by Martha Wells
He waited for me to tell my story, to blurt out the tale of Acanthus Porter, but I didn’t. I thanked him in barely audible whispers, grabbed my bag, and got the hell out. The Miskatonic halls seemed drenched in shadows so thick I could feel them drag on my skin as I hurried away, toward the dim, cloudy light outside. A breeze blew in from the sea, and I shuddered. It felt damp and clammy and wrong and held a dark, swampy odor I recognized.
I drove back to Acanthus Porter, simply because I didn’t know where else to turn.
***
The next few days brought an unexpected flurry of events. First, Mrs. Porter got a visitor—a buttoned-up, sharply dressed lawyer, who had her fill out paperwork without any involvement from me. She dealt with him as sharply as any rational person, and speed-read the documents he put in front of her, legalese and all, before signing with bold slashes of her pen on the last page. I asked what it was about, but she didn’t answer. She asked for more paper, and I watched her draw more unsettling illustrations, and write more obscure, unknown lines of text. When I asked what she was doing, I got a one-word answer.
“Waiting.”
She didn’t have to wait long. Two days later, Ken and Darlene made another appearance. They were shaken and angry, and Ken was clutching a piece of official-looking paper in one hand. He stormed in and found his mother writing, as usual, in the corner of the common room. Like Darlene before him, he came to a sudden halt five feet away, well out of touching distance, and brandished the paper in front of him. “What’s the meaning of this, Mother?”
Acanthus didn’t look up. I suppose Ken didn’t know to be grateful for that. She was carefully inking in details of an illustration of what looked like an astrological symbol, but nothing I recognized. “It’s self-evident,” she said. “Isn’t it?”
“It withdraws our power of attorney for you!”
“It does,” she agreed. “I feel it is time for me to take over my own affairs again.”
“But—”
She looked up then, and whatever Ken would have said, it died in his throat, rotted, and turned to dust. There was something wild and alien in Acanthus’s look, something awful I couldn’t even comprehend. “I will require money,” she said. “For what I need to do. So I will take it.”
Darlene, who’d been hiding behind Ken, stepped out and, keeping her gaze averted from her mother, said, “Mama, maybe you should let us handle your finances—”
“You have the papers,” Acanthus said. “Now go away. I don’t need you.”
Darlene flinched, and Ken actually growled somewhere deep in his throat, like a dog hopelessly facing a bear, and then backed away. I realized he didn’t want to turn his back on his mother. Darlene didn’t have such qualms; she turned and hurried out as fast as she could without running.
Acanthus laughed. Or, at least, I think it was a laugh. It didn’t sound amused, or human, but there was a rhythm to it that approximated laughter. The short hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.
The laugh cut off abruptly, and her head turned toward me. I didn’t look. I stared hard at the lines of text on the page in front of her, the half-inked drawing.
“You,” she said. “I’ll need you to come with me.”
I swallowed hard and shook my head. “I have a job here. I’m not going anywhere.”
“A million dollars,” she told me. “A million dollars to accompany me. Surely that will be better than this.” She indicated the room of Alzheimer’s patients with a contemptuous jerk of one hand, as if slapping them away. “I need you. Rose.”
It was, I thought, an attempt to sound warm. Human. It failed. But a million dollars… I stared at her doubtfully. To someone at my wage rate, a million bucks sounded like miracle money. Life-changing money. If she has it, I thought. I cleared my throat. “I’d have to know you’re serious,” I said. “I have to see the money.”
She gave that awful laugh again, took another piece of paper, and wrote something down—not in the strange, alien script this time. In English. Perfect cursive, old school rounded letters and numbers, like a calligrapher. It gave the phone number of someone named Elliott Lange. “Ask him,” she said. “He will show you.”
I took out my phone and dialed and got an immediate, crisp voice on the other end saying, “Law Offices of Elliott Lange, how many I direct your call?”
“Mr. Lange, please,” I said, and swallowed hard.
“Who may I say is calling?”
“Rose Hartman. I’m the… attendant to Mrs. Porter.”
While waiting, I switched to the Internet and looked up Elliott Lange. He was a high-powered Arkham lawyer specializing in estates and wills, and I recognized his picture. He’d been the man bringing papers to Acanthus to sign.
The one who’d cut her children clean out of the process.
“Lange,” said a clipped, businesslike voice on the other end of the line. “Miss Hartman? Any problems with Mrs. Porter?”
“No, I just—”
Acanthus’s withered hand snatched the phone away from me and put it to her ear. “Tell her how much money I have,” she said, and handed the phone back.
Lange was silent on the other end, then said, “I see. This is irregular.”
“Tell me about it,” I said. “She offered me a million dollars. Does she, ah, actually have it?”
“You can safely assume that. She could offer you ten times that without any problem. You’ll forgive me for not being more specific.”
“Of course,” I said. “Look, I don’t want this to look like I’m taking advantage…”
“Put Mrs. Porter on the phone and I’ll verify.” I handed it to the old lady and walked away. She talked for a while, then put the phone down and gestured for me to come back. I picked up and found Lange still on the line. “It’s settled. I’m drawing up papers for her to sign. You’re firewalled from any undue influence charges.”
“No offense, Mr. Lange, but I’ve met her kids.”
“So have I. She’s leaving them everything else, an estate in the hundreds of millions. They’re not going to care. She just wants a million for you, and a million for herself.”
“A million for her? What for?”
“Travel,” he said. “I’ll wire your cash to you tomorrow. Give my assistant your bank information. And Miss Hartman?”
“Yes?”
He hesitated. Up to that point, it had been a brusque, just-the-facts conversation. But his tone was entirely different when he said, “This may be a breach of protocol, but… I wouldn’t go with her. Not for any amount of money. You understand?”
I did. I said, “How much cash do you have in the bank? Because if it’s more than five hundred bucks, I don’t think we’re operating from the same starting point on that one. Besides, I know her. I’m with her every day.”
“Point taken. I hope—I hope to hear from you soon.”
That was it. Next thing, his assistant was asking for my bank info, and I gave it, and when I hung up the call, Acanthus Porter was watching me.
She said, “Pack.”
***
It was a long flight. Arkham to Boston, Boston to New York, New York to Melbourne. I worried Mrs. Porter wouldn’t be able to cope with the rapid changes, the rush, the security, but I shouldn’t have; she seemed vital, healthy, full of sharp energy. We flew first class, and oddly, the passengers in the row behind and ahead of us requested new accommodations in business class instead of being nearby. Bad dreams, I guessed; my head had been full of them every time I tried to close my eyes. I saw the city, the towers. I saw strange, half-seen creatures floating in the dark skies. I saw huge, bolted trap doors that seemed to strain and bend with pressure from below. I felt the whispering touch of an ancient, utterly incomprehensible darkness that bubbled around me like black oil.
We arrived in Melbourne, and I staggered off the plane sick and weak from proximity to Acanthus Porter. I seriously considered abandoning the old woman and fleeing back to safety, but she didn’t give me the c
hance; we marched directly to a waiting chauffeur and black car, and from there we were whisked off to another airport, and another smaller, claustrophobic plane. This new plane only held the two of us, plus a silent crew who avoided even looking in our direction. They were so quiet, in fact, that I wondered who they were. One of them made a gesture to Acanthus at one point that was very like a bow.
Strange.
I don’t know how long we traveled, or how far. It became a blur. I lost the will to eat, to sleep, to even try to find a way out and away from her; it was as if she’d somehow harnessed me, and I felt energy draining out of me just from standing in her shadow. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t imagine my old life before her, the other sweet old people I’d cared for, Christophe, Marisela, all my other friends who’d just… disappeared. I had a family, somewhere, who must have been thinking of me—a mother, a father, two sisters. Hadn’t talked to them in a year, now.
I couldn’t remember their faces. All I could see was shadows, and all I could feel was that awful, soul-sucking wind that had brought Acanthus Porter—or what walked inside her—into this world.
I wondered if it had taken part of me away at the same time.
We finally arrived at our destination. By that time, we were traveling in a sturdy, large desert vehicle, something almost military in size, and when we exited we were in the sandy wastes of Western Australia, away from the coast and into the Outback. To call it desolate would be an understatement; it was one of the harshest places on earth, and my Arkham-adapted skin cooked in the first moments of being under that staring, hostile sun. Even the hat some kind soldier-type gave me didn’t help. I felt dazed from the jet lag and lack of food and sleep. I didn’t know why I was here.
Acanthus Porter knew.
I struggled along with her, a caregiver for someone who needed no help at all, and the million dollars I’d traded for my soul seemed far, far away. Useless. Lost. There was nothing here, and whatever was coming next would be worse. No amount of money was worth this, because I realized with a dreadful certainty I was never, ever going back.
It was night when we finally staggered to a halt in a place that seemed no different from the others—windswept and empty—until I realized that what I’d taken for a boulder was actually wind-eroded stone block. It still had some kind of script incised into it, something that looked almost notational, like the strange symbols they use for higher mathematics. I wanted to touch it, but I was afraid to. There was energy in that stone, and I was so horribly, mortally weary.
I was staring at the stone, and realizing there were more stones, many more, scattered around us, when several people came out of the swirling sand and darkness to gather with us in the middle. A young man of around twenty who seemed of South American ancestry. A middle-aged Chinese woman with a younger man in tow. An older African man who had the muscular, wiry build of a runner.
Those four, and the two of us.
“You didn’t bring what you promised,” Acanthus said, and pointed to the South American and the African men. “Why not?”
“I lost them,” the South American said, and shrugged. “They saw.”
“When?”
“Years back. They saw the glory to come, but they could not understand when. The instructions were imprecise, I did not understand the time of this place. I lost them fifty years ago. They sacrificed too early, and too far away.”
Acanthus looked at the African. “And you?”
“Mine is gone as well,” he said. “But longer ago. He did not understand what was meant by Taman Shud. At least he was here on these lands, where he could be heard. He echoes.”
“He echoes,” said the others, in unison, except for the poor Chinese man, as frightened and out of place as me. Echoes. This place did echo, horribly, as if it existed all around me, these fallen stones rising into solid structures, and the shadows of black towers piercing even higher toward the stars. Echoes. This place vibrated with a horrible dark energy, and I remembered the scream from Acanthus’s mouth, the rending metal shriek, the trap door bulging in the depths under pressure, the shadows on the stars.
Shadows licking over my skin.
I felt sick, thirsty, hungry, disoriented. Taman Shud. I knew those words. I saw them. I saw… I saw…
I saw two men on a hillside far, far from here, in thick trench coats buttoned tight in the blazing sun, fitting lead masks over their eyes. They were reading instructions in a language I couldn’t understand, yet I knew what it meant… “16:30 be at the specified location. 18:30 ingest capsules, after the effect protect metals await signal mask.”
It made no sense. I saw them check watches. Take some strange capsules with the air of ceremony. Lift their faces to the blazing sky.
Fall to the ground and stretch themselves out as if they slept.
I watched them die.
And then I was somewhere else, in a nauseating spiral of movement, on a beach, with a man in an old-fashioned suit who took a capsule from a pocket, raised his face to the night sky, and swallowed the medication down. He stood with his neck craned at a completely unnatural angle, and he changed words and numbers under his breath, and then suddenly said, “Taman Shud,” and sat down against the seawall, as if he’d become tired. He looked at rest there, legs crossed, arms at his sides.
He died staring at the sky.
None of it made sense. None of it.
I realized, with a jolt, that the Chinese man was trying to run away now. He fell over a hidden stone block, and in a strange burst of moonlight I saw the stone was black, black, and I knew without being told that it had fallen from that eerie, awful black tower that had stood here hundreds of thousands of years ago, that stood here now, in shadows, in whispers, and he screamed as if he was being consumed, and he was, he was, I saw it eat him. But not his body.
I saw it eat his soul. I saw the oily blackness slide over his eyes, and then he was dead.
The other four nodded in unison: young, old, from four corners of the earth. All somehow not themselves.
And then they all turned to me.
No. No, I had a million dollars. I was going to go home. I was going to change my life. I was going to be… I was going to be…
I fell through a black hole, into Hell, and my last sight was of the four of them lifting up their hands, but they weren’t hands, the shadows behind them were different, awful, wrong, and Acanthus smiled, and I saw nothing there but darkness.
I grabbed for a handhold in the black, and felt rock slip through my fingers. I tried again as I plummeted down, and down, and finally my fingers caught something. It broke free, but my fall slowed, and the next grip I caught and held. I hung there, suspended, gasping, desperate. There was light here, but… a dark kind of light, like the glow from something rotting in a grave. The stench was overwhelming: that swampy odor I’d sensed constantly from Acanthus. I felt that wind again, pushing at me, sucking at me, hot and cold at once, and clammy as the skin of a corpse.
Taman Shud, it whispered, and I saw the strange, reaching tendrils of the plants from the Voynich manuscript, and the ones that had grown obscenely from the tip of Acanthus’s pen.
Something touched my legs. Slithered around them.
Pulled.
I fell, screaming, and when I landed, I hit hard on a rocky floor that was strangely flat. Blocks. I felt around and touched carvings that burned my skin, leached into me like poison, and I screamed and crawled away toward a half-seen light. The only light I knew.
Rose, something whispered down there. You are Rose. But that wasn’t me saying it. Something else.
The time is here. It is time.
I lurched to my feet and ran before it could touch me again. Whatever Acanthus was, she was better than what dwelled down here. I needed to go up.
I burst into a room, and the light hit me like a fist, driving me to my knees. It blazed up in a column of cold blue, and lit up tilted spires and columns, broken arches like the fantastic skull of an ancient beast. It was
massive, on a scale like nothing I understood, and yet there were shelves, shelves with metal boxes. Each shelf was as tall as I, each box almost half my size. One had fallen at my feet, and when I reached down to move it I found it was light, wrongly light. There were knobs on it, and my hands moved without any direction of my own, turning, pushing, pulling in a complex code until the box’s top folded back. Inside were pages coated in some strange oily substance.
Voynich pages, but new and vital, the colors bursting from the paper.
I could read them now. It was the history of a world, a long-lost world vanished into dust. A people gone into shadows, who had never been people at all, but something else. They’d observed us. Manipulated us.
Invaded us.
They were gone now, and only a few left. Only a few surviving.
Only four.
I held the pages and listened to the dark around me as it whispered my name. Four of them lived, up on the surface, and four of them held the darkness down here, by giving it sacrifices. Souls to taste and chew until there was nothing left.
There was a darkness at the heart of our world, and it wanted to eat us all.
You are chosen, I heard Acanthus whisper in my ear. It is the last act we can perform, we four of the Great Race of Yith. We survived so long, traveling through bodies. Through time. Here we prisoned the darkness. Here we built our cities. Now you must save your race, Rose.
You must close the door.
There should have been more of us, I realized. The two men dead on a hillside in Brazil in 1966. A man dead in Australia, on a beach, in 1948. The terrified Chinese man who’d died just moments ago.