New Cthulhu 2: More Recent Weird

by Elizabeth Bear

  Oh, there was great power here. He had not been wrong to cross a continent with these corpses expressly to offer them here. This pool was Death’s most absolute orifice, the threshold of a perfect annihilation.

  He watched his soldiers awkwardly crouching, unlimbering wire, cutters, and weights from the satchels. Their dazed unease was understandable, entering this place for the first time. Even these morons sensed what was here.

  “So what was your count, guys?” he asked them. Smiled again within his mask to see their eyes’ identical looks of guilty alarm.

  It made him wonder: were such crude life-forms as these an insult if offered in sacrifice? To the Power that he had from the first felt to be hidden in this shaft, were two such primitive souls worse than no sacrifice at all? Come to that, were even the slightly more intelligent, slightly more dangerous men inside the body bags also too crude, too worthless an offering?

  How could he know? On the threshold of such a Mystery as Lazarian sensed down here, who did know the rules? In the end, his own instinctive sense of a presence, his Awe—that was the real offering. His soul’s readiness was the incense he burnt on the altar. The sacrifices themselves must always be guesswork, mere gesture. They displayed his devotion, whether or not the god here valued them.

  Granting all this, it was Lazarian’s intuition that told him he did right. Every life, however simple, in passing through Death’s membrane, forced open a seam between the space-time of this world and the unknowable Outside. Every death created a brief aperture through which something might be glimpsed.

  “Never mind, guys,” Lazarian said. “I kept count. They’re overfilled.” He pulled two fat packets of hundred-dollar bills from his pocket, and waggled them. “I know how neat and tight your wiring’s going to be, so I want you to take your bonuses now.” Their eyes crinkled above their masks—so pleased, pocketing the cash!

  And Lazarian would send them into the pool with their money still in pocket. Like grave goods in the ancient world’s funerals, it was a ceremonial responsibility. Death would reveal nothing to those who tried to get revelation for a bargain price.

  He told the men, “I’m going up to talk to the gate-man. Weight them heavy. I’ll be back down before you get both of them wired.”

  Long minutes later, though they could no longer see Lazarian’s ascending light, Sonny’s voice was still cautiously low:

  “You believe this stench?”

  Junior—slightly dazed, his eyes goggled—shook his head. He was looping wire around the middle of the smaller of the two bodies, and threading the wire through a ten-pound weight-disc. “Fuckin smell feels like it’s leakin’ in through my skin!”

  Their mask-muted voices rang strange to them, like buried men speaking from their graves. “Lift ’im a little higher,” Junior said, as he threaded the wire through another weight.

  The gaseous air lay like a lubricant mist on everything. The weight slipped from his grip. It rolled, bounced off a lower tie, and jumped into the pool. The pair recoiled to either side from the tongue of black slop thrown back from the splash.

  “You dipstick!”

  “It slipped! Shoot me!”

  “Don’t slip!”

  The booming of their angry voices suddenly subdued them. The after-splash of the weight into the pool made the pond gently vibrate, and its rim kiss the walls of the shaft:

  slap-suck, slap-suck . . .

  The echoes took forever to die down. It seemed to Sonny a long time that they crouched there, listening. He wondered if the air was stoning him, messing with his time sense. He was crouched there, meaning to get back to work, but not doing it.

  It was Junior who got them moving.

  “Tilt ’im up again.”

  They got back into it. Sonny manipulated the corpse while Junior paid off the wire.

  “They were so stiff when we loaded ’em,” Junior said. “They’re a bitch to handle all floppy like this!”

  They’d crossed the country in a little under forty-eight hours. The corpses were stiff to start with, but now that rigor would have been useful, it was long gone. The slack stiff slumped, resisting their work. Now that they had the third wire loop pinching into its bagged length, it had begun to look segmented, like a caterpillar.

  Sonny remembered a book about Houdini he’d read in slam, and thought of something funny. He weighed his words. You had to be careful, if you wanted Junior to understand something.

  “Hey Joon. You know that when you tie a guy in a buncha short lengths like this? Instead of tyin’ him in one long piece? You tie him in short lengths like this, and it’s harder for him to get out of. You know—free himself, escape.”

  Bug-muzzled Junior sat goggle-eyed, staring at him. With just his eyes showing like this he looked . . . shocked at what Sonny had said. Wasn’t getting the joke at all.

  Sonny pulled down his mask a little to show Junior he was smiling, making a joke. “You know—get himself untied?”

  Junior’s brow corrugated. Really concentrating now, and still not getting it. With his forehead corrugated like that, he looked almost terrified, like these stiffs might suddenly try to untie themselves.

  “You fuckin idiot,” Sonny said, and then couldn’t help laughing at that face of Junior’s. “It’s a joke! How’re they gonna escape? They’re fuckin dead!”

  And then both of them looked for a moment at the bagged stiffs—as if they hadn’t quite fully grasped that fact before.

  They worked on. They said nothing more, but their least movements wove fine webs of echo around them.

  The last weight was wired. Stiff Number One was now a black caterpillar of seven unequal segments, with the discs attached to it like the eggs of some parasitic wasp.

  Sonny thumbed out the razor tip of a utility knife, and cut the “window” Sol had prescribed—a big, square flap out of the bag over the stiff’s face, to let the solvents in to work on the nude corpse. As he cut, he felt the blade meet doughy resistance, and when he unmasked the face found a deep, unbleeding slice beside the nose.

  “Sorry about that, wise guy.”

  “Who do ya think he was?” asked Junior.

  “An East-coast greaseball like the other one. Who cares?” He and Junior had staged a hold-up in an Italian restaurant; the distraction had covered Lazarian’s abduction of this guy from a back table.

  Corpse Number Two had required the pair to enter the lobby of a plush high-rise, and kick up a drunken fuss about being admitted to the elevators up to “Lulu’s” condo. Four really big guys, armed, had poured from the elevator a moment later. Though the two tried to prolong the distraction, they were thrown out on their ass PDQ, but Lazarian still had the big stiff in the van by the time they returned to it. Guy was wearing sweat-stained exercise togs, apparently had been having a workout in his home gym.

  “You come a long way, Bo-seephus,” Sonny told Stiff One. To Junior he said, “Why the hell did he take us all the way out there to get these guys, then bring them all the way back here to get rid of ’em?”

  Junior shrugged mountainously. “Who knows? He’s a goon, got his goon reasons. I mean, this is a pretty good hidin’ place.”

  “Yeah, but between here an’ Jersey there’s three thousand miles of—”

  “What’s that?”

  Slap-suck, slap-suck, slap-suck . . .

  The pool was quaking again, still gently, but just a little stronger than before. Both men were lifelong Californians, but now they were discovering that a casual attitude about earthquakes decreased radically as the depth of your body under the earth increased.

  “The stuff probably just keeps settling,” said Sonny. “Down into cracks an’ holes down there.”

  “I don’t see no bubbles.” The cogency of this remark, coming from his slow-witted friend irritated Sonny.

  “Okay, okay. So whaddya say we just quit fuckin’ the dog, Joon? You get that end, I’ll get this end.”

  They stood up with the corpse hammocked between them.<
br />
  “One . . . two . . . ”—they had a fair swing going—“three!”

  The dead goon was launched. He lay face-up on the air for a moment. Framed in the “window” they’d cut, his eyes and mouth were pools of shadow in the oblique light from the lanterns. The shadows made the face live in that instant—it seemed to grimace as it fell.

  It had to be this druggy air that made them both so late in jumping back—the splash was big and it wet their boots and spattered the lanterns.

  Cursing, they wiped their boots on their jeans and set the lanterns higher up. Would the pond never settle? Jittering and splashing and slopping . . . They stood watching that turbulence, and imagining the wise guy’s journey down the steep shaft, a long slo-mo tumble down through the most perfect blackness there ever was.

  “How far down you think he’ll go?” rumbled Junior.

  Sonny understood exactly what Junior was picturing: the weighted mummy sinking, striking the shaft-floor a little farther down, jouncing up off the ties, tumbling slowly farther down, jouncing again.

  They both looked up behind them at the tunnel’s steep pitch. Sonny rumbled, “If the slope don’t change he’ll just keep bouncin’ down.”

  “So how far down’s this tunnel go?”

  “It’s called a shaft, Joon. Tunnels you can come out the other end of.”

  “So how far down’s this shaft go?”

  “Well . . . ” Sonny’s mind kept jouncing down deeper and deeper with the corpse, and saw no end to it. “How should I know?”

  It was funny how they kept freezing up and listening down here. And now they’d done it again, just crouching there, the silence deepening around them.

  “Know what I think, Sonny?” Junior’s eyes had a look in them that Sonny had never seen before. It was like . . . amazement. “I think that this is some strange shit for us to be doin’ down here.”

  This declaration flashed Sonny on some of the other strange things they had done as “soldiers.” He considered these, and then he nodded. “I think this is the strangest shit we’ve done yet.”

  “And the hardest work too.”

  They roused themselves, and started wiring Stiff Two. Heavier though it was, they were working more smoothly now—suddenly almost deft. Perhaps it was that they both felt a new tension in the shaft, felt the presence of something that seemed to applaud their work, to will it forward.

  “Jesus!” Junior yelped, dropping a weight and his pliers. A roiling sound, a silken fizzing filled the shaft. The pool was foaming, bulging upwards at its center, mounting in a dome of turbulence, rising as if lifted by some powerful under-pressure.

  Had the respirators melted from their faces? It felt like the poisoned air had suddenly soaked through their skulls, and was licking the brain-meat out of them. The pressure-dome mushroomed to the ceiling, and came surging at them.

  They turned to launch themselves up-shaft, and tripped over the half-wired second body. Got up and scrambled past it, a voice in Sonny’s skull saying: One heartbeat too late. They were just getting their stride on the ties, the lighter Sonny taking the lead, as the gust of the black wave’s air pressure touched their napes.

  The wave punched Sonny’s legs out from under him, gripped his waist like a cold, melting hand, and dragged him back down. He rammed desperate knees against the stone, felt bone crack and his fingernails torn off, but held on against the terrible back-drag of caustics draining off of him.

  Looking back over his shoulder, he saw that Junior Lee had been dragged all the way down, and now was up to his neck in the pool, his arms scrabbling for the shaft floor just out of reach. And there, just beyond Junior, Sonny saw what stood up from the pool, saw its hugeness and the wild night-black glare of its eyes. Awed, Sonny watched it seize Junior by the back of the neck and lift him up like a kitten, and with its free hand, hugely fisted, smite the pool, to send a second, mightier wave booming up the shaft straight at Sonny.

  Again Sonny scrambled up-shaft, his knee broken but fighting himself up one tie higher, another tie, another . . . while a voice in his head was saying: just one heartbeat too late.

  A tongue of waste shot past him along the shaft wall, and as he reached the lanterns, the wave curved around just beyond them, and came sweeping back down towards him like a gathering arm. For an instant, the lanterns made a black mirror of the oncoming liquid wall, and in it Sonny saw himself: a bug-mouthed being on its belly and reaching for a lantern, its eyes bulging at its oncoming end.

  The descending wave’s satin mass wrapped him in blindness, flipped him on his back and snatched him down, the stepped earth under him beating him, braining him, blotting him out. A perfect blackness was the aftermath. The echoes of uproar and choked-off shouts collided again and again with the stone walls, subsiding at long last to a faint liquid chuckle.

  Shortly after, there came down the sound of a heavy tread descending the shaft from the far, faint circle of moonlit sky high above.

  Sol Lazarian stopped at the limit of the drenched zone, which now extended fifteen yards up-shaft of the pool itself. Not a sign of his soldiers remained, nor any sign of the two bagged dead they’d carried.

  Fear, in Lazarian, was a darker shade of joy, it was the same radiation at a different frequency. When he broke a man’s life in his arms, his prey’s shock was his joy’s fuel. And, when any horror laid its hand on him, he felt not crushed, but light, combustible, packed like dynamite with a savage sympathy for that larger joy, that joy more monstrous than his own, that might be about to consume him.

  Already at thirty-eight, young for a real master, he had consumed a dozen other first-rate killers. Real samurai like himself, not moronic buttons—of those he kept no count. And all these gifted men had learned that to endanger Lazarian was to inspire and ignite him. His startling face got eerily prettier, his manner even more serene. You had him distracted. You watched him fail to spot your trap. You sprang it on him, and suddenly, there was Sol Lazarian’s forearm across your throat and Sol Lazarian’s mellow baritone crooning unspeakablities in your ear . . . and there was your neck breaking.

  He stood thoughtful for a moment, ears straining. Ta-da-dum

  Ta-da

  Ta-dum, da . . .

  In the spectrum of things audible there is a doubtful zone shared by that which is imagined and that which is faintly heard.

  If real, this voice was beautiful and sad. A velvet-and-molasses gospel voice. It gave him a delicate attack of the creeps, a horripilation of the fine black lanugo that covered the back and shoulders of the pale giant, and that no living man had ever seen.

  Ta-da-dum

  Ta-da

  Ta-dum, da . . .

  Sol thrust his light further forward seeking some purchase on what he’d heard, and the movement of his light revealed that the blackness under his feet was a shape, not a blot. Something distinctly outlined in the stone and timber. His hair stirred. Its outline was precisely that of a huge, outreached hand.

  Lazarian stood squarely in the palm of that hand. You are mine, it said. Give me more, it said . . . Yes, it demanded more, as plain as printed speech. Demanded more.

  Not many nights later Sol Lazarian had fetched another body from New Jersey, this one still living, though snugly bound: Lou Bonifacio.

  Accomplishing this had been no slight feat.

  Lazarian had had to kill no fewer than four buttons in swift succession—and quite good samurai they had been—two of them, anyway, so good Sol had for some moments considered bringing one—or even both of their bodies—back as additional offerings to the shaft.

  But after all, the capture and sacrifice of his Capo must rightly claim his sole attention. To kill one whom he had served was an act of great spiritual weight.

  Coming west, the securely bound Bonifacio had dozed for a long stretch of hours—an aging body, perhaps subconsciously fleeing its dire predicament. But he came awake again as their van climbed the switchbacks toward the Quicksilver Mine.

  He was gag
ged. Lazarian had been driven to gag him not long after their journey’s outset. Lou’s abusive raging had quickly exhausted Lazarian’s intention to be courteous and sociable on the long drive. Now, even after so long at the wheel, Lazarian had never felt more awake. His heart rose in him while his van, turn by turn, ascended the switchbacks.

  He drove rapt, so clearly recalling it—the black hand perfectly articulated, telling him whose Hand he stood in.

  But whose?

  Who but the one he’d lived and worked to meet? It was the hand of Annihilation itself, standing up and reaching out. The whole world had altered in answer to his sacrifice of those two goons! The spirit in the shaft had seized both his kills and his hirelings, obliterated the four of them, and left for Lazarian an urgent sign, the extended hand that said GIVE MORE.

  Very soon now he was going to learn what he would purchase with this more powerful offering. A full-fledged Capo plucked right from his fortress.

  In that moment of his first offering’s acceptance, his spirit had been enlarged, as if he had fed himself those lesser lives.

  The odd thing was, that it was to Bonifacio himself that Lazarian wanted to talk about it, his Capo, a man who had himself offered human sacrifices. Who better able to provide a judgment of the eerie rightness of this shaft, the Dantean poetry of its deeps? It was to Lou he longed to confide that he found dread here too. For he did not know how much this black hand offered, and how much more it might demand.

  If only they could toss it back and forth, as they had on other, no less homicidal excursions during their long shared past. He smiled wistfully. Honestly, whaddya think, Lou? I think you have to agree: apart from it being a really secure site, your life will unlock something big down here. Down here your life will buy me some kind of real power. Doncha think?

  Lazarian steered through the last switchback, and out onto the mountain’s broad shoulder. A fragmentary moon showed them Chip sliding open the gate of the compound a moment before Lazarian’s headlights splashed across him. Chip had been informed that his assistance tonight was required. He brought out a sturdy dolly. Lazarian stood the shackled Bonifacio in the dolly and bound him to it, and then hauled him up to the shaft. The shaft-mouth was wreathed in the mist of artificial light that it breathed out at the stars.