The Madness of Cthulhu Anthology (Volume One): 1

  The decoder was going crazy. In English Maheen breathed, “Holy shit.”

  Hry scratched himself, briefly and lightly. His itch was superficial, if it was itch at all, and if it was music he wouldn’t know it.

  His paltry scratching intensified Blythe’s need to scratch. When her own itching was at its worst, and then incrementally worse again, this whole valley seeped and crackled with incipient music only she, apparently, was aware of. A nasty transposition of how she’d lived her life.

  Blythe scratched, scratched, dug, could not reach the itch but could not stop trying. A bald spot spread raw and bleeding under any shield anyone including her had come up with, under the decoder itself. A choker of deep gouges grew and tangled under the high, tight energy collar devised specifically for her with her input and yet penetrable if she put her mind to it, which she did without conscious will.

  Melodies, riffs, scales, tones, and half-tones swarmed through her. She couldn’t escape them, couldn’t get them away from her, couldn’t get them out of her head or off the decoder screen Maheen was monitoring. Voices and some kind of low horn fluttered in her brain. Music dripped from the air, bulged up out of the ground through the floor and the soles of her shoes, invaded her body in food and drink and breath.

  “I wish I could do something for you.” Maheen patted her shoulder.

  Blythe flinched and moved her head back and forth against the chair, meaning, “That’s ridiculous, we both know you can’t,” and, “Shut up,” and just general existential protest.

  Hry was fascinated by the images on the decoder screen. “What is that?” In the limited Droyan language, he asked that question more often and more intently than the scientists and explorers whose job was asking questions.

  “That’s itching,” Maheen explained again, again incompletely because music could not be mentioned.

  “Itch, yes.” Hry’s humanoid appendages scrabbled over his dappled skin, demonstrating that he understood itch. For Droyans as for humans, just thinking about pain didn’t cause pain, but just thinking about itching caused itch. He wasn’t satisfied, though. He knew there was more. “What is that?”

  Maheen pointed out half a dozen pulses on the screen. “This is a real-time representation of Blythe’s brain. All that brain activity is intense itching,” she repeated, as if she were giving more information but in fact assiduously following the long, dense corporate protocol that boiled down to: No Music. You could be fined for singing in the shower, confined to quarters for whistling on a blade of grass, taken off the project for speaking in a chanting or singsong voice, fired and sent home at your own expense—no small threat, given the remoteness of this site—if caught with external or internal musical contraband devices or for talking about music to the indigenes. When the itch subsided enough that Blythe could think of other things, she sometimes wondered whether self-harm for the purpose of rooting out music would lead to a promotion or get her sent home—where there was nothing, but at least there had not been this itch.

  Hry scratched again. “Hry,” she gasped. Her lazier co-workers called him Henry or Harry or Herr or a phoneme in Portuguese or Bantu. He would answer to any of it, but Blythe tried to respect the pronunciation of names in this culture; xenoanthropological evidence suggested that, in addition to ancestors not yet identified, the Droyans were likely descended from forebears common with modern humans, so the physical and mental apparatus to produce the correct sounds ought to be there. His name was all she could say right now, but it was enough to get him to stop scratching, and she groaned it again in thanks that he might or might not understand.

  The itch swelled. Between Blythe moaning on the table and the explosive image of Blythe’s brain on the screen, Hry had twisted himself into the Droyan attitude of extreme attentiveness.

  Then it stopped. The frenzied struggle to scratch persisted autonomically until Blythe could realize she wasn’t itching anymore. She collapsed in the restraints, wanting only to rest, wanting only for the music not to come back.

  Maheen murmured a reverent exclamation like “Wow!” in Farsi. She checked the displays, pressed keys, patted Blythe’s knee. “Two hours forty-seven minutes level 8 or above. This was a bad one.”

  Blythe exhaled, “Yeah.”

  “We gathered many interesting data, though.”

  The only data-cruncher in the minimally funded expedition, Blythe would be analyzing the record of this episode as soon as her mind cleared enough, usually within the hour. She didn’t need Maheen to thank her or flatter her about what a contribution she was making, how she was rising above her own adversity for the greater good of two species, how brave she was not to seek medical intervention or administrative transfer, etc., etc. But Maheen did anyway, while Blythe tried to concentrate on smoothing the insides of her mind and body so she could get out of the lab and away from Maheen’s kindness and Hry’s excessive interest.

  Blythe had never liked music. Any form of music, in any genre, produced by any instrument. At first she’d simply been unaware of it. As an infant unsoothed by lullaby, she’d been wrongly suspected of deafness. As a child she’d never sung and had not required accompaniment for expressive and interpretive body movement. That particular adolescent obsession had spared her. Adulthood had finally allowed her to identify what was commonly referred to as music and so to avoid it—if not altogether, at least in her own living spaces where she spent as much of her time alone as possible.

  Her aberration had given her the grim pleasure that was the only kind she allowed herself, until as a randomly studious teenager she’d learned there was actually a clinical term for it—meaning that, to her displeasure, she was not the only one. She’d never had any interest in trying to find compatriots.

  Discovery that the Droyans had no music of any sort, no word for it, had initially appalled her as much as the others in the expedition, but for different reasons. She’d been insulted that an entire culture, albeit a decimated and shallow one, would presume to share her amusica, while her colleagues regarded the Droyans as if they were defective because of it.

  Religion, still full of trappings, had one less here. Birds and cricket noises were not mimicked. Parents rocked their children to sleep without feeling the need to vocalize. Nowhere were there sly references to symphony or harmony or dissonance or rhythm, for the Droyans perceived none of that and so Blythe hadn’t had to, either.

  After all this time among them, Blythe wouldn’t say she was anything like charmed, a descriptor that might have been from a defunct language for all it had to do with her. But, having long been scornful of the supposed relationship between the masses and music, she had come to approve of this ancient, isolated, remnant society in this long-lost and now-found deep valley where there was no such symbiosis.

  Blythe had also been struck, also for reasons different from those of her more pedestrian colleagues, by subsequent evidence that music had once been strong—she wouldn’t use the popular term “rich”—in the Droyan culture. Computer logarithms from afar and from recent on-site digs and models showed that this civilization had once made music, sung and played and composed and recorded it, spoken of it and represented it in art forms.

  Then, somewhere between five and ten thousand years ago, invaders still referred to only as the Sky People had destroyed everything, including all music and, eventually, all cultural memory of it. The tiny band of Droyans’ tinier band of forebears had escaped to this hidden place and gone about creating life from scratch until enough generations had passed that no one remembered it hadn’t always been this way—simple, hemmed in, half-buried, amusical, and without need for music.

  That such a cleansing was possible would never have occurred to Blythe. Maybe she was a descendant of the Sky People.

  She didn’t waste much time wondering about that. She just did her job analyzing, annotating, and archiving the data given her. Interacting only as much as she had to with human or Droyan, she’d been starting to relax. At moments she’d thought
she might almost be feeling at home.

  Then the music had invaded her. Off guard in this music-free place, she hadn’t heard it coming. One morning on a mapping trek through the labyrinthine passages underneath the cliffs, staying well behind the others so their vapid chatter wouldn’t interfere with her instruments, she’d become aware of sounds she could only label as music—complicated, rhythmic, irritating. It had seemed to be exuding from the interior surfaces of the tunnel, the rocks and water, the cracks and stalactites and stalagmites.

  No one else had reacted. Finally Blythe had been forced to inquire if anyone else was hearing it. No one was.

  Surely she was the most inhospitable of hosts, so it seemed to her there must be some intentionality about it, some purpose, if only to be cruel. The itching response had soon developed, and her need to root it out. By now, she found herself in a bizarre sort of mortal danger from it.

  Maheen was still watching the decoder. “Things are looking calmer.”

  “Yeah. Time to go.” Blythe moved against the restraints again, less frantically but with no less determination.

  “Are you certain, Blythe? Sometimes there has been recurrence—”

  She was by no means certain, but she said she was.

  “I must examine—” Palpating Blythe’s scalp, scanning her skin under the disheveled uniform, Maheen apparently found no new wounds. Blythe hadn’t thought she’d hurt herself this time, but sometimes she wasn’t aware of it until later. Maheen’s fingers paused at the deepest gouge on Blythe’s throat, which burned to the touch but had begun to heal. Blythe forced herself not to jerk away or slap Mheen’s hand aside. Neither of them commented on it.

  Blythe left the lab while Maheen was still recording and Hry was still scratching in his frivolous way. As she stepped outside, where late-afternoon shadows curtained the landscape and the cliffs towered in the low light, it was easy to understand how this place had stayed secret for so long, even to imagine that it was not now being contaminated by the outside world of which she herself was a scout.

  Shaky, hungry, exhausted, head and throat hurting, Blythe headed back to her quarters through the rapid mountain twilight.

  She detected no music inside her now, and no itch, but she knew she was moving through poison. The music was coming from the site itself. She could feel it crawling down from the night sky, founting up from the river. Maybe it had lain dormant these five or ten thousand years, waiting for her. Just thinking about it made the itch stir.

  She clenched her fists and pressed her arms over them. She lost the familiar path and didn’t know where she was for a while. The trail roughened and sharply descended. Her feet scrabbled and her balance was uncertain. The density of the ambient energy increased as something solid rose on either side of her—rock, rock embedded with music. Without stopping she stepped sideways and leaned so that her shoulder and flank scraped along the rough wall, assuaging the itch nearest the surface but exacerbating its more profound layers. Then she stumbled into an open space and recognized it as the rock field where insubstantial legend suggested the Sky People had burned and buried and sacrificed. She was digging at her throat.

  In the long dark mountain-bound space between sunset and moonrise, she didn’t know Hry was there until the humming was interrupted by “What is that?” and then resumed. Her throat was bleeding. Hry was humming. Hry was making music.

  “Music!” The itch spurted blood but didn’t ease.

  Hry approximated the word “music” and hummed.

  “Stop!” Hry knew the word but maybe didn’t associate it with the sound he was creating or channeling, or maybe his pleasure was more compelling than her pain. He didn’t stop. Something like a chant was exuding from him now, between his bulbous lips or through his pores. The itch was beyond her reach. She had to reach it. She drove her fingers into the wound in her neck. Then Hry’s music dimmed.

  Later Maheen told her, “You nicked the carotid artery. I would not have thought it possible to do that to oneself.”

  Though the sounds Blythe made in an attempt to ask about extent of damage and prognosis only approximated language, Maheen answered, “We have done our best with the tools we have and are cautiously hopeful, if you do not injure yourself again. You must stop this, Blythe. It has gone too far.”

  “Itch,” Blythe rasped. “Itch. Itch!”

  Maheen leaned close to whisper, “Did you tell him about music? He knows about music.”

  Blythe tried to say, “He already knew.”

  During her recuperation, Hry was a frequent visitor to the clinic. He might have been helping to take care of her. In and out of consciousness, she was at the mercy of the music that came with him, humming and tapping and whistling and jangling and dancing. No one else seemed aware of it. She itched. She’d wake up to find herself scratching, or restrained. She’d order him out and he would leave, but then he’d be back in a cloud of music. “Keep him away from me!”

  Now the music had gone too far, the itch too wide and wild and deep. Even her wails sounded like music. Even her breathing itched, and her thoughts. It hardly seemed possible that the images riffing through the room from her decoder screen could be generated by a human brain.

  “Let it go, Blythe.” Maheen came every day to download the data. Blythe wondered who was analyzing and recording, what would be lost and forgotten. “Let them give you something to ease you. You have done enough.”

  Instead, she disconnected herself from the tubes, meters, and decoder and stumbled out into the midday. Her feet two-stepped and waltzed. Her throat buzzed with unorganized song. Her hands scratched, damp at her scalp, clumps of hair like a trail of eighth-notes.

  The whole place might have been a cave. The cliffs narrowed bright sky and ground, focused and guided the invasion. The whole place might have been music. Even her moans and curses were musical, even the sounds inside her head from her frantic scratching at her skull. The whole place might have been itch.

  Hry was beside her, touching her in the silent Droyan greeting. Denying her human instinct to fight or flee, she kept moving to the agonizing and useless scat of both hands digging at pocked planes of her scalp.

  Hry’s soprano fluted, “What is that?”

  “Music,” she cried. “Music, music.” Naming it called it out. Her fingertips were sticky and her hair matted. She bowed and pirouetted. “Music music music.”

  The name of it didn’t seem to be what Hry was after. His alto crooned, “Music,” but then, “What is that?”

  “Itch!”

  He scratched himself in syncopation and echoed, “Itch,” but then in booming growling bass repeated, “What is that? What is that?” as her fingers broke through a layer and then another near her right temple where there was a gap in the bone.

  Hry was pressing against her, veering her onto rougher ground. Blythe knew this was not aggression. In this hermetic culture, where aggression would have been disastrous, spoken language had evolved nearly as free of words for force as for music, body language persuasive and suggestive rather than hostile. All she would have had to do was pause, or angle in another direction, and he’d probably have acquiesced or gone on his way. But what was the point?

  They were all but underground. Her feet were wet with oozing music. The substance on her fingers didn’t feel or smell like blood, and in the indirect moonlight it didn’t look red. The hole in her scalp seemed to be deeper than thin scalp. She tried to reach the itch inside.

  Horns played, strings, plinking instruments; Blythe had never been able to tell one from another. Drums. Voices made noise and other voices made noise. Were Droyans down here, singing and playing music? Some sort of secret society? She saw no one, no identifiable source except the hidden place itself inside the hidden place. More and more music stored for millennia deeper and deeper underground.

  Itch.

  Hry burst into exuberant, worshipful music.

  Blythe drove her fingers into her brain.

  CTHULHU RISINGr />
  HEATHER GRAHAM

  “LAST NIGHT, I HEARD IT. I HEARD A SHARP SCREAM—AND THEN the moaning sound that the engineers reported when the Guinevere was at the shipyard!”

  The young woman speaking leaned forward across the cocktail table where she sat in the lounge of the historic mystery ship. Her name was Devon Adair; she was American, and simply beautiful. Finn McCormick had barely had a chance to talk with her as yet—this was just their second night aboard the ship. Her eyes were as blue as a summer sky in Montana, and her hair was nearly jet black. At about five-seven, she was slim yet shapely, filled with energy and had a smile for anyone she met.

  “Yes!” the man sitting opposite from her in the ship’s promenade lounge said, leaning forward with excitement as well. He was Michael Corona, and, apparently, her longtime friend and associate. “I heard it, too. I was half asleep and I thought I was imagining things. But I heard it—oh, the moaning! It was tragic—and so clear. Just wonderful.”

  Tragically wonderful? Finn thought.

  Devon sat with her own group—the Ghosties—as Finn’s fellows referred to them.

  And, oddly enough, the two small groups of passengers had arrived in the lounge to await the dinner hour at about the same time, after a day of roaming the ship—or the Promenade Deck, the only one allowed to them—individually, in pairs or smaller groups.

  They had, however, gathered at separate tables.

  There were no bartenders in the lounge. The only staff members aboard, other than those needed to manage the great ship on which they sailed, were two stewards and a kitchen staff of three. And their paths hadn’t crossed with any of the staff since lunchtime. They’d known this was the way it would be, of course. Matt Barringer, the attorney for the owners, had explained the entire set-up to all of them at his London offices. Discovered by British researchers, the ship been brought in to London where basic work had been done on her that would allow engineering experts to deem her seaworthy. There, she’d been checked from stem to stern to determine her condition, which had proven to be remarkably good. But after months of legal wrangling, it had been determined that she still belonged to the East-West Luxury Sail company, now called Sun-Moon Vacations.