by Paula Guran
He’d also said he thinks this creature, whatever it is, is calling us to descend farther and farther down so it can give us some new kind of fire, the kind that lights up the depths of space.
I’d asked him how he came to know this, but Dad couldn’t really say.
Only two pit-canaries have come back in the whole time I’ve been here, but it seems to be enough to keep people believing, waiting, wondering. The first was an elderly woman who’d owned a cake shop on Main Street. She said she’d heard trumpets and bells in that tunnel, then the green light had welled up to touch her, and for one brief but glorious moment she was able to hold her own heart in her hands. She’d said she tested it for heft and had determined that it wasn’t yet light enough, so she’d come back up to fast and pray. She stayed above. I never found out what happened to her.
The other pit-canary who returned only lived for a few seconds. He came crawling out of the tunnel screaming in agony. He screamed and he screamed. He even tore out the vine of bellflowers. When two of the men dragged him out they discovered that he’d been torn open, but the innards that spilled from his jagged and gaping wounds were fossilized; white and smooth and preserved, like the entrails of a marble grotesque.
Only after the commotion ended did someone comment about how the red bellflowers had already grown back across the tunnel mouth.
Another tremor.
And another.
It won’t be long now, whatever “it” is.
The bellflowers have begun to ring. Their chiming is open and almost without a source. They swing like their namesakes in a belfry. And like those chapel bells, these seem to rouse the faithful to service.
One by one the people began to crawl through the tunnel. Where they had once given a wide berth to avoid, they now scrambled and fought to penetrate. The emerald glimmer was now visible within the tunnel, cresting upward like a tide of foul sewer water. We both watched as the last resident wriggled toward that ill light.
Rita begged me to let her go, but I held her back. Impulsively, senselessly, she had wrestled that damned dress over her head, tugging it over her filthy T-shirt and jeans.
A short time later we felt the collapse just below us. It shook the ground. The chorus of screams from those below was muffled by the falling black rock but was no less terrible.
Is this what you lured all of them down there for? I wondered.
“Dad!” Rita cried, over and over.
I shrieked for her to follow me into the rescue pod. Eventually she did. I shut the door, praying that the cave-in wouldn’t reach this upper level and that it ended swiftly. There was no oxygen in the tank, but we needed shelter from the mushrooms of black smoke that filled the tract. Chunks of coal smacked against the pod like a shower of stones. The light leaked up through the fresh fissures in the ground.
Eventually the thunder waned. I looked through the pod window, expecting to see only blackness. But there was a distinctive glimmer, greenish and persistent, even against the thick filter of coal dust.
I closed my hand over my mouth.
She pushed past me.
I followed her, choking on the fumes and dust.
The emerald light pushed through the collapsed tunnel, shining like a lamp covered with perforated black felt. For a long time we simply stood. Then something pressed through the piled rocks. It rolled near with patient velocity.
I turned to Rita, who was bolted in place. Terror blanched her face and made her jaw hang slack.
I took a step forward.
“No!” I heard my sister scream, seemingly from the far end of the world. “No, goddamn it!”
I reached down, picked up the luminous object, and turned back to Rita.
I rolled the object in my palm before halving it with a forceful twist.
“It’s from father,” I informed her with a knowledge that had bypassed even my own consciousness.
Rita reached for her half but quickly dropped her hand. She watched in mute but visible agony as I bit into the apple.
Don Webb views his story, “The Future Eats Everything,” as a “Lovecraftian intersection of the cosmically strange and impersonal, and the personal and mundane. Lovecraft is seen as the prophet of the former and ungifted as to the latter, but in reality it is he that showed that true fear happens when the cosmic rubs its legs against the sleeping human in the bed of the mundane.” Webb’s most recent book is collection Through Dark Angles: Works Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft (Hippocampus Press). He has had sixteen books and more than four hundred short stories published. He lives in Austin, Texas, and teaches creative writing for the UCLA Extension Writers Program.
The Future Eats Everything
Don Webb
——
It was the day of the flood that Matthew D. Smith discovered the human world faced a menace, always has faced this menace, and will inevitably lose out to it.
Central Texas had been enduring a three-year drought. The weather was so hot and so dry that even the staunchest global warming deniers had begun to doubt. The Catholics had prayed to Mary, the Protestants to God, the Muslims to Allah, the Wiccans to the Goddess, and the Thelemites had practiced sex-magick for rain. Someone or something had heard the call. Matthew pictured God as an old man in a white robe saying, “Me – damn it! I’ll give these S.O.B’s rain!”
It started with a lightning storm about eight the night before; a heavy rain in less than an hour. Matthew and his wife kept their windows open all night – if you haven’t heard rain in many months, it is a sleep-inducing bliss to hear it. Several times during the night Matthew had awakened from vague and uneasy dreams to the sound of the heavy downpour.
At 5:15 a.m. the emergency phone-calling service of Doublesign Data Systems Inc. informed him – in an automated voice – that the work day would start two hours late. “Great I can sleep late.” Matthew thought. Then at 5:25 a.m., the Austin Independent School District’s automated voice called Kathleen and told her that school would not start until noon. Then at 6:30 a.m. his assistant called him to ask if the message that work was delayed was for real. Finally, at 6:45 a.m. Kathleen’s principal called her to see if she had received the 5:25 a.m. message.
Common sense told Matthew he should allow extra time to drive from his south Austin two-story brick home to the one-story white stucco building in Doublesign. But the sweet sound of rain told him to sleep longer. After all, he had driven the same back-road route for nine years and the roads had never been closed. There had been one snowstorm and two other floods in that near-decade, and he’d had no problems.
Matthew took his old black Chevy pickup out at eight and headed south. He noticed no cars were streaming north of Austin on FM 118. Perhaps it was only an early morning traffic problem. The sky glowed with a lovely gray mother-of-pearl color. Matthew always drove to work in the dark; it seemed almost like a luxury to be driving so late in the day.
About a mile out of Austin, two orange sand-filled traffic barrels were set up with a ROAD CLOSED sign between them. But there was space enough to drive around the barricade. He could see a car a quarter of mile ahead where the road twisted through a grove of live oak. If that guy could make it, he could too. He was dammit, a man – even if his big blond wife sometimes disagreed. Matthew drove his truck very slowly between the barrels, its rear panel very gently brushing one of them.
After he’d rounded the bend, he saw a river, which was a surprising sight because there had never been a river there in nine years. There wasn’t creek there, or even a dry creek bed. There was scarcely a dip in the road. The cream-colored Lexus he had seen seconds before was making a difficult three-point turn to head back to town. Matthew saw he would have to turn around in the same spot, so he waited for the Lexus to navigate its turn, then pulled up slowly to the fast-moving river. It was at least waist high in the oaks, and Matthew could see an angry muddy gap in the pavement where the road had once slopped very slightly; chunks of asphalt were falling off into the foaming white water.
What the hell were they?
Should he go back and get pictures?
Who should he call?
Damn! He’d lost his phone.
Is there any money to be made from this?
Should he keep his trap shut so that he didn’t look like a nut?
Matthew thought of Gordon, the school teacher on Sesame Street, who never saw any weird phenomena that kids and Muppets saw. So he became the voice of skeptical reason – he was always wrong, of course, but he was supposed to be the smart, credible adult.
Matthew assumed his wife, Kathleen, would be a “Gordon.” She taught high school science and would, no doubt, be all practical and skeptical about the bugs.
Instead, she was thrilled. She tossed back her mane of (dyed) blond hair and demanded they drive out to the site immediately.
“Look, the road is still closed,” she said. “If you wait until morning, it will be open again and the insects will probably be gone. If we go now, this could be our Discovery.”
He definitely heard the big “D.”
He called the office and said the road was washed out so he would not be making it in today. Kathleen still had three hours before her school opened – if they opened at all, which was beginning to look doubtful.
It was a scary drive. Rain had continued to fall, albeit much more gently, and the road was slick. There was no oncoming traffic, apparently no one else was foolish enough to risk the drive. Matthew didn’t pull his car into the red mud of this morning. He figured it would be way too squishy now and the truck would get stuck. Kathleen practically flew out of the car, carrying the giant flashlight she had bought for emergencies. She found one of the creatures almost instantly. “Matt hold the flashlight while I snap some shots.”
The pale-fleshed trilobite (or whatever the fuck it was) didn’t seem to like the light. It began pulling itself toward the scar in the earth.
“Matt – grab it.”
Matthew made a grab, dropping the flashlight. The bug hissed at him, and he jumped back. It had three rows of sharp-looking teeth – translucent and serrated like some sharks’ teeth, but much smaller.
“Okay. Maybe don’t grab. Can you get the flashlight back, sweetie?”
Matthew recovered the flashlight and kept the scurrying bug in the center of the beam. It climbed over a gray-green rock as it headed toward the mud. Matthew swung the beam in long gentle arcs across the area. No other creatures were in evidence.
“Move the light back to that rock.”
Matthew did so, and he observed what Kathleen was about to comment on.
“Something is written on the rock.”
Something was. A rectangular piece of gray plastic – somewhat smaller than a credit card – was embedded in the siltstone. On it, in black letters: XUTHLTAN. Matthew picked up the stone. He tried to knock the plastic tag off, but he could see it was truly and firmly embedded in the rock.
“Hey it’s really stuck in there. I mean it’s part of the rock – like the rock formed around it. Why would a rock have a piece of plastic stuck in it?” asked Matthew.
“I don’t know. Time travel maybe. Maybe some future person journeyed back to trilobite times and dropped his portable . . . Xuthltan . . . in the muck, probably when one of these little fuckers hissed at him.”
Her large brown eyes were shiny with excitement. This was suddenly the sexiest moment of their marriage in the last ten years. Matthew stepped forward, but Kathleen said, “Look!”
They were everywhere. Matthew could see at least twelve of the bugs all headed toward him and Kathleen. Suddenly they all started to whine like summer locusts. Each bug had a slightly different pitch and each seemed to be modulating its tone. As he grabbed Kathleen by the waist, he thought they might be talking. He had the presence of mind to shove the rock into his pocket.
The warm Texas sun ruled for the next three days. Floodwater receded. The middle-class neighborhood of Onion Creek dealt with property damage and insurance people; the poor neighborhood of Dove Springs dealt with homelessness and need. The closed streets were opened and Matthew found the strange insectile visitors on his route had vanished. No tiny claw marks in the drying mud. No sign they’d ever been there. All that was left were a few badly lit photos and memories of a night of fear and then lovemaking.
Kathleen pointed out that in an era of Photoshop, bad pictures didn’t mean squat.
But there was the rock.
Five years before, when Kathleen was getting her degree at the University of Texas, she had dated a man named Randall Wong. Randall, who worked in the Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Lab, was a careful and thoughtful lover – and was dating three other undergraduates. (These AMS lads were like catnip to the ladies.) All the girls dropped him but Kathleen, who remained his friend (at least on Facebook). He had said to her, jokingly, in an IM just days ago: “If you ever need any carbon-14 dating, just ask me.”
Now Kathleen wanted Radall to radiocarbon date the rock.
Matthew wasn’t too keen on the idea. In his heart he knew – or was at least 85 per cent sure that Kathleen and Randall had had a little affair last year when he’d worked in Dallas for six weeks. But she seemed so excited by the mystery . . . and seeing the bugs had led to them making love for the first time in five years. Besides, he still cherished the hope that “solving” the mystery would mean leaving his dead-end day job.
Dr. Randall Wong was (of course) quite surprised by the rock. It’s not that often you see plastic encased in siltstone. In fact, it was impossible. Still, it seemed genuine enough.
Kathleen told Randall she couldn’t tell him any details about the artifact, but hinted her uncle in the CIA needed to know and had instructed her to approach her friend on a hush-hush basis. (Kathleen did, actually, have an uncle employed by the Central Intelligence Agency. But as Uncle Fitz only did payroll, any top secret instructions would be unlikely. In fact, impossible.)
Randall didn’t like the results.
“Look don’t tell anyone the university lab had anything to do with this,” Dr. Wong told them after the test. “I could lose my job. This will bring every nutcase out of the woodwork for miles.”
Kathleen and Matthew had met him at the Kerbey Lane Café. They looked up from their pancakes and said, “Why?” almost at the same time.
“I’m not giving you the printouts. I’m not giving you anything. The plastic is from now, which shouldn’t be a surprise, but the stone matrix was . . . I mean will be . . . laid down about fifty thousand years in the future.”
Randall dropped the stone on the café table. Before they could speak, he said, “No. Just no. No, I don’t understand it. No, I don’t want the publicity. No. Stuff like this ends careers. Investigate if you want, you’re a high school science teacher – and you do whatever it is you do, Matthew. But for me? No.”
Randall walked out. He had not finished his waffle.
Matthew and Kathleen stared at each other.
Of course the next step was the Internet.
“Xuthltan” was the name of a government official in the Maldives, a word for an evil village in a short story by Texas writer Robert E. Howard, a character in a multi-player online game, and a church in a bad Austin neighborhood.
Austin it was then. The phone number from the website did not work, so Matthew decided to visit the next Saturday. He told his wife to stay home “in case there was any trouble.” Matthew didn’t know what sort of trouble you could have with people that had artifacts embedded in siltstone formed thousands of years from now; the Internet didn’t have any information on the subject.
The Church of Xuthltan was a storefront, part of a cheap-looking row of shops in East Austin. It shared its parking lot with a pawn store, a 7-Eleven, a store that sold knock-offs of famous perfumes, a tattoo parlor, a loan office, and a botánica. Some guys were working on a white car near the church’s door.
Matthew peered through the church’s grimy glass door. The light was off, but Matthew could see someone inside – an old white guy in faded blue jeans and a dirty white T-shirt. He had a long scruffy white beard and wore a blue baseball cap. He was watching a tiny television. Matthew knocked on the thick glass of the former-shop window. The old man looked up and gave him a wide grin, perhaps one of idiocy. The guy got up and started ambling to the door.
From outside, Matthew could see the church had four rows of rusty folding chairs facing a pulpit that had seen better days. Behind the pulpit stood what could be a marble baptismal font and a square folding table. A cash register stood on the table. There were bookshelves on two walls. The old guy turned on the overhead fluorescent lights and unlocked the door. He smelled like he had not bathed in a while, but there a cinnamon-y odor coming from the church itself.