Fantasy For Good: A Charitable Anthology

by George R. R. Martin

  “Our business is more remarkable than that, and of far greater importance. You’re new in town, Mr Talbot. It would be a pity if we found ourselves at, shall we say, loggerheads?”

  “You can say whatever you like, pal. In my book you’re just another adjustment, waiting to be made.”

  “We’re ending the world, Mr Talbot. The Deep Ones will rise out of their ocean graves and eat the moon like a ripe plum.”

  “Then I won’t ever have to worry about full moons anymore, will I?”

  “Don’t try and cross us,” he began, but I growled at him, and he fell silent.

  Outside my window the snow was still falling.

  Across Marsh Street, in the window directly opposite mine, the most beautiful woman I had ever seen stood in the ruby glare of her neon sign, and she stared at me.

  She beckoned, with one finger.

  I put down the phone on the aluminum-siding man for the second time that afternoon, and went downstairs, and crossed the street at something close to a run; but I looked both ways before I crossed.

  She was dressed in silks. The room was lit only by candles, and stank of incense and patchouli oil.

  She smiled at me as I walked in, beckoned me over to her seat by the window. She was playing a card game with a tarot deck, some version of solitaire. As I reached her, one elegant hand swept up the cards, wrapped them in a silk scarf, placed them gently in a wooden box.

  The scents of the room made my head pound. I hadn’t eaten anything today, I realized; perhaps that was what was making me lightheaded. I sat down, across the table from her, in the candle-light.

  She extended her hand, and took my hand in hers.

  She stared at my palm, touched it, softly, with her forefinger.

  “Hair?” She was puzzled.

  “Yeah, well. I’m on my own a lot.” I grinned. I had hoped it was a friendly grin, but she raised an eyebrow at me anyway.

  “When I look at you,” said Madame Ezekiel, “this is what I see. I see the eye of a man. Also I see the eye of a wolf. In the eye of a man I see honesty, decency, innocence. I see an upright man who walks on the square. And in the eye of wolf I see a groaning and a growling, night howls and cries, I see a monster running with blood-flecked spittle in the darkness of the borders of the town.”

  “How can you see a growl or a cry?”

  She smiled. “It is not hard,” she said. Her accent was not American. It was Russian, or Maltese, or Egyptian perhaps. “In the eye of the mind we see many things.”

  Madame Ezekiel closed her green eyes. She had remarkably long eyelashes; her skin was pale, and her black hair was never still—it drifted gently around her head, in the silks, as if it were floating on distant tides.

  “There is a traditional way,” she told me. “A way to wash off a bad shape. You stand in running water, in clear spring water, while eating white rose petals.”

  “And then?”

  “The shape of darkness will be washed from you.”

  “It will return,” I told her, “with the next full of the moon.”

  “So,” said Madame Ezekiel, “once the shape is washed from you, you open your veins in the running water. It will sting mightily, of course. But the river will carry the blood away.”

  She was dressed in silks, in scarves and cloths of a hundred different colours, each bright and vivid, even in the muted light of the candles.

  Her eyes opened.

  “Now,” she said. “The Tarot.” She unwrapped her deck from the black silk scarf that held it, passed me the cards to shuffle. I fanned them, riffed and bridged them.

  “Slower, slower,” she said. “Let them get to know you. Let them love you, like… like a woman would love you.”

  I held them tightly, then passed them back to her.

  She turned over the first card. It was called The Warwolf. It showed darkness and amber eyes, a smile in white and red.

  Her green eyes showed confusion. They were the green of emeralds. “This is not a card from my deck,” she said, and turned over the next card. “What did you do to my cards?”

  “Nothing, ma’am. I just held them. That’s all.”

  The card she had turned over was The Deep One. It showed something green and faintly octopoid. The thing’s mouths—if they were indeed mouths and not tentacles—began to writhe on the card as I watched.

  She covered it with another card, and then another, and another. The rest of the cards were blank pasteboard.

  “Did you do that?” She sounded on the verge of tears.

  “No.”

  “Go now,” she said.

  “But—”

  “Go.” She looked down, as if trying to convince herself I no longer existed.

  I stood up, in the room that smelled of incense and candle-wax, and looked out of her window, across the street. A light flashed, briefly, in my office window. Two men, with flashlights, were walking around. They opened the empty filing cabinet, peered around, then took up their positions, one in the armchair, the other behind the door, waiting for me to return. I smiled to myself. It was cold and inhospitable in my office, and with any luck they would wait there for hours until they finally decided I wasn’t coming back.

  So I left Madame Ezekiel turning over her cards, one by one, staring at them as if that would make the pictures return; and I went downstairs, and walked back down Marsh Street until I reached the bar.

  The place was empty, now; the barman was smoking a cigarette, which he stubbed out as I came in.

  “Where are the chess-fiends?”

  “It’s a big night for them tonight. They’ll be down at the bay. Let’s see: you’re a Jack Daniels? Right?”

  “Sounds good.”

  He poured it for me. I recognized the thumb-print from the last time I had the glass. I picked up the volume of Tennyson poems from the bar-top.

  “Good book?”

  The fox-haired barman took his book from me, opened it and read:

  “Below the thunders of the upper deep;

  Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,

  His ancient dreamless, uninvaded sleep

  The Kraken sleepeth…”

  I’d finished my drink. “So? What’s your point?”

  He walked around the bar, took me over to the window. “See? Out there?”

  He pointed toward the west of the town, toward the cliffs. As I stared a bonfire was kindled on the cliff-tops; it flared and began to burn with a copper-green flame.

  “They’re going to wake the Deep Ones,” said the barman. “The stars and the planets and the moon are all in the right places. It’s time. The dry lands will sink, and the seas shall rise…”

  “For the world shall be cleansed with ice and floods and I’ll thank you to keep to your own shelf in the refrigerator,” I said.

  “Sorry?”

  “Nothing. What’s the quickest way to get up to those cliffs?”

  “Back up Marsh Street. Hang a left at the Church of Dagon, till you reach Manuxet Way and then just keep on going.” He pulled a coat off the back of the door, and put it on. “C’mon. I’ll walk you up there. I’d hate to miss any of the fun.”

  “You sure?”

  “No-one in town’s going to be drinking tonight.” We stepped out, and he locked the door to the bar behind us.

  It was chilly in the street, and fallen snow blew about the ground, like white mists. From street level I could no longer tell if Madame Ezekiel was in her den above her neon sign, or if my guests were still waiting for me in my office.

  We put our heads down against the wind, and we walked.

  Over the noise of the wind I heard the barman talking to himself:

  “Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green,” he was saying.

  “There hath he lain for ages and will lie

  Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,

  Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;

  Then once by men and angels to be seen,

  In roaring he sha
ll rise…”

  He stopped there, and we walked on together in silence, with blown snow stinging our faces.

  And on the surface die, I thought, but said nothing out loud.

  Twenty minutes’ walking and we were out of Innsmouth. The Manuxet Way stopped when we left the town, and it became a narrow dirt path, partly covered with snow and ice, and we slipped and slid our way up it in the darkness.

  The moon was not yet up, but the stars had already begun to come out. There were so many of them. They were sprinkled like diamond dust and crushed sapphires across the night sky. You can see so many stars from the sea-shore, more than you could ever see back in the city.

  At the top of the cliff, behind the bonfire, two people were waiting—one huge and fat, one much smaller. The barman left my side and walked over to stand beside them, facing me.

  “Behold,” he said, “the sacrificial wolf.” There was now an oddly familiar quality to his voice.

  I didn’t say anything. The fire was burning with green flames, and it lit the three of them from below; classic spook lighting.

  “Do you know why I brought you up here?” asked the barman, and I knew then why his voice was familiar: it was the voice of the man who had attempted to sell me aluminum-siding.

  “To stop the world ending?”

  He laughed at me, then.

  The second figure was the fat man I had found asleep in my office chair. “Well, if you’re going to get eschatological about it…” he murmured, in a voice deep enough to rattle walls. His eyes were closed. He was fast asleep.

  The third figure was shrouded in dark silks and smelled of patchouli oil. It held a knife. It said nothing.

  “This night,” said the barman, “the moon is the moon of the deep ones. This night are the stars configured in the shapes and patterns of the dark, old times. This night, if we call them, they will come. If our sacrifice is worthy. If our cries are heard.”

  The moon rose, huge and amber and heavy, on the other side of the bay, and a chorus of low croaking rose with it from the ocean far beneath us.

  Moonlight on snow and ice is not daylight, but it will do. And my eyes were getting sharper with the moon: in the cold waters men like frogs were surfacing and submerging in a slow water-dance. Men like frogs, and women, too: it seemed to me that I could see my landlady down there, writhing and croaking in the bay with the rest of them.

  It was too soon for another change; I was still exhausted from the night before; but I felt strange under that amber moon.

  “Poor wolf-man,” came a whisper from the silks. “All his dreams have come to this; a lonely death upon a distant cliff.”

  I will dream if I want to, I said, and my death is my own affair. But I was unsure if I had said it out loud.

  Senses heighten in the moon’s light; I heard the roar of the ocean still, but now, overlaid on top of it, I could hear each wave rise and crash; I heard the splash of the frog people; I heard the drowned whispers of the dead in the bay; I heard the creak of green wrecks far beneath the ocean.

  Smell improves, too. The Aluminum-siding man was human, while the fat man had other blood in him.

  And the figure in the silks…

  I had smelled her perfume when I wore man-shape. Now I could smell something else, less heady, beneath it. A smell of decay, of putrefying meat, and rotten flesh.

  The silks fluttered. She was moving toward me. She held the knife.

  “Madame Ezekiel?” My voice was roughening and coarsening. Soon I would lose it all. I didn’t understand what was happening, but the moon was rising higher and higher, losing its amber colour, and filling my mind with its pale light.

  “Madame Ezekiel?”

  “You deserve to die,” she said, her voice cold and low. “If only for what you did to my cards. They were old.”

  “I don’t die,” I told her. “Even a man who is pure in heart, and says his prayers by night. Remember?”

  “It’s bullshit,” she said. “You know what the oldest way to end the curse of the werewolf is?”

  “No.”

  The bonfire burned brighter now, burned with the green of the world beneath the sea, the green of algae, and of slowly-drifting weed; burned with the colour of emeralds.

  “You simply wait till they’re in human shape, a whole month away from another change; then you take the sacrificial knife, and you kill them. That’s all.”

  I turned to run, but the barman was behind me, pulling my arms, twisting my wrists up into the small of my back. The knife glinted pale silver in the moonlight. Madame Ezekiel smiled.

  She sliced across my throat.

  Blood began to gush, and then to flow. And then it slowed, and stopped…

  –The pounding in the front of my head, the pressure in the back. All a roiling change a how-wow-row-now change a red wall coming towards me from the night

  –I tasted stars dissolved in brine, fizzy and distant and salt

  –my fingers prickled with pins and my skin was lashed with tongues of flame my eyes were topaz I could taste the night

  My breath steamed and billowed in the icy air.

  I growled involuntarily, low in my throat. My forepaws were touching the snow.

  I pulled back, tensed, and sprang at her.

  There was a sense of corruption that hung in the air, like a mist, surrounding me. High in my leap I seemed to pause, and something burst like a soapbubble…

  *~*~*~*

  I was deep, deep in the darkness under the sea, standing on all fours on a slimy rock floor, at the entrance of some kind of citadel, built of enormous, rough-hewn stones. The stones gave off a pale glow-in-the-dark light; a ghostly luminescence, like the hands of a watch.

  A cloud of black blood trickled from my neck.

  She was standing in the doorway, in front of me. She was now six, maybe seven feet high. There was flesh on her skeletal bones, pitted and gnawed, but the silks were weeds, drifting in the cold water, down there in the dreamless deeps. They hid her face like a slow green veil.

  There were limpets growing on the upper surfaces of her arms, and on the flesh that hung from her ribcage.

  I felt like I was being crushed. I couldn’t think any more.

  She moved towards me. The weed that surrounded her head shifted. She had a face like the stuff you don’t want to eat in a sushi counter, all suckers and spines and drifting anemone fronds; and somewhere in all that I knew she was smiling

  I pushed with my hind-legs. We met there, in the deep, and we struggled. It was so cold, so dark. I closed my jaws on her face, and felt something rend and tear.

  It was almost a kiss, down there in the abysmal deep…

  *~*~*~*

  I landed softly on the snow, a silk scarf locked between my jaws.

  The other scarves were fluttering to the ground. Madame Ezekiel was nowhere to be seen.

  The silver knife lay on the ground, in the snow. I waited on all fours, in the moonlight, soaking wet. I shook myself, spraying the brine about. I heard it hiss and spit when it hit the fire.

  I was dizzy, and weak. I pulled the air deep into my lungs.

  Down, far below, in the bay, I could see the frog people hanging on the surface of the sea like dead things; for a handful of seconds they drifted back and forth on the tide, then they twisted and leapt, and each by each they plop-plopped down into the bay and vanished beneath the sea.

  There was a scream. It was the fox-haired bartender, the pop-eyed aluminum-siding salesman, and he was staring at the night sky, at the clouds that were drifting in, covering the stars, and he was screaming. There was rage and there was frustration in that cry, and it scared me.

  He picked up the knife from the ground, wiped the snow from the handle with his fingers, wiped the blood from the blade with his coat. Then he looked across at me. He was crying. “You bastard,” he said. “What did you do to her?”

  I would have told him I didn’t do anything to her, that she was still on guard far beneath the ocean, but
I couldn’t talk any more, only growl and whine and howl.

  He was crying. He stank of insanity, and of disappointment. He raised the knife and ran at me, and I moved to one side.

  Some people just can’t adjust even to tiny changes. The barman stumbled past me, off the cliff, into nothing.

  In the moonlight blood is black, not red, and the marks he left on the cliff-side as he fell and bounced and fell were smudges of black and dark grey. Then, finally, he lay still on the icy rocks at the base of the cliff, until an arm reached out from the sea and dragged him, with a slowness that was almost painful to watch, under the dark water.

  A hand scratched the back of my head. It felt good.

  “What was she? Just an avatar of the Deep Ones, sir. An eidolon, a manifestation, if you will, sent up to us from the uttermost deeps to bring about the end of the world.”

  I bristled.

  “No, it’s over, for now. You disrupted her, sir. And the ritual is most specific. Three of us must stand together and call the sacred names, while innocent blood pools and pulses at our feet.”

  I looked up at the fat man, and whined a query. He patted me on the back of the neck, sleepily.

  “Of course she doesn’t love you, boy. She hardly even exists on this plane, in any material sense.”

  The snow began to fall once more. The bonfire was going out.

  “Your change tonight, incidentally, I would opine, is a direct result of the self-same celestial configurations and lunar forces that made tonight such a perfect night to bring back my old friends from Underneath…”

  He continued talking, in his deep voice, and perhaps he was telling me important things. I’ll never know, for the appetite was growing inside me, and his words had lost all but the shadow of any meaning; I had no further interest in the sea or the clifftop or the fat man.

  There were deer running in the woods beyond the meadow: I could smell them on the winter’s night’s air.

  And I was, above all things, hungry.

  *~*~*~*

  I was naked when I came to myself again, early the next morning, a half-eaten deer next to me in the snow. A fly crawled across its eye, and its tongue lolled out of its dead mouth, making it look comical and pathetic, like an animal in a newspaper cartoon.