The Children of Cthulhu

by John Pelan

  Sonja had been here. Certainly in the stale, but closer still. Here. This house, this room. Why refer to it o herwise, alluding to it with a veiled invitation?

  I stayed in the house for hours, until nightfall, then gave up for the day and drove off to find a motel, where I slept so little it seemed a waste of money. But at least 1 was showered and fresh the next morning before going back to the farmhouse to wait again, certain that whatever was to happen r ext, it was meant to happen here.

  The day was altogether more dismal than the sunny day before—the darker side of October was showing now, the October of spirits and Samhain, the October that blusters gray skies above your head and drags at your bones with a misty rain. I roamed the house and listened to it creak, and tried without success to recall the place from another time, to remember running happily through its well-kept halls.

  I was sitting halfway up the staircase to the second floor when she came that afternoon—first the sound of a car stopping on the weed-choked gravel drive out front, and then footsteps, too light to be those of some deputy arrived to run off a squatter. Her hollow tread on the porch, the painful rasp of the front door hinges.

  And then, for the first time in nearly two weeks, we were looking at each other, here on the other side of the country.

  The normal instinct you ordinarily have at such a moment is to run and hold the other person. That the impulse was suddenly squashed within me is the best testament to how unsettling the moment truly was. It was Sonja and then again it wasn't. It was someone wearing Sonja's face. It was Sonja after she'd removed a mask I'd never noticed. And it might've even still been love with which she looked at me, but no kind of love I would ever knowingly seek.

  “You must've been upstairs, at some point,” she said.

  “This is ancient history,” I told her. “It's been years since what happened here meant anything to me.”

  “Years and meaning have nothing to do with each other.” Blue eyes and total conviction. “Besides, how can you say that if you don't even know what really did happen?”

  “Oh, and you do?” I challenged, but she didn't answer, just moved to the stairs and ascended, one hand on the dingy banister, brushing my shoulder with the other as she glided past.

  I rose to follow. You know where we went.

  “It happened right here,” she said, this stranger I'd loved — hadn't I? She was pointing to a spot along the floor, a few feet from one set of windows. “The bed was here, and he sat on the floor and this is where he slid the needle in his vein. A few seconds later he tried to stand but he fell back on the bed and never got up again. He died staring at the ceiling. But what he was looking at, who knows?”

  “So what. So fucking what. You're an obsessive fan who somehow managed to hide it until now. You're the one who needs to come to terms.” Telling her this, but thinking now that it was never me she'd loved, it was him all along—the image of him, the stupid fantasy of him, because she'd been three years old when he died, and I was just the consolation prize.

  She ignored me entirely, moving now tc the other wall's windows. “But he'd looked at enough for one night.”

  Gaze out these particular windows and you had an excellent overview of the farmhouse's backyard, long since overgrown and wild; once it must've been lush and mown, the flagstones to the far barn like a curving archipelago.

  “He watched it happening from here,” Sonja said. “She thought he was asleep and so he wasn't supposed to see it, but he did, and that must've been why he killec himself. But he didn't do it right away, because she was finished already and he was still alive, so he probably wanted to make sure he wasn't just hallucinating. He killed himself in fiont of her, you know—he didn't die alone.”

  “You can't know these things,” I whispered

  She merely smiled. You can argue with anything but a smile.

  “Watched what happening… ?” I asked, crumbling the way she knew I would.

  “Do I have to say? It can be enough of an insult to tell a man what his mother did with other men … let alone something very tall that walked out of the woods late at night, that she was waiting for… because unlike so many she always knew who and what she was…”

  And I suppose it was right about then that my head began to pound —

  “She was such a tall woman, do you evei remember that about her?” Sonja said. “You can't really tell so from any of the pictures you showed me, but she was uncommonly tall. Maybe why you don't remember is because all little children think their parents are tall. But… where do you think you got your height?”

  —and I felt that I was about to scream, because I wasn't supposed to care.

  “Do you even remember her name?”

  And I stammered out that it was Gudrid, something like that, a name I'd never even thought was real, because it sounded like one of those fantasy names that counterculture airheads were fond of using back then. But no, Sonja said, it was my mother's real name.

  “I should know—it's Icelandic,” she said. “They've told your uncle about what happened in Iceland by now, haven't they?”

  And Sonja stood before me with her cold beauty and her hair like the sun shimmering on ice, so much more in control of herself than I was as I pleaded to know who she really was, where she had really come from, who had really sent her to meet me so many years ago, if it had to do with these people at Miskatonic who had drawn Terrance in… but her inarguable smile was sad in its refusal, and all she would say was that there was science, and there was worship, and sometimes, if very rarely, they overlapped.

  “I could worship you, too,” she said, “if it wasn't for your ignorance.”

  But why would she ever want to, I wondered, but didn't want to know, either because of what it would say about her or imply about me.

  “So I'll settle for this.…”

  And I swear it was Sonja who picked up the discarded bottle, heavy old thing long drained of wine, and put it in my hands, then knelt before me and tossed her head back and looked up at me with the kind of expectation you might expect in the transcendent eyes of sacrifices who willingly laid themselves beneath the obsidian knives of Aztec priests. Giving themselves to a higher cause.

  “If it helps you to know, to awaken, then do it…”

  And here I was, years later, back with the sick mind-fuck games all over again. No different than with the unhealthy women I swore I never wanted to meet again, who'd wanted me to cut them, to whip them, who weren't happy unless they were hurting—did they smell something on me?

  “Do it!” she shouted, beautiful Sonja whom I'd never known, who'd come to me for reasons I'd never suspected. “Do it… or I'll tell you about your real father.”

  That did it.

  It's astonishing how sturdy thick glass can be, how hard and how many times it can be swung before brearing.

  It looked far too time-worn for Sonja to have brought it here herself during the past days. Whoever had left it, years ago, decades even, I wondered what dim impulse they'd obeyed, if they had the faintest sense the bottle was meant to be left here for just this day.

  To kill the future daughter-in-law of their iallen god.

  For the trip home, I ignored the airlines and took Sonja's car, in part because I didn't want to leave it behind to be found. To possibly be linked with the remains of the ur identified woman that were sure to be discovered sooner or later. Most of her I left in the cleansing waters of the woodland brook near the farmhouse. The rest, which might have established her identity from fingerprints or dental records, went elsewhere, many elsewheres, for more thorough concealing.

  I found it amazing, the survival instincts that welled up within me. I did these things as if the self I'd always known was watching them be done by another self who had assumed command. Another self I'd never realized was there, buried deep in bone and DNA.

  And afterward, Sonja's car and solitude across a continent's worth of roads. I felt so numb that I had hardly any sense of seeing the
eastern third of the country, able only to drive and sleep and, just barely, eat. I would drive late into the night and the frosty black breath of its dampened autumn chill, and sometimes I would stop on a desolate stretch of highway and stand beneath the frozen light of stars, listening for their distant music.

  On the third night I was finally able to sit awake with myself and my deeds in the cheerless cubicle of a motel room. Nebraska, this was in. On the bed, I opened the lid of the wooden box containing what little I had to remember my earliest years by. I'd packed it for the flight to Vermont without really knowing why, only that it seemed fitting, full circle.

  Inside were the worthless, priceless treasures of a young boy. Trading cards, seashells, those few faded family photos. Guitar picks. A little pistol that must've belonged to a toy soldier, long gone. Two Matchbox cars. A bone, small but strangely dense, from nothing I could guess. A magnet. Stuff like that. I held it all, piece by piece, and marveled at how small our worlds are when we're young.

  At the bottom lay a brown envelope, a tiny thing really, two inches by four. Small as it was, it had been rubber-stamped with the name and office address of a dentist; the town, I was surprised to see, was just a few miles from the farmhouse. Pencilled notations, too, in what might've been my mother's hand—my first name and an October date only two days before my father had died. I had to smile at this unexpected evidence of maternal responsibility, my mother laking me in for a checkup.

  I opened the envelope, probably unopened since I was ten, and slid out the only thing inside: a pair of dental X rays, ghostly blue-white on black. When I held the m up to the light of the motel lamp, they were clearly a child's, the baby teeth grown in, the adult teeth in their hidden sockets above, awaiting their turn.

  But above those, there were more.

  Along each side, high in the bone of the upper jaw, deep in the bone of the lower, they abided even the n… wide teeth down the center of each side, long and razored, that looked made to mesh together top and bottom like meat shears.

  Whether they had implications for a future still to come or were vestigial leftovers from aeons ago, I couldn't begin to guess.

  But no wonder they were in with the family photos.

  6

  So I returned to my home in the mountains, and to the one thing that had always helped me find purpose: my work with the sounds of other worlds and of other people's dreams and nightmares.

  I had a film to finish up, and came through for the studio and its deadlines, and the day after the package of my sound design arrived down in Los Angeles, to be layered into Subterrain's soundtrack, I got a call from Graham Pennick, who had no reservations in proclaiming it the single most unsettling work he'd ever heard me, or anyone, do. Parts of it really got under his skin, he said, although he couldn't say precisely why, and of course asked what I'd done, what my sources were.

  “A little of this, a little of that,” I said, elusive. “From here and there.”

  Which he respected, of course. Trade secrets. There was no need, really, to mention how far away some of it had come from in time and space.

  And it was around then that Uncle Terrance lost the power of speech, so we communicated by e-mail for a short while, but by now there was little more to share than his own misery.

  This thing growing inside is eating me alive, he wrote in the final missive I received from him. If it's true we were made by conscious design, we still were not made in benevolence. There can be nothing crueler than an evolving world.

  I believe you have a point, I wrote in reply. Just look at the teeth that rise to the challenge.

  But I don't know if he received this, because the next thing I heard—from his companion, Liz—he was dead. He'd been squirreling away painkillers until he had enough of a cache that would rob the cancer of its last laughs. The unspoken implication was that she'd helped him make his exit. For which I thanked her.

  But while I know she made him happy, I had to wonder if Liz was really who he thought she was. Or if she was with him according to dictates other than those of her own heart. You'll naturally understand my paranoia, since I have to wonder when all this really started. If my aunt Genevieve's murder truly was an unsolved mugging or only looked like one. The surest way of shaking up Terrance's life, getting him to Norway and to the skull, which then made its way to me. The surest way of bringing in Liz to ease the fresh loneliness of his life… and make sure certain things got done.

  I have to wonder if his colleagues at Miskatonic were players or mere pawns on a much grander scale of dominion. Because, as Sonja had said, there is science, and there is worship, and sometimes they overlap.

  Or maybe it all began earlier still, with my birth, or my father's death and my abandonment, so that someday I could more easily receive this legacy of chant and xne. Marked for this, perhaps, even while in Gudrid's strange vvomb, then once I was free, imperceptibly guided the rest of the way.

  Years ago, it occured to me that when you can barely remember your own parents, you can hardly know who and what you are.

  And now, while I still agree with this, it occurs to me that discovering such knowledge, rather than growing up with it, means it's much less likely to be taken for granted. Or rebelled against.

  I think of another conversation Terrance and I had while he was here, the day after he'd given me the skull. I was intrigued by those huge intervals in the geological levels at which the various specimens of Homo sapiens primoris fad been found. It wasn't a smooth, continuous fossil record. Instead, they'd been found in four distinct strata —from roughly thirty million years ago, eighteen million, six million, and, like the skull he gave me, just 350,000. Mostly consistent in form, but separated by vast gulfs of time.

  “What do they make of that at Miskatonic?” I'd asked.

  “The natural inference drawn is that something periodically seeded the Earth with these… beings,” Terrance had said. “And long after they went extinct, tried again, until maybe, finally, they flourished.”

  “Are they us?” Something I would know setter than to ask now. “Are they any part of us?”

  “I'm not even sure what ‘us’ means anymoie,” he'd said. And wouldn't look at me. “But if we really were created in some other being's image, I'm no longer sure I like the prospect of who or what that might've been.”

  News will periodically come to me that I'm now much better equipped to know what to make of, how to read between its lines, than I would've been before receiving my birthright.

  When I first heard about a tiny town in Iceland that had been mysteriously burned to the ground, every last inhabitant slaughtered, I immediately knew what to make of it. And understood instinctively that the world is poised to embark upon another cruel path.

  When similar events occured in Canada and Germany and Brazil, I saw the same hand at work and didn't even need the affirmation furnished by the large footprints found.

  But news comes from much closer to home, as well.

  The soundtracks of films are generally mixed by three or so audio engineers working at a large digital board. When word got back to me of the strife between the trio who mixed Subter-rain, and how they twice had to be replaced, I thought back on my late-night experiment that had caused coyotes to tear one another to pieces.

  When a couple of weeks later I learned about the arrest of two of the studio executives who'd sat in on the screening of a preliminary cut of the finished film, I understood why they might've gone on their killing spree afterward.

  The prerelease buzz is that it's an extremely powerful movie.

  A major holiday release, it premiers nationwide in another week, in more than two thousand theaters. I look forward to opening day with great anticipation.

  Once I wanted to burn the Earth, remember? Never dreaming I would be handed the chance, in the service of ancient gods whose names I don't yet know, but whose titan souls I suspect I've always heard.

  I began by telling you that I'm more my father's son than
my uncle's nephew, and surely this is more true now than I ever fathomed it could be, if Sonja's final words really were spoken from knowledge:

  Do it… or I'll tell you about your real father.

  But until he makes himself known to me, I will above all regard myself as the son of my mother, and yearn to see her one last time.…

  If only to show her how I've grown.

  TEETH

  Matt Cardin

  For in much wisdom is much grief:

  and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.

  — ECCLESIASTES l:l8

  Consciousness is a disease.

  — MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO

  1

  My first and decisive glimpse into the horror at the center of existence came unexpectedly during my second year of graduate school. I was pursuing a doctorate in philosophy, and I had stopped by the library in between classes for some quick research. As I was searching out a copy of the Enneads of Ploti-nus I came upon my friend Marco hidden away among the second-floor stacks at a small table near the south wall.

  “Marco!” I said with genuine pleasure, flashing a smile. “Hello, Jason,” he murmured, without glancing up from his books. He was surrounded by piles of them, 50 many they were almost spilling off the table. He appeared to be copying a passage from one of them into a notebook, and I stood by uncertainly while he continued writing.

  Marco was a visiting student from Guatemala, though he had only a slight Spanish accent. His auburn skin, coal black hair, and muscular physique gave him the air of a Third World revolutionary. He was also the most brilliant person I had ever met, a savant who was triple-majoring in physics, philosophy, and history. We had met at the beginning of the fall semester, and I had quickly learned that his chic-terrorist look concealed a fierce intelligence. Now, at the end of the spring term, I was still amazed at his vast knowledge. He could discourse at length on almost any subject, and in the process usually would make anyone else feel woefully ignorant. The books now spread out on the table before him were enough to dizzy the average mind. He was only twenty-six, and I could never figure out how he had gained so much knowledge in such a short time.