New Cthulhu 2: More Recent Weird

by Elizabeth Bear

  I wiped drool from the corner of my mouth. The horrible vision of Glenn falling, shattering his spine, kept me from yelling. I said, “You’re him.”

  “Call me Tom.”

  “Tom. Can’t be.”

  “Didn’t say I was Tom. I said, call me Tom. Got any hooch? That’s a rhetorical question, by the way.”

  I shuffled to the kitchen and immediately noticed the cellar door ajar by several inches. The way down was via a narrow wooden staircase missing its railing. The cellar itself was small and cramped and mildewed and we never used it. I took a bottle of Stoli from the cupboard. I poured two tall water glasses a finger below the rims and carried them to the living room. In the back of my mind I’d hoped this would break the spell, that I’d snap out of this somnambulant state and find the visitor had evaporated. He hadn’t. Tom accepted the glass and drank half of it in one long gulp. I sat on the couch, elbows on my knees, clasping my own drink with both shaky hands. “Why you? I don’t get it. Why you and not my granny? Or my dad?” He shrugged. I said, “It’s because of that story tonight.”

  “Real double-breasted asshole, wasn’t I?” he said, and laughed. “Your granny and your old man don’t have anything to say to you, I guess. You’re making assumptions about where I come from, anyway. This ain’t like that. See wings on me? Horns?”

  “Maybe An American Werewolf in London made a bigger impression on me than I thought. Next time we meet your face will be a melted pizza.”

  “Loved that fucking movie. Damn, that nurse was hot. For months I got a boner every time I heard a shower running.”

  “She didn’t do much for me.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “What’s going on here?”

  “I could use a smog. Drinking and smoking go hand and hand. My old man was Black Irish. Like Glenn’s. We Black Irish smoke and drink and beat our wives.” Tommy laughed, grating and nasty.

  “Glenn quit,” I said. “I don’t smoke, either. Sorry.”

  Tom stared at me through the dark. His eyes glistened in the blue radiance of the TV, brightening, dimming, disappearing with each flicker of the screen. There was a hateful weight in that stare. “Dane smokes,” he said.

  “So, go ask him for a smog,” I said.

  He laughed again. “You wouldn’t like what happens.”

  I had another vision, a confused, menacing premonition that sickened me even though I couldn’t see anything but weird, jerky movement in the shadows, and a smash close-up of Dane’s eyes growing too wide. I walked into the kitchen and rummaged in a drawer until I found a pack of Kools that had been squished under the silverware tray since forever. I lighted a cigarette on the burner, returned to Tom and handed it over. He said, “Tastes shitty like a cigarette should.” I had set my glass on the arm of the couch. I drank the rest of the vodka while Tom smoked. A sulfurous stench filled the room. “You play with Ouija boards when you was a kid, Willem?”

  I nodded. “Sure, in high school. I bought one—Parker Brothers.”

  “Hell, all you need is a piece of construction paper and a glass. They work. Ouija boards. Other things too. Like that book you’ve been dicking with. It completes a circuit.”

  I snapped my fingers. “I knew it. The book.”

  “Right on, Ace. The book. The Black Guide. You been fucking around with it, haven’t you?”

  “If by fucking around with it, you mean reading it, then yeah. I have.”

  “C’mon, those drawings in the back—you didn’t copy some of them? Maybe scribbled a few of those weird doodads that look like hieroglyphics onto scratch paper. Tried to sound out some of those gobbledygook Latin phrases. You’re a nerd. Course you did.”

  He was right. I’d copied a diagram of a solar eclipse and its related alchemical symbols into my moleskin journal with the heavy enamel pen my younger brother bought me back when we were still talking. I’d also made dozens of curlicue doodles of the broken circle on the cover. There was something ominously compelling about that ring—it struck a chord on what I could only describe as an atavistic level. It spoke to my inner hominid and the hominid screeched and capered its distress. “What if I did? Did I do something wrong?” My voice was flat and metallic in my ears. I sounded strident and absurd.

  He said, “Remember the Golden Rules. Action equals reaction. The Crack that runs through everything stares into you. Big fish eats little fish. Night’s agents watch you, ape.”

  “Yeah? Why are you here? Why are you warning me and not your chums. Their idea to use the book for sight-seeing, not mine.”

  “I’m not here to warn anybody. I’m here to give you a good ol’ mindfucking, among other things. Think you found the book by accident? There are no accidents around here. Time is a ring. Everything and everyone gets squished under the wheel.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Then you, my friend, are an idiot. And friend, keep going the way you’re going and maybe a friend will slice your heart from your chest and take a bite out of it like a Washington’s Best in the name of The First Power. That’s how friends are.”

  “This an idiotic imaginary conversation,” I said. There wasn’t anything imaginary, however, about the searing alcohol in my burps, or the fact my head was wobbling, nor the flutter-flutter of my heart. “Shoo, fly, shoo.”

  Tom didn’t answer. The cherry of his cigarette dulled and blackened. A split second before his shape merged with the darkness, it changed. The room became cold. A woman said, There are frightful things. I couldn’t tell where the whisper originated. I finally gathered the courage to switch on the lamp and I was alone.

  Sleep was impossible. I made a cup of coffee and crept into my office and ran a search on the Kalamov Cavern, the Kalamov Dolmen, and Dr. Kalamov himself. There wasn’t a record of a dolmen of any kind in Washington. Boris Kalamov turned out to be no doctor at all, but a rather smarmy nineteenth century charlatan who faked his academic credentials in order to bolster extraordinary claims made in his series of faux scholarly books regarding naturalism and the occult. The good doctor’s fraudulent escapades came to a sad end thanks to French justice—he was convicted of some cryptic act of pagan barbarism and confined to a Parisian asylum for the remainder of his years. As to whether any of Dr. Kalamov’s treatises mentioned a cavern or dolmen on the Olympic Peninsula, I’d likely never know as all were long out of print. However, Mystery Mountain National Park was indeed where The Black Guide indicated, and open for business until mid-October.

  Glenn scrambled eggs for breakfast. He didn’t comment on my absence from bed. I spent enough late nights at the computer he scarcely noticed anymore. He was hung over—all of us were. Pale sunlight streamed through the window and illuminated our chalky faces as we sat at the kitchen table and sipped orange juice and picked at scrambled eggs. The whiteness of Glenn’s cheeks, the raccoon-dark circles of his blank eyes, startled me. My own hands shone, for a moment, gnarled and black-veined, as if from tremendous age. I gulped a whole glass of juice, coughing a bit, and when I looked again I saw it was only an illusion. I’d seen it before, watching Glenn sleep with the light illuminating him in such a way that his future self, the wrinkled senior citizen, was forecast.

  5.

  Glenn’s Land Rover was a rattletrap sky-blue hulk. He’d driven the rig exactly four times since purchasing it at an estate sale in Wenatchee some years prior. Normally, we tooled around in his Saab or rode the bus. The Land Rover had bench seats wide enough to host a football team, a huge cargo bed, and smelled of mold, rust, and cigarette smoke.

  “Hurray,” Victor said when Glenn backed it out of the garage. “Let’s get this safari started!”

  September was unseasonably warm. The Land Rover lacked modern amenities including a CD player and air conditioning. I sat in back with the window rolled down. Everybody wore off-the-rack Hawaiian shirts (a gag dreamed up by Dane) and sunglasses—designer shades for my companions; for me, a cheapo set I’d gotten at an airport gift shop. I also strapped on a pa
ir of steel-toed boots as I usually did when away from home. One never knew when one might need to stomp a mugger or other nefarious type. Victor wore a digital camera on a strap around his neck. While drinking one night, he’d confided parlaying his access (through Dane’s position) to the Broncos’ sideline into almost twenty-five hundred close-up pictures of the cheerleaders in action. He was toying with the notion of auctioning the album on the underground channels of the internet. I thought there were already plenty of candid cheerleader shots floating around the internet; then what did I know?

  The voyage started well—Victor even pronounced a soothsaying to that effect: “Sun and moon augur a favorable and erotically charged escapade!”

  I said goodbye to the cat—a neighbor would pop in and feed him every day—and locked the doors.

  The hiking trip to Mount Vernon was a relaxed affair as none of us were hardcore outdoorsmen. We had a picnic in the foothills and returned to the lodge well before dark, where we played pinochle with some other tourists, and drank beer until it was time to turn in for the night. Glenn and I got into bed. He typed on his computer while I labored over The Essential Victor Hugo—the Blackmore translation. My problem was less with Hugo than the nagging urge to dig The Black Guide from my suitcase and have another go at the procession of peculiar diagrams in the appendices and to attempt to tease more meaning from the cryptic entries and footnotes.

  I’d told Glenn about my encounter with Tom, careful to frame it as a weird dream. Glenn frowned and asked for more details. He was intrigued by the occult, fascinated to learn of the secret lives of the famous artists I studied. His interest in such matters waxed stronger than mine—alas, his patience for wading through baroque texts wasn’t equal to the task. Upon listening to the tale of Tom’s apparition, he’d muttered, “What does it mean?” He was too calm, obviously throttling a much more visceral reaction. Whether this deeper emotion was one of sympathy for my strange encounter, or worry that my screws were loose, I couldn’t tell. And I’d said, “I was drunk. It didn’t mean anything,” while thinking otherwise. Tom indeed referred to cigarettes as “smogs,” a fact I’d been unaware, and thus a detail that lent creepy and disturbing authenticity to the encounter. Dream or not, I hadn’t cracked the book for three days. I imagined it burning a hole in the case, a chunk of meteorite throbbing with sinister energy.

  The next day we spent a few hours at the Tacoma Museum of Glass, then soldiered on to Olympia for a desultory afternoon of wandering the streets and poking around the cafes and boutiques. While my companions were sipping ice coffees, I stepped into a used bookstore and investigated the regional history and travel sections. I got into a conversation with the clerk on duty, a bored ex-librarian who stirred to life when I showed her the guide. She adjusted her glasses and made ticking noises with her tongue as she flipped pages. “I’ve heard of these. Farmer’s Almanacs for pagans.”

  The ex-librarian was tall and thin and wore cat’s-eye glasses with pearly frames. Her hair was black and straight and her hands were bigger than Dane’s. She asked where I’d gotten the book and seemed disappointed that I couldn’t remember the name of the store in Seattle. I asked her what she made of the appendices, directing her to the drawings and arcane symbols.

  “Well, I’m sure I can’t say.” She shut the book with one hand in the resounding manner they must teach in Librarian School. She smiled obliquely. “Perhaps you should visit one of the individuals listed in Moderor de Caliginis. Such a person could doubtless tell you a few things.”

  Long shadows lay across the buildings when I rejoined everyone at the sidewalk table. My ice coffee had melted to a cup of slush. I envisioned the ex librarian’s hair swept in a raven’s wing over her bony shoulder, her simple blouse and Capri pants transformed into an elegant evening dress some vamp in a Hammer film might toss on for a wild night at the castle. Her smile smoldered in my imagination. Clammy and unnerved, I suggested we repair to the hotel and change for dinner.

  The Flintlock Hotel (est. 1895) was a brick and plaster building set back from Capitol Boulevard between a floral shop and an antique furniture store. The boulevard was lined with trees, and a mini U.S. flag rustled on every light pole between downtown and the Tumwater Bridge. Glenn had rented the McKinley Quarters. This was on the third floor, overlooking the street; a cozy number with a sitting room, bedroom, and two baths. There were all kinds of frontier photographs in frames and the place smelled like roses and Douglas fir. Dane and Victor got the Monroe Suite down the hall. Same décor, same layout, but a view of the alley.

  I told Glenn I had a migraine. Concerned, he volunteered to cancel our dinner plans and stay in to watch over me. I was having none of that—what I needed was a couple of hours rest, then, I’d join him and the boys for drinks and dancing at one of the clubs. He ordered warm milk and aspirin from room service and waited with me like a perfect dear until it arrived. He watched me take the aspirin and drink the milk. He felt my forehead then left with his jacket slung over his shoulder.

  I waited five minutes, then dialed the anthropologist at his office. We’d arranged to talk a couple of days beforehand. Dr. Berman answered on the second ring. “Look, this guide. It’s special.” His voice was rough. I pictured him: alone in the wing of large, decrepit campus museum, a disheveled academic wearing a tweed jacket and thick glasses, slouched in a chair at a desk cluttered with papers and a skull paperweight. His office was lighted by a single lamp. He was smoking a cigarette, a cheap bottle of whiskey in arm’s reach. “Say, any notes in the margins? Pages eighty through one-ten. That’d be the chapters on the Juniper Dunes, Olympia, the Mima Mounds . . . ”

  “Yeah,” I said. “So that was you. I can’t read your handwriting.”

  “Neither can I.” His chair creaked in the background. I got the impression he was pouring from his bottle and congratulated myself on being so damned clever.

  I said, “Why’d you get rid of the book?”

  “I didn’t. My assistant accidentally put it in a box of materials the department donated to the University of Washington. It was some months before I discovered the mistake. The university had no record of its arrival. If I may ask, where did you find it?” I told him. He said, “Odd. Well, perhaps I could inveigle you to return it to me. To be honest, it might fetch a considerable sum on the collector market. Likely more than I can afford.”

  “I’m not interested in money. Sure, I’ll send it back—after our vacation. Where did you come across the book?”

  “In the foothills of the Cascades. I was backpacking with friends. They knew of this cabin near an abandoned mine. Supposedly a trapper dwelt there in the 1940s. The place was remarkably intact, albeit vermin-infested. The book lay at the bottom of a rusty footlocker, buried beneath newspaper clippings and magazines. Passing strange. A hiker must’ve hidden it. I often ponder the scenario that led to such an act.” While he talked, I reflected that anthropologists and their ilk came by their reputations as tomb robbers honestly. He got cagey when I inquired after his experiences with the pagans mentioned in the book. “Ah, all I can say is some farmers here and there cleave to ancient customs. More country folk look to the sun, the moon, and the stars for succor than you might think. The nature spirits and the old gods. They don’t advertise, what with Western culture and Christianity’s persecution of such traditions.” This latter comment struck an unpleasant chord.

  I said, “The good folk don’t advertise, except in the little black book. You mean cults. Satanists?”

  “Those too, I suppose. I don’t know firsthand, but to my knowledge I never met any.”

  “My boyfriend tells me Washington State is a hotbed of Satanic worship,” I said. “By the way. Have you visited the Kalamov Dolmen?”

  “The what?”

  “Page, um, seventy-two. The Kalamov Dolmen on Mystery Mountain.”

  There was a long pause. “I don’t recall reading that entry. A dolmen? Hard to believe I’d miss something so important. Well, the guide has a peculi
ar . . . effect. The type is so tiny.” He hesitated and the bottle and glass clinked again. “This may sound, nutty, but be careful. As I said, I met decent folk on the main. User-generated content has its perils. There exists a certain potential for mischief on behalf of whomever anonymously recommends an attraction or service. Look sharp.”

  “Sure, Doc.” We said goodbye, then I blurted, “Oh, wait. I meant to ask—you happen to meet any of the folks who’ve owned the book? There’s a girl in your area . . . Rose. That’s her online persona.” I gave him the rundown of Rose’s journal entries.

  “Hm. Doesn’t ring any bells,” Dr. Berman said. “She found the book in Ellensburg? I taught there for a decade. I wonder if she was one of my students. A striking coincidence if so. Please, keep in touch.”

  We said goodbye again, for real.

  Tree branches scraped the window. A streetlamp illuminated the edges of the leaves. I checked my watch. The good doctor had seemed in a hurry to end the conversation. Maybe he knew more about the anonymous journalist than he admitted. I unzipped my suitcase and lifted Moderor de Caliginis in its swaddling cloth from amid my socks and underwear. I unwrapped the guide and set it on the table. “Boy, you do get around,” I said. A shiny black beetle, easily the size of my thumbnail, crawled from the lumpy pages. It scuttled across the tabletop and fell to the carpet, shriveled in death.

  6.

  I went downstairs to the lounge and started a tab with a double vodka on the rocks. The place was small and half full of patrons, yet full of mirrors, thus it appeared busy. Behind the bar there was a big photograph of three loggers standing in the sawn wedge of a redwood. The trio had short hair and handlebar mustaches. Two of them leaned on double-headed axes. The third logger stood a Swede saw on end so it rested against his shoulder. The men wore dirty long johns and suspenders. I finished my drink and the bartender set me up with another without my asking.