“Hey, I know every walker in this city. I get around. I keep my eyes open. So do you wanna believe, or do you wanna bury your head?”
“In the sand?”
“In the sand.”
“Lead on. I’ve got a knife,” [true] “and I’ve got a gun,” [untrue] “and I know how to use them both.” [untrue—neither one].
He led them back up into the trees. She parked her cart under cover, slung Ramses on her chest. Ramses looked alert and eager, as if today an added amperage coursed through him. The little whippet had always been her warning system, and he was telling her to follow this man.
“I’m Maxie.”
“I’m Leon.” He didn’t look back at her, leading them upslope through the trees, rounding the shoulder of the headland. As they advanced northeasterly, the northern pylon of the Golden Gate just peeked into view, until the woods got thicker and the ground got steeper and she had to give all her attention to the trail.
Leon’s route, scarcely a proper path itself, crossed many a clearer path descending steeply to the beach below. This crooked deer trail moved only gradually down the bluffs as it arced round them.
Now the bluff got quite steep, and the hillside in-folded deeply. And within this seam, a sharper, deeper gully lay. It was bare dirt, running perhaps a hundred yards down the bluff, heavily overgrown along its crests to either side, but in its depth just bare rock and the reddish clay of the cliffside’s flesh.
“Step here,” said Leon quietly, stopping, turning to her. “You up to it? We gotta go down to that outcrop by the lower angle—see it?”
“I’m up to it,” Maxie snapped.
Still, it was steep, and the earth had to be worked with the heel to furnish footholds, and the shrubs used for steadying handholds. Ramses stirred in his pouch, and his muzzle probed the cold blue morning air.
The rim shelved a little. Leon called a halt, and they looked down into the gully. A damp breath welled from it. He pointed towards its apex, upslope of them. “Looka there. You see the stream creeping out of this thing?”
The earth seemed moister round a seam in the clay up there, and yes, she could now see that a thin sheen threaded its way all the way down along the gully’s floor, and into the shrubbery below it.
“I don’t see any flow.”
“Look at that slickness. It’s transparent but it’s like thick, right?”
“Okay, there’s some moisture I guess. So what?”
“This gully right here is where all that foam along the beach is coming from.”
“Hey, Leon. You’ve gotta be kidding.”
“No. But since you don’t know shit, of course you’d say that.”
“Hey, I don’t like your mouth. I don’t like your mustache either. It looks like the whiskers on a walrus’s ass.”
“You’ve seen the whiskers on a walrus’s ass?”
“A white walrus’s ass.”
“Okay. Okay. Why should you trust me? But I’ll tell you what. Come back here just before dark tonight, and get into some cover, and stay hidden, and watch this ravine. You won’t watch long, before you see exactly what I’m talkin’ about.”
The morning sun slanted through the kitchen windows. From her Barcalounger, Maureen gazed dreamily at Tasha’s dish, the scattered kibble on the linoleum, and not even a whisker of Tasha herself. Tasha had been eaten by what Muffin had turned into!
Amazing as this was, it was just a beginning. Maureen had lain for hours perfectly calm, except that her calm wasn’t exactly calm, it was richer than that, more powerful. She felt a golden wholeness, a physical sense of completeness and purpose. Felt utterly relaxed, and utterly vibrant.
And, stranger than this, she felt multiple. More than having thoughts now, she seemed to be having a chorus of them. It dawned on Maureen for the first time in her long life that her mind was not really inside her body, not exactly, but that rather it was bombarding her body with constant queries and tests from more or less outside it.
And this dawned on her precisely because, for the first time, she felt that her mind was inside her body, or was multiply inside three separate parts of it. There was first her upper body, and she knew it from within. She was inside her ribcage. She didn’t picture her ribcage—she was in it, enveloped in its blood-slick membranes, in the blood-swollen loaves of her lungs.
And her wonder at this was echoed, for she was also inside her legs, separately inside each one, her knowledge tendriled round their long bones like a ghostly ivy; marveling at the architecture of muscle and tendon and vein.
Never had Maureen felt so complete unto herself—felt herself to be such an exotic construction of bone and meat and soul! A wonderful coolth flushed through her tripart self, as if she had been dipped in a tarn of the blackest, deepest, purest water.
So within herself—within her three selves!—did she feel, that she did not at first realize that her eyes were closed and she lay in a sun-shot darkness. She willed her eyes to open, and it was revealed to her that she had no eyelids, nothing answered the movement of her will. At the same time, this seemed to matter not at all, so gorgeous was the architecture of tissue and vein she lay bathed in, wrapped in.
She tried to touch herself, to learn how she was changing, and it was revealed to her she had no arms while it seemed her feet were bulging, swelling (with a distant noise of ruptured slippers) and her legs’ junctures with her waist were thinning, twisting, and her waist itself was doing likewise. And at the end of this vigorous unbraiding, it seemed three linked tails disengaged.
Maureen’s legs thrust muscularly forth, and they (and her other selves in them) departed, surging reptilically down the hall and bursting—first one, then the other—with a slick whispery sound of passage out through the pet door.
While she who remained in the Barcalounger lay with tail thrashing to a metabolic rhythm, lay enthralled by the great strength blossoming in her newly potent shape.
Transfiguration! Accelerating now. Her flesh became whip-taut and cool. In smooth convulsions, her head and jaws usurped all the mass of her erstwhile body from the ribs up. And her eyes came back! My God, how they came back! Maureen could see all the way around her, her great orbs swiveling like greased ball bearings, eyes big enough to hold the world, catch every least movement in it.
Then, huge-jawed, her skin a glossy armor tough as leather, she wrenched free of her robe. She leapt, in a cavorting dolphins arc, from the Barcalounger, and hit the floor with the four surprises of little legs and clawed feet to break her impact. She scrabbled and slithered toward the front door.
By God in Heaven, Maureen was hungry! It was a raging void in her, a cyclone of need. But her head was too huge for the pet door, and her forefoot too crude for the knob. She rammed the door, cracking it lengthwise, but also hurting her head. She mustn’t use her head as a ram yet. Her instinct told her that food was strength, and she would grow mightier with eating. The kitchen window should be easier than the door. She craved something large to eat, and the thought of the backyard—even as she toiled swiftly back down the hall—brought instantly to mind what she wanted to eat. It was when she was out back gardening, that she was most tormented by King’s barking.
She leapt up onto the kitchen table. Perched on the table, her legs seeming to grow with every passing second, she gathered herself for a mightier leap—straight at the double panes above the kitchen sink.
Erupting into morning sun, in a sparkling spray of glass, Maureen dropped splay-legged—whumph—onto her deep, lush lawn.
King lived two yards over. Even now he was barking, with deep, baying deliberation.
She regarded her sturdy plank fence. She sensed that a moment was coming, not too distant, when she would have hind legs that could launch her right over it. But for the present, she began to ram and claw her way into the soft earth at the base of the fence.
She made rapid progress into the soil. As she worked, she heard the strains of Barry Manilow. That was why King was so vocal—his peopl
e, Wyatt and Eve—were out in their Jacuzzi on the back deck, enjoying the day with him.
With her cart stashed, knapsack packed, and Ramses in his sling, Maxie headed down one of the steep trails to the beach. Ramses was lively, head up out of the pouch, turning the little wand of his muzzle left and right. And there was a scent of something. A cool October day, a shred or two of cloud across the blue, but it didn’t smell as fresh as it looked. There was a rankness that flirted with her mind.
Ramses got even livelier. Had to be put down. Tottered to a tree and peed on it. He seemed conscious of some adversary here, one he meant to meet. She put him in the sling the rest of the way down, but when they reached the narrow beach, he insisted on getting down again and tottered, zig and zag, ahead of her.
Maxie climbed the rocks a little way, and saw the yellow curdled foam mantling the sea for a hundred yards offshore, an unbroken collar arcing eastwards, curving round back towards the Golden Gate. In that direction the creamy expanse narrowed. Would it taper finally to a point of origin?
Ramses was already well ahead of her. She hurried after. Look at the life and purpose in him today! Put him to sleep? The idiocy of that woman.
They picked their way across rock shelf and gravel bar. Maxie found Ramses’ unflagging energy as astonishing as she did the foam, which was indeed tapering, narrowing, till they came to a sharp invagination of the bluffs’ wall.
Rounding this, they confronted a vertical cleft that vanished into the vegetation overhead. It was reminiscent of the much higher one Leon had taken her to, but its cleft was moister, and faintly foamy, and from its juncture with the barnacled rocks, a thin, milky threadwork branched out into the sea. The whole great stream of foam rose here!
Her clawed feet seemed to grow in strength with use—they gave Maureen a surprising amount of leverage in the earth. But it was her massive muscled head, and sinewy fish-like thrust, that enabled her momentum through the loam.
Surfacing in a spray of marigolds (Miss Saunders’ largest bed of them) she charged to the next fence, and dove again against the earth, the dense soil a medium almost as yielding as water to her miraculous new shape.
She erupted in front of King’s sizeable little house, which was in the corner of the yard the dog most loved—for from here he could bark at houses on every side of him. Maxie rose like a geyser of hunger, a craving void that must obliterate this beast. King had spirit. He yelped, he snarled, he lunged—into Maureen’s widening, up-rushing jaws, which possessed his forelegs, head and chest, and lifted his struggling hindquarters skywards.
The game brute was chewing ferociously on Maureen’s tongue, a massy organ which felt not pain, but tingling imminence, and then that tongue swelled and thrust more deeply into King’s throat, a thick, expanding root that exploded King’s skull within her mouth. She heaved him back, and yet again back, bagging the dog—near inert now, just tremoring—all the way down her gullet.
For an indeterminate time she crouched there, hidden by King’s house from Wyatt and Eve in their Jacuzzi. Crouched there while Barry Manilow swelled suavely overhead. Crouched there discovering that King within her, though the architecture of him was dissolving in her corrosive stomach acids, though the brain and the bone shell that had held his heartbeats, his thoughts, were dissolving in her hunger, King himself was not dissolving, the animal’s spirit emerged intact within her as his fleshly structure crumbled away. She felt, in the darkness of her digestion, the barking brute’s horror and dismay, to find himself existing within the black sphere of her belly.
And as if this doleful incarcerated life in her were some kind of dynamo, an imperative deep in her new body, Maureen’s bones branched creaking to life, and the muscles of her legs bulged along these bones. Almighty God in Heaven! I behold your wonders and I cry hallelujah unto you! Behold I open like a blossom under your radiance!
Swelled—in moments!—to half again her size, Maureen could just overlook the roof of the doghouse. In her almost spherical gaze, how shapely did Wyatt and Eve look, waist-deep in their Jacuzzi, drinks at their elbows! And how she hungered for them! Their fleshiness. In them lay her own more lordly stature! Behold the greatness the Lord declared that she had earned! To snatch them into her need’s whirlwind would be to tower like a colossus when the meal was done. Still her hind legs grew, her steel-spring knees jutting higher to her sides, the muscles swelling like melons. And now, low though she squatted, Wyatt saw her.
She met his gaze. Such a square, fleshy young man, very intimidating whenever she’d gone to him with her faint, courteous complaints about King’s barking. At present he didn’t look threatening, looked astonished and suddenly Maureen absolutely knew that she could splash down into that hot tub with a single leap—
And as she thought it, launched it, thrust old bony mother earth so powerfully beneath her that she hung on air, a weightless bubble sailing the blue sky, and hit the water swallowing, Wyatt already socketed in her vast mouth, so that she reared his legs high in a crown of spray, and got him all down with a gulp.
She sat in the water with Eve, pinning her against the tub’s rim. Maureen and Eve both sat astonished—Eve at Wyatt’s vanishing, and Maureen at Wyatt’s arrival within her, for as her cauldron belly’s acids licked him swiftly to bone, his mind, his memories coalesced within her own. She knew him inhabiting her, and he, thus pent, knew her.
Loving Lord! You show me, unworthy, your wonders! Your glory is as a feast you set before me!
She was saddened to find that she could not communicate this gratitude to Eve, and tell Eve how she was not going to be annihilated, but was to live again within Maureen. Her attempt at explanation produced only a long sticky amphibious hiss, at which poor frightened Eve cried out, and peed in the tub water. Maureen gripped Eve with her forefeet, and thrust the young woman headfirst into her jaws. Soon, once she was dissolved, Eve would understand, would know it was all right.
For almost an hour longer, her globed eyes dreaming, her body sunk in metabolic meditation, she squatted in the foaming water. It seemed her mind half dozed, while her body grew so vast that stars were coming out inside her, winking on here and there, a visceral swarm of tiny suns.
Then Maureen came more awake. These stars she felt inside her. These myriad points of light. they were her eggs. She had to find her way to water—big water, in the dark earth. She had to meet someone.
Ramses squirmed to be put in his bed-box in the cart’s prow. Not to curl up, but to sit propped on his rickety forelegs, sniffing the air, his attention drawn everywhere. Her little protector was back, but what kind of danger could waken him so? She walked along California, up Arguello to its end, crossed the park, thence along Waller (Haight itself, though she liked to scope all the people and what they were wearing, took too much steering of her cart), and then down along Divisadero to the Castro. Went into the Gin and Beer It, which had a back alley where Yves let her park her cart between his dumpsters.
“How’s our little man?” Yves leaned his beaky nose down to Ramses, who dabbed his answering muzzle from the sling. To Maxie, setting up her gimlet, he said, “Why didn’t you tell me you had a new friend?”
“I don’t have a new friend.”
“Well, Leon said to tell you, if you showed up, to stick around a little and he’d be back.”
“A scrawny whacko with a white mustache?”
“So you do know him. I’ve known him for years. He’s a walker, like you. And here he is! Well howdy, Miss Dee.” This to Leon’s companion. A gray-haired woman with a handsome face-gray eyes and gaunt cheeks. She carried an old fashioned walking stick with a brass head.
Leon said, “Maxie, this is Dee. Let’s take a table—you gotta talk to Dee, Maxie.”
“Don’t be so abrupt.” Dee poked his shoulder. “I’m very pleased to meet you, Maxie. I’ve seen you around. The thing is, I do have to talk to you. Would you please? Can I buy you another gimlet?”
“Well, sure. Yes you can, dear.” It was fun using the o
ld-ladyism “dear.” She had the right, had maybe fifteen years on Dee, and liked her too, liked her eyes, both kind and tough. It occurred to her Jack had been just around this woman’s age when he died.
At the table Leon sat opposite Maxie, and while Dee got some books from her little backpack, Maxie asked him, “What are you staring at?”
“I’m just keepin’ my mouth shut till you’ve heard her and gone through all the usual changes.”
A comeback died in Maxie’s throat. For some reason, his sarcastic conviction called sharply back to her Vera’s two a.m. vision in the Panhandle. Vera was not the hallucinating type. A cold, cottony sensation moved delicately down Maxie’s spine, recalling white rags of sourceless sea foam, tumbling before the wind.
“There’s no way to ease into this,” Dee told her. “Please. Just listen. And after a while, I’ll tell you what I’ve seen with my own eyes.” And she began to read from a battered gray book.
“Our little Earth is beset by Titans. In the infinitude of space and time, the Great Old Ones swim like krakens through the deep. Time and again they find us, in worlds that have been, and worlds that have yet to be anywhere and anywhen they find, have found, will find us, time without end, but in this present time, in the cosmic deep they navigate, there hangs one particular window of light and color that draws them. Like a stained-glass pane high above, it tempts the titans’ appetites with a flash of rainbow radiance. And that is the window on our twenty-first century.
“For now, in our age, it is this Queen of Cities, skirted by her seas, it is this jewel among metropoloi, crowned with towers, limbed with mighty bridges, robed in lushly architected stone—it is San Francisco that beguiles the Titans’ mossy megalithic eyes, as they drift through the cosmic benthos.
“In our present time, it is towards San Francisco they converge, hither they swim! Hither they glide, drawn to this radiant window on the rest of our world.
“Of the Great Old Ones, the mightiest, dread Chthulu, is among us already. He appropriates our souls, possesses our wills. Legions of his minions, his devout Ganymedes, already infest our corporate boardrooms, our governments, our churches.
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