New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird

by Michael Marshall Smith

  “For a dog? For a goddamned dog?” Connelly tried to kick him again, but Garner grabbed his foot and rolled, bringing the other man down on top of him. The two of them grappled in the snow, their heavy coats and gloves making any real damage all but impossible.

  The flaps to one of the tents opened and Bishop limped out, his face a caricature of alarm. He was buttoning his coat even as he approached. “Stop! Stop it right now!”

  Garner clambered to his feet, staggering backward a few steps. Connelly rose to one knee, leaning over and panting. He pointed at Garner. “I found him in the crevasse! He went down alone!”

  Garner leaned against one of the packed sledges. He could feel Bishop watching him as tugged free a glove to poke at a tender spot on his face, but he didn’t look up.

  “Is this true?”

  “Of course it’s true!” Connelly said, but Bishop waved him into silence.

  Garner looked up at him, breath heaving in his lungs. “You’ve got to see it,” he said. “My God, Bishop.”

  Bishop turned his gaze to the crevasse, where he saw the pitons and the rope spilling into the darkness. “Oh, Doc,” he said quietly.

  “It’s not a crevasse, Bishop. It’s a stairwell.”

  Connelly strode toward Garner, jabbing his finger at him. “What? You lost your goddamned mind.”

  “Look for yourself!”

  Bishop interposed himself between the two men. “Enough!” He turned to face Connelly. “Back off.”

  “But—”

  “I said back off!”

  Connelly peeled his lips back, then turned and stalked back toward the crevasse. He knelt by its edge and started hauling up the rope.

  Bishop turned to Garner. “Explain yourself.”

  All at once, Garner’s passion drained from him. He felt a wash of exhaustion. His muscles ached. How could he explain this to him? He could he explain this so that they’d understand? “Atka,” he said simply, imploringly. “I could hear him.”

  A look of deep regret fell over Bishop’s face. “Doc . . . Atka was a just a dog. We have to get Faber to the depot.”

  “I could still hear him.”

  “You have to pull yourself together. There are real lives at stake here, do you get that? Me and Connelly, we aren’t doctors. Faber needs you.”

  “But—”

  “Do you get that?”

  “I . . . yeah. Yeah, I know.”

  “When you go down into places like that, especially by yourself, you’re putting us all at risk. What are we gonna do without Doc, huh?”

  This was not an argument Garner would win. Not this way. So he grabbed Bishop by the arm and led him toward the crevasse. “Look,” he said.

  Bishop wrenched his arm free, his face darkening. Connelly straightened, watching this exchange. “Don’t put your hands on me, Doc,” Bishop said.

  Garner released him. “Bishop,” he said. “Please.”

  Bishop paused a moment, then walked toward the opening. “All right.”

  Connelly exploded. “Oh for Christ’s sake!”

  “We’re not going inside it,” Bishop said, looking at them both. “I’m going to look, okay Doc? That’s all you get.”

  Garner nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

  The two of them approached the edge of the crevasse. Closer, Garner felt it like a hook in his liver, tugging him down. It took an act of will to stop at the edge, to remain still and unshaken and look at these other two men as if his whole life did not hinge upon this moment.

  “It’s a stairwell,” he said. His voice did not shake. His body did not move. “It’s carved into the rock. It’s got . . . designs of some kind.”

  Bishop peered down into the darkness for a long moment. “I don’t see anything,” he said at last.

  “I’m telling you, it’s there!” Garner stopped and gathered himself. He tried another tack. “This, this could be the scientific discovery of the century. You want to stick it to McReady? Let him plant his little flag. This is evidence of, of . . . ” He trailed off. He didn’t know what it was evidence of.

  “We’ll mark the location,” Bishop said. “We’ll come back. If what you say is true it’s not going anywhere.”

  Garner switched on his flashlight. “Look,” he said, and he threw it down.

  The flashlight arced end over end, its white beam slicing through the darkness with a scalpel’s clean efficiency, illuminating flashes of hewn rock and what might have been carvings or just natural irregularities. It clattered to a landing beside the corpse of the dog, casting in bright relief its open jaw and lolling tongue, and the black pool of blood beneath it.

  Bishop looked for a moment, and shook his head. “God damn it, Doc,” he said. “You’re really straining my patience. Come on.”

  Bishop was about to turn away when Atka’s body jerked once—Garner saw it—and then again, almost imperceptibly. Reaching out, Garner seized Bishop’s sleeve. “What now, for Christ’s—” the other man started to say, his voice harsh with annoyance. Then the body was yanked into the surrounding darkness so quickly it seemed as though it had vanished into thin air. Only its blood, a smeared trail into shadow, testified to its ever having been there at all. That, and the jostled flashlight, which rolled in a lazy half circle, its unobstructed light spearing first into empty darkness and then into smooth cold stone before settling at last on what might have been a carven, clawed foot. The beam flickered and went out.

  “What the fuck . . . ” Bishop said.

  A scream erupted from the tent behind them.

  Faber.

  Garner broke into a clumsy run, high-stepping through the piled snow. The other men shouted behind him but their words were lost in the wind and in his own hard breathing. His body was moving according to its training but his mind was pinned like a writhing insect in the hole behind him, in the stark, burning image of what he had just seen. He was transported by fear and adrenaline and by something else, by some other emotion he had not felt in many years or perhaps ever in his life, some heart-filling glorious exaltation that threatened to snuff him out like a dying cinder.

  Faber was sitting upright in the tent—it stank of sweat and urine and kerosene, eye-watering and sharp—his thick hair a dark corona around his head, his skin as pale as a cavefish. He was still trying to scream, but his voice had broken, and his utmost effort could now produce only a long, cracked wheeze, which seemed forced through his throat like steel wool. His leg stuck out of the blanket, still grossly swollen.

  The warmth from the Nansen cooker was almost oppressive.

  Garner dropped to his knees beside him and tried to ease him back down into his sleeping bag, but Faber resisted. He fixed his eyes on Garner, his painful wheeze trailing into silence. Hooking his fingers in Garner’s collar, he pulled him close, so close that Garner could smell the sour taint of his breath.

  “Faber, relax, relax!”

  “It—” Faber’s voice locked. He swallowed and tried again. “It laid an egg in me.”

  Bishop and Connelly crowded through the tent flap, and Garner felt suddenly hemmed in, overwhelmed by the heat and the stink and the steam rising in wisps from their clothes as they pushed closer, staring down at Faber.

  “What’s going on?” Bishop asked. “Is he all right?”

  Faber eyed them wildly. Ignoring them, Garner placed his hands on Faber’s cheeks and turned his head toward him. “Look at me, Faber. Look at me. What do you mean?”

  Faber found a way to smile. “In my dream. It put my head inside its body, and it laid an egg in me.”

  Connelly said, “He’s delirious. See what happens when you leave him alone?”

  Garner fished an ampule of morphine out of his bag. Faber saw what he was doing and his body bucked.

  “No!” he screamed, summoning his voice again. “No!” His leg thrashed out, knocking over the Nansen cooker. Cursing, Connelly dove at the overturned stove, but it was already too late. Kerosene splashed over the blankets and suppli
es, engulfing the tent in flames. The men moved in a sudden tangle of panic. Bishop stumbled back out of the tent and Connelly shoved Garner aside—Garner rolled over on his back and came to rest there—as he lunged for Faber’s legs, dragging him backward. Screaming, Faber clutched at the ground to resist, but Connelly was too strong. A moment later, Faber was gone, dragging a smoldering rucksack with him.

  Still inside the tent, Garner lay back, watching as the fire spread hungrily along the roof, dropping tongues of flame onto the ground, onto his own body. Garner closed his eyes as the heat gathered him up like a furnace-hearted lover.

  What he felt, though, was not the fire’s heat, but the cool breath of underground earth, the silence of the deep tomb buried beneath the ice shelf. The stairs descended before him, and at the bottom he heard a noise again: A woman’s voice, calling for him. Wondering where he was.

  Elizabeth, he called, his voice echoing off the stone. Are you there?

  If only he’d gotten to see her, he thought. If only he’d gotten to bury her. To fill those beautiful eyes with dirt. To cover her in darkness.

  Elizabeth, can you hear me?

  Then Connelly’s big arms enveloped him, and he felt the heat again, searing bands of pain around his legs and chest. It was like being wrapped in a star. “I ought to let you burn, you stupid son of a bitch,” Connelly hissed, but he didn’t. He lugged Garner outside—Garner opened his eyes in time to see the canvas part in front of him, like fiery curtains—and dumped him in the snow instead. The pain went away, briefly, and Garner mourned its passing. He rolled over and lifted his head. Connelly stood over him, his face twisted in disgust. Behind him the tent flickered and burned like a dropped torch.

  Faber’s quavering voice hung over it all, rising and falling like the wind.

  Connelly tossed an ampule and a syringe onto the ground by Garner. “Faber’s leg’s opened up again,” he said. “Go and do your job.”

  Garner climbed slowly to his feet, feeling the skin on his chest and legs tighten. He’d been burned; he’d have to wait until he’d tended to Faber to find out how badly.

  “And then help us pack up,” Bishop called as he led the dogs to their harnesses, his voice harsh and strained. “We’re getting the hell out of here.”

  By the time they reached the depot, Faber was dead. Connelly spat into the snow and turned away to unhitch the dogs, while Garner and Bishop went inside and started a fire. Bishop started water boiling for coffee. Garner unpacked their bedclothes and dressed the cots, moving gingerly. Once the place was warm enough he undressed and surveyed the burn damage. It would leave scars.

  The next morning they wrapped Faber’s body and packed it in an ice locker.

  After that they settled in to wait.

  The ship would not return for a month yet, and though McReady’s expedition was due back before then, the vagaries of Antarctic experience made that a tenuous proposition at best. In any case, they were stuck with each other for some time yet, and not even the generous stocks of the depot—a relative wealth of food and medical supplies, playing cards and books—could fully distract them from their grievances.

  In the days that followed, Connelly managed to bank his anger at Garner, but it would not take much to set it off again; so Garner tried to keep a low profile. As with the trenches in France, corpses were easy to explain in Antarctica.

  A couple of weeks into that empty expanse of time, while Connelly dozed on his cot and Bishop read through an old natural history magazine, Garner decided to risk broaching the subject of what had happened in the crevasse.

  “You saw it,” he said, quietly, so as not to wake Connelly.

  Bishop took a moment to acknowledge that he’d heard him. Finally he tilted the magazine away, and sighed. “Saw what,” he said.

  “You know what.”

  Bishop shook his head. “No,” he said. “I don’t. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Something was there.”

  Bishop said nothing. He lifted the magazine again, but his eyes were still.

  “Something was down there,” Garner said.

  “No there wasn’t.”

  “It pulled Atka. I know you saw it.”

  Bishop refused to look at him. “This is an empty place,” he said, after a long silence. “There’s nothing here.” He blinked, and turned a page in the magazine. “Nothing.”

  Garner leaned back onto his cot, looking at the ceiling.

  Although the long Antarctic day had not yet finished, it was shading into dusk, the sun hovering over the horizon like a great boiling eye. It cast long shadows, and the lamp Bishop had lit to read by set them dancing. Garner watched them caper across the ceiling. Some time later, Bishop snuffed out the lamp and dragged the curtains over the windows, consigning them all to darkness. With it, Garner felt something like peace stir inside him. He let it move through him in waves, he felt it ebb and flow with each slow pulse of his heart.

  A gust of wind scattered fine crystals of snow against the window, and he found himself wondering what the night would be like in this cold country. He imagined the sky dissolving to reveal the hard vault of stars, the galaxy turning above him like a cog in a vast, unknowable engine. And behind it all, the emptiness into which men hurled their prayers. It occurred to him that he could leave now, walk out into the long twilight and keep going until the earth opened beneath him and he found himself descending strange stairs, while the world around him broke silently into snow, and into night.

  Garner closed his eyes.

  Vast and lonely is the ocean, and even as all things came from it, so shall they return thereto. In the shrouded depths of time none shall reign upon the earth, nor shall any motion be, save in the eternal waters.

  “The Night Ocean” · H.P. Lovecraft & R. H. Barlow (1936)

  • BAD SUSHI •

  Cherie Priest

  Baku’s hand shook.

  In it, he held a pinch of wasabi, preparing to leave the condiment as a peaked green dollop beside a damp pile of flesh-colored ginger. He hesitated, even though his fellow chef slapped the kitchen bell once, twice, a third time—and the orders were backing up.

  The waitress flashed Baku a frown.

  Some small fact was wiggling around in his expansive memory. In the back of his sinuses, he felt a tickle of sulfur. The kitchen in Sonada’s smelled like soy sauce and sizzling oil, and frying rice; but Baku also detected rotten eggs.

  He smeared the glob of gritty paste onto the rectangular plate before him, and he pushed the neatly-sliced sushi rolls into the pick-up window. The hot yellow smell grew stronger in his nose, but he could work through it. All it took was a little concentration.

  He reached for his knives. The next slip in the queue called for a California roll, a tuna roll, and a salmon roll. Seaweed. Rice. Fish meat, in slick, soft slabs. He wrapped it all expertly, without thinking. He sliced the rolls without crushing them and slid them onto the plate.

  This is why Sonada’s kept Baku, despite his age. He told them he was seventy, but that was a lie by eight years—an untruth offered because his employers were afraid he was too old to work. But American Social Security wasn’t enough, and the work at the restaurant wasn’t so hard. The hours were not so long.

  The other workers were born Americans. They didn’t have to take the test or say the pledge, one hand over their hearts.

  Baku didn’t hold it against them, and the others didn’t hold his original nationality against him, either. They might have, if they’d known the uniform he’d once worn. They might have looked at him differently, these young citizens, if they’d known how frantically he’d fired, and how he’d aimed for all the bright blue eyes.

  There it was again. The sulfur.

  Baku had tripped over a G.I.’s body as he staggered toward the beach at Cape Esperance, but he hadn’t thought much of it. He’d been preoccupied at the time—thinking only of meeting the secret transport that would take him out of Guadalcanal. The Emperor had
declared the island a lost cause, and an evacuation had been arranged. It had happened under cover of night. The transport had been a crushing rush of thirteen thousand brown-eyed men clamoring for the military ferry. The night had reeked of gunpowder, and body odor, and sulfur, and blood.

  Baku thought again of the last dead American he’d seen on Guadalcanal, the man’s immobile body just beginning to stink in the sunset. If someone had told him, back in 1942, that in sixty years he’d be serving the dead American’s grandchildren sushi rolls . . . Baku would have never believed it.

  He looked at the next slip of lined white and green paper.

  Shrimp rolls. More tuna.

  Concentrate.

  He breathed in the clean, sparse scent of the seafood—so faint it was almost undetectable. If it smelled like more than salt and the ocean, it was going rotten. There were guidelines, of course, about how cold it must be kept and how it must be stored—but the old chef didn’t need to watch any thermometers or check any dates. He knew when the meat was good. He knew what it would taste like, lying on top of the rice, and dipped lightly in a small puddle of soy sauce.

  One order after another, he prepared them. His knives flashed, and his fingers pulled the sticky rice into bundles. His indefatigable wrists jerked and lurched from counter to bowl to chopping block to plate.

  Eventually, with enough repetition and enough concentration, the remembered eggy nastiness left his head.

  When his shift was over, he removed his apron and washed his knives. He dried the knives each in turn, slipping them into a cloth pouch that he rolled up and carried home. The knives belonged to him, and they were a condition of his employment. They were good knives, made of German steel by a company that had folded ages before. Baku would work with no others.

  At home that night, he lay in bed and tried to remember what had brought on the flashback. Usually there was some concrete reason—an old military uniform, a glimpse of ribbon that looked like a war medal, or a Memorial Day parade.

  What had brought him back to the island?

  At home in bed, it was safe to speculate. At home, in the small apartment with the threadbare curtains and the clean kitchen, it was all right to let his mind wander.