“Figured what?” My lie, for once, convinced even me.
Lips pulled tight against teeth, just a line of green between them. “You. You’d rather have that thing be not real, you know? Half-real. Strong enough to hurt you but invincible. We’d rather have it so we can take ourselves a bite. Solid. Known.” He pointed, and even with the weight of the gloves, his finger seemed impossibly skinny.
I let him think he was right. I listened to the sounds of the seagulls and let them make more sense to me than him.
“Nothing to say, Mister EA-report-taker? Gonna let your tears stain the pages?”
The sigh escaped me without thought. A little heavy.
“So, there’s the dream, man. Squid meat in vacuum-packed bags. Chunked. Dig it.” He waited for a response that I wasn’t going to give. Then he shrugged and swept away.
Back on the cot, I felt hollow, staring at the metal ceiling, scratched and marked with graffiti from a hundred others. The sound of the seagulls continued somewhere in the back of my mind.
The cabin lurched as if we’d hit something or suddenly picked up speed. I rolled out of the cot and took to the floor before another something shook the whole ship. A red LED dome started flashing along to a chirp that dug into my skull. I slid my jacket on, and I was out the door before it pulsed again.
Clamor bubbled around me and below. Feet and hands hitting the deck and slamming bulkhead doors with empty clangs. Everyone was moving.
The deck shook and jarred, and over the chaos, I heard the screaming of seagulls. They were laughing as the ship yawed. I was thrown to the wall-become-floor before it snapped back sickeningly. Something roared like all the ocean being dumped out in mile-high waves and crashing down.
It must have been the ocean.
Tears welled up. I thought it from the sharp pain in my elbow, which felt broken, having taken most of my weight. It was useless now. But it wasn’t that.
Crewmen screamed and cried in reply, gasps of shock welling up in a torrent of realized fear. I could have jarred and preserved it, so thick was it around me.
The ship settled back, but something was wrong. We pitched backward as if a mighty weight at the tail end of the ship was pulling us down. I felt the engines go full in response, a shudder rippling through my feet and legs as I stood uneasily.
The captain started babbling something over the loudspeaker between those incessant chirps. It must have been Russian or Ukrainian, whatever was the language of his heart. As he spoke, the seagulls hushed and the roar subsided, replaced by another sound.
Creaking. A groan ten miles long snaked past me, and I felt the engines go dead with a loud chunk. The angle of descent steepened. Outside the door, things went splashing overboard and screaming at one another or the sea or the sky.
Something moved far below me, under the skewed decks. There was a sensation of power, like the engines starting up, but it wasn’t that. There was no regularity, but there was unleashed strength. It hammered in every direction at once. The ship shook again, but this time, it was from within. Violent force pulsed as bulkheads below me shattered and tore.
The life vest already felt wet beneath my fingers, but I took it anyway. Tears flooded down my face, hot and stinging, even where they welled behind my glasses. The night wind whipped my face as I slipped out the door and onto the deck. There were no bodies on the deck, just a glistening of fresh emerald slime. That was enough.
The water below was black and choppy with the thrashing of hundreds of limbs and another, larger set of waves driving away from the ship. The whole works heaved as the grounding line drew taut. Something had dived under the surface, and it was still leashed to the ship, bringing it down.
I stood canted at a sickening angle on the deck, high up. There was a moment of dreamy weightlessness and rushing before the concrete slap of impact on the water.
The dull fire of my arm roused me. I held onto the life jacket more than I wore it. Above me was night. The gulls still laughed, but now, it was a chaotic sound. There was no rhythm to it.
My head lolled toward the sky, black and huge. I turned, groaning. Rimmed by the remnants of its own strange weather, the bow of the ship jutted out of the calming sea, like a misplaced monolith, suggesting so much of what was happening beneath the surface. The sea lurched, and the hull shook like a toy in a palsied hand.
It slid beneath the surface without me knowing its full name, only the letters -vidence written in man-high writing, never to be read again.
Matt Maxwell was born between the assassination of JFK and the first Apollo landing. He started reading horror stories around the time he was ten and never stopped, though they often don’t scare him. He’s written short fiction for Blizzard Entertainment as well as the series of self-published Strangeways graphic novels. In addition, he’s written three collections of short stories, two collections of pop culture commentary, a Norse apocalyptic road trip novel (Ragnarok Summer), and an as-yet-unpublished near-future science-fiction novel called Black Trace. You can read more about him at highway-62.com or on Twitter @highway_62.
Testimony XVI
Lynda E. Rucker
Classified by: Hastur Project Team
Document by unknown female
Retrieved from Pacific Northwest Exclusion Zone
Top Secret
Something big is happening.
That was what everyone was saying. No, that’s not right. “Something big” is a hip club opening, a blockbuster 3D, a new line in holo-tablets. Something momentous was happening. But bigger than momentous, even. Bigger than anything that had ever happened before. Bigger than Jesus, as the Beatles once said. Well, as big as Jesus at any rate. Certainly, something on the order of the second coming of Christ—and possibly that very thing. Yes, as big as all that.
A few were in the know even in the early days, of course. But they weren’t talking.
Jess talked, of course, but that was at the end and not surprising. I’d always thought he was a crackpot. My best friend Gwen’s sometime-boyfriend, ostensibly a philosopher, had clawed his way into a tenured position at the University of Oregon in Eugene before he became famous as a kind of New Age prophet. I think he wasn’t such a big deal in academia as he was in pop culture. Maybe he was an embarrassment to his colleagues, but I wouldn’t know. I’m a waitress, and I play drums in my time off. Or I did. Anyway, a segment of the media and public thought Jess was a brilliant iconoclast, and he went on talk shows and wrote best-selling books that said things like reality was all just a consensual illusion, and soon, we’d all learn how to do interdimensional travel. All thanks to the assistance of beings from some parallel world (or maybe aliens, I can never remember which) that will push us to the next evolutionary stage of enlightenment.
Jess spent weekdays down in Eugene and came up to Portland to see Gwen most weekends. As Jess saw it, it was the easiest way to keep Gwen and the undergraduates he was fucking as far apart as possible. The joke was on him, really. Gwen knew and honestly, truly could not possibly have cared less. She had her own things going on the side, and really, who could stand having Jess around for longer than a weekend anyway? I asked her once what she saw in him and she just smiled and said, “He’s got an enormous cock and he knows how to use it.”
Men, in Gwen’s world, were good for sex, and for buying you things, and little else. I don’t know what made her like that. I said she was my best friend, and she was, but as much as she would happily regale me with stories of Jess’s prowess in the bedroom (and the kitchen, and the living room, and on the balcony), she almost never told me anything personal. I don’t even know where she was from originally. I guess it doesn’t matter anymore. Only it does. It matters that she was—that all of us were—once. Even though we soon will be no more.
So I don’t even know who I am writing this for—for no one, I suppose. But surely there is some power left in human emotion and human intelligence. Before humanity fell, how many brave stands were made throughout our history tha
t no one ever knew about? I don’t think that makes those stands any less courageous, any less meaningful. And so this, too, will be lost along with all of the human race. In whatever time we have left, I believe that it still matters that I wrote it down.
So they found something off the coast of Oregon, not far from Newport. Who is they, you ask me. (You who are not reading this. You who will soon cease to exist along with the rest of us.) Well, you know. The government, the scientists, the powers that be—someone found something, at any rate, and that someone was quickly hushed up. The government and the scientists or the government scientists moved in, and the rumors got started right away: they’d found an alien spacecraft, the ruins of an ancient civilization, a plane loaded with unexploded kamikaze bombs from World War II. It was the North Koreans, it was ISIS, it was Boko Haram, it was some new terrorist warlord totalitarian anti-American organization we’d never even heard of yet, but they were coming for us, oh yes, they were. All of them.
We weren’t just paranoid. They (the other they, not the scientists but the terrorists, the great sweeping mass of fanatical believers that were not-us, and we never once considered our own solid belief in the Western world as the basis of reality equally fanatical) have grown clever over the past decade about the fear you can induce in striking small, soft targets, like a San Diego shopping mall, an Atlanta cinema, a park in Minneapolis. Eventually, you grew numb to the attacks. A dirty bomb in Austin? Large no-go areas quarantined in central Boston? Same old, same old. I was in my late teens when the SWAT teams and the troops started appearing on the streets of Portland, when the checkpoints went up and the curfews began. Old enough to know better, to know it had been better once upon a time, but you know, you got used to it. You can get used to anything. Almost.
But before that, for the rest of us, I guess it started with the earthquakes. Growing up in Portland means growing up with stories of how the Big One is coming, probably sometime between later on this afternoon and the next few decades—the 9.5 game-changer that will put anything that’s ever rocked California to shame. Even the most conservative of seismologists and disaster planners talk about bridges and railways and buildings and runways ripped from the earth, about death tolls in the thousands.
We always have a few little quakes per year, but just before they found it, there were four or five, and stronger than usual. We tried to laugh them off, but you couldn’t help think—is this it, the Cascadia Fault slipping and sliding at last? Are we all going to be living in our own real-life disaster 3D? Geologists were oddly silent on the subject, which only fuelled further and more frantic speculation.
The earthquakes had me on edge, but in those first few days, I didn’t pay very much attention to the story about something found off the coast. Part of me thought I was above it all. Because I’m an arrogant fuck, every bit as much as Jess, I guess—I’m a girl drummer, I’m good at it, people come to see my band because of me—so what did I care about some new boogeyman? Yet another something that heralded the collapse of civilization as we knew it? We all had a cultivated nihilism about us, wore meaningless cloaks of ironic laughter: who cares, we’re all going to die.
We could afford to because we knew we weren’t, not really. Not all of us, at any rate.
Now, everything is different.
I can’t believe how much I care.
Gwen and I met Jess at the McMenamins on Burnside, across from Powell’s Books—God, it was only last night. I didn’t want to go, but she’d begged me. “Jess was weirder than usual on the phone,” she said.
Weirder how? I mean, this is a guy who’d been working with a chemist friend to develop a synthetic version of ayahuasca that he thought would help hasten this spiritual awakening he was so sure was going to happen. He said if the CIA succeeded in getting crack on the streets, he would figure out how to distribute this somehow. Then people would see the truth, and they would rise up.
So if Gwen said he sounded weird, I couldn’t imagine what was coming.
He was already there when we arrived, sitting off in a booth as far away from any other customers as possible. Jess was normally a vain guy, but last night, he looked terrible. He clearly hadn’t slept in a while. “I’ve been down in Newport all week,” he said. “They called me in. As a specialist. Consulting. You can’t tell anybody.”
We must have both looked at him blankly. It took a few moments for us to make the connection between Jess and Newport to the story that had been in the news for the last week or so, and then I imagine we still looked blank. What on earth could Jess have to do with any of that?
“A specialist? What kind of specialist?” Gwen said.
His voice shook. “A specialist in making contact with parallel worlds,” he said.
“What are you talking about?” Gwen peered at him. “Jess, are you on drugs? Did you take that aya-whatever stuff again?”
He laughed humorlessly. “Drugs!” he said. “Where we’re going, we don’t need drugs!”
Gwen looked at me across the table. It was a look that said, what the fuck? And, how do we get out of this? Then Jess turned to her and took her hand, and his eyes were glistening with tears as he said, “Gwen, will you marry me?”
Do I need to tell you that the evening went downhill from there? (You, who are you, gentle reader who will never be?)
Jess said everyone was wrong about what they’d found there off the coast. It was something crazy all right, though. Something they thought at first had crawled up from some part of the ocean that was too deep to measure or explore. Here be monsters. They assembled a team of scientists to study it, this leviathan. They wondered if it was dying, coming into the shallows and trying to beach itself. There was a lot of excitement—how had a species of such a massive size gone undiscovered? And was this the basis of all the old legends about sea monsters?
They kept it quiet because they didn’t know what it was yet, and because they wanted to fly under the radar of the animal rights activists. Because they also didn’t know what they might need to do to the creature in order to study it. They had cordoned off an area of the coast of several miles, so no one could come near their research facility.
Then the dreams started.
They were scientists, so at first, they thought nothing of it.
But they were the same dreams. Or rather, the same nightmares. We asked Jess what they were about, but he just shook his head.
They thought maybe it was some kind of bioweapon, a monster made of organic and mechanical material, and that whatever poison it carried was affecting their minds.
“That’s probably it,” Gwen said. “That’s really scary. How far is its range? Can it reach all the way to Portland? Will we be affected?”
Jess shook his head. “That’s not it,” he said. “They tested samples of it. It wasn’t—it isn’t a carbon-based life form.”
Gwen frowned. “So, it was all mechanical?”
I got there before she did, or maybe she didn’t want to get there. “Gwen,” I said. “That’s why they brought Jess in. It wasn’t anything anybody made. It was from somewhere else. Right, Jess? Everything alive is carbon-based. Maybe it came from another planet, right?”
He nodded. He couldn’t speak any more. All of his books were coming true, and he was falling apart in front of us. I thought he was going to cry, and I hoped not because I didn’t know what I would do in that case.
Instead, we got out of there. We cut over to Morrison and walked down toward the waterfront. I always imagined that if someone told me “the end of the world is nigh,” it would be more dramatic, but there wasn’t really much of anything to say. Some small part of me hoped that Jess was just freaking out or making it all up, but I knew he wasn’t.
We got as far as Pioneer Square, and I grabbed Gwen’s hand and said, “Hey, remember when they used to have big crowds in here?” Then I remembered that she didn’t, because, of course, we hadn’t known one another as teenagers. But for some reason I felt like I had to start telling
her and Jess about what it had been like here before everything changed: how there would be festivals or they’d show the World Cup final or a movie on the big screen and thousands of people would throng into the square. Back before it was forbidden for crowds of that size to gather.
They let me rattle on like that for a while, and then Gwen said, “What’s going to happen, Jess? Are you going back down there? Are there more of those things coming?”
Jess said, “I’m supposed to go back tonight. I told them I needed to come back for some important papers, that I couldn’t do anything further without some of my notes, but I really came back for you, Gwen. I’m serious. Please come back with me. I don’t know if I’ll be able to come again. I don’t know if I’ll ever see you again.”
Who could have guessed that I would hear the most romantic speech of my life from someone like Jess? But Gwen just looked at him sadly and shook her head.
“No,” she said, “and anyway, I don’t believe you. I don’t believe any of it. Nothing’s going to change.”
That night, Gwen stayed at my place. It was something we did sometimes when one of us was upset or drunk or had missed curfew. I never had a sister but I always imagined if I had it might be like this. We’d lie side by side in my big bed and talk about stuff in the dark—the kinds of things you don’t bring up when the light is on.
We lay there that night and talked about what Jess had told us and whether or not we could believe any of it. We got back up and opened a bottle of wine and looked up stuff online: legitimate and whacked-out news stories, forums buzzing with rumors, social media heaving with hearsay. Gwen had her little holo-tablet with her, and we tried to watch the footage some guy had supposedly shot of the outside of the research facility, but it really didn’t work that well. It kept stuttering and falling back into just a flat image, and really, it was just a building anyway, so we gave up on that. They—more they, nothing sinister this time, just the companies that manufacture holo-tablets—had said the next generation would be out next spring and would work a lot better, but I thought that if Jess was right, this was the last holo-tablet the world would ever know. I felt suddenly sad that it had been kind of a shit product and that we’d never been able to really get off the planet properly or even make decent holo-tablets before we got wiped out.
Tomorrow's Cthulhu: Stories at the Dawn of Posthumanity Page 28