The Children of Cthulhu

by John Pelan

  Except…

  Except that she did see. The loneliness and stress produced visions in her mind. She'd looked to her instruments first, of course, the “Christmas tree” panel lights all still glowing green, just in case it might be some bad mix of air. She'd checked and rechecked again, thinking at one point she might call NASA to ask their opinion, but, no, she had best not—why cause needless worries? It was only the loneliness, after all, that and the fit-fulness of her sleep habits, despite the schedule of sleep-times NASA had asked her to follow.

  But how could she have slept otherwise, now that Gyorgi and the others were on the moon's surface?

  And so the visions came, from the books she had hoarded that autumn. The dreams of Heinlein, naive and hope-filled, mixed with the more cautious, Gallic optimism of Verne. And the darker, although still ambiguous, visions oi Wells and Poe— Poe with his bleakness, his soul-searing horror, still having his astronaut dream, too, of fields of Selenite poppies. Of lakes and forests.

  But, then, Lovecraft's colors. His dreams of far Yuggoth. Her own dreams, no less terrible for their having been lived once, of Hitler and Stalin, of KGB horrors. Poe at his worst still foresaw some brightness, some faint trace of Byelobog. While the other, his fellow American prophet of darkness…

  She didn't complete the thought. Something was happening. Lights played on rock spires—spaceships as she saw, but still looking stonelike to the others. And now behind them as they climbed the talus of Tsiolkovsky's mounlain.

  “Over here, quickly!” The voice wasn't Gyorgi's. Rather, the Frenchman's, also with an accent. She watched as the camera panned, saw his lights sparkle. And then… deeper darkness.

  “I don't know, Gyorgi.” The voices crackled. “What do you think then?”

  “A cavern of some sort.”

  No, Gyorgi! she thought. But he could not hear her. Nor could she call down to the 1.m. to warn them, because there was no one inside to receive the call, and their suit radios were designed only for communications between one another.

  And so she could only watch as they entered. Half seeing, half dreaming—was it a cave mouth? Some huge sort of airlock?

  She still heard their voices, that much of her still tracking them on the monitor.

  “Sloping down…”

  “Smooth-floored. Almost circular in its cross-section…”

  “Almost—what do you think?”

  “Almost as if it were artificial…”

  She dreamed of Gyorgi, her vision widening, while at the same time she still stared at the TV. The sudden swirling beneath the men's feet, as if their descent took them into a mist…

  “Some kind of gas, maybe. Do you know what this means?”

  “That the moon has an atmosphere of sorts. But so thin, so tenuous, that it exists only beneath the surface. Look, you go out—check the wire antenna. Make sure we're still broadcasting up to the cm. Then bring back a container of some sort for a sample.”

  She dreamed of Gyorgi, her vision widening. She saw a huge comet, and yet not a comet. A spaceship itself, crashing into the moon.

  Blasting a crater two hundred and more kilometers wide— the aftershock throwing up its central mountain. The occupant, wounded…

  Byelobog shattered. Dead. Chernobog crawling out, once the moon's floor had cooled, finding a cleft in the newly formed mountain. A hole to bore into. To bide its time… hiding.

  And on the TV screen, the mist coalescing. Shadowy, whirling.

  Forming tendrils.

  The vision of H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds. A hollow stone turning, revealing metal. Tentacles reaching out. Except…

  Except much vaster.

  Edgar Allan Poe's horrors most stern and most appalling, yet vaster and darker still.

  What she saw now, her mind's grasp expanding…

  To bide its time from the time the moon was young, over the eons, until it was stronger. And while it was waiting, to draw others to it.

  The children, perhaps, of spores it had scattered on its mad journey—some, even, that came to Earth—to draw their strength back into its own body.

  And even it, perhaps the smallest of entities…

  Coalescing. She saw. In her dream, she tried to send-somehow—some warning to Gyorgi.

  That something stared back at her.

  Knowing. Not knowing. The myths were metaphors. Human and nonhuman, all of the same spawn. Dazhbog and Myesyats. Byelobog. Chernobog. All of them part of the same dark evil…

  Tasha woke, crying, to NASA's frantic calls via the space station, demanding to know why she had stopped transmitting. Outside she could see the Earth, bathed in full sunlight. Yet cold and colorless.

  On the TV, static. There was no picture.

  She closed her eyes, straining. Trying to dream again. Trying to find some trace of her husband.

  Then, slowly, she sat up and straightened her clothing and opened the c.m.'s own, separate transmission link, wondering as she did what exact words she could use to tell NASA.

  There would be no springtime.

  RED CLAY

  Michael Reaves

  The grave lay in a tiny meadow halfway up one of the many sawtooth ridges that overlooked Harron's Notch, far from the town's cemetery and the quiet dead who rested there. No headstone or cross marked it; legend had it that the grave had once been so adorned, but not within the memory of any living man or woman in the small town. Whether the marker had been taken away or had simply been shattered by one of the many lightning storms that raged around the summit, no one knew.

  Nor did anyone know who was buried there, so far from the Christian graveyard that lay behind the sturdy three-room chapel of whitewashed pine. But where history was silent, legend spoke volumes. Some said it was the grave of one of the witch folk—those shapechangers able to fly as eagles or bound as cougars from crag to crag in the dark of the moon—who had been struck down by silver and prayer and buried in unhallowed ground. Others spoke of a man who foolishly thought to deal with Mister Scratch and come out of it with both his soul and wealth intact. And there were those who insisted that a Yankee soldier, shot in the back during a cowardly flight from battle, had been interred there, and that not even the grass of this Southern soil would grow on his grave.

  This last bit of legend was due to a fact easily verified by those brave enough to climb the ridge and see for themselves: Although the meadow grew high in spring and summer with flowers and grass, not a bit of green ever took root on the six feet by two feet that marked the grave. And neither snow nor frost settled there in autumn and winter. It remained the year around a raw wound of red dirt.

  One theory offered around cracker barrels and potbellied stoves as to why the grave stayed naked was that it was hot with the fires of perdition, hot enough to melt snow and sizzle unwise flesh. It was also said that once a mountain man, more brave than prudent, tried to dig up the grave, but the instant he thrust his spade into the clay soil he was fried black, as though struck by one of the high-tension lines that hummed above the trees down near the highway. It was generally agreed by young children and old folks alike that anyone with the sense the Almighty gave a moonstruck possum steered clear of that unnamed and unmarked grave.

  Zeb Latham was, they said, smarter than a moonstruck possum, though not by much. A massive scion of hillbilly stock, with wiry black hair that grew rampant over his skull, cheeks, and chest, and brooding gray eyes that peered out from beneath sheltering ridges of bone, Zeb had, for most of his twenty-odd years, supported himself in a life that was marginal even by backcountry standards. He lived on the edge of the Notch, in a one-room hovel made of unstripped logs, with a leather-hinged door and no floor but the ground itself. He eked out his survival mostly by foraging, hunting, and fishing; in the winter he chopped wood and did other odd jobs for the townsfolk in exchange for food and clothing.

  While no one was his enemy, neither was anyone who knew him particularly willing to call him friend. Having been raised by an abusive m
other who abandoned him at the age of ten, Zeb was by nature suspicious of humanity in general and women in particular. His speech, when he was forced to communicate with others, was curt and monosyllabic but always stopped short of active antagonism. Some of the townsfolk considered him a powder keg, but most dismissed him as harmless, and some even felt sorry for him: a piece of poor white trash, doomed no doubt to an early death from malnutrition or exposure.

  For his part, Zeb gave these matters little, if any, consideration. The past and future weren't things he cared to dwell on — the present he dealt with day by day.

  On this particular day he had ventured far up the steep slopes of the Notch, following a flight of bees in hopes of finding their nest. He was successful, spotting the bees swarming around the stump of a lightning-blasted pine. The n;xt step was to locate a deposit of the thick red clay so prevalent in those parts and coat his face and hands with it for protection while he scooped out part of the comb. Zeb could almost taste the thick, syrupy spoils of his hunt, spread over the loaf of bread Aimie Meechum had given him as payment for digging those rocks from her truck patch.

  He pushed his way through a thick patch of brush and into a small clearing. It was one of the many leas that pock the sides of the mountains. At the far end a cliff opened onto a vista that most city dwellers would pay dearly to see frcm their windows, but which Zeb hardly noticed. His attention was concentrated on the patch of red dirt in the middle of the grass.

  He headed for it but stopped halfway there. The meadow was oddly silent. He could hear no insects singing, no birds trilling; only the soft whisper of the wind through the tall grass. This in itself was enough for only a moment's notice, but combined with the strange barren patch of ground that lay before him, it was enough to give him pause.

  In the three years of schooling he had had as a child, Zeb had heard vague stories about the mountain grave, but he did not connect those tales with what was before him now. His sudden apprehension was of a more primal sort; he sensed a wrongness here, the same way a game animal might intuit a trap laid in the woods. Zeb rubbed the black bristles of his beard uneasily and shifted from foot to foot, an ungainly dance of mental conflict.

  Then a shift in the breeze brought from back in the forest the faint buzzing of the bees, which reminded him of his purpose. He crossed the last few feet and dropped to his knees before the patch of dirt.

  Again he hesitated, feeling oddly nervous; then, with a scowl, he plunged both hands into the dirt at the edge. And pulled them back almost as quickly, with a grunt of surprise. There was an odd tingling transmitted from the soil up his arms, almost like a low-grade electrical shock.

  Zeb reached one hand out again, cautiously, and placed it flat, fingers splayed, on the clay. The tingling was still there but not as pronounced as before. Certainly not painful. Almost enjoyable, in fact.

  The other interesting thing about the clay was its consistency. Zeb worked his fingers into it, feeling the soft marl ooze between them. It was the texture of dough, with no hard or crumbly bits. He put his other hand into it, kneading it, making patterns with his fingers. There was an almost silken homogeneity to it, like long-churned butter. It was decidedly unnatural, and yet at the same time a pleasing sensation.

  He pulled two handfuls loose with a sound like a cow pulling her feet out of mud. He brought the nud up to his face and sniffed cautiously. It had the familiar damp rich odor of clay, but there was another scent underlying it; Zeb could not decide if the smell was faintly spicy or like the coarse odor of decay. The tingling had become so subtle as to be almost unnoticeable.

  Zeb's original plan to use the clay for protection against the bees was forgotten. He rocked back from his knees and stood, still holding the two handfuls of red earth. He stared at them, vaguely puzzled. Then he turned and lumbered back toward the forest.

  It was dark by the time he got back home. He stoked a fire in the massive brick fireplace—he had built the cabin around it, the only part left standing when a wood-frame house had burned down twenty years before —and by its flickering light sat at the rude wooden table, looking at the clay.

  In the uneven radiance it seemed almost alive, with subtle shades of red washing over its surface like oil over water. Zeb stared at it for a long time, his brow furrowed in unaccustomed concentration. Twice he reached toward it, and twice he drew his hands back. The third time he took hold of it almost gently, as though it were a newborn child.

  His fingers were thick stubs with hornlike nails, unaccustomed to any action more gentle than wringing a chicken's neck or wielding the shaft of an ax. But now he stroked the yielding clay lightly, almost lovingly. At first his movements were tentative, but as the minutes passed they became more assured. He molded and prodded, his face a mask of concentration. The fire began to die, but he didn't notice. He worked on in increasing darkness.

  At last he stopped and sat back. It was a most too dark to see the thing he had created. Zeb rose stiffly and put another log on the fire. The hungry flames blazed up, and he carefully lifted the small object and put it near the fire where it could dry.

  Then he turned and stumbled to the straw tick mattress in one corner of the room, where he immediately fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  The next day, when the sun was heading toward noon, Walker Burnett came to knock on Zeb's door. There was no answer, but he noticed the door was ajar and so he pushed his way in.

  The morning sun illuminated the interior, showing Zeb sitting at the table, staring at something on it. “Zeb!” Walker said with some asperity. “Here you still sit, when you was supposed to be cleanin' my chicken coop as soon as those hens left the roost!”

  Zeb turned, blinking in the light. He seemed even more slow-witted than usual to Walker. “Guess I forgot,” he said. “My 'pologies.”

  Walker stepped closer to see what Zeb was looking at. The door swung wider in a gust of air and sunlight fell across the table, revealing the object. Walker's breath caught in his throat. “God, Jesus, and Mary,” he said. “Where'd you find such a thing, Zeb?”

  Zeb looked back at the statuette on the table. “Didn't find it,” he said, with a trace of pride. “I made it.”

  Not likely, Walker thought, regarding the statuette. It was perhaps six inches high, and rudely shaped, but undeniably the work of an artist. Walker had had a year at the state college and he had been to the art museum in the capital, and though he'd be the first to admit he was no expert, he felt certain that this piece of work would not be out of place in a city gallery.

  Its subject wasn't particularly impressive: a dead tree, its branches raised in vaguely humanoid shape. But there was something to it—a strength, Walker allowed, that made it impressive. Something about it was unsettling; looking at it, Walker knew he would not want to be trekking through the woods late at night and come suddenly into view of that tree, its branches upraised against a full moon like something about to attack.

  “Well, Zeb,” he said slowly, “never knew as how you could do somethin' like this. Right impressive. What called on you to take up sculptin'?”

  Zeb shrugged, looking uncomfortable. “Just… thought I'd try my hand at it.” He seemed somehow embarrassed.

  “Well, you might could do worse than try it again. Could be you have hold of somethin' there,” Walker said. Then he added, “But not till you've taken up and cleaned that henhouse o' mine.”

  Zeb stood hastily and headed for the door, with Walker following. “Yessir,” he said, “I'm pleased to get right on it.” He seemed anxious to leave the cabin. Walker followed him, turning at the door to get a last look at the clay sculpture.

  Lord call me home, he thought. Zeb Latham an artist.

  It was past noon when Zeb received his payment from Walker for the job—ten dollars and a jug of Walker's blockade whiskey. Normally Zeb would have hastened back to iis cabin, where a considerable portion of the jug's contents would have disappeared before the following dawn. Zeb was ~io tosspot, but he did
enjoy a touch of the creature when it came his way. Today he paused at his cabin only long enough to deposit his earnings there, and then turned his face toward the winding trail that led up the ridge.

  Since he had awakened he had felt an urge to return. It was like the tingling he had felt in his hands, only now it seemed to be in his blood, moving within him; a restlessness that he knew could be soothed only by returning to the high meadow and the red clay that lay there.

  This time he brought as much clay as he could carry in his hands back down the hill, enough for two sculptures. He stayed up all night completing them. Then, as before, he collapsed into a slumber that was deep but still not restful.

  As the days passed, some more of the local folk had occasion to drop by Zeb's cabin: Gussie Peterson, in an effort to do the Lord's work, brought him a pot of beans and rice; old Jackson Pharr stopped to ask Zeb to pour gasoline on the fire ant nests around his trailer; and Lionel Rampling, on a drunken toot, stumbled into the cabin mistaking it for an outhouse and nearly peed in the iron cauldron near the fireplace before discovering his error. The first two were astonished and somewhat disturbed at the growing number of statuettes that Zeb had created; Lionel was too drunk to notice them at the time, but later memories of what he saw were so unsettling that he went on the wagon for a record sixteen days.

  Word of Zeb Latham's unlikely talent quickly spread throughout Harron's Notch and the surrounding countryside. People began to show up for the express purpose of viewing the sculptures. In some households Zeb's work was condemned as Satanic, and this was sufficient to warrant a visit by the Reverend Coombs. He pronounced the collection of artwork, which by the time of his visit had grown to nearly a dozen statuettes, as the work of a disturbed mind, but not demon-inspired.