New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird

by Michael Marshall Smith

  “I open and shut the door so damned quick because I can only afford a moment. That thing is ready to pounce. It wouldn’t take a second for it to leap up at me out of the sight of your hair or your books or whatever.”

  Her voice ebbed out. I waited a minute for her to resume, but she did not do so. Eventually I knocked nervously on the door and called her name. There was no answer. I put my ear to the door. I could hear her crying, quietly.

  I went home without the bowl. My mother pursed her lips a little but said nothing. I didn’t tell her any of what Mrs. Miller had said. I was troubled and totally confused.

  The next time I delivered Mrs. Miller’s food, in a new container, she whispered harshly to me: “It preys on my eyes, all the white. Nothing to see. Can’t look out the window, can’t read, can’t gaze at my nails. Preys on my mind.

  “Not even my memories are left,” she said in misery. “It’s colonizing them. I remember things . . . happy times . . . and the thing’s waiting in the texture of my dress, or in the crumbs of my birthday cake. I didn’t notice it then. But I can see it now. My memories aren’t mine anymore. Not even my imaginings. Last night I thought about going to the seaside, and then the thing was there in the foam on the waves.”

  She spoke very little the next few times I visited her. I read the chapters she demanded and she grunted curtly in response. She ate quickly.

  Her other visitors were there more often now, as the spring came in. I saw them in new combinations and situations: the glamorous young woman arguing with the friendly drunk; the old man sobbing at the far end of the hall. The aggressive man was often there, cajoling and moaning, and occasionally talking conversationally through the door, being answered like an equal. Other times he screamed at her as usual.

  I arrived on a chilly day to find the drunken cockney man sleeping a few feet from the door, snoring gutturally. I gave Mrs. Miller her food and then sat on my coat and read to her from a women’s magazine as she ate.

  When she had finished her food I waited with my arms outstretched, ready to snatch the bowl from her. I remember that I was very uneasy, that I sensed something wrong. I was looking around me anxiously, but everything seemed normal. I looked down at my coat and the crumpled magazine, at the man who still sprawled comatose in the hall.

  As I heard Mrs. Miller’s hands on the door, I realized what had changed. The drunken man was not snoring. He was holding his breath.

  For a tiny moment I thought he had died, but I could see his body trembling, and my eyes began to open wide and I stretched my mouth to scream a warning, but the door had already begun to swing in its tight, quick arc, and before I could even exhale the stinking man pushed himself up faster than I would have thought him capable and bore down on me with bloodshot eyes.

  I managed to keen as he reached me, and the door faltered for an instant, as Mrs. Miller heard my voice. But the man grabbed hold of me in a terrifying, heavy fug of alcohol. He reached down and snatched my coat from the floor, tugged at the jumper I had tied around my waist with his other hand, and hurled me hard at the door.

  It flew open, smacking Mrs. Miller aside. I was screaming and crying. My eyes hurt at the sudden burst of cold white light from all the walls. I saw Mrs. Miller rubbing her head in the corner, struggling to her senses. The staggering, drunken man hurled my checked coat and my patterned jumper in front of her, reached down and snatched my feet, tugged me out of the room in an agony of splinters. I wailed snottily with fear.

  Behind me, Mrs. Miller began to scream and curse, but I could not hear her well because the man had clutched me to him and pulled my head to his chest. I fought and cried and felt myself lurch as he leaned forward and slammed the door closed.

  He held it shut.

  When I fought myself free of him I heard him shouting.

  “I told you, you slapper,” he wailed unhappily. “I bloody told you, you silly old whore. I warned you it was time. . . . ” Behind his voice I could hear shrieks of misery and terror from the room. Both of them kept shouting and crying and screaming, and the floorboards pounded, and the door shook, and I heard something else as well.

  As if the notes of all the different noises in the house fell into a chance meeting, and sounded like more than dissonance. The shouts and bangs and cries of fear combined in a sudden audible illusion like another presence.

  Like a snarling voice. A lingering, hungry exhalation.

  I ran then, screaming and terrified, my skin freezing in my T-shirt. I was sobbing and retching with fear, little bleats bursting from me. I stumbled home and was sick in my mother’s room, and kept crying and crying as she grabbed hold of me and I tried to tell her what had happened, until I was drowsy and confused and I fell into silence.

  My mother said nothing about Mrs. Miller. The next Wednesday we got up early and went to the zoo, the two of us, and at the time I would usually be knocking on Mrs. Miller’s door I was laughing at camels. The Wednesday after that I was taken to see a film, and the one after that my mother stayed in bed and sent me to fetch cigarettes and bread from the local shop, and I made our breakfast and ate it in her room.

  My friends could tell that something had changed in the yellow house, but they did not speak to me about it, and it quickly became uninteresting to them.

  I saw the Asian woman once more, smoking with her friends in the park several weeks later, and to my amazement she nodded to me and came over, interrupting her companions’ conversation.

  “Are you alright?” she asked me peremptorily. “How are you doing?”

  I nodded shyly back and told her that I was fine, thank you, and how was she?

  She nodded and walked away.

  I never saw the drunken, violent man again.

  There were people I could probably have gone to to understand more about what had happened to Mrs. Miller. There was a story that I could chase, if I wanted to. People I had never seen before came to my house and spoke quietly to my mother, and looked at me with what I suppose was pity or concern. I could have asked them. But I was thinking more and more about my own life. I didn’t want to know Mrs. Miller’s details.

  I went back to the yellow house once, nearly a year after that awful morning. It was winter. I remembered the last time I spoke to Mrs. Miller and I felt so much older it was almost giddying. It seemed such a vastly long time ago.

  I crept up to the house one evening, trying the keys I still had, which to my surprise worked. The hallway was freezing, dark, and stinking more strongly than ever. I hesitated, then pushed open Mrs. Miller’s door.

  It opened easily, without a sound. The occasional muffled noise from the street seemed so distant it was like a memory. I entered.

  She had covered the windows very carefully, and still no light made its way through from outside. It was extremely dark. I waited until I could see better in the ambient glow from the outside hallway.

  I was alone.

  My old coat and jumper lay spreadeagled in the corner of the room. I shivered to see them, went over, and fingered them softly. They were damp and mildewing, covered in wet dust.

  The white paint was crumbling off the wall in scabs. It looked as if it had been left untended for several years. I could not believe the extent of the decay.

  I turned slowly around and gazed at each wall in turn. I took in the chaotic, intricate patterns of crumbling paint and damp plaster. They looked like maps, like a rocky landscape.

  I looked for a long time at the wall farthest from my jacket. I was very cold. After a long time I saw a shape in the ruined paint. I moved closer with a dumb curiosity far stronger than any fear.

  In the crumbling texture of the wall was a spreading anatomy of cracks that—seen from a certain angle, caught just right in the scraps of light—looked in outline something like a woman. As I stared at it it took shape, and I stopped noticing the extraneous lines, and focused without effort or decision on the relevant ones. I saw a woman looking out at me.

  I could make out the suggesti
on of her face. The patch of rot that constituted it made it look as if she was screaming.

  One of her arms was flung back away from her body, which seemed to strain against it, as if she was being pulled away by her hand, and was fighting to escape, and was failing. At the end of her crack-arm, in the space where her captor would be, the paint had fallen away in a great slab, uncovering a huge patch of wet, stained, textured cement.

  And in that dark infinity of markings, I could make out any shape I wanted.

  . . . the dreams began. They were very sparse and insidious at first, but increased in frequency and vividness as the weeks went by. Great watery spaces opened out before me, and I seemed to wander through titanic sunken porticos and labyrinths of weedy Cyclopean walls with grotesque fishes as my companions. Then the other shapes began to appear, filling me with nameless horror the moment I awoke.

  “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” · H.P. Lovecraft (1936)

  • ANOTHER FISH STORY •

  Kim Newman

  In the summer of 1968, while walking across America, he came across the skeleton fossil of something aquatic. All around, even in the apparent emptiness, were signs of the life that had passed this way. Million-year-old seashells were strewn across the empty heart of California, along with flattened bullet casings from the ragged edge of the Wild West and occasional sticks of weathered furniture. The sturdier pieces were pioneer jetsam, dumped by exhausted covered wagons during a long dry desert stretch on the road to El Dorado. The more recent items had been thrown off overloaded trucks in the ’30s, by Okies rattling towards orange groves and federal work programs.

  He squatted over the bones. The sands parted, disclosing the whole of the creature. The scuttle-shaped skull was all saucer-sized eye-sockets and triangular, saw-toothed jaw. The long body was like something fished out of an ash-can by a cartoon cat—fans of rib-spindles tapering to a flat tail. What looked like arm-bones fixed to the dorsal spine by complex plates that were evolving towards becoming shoulders. Stranded when the seas receded from the Mojave, the thing had lain ever closer to the surface, waiting to be revealed by sand-riffling winds. Uncovered as he was walking to it, the fossil—exposed to the thin, dry air—was quickly resolving into sand and scraps.

  Finally, only an arm remained. Short and stubby like an alligator leg, it had distinct, barb-tipped fingers. It pointed like a sign-post, to the West, to the Pacific, to the city-stain seeping out from the original blot of El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora de la Reyna de los Angeles de Rio Porciunculo. He expected these route-marks. He’d been following them since he first crawled out of a muddy river in England. This one scratched at him.

  Even in the desert, he could smell river-mud, taste foul water, feel the tidal pull.

  For a moment, he was under waters. Cars, upside-down above him, descended gently like dead, settling sharks. People floated like broken dolls just under the shimmering, sunlit ceiling-surface. An enormous pressure squeezed in on him, jamming thumbs against his open eyes, forcing liquid salt into mouth and nose. A tubular serpent, the size of a streamlined train, slithered over the desert-bed towards him, eyes like turquoise-shaded searchlights, shifting rocks out of its way with muscular arms.

  Gone. Over.

  The insight passed. He gasped reflexively for air.

  “Atlantis will rise, Sunset Boulevard will fall,” Cass Elliott was singing on a single that would be released in October. Like so many doomed visionaries in her generation, Mama Cass was tuned into the vibrations. Of course, she didn’t know there really had been a sunken city off Santa Monica, as recently as 1942. Not Atlantis, but the Sister City. A battle had been fought there in a World War that was not in the official histories. A War that wasn’t as over as its human victors liked to think.

  He looked where the finger pointed.

  The landscape would change. Scrub rather than sand, mountains rather than flats. More people, less quiet.

  He took steps.

  He was on a world-wide walkabout, buying things, picking up skills and scars, making deals wherever he sojourned, becoming what he would be. Already, he had many interests, many businesses. An empire would need his attention soon, and he would be its prisoner as much as its master. These few years, maybe only months, were his alone. He carried no money, no identification but a British passport in the name of a newborn dead in the blitz. He wore unscuffed purple suede boots, tight white thigh-fly britches with a black zig-zag across them, a white Nehru jacket, and silver-mirrored sunglasses. A white silk aviator scarf wrapped burnoose-style about his head, turbanning his longish hair and keeping the grit out of his mouth and nose.

  Behind him, across America, across the world, he left a trail. He thought of it as dropping pebbles in pools. Ripples spread from each pebble, some hardly noticed yet but nascent whirlpools, some enormous splashes no one thought to connect with the passing Englishman.

  It was a good time to be young, even for him. His signs were everywhere. Number One in the pop charts back home was “Fire,” by The Crazy World of Arthur Brown. “I am the God of Hellfire,” chanted Arthur. There were such Gods, he understood. He walked through the world, all along the watchtower, sprung from the songs—an Urban Spaceman, Quinn the Eskimo, this wheel on fire, melting away like ice in the sun, on white horses, in disguise with glasses.

  In recent months, he’d seen Hair on Broadway and 2001: A Space Odyssey at an Alabama Drive-In. He knew all about the Age of Aquarius and the Ultimate Trip. He’d sabotaged Abbie Hoffman’s magic ring with a subtle counter-casting, ensuring that the Pentagon remained unlevitated. He knew exactly where he’d been when Martin Luther King was shot. Ditto, Andy Warhol, Robert Kennedy, and the VC summarily executed by Colonel Loan on the Huntley-Brinkley Report. He’d rapped with Panthers and Guardsmen, Birchers and Yippies. To his satisfaction, he’d sewn up the next three elections, and decided the music that children would listen to until the Eve of Destruction.

  He’d eaten in a lot of McDonalds, cheerfully dropping cartons and bags like apple seeds. The Golden Arches were just showing up on every Main Street, and he felt Ronald should be encouraged. He liked the little floods of McLitter that washed away from the clown’s doorways, perfumed with the stench of their special sauce.

  He kept walking.

  Behind him, his footprints filled in. The pointing hand, so nearly human, sank under the sands, duty discharged.

  At this stage of his career, the Devil put in the hours, wore down the shoe-leather, sweated out details. He was the start-up Mephisto, the journeyman tempter, the mysterious stranger passing through, the new gun in town. You didn’t need to make an appointment and crawl as a supplicant; if needs be, Derek Leech came to you.

  Happily.

  Miles later and days away, he found a ship’s anchor propped on a cairn of stones, iron-red with lichen-like rust, blades crusted with empty shells. An almost illegible plaque read Sumatra Queen.

  Leech knew this was where he was needed.

  It wasn’t real wilderness, just pretend. In the hills close to Chatsworth, a town soon to be swallowed by Los Angeles, this was the Saturday matinee West. Poverty Row prairie, Monogram mountains. A brief location hike up from Gower Gulch, the longest-lasting game of Cowboys and Indians in the world had been played.

  A red arch stood by the cairn, as if a cathedral had been smitten, leaving only its entrance standing. A hook in the arch might once have held a bell or a hangman’s noose or a giant shoe.

  He walked under it, eyes on the hook.

  Wheelruts in sandy scrub showed the way. Horses had been along this route too, recently.

  A smell tickled in his nose, triggering salivary glands. Leech hadn’t had a Big Mac in days. He unwound the scarf from his head and knotted it around his neck. From beside the road, he picked a dungball, skin baked hard as a gob-stopper. He ate it like an apple. Inside, it was moist. He spat out strands of grass.

  He felt the vibrations, before he heard the motors.

  Several vehicles, engines exposed
like sit-astride mowers, bumping over rough terrain on balloon tires. Fuel emissions belching from mortar-like tubes. Girls yelping with a fairground Dodg’em thrill.

  He stood still, waiting.

  The first dune buggy appeared, leaping over an incline like a roaring cat, landing awkwardly, squirming in dirt as its wheels aligned, then heading towards him in a charge. A teenage girl in a denim halter-top drove, struggling with the wheel, blonde hair streaming, a bruise on her forehead. Standing like a tank commander in the front passenger seat, hands on the rollbar, was an undersized, big-eared man with a middling crop of beard, long hair bound in a bandanna. He wore ragged jeans and a too-big combat jacket. On a rosary around his scraggy neck was strung an Iron Cross, the Pour le Mérite and a rhinestone-studded swastika. He signaled vainly with a set of binoculars (one lens broken), then kicked his chauffeuse to get her attention.

  The buggy squiggled in the track and halted in front of Leech.

  Another zoomed out of long grass, driven by an intense young man, passengered by three messy girls. A third was around somewhere, to judge from the noise and the gasoline smell.

  Leech tossed aside his unfinished meal.

  “You must be hungry, pilgrim,” said the commander.

  “Not now.”

  The commander flashed a grin, briefly showing sharp, bad teeth, hollowing his cheeks, emphasizing his eyes. Leech recognized the wet gaze of a man who has spent time practicing his stares. Long, hard jail years looking into a mirror, plumbing black depths.

  “Welcome to Charlie Country,” said his driver.

  Leech met the man’s look. Charlie’s welcome.

  Seconds—a minute?—passed. Neither had a weapon, but this was a gunfighters’ eye-lock, a probing and a testing, will playfully thrown up against a wall, bouncing back with surprising ferocity.

  Leech was almost amused by the Charlie’s presumption. Despite his hippie aspect, he was ten years older than the kids—well into hard thirties, at once leathery and shifty, a convict confident the bulls can’t hang a jailyard shivving at his cell-door, an arrested grown-up settling for status as an idol for children ignored by adults. The rest of his tribe looked to their jefé, awaiting orders.