The Book of Cthulhu 2

by Ross Lockhart

  * * *

  Melei’s eyes opened slowly as the sunrise just finished and serene Ulthar gradually stirred from its long nocturnal slumber. She slid her prodigious bedding aside, and took up her scribbling-notebook in one hand, searching for the words that would draw the magnificently drab colors across from that other world into hers.

  A troupe of cats passed by her window, miaowing gleefully at one another, and she rose to peer out at them, as if to divine some portent from the colors of their coats; but they were a motley pack, impossible to read even for a girl as bright as Melei.

  Waking, dreaming. She felt as if a woman torn between two lovers—one of them calm, and sweet, and still and good, and the other magnificent, stone-muscled and taciturn and bold enough to seize her and pull her close to him in the darkness of night.

  She set the notebook down, ruminating. There was a choice coming. She would have to choose a name. Said she, in that world, “Melei,” then her dark lover would listen, and hear, and understand what her heart said. The delicious torture would end, and he would send her home… never to return. Yet said she that other name, that strange name that even now squirmed beneath her tongue, prickling her mouth and fighting to be pronounced in the sunny morning calm of Ulthar, then her dark lover would seize her, all at once, and carry her off into the delightful terror of the world of her dreams, leaving the streets of Ulthar forever empty of her.

  She could feel the city’s ache, at the very thought of her leaving. The city’s ache, or perhaps it was her own.

  No harm could come of writing the name, she decided. She had written it upon her own palm, in different scripts, one by one, and not a thing had happened save that she had dreamt of the other world sooner, and more fiercely, each time. She could write it upon a page, she was sure. It was not the same as saying it. She could still decide. Melei, or…

  She took a quill, unlidded a jar of sepia ink, and touched the quill’s tip into the inky darkness. Without speaking—with her jaw locked firmly, to guard against accidental pronouncement—she touched the tip of the quill against the gently yellowed page. The dawn sunlight cast a shadow from the feather quill, throwing a line of gentle shading across the page and into her lap. She shut her eyes, and opened them, and shut them again, and once more opened them, so as to let the shadow find a place in her heart’s memory.

  She realized, then, she was building up a storehouse of memories already. The faces of the swarthy guards. The troupes of cats mewing happily all around her. She had stopped hating Ulthar, wincing at the summery stink of the cat turds and grumbling at the foreign power that ruled the place. She had found the kind of love that wells up one when she abandons her lover for another, her world for another’s; that sort of love that is rooted in impossibility that cannot be prevented even by sorrow, even by fear, even by the movement of the shadow across a page as the sun slips up into the sky.

  She did not write the name, but instead rose, scribbling-book still in hand, and went back to her window. The sweetest cottages of Ulthar lay just there, empty of terror but touching in their way, stirring memories of the games she had played in these dusty streets during what felt like another life. Laughter and the voices of children who had somehow become half-forgotten friends, folk whose faces that she had seen not once in ages and ages.

  And Melei knew, then, that she would say the name. Perhaps not that night. Not so soon as that, she told herself. But she would say it, and go, and old Ulthar would continue on without her, as it had done before her birth, with its cats and gentle sunny days and whispering old women and men.

  She filled a basin with warm water, and carried it to a high table in her room, her feet padding upon the wooden planks of the floor. Outside, a bird sang a snatch of birdsong she had heard dozens of times before, though she could not name what type of bird it was. She splashed the water on her face, delighting in its gentle warmth, steeling herself.

  For there would be precious little warmth like this in the other world, in the arms of her dark dream lover.

  And then she donned a bright and comfortable silk, light in shade to suit the warm day, and crossed the threshold of her home, going out into a street that smelled of blooming cherry flowers and apple orchards that had been planted by the Southerners. There, in the street, a trio of cats gazed up at her, curiously eyeing her approach with heads tilted one way or another. They seemed, like all cats in Ulthar, almost as if they wished to ask her something, or to dispense some holy secret to her, but if indeed this was so, they said nothing, their own jaws as firmly locked as hers had been minutes before.

  An old man made his way down the street, comfortable and calm though his back was a little bent. He smiled at her, and a cock crowed in the distance, and Melei closed her eyes. And opened them again.

  And closed them.

  And opened them again, committing every breath of it, every shade and tiny noise and scent, to the strongest urn in the storehouse of her memory. The voices of children long gone echoed, now, within that storehouse, and the image of her mother baking sour bread, and the laughter of cats—for in Ulthar, by nights, cats do laugh, though only the most blessed ever hear it more than once—and the sunrises, the sunrises that had saddened her so often.

  Perplexed, she went through the streets, dazed, eyes and heart drinking Ulthar in deeply and constantly until she was drunk with the place. It was her farewell kiss to the world of her birth, a kiss of the eyes upon the forehead. It was her last embrace of the little city, day-long as she wandered and rambled from shop to temple to the current doorsteps of present friends and the abandoned doorways of friends long-lost. She met those she had once loved, and said nothing of leave-taking, though she wondered if they could see it in her eyes. Yet she asked not a soul as she spoke to them of nothings, of needle work and gossip and of the latest news from other cities and lands. As she walked those quiet, calm streets, her footsteps tapping gently the beat of her last ballad to Ulthar, she realized she loved this city, loved it unceasingly and would do so evermore though she would not live here any longer.

  For as the sun began slowly to draw itself down unto the horizon, and the shadows lengthened across the streets as another shadow had done upon her page that morning, the name beneath Melei’s tongue stirred once more, this final time irresistibly…

  •

  A Gentleman from Mexico

  Mark Samuels

  “Barlow, I imagine, can tell you even more about the Old Ones.”

  —Clark Ashton Smith to August Derleth, April 13th 1937.

  Víctor Armstrong was running late for his appointment and so had hailed a taxi rather than trusting to the metro. Bathed in cruel noon sunlight, the green-liveried Volkswagen beetle taxi cruised down Avenida Reforma. In the back of the vehicle, Armstrong rummaged around in his jacket pocket for the pack of Faros cigarettes he’d bought before setting off on his rendezvous.

  “Es OK para mí a fumar en tu taxi?” Armstrong said, managing to cobble together the request in his iffy Spanish.

  He saw the eyes of the driver reflected in the rear-view mirror, and they displayed total indifference. It was as if he’d made a request to fold his arms.

  “Seguro,” the driver replied, turning the wheel sharply, weaving his way across four lines of traffic. Armstrong was jolted over to the left and clutched at the leather handle hanging from the front passenger door. The right hand seat at the front had been removed, as was the case with all the green taxis, giving plenty of leg-room and an easy entrance and exit. Like most of the taxi drivers in Mexico City, this one handled his vehicle with savage intent, determined to get from A to B in the minimum possible time. In this almost permanently gridlocked megalopolis, the survival of the fastest was the rule.

  Armstrong lit up one of his untipped cigarettes and gazed out the window. Brilliant sunshine illuminated in excruciating detail the chaos and decay of the urban rubbish dump that is the Ciudad de México, Distrito Federal, or “D.F.” for short. A great melting pot of the crimina
l, the insane, the beautiful and the macho, twenty-five million people constantly living in a mire of institutionalised corruption, poverty and crime. But despite all this, Mexico City’s soul seems untouched, defiant, and no other great city of the world is so vividly alive, dwelling as it does always in the shadow of death. Another earthquake might be just around the corner, the Popocatéptl volcano might blow at any hour, and the brown haze of man-made pollution might finally suffocate the populace. Who knows? What is certain is that the D.F. would rise again, as filthy, crazed and glorious as before.

  They were approaching La Condesa, a fashionable area to the north of the centre that had attracted impoverished artists and writers ten years ago, but which had recently been overrun with pricey restaurants and cafés. Armstrong had arranged to meet with an English-speaking acquaintance at the bookshop café La Torre on the corner of Avenida Nuevo León. This acquaintance, Juan San Isidro, was a so-called underground poet specialising in sinister verse written in the Náhuatl language and who, it was rumoured, had links with the narcosatánicos. A notorious drunk, San Isidro had enjoyed a modicum of celebrity in his youth but had burnt out by his mid-twenties. Now in his mid-thirties, he was scarcely ever sober and looked twice his actual age. His bitterness and tendency to enter into the kind of vicious quarrels that seem endemic in Latin American literary circles had alienated him from most of his contemporaries. Armstrong suspected that San Isidro had requested a meeting for one of two reasons; either to tap him for money or else to seek his assistance in recommending a translator for a re-issue of his poetical work in an English language edition in the United States. It was highly unlikely that San Isidro was going to offer him a work of fiction for one of his upcoming anthologies of short stories.

  The taxi pulled up alongside the bookshop.

  “¿Cuánto es?” Armstrong asked.

  “Veintiún pesos,” the driver responded. Armstrong handed over some coins and exited the vehicle.

  Standing on the corner outside the bookshop was a stall selling tortas, tacos and other fast-food. The smell of the sizzling meat and chicken, frying smokily on the hob, made Armstrong’s mouth water. Despite the call of ¡Pásele, señor! Armstrong passed by, knowing that, as a foreigner, his stomach wouldn’t have lasted ten minutes against the native bacteria. Having experienced what they called “Montezuma’s Revenge” on his first trip to D.F. a year ago, there was no question of him taking a chance like that again. Across the street an argument was taking place between two drivers, who’d got out of their battered and dirty cars to trade insults. Since their abandoned vehicles were holding up the traffic, the rather half-hearted battle (consisting entirely of feints and shouting) was accompanied by a cacophony of angry car-horns.

  La Torre was something of a landmark in the area, its exterior covered with tiles, and windows with external ornate grilles. A three-storey building with a peaked roof, and erected in the colonial era, it had been a haunt for literati of all stripes, novelists, poets and assorted hangers-on, since the 1950s. During the period in which La Condesa had been gentrified some of La Torre’s former seedy charm had diminished and, as well as selling books, it had diversified into stocking DVDs and compact discs upstairs. Part of the ground floor had been converted into an expensive eatery, whilst the first floor now half occupied a café-bar from where drinkers could peer over the centre of the storey down into the level below, watching diners pick at their food and browsers lingering over the books on shelves and on the display tables. As a consequence of these improvements, the space for poetry readings upstairs had been entirely done away with, and Juan San Isidro haunted its former confines as if in eternal protest at the loss of his own personal stage.

  As Armstrong entered he glanced up at the floor above and saw the poet already waiting for him, slumped over a table and tracing a circle on its surface with an empty bottle of Sol beer. His lank black hair hung down to his shoulders, obscuring his face, but even so his immense bulk made him unmistakable.

  Armstrong’s gaze roved around and sought out the stairway entrance. He caught sight of the only other customer in La Torre, besides himself and San Isidro. This other person was dressed in a dark grey linen suit, quite crumpled, with threadbare patches at the elbows and frayed cuffs. The necktie he wore was a plain navy blue and quite unremarkable. His shoes were badly scuffed and he must have repeatedly refused the services of the D.F.’s innumerable boleros. They keenly polished shoes on their portable foot-stands for anyone who had a mere dozen pesos to spare. The man had an olive complexion, was perfectly clean-shaven, and about forty years old. His short black hair was parted neatly on the left-hand side. He had the features of a mestizo, a typical Mexican of mingled European and Native Indian blood. There was something in the way that he carried himself that told of a gentleman down on his luck, perhaps even an impoverished scholar given his slight stoop, an attribute often acquired by those who pore over books or manuscripts year after year.

  He was browsing through the books on display that were published by the likes of Ediciones Valdemar and Ediciones Siruela that had been specially imported from Spain. These were mostly supernatural fiction titles, for which many Mexican readers had a discerning fondness. Armstrong was glad, for his own anthologies invariably were comprised of tales depicting the weird and uncanny, a market that, at least in the Anglophone countries, seemed to have self-destructed after a glut of trashy horror paperbacks in the 1980s. But these were not junk, they were works by the recognised masters and a quick glance over the classics available for sale here in mass-market form would have drawn the admiration of any English or American devotee. Here were books by Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, M.R. James and Ambrose Bierce, amongst dozens of others. Most striking however, was the vast range of collections available written by H. P. Lovecraft. The browsing man in the dark suit picked up one after the other, almost reluctant to return each to its proper place, although if his down-at-heel appearance were an indication, their price was surely beyond his limited means. New books in Mexico are scarcely ever cheap.

  Armstrong looked away. He could not understand why this rather ordinary gentleman had stirred his imagination. He was, after all, merely typical of the sort of book-addict found anywhere and at any time. Meanwhile Juan San Isidro had noticed Víctor’s arrival and called down to him.

  “¡Ay, Víctor, quiero más chela! Lo siento, pero no tengo dinero.”

  Armstrong sighed, and made his way up the stairs.

  When they were eventually sat opposite one another, Armstrong with a bottle of Indio and San Isidro with a fresh bottle of Sol, the Mexican switched from Spanish to English. He was always keen to take whatever opportunity he could to converse in the language. A huge bear of a man, he’d recently grown a shaggy goatee beard and the T-shirt he wore bore the logo of some outlandish band called “Control Machete”, whose music Armstrong did not know and did not want to know. Years ago Armstrong had foolishly mentioned San Isidro’s literary efforts to the publisher of a small press imprint in California who was looking for cosmic or outré verse. The result had been a chapbook with a selection of San Isidro’s Aztec-influenced work translated into English, and thereafter Armstrong had never been able to entirely shake off his “discovery”.

  “So,” he said, “how are things with you? Still editing those antologías?”

  “There’s scarcely any money in them, Juan,” Armstrong replied, “unless I’ve managed to wrangle something original out of Steve King, the publishers want to nail my balls to the wall.”

  “You know him? King? Do you think he’d give me a loan? He’s very rich, no? Help out a struggling brother artist?”

  Armstrong tried not to smile inappropriately. He could only imagine how quickly San Isidro would piss away any handouts he’d receive on booze. No one other than their agents, accountants, lawyers or publishers milks cash-cow authors.

  “He’s a busy man. I don’t think he’d appreciate my…”

  “You mean he’s a pinche cabrón. Kee
ps his money up his culo where no one else can get at it. That’s why todos los gringos walk around with their legs apart, like cowboys, no? All those dollar bills stuffed in there.”

  Armstrong was relieved to be British. Even liberal Americans who came south, seeking to atone for the recent sins of NAFTA and a long history of land grabbing, were objects of ridicule here. They might get away with such conscience posturing in the north, in cities like Monterrey that were closer to the border and which looked to rich U.S. states like Texas for inspiration, but in Mexico D.F. gringos are only ever pinches gringos and no amount of self-loathing or atonement on their part could ever erase the fact. The British, on the other hand, despite their Imperial past, were redeemed by virtue of having given the Beatles and association football to the world.

  “Why did you want to see me, Juan?” Armstrong asked, taking out his packet of Faros and putting them on the table. His companion looked at the cheap brand with amused contempt. Nevertheless, this attitude did not stop him from smoking them.

  “I want you to take a look at some cuentos,” San Isidro replied, puffing away on the cigarette he’d taken. “Read them and make me an offer. They’re in your line of work.”

  He delved into a shoulder bag lying underneath the table and took out a pile of papers, individuated into sections by rubber bands, and handed them over.

  “I thought you didn’t write short stories,” Armstrong said.

  “I didn’t write them. I’m acting as the exclusive agent. They’re in English, as you see, and they’re the type of horror stories you like. I handle all his stuff.”

  “Who’s this author,” Armstrong said, looking at the top sheet, “Felipe López? I can’t say I’ve heard of him.”

  “El señor López has only been writing for a couple of years. He’s my personal discovery, like you discovered me, no? Es un autor auténtico, not some hack. Mira al cabellero down there, the one who’s looking through the books? That’s el señor López. He doesn’t want to meet you until you’ve read his stuff. I told him I knew you, and that you weren’t the same as all those other culeros who’d rejected him.”