Suddenly everything on the battlefield is after Ruthie.
No, she realizes, they aren’t running toward me. They’re fleeing to the high ground, like mice. That’s right, there’ll be a shockwave, won’t there?
“Matthew,” Ruthie shouts, before a scorching wind lifts her off her feet, ripping her mask off, flipping her ass over tea kettle through the air.
When she awakes, she is soaked, sore, and draped on a delicate arch of rock formed by the cliff’s edge and the lip of a dust crater. She raises herself to hands and knees, pulling her seaweed mini-skirt over her ass and staring around.
Water has battered the graveyard, making pools of its many Dust craters. Seawater, she guesses, thrown by the explosion. The rush of water doused the Fiends’ flamethrowers, giving the squid an edge in the battle—the offworlders seem to be winning now. Drowned and strangled humans litter the ground, along with Dust-proof tubes containing human DNA samples—coffin tubes—that jut up from the murk of the one-time golf course.
There is no sign of Matt or Holly.
Everything’s quiet, Ruthie realizes. The battle is continuing in total silence.
“Actually, spawn, I think you’ve gone deaf.” The words are Kabuva. Dad and Isshy are with her, flickering in the fog.
Isshy is right. She cannot hear a thing.
Her eyes find a column of black smoke rising in the east, where the Sponge was. “Isshy’s dead then,” she says and it is a surprise how much that hurts.
“Is he?” Dad says.
“I must be,” the squid says. “Child’s right. Nothing could survive that.”
“You’re hallucinations,” she says slowly. “The baby . . . I would know if Matt was dead, wouldn’t I?”
“Oh yes,” Dad says. “You would know. He’s alive—oh, wait, there’s his body.”
She screams, curling up in the crater.
“That’s not him, Ruth,” Isshy says, in that annoyingly gentle voice. “Jacob, you’re upsetting her.”
Is it or isn’t it? She crawls to the gristle lying face down in the bloody sand.
“What did I tell you, child?”
It is a stranger. He is lying atop an old machine gun. An extra cartridge of bullets is taped to his fist.
Ruthie crouches by the body, takes a breath, makes a snowball. She can see it, just as she sees Dad and Isshy loitering beside her. She tosses it into the pond, but there is no splash, no ripples.
Write it off, she thinks. The van, Isshy, escape, even my sanity. But not Matt. Never Mattie.
All around her, the skirmish continues, a disorderly cut and thrust. Down the cliff path, her intended route of escape, is a squad of Demo soldiers and armed squid, trotting up to join the fight. A trio of Fiends has set up an ambush for them. They’ve hidden behind a toppled cenotaph and are making ready to Dust the upcoming squad.
“What now?” Dad asks. “Dive into the fray looking for your brother?”
“What chance would she have?” Isshy replies. “One side or the other is bound to shoot her.”
“He’s right. Hon, you can’t start looking until the dust settles. Pardon the pun.”
“And you can’t help your brother if you’re dead.”
“Shut up!” She covers her deaf ears.
“She should go to ground. Wait this out.”
“Sure,” Dad says, “And end up a prisoner of whichever side wins?”
“You’ve been drafted after all, Ruth,” Isshy tells her. “Pick a side and go with it.”
“The Fiends killed us,” Dad reminds her. “They made you do the concert. Sam fed you fireseeds. Isn’t that him over there, directing that ambush team?”
“The Fiends are winning the war,” Isshy disagrees. “Her best chance for finding Matt might be to get Friendly. Holly thought so.”
Is it that simple? Take up the gun, join the ambush? Start killing the Demos, or start killing squid?
“Hon,” Dad says.
“Shut up,” she says. “You’re a hallucination.” She looks from one parent to the other, Dad with his guitar and reproachful eyes, Isshy pale-blue with understanding. Who would Matt pick?
Impossible to say. His mom’s a squid, his lover’s a Fiend.
But she does know who she’d most like to kill.
“Ruth,” argues Isshy. “The Fiends are winning. Your best chance to get offworld died with me. Forget the Democratic cause and join that ambush. Pick the winning team.”
“They’re not winning this battle, are they?” Dad counters. “She doesn’t get off the cliff, today, she doesn’t get to look for anyone.”
Daddy’s right. And the squid might be grateful if she pitches in; the Fiends just regard it as their due.
She pries the clip of ammo off the corpse and slithers up to the lip of the dust crater. She takes careful aim at the centre of Sam’s back, the sweet spot, as he prepares to slaughter the contingent of Demos and squid coming up from below.
“Ashes to ashes,” she murmurs—and it is so weird not to be able to hear her voice, or even the pop pop pop of the gun as she signs up for the Demo cause, pulling the trigger and sending her alleged brethren to oblivion.
verse found scratched inside
the lid of a sarcophagus
(dynasty unknown)
GEMMA FILES
Never think to hide yourself in death from me.
Before you are even half-digested
my body’s adze will pry open your flesh-eating box—
I will bake myself into a clay doll for your tomb
and slip thus beneath the portico, with its net of spells.
I will pursue you through every division of the night
even unto the realm of the fourth and fifth hour,
that howling wasteland where serpents coil
and crocodiles sharpen their teeth on bones.
Knowing well Lord Seker has no care for his own worshippers,
I will pass both him and his eight gods by, move unnoticed
through fields of chopping blocks, pits of vomited fire;
I will fear neither the black rustle of his wings (knit from
resinous wrappings), his two heads on two necks,
that his tail terminates in a human skull.
As the oils of your press turn rancid, curing you in cedar,
I will burn kyphri ‘til the air itself hangs heavy
with myrrh, broom and saxifrage,
‘til ba and ka alike fall slumbrous as smoked bees.
I will work an Execration Text on you
and sever each part of your soul in turn—
your heart, your name, black shadow of your vital spark—
shape you in wax, in mud, bound and dismembered.
I will crush you flat and scribe my will upon you,
threaten you with the Second Death,
murder your name, erase you, make it so that none
now living remember you ever lived (but me).
As Hathor’s blood-drunkenness overcomes me, I too
will collect the dribbled bile of Re, our senile God-king—
like Isis, I will reduce you to torn-up parts, then string
(all I can find of them) back together with my father’s spit.
Like Nut, unending sky, I will stretch myself upon you
at last, open your mouth with mine and murmur:
There, it is done, you are Beautified. Rise up now,
and join me. Rise up. Wake to my word, to me.
Rise up, wake, to me, and now. Or never.
I will not be denied.
collect call
SILVIA MORENO-GARCIA
I read a photocopied copy of the Necronomicon in Mexico City when I was in junior high and living on the fourth floor of a building which smelled like garbage.
The neighbours used to dump their trash bags outside their d
oors and there was always a broken light bulb dangling from the ceiling. Which was not so bad. The other apartment buildings around us were even shittier. La Bola’s elevator, for example, had a big hole in the floor that nobody fixed. One night, one of the hobos that used to sneak into the building got his leg stuck in it, then made a bloody mess trying to pull himself out and they had to call the cops.
Some kids said they had to amputate the man’s leg when he got tetanus from the cuts. La Bola got a good laugh out of it.
He was the one who found the Necronomicon.
I knew nothing about Lovecraft until this fat dude who liked to smoke a lot of dope and watch foreign movies lent me a copy of At the Mountains of Madness. I was in my Poe phase back then and the dude—his name was Leonardo but we called him La Bola—had seen me thumbing through it.
He circled my desk, shark-like, as I read The Fall of the House of Usher and told me that if I liked Poe, I would really like Lovecraft.
Now this dude, he wasn’t friendly. The other kids teased him with some creative nicknames. The nicest one of them was La Bola, because he was so big, but he got called much worse.
La Bola had a pierced ear, which was a no-no at our school, and he carried magazines of girls with big boobs and heavy metal music tapes inside his knapsack. In short, he wasn’t my sort of friend.
I was the nerd with the glasses and the baggy uniform. My mom had bought it two sizes bigger because she thought she’d save some money if I could grow into the clothes. I never did grow and remained short and skinny, rolling up my sleeves all year long so I could see my fingers.
Anyhow, he gave me the Lovecraft one Friday and on Monday he asked me what I thought.
“It was cool,” I said.
“Wasn’t it,” he said as he sat next to me, giddy with excitement. “You want to read another one?”
That’s how we became friends. It was a good friendship. La Bola lent me books and I fed him. His mom, just like mine, worked until late at night and there was rarely anything to eat in his house, so I kept inviting him to have supper with me and my sister. Then we’d rush to my room and listen to some of his music while we chatted about horror stories.
On our way back from school La Bola purchased copies of La Alarma, which was a thin, yellow newspaper with graphic crime stories and a naked chick on page five. “Followed Murdered Raped!” screamed the front page.
My sister Marilu loathed the crime rag and she did not like the fact that La Bola ate huge portions of the chicken she cooked for us. However, she was willing to keep her mouth shut about him as long as I did not tattle to mom about Marilu’s boyfriend.
Marilu’s boyfriend had gone off to the States a few months before and was working in Texas. He phoned her once a week, collect call, and they chatted for a good hour. Mother had forbidden her from accepting his calls and told me to hang up if anyone called collect, but I always passed the receiver to my sister and feigned stupidity when the bill arrived in the mail.
I did not bother Marilu and she did not bug me, and La Bola continued to come over to eat my sister’s food and talk about horror stories.
And then there was the whole mess about the book and La Bola stopped visiting.
One morning, when were on our way to school, La Bola stopped to talk to a hobo. We were following our usual path, zipping next to rundown 19th century buildings, art deco apartments with tiles falling off the facade and modern monstrosities shaped like boxes built in the seventies. Some neighbourhoods had turned their old buildings into fashionable nightclubs. There was a colonial church now transformed into a spiffy bar. But not ours. Factories jutted next to vecindades, buildings that had gone up during Iturbide’s empire served as a backdrop for prostitutes, and a sad park with more concrete than trees stood as the heart of this grey collage.
The hobo stumbled through a garbage-littered corner just as we left behind the park. I knew him—or knew of him—he sold all kinds of trinkets: old magazines of girls with big titties and drugs were the most crucial items for kids my age, but rumour was he could get any merchandise you wanted.
I stepped aside, pressed myself against the wall to let the stinky fellow go by. But the man recognized La Bola and started cooing, talking to him like they were old friends.
“Hey, long time no see,” said the man. “I got some new stuff, some nice stuff for you. You want to take a look?”
He probably meant drugs. I didn’t do drugs and there was a strict no pot rule at my house for fear that my mother would belt my ass red if she smelled it. But La Bola bought drugs, smoked cigarettes. He liked to demonstrate his superior sophistication with his knowledge of stimulants.
“Can’t right now,” La Bola said.
“But this is big stuff. Good stuff. It’s that book you wanted. The N.”
“Maybe a peek.”
“We’re going to be late,” I reminded La Bola.
He ignored me and started following the panhandler, and I in turn followed La Bola until they crawled inside the abandoned pantyhose factory where some of the kids liked to have sex. The old building had tons of shattered milky-white glass panes and it was easy to sneak inside, but I did not like to go in there, and when La Bola insisted he didn’t want to go alone, I said I’d keep watch from outside.
I didn’t dare to crawl in.
Through the glass plane I made out two murky figures, shadows, Bola and the man talking. There was a noise, a cry. Not a scream. A cry. Might have been a “no.” Might have been nothing at all.
Stuff happens at the old factory and you’ve got to be careful. Just look away. That morning I put my hands in my pockets and rushed to class, left Bola alone. Left him behind.
I saw nothing.
La Bola was late to school.
A few weeks later, La Bola talked about the invocation and showed me the grease-stained photocopies then man had given him.
It was October and the Day of the Dead was right around the corner. The streets were filled with sugar skulls and pictures of death in a long Porfirian dress. We were walking next to the offices of Telmex when La Bola suddenly stopped in the middle of the street—it was the same street where the whores gathered at night to ply their trade, causing my mom to pull my arm very quickly whenever we were out late—and said we should try to put the Necronomicon to good use.
“Like seriously,” he said. “We should call Cthulhu.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. We went to sit in the park and I opened my math book so I could do a bit of studying while La Bola went to get some sodas and chips from the corner grocery store. The daughter of the store owner was a plump, gap-toothed fifteen year-old who had a crush on La Bola on account of his “dangerous” earring and the inverted-star drawn on his backpack with red marker. La Bola would spend some ten minutes sweet-talking her and she would give us the junk food for free.
But instead of lining up behind the construction workers who were buying beer and tortas, La Bola sat down. He pulled out some photocopies from a yellow envelope and gushed about how he had purchased an authentic facsimile of the Necronomicon from the man we had met on our way to school.
“It’s the real deal,” he told me, very seriously.
“Bullshit,” I said. “Lovecraft made that book up.”
“That’s what some people say. But other people claim he merely used a coded name for a real book. This book. The true Necronomicon.”
“Yeah, so even if it’s true what the hell is a copy of the Necronomicon doing in the hands of a panhandler in Mexico City? Shouldn’t it be in Boston or New York or some shit like that?”
“Olaus Wormius made a Latin translation and somebody wrote a translation of that into Spanish. This is a copy of the Spanish manuscript, written in Zaragoza and carried by a Spanish scribe to Veracruz. Somebody sold it to Porfirio Diaz and then during the Revolution it got lost, but it was in the library of the UNAM back in the seventies when this du
de photocopied it and then someone else made more photocopies.”
I shrugged an answer. We had a math test the next day and I was more worried about getting a bad mark in Calderon’s class than whatever weird shenanigan La Bola had cooked up.
“It looks like gibberish to me.”
He plucked four pages, placed them smack on top of the math book I was trying to read.
“These are authentic aetheric keys. They can be used to invoke all sorts of stuff like Cthulhu and shit. We can call him.”
I shoved the pages inside the book and rolled my eyes.
“Why would we want to do that?”
“Because it’s neat,” La Bola concluded. “Come on, you’ve got to help me.”
“We’ve got that test.”
“So?”
“So I can’t play Lovecraft right now.”
“Who’s talking about playing?”
“Are you going back to the factory?”
“I can’t invoke nothing in my place,” La Bola said.
“Will that dude be there?”
“Who?” he asked.
“You know,” I said, but I didn’t say the hobo’s name and La Bola pressed his lips together and shook his head.
“I’m not talking to him anymore,” he muttered.
“Why?”
“Because, he’s a damn cultist that adores Dagon and he wants to sacrifice me to the Elder Gods. Who cares?” He grabbed his envelope, zipped it into his backpack and huffed at me.
“You’re always saying stupid shit like that. There’s no monsters hanging ‘round the park.”
“There’s monsters,” he assured me.
Stupid La Bola. Still dicking around with horror books wrapped in garish covers and little-kid ideas about things from the stars.
I was conscious of the realities and hardships of everyday life. La Bola took photocopies from drunkards, like a modern Jack waiting for his beanstalk to grow.
“Whatever, asshole,” I muttered. “You’re nuts.”
“I am not! You’ll see! I’ll show you!”
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