New Cthulhu 2: More Recent Weird

by Elizabeth Bear

  “Very. I can’t believe you aren’t exhausted.”

  “I am—believe me, I’m dead on my feet. It’s just, this thing—”

  “I understand—honest, I do. Why don’t you come up to bed? Maybe once you lie down—”

  “All right. You go up. I just need a minute more.”

  “For what?” she wanted to ask but didn’t, opting instead to drape her arms over his shoulders and press her cheek against his neck. “Love you,” she said into his skin.

  “Love you, too.”

  Her heart, settled after its earlier gallop, broke into a trot again as she padded down the hall to the stairs. The sight of Rick, once more staring at the computer screen, did nothing to calm it, nor did her lowering herself onto the bed, drawing the covers up. If anything, the thoroughbred under her ribs charged faster. She gazed at the bedroom ceiling, feeling the mattress resound with her pulse. Was she having a panic attack? Don’t think about it, she told herself. Concentrate on something else.

  Rick. What else was there beside him at the table, his fingers resting on the keyboard’s sides, sifting through his father’s last, bizarre project? Not the most reassuring behavior; although it was true: each monthly pilgrimage to his father left him unsettled for the rest of that day, sometimes the next. No matter how many times she told him that his dad was in the best place, that the home provided him a quality of care they couldn’t have (not to mention, his father’s insurance covered it in full), and no matter how many times Rick answered, “You’re right; you’re absolutely right,” she knew that he didn’t accept her reasoning, her reassurance. In the past, thinking that anger might help him to articulate his obvious guilt, she had tried to pick a fight with him, stir him to argument, but he had headed the opposite direction, descended into himself for the remainder of the weekend. She had suggested they visit his dad more often, offered to rearrange her work schedule so that they could go up twice a month, even three times. What good was being store manager, she’d said, if you couldn’t use it to your advantage? Albany wasn’t that far, and there were supposed to be good restaurants there; they could make a day of it, spend time with his father and have some time for themselves, too.

  No, no, Rick had said. It wasn’t fair for her to have to rework the schedule (arriving at which she’d compared to the circus act where the clown spins the plates on the ends of all the poles he’s holding while balancing his unicycle on the highwire). It wasn’t as if his dad would know the difference, anyway.

  He might not, Connie had said, but you will.

  It was no good, though; Rick’s mind had been made up before their conversation had started. He had never admitted it, but Connie was sure he was still traumatized by his father’s last months of—you couldn’t call it lucidity, exactly, since what he would call to yell at Rick about was pretty insane. Gary Wilson had been an astronomer, his most recent work an intensive study of the dwarf planets discovered beyond Neptune in the first decade of the twenty-first century: Eris, Sedna, and Orcus were the names she remembered. From what she understood, his research on the surface conditions on these bodies was cutting-edge stuff; he had been involved in the planning for a probe to explore some of them. Plenty of times, she and Rick had arrived at his apartment to take him to dinner, only to find him seated at his desk, staring at his computer monitor, at a painting of one or the other of the dwarf planets. At those moments, he had seemed a million miles away, further, as far as one of the spheres he studied. Hindsight’s clarity made it obvious he was experiencing the early effects of Alzheimer’s, but the spells had always broken the moment Rick shook him and said, “Dad, it’s us,” and it had been easier to accept her father-in-law’s assurance that he had merely been daydreaming.

  Not until his behavior became more erratic did it dawn on them that Rick’s father might not be well. His attention had been focused on one dwarf planet, Sedna, for months. Connie had sat beside him at the Plaza diner as he flipped over his mat and drew an asterisk in the center of it which he surrounded with a swirl of concentric circles, all of which he placed at one end of a great oval. “This is Sedna’s orbit,” he had said, jabbing his pen at the oval. “Twelve thousand years, give or take a few hundred. Over the next couple of centuries, it will be as close to us as it’s been during the whole of recorded history. The last time it was this near, well . . . ”

  “What?” Rick had said.

  “You’ll see,” his father had declared.

  They hadn’t, though, not directly. One of Rick’s father’s friends at the state university had phoned after a presentation during which the extent of Gary Wilson’s breakdown had become manifest. Connie had heard the lecture, herself, in person, on the phone, and in a long, rambling voicemail. She considered herself reasonably well-educated in a hold-your-own-at-Trivial-Pursuit kind of way, but Rick’s father’s discussion strained her comprehension. Almost thirteen thousand years ago, a comet had burst over the Great Lakes—yes, that was a controversial claim, but how else to explain the high levels of iridium, the nano-diamonds? The glaciers were already in retreat, you see; it was the right time, if you could measure time in centuries—millennia. This was when the Clovis disappeared—wiped out, or assimilated in some way, it was hard to say. You wouldn’t think a stone point much of a threat, but you’d be surprised. The drawings at Lascaux—well, never mind them. It’s what happens at Gobekli Tepe that’s important. Those curves on the stones—has anyone thought of mapping them onto Sedna’s orbit? The results—as for the shape of the monuments, those giant T’s, why, they’re perches, for the messengers.

  And so on. The thing was, while Rick’s father was propounding this lunatic hodgepodge of invention, he sounded as reasonable, as kindly, as he ever had. Perhaps that was because she hadn’t challenged him in the way that Rick did, tell him that his ideas were crazy, he was flushing his career down the toilet. Confronted by his son’s strenuous disbelief, Gary flushed with anger, was overtaken by storms of rage more intense than any she had witnessed in the seven years she had known him. He would stalk from their house and demand that Connie drive him home, then, once home, he would call and harangue Rick for another hour, sometimes two, until Rick reached his boiling point and hung up on him.

  The end, when it came, had come quickly: she had been amazed at the speed with which Rick’s father had been convinced to accept early retirement and a place in an assisted living facility. There had been a brief period of days, not even a full week, during which he had returned to something like his old self. He had signed all the papers necessary to effect his departure from the college and his relocation to Morrison Hills. He had spoken to Rick and Connie calmly, with barely a mention of Sedna’s impending return. Two days after he settled into his new, undersized room, Gary had suffered a catastrophic event somewhere in his brain that the doctors refused to call a stroke, saying the MRI results were all wrong for that. (Frankly, they seemed mystified by what had happened to him during the night.) Whatever its name, the occurrence had left him a few steps up from catatonic, intermittently responsive and usually in ways that made no sense. There was talk of further study, of sub-specialists being brought in, possible trips to hospitals in other states, but nothing, as yet, had come to pass. Connie doubted any of it would. There were more than enough residents of the facility who could and did vocalize their complaints, and less than enough staff to spare on a man whose tongue was so much dead weight.

  Harrowing as Rick’s father’s decline had been, she supposed she should be grateful that it had not stretched out longer than it had. From talking with staff at Morrison, she knew that it could take years for a parent’s worsened condition to convince them/their family that something had to be done. At the same time, though, Rick had been ambivalent about his father entering assisted living. There was enough room in the house for him: he could have stayed in the downstairs bedroom and had his own bathroom. But neither of them was available for—or, to be honest, up for—the task of caring for him. Rick’s consent to hi
s father’s move had been conditional; he had insisted and Connie had agreed that they would re-evaluate the situation in six months. Their contract had been rendered null and void by Gary’s collapse, which had left him in need of a level of care far beyond that for which either of them was equipped. However irrational the sentiment might be, Connie knew that Rick took his father’s crash as a rebuke from the universe for having agreed to send him away in the first place.

  Connie didn’t realize she had crossed over into sleep again until she noticed that the bedroom’s ceiling and walls had vanished, replaced by a night sky brimming with stars. Her bed was sitting on a vast plane, dimly lit by the stars’ collective radiance. Its dark red expanse was stippled and ridged, riven by channels; she had the impression of dense mud. That and cold: although she could not feel it on her skin, she sensed that wherever this was was so cold it should have frozen her in place, her blood crystallized, her organs chunks of ice.

  To her left, a figure was progressing slowly across the plane. It was difficult to be sure, but it looked like a man, dressed in black. Every few steps, he would pause and study the ground in front of him, occasionally crouching and poking it with one hand. Connie watched him for what might have been a long time. Her bed, she noticed, was strewn with orchids, their petals eggplant and rose. At last, she drew back the blanket, lowered herself onto the red mud, and set out toward him.

  She had expected the mud to be ice-brittle, but while it was firm under her feet, it was also the slightest bit spongy. She wasn’t sure how this could be. A glance over her shoulder showed the bed and its cargo of flowers unmoved. While she was still far away from him, she saw that the man ahead of her was wearing a tuxedo, and that he was Rick’s father. She was not surprised by either of these facts.

  In contrast to her previous dream of him, Gary Wilson stood tall, alert. He was following a series of depressions in the plane’s surface, each a concave dip of about a foot, maybe six feet from the one behind it. At the bottom of the depressions, something dark shone through the red mud. When he bent to prod one, he licked his finger clean afterwards. Connie could feel his awareness of her long before she drew near, but he waited until she was standing beside him to say, “Well?”

  “Where is this?”

  “Oh, come now,” he said, disappointment bending his voice. “You know the answer to that already.”

  She did. “Sedna.”

  He nodded. “The nursery.”

  “For those?” She pointed at the depression before him. “Of course.”

  “What are they?”

  “Embryos.” The surface of his cheek shifted. “I don’t understand.”

  “Over here.” He turned to his left and crossed to another row of depressions. Beside the closest was a small red and white container—a cooler, its top slid open. To either side, the depressions were attended by thermoses, lunchboxes, larger coolers, even a small refrigerator. Rick’s father knelt at a dip and reached his hand down into the mud, working his fingers in a circle around whatever lay half-buried in it. Once it was freed, he raised it, using his free hand to brush the worst of the mud from it. “This,” he said, holding out to Connie a copy of the thing she and Rick had found on the Thruway. Its surface was darker than the spaces between the stars overhead.

  “That’s an embryo?” she said.

  “Closest word.” Bending to the open cooler, he gently deposited the thing inside it. His hands free, he clicked the cooler’s lid shut. “Someone will be by for this, shortly,” he said, raising his fingers to his tongue.

  “I don’t—” Connie started, and there was an explosion of wings, or what might have been wings, a fury of black flapping. She put up her hands to defend herself, and the wings were gone, the cooler with them. “What . . . ?”

  “You have to prepare the ground, first,” Rick’s father said, “fertilize it, you could say. A little more time would have been nice, but Tunguska was long enough ago. To tell the truth, if we’d had to proceed earlier, it wouldn’t have mattered.” He stepped to the next hole and its attendant thermos and repeated his excavation. As he was jiggling the thing into the thermos, Connie said, “But—why?”

  “Oh, that’s . . . ” Rick’s father gestured at the thermos’s side, where the strange cross with the slender join and rounded arms was stenciled. “You know.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  Gary Wilson shrugged. His face slid with the movement, up, then down, the flesh riding on the bone. The hairs on Connie’s neck, her arms, stood rigid. She did not want to accompany him as he turned left again and headed for a deep slice in the mud, but she could not think what else to do. Behind her, there was a chaos of flapping, and silence.

  The fissure in the mud ran in both directions as far as she could see. It was probably narrow enough for her to jump across. She was less sure of its depth, rendered uncertain by dimness. At or near the bottom, something rose, not high enough for her to distinguish it, but sufficiently near for her to register a great mass. “Too cold out here,” Rick’s father said. “Makes them sluggish. Inhibits their”—he waved his hands—“development. Confines it.” There were more of whatever-it-was down there. Some quality of their movement made Connie grateful she couldn’t see any more of them.

  “Funny,” Rick’s father said. “They need this place for infancy, your place for maturity. Never known another breed with such extreme requirements.”

  “What are they?”

  “I guess you would call them . . . gods? Is that right? Orchidaceae deus? They bloom.”

  “What?”

  “Bloom.”

  There was a small deck at the back of the house, little more than a half-dozen planks of unfinished wood raised on as many thick posts, bordered by an unsteady railing, at the top of a flight of uneven stairs. A door led from the deck into the house’s laundry room, whose location on the second floor had impressed Connie as one of the reasons to rent the place two years ago, when her promotion to manager had allowed sufficient money to leave their basement apartment and its buffet of molds behind. On mornings when she didn’t have to open the store, and Rick hadn’t worked too late the night before, they would carry their mugs of coffee out here. She liked to stand straight, her mug cradled in her hands, while Rick preferred to take his chances leaning on the rail. Sometimes they spoke, but mostly they were quiet, listening to the birds performing their various morning songs, watching the squirrels chase one another across the high branches of the trees whose roots knitted together the small rise behind the house.

  A freak early frost had whited the deck and stairs. Once the sun was streaming through the trunks of the oaks and maples stationed on the rise, the frost would steam off, but at the moment dawn was a red hint amidst the dark trees. Red sky at morning, Connie thought.

  She was seated at the top of the deck stairs, wrapped in the green and white knitted blanket she’d grabbed when she’d left the laundry room hours ago. The bottle of Stolichnaya cradled in her arms was almost empty, despite which, she felt as sober as she ever had. More than sober—her senses were operating past peak capacity. The grooves in the bark of the oaks on the rise were deep gullies flanked by vertical ridges. The air eddying over her skin was dense with moisture. The odor of the soil in which the trees clutched their roots was the brittle-paper smell of dead leaves crumbling mixed with the damp thickness of dirt. It was as if she were under a brilliant white light, one that allowed her no refuge, but that also permitted her to view her surroundings with unprecedented clarity.

  She had emerged from her dream of Rick’s father to silence, to a stillness so profound the sound of her breathing thundered in her ears. Rick’s side of the bed was still cold. Except for a second strange dream on the same night, there had been no reason for Connie to do anything other than return to sleep. Her dream, however, had seemed sufficient cause for her to rouse herself and (once more) set out downstairs in search of Rick. In the quiet that had draped the house, the creaks of the stairs under her feet had bee
n horror-movie loud.

  She had not been sure what she would find downstairs, and had walked past the front parlor before her brain had caught up to what it had noticed from the corner of her eye and sent her several steps back. The small room they called the front parlor, whose bay window overlooked the front porch, had been dark. Not just nighttime dark (which, with the streetlight outside, wasn’t really that dark), but complete and utter blackness. This hadn’t been the lack of light so much as the overwhelming presence of its opposite, a dense inkiness that had filled the room like water in a tank. Connie had reached out her hand to touch it, only to stop with her fingers a hair’s-breadth away from it, when the prospect of touching it had struck her as a less than good idea. Lowering her hand, she had retreated along the hall to the dining room.

  Before the dining room, though, she had paused at the basement door, open wide and allowing a thick, briny stench up from its depths. The smell of seaweed and assorted sea-life baking on the beach, the odor had been oddly familiar, despite her inability to place it. She had reached around the doorway for the light switch, flipped it on, and poked her head through the doorway. Around the foot of the stairs, she had seen something she could not immediately identify. There had been no way she was venturing all the way into the basement; already, the night had taken too strange a turn for her to want to put herself into so ominous, if clichéd, a location. But she had been curious enough to descend the first couple of stairs and crouch to look through the railings.

  When she had, Connie had seen a profusion of flowers, orchids, their petals eggplant and rose. They had covered the concrete floor so completely she could not see it. A few feet closer to them, the tidal smell was stronger, almost a taste. The orchids were motionless, yet she had had the impression that she had caught them on the verge of movement. She had wanted to think, I’m dreaming; this is part of that last dream, but the reek of salt and rot had been too real. She had stood and backed upstairs.