New Cthulhu 2: More Recent Weird

by Elizabeth Bear

  Why are you not with your kin? I swallowed bitter answers. “My loneliness is no concern of yours.”

  “I think it is.” She turned to Wilder, who had kept his place before the altar. “If she’s not a charlatan . . . either she’s a spy, sent to keep us from learning her people’s powers, or she’s in exile for crimes we cannot begin to imagine.”

  I hissed, and unthinkingly thrust myself into her space, breathing the stink of her sharply exhaled breath. “They. Are. Dead.”

  Bergman stepped back, pupils wide, breath coming too quickly. She drew herself up, straightened her skirts, and snorted. “Perhaps you are a charlatan after all. Everyone knows the Deep Ones cannot die.”

  Again without thinking, I lunged for her. She stumbled backward and I caught her collar, twisted, and pulled. She fell forward, and I held her weight easily as she scrabbled to push me away. I blinked (eyes too big, too tight in their sockets), anger almost washed away by surprise. It was the first time the strength had come upon me.

  And I had used it on an old mortal woman whose only crimes were pride and suspicion. I released her and turned my back. The joints of my fingers ached where I had clenched them. “Never say that again. Or if you must, say it to the soldiers who shot my father. We do not age, no—not like you do.” I could not resist the barb. “But there are many ways to die.”

  Oz finally spoke, and I turned to see him helping Bergman to her feet. “Peace, Mildred. She’s no spy, and I think no criminal. She will not take your immortality from you.”

  I paused, anger not entirely overwhelmed, and searched her features carefully. She was slender, small-eyed, fine-fingered—and unquestionably aged. For all her dignity, it was impossible that she might share even a drop of blood with my family.

  She caught my look and smiled. “Yes, we have that secret from the Deep Ones. Does it surprise you?”

  “Exceedingly. I was not aware that there was a secret. Not one that could be shared, at least.”

  A broader, angrier smile. “Yes—you have tried to keep it from us. To keep us small and weak and dying. But we have it—and at the harvest moon, I will go into the water. I am beloved of the Elder Gods, and I will dwell in glory with Them under the waves forever.”

  “I see.” I turned to Wilder. “Have you done this before?”

  He nodded. “Mildred will be the third.”

  “Such a wonderful promise. Why don’t you walk into the ocean yourself?”

  “Oh, I shall—when I have trained a successor who can carry on in my place.” And he looked at me with such confidence that I realized whom he must have chosen for that role.

  Mildred Bergman—convinced that life could be hoarded like a fortune—would never believe me if I simply told her the truth. I held up my hand to forestall anything else the priest might have to say. “Wilder, get out of here. I’ll speak with you later.”

  He went. If he had convinced himself I would be his priestess, I suppose he had to treat me as one.

  I sat down, cross-legged, trying to clear the hissing tension that had grown between us. After a moment she also sat, cautiously and with wincing stiffness.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It doesn’t work like that. We go into the water, and live long there, because we have the blood of the deep in us. The love of the gods is not so powerful. I wish I had more to offer you. There are magics that can heal, that can ease the pains of age, that can even extend life for a few decades. I will gladly teach them to you.” And I would, too. She had been vile to me, but I could invite her to Charlie’s back room to study with us, and learn the arts that would give her both time and acceptance. All but one spell, that I would not teach, and did not plan to ever learn.

  “You’re lying.” Her voice was calm and even.

  “I’m not. You’re going to drown yourself—” I swallowed. “I’m trying to save your life. You haven’t done a speck of real magic in this room, you don’t know what it’s like, how it’s different.”

  She started to say something, and I raised a hand. “No. I know you won’t listen to what I have to say. Please, let me show you.”

  “Show me.” Not a demand—only an echo, full of doubt.

  “Magic.” I looked at her, with my bulging eyes and thick bones, willing her, if she couldn’t yet believe, at least to look at me.

  “What’s involved in this . . . demonstration?” she finally asked, and I released a held breath.

  “Not much. Chalk, a pair of bowls, and a drop of blood.”

  Between my purse and the altar, we managed to procure what was needed—fortunate, as I would have hated to go up and ask Wilder to borrow them. Having practiced this with Charlie, I still had the most basic of seals settled in my mind, at least clearly enough for this simple spell. I moved us away from the carefully laid tile to the raw flagstone behind the stairs. There was no reason to vandalize Wilder’s stage.

  Bergman did not know the Litany, nor the cosmic humility that was the core of Sharhlyda practice. And yet, in some ways, she was easier to work with than Charlie. I could tell her to feel her blood as a river, without worrying what she might guess of my nature.

  As I guided her through the opening meditation, Bergman’s expression relaxed into something calmer, more introspective. She had some potential for the art, I thought. More than Wilder, certainly, who was so focused on the theater of the thing, and on the idea of power. Bergman’s shoulders loosened, and her breath evened, but she kept her eyes open, waiting.

  I pricked my finger and let the blood fall into the bowl, holding myself back from the spell long enough to wipe the blade and pass it to Bergman. Then I let the current pull me down . . .

  Submerging only briefly before forcing myself upward, out of the cool ocean and into the harsh dry air. I took a painful breath, and laid my hand on Bergman’s arm.

  A thin stream moved through a great ravine, slow and emaciated. Rivulets trickled past great sandy patches. And yet, where they ran, they ran sweet and cool. The lines they etched, the bars and branches, made a fine and delicate pattern. In it I saw not only the inevitable decay that she strove against, but the stronger shape that was once hers—and the subtler strength in the shape she wore now.

  “You are one of them.”

  I returned, gasping, all my instincts clamoring for moisture. I wanted to race upstairs and throw the windows open to the evening fog. Instead I leaned forward.

  “Then you must also see—”

  She sniffed, half a laugh. “I see that at least some of the books Wilder found can be trusted. And none of them have claimed that the Deep Ones are a more honest race than we. They do claim that you know more of the ancient lore than most humans have access to. So no, I don’t believe that your immortality is a mere accident of birth. It can be ours as well—if we don’t let you frighten us away from it.”

  We argued long and late, and still I could not move her. That night I argued with myself, sleepless, over whether it was my place to do more.

  Of course Charlie asks, inevitably.

  I have been teaching him the first, simplest healing spells. Even a mortal, familiar with his own blood, can heal small wounds, speed the passage of trivial illnesses and slow the terrible ones.

  “How long can I live, if I practice this?” He looks at me thoughtfully.

  “Longer. Perhaps an extra decade or three. Our natures catch up with us all, in the end.” I cringe inwardly, imagining his resentment if he knew. And I am beginning to see that he must know, eventually, if I continue with these lessons.

  “Except for the Yith?”

  “Yes.” I hesitate. Even were I ready to share my nature, this would be an unpleasant conversation, full of temptation and old shame. “What the Yith do . . . there are spells for that, or something similar. No one else has ever found the trick of moving through time, but to take a young body for your own . . . You would not find it in any of these books, but it wouldn’t be hard to track down. I haven’t, and I won’t. It’s not difficult, from what I
’ve heard, just wrong.”

  Charlie swallows and looks away. I let him think about it a moment.

  “We forgive the Yith for what they do, though they leave whole races abandoned around fading stars. Because their presence means that Earth is remembered, and our memory and our stories will last for as long as they can find younger stars and younger bodies to carry them to. They’re as selfish as an old scholar wanting eighty more years to study and love and breathe the air. But we honor the Yith for sacrificing billions, and track down and destroy those who steal one life to preserve themselves.”

  He narrows his eyes. “That’s very . . . practical of you.”

  I nod, but look away. “Yes. We say that they do more to hold back darkness and chaos than any other race, and it is worth the cost. And of course, we know that we aren’t the ones to pay it.”

  “I wonder if the . . . what were they called, the Ck’chk’ck . . . had a Nuremberg.”

  I start to say that it’s not the same—the Yith hate nobody, torture nothing. But I cannot find it in me to claim it makes a difference. Oblivion, after all, is oblivion, however it is forced on you.

  The day after my fourth meeting with Spector, I did not go to work. I walked, in the rain and the chill, in the open air, until my feet hurt, and then I kept walking, because I could. And eventually, because I could, I went home.

  Mama Rei was mending, Kevin on the floor playing with fabric scraps. The Chronicle lay open on the table to page seven, where a single column reported the previous night’s police raid on a few wealthy homes. No reason was given for the arrests, but I knew that if I read down far enough, there would be some tittering implication of debauchery. Mama Rei smiled at me sadly, and flicked her needle through a stocking. The seam would not look new, but would last a little longer with her careful stitching.

  “You told him,” she said. “And he listened.”

  “He promised me there would be no camps.” Aloud, now, it sounded like a slender promise by which to decide a woman’s fate.

  Flick. “Does he seem like an honorable man?”

  “I don’t know. I think so. He says that the ones they can’t just let go, they’ll send to a sanitarium.” Someplace clean, where their needs would be attended to, and where they would be well fed. “He says Wilder really does belong there. He believed what he was telling the others. What he was telling Bergman.”

  And she believed what he told her—but that faith would not have been enough to save her.

  No one’s faith ever was.

  Flick. Flick. The needle did a little dance down and around, tying off one of her perfect tiny knots. Little copper scissors, a gift purchased with my earnings and Anna’s, cut the dangling thread. “You should check on her.”

  “I don’t think she’ll want to see me.”

  Mama Rei looked at me. “Aphra-chan.”

  I ducked my head. “You’re right. I’ll make sure they’re treating her well.”

  But they would, I knew. She would be confined in the best rooms and gardens that her money could pay for, all her physical needs attended to. Kind men would try to talk her back from the precipice where I had found her. And they would keep her from drowning herself until her blood, like that of all mortals, ran dry.

  I wondered if, as she neared the end, she would still pray.

  If she did, I would pray with her. If it was good for nothing else, at least the effort would be real.

  Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They have trod earth’s fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread.

  “The Dunwich Horror” . H. P. Lovecraft

  NECROTIC COVE

  Lois H. Gresh

  The sun hangs low and drools lava across a sea the color of stillborn baby. A dead branch whisks my cheek as I step from the trail onto the beach, and blood trickles into my mouth. The air reminds me of cantaloupes left on the counter too long. Insect wings brush my neck, a sting, and my skin swells and itches. None of this bothers me. I’m here, at long last, I’m here.

  I stand transfixed as the emptiness inside me fills with emotions I don’t understand.

  Necrotic Cove, where we come to be cleansed and purified.

  Tatania says, “Can we leave now? You’ve seen it, isn’t this enough?”

  I mouth the word no, but I don’t think I say it. It’s as if I’ve always been locked outside of the universe, looking in but never fitting in until this very moment.

  I gaze to my left and right, where cliffs reflect the sun. The sand spreads like a fan stained by cyanosis, and the water is comatose. This is a place of death, and yet I feel something flickering to life within me.

  Tatania grasps my elbow. “Watch it, you’re going to fall,” she says, and yes, I find that I’m tottering, and I’m so weak that even an old woman’s claws bruise me. I squint at her. My best friend since childhood, she’ll do anything for me, won’t she? Even leave the comforts of her widow’s lair to follow me here. Anything to please pathetic Cassandra before my spine finally snaps and the cancer finally eats what’s left of my ulcerated insides. I clasp Tatania’s waist and steady myself. I say, “My dying wish, and you granted it.”

  “You’re not dead yet, Cassandra. Stop saying that.” She drops to the sand beneath the brown entrails of a palm. Leans against the trunk, stretches her legs, flinches as the sand burns her thighs. “Sit beside me, dear,” she says.

  I do as she asks. I always do what Tatania wants.

  “Four hours we hiked, and through a path so narrow a squirrel couldn’t make it through.” Tatania removes her hat and fans her face. Sweat glues her dyed black hair to her scalp. I have no idea why she bothers to dye her hair, it’s so obviously fake at our age. She wipes her forehead with the back of a hand and scratches an insect bite. Her rings flash the sun into my eyes, and I shift my view back to the cliffs, their coppery sheen far more beautiful than her diamonds.

  “I’m not surprised that nobody comes here.” Her laugh breaks into a cough. “The beach smells like a sewer, and the insects are horrible.”

  I can’t explain the allure of this place to someone like Tatania. She’s never been empty and alone like me. She’s always belonged. Married three times, always to wealthy men, she never had to work, never did much of anything other than make it to her tennis lessons on time, pamper herself with fine food and wine, subject herself to botox, and let the doctors carve her up with plastic surgery. Light blue contacts on her navy eyes. Tatania looks like a parody of her younger self, but she doesn’t realize it. She’s more comfortable at thousand-dollar-a-plate parties and vodka lunches at Chez Grande. But she’s always up for a wild time, and I don’t know why, but I needed her to come with me.

  “Listen,” I say, “I’ll cool down in the water, and then we can head back, okay?”

  Her face tightens into the mock-grimace of the surgically preserved. This is her way of issuing a slight smile of agreement. As she stretches onto a towel, I peel off my T-shirt and shorts, pull my gray hair into a ponytail, and slip off my sandals. My feet are tired from the long walk, my calves ache, but the sand scorches so I hurry to the water, and as only the chronically ill know how to do, I ignore the pain shooting down my legs.

  The water quickly sucks me in and coats me with muck. I see nothing through the bruise of the surface, but I feel the fish, their silken gills fluttering like butterfly wings on my legs. I flip to my back and float. Amniotic water cradles me, and the whisper of a breeze, like an angel’s touch, caresses my face. My heart surges as if to the other side of the air. And the pain leeches from my back and legs into the water.

  My esophagus and stomach, my intestines: all such a mess, riddled with holes, I can hardly eat or even drink water without the pressure in my ribs and the squeezing of pain through my torso
into my back. Constant falls have fragmented my back, the bones so thin they don’t register on medical equipment, the bones like shrapnel on my nerves.

  The peace here is beyond anything I’ve known. This must be what it’s like when people find Jesus or whatever other gods they worship. Must be what it’s like when men orgasm, when women feel beautiful, when cats catch mice.

  Wide-winged birds float past, and my ears buzz as their notes fall into harmony with my breathing. I pant, and the notes intensify in pitch and go up an octave. I almost smile, I’m so content, but I don’t know how to smile, not really. I hold my breath until my lungs hurt, and the birds stop singing.

  I’m one with the water and all it contains, one with the air and everything in it.

  The locals claim that boats never make it to this cove, that the sea rises and swallows them at the horizon. The locals fear this place and are happy enough to stay away. Me, an outsider, just an old woman with nothing to lose, well, what’s left to fear when you don’t care if you die?

  Back on shore is Tatania, rolled to one side, belly protruding, eyes riveted to a paperback rather than the beautiful sea.

  My breath spills into the heat of the noonday sun.

  My heart pounds in rhythm to the wings of birds and to the gills of the fish.

  I doggy-paddle toward the jagged rock towering over the right side of the cove. Peek again at Tatania, sleeping now, her body heaving up and down, and she must be snoring in her “feminine way,” as she likes to put it.

  The cliffs call to me through the harmonies of the birds and the fish. The rhythms form words I don’t know,

  F’ai throdog uaaah

  and

  ogthrod ai-f geb’l-ee’h

  I’m not crazy, never been crazy. Even with all the medicine, I’m not the type to let my mind drift into the stupors of drugs or self-pity. I simply stopped caring long ago whether I was dead or alive, which in my case is a form of death anyway. And the stories of this place, the Necrotic Cove, I could not ignore. It is said, by the people who fear this place, that it can devour your soul and lay you to rest. And this is what I want. I don’t want to die in a hospital, a nursing home. I want to die on a beach or in waters that tranquilize and numb me, I want to die beneath copper cliffs and a molten sun. Had I told this to Tatania, she would have found a way to prevent me from coming here.