Shotguns v. Cthulhu

by Larry DiTillio

  It was a three foot deep slack of mud, which sunk in an uneven pyramid to a black gap, about the size of my fist, in the center. I shone the light down the hole, but all I could see was black. It seemed wrong too. I had leaned up against the rock that had been there for years. It was cool all year round, tall and grey and flat, well mostly. If you leaned back facing the center of the ring, and looked up, a slight dip in the stone seemed to frame a star in the center of the sky.

  No one knows who put them up. The Indians have stories. Back in high school I dug up some books on the stuff and poked around. It’s a habit I have. I find something out of the ordinary, I latch on, and I read about it. Or at least, read about it as much as I can. Then I think about it. The summer I became interested in the stones, I read seven books on them. I have a notebook somewhere.

  First off, the Indians didn’t build them, and that’s according to the Indians. Rogue Vikings, a moon-faced white people who feared the sun, some unknown pre-native civilization, take your pick. The whole of New England is peppered with them, stone forts, old rings of stones, gullies and gunnels and fences of chipped rock—monolithic structures which thumb their nose at modern science. Some of the rocks are huge, three, four tons. They were standing when Champlain blew through here in 1609, dropping a flag along the way, and they were standing when the state was founded.

  Strangely, no one really seems to care too much who put them up. It’s amazing what people choose to ignore when it bothers their pre-established sensibilities. It’s also useful when you want to knock them down. There’s no definitive culture to protect. Some Indians might raise a stink, and some sad little faux-Wiccans, but past that, there’s no one left to stand up and complain. It’s a shame, really. The rocks are incredible.

  Some studies, for instance, of the rocks at King’s Chamber (another site in Vermont) dated it 10,000 years before the Indians got here. Trouble that. It was ignored. I mean, they printed it, but no one looked any deeper. Who was I to complain? I didn’t really take it upon myself either. Just because I read a few books and took some notes, didn’t make me any better. I just went along with it like the rest of them. Complaining about it didn’t help.

  I still think about them a lot.

  This must have been a dream.

  I was on the mountain. It was a warm and clear and a spring or summer morning. Nan was there. We were walking together in the pines, holding hands. There were no bugs yet. Birds were crying in the trees, there was a clear, warm grey white light and the shadows that the sun cut divided the world into a grid of darkness and light.

  Nan turned from me, releasing my hand, and began walking up Indian Hill towards the stones. I stopped, refusing to follow. She didn’t look back. In fact, I couldn’t recall seeing her face at all. Her back was to me, wearing the same green sweater torn at the sleeve, the same capri pants. I knew it was her. But I couldn’t see her.

  I wanted to see her face, but I didn’t want to go up the hill. She continued up the rise until she was nearly a hundred feet away.

  The tug was sudden.

  My right arm was suddenly pulled forward with a shocking force, causing me to stumble forward, arm outstretched, barely keeping my feet.

  It was only then I realized that my hand wasn’t just my hand. The skin at the ends of the fingers kept going, snaking out from my finger tips like it had run like hot wax, congealing into a messy knot of muscle and fat, forming a rope of flesh that tumbled to the ground and coiled up the hill towards Nan.

  The hand she had been holding with mine was connected by a hundred foot rope of grey-pink flesh.

  I don’t remember what happened next. Maybe I woke up.

  One morning, pre-dawn, on the run. Don’t know when. I was standing outside the booth, taking a piss down the run when I heard it.

  As I stopped peeing, I heard a thin, high sound—something far off and distant and directionless. I zipped quick, unable to identify the noise, worried someone might be coming, but as I moved, the sound vanished beneath the crackly and shuffle of my clothes.

  I froze in place and listened again. A moment later the sound, a voice, maybe a child, or a woman or a man singing. High and thin and far off. It floated through the air and seemed to hover for a moment before vanishing. There were no words I could pick out. No structure. No pattern. Just a voice that rose and then faded. But some birds can sound like people. But it was too cold and too dark for birds.

  I stood still and listened again. Waiting.

  While I was waiting, I don’t know how long, the dawn came. Slowly filling the gaps in the air with light. Finally, with my legs getting stiff and my fingers growing numb, I went back into the booth to warm up.

  It never occurred to me to go up the hill to the stones. Not then.

  I think.

  This was before the homeless guy maybe. Near there at least. It wasn’t a dream.

  I climbed from the cab at about eight in the morning, and the town was already up and about for hours. I skirted the plow-line to the salted sidewalk and considered myself in the glass of Griffen’s. My hair was standing in sleep-spikes, my eyes were deep and bruised with lack of sleep. I looked ruined. My bed was two hundred yards from here, up a rickety set of steps, in a room with a whistling water heater and frayed quilts. It sounded like a dream. Like heaven.

  I turned to walk home and found myself facing Armin Dowdy, no more than fifty feet from me, moving at a clip in my direction.

  Everyone knew Dowdy. He was the terrible old man from our childhood. His house bordered the garden. He’d run up on parties on the stones three or four times a year, scattering kids with his screams. He was frightening, tall and thin and scarecrow-like, forever in insulated overalls and a down vest. His was older now, thinner, but none of his presence had left him. He saw me, and I saw him and without thinking I turned back and stepped into Griffen’s.

  With my back to the door, I found the paperback rack and began searching it. The door opened behind me with a BING and I kept my eyes down. Then, silence. The clerk was lost in her magazine and the music playing was soothing. I tracked titles but all the words seemed jumbled. Reversed, mixed-up. Gibberish.

  “You’re guarding the run,” Dowdy said to me. His voice was close behind me. For some reason, I didn’t turn. I pictured him, a tall old man hunching down to speak into my ear.

  “Don’t turn around. I can see it hasn’t got ya yet,” his breath was warm and smelled of coffee and denture-cream.

  Confusion, now. I smirked a little, uncontrollably. A picture formed in my mind. Crazy. Dowdy had slipped off his rocker quietly somewhere along the way. What was he? Seventy? Dementia. Burning out slowly up on the hill in a big ratty house. Losing his mind piece by piece. I didn’t turn. I was confused, embarrassed.

  “I don’t know how many in the town been taken, hard to tell in winter,” I could sense him turning his big head to look around.

  “You listen up. Don’t let no one touch you. No one. Skin to skin. Don’t you do it.”

  I turned to look at him and was startled to see his eyes filled with fear.

  “I can’t talk you off the run. You be careful. It’ll come for you soon.”

  The old man exited the door with a bang, and was gone.

  But maybe that was earlier?

  Once, I dreamt of warmth. A womb-like warmth and nestling close to others. Other people in a dark liquid. There was a sound like a drum. Something banging away somewhere else in the warmth, shaking it, shaking me. It felt safe, but also tomb-like, enclosed, buried.

  I opened my eyes and in the blurred half-light I saw a dozen naked bodies, floating in a yellow-brown gel, mouths open and filled, eyes alive and searching in the murk. The next thing I knew I was wobbling in front of my bathroom mirror, face covered in cold water, eyes wide and blank and frightened. I ran cold water through my hair and slowly came back to reality.

  Then I went downstairs and made myself a turkey pot pie and watched the news.

  One night, I opened the ga
te at four-forty, expecting to find the last dregs of workers leaving the area, and Martin or Davis at the booth, instead, I found no one. The trucks were gone. The booth was closed and locked, but no one was there. I locked the gate, unlocked the booth and got in to get it over with.

  I would ignore the strangeness and simply mark the countdown. Then, back to school.

  This is one of the few moments I can track with any certainty.

  A night, in the booth.

  I felt it right away. Even before the first timer went off, I could feel it. The buzz at the base of your neck when someone is watching you. I sat staring at the same paragraph again and again, eyes flicking glances out the window into the dark. I had read nothing. The idea of being watched had spun up to a monstrous size in my mind, consuming all else.

  Finally, unable to stand it, I stood, picked up the shotgun, slung it, and grabbed the flashlight. I stepped out into the dark and clicked on the light.

  “Hello,” I said to no one at all and felt immediately embarrassed. What was I doing? There was no one to hear me.

  With a muffled DING the timer sprung in the guard booth and I spun and came within a fraction of a second of shooting blindly at the door, cutting it up with shot.

  My breath huffing out of me, I let the shotgun hang from its strap and stared in wonder at the safety of the booth. I put my hands on my knees, the shotgun spun and dropped and butt first, dangled in the dirt, and I laughed, shaking. How would I explain a booth peppered with shot in the morning? God. What was I doing?

  That’s when I heard it. The soft crunch of footsteps in the snow. I didn’t look up, but the shaky humor faded from me quickly. I sat there, leaning on my knees, huffing out pillars of smoke. Was I afraid? I don’t know.

  Finally, not really moving, I looked up to the left.

  Past the edge of the light of the shack, maybe thirty feet away, stood a person. She was short, maybe five feet tall, and a woman, that much was clear. You couldn’t see much. She was dark, and it wasn’t just the light. Her skin was dark, and there was a lot of it, because she was nude. She was covered in black chunks of mud.

  Standing in the snow at night, nude, watching me.

  My breath caught in my throat as I watched her watch me. She stood still, but in the silence, I could hear something else. It sounded like a rubber-tire dragged along grass, a slow, low hissing sound.

  Suddenly, I flicked the flashlight up on her. For a moment, she was there, clear as day. Naked, brown with frazzled, mud-stained black hair. Dark eyes. Pearl white teeth pulled back in a grimace. An Indian.

  Next, she was in the air as if she had leapt backwards eight feet, then ten, flying backwards, hands flailing out in front of her. She made no sound, but her form vanished in seconds into the black of the trees, up the run towards the stoners’ garden.

  I stood there for a long time, in the dark, shaking.

  I remember some of it, now.

  Some morning, when Thomas showed up, everything was in order. My face was fixed in a bored expression I had practiced the last few hours. I hopped the fuel truck down the mountain. What nobody knew is I spent the night in the shack curled up in its base, avoiding the windows, a shotgun clutched in my hands, waiting for any noise. I didn’t walk the perimeter. I didn’t check the stones. I didn’t leave that booth. I didn’t even pee.

  When I was off the hill, the feeling of relief was palpable.

  I didn’t sleep when I got back. I ate, went upstairs, and sat on the bed, rolling the night over in my head.

  It was difficult to place last night’s events in any order. I could still see them in my mind, but there was a powerful urge to discard them. To cover them up with other things. Had I seen what I thought I had seen? Was there a naked woman up there that night? Was it a trespasser?

  I had to know.

  It’s almost clear now.

  I went up the mountain with a box full of slugs in my jacket that night. No more shot. I didn’t think it would do any good. This is still when I thought it was under control. I had suspicions, but they were so crazy, I didn’t even really believe them, though my body did. On some primal level I was terrified all the time.

  When I made it to the booth, I loaded up the shotgun, left the booth and marched up the hill before the sun went down. The march was slow. A new snow had fallen. The garden was clear of all but one stone. Eight muddy holes, criss-crossed by a thousand muddy footprints, truck and bobcat tracks and picket fences.

  I sat on the last stone. It was a huge, low, hill-like stone. It was the stone I woke on so many years earlier after a night of drunken partying. I sat very still, breath pouring from my scarf in gouts. Shotgun on my lap. I placed the flashlight on the rock next to me.

  From my vantage point, I had a clear view of all of the holes.

  I decided, then, that I would spend the night here, just to see what might happen. Though then I really didn’t know why.

  Nan is yelling at me. She’s marched from the living room to the bathroom and saying something hurtful. But now I know this is not real. Nan was there, sometime in the past. Some other point before all of this, but this here, this moment, is not real.

  I know this because she throws a box of letters at me, letters I wrote to her, I think. The box hits me and tumbles and catches the air and scatters papers everywhere. She slams the door.

  On the ground, in front of me, a dozen letters are all arrayed all over the ground, staring up at me. Every line on them is gibberish. A jumble of letters which seems to shift and change as I look at it.

  I know.

  On the last night, when the first thing slithered from the hole, I was asleep. I had nodded off. It was a slow sound, broken by a squelch and a pop, waking me immediately. I clicked on the light. Unsure if there had been a noise at all or if my imagination had startled me from sleep.

  It had gone full dark a few hours before, and as the stars spun through their tracks and nothing happened, the fervor I had felt in waiting for something had faded. My eyes closed sometime after seven.

  I grabbed the flashlight and clicked it on, pointing it north, but all I saw was empty, muddy holes and the night sky cut by the tops of pines further down the mountain. Then someone said something.

  The voice was low, keening. It took a moment to realize it was terrified, that voice, wheezing. Barely under control.

  My light tracked around until it found the woman. It was the same woman I had seen earlier. Muddy, naked in the snow. She was an Indian. She was curled on the ground near one of the holes, lips drawn back in a grimace, wheezing, mumbling words in a language that I didn’t know.

  I stepped forward, and she seemed to shake convulsively. I brought the shotgun around and pointed it at her. She didn’t react to the gun, she just stared at me with crazed eyes. Eyes that reminded me of something I had seen years before.

  I crept up on her like that. Shotgun in one hand, flashlight in the other, in a shuffling gait.

  I was only a few feet from her when I saw it.

  A clear, grey white tentacle tracked from the shadow behind her, curling into the muddy hole from one of the stones, emerging from it like a worm from the ground. It slid lazily back and forth, easily fifty feet long and as thick as my thigh. Inside it, when the light crossed it, I could see liquid pumping through it.

  When the light hit it, it shifted as if it could feel it, sliding back and the Indian woman was pulled from her feet with a scream.

  My mind dropped through my feet and the fear was on me in a way I never thought possible. The tentacle was attached to the back of the Indian woman’s neck. It held her like a marionette...attached.

  The sliding sound woke me from my revulsion.

  Other tentacles had emerged from the ground. One, with a tip barbed and cut like a lamprey, was almost at my boot when I saw it.

  I opened up. I pumped a 10 gauge round into it, and it flailed back, spraying the ground with a grey-white soup which seemed to melt the snow beneath it. The smell was like a swi
mming pool gone over in high summer. A whiff of chlorine filled with the swampy stink of green. There were screams; the Indian woman was yanked back as if an invisible giant had swept her off into the dark.

  I ran down the rise and fired three times, cutting one tentacle that popped up in front of me in two with a single shot, leaving an end flopping in the dirt, when I was knocked from my feet.

  I was struck by something big which hit me from the side with the force of a linebacker’s tackle. The air left me, the shotgun fell. The flashlight went flying through the night air in arcs, landing in a drift, pointing up towards the ceiling of naked pines.

  The Indian woman was there. The Indian woman had struck me. Her face was a mask of tears. Her mouth moved soundlessly. She was sorry, she was exhausted, she was not in control.

  Something was in her.

  I scrambled backwards like a crab until my hands fell on the shotgun. The tentacle LIFTED her off the ground by her neck, making her look as if she was floating, her eyes rolling back in her head and her hands opening in front of her in a strange gesture like a cat in repose. She crossed the ground I had crab-walked in a second, landing with a leg on either side of me, her face a mask of terror and regret.

  I rolled, pulled the shotgun around and pushed it into her chest. Fired.

  There was a huge explosion. Her eyes rolled in her head, and her lips pulled back in a grimace which was more of a grin. With a shake, her body dropped, hollowed out by the slug, like a sack of wet flour. I was covered in a soup of grey white jelly mixed with blue black clots of blood, which flooded from the hole in a gout. The tentacle roiled back until it was a dozen feet off the ground, two dozen. It looped, and curled and tracked me, covered and pinned and screaming.

  I went to fire again, but the shotgun was empty. But that’s not important right now, I think.