The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction

by Paula Guran

  Above him, behind him, and all around: COME BACK COME BACK COME BACK.

  “Then what happened to the rest of them?”

  “That’s probably a dirty old secret that died out with somebody a long time ago.” Paulette looked both solemn and sad. “What do you think? You come from West Virginia. If I’ve heard stories about what used to happen in your mountains there, then I know for sure you must have.”

  There was that. Yes. People who trekked up into the hollows to nose around where they didn’t belong, and never came out again. Or one group taking such a dislike to another they decided they could no longer abide living side by side. The population had always been sparse out here, and he supposed there was a time when not a lot could come of rumor and a mass of unmarked graves.

  Especially if the dead were . . . different.

  And if there was a sole survivor, killers left them for all manner of reasons, by accident or as reminders or to soothe their consciences that what they’d done wasn’t actually genocide.

  God damn. Will Senior had sensed it simply from listening once in the dark. It’s like some kind of lamentation. There’s sorrow in it. Sorrow and rage.

  Young Will trudged across the cellar and slumped onto the steps, heedless of the dust, then shot a baleful look at the statue. “A lifespan like that? The way she looks in the photo? This thing did that to them?”

  Clarence couldn’t bring himself to agree. Not out loud. Not to Will. Impressionable Young Will. “Do you hear yourself, what that sounds like?”

  “Well, I’ve sure as shit spent my life hearing what she sounded like.” He turned his gaze on Clarence, no less spiteful. “That thing’s not natural, not one bit. There’s something coming through it. Don’t tell me you don’t feel it. I can see it in your face. You’re the worst liar I ever met.”

  Clarence approached the stairs while Paulette watched as if she suddenly feared both of them blocking the only way out. Nobody could fight like brothers.

  “Come on. Let’s go,” Clarence said, as gently as he could. “We’re not going to learn anything more here. We’ve already learned more than we ever wanted to.”

  Will fixed him with a look that nailed his feet to the floor. “He’s not even dead. You realize that, don’t you? I’ll bet you anything he’s not. He could still be alive even without that thing’s influence. He’d be, what, around ninety? It’s no big deal to hit that anymore. All this time we’ve taken it for granted he would’ve come home if he could, but what if family didn’t mean as much to him as everyone assumed it did. We never even met him, you and I. But think about it. Doesn’t it sound like home just turned into a place for him to plan the next trip? And songcatching, maybe that was only the surface of what he was really out looking for.”

  Clarence’s first impulse was to argue, until he realized he had nothing to wield. He’d bought it all on faith. He’d never considered this alternative. Not seriously. He’d swallowed the easier story to accept and let it dictate his life.

  Maybe it was Willard Chambers all along who had made sure his car was never found, and that his Nagra and his camera were. If he didn’t need them anymore, maybe they’d prove more useful as circumstantial evidence of death.

  “He loved Mom,” Clarence whispered. “He loved Grandma. He loved Aunt Jane and Uncle Terry. He did.”

  “And then he found something that meant more.”

  Will stood up, finally, as around them, the storm cellar grew thick with the weight of eons.

  “I was named for a deserter. Mom hung that on me.” His face curled with the disgust of betrayal and a life of self-told lies. “He may have done his duty in war, but back home? He was a deserter.” Will nodded, confirming it to himself. “But there’s a side of me that can’t totally blame him for it.”

  When he looked at the statue again, his anger was all but dissipated.

  “It must’ve been worth it.”

  He shouldered past, and when Clarence hooked a hand around his arm, Will whirled. Next thing Clarence knew, he was sprawling across the hard-packed earth with a dull, throbbing ache in his cheek, as somewhere out in the blur, Paulette gave a startled cry of warning that plunged into sorrow.

  When his vision cleared, he saw Will gripping the statue with splayed hands, tense as a cable but motionless, until his head tipped slowly, ecstatically, back and he made a reedy sound that seemed to come from a much older man. His bladder let go in a spreading dark stain.

  Though sunk in the earth and surrounded by walls, the statue had brought its own climate. Clarence felt it deeper than skin, a gust of particles and waves, the solar wind from a black sun. Outside was August, but down here was a numbing gust of absolute zero, the point where every molecule froze, everything but thought, and the invitation beckoned: Come . . . join with it . . . step outside the boundaries of time. It only burns for a little while.

  His instinct, still, was to intercede, the way he’d always done. It was what big brothers did, pulling their little brothers out of traffic when they stepped off the curb, and out of the deep water when they fell in over their head. Maybe he could do it without harm, and Will was not yet a conduit for whatever was coming through that timeless chunk of shrapnel from the cataclysm that birthed the worst among gods.

  And maybe he couldn’t. But it had always been expected of him to try.

  Then Paulette was at his side, clutching his wrist, levering his arm down again. He’d never have dreamed he could let her do it so easily. He knew she was going to join Will before she seemed to realize it herself. As their eyes met, and from a place beyond words she urged him to let his brother go, he saw the conflict play itself out, then the resolution: that she preferred the vast unknown to a life she didn’t want to go back to, as long as she didn’t have to do it alone.

  For all he knew, Will had even been counting on it.

  They stayed down in the cellar a long time, long after Clarence had made it up the steps. He sat with his back to the hole some twenty paces away and shivered in the August sun. He didn’t want to look. He didn’t want to listen. Yet he didn’t want to drive away without knowing what, exactly, he would be driving away from. If there was a chance, the slightest chance, he still had a brother he recognized.

  And when their shadows fell across him, long and distorted, he had time to wonder if he hadn’t made the last mistake of his life.

  It didn’t seem particularly lucky that there would be time for many more.

  “I don’t think I’ll be going home for a while,” Will said. “You probably guessed that already.”

  He knew their names. Will. Paulette. He knew their faces. He knew their clothes and the sound of their voices and the smell of them after a long, hot day. He just didn’t know who they were. To see them now was like looking with one eye off-center. The halves of the image didn’t quite line up.

  “What am I supposed to tell Mom?” he asked.

  “You can tell her whatever it takes. I haven’t lived at home home for years. How different will it be?”

  “Except for the part where you call every day.”

  “I could still check in from time to time.” He looked down at the dirt with a murky little smile, as if it had whispered a joke. “It won’t matter that long, anyway.”

  This from a son who could barely be coaxed into admitting his mother had two years, at best, to live.

  Then Will held out the camera, the well-traveled Leica that had led them here, full circle after half a century. Its last shot from earlier, around front – Clarence didn’t know if he could ever bring himself to get it developed. Until Will took him by surprise, so he would have no choice.

  “Go on, shoot one more. Both of us,” he said. “Show Mom I’m okay. Show her that we’re happy.”

  Clarence steadied himself and shot it, the camera alien in his hand, like someone else’s heart. It had passed to him, but it wasn’t his. It would never be his. Behind them, these imposters in familiar skins, the hovel sat as it always had, slumping into i
tself year by year, as patient as decay, and the land stretched empty for miles.

  “Here,” Clarence said. “You’re staying . . . here.”

  To Paulette, nothing seemed more natural. “It’s got everything we need.”

  And that was that. They turned their backs on him, returning to the cellar, and the last he saw of Young Will was his arm, reaching up from below to swing the rotting wooden door closed again. As Clarence remembered the other day, not without shame, telling Will that he and Paulette didn’t match.

  They would. One day, they would.

  On the drive back to the motel, solitary and endless, the pain worse than if a piece of him had been amputated and burned before his eyes, he passed the same dead barns and farmhouse ruins but saw them differently now. Had that really been him, last week, talking of breaking one down for the wood?

  It was inconceivable now. No telling what such a place might hold. They only looked dead from the road.

  Maybe she just walked away.

  To go where? Where do you go from here?

  She had her pick, didn’t she? There were so many, all waiting like carcasses for the flies to come and settle and breed.

  His eyes started to play tricks, imagining he caught a glimpse of her in this one, that one, and the next. Peering out at him from between fungus-eaten boards, and then there were worse tricks to come, as he divined it wasn’t just her. No, she had a companion, a man the likes of which they didn’t make anymore. A changed man who wouldn’t even know his own grandson if he watched him drive by.

  Because there were so many more lasting things worth knowing.

  The phone calls started three weeks later.

  But the first came at nearly four o’clock in the morning, so Clarence missed it, and it went to voicemail.

  I was right. He’s out here. Somewhere. I can feel him. I can feel him passing by in the night. It’s happened twice. Sure as god made little green apples. But I don’t think he wants to be found. Maybe it’s because I’m not worthy of finding him yet. You think so? Hello? Are you there?

  After that, Clarence got a new phone for everyday use, and let the earlier one go straight to voice mail. Permanently. He wanted the connection. He just couldn’t hold up his side of the conversation.

  If you were dreaming the dreams of a mountain under the sea, how could you tell anyone what they were so it would all make sense? That’s what this is like.

  He went to Boston, where he shut down as much of Will’s life as he could, and took over the phone bill, so the conduit would remain open. How Will was keeping a charge in the phone was anyone’s guess.

  We’re getting closer. I can feel him. He’s a mighty thing. I wonder if he’ll be proud or angry. Paulette says hello. I think that’s what she meant.

  The months passed, and the calls came in when they came, infrequent and random, no pattern to it, other than the way every time he thought Will had finally stopped, surely by now he’d stopped, another message was waiting a day or two later.

  I was wrong. This isn’t what I thought it was going to be. I just don’t know if it’s better or worse. It’s . . . it’s the knowing that changes you. Like a download of information wakes up something that was always inside. I never could buy it that what they call junk DNA is just junk. Are you even there anymore? Why don’t you ever answer?

  And it was Will’s voice – he would recognize it anywhere – yet something was different about it each time. It was more than how each call sounded a bit farther away, fighting past a little more static and noise than the previous time. It was in the resonance of his throat, and the tones it produced.

  Mom’s gone. Isn’t she. I don’t know how I know that, I just do. Don’t be sorry for her. She’s lucky. She’s beyond what’s coming. You should be too. I shouldn’t be telling you this. You should kill yourself, though. Rochelle first, then yourself. You should be okay then. I know you, you won’t want to do it because she’s pregnant, but you’ll be glad you did. That day will come. If you can’t trust your baby brother, who can you trust?

  A thousand times a day, he thought of cutting the connection. But never could.

  I shouldn’t tell you this. When they come, they’ll look like meteors. But that won’t be what they are at all. When the sky changes color, it’ll be too late. Nothing will make any difference then. They’ll already have you. That’s when you’ll wish you’d listened to me. Don’t ask what color, I can’t really describe it. But out here, I’ve seen the kind of green the sky turns before a tornado. That’s a start.

  We’re really getting close now. I wonder if Daisy will let me call her “Mother.”

  And when it had gone nearly a year between calls, and so much had changed, and Clarence was a father now, with a father’s fears, he knew better than to think the calls were done. They would never be done. Even when they no longer conveyed any words he could understand.

  Since coming home from Kansas for the last time, alone, he hadn’t listened to his grandfather’s tape any more, the longest in his life he’d let it idle. There was no more to learn from it. He would rather forget.

  But there was no forgetting such a song. He knew it, still, the moment he heard it begin, coming through miles and static and time. He would always know it.

  Yet now there was a difference. He could no longer hear the lamentation in it. Just the rage. It was a song of endings and rebirths, a song for green skies and streaks like blue-white fire among the clouds. A song he would never be fit to join and sing.

  And, finally, it was coming from more than one throat.

  He counted two the first time.

  He counted four the next.

  In the end, he counted a choir of multitudes.

  Helen Marshall is a critically acclaimed Canadian author, editor, and medievalist. Her debut collection of short stories, Hair Side, Flesh Side won the 2013 British Fantasy Award for Best Newcomer. Her second collection, Gifts for the One Who Comes After, was shortlisted for the Bram Stoker, the Aurora, and the Shirley Jackson Awards. She lives in Oxford, England, where she spends her time staring at old books. Unwisely. When you look into a book, who knows what might be looking back . . .

  “One of the finest books I have read in recent years is Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle,” she notes. “Merricat Blackwood is a bizarrely engaging narrator with her love of her sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the deathcap mushroom, and the mixture of naiveté, love, loyalty, and killer instinct that she shows in the novel has always resonated with me. When I was asked to write for this anthology, I had one of those wild, improbable titles that made me giggle to myself with enough manic glee that I knew I was onto something – We Have Always Lived in the Cthulhu. But what might have been nothing more than an amusing pastiche began to take on more and more depth as I explored alongside Caro and her grandmother the spiraling shell of an ancient ocean-dwelling creature and the terrible secret at the center of it. What has always fascinated me about Lovecraft’s stories is the madness that accompanies any sort of genuine knowledge – but the question I have always wondered is what happens afterward? How do we live in madness? How do we accommodate ourselves to knowing too much? Much like Jackson’s delightful black comedy, which finds something redemptive and oddly touching in the apparent insanity of the Blackwood family, this story seeks to provide some sort of answer – albeit a very strange one.”

  Caro in Carno

  Helen Marshall

  ——

  “That is not dead which can eternal lie . . .”

  – H. P. Lovecraft, “The Nameless City”

  My name is Caroline Eve Arkwright and I am thirteen years old. I prefer to be called Caro over Caroline and I don’t like the name Eve at all. I’ve insisted to Nan that I be called Caro because I’ve recently begun to learn my Latin declensions: caro, carnis, which means flesh, the body, and low passions. I don’t know much about low passions but I’m much more knowledgeable when it comes to flesh an
d the body. The body is the house in which the soul lives; and so I myself am like a house and I’m also the person living inside the house. This presents a conundrum, which I like very much. How can I be both a house and the occupant? Nan will not answer me. Nan has never enjoyed conundrums as much as I do.

  Nan and I have always lived in the house and Nan tells me this is how it must always be. Our house isn’t like the houses in the village, Nan has told me, for it is caro, carnis as well. It is a big house. How shall I describe it? The walls are white, like the chalk cliff, but even more beautiful than that for they shine different colors in the light and are perfectly smooth. The floor is curved as well. From the outside the house appears as a giant hole opened in the cliff, but on the inside it has a series of chambers or cubicula, which spiral inward, each smaller than the last and curved as well. The house then is an orbis, which means ring, disk, coil – but most of all – world. I’ve spent many hours exploring the house but I’ve never gone beyond the eleventh chamber.

  The village sits atop the cliff, not so close by, for the villagers are afraid of the ground giving way as it did once before. Their houses, which I’ve seen for myself, are neither orbes nor carnes but rather saxa, which is stones, and quadrata, which is squares. They have wooden roofs. They have windows in the attics with lights that come on and go off when I pass them. The people inside are caro or rather caro in saxo, but I am Caro in carno.

  The way to the village is dangerous. The cliff is sheer and there are all sorts of other seashells and such visible there. None are as large as my house. The view of the ocean from the steps is very beautiful but if I’m not careful I could fall. Nan says this is what happened to Mother and Father, that they were not careful enough and so they fell. I don’t know if this is true but I’ve chosen to believe it. We must all choose to believe something, mustn’t we, even if it’s bad? Nan is too old to make the journey now and so I must make it alone. I try not to look down. Below me is mors, mortis which does not mean fall but death.