New Cthulhu 2: More Recent Weird

by Elizabeth Bear

  He shrugged and smiled. I didn’t like how easy he could be, with his wrist still stinking of blood. “If you grant me that, you’re already several steps ahead of the U.S. government, just after the first World War. In the twenties, they had run-ins with a couple of nasty Aeonist groups. There was one cult down in Louisiana that had probably never seen an original bit of the canon, but they had their ideas. Sacrificial corpses hanging from trees, the whole nine yards.” He glanced at me, checking for some reaction. I did not grant it.

  “Not exactly representative, but we got the idea that was normal. In ’26, the whole religion were declared enemies of the state, and we started looking out for anyone who said the wrong names on Sunday night, or had the wrong statues in their churches. You know where it goes from there.”

  I did, and wondered how much he really knew. It was strange, nauseating, to hear the justifications, even as he tried to hold them at a distance.

  “It won’t shock you,” he continued, “to know that Innsmouth wasn’t the only place that suffered. Eventually, it occurred to the government that they might have over-generalized, but it took a long time for changes to go through. Now we’re starting to have people like me, who actually study Aeonist culture and try to separate out the bad guys, but it’s been a long time coming.”

  I held myself very still through his practiced speech. “If this is by way of an apology, Mister Spector, you can drown in it. What you did was beyond the power of any apology.”

  “Doubtless we owe you one anyway, if we can find a decent way of making it. But I’m afraid I’ve been sent to speak with you for practical reasons.” He cleared his throat and shifted his knees. “As you may imagine, when the government went hunting Aeonists, it was much easier to find good people, minding their own business in small towns, than cultists well-practiced in conspiracy and murder. The bad guys tend to be better at hiding, after all. And at the same time, we weren’t trying to recruit people who knew anything useful about the subject—after a while, few would have been willing even if we went looking. So now, as with the Japanese-American community, we find ourselves shorthanded, ignorant, and having angered the people least likely to be a danger to the country.”

  My eye sockets ached. “I cannot believe that you are trying to recruit me.”

  “I’m afraid that’s exactly what I’m doing. I could offer—”

  “Your five minutes are up, sir.” I walked past him, biting back anything else I might say, or think. The anger worked its way into my shoulders, and my legs, and the rush of my blood.

  “Miss Marsh!”

  Against my better judgment, I stopped and turned back. I imagined what I must look like to him. Bulging eyes; wide mouth; long, bony legs and fingers. “The Innsmouth look,” when there was an Innsmouth. Did it signal danger to him? Something more than human, or less? Perhaps he saw just an ugly woman, someone whose reactions he could dismiss until he heard what he wanted.

  Then I would speak clearly.

  “Mister Spector, I have no interest in being an enemy of the state. The state is larger than I. But nor will I be any part of it. And if you insist, you will listen to why. The state stole nearly two decades of my life. The state killed my father, and locked the rest of my family away from anything they thought might give us strength. Salt water. Books. Knowledge. One by one, they destroyed us. My mother began her metamorphosis. Allowed the ocean, she might have lived until the sun burned to ashes. They took her away. We know they studied us at such times, to better know the process. To better know how to hurt us. You must imagine the details, as I have. They never returned the bodies. Nothing has been given back to us.

  “Now, ask me again.”

  He bent his head at last. Not in shame, I thought, but listening. Then he spoke softly. “The state is not one entity. It is changing. And when it changes, it’s good for everyone. The people you could help us stop are truly hurting others. And the ones being hurt know nothing of what was done to your family. Will you hold the actions of a few against them? Should more families suffer because yours did?”

  I reminded myself that, after humanity faded and died, a great insectoid civilization would live in these hills. After that, the Sareeav, with their pseudopods and strange sculptures. Therefore, I could show patience. “I will do what I can for suffering on my own.”

  More quietly: “If you helped us, even on one matter, I might be able to find out what really happened to your mother.”

  The guilt showed plainly on his face as soon as he said it, but I still had to turn away. “I cannot believe that even after her death, you would dare hold my mother hostage for my good behavior. You can keep her body, and your secrets.” And in R’lyehn, because we had been punished for using it in the camps, I added, “And if they hang your corpse from a tree, I will kiss the ground beneath it.” Then, fearful that he might do more, or say more, I ran.

  I kicked off my shoes, desperate for speed. My feet slapped the wet ground. I could not hear whether Spector followed me. I was still too weak, as weak as I had been as a child, but I was taller, and faster, and the fog wrapped me and hid me and sped me on my flight.

  Some minutes later I ducked into a side drive. Peering out, I saw no one following me. Then I let myself gasp: deep, shuddering breaths. I wanted him dead. I wanted them all dead, as I had for seventeen years. Probably some of them were: they were only ordinary humans, with creaking joints and rivulet veins. I could be patient.

  I came in barefoot to the Kotos. Mama Rei was in the kitchen. She put down her chopping knife, and held me while I shook. Then Anna took my hand and drew me over to the table. The others hovered nearby, Neko looking concerned and Kevin sucking his thumb. He reminded me so very much of Caleb.

  “What happened?” asked Anna, and I told them everything, trying to be calm and clear. They had to know.

  Mama Rei tossed a handful of onions into the pan and started on the peppers. She didn’t look at me, but she didn’t need to. “Aphra-chan—Kappa-sama—what do you think he wants?”

  I started to rub my face, then winced. Spector’s blood, still on my nails, cut through the clean smell of frying onion. “I don’t know. Perhaps only what he said, but his masters will certainly be angry when he fails to recruit me. He might seek ways to put pressure on me. It’s not safe. I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t want to leave,” said Neko. “We just got here.” I closed my eyes hard against the sting.

  “We won’t leave,” said Mama Rei. “We are trying to build a decent life here, and I won’t be scared away from it. Neither will you, Aphra-chan. This government man can only do so much to us, without a law to say he can lock us up.”

  “There was no law countenancing the things done to my family,” I said.

  “Times have changed,” she said firmly. “People are watching, now.”

  “They took your whole town,” said Anna, almost gently. “They can’t take all of San Francisco, can they, Mama?”

  “Of course not. We will live our lives, and you will all go to work and school tomorrow, and we will be careful. That is all.”

  There was no arguing with Mama Rei, and I didn’t really want to. I loved the life I had, and if I lost it again, well . . . the sun would burn to ash soon enough, and then it would make little difference whether I had a few months of happiness here, or a few years. I fell asleep praying.

  One expects the storage room of a bookstore to hold more books. And it does. Books in boxes, books on shelves, books piled on the floor and the birch table with uneven legs. And one bookshelf more solid than the others, leaves and vines carved into dark wood. The sort that one buys for too much money, to hold something that feels like it deserves the respect.

  And on the shelves, my childhood mixed with dross. I hold up my hand, afraid to touch, to run it across the titles, a finger’s breadth away. I fear that they too will change to gibberish. Some of them already are. Some are titles I know to have been written by charlatans, or fakes as obvious as the blond man’s G
rey People. And some are real.

  “Where did you get these?”

  “At auction. At estate sales. From people who come in offering to sell, or other stores that don’t know what they have. To tell the truth, I don’t entirely either, for some of them. You might have a better idea?”

  I pull down a Necronomicon with shaking hands, the one of his three that looks real. The inside page is thankfully empty—no dedication, no list of family names. No chance of learning whether it ever belonged to someone I knew. I read the first page, enough to recognize the over-poetic Arabic, and put it back before my eyes can tear up. I take another, this one in true Enochian.

  “Why buy them, if you can’t read them?”

  “Because I might be able to, someday. Because I might be able to learn something, even with a word or two. Because I want to learn magic, if you must know, and this is the closest I can come.” His glare dares me to scoff.

  I hold out the book I’ve been cradling. “You could learn from this one, you know. It’s a child’s introductory text. I learned a little from it, myself, before I . . . lost access to my library.” My glare dares him to ask. He doesn’t intrude on my privacy, no more than I laugh at what he’s revealed. “I don’t know enough to teach you properly. But if you let me share your books, I’ll help you learn as best I can.” He nods, and I turn my head aside so my tears don’t fall on the text—or where he can see.

  I returned to work the next day, wearing shoes borrowed from neighbors. My feet were far too big for anything the Kotos could lend me. Anna walked me partway before turning off for the laundromat—her company more comfort than I cared to admit.

  I had hovered by the sink before breakfast, considering what to do about the faint smudge of Spector’s blood. In the end, I washed it off. A government agent, familiar with the Aeonist canons, might well know how to detect the signs if I used it against him.

  Despite my fears, that day was a quiet one, full of customers asking for Westerns and romances and textbooks. The next day was the same, and the day after that, and three weeks passed with the tension between my shoulder blades the only indication that something was amiss.

  At the end of those three weeks, he came again. His body language had changed: a little hunched, a little less certain. I stiffened, but did not run. Charlie looked up from the stack of incoming books, and gave the requisite glare.

  “That’s him,” I murmured.

  “Ah.” The glare deepened. “You’re not welcome here. Get out of my store, and don’t bother my employees again.”

  Spector straightened, recovering a bit of his old arrogance. “I have something for Miss Marsh. Then I’ll go.”

  “Whatever you have to offer, I don’t want it. You heard Mr. Day: you’re trespassing.”

  He ducked his head. “I found your mother’s records. I’m not offering them in exchange for anything. You were right, that wasn’t . . . wasn’t honorable. Once you’ve seen them—if you want to see them—I’ll go.”

  I held out my hand. “Very well. I’ll take them. And then you will leave.”

  He held on to the thick folder. “I’m sorry, Miss Marsh. I’ve got to stay with them. They aren’t supposed to be out of the building, and I’m not supposed to have them right now. I’ll be in serious trouble if I lose them.”

  I didn’t care if he got in trouble, and I didn’t want to see what was in the folder. But it was my mother’s only grave. “Mr. Day,” I said quietly. “I would like a few minutes of privacy, if you please.”

  Charlie took a box and headed away, but paused. “You just shout if this fellow gives you any trouble.” He gave Spector another glare before heading into the stacks—I suspected not very far.

  Spector handed me the folder. I opened it, cautiously, between the cash register and a short stack of Agatha Christie novels. For a moment I closed my eyes, fixing my mother’s living image in my mind. I remembered her singing a sacred chanty in the kitchen, arguing with shopkeepers, kneeling in the wet sand at Solstice. I remembered one of our neighbors crying in our sitting room after her husband’s boat was lost in a storm, telling her, “Your faith goes all the way to the depths. Some of us aren’t so lucky.”

  “I’m sorry,” Spector said quietly. “It’s ugly.”

  They had taken her deeper into the desert, to an experimental station. They had caged her. They had given her weights to lift, testing her strength. They had starved her for days, testing her endurance. They had cut her, confusing their mythologies, with iron and silver, noting healing times. They had washed her once with seawater, then fresh, then scrubbed her with dry salt. After that, they had refused her all contact with water, save a minimum to drink. Then not even that. For the whole of sixty-seven days, they carefully recorded her pulse, her skin tone, and the distance between her eyes. Perhaps in some vague way also interested in our culture, they copied, faithfully, every word she spoke.

  Not one sentence was a prayer.

  There were photos, both from the experiments and the autopsy afterward. I did not cry. It seemed extravagant to waste salt water so freely.

  “Thank you,” I said quietly, closing the folder, bile burning the back of my throat. He bowed his head.

  “My mother came to the states young.” He spoke deliberately, neither rushing to share nor stumbling over his apparent honesty. Anything else, I would have felt justified interrupting. “Her sister stayed in Poland. She was a bit older, and she had a sweetheart. I have files on her, too. She survived. She’s in a hospital in Israel, and sometimes she can feed herself.” He stopped, took a deep breath, shook his head. “I can’t think of anything that would convince me to work for the new German government—no matter how different it is from the old. I’m sorry I asked.”

  He took the folder and turned away.

  “Wait.” I should not have said it. He’d probably staged the whole thing. But it was a far more thoughtful manipulation than the threats I had expected—and I found myself afraid to go on ignoring my enemies. “I will not work for you. But tell me about these frightening new Aeonists.”

  Whatever—if anything—I eventually chose to pass on to Spector, I realized that I very much wanted to meet them. For all the Kotos’ love and comfort, and for all Charlie’s eager learning, I still missed Innsmouth. These mortals might be the closest I could come to home.

  “Why do you want to learn this?” Though I doubt Charlie knows, it’s a ritual question. There is no ritual answer.

  “I don’t . . . ” He glares, a habit my father would have demanded he break before pursuing the ancient scholarship. “Some things don’t go into words easily, all right? It’s . . . it feels like what should be in books, I suppose. They should all be able to change the world. At least a little.”

  I nod. “That’s a good answer. Some people think that ‘power’ is a good answer, and it isn’t. The power that can be found in magic is less than what you get from a gun, or a badge, or a bomb.” I pause. “I’m trying to remember all the things I need to tell you, now, at the beginning. What magic is for is understanding. Knowledge. And it won’t work until you know how little that gets you.

  “Sharhlyda—Aeonism—is a bit like a religion. But this isn’t the Bible—most of the things I’m going to tell you are things we have records of: histories older than man, and sometimes the testimony of those who lived them. The gods you can take or leave, but the history is real.

  “All of man’s other religions place him at the center of creation. But man is nothing—a fraction of the life that will walk the Earth. Earth is nothing—a tiny world that will die with its sun. The sun is one of trillions where life flowers, and wants to live, and dies. And between the suns is an endless vast darkness that dwarfs them, through which life can travel only by giving up that wanting, by losing itself. Even that darkness will eventually die. In such a universe, knowledge is the stub of a candle at dusk.”

  “You make it all sound so cheerful.”

  “It’s honest. What our religion tells us,
the part that is a religion, is that the gods created life to try and make meaning. It’s ultimately hopeless, and even gods die, but the effort is real. Will always have been real, even when everything is over and no one remembers.”

  Charlie looks dubious. I didn’t believe it, either, when I first started learning. And I was too young then to find it either frightening or comforting.

  I thought about what Mr. Spector had told me, and about what I might do with the information. Eventually I found myself, unofficially and entirely on my own recognizance, in a better part of the city, past sunset, at the door of a home rather nicer than the Kotos’. It was no mansion by any imagining, but it was long lived-in and well kept up: two stories of brick and Spanish tile roof, with juniper guarding the façade. The door was painted a cheerful yellow, but the knocker was a fantastical wrought-iron creature that reminded me painfully of home. I lifted the cold metal and rapped sharply. Then I waited, shivering.

  The man who opened the door looked older than Charlie. His gray hair frizzed around the temples and ears, otherwise slick as a seal. Faint lines creased his cheeks. He frowned at me. I hoped I had the right address.

  “My name is Aphra Marsh,” I said. “Does that mean anything to you? I understand that some in this house still follow the old ways.”

  He started, enough to tell me that he recognized my family’s name. He shuffled back a little, but then leaned forward. “Where did you hear such a thing?”

  “My family have their ways. May I enter?”

  He stepped aside to let me in, in too reluctant a fashion to be truly gallant. His pupils widened between narrowed eyelids, and he licked his lips.

  “What do you want, my lady?”

  Ignoring the question for the moment, I stepped inside. The foyer, and what I could see of the parlor, looked pedestrian but painfully familiar. Dark wood furniture, much of it bookshelves, contrasted with leaf-green walls. Yet it was all a bit shabby—not quite as recently dusted or mended as would have satisfied my mother’s pride. A year ago, it might have been the front room of any of the better houses in Innsmouth. Now . . . I wondered what my family home had looked like, in the years after my mother was no longer there to take pride in it. I put the thought forcibly out of my mind.