New Cthulhu 2: More Recent Weird

by Elizabeth Bear

  And look at them right now: piloting this beautiful beast over the colossal crooked frame of the Richmond Bridge, cruising like a star-liner above the red-and-white river of traffic, the whole Bay encircling them with galactic scenery out of some sci-fi flick.

  Kim didn’t want to have any reservations about this totally cool job. But there was a side to it that nagged at her.

  “Toxics,” she said, as if trying the word out. Then a little more forcefully, “That’s why he’s always so uptight. All this is illegal.” She waited, uneasy, hanging that one out there. It had gone five nights unspoken but now she’d said it: their unseen passenger, the truth.

  He tossed it back: “Well duuuhhh! But look. Hey. Let’s get a brewski. What’s a few minutes. If he wants us on time, he’s gotta give us more time.”

  They were just south of Petaluma, and Kim eased the rig down an off ramp, steering the big tanker rocking and squeaking through dark streets to where a liquor store was the only thing alive for blocks around. They left the truck idling, and jumped down from the cab.

  The store’s neon shed a sick greenish light on the pavement. The sidewalks were eerily empty.

  No. There was someone sitting on the dark curb just beyond the store. Someone big struggling to his feet . . . her feet? Yes. A bulky bag-lady in multi-layered shabby clothes.

  Odd, how slowly she rose up, like a gradually inflating balloon of dirty rags. The two of them found themselves turning towards her, watching her rise. Then, just as they caught themselves and began to turn away from her, she moved with sudden energy, shambling crabwise—surprisingly quick for her great size—and intercepted them before they reached the store’s entry.

  Her face was swollen and crusted with dirt; her breath gusted cold and vile from her wide, loose mouth. They shifted to steer around her, but her bigness seemed somehow to slow down their movements, as if she exerted a kind of gravitational pull.

  “Drink up, kids!” she hissed, and thrust a bottle at them. Kim received it, and felt its cold in her palm. The huge derelict winked at them. A dizzying chemical whiff, like a still-bottom, came off of her.

  Then she pulled her own bottle from her rags, winked again, hoisted it, and drank. She drank obscenely. Her flabby throat working up and down, her dirty jowls quivering, her scabby eyes squeezed shut in the bliss of guzzling.

  Kim, flustered, stammered some thanks for the beer as they retreated, and hustled away from the hulk. When she looked at the bottle in the light of the store’s entry, she was surprised to it was perfectly clean and new looking. Great Old Ones Ale, in gold gothic lettering, arched across its label.

  “What was that all about?” muttered Alex as they hustled into the store. At the counter, a wino was puzzling out his pennies and dimes but when they got to the register with the sixer, the huge eerie lurker was gone.

  They got back in the cab and back on the freeway, both silent until Alex said, “Man! She smelled like . . . ”

  They both tried to think of the precise word, groping for it until Kim said, “She smelled like the kinda shit we truck.”

  “That’s it,” said Alex. And they shared a moment of strange self-consciousness about this grand rig they were so jazzed about piloting. Here was their tanker, huge, towering above the traffic, rolling down the public highway, heavy with high-caliber toxins. High, wide, and handsome their tanker cruised up the 101.

  Alex cracked a beer.

  Kim looked doubtfully at the bottle of Great Old Ones Ale in the cupholder. “These micro-breweries and their weird-ass names. No way I’m drinkin’ it,” and took one of theirs instead.

  Kim swung them off 101. They rolled down a narrower highway through darker countryside. Sleeping orchards, a few vineyards, some country houses slid past them under the silver moon.

  She geared their rig up through the switchbacks of the hills, the oaks gestured in the sweep of their lights. The big truck’s headlights set all those crooked trees slow-dancing with their crooked shadows. Gaps here and there showed the young truckers fragments of the jeweled Santa Marta plain below and behind them.

  “You gotta meet my Auntie some day,” Alex said, scanning that view. “She’s like half Miwok or something. Anyway she told me this mountain Chip’s mine is in was like a Spirit Place—like where you go to fast and have visions? Go to like, face your demons and stuff.”

  “Spirits! Rad. I wish there was something cool like that about it. That would be something, but I think what these guys are doing up here is just plain old creepy and criminal.”

  “Yeah, but we don’t really know that, not for sure. Anyway, we’re definitely good and late now. Maybe he’s just gonna fire us. When Chip said get back on time, he put a lot into it.”

  “I think he sounded scared,” Kim said hauling on the wheel. “He just doesn’t wanna stay late.”

  “Whaddya mean late? He sleeps up there at the mine! What does he care?”

  “He just doesn’t like to wait up for us. He wants to go to bed.”

  Alex turned his face away, irritated.

  “Maybe, but I got the feeling he’s got company coming that he doesn’t want us to meet.”

  “Where the hell do you get that idea?”

  She mimicked Chip’s scoldings, “ ‘I wancha here, downloaded, an outta here by eleven-thirty! For once! Can’ya manage it?’ Why else would he be so pissed? He’s scared.”

  Three quarters up the hill, the road mounted a broad shoulder of the mountain, and halfway out across that shoulder was the gated compound of the Quicksilver Mine. Through gaps in the treeline, fragments of Santa Marta’s jeweled plain glittered here and there below and behind them.

  Chip was already rolling the cyclone gate back. Their headlights latticed his scrawny little body in the chain-links’ shadows as the gate slid aside. He had his rubber boots and rubber apron on, and his respirator was hanging by its straps from his skinny old neck. They pulled in and he stomped over, mounted the step-up and thrust his head in Kim’s window.

  “You goddam kids think you signed on for a day at the beach?”

  Very pissed. His back-sloped forehead suggested some browless animal, maybe a possum. “I can’t believe you come a half hour late after what I told you! You two swing your ass up there, you squirt, an’ you leave!”

  At the hill’s crest was the mouth of the Quicksilver’s shaft, breathing out the white light of arc-lamps at the stars. Down near the gate was the office trailer, and beyond that was a sizeable pyramid of disposal drums five tiers high, with just enough moonlight on them to sketch their rims and bulges. It had been explained to both young drivers that these were filled inside the shaft from the holding tank, and then conveyed down the tracks in the ore carts left over from the mercury mining days. Much farther below, they were told, the drums were stacked securely in passages carved in the mine’s walls.

  The only part of this process that Kim and Alex had ever seen was the offload hose snaking from their tanker up through the mouth of the shaft, as they sat idling and running their offload pump.

  Initially they’d thought “Great, an environmentally correct operation!” But somewhere in the course of delivering a hundred thousand gallons, they’d noted that the great pyramid of drums had never altered its outline. It suggested to Kim one of those old jungle ruins the Maya or Inca left—moonlit and with an aura of ancient evil—erected for strange gods and human sacrifice.

  Chip, radiating anger and impatience, clung to the door of the cab as Kim backed the tanker up to within thirty yards of the mine’s mouth. There, Chip jumped down and hurried into the shaft, pulling his mask on, to re-emerge a moment later dragging the fill-hose.

  Was there any possibility this hose did fill a holding tank inside . . . ? Naw. They were just squirting all this black poison straight into the shaft, to soak into the naked earth. Chip’s gnomish fury, and his expression of disgust, proved that if nothing else did.

  “ . . . just can’t believe you kids! Unship your out-take!”

 
Chip helped them couple the fill-hose to the tanker’s offload spout, and switch the pump on. “I got people comin’,” he told them. “You squirt your goddam load, you uncouple, an’ you drive the fuck outta here. Can’ya do that? Can’ya manage it?”

  He stomped back down to the office trailer.

  They sat in the cab, a couple of scolded kids. “Just tell me straight,” Kim said grimly. “Do you think Chip’s just a really grouchy old man, or do you think he’s afraid?”

  “Okay. How I heard about this job was my cousin Nolo, who was drivin’ for these guys. He left real sudden down to L.A., but I got him to give me their number before he went, couldn’t believe he was dumping a gig like this. Now maybe I’m thinking Nolo got it right.”

  Over the sound of their offload pump they heard a vehicle coming up the highway. Headlights swung in through the gate. A big dark van stood idling there.

  Chip hustled out of the office and stood by the van’s driver’s side. He was talking to the driver, a slight cringe in his posture. He made a gesture toward the tanker, seeming to dismiss it, to be explaining something.

  The tanker’s offload pump cut off. Kim and Alex got out quickly, eager to be gone before they met whoever had just driven that van in. They uncoupled their offload spout, coiled it onto its rack, and got back into the cab. They were hurrying to the max, while at the same time trying to seem casual.

  Before Kim could slip the tanker into gear, the dark van rolled forward, driving right up into their headlights. It seemed to intend coming bumper-to-bumper with them, but just a few yards away from them it swung right, showing them its glossy black flank, and idled there, its driver’s head profiled in the tanker’s lights.

  The driver turned his head and faced them directly, deliberately showing them his face, faintly smiling. A startling face, its features finely chiseled. For several slow beats he blocked them there, staring. Then he slipped his brake, and eased his van slowly up to the shaft-mouth.

  Kim steered the tanker down the slope and into its slot beside the office. They jumped out and hustled down to Alex’s old Chevy pickup. Usually Kim felt the contrast, felt diminished switching the big rig for her or Alex’s four-wheeler. But tonight, the pickup felt light and frisky, a godsend—like an escape pod from a big spaceship that was blowing up.

  Alex took the curves fast, and that was fine with Kim.

  “What was that look?” he said. “Like he was showing us his face.”

  “No,” Kim replied, her eyes fiercely fixed on the road. “He was looking through our headlights, trying to see our faces.”

  “How could he see anything?” Alex asked.

  “You see his eyes? I almost think he could see us through our headlights. That was one spooky guy. You know what? Money or no money, maybe I don’t wanna keep working here, much as I love driving this rig.”

  “Me either.”

  She glanced at him gratefully. “The thing is, I’m seriously broke.”

  Alex gave her his hey-girl smile. “Check this out. I gotta friend I can move in with practically for free, an you could come too.”

  “Wow, thanks, but just friends, okay?”

  “C’mon, gimme some credit. But, hey, you wanna go out tonight? The Red Elvises are at the Phoenix.”

  “No shit?” They cracked two beers, from their after-work sixer they kept in whichever ride had brought them up to work at the mine. The old pickup dove down toward the lamp-starred Santa Marta plain as they talked music.

  Sol Lazarian parked his van well downslope of the shaft-mouth, so his soldiers would have to climb a bit with their burdens before carrying them down into the shaft. It was tricky footing down there, and he wanted them warmed up for the work.

  Lazarian smilingly thought of tonight’s task as “compounding the assets” of his employer, Lou Bonifacio of New Jersey: they were putting two of Bonifacio’s dead enemies inside one of Bonifacio’s toxic dumps in California.

  Rather than hide his face, Lazarian had given the drivers of that tanker a good look at it. A couple of kids—a girl and a young man. They’d brought, like him, their offering to this place. Had they felt its aura?

  Sol thought it unlikely. He himself had frightened them, as he’d meant to do, but they, being young, had probably not sensed the terrible magic of this ground.

  The driver before them, an older Latino, had perhaps sensed it and quit. The driver before him was still here—down in the shaft where Sol had put him. He hadn’t sensed anything. He had just been running his mouth off one evening in the tavern he favored.

  Sol shouldered the heavier of the two bodybags and led briskly upslope with it. His two helpers were slower. Big, bearded Junior Lee carried the two satchels of weights. Sonny Beasely—almost as big as Junior Lee, but an edgier guy with acne-scarred cheeks—had the lighter bodybag.

  “Look at ’im,” muttered Junior, impressed. “That sumbitch musta gone two-forty at least,” referring to the corpse Lazarian toted so lightly. Trudging up after, the pair watched the big man—so light of foot—leave them farther and farther behind.

  Sonny grunted, low voiced, “Don’t it seem strange doin’ this? Fuckin ocean’s just five miles west.”

  “Said we’re goin’ way down in.”

  “So someone else could just walk way down in, and find these stiffs there!”

  “Maybe we’re gonna bury ’em down there.”

  “If we’re gonna bury ’em, we could bury ’em just as deep up in these hills, without goin’ down a fuckin’ mineshaft.”

  They saved their breath for the rest of the climb. Waiting above them, Lazarian stood backlit by the shaft. His dreamy smile was invisible to them as he watched them come. Their faces were a quarter-turned to each other as they climbed, trading doubts perhaps, showing brief profiles of effort and unease.

  Did these two simpletons feel the power here? Yes, rudimentary though their spirits were, Lazarian read in their eyes that they felt it as they came up and faced the shaft-mouth. Uneasily they registered the aura of that big, dark gullet.

  Click. The image of them in this instant strobed in his mind’s eye, the way they looked right now in their moment of uneasy conference, repeating, repeating as if his visual cortex was a projector whose sprocket gear was slipping. When younger, these little epiphanies had unnerved him. Now he knew them to be a kind of signature radiation which his prey emitted as they neared death—like that given off by particles that were swallowed in a Black Hole.

  “You need a breather?” Sol asked when they joined him up in the lip of the shaft-mouth.

  “No! (gasp) Good to go!”

  “No way, Sol!”

  “Okay. So let’s pop on the masks, guys!” said genial Sol.

  They all three set down their burdens and put on their masks, respirators with complex double filters that looked like the mouth-parts of insects. Even before entering, just standing here in the shaft’s mouth the air was awesome. Sonny and Junior gaped at each other as they struggled with their straps. The vapors were a waft of pure uncanniness, moving through their braincells like the creepy fore-tremors of a major acid high.

  Sol Lazarian was no less awed than they were. It was a reek so potent it became deafening, a pandemonium of stenches impacting the mind like a chorus of shrieking angels, a mob of divine sopranos gone mad.

  His soldiers, watching Lazarian put his mask on, felt an identical little chill.

  The big man’s beauty was always a little unbelievable seen up close: the carven features, the rosebud mouth, the heavy-lidded eyes two pools of luminous candor. Shocking, though, when half that face was holstered in the mask, and you felt no mismatch between those lovely eyes, and what looked like the jaws of a huge bug.

  “Man, this air is messin’ me up, Sol,” Sonny croaked through the crude amplifier. “You could sell it to junkies.”

  “Relax.” Lazarian’s voice came out mellow, almost unmangled by the mask. “Breathe through your filters, you’ll be fine. And listen: count your steps going dow
n. We think the guy running this place for us is ripping us off, taking other deliveries on the side. So count your steps down so we can check the fill-level.”

  He doubted his laborers could show the concentration for a count. His real aim was to create a pretext for leaving them down there while he went back up for the weights and bags he was going to use on them in their turn. They took up their burdens and lanterns again, and he led them down into the shaft of the old Quicksilver Mine.

  Here in the well-lit shaft-mouth they were in a stage set. There was a holding tank for delivered toxins, and a little stack of empty drums to be filled from that tank. There was a donkey engine mounted on the track, and some carts linked to it by cable—everything needed for lowering sealed drums of toxins carefully into the shaft for clean storage.

  But sixty yards down, the rails gave out, recycled long ago for their steel. Below that point, as they pushed their bubble of light down the steepening pitch, there was only the black, six-inch fill-hose running along down the shaft floor beside a crude staircase of rail-less cross-ties. And as they descended, their lanterns’ light made the hose’s shadow twitch and shift, like a giant house snake, the resident genius of this place dancing down shaft beside them.

  Ever deeper they sank down through a strange, ethereal inferno. Down here it wasn’t the men who sweated out into the air, but the air that sweated itself into the men, air like dragon’s breath, a micro-blizzard of molecular razors, and the brew that exhaled it was perhaps the perfect human solvent.

  At this thought Lazarian’s smile bloomed within his mask, a secret flower.

  Even sooner than Lazarian had expected, they reached the black pool. It was always a shock encountering it. Its stillness seemed to mask a secret aggression, as if this slug of earth-socketed poison—more than a mile in depth—had stealthily been hastening up to meet them, and had, just an instant ago, paused, pretending immobility, its flat black eye dazzling their lights back at them, its cold breath licking the skin of their faces like a demon’s caustic tongue.