Cthulhurotica

  I stood behind them now and listened. The naked girl was striking but I felt more curious than prurient at this point.

  The girl turned to smile at the three others and I saw her face for the first time. It too was lovely but more than that, I felt I had seen it somewhere before. She looked quizzically at the outraged man. “What is disgraceful, if I may ask?”

  “You, you brazen strumpet!”

  She laughed as if in surprise. “Me? Whatever do you mean? I am suntanned if you mean bronzed, but I am no strumpet.”

  “You come here stark naked and pretend nothing is wrong!” said the redheaded man.

  She smiled slowly, shaking her head. “If you disregard my footwear,” she said. “But that is not disgraceful. Didn’t you see the signs?”

  The redheaded man looked at the clothed woman with a puzzled expression, and the husband kept his unblinking gaze pointed out toward the sea.

  “What signs?” I said. I knew what signs. But I meant, what do the signs mean?

  The woman turned to see me. “Why hello again,” she said. “I am glad you took my advice. I was hoping you would.”

  I realized this was the woman from the hotel desk who had advised me to come to this spot.

  I said, “You told me I would see an extraordinary view. You did not lie.”

  She smiled broadly at this and nodded in acceptance. “The clothing optional signs,” she said.

  “Why I never!” said the clothed woman.

  “Not ever?” asked the naked woman, “if I may quote Gilbert and Sullivan.”

  “Here they are!” said the redheaded man, pointing behind me to two uniformed police officers approaching. “Officers, arrest this woman!”

  “What has she done?” asked the taller of the two.

  The clothed woman sputtered, “But-but can’t you see! She’s naked and she is beautiful. There has to be a law against it.”

  Both officers regarded the naked woman closely. “You may be right,” said the shorter.

  “If you disregard my footwear,” the naked woman said again, with an amused and inviting smile.

  “I don’t know,” the taller officer said. “Your footwear has a kind of charm of its own.”

  “Surely such things cannot be legal in this city!” the redheaded man said, obviously a tourist himself.

  “Well, it’s funny you should mention it,” the taller officer said. “The city council had quite a debate. One side insisted the signs not say ‘clothing optional’ as it would scare off some shy or conservative tourists. But they failed to convince the — lets call them the more radical council members — to omit the signs all together. They compromised on leaving the signs up with only the word 'optional.' But they never said or defined or compromised on what that word meant. Which is kind of a shame, because now there are some cases tangled up in court.”

  “Well, what are you going to do!” the clothed woman demanded to know.

  “Mostly,” the taller officer said, “we are going to sit back and wait for the legal system to try to untangle what the city council messed up.”

  “You can’t do that while this cougar preys upon innocent victims in her stark everything.”

  “Disregarding the footwear,” I put in helpfully.

  The naked hotel employee and I exchanged warm smiles, and then she frowned cutely at the redheaded man.

  “Have you been preyed upon or molested yet?” the shorter policeman asked him.

  “No,” the redheaded man said. “But it is only a matter of time. And look at this poor woman’s husband.” But you could only look at the back of the head of the husband in question. “And I think this other gentleman is in trouble already.” I think he meant me.

  The naked lady said, “Shouldn’t you wait for the other gentleman to file his own complaint before you leap to that conclusion? And speaking of leaping to conclusions, what is with that cougar crack? How old do you think I am?”

  The redheaded man turned away from her to the two police. “What do you think is going to happen? Don’t you feel you need intervene?”

  “We have to wait for the courts,” said the taller policeman.

  “And the city comptroller estimates this uncomplaining gentleman and his friends and ilk are going to come back often and bring much revenue with them to the city. It all has to be taken into consideration.”

  “What is spent in our fair city stays in our fair city,” the other officer said.

  “So is everything to your liking so far?” the nude woman asked me.

  “So far I am as happy as a bug in a Persian rug,” I told her.

  “Why don’t you come with me for a swim and ditch that unflattering old swim suit now that you understand the sign?”

  I grinned. “I am not used to doing certain things in public.” In a crowd of cultists, yes, but in front of strangers?

  She smiled undeterred. “Very well for now. Fortunately, you know how to find me if you feel like a drink later.”

  “I’ll sue,” the redheaded man said.

  “We’ll all sue,” said the clothed lady.

  The taller cop smiled grimly. “The city comptroller said a lot of people might sue. Any idio— any person can sue.”

  “And our lawyers can use the money too, he said,” the other cop said.

  The naked lady (who turned out to be named Sue Beth Lee) and I left them arguing while the two of us compromised and went for a mixed swim – she very politely did not mention again that I was overdressed for the activity. The warm sea water was just what I needed at that moment, and we had a lovely conversation about the Festival over a picnic lunch on the sand.

  Two nights later things became even more intense in the moonlight.

  Ay-ee yah! Iä! Shug Niggurath!

  The Brides of Tindalos

  by Kirsten Brown

  LE CIÉL OUVERT

  BY KIRSTEN BROWN

  I always have to stop and look at the sky over the University, at the lenticular shape torn in reality that hangs above it, pulsing black and empty over silent causeways and high over Administration, First and Second Science, and the Art Wing donated sometime in the past century by the Pickman family. Over trees that never infloresce or sprout leaves anymore, lawns that remain grey and tangled and desolate. The whole area is like this, most of Arkham proper and Innsmouth are walled off and patrolled by the military. Even some of the surrounding rural areas have been evacuated. Arkham itself has been a ghost town for the five years since the accident in the basement labs, that I was once supposed to be a part of.

  There is an eclipse every day, here, when the sun passes behind this rip, and night falls for a brief time, fifteen, twenty minutes at most. We have not so far been able to record what happens in this shade; sending a person failed spectacularly the last time, and it seems that even electronic equipment can't really handle it.

  I try to be back at the van when this happens, a brief respite from the containment suit and the proximity display, my load of sensory and recording equipment. There’s time for lunch, maybe, and some nervous joking with the military guys who drive the truck full of expensive equipment there and back to a safe distance. I know that my presence makes them a little uneasy, especially after the first attempt to ask me out, when I told Dennis or Daniel or whoever-politely, mind you-that I wasn't interested in men. They also don’t know what to make of me because I initially volunteered for this though I am getting quite a bit of hazard pay.

  I don't talk to them too often. Just enough to not make it worse for everyone.

  I'm a little bit of a pariah at the lab at the other end of this, too. I'm The Student, the one who'd actually lived in the town and whose parents worked at this school and sent her there, the one who made it out alive and relatively whole, the one who wasn't driven mad by the things in this desolate space, or at least not permanently and disablingly so. My chaperones simply think I am mad or odd, but the scientists are afraid. I can't fathom why, and stopped trying a while ago.

&nbs
p; "How's it going out there, Cait?"

  "No aberrant readings, yet. EM fields are the same as usual, maybe a little high, air pressure a little bit lower, but it looks like the weather might be planning something interesting to make up for how quiet everything else is. Out for now, Andy." I squint up at the sky around the tear, and try to judge where the sun might be, behind building clouds. Usually the direction of light is enough, but today it is ambient, scattered by a Fresnel lens of stratus clouds stretching between horizons. The timer on my suit's display reads a little before noon, and my estimate gives me maybe an hour or two before an enormous shadow, cast by nothing, by a hole, sweeps across the town, and I shiver at this thought. One of the readouts in my periphery jumps, settles, jumps again, as if in sympathy.

  I can only guess at what it means; it all goes back to the van, and from there it will go to a laboratory not unlike the one where this all began, to that group of men and women whose lives have been consumed by esoteric equations and the behaviours of particles that had, up until now, been theoretical. Had things gone as normal, had I finished grad school and continued to points beyond, I might have been one of those researchers.

  Or, I might not be here at all, had it not been for my alarm clock finally giving up the ghost the morning my lab assistantship was to begin. Still, this? This beats the assistantship, beats grad school and being felt up by professors and endless papers and revisions and criticisms, even on the most boring of these excursions.

  I'm in the building, now, where there is more cover both for me and whatever else might be around. The bottom corner of my display shows, like a radar scan, the walls around me, as well as anything that might be behind or between those walls, and me, the dot in the centre. Anything too close or too large, and I am simply to run. I did some time in high school track, as well as college, and the habit has not lapsed too much. If I need it, and can still radio for it, the men in the van will cover my approach. They are well-armed and frighteningly good shots. I trust them, though I know their job is more to keep things from spreading past containment limits than to protect me. But the only thing that moves today are a few insects, barely enough to even show up on the readout. I mutter to myself, "Even the terrifying shit that lives here doesn't like getting caught in the rain."

  "What?"

  "Nothing. Thinking out loud. Which direction would you like me to go, today? It seems to be especially quiet."

  "Hrm. Where were you pointing that the one gauge was spiking, Cait?"

  "The courtyard, I think. One direction is as good as any, right now. There isn't a thing to orient to, readings-wise." My path continues that way, stepping carefully around spilled books and bags, even before Andy can give me assent in the form of a noncommittal grunt. At least there are no bodies, here. Once it was deemed safe, at least for tentative study, the first task had been to collect remains for autopsy and eventual return to their families.

  I had still been in the institution when that happened, though better off than some of the others who'd ended up there. I had dreams, still, of what I had seen pulling into my first day of work two hours late, but it was nowhere near as bad as it had been. A vast improvement on weeks of not-precisely nightmares, fragments of memory parading before my unconscious mind, ripping me from sleep repeatedly, waking to sweat-stained sheets and a nameless need that disturbed me far more than simple fear ever could. For months, even after being deemed fit to rejoin society, I didn't sleep without pharmaceutical help, a parade of pills in soft, presumably soothing, shades of blue. Not until I signed up for this.

  The quiet days are difficult; several hours of wandering will yield nothing, and the labcoats will likely act as if it were my fault I found nothing but dust and the same atmospheric or particle readings as anywhere else on this planet. I know now that there is a little part of me that wants to find something in here, to face something that those scientists never will. I might finally see something that the men in the truck wouldn't come in here to save me from, wouldn't look at except if they had to, and then only down the scope of their sniper rifles.

  No, not just a part of me.

  I saw something, whatever began all of this five years ago, and I want to see it again, to know that I saw something, like an addict wants more of whatever is the flame to their moth, like a stalker wants even the merest glimpse of the object of their obsession. I need to see it again, to know that I did not go mad over nothing, to find something more than what I could see and touch, to try and know the unknowable.

  Rain begins to patter on the windows along the hall, and on the roof. This section of the university is only one floor aboveground, and several beneath, and the sound echoes through the empty spaces, making it seem even more lonely and filled with ghosts. I check my clock, and it's not even twelve-thirty. There is still at least a half-hour until the sun reaches zenith at this time of year, and it only takes a couple of minutes to get back to the van.

  Do I really want to go back?

  The question never voiced, never even asked of myself until now, not consciously. I cannot even admit to myself for a few minutes that it crossed my mind; the first person who had done this job stayed through the small night and had to be retrieved after the video feed went berserk and his audio became incoherent screaming and deafening static, a white noise of such power that it nearly ruined everything in the van that could perceive it. It was played for me like a macabre version of those training videos for entry level service jobs, presumably to try and dissuade me from signing all of the forms to take the position.

  When they retrieved him, he had gone the same route as many of the people from the day the sky opened, hovering somewhere between catatonia and mania, and now lay in a long-term cell at Arkham. I visited once, a month into assuming this position, driven to do so out of a weird conjunction of curiosity and a sense of duty borne of being his replacement, only to watch him cower in a corner in a straightjacket, gibbering something about the stars having teeth. I was told he was restrained after the first week passed and he had not slept, not even on enough morphine to drop a heavyweight boxer. That he had tried to claw out his own eyes, and that no one had seen him sleep in the months since.

  I still wonder what he saw, that I did not.

  Hanging slightly open, the door leading to the courtyard lets in a soft pillar of light, a few motes of dust suspended in it and drifting slowly. More join them as I approach. Mine are not the only prints on the ground here, nor are all of them human. There are hints of something ostensibly clawed, doglike prints that disappear abruptly near the wall, and a swath of absolutely smooth, clean floor that suggests something enormous and sinuous, at least as big around as I am tall. I take pictures of both, swab the imprints and carefully place each sample in its own container, and point my scanning equipment at the area, focusing on those spots. I try to ignore the question still insistent, unanswered, the pull of it burning and coiling around my brain, instead filling my head with idle chatter about why one needle jumps and skips, while another is pinned in the negative, and still another hovers near the red, something possibly verging on harmful, before I move on again.

  Once outside, I look up, and all pretension evaporates in the presence of the anomaly. It is almost directly above me, and seems much larger than it should, even allowing for my own shift in perspective. This is the closest I have been to the epicentre, the courtyard with its once cheerful benches and paths all almost directly above the restricted labs in the basement and subbasement. The paths I have taken around the buildings for weeks, months, maybe years, had all circled back to here, to this.

  My breath catches involuntarily before I can let it out again, and I cannot tell if I am polarized towards it or away, terror as well as something more singing along taut nerves. Instinct tells me that I should be nowhere near this thing, should be as far away as humanly possible, but it is beautiful, too. Like a pool of ink, that kind of luminous dark, framed by endless-seeming rainclouds scudding past. Almost perfectly round from
this angle, there is a sense of surface tension to it, like the darkness, the nothing in it is pressing on the sky and threatening to rupture. I am transfixed, breathless, I am a needle seeking a very strange compass, a crystal glass resonant to this, and I have no idea how long I stand there.

  I did not know how long I was out that first time, either. But I remember it now. I remember all of it, not just the teasing, shadowed fragments that dreams leave behind. I had just shut the car door, trying to balance the coffee that would be my only breakfast because I was running so late, and my notebooks, and locking the car door, when everything fell out from beneath me, A tearing and grinding sound, thick, like fabric being ripped away, filled all of my senses. It was louder than anything I had ever experienced, only not just loud. I could feel it on my skin, through the frame of me, taste the wrongness in the air as I watched the otherwise perfect spring sky above stretch and warp.

  I couldn't move then, either.

  It had gone from a pulling, to a stain, to a hole opening like a lens, in that kind of smooth irising motion. I had squinted, against instinct and all better judgement, looking at something indistinct that rose like smoke to meet it, but thicker. It was the shadow being thrown by whatever was opening, but it was also solid, or approaching such. It coiled and writhed upwards, spreading, growing more opaque as it did so, and opened like a hunting sea creature. Within that-

  "Cait! You need to get out of there. The umbra is approaching. It's diffused by the clouds, but we don't know if that matters, yet." Andy's voice breaks the spell for a moment, the signal growing rougher. I am still frozen to the spot, rabbit-in-headlights, girl too far gone in remembering.

  When the seething mass opened, unfolded like a terrible flower, I remember falling over, scraping my palms and then my knees, as my mind was assaulted by too many streams of input to process at once. It was coiling tendrils and blackness that crawled like flame and a human figure, but of a substance like volcanic glass. It had no face, and its face was smooth, was nothing but teeth like a viperfish, and it was as flawlessly, inhumanly beautiful as an Egyptian sculpture of some ancient king. It was male and female and monstrous and breathtaking. It had risen until it was framed by the hole, the gate, like a reverse halo. Beyond, alien stars, a nebula or a galaxy perhaps, lined with rows and rows of teeth larger than any star, maybe even than entire solar systems.