The Madness of Cthulhu Anthology (Volume One): 1

by The Madness of Cthulhu (epub)

  Their boats advanced. The sheer walls began to fall away from them, lying back in more gradual slopes from the channel they cruised, until soon it was not a chasm, but a white river valley.

  “Listen,” said Belinda, her eyes locked on her sister’s as they rode thirty feet apart. Her unforced voice seemed to ricochet sharply over the icy spaces. “Do you see what I see ahead there? Am I crazy? Hasn’t all that been … built?”

  Coming abreast of what she meant, they both stood staring up that slope. Melody nodded in a dazed way. Half that whole frozen hillside seemed one vast, stepped hive, tier upon receding tier of crudely faceted cells. The cells were of a giant scale, sized to house larvae big as skiffs, and wrought of a hard-sheened substance almost as pale as the ice, but nuanced with faint color here and there like mother-of-pearl.

  The cells were not so precisely shaped as those of wasp combs are. An irregularity in their faceting seemed to express a cruder instinctual energy. The sprawling structure declared a rude, Cyclopean power abroad in this white waste.

  “My God,” Belinda said.

  “Shit!” barked Melody, seeing then what her sister did—a colossally agile crustacean bigger than both their boats combined, a kind of huge crab of a streamlined make, narrow-thoraxed, running on six legs while holding aloft two forelegs prodigiously clawed and hinged like a mantid’s. Arcing back up from the stern of its thorax was a jointed tail tipped with the stinger-bulb of a scorpion, but the size of a wrecking-ball.

  Huge and swift, it came down the great comb, its legs rippling like pistons in their smooth succession. Its great weight glided across the faceted cells, leapt down onto the ice-slope, and launched from a hundred meters. Hanging on the white air above the channel with its barbed arms outreached, it landed in an explosion of brine, seized Belinda’s sub by stern and prow—and hoisted it aloft.

  The giant seemed to triumph over its prey for a moment, brandishing the little sub while Belinda whiplashed in her cockpit seat, the monster flourishing near a ton of steel at the leaden sky. Then the colossal crustacean spun around and ran with it straight back up the slope, and into the vast comb of its hive.

  “Stay on com!” Melody shouted into her sister’s stunned face on her screen. “Dog your hatch down—I’ll take that fucker apart!”

  “Just don’t take me apart, okay?” Belinda’s voice was oddly absent, more amazed than galvanized. “I’ll signal if—”

  Her transmission was cut off, even as Melody was grounding her prow on the glacier. She flung back her bubble and jumped out, seizing up her Tommy-gun and bag of extra magazines.

  The giant had a seventy-yard lead when Melody came sprinting up after. Seeing how swiftly it ran even with its seventeen-foot burden, she dreaded losing Belinda entirely and cut loose a burst of .45 slugs—amazing recoil!—that by wild chance took off the bottom joint of the rearmost of the brute’s four left legs while her slugs sparked away on up the icy slope. The predator faltered slightly, but then ran on, Melody running up after it.

  She dared not fall behind and fail to see where the thing installed Belinda in the colossal comb—indeed, her sister must not be installed. If this seeming arthropod was at all wasplike, it would paralyze its prey when sealing it in a cell.

  She fired again as she ran, not daring to send anything high enough to hit the pod, but desperately trying to catch another of its legs to slow it down.

  Unhit, the thing danced nimble as a nightmare, holding her sister in her boat above it like a trophy.

  And now, they were running up across the comb itself, whose amber gloss and hexagonal patterning made it seem some colossal insect’s compound eye that she crossed, her soles drumming on the waxy caps that roofed each cell, whose translucence showed the dim shape of prey within them.

  Furious though her pursuit was, she kept glancing at those shapes beneath her as she ran, and some of those prisoners seemed to stir.

  Or … if they were paralyzed, perhaps they were being stirred by the larvae devouring them.

  Desperately Melody sprinted across this vast, waxen pavement, still firing bursts of the Tommy and stumbling and scrambling higher and higher. If—oh please!—she got the boat back and Melinda was unharmed, how was she going to get it back down to the channel, which was already five hundred meters below and behind her, and dropping fast as she climbed?

  She could see the boat aloft in the giant’s pincers; its bottom had just enough of a keel on it to cut into this snow-crowned ice. It just might run back down this glacier like a big sled. Its tough little rudder might even help to guide its plunge through the deeper snow on its way down to the channel. But how could you steer it at the speed you’d be going?

  The predator was fast and untiring. Melody’s legs pumped up the slope at the excruciating limit of her strength. If the thing weren’t carrying the weight of that boat, she could never have hoped to keep up with its machinelike power.

  Her heart was hammering at breaking point, but now here it came, the opening she’d hoped for: they reached the crest of the ice-slope just where its sharp rim had crumbled along a stretch of a few hundred meters, creating a ribbon of negotiable footing.

  She was a toiling shape of sinew and bone, all flesh burnt off her. And there, the huge crustacean laid that boat upon the ice-rim and wheeled to meet her, two pairs of its jointed legs scissoring the air to take her.

  Melody was no longer praying. She had become a prayer, her every nerve a single plea for luck.

  She leapt, arms wide, in a half-blind plunge to embrace the boat, to seize their stolen survival, and she felt an instant of surprised delight at how well-aimed her lunge was. Here was her grateful body crashing against the little sub’s hard hull, hugging its bubble with her every sinew and driving hard with her legs to shove both her and the boat and her sister at its wheel inside—all at once straight back down the slope, and into almost-freefall, this shrieking, racketing, rocketing plunge straight down the ice wall.

  “Damn you!” she screeched to the vessel she clung to. “Turn!” Melody’s every cell screamed it. She had to angle down, toward where the channel broadened to an embayment, with enough open water to receive them if she plunged slantwise toward it.

  How fragile at this speed was the vehicle’s grip on the ice! To force a turn in such a plunge seemed madness, meant tumbling death, the shattering of neck and spine. But what would it do to her to go straight down and hit the water at maximum acceleration?

  Clenching her jaws and bidding her body a terrified goodbye, she twisted her frame’s whole length powerfully rightwards.

  It torqued the whistling hull crossways so that the slight keel caught and cut a slanting course down the steep wall on a branching path, descending down the steeps at perhaps forty-five degrees off the vertical.

  And now they were aimed at a further, much broader part of the channel with room to maneuver after their high-speed impact with the water. Their destination had improved, but not their chances of surviving such an impact, for after just a few seconds of descent they were rocketing again, shrieking down at a speed that would break their bodies upon entry.

  Melody pressed her boots’ toes against the ice behind her, trying to brake their plunge. But, hugging the cockpit bubble with her whole body, she couldn’t exert any leverage against the glacier speeding under them.

  Clinging thus, she could not see her sister’s face, but she felt her presence right beneath her, riding this long plunge with her, the pair of them in touching distance, but powerless to touch before the impact killed them.

  Melody lifted her head, letting the icy spume streaming up from the runners sting her face, fixing her eyes on the wall they plunged down, to perceive any feature that offered some natural channel to guide their plunge. The shriek of their keel seemed terror itself.

  Please God, Belinda might, just might—braced inside—survive the impact, but when the boat slammed into the water that impact would tear her own grip right off the bubble and she’d hammer that water hea
d-first. Even if it didn’t break her neck, it would surely stun her stone-cold as she knifed deep down in that freezing channel. Deep-sunk and stunned, the sudden killing weight of her drenched clothes would drag her to her death.

  The boat’s keel shrieked. The sleety air flayed her ears. The corner of her eye caught big movement on the slope ahead.

  The huge crustacean was racing down the steepness, impossibly swift. Its nightmare agility was an enlargement of the familiar little miracle of a spider rushing with equal ease straight up or down a wall. But this bug was big as a truck, and its descent was going to intersect with theirs.

  Melody had no hope of survival if she did not jump clear of this hurtling boat, without jumping short and landing on the boulders below. She had to do it in the next six or seven seconds to stay on the ice shelf.

  Belinda down inside the boat was screaming something up at her.

  Was she saying hold on?

  The thought caused a tightening of Melody’s embrace of the bubble, just as the boat’s actual pilot re-took command and wrenched their prow toward their huge predator.

  The spidery giant, its glossy black eyes on their stalks bent toward them, veered more sharply to intercept and seize them. Beneath its hideous eyes its chelicera—the largest of its mouthparts—scissored like jointed scythes with its greed to take them.

  “Oh shit!” shouted Melody, seeing their intersection not fifty meters off. And at that, Belinda wrenched the wheel, and they were shrieking dead for the brute.

  Its crooked legs danced hard to turn and meet them, but their suddenness had thrown it off-balance. Melody, from her rooftop vantage, watched the huge legs tilting and faltering, the monster outmaneuvered. As the mighty tail with its stingered bulb struck down on the ice behind her, they shot past its forelegs straight under it. She watched a huge pincer arc down at her two seconds too late and shatter only the air with the snap of its closing.

  “No!” she screamed, for instantly here came Belinda’s target looming at them: one of the brute’s back legs. Caught with its weight on that leg, it could not dodge the dead-on impact of the hurtling boat.

  Collision, in the next nanosecond, proved to be deliverance. The leg shattered with a tree-snapping report, and their boat leapt through.

  Still Belinda steered them slantwise to the killer slope and then brought them around into a counter-slant. She was switchbacking, yes! Melody glanced back upslope and saw that their impact had cost the brute half of another leg on the same side as the first amputation. Again, the machinelike predator was pistoning downslope after them, though now there was a wobble to its gait.

  It came crookedly dancing down. But though at first it veered left and right, echoing its quarry, it suddenly got smart and began to make a beeline that transected their zigzags. Even damaged, it was far more stable on this steepness than its prey. Melody craned her neck back and saw with horror how quickly it gained on them.

  The vast speeding slope below her, the channel still so far, the predator huge and tireless and hungry—the physics of their situation struck Melody’s heart like a sledge.

  They swung into another giddy switchback, and as they streaked slantwise down again, the relentless arthropod came down in a leap, the cage of its crooked legs striking the ice in a spray of fragments that echoed on their hull even above the roar of their keel and the wind.

  The huge predator on its straight plunge would surely intersect them on the next switchback. Melody screamed, “Break another leg when it jumps us!” Through the dark polarized bubble she could just see Belinda’s head nod.

  The shriek of their hull was a demon’s song, while the wild winds flung swarms of sleet and snow, drenching them with a light now pallid and now blazing white. A surge of wind came booming down the channel that they plunged into. They could see where this chasm in the Shelf narrowed back to the slender but ample channel they had entered by.

  Another switchback, shrieking leftward down it, and below this, the last long plunge cross-slope to the wider stretch of water where their other boat waited.

  Could this boat survive impact? Would it break up? Would it ship too much water and go straight down?

  Belinda threw her last switchback, and there was their final plunge ahead of them, five hundred meters down the ice-face to the embayment she had targeted. Melody embraced the bubble passionately.

  A huge mass overleapt them. She felt the atmospheric bow-wave of a soaring giant, and then—as Belinda veered their boat and Melody held on for dear life, every joint crackling—the legs came down like jointed trees of some skeleton forest sudden-planted dead ahead.

  Through the wind-shriek Melody heard a dull boom from the cockpit under her—two beats. She took that muffled bellow to be Belinda telling her to hold on. What else could she do up here? They plunged like a bomb straight for that thicket of crooked huge legs.

  Belinda had decided to dodge past those legs, right? But in an instant she knew otherwise. They thrust right into them, missing a front leg by a hair but plunging at a hind one.

  The whole bottom joint of that leg blew to splinters as their boat burst through it. One piece slammed down on Melody’s shoulders as it streaked past her, knocking out her breath, but she held on. She looked back at the huge bug.

  Though some of its legs were out of commission, it was still moving, turning around and springing down after them, but its pursuit was more staggery. They could beat it to the bottom.

  Below them the channel looked like a band of steel. The smooth sweep of the ice down to its shore was broken by frosty black rocks jutting up through it for the last hundred meters of its descent. If they couldn’t slow down …

  And then she shrieked a question, knowing Belinda couldn’t hear it. “What the fuck is that?”

  For all their switchbacking, the channel was much closer now—they could see the texture of the water, see the sculpting of the ice walls, seamed and graven by the sea.

  And see something else. Something big, moving just under the water, creating a turgid zone out in the channel.

  In a ceaseless wail of metal-torn ice, Melody and Belinda under her plunged down the steeps, Melody a limpet on the shrieking vehicle.

  She screamed—at what was erupting from the channel they plunged toward. A big knot of unrest began to roil the water. A sinewy disturbance grew, the cold sea writhing in a boil of greenish-black tentacles.

  Even in the adrenalized distress of their plunge, the size of that stir crackled up and down Melody’s spine, and then she saw the body of what thrust those tentacles up toward them.

  This huge, mossy fuselage had, near its crown, a colossal eye like an eerie, pallid target. Both women could see this orb, half submerged in the channel, turn its hugeness fractionally and focus precisely on them.

  A pair of the tentacles came snaking up the slope to meet their rocketing plunge. Evasion seemed as impossible as in nightmares—the tentacles’ tips broadened into suckered pads of a size to seize their sub right off the ice.

  But suddenly, it seemed that it was their huge pursuer that had captured that titan’s attention. Those benthic arms thrust past them and gripped their crook-legged pursuer while, down in the channel, the snake-limbed titan regarded them with so huge an eye: a colossus of alien sentience.

  It raised the captured beast aloft and snatched it down, while all the crab’s remaining legs clawed the air for the traction they’d lost. The tentacle crushed the crab and conveyed it down to its own kraken’s beak, which engulfed it whole.

  But throughout, it seemed to Belinda that the monstrous eye was focused on them.

  As they hurtled down, the size of its eye seemed to grow like a planet. The immense pupils seemed a gulf of worlds where millennial visions seethed.

  And what both Melody and Belinda perceived in that colossal eye, what they afterwards reported to each other in awe and solemn wonder, was a consciousness, a recognition of their own brief being…. Was it more? A glint of sly derision, of irony? The titan, old
past reckoning, looked out at them from its millennial eye and knew them for the mayflies that they were.

  As they dove toward that colossal eye, both sisters saw themselves known. For the rest of their lives (neither one short) they spoke of it together, again and again through the years.

  They saw in that vast eye a flood of their own memories, so minutely etched and poignant, felt themselves plucked back through years and seasons of their deeds and days, felt warm rain and hot winds on their skin, felt epiphanies of heart and spine on hillsides and freeways, on subways and beaches, saw their own tears in their most secret pain and saw again the starwheels they’d seen blazing through a thousand summer nights gone by.

  Within the suckered pads of its two seizing limbs the titan captured their prow, cradled its plunge. Its hugeness began to slide back beneath the waters of the sound as it slowed them gently to a standstill at the channel’s brink.

  So slowly it submerged, and last of all its eye sank just beneath the surface and hovered there … how many heartbeats?

  And in the course of those heartbeats they absolutely knew the brevity of their own lives before the long endurance of this titan.

  And knew as well, incommensurate though they were with this colossus, that it saluted their sentience and their brevity. Performed for them this cosmic courtesy—salvation—and withdrew to the benthos that housed its huger life.

  The sisters spoke of it together long, long afterwards. Did not that colossus seem amused?

  They agreed that immense sly eye saw all of them—somehow saw their cluttered world far away and their seething confusion within it, and was frostily lit with an irony.

  Surely, inwardly, the titan smiled?

  CANTATA

  MELANIE TEM

  DR. BLYTHE ANDRADE FOUGHT THE RESTRAINTS SHE HERSELF HAD helped to design and construct, the self-protection she’d fled here into the lab to find. Her throat contorted with the terrible itch to sing and the desperate need to scratch it out. Deep and fierce in her brain, musical passages and unattached notes itched, itched. Above her right ear another place where she’d scraped through her scalp had just begun to scab over and was itching again.