by Paula Guran
It is a fishing plummet.
And he is to be the weight.
It’s an hour, at best, before the Aunts cease their invocations and find Aitch gone.
The sea is in turmoil as he flees. Legs pumping, he prays they didn’t hear the slap of his feet on the lighthouse stairs. The screech of the ground-level door opening, the thundering clang of it swinging shut. Breakers crash against the headland, spray soaking the pebbled path to the wharves, washing away the crimson trail spattered behind him. He looks down, always down, unsure which is more frightening: the ocean roaring, wild and vicious, or the roiling, boundless cloud-sea. The lighthouse, forever watching.
No matter how far he runs, Aitch feels the Aunts’ glare from above. At first their song keeps pace with his flight, but soon it outruns him. Picked up by many voices, the strange chorus is repeated, reverberating from reef to village and back. It surrounds Aitch as he sprints, urging him on, to break free—
I have, he wants to scream, but foul air burns his lungs, reeking of clams and grave-soil and rot. You are not a bird, he hears the Aunts say, clicking their tongues. You are not built for flying, but for swimming . . .
Whistling on the docks, a scattering of oil lamps flare to life. It is early yet for fishing, Aitch thinks, but takes some comfort in the men’s presence. The assured way they handle both oars and fire, rowing out to join their mates on the reef. Taking only their nets. Wearing flippers.
I’ll sail with them, Aitch thinks. They’ll take me away, back to the train, back to Mother . . .
“Help,” he breathes, dashing past stalls battened for the night. Too quiet, he tries again. Pitches his voice to out-sing the Aunts. “Help me!”
Clunking across weathered boards, he aims for the one berth he clearly remembers. An old sea-dog, an oyster, a puff-of-steam beard. “Captain Southwark,” he cries, startling a sharp-beaked carrion crow. The brig is moored midway down the jetty, a small fleet of rowboats ready at its stern. Under a tarp at the foot of its gangplank, a grizzled guard snoozes in a whiskey fug. Aitch thunders past him, halfway up the footbridge. Safety, he’s sure, awaits him on this ship. Fair passage, wind-bellied sails. The swiftest – the only – way home. “Captain—”
“Muffle it, swain. That screech of yers is fit to wake the dead. And far as I know, I en’t there yet.”
Aitch stops. Turns. Slowly descends and approaches the man emerging from under the mold-spotted canvas. “Captain Southwark?”
“Heard ye the first time, mate.” The old man stands and belches, then reaches up under his sweater to scratch his big belly. Plugging one nostril at a time, he leans over the railing and snorts into the water. Ablutions done, he pinches the bridge of his nose and speaks into his cupped hand. “What ye hollering for?”
For a minute, Aitch jibbers about tentacles and boy-weighted plummets and voices rising from the deeps. “The Aunts—”
“Always does things too fancy,” Southwark says. Clapping Aitch on the shoulder, his gaze drops to the talisman hanging round the boy’s neck. Thick, callused fingers inspect the leather pouch, then pat it gently against Aitch’s chest. “It’s their way or no way . . . Ye ken me, don’t ye?”
Aitch nods, relieved.
“Told them, didn’t I, to keep it simple. But those women . . .” Southwark pauses, slants an eyebrow. “They’s got a different take on simple, don’t they just?”
Aitch’s cheeks tighten and twitch, caught somewhere between a sob and a smile. “Can you take me home? Please?”
“’Bout time someone did.”
Grinning now, really grinning, Aitch makes for the brigantine, but again the captain stops him short. “Crew’s reveling,” he explains, steering the boy toward the last rowboat, guiding him under the railing and over the gunwale. “I’ll take care of yer me own self, won’t I.”
“Hurry,” Aitch says.
For a man of his bulk, Southwark is light on his feet. The dory hardly rocks as he boards; despite the choppy water, his stroke is smooth, their progress swift. Within moments the shoreline has fallen away, the wharves, the gold-littered reef. Southwark tilts his cap at the shadows chanting there, then puckers the billows around his mouth and begins trilling, picking up their funereal beat.
An icicle forms at the base of Aitch’s heart, stabs into his stomach. “I don’t know the direction,” he says, leaving bloody palm-prints on the crossbench. He looks back at the headland as the boat shoots past the breakwater. The lighthouse searches, searches, but he’s gone. He’s out of reach. Turning back to the old man he asks, “Is it far?”
Southwark glances up at the moon, gauging distance by the few visible stars.
“Fathoms,” he replies, locking oars.
Pouncing.
With practiced ease, he pins Aitch with one hand, grabs the anchor with the other. A flick of the wrist and the sink-rope whirrs round the boy’s ankles. “This business don’t have to be hard, son,” he says, upending Aitch easily as emptying a pail of chum. Throwing him overboard. Aiming the weight at his surfacing head, tossing it. “See?”
Fluid hymns sing Aitch down, down, further down.
Limbs numb, ankles bent out of shape, arms waving ten little cylinders in front of his face. He grabs the leather tube strung around his neck, tears it open, wrings. His caul oozes out, unfurls, and is swept away by strong undercurrents.
Mother, he quails, voiceless. I’m drowning.
Tessellations spark around him as he exhales. Neon alphabets, pink and purple and green. Luminescent pictograms of algae. Jellyfish punctuation, bright tremulous sentences felt as fin-flutters. Paragraphs sketched in krill, tiny oxygen explosions. Entire stories swimming in syllables of elder seas.
All ushering him down towards – what? He can’t say.
All communicating things he can’t understand.
Aitch is not special.
He’s just a half-finished thought, sinking into the abyss. He’s an initial, merely one of the first. Many others – he’s sure, he foresees – will be thrown in as bait after him. On and on, until – when?
Soon, the Aunts would say, meaning, possibly, forever.
Meaning, We don’t know either.
At last, Aitch inhales.
A tentacle emerges from the darkness, latches on. Squeezes him for dear life.
Caitlín R. Kiernan has been quoted as feeling “too many people are obsessed with Lovecraft’s monsters, tentacles and polyps and shoggoths . . . I think they’re missing the point. At least, they’re missing the part that has played the greatest influence on me, and those elements would be the importance of atmosphere, the found manuscript as a narrative device, and his appreciation of what paleontologists and geologists call deep time. Deep time is critical to his cosmicism, the existential shock a reader brings away from his stories. Our smallness and insignificance in the universe at large. In all possible universes. Within the concept of infinity. No one and nothing cares for us. No one’s watching out for us. To me, that’s Lovecraft.”
With “The Peddler’s Tale, Or, Isobel’s Revenge,” Kiernan uses oral storytelling rather than a discovered palimpsest for a story told (in the fabled city Ulthar) of Lovecraft’s vast Underworld, a universe as indifferent to humankind as the rest of the cold, remorseless cosmos.
Kiernan is a two-time recipient of both the World Fantasy and Bram Stoker awards. Her recent novels include The Red Tree and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, and, to date, her short stories have been collected in fourteen volumes, including Tales of Pain and Wonder, A is for Alien, The Ammonite Violin & Others, and the World Fantasy Award-winning The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories. The most recent collections are Beneath an Oil Dark Sea: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume 2) (Subterranean Press) and Houses Under the Sea: Mythos Tales (Centipede Press). She also wrote Alabaster, an award-winning, three-volume graphic novel for Dark Horse Comics. She recently wrote her first screenplay and is currently working on her next novel, Interstate Love Song.
The Peddler’s Tale or Is
obel’s Revenge
Caitlín R. Kiernan
——
“If you are very sure that’s the story you wish to hear,” said the peddler, the seller of notions and oddments, to the tow-headed girl child who called her Aunty. They were not related, by blood nor marriage, but very many people in Ulthar called the peddler Aunt or Aunty or the like. Few people living knew her right name or her history. Most felt it impolite to ask, and she never volunteered the information.
“You should be certain, and then be certain you’re certain, before I begin. I’ve come a long, long way. And tomorrow I leave the city and will not soon return. So, be sure this is the tale you wish to hear.”
“Aunty, I am very certain,” said the girl impatiently, and the other two children – both boys – agreed. “I have no doubt whatsoever.”
“Well, then,” said the old woman who wasn’t her aunt. She sat back in her chair and lit her pipe, then squinted through gray smoke at the youngsters who’d arranged themselves on the floor between her and the crackling hearth fire. Also, there were five cats, none of whom seemed the least bit interested in peddlers’ yarns.
She took a deep pull on her pipe, then began.
“You’ve all heard the name of the King of Bones, and you’ve heard the tales of how he came to power. And of his Queen, his twin sister, Isobel.”
The children nodded eagerly. And the peddler paused, because she knew that the making of beginnings is, as many have noted, a matter not to be undertaken lightly. And, too, the girl had requested of her a very grim tale, which made the beginning that much more delicate an undertaking. The old woman watched her audience, and they watched her right back. She was well versed at hiding exhaustion, disguising an aching back and sore feet behind a pleasant demeanor, not letting on how her weary sinews wished for the rare luxury of a soft mattress. Duty before rest. This tale was the price of her night’s lodging and board, and she was a woman who paid her debts.
Shortly after dawn, the peddler had led the strong draught pony that pulled her wagon over the ancient stone bridge spanning the River Skai, that wild path of meltwater gurgling down from the glaciers girdling Mount Lerion and flowing northwards towards the Cerenarian Sea. She’d lingered a while on the bridge, admiring the early autumn sunrise, the clean smell of the river, and the view to the east. This was always a welcome sight, the cottages and farms speckling the hills beyond the bridge. Behind her lay Nir and Hatheg, neither of which had proven as profitable as she’d hoped. With so many merchants and craftsmen – and it seemed there were more every year – few in the villages and cities had use for a traveling tinker and a seller of oddments and notions, a peddler of medicinals and salves, a woman up to almost any menial job for a few coins. She’d become an anachronism, but at so advanced an age it was hardly practical to seek some other more lucrative trade.
Out beyond the farmland, just visible in a gauzy mist starting to burn away beneath the new day, she had been able to discern the suburbs of Ulthar. She was born in the town and hoped to spend her last years there, fate willing. She did not ever think gods willing, as she had long since learned the folly and dangers of placing one’s hope in the hands of gods and things that fancy themselves gods.
“Isobel and Isaac, the earthborn ghouls,” said the girl, prompting the peddler to continue.
“Yes, well,” said the peddler. “But they were not true and proper ghouls, only mongrels, birthed of a mostly human mother. They were fair, some even say beautiful to behold, their skin white as milk, their eyes clear and blue as sapphires. Their Ghūl heritage barely showed, excepting in their appetites and ruthlessness. Still, they wished to rule as ghouls. By the procurement of a powerful, terrible artifact, they raised an army and threw down the rightful King and Queen of Bones and Rags, and—”
“The Qqi d’Tashiva and Qqi Ashz’sara,” the tow-headed girl interrupted. “And the artifact is the Basalt Madonna – Qqi d’Evai Mubadieb – and, Aunty, I’ve heard—”
The old woman raised an eyebrow and scowled, silencing the girl.
“Now, which of us is telling this tale?” she asked. “And, besides, I’d not guess your ma and pa would think so highly of your palavering in the corpse tongue.”
One of the cats, a fat tabby tom, leapt into the peddler’s lap, stretched, then curled up for a nap. She stroked its head. In her wanderings far and wide from the cobblestone streets of radiant Ulthar, the cats were, perhaps, what she missed above all else. For an age, the citizens of the city had been forbidden to harm any cat for any reason, upon pain of death or banishment. There were not many laws of man she counted wise and unquestionably just, but that surely was one of the few.
“Yes. Those were the titles that the Snow twins took for themselves when all the forces of Thok had fallen before them and the fire they wielded, after even the city of the gugs and the vaults of Zin lay at their feet, after even the great flocks of night gaunts had surrendered. In the days that followed the war, when I was only a very small girl myself, there was fear even here that Isaac Snow might not be content to rule the shadows of the Lower Dream Lands, that he might have greater ambitions and rise up against the world of men.
“You know, of course, no such thing happened. We’d not be sitting here, me telling you this story, if matters had gone that way. We were, all of us, fortunate, for many are the generals who’d believed the might of the twins was so awful that none could ever stand against it. It is written that the Snows were content to remain below, and that they still – to this day – rule over and enslave the creatures of the Lower Dream Lands.”
“But—” began the tow-headed girl, and this time the peddler interrupts her.
“But, child, though this is what most count as the truth, there are those who whisper a secret history of the Ghūl Wars. And if this other account is to be believed – and I warrant there are a few priests and scholars who will swear that it is so – the twins were never of one mind. Indeed, it is said that Isaac greatly feared his sister, for the same prophecy that had foretold their victory also spoke of the birth of a daughter to them.”
“He feared his own child?” asked the boy seated to the tow-headed girl’s right.
“He did.”
“But why?” the boy asked.
“If you’ll kindly stop asking questions, I was, as it happens, coming to that.”
The peddler chewed the stem of her pipe a moment and stroked the tabby tom’s head. It purred, and she briefly considered changing horses in the middle of this stream and insisting they hear some other tale, one not populated with ghouls, half ghouls, and moldering necropoleis, and not a tale of war and the horrors of war. Likely, if she continued, it would end in nightmares for her and the children both. The plains of Pnath and the peaks of Thok might lie far away, and the battles in question long ago, but neither space nor time, she knew, could be depended upon to hold phantoms at bay.
Still, this was the tale they’d asked for, and this was the tale she’d promised, and the peddler was not a woman to go back on her word.
“The prophecy,” she continued, “had been passed down since the ghouls were defeated by the Djinn and cast out of the wastes of the Arabian deserts into the Lower Dream Lands, so thrice a million years before the first city of humankind was built. It foretold that someday a daughter would be born to half-ghoul twins, half-modab albino twins, and this daughter would grow to be a savior, a messiah, who’d be more powerful by far than even her terrible parents. She would, so said the prophecy, lead the Ghūl through the Enchanted Wood and up the seven hundred steps to the Gates of Deeper Slumber and through the gates into the Waking World. Once above, the mighty Djinn would find their doom by the same hellish weapon her mother and father had wielded in Thok. But . . .”
And here the peddler paused for effect and puffed at her pipe a moment. The air in the room had gone as taut as a harp string, and the three children leaned very slightly forward.
“But?” whispered the tow-headed girl.
; “But,” continued the peddler, smoke leaking from her nostrils, “the rise of the ghouls would also be the downfall of the father of their champion. Because first, or so went the prophecy, the daughter would have to murder the father and claim both thrones for herself. She would spare her mother, but never again would there be a king and a queen in Thok. Those immemorial titles would vanish into memory and then pass from all recollection.
“The King of Bones and Rags, he did believe the prophecy, for, after all, had it not foretold of his and his sister’s birth and their coming to the Underworld and of their ascension? Sure it had, and if that portion of it was not false then how could he not fear those passages that had yet to be realized? Sure he was terrified, because even so great a monster as he may fear his own undoing at the hands of such unfathomable mysteries as soothsaying. And, what’s more, he soon learned that Isobel Siany Snow – for that was her earthborn name in full, given by their mother Hera – that Queen Isobel was already pregnant. That she had become so shortly before the war began, when she and he were hardly more than storm clouds gathering on the horizon.”
And here the peddler departed briefly from her simple narrative, for the bare bones of a tale are a dull affair and should be dressed appropriately in the attire of atmosphere and the garb of mood. Too easily might this story become a dry recitation of perhaps it was, and so they say, and might have been. So, with words she deftly painted images of the perpetual twilight that lay over the dreaded Vale of Pnath, where gigantic bholes burrowed through unplumbed strata of gnawed bones heaped into the wide valley. She told of towering forests of phosphorescent fungi that pressed in all about the borders of that land in the shadow of the ragged peaks of Thok, mountains so lofty they reached almost to the rocky, stalactite-festooned ceiling of the Lower Dream Lands. It was the ghouls, she explained, who’d made Pnath a plain of dry ribs and broken skulls, for they’d spent untold years tossing the leavings of their unspeakable feasts over the cliffs into the abyss below. In those lands, the peddler assured them, every breath of air was redolent of death and rot. For it was the realm of the grave. It was the abode of nightmares beyond reckoning.