by Tim Curran
“What about us,” Sil whispers.
“We’re human. Enough.” She glares at me like I’ve whipped her.
“We’re human enough.”
We pick our way across the migraine canyon / plain, every step threatening to become a fall into the sky, an orthogonal slide into a higher dimension, a stumble into a compressed lifetime of agony. The hexentechs prod the shoggoth with makeshift pikes and the perverse thing moans and whistles with delight at each assault. I get on the radio to Grantha.
“It’s time.”
My stomach drops as I say the words and my feet follow, rushing away beneath me in a single vertiginous plunge. A moment later and we are at the door, our vertebrae cracking and quaking with the effort to keep upright, our eyes bleeding. One of the three remaining hexentechs gives us a cheery thumbs up and proceeds to reduce the front of his skull to slurry on a bas relief.
“Dreams for the Dreaming Lord! Courtesy of me! Jesse A. Oster!” His laughter becomes a wet red gurgling as his head rockets back and forth into the stone. It’s over in seconds. His fellows and Sil and Piotr stare at me in mute horror as I key the radio again.
“Send it through, Grantha. Full Oppenheimer. Repeat, we are at Full Oppenheimer.”
“Activating Hoffman-Price bubble now, Captain Strunk. Deployment of Little BoyGirl in ten, nine, eight...”
The anchor gasps once, twice. The vantablack coating makes it difficult to see the contractions in the angles of the tetrahedron, so that when it happens, it seems to happen all at once. The anchor condenses, pops out of existence to leave an oily bubble of nothing hanging in the air. A sizable chunk of the young shoggoth goes with the anchor to wherever it went; the beast yowls with sick pleasure.
The void sizzles in anticipation, warbling shafts of light and scenery coming into view: the deck of the Hassan-i Sabbah, Grantha’s misshapen mug in a silent anticipatory leer, another sky, a different time. Another moment of this and the bomb is here, shedding light and polymer plates like a lotus blossom sheds petals.
The shoggoth roars and changes state in an effort to escape, becoming steam and memory, leaving Little BoyGirl to hover in the air. Green mist recoils and pulses in a peripatetic rhythm at the periphery of the golden light that builds and builds. Tillich is passive in the glow, the hexentechs have tears in their eyes. Sil is on her knees, openly weeping, with her long hands palms up on the stone between her knees. Worshipful.
“So beautiful,” I hear her say.
She’s right. The footage of the early bomb tests did no justice to the experience of being here, at Ground Zero. The bomb is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Little BoyGirl shines like a beacon from heaven as zhe rises, the darkness sloughing away from hir like scales, like a bad dream after waking. Gravity, despair, madness, all the things that could pull hir down to the tormented earth; these have no hold on hir. Zhe shines like the sun, no, better than the sun. Pure in a way the sun could never be. Zhe shines like the Platonic ideal of the Sun, with a light that welcomes the eye instead of burning it away, a light that is Life and Hope. Zhe is clean-limbed and symmetrical, perfect in hir form, with a noble forehead and graceful hands, a golden mane of hair in a halo around hir head. Hir generative members are aroused and pleasing to the eye, thick and moist and swelling with the potential for life, human life, the real human lifewave that has been gone from the world for so long and I am weeping now, weeping with the others in this awful place, my hands outstretched to the floating being, this bodhisattva, this gorgeous creature who will sacrifice itself for us, for our future. I want to touch hir face, to tell hir thank you, to press my deformed mouth to hir perfect lips and know the grace of hir accepting smile for a single second, know the warmth of hir enlightenment on my wretched wintered skin before zhe saves us all with her glorious ignition. I cry out, once, an inarticulate sound of longing, a longing to be consumed, to be ended in hir light...
My cry is answered.
The emerald mist begins to howl. In the air, on the stones, streaming from our fingertips and filling our lungs: each drop of it begins to vibrate and scream, and not with fear or anguish or rage. This scream is one of lust. Triumph. And worse, a species of gleeful indifference.
Little BoyGirl halts in the air for a moment, and casts hir shining eyes down to the monsters below, to us, hir worshippers, the monsters zhe is here to save. A fleeting cloud of concern passes across hir beatific features before it all comes to an end.
The mist condenses in a thunderclap. It was everywhere: here, across the impossible length and breadth of R’lyeh, and in our dreams and our history, in our genes and our philosophy and most especially in our hubris. It was everywhere, and it had always been. It had never died, only dreamed, and had awakened long ago, and would now, at the birth of stranger new aeons, conquer death. The mist condenses, becomes a mountain that walks, stumbles, screams to end the world.
We answer it, all of us. Sil, Tillich, the hexentechs, myself. Little BoyGirl screams too. The bomb screams most of all as the mountain plucks it from the air with limbs I know are not limbs, only the suggestion of limbs, only seeming to be long muscular feelers to my lower-order mammalian eyes. Little BoyGirl is plucked, and dissected, and raped across all levels of reality, hir perfect soul and hir weaponized enlightenment rendered into a mewling paste. It takes seconds.
There’s not much left of hir, but what is left is extended to me, speared on the tip of a writhing pseudopod. A parting gift of awareness. I grasp the contorted remains—a head, part of the upper torso—with numb hands and pull hir to my chest. A golden eye looks up at me from a face made insectoid, reptilian. The perfect lips, smeared into a jackknife smile of derangement, crack and hiss into my ear. The mountain is already moving away, its vast bulk blacking out the moon and the reeling stars, but the words I hear surely belong to it, siphoned through a mouthpiece it has already forgotten it owns.
Captain, Little BoyGirl says. Captain, do not all the old texts state that this would come to pass? The time would be easy to know, for all men would be as we, shouting and killing and reveling in joy. This is the foretold holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. We shall teach you new ways to shout, kill, revel. Enjoy. Your friends are.
In the distance, Piotr is dropping the waxen mask of his humanity and assuming his ideal fungoid form. The hexentech Laura Lambert lies convulsing at his feet, obscene mycelial cultures bursting from her mouth and soft tissue. Chris Loan is pinned to a slab while Piotr feeds the glowing growth from his ruined shoulder down the hexentech’s throat. Piotr hums while he works.
There is a sound of tearing fabric and I feel a sudden searing pain in my core. I look down to see Sil between my knees, my secondary generative organs dangling from her crimson teeth. I drop the saviour’s remains at my feet and cuff the ghoul-girl across the mouth. She laughs in derision as her cheek bounces off the slimy rocks with a crack.
“Don’t be pissy, Deimos. I’m five by five, still, your Sil, your servant. Stay with us.” She moans and twitches and dances like a dog cornering prey. “The dead should serve the living, and there was never anything as alive as the Lord of Dreams. Stay and serve him.”
She’s not wrong, says the head of Little BoyGirl. You’re already here, after all. So many times. So often you visit. Look. Look and see.
I look, and I see the ghosts of every other attempt we’ve made on the Lord of R’lyeh flicker in and out of view. Bodies and bombs strewn and ruined and draped across the land in a carpet of gore and failed detonations and detonations that were successful but made no difference. We are legion, and nothing. The eternal dirt from which nightmares grow. Not even the dirt. Crawlers in the dirt. Mites on the crawlers.
Enjoy, enjoy, enjoy, Little BoyGirl coos. You must work at it, though. The best and highest thing you can be is me, and you’ve a long way to go. Shout. Kill. Revel. Repeat.
The Hoffman-Price bubble is contracting rapidly, but I throw myself through anyway, knowing I’m too late. As it closes, I can hear the mouthp
iece speak to a laughing Sil...
Do you think it misunderstood me?
On the deck of the Hassan-i Sabbah, I spend a moment in contemplation at the loss of my lower legs, and take some small comfort in the thought that Sil is likely making a meal of them even now, prayers remembered from her cemetery catechism dropping from her mouth between red bites.
I drag myself past the spot where Grantha has propped himself against a bulkhead. He is delicately removing his own eyes with a graphite blade, slice by quivering slice.
“Homie don’t do that,” the gnome mumbles. “Homie can’t see shit. Straight up the wgah’nagl, coming at ya right straight up.”
“Carry on, High Priest,” I say, giggling at his futile efforts. There’s still the pineal to be seen to. “The stars are right.”
“That you, Captain? Mission aborted? Heh. Stars. Son, they ain’t never been wrong.
“You’re right there, at least. I’m sorry about your acolytes, for what it’s worth, priest.”
“All lost? Well. I liked ‘em, but whaddaya gonna do when doom falls like the night, ai’aight? Y’all be keepin’ it R’lyeh, now.” He returns to his self-butchery, a wiser man.
I go below, seeking my one true and singular, pure thing. Of course I don’t find it, no matter how many corridors I careen down on the stumps of my ruined legs, no matter how many blubbering crew members I tear apart in absent glee. I don’t find it.
Instead, I sit in my sleep chamber / confess my sins to the ship / strip naked in front of a mirror, those manifold tusks, that prehensile whatsit, I’m a thing of rare beauty even with the red ruin at my crotch oh yes / paint myself in bloody sigils / execute a decent pirouette for the gathered ghosts, thank you thank you I’ll be here all aeon / make my way to the engine room of stuttering blue light / paint myself again, this time in the weak chakra-glow of depleted abortions retrieved from the overflowing waste hopper in back of the Tindlosi Drives / begin penning this narrative / place one hand on the icy curve of a sphere while the fingers of my other hand drop to a command pad, keying in the sequence that will crack the seal on the sphere.
It is the Hour of the Virginal Appraisal, appropriately enough, and my mind is as clear as the air around me is clouded with the hiss of approaching death. I know what the mountain said at the last, but I respectfully disagree with its assessment. And I may have my one pure thing, now. The best and highest thing I can be.
“Here, puppy,” I softly whistle. “Who’s a good boy. Who’s tired of kibble. Who wants a real meal?”
STRANGERS DIE EVERY DAY
Cody Goodfellow
The first time he showed up in the U-Haul lot on East Comanche to look for work, the other guys, Mexicans and Central Americans who’d paid in blood for the corner, knocked his Dunkin Donuts coffee out of his hands, beat the shit out of him, and threw him in front of a passing car. When he came back next day, someone somehow had found out what he did and what he was. That morning and every day thereafter, there was a tall Dunkin Donuts coffee on the furthest stretch of curb from where the other pick-up laborers waited and flagged down cars.
Miracles and wonders, Tobin Thrush thinks, drinking his coffee. It’s supposed to be different, now.
Some things are different. Every once in a while, a car slows down without pulling into the rental lot, the driver looking lost in more than just this dead industrial wasteland neighborhood. And they roll down the window, and if they ask him to help them move, he pretends not to speak English and asks way too much, because he hates moving. But he’s good at other things, things that, now, everybody needs, sooner or later.
Just before sunrise. “I need help with a … I heard you … I …” They can never just say it. He gets into the passenger seat of the Volvo station wagon. “What kind of job?”
The driver pushes his glasses up his nose. “Somebody took our daughter.”
“How old? Is she a virgin?”
No hesitation or outrage. “Yes, and she’s eleven.”
“Has she had her first period?”
“I don’t … how would I…?”
“You want to call your wife? It could be important. Show me a picture.”
He shakes his head. “She’s … she took it hard, she’s at her mother’s. I can’t …” He spaces out.
“Picture,” Thrush says.
He reflexively goes for a phone, then takes out his wallet, shaking his head. “Everybody still does that, you notice?” No phones, not much TV and hardly any computers. Thrush never had a phone. He misses the news. He misses knowing and seeing it live when cities fall into the sea.
A school Xmas portrait. Brilliant smile, eager to please, not a self-satisfied or a rebellious bone in her birdy, blossoming body. Ash-blonde hair, fine as feathers. Thrush smells the picture, pockets it. “Where and when did you lose her?”
That almost makes him argue, but he’s smart enough not to take the bait. “Out of her room last night, sometime between two and four. I’m a night owl and my wife’s an early bird, but neither of us heard anything.…”
“Drive,” Thrush says, and they pull away too fast. “Where do you live?”
“Bishop Creek. It’s not the Heights, but it’s gated.”
“So you have money.”
“Well, not really … The house is my wife’s family. We don’t have anything left, we’re down to selling furniture. I don’t see why they’d pick on me.…”
No point in explaining that kidnapping is just something to do for a lot of people now. They don’t check the means of the victim’s family. A lot of times, they’re just desperate to get anybody and collect the ransom in a hurry to pay the ransom on the loved one someone took from them.…
“No ransom note?”
“No …”
“If you don’t hear from them by noon, then it probably wasn’t a kidnapping.”
The driver nods. Even he knows that.
“You know what I do?”
Pretending to watch the road, the driver nods but shrugs. “I don’t … I just heard you can … bring people back.”
“Sometimes,” Thrush says. “I know some people, and a thing or two. I could help, but if it’s what you’re afraid it is … Why so sure? Didn’t you talk to the cops?”
“We can’t afford the cops. Not the real ones … We already pay a fortune for security, not that they’re worth a shit––” They’re driving in circles around downtown and the mostly dead blocks around it. “It’s just, they said it was the end of everything, and it … I guess it’s not the same for you, is it? You people got what you were praying for.…”
“Just drop me off by the payphones there, in front of the post office. I’m gonna need a hundred … and fifty, uh, deposit, and, uh …”
Mouth turned down, he says, “I was told what to bring,” and hands Thrush a sandwich bag.
Thrush gets out and goes to a payphone and picks up the receiver. “Ursula.”
Her thick wet breath. “I’m working, Tobin.” Bathroom-tile reverb, low red whisper. “And he’s not making it easy.”
“I need the car. I have a job.…”
“That’s great, hon. But so do I.”
“How far along are you?”
“Not even conceiving yet, damn it.”
“Give him his money back.”
“You get paid yet?”
“I need the car.”
“Get over here.”
“Come get me.”
“Walk.”
He runs.
A lot of Thrush’s people, they were angry all the time, like the sun was supposed to burn out, all their enemies were Raptured away, and nobody would ever have to work again. Like everything was supposed to change, like the stars were supposed to run on their schedule. That was the old thinking. That was why things were running down, but nothing changed overnight. The Oklahoma Sink just outside of town was ten miles across and had no bottom, but nothing much had come up to say thanks for all the countless offerings cast into it. The seas had
risen and washed away about a fifth of the world’s population, and sent the rest scurrying to fight for food and shelter, but after all the sensitive types went mad and offed themselves, the line had gone dead. Maybe somewhere they were ravening for delight in the streets, but shit is pretty much the same as it ever was here in Norman. Thrush thinks of the poster on the wall in the U-Haul men’s room, next to the Snap-On Tools calendar. It says, IF YOU’RE NOT THE LEAD DOG, THE SCENERY NEVER CHANGES, and the picture is a close-up of a husky’s asshole.
Some things did change, though. They still have to eat, still have to work. But now, at least, they don’t have to hide.
He finds the apartment by listening for Ursula’s voice. She’s arguing with the client. “Listen, I don’t make the rules, bright boy––”
“I just don’t see why I can’t just in vitro it.…”
“Give him his money back,” Thrush says through the screen door.
“Stay out of this, Tobin.”
The door is locked, but the cheap tin frame comes apart at the merest tug. He rips it away, batting at rusty screen and comes in.
The client stops pacing, glaring at him. He’s wearing torn-up black Levi’s and a faded shirt that says HARRY CREWS on it but has a picture of a bunch of pissed-off chicks on it, horn-rimmed glasses taped together. Books and empty bottles everywhere.
The hairs all over Thrush’s body stand out, pushing through his shirt. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Ursula spills out of a sprung loveseat, face bloated with tears, choking down snot as she digs around in her purse. “Take the damn keys and go.”
“You don’t know what you’re doing, do you? What do you even want a monkey for?”
“None of your goddamned business. Look, I want my money back, and I want you both to leave.…”
Thrush pulls his t-shirt down over his gut, wipes the sweat out of his eyebrows and kicks the front door shut. “We’re keeping your money one way or the other, because you made her come all the way over here and you made her cry. But whether or not you get your money’s worth, you’re gonna understand something.”