by Martha Wells
He was sitting there like that when Mirja arrived with a tray of coffee. She set it down on one of the tables and tried to slip out silently.
“Mirja,” Artúr said, trying to keep his voice steady. “It just occurred to me that Jacks didn’t give me an elevator key. If I want to go out for lunch, how do I get to the lobby from here?”
“There is no use for going out,” she said, then paused for a tight smile, lips pressed together. It was the costume jewelry equivalent of smiles. “Everything of your wanting is in your suite.”
“But what if I want to go out?” Artúr asked.
“You must speak with Mr. Jacks, yes?”
“Do you ever go out?”
Mirja looked off like she was thinking, as though Artúr had posed a difficult math problem. “It is not a question for me,” she said at last.
“Maybe through the doors that never close?” Artúr attempted experimentally.
Mirja remained motionless, like she was willing her muscles not to move. Only the slightest twitch appeared at one corner of her mouth.
“Have you ever heard the name Shub—”
“Let me pour your cream!” she cried out, and then lurched forward, almost striking Artúr in the face with an elbow as she gripped the little creamer. She leaned in to pour and said, hardly louder than the sound of his own pulse in his ear, “To say her name is to know her. Don’t.”
She hurried out of the archive.
***
Knowing that Mirja would be lurking around in his apartment made Artúr uneasy, so he put off lunch until he became distractingly hungry. When he made his way to the suite, she had him sit in the dining room where she served him a plate of baked salmon with a cream sauce, glazed carrots and potatoes roasted with garlic and big chunks of salt. After putting down the dish, she slinked away, as if afraid he would make conversation with her. Artúr was not looking forward to his evenings.
While he ate, he looked up and noticed a security camera in the upper corner of the dining room. He tried to ignore it. He told himself that the furnishings were no doubt expensive, so of course they wanted to keep an eye on things, but even so, it was unnerving. After he finished his lunch, Artúr made a brief survey of the rest of the suite and discovered security cameras in every room, including the bathroom, where it was directed at the toilet.
He found Mirja in the kitchen washing dishes, her shoulders hunched like she was expecting a beating.
“How do I contact Mr. Jacks?” he asked her.
She turned off the water and pivoted slightly, but did not meet his eye. “He will let you know.”
“He’ll let me know how to contact him?”
“Yes, of course,” she said as she worked her sponge over a troubling spot on a pan.
“How do you contact him?” he pressed.
“He will let me know when it is necessary,” she said. Her eyes flickered to the kitchen security camera, and then she flipped the water on and returned to the dishes.
When he stepped out of the kitchen, he took out his phone and decided he would make some plans. He needed to get out of this place, hang out with some normal people, have a few too many beers. Once he made the plans, he’d have to find Jacks, and Jacks would have to tell him how he could get in and out on his own.
There was no cell phone service, however. And there were no phones in the apartment. It began to occur to Artúr that he would have no contact with any human being but Mirja until Jacks decided otherwise.
***
Back in the archive, Artúr made up his mind to be productive. He knew how to get work done under difficult conditions. That’s what graduate school was all about. He would work hard all afternoon, and when he saw Jacks next, he’d be in a position to ask for things because he would have progress to show for himself.
Howard Ostentower was a K’n-yan obsessive, just like the people Artúr worked on for his dissertation. Just like Amanda. That much was clear. Now what Artúr had to do was put together something, some hint or sign. He knew, from his research, how excited these people could get at anything.
He also wanted to find Amanda’s papers, but he didn’t want to push that. Maybe Ostentower was reading them. Maybe that’s how he learned Artúr’s name.
He decided to begin with the most contemporary material, things he hadn’t seen before. There were other researchers from all over the world. Some, like Amanda, had held university posts. Others were loners, working in their basements or dusty houses, poring over old notes or tracking down internet rumors. A few, he noted, were from other financial institutions. They all believed that somewhere in Oklahoma lay the entrance to an underground realm. Not a cavern or even a city, but a realm—a land or kingdom. There, people who were not like us lived in ways we could not imagine, but in ways that would open our imaginations, enlighten us, and very likely destroy us. There, they all agreed, they dedicated themselves to the black goat of a thousand young. To speak her name, he saw in almost every set of notes he examined, was to know her.
By the end of his first day, he had organized his reading into several cross-referenced lists. It was going to take weeks, maybe months, to work his way through the material. Interpretation of handwriting alone was going to be a chore. At least he knew where to begin, though.
When he returned to his suite. He found the dinner table set for one. Mirja called from the kitchen that he should sit when he was ready, and though being served made him uncomfortable, he didn’t see much of an alternative. Almost as soon as he pushed his chair in, Mirja brought him a plate of smoked lamb, beets, and a green salad. She poured him red wine and water from decanters.
“Why don’t you eat with me?” he asked. He wasn’t trying to make a move on her. Mirja was pretty, but he was too weirded out by his situation at CapitalBank to consider trying to flirt with her. Regardless, she only shook her head, like the offer had embarrassed her, pushed her hair from her eyes, and slinked off to the kitchen. The smoked lamb was excellent.
After dinner it became apparent that there was no television in the suite. No radio either. He was completely cut off from the outside world.
Artúr decided he was not going to put up with this. An international banking firm, a Wall Street stalwart, could not keep him prisoner in its New York headquarters. Why should they want to? Tomorrow he was going to tell someone. He was going to refuse to live like this. He could go back to his apartment and prepare his own food and ride the train to work like everyone else, or he would quit. He would walk away from their insane salary. What did the money matter if he could never leave? If he had nothing to buy and sell, the money was nothing but an abstraction. Of course, that’s what they dealt with at CapitalBank—financial abstractions, only at a much larger level.
He sat on his bed thinking all this, needing desperately to pee, but not wanting to do so in front of the security camera. Finally he shut out the lights, let his eyes adjust to the darkness, and got ready for bed simply because he had nothing to do. He could not be sure of the time. There were no clocks in the suite.
He came out of the bathroom wearing his bedtime attire—cotton shorts and a t-shirt—and listened to the sounds of Mirja in the kitchen. The occasional tinkle of water and subsequent splat told him she was mopping. He wondered if he should tell her he was going to bed, but decided there was no point. It wasn’t like they were socializing or anything.
He went into his bedroom, picked up a paperback novel he’d brought with him—a mystery—but couldn’t really concentrate, and what little elements of the plot he could follow made him uneasy. Recreational tension had lost much of its appeal. Finally, he turned out the lights and hoped to fall asleep.
***
An hour later, he was still awake when his door creaked open. Mirja slipped into the room, wearing only a nightgown, and made her way to the bed. She gently sat and stretched out next to him, draping an arm over him, sliding a hand under his shirt. She pressed her face against his, and Artúr could feel her skin slick with tears.
He moved away. “Mirja, what are you doing?” he whispered, as though there was someone else to wake.
“I am here for this too,” she said. “The making of comfort. Only lights must be on for camera.”
He turned on the light, but not for any damn comfort making. “Mirja, this is crazy. Why would you agree to this? You obviously don’t want to.”
She sat up and wiped at one of her eyes. “You do not like me?” There was a hint of panic in her voice.
“Of course I like you. You’re very pretty. I just don’t want you to feel that this is something you have to do—that you’re being paid for.”
“I want to,” she said, though her voice was empty and hollowed out, like she was remembering something utterly inconsequential from long ago. “You make me have horny feeling.”
“Ugh,” Artúr said, shifting away from her. It was like she was being forced at gunpoint. “Mirja are you a prisoner? Are they making you do all this?”
She shook her head. “I choose to stay.” She leaned in as if kissing his ear, but he realized at once it was a ruse. “I saw her once. I catch a glimpse. It was like watching everything become nothing. Everything made empty.” She pulled away. “I choose to stay.”
“Jesus,” Artúr breathed.
“Do not say that,” Mirja warned. “Mr. Ostentower doesn’t like to have any names of that kind.” She glanced at the security camera.
Artúr sighed. “I’m very flattered by your interest, Mirja, but I’m going to try to get some sleep now.”
“I understand,” she said. “It is busy day. Maybe soon you will want me.” She lay down next to him and closed her eyes. Artúr didn’t have the heart to tell her to get out of his room. Instead, he closed his eyes and tried to fall asleep, but sleep did not come.
***
It was pitch black, as it always was in the suite when the lights were out, and Mirja was pulling on his shoulders.
“You must get up. Mr. Ostentower wants you for worship.”
“What time is it?” he demanded.
“Almost new moon.”
When he finally sat up, still sorting out where he was and what might be going on, Mirja shoved a towel into his hand. “Shower,” she said. “And wear suit. Be respect.”
Artúr had no interest in attending any kind of weird predawn worship service with Howard Ostentower, but at least this would give him a chance to vent his complaints. Rather than be seen naked, Artúr showered in the dark and only turned on the light to shave once he was wearing underpants and an undershirt. He felt exposed and foolish.
When he came out of the bathroom, his suit was hung up in his bedroom, having been dry cleaned since his arrival. A new shirt, still in the package awaited him, as did a tie he had never seen before.
When he finished dressing, Artúr went into the kitchen to look for a cup of coffee, but Mirja told him he had to worship on an empty stomach. He then went out the door and into the archive, where he found Jacks waiting for him. His hair looked more neatly combed, but otherwise his unkempt appearance had not much changed. As near as Artúr could tell, he wore the exact same clothes he’d had on when they first met.
“How’s everything going?” he asked. “Settling in?”
“No, I’m not settling in,” Artúr said as they walked toward the elevator. “No one told me I was going to be a prisoner here.”
“Where’d you get that idea?” Jacks asked as they road down to the lobby. “Prisoner. You have gone insane, if I am not mistaken.”
“I can’t leave the building,” Artúr said. “I can’t contact anyone outside. What does that sound like to you?”
“Sounds like the sort of adjustment period all new employees go through,” Jacks said as he led Artúr over to the next elevator bank. “We’ll get it all sorted out. Give us a few days before you start spinning out paranoid theories.”
“What about the security cameras in my suite?” Artúr asked as they rode up to the executive floors.
“For your protection,” Jacks said as though stating the obvious.
They emerged from the elevator on a floor Artúr had not previously visited. It was poorly lit and much cooler than the rest of the building. Jacks led Artúr down a shadowy hall, where the walls were lined with what looked like stones, illuminated with candles from floor sconces. He felt like he was miles underground, not in a towering skyscraper.
At last Jacks pushed open a door and let Artúr enter. Inside, Howard Ostentower waited. It was a similarly lit stone room, small, with a few wooden benches. Ostentower had his back to Artúr, and his hands were at his throat, like he was straightening his tie.
Jacks closed the door, leaving Artúr alone with Ostentower.
“It’s the ceremony for the new moon,” Ostentower said. “You’re going to be an important part of it.”
“What is all this about?” Artúr demanded. “Why am I here?”
“You know what it’s about, Artúr. You heard her name. I saw it on your face when I met you. Jacks did too. To hear her name is to know her. That requires a sacrifice.”
Artúr took a step back. Cold panic gripped him. “You can’t do this,” he said. “You’ll be found out.”
“Not that kind of sacrifice,” Ostentower said, like he was laughing at a child’s naïve understanding of something from the adult world. “A sacrifice of time and space. Not a sacrifice of life, but of being. Your search for that which cannot be found is the sacrifice. You will live among us, cut off from the world, just like the others who discovered what was not theirs to know.”
“Mirja,” Artúr said.
“She should not have been listening,” Ostentower told him.
“And our being Icelandic?”
“It is a flavor she enjoys,” Ostentower said. “Ancient and crisp.”
“But what if I don’t want to stay?” Artúr asked.
“I’m afraid the choice is not yours. We have a big mergers and acquisitions deal on the table right now, and we cannot afford her displeasure. Come.”
Ostentower pushed open a large wooden door, and inside was a huge chamber, like an opening in an underground cavern. It was filled with hundreds, maybe thousands, of men and women in suits, looking up into blackness. They were like the people he’d seen on the trading floor, young and energetic—freshly minted adults. They all murmured under their breath, but no one said it aloud. No one spoke the name.
At the far end of the chamber, Artúr caught a glimpse of something. A woman’s body in a business suit, but her head was not human. It was black and shaggy. Her open suit jacket revealed leaking breasts. At the same time, he had not seen any of that. It was a sort of afterimage, like the lights you see with your eyes closed after a bright flash. Instead he saw emptiness and devouring and swirling, like worlds slamming into worlds, reaching out with arms of energy, pulling one another toward each other, toward their mutual doom. And he saw none of that too.
“Shub-Niggurath,” he whispered under his breath. It came out in a rush of terror and delight and wonder, and he felt her blessings fall upon him as something began to leak from the corner of his eyes. Not tears. Blood.
“Shub-Niggurath,” he said again, and now he felt something take his hand, cool and dry and welcoming. He didn’t have to look to know it was Amanda. She was here with him and the two of them were never going to go away, for they had walked through a door, which had always been there. He knew in his heart that the mergers and acquisitions deal was going to be an amazing success.
Shub-Niggurath
What makes the sap rise in the boughs of trees? What quickens the yoke in the fowl’s egg? What causes verminous things to engender and spring forth from the virgin mud? What fires the lust of a man for a woman? The force that lies behind these urges has a name, and it is Shub-Niggurath. She is the womb of the world, the goat with a thousand young. She is the life-force struggling to find shapes through which it may express itself. She is hunger, and thirst, and the essence of need that makes a livin
g thing struggle to go on living.
From the chaos in the womb of this old one arise monsters of the seas and subterranean darkness, things partially formed that could not wait the term of nurture but forced their way into this world screaming and mewling in pain, covered with slime and filth. For all generation arises from filth and is made of filth that has been patterned and ordered by the harmonies of Azathoth’s flute. This is true of a blade of grass that grows from a seed in the mire, and it is equally true of man and woman.
From blood and excrement and urine and filth of the earth are we engendered. Why else would the Elder Things who called us forth from the womb of Shub-Niggurath have placed our organs of excretion and our organs of procreation together? After death our souls may soar to the stars, as the Greek philosopher Plato believed, but while they are bound to this world in vessels of flesh, they remain wedded to filth and corruption. The crack in the flute of Azathoth renders his song imperfect, and one of the ways that imperfection expresses itself in this world is through uncleanness.
A thousand forms has Shub-Niggurath, for she is as varied as the monsters that pour from her open womb and cling as sucklings to her myriad breasts. She is worshipped by men in the shape of a black she-goat. Of all beasts the goat is renowned for its ruttishness. Both male and female are the same to her, for she is the lust of both, and that lust is one. It cannot be divided. The lust of all living things to burst forth from the womb or the egg or the seed is ever the same lust.
Her worshipers drink strong wine and dance to the music of drums and flutes. They make sacrifice of their first-born babes, and then couple without discrimination around the cloven-hoofed idol of their goddess, whose sexual member is ever depicted as rudely erect. Fathers couple with daughters, mothers couple with sons, brothers couple with sisters, the old impregnate the young.