The Children of Cthulhu

by John Pelan

  Hung out.

  “Like best friends.”

  Was there a chance we could ever get back together?

  Silence. “You're putting me in a corner. What do you want me to say? You made it very plain that you didn't approve of my choice in lifestyle.”

  But we were married, and that meant neither one of us had a lifestyle. We were a “we.”

  “Well, maybe I'm just not cut out to be part of a ‘we.’ “

  She had no problem being part of a “we” with that bastard who'd fucked her.

  “Keiran, if you're going to keep bringing that up—”

  What? It was the truth of the matter.

  “No! Aren't you ever going to get it through your head? I wanted to do it. I slept with him, Keiran! And there've been others, lots of others!”

  After that I didn't call her again.

  I sat on Collis's back porch, enjoying the air. From the hillside where he'd built his home, the view across the valley was spectacular, as the lights of Arkham and the surrounding communities blinked on one by one. The Miskatonic River babbled softly to itself as it wended its way below us, and fireflies danced in the dim purple twilight.

  Collis was inside, preparing dessert for us. Beside myself, my younger twin siblings, Morse and Duana, also sat at the glass patio table. Morse idly moved his half-finished zombie —his third of the evening—in damp circles on the glass as he told an anecdote about the hardware store he owned in Arkham, and his poor luck in finding an assistant manager who lasted longer than six months in the job. Duana, as usual, seemed bored with Morse and his tales, projecting an almost palpable ennui.

  As Morse's reedy voice went on about the vagaries of the hardware business, my attention drifted to those points of light down in Arkham. Each one of those bright dots represented a life, I thought. And many of those lives were meeting, joining together in love and happiness and tenderness and Eros, as mine and Guinevere's lives once did. Would I ever feel such emotions again without her?

  As had happened so often during the last three months, my eyes teared up. I dabbed at them with a paper napkin, hoping Morse and Duana wouldn't notice.

  “Say, are you all right?” It was Morse. He reached out and gently laid a hand on my shoulder.

  “I'm fine,” I choked out. In my mind, the thought: I'll call her tonight. I'll call her tonight. Perhaps she's changed her mind and is only waiting to hear from me again.

  “You're still thinking about Guinevere, aren't you?” There was no hiding the sour look on Morse's face.

  “Why do you say it like that? I know none of you ever liked her, but I loved — love— her more than anything in the world. I threw away all I had just to prove some kind of stupid point by moving back here. All the happiness in the world if only I'd chosen differently. I could have made things work. I could have been happy.…”

  “First,” said Collis, who'd arrived bearing a tray filled with bowls of sorbet topped with wild raspberries, “we tried liking Gwen. But it was obvious from the start that she never liked us, and after a while the law of diminishing returns kicked in. We rubbed her the wrong way, so she rubbed us the wrong way. And then she dragged you off across the country, just so she wouldn't have to deal with us any longer.”

  My mood switched instantly from melancholy to mounting rage. “I don't have to listen to this crap — “

  “Shut up,” boomed Collis, his voice echoing down the hillside. “Yes, you do.”

  “Second,” offered Morse, “she cheated on you and hasn't offered an apology. She shut you down and never even allowed you to really get angry with her, because she rationalized everything away. She's a great talker, that one —sometimes I wish I could have hired her as a negotiator—”

  “Morse, get to the damn point,” Collis ordered.

  “Yes. Well. The point is, Keiran, you bought every word of what she told you. You even began thinking it might be your own fault that she had to go off and screw around with another man.” He took another swig of his pina colada. Funny; I could have sworn that he'd been drinking a zombie just a few moments earlier.

  “But our sex life could have been better—if I'd just paid more attention to her needs — “

  “What about your needs, Keiran? Don't you deserve to have them fulfilled? Quit sitting around feeling sorry for yourself and get angry. Get angry and start living again.”

  I sat there, incapable of speech. Why were they doing this to me? Why were they trying to turn me against my beloved Gwen?

  “Third,” Duana finally said in her whisper-soft voice, “there's this. The latest issue; it just came into The Golden Gallimaufry.” From beside her seat she picked up her large black leather handbag and rummaged around in it. Finally she produced a magazine. I knew it; it was called Ambrosia, and I'd often seen Gwen reading it. Once I'd picked up a copy she'd left on the couch, and found it to be a confusing mishmash of Wiccan Goddess-worship and Riot-Grrrlish propaganda, combined with amateurishly shot female-empowering pornography.

  “What—what's so important about that?” I asked, dreading the answer. In the months before we'd separated, Gwen had often talked of submitting material to Ambrosia, perhaps an article detailing her emergent interest in magick.

  Duana brushed a wisp of black hair away from her eyes and silently flipped open the magazine. Once she'd found the page for which she was looking, she handed it to Morse, who handed it to me without even glancing down.

  Collis stood at the rail of his porch, peering into the night sky.

  I looked at the article to which Duana had turned.

  HOW TANTRIC SEX MAGICK

  HELPED ME ACTUALIZE MYSELF

  BY

  GUINEVERE SKYCLAD

  Cute, I thought. She'd already adopted a new, pagan name.

  And then I saw the photograph on the facing page.

  My stomach lurched, and I felt a sensation exactly like having my feet slip out from underneath me on a patch of black ice.

  The photo showed Gwen, naked, her small but firm breasts jutting forward proudly, astride a man (a different man! How many were there?), a circle of half-burned candles surrounding them. Her hands raised high in supplication to her Goddess; her eyes closed and the look on her face reflecting an ecstasy I'd never before seen in all the years I'd spent with her.

  I glanced up and saw Duana quickly turn away from my haunted million-mile stare.

  “Wait till you see the orgy sequence a couple of pages down the line,” said Collis, still gazing out at the cold-hearted stars.

  “I just read it for the articles, myself,” Morse said blandly.

  I don't recall how much I drank that night; I think that Collis must have carried me upstairs to his spare bedroom. The dreams came again that night for the first time in years, dreams of red rage and slaughter. My teen years had been so constantly disrupted by these nightmares that there was talk of giving me tranquilizers or sleeping pills.

  I was in a wooded area near the ocean, somehow I sensed rather than saw that the woods were filled with my people, waiting, watching.…

  The little men and their horses had no chance; we were upon them with cudgel and claymore before they were aware of our proximity. My club rose and fell, rose and fell and it shattered skulls, human and equine alike.

  I awoke covered in a cold sweat and feeling the beginnings of a colossal hangover. I thought about telling Collis about the dream, but he'd always seemed strangely quiet when I'd brought up the subject before. Instead, I swallowed a handful of aspirin and returned to my bleak apartment.

  After my family's intervention, I moped around for a while, still sad but thankfully broken of my illusions regarding Gwen. I dated a few women, mostly students from Miskatonic, but soon discovered that most of them had the mystical pretensions that I had once found so charming in Gwen. None of these relationships lasted very long. I pushed these women away like unappetizing dishes at a banquet of the damned.

  And then I met Trista.

  I sat nursin
g a Scotch at the Yellow King, one of the oldest pubs in Arkham. Its dim interior and musty air suited my melancholy mood. The folk there didn't bother me, and I didn't bother them, whereas in other bars I would have been greeted with stares incited by my hulking size, and maybe even drunken macho challenges from townies who felt they had to prove their manhood by taking down the largest guy in the joint.

  The amber depths of my drink fascinated me, and I swirled it around in the cheap glass, watching the smooth contours of the melting ice cubes as they slid against one another. Like bodies they were, locked in the grip of Eros divine…

  I dimly grew aware of a presence at the opposite side of the table, and glanced up.

  The woman standing there seemed to have a nimbus of dark light around her shoulder-length, tightly ringleted black hair. Her skin was dusky and her eyes were large, dark green subterranean pools of surprising depth.

  “Excuse me,” she said, her voice a husky growl that immediately intrigued me. “I'm sorry if I bothered you.”

  Setting my Scotch down on the scarred table, I shook my head. “Not at all.”

  She stepped closer. “I was just wondering… are you a Jeffison?”

  “Right the first time. How did you know? I haven't been in Arkham in years.”

  She smiled, a quick dark feral grin. “Family resemblance. I'm a student of Collis Jeffison's at Miskatonic.”

  “He's my older brother,” I said. And then I surprised myself by inviting, “Please, have a seat, Miss—?”

  She was sliding into the chair opposite mine before I was halfway through the offer. “Marsh. Trista Marsh.”

  “Keiran Jeffison.” I reached over the table to shake her hand, which had an odd quality of both soft, tender areas and hard calluses. Hers was a hand that had done serious work in its time. “Funny, you don't look like a Marsh.”

  “You mean I don't have the Innsmouth Look,” she said, referring to the odd, slightly repellent appearance many of the Marshes in the area exhibited. Some bad blood had gotten into the Marsh line, traceable back to the small coastal hamlet of Innsmouth and a Marsh ancestor who had married an extremely strange woman from the South Seas.

  “Ah, yes, that's what I meant. I hope I didn't offend. I've had a couple of Scotches and I'm not being as… politic … as I could be.”

  Trista Marsh laughed, a deep, soulful, and sexy laugh that entranced me. “Please, don't worry about it. I'm not related to the local Marshes, thankfully. My parents are from Scotland; they moved here to join the staff at Miskatonic when I was young.”

  “Where in Scotland were you from?”

  “A small town near Galloway.”

  I blinked in astonishment. “Galloway? My family has roots there!”

  Trista tilted her head and smiled. “Your brother's mentioned that. We've had quite a few long talks about Galloway. He thinks that perhaps your family and mine were… intertwined… long ago.”

  “That's unusual. He's usually very guarded about our family history.”

  “And just what secrets does your family have to hide?”

  I chuckled into my Scotch. Not just at the boldness of her question, but at my odd desire to answer it. I wished I could, but apart from vague generalities about our place of origin and when the Jeffisons had come to America, there was nothing I could tell her. Coll is had never told me anything more concrete. He'd implied that Jeffison was not our ancestral name, but had always refused to say any more about it. In the past I'd never thought much to press him on the subject. Now I resolved to ask him about it as soon as the opportunity presented itself.

  “Well, that's something we can save for another time,” I told Trista Marsh. “Listen — can I buy you a drink—?”

  “Absolutely not,” said Collis. “You're not ready yet.”

  I'd bearded him in his office on the Miskatonic campus, in historic Armitage Hall. Collis sat at a desk that took up an entire end of the room, bracketed by overflowing bookshelves lining each wall from floor to ceiling. The office seemed far too small for a man his size, and with me in there as well, there was barely room to breathe.

  “Dammit, Collis, I'm not a child any more. I'm ready to know our family's heritage, and I won't take no for an answer!”

  “Actually, you will,” he said calmly. “Your time away from family has left you fragile, and your behavior during the recent I'affaire de Guinevere shows that you're not ready for this.”

  “I resent that. I am completely over Gwen, thanks in part to your clumsily staged intervention — and I'm very grateful. I feel ready to fully reenter the family fold. What could possibly be so horrid about our ancestry that you can't tell me about it?”

  Collis peered at me over pyramided fingers. “You'll be surprised, little brother.”

  “Please. Tell me.”

  For a moment it seemed as if he'd reconsider; I could see the struggle play itself out in the downward cast of his eyes and in the twitch of the muscles along his jaw. Then, finally, the words rolled out cruelly and inexorably: “No. Not yet. You're not ready.”

  With Trista, I found myself coming back to life. We prowled corners of Arkham I'd never known existed: Tiny curio shops and antiquariums revealed themselves before my startled eyes as she excitedly dragged me here and there. Musty old bookshops sparked her enthusiasm as much as they did mine, and with some bitterness I recalled how Guinevere hated going to such places with me.

  In a small dessert shop near the campus we would often sip hot mulled cider and eat delicious cakes and pastries while comparing our finds. And at those times I silently marveled at how Trista had come to me, helping heal the wounds Gwen's betrayal had left in my heart.

  More to the point: “You're in love,” Collis said.

  I'd met him for lunch on campus. The green quad had browned, and the last of the season's leaves twitched at the ends of skeletal branches, tore away, and spiraled in their death dance to the damp ground. Light puffs of mist burst in front of our faces as we spoke.

  “Now, I wouldn't go that far,” I said good-naturedly. I'd put aside my efforts at getting him to tell me about the skeletons in the Jeffison family closet, and the tenseness between us had mostly dissipated.

  Collis pulled the collar of his jacket tighter around his neck. “I would. It's in your face, it's in your step, it's in the air around you.”

  “Sounds like the Mary Tyler Moore theme song.”

  He made a chuffing sound deep in his throat. “There's nothing wrong with admitting it.”

  I sighed deeply and felt the bite of the chill air in my lungs. “All right. Let's say I'm —enamored—of Trista. She's very special, Collis. I don't want to blow things with her by moving too quickly.”

  Collis laughed, a booming sound that echoed around the barren quad. “Keiran, the girl has loved you since the moment she first saw you. Why do you think she tracked you down at the Yellow King?”

  “Tracked me down? I don't—”

  “She already knew you were my brother. She'd seen you visiting me on campus and asked me who you were. I told her.”

  I stopped in my tracks. “You set me up?”

  “I just aimed her in the right direction.”

  “You set me up!”

  He drew an exasperated breath. “Yes, yes, okay; I set you up with Trista Marsh. Are you satisfied?”

  I lunged toward him; startled, he stepped back as if expecting a blow. But instead I hugged Collis fiercely. “You damn bastard, I think you saved my life.”

  There was nothing he could say to that. For the rest of the day he wore his most ferocious grin, and I heard later that several freshmen in his afternoon course on the Lost Cities of Asia were so scared that they had to be sedated.

  Trista impatiently pulled me down the sidewalk. “We're going to be late,” she worried.

  “The film doesn't start for another fifteen minutes, and we're only a block away from the theater,” I pointed out. I wanted to relax and enjoy myself; the weather was warm and the late spring air smel
led of flowers and promises. We were about to pass my sister's shop, The Golden Gallimaufry, and perhaps I'd give her a wave as Trista and I strolled by.

  “All the good seats will be gone.”

  “It's only a revival of All About Eve, not the new Star Wars movie.”

  A moment later she nearly yanked my right arm out of its socket when I stopped abruptly to stare at a poster in the window of The Golden Gallimaufry.

  “Keiran! What are you — “

  Her voice trailed off as she saw how pale my face had gone.

  I continued staring at the poster, thinking I had somehow stumbled into a waking nightmare.

  “Oh, my—it's her, isn't it?” asked Trista.

  I nodded, my throat gone dry as dust.

  Guinevere's smiling face, larger than life, confronted us in black and white, a pale specter from my past. Beneath her ghostly visage, ornately flowing calligraphy announced:

  GUINEVERE SKYCLAD

  IN PERSON!

  SIGNING COPIES OF

  HER BOOK

  EMBRACING SEX MAGICK

  “She has a book,” I mumbled. “She wrote a book. How the hell could she have written and published a book? It's only been a year since I left her.”

  “Keiran —”

  “She must have been writing it before I left. And I never even knew about it. She never even told me. I can't believe this. I cannof believe this.”

  “Keiran — “

  “She always had me in the dark. I must have been like some kind of joke to her, some kind of Baby Huey lurching around the apartment while she was writing about sex magick—”

  “Keiran!” Trista had grabbed the sides of my face and turned my face so that I had to look into her eyes. “She's here.”

  “What? Now? Here?” I babbled.

  Trista gestured at the bottom of the poster, which bore today's date.

  And now I noticed that The Golden Gallimaufry was packed full of people, all facing toward the rear of the shop. Because the people closest to us were standing, I couldn't see the object of their attention, but there was no doubt: Gwen was in there.