The Children of Cthulhu

by John Pelan

  In the same instant I became aware of a terrible atmosphere which permeated that place. It lay beyond the usual brand of social despair, although it was certainly despairing; there was an abiding sense of sickness and misery that felt uniformly spiritual. You might think it was a simple reaction to considering the murders, but I know it was palpable. A queasiness dabbled with my stomach and my throat felt like it was constricting. For some reason I couldn't quite explain, I suddenly felt very, very frightened, as if I had plugged in to the primeval part of the brain that instinctively responded to subtle dangers in the environment. I couldn't help glancing round at the lonely, darkening landscape, the silhouetted bulks of discarded fridges, old washing machines, and the bare bones of ancient sofas, the constantly waving yellow grass. It was only then that I realized the wind had dropped. But the grass was still moving.

  My anxiety continued to rise beyond the reach of reason. With pounding heart I watched the gentle swaying. If I could only see what was in there: a dog, rabbits, an urban fox. Soon it would emerge.

  Seconds passed, and the more I waited the more the strangling sensation of fear rose in my throat. My irrational response to that mundane sight took complete control of me and suddenly I knew I didn't want to see. I was in fear of my life; I had to get away from there.

  “Quick! Over here!”

  I started at the hissed words as if I'd been shot. A shadowy figure was beckoning to me frantically from a splintered wooden door leading into the nearest backyard. Before I had time to react, the figure had hauled me into the yard, bolting the door behind. Mv uncontrollable fear made me lash out wildly, but the grip on me was tight and I was propelled into the dark house. I stumbled onto a carpet that smelled of damp and urine and was on my feet in a second, but the figure was ignoring me. The back door was bolted several times and heavy drapes drawn across the window before a light was put on. The sickly bare bulb illuminated a man I recognised from my childhood, although like my father he looked much older than his true age. He was an American, his grey hair long and wild and matted with grease around a face that looked like it was made of leather. He'd always kept himself to himself as if he was afraid of being discovered, but on one occasion he'd let slip that he'd once lived in a place called Red Hook. I had no idea where that was, but the name was so evocative it had piqued my imagination for months after.

  He didn't seem to recognise me, though: barely paid me any attention at all. He simply stared at the drawn curtains as though he could see through them, constantly kneading his hands together to stop them trembling.

  By that stage I'd calmed enough to feel my earlier reaction was a little ridiculous.

  The American seemed to know what I was thinking. “You always feel like that when you're near them. Sick in your stomach. Terrified. It's ‘cause a part of us knows they shouldn't exist. Or maybe it's’ cause we recognise our natural predator.”

  “I don't know what you're talking about.” His words had once again started that buzz of anxiety in my gut.

  He looked at me suspiciously for a moment, then silently led the way up a darkened stairway to a stark bedroom that stank of vomit. Standing on either side of the window where we couldn't be seen, we looked out across the wasteland. Where the yellow grass was swaying, I could now see dark shapes moving back and forth, tracing out strangely disturbing patterns on the landscape. At first I thought they were people crawling slowly. Then I returned to my earlier guess of beasts; pigs, perhaps. Finally, and to my horror, I realised they seemed to be some sickening combination of the two.

  “What are they?” I croaked.

  Shaking his head, the American wandered back to his stairway. “Areas like this always have their infestations. I can't work out if those things cause places to turn bad or if they're just drawn here because they like the air.” His chuckle turned into a phlegmy cough. “Places that God's given up on.”

  My head was spinning. I wanted to run out of there, get out of the city and back to where the decent people lived, but I was terrified of crossing the wasteland while those things were out there.

  The American was mumbling again. “You know what I think? Spots like this draw people who deserve to live here. People like me.” He looked at me with cold, hateful eyes. “And people like you.”

  Night had fallen completely and out in the wasteland the creatures were circling closer to the houses. The moon made their hides appear creamy white. Occasionally I caught glimpses of yellow pinpricks, like distant stars; their inhuman eyes glinting. Were these what had caused the atrocity? What had driven my father to the brink of insanity?

  “It doesn't make any sense!” I said pathetically. After the events of the day, the strain of coming back, everything seemed too much, but that tough streak which had got me out of there in the first place stopped me from breaking down.

  The American was roaming the room, yanking at his hair. “I can't leave here. That's the terrible thing. I can't leave!” Tears sprang to his eyes, but he made no attempt to blink them away.

  Despite his age, I grabbed him roughly by the shoulders and threw him against the wall. “What are they?”

  He started to cry weakly, his voice turning into an irritating whine. “They live underneath here! They've burrowed tunnels up from somewhere… somewhere … In the day I can hear them singing under the ground! It makes me want to kill myself!”

  “Calm down.” I shook him a little too hard.

  “You know what they do? They feed on people! First they used to feed on emotions, all that bitterness and despair and hatred. But in the end that wasn't enough. They wanted—”

  I shook him again until his head cracked on the wall. “How do you know all this?”

  He looked away guiltily. “I just know.”

  “They killed those people?”

  “They hadn't finished with them. But the cops came, disturbed them. They lay low for a while. I saw them disappear down the tunnel under number eighteen.”

  Ice water washed through me. “My house?”

  He blinked, as if he was seeing me for the first time. ‘You're the Kirk kid?’

  “My house!” My fear was suddenly replaced by a terrible rage. I threw the American across the room. He sprawled over the bed and landed hard on the floor.

  “What do you care? You got out—”

  “Shut up. You've got to show me.”

  “We can't go out there —!”

  “You've got to show me!”

  We hurried across the street like rats keeping to the shadows. The front door hung jaggedly on smashed hinges. I'd expected a little twinge of nostalgia for some of the good days—the few—when I was a kid, but all I felt was a deep fatigue. I'd never wanted to see the place ever again.

  The American led me through the front room to the kitchen at the back; there was a ragged black hole in the middle of the floor. That gave me a brief feeling of relief, but when I looked out into the back garden I saw the deep furrows of disturbed earth that confirmed my worst fears.

  The house itself was just as I remembered: cheap furniture, too few home comforts; nothing out of the ordinary. With a queasy sense of things spinning out of control, I knew my only hope was to check in the hole.

  The American realised what I was planning before I spoke. “What's wrong with you? You don't have to go in there!”

  I peered into the sucking darkness, not even thinking what those things I'd seen crawling around could possibly be; somehow it didn't seem important. I gave the American a hefty shove and followed him into the hole.

  I don't know how long we slithered and slid around the tunnels; they were more extensive and confusing than I'd ever imagined, and I was so lost in my own awful thoughts I barely noticed the passage of time. Nor did I have any fears for my own safety; I was single-minded in my determination. But at least there was a faint luminosity to the walls that prevented us journeying in complete darkness. On closer inspection the illumination came from a thin coating of slime like the trail slugs left beh
ind; I wondered if it was some filthy residue from those creatures.

  The American had started mewling like some kind of animal and I honestly feared he was losing his mind. He had been under tremendous pressure, even by the yardstick of my hometown, where pressure was a daily constant. There was no going back, though. There hadn't been for very many years.

  As we progressed, the burrowed tunnels emerged into ones that were stone-lined, although at first glance it was hard to tell they had actually been constructed; the walls were so rough-hewn they almost seemed natural. Certainly no human hand had ever touched them. The air, too, took on a disturbing quality. All I can say is there was a pressure to it, but of an emotional kind; despair welled up inside me, and fear, and anger, and all sorts of emotions that civilised people tried to keep buried.

  Just as I was about to give up my search we came to a chamber lying off the main tunnel, and it was from here that the disturbing atmosphere seemed to be emanating. The American started to whimper, refusing to enter. I soon changed his mind.

  The walls of the chamber were scarred with a chiseled writing, but of a kind I'd never seen before. It was incomprehensible, runic in form, but though inexplicable it filled me with an irrational dread. On one side there was an alcove made important by strange, twisted carvings that nauseated me the moment I laid eyes on them. Within the niche was a rock covered with more glyphs and runes. The American seemed drawn toward it. His whimpering died away as he inspected it from different angles. I hissed at him to leave it alone, but he was oblivious to my warnings. My instincts proved correct, for the moment he laid his hands on it, his body grew rigid, his head slumped backward and his eyes rolled up until only the whites were showing. The air itself suddenly grew electric.

  “G'a'Restlig Tham.” His mouth contorted to form alien syllables. The timbre of his voice made it sound as if he was praying. “G'a'Restlig Tham,” he said again, and this time the entire wall that housed the alcove grew opaque. The milky surface shifted like mist, gradually clearing to reveal a vista across space. Stars flared in the infinite, icy void. I only had an instant to take it in before I realised there was something else out there, something alive although not in the terms of reference we knew. And as that thought entered my head I had the terrifying sensation that it had seen me, that it was suddenly hurtling toward me at a speed that defied reason.

  In a blind panic I jumped forward and knocked the American away from the rock. The image on the wall cleared in a second, leaving me wondering if it had ever been there. But the sensation of that cold, alien intelligence focusing on mine still filled every fibre of my being, and I knew I would never, ever forget it.

  “What's going on?” the American moaned. “What does it mean?”

  Sickened, I pushed past him toward another chamber I'd spotted at the back of the room, wishing I could leave, drawn on by sick memories. The oppressive fruity smell emanating from the dark doorway told me what lay within before I saw the mutilated bodies of some of my former neighbours. Even so, I continued, immune to the horror as I had been for a long time. Here were people who had lived in the now-demolished streets. I wondered briefly if the authorities knew what lay beneath our depressed little patch and had simply tried to obliterate it, knowing they could never put it right.

  But a pile of my father's closest neighbours lay there too; fresh kills. And among them was the thing I had been searching for yet feared finding. I ducked down and plucked a piece of glinting metal from the decomposing pile.

  How hardened was I? Not as much as I believed, I suppose, for after that moment of revelation my mind seemed to wink on and off like a strobe light, barely able to contain the terrible thoughts passing through it. I vaguely recall the American shouting, “Something's coming!” and turning and seeing movement. I remember a sea of those creamy-white human pigs and me kicking and flailing like a madman. There was one moment when I looked into the face of one of the beasts and saw traits that echoed the stagnant gene pool of my hometown, not knowing if the beasts had become people or the people beasts, or if it was something infinitely worse.

  The American was screaming for me to save him, and I almost considered it, but self-preservation took over, as it always had. I was blind and stupid with panic, but somehow I managed to break away. And then I was running along deserted tunnels for what seemed like hours and hours, eventually emerging in another house at the end of the street just as dawn was breaking over the dingy tower blocks.

  My rational thought processes only really came together once I had crossed the wasteland and by then I wished they hadn't. Somewhere at the heart of it all was a bitter joke I could barely put into words. The place I had grown up in was damned, the people feeding on their own misery, feeding on one another, in a vile cycle that never ended. And what was that terrible alien power that focused its incomprehensible intelligence on me for the merest instant, yet scarred me forever? For all our pretensions to order and evolution and superiority, everything I'd experienced suggested we were truly meaningless, existing in a universe that was indifferent to us, where acts of kindness and humanity amounted to nothing. Goodness wasn't rewarded, evil wasn't punished; there was no overarching order. We lived and suffered and died and that was it.

  But then I already knew that.

  In my hand was the cheap, tarnished engagement ring I'd bought under duress, offered in despair. You can never leave the past behind. Those crawling things had unearthed the body I'd frantically buried in the back garden on a night of madness and jubilation, freedom that turned to slavery for as long as I lived. It was a desperate act of escape, my one chance—but here I was back home again. It was finding the body, that awful realisation, that had destroyed my father and that I had seen in his eyes when he gave me his final look of contempt.

  I searched the fringes of the wasteland until I saw her, staring at me with those accusing eyes that had followed me for ten years. The past, always with me, to make sure I really didn't leave the old town behind.

  And then I thought back to what the American said about these sour places attracting the people who deserved to live there. And you know what? I think he was right.

  MEET ME ON THE OTHER SIDE

  Yvonne Navarro

  “I'm not sure I heard you correctly” Macy said. “What was that—some kind of Israeli name?”

  “Bethmoora,” Paul said. “And no, it's not Israeli. Actually, the roots aren't traceable to any specific language or dialect. But it's still… foreign.”

  “And you want to go there on vacation,” she said, looking thoughtful. “You know, I'll have to check the expiration date on my passport—I didn't realize you were thinking about traveling overseas. It's where, exactly?”

  Paul looked at her, and his deep green eyes never wavered. “I don't know.”

  “I never knew you had an interest in this,” she said as she helped him finish with the last of the packing. Outdoor equipment, all of it—small camping stove and dried food, utensils and first-aid kits, lightweight survival clothing that would keep them warm and dry no matter how severe the rainstorms they ran into, all packed into roomy, sturdy backpacks that would, above all, hold plenty of water. After all, Paul was leading them into a stretch of the Arizona desert that could just as easily fry their brains inside their skulls as dump a monsoon-induced flash flood over them… then chill them down to their souls when the sun sank below the horizon. “When — “

  “Brand new,” he said, answering her question before she could ask it. Another woman might have found that annoying, but it didn't bother Macy; she and Paul had been doing stuff like that since the first day they'd met thirteen years ago. “I ran across this weird-looking little book called the Encyclopedia Cthulhiana, picked it up just because it had this whacked-out illustration on the front—curiosity, nothing more.”

  “And?”

  He shrugged, but there was nothing self-conscious about the movement. “I'd never seen anything like it before, never heard of the stuff it talked about, so
I shelled out a few bucks. Skimmed through it, asked around a bit. There's a lot of hype, but not much real info. Still, I kept coming back to the entry about Bethmoora, kept wondering about it. I did some poking around on the Internet and found out there was a lot more stuff around than I thought about this Cthulhuism, or whatever the hell it's called. Entire cults.”

  Macy considered this. “So you've done your research.”

  “More or less. It's not like we're going to Egypt, you know. Hell, we've been hiking in worse places than the Arizona desert.”

  She couldn't argue with that, and the truth was, she had no inclination to do so. They had this thing, her and Paul, a hunger for excitement, a not-very-well-hidden taste for danger. It was what had drawn them together and kept them that way, surviving through dozens of friendships and even an affair or two on both sides —odd, experimental things that had been born only to test the limits of their senses of self and their marriage, the what-if-I-did-this factor, and the strength of their affection for each other.

  The thought of traipsing through the scorching Arizona desert didn't scare Macy, but it did start a tickle of anticipation in her gut, the same thing that had been present during their two or three trips a year, trips that had included an illegal archaeology hunt in Egypt, a jungle trip in Burma where they'd entered a forbidden underground temple, a weekend of drugs and nearly unspeakable sex in Bangkok, other things done in Russia that were better left unsaid. Their jaunts around the home country were nothing more than minor stress-busters, two- or three-day getaways to hold them over until their work schedules and budget would allow them to seek bigger and better entertainment. This proposal of Paul's was a rarity, with a sense of adventure seldom offered in the short term. Each trip had given her some memento, a trinket to tuck away and savor now and then; only the Burma trip had gifted Macy with something she wore all the time, an irregularly shaped ruby half the size of her little fingernail and with a slash of black deep at its center. They had stolen it from the temple's altar, and it now hung continuously on a heavy gold chain around her neck.