New Cthulhu 2: More Recent Weird

by Elizabeth Bear

  “ . . . in the basement,” he was saying. “Would you like to see?”

  I ran my memory back through the last seconds, and discovered that he was, in fact, offering to show me where they practiced “the old ways.” “I would. But an introduction might be in order first?”

  “My apologies, my lady. I am Oswin Wilder. High priest here, although probably not a very traditional one by your standards.”

  “I make no judgment.” And I smiled at him in a way that suggested I might well do so later. It was strange. In Innsmouth, non-Sharhlyd outsiders had looked on us with fear and revulsion—even the Sharhlyd who were not of our kind, mostly the nervously misanthropic academics at Miskatonic, treated us with suspicion. Respect was usually subordinated to rivalries over the proper use of ancient texts. The few mortal humans who shared both our town and our faith had deferred openly, but without this taint of resentment.

  He led me down solid wooden steps. I half expected a hidden sub-basement or a dungeon—I think he must have wanted one—but he had worked with the home he already had. Beyond the bare flagstone at the foot of the stairs, he had merely added a raised level of dark tile, painted with sigils and patterns. I recognized a few, but suspected more of being his own improvisations. At the far end of the room, candles flickered on a cloth-covered table. I approached, moving carefully around the simple stone altar in the center.

  On the table sat a devotional statue of Cthulhu. I hardly noticed the quality of the carving or the material, although my childhood priest would have had something to say about both. But my childhood was long discarded, and the display struck my adult doubts with forgotten force. Heedless of the man behind me, I knelt. The flickering light gave a wet sheen to tentacles and limbs, and I could almost imagine again that they were reaching to draw me in and keep me safe. Where the statue in Innsmouth’s church had depicted the god with eyes closed, to represent the mysteries of the deep, this one’s eyes were open, black and fathomless. I returned the gaze, refusing to bow my head.

  Have you been waiting for us? Do you regret what happened? With all your aeons, did you even notice that Innsmouth was gone? Or did you just wonder why fewer people came to the water?

  Are you listening, now? Were you ever there to listen?

  More tears, I realized too late—not something I would have chosen for the priest to see. But I flicked a drop of my salt water onto the statue, and whispered the appropriate prayer. I found it oddly comforting. My mother, old-fashioned, had kept a jar of seawater on the counter for washing tear-streaked faces, and brought it to temple once a month. But I had still given my tears to the god when I didn’t want her fussing, or was trying to hide a fight with my brother.

  We were near the ocean now. Perhaps the Kotos could spare a jar.

  My musings were interrupted by the creak of the basement door and a tremulous alto.

  “Oz? I knocked, but no one answered—are you down here?”

  “Mildred, yes. Come on down; we have a guest.”

  Full skirts, garnet red, descended, and as she came closer I saw a woman bearing all my mother’s remembered dignity. She had the air of magnificence that fortunate mortals gained with age; her wrinkles and gray-streaked hair only gave the impression of deliberate artistic choices. I stood and ducked my head politely. She looked me over, thin-lipped.

  “Mil—Miss Marsh,” said Wilder. “Allow me to introduce Mildred Bergman. Mildred, this is Miss Aphra Marsh.” He paused dramatically, and her frown deepened.

  “And what is she doing in our sanctum?”

  “Miss Marsh,” he repeated.

  “Anyone can claim a name. Even such an illustrious one.” I winced, then lifted my chin. There was no reason for me to feel hurt: her doubt should be no worse a barrier than Wilder’s nervous pride.

  Taking a candle from the altar for light—and with a whisper of thanks to Cthulhu for the loan—I stepped toward her. She stood her ground. “Look at me.”

  She looked me up and down, making a show of it. Her eyes stayed narrow, and if I had studied long enough to hear thoughts, and done the appropriate rites, I was sure I would have heard it. Anyone can be ugly.

  Wilder moved to intervene. “This is silly. We have no reason to doubt her. And she found us on her own. She must have some knowledge of the old arts: we don’t exactly put our address in the classifieds. Let it go and give her a chance to prove herself.”

  Bergman sniffed and shrugged. Moving faster than I would have expected, she plucked the candle from my hand and replaced it on the table. “As high priest, it is of course at your discretion what newcomers must do to join the elect. The others will be here soon; we’ll see what they think of your guest.”

  I blinked at her. “I’ll wait, then.” I turned my back and knelt again at the god’s table. I would not let her see my rage at her dismissal, or the fear that the gesture of defiance cost me.

  The first and most basic exercise in magic is looking at oneself. Truly looking, truly seeing—and I am afraid. I cannot quite persuade myself that the years in the camp haven’t stolen something vital. After doing this simple thing, I will know.

  I sit opposite Charlie on the plain wood floor of the storage room. He has dragged over a rag rug and the cushion from a chair for his knees, but I welcome the cool solidity. Around us I have drawn a first-level seal in red chalk, and between us placed two bowls of salt water and two knives. I have walked him through this in the book, told him what to expect, as well as I am able. I remember my father, steady and patient as he explained the rite. I may be more like my mother—impatient with beginners’ mistakes, even my own.

  I lead him through a grounding: tell him to imagine the sea in his veins, his body as a torrent of blood and breath. I simplify the imagery I learned as a child. He has no metamorphosis to imagine, no ancestors to tell him how those things feel under the weight of the depths. But he closes his eyes and breathes, and I imagine it as wind on a hot day. He is a man of the air, after all. I must tell him the Litany so he will know what that means, and perhaps he will make a new grounding that fits.

  Bodies and minds settled, we begin the chant. His pronunciation is poor, but this is a child’s exercise and designed for a leader and a stumbling apprentice. The words rise, bearing the rhythm of wind and wave and the slow movement of the earth. Still chanting, I lift the knife, and watch Charlie follow my lead. I wash the blade in salt water and prick my finger. The sting is familiar, welcome. I let a drop of my blood fall into the bowl, swirling and spreading and fading into clarity. I have just enough time to see that Charlie has done the same before the room too fades, and my inward perceptions turn clear.

  I am inside myself, seeing with my blood rather than my eyes. I am exquisitely aware of my body, and its power. My blood is a torrent. It is a river emptying into the ocean; it thunders through me, a cacophony of rapids and white water. I travel with it, checking paths I have not trod for eighteen years. I find them surprisingly in order. I should have known, watching mortals age while my hard-used joints still moved easily—but that river still carries its healing force, still sweeps illnesses and aches from the banks where they try to cling. Still reshapes what it touches, patiently and steadily. Still carries all the markers of a healthy child who will someday, still, go into the water. I remember my mother telling me, smiling, that my blood knew already the form I would someday wear.

  I am basking in the feel of myself, loving my body for the first time in years, when everything changes. Just for a moment, I am aware of my skin, and a touch on my arm.

  “Miss Marsh, are you okay?”

  And now I remember that one learns to stay inside longer with practice, and that I entirely neglected to warn Charlie against touching me. And then I am cast out of my river, and into another.

  I’ve never tried this with anyone outside my own people. Charlie’s river is terribly weak—more like a stream, in truth. It has little power, and detritus has made it narrow and shallow. Where my body is yearning toward the ocea
n, his has already begun to dry out. His blood, too, knows the form he will someday wear.

  He must now be seeing me as intimately.

  I force the connection closed, saying the words that end the rite as quickly as I dare. I come to, a little dizzy, swaying.

  Charlie looks far more shaken. “That . . . that was real. That was magic.”

  And I can only feel relief. Of course, the strangeness of his first spell must overwhelm any suspicion over the differences in our blood. At least for now.

  Wilder’s congregation trickled in over the next hour. They were male and female, robed richly or simply, but all with an air of confidence that suggested old families used to mortal power. They murmured when Wilder introduced them to me; some whispered more with Bergman afterward.

  It only seemed like an endless aeon until they at last gathered in a circle. Wilder stood before the table, facing the low altar, and raised his arms. The circle quieted, till only their breath and the rustling of skirts and robes moved the air.

  “Iä, iä, Cthulhu thtagn . . . ” His accent was beyond abominable, but the prayer was familiar. After the fourth smoothly spoken mispronunciation, I realized that he must have learned the language entirely from books. While I had been denied wisdom writ solid in ink, he had been denied a guiding voice. Knowing he would not appreciate it now, I kept my peace. Even the mangled words were sweet.

  The congregants gave their responses at the appropriate points, though many of them stumbled, and a few muttered nonsense rather than the proper words. They had learned from Wilder, some more newly than others. Many leaned forward, pupils dilated and mouths gaping with pleasure. Bergman’s shoulders held the tension of real fervor, but her lids were narrowed as she avidly watched the reactions she would not show herself. Her eyes met mine and her mouth twitched.

  I remembered my mother, her self-contained faith a complement to my father’s easy affections. Bergman had the start of such faith, though she still seemed too conscious of her self-control.

  After several minutes of call and response, Wilder knelt and took a golden necklet from where it had been hidden under the folds of the tablecloth. It was none of the work of my people—only a simple set of linked squares, with some abstract tentacular pattern carved in each one. It was as like the ornate bas-relief and wirework necklace-crowns of the deep as the ritual was like my childhood church. Wilder lifted it so that all could see, and Bergman stood before him. He switched abruptly to English: no translation that I recognized, presumably his own invention.

  “Lady, wilt thou accept the love of Shub-Nigaroth? Wilt thou shine forth the wonders of life eternal for our mortal eyes?”

  Bergman lifted her chin. “I shall. I am her sworn daughter, and the beloved of the Gods: let all welcome and return their terrible and glorious love.”

  Wilder placed the chain around her neck. She turned to face the congregation, and he continued, now hidden behind her: “Behold the glory of the All-Mother!”

  “Iä Cthulhu! Iä Shub-Nigaroth!”

  “Behold the dance in darkness! Behold the life that knows not death!”

  “Iä! Iä!”

  “Behold the secret ever hidden from the sun! See it—breathe it—take it within you!”

  At this the congregation fell silent, and I stumbled over a swallowed shout of joy. The words were half nonsense, but half closer to the spirit of my remembered services than anything Wilder had pulled from his books. Bergman took from the table a knife, and a chalice full of some dark liquid. As she turned to place it on the altar, the scent of plain red wine wafted to my nostrils. She pricked her finger and squeezed a drop of blood into the cup.

  As we passed the chalice from hand to hand, the congregants each sipped reverently. They closed their eyes and sighed at private visions, or stared into the wine wondering before relinquishing it to the next. Yet when it came around to me, I tasted only wine. With time and space for my own art, I might have learned from it any secrets hidden in Bergman’s blood—but there was no magic here, only its trappings.

  They were awkward, and ignorant, yearning and desperate. Wilder sought power, and Bergman feared to lose it, and the others likely ran the same range of pleasant and obnoxious company that I remembered from my lost childhood congregation. But whatever else they might be, Spector had been wrong. The government had no more to fear from them than it had from Innsmouth eighteen years ago.

  As Charlie shuts the door to the back room, I can see his hands trembling. Outside this room he wears a cynical elder’s mask, but in truth he is in his late thirties—close enough to my age to make little difference, were we both common mortals. And life has been kind to him. What I now offer has been his greatest frustration, and his eagerness is palpable.

  As he moves to clear the floor, I hold up my hand. “Later, we’ll try the Inner Sea again”—his unaccustomed smile blossoms—“but first I need to read you something. It may help you to better understand what you’re seeing, when you look into your own blood.”

  What I seek can be found in at least three books on his shelf, but I take down the children’s text, flipping carefully until I come to the well-remembered illustration: Earth and her moon, with thirteen forms arrayed around them. I trace the circle with one too-long finger.

  “I told you that you can take or leave the gods, but the history is real. This is that history. We have evidence, and eyewitnesses, even for the parts that haven’t happened yet. The Great Race of Yith travel through space and through time, and they are brutally honest with those who recognize them. The Litany of Earth was distilled over thousands of years of encounters: conversations that together have told us all the civilizations that came before the human one, and all the civilizations that will come after we’re gone.”

  I wait, watching his face. He doesn’t believe, but he’s willing to listen. He lowers himself slowly into a chair, and rubs his knee absently.

  I skip over the poetry of the original Enochian, but its prompting is sufficient to give me the English translation from memory.

  “This is the litany of the peoples of Earth. Before the first, there was blackness, and there was fire. The Earth cooled and life arose, struggling against the unremembering emptiness.

  “First were the five-winged eldermost of Earth, faces of the Yith. In the time of the elders, the archives came from the stars. The Yith raised up the Shoggoth to serve them in the archives, and the work of that aeon was to restore and order the archives on Earth.

  “Second were the Shoggoth, who rebelled against their makers. The Yith fled forward, and the Earth belonged to the Shoggoth for an aeon.”

  The words come easily, the familiar verses echoing back through my own short life. In times of hardship or joy, when a child sickened or a fisherman drowned too young for metamorphosis, at the new year and every solstice, the Litany gave us comfort and humility. The people of the air, our priest said, phrased its message more briefly: This too shall pass.

  “Sixth are humans, the wildest of races, who share the world in three parts. The people of the rock, the K’n-yan, build first and most beautifully, but grow cruel and frightened and become the Mad Ones Under the Earth. The people of the air spread far and breed freely, and build the foundation for those who will supplant them. The people of the water are born in shadow on the land, but what they make beneath the waves will live in glory till the dying sun burns away their last shelter.

  “Seventh will be the Ck’chk’ck, born from the least infestation of the houses of man, faces of the Yith.” Here, at last, I see Charlie inhale sharply. “The work of that aeon will be to read the Earth’s memories, to analyze and annotate, and to make poetry of the Yith’s own understanding.”

  On I count, through races of artists and warriors and lovers and barbarians. Each gets a few sentences for all their thousands or millions of years. Each paragraph must obscure uncountable lives like mine, like Charlie’s . . . like my mother’s.

  “Thirteenth will be the Evening People. The Yith will w
alk openly among them, raising them from their race’s infancy with the best knowledge of all peoples. The work of that aeon will be copying the archives, stone to stone, and building the ships that will carry the archives, and the Evening, to distant stars. After they leave, the Earth will burn and the sun fade to ashes.

  “After the last race leaves, there will be fire and unremembering emptiness. Where the stories of Earth will survive, none have told us.”

  We sit for a minute in silence.

  “You ever meet one of these Yith?” Charlie asks at last. He speaks urgently, braced against the answer. Everything else I’ve told him, he’s wanted to believe.

  “I never have,” I say. “But my mother did, when she was a girl. She was out playing in the swamp, and he was catching mosquitoes. Normally you find them in libraries, or talking to scholars, but she isn’t the only person to encounter one taking samples of one sort or another. She asked him if mosquitoes would ever be people, and he told her a story about some Ck’chk’ck general, she thought the equivalent of Alexander the Great. She said that everyone asked her so many questions when she got home that she couldn’t remember the details properly afterward.” I shrug. “This goes with the magic, Mr. Day. Take them both, or turn your back.”

  The basement door creaked, and skirts whispered against the frame.

  “Oz,” came Bergman’s voice. “I wanted to talk to you about . . . Ah. It’s you.” She completed her regal descent. “Oz, what is she doing here?”

  I rose, matching her hard stare. If I was to learn—or perhaps even teach—anything here, I needed to put a stop to this. And I still had to play a role.

  “What exactly is it that you hold against me? I’ve come here many times, now. The others can see easily enough—none of them doubt what I am.”

  She looked down at me. “You could be an imposter, I suppose. It would be easy enough. But it’s hardly the only possible threat we should be concerned about. If you are truly of the Deep Ones’ blood, why are you not with your noble kin? Why celebrate the rites here, among ordinary humans who want your secrets for themselves?”