New Cthulhu 2: More Recent Weird

by Elizabeth Bear

  Rick said, “Maybe it’s a Mob thing.”

  “What?” Connie looked across the table at him, slouched back in his chair, arms folded over his chest.

  “I said, maybe it’s a Mob thing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He straightened. “Maybe it’s part of someone who, you know, messed with the Mob. Or someone they had a contract on.”

  “Like what—a finger?”

  “Finger, hand—proof that the job was done.”

  “Seriously?”

  He shrugged.

  “It’s a possibility.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know what?”

  “I don’t know—I mean, the Mob? Transporting—what? Severed body parts in medical coolers? Wasn’t that a movie?”

  “Was it?”

  “Yes—we saw it together. It was on TNT or TBS or something. Joe Pesci was in it. Remember: he’s a hit man and he’s got these heads in a duffle bag—”

  “Eight Heads in a Duffel Bag.”

  “That’s it!”

  “So there was a movie. What does that prove?”

  “It’s just—”

  “Or maybe it’s some kind of black market thing, a kidney for sale to the highest bidder, no questions asked.”

  “Isn’t that an urban legend?”

  “Where do you think these things come from?”

  “I—”

  “Look—all I’m saying is, we’ve exhausted the legitimate avenues, so it makes sense to consider other possibilities.”

  Connie took a breath. “Granted. But we don’t even know what’s inside the cooler—if there’s anything in it.”

  “You’re the one who said we shouldn’t open it.”

  “I know. It’s—if there’s something in it, then we need to be careful about not contaminating it.”

  “Are you listening to yourself? We don’t know if there’s anything in the cooler, so we shouldn’t be too concerned about it, but we shouldn’t open it, in case there is something in there. What are we supposed to do?”

  Before she could answer, Rick pushed himself up from his chair and stalked to the refrigerator, the bottles in whose door rattled as he yanked it open. Connie bit the remark ready to leap off her tongue. Instead, she stood and leaned over to have another look at the square sticker on the cooler’s lid. There were no identifying names on the label, no hospital or transport service logos, no barcode, even, which, in the age of global computer tracking, struck her as stranger than the absence of a corporate ID. There were only four or five lines of smeared black ink, unintelligible except for one word that she and Rick had agreed read “Howard” and another that he guessed was “orchid” but of which Connie could identify no more than the initial “o.” Now, as her gaze roamed over the ink blurred into swirls and loops, she had the impression that the words which had been written on this sticker hadn’t been English, the letters hadn’t been any she would have recognized. Some quality of the patterns into which the writing had been distorted suggested an alphabet utterly unfamiliar, which might smear into a configuration resembling “Howard” or “orchid” by the merest coincidence.

  God, you’re worse than Rick. She resumed her seat as he returned from the fridge, an open bottle of Magic Hat in hand. Not that she wanted a drink, exactly, but his failure to ask her if she did sent Connie on her own mission to the fridge. They were out of hard cider, dammit. She had intended to stop at Hannaford for a quick shop on the way home, then the cooler had appeared and obscured all other concerns. They were almost out of milk, too, and butter. She selected a Magic Hat for herself and swung the door shut.

  Rick had set his beer on the table and was standing with his back to her, bent forward slightly, his arms out, his hands on the cooler.

  “Rick?” Connie said. “What are you doing?”

  “Is that a trick question?”

  “Very funny,” she said, crossing the kitchen to him. He was staring at the cooler as if he could will its contents visible. He said, “We have to open it.”

  “But if there’s something inside it—”

  “I know, I know. I can’t see any other choice. We called Wiltwyck, and they didn’t know anything about it. Neither did Penrose or Albany Med or Westchester Med. The transport services they gave us the numbers for weren’t missing any shipments—the one said they aren’t even using coolers like this anymore. The cops were useless. Hell, that guy at the sheriff’s thought it was probably just someone’s cooler. Maybe there’ll be some kind of information inside that’ll tell us where this is supposed to go.”

  “What if it’s a Mob thing?”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “No, but I could be wrong, in which case, what would we do?”

  “Get rid of it as quickly as possible. Burn it. I don’t think there’s any way it could be traced to us.”

  To her surprise, Connie said, “All right. Go ahead.”

  Rick didn’t ask if she were sure. He pressed in the catches on the lid and slid it back. As Connie inclined toward it, he drew the cooler toward them. It scraped against the table; its contents shifted with a sound like gravel rasping. Connie had been anticipating a strong odor washing out of the cooler’s interior, raw meat full of blood; instead, there was the faintest blue hint of air long-chilled and another, even fainter trace of iodine. Rick’s arm was blocking her view; she nudged him. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Let me see.”

  He shifted to the right. The cooler was full of ice, chips of it heaped in shining piles around, around—

  She registered the color first, the dark purple of a ripe eggplant, shot through with veins of lighter purple—blue, she thought, some shade of blue. It was maybe as wide as a small dinner plate, thicker at the center than at its scalloped circumference. At five—no, six spots around its margin, the surface puckered, the color around each spot shading into a rich rose. The texture of the thing was striated, almost coarse.

  “What the fuck?”

  “I know—right?”

  “Rick—what is this?”

  “A placenta?”

  “That is not a placenta.”

  “Like you’ve seen one.”

  “As a matter of fact, I have. There was a show on Lifetime—I can’t remember what it was called, but it was about women giving birth, in living color, no detail spared. I saw plenty of placentas, and trust me, that is not a placenta.”

  “Okay, it’s not a placenta. So what is it?”

  “I—is it even human?”

  “You’re saying what? That it’s an animal?”

  “I don’t know—some kind of jellyfish?”

  “Looks too solid, doesn’t it? Besides, wouldn’t you store a jellyfish in water?”

  “I guess.”

  Rick started to reach into the cooler. Connie grabbed his wrist. “Jesus! What are you doing?”

  “I thought I’d take it out so we could have a better look at it.” He tugged his hand free.

  “You don’t know what it is.”

  “I’m pretty sure it isn’t someone’s kidney.”

  “Granted, but you can’t just—it could be dangerous, toxic.”

  “Really.”

  “There are animals whose skin is poisonous. Haven’t you heard of Poison Dart Frogs?”

  “Oh.” He lowered his hand. “Fair enough.” He stepped away from the cooler. “Sweetie—what is this?”

  “Well, I’m pretty sure we can say what it isn’t. I doubt there’s anyone whose life depends on receiving this, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t attached to any Mob informer. Nor was it feeding a fetus nutrients for nine months. That leaves us with—I don’t have the faintest idea. Some kind of animal.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Connie shrugged. “The world’s a big place. There are all kinds of crazy things living at the bottom of the ocean. Or it could be from someplace else—deep underground. Maybe it’s a new discovery th
at was being transported to a museum.”

  Rick grunted. “Okay. Let’s assume this was on its way to an eager research scientist. What’s our next move?”

  “Another round of phone calls, I guess.”

  “You want to start on that, and I’ll get dinner going?”

  She wasn’t hungry, but she said, “Sure.”

  Rick reached for the cooler. “Relax,” he said as she tensed, ready to seize his arms. Steadying the cooler with his left hand, he closed it with the right. The lid snicked shut.

  No surprise: she dreamed about the thing in the cooler. She was in Rick’s father’s room at the nursing home (even asleep, she was unable to think of him as “Gary” or “Mr. Wilson,” let alone “Dad”). Rick’s father was in the green vinyl recliner by the window, his face tilted up to the sunlight pouring over him in a way that reminded Connie of a large plant feeding on light. The green Jets sweatsuit he was wearing underscored the resemblance. His eyes were closed, his lips moving in the constant murmur that had marked the Alzheimer’s overwhelming the last of his personality. In the flood of brightness, he looked younger than fifty-eight, as if he might be Rick’s young uncle, and not the father not old enough for the disease that had consumed him with the relentless patience of a python easing itself around its prey.

  Connie was standing with her back to the room’s hefty dresser, the top of which was heaped with orchids, their petals eggplant and rose. The air was full of the briny smell of seaweed baking on the beach, which she knew was the flowers’ scent.

  Although she hadn’t noticed him enter the room, Rick was kneeling in front of his father, his hands held up and out as if offering the man a gift. His palms cupped the thing from the cooler. Its edges overflowed his hands. In the dense sunlight, the thing was even darker, more rather than less visible. If the scene in front of her were a photograph, the thing was a dab of black paint rising off its surface.

  “Here,” Rick said to his father. “I brought it for you.” When his father did not respond, Rick said, “Dad.”

  The man opened his eyes and tilted his head in his son’s direction. Connie didn’t think he saw what Rick was offering him. He croaked, “Bloom.”

  “Beautiful,” Rick said.

  His father’s eyes narrowed, and his face swung toward Connie. He was weeping, tears coursing down his cheeks like lines of fire in the sunlight. “Bloom,” he said.

  Almost before she knew she was awake, she was sitting up in bed. Although she was certain it must be far into the night, one of those hours you only saw when the phone rang to announce some family tragedy, the digital clock insisted it was two minutes after midnight. She had been asleep for an hour. She turned to Rick and found his side of the bed empty.

  There was no reason for her heart to start pounding. Rick stayed up late all the time, watching Nightline or Charlie Rose. For the seven years Connie had known him, he had been a light sleeper, prone to insomnia, a tendency that had worsened with his father’s unexpected and sudden decline. She had sought him out enough times in the beginning of their relationship to be sure that there was no cause for her to leave the bed. She would find him on the couch, bathed in the TV’s glow, a bag of microwave popcorn open on his lap. So prepared was she for him to be there that, when she reached the bottom of the stairs and discovered the living room dark, something like panic straightened her spine. “Rick?” she said. “Honey?”

  Of course he was in the kitchen. She glimpsed him out of the corner of her eye the same instant he said, “I’m in here.” By the streetlight filtering through the window, she saw him seated at the kitchen table, wearing a white T-shirt and boxers, his arms on the table, his hands on the keyboard of his father’s laptop, which was open and on. The cooler, which he had pushed back to make room for the computer, appeared to be closed. (She wasn’t sure why that detail made her heart slow.) She walked down the hallway to him, saying, “Couldn’t sleep, huh?”

  “Nah.” His eyes did not leave the computer screen. “You’re like this every time we visit your Dad.”

  “Am I? I guess so.”

  She rubbed his back. “You’re doing all you can for him. It’s a good place.”

  “Yeah.”

  On the laptop’s screen, a reddish sphere hung against a backdrop of stars. Connie recognized the painting from the NASA website, and the next picture Rick brought up, of a rough plane spread out under a starry sky, at the center of which a cluster of cartoonishly fat arrows identified a handful of the dots of light as the sun and planets of solar system. A third image showed eight green circles arranged concentrically around a bright point, all of it inside one end of an enormous red ellipse.

  The screen after that was a photo of a massive stone monument, a rectangular block stood on its short end, another block laid across its top to form a T-shape. The front of the tall stone was carved with a thick line that descended from high on the right to almost the bottom of the left, where it curved back right again; in the curve, a representation of a four-legged animal Connie could not identify crouched. The image that followed was another painting, this one of a trio of circular structures set in the lee of a broad hill, the diameter of each defined by a thick wall, the interior stood with T-shaped monoliths like the one on the previous screen.

  Rick sped through the next dozen screens, long rows of equations more complex than any Connie had encountered in her college math class, half of each line composed of symbols she thought were Greek but wasn’t sure. When he came to what appeared to be a list of questions, Rick stopped. Connie could read the first line: Twelve thousand year orbit coincides with construction of Gobekli Tepe: built in advance of, or in response to, seeding?

  Oh God, Connie thought. She said, “You want to come to bed?”

  “I will. You go ahead.”

  “I don’t want you sitting up half the night feeling guilty.”

  He paused, then said, “It isn’t guilt.”

  “Oh? What is it?”

  He shook his head. “I had a dream.”

  Her mouth went dry. “Oh?”

  He nodded. “I was sitting here with my Dad. We were both wearing tuxedoes, and the table had been set for some kind of elaborate meal: white linen tablecloth, candelabra, china plates, the works. It was early in the morning—at least, I think it was, because the windows were pouring light into the room. The plates, the cutlery, the glasses—everything was shining, it was so bright. For a long time, it felt like, we sat there—here—and then I noticed Dad was holding his fork and knife and was using them to cut something on his plate. It was this,” he nodded at the cooler, “this thing. He was having a rough time. He couldn’t grip the cutlery right; it was as if he’d forgotten how to hold them. His knife kept slipping, scraping on the plate. The thing was tough; he really had to saw at it. It was making this noise, this high-pitched sound that was kind of like a violin. It was bleeding, or leaking, black syrupy stuff that was all over the plate, the knife, splattering the tablecloth, Dad’s shirt. Finally, he got a piece of the thing loose and raised it to his mouth. Only, his lips were still trembling, you know, doing that silent mumble, and he couldn’t maneuver the fork past them. The piece flopped on the table. He frowned, speared it with his fork again, and made another try. No luck. The third time, the piece hit the edge of the table and bounced off. That was it. He dropped the cutlery, grabbed the thing on his plate with both hands, and brought it up. His face was so eager. He licked his lips and took a huge bite. He had to clamp down hard, pull the rest away. There was a ripping noise. The thing’s blood was all over his lips, his teeth, his tongue; his mouth looked like a black hole.”

  Connie waited for him to continue. When he didn’t, she said, “And?”

  “That was it. I woke up and came down here. There was nothing on TV, so I thought I’d get out Dad’s laptop and . . . It’s like a connection to him, to how he used to be, you know? I mean, I know he was already pretty bad when he was working on this stuff, but at least he was there.”

&nb
sp; “Huh.” Connie considered relating her own dream, decided instead to ask, “What do you think your dream means?”

  “I don’t know. I dream about my Dad a lot, but this . . . ”

  “Do you—”

  “What if it’s from another planet?”

  “What?”

  “Maybe the dream’s a message.”

  “I don’t—”

  “That would explain why there’s no record of it, anywhere, why none of the museums knows anything about it.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Connie said. “If this thing were some kind of alien, you’d expect it’d be all over the news.”

  “Maybe it’s dangerous—or they aren’t sure if it’s dangerous.”

  “So they pack it into a cooler?”

  “They’re trying to fly under the radar.”

  “I don’t know—that’s so low, it’s underground.”

  “Or . . . what if a couple of guys found it—somewhere, they were out hunting or fishing or something—and they decided to take it with them in the cooler they’d brought for their beers?”

  “Then why the red cross on the cooler? What about the sticker?”

  “Coincidence—they just happened to take that cooler.”

  “I could—look, even if that is the case, if a couple of hunters came upon this thing, I don’t know, fresh from its meteorite, and emptied out their oddly decorated cooler so they could be famous as the first guys to encounter E.T., how does that help us know what to do?”

  “We could call NASA.”

  “What? Would they send out the Men in Black?”

  “I’m serious!” Rick almost shouted. “This is serious! Jesus! We could be—we have—why can’t you take this seriously?” He turned to glare at her as he spoke.

  “Rick—”

  “Don’t ‘Rick’ me.”

  Connie inhaled. “Honey—it’s late. We’re tired. Let’s not do this, okay? Not now. I’m sorry if I’m not taking this seriously. It’s been a long day. Whatever it is, the thing in the cooler’ll keep until we get some sleep. If you want, we can call NASA first thing in the morning. Really—I swear.”

  “I—” She readied herself for the next phase of his outburst, then, “You’re right,” Rick said. “You’re right. It has been a long day, hasn’t it?”