The Madness of Cthulhu Volume 2

by Joshi, S. T

  “Oh, they don’t need an old guy like me on a day like today, climbing in and out of those shafts searching for those inspectors, not when the ground’s this unstable. I’d just get in the way.”

  “I’ve never known you to sit things out before, Walt.”

  “Well … I’ve never seen fractures like the ones we’ve been getting. Deep stuff I can’t make sense of. I’m used to having some kind of explanation for things within my area of expertise, narrow as it might be.”

  “I thought you said Naomi didn’t have anything to worry about.”

  “Oh, she doesn’t, I don’t think. I guess I’m just getting tired of the job. I should’ve retired a long time ago—judgment ain’t what it used to be. So—what’s next on the list?”

  “Paint. She wants me to match what we’ve got in the dining room. The chairs have scraped a line across the plaster.”

  Walt whistled. “That paint’s a good twenty years old, I’ll bet. You know you’re going to have to repaint the whole thing, don’t you? Might as well pick a better color if you ask me, something brighter.”

  “I don’t care, never noticed. I’m just trying to keep her happy. These little repairs—that’s what makes her happy. ‘Progress,’ that’s what she calls it. ‘It’s important we make progress,’ she says.”

  We have this beautiful house, but you won’t do a thing to keep it that way. I want things nice for the holidays. That was what she’d said when she gave him the list that morning. Maybe it was true he didn’t get to repairs the way he should, but he did have to go into work every day. By the time he got home all he wanted to do was collapse in front of the TV. Especially now these repairs seemed like a waste of time—why couldn’t she at least wait until the quakes stopped? There was something a little frenetic about it—it made him anxious just to be a part of it.

  All year he’d been looking forward to snow—it was an unusual desire for him. He hated driving in snowy weather. But wouldn’t it have a calming effect? Wouldn’t it at least make things look better?

  “The need for maintenance never ends. Because of that it’s doomed to fail,” Walt pronounced. “That’s why I don’t sweat a little bit of shabbiness. Shabby is the basic human condition, if you ask me. Whoa! Watch out!”

  Tom slammed on the brakes. A homeless guy struggled to get his grocery cart full of junk out of the way. Tom hadn’t seen him at all—it was like the fellow had just popped out of the broken pavement. He recognized him then—everybody called him Freddy. He wandered this part of town at all hours of the day, and people said he slept somewhere in one of the big parking garages. Freddy’s hair and beard looked strangely animated, as if gnawing at his raw, swollen face.

  “Lines ’n’ lines ’n’ lines!” Freddy growled.

  Tom rolled down the window. “Excuse me?”

  “I said you got yer lines ’n’ lines all over the damn place!” Freddy shouted, mouth throwing froth. “Lines up there ’n’ lines down there, but mostly down there. All a tangle and angry. Them lines is angry!”

  The guy wandered off to a crumbling old warehouse next to the road. Traffic was at a dead stop. Tom couldn’t get his eyes off that building—an interesting weave of lines wrapped around the corner of the brick wall like the remains of some giant signature. Freddy was poking, babbling to himself. More cracks spread. Masonry and concrete fell away. The ground around the foundation was mounded with debris. The rusty roof sagged, straight lines collapsed into waves, gaps opening in the seams. It was a dangerous situation—the area should have been barricaded.

  One wheel of his trembling automobile suddenly slipped into a large hole in the pavement. The right front fender made a scraping sound as he drove out of the cavity. Walt groaned softly beside him. Tom looked over in alarm, but Walt just shook his head and made a pained smile. “You need a chiropractor if you’re going to drive around this town, I swear.”

  Ahead of them a line of vehicles rocked slowly along the battered, pitted road. Two city trucks slumped at the edge, workers leaning on picks and shovels. They stared at the disastrous pavement as if unsure what to do. Behind them the highway fence had been patched with plywood and discarded sheet metal.

  Tom found the right paint store, parked his car crookedly in the lot. He jumped out holding the little chip of wall board painted the color he needed to match. He felt a little dizzy after the first few steps. It had suddenly gotten very cold. He saw tiny snowflakes like slivers of glass gleaming in the air. The parking lot had obviously been poorly paved. It tilted steeply overall, and the far end appeared badly warped. The lines marking the various spaces were skewed. A good snow would cover all this. Snow would be a very good thing right now.

  Suddenly he realized Walt wasn’t with him. He twisted around. There his friend was on hands and knees peering beneath the car. Tom went back and stood over him. “Walt? What’s going on?”

  Walt backed out with a hand full of gravel. “The whole lot is like this—coming apart into little pieces. This stuff is almost like powder.”

  “They don’t have the funds to keep up the infrastructure. You see this all over these days.”

  Walt shook his head. “It’s like it vibrated apart.” He held his head up. “Can you feel that? It’s like my teeth are shaking in their sockets.”

  “Walt—”

  “I was here last week, Tom. This lot wasn’t like this. I swear it was almost like new.”

  The faded poster in the front window of the paint store displayed a rainbow of nearly indistinguishable pale paint colors. The clerk’s ugly, patchy beard looked as if he’d pulled big hunks out of it, but he seemed to know his paints, identifying Tom’s sample as “Mahogany Paradise.” Tom was skeptical but took it anyway.

  Walt took one look at it. “If you’re lucky the next quake’ll take the whole wall down, then you won’t have to use this.”

  Outside Tom saw that the snow had increased, but initially it only made the shabbiness of everything a little uglier, as if a highlighter had been used to locate all the cracks. He stumbled and almost dropped the paint, the slick, crooked lines of the parking lot and the tangle of his shoelaces working together to bring him down. Walt grabbed him by the jacket, and his left hand landed on a stuccoed concrete post. His palm came away dusty, and several inches of chipped material fell onto the uneven asphalt.

  Back in the car Walt seemed troubled, rubbing his hands together as if he couldn’t keep himself warm, uncharacteristically quiet. Tom was ready to pull over and ask him what was wrong when Walt spoke up. “Do you know why my daddy left the mines?”

  “I’m surprised when anybody works the mines more than a day.”

  “Oh, he loved the mines. Didn’t mind the danger, or the coal dust. He just loved bustin’ rock. It was that simple. No, he left because he became convinced that down below the mines—‘somewhar short o’ Hell’ is the way he put it—there was a city down there, one with great towers and highways and magnificent halls, and maybe, well, maybe a UFO, or two, or three.”

  Tom wasn’t sure if he’d heard right. He’d been distracted—the sky appeared to be sinking rapidly, the cold creeping into the interior of the car and scratching at his skin. He began to feel some urgency to get his errands done before it got worse, but slow traffic, crumbling roads, and store façades missing identification were slowing him down. He’d lived in this area all his life and yet he felt vaguely lost. He still had a replacement lampshade to get, a new handle for one of the cabinets, a match for a missing knob. “So he believed people lived down there?”

  “No—he said he was always dreaming about that city, or seeing things in the shafts that—I don’t know—reminded him? And the doorways and windows—they obviously weren’t meant for humans. Actually, he said it was like something you might see in an aquarium, like a city for something aquatic, but on land.”

  “And he got all that from dreams?”

  “Not entirely. Like I said, things in the mines reminded him, or sometimes it was like a memory,
but not really.”

  “Walt, no offense, but are you saying your dad left the mines because he was going crazy?”

  Walt laughed. “Yeah, maybe I am. He was pretty convinced, and it scared him. I don’t believe in any of that Chariot of the Gods or UFO mumbo-jumbo. I’m a scientist, for God’s sake. Four hundred and sixty million years ago the volcanoes spewed enough lava to make these mountains as high as the Alps. When they started to weather they absorbed enough greenhouse gas to cause an ice age, killing off two-thirds the species on the planet. But with their north-south orientation these mountains made a pretty good bridge for some to escape the ice.”

  “And …”

  “Sorry—I’ve just been thinking it out. There’s a lot of porous limestone under these hills, caves everywhere, most of them unexplored. There’s just a lot we don’t know—that’s all I’m saying.”

  The jazz music started up again. Reluctantly Tom flipped on his phone. “Hey, Naomi. I saw that you left a message.”

  “That was a half hour ago.”

  “Traffic’s been crazy. You don’t want me answering the phone while I’m driving, do you?”

  “The sewer people are still here. They’re not having very much luck getting the main line unplugged. They want to run a camera down there.”

  “Are they sure there’s no other way? Maybe they should try some more with that snake rooter thing of theirs. Running a camera is expensive.”

  “I know it’s expensive, but they’ve been running their machine all morning, over and over, and it’s obviously not getting at whatever is blocking the line. They say 200 dollars minimum—there may be a break in the pipe, or a separation. They say we should have gotten the old clay pipe replaced years ago.”

  “They always say that.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Tell them to go ahead. I’ll be running in and out of stores the next couple of hours, so I’ll probably be unavailable.”

  They stopped at an older strip mall, junk and surplus stores mostly, to try to get the last few items on the list. Here one store smashed up against the next all along the row, all of it leaning ever so slightly out of true, leaving scattered piles of chips and pebbles from the collisions. The storefronts were so filthy, so mismatched in color, style, and signage, they made Tom think of unsorted boxes of trash.

  At least the snow had thickened enough it was beginning to cover all this with a deceptively clean layer of white, and maybe after a time he wouldn’t immediately think of the filth, decay, and ruin underneath.

  Tom found most of the replacement hardware he needed in a dingy, dirty junk store at one end of the slovenly mall. Walt wasn’t much help. As soon as they walked in he became distracted by several crates of “antique architectural remnants” shoved under a battered old table.

  Moldings, brackets, inscribed metal plates, and various building ornamentation covered in grease, coal dust, and substances unidentifiable. Tom wanted no part of it, but Walt seemed somewhat obsessed.

  Walt didn’t buy anything, but he was lost in thought when they left. Tom was beginning to feel a little worried for him.

  The alley and walk on one side of the junk store were layered in filth spilled over from an intersecting lane. Out of morbid curiosity Tom stepped carefully over the trails of coffee grounds, stained papers, and unidentifiable organic debris and peered around the greasy brick wall into the opening of the lane. It was a long alley bordered by tall walls of windowless mildewed concrete, and at the far end a writhing tangle of what he presumed to be trash consisting mostly of … lines. Strings and tapes and moving tubes of who-could-tell? He stopped Walt from coming around and taking a look himself and ushered him back to the car.

  Back on the road the windshield fogged, and the defrosters seemed to be of little help, clearing only a small semicircle of window in front of the steering wheel crowned by a halo of frost. Outside, as the day wound down toward sunset, the air gradually thickened into a white mist that spread and obscured the more distant buildings, then ate away at the horizon until Tom could see only a few hundred feet ahead of him.

  The car suddenly filled with that cacophonous jazz. Naomi again. But a truly serious snowfall felt imminent, and it seemed urgent for him to finish and get home.

  “Hey, Tom,” Walt said softly. “Do you think you could just take me home now? I’ve got lots to do before tomorrow and I’m beginning to feel a little poorly.”

  “Sure, Walt. Sure.” Walt never complained about how he felt, ever, so Tom was taking this seriously.

  Walt lived in a modest frame house a couple of blocks off the old downtown. When they pulled into the front yard—just a few square yards of dirt and gravel, actually—Walt said, “Come in a minute, will you?”

  “Hey, Walt, I’d like to, really. But with this snow, and Naomi freaking out about the sewer, I really oughta get home.”

  “I know you’re in a hurry. But this’ll only take a minute of your time. Promise.”

  Walt led Tom past a mismatched washer and dryer combo sitting out in the side yard, through a small maze of raised dead flowerbeds to a screen door and the crowded porch beyond. Old auto parts, appliance parts, surplus mining equipment, and antique mechanical devices were in remarkable abundance. They padded through the darkened kitchen into another room where Walt flipped on the overhead light.

  The object on the dining room table was about six feet long and resembled either a seriously heavy, highly ornate weather vane or a finial from the top of a Victorian tower or cupola. It was engraved along its length with a dense script in a language Tom did not recognize, and a raised design which might have been intended to represent oceanic plant or animal life, or perhaps the internal digestive tract of some long-extinct creature of enormous size.

  He touched it gingerly. It was hard and shockingly cold. Like touching dry ice. He stepped back—the table legs appeared on the verge of failure, the top sagging significantly. “What’s it made of?”

  “Haven’t a clue. Every test I can do gives, well, unlikely results. It’s age I can’t even calculate. My equipment’s not that good.”

  “It’s so heavy. How did you get it in here?”

  “I didn’t. My dad found it, with his crew down in the Number 82 shaft. They raised it on the winch and borrowed one of the big company trucks. Did it late one night. Twenty of them. I thought half of them would die getting it in here. That was a year before my dad quit.”

  “So is this why your dad got that notion of an underground city?”

  “This, and a lot of other things he wouldn’t say much about. After he died, I tried to talk to some of those guys, the ones that were still left. They didn’t tell me a thing.”

  Tom looked up at his friend. “What’s going on, Walt?”

  “I’m leaving tomorrow for Colorado. I’ve got more family out there. I never wanted to leave these mountains, but they’ve got mountains out there, too. I just wanted you to see this. And I hope you won’t think I’m a coward.”

  “A coward? Why would I ever think that?”

  “For leaving,” Walt said. “Just for that.”

  As Tom drove through the empty downtown streets, the snow piled up, covering everything, but not before he noticed that the edges of the old buildings appeared to sag and a white, frothy sort of corrosion on the corners was evident. Hints of twisted and tangled debris peeked over the rooflines.

  As his car made the top of a hill, huge chunks of snow were drifting down. In the dim light from the surrounding poles it looked like bits of yellowed insulation. Naomi’s jazz sounds started up again, and this time he took the call.

  She sounded breathless. His chest grew tight. She’d be wanting him to do something about something, and now.

  “Why didn’t you call me back? I’ve called you three times!”

  Was this possible? He didn’t see how. “What’s the problem?”

  “The sewer line is full of hair, and big long—I don’t know—earthworms maybe? Great gobs of them!”r />
  “They’re exaggerating.”

  “I’ve seen it myself! It’s right on their little TV monitor.”

  “It must be roots. That’s always been a problem. You’ve all mistaken the roots for hair.”

  His wife didn’t answer for some time. Then, “You’re ridiculous. I’ll just handle it.” She hung up.

  He dropped the phone back onto the seat beside him. Good, let her handle it. It would be easy enough to put a pre-recorded video into their machine showing any problem they wanted. In a few minutes Naomi would call back to tell him they wanted some huge amount of money to fix the problem. Then he would take over. He would say absolutely no and she would be satisfied that he’d handled it.

  It was snowing quite heavily now. He pressed his fingertips against the underside of the windshield, then jerked them away, feeling burned. But when he examined his fingers he could find no damage; they were just … cold. He eased his fingers back against the glass, and then a palm. He could feel the cold outside through his entire body. It seemed as if he could feel the cold as it spread from miles and deep layers away.

  Flakes were multiplying at a dizzying rate. He heard a crack of thunder, and in the distance the sky split with a dazzling white light. Unusual in a snowstorm, but not unheard of. He watched as flakes like huge moths touched the glass, rested for a second, then tumbled off. More fragments than flakes, the same color and shade as the sky, as if the sky had fallen out of the sky.

  That object on Walt’s dining room table—where could it have come from? And the idea that he had lived with it there for all those years after his dad died, without telling anybody? Some things were beyond human understanding. Actually, all things were. There must be a physics beyond the physics we know—it was the only reasonable explanation. Layers upon layers, origins beneath origins. The only way to really make sense of things was through a kind of psychological archaeology.

  The snowfall became so heavy Tom stopped the car in the middle of the street. Nothing else was moving—he probably could stay there all night. Maybe he would. Maybe he would just call Naomi and tell her he was going to have to spend the night in the car and he was sorry, so very sorry but she would have to deal with those sewer people herself. In any case she was doing a great job—she should be very proud of herself.