I lay in bed, chilled and shaking, Glenn a dead lump next to me. The accent lamp in the hall gave a warm, albeit fragile yellow light. Without shifting to face me like he normally would’ve, Glenn said, “Tommy fell into a hole in the woods. That’s how he really died.”
I said, “Yeah. Vicky told me. You fucker.”
Glenn still didn’t move. I couldn’t recall him ever being so still. He said, “I figured that’s why you’ve been so bent. Then you know why we kept quiet.”
“No, I don’t.”
The light flickered and now Glenn’s head turned. “True. You don’t. I apologize. I should’ve come clean long ago. Tommy was so deep into black magic it blew my mind when I finally caught on. He always sneered at the lightweight stuff me and Dane fooled with. I really believed he was just a redneck who made good. Then we hit some extra heavy duty acid one night and he bared his soul. We were on spring break and spending a weekend in the Mojave with some of the guys and he got to rambling. His parents were basically illiterate, but he had well-to-do relatives on his mom’s side. Scholars. He lived a few summers with them and they turned him on to very, very dark occultism. Tommy intimated he’d taken part in a human sacrifice. He lied to impress me, I’m sure.”
I wasn’t sure. “What did they do? The relatives.”
“His uncle was a professor. World traveler who went native. Hear Tommy tell it, the old dude was a connoisseur of the black arts, but specialized in blood rituals and necromancy. Tommy said the man could . . . Conjure things. Doctor Faustus style.”
“I might’ve laughed at that the other day,” I said. The lamp flickered again and shadows raced across the wall. Glenn said, “Tommy showed me some moldy manuscript pages he carried in his pocket. They were wrinkled and obviously torn from a book. The words were written in Latin—he actually read Latin! He wouldn’t say what they meant, but he consulted them later when we went on our trip into the Black Hills near Olympia. Looking back, I get the feeling maybe he had his own Black Guide.”
“It could’ve been a possum stew recipe from his grandma’s cookbook,” I said. “The motherfucker didn’t come visit me in the night. I dreamed that when I was rocked off my ass. The guide, well there’s a coincidence. I’m not going to buy a conspiracy theory about how dead Tom made sure we found it at ye old knickknack shop. I sure as fuck ain’t going to worry my pretty head over what we saw on the mountain. I’m sorry for Vicky and Dane. We’re okay, though and I say let sleeping dogs lie.” I breathed heavily and stared at the hall lamp so hard my eyes hurt, despising my fearfulness.
“Ignoring those sleeping dogs is what got us here. Tommy talked and talked that enchanted evening, had a scary expression as he watched me. His eyes were so strange. I got paranoid thinking he wasn’t really high, that this was a test. Or a trap. I remember him saying there was ‘sure as God made little green apples’ life out there. He pointed at the stars. Cold night in the desert and those stars were right on top of us in their billions. He wanted to meet them, except he was afraid. His uncle warned him the only thing an advanced species would want from us would be our meat and bones.”
Glenn didn’t say anything for a while. He rubbed my arm, which still ached fiercely. Finally, he said, “Everything returned to normal after the Mojave trip—he didn’t mention our chat, didn’t seem to recall letting me in on his secret life. A few months later it was summer vacation and we were knocking around Seattle. I came home to visit my folks and the others tagged along. Tommy put together an overnight hike and away we went. I saw him fall into the hole as we were walking way up in the hills along a well-beaten path. Mountain bikers used it a lot, even though it’s a remote spot. Dane and Victor were joking around and I glanced over my shoulder exactly as he fell. I didn’t tell those two what I saw. I made a show of yelling for him until Dane found the sinkhole. Course we called in the troops. I’m sure Vicky told you what happened next. Cops, Fish and Wildlife, everybody we could think of. No luck. That pit just dropped into the center of the Earth and it was impossible to help him. To this day nobody but me is completely sure that’s where Tommy disappeared—it just makes the most sense. Him tripping into a bottomless pit is awful, yeah. Not as awful as other possibilities, though.”
The lamp clicked off and on three times and I raised myself against the headboard and clutched the coverlet to my chin. I lost interest in finally getting to the bottom of Tommy’s death and the weird conspiracy to sanitize its circumstances. “Holy shit—Glenn, please stop. I’ve got a bad feeling.” I had a sense of impending doom, in fact. I could easily envision a colossal meteor descending from on high and smashing the house to bits. Daulton fluffed into a ball of bristling fur and scooted under the bed where he hissed and growled.
Glenn kept rubbing my arm and the light flickered again and again, and the filament ticked like a rattler. “I never told the guys what I really saw that day. Tommy didn’t fall. He was snatched by a hand . . . not a hand that belonged to any regular person I’ve seen. An arm, fish-belly white, shot up and caught his belt and yanked him in . . . and the hand had . . . claws. He didn’t even scream. He didn’t make a peep. It happened so fast I thought it couldn’t be real. I dreamed it like you dreamed Tommy was in the living room after the party.”
“I can’t believe this shit,” I said. What had Tommy expected to find in the Black Hills? Another ancient ruin hidden from all but the initiated and the doomed? I was getting colder. I wanted to ask Glenn if he still loved Tommy. Nothing he said would’ve mattered and so I comforted myself with smoldering resentment.
“When we were in the dolmen, did you get a look at that guy’s face?” he said.
“The dude in the crevice? That freaky inbred motherfucker who got separated from all his Ozarks kin? No.”
“I did,” Glenn said. “It was him.”
The light went off and stayed off.
14.
I woke with dry mouth. Glenn’s covers were thrown back and his side of the sheets were cool. I listened to the creaks of the house. The power was out. Glenn laughed, downstairs. He said something unintelligible. In my semi-conscious state, I assumed he’d called the power company and was sharing a joke with the poor sap manning the phone center.
Fuzzy-headed, I put on my robe and negotiated the hall and the stairs. A bit of starlight and the tip of the crescent moon gleamed through the windows. Glenn had lighted a candle in the kitchen and it led me through the haunted woods to the doorway. It was only a single candle, a fat one I’d bought at a bookstore for my office but stuck in a kitchen drawer for emergencies instead, and so the room remained mostly in gloom.
She slouched at the opposite end of the dining table. She was naked and lush and repellently white. Her hair was long and thick and black. Her hands rested on the table, and her fingers and cracked, sharp nails were far too long and thin. Moderor de Caliginis lay open before her. She lazily riffled pages and smiled at me. I couldn’t see her teeth.
Glenn stood to her left in the breakfast nook, the toes of his slippers in the light, his shape otherwise indistinct. He waited mutely.
“Who are you?” I said to her, although I already knew. The covetous way she handled the guide made it clear.
“Three guesses,” she said in a perfectly normal, good-humored tone.
“Rose, I presume,” I said, voice cracking and ruining my attempt at bravado. “How kind of you to drop in.” The gun was in my coat in the living room. I thought I might make it if I ran and if I didn’t trip over anything.
“How kind of you to open your home. Thank you for the lovely note. Yes, I had a fabulous visit to the Peninsula—and points beyond. That saying, a nice place to visit . . . Well, I liked it so much, I decided to naturalize.”
“Glenn,” I said. I was exhausted. It came over me in a wave—the seasick feeling of giving way too much blood at the nurse’s station. I resisted a sudden compulsion to collapse into a chair and lay my head on the table. My fingers and toes tingled. I gripped the door frame for balance. “G
lenn,” I tried again, weak, hopeless. Glenn said nothing.
“He’s not for you. He belongs to Tommy,” Rose said. “He belongs to us. We love him. You were never part of their inner circle, were you, Willem? Second best for Glenn. His vanilla life after graduation into the real world of jobs, bills, routine sex. No thrills, not like college.” She closed the book and traced the broken ring on its cover. “Alas, nice guys do indeed finish last. I, however, believe in second chances and do-overs. Would you like a do-over, Willem? You’ll need to decide whether to come along with us and see the sights. Or not. You are more than welcome to join the fun. Goodness knows, I hope you do. Tommy does too.”
The cellar door had swung open while I was distracted. Rose stood and took Glenn’s hand. They passed over the threshold. He turned and stared at me. Behind him was infinite blackness. Her arms, pale as death, emerged from that blackness and draped his shoulders. She caressed him. She whispered in his ear, and in mine.
The pull was ineluctable; I released the door frame and crossed the room in slow, tottering steps like a man wading into high tide. The universe whirled and roared. I came within kissing distance of my love and looked deep into his dull, wet eyes, gazed into the bottomless pit. His face was inert but for the eyes. Maybe that was really him waiting somewhere down there in the dark.
“Oh, honey,” I said, and stepped back and shut the door.
15.
I sold the house and moved across the country. For nearly a decade, I’ve lived on a farm in Kingston, New York with an artist who welds bed frames and puts them on display in galleries. We share the property with a couple of nanny goats, some chickens, two dogs, and Daulton II. I write my culture essays, although Burt makes enough neither of us needs a real job. Repairing the fences in the field, patching the shed roof, and making the odd repairs around the house keep me occupied, keep me from chewing my nails. Nothing can help me as I lie awake at night, unfortunately. That’s when I do the real damage to myself. Against my better judgment I mailed The Black Guide to Professor Berman, though I cursed him for a fool during our last email exchange.
Victor’s confined to an asylum and his doctor contacts me on occasion, hoping I’ll reveal what “massive trauma” befell his patient to precipitate his catastrophic break from reality. From what I gather, Victor keeps journals—dozens of them. He’s got a yen for astronomy and physics and at least one scientist thinks he’s a savant. Dane disappeared three years after our fateful trip and hasn’t resurfaced. His credit cards and bank accounts remain untouched. The cops asked me about this, too. I really don’t know, and I don’t want to, either.
Burt raised his eyebrows when I bought the .12 gauge shotgun a few months back and parked it by my side of the bed. I told him it was for varmints and he accepted that. There are cougars and bears and coyotes lurking in the nearby forest. He hasn’t a clue that when he’s away on his infrequent art show trips, I sit in our homey kitchen by the light of a kerosene lamp with the gun on the table and watch the small door leading into the cellar. The door is bolted, not that I’m convinced it matters. It began a few weeks ago and only happens when Burt’s out of town. He’s not a part of this, thank God for small favors—that’s why they bide their time, of course. The dogs used to lie at my feet and whine. Lately, the normally loyal pair won’t come into the room after dark, and I don’t blame them.
Burt’s in the city for the weekend. He’s mixing with the royalty and pining for home, has said as much in no less than a half dozen phone messages. I sit here in the gathered gloom, with a bottle of scotch, a glass, and a loaded gun. Really, it’s pointless. I sip scotch and wait for the soft, insistent knocks against the cellar door, for Glenn to whisper that he loves me. Guilt and loneliness have worked like acid on my insides. God help me, but more and more, I’m tempted to rack the slide and eject the shells, send them spinning across the floor. I’m tempted to leave the deadbolt unlocked. Then see what happens next.
Only a very rare affliction, of course, could bring about such vast and radical anatomical changes in a single individual after maturity—changes involving osseous factors as basic as the shape of the skull—but then, even this aspect was no more baffling and unheard-of than the visible features of the malady as a whole.
“The Shadow Over Innsmouth” . H. P. Lovecraft (1936)
THE TRANSITION OF ELIZABETH HASKINGS
Caitlín R. Kiernan
Elizabeth Haskings inherited the old house on Water Street from her grandfather. It would have passed to her mother, but she’d gone away to Oregon when Elizabeth was six years old, leaving her daughter with the old man. She’d said she would come back, but she never did, and after a while the letters stopped coming, and then the postcards stopped coming, too. And now Elizabeth Haskings is twenty-nine, and she has no idea whether her mother is alive or dead. It’s not something she thinks about very often. But she does understand why her mother left, that it was fear of the broad, tea-colored water of the Ipswich River, flowing lazily down to the salt marshes and the Atlantic. Flowing down to Little Neck and the deep channel between the mainland and Plum Island, finally emptying into the ocean hardly a quarter of a mile north of Essex Bay. Elizabeth understands it was the ruins surrounding the bay, there at the mouth of the Manuxet River—labeled the Castle Neck River on more recent maps, maps drawn up after the late 1920s. She’s never blamed her mother for running like that. But here, in Ipswich, she has the house and her job at the library, and in Oregon—or wherever she might have run—she’d have nothing at all. Here she has roots, even if they’re roots she does her best not to dwell on.
But this is only history, the brief annals of a young woman’s life. Relevant, certainly, but only as prologue. What happened in the town that once ringed Essex Bay, the strange seaport town that abruptly died one winter eighty-four years ago, where her grandfather lived as a boy.
It’s a Saturday night in June, and on most Saturday nights Elizabeth Haskings entertains what she quaintly thinks of as her “gentleman caller.” She enjoys saying, “Tonight, I will be visited by my gentleman caller.” Even though Michael’s gay. They work together at archives at the Ipswich Public Library, though, sometimes, he switches over to circulation. Anyway, he knows about Elizabeth’s game, and usually he brings her a small bouquet of flowers of one sort of another—calla lilies, Peruvian lilies, yellow roses fringed with red, black-eyed Susans—and she carefully arranges them in one of her several vases while he cooks her dinner. She feels bad that Michael is always the one who cooks, but, truthfully, Elizabeth isn’t a very good cook, and tends to eat from the microwave most nights.
They might watch a DVD afterwards, or play Scrabble, or just sit at the wide dinner table she also inherited from her grandfather and talk. About work or books or classical music, something Michael knew much more about than she did. Truth is, he often makes her feel inadequate, but she’s never said so. She loves him, and it’s not a simple, Platonic love, so she’s always kept it a secret, allowed their “dates” to seem like nothing more than a ritual between friends who seem to have more in common with one another than with most anyone else they know in the little New England town (whether that’s true or not). Sometimes, she lies in bed, thinking about him lying beside her, instead of thinking about all the things she works so hard not thinking about: the river, the sea, her lost mother, the gray, weathered boards and stone foundations where there was once a dingy town, etcetera and etcetera. It’s her secret, and she’ll never tell him.
Though Michael knows the most terrible secret that she’ll ever have, and she’s fairly sure that his knowing it has kept her sane for the five years they’ve known one another. In an odd way, it doesn’t seem fair, the same way his always cooking doesn’t seem fair. No, much worse than that. But him knowing this awful thing about her, and her never telling him how she feels. Still, Elizabeth assures herself, telling him that would only ruin their friendship. A bird in the hand being worth two in the bush, and in this instance it really is better not to h
ave one’s cake and eat it, too.
They don’t always play board games after dinner, or watch movies, or talk. Because there are nights that his just knowing her secret isn’t enough. There are nights it weighs so much Elizabeth imagines it might crush her flat, like the pressure at the bottom of the deep sea. Those nights, after dinner, they go upstairs to her bedroom, and he runs a porcelain bowl of water from the bathtub faucet. He adds salt to it while she undresses before the tall mirror affixed to one wall, taller than her by a foot, and framed with ornately carved walnut. She pretends that it’s only carved with acanthus leaves and cherubs. It’s easier that way. It doesn’t embarrass her for Michael to see her nude, not even with the disfigurements of her secret uncovered and plainly visible to him. After all, that’s why he’s returned from the bathroom with the bowl of salty water and a yellow sponge (he leaves the tap running). That’s why they’ve come upstairs, because she can’t always be the only one to look at herself.
“It’s bad tonight?” he asks.
She doesn’t answer straightaway. She’s never been one to complain if she can avoid complaining, and it’s bad enough that he knows. She doesn’t also want to seem weak. After a minute or half a minute she answers, “It’s been worse.” That’s the truth, even if it’s also a way evading his question.
“Betsy, just tell me when you’re ready.” He always calls her Betsy, never Elizabeth. She’s never called him Mike, though.
“I’m ready,” she says, leaning her neck to the left or to the right, exposing the pale skin below the ridge of her chin. But I’m not ready at all. I’m never ready, am I?
“Okay, then. I’ll be as gentle as I can.”
He’s always as gentle as anyone could be.
“You’ve never hurt me, Michael. Not even once.”
But she has no doubt he can see the discomfort in her eyes when the washcloth touches her skin. She tries hard not to flinch, but, usually, she flinches regardless.
New Cthulhu 2: More Recent Weird Page 13