Kero was still whining like a thrashed dog. I heard him huff with exertion as he was dragged to his feet. Without a fight from any of us, the Kõpura led us down the beach to the outrigger.
It wasn’t until I was actually thrown into the bottom of the craft that I began to fight back. While the women and the rest of the men were standing alongside in the waves, two of the Kõpura, a man and a woman, jumped in and thrust their knees onto my chest. All the wind went out of my lungs. Totally controlled by their grip, they released a little of the pressure, allowing me to breathe. They leaned down close to me, and I noticed two things. First: the carved strips of volcanic glass inlaid into the man’s forehead, with old-growth flesh holding them in place; second was how calm these people looked, in spite of their exertions. The man reached down and, with a serene stare, yanked my head up. He held a half shell level and I could tell it was full of something.
The woman kneeling beside me also had obsidian inlays, but hers were small and round, forming broken circles surrounding her big eyes. Calmly, with a half-smile—almost as if she were doing nothing more than ruffling a child’s hair—she held my chin and forced me to drink. It all happened so fast that it was some seconds before I recalled what Kero had said on the beach.
“She gave me a drink.”
I began to panic, but it was only permitted for a few seconds. The woman kneeling on my chest held up a spongy thing. I smelled a sickly sweetness, and the sponge was pressed down, covering my face. I struggled in vain for a moment and breathed deeply trying to gasp in oxygen, then I felt myself going under the sweet nectar and my struggles seemed a waste of time, so I gave up and let things happen.
I swam up out of a stupor and became aware I was lying with the lower half of my body along the bottom of the outrigger, my chest resting against the gunwale and my throat and chin over the edge. Without moving my head I saw sand forming a beach. A metre directly below, but a little away from the outrigger I saw a series of flat, interlinked rocks, seeming to form a kind of roadway. I turned my head and looked up the beach along the length of the road, and saw that it sloped gently upwards and in under Sago palms. Then I realised that the same paved road ran past the outrigger down into the water. Turning further I saw it ran downward under the surface until I could no longer see it amid the green depths. It looked like some kind of ancient boat ramp. Yet I wondered why it would need to run so deep. Somehow I was sure there was much more to its length further down, leading into the darkest depths.
I was properly conscious now. I dragged one of my arms up to grab the gunwale and to take the pressure off my throat. Above me I heard seagulls. My eyes began to itch and a pain arched across and behind my eyeballs. Putting my hand over the edge of the outrigger I gripped it and sat up. Seeking the source of pain I touched the edge of my eye, near my temple. There I felt a lump in the outer corner. I must have shouted, because it drew attention to me. The hair on the back of my head was grabbed roughly and another soft sponge was thrust across my face. Again I fell away into sleep.
I woke to the feeling of sun on my face, which would have been pleasant had it not been for the pain behind my eyes. I managed to sit up, and looked upon an earthen floor packed down hard. I glanced about and saw a waist-high stone wall surrounding me. I regained my senses and realised I was in an enclosure that was open to the weather. I could not see over the top of the wall, but noticed the stones fitted together neatly, cleanly, without mortar. I was reminded of the walls in South American Incan towns. To one side there was a gap in the wall the width of a normal doorway. I shifted and heard the clatter of something I had disturbed. I realised I was sitting amid a scattering of bleached white bones, many of which were oddly shaped and twisted. Some had the overall look of ribs, but were deformed. Some femurs and shinbones had growths branching off like a second stunted leg. With rising disgust, I swept my arms about and shoved the nearest ones away. They clacked into each other.
I heard the sigh behind me, a kind of wet gurgling exhalation. Twisting I sucked in a deep breath. It was Kero, lying on his side. I blinked and saw him smile in my direction. Looking closer I realised he was not seeing me. When I leant forward the pain in my head sharpened, causing my eyes to water. Wiping them, I looked and saw that Kero had his hands wrapped in what looked to be bark strips, with the tips of his fingers protruding. With one bark-covered hand he was clumsily playing with something at the corners of his eyes. There were stalks, much like gangly field mushrooms. I sat up and leant back in an effort to get away from him. He had spittle dangling from the corner of his mouth nearest the floor. Deformed white bones lay close to his face. I leaned forward again and saw the fungus growths flop against one of his cheeks when he turned his head to look upwards. He was still obviously not seeing me. I knew I was looking at the fungus, Cordyceps. The stalks exiting from the corners of his eyes were a pinkish grey, and from this were growths looking like sickly baby lettuce with soft curly edges. I felt ill.
Without warning Kero began to cry out. But they were weak calls, again, wet and gurgling, as if his throat was filling with mucous. His cries soon lessened and finally became a soft, laughing, coughing sound. I was exhausted from my treatment and from the time I had been drugged. In spite of my growing fear and the thought of what might happen to us, I could not stay awake. I slept amid the bones.
Days must have passed because my time in the enclosure seemed interminable. Sunlight and darkness came and went many times. I slept most of the time, only waking occasionally to feel a woven piece of bedding across me, or waking to daylight to see nothing but stone wall, white bones, and Kero’s back as he lay with his face away from me. I only knew he was still alive because of his irregular, gurgling breaths. One time I awoke with the sounds of screams fading away from some fevered dream, only to find they were continuing as I fully woke. I lay on my side with a plaited palm raincoat covering my shoulders. Still the screams continued in short bursts. Again they were incorporated into my nightmares. Daylight came and went and came. The sun burnt me during those days.
The lethargy left and I sat up for the first time in what seemed ages. I ached and felt pains on my hips. Checking them I found I had pressure sores. Immediately I realised how hungry I was. I felt weak and could hardly hold myself upright. Because of this, dizziness had come over me. Finally I managed to turn to face Kero. He was sitting among the bones, staring as if blind. He was filthy and emaciated. From his eyes and from out of his head grew a massive growth of greenish grey fungus that nodded and flapped against his cheeks as he shook his miserable head. He moaned and lifted his hands to look at them. I saw the bark bandages had been removed. I stared in disbelief. Bloodied and smeared with soil from the floor of the enclosure I saw what had been done to him. I could tell his fingers had been broken, because they were crooked and a couple bent a little backward in a way that would not be possible on a normal hand. But the worst thing was seeing evidence the Kõpura had sewn the fingers of each hand together. My friend now had two crude paddle-like appendages where he should have had hands.
For a moment I lost reason. Then, regaining clarity, I thought of Jenna. But my body was rebelling at its ill treatment. I vomited up some bile into the back of my throat. It stung and I gasped, swallowing the acid. I began to tremble. All the while I sat there in the dirt among the bones, listening to Kero’s gurgling mucous and still thinking of Jenna, wondering what horrors she was being subjected to. I realised we were being purposely starved, in order to completely break us.
I did not have long to contemplate all this. I saw a group of the Kõpura leaning across the enclosure wall. They came through the open part of the enclosure, their bark-sandalled feet crunching upon the twisted bones. I was forced to eat a foul-tasting puree. When I saw one of my captors holding a wet sponge, I knew what was about to happen, but was too weak to resist.
I woke on a woven flax mat, which sat upon a grassy expanse, some way up from a beach of sand and shingle. I raised myself and sat and realised I was no
longer hungry.
I looked up at a cloudless sky. I lowered my gaze and saw a small bay of turquoise water almost surrounded by two finger-like projections of jungle-draped land spits. Out in the bay, some way from the beach, three big-sailed double outriggers rocked in a light swell. I heard birdcalls sounding from some distance behind me. Palms lined the beach, dividing sand from grass. It was beautiful.
Some distance to my right was a pyramid, ancient, and flat-topped with a walkway of massive steps on the side facing the bay. Much of the structure was under water. I peered with my hand up against my eyes to stop the glare of the sun. I saw the sand had encroached upon the massive lower blocks of the structure and that part lying in the water appeared to reach down into the green depths, and I knew it went down further than I could see. I wondered at the millennia that must have elapsed since its erection, for tectonic plates to move, allowing the ocean to climb this high up the structure.
The sun felt good upon me. I felt strength unfamiliar. It was as if I had eaten a substantial meal. I looked about and upon turning my head I felt something soft brush against my check. Raising my hand I felt the soft edges of the fungus. I did something then, which, a short while ago, I would not have been capable of. I smiled. Again, I touched the growths. To my mind they seemed the most natural thing in the world. I heard a sound behind me, the one place I had not yet looked. Turning upon my flax mat, I saw one of the Kõpura women. She was sitting upon a large rock that looked to have been chiselled to form a seat. While she regarded me, her form shimmered under the glare of the sun. She smiled and I could not make out the shape of her mouth. It altered even as I looked at it. She was topless. I saw the mottling on her breasts flash a different colour—green to brown, to scarlet and back. I blinked and stared stupidly at her. My gaze was drawn back to her face. Her entire head had for a fleeting moment changed shape. For an instant it elongated and took on a light brown colour. And for a second there seemed something familiar, but as well something unearthly about the shape. I stretched open my mouth and worked my jaw. Looking again at the woman’s face I caught a glimpse of bright yellow spots ringed by deep blue, flash diagonally up across her face from chin to forehead. It looked like an octopus changing colour.
I sat on the mat feeling confused, looking again at this extraordinary woman who now appeared completely normal. Behind I heard the sound of feet squeaking on hot sand as someone walked towards me. I turned with renewed strength and saw to my astonishment Kero striding purposefully across the sand toward us. I looked at his face and was surprised to see none of the pain and horror I had seen only recently. It occurred to me I had no idea how long ago that had been. His transformation was miraculous. He appeared to be now taller and thinner, but it was still his face. Gone was the fleshy, nodding, grey fungus of the Cordyceps. In its place, circling his eyes, were incisions not yet healed, tracing a V-shape from his forehead down to the bridge of his nose, inside of which sat freshly inlaid shards of volcanic black glass. I stared and wondered how long had elapsed since we had lain in terror amid the bones inside the open stone enclosure.
To my surprise, the man whom I had once known as Kero, looked down at me and smiled faintly, as if he did not recognise me. I could think of nothing to say. But I caught one thing in his look and it was as if he pitied me. Remembering his hands, I looked at them as he passed me and walked towards the Kõpura woman seated on the chiselled boulder. He was swinging his hands by his side as he walked, like a man supremely confident in himself. It was on those swinging hands where I saw the most change. There was no longer any dirt or blood. The hands were clean and there were no fingers. As he strode past me I saw there were no longer any stitches. The skin had grown seamlessly together and all he now had were two thumbs and one seamless expanse of flesh on both hands. I watched his back, and he reached the Kõpura woman, bent down and kissed her on her mouth. She responded enthusiastically, the bare flesh of her arms rippled as if the muscles underneath were tightening and relaxing, bulging with stubby, extended pseudopods looking like a blind worm smelling the air. Colour flashed up and down the lengths—blue, emerald green, red and purple. They stopped kissing and the woman leaned out from behind Kero’s shoulder. She smiled and winked at me. She spoke and I recognised the voice.
“Your growths will wither and pain will come and then go. It will be lost and you will no longer care. Your vices will be many and you will feed on the terror of our guests.”
It was not what she said, it was who said it. I realised I was looking at Jenna. What had once been Kero, and what had once been Jenna, looked down at me sitting on the mat. It was as if they were thinking of me as a child. Again, I remembered Kero’s words on the beach at Imora: “She gave me a drink”.
Then I knew. He had been talking about Jenna. She was Kõpura. They had sailed to her home of Tokonu all those years ago and had taken her, changed her. There were those marks across the flesh covering her collarbone—not surgery, but makeup, where her pigmentation had been covered in order for her to walk unsuspected among the Solomon peoples. Even before she had met us, she had been planning our abduction.
I felt no anger at this. Something had been lifted from me, some sense of responsibility for my existence had been removed and there was nothing to ever worry over—others could now make all my decisions. I felt light headed and strangely safe.
In another moment of clarity, I realised it had never mattered that I had not been bitten and had escaped the enzyme from the saliva of infected children. The hospital at Gizo had been harvesting it. That was what was in the syringe when I had my shot. When the doctor had given me the needle and had explained things, she was shutting down my amygdala, by infecting me with Urbach disease. Realisation came to me. Jenna had been sitting in the chair in the waiting room, because she had never needed a shot. The doctors at Gizo, the navy; RAMSI, the entire lot of them were creating a weapon. I laughed at the genius of it all.
I pulled my knees up to my chest and held them together with my arms. I watched my old companions watching me, smiling with their oddly shaped mouths. Colours flashed across Jenna’s flesh. She and Kero stood and walked to me, one each side. They held down their hands for me to take and I did so. To my new way of thinking, Kero’s surgical enhancements seemed now quite normal.
They led me up the beach towards a group of people waiting for us on the sand. As we got closer, Kero and Jenna let go of my hands. I looked at Jenna in her splendid form and she smiled and nodded to me. I turned and faced those others. I heard them give a collective sigh. I wondered what they might smell like. I knew, of course, that creatures so powerful would smell sweet. I went forward on shaky legs, still a little weakened from my incarceration, but gaining strength with each step. I crossed the expanse of sand and shingle. For a moment their forms jerked in unison, like a faulty hologram. Then, as if a veil had dropped, I was allowed to see beyond, to the true reality that was hidden from humanity. I knew I would soon be seeing things as they really are, and I would gaze upon my brethren and marvel upon their terrible majesty. I laughed and stared in wonder at the sight of the flashing and brilliant colours as their subsurface chromatophores relayed their many emotions. With a happiness I felt would burst out of me, I walked into the arms of my new family.
Biographies
(in order of appearance)
STEVE PROPOSCH, CHRISTOPHER SEQUEIRA & BRYCE STEVENS are the co-editors and creators of the Cthulhu Deep Down Under (CDDU) concept. Their recent decision to collaborate on a rolling series of anthologies under the group moniker ‘Horror Australis’ reflects their belief that the most exciting opportunities for southern equatorial genre fiction lie ahead. Works by the members of this team in collaboration include co-editing Terror Australis: The Australian Horror and Fantasy Magazine; Bloodsongs magazine (published internationally) and horror comics under the Sequence Publications banner that included contributions by each of them. One further CDDU volume, as well as Cthulhu Land of the Long White Cloud, are set for release
in 2018-19.
STEVE SANTIAGO became a fan of all things weird at an early age and that attraction has never stopped. He graduated with a BA in Graphic Design and has over 20 years of experience working as a full-time graphic designer in California. The past few years he has been able to devote most of his time to illustrating and photoshopping covers and interior art for anthologies, magazines, ezines, CD covers, board game art and concept art for a Lovecraftian film. As a freelancer, Steve has created art/designs for clients from as far away as Australia, Germany, Hungary, U.K., and the Netherlands—illustrator-steve.com
ANDREW J. MCKIERNAN was once an award winning writer and illustrator. These days, he mainly just sits on his back porch sipping whiskey and playing the blues—www.andrewmckiernan.com
PETER RAWLIK is the author of more than fifty short stories, the novels Reanimators, The Weird Company, and Reanimatrix, and The Peaslee Papers, a chronicle of the distant past, the present, and the far future. As an editor he has produced The Legacy of the Reanimator and the forthcoming Chromatic Court. His short story Revenge of the Reanimator was nominated for a New Pulp Award. He is a regular member of the Lovecraft Ezine Podcast, which in 2016 won the This is Horror Non-Fiction Podcast of the year award. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Science Fiction.
KIRSTYN MCDERMOTT is an Australian author of two award-winning novels, Madigan Mine and Perfections, as well as a collection of short fiction, Caution: Contains Small Parts. Until recently, she produced and co-hosted a literary discussion podcast, The Writer and the Critic, and is currently undertaking a creative PhD at Federation University with a research focus on retold fairy tales. She can be found online at www.kirstynmcdermott.com
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