The Children of Cthulhu

by John Pelan

  He remembered screaming and falling aid twitching in a combination of anger and frustration and fear until his body finally fell still. All he heard was the beating of his own heart and the strange words flowing through his vens.

  … Gog-Hoor!

  … Gog-Hoor!

  … Gog-Hoor!

  The only truly clean and perfect place was the bathroom. When he had moved in, there had been an insidious array of gold and green tiles. Matching yellow stucco forever dripped from the ceiling, and Alvin couldn't help but be reminded of a sky of snotty discharge. The mere sight had made him sick. He had even retched, later in the hotel room. It wasn't until the landlord had removed the offensive tile, replacing everything with the perfect abstinence of white enamel that he had finally moved in.

  And on the sixth day, he rested within the confines of the clean walls and floor and ceiling of the bathroom… within the clean clear water of the bathtub, the whiteness of the room the only thing that could dull the color of his unblemished skin. It was the whiteness that settled his raging mind and let him keep whatever slim grip on sanity he was able to maintain. Everything was fine except the minute rippling of the water. He tried to control his breathing. He ignored itches. He fought the urge to urinate.

  Yet each miniscule movement, each twitch of a muscle, each minute shift of an elbow sent the water undulating… quivering.

  It was seven P.M. when he finally shot out of the tepid tub imagining each tiny wake as the precursor for a tentacle. The nasty appendages that so defined chaos and imperfection had been haunting him, laughing at him, making him afraid of life. Those damned tentacles that were so much like the swinging arm of the pimp or the wagging tongues of the therapists or the chained wrists of his mother as she discoed atop yet another John.

  If it was all in his mind, he could fix it.

  If it was the devil he could beat it.

  If it was a chemical imbalance, he could purify his body.

  Alvin would not, could not be defeated by apparitions that were begging his attention. He would fight them. He would challenge their vision and prove his superiority. He would fight for himself and the perfection that was his life.

  That is…

  That is, if he only knew how.

  The rage he had been forging dissipated into the water. His chest expanded until it threatened to burst, the static pain of isolation and the irreconcilable fact that he was adrift and about to die filled him. A lonely sob escaped into the white room.

  He descended into himself and once again fell prey to the dream.

  … the shape was the highest thing in the world, the pinnacle of all attention. With the coalescing of the cross came the shape upon it. A tall man, his legs pinned. His arms were spread as if he was waiting to embrace the world. Hu head was raised skyward.

  I found that I had moved closer and I could make out his lips peeled back, the muscles of his neck bulging as if he was screaming, begging, crying. But whatever sound emanated was smothered by the eternal buzz that thickened the ah.…

  Alvin awoke screaming…

  … shivering.

  Instead of lying within the water of ffe tub, he found himself standing in the kitchen. Water dripped from his thighs and arms and torso. Rivulets slid down hi;; body, forming a puddle upon the floor.

  He was groggy from a hundred dreams. Seven days of assault. Each blink of an eye, a nightmare. It was time to end it.

  He reached and opened the silverware drawer to his right. His eyes were upon the growing puddle below him. His impeccable organization allowed his hand to immediately grab the boning knife and he withdrew it from the drawer. He shifted his glance slightly and admired the slim Italian blade. He knew how sharp it was, for he had spent many nights filleting pork loin, removing the skin from his chicken breasts and de-marbleing his steaks.

  Alvin marveled at his own fearlessness as he dipped the blade into one of his naked thighs and then another, slicing two perfect six-inch seams, revealing pinkish white-lined muscle. His blood quickly ran in small rivers down his legs, mixing with the clear water in reddish clouds.

  Almost absently, he dropped the knife and stared upward, his eyes seeing past the ceiling, past the sky, searching for the God he had so long ago turned away from. As his bladder released, the warm trail descending and commingling with the water and the blood to form a fetid brew, he began his chant:

  … Gog-Hoor!

  … Gog-Hoor!

  … Gog-Hoor!

  It began as a mumble, his mouth fumbling over the words his mind had found so familiar, but soon rose to a shout as he became more used to the alien sound, until finally, he was belting the syllables in rapid-fire reverie. So engrossed was he in his cries for salvation, it wasn't until a tentacle danced across his knee that he realized that the creatures of his nightmares had arrived.

  His voice became a fevered moan as he fought both the fear of the unknown and the ecstasy of the Gog-Hoor's touch. He stared and watched as the single tentacle was joined by another and then another and another, until seven brownish tentacles were wrapping and rewrapping him in alternating embraces. They were tasting him. Loving him. Testing him, waiting to see if he bolted.

  From the moment he had grasped the knife, he had known that he would stay. He had seen their victims and knew that there was no limit to their painful ministrations or their creative solutions. He moaned again and barely registered a tentacle piercing and ripping the plastic bag of garbage. It thrashed within the detritus, sending offal flying throughout the kitchen and into the living room.

  But he was already changing. Instead of a cringe, he shuddered in anticipation, wondering what his sentence would be.

  He didn't have long to wait.

  Alvin rose into the air and was shoved roughly against the cupboards, the antique brass knobs he had picked up at auction digging wickedly into this back. Two tentacles rose side-by-side in front of him, each gripping the T-s laped bone of last week's steaks. His body arched as the bones pierced his wrists, pinning him to the cupboards. He screamed as he was crucified, his arms wide as if embracing the world. He screamed again as his feet were pinned to the wall by the screwdriver he had thrown away, the Phillips head spinning as it entered his skin, sinking through bone and plaster. His head was raised skyward. His lips peeled back as the agony shot through his bones.

  He was Jesus.

  He was the man in the dream.

  The Gog-Hoor was attending him.

  His shrieks changed to giggles as the tentacles began to rub the trash upon his body. Coffee grounds, rancid butter, beef fat, spaghetti noodles, used tissues, eggshells scoured his skin.

  Alvin laughed louder, remembering playing in the mud as a child, making mud pies, eating them, smearing them over his body. He remembered his mother skipping down the stairs to join him, the brown earth immediately dottirg her face, adding to the many freckles that made her so beautiful.

  The dirt and grime became more a part o-him as the tentacles began to speed up. Soon each one was sliding across the slick coating that had been created like a cocoon atop his skin.

  He stared at his body, simultaneously haling and admiring the melange of colors that he had become. He watched as the tentacles disappeared beneath the surface of the puddle, and his gaze followed…

  … and it was like staring into the face of God.

  The thing beneath the puddle, the Gog-Hoor, stared back at him.

  Its head was immense. More than a dozen wide blue eyes watched him, expectant, loving and patient. Bullet shaped, the mouth was more a proboscis that opened and closed in such a regular motion that it seemed to be speaking to him. Beneath the enormous head stretched a body that disappeared into eternity. It was as immense as the universe was immense. The size was unfathomable and seemed able to wrap the world if necessary.

  Alvin tried to lower his head, ignoring the blood as the skin and muscle of his wrists ripped around the steak bones.

  He desperately needed to hear the submerged wor
ds of the Gog-Hoor. He needed to know the answer. He began to struggle, begging to be freed so he could dive and become one with the Gog-Hoor.

  Finally, a single word bubbled forth.

  “You.”

  And with that word came knowledge.

  The Gog-Hoor was there for his sins.

  Alvin was special. He was different. He was rare.

  The Gog-Hoor had chosen to salvage him rather than allow his existence to continue.

  He would live.

  He would change.

  He would become something he had never imagined.

  Maybe even normal.

  Alvin raised his head and laughed. The muscles of his neck bulged with the effort and very quickly he lapsed into the peaceful darkness of a dreamless sleep.

  THE FIREBRAND SYMPHONY

  Brian Hodge

  I believe that sound is a powerful tool to investigate the cosmos

  because it reflects the properties of celestial objects.… Socrates

  thought that the movement of celestial bodies generated music. But

  even though man is born with the music of the spheres in his hearing,

  man doesn't hear this music anymore.

  —DR. FIORELLA TERENZI

  1

  I couldn't fight it: I am definitely more my father's son than my uncle's nephew, even though I was raised mostly by the latter. The two of them were as unalike as any pair of brothers could be—twelve years apart in age, with my father the younger of the two, and operating from opposite halves of the brain. Their life-paths skewed in such divergent directions that it's a wonder my uncle took me in at all after I ro longer had parents… although a part of me wonders if to him I was some sort of noble experiment in the realm of those endless nature-versus-nurture hagglings that seem never to be satisfactorily resolved.

  My father, if you must know, was an irresponsible hedonist who held every credential required to live a tumultuous life and then die young. Ordinarily that's as secuie a career path as any to insure a kind of immortality, but he was no Jimi Hen-drix or Jim Morrison, even though he was their contemporary.

  Every now and again, in a used record shop, some twisted sense of nostalgia will get the better of me, and I'll flip through the bins of musty, dusty vinyl and find a sad castoff or two from my father's band. They look embarrassing now, artwork choked with puffy lettering in Day-Glo colors and swirling with psychedelia. It looks silly and naive. Some styles of music and their trappings age well. Acid rock did not. Turn the album sleeves over and there he is, my father and his guitar and his bandmates, and in these pictures he's usually standing beside a tree or some eroded hulk of statuary, striving hard to look British because that was all the rage then, but mostly appearing unkempt and ill-bathed and very much a trendy product of his time. I'll look at his pictures and just barely remember the guy who would try to get me stoned when I was four or five; yet, too, I'll remember us at a lake —exactly where, who knows? — his hair and beard streaming gallons of water, and the infinite patience he showed while teaching me to swim. I'll look at the pictures and wonder what it was about him that drew my mother to him above all the rest. And what it was that made her different from the multitudes of other skinny, starstruck groupies who must have come to him with flowers in their hair and, probably, a willingness to dispense blow jobs like M&Ms. I'll wonder whose idea it was that she get pregnant, or if it just happened that way. I'll imagine them loving and touring, and fighting because he couldn't stay faithful, or sober when it mattered, and I'll wonder why she continued to choose that life instead of raising her son, even after my father overdosed in a rented Vermont farmhouse where a new album was to be rehearsed and recorded.

  Unanswered questions, all. Because he was dead in his so-called prime, and soon she was gone off with another one just like him, never to be heard from again, and my sixth birthday was still months away.

  Over these last several years, it's always been strange to think of myself as being older than he ever got to be. Almost as strange as it was, growing up, to look at my uncle and think They were brothers, those two? Because my uncle was a professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago, and perhaps under all that hair my father might have resembled him, but as it was, my father looked more like something Uncle Terrance would've studied rather than admit to being related to.

  So, knowing that much, at least, you can imagine my surprise when, given the hundreds of esteemed colleagues my uncle must've worked with and associated with over the decades, it was me he chose to give that enormous skull to after he learned he had only a few months left to live.

  2

  Conventional wisdom would hold that Uncle Terrance shouldn't even have been traveling, but I suppose there's little enough about our family that has been strictly conventional. Besides, he was doing practically none of the driving himself, and admitted to me that he longed to see the Pacific Northwest one final time.

  It hurt to hear that. Not only because it drilled in the idea of his imminent demise, but because it emphasized that everything we most enjoy doing is done a finite number of times, and, whether or not we realize it at the moment, one of them will be the last. The last time we hear the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth. Or see the full moon. Or kiss the person we love most in the world.

  So. My uncle wanted to see the Northwest again before he died.

  And, as I was to realize, people with agendas have a remarkable way of seeing them through regardless of how sick they are, and maybe even because of it.

  For the past few years I've lived and worked in the forested hills of Oregon's Cascades. If you were to pin me to it, I would have to admit that probably I became the son of two fathers— although I distinctly recall Terrance admonishing me as a young boy that I was never to call him “Dad.” From my father I inherited a love of and talent for music (well, noise and structure, if you were to nitpick), and from Uncle Terrance I inherited (if belatedly) a use for stability. I suppose I'm one of the lucky ones who eventually figured out a way to indulge most whims and meet most needs under the same roof.

  Even so, the path here, to our six thousand square feet on five acres, wasn't without its share of sordidness, violence, starvation, and drama. Fifteen years ago Terrance would've had every reason to write me off as a lost cause, settling on the more distressing answer to his nature-or-nurture conundrum.

  So I suppose what I was feeling most while I showed my uncle and his assistant/companion/lover around was a sense of smug but still affable pride. I'd succeeded in his world, but on my terms. So there.

  He stood in the center of my studio, which takes up a full fifth of the house, and nodded with bemusement at the vast arsenal of electronics. Keyboards. Synthesizers. Samplers. Sound processors. Racks of arcane gear with more tiny lights than a Christmas tree. Twenty-four-track mixing board. Three pairs of reference monitors. Computers. Microphones on boom stands. Plus strange hunks of iron that hung from welded frameworks like mangled gongs.

  In technical terms, I'm what's known as a gear slut.

  “What are you working on now—anything I can hear?” he asked, and then amended: “Anything I'd want to hear?”

  I sat at my main desk and grabbed a CD-24 that I'd burned the night before but hadn't yet sent down to Los Angeles: a rough mix for the film I was working on at the moment. I popped it into the workstation and routed the audio to the Mackie HR824s and the subwoofer, and when I potted up the volume, the effect was like a punch to the gut that radiated throughout the entire body.

  It's not music, per se. It's sound design, a logical extension of the discs I've recorded under the name Megalith that are themselves mostly sonic sculpturing. Had this epiphany long ago that if I wanted to sustain any kind of music career, the only way to do that would be to shun trends and st ck to the strange, which never goes out of style because it's never wholly in. Which automatically imposes a lot oinevers. [would never see a chart position. Never get close to a gold record. Never have the cover of a magazin
e that sold more than ten thousand copies, or have the luxury of destroying a hotel room. Then again, I would never have to be the subject of one of those humiliating where-are-they-now? documentaries on VH-1. Or find myself on a packaged instant-nostalgia tour with two metric tons of flabby, forgotten flavors of the last decade, trying to fake excitement for a crowd of balding one-time fans.

  Fortunately, the same conclusion was reached by an early sometime-collaborator of mine named Graham Pennick, who made the peculiar but lucrative transition from ferociously clangorous industrial music to scoring film soundtracks. And who was eventually able to start hiring me, on the strength of those first couple of Megalith recordings, to create ambiences and sonic textures that aren't part of the musical cues, yet are still an essential component of film soundtracks.

  Uncle Terrance listened to several moments of my past weeks' work with an expression of increasiig distress: deep, murky drones that roiled in and out of one another's grasp like a tangle of vast worms.

  “Good God,” he said. “It sounds so much like the movements of giant bowels that I think it's moving mine right where I stand.”

  “Terrance,” chided his friend Liz. “Try harder not to be disgusting.” But she obviously adored him. My aunt had been dead for a dozen years, and I was glad Liz had taken her place in his life, in a relationship that had evolved from professional into the personal. She was years younger, in her late forties, while Terrance was just over seventy, but he had aged nicely, into one of those trim gents who had more than enough intellectual curiosity and just enough physicality to give them a vigor that some women fnd appealing.

  “Well,” he said to her, 'it'll never be confused with Chopin.”

  I clicked ahead to another track and the oppressiveness lifted into a mood of hushed mystery, with the subtle, low chiming that might be made by stalactites if they could in fact sing. I explained that these were for a film entitled Subterrain, set largely beneath the surface of the Earth, about a hidden civilization there.