The Mall of Cthulhu

by Seamus Cooper

As they drove, Laura began to feel nauseous. She thought back on the violence she'd committed, the lives she'd very likely taken, and the worst part was not the memory of the sounds, or the sight of the blood and broken limbs. The worst part was the memory of how much she had enjoyed it. It wasn't just a fight for survival; it was one of the biggest thrills of her life, and she was still high from it. And that was the disgusting part. She wondered if that was what kept Ted up at night—not what he'd seen in the Omega house, but what he'd seen in himself. That he was not only capable of committing violence, but he was capable of liking it. Or maybe that was just her.

  She still had the book in her pocket. It occurred to her that she could refuse to hand it over to Marrs, that she could use it to try to get Ted back. That was a dumb idea, but still, once she handed the book to Marrs, the door to wherever Ted was trapped was closed forever.

  Still, she didn't want to be in charge of something that had the power to destroy the world. If she had it instead of Marrs, then it would be her fault if somebody stole it and did this again. The hell with that. Who the hell wanted that responsibility? She couldn't even keep a cat, much less the key to the Necronomicon.

  No, Ted was gone, and she had to suck it back.

  Back at Marrs' hotel, he tapped away on his computer, removing her prints from the national database while Laura showered. She tried to wash away the killer instinct, the joy she'd felt at being able to strike back at the men who'd taken Ted from her, but all of that seemed to cling to her.

  When Laura emerged from the shower, she reached into her pocket, pulled out the book, and gave it to Marrs.

  His face lit up like this was the best present he'd ever received. "This is really remarkable! Fantastic!" He thumbed through it. "It looks to be early eighteenth, possibly late-seventeenth-century. If we only had the resources, we could really find something out about this—you know, I wouldn't be at all surprised if this particular copy weren't related to that business in Salem . . . "

  "You mean the witch trials?"

  "Right." He continued to page through the book.

  "But I thought those were a power grab, an expression of the misogyny of puritan society, a—"

  "Yes, absolutely. They were all of those things. But there were real witches, too." Laura stood awkwardly for another five minutes watching Marrs turn pages, and finally cleared her throat.

  Marrs looked up like he was surprised she was still standing there. "Yes? Oh, right."

  "So what's next?"

  "Well, we've got some chupacabras outbreaks in Puerto Rico—of course, I always prefer it when those happen in January—nothing like chupacabras duty when there's snow on the ground . . . or, Cambridge, Ohio, has seen two killings that could be vampiric—I suppose you should take that one, as you're the expert. Perhaps you could pass for a grad student . . . "

  "Uh, but what about Cthulhu?" And what about Ted?

  "Well, Cthulhu is about as done as we can manage. We have the book. We have to assume that they've made copies, but I have to believe you've thrown a scare into Dick Johnson and his fellows, and I suspect they'll be lying low for a while—"

  "Are they dead? His fellows?"

  "One is. The other is just seriously injured."

  "They were going to kill me."

  "I haven't said otherwise, and the good thing about our limited resources is that we do not have any internal affairs department to pester you with questions. You trusted me by signing on to my shoestring operation. I trust you that you will not wantonly kill."

  He said nothing for a moment, then said, "Though I did wonder there at the end. You really are much tougher than you look, aren't you?"

  Laura smiled. "I'm tough as an old boot. But should we go after the other guys? I mean, what if they have copies of the book?"

  "Oh, they almost certainly do. At least, we have to assume it. We found a fragment on William Castle's hard drive, and I'm going to assume that there's something on Dick Johnson's as well—we can wipe the hard drives of everyone who accesses their online meeting places with a fantastically devious worm that one of our colleagues designed. And they have no idea how under-resourced we are. We'll do a little more—post some cryptic threats in their chat rooms, stuff like that. Unless they're incredibly stupid as well as evil they'll lay low for a while."

  "But they killed—God, they killed those people at Queequeg's, they killed Ted and his girlfriend . . . they're just going to get to walk around free?" Suddenly she wished she had emasculated Dick Johnson while she had the chance.

  Marrs closed the book and looked up at her. "Look. We can't go after them—the shooter is languishing in another dimension, we have no proof that they were involved. The immediate threat has passed, and if they get themselves organized again, well, we'll come back to deal with it, and this time—" he held the book up—"it will be far easier to deal with. We could probably do it with an incantation instead of a Taser and a can of Mace."

  "What?"

  "That's what Ted and Jennifer used. They took out four cultists. Might have been enough to prevent the rift from growing to Cthulhu size. They really did a tremendous thing."

  Laura paused. She hadn't known that. "Can I . . . could I . . . do you have a copy of the tape I can look at? I'd just like to see Ted . . . " She couldn't finish her sentence because she was crying, and she hated that, because it made her look like a weak, emotional woman, though Marrs didn't seem like the kind of employer who'd hold it against her.

  He stood and placed a hand on her shoulder. "I know. I know. I spent my first three years on this job tracking the werewolf who killed my mother. I finally found he'd grown old and died wealthy. I'd love to be able to offer you closure, or justice, or anything, and sometimes we do get that—if it's really a vampire we've got in Cambridge, you can stake the bastard yourself—it's a remarkable rush—but in this case, I can't offer that. The bad guys—well, most of them, anyway—are going to get away, but at least they haven't won—if they had, it would be Cthulhu's world, and we would just be living in it. But today most of our fellow citizens woke up and went about the business of their daily lives without worrying about the Old Ones. We won. Remember that. It's important."

  Laura found that her tears wouldn't stop. "I know it's important, it's why I got into this, it's just . . . It's not enough."

  "I know," Marrs said. "I know."

  Nineteen

  A funny thing happened after several eons of sweating, grunting, and writhing, with every neuron firing super shots to the pleasure center. Ted found himself growing bored. He couldn't imagine why—he felt better than he'd ever felt, and there was no indication that he ever needed to feel bad ever again. Surely this was what he'd been chasing for the last decade, what every drug, every second of television, every minute of McJob monotony had been aiming at—just take the pain away, I just want to feel good, I've felt bad enough for a lifetime, now I just want to feel good forever, is that so much to ask?

  And yet, now he'd achieved that and never needed to feel bad ever again, it was somehow lacking. It wasn't just that he was craving some afterglow—though he was, and he wondered briefly if this made him a chick—it was just that even nonstop pleasure could, it seemed, get monotonous. Maybe, he thought, he needed a little of both—some pain to balance out the pleasure, some misery to make him appreciate happiness, some—he was thinking too much, and he untangled himself from Cayenne.

  "Oh my God, I'm so glad you did that," she said. "I was starting to . . . I don't know . . . ."

  "I know," Ted replied. "It was . . . I mean, don't get me wrong, it was fantastic, amazing, wonderful, but . . . "

  "Well, speaking for myself, the idea of doing that forever was starting to freak me out. Actually, the idea of forever has always freaked me out."

  Ted felt a sour feeling in his stomach all the sudden. "Yeah. Me too. And now it looks like we may have to get pretty well acquainted with forever."

  There was a pause, and Ted ran his fingertips over Cayenne's stom
ach. She curled up next to him, and Ted thought it really was strange—there was something about being scared that made curling up with her better. It just made it sweeter.

  They didn't talk for a long time. Though he wasn't cold, Ted wanted his clothes. He reached around for them absentmindedly, then really began to look. Eventually he saw that his clothes had drifted to the opposite surface from where he and Cayenne were—either they were floating on the ceiling, and their clothes had dropped, or they were on the ground, and the clothes had floated. Whichever the case, their clothes were inaccessible.

  "How long do you think we've been here?" Cayenne asked.

  "You mean in this room?"

  "No, in this city."

  "Oh, God, I have no idea. I really can't even imagine—I honestly . . . I mean, it couldn't be less than ten years. I really believe that." Ted was lowballing his estimate—he feared it had already been at least a hundred years. He thought about all the time since he'd found himself face down on the stinking flagstones and felt very, very old.

  "I was going to say fifteen. I'm glad it's not just me."

  "I wonder why Cthulhu can sleep, and we can't."

  "You know what I think? I think it's an act of mercy. I think Cthulhu was a very bad boy, and this place is his jail—I thought about this a lot, probably for a year at least—and as they were closing the door, he was begging for death, and they gave him sleep instead. Because it would just be too horrible to be trapped here awake forever."

  And Ted's stomach went sour again. "Like us."

  Cayenne looked troubled. "Yeah. Like us."

  They sat in silence for a very long time. Ted tried to count seconds, but somewhere around two hundred Mississippi his brain wandered off into a recitation of "Fifty Nifty United States," and he had no idea how long that went on, but it led to every song he'd learned in elementary school, and every Schoolhouse Rock!, and he . . .

  "Do you think we're dead?" Cayenne asked. "I mean, we could actually be dead, right? From what I remember of my Buddhist phase, they believe that you eventually reach this unchanging state of enlightenment, that all the changes of the wheel of existence finally stop, and you are free."

  "I don't feel enlightened. I've been thinking about TV a lot. And, I mean, call me a gerbil, but I want back on the wheel. I mean, it's not just the stench, or the gross light, or the fact that I can't tell walls from ceilings from floors—because I'm almost sure we're on a ceiling right now, but it was definitely a floor when we came in here—it's that I just . . . . I want something to happen. I mean, finding you was the only thing that's happened in ten years or more. And I love being with you, but what are we going to talk about if we don't have any experiences?"

  "Well," Cayenne said, smiling, "we can do it all the time."

  Ted wanted to protest that he needed a break, that it would be better if they waited a while, but, then again, they'd already had a break that lasted at least a few days, and if it was monotonous to be in a state of constant ecstasy, it was far preferable to contemplating eternity in this filthy shithole.

  The next few years were very, very good ones.

  Twenty

  Laura sat in an airplane. She was flying to the Cincinnati airport, which was apparently not even in the same state as Cincinnati, and then driving about sixty miles to Cambridge, Ohio, where one undergraduate and one town resident had been murdered, drained of all their blood. Marrs was of the opinion that she wouldn't get the sharpened stakes through the airport x-ray, so he was FedExing them to her motel in Cambridge.

  Marrs had the book, but Laura now had the clearance to access the department's documents and files, and once they had decoded everything, Laura had every intention of getting that information and using it to get Ted back. It was difficult to wait, but the only way she could make sure she continued to have the access she needed was to keep working for Marrs, which meant, for now, flying to Ohio.

  She was next to the window, and two seats away was another professional-looking woman in a suit. Laura barely noticed her or anyone else on the half-empty flight. As soon as she was permitted to use electronic devices, she booted up her laptop and watched the security video again. The angry white guys walked to the atrium railing, and began to chant, quietly at first, then louder and louder. Then she could hear Ted's voice screaming, "Laura, it's happening, they're in the mall! Help!" into the phone. It was the exact same words she heard on her voice mail every day. She began to cry, again. How was it possible that Ted's voice existed on this hard drive and on the hard drive of the voice-mail server as a bunch of zeroes and ones that computers were able to translate into his voice? How could it be that the zeroes and ones lived on while Ted was gone? It just didn't make any sense.

  Laura wiped her face and watched as Ted and his girlfriend raced around the mall atrium, Cayenne pumping her fist every time one of the cultists went down. Laura marveled at Ted's agility—he faked out and dodged the security guards ably—but, more than that, she marveled at his decisiveness. She watched him move and couldn't understand how this guy who had been so lost in real life, so unable to choose a direction that he'd attached himself to her like a remora, could suddenly transform into this dynamo of purpose in a crisis. He wasn't hesitating, he wasn't stopping to think, he was just doing what needed to be done. Laura had been able to do that, finally in Franklin Park, but by then it was already too late.

  Laura had to pause the video to cry as Ted completed his final decisive act on earth, vaulting the railing to the atrium and doing a cannonball into the rift in time and space that was in the middle of the mall. She cried for two minutes, then held back the tears just so she could punish herself. She unpaused the video and made herself watch the horrible, cringe-inducing part—as people ran around and screamed, a female FBI agent came in with gun drawn. You could see it in the way she moved—she was terrified and confused—she had no plan, she looked tentative. She walked to the railing, saw the rift knit itself up, and looked completely lost, completely befuddled. Big, strong, cool, Agent Harker was panic-stricken and ineffectual. After watching this video more times than she could count, she decided that this particular part was the worst—one of the cultists walked right past the stunned agent. She could have grabbed him, she could have at least beaten the crap out of him, and every time she watched it, even though she knew it was crazy, she willed the little figure on the screen to reach out, to take a swing with the butt of the pistol, to do something to stop the guy who was walking right past her . . . and, for the millionth time, her little avatar on the screen did nothing. She was a total waste, and the fact that she'd later dealt out some rather severe punishment to three of these guys did nothing to lessen her contempt for the idiot on the screen with the perpetrators walking past her.

  Laura turned the laptop off and hung her head.

  She breathed deeply and tried not to think about Ted and how much she missed him. She thought about her current mission, about killing vampires, about how she was going to be the scourge of the undead for decades to come, and every time she sent one of those bastards screaming to hell, she'd get right in their foul, unclean faces and say, "That's for Ted, bitch!"

  Her reverie of violence and death had nearly flushed the sadness from her system when a voice from two seats away said, "Sad movie?"

  Oh, great. She turned to glare at her interlocutor and saw that it was the woman sitting two seats away. She was a very attractive woman about five years older than Laura with shoulder-length chestnut hair and an expensive suit. Laura decided not to bite the woman's head off, but instead said, "Yeah. It's . . . I just lost my best friend."

  "Oh my God, I'm so sorry," the woman said. "And it's probably really annoying to have somebody in your face when—I'm sorry, I just . . . I felt bad because you looked so sad, and I know I should have just kept my mouth shut, but, I mean, I know about sadness, which is why I wanted to say something but which is also why I should've known enough to keep my mouth shut and mind my own business. Listen, I'm really real
ly sorry. I'm going to shut up and leave you alone now."

  "No, that's okay. It's kind of nice to get outside of my own head. I actually need to stop watching that. So my best friend—" she paused briefly as she said this, wondering when she'd ever told Ted that he was her best friend—"anyway, my best friend just died. What's your story?"

  "Sole survivor of a car accident on prom night. They still show the footage in drivers' ed classes. I was as drunk and stupid as everybody else, but I was hanging out the window vomiting, and so I got thrown and got away with a broken clavicle and a concussion. Everybody else was in pieces."

  Laura was silent for a moment. "Jesus. That's horrible. I . . . I mean, I know what that's like—" and she felt sudden empathy with Ted's desire to tell everybody everything, because she wanted to say, yeah, I know about carnage, but instead she said, "I survived a fire unhurt in college. Twelve people died."

  The other woman looked at her, shook her head, and didn't say anything. Laura reflected that this was pretty weird for air travel small talk. She realized, briefly, that grief must still be screwing her up.

  Laura spent the next hour talking with Elaine, who worked for Gillette and was going to Procter & Gamble headquarters in Cincinnati to try to save her job after the merger, or to try to convince her new bosses that she was indispensable, or something. Laura just volunteered that she had a new job in law enforcement.

  When they parted at the rental car counter, Laura had Elaine's card with her cell phone number on the back and the information that Elaine was staying at the Westin.

  Laura drove up the highway to Cambridge, Ohio, which was lined with little crosses marking car crash fatalities, wondering if Elaine had been hitting on her or was just looking for a friend. She decided that Elaine had definitely been hitting on her. She pondered this—Ted would have told her to go for it, and she might simply have to honor Ted's memory in this way. Of course, this led her to thinking about Ted, which led her to another crying jag. She just couldn't stand the fact that Ted was either dead or trapped in an eternity of torment, and she was doing nothing—well, she might get to kill a vampire and she might have sex with a stranger, both of which were activities that Ted would have approved of mightily, but she wasn't doing anything to help him, if he could even be helped at this point. He'd faced down an eternity of damnation for her, and she'd done nothing for him, at least not when it counted, not when it might have mattered. She'd even given back the book that held the key to opening the rift again, so there was no way she could even hop through to check to see if he was dead . . . .