The Madness of Cthulhu Volume 2

by Joshi, S. T

  The snow varied in intensity until after another hour or so when it stopped as if the sky had run out of its supply. In fact, it stopped so suddenly Tom was vaguely alarmed by the change. He pushed his face up against the inside of the windshield. The streets were empty, and there appeared to be no wind. As far as he knew he might be the last person out in this, out in his car looking out the window, although there was always the chance there were others watching, wedged against their house or apartment or office windows. But even the nearest windows were some distance away. He could see nothing in them.

  Some of the roofs here appeared slightly sagged, and some of the vertical lines of the stark architecture somewhat bent, but there hadn’t been that much snow. The settling of the snow, and the way it had stuck to corners and onto shallow horizontal ledges, must have created an optical illusion.

  The street in front of him and the streets he could see branching off to the sides were a seamless expanse of white, everything looking very much like part of a gigantic skating rink. He was thinking that he could almost see the skaters racing, writing their lines and curls into the white, when the first actual lines began to form.

  He thought at first a breeze had come up that was gently sweeping the pavements, skimming off the layers of snow and revealing the lines that separated the concrete and asphalt slabs. But he could detect no breeze in the trees, and the snow itself did not appear to be moving generally—it was simply disappearing where the lines were.

  Then he saw Freddy, racing down the street across the table of snow pushing his grocery cart in front of him, making such a mess of that clean, seamless snow, churning it, ruining it. Freddy’s mouth was open, but Tom couldn’t tell if he was saying anything. Freddy kept jerking his head back to look behind him, and that was when Tom saw the rushing, curling dark lines in the snow pursuing him.

  And then the huge loops and whirls of tracks made by invisible fingers and tails or whatever might make such marks began to appear, soon covering the street over its entirety, like giant ornate, overlapping signatures in some unknown language. Overwriting Freddy and overwriting Freddy until you could no longer distinguish him in the morass of lines.

  Tom seriously doubted this was in fact any sort of writing because it appeared to come from beneath, so they were perhaps cracks as the world shook off its hard coat, but who could know? If so they were unlike any cracks he had ever seen.

  If he were a smarter man perhaps he could read them, but for now they were simply his evening coming apart. The lines spread like musical transcription, like a spool of thread thrown from a passing car, like the mysterious lines of force which held the world together.

  As the fractures began to deepen, to widen, he noticed that his phone was flashing frantically. In his annoyance with Naomi’s ringtone had he turned the ringer off? He picked up the phone. He dialed in for messages and her frantic voice filled his ear. “Why haven’t you answered? The lines are coming out of the drain. Did you hear that? The lines are everywhere.”

  Of course he did not fully understand. It seemed to him now that all year long he’d been looking forward to the snow, and now it was here at last.

  THE DREAM STONES

  DONALD TYSON

  1

  LET ME MAKE THIS CLEAR, I HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THE EVENTS I am going to set down in this narrative. I was merely an observer, and am in no way responsible for what happened this semester, either in a moral or in a criminal sense. None of the deaths were my fault, not even Tommy’s, and I resent any implication to the contrary.

  It is true that I was the one who happened to notice the homeless man on the corner of Prince and Barrington. It was early fall before the leaves turned—no, I don’t remember the exact date, but it was shortly after the beginning of the university year. I had just settled myself into my apartment near the Dalhousie campus with my roommate, Thomas Straw, another graduate student doing thesis research in the field of Canadian history.

  Perhaps I should mention that he was my closest friend. No, that’s not quite honest—he was my only friend. I am not gregarious by nature. People have told me, often quite unkindly, that I am antisocial. If it is so, it is not a deliberate choice on my part, but I find it difficult to make friends. Being both gay and shy does not make it any easier. I was glad to have Tommy as a roommate, if for no other reason than because it meant I did not need to live with a stranger. We had come to know each other during our undergraduate years at the university. Both of us were non-locals. This created a bond between us that otherwise might never have developed.

  It was a windy day in late September. The wind can gust viciously at the lower end of the steep, downtown Halifax streets below the old British fortress of Citadel Hill, where the harbor waters are only a long stone’s throw away. We’d just come out of a coffee shop and were walking along Barrington toward Prince, which we intended to climb to the base of the Citadel and then go around it and across the Commons to our apartment. Our building was within walking distance of the downtown, about midway between the harbor and the university.

  I remember thinking that there was something odd about the quality of the air that day. It probably has no bearing on the events that later transpired, but you did say that I should mention every detail. The air was cool, of course, with the first hint of October to come, but there was something else. I don’t know how to describe it exactly—a kind of shimmering vibration that tickled at the back of my throat and buzzed in my ears. It was probably an impression caused by too much caffeine.

  You know the downtown district. There are street people everywhere, coming and going like stray cats, always with their hands out, begging for money. They occupy a corner or a doorway for a few weeks or a few months, and then suddenly they are gone. Well, this windy day as we turned the corner to ascend the steep incline of Prince Street, I noticed a homeless man I had not seen before, sitting on the sidewalk on the other side of the street, and some impulse made me point him out to Tommy. There was a dirty towel spread beside him on the concrete with some trinkets arrayed on it, evidently being offered for sale. Tommy immediately decided to take a look. I remember being annoyed that I had pointed the man out. I wanted to get home and do some background reading for my thesis before the afternoon ended, but I followed him across the street.

  How shall I convey the pathetic wretchedness of what lay on the towel, the original color of which was impossible to determine? A few sea shells of the kind that might be found on any beach in Nova Scotia. Some colored fragments of sea glass. Braided necklaces made of wooden beads and hemp twine. Small wood carvings very crudely whittled that depicted some sort of primitive female figure. A handful of old coins too badly worn to be worth anything to a collector. A bronze medal, the origin of which was not obvious on casual inspection. Two well-used jackknives with rusty blades, one with a plastic handle that resembled stag horn, and the other with a plastic handle that looked like ivory. There were some other odds and ends I don’t remember now.

  The man seated cross-legged on the sidewalk looked foreign to me—Middle Eastern, maybe. That was the impression I got from his dark skin and black eyes. You know what I mean by black eyes? The irises of his eyes were so dark, they merged with the pupils, so that his eyes looked completely black except for a thin band of white around their edges. They were close-set on either side of a huge nose like the blade of a hatchet. His entire face was elongated, his forehead high and narrow, mouth small but with full lips, chin pointed beneath a scraggle of reddish beard.

  He sat with his back very straight against the brick wall behind him, and his shoulders squared, as though he’d served in the military at some time. How old was he? I really couldn’t say. No, I can’t take a guess. I don’t know how old he was, only that he felt old. His hair, where it escaped from beneath his fur-lined leather cap, was gray, not red like his beard, but he didn’t seem feeble. Quite the contrary, his hands were unusually large and strong, the hands of a man who had worked as a laborer all his life
—a farmer or a fisherman, maybe. He radiated an aura of sleeping vitality, like some ancient tree.

  That wasn’t the only thing he radiated. The wind blew up the street from the harbor, and I found myself making little sidesteps to put myself downwind from him. He stank of a mixture of urine, old sweat, and alcohol. Most street people smell that way, have you noticed? White stains on the front of his quilted green canvas coat showed where he had vomited on himself.

  I found his little black eyes disturbing. They never left us the entire time we stood over him. At the time, I thought it was because he feared we would steal his trinkets, but I’ve since come to believe his interest in us was more complex, and more sinister.

  I was impatient to keep walking and had no interest in the old man or his trash, but Tommy had his eyes fixed on the dream stone in the center of the towel. It was a piece of greenish stone that looked like soapstone, about six inches across and maybe an inch and a half thick, very crudely carved in the shape of a pentagram with truncated points. There was a small depression scooped out at the center. It was the largest object on the towel.

  I’m just going to repeat the things we said, and he said, as nearly as I can remember them. It’s easier that way.

  “Let’s get going, Tommy,” I murmured under my breath. To be honest, the unwinking black eyes of the old man gave me the creeps.

  “Wait a sec, Walt, I want to look at something.” He always called me Walt, even though I usually go by my full name, Walter.

  He pointed down at the towel and crooked that endearing grin of his at the owner. He really was quite a handsome young man—it’s too bad you had to see his mutilated corpse. You’ve seen his picture? Photographs never did Tommy justice. He always looked as though he were about to make a joke, even when he was deadly serious, as he was this afternoon.

  “What’s this thing?”

  The old guy shifted on his haunches with a kind of serpentine wiggle and smiled. His full lips parted slightly to show a line of small but even yellow teeth. He spoke English without a trace of any accent, but his words were slurred, and even downwind of him I could smell the rum on his breath.

  “You got a good eye, kid. That’s a rare item,” he said in a rasping voice.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s what they call a dream stone.”

  “And what is that?” Tommy asked patiently.

  “What do you think? It makes dreams when you put it under your pillow.”

  “Makes dreams? What kind of dreams?”

  “Well, that depends,” the old man said with a smile. It was really more of a grin—I could see his teeth. “The Pakis say the dreams come like opium visions. Sometimes you never want to wake up, but sometimes they make you piss yourself.”

  All the while the old bastard talked, he kept nodding his head. It was as if he was silently saying yes-yes-yes behind every word he spoke. Thinking back on it, I believe that he must have hypnotized Tommy into buying that stone, but I didn’t realize it then. At the time, he just made my skin crawl.

  “Let’s go,” I said again, and touched Tommy on the small of the back to indicate that what I really meant was, let’s get the hell out of here. He ignored me as though I wasn’t there.

  “How much?” he asked.

  The old man shrugged and pursed his small mouth, making it look even smaller.

  “I wouldn’t sell this stone to everyone. It’s magic is hellacious strong, but you look like someone who isn’t afraid of the dark.”

  He hacked up phlegm, turned his head, and spat on the sidewalk with a practiced motion. A little drop of white clung to his beard under his lower lip, but he did not appear to notice. His black eyes never left Tommy.

  “For you, kid, it’s one hundred dollars. That’s my special rate.”

  “For a rock?” I said, shaking my head in disbelief. “That’s too much.”

  “I’ll take it,” Tommy said. No hesitation, just “I’ll take it.”

  Understand, neither one of us had money to spare. We earned a small amount correcting papers at the university and tutoring undergraduates, and we both had received scholarships coming into our graduate studies, but money was tight.

  “You’re a kid who knows what he wants,” the old man told him, nodding yes-yes-yes. “I like that.”

  Tommy pulled his brown calfskin wallet from the back pocket of his jeans and took out all the money it held. Counting along with him, I was surprised to see that it was more than seventy dollars.

  “Seventy-seven dollars,” Tommy said. “That’s all I’ve got.”

  “That’s too bad, kid. I wanted you to have it.”

  “I don’t suppose you take Visa?”

  The old man smiled.

  Tommy turned to me. His face had a hard look on it that caught me by surprise.

  “I need thirty-three dollars, Walt.”

  “Tommy, a hundred dollars? For an old piece of rock?”

  “Are you going to lend me the money?”

  I shook my head, but pulled out my wallet anyway and counted out the money. Tommy took it from my hand and gave it to the old man. He slid the folded bills and coins away inside his coat and zipped it back up, then picked up the dream stone with a strangely delicate touch, handling it as though it were covered with cactus needles. As Tommy took it, for the first time I noticed some pendants on the sidewalk behind the towel.

  “How much are those?” I said out of curiosity.

  There were five of them, and they were carved from the same kind of green stone into the shape of truncated pentagrams, but set in crudely hammered brass frames that extended prongs between the arms of the star. Each was about an inch across—I say about, because every one of them was slightly different in size. But they were all identical in shape.

  “Sorry, twinkletoes, them ain’t for sale to you,” the street bum said with that creepy smile.

  By the time we got away from that foul-smelling corner, it had started to rain.

  “Are you crazy!” I almost shouted at him as we climbed slowly up Prince Street. “You can’t afford a hundred dollars for a rock. You should take it back.”

  “I like it,” was all he said.

  “Why in hell did you buy it?”

  “It’s interesting.”

  “You don’t believe any of that nonsense the old bum told us?”

  He looked at me sharply, then relaxed and laughed.

  “Of course I don’t believe it. But what a sales pitch, right?”

  That night as we got ready for bed, I asked him if he planned to try out the dream stone. He got a distant look on his face.

  “Maybe I will, just for laughs. I’ll let you know how it turns out tomorrow.”

  The next morning he got up late. I remember because it was uncommon for him. He was usually up before me.

  “How did it go last night?” I asked him while he made his usual toast with marmalade.

  “How did what go?”

  I punched him in the shoulder out of sheer exasperation.

  “Idiot, did you dream?”

  He didn’t look at me, just pursed his lips and shook his head.

  “Nothing?” I asked again.

  “Sorry, what can I tell you. I didn’t dream.”

  I don’t know why, but even then I was certain he was lying.

  2

  THANK YOU FOR THE WATER. MY THROAT WAS VERY DRY. I’M NOT used to talking out loud for so long. Now where was I? Yes, I remember.

  Nothing more happened for a couple of days. I forgot all about the dream stone, until the evening in the Killam Library when I first saw Cheryl Lewis. It’s funny I hadn’t noticed her before, but as I’ve said, I’m not very good when it comes to personal interactions. She was an attractive blonde with ice-gray eyes and flawless skin, about five feet six inches tall, and athletic. What made me notice her that night was the pendant she wore between her breasts on the outside of her red sweater. It was one of those star-shaped stone pendants from the homeless man on the stree
t corner. No mistaking it.

  Seeing the pendant caused me do something I never do: I went over to her reading table and said hello. She looked up at me with a slight smile. Maybe she thought I was trying to pick her up. Most girls sense that I’m gay before I tell them, but some don’t. I spoke my name and described how I’d seen the pendant she wore for sale on Barrington Street a few days before.

  “That’s where I got it,” she agreed.

  “That old guy in the leather cap is something else, isn’t he?”

  “He is not of this planet.”

  “If you don’t mind, would you tell me what made you buy it?”

  She shrugged.

  “I just liked the look of it, I guess. It’s funny, though.”

  “What is?”

  “I really wanted to buy the biggest one, but the old man told me that the big one wasn’t for me, this one was for me.”

  “Uber creepy.”

  “I’ll say. It didn’t really matter, they’re all almost the same, so I took this one.”

  As I talked to Cheryl, Tommy noticed me from the other side of the library and came over. Immediately, her attention shifted away from me to him, and it never came back to me. That’s just the way it was with us. He always had more personality, more charm, more of whatever makes someone interesting and attractive. It wasn’t just his dark good looks, either. He gave his attention to others in a way I never could and really listened to what they had to say.

  He and Cheryl hit it off at once. Even from the first there was a kind of vibe between them. After a while, I could see that she wasn’t even noticing me, so I left them and went back to my table to take notes from the book I was using in my research. You might assume that my feelings were bruised, but this kind of thing happened so often, it didn’t bother me. I was accustomed to getting passed over by girls, especially when Tommy was around. Girls seldom pay much attention to a skinny introvert with thick glasses who blushes. Why should they? It wasn’t as though I was going to reciprocate if a girl did show an interest in me, so why get upset about it?