The Children of Cthulhu

by John Pelan

  A mischievous light flashed in Trista's eyes, and I had the sinking feeling I knew what she was going to say next. A second later, she proved me right.

  “I want to go in,” she said.

  Crowds have a tendency to part before me, a pleasant side effect of my size. When a man is six and a half feet tall, most people don't want to be in his way. I can only imagine the reasoning: Oh, God, what if he falls on me? If I don't move, that guy's going to mow me down. Perhaps they were afraid I would eat them.

  The New Agers and Wiccans in The Golden Gallimaufry were no different. As soon as heads turned and people saw me, I had no trouble leading Trista into the center of the store. There was no sign of Gwen anywhere; merely a podium draped with a tapestry showing a crescent moon, around which the crowd had gathered in a circle. The early arrivals, lucky enough to be directly in front of the podium, were seated on the floor. The smell of patchouli was thick in the air, and I could hear the tinkling of tiny bells which had been sewn into loose-fitting, multicolored clothing.

  I looked around and saw Duana standing by the sales counter. As usual, I couldn't tell what lay behind her inscrutable expression. She merely stared calmly into my eyes as I stomped across the room.

  “Why the hell didn't you tell me about this?” I demanded, my voice trembling with anger.

  “It was inevitable that you'd find out,” she whispered. Then, to Trista: “Oh, I'm very glad to see you could make it.”

  Trista smiled ferally. “I wouldn't miss it for the world.”

  An unpleasant suspicion or two crossed my mind.

  “Hola!” cried someone behind me. “Keiran, mi hermanol”

  I turned to see Morse standing there, incongruously sipping on what could only be a margarita.

  “I'm feeling a little festive tonight,” he continued. “In a Latin mood!”

  I resisted the temptation to knock the drink out of his hand, and instead whirled on Trista. “You knew Gwen was speaking here tonight. Everyone knew except me. I was set up. Again.”

  Trista grinned and nodded, unafraid despite my barely contained Vesuvial rage. Near us, a group of black-velvet-clad Gothic types edged nervously away.

  “Why have you done this to me? You—my family—”

  And then I realized who was missing.

  “Collis,” I breathed. “Where the fuck is Collis?”

  “He's around,” said Morse. He took another big swallow of his margarita.

  “Collis is nearby,” agreed Trista. “Keiran, just wait and you'll understand. Collis has a very good reason for all this.”

  “Good enough that you lied to me,” I spat.

  She took the venom in stride. “It'll all be worthwhile, Keiran. Just wait and trust us. Look: The show is about to begin.”

  The lights had dimmed near the podium. An expectant hush fell upon the crowd, and even I found myself anxiously wondering what would happen.

  And then… she came.

  In a silent burst of white light and smoke Guinevere Skyclad appeared at the podium, smiling beatifically. A cheap stunt, but her crowd gasped and applauded as though they'd never seen the like before. Gwen had changed some: dyed her hair black, added a few new earrings higher up in the cartilage, and what appeared to be the tip of a much larger tattoo—the tail of a lizard—ran up along the left side of her neck and coiled around her ear. Maybe her New! Improved! style meant something to her, but to me it only brought home the point that I was over her.

  I couldn't believe I'd ever been married to this New Age flake.

  “Brothers and sisters,” she said, “you do me a great honor by appearing here tonight, to listen to my insignificant words.”

  “Oh, brother,” I muttered. Beside me, Trista took my hand and gave it a quick squeeze.

  Gwen spread her arms. “I've come among you to tell you all of my experiences … of how sex magick has transformed me and lifted me nearer my full potential as a human being.

  “Once I was like many of you. Trapped in a loveless, unful-filling marriage — “

  Trista gave my hand another, harder squeeze, and with great effort I kept my mouth shut.

  “—with absolutely no sexual spark left—”

  Squeeze.

  “ — no desire, no passion — “

  Squeeze.

  “ — nothing but the empty shell of a passing fancy.”

  In the audience, heads bobbed in agreement with Gwen's words. I felt like rushing out there and ripping those heads off their toothpick necks.

  I had never been so angry in my entire life.

  Gwen's voice faded in my ears as the rushing of my own blood became all I could hear. I felt faint and closed my eyes for just a moment—

  The ropes had been cunningly strung across the road at precisely the right height to catch the horses and send them plunging. Before the riders even hit the ground my family was upon them. With knives, clubs, and the few swords that we'd taken from our previous victims we dispatched them within seconds. We made short bloody work of hacking the meat into more portable segments as even the children helped by carrying stray limbs back to the caves. While the moon stared down at us, aghast at our feast that night, our friends from the sea came to join us, their women mingling freely with our men, and our men taking their pleasure with these strange women.

  I tried blinking away the momentary vision. What was it? In my mind's eye I still saw the hapless bearded man, dressed in well-kept furs, as he backed away from me in fear. Behind him, a circle of similarly dressed warriors stood on a grassy ridge beneath a gloomy iron sky.

  I could still see Gwen, standing at the podium, but behind her that stark landscape was also visible, as if the scenes were a photographic double exposure.

  “Trista,” I said softly, “I think I may be having a stroke.”

  “No!” she whispered harshly. “You're remembering. The anger is helping you remember.”

  “Remember? What—”

  Squeeze. “Listen to that woman up there, Keiran,” Trista insisted. “Listen to her. She's saying that your love for her was nothing but a sham. She's telling them how she betrayed you, and she's proud of it. She enjoyed it. She enjoyed cuckolding you —

  I saw the massive kettles glow a dull red as we tossed in the arms and legs of the little men who had foolishly ridden within our reach. The people from the sea enjoyed our feast as much as they enjoyed our coupling; they were like our clan, born to hunt these lesser creatures with their pathetic cities and their foolish religions.

  I held the woman close as we shared the arm of one of the soldiers. I stared at her beautiful dark green eyes that stood out in such contrast to the red rivulets of blood that flowed down her chin and dappled her breasts. I saw my father tear off a chunk of meat from one of the women that we'd taken. Like my father, I saw no point in waiting for the meat to be fully cooked; fresh from the bone was tastier. I saw one of my sisters approaching with a steaming platter of brains—the best part.…

  And then I knew nothing more.

  I found myself sitting on the sidewalk in front of The Golden Gallimaufry. Trista's hand ran through my hair, rubbing away my anxieties. As well the wife of a warlord should. The cool night air helped sharpen my senses and bring me back to myself.

  Offering his great, meaty hand, my brother Collis helped me to my feet. “Do you remember now?” he asked.

  “Oh, yes, I remember,” I said, grinning ruefully. “I can't believe I didn't for such a very long time.”

  “I told you that you weren't ready. Each member of our family, as we are reborn, must be brought to our heritage in a similar way, but you were too used to swallowing your anger and putting it aside, instead of embracing it. You'd become too much of a modern man.

  “You needed to feel the bloodlust again. Only that would break through the blocks in your memory.” His brows knitted together. “Um… how much do you remember?”

  I remembered the dark caves near the sea. I remembered the larder, the cave where we smoked our
meats and stored the treasures that we accumulated over three generations. I remembered our meeting and our melding with the people from the sea, the strange quiet folk with the large protruding eyes and the teeth as sharp as a shark's. And I remembered the ONE that spoke to us in our dreams, that promised an eternal undying as we would be born again throughout the ages if we coupled with the people from the sea. The ONE that gave us eternal life—lives to be lived to the fullest over and over again, reborn in each new age, seeking out the bonds of tribe and family and remembering who we were, all over again.

  The sons and daughters of Sawney Beane.

  “I remember everything!' I roared, sweeping my beloved Trista up in a bear hug and whirling her around. Morse and Collis beamed, and even Duana smiled slightly in her witch's garb. All my family and my wondrous, true wife, gathered together again, all of us with full knowledge of who and what we were.

  Morse said it before I could. “This calls for a celebration.” And in his hand was a stone mug that looked as if it were thousands of years old, filled to the brim with something that might have been wine.

  “Yes, a celebration!” I echoed.

  The door to The Golden Gallimaufry opened, and Guinevere Skyclad stepped outside. “Why, Keiran,” she said with every ounce of sweetness she could muster. “I thought that was you inside. It's good to see you.”

  I smiled broadly. A celebration! And there was only one fitting way for our family to celebrate.…

  “Gwen,” I said, as Collis and Morse began circling behind her, “you remember my family, don't you?

  “We thought we'd have you for dinner.”

  Reno/Seattle, 1997-2000

  For Lou Reed

  LONG MEG AND HER DAUGHTERS

  Paul Finch

  1

  In the dream, he saw what he thought were th 2 frozen ridges of ice-clad mountains. On second glance, however, he realized they were buildings… colossal in structure and jumbled chaotically together. It was a wondrous yet bizarre vision, all angles crazy, all symmetry absent. There was no order there, no apparent purpose hidden in the mayhem. Arches stood at random, towers leaned precariously; there were grand stairways that ended in midair, ramps that led to nothing, pillars that ran in colonnades, yet supported no roofs On very edifice, the apertures of windows were visible, but of varying size and distortion and scattered blindly without thougiit to sequence or pattern. It was mind-numbing in its madness. The more he gazed at it, the more grateful he was for the opalescent mist that swamped the citadel like a milky sea, obscuring the worst of its alien excesses.…

  “Nick?” said the voice on the phone. “Nick!”

  “Mmmm…”

  “Nick, it's Andy!”

  “Andy,” Nick mumbled, wondering who he knew called Andy. “Oh shit… that Andy!” He glanced across the darkened bedroom, and his sleep-sticky eyes widened in disbelief when they registered the neon numerals on his clock-radio. “This had better be good at five in the morning, Andy!”

  “They've found Caleb.”

  Nick sat bolt upright. “Where?”

  “Back in Cumbria, would you believe.”

  Nick swung his feet to the floor. He'd only been asleep four hours, but the name Caleb was more than enough to give any British police officer a wake-up call. “Where's he being held?”

  “He's not.”

  “Don't tell me he's bloody escaped again!”

  “Nick… he's dead.”

  Nick was in the process of pulling his jeans on. He paused. “Dead?”

  “Up on the moors. They found him first thing this morning.” Nick sat down. “And he'd dead?”

  “As a doornail, the local fuzz reckon.”

  “And this is up in Cumbria?”

  “Yep … his old hunting ground. Apparently there are suspicious circumstances, too … so SCARS have copped for it. Detective Chief Inspector Beardmore's been on. It's me and you.”

  Five minutes later, Nick had thrown on his vest, a sweater, and a pair of old sneakers, and was in his cluttered bathroom, running an electric shaver over his stubble. The face that gazed back from the mirror was more weathered than it should have been for its thirty-nine years—old nicks here and there, a little on the pitted side maybe —but under his mop of black hair and with eyes once described by Amy as “laser blue,” he wasn't unattractive. His mood soured a little when he thought about Amy. It seemed impossible that it was fifteen years since her death. Nick had been raised a Catholic, and at first he'd tried to handle the tragedy by picturing his wife and unborn son as two benign spirits who from that point on would watch over him, but after twenty years as an inner-city cap, it was difficult to have faith in anything in which goodness was the essential ingredient.

  Evil, on the other hand… evil was a different matter. Nick Brooker had a very firm belief in evil.

  2

  “Sure this wreck's going to get us all the way?” Andy quipped, climbing into the front-passenger seat of Nick's old E-reg Citroen.

  “Less of it,” Nick replied, shoving a piece of toast into his mouth. He drove away from the curb. It was still quite early, but traffic was already pouring into the city center. “What do we know?”

  Andy began to shuffle through the documents on his knee. He was slighter and blonder than Nick, and several years younger, but he, too, wore casual civvies. Or “foreign soil” operations, SCARS always did.

  “Somewhere called Barrowby,” he muttered. He located a pad with directions scribbled on it. “About twenty miles northeast of Penrith.”

  Nick snorted. “What happened… Caleb get savaged by a flock of sheep?”

  Andy continued to read. “Sounds like his body was found in the middle of the stone circle there.”

  “Come again?”

  “Long Meg and Her Daughters… sort of an ancient monument.”

  “And that's it?”

  Andy put the document down. “That's all we've got.”

  Nick shook his head. “I hope there's more when we get there, if they're sending us eighty-odd miles.”

  They made steady progress north, first along the M61 motorway, then on the busier but wider M6. By nine o'clock, they'd reached the Bowland moors, and Lancashire's central artery was slowly clogging up.

  “How far?” Nick asked, as they ground to their third or fourth halt in five minutes.

  “Forty miles,” Andy muttered. “Shouldn't be so long now.”

  Nick glanced at the pile of paperwork. “I don't suppose there's a faxed medical report in there?”

  Andy shook his head. “Things move pretty slow up Bar-rowby way. When this lot came through, a doctor hadn't even seen him.”

  “So who certified death?”

  “No one. But according to the plod who found him, there was no doubt.”

  “Cryptic, eh?” Nick said, as he drove slowly on.

  The eastern Lake District was very different from the high, rugged grandeur of the west. Whereas Skiddaw and Helvellyn had soaring fells, clad all over with pine and peaking in crags of spearlike granite, the forests of Lune and Milburn comprised rolling hills and verdant vales. While Cumbria's western mountains had a majestic, near-Alpine aspect, the area the detectives now cruised into was more classically English.

  “You wouldn't believe there'd by any crime round here, would you?” said Andy.

  To either side of them, fertile farmland was hedged in neat squares, interspersed with birch woods and threading waterways. Still further east, the Pennine uplands rose emerald green, slashed by gleaming limestone scarps.

  “Don't know,” Nick replied. “It's only eighteen years since that bastard was first on the loose.”

  “Yeah,” Andy said after a moment, and his thoughts drifted. …

  This lush and lovely area of northern England had been terrorized almost to death by the man called Alun Caleb, aka the Black Goat of the Woods. He was so nicknamed because he wore dark combat gear and a full head mask of black leather with zippered slits for his eyes and mouth; because
he was a predatory rapist, whose sixteen victims were left broken both in body and mind; and mainly, because he signed himself that way in the gloating letters he wrote to the newspapers.

  Andy didn't remember the investigation personally … he'd been at junior school at the time, but he knew Nick Brooker did. Nick Brooker remembered it better than anyone. The hardened detective-sergeant had been a rcokie beat cop in those days, and only one of many young constables in the northern English forces who got drafted in for what was at the time the biggest manhunt ever launched by the British police. More than nine hundred officers, both detectives and uniforms, were involved, though of them all, Nick was the only one whose career it would make.

  Even now, he played it down, maintaining that he'd only got his hands on the culprit through good fortune, and costly good fortune at that. There was no denying, though, that what the young bobby had done had taken tremendous courage.

  In August 1982, he'd been part of a three-man detail on a Land Rover patrol on Alston Moor, quite close to a village where two of the rape victims lived. There hadn't been an attack for several weeks, and little progress was being reported. It was a hot, dry day, and by sheer chance, the unit stopped at Caleb's isolated farmhouse to ask for a jug of water for their overheating engine. The madman, however, having spotted them as they arrived, and assuming they were there to arrest him, charged out with his shotgun and fired at the officers with both barrels, killing the inspector outright and wounding the two constables. Nick had been the least badly hurt, though to this day there were buckshot pellets embedded in his sternum. He managed to overpower their assailant, knocking him unconscious with a blow from his staff.

  The usual show trial had followed, sensation coming after sensation. News broke at an early stage that Caleb was a satanist whose home was filled with occult paraphernalia, and that he'd actively worshiped at a black-magic altar constructed in his cellar. As part of its material evidence the prosecution presented detailed notes written by Caleb himself, which outlined plans to attack a total of seventy women and offer them all “in bondage for the passing pleasure of the divine Shub-Niggurath.” There'd been dramatic scenes in court. Several of the victims suffered breakdowns before they were able to give testimony, while others, perhaps understandably, had blocked out all memory of the incidents and were unable to give accurate accounts of what had happened.