The Lovecraft Squad: Dreaming

by Stephen Jones

  She pulled herself to her feet, and lurched in.

  The old man stood at the other end of the room, in front of the window, with a viol under his chin. The last unearthly note of his music still hung in the air, like smoke, like fog.

  “Oh, child,” he said, when he saw her.

  “They hurt me,” she murmured. There was no reason for him to care, but she had nobody else to tell.

  “They will. People always will.”

  “But why?”

  “Because there is no ‘us.’ There is no ‘together.’ We are just sheep milling around the same pen. We are all food. Mouthfuls of sustenance for things we cannot see.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they are hungry.”

  “No—why are you here?”

  “Every Tuesday,” he said. “I told you. Every Tuesday night I must be here, and do this. Some other days and nights I do it somewhere else. There is a schedule. Recently it has been hard, even more of a struggle. That’s why I let you stay. I thought perhaps you seeing might help, that another set of eyes through the window would keep what’s out there at bay, and our world in place. This layer of it, at least. But you saw through it, didn’t you? You saw to the other side.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I think you do. And it’s too late to change it now.”

  He walked over to the table and put his viol in the case lying upon it. “I’m sorry for your pain,” he said. “But that is food for them too, and perhaps you have bought us a little time. For that, I thank you.”

  And with that, he left the room.

  An unknowable period of time later, Marion realized that the view had changed outside. She had spent the intervening minutes or hours standing in front of the window, but mired deep inside her head, feeling as though she was running after a musical note, chasing it, trying to catch it—the otherworldly note that the old man had left with her in the attic.

  Then she was aware of herself again, and seeing past the fractured reflections of herself in the colored glass to what lay beyond.

  It was different now.

  No buildings, only the dark ships and the fog. The shouts of men as they loaded cargo, and as she stared down at the cove she finally glimpsed what they were shoving aboard the rotting hulks—the lines of pale men and women, naked and filthy and tied together with chains.

  Not slaves. Food.

  For the things that live in the star-oceans above.

  She turned and limped to the door, and descended the flights of stairs, step by painful step, gripping the handrail to stop herself stumbling and falling, half the fingernails on each hand ripped off in her attempts to pull people off her in the house near Haight that afternoon. The walls of the stairwell seemed to pulse as she passed, as if breathing, the ever-moving intestine of some vast and terrible creature as it digested her, as it digested all of them.

  But she kept going down. At the bottom, she tugged the street door open and stepped outside. This time the modern city had not reappeared and the men in the suits were gone.

  It was how it should be.

  Her feet, which were bare—and had been for her staggering return from the house up near Haight—stood upon wood, not paving stones. The splintered planks of a narrow old wharf. She turned left, knowing what she would see.

  She knew, because the sketch map in the article she had upstairs showed the positions of the fossil ships that had never made it back out of Yerba Buena Cove—and so she had known that the remains of one had been buried beneath the foundations of this very building. A ship from Europe.

  And there it was. Double-masted, but with no sails. The sides damaged and sliding. A ship called the Pentimento.

  A gust of wind came rolling down the wharf, turning the fog into a roiling cloud. She heard a slamming sound behind her. The door to the building closing.

  She turned, but the building wasn’t there anymore, just the sound. It didn’t matter. She hadn’t brought the key down. There was no turning back now, and that was the way it was.

  She staggered instead along the wharf toward the ship, smelling its rotting interior more clearly with every step. A gangplank reached out to a dark, gaping opening in its side.

  This was her ship. This was how she could sail away. It was no coincidence that it had lain all these years beneath the building she’d found herself in, to which the city had steered her. It had been waiting for her all this time.

  She stepped out onto the gangway, leaving another bloody footstep on the wharf.

  Took another step, and then another.

  The rotted wood snapped beneath her, and she plunged down into the water.

  Marion could swim, but she chose not to. The water was not deep, but she remembered her grandmother telling her once—long, long ago—that you can lose your life in just two inches of water, if you’re facing down.

  She turned facedown, and listened to the faint melody born on the fog, or from it, as she slowly drowned.

  There is one place you can make your own. A place they can’t stop you being. It is a land in flux, somewhere you find not with a ship but with your feet, a realm that is yours alone. Unique, defensible through constant movement, created through twists and turns and exhausted footstep after footstep.

  If you walk far and long enough you’ll find it, and whatever else people do to you, they can’t stop you being there. You can be there forever, in your kingdom of one.

  Marion did not die that day, though others did that Summer of Love—before, during, and after the counterculture bubble burst and all those pretty birds lost the wind beneath their wings, and they came crashing to Earth, a city full of offerings to dark forces they’d never understood. In every era there must be a great sacrifice. There must be blood.

  Some perished in random accidents. Many—like Dylan, seven weeks later—through overdoses. Others survived against the odds, in some cases for a long time. Cindy lived to the age of seventy, leaving a fifty-year trail of broken lives and casual destruction in her wake, as she unwittingly served the Elder Gods that live beyond the last layer that sane humans can see or understand. She never understood this, or cared, and died a peaceful death that she did not deserve.

  Marion did not die in those years either, though for much of the time that followed she had no idea who she was.

  Others knew her as the crazy lady on the street corner, or the woman in rags standing screaming at the bay, demanding that the ships come and take her.

  Then, when she was a little older, coming up on thirty, as the huddle of filth that spent the day in bushes at the side of the park, talking and whispering to herself.

  But every evening she walked, around and around those streets, following a route that made sense only to her, as she was the sole person who knew that her path took her over every single one of the deeply buried hulks of the ships underground, the vessels that had refused her passage, instead trapping her in the city as a final sacrifice, one whose soul bled for them. Year after year after year.

  One scream at a time.

  Until one weekend, midafternoon, when Marion was nearly forty years old, crouched in a doorway right by the Pentimento building, gnawing on a three-day-old pizza crust.

  A family of tourists slowed to look as they passed. Twin girls in their early teens winced at the acrid smell coming from the woman on the ground. Their father shook his head, and tried to keep them moving, wishing they hadn’t taken this shortcut—sympathetic, but knowing there was nothing that could be done. That every city holds creatures like these, and they belong there, as part of their fabric.

  His wife stopped dead in her tracks, however. Despite the thick layers of grime, she could see who lay below.

  “Marion?” she said.

  Marion looked blearily up at her, seeing the handsome, confident woman Katie had become. The girl who’d seen through it all, back then, and survived to come out the other side, not just in one piece, but twice the size.

  It broke Marion
’s heart, the distance, and she tried to turn away.

  But Katie was firm, and reached down to take Marion’s hand, to pull her to her feet. To yank her back up out of a shallow, turgid bay that nobody else could see.

  “Come with us,” she said.

  Marion’s voice had soured and broken long ago, and was now little more than a rasp. “Where . . . ?”

  “To South Dakota,” Katie said. “You should have done it then, but you can still do it now.”

  “But how can I get there?”

  “There’s room next to me. And it’s time to go home.”

  FOUR

  The Dunwich Horrors

  SUMMER NIGHT IN A quiet part of England. Gray moon, silver sand, silent stars, pallid waves lapping in their gentle retreat from the shore.

  And a man dressed in a clown costume, running across the beach as if his life depends on it.

  The man is not a clown, that much is important to establish, nor has the costume been placed upon his body without some degree of struggle. But it was on now, and once he had realized he couldn’t get it off, he had diverted all his energies to escaping.

  He is still trying.

  He could hear them now, far behind him as they emerged from the ragged holes in the cliffside. Their unearthly cries, their hideous gasping croaks and slurps, all just loud enough for him to make out over the sound of his own tortured breathing.

  He had to keep moving.

  Ahead lay the ragged path that wound up to the coast road. If he could just get there maybe he could flag down a vehicle, or at least conceal himself in the scrubland until one came. Then he remembered the bright colors in which he had been dressed. He knew the eyes of his pursuers were best suited to the darkness, but that probably meant they could pick out his form all the more easily.

  Run, then.

  Their cries were closer now, almost exultant, which was odd because they were still too far away to be so sure of catching him. The rambling cacophony began to resolve itself, becoming organized into discernible sounds, if not exactly words.

  A chant.

  Slowly building, the rhythmic ululations were timed with the movements of the tide, a crescendo when the waves receded, quieting as the sea returned to the land. It almost sounded as if they were summoning something, sending a call out to the sea. He glanced across to where the light from an indifferent moon shimmered on the surface of the waves.

  Shimmered . . . and moved.

  The sight almost brought him to a halt. He ran another twenty yards before he found himself having to stop, to turn, to look out at the sea to reassure himself that his eyes had been tricking him.

  They hadn’t.

  The disturbance of the ocean surface was greater now, and was it his imagination or was it closer to the beach than before? He squinted, doing his best to ignore the chanting coming from his left.

  It was moving. A peculiar, isolated turbulence of the water—seething, bubbling, moving purposefully toward the shore.

  Toward him.

  He gulped down breath and ran again. He covered another hundred yards before he turned and looked once more.

  The area of bubbling sea surface was greater now, more widespread. It was still moving toward the shore, although its angle had changed.

  Because it was still moving toward him.

  He had never been a man of faith. Had never, despite the briefings and the historical documents and records he had been shown, truly believed in what he had been sent down here to investigate.

  As something shining and immense and dome-like broke the surface of the water, he finally did believe. Everything.

  And he began to run again. Not the careful, coordinated, calculated way of escaping from such entities that he had been through in his training, but the random, panicked breathless scrambling of someone whose mind has been clouded by fear, wiped clean by terror, the only thought remaining being that of needing to escape the immeasurable horror that was even now emerging from the sea behind him.

  He was scrambling up the dunes when he heard it, a thud so loud and so earth-shattering that the ground shook and his eardrums threatened to burst with the vibration.

  Another thud.

  And another.

  Footsteps. They had to be, accompanied by the deafening sucking sound of something gargantuan leaving the water.

  He clapped his hands to his bleeding ears as he scrambled over the dunes. Ahead lay the road, a thread of winding black through the scrub of the landscape. As he staggered toward it, the moonlight that had been illuminating his path suddenly vanished, then reappeared, then vanished once more as the creature cast a vast, squirming shadow over the direction he was taking.

  He had almost reached the road when the huge, lumbering form that had been called from the ocean depths by its followers caught up with him.

  “I’ve never been a fan of oysters.”

  Jonathan Mount raised an eyebrow at his colleague’s confession, then picked up the tiny segment of lime he was holding and squeezed it over the contents of the shell in his other hand. “You just haven’t been served them properly,” he replied with a grin. He put down the exhausted peel and raised a shot glass filled with a clear liquid. “I think you’ll find a little tequila works wonders.”

  It was more than a little, and Miss Emelia Shaver had to admit it made a world of difference. She swallowed the shellfish. “Not bad,” she said. “But it will take more than that to obliterate my memory of food poisoning from them when I was fourteen.”

  “That really was an exclusive girls’ school you attended wasn’t it, what, five years ago?”

  Emelia gave him a sallow look. “Has nobody ever told you it is not only rude to ask a lady’s age, but just as rude to take random potshots at guessing it by roundabout means?”

  “Touché.” Mount swallowed a second oyster and turned his attention to one of the lobster claws. “I must say, they have put a splendid spread on for us.”

  Emelia pierced a small ring of squid. “By ‘they’ I presume you mean this restaurant? Or are the HPL footing the bill for this?”

  “They do allow us an expense account, you know.” Mount refilled their champagne glasses. “Besides, I thought we deserved a reward after putting paid to that devilish business in Portmeirion.”

  “I’m not arguing.” Emelia picked up the other lobster claw and put it on her plate for later. She knew Mount was overly fond of seafood, and she was not to be denied her share. “Who would have guessed that Azathoth would have had any interest in trapping people in a village in North Wales?”

  Mount nodded. “And making them think they were spies being kept there against their will to prevent the divulgence of state secrets.”

  “Well, there we go.” Emelia raised her glass and clinked it against Mount’s. “Here’s to 1968, may the rest of the year yield a distinct lack of ghosties, ghoulies, and unmentionable ancient entities who wish to enslave humankind.”

  An uneasy-looking waiter approached them.

  “Sir, madam, I’m sorry to interrupt your lunch. I’ve been asked to pass on this telegram to both of you.”

  Mount took the proffered note and unfolded it.

  Emelia cracked open her lobster. Telegrams to the pair of them never bore good news, and she was determined to finish as much of her lunch as possible before they had to leave. “Trouble?”

  Mount read from the paper: “‘Proceed immediately to Dunwich Suffolk Stop Agent Curtis vanished Stop Possible link to local abductions and the Armies of the Night Stop.’”

  “Is that all?”

  Mount sighed. “‘Expense account only for essential work Stop Not for lunch at Claridges Stop Do not even think about it Stop.’”

  “I suppose that means . . .”

  “Exactly.” Mount cut into a delicious-looking piece of swordfish. “Once we’ve finished this, we need to cover ourselves by convincing the manager that this place is a possible hotbed of Dark and Evil activity.”

  “We’re in L
ondon,” Emelia drained her glass. “I doubt we’ll be telling him anything he doesn’t know already.”

  “Oh, to be in England, now that summer’s here!”

  Emelia shivered. “Surely you mean, ‘Oh to be absolutely anywhere else because summer in England is simply horrible’?”

  Mount shook the drops from his umbrella and closed it, before taking a deep breath of sea breezes that were threatening to develop into a gale. “Well, you did know where we were headed, and far be it from me to make such a suggestion to you, but perhaps a scarlet Mary Quant miniskirt and matching jacket isn’t the ideal apparel for such an adventure?”

  “The outfit is André Courrèges, if you must know. He insists Mary was ‘just an advisor.’” Emelia took one step forward, and the heel of her red leather go-go boot sank into sand the color and consistency of gruel. “I think Charles Dickens has left rather a lot of his lunch behind.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Twist, Oliver? More please, sir?”

  Mount shook his head. “No more of that, I beg you. And you know what I’ve said about you calling me ‘sir’ in public.”

  Emelia raised a scarlet-gloved palm, which Mount skillfully diverted into his grasp. “I think you’ll find the path over there will allow us to access the beach with a little less squelching.”

  “I don’t need hand-holding, thank you very much, or fashion advice. Do you really think Pierre Cardin designed your suit to be worn out here?”

  “Very interested in space exploration is our Pierre.” Mount had released Emelia’s hand and was striding off down the path, swinging his umbrella as he did so. “He told me once his dream is to visit NASA. I’m sure he’d approve of one of his double-breasted, box-cut jackets being used in the fight against evil. Oh dear.”

  “What have you found?”

  Mount was crouching by something on the path. He took out a pencil and used it to extract a tangled piece of material from the surrounding scrub. He held it aloft. “Suggest anything?”