by Martha Wells
In the depths they built their cities from stone blocks so massive, it would be impossible for men to move them, but they were easily lifted into place by a race of slaves bred by these wise Elder Things for this purpose. These slaves were called shoggoths, and they are said to be the strongest living beings that ever existed.
In appearance like amorphous sacks of dirty translucent fluid, the shoggoths possess the remarkable ability to extend at will hands or legs or organs of perception. They lifted the great stones by flowing beneath them and expanding their bodies. In this way they could shift and raise weights that appeared impossible to move. When angered they could throw down the stones of a wall as easily as they had raised them.
For long ages the Elder Things ruled this world beneath the waves. When living creatures crawled from the oceans to the land, and lush forests covered the hills and valleys, the Elder Things moved from the sea to the land and built more cities in the open air.
They had the minds of sages and were wise beyond our reckoning. They made and molded the flesh of living things the way a potter makes pots of different shapes. It is whispered that one of their creations was the human species, but why they created us is unknown. Some say we were made to be a food animal, as we ourselves might breed a sheep or a goat, for the Elder Things were flesh eaters. Others say that we were created for their amusement, as grotesque and comical monsters to be stared at and mocked.
As the aeons continued to pass, other alien races descended from the stars to our world and began to make war against the Elder Things for mastery of the earth. The Elder Things fought against Cthulhu and his spawn, the Mi-Go, and the Great Race of Yith. The devastation wrought by these battles rendered much of the surface of the world unable to support habitation. The Elder Things were gradually driven from the surface of the land by these wars, back to their original cities deep beneath the sea, and their numbers diminished.
The most terrible of their wars was the uprising of their own slaves, the shoggoths, who over the ages became intelligent and threw off the mind control of the Elder Things. They sought to kill their masters so that they would be free. The Elder Things defeated the army of shoggoths using terrible weapons, but the destruction these weapons caused to the earth was tremendous. They retreated to their last great land city far to the south, and abided there in peace until the coming of the age of endless winter, when their city was covered by a creeping sheet of ice.
It is rumored that the last remnants of the Elder Things may have fled their frozen city and retreated into caverns deep beneath the mountains, where perchance they still dwell. Their cities are all destroyed, and no Elder Thing has been seen by the eyes of men, although blind Theon and others have glimpsed them in dreams. If relics of their vanished civilization survive, it can only be in the waste places of this world, where no man dares to travel, or in the frozen desolation at the poles, where there is only snow and ice.
A Dying of the Light
Rachel Caine
You can adjust to all kinds of things, no matter how depressing they may be. Working in a facility that deals with Alzheimer’s patients, for instance; sure, it might be distressing at first, how they grab onto you with wild, panicked desperation and stare, unable to articulate the howling darkness inside their minds. How they beg you to save them from being sucked down into it.
But you get used to it. Sad fact. You can get used to anything.
At the time I met the newest resident of Shady Grove, I’d just become a Licensed Elder Care Technician—that’s what my paystub said, anyway, and it earned me a sweet twenty bucks an hour. I was relatively new at the whole Elder Care game, but most of the time, it wasn’t so bad. I mean, you had to have a strong stomach; there’s a whole lot of waste spillage involved, if you know what I mean, but I’ve never been squeamish about bodily fluids. Shit, blood, urine, vomit… it never made me sympathy puke, though some of my coworkers just couldn’t deal. I was the one who got emergency mop-and-bucket duty for the most part, and I was fine with it. My colleagues usually bumped me some extra cookies or something at breaks to make up for it.
What was harder for me were the faces of our patients—excuse me, residents. The blank, slack, yet still somehow living faces, continually struggling to climb out of whatever pit they’d fallen into inside their skulls. The human body is tough, and a lot of the time it just doesn’t know how to quit, even when the fight’s long lost. I was always as gentle as I could be with them, even the ones who hit the skids and took a wrenching left turn into screaming, spitting, biting, punching, you name it. My facility didn’t get those as much. There were—air quote—special facilities for those cases. I’d only been slapped or hit a couple of times, once by a tiny little lady who just the day before had been the sweetest, most fragile thing.
They changed, you see. They all changed, eventually. And there was never any going back, just a long, slow march down into the dark.
I was in my seventh month of the job when destiny moved in. Well, moved in wasn’t quite right; she was wheeled in from St. Gregory Hospital one rainy afternoon, and as I watched them roll her down the hall and into room 422, I thought, she’ll take some work. The old lady who passed me was bedridden, and worse, she had the thousand-yard, dead stare of an end-stager… if anybody was still home in that graying head, she sat in the dark, silent and alone. Better than combative, but not by much. Special care would need to be taken to ensure she didn’t develop bedsores, and she was probably on a boatload of meds, too.
Not my wing, thank God, I thought, right before Chris, the nursing supervisor, stuck his head out of his office and beckoned me over. He was sorting out boxes of medications, logging them in on charts, and labeling them with room numbers, and while he worked he jerked his pointed chin in the direction that the gurney had taken, toward 422.
“She’s yours,” he said. Chris—Christophe, really—had a rich, soft Jamaican accent that always reminded me of some sun-drenched shore far from our dim old Arkham, Massachusetts, nursing facility. “They asked for you special.”
This part of the state always seemed gloomy, overcast, raining, or managed to be dour and played out even on sunny days; a little Jamaican beach fantasy wasn’t a bad thing. Christophe was also tall, broad-shouldered, and had the most perfect, poreless skin I’d ever seen on a man. He had a white-ink tattoo on his shoulder that rumor said was a voudon symbol, but I figured it was probably just picked out of a design book somewhere in Boston, and neither Chris nor the tattooist had the vaguest idea what it really was.
Still, for all his charm and warmth and handsome features, many of the staff, especially those with Caribbean backgrounds, minded their manners around Christophe.
“Wait, what?” His words finally registered on me like the brassy clang of a bell. “I—what? That’s not my wing!”
“Special request,” he said again, and gave me a broad, amused smile. “Your fame is spreading, Rose.”
“That is not my fault.” Somehow, when I’d done my job and nothing but, an enterprising blogger had twisted me into an ALZ whisperer who could charm difficult patients into miracle recoveries. For one thing, that poor old man hadn’t even been properly demented, just neglected and lonely. For another, half of what that damn post had said was nonsense anyway. “Please don’t make me some bullshit plastic dashboard saint.”
“We can charge extra if we sell action figures.”
“You asshole.”
He shrugged. “She’s your patient. Saint Rose.”
I flipped him off, and he crossed himself, and we parted friends, I hoped. I wasn’t really upset. The new patient—resident—wouldn’t be too much trouble. If I could persuade Christophe to let me spend more time with her, I might be able to cut down on some of the emergency shit detail I usually inherited. A little more quality time with a person, even a nearly dead one, was much better.
And I did like being able to make their dark days a little brighter, even if they could only see it in glimpses and shadows. Wa
sn’t really cool to say that around the others, who all complained about the work and the lousy pay and the heavy lifting, but I didn’t mind all that, mainly because I’d done worse. Ever clean out portable toilets? This beat that by miles.
I stopped by the main office and picked up a Welcome Pack, which was kind of a joke because most of our residents were too far gone to understand what we were giving them, and anyway it was just soap, tissues, a lap blanket, things like that. Things their families, if they had any, forgot to provide. It came in a cheery yellow wicker basket with some sugar-free candies and Depends. I carried it over to room 422, where the ambulance attendants who’d brought her were just finishing up transferring her from the gurney to the small medical-grade bed where she’d finish up her life. One of them handed me the paperwork, and I looked it over. “Acanthus Porter,” I said. “Huh. Sounds familiar. Should I know her?”
The younger one shrugged, but the older, about thirty, said, “Yeah, she was some kind of movie star back when dirt was new. Couldn’t tell now, huh?”
“Don’t get cocky,” I said. “You won’t be the handsome specimen you are now at her age, either.”
He laughed. I read the rest over quickly—the usual stuff, statements about her condition, meds, a do not resuscitate order, contact info for her next of kin, which included a daughter and son who hadn’t bothered to show up to see her moved into what was almost certainly her last residence. Both local. I signed the transfer and handed it back, and got a bag of stuff that was all Acanthus Porter had now in terms of worldly possessions: mostly nightgowns and robes. No valuables, thank God; those had to be locked up in the office safe. I could never understand why people put Grandma’s jewel collection in her room, when Grandma was dotty enough to flush it down the toilet.
The ambulance guys left, and shut the door, and I put Acanthus Porter’s things into the small chest by her bed. Her belongings only took up two of the four drawers. Sad. I put the Depends in the bottom drawer and the candy arranged in a nice little bowl by her bed, and tried to spread the rest of it around so it looked less like a cell and more like a home.
As I was spreading the cheery plaid lap blanket over her, I looked up into Mrs. Porter’s face. She was as wrinkled as a raisin, pale and bloodless, and her blue eyes—which had probably been a stunning cornflower blue in her prime—stared blankly, faded and dull. No sign of life in her, though the pulse at her throat still beat, and her frail little chest rose and fell. I took her hand. It was chill and slack, and the skin was thin enough to see through, like something half-formed and unborn. I could see the shadows of bones, feel the ridges of thickened joints.
Her hand tightened on mine with sudden, shocking strength. It didn’t surprise me; Alzheimer’s patients were capable of that kind of thing. Their minds were wasting away, but the body was slower to follow. And the body was afraid.
Her grip hurt, but I didn’t wince. “It’s all right,” I said, and gently eased some of the gray hair off her forehead. She was sweating a little. “Acanthus, it’s all right. You’re safe here. My name is Rose. I’m going to take care of you.”
I kept my tone gentle. The words really didn’t matter; I could have recited the phone book to the same effect, because at her stage, patients lost the ability to keep up with the meaning of sentences. They responded to touch, and to tone, and sure enough, gradually the grip around my hand slackened and fell away. I felt the sting of cuts and looked down. She’d dug in with her nails and left little red crescents in two spots. I should have nails that good, I thought, and almost laughed. I’d cut them short later.
“I’ll bet you’re hungry,” I told her, in the same warm, soothing voice. “I have to warn you, the food’s pretty crap, but I’ll get you something tasty, all right? Something soft and warm. And some pudding. You like pudding, I’ll bet.”
I got up to go, and when I did, something… happened. I don’t believe in ghosts, or demons. I’d always believed in what I could see and feel, and I believed that everything had a reason. Everything.
So all I can say about it is that I felt a wind out of nowhere blow up from beneath us, from the damn floor, and it felt hot and yet somehow clammy, like the skin of something dead a long time. It was so strong it felt as if it would tear the skin off my bones, and then it was gone, and I realized—though believe me, I know it doesn’t make sense—that the shocking blast hadn’t so much as ruffled the cheery green curtains on the window. I experienced a terrible stillness in that room, a presence like something awful smothering me with a wet, hot mouth, and I covered my face and, as strong-stomached as I am, I almost vomited into my hands.
Then it was gone. Just… gone.
I turned back to the bed, and the frail little woman dying on it, and another inexplicable feeling swept over me. A hot flash of utter horror, as if I was staring at something that should not be, then I blinked and it was over, except for the incredibly fast pulse of my heart and the sickening taste at the back of my throat.
Acanthus Porter sat up in bed and looked at me with cold, shining blue eyes. There was something wrong in the tilt of her head, the set of her shoulders, as if she’d put on the wrong skin.
I bit back the urge to scream and managed to say, fairly calmly, “Acanthus? Can you hear me?” Maybe, I told myself, there’s nothing really wrong at all. Alzheimer’s patients didn’t react well to changes in environment; routines were everything to them. Maybe she’d just frozen out during the transfer and was starting to come back a little. Weird, but not unprecedented.
That fragile, desperate hope shattered when Acanthus opened her wrinkled little mouth and out poured a sound that was so wrong, so chilling, it sounded more like metal shrieking under pressure than a voice. Loud, so loud I had to clap my hands over my ears. It physically hurt, and when it finally died away I heard myself screaming in protest.
Acanthus dropped back to the pillows as if a puppeteer had cut her strings, with dead-but-alive eyes staring up at the ceiling, just as Christophe banged open the door to the room and charged in. He skidded to a halt, staring at me and breathing fast.
“What the hell are you screaming about?” he demanded. I slowly took my hands away from my ears, still watching Acanthus the way I might a poisonous spider on my pillow. “My God, Rose, you could have raised the dead! I’ll have half the hall agitated the rest of the day after that!”
It slowly penetrated to me that he hadn’t heard Acanthus’s awful, metallic shriek at all. He’d only heard me, screaming for no apparent reason.
Acanthus lay limp on the bed, breathing evenly, a fragile old lady without much of a mind left, and I knew I couldn’t tell him what I’d seen. Not if I wanted to keep my job.
I made up some story about seeing a rat and left him to hunt it down while I ran to the bathroom to throw up. My body needed to expel something, and if it couldn’t get rid of the image of Acanthus upright in that bed, her eyes bright and dead inside, that voice…
Breakfast would have to do.
***
So, yeah, I thought about leaving—just quitting, walking off the job, never coming back. Problem is that, at least in Arkham, there are a limited number of jobs for someone like me, and I liked what I did. I couldn’t afford a bad reference out of Shady Groves, or Christophe spreading the word I was unstable. I just had to find a way to never be alone with Acanthus again.
Easier said than done, but I managed for a while; I kept the door open to her room and engaged other caregivers in conversations while changing her clothes and sheets and bathing her and turning her and feeding her. She was a warm, malleable doll in my hands, though from time to time I saw that flash of cold intelligence in her eyes and was glad I had someone else to chat with, someone to offer me protection. Somehow, I knew it wouldn’t happen when there were other witnesses.
That didn’t last, of course. I was dressing Acanthus in her nightgown after her bath when my friend Marisela was called away to tend to someone who’d had a fall, and the instant Marisela was gone the
old lady’s faded eyes flicked over to fix on mine. Utterly present. Utterly terrifying.
I let go of her. She should have fallen back to the pillows, but instead she stayed where she was, half-reclined, floating on the air… and then she sat up.
She swung her stick-thin legs over the edge of the bed and stood.
I’d moved back by then, well back, out of grabbing range. I didn’t know what was coming. There was that damp heat in the room again, with a strange edge of chill underneath, and something wrong, very wrong, in the way Acanthus stood on her two feet. Stroke patients sometimes relearned how to sit, stand, walk, talk… but even then, they looked human in their bodies. Just uncertain and clumsy.
Acanthus looked wrong. And not at all uncertain.
“Jesus,” I breathed. She was staring at me with those greedy, wet eyes—observing every little tic and breath and muscle. I had the odd, creepy idea that she was learning. She suddenly cocked her head to an angle that just had to hurt, too far over, too sudden, and then slowly straightened it again. Took a slow, shuffling step toward me. “Oh Jesus Christ—” The dread had taken hold of me hard, but I couldn’t let it paralyze me. She’s just a frail old lady, what the hell are you afraid of?
It made me feel physically ill to push through the dread, but I moved to her, not away, and took her arm. Thin, velvety skin slid loose over muscles that, though wasted, felt cable-strong beneath.
“Acanthus?” My voice sounded high and strange, and there was a tremble in it, just as there was in my grip on her forearm. “Dear, you should sit down. I don’t think you should be standing up.”
She obligingly sat on the edge of the bed. I felt her body shifting, trying to find a balance that, even in an Alzheimer’s patient, should have had some instinct to it… but it felt like she’d never done this before. I held her in place until she was steady, then let go. I rubbed my palm down the fabric of my uniform pants, trying to scrub off the feel of her flesh, but I somehow managed to smile. “That’s good, Mrs. Porter. Very good.”