
My body trembles with hidden promise. I know I’ve got a place in this new world.
Towering things with shadow- bright wings descend to squat about me, staring with clusters of glazed eyes as
I crumple . . . shiver . . . evolve.
I raise my blossoming face to the storm and screech my joy across the face of the world.
His world.
Cthuuuuulhuuuuu . . .
Spreading black wings, I take to the sky.
THE SHALLOWS
John Langan
“Il faut cultiver notre jardin.”
—Voltaire, Candide
“I could call you Gus,” Ransom said.
The crab’s legs, blue and cream, clattered against one another. It did not hoist itself from its place in the sink, though, which meant it was listening to him. Maybe. Staring out the dining room window, his daily mug of instant coffee steaming on the table in front of him, he said, “That was supposed to be my son’s name. August us. It was his great-grandfather’s name, his mother’s father’s father. The old man was dying while Heather was pregnant. We . . . I, really, was struck by the symmetry: one life ending, another beginning. It seemed a duty, our duty, to make sure the name wasn’t lost, to carry it forward into a new generation. I didn’t know old Gus, not really; as far as I can remember, I met him exactly once, at a party at Heather’s parents’ a couple of years before we were married.”
The great curtain of pale light that rippled thirty yards from his house stilled. Although he had long since given up trying to work out the pattern of its changes, Ransom glanced at his watch. 2:02 . . . PM, he was reasonably sure. The vast rectangle that occupied the space where his neighbor’s green-sided house had stood, as well as everything to either side of it, dimmed, then filled with the rich blue of the tropical ocean, the paler blue of the tropical sky. Waves chased one another towards Ransom, their long swells broken by the backs of fish, sharks, whales, all rushing in the same direction as the waves, away from a spot where the surface of the ocean heaved in a way that reminded Ransom of a pot of water approaching the boil.
(Tilting his head back, Matt had said, How far up do you think it goes? I don’t know, Ransom had answered. Twenty feet in front of them, the sheet of light that had descended an hour before, draping their view of the Pattersons’ house and everything beyond it belled, as if swept by a breeze. This is connected to what’s been happening at the poles, isn’t it? Matt had squinted to see through the dull glare. I don’t know, Ransom had said, maybe. Do you think the Pattersons are okay? Matt had asked. I hope so, Ransom had said. He’d doubted it.)
He looked at the clumps of creamer speckling the surface of the coffee, miniature icebergs. “Gus couldn’t have been that old. He’d married young, and Heather’s father, Rudy, had married young, and Heather was twenty- four or -five . . . call him sixty-five, sixty-six, tops. To look at him, though, you would have placed him a good ten, fifteen years closer to the grave. Old . . . granted, I was younger then, and from a distance of four decades, mid-sixty seemed a lot older than it does twenty years on. But even factoring in the callowness of youth, Gus was not in good shape. I doubt he’d ever been what you’d consider tall, but he was stooped, as if his head were being drawn down into his chest. Thin, frail: although the day was hot, he wore a long-sleeved checked shirt buttoned to the throat and a pair of navy chinos. His head . . . his hair was thinning, but what there was of it was long, and it floated around his head like the crest of some ancient bird. His nose supported a pair of horn- rimmed glasses whose lenses were white with scratches; I couldn’t understand how he could see through them, or maybe that was the point. Whether he was eating from the paper plate Heather’s uncle brought him or just sitting there, old Gus’s lips kept moving, his tongue edging out and retreating.”
The coffee was cool enough to drink. Over the rim of the mug, he watched the entire ocean churning with such force that whatever of its inhabitants had not reached safety were flung against one another. Mixed among their flailing forms were parts of creatures Ransom could not identify, a forest of black needles, a mass of rubbery pink tubes, the crested dome of what might have been a head the size of a bus.
He lowered the mug. “By the time I parked my car, Gus was seated near the garage. Heather took me by the hand and led me over to him. Those white lenses raised in my direction as she crouched beside his chair and introduced me as her boyfriend. Gus extended his right hand, which I took in mine. Hard . . . his palm, the undersides of his fingers, were rough with calluses, the yield of a lifetime as a mechanic. I tried to hold his hand gently . . . politely, I guess, but although his arm trembled, there was plenty of strength left in his fingers, which closed on mine like a trap springing shut. He said something, Pleased to meet you, you’ve got a special girl here, words to that effect. I wasn’t paying attention; I was busy with the vise tightening around my fingers, with my bones grinding against one another. Once he’d delivered his pleasantries, Gus held onto my hand a moment longer, then the lenses dropped, the fingers relaxed, and my hand was my own again. Heather kissed him on the che
ek, and we went to have a look at the food. My fingers ached on and off for the rest of the day.”
At the center of the heaving ocean, something forced its way up through the waves. The peak of an undersea mountain, rising to the sun: that was still Ransom’s first impression. Niagaras poured off black rock. His mind struggled to catch up with what stood revealed, to find suitable comparisons for it, even as more of it pushed the water aside. Some kind of structure—structures: domes, columns, walls—a city, an Atlantis finding the sun again. No—the shapes were off: the domes bulged, the columns bent, the walls curved, in ways that conformed to no architectural style—that made no sense. A natural formation, then, a quirk of geology. No—already, the hypothesis was untenable: there was too much evidence of intentionality in the shapes draped with seaweed, heaped with fish brought suffocating into the air. As the rest of the island left the ocean, filling the view before Ransom to the point it threatened to burst out of the curtain, the appearance of an enormous monolith in the foreground, its surface incised with pictographs, settled the matter. This huge jumble of forms, some of which appeared to contradict one another, to intersect in ways the eye could not untangle, to occupy almost the same space at the same time, was deliberate.
Ransom slid his chair back from the table and stood. The crab’s legs dinged on the stainless steel sink. Picking up his mug, he turned away from the window. “That was the extent of my interactions with Gus. To be honest, what I knew of him, what Heather had told me, I didn’t much care for. He was what I guess you’d call a functioning alcoholic, although the way he functioned . . . he was a whiskey-drinker, Jack Daniels, Jim Bean, Maker’s Mark, that end of the shelf. I can’t claim a lot of experience, but from what I’ve seen, sour mash shortcuts to your mean, your nasty side. That was the case with Gus, at least. It wasn’t so much that he used his hands—he did, and I gather the hearing in Rudy’s left ear was the worse for it—no, the whiskey unlocked the cage that held all of Gus’s resentment, his bitterness, his jealousy. Apparently, when he was younger, Rudy’s little brother Jan had liked helping their mother in the kitchen. He’d been something of a baker, Jan; Rudy claimed he made the best chocolate cake you ever tasted, frosted it with buttercream. His mother used to let him out of working with his father in the garage or around the yard so he could assist her with the meals. None of the other kids—there were six of them—was too thrilled at there being one fewer of them to dilute their father’s attention, especially when they saw Gus’s lips tighten as he realized Jan had stayed inside again.
“Anyway, this one night, Gus wandered into the house after spending the better part of the evening in the garage. He passed most of the hours after he returned from work fixing his friends’ and acquaintances’ cars, Hank Williams on the transistor radio, Jack Daniels in one of the kids’ juice glasses. In he comes, wiping the grease off his hands with a dishtowel, and what should greet his eyes when he peers into the refrigerator in search of a little supper but the golden top of the cherry pie Jan made for the church bake sale the next day? Gus loves cherry pie. Without a second thought, he lifts the pie from the top shelf of the fridge and deposits it on the kitchen table. He digs his clasp-knife out of his pants-pocket, opens it, and cuts himself a generous slice. He doesn’t bother with a fork; instead, he shoves his fingers under the crust and lifts the piece straight to his mouth. It’s so tasty, he helps himself to a second, larger serving before he’s finished the first. In his eagerness, he slices through the pie tin to the table. He doesn’t care; he leaves the knife stuck where it is and uses his other hand to free the piece.
“That’s how Jan finds him when he walks into the kitchen for a glass of milk, a wedge of cherry pie in one hand, red syrup and yellow crumbs smeared on his other hand, his mouth and chin. By this age—Jan’s around twelve, thirteen—the boy has long-since learned that the safest way, the only way, to meet the outrages that accompany his father’s drinking is calmly, impassively. Give him the excuse to garnish his injury with insult, and he’ll take it.
“And yet, this is exactly what Jan does. He can’t help himself, maybe. He lets his response to the sight of Gus standing with his mouth stuffed with half-chewed pie flash across his face. It’s all the provocation his father requires. What? he says, crumbs spraying from his mouth.
“Nothing, Jan says, but he’s too late. Gus drops the slice he’s holding to the floor, scoops the rest of the pie from the tin with his free hand, and slaps that to the floor, as well. He raises one foot and stamps on the mess he’s made, spreading it across the linoleum. Jan knows enough to remain where he is. Gus brings his shoe down on the ruin of Jan’s efforts twice more, then wipes his hands on his pants, frees his knife from the table, and folds it closed. As he returns it to his pocket, he tells Jan that if he wants to be a little faggot and wear an apron in the kitchen, that’s his concern, but he’d best keep his little faggot mouth shut when there’s a man around, particularly when that man’s his father. Does Jan understand him?
“Yes, Pa, Jan says.
“Then take your little faggot ass off to bed, Gus says.
“What happened next,” Ransom said, “wasn’t a surprise; in fact, it was depressingly predictable.” He walked into the kitchen, deposited his mug on the counter. “That was the end of Jan’s time in the kitchen. He wasn’t the first one outside to help his father, but he wasn’t the last, either, and he worked hard. The morning of his eighteenth birthday, he enlisted in the Marines; within a couple of months, he was on patrol in Vietnam. He was cited for bravery on several occasions; I think he may have been awarded a medal. One afternoon, when his squad stopped for a rest, he was shot through the head by a sniper. He’d removed his helmet . . . to tell the truth, I’m not sure why he had his helmet off. He survived, but it goes without saying, he was never the same. His problems . . . he had trouble moving, coordinating his arms and legs. His speech was slurred; he couldn’t remember the names of familiar objects, activities; he forgot something the second after you said it to him. There was no way he could live on his own. His mother wanted Jan to move back home, but Gus refused, said there was no way he was going to be saddled with an idiot who hadn’t known enough to keep his damn helmet on. Which didn’t stop him from accepting the drinks he was bought when Jan visited and Gus paraded him at the V.F.W.”
Behind him, a pair of doors would be opening on the front of a squat stone box near the island’s peak. The structure, whose rough exterior suggested a child’s drawing of a Greek temple, must be the size of a cathedral, yet it was dwarfed by what squeezed out of its open doors. While Ransom continued to have trouble with the sheer size of the thing, which seemed as if it must break a textbook’s worth of physical laws, he was more bothered by its speed. There should have been no way, he was certain, for something of that mass to move that quickly. Given the thing’s appearance, the tumult of coils wreathing its head, the scales shimmering on its arms, its legs, the wings that unfolded into great translucent fans whose edges were not quite in focus, its speed was hardly the most obvious detail on which to focus, but for Ransom, the dearth of time between the first hint of the thing’s shadow on the doors and its heaving off the ground on a hurricane-blast of its wings confirmed the extent to which the world had changed.
(What was that? Matt had screamed, his eyes wide. Was that real? Is that happening? Ransom had been unable to speak, his tongue dead in his mouth.)
Like so many cranes raising and lowering, the cluster of smaller limbs that rose from the center of the crab’s back was opening and closing. Ransom said, “I know: if the guy was such a shit, why pass his name on to my son?” He shrugged. “When I was younger—at that point in my life, the idea of the past . . . of a family’s past, of continuity between the present and that past, was very important to me. By the time Heather was pregnant, the worst of Gus’s offenses was years gone by. If you wanted,
I suppose you could say that he was paying for his previous excesses. He hadn’t taken notice of his diabetes for decades.
If the toes on his right foot hadn’t turned black, then started to smell, I doubt he ever would have returned to the doctor. Although . . . what that visit brought him was the emergency amputation of his toes, followed by the removal of his foot a couple of weeks later. The surgeon wanted to take his leg, said the only way to beat the gangrene that was eating Gus was to leap ahead of it. Gus refused, declared he could see where he was headed, and he wasn’t going to be jointed like a chicken on the way. There was no arguing with him. His regular doctor prescribed some heavy-duty antibiotics for him, but I’m not sure he had the script filled.
“When he returned home, everyone said it was to die—which it was, of course, but I think we all expected him to be gone in a matter of days. He hung on, though, for one week, and the next, and the one after that. Heather and her mother visited him. I was at work. She said the house smelled like spoiled meat; it was so bad, she couldn’t stay in for more than a couple of minutes, barely long enough to stand beside Gus’s bed and kiss his cheek. His lips moved, but she couldn’t understand him. She spent the rest of the visit outside, in her mother’s truck, listening to the radio.”
Ransom glanced out the window. The huge sheet of light rippled like an aurora, the image of the island and its cargo gone. He said, “Gus died the week after Heather’s visit. To tell the truth, I half-expected him to last until the baby arrived. Heather went to the wake and the funeral; I had to work. As it turned out, we settled on Matthew—Matt—instead.”
His break was over. Ransom exited the kitchen, turned down the hallway to the front door. On the walls to either side of him, photos of himself and his family, his son, smiled at photographers’ prompts years forgotten. He peered out one of the narrow windows that flanked the door. The rocking chair he’d left on the front porch in a quixotic gesture stood motionless. Across the street, the charred mound that sat inside the burned-out remains of his neighbor’s house appeared quiet. Ransom reached for the six-foot pole that leaned against the corner opposite him. Careful to check that the butcher knife duct-taped to the top was secure, he gripped the improvised spear near the tape and unlocked the door. Leveling the weapon, he stepped back as the door swung in.